More wordily:

On the fifth page of of Brain Thief there’s an editing gaffe that had me staring at three short paragraphs for a good minute trying to work out what Jablokov had intended to convey. This is noteworthy because it’s such an aberration. If there were any rough patches later on, I was far too caught up to notice; Brain Thief ’s tightly coiled plot is like some finely machined watch in the act of exploding.

Brain Thief marks the first time I read a physical book and wished I was reading an electronic copy instead. This was partly because I spiked it with a dozen bookmarks for passages that exemplify Jablokov’s prose tightrope-walking between evoking classic noir and sleek sci-fi flavor (”He wore a black suit jacket, which Bernal pretended to himself he could identify as Armani,” “an old gray-water recovery unity with dangling filters made of nylon stockings stood next to a high-end rotating composter that smelled of rotting meat”, “the warbling bleert of an old dial-up modem”, “heavy batteries . . . everything in the modern world had become small and light, except the very heart of their power, which still had a Victorian mass”, “a warm day, the first day when the warmth seemed sincere rather than a smile pasted on a lurking winter” — Jablokov’s dialog crackles, too, although it’s harder to excerpt without running afoul of spoilers). But it was also because I kept needing to flip back to review previous scenes as new twists evolved my interpretation of events (Brain Thief rewards close and careful reading).

I’m not entirely clear on how eligibility for the major SF awards works, so maybe Brain Thief can still garner at least a (richly deserved, in my opinion, because there’s some serious thoughtfood under the thrillride) nomination for best novel. But I think it may not. Brain Thief is packaged as science fiction, but if you absolutely had to choose, it’s more a mystery novel with science fiction elements than a science fiction novel with mystery elements.* Perhaps that will keep it from being seriously considered as an award candidate in either genre. Which leads me to a thought about all the calories fans and critics (myself included) put into micro-classification: genre identification is helpful if it leads you to something you enjoy, but it’s harmful if it excludes something you might enjoy.

Brain Thief is also mostly set where our kittens hail from — between Boston and The Berkshires — and has some slyly mutated takes on some New England institutions which endeared it to me even more.

* Brain Thief reminded me of Rian Johnson’s terrific film Brick in how it incorporated the traditional elements of noir fiction into non-traditional noir setting, bringing a startling freshness to well-worn genre tropes.

needs more demons? good gravy, no.

A sextet of short stories by D. Harlan Wilson opens the collection. Wilson is big on present tense, and characters with attributes instead of names: “the man in the silver handlebar mustache”, “the little boy”, “a bodybuilder in a purple spandex G-string.” He favors dream-like illogic over anything resembling coherent plot. His prose is often very concrete and mechanical: “[He] sniggered, then began moving his tongue around the insides of his mouth so that his cheeks poked out.” Wilson claims Kafka as in influence to the extent that he titled a short story collection The Kafka Effect, but nothing drives these stories the way Kafka’s paranoia and the tension between the individual and society/The State drove his. None of them really grabbed me.

Bizarro first came to my attention via the impressively lurid titles of Carlton Mellick III’s novellas, here represented by The Baby Jesus Butt Plug. It’s probably not a bad litmus test: the titular object is not a molded toy-in-the-shape-of, it’s an actual clone of the Savior, and if this seems simply too offensive or too mechanically improbable, then Mellick is probably not for you. The shock-for-its-own-sake aspect leaves me cold, but beyond that the obvious metaphor of (ahem) internalizing belief systems and its consequences on a couple whose beliefs become disparate is explored with something approaching emotional resonance. Meanwhile the nightmarish milieu doesn’t make sense to me, but it seems to make sense to Mellick’s narrator; there’s something approaching internal consistency. I might cautiously experiment further with Mellick.

I didn’t enjoy Jeremy Robert Johnson’s Extinction Journals while I was reading it, but its grotesque imagery has stayed with me more than anything else in the book. And I have to admit that while marrying the hoary last-man-and-woman-in-post-apocalyptic-wasteland cliché with the popular notion that cockroaches are the critters most likely to survive a nuclear holocaust struck me as a tad obvious (not to mention really gross), I had never read anything quite like it.

Kevin L. Donihe’s The Greatest Fucking Moment in Sports was for me the anthology’s first clear win. It has some weak spots — the back and forth between a pair of news commentators seemed trite, but on the whole it was surprising and held my interest. I may have a soft spot for it in part because the “sport” is cycling (and not, as the title might have led you to expect, copulation).

Gina Rinalli’s Suicide Girls in the Afterlife seemed a bit too familiar — a bit of Neil Gaiman, a dash of Kelly Link, a dollop of Beetlejuice — but if it’s maybe too indebted to obvious sources, I like those sources. Promising.

Andre Duza’s Don’t F(beep) with the Coloureds goes in quite a different direction than its inflammatory title might suggest. It reminded me a lot of a 1988 film, only (naturally) darker, and grosser. I liked the story-in-story structure (although I would have liked to see it pushed a little further) and thought some of the expository chunks could have been more smoothly integrated, but give it a qualified thumbs up overall.

Vincent Sakowski offers up one two short-shorts, one of which feels a bit like a Robyn Hitchcock song rendered in prose, and one which is tired and vile, and the pretty nifty long short story “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Ragnarok.” Its embittered modern couple, Vogue and GQ, have just enough depth to be more than tropes, and the intrusion of mythic elements offered a few interesting twists. The mood reminded me a bit of Leslie What’s “The Goddess is Alive, And, Well, Living in New York City,” only (naturally) darker and grosser. I may seek out more from Sakowski, although the story I really disliked leaves me somewhat distrustful.

I was a little annoyed by a persistent tic of Steve Beard’s Survivor’s Dream: it uses a boatload of definitive articles, maybe to evoke a childlike narrative voice: “She was hiding in this ship”, “It had a domed roof held up by these thick white pillars,” et cetera. It seemed excessive, but afterward it occurred to me that plenty of writers from the lit’ry side of the street play with not dissimilar tactics, e.g., Kathy Acker or even Vonnegut’s “So it goes.” (Of course I’m sometimes annoyed by those, too). Other than that, Beard manages a kind of impressive balancing act between multiple, contradictory narrative threads tied together by a pervasive mood and Beard’s flat, unmusical prose. I would have liked it better if it had been shorter.

John Edward Lawson’s Truth in Ruins is one of the most hyperbolic entries in the entire anthology. In Lawson’s grim future humanity is divided into serial killers and profilers, with genetically engineered “Humanzees” poised to take over after humanity’s failure. It’s self-consciously, cartoonishly, uber-violent, and narrative chunks are jammed together in ways that emphasize their incongruities, like a movie made of nothing but jump cuts. I sort of liked it, although I had to skim over some stomach-turning bits.

Three of Bruce Taylor’s short stories, “The Breath Amidst the Stones” and “A Little Spider Shop Talk,” and “Of Tunafish and Galaxies” are perhaps the most conventional entries in the collection: weird, for sure, but coherent, reminiscent of Leiber and Lafferty. I liked them. I thought the last, “City Streets” was less successful.

needs more demons? maybe kinda sorta

I wasn’t a hundred percent wrong, but almost. Jinks quickly downplayed the Potterisms, and Evil Genius became the most suspenseful young adult novel I’ve ever read, bar none. The way the tension kept ratcheting up and the pervasively paranoiac atmosphere reminded me of no one so much as Patricia Highsmith. I could usually tell when something was about to go horribly wrong, but seldom guessed exactly what it was; once it really got cranking, Evil Genius held me riveted right up to the last page.

Also like Highsmith, I thought Jinks did a good job of keep the reader’s sympathy with Piggot, even when he’s undertaking not particularly pleasant pursuits. In fact, some of Piggot’s less lovable behavior struck a little close to the bone, reminding me of how being picked on in my own adolescence sparked some grandiose revenge fantasies. I wonder if many of the people who eventually grow up to be novelists and/or volunteer critics on the Interwebs — not to mention readers drawn to a book where the bad guys are at least nominally the protagonists — might not have had some similar dark thoughts at one point or another.

Evil Genius additionally impressed me because its smart people consistently really sound smart (if twisted). It’s sprinkled with mentions of mathematics, chemistry, and, particularly, computer hacking topics that are much more credible than the usual fictional depiction.

One the negative side, near the end I had trouble keeping track of all the crosses and double-crosses — but then again, many of the characters were in the same bind.

needs more demons? no.

When Franz finally departed for a place he referred to mysteriously a the Halfway Club, I resolved to confront Professor Krak as soon as I saw him again, & was he planning to use me & Fru Schleswig as guinea-pigs? And if so, he had no right to make assumptions of any sort about what we would & would not do, unless a very tempting financial offer was involved! And then for the first time in my life, I enacted what I later learned was a strong tradition amongst the inhabitants of that country & and time in which I now found myself: I trained my eyes on the silent flickering televiison screen, across which passed a stream of images, by turns boring, sugary, violent, & plain incomprehensible, & fell asleep.

Aside from its fantastic premise, My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time is a novel which refuses to commit itself fully to any of the genres in which it could perhaps be placed: it’s not twisty nor dramatic enough for adventure, not uproarious enough for broad comedy, not incisive enough for satire, not bawdy enough (despite its title) for erotica, nor sentimental enough for romance (though it comes nearest the mark on this last; Charlotte’s heart is, inevitably, electro-plated). Instead it’s a little bit of all these things, which I found formed an enjoyable, if not exactly compelling, muddle.

needs more demons? perhaps.

This time around, what impressed me most was the density of repurposing elements from other recent media: the (powerful young) zombie settler/Settler’s Affairs back drop is very Buffy the vampire slayer/Watcher’s Council. The pom squad/cheerleader social conflict is straight out of Glee. In the second book I was more conscious of tiresome Twilight-ish romantic mooning (and I suspect if I had ever read a “Sweet Valley High” book I might have found points of comparison there, as well). Last time I thought it was a bit unfair of me to brand people yelling vaguely Latin-ish spells like “Reverto!” as derivative of Harry Potter, but this book adds a distinctly Potter-y element to the evolving plot thread as well.

Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments books draw on much of the same source material, but far more successfully. Undead Much leans very, very hard on tall coincidence, and its conclusion is far too much like that of You’re So Undead to Me — both feature a late revelation of the villain’s identity that abandons character consistency, and a big improbable fight scene.

As an adult male I’m admittedly way outside the target demographic for this novel. But there are a plenty of young adult books I have no trouble enjoying. This was not one of them.

I was also a bit creeped out by Undead Much’s treatment of adolescent sexuality. Megan Berry spends a lot of time wondering whether she should become sexually active or not — but because there’s black magic afoot and the blood of virgins has ritual uses, in her situation her life would literally become less complicated if she started having sex. I hate to sound like an old prude, but that seems like a misleading message to send teens.

needs more demons? yeah.

(He also ignores some commands about disposition of bodily waste that I can’t locate after a few minutes’ search, but am pretty sure I read at one point.)

There are few interesting aspects to this — he’s doing an experiment on himself to see how following biblical precepts affects his own attitudes. But he also demonstrates the impossibility of following all of the Bible’s instructions. He makes a pretty strong case that as much as some hard-liners decry the “cafeteria” approach to living by the Bible, it’s actually the only viable approach. The questions, he asserts, are of where you draw the lines on one hand between interpretation and literalism, and between continued relevance and outdatedness on the other.

In the course of his year he talks to everyone from Orthodox Jews to right-wing evangelicals and snake handlers. When I wrote about The Guinea Pig Diaries I paid it the somewhat left-handed compliment of being more entertaining than educational. I’ve felt slightly guilty since that I didn’t emphasize the entertainment value by mentioning how many snorts, chuckles, and outright guffaws the book inspired. The Year of Living Biblically also repeatedly made me make noises, and I learned more from it to boot.

I also thought it dragged a bit (although I can’t imagine how I would have felt trying to live through the year it took Jacobs). Jacobs spends most of his time on the Old Testament before switching to the New, and I was distinctly impatient for the change of focus — although toward the end of the Old Testament section I found probably my favorite passage, in which Jacobs discusses the inconstancy of his faith, or lack thereof, with a clarity and honesty that struck me as very uncommon. (It reminded me of one of my favorite David Bazan lyrics, which is in no way a left-handed compliment.)

This book also dovetailed oddly with my own life. One of the most profound and lasting effects on Jacobs is that he find himself continually and deeply grateful for the good things in his life. My experiences in January of 2008 and in May and June of last year changed me so fundamentally that some people have begun to describe me as an optimist. (That notion inspires a lot of cognitive dissonance, but I have to concede I see where they’re coming from.) Jacobs never literally expresses the words that have become my mantra — “every day is a gift” — but I think he might agree, even if he, like me, doesn’t think of the giver in particularly concrete terms.

needs more demons? (for once, not going there)

Jacobs’ blend of ingredients is not dissimilar to Spurlock’s: a lot of subjective experience, a dab of underlying science, a few gags, a bit of analysis, a few insights. (Probably my favorite aspect of The Guinea Pig Diaries, much of which was originally published as articles for Esquire, are the codas to each essay, in which Jacobs discussed how each project did (or didn’t) continue to affect his life after its conclusion.) But I think it’s fair to say that the emphasis is on entertainment, with educational value as a secondary focus.

Jacobs’ nine “experiments” and the resulting chapters all follow the same basic template. Some seemed goofier than others. I thought “What Would George Washington Do?” was the weakest, but it demonstrates the general form. In it, Jacobs follows Washington’s personal code of conduct for a month (sort of an abbreviated, watered-down version of Jacobs’ own The Year of Living Biblically) with a side-order of biographical tidbits; in the process he comes to realize how uncivil our society is, and how much he dislikes shaking hands.

The fascinating meta-lesson of Jacobs’ experiments, though, is that he consistently finds that adopting a given behavior — even very artificially and deliberately — winds up changing his attitudes about the behavior he’s adopted. Funnily enough, I recently arrived at the same realization (perhaps sparked by some of the things I read in Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open) and so I’m currently engaged in a few different Jacobs-style experiments with the goal of altering my mindset through behavioral changes. (For instance, I’m trying to defuse my anger at unsafe and law-breaking bicyclists. So far, it seems to be helping.)

needs more demons? the essays do get a bit samey if you read them all back-to-back (which is awfully easy to do). The incursion of an extra-dimensional evil entity would have broken up the pace a bit, for sure.

The first-person narrator is herself a vampire, and Jinks exploits this to build intrigue and suspense: when Nina wakes up at sundown, she has to figure out what happened during the daylight hours. It was an effective plot device and I’m surprised more authors don’t take advantage of it. Nina’s sardonic narrative voice is also terrific and her wry outlook provided several laugh aloud moments.

On the minus side, the major plot arc plays with some of my less favorite tropes of the modern vampire novels, and it felt just a bit mechanical. For the most part characters act believably as situations evolve, and react as you might expect, so the novel is relatively low on big surprises.

But mostly I found The Reformed Vampire Support Group fresh, funny, and engaging. Also unusual and commendable: it’s a real honest-to-goodness standalone novel that doesn’t demand a sequel. I’ll read more by Jinks for sure.

needs more demons? no.

In the first volume of Jay’s post-Buffy zombie franchise, reluctant zombie “Settler” Megan Berry is at least as concerned with boys and cheerleader tryouts as she is with figuring out who’s sending murderous zombies after her. It’s more lighthearted than most recent publishing successes with superficial similarities. This isn’t a bad thing at all — in fact, Jay has crafted a novel that might not only appeal to some fans of Meyer’s Twilight books, but also to some readers who find Bella’s level of angst a little wearing, if not unintentionally silly.

Berry is obtuse about some of what’s going on around her in a way that may make some readers’ eyes roll (although it’s partly a specie of obtuseness that certainly honors longstanding tradition) and alert readers will see through the red herrings easily. But like Berry’s selective blindnesses, a flimsy mystery seems less a fault of this novel than an attribute of the genre that You Are So Undead to Me embodies. It’s very much a color-inside-the-lines exercise, but it delivers exactly what it promises.

needs more demons? has just about the requisite amount.

And he delivers at least a few that stick for me. I learned things about the amygdala and the fear response that will be helpful when I’m allowed to ride a bike again; since I don’t remember the accident itself, I can expect not to be particularly afraid. And now I understand why for the past several years I’ve reacted so strongly to the sight of a car door opening ahead of me, even ones I can easily avoid and that pose no signficant threat.

I was also especially fascinated by Johnson’s chapter on laughter and tickling. After discussing compelling research that illustrates that laughter has very little to do with humor — maybe this is one of the hallmarks of the long-decay idea; it sounds counter-intuitive at first blush, but makes increasing sense as you think about it — Johnson stops just short of suggesting that laughter may have been a precursor to language. He argues that it’s a form of communication, and I’m inclined to think that what it communicates is largely “I’m going to interact with you in a non-threatening way.” (Even though we sometimes use it now to communicate the reverse.)

I didn’t find Johnson’s insight all equally affecting (and I’d bumped into some of them before, blunting their impact a bit) but they were all certainly interesting. As with The Ghost Map I found Johnson an exceptionally lucid writer.

But my naval-gazing response to his fear response chapter was no accident. Throughout Mind Wide Open, Johnson draws parallels between his personal anecdotal experience and the research he is writing about. The Ghost Map was so good that it earned Johnson a lot of leeway with me, and I’m glad I started with it instead, because otherwise I think I might have found passages like this irksome:

As I write these words, my attention is divided roughly between tw primary actions: thinking about the words as they are geneated in my head and materialize on the computer screen, and half listening to familiar songs playing in the background…I also have a vague background sense of mood — a bright midmorning working alertness, slightly caffeine enhanced.

Fortunately, that’s about the peak of the book’s self-involvement, but I can really recommend it strongly only to those who don’t mind a good bit of Steven Johnson the writer/husband/father mixed in with their brain science.

Perhaps predictably, I also became interested in the things Johnson might be saying without intending to say. He lives in New York and the book was written (judging from the interview dates) during 2001-2003 — and even so it was startling to me just how much of a shadow the events of 11 September 2001 cast over this book. (Speaking, for what it’s worth, as a resident at the time of the other city in which an airplane was flown into a building.)

needs more demons? perhaps just a touch fewer personal demons, actually