Joe Pernice, if you don’t know the name, has one of the most honeyed voices in all of indie rock and a heaping helping of songwriting skill, displayed for the past several years/records in his band Pernice Brothers. Joyce Linehan is Pernice’s partner in Ashmont Records. This book is literally culled from Joyce Linehan’s twitter stream, mostly focusing on communication to and from Joe, about the business of being in a touring/recording band (although Massachusetts residents might note a few poignant moments not directly related to Ashmont Records).

I read Pernice to Me compulsively in a single sitting — not hard to do, it’s short — and while it certainly entertained me, it left me a little sad.

Pernice to Me has a mean side in more than one sense of the word. I couldn’t help but be reminded of seeing excerpts of Johan Sebastian Bach’s correspondence with the great composer whinging about shillings and farthings. And if you’d have a mental image of Pernice as a “gentle, fragile sad sack”, that you want to keep intact, you should avoid Pernice to Me, because that’s the perception that Linehan explicitly sets out to destroy. She presents Pernice as epically grumpy, a quintessentially high-maintenance and self-involved artist.

But the format of Pernice to Me dramatically reinforces its artificiality. It may be generally acknowledged that reality show editors can paint any cast member as either the villain or the long-suffering hero, but when the stuff from which a work is assembled is exclusively 140-character-or-less soundbites, it really hammers home how very much the selection of exactly which tweets to include or exclude affects the shape of the work as a whole. I was also keenly aware how much I was lacking anything that might put the tweets in context: how long Pernice had been on the road, how much sleep Linehan had, what tone of voice the words were spoken in (many of the tweets are transcribed telephone exchanges).

It also implicitly makes the point that the music industry wasn’t wrong back in the days of Napster: the sky really is falling. Something is wrong with the picture if an artist with all of Pernice’s gifts finds it difficult to eke out a living. And if releasing one of the first books based on a Twitter stream helps Ashmont get some media attention and helps Pernice sell a few more records, more power to them.

needs more demons? not exactly.

• When Pierson’s characters talk about bands, the made up names, e.g., The Boy Who Cried Sparrow, sound so believable I had to use Google to make sure they weren’t real.
• This book has the most realistic depiction ever of a high school friendship between two ubernerds. I say this as a “co-author” of a comic apocalyptic “novel” that shamelessly ripped off “Hitchhickers’ Guide” and Tolkein metal and whatever else my ubernerd pal and I were reading/listening to, and which was not utterly unlike Darren and Eric’s TimeBlaze project.
• Darren’s voice, holy crap. The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To is the first book I read beginning to end on an e-reader device, and I set bookmarks on pages with passages that made me really want to read them aloud to anyone in range, and there were, like, a dozen. Here’s one:
  

  When I get up to my room I take my shirt off and look into the mirror for a while, not in a vain way, just to see what the fuck is going on with my torso, scrawny and fat at the same time, has to be the worst torso for miles. Then I might turn on MTV, again not because I like what’s going on there but simply to gape in wonder at what the fuck is wrong with everybody, and occasionally there’ll be some stupidly hot girl on, writhing around on the top of a car.

  and here’s another:

  Basically something I think I believed without ever having thought about it is that part of being smart is not being able to start a sentence with a subject and then end that sentence by saying that subject is a good thing and actually mean it.

  Darren usually opts for flat, uncomplicated language like this, but if it’s low on frills, it possesses a distinctive rhythm, and it feels so completely authentic that I sometimes feel as if Pierson must have rooted around in my own high school-era cranium.

• The title of this blog alludes to the fact that strictly naturalistic fiction, with no speculative or fantastic elements, sometimes leaves me feeling like there’s something missing. The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To does have speculative/fantastic aspects, but it’s a measure of how resonant that I found it that I almost wished it hadn’t. I was so interested in what was going on between Darren, Eric (and other characters I won’t mention to avoid spoilers) that sometimes the fantasy elements felt almost intrusive. Coming from me this is high, if a bit left-handed, praise. (I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s textual evidence that Darren is delusional and that the novel’s fantastic events didn’t “really” happen, but it’s at least hinted at that fantasy worlds are one of Darren’s coping mechanisms for dealing with the messy emotional business of the real world and real people; once or twice I even had the sense that it might have been a distancing technique for Pierson — that maybe he didn’t think he could make the story compelling without the sci-fi twist. The irony here is that I think would have found it compelling, but I might never have thought to pick it up without that hook to draw me in.)

One thing I didn’t love quite so much — the ending works thematically, but it seemed a bit rushed. It leads into the prologue –but that prologue feels almost like it belongs to a different novel entirely. Maybe a sequel is in the offing. But whether Pierson revisits Darren, Eric, et al in future fiction or not, I eagerly await his next book, no matter what genre labels might apply to it.

needs more demons? Absolutely not.

needs more demons? worked fine for me, despite being not particularly demon-y

Puchner’s Music Through the Floor is a short story collection that really doesn’t require this approach — the breadth of these nine stories is impressive. There’s something dark, in some cases even grim, in all of them, but their tones, voices, and themes are strikingly different. Even something as generic as “these stories are about people struggling to overcome communication barriers,” can’t encompass this collection. “Neon Tetra” derives its tension from the gap between its young protagonist’s understanding of the situation, and cues the adult reader recognizes. (It’s a short enough piece that this disparity is sufficient to carry it). “Children of God,” isn’t about the narrator’s struggle to communicate — it’s about how he uses his bond with two “developmentally disabled” men to avoid communication.

What these stories do have in common is sharp observation and vividly drawn characters. They’re all good, and some of them are jaw-droppingly, I’m-so-jealous-of-your-talent, I-can’t-believe-this-is-your-first-book good. My only criticism is that the resolution — the final sentence, even — of a few of these stories seems a little too tidy. (Perhaps this is a reaction to the fact that the stories in the last comparably strong collection I read, Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, went out of their way to avoid definitive closure. In any case, it’s a teeny quibble.)

needs more demons? nuh uh.

But despite all the sci-fi trappings and a plot which superficially resembles an adventure story, The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a serious, ambitious novel of ideas. It’s primarily concerned with the inherent subjectivity of all human experience, and specifically with the fundamental inadequacy of language as a tool to establish objective understanding.

It’s by turns darkly funny and grotesque, sometimes even disturbing. It decidedly establishes Palmer as an author from whom I would like to see more. It’s dense and allusive, with abundant references to The Tempest, but also to The Wizard of Oz and many other works as well. Just as I’m thinking how utterly impossible it is to read about an eccentric industrialist offering a tour of his secret facilities to a select group of under-privileged children without thinking of Willy Wonka, for instance, Palmer’s protagonist Harold Winslow remarks that he is “not like that other kid in the class who still carries disfiguring scars across his face, earned during some misadventure in forbidden culs-de-sac of a local chocolate factory.” The Dream of Perpetual Motion features some strong descriptive writing. I particularly liked this bit:

This night we punish ourselves, making a bad thing worse by drinking coffee of a brand that Prospero imports from a tropical nation with a perpetually unstable government and a boundary that confounds cartographers. He bombards the beans with high-intensity Röntgen rays and brews them hot enough to scald the tongue. The result is a cup of coffe whose first sip will make you grind your teeth into a fine white powder.

That’s the good news.

Palmer uses the surreal and outright fantastic to construct metaphorical externalizations of his characters’ mental states in a way that recalls Haruki Murakami, David Foster Wallace, and Colson Whitehead. Unfortunately, although it’s interesting and promising, I think it’s ultimately a failure. (I reject out-of-hand as meaningless sophistry the notion that a novel about the inadequacy of communication must fail in order to succeed.)

Palmer is more interested in archetype than character, which I can accept, and the cursory attention devoted to the “plot” is certainly forgivable; the plot is not the point. My biggest problem is the novel’s lack of subtlety. I didn’t mind

Tiny lead blocks with inverted letters carved on them in relief are dropped into the bath one at a time, and the letters twist out of shape and disappear amidst bubbles that slowly rise to the surface and explode, each one releasing the whiff of a lost word.

But with passages like

…no matter how he tries he can’t make the ink marks on the page represent the things he’s seen with enough fidelity to be certain that someone else might read the words and be certain of the things he saw. Even worse than this is that he can feel his mind actively making up events from whole cloth to fill the blank spaces of his story that lie between those few things he does remember, and that as soon as it does this, he can’t distinguish between the truths of his memory and the fictions of his necessary fantasies.

and

I can hear what you have to say: it’s not clear whom I think I’m fooling with this business about “searching for Miranda.” Perhaps you think this is some kind of dumb fable, a means to evoke the rhetorical question, “Ah, but can one person every really know another? Are we not all mysterious to each other? Is not Woman an enternal mystery to Man?” It’s all very profound, and at the end of the story we discover that Miranda (Woman) was just an objectified fragment of Harold’s (Man’s) imagination, just like the voices from his past. All very academic.

I sometimes had the impression Palmer was writing the Cliffs Notes to the novel, rather than the novel itself.

I was annoyed when, after Winslow encounters a sort of incarnation of Vulcan, Winslow (and the reader) get a quick primer on some of the mortals who ran afoul of Jupiter, Juno, et all — just in case we might not have recognized the misshapen, musclebound figure in his fiery element. And this, in a novel featuring not only a Prospero, but a Caliban and a Miranda, seemed, well, gratuitous:

“Students, believe me when I tell you this: everything in the twentieth century is dead. Everything has already been said… all we have left to us are possible permutations of the building blocks of fossilized ideas and dead sentences.”
…
Each of the twelve students in the classroom has on his or her desk a twenty-cent paperbound copy of The Tempest, a bottle of glue, and a pair of scissors. Their assignment is to dismantle and reconstruct…they must rearrange the words into another work that is to “reflect the spirit of the twentieth century,” according to the professor.

needs more demons? The role of the Wicked Witch’s flying monkeys is played by tin demons, actually, so there are a good few. But, yeah, kinda.

• 1 part coming-of-age novel (protracted)
• 1 part feminist subtext
• 1 part formalized presentation (every chapter has an “I Confess…” header; text incorporates ordered lists and the occasional chart)
• 1/2 part not utterly reliable narrator
• 1 1/2 parts pseudo-credible gossip/speculation about Skull & Bones
• 1 1/2 parts mystery/suspense
• 5 parts college-age soap opera

I don’t mean the breakdown to be dismissive; if it were straight college soap I wouldn’t be along for the ride, and, as with any cocktail, the trick is in blending the various flavors of the constituents into a cohesive, pleasing whole.

I was way ahead of “confessor” Amy Haskell on most of the plot reveals this time around, but I’m not at all sure that’s not Peterfreund’s intent. It didn’t interfere much with my enjoyment of the novel and I’m looking forward to the concluding volume.

needs more demons? no

Since Peterfreund’s unicorns are fierce predators inclined to maim and/or devour any but a maiden pure, she posits a secret society of unicorn slayers. For a little while it seemed like Rampant was going to be more-or-less a rip off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Seasons 7 and 8* in particular, with narrator Astrid as the Buffy-figure helping to train a cadre of young warrior women to combat unicorns instead of vampires ). I would have been fine with that; the sheer novelty of fierce and deadly unicorns was sweeping me along.

But ultimately, Rampant, to its credit, has a lot more going on. It deals with feminist issues a little more explicitly than Buffy, and it’s angrier. I can imagine that if some teenage boys could bring themselves to read a (dark, gory) book about (fighting) unicorns they could possibly have their consciousnesses raised in ways that might prevent some real-world damage to human beings.

I was a little worried as the remaining page-count dwindled that Rampant was going to be one of those “novels” that turned out to be first-in-series and not a complete story. I was pleasantly surprised that while Rampant doesn’t exactly preclude a sequel, it certainly doesn’t require one. I thought the dénouement was a little rushed, but that may have been partly because I was turning the pages so fast.

Peeve: “hissed” as the verb describing the utterance of several sibilant-free bits of dialogue. Multiple times, yet.

*yes, Season 8. It’s currently unspooling in comic book form.

needs more demons? nope.

In the role of those who stand between us and the crawling horrors of other-dimensional space, Wong casts a pair of potty-mouthed chronic underachievers who could almost have slouched over from the nearest (good) Kevin Smith movie.

Wong has excellent control of narrative tone, and the book is often really funny in a slightly sophomoric way. The protagonist encounters an unusual monster in the prologue, and his response was the first thing in this book that made me chuckle, snort, or laugh outright:

The man-shaped arrangement of meat rose up, as if functioning as one body. It pushed itself up on two arms made of game hens and country bacon, planting two hands with sausage-link fingers on the floor. The phrase “sodomized by a bratwurst poltergeist suddenly flew through my mind.”

I also like how Wong makes no bones about his musical taste:

I turned on the radio, looking for something to blast the thoughts out of my head, hoping the moist nighttime air would blow in a rare non-country station. I ground through static and static and static, then recoiled at the shrill, choking sound of a man apparently squealing through a crushed larynx. After a moment I realized it was simply Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit – [an acquaintance's] favorite band. They’re the ones who invented the musical technique of feeding a list of generic rap phrases to a goat, then reading its turds into a microphone over heavy-metal guitar.

Another of John Dies at the End’s substantial pleasures is that it’s clearly not meant to be taken at face value. The novel is narrated in the first person by David Wong, the pseudonym employed by author Jason Pargin — but even in the context of the novel, “David Wong” is not the character’s “real” name; he adopted “Wong,” simply because it is the world’s most common surname. Likewise the titular “John” is not really named John but is referred to by it because it’s (allegedly) the world’s most common first name. Much of John Dies at the End uses a framing device of David telling his story to a reporter, who wonders, logically enough, how much of what David says is true, and whether David is really a serial killer with an involved paranoid delusional system. David’s narrative reliability is further called into question by David himself — he glibly glosses over inconsistencies in his story with comments like ” I can’t remember exactly how [she] pulled that off.” When David recounts John’s experiences, he is even more explicit about the integrity of the narrative, liberally sprinkling asides like, “according to John, of course” into the story.

The novel’s “what’s real and what’s not” games go both ways: the jacket copy starts out, “Stop. You should not have touched this book with your bare hands. NO, don’t put it down. It’s too late. They’re watching you.” And on Wong’s website JohnDiesAtTheEnd.com, commenters join in by contributing alleged mysterious happenings resulting from exposure to the book.

It all adds up to a very interestingly multi-layered reading experience.

In the mildly minus column for me, the book consistently employs gross-out imagery. (Skimming an early sequence made me decide this was a library book not a purchase book; it seemed a little cheap and easy. If Wong had led with the bratwurst poltergeist I might have made a different call.) This is not a novel for anyone with a serious objection to authors slopping assorted bodily fluids around by the bucketful.

I also thought it flagged a tiny bit in the last quarter. Wong has to make some choices about how much he wants to tie his wild ride into a coherent narrative, and he also has to choose between emotionally satisfying and thematically appropriate outcomes. I don’t think he always picks the option that would make for the strongest possible book. But this is a teensy quibble — it still makes for a very enjoyable book, and I’m delighted to learn that a sequel is likely to materialize at some point, and intrigued by the one-third complete novella on the author’s website. Basically I’m afraid that I’ll stay up half the night reading it, and then really, really, really want to know WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!?

So, uh, so much for critical distance and reserve.

* as Warren Zevon once sang

needs more demons? not at all.

The other thing that holds the novel together despite its changing mood and tone is the emotional core of the story. Briar Wilkes and her son Zeke have a lot of issues and history to work through. Wilkes is the widow and daughter of two notorious men. Their legacy casts a shadow over her life and Zeke’s. Wilkes has avoided many of Zeke’s questions about his father, grandfather, and the events that triggered Seattle’s zombie infestation. You could probably read much of the novel’s plot as an externalization of their respective struggles to overcome the barriers to clear and open communication between them.

In the universe of Boneshaker people are zombified by exposure to a toxic substance referred to as the Blight. Maybe it’s a stretch to think of the Blight as a metaphor for heroin, which was first synthesized at roughly the same time as Priest’s characters encountered the Blight. Priest lives in Seattle, so she might prefer not to reinforce any connection in the popular consciousness between her city and heroin. But I found it interesting to think about.

Priest apparently has additional novels set in the same overall milieu (but not direct sequels). I’m impatient for them.

needs more demons? nope, Boneshaker’s people are well supplied with personal demons.

Couch is the story of three roommates who have singular experiences moving an ugly orange couch that is easier to carry in some directions than others. They start out with the intent of donating it to a local charity organization, and wind up carting it — or being carted by it, the distinction is sometimes hazy — halfway around the globe in a quest of gradually deepening mystical significance. It reminded me of James Blaylock’s generally mild and whimsical — but sometimes grim — fantasies in which modern-day characters encounter artifacts with mythic resonances.

Although there’s no explicit justification in the text, I found myself reading with the supposition that the three roommates represent fragmented aspects of a complete person. Computer hacker Thom is intellectual and logical, perhaps to a fault (in one of my favorite quirks of the novel, Thom occasionally even thinks in SQL syntax: “SELECT * FROM the_brain WHERE memory LIKE “%Tree falling in blackberry bushes%”). Erik is more impulsive, less distanced from his id. Tree seems to represent the spirituality of the trio.

I thought it started much stronger than it finished. Parzybok’s descriptions of Portland were much more compelling than the largely allegorical landscape of the last legs of the roommate’s trip. Perhaps perversely, it was much easier for me to suspend disbelief in a couch that weighs less moving in certain directions than to imagine the same couch being carried through untracked jungle without teams of machete wielders. The concluding chapters also reminded me a tad of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in that a journey that was difficult for the protagonists was also a little hard on the reader. Then again, I also finished this novel immediately before and after surgery, with prescription painkillers in my system, so maybe it’s not really quite as hard to follow as I found it.

Couch is published by (my favorite publisher) Small Beer Press, which is basically all the reason to buy it I needed, but the deal was super-sealed by Parzybok’s playlist for the novel at Largehearted Boy. Writers, a deal for you: if you namecheck Veda Hille (and mean it) I will buy your book. Um, I guess unless it’s crazy expensive.

needs more demons? just a smidge.