Kill Me’s nameless, rich, extreme-sport-loving, narrator doesn’t want to be left a vegetable by an accident. He doesn’t even want to live with undiminished mental capacity if circumstances render him unable to live life to the fullest. He learns of a business venture — the narrator refers to them as the “Death Angels” — that provides a service to sufficiently wealthy clients. You sign up, they monitor you continually, and when your quality of life falls below a pre-determined threshold, they will snuff at your life, doing their best to make it look like an accident. The catch is, if you enter into an agreement with the Death Angels when you are of sound body and mind, they take any inclination to re-negotiate or abrogate the contract as an indication of mental unsoundness. There’s no backing out.

I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that this doesn’t go as well as planned.

White’s narrator provides a wealth of carefully-observed physical detail, presumably intended to counteract the book’s credibility problems. He also really likes to hear himself talk, and is convinced of his own profundity:

It was the kind of mindless financial foreplay that Adam would
have walked out of, the kind of meeting that if I had any guts I
would have walked out of. The suits ran out of ideas long before
they ran out of words, so I was ready for them to shut their
mouths long before they finally shut their briefcases. I hustled
out of the building and slunk down into the subway with about a
million other people and stuffed myself into a croweded car on the
Lexington Avenue line heading to Midtown. I could have taken a cab
or arranged for a Town Car or limo to go uptown, but despite my
whining I liked the crush of life in the tunnels below the city,
especially during rush hour.

I couldn’t tell if White wanted the reader to like the narrator despite his arrogance, or didn’t really care. I found the narrator largely credible — I haven’t met many, if any, people with quite as many millions as he’s got, but I’ve certainly met a few who aspire to have that much wealth, and act much as he does — but not compelling, nor particularly pleasant. I was interested enough to keep reading, but not emotionally invested.

I did struggle with suspension of disbelief throughout the book. The Death Angels seemed improbably well-resourced, so much so that I almost wanted them to be given a sci-fi-ish rationale (They’re from the future! It’s a secret CIA training program!) . The narrator often seems much better at cloak & dagger stuff than I would expect from a corporate executive, but misses some obvious tricks when the plot requires him to be blindsided.

I don’t want to give away any surprises, but will mention two things. It’s obvious that a book like this will have some twists. For a while I thought the twist might be that the Death Angels never actually killed anybody — that they used the threat of death to restore their members’ will to live. So first, if this is the sort of twist you’d prefer, this may not be the book for you. Second, I was frustrated through much of the novel with the narrators’ refusal to to contemplate the moral compass of people who would choose to work for the Death Angels — but if White’s narrator doesn’t think about this, at least White himself does.

needs more demons? Perhaps just not my thing.

For better or worse, in the wake of Twilight’s success (not to mention Harry Potter’s, Buffy’s and the more explicit books of Hamilton’s, Harris’s, et al) there’s a lot of supernaturally-themed young adult fiction being published these days that shares many common attributes. These books generally use supernatural abilities as a metaphor for ordinary adolescent alienation. Many of them employ themes of humans consorting with the not-quite-human to deliver mildly illicit thrills (whether or not the characters actual consort). The overall vibe is generally escapist, with plot more prominent than theme or character development. (In fact, I think some of these books — although not the best of them — deliberately skimp on development of the viewpoint characters to increase the degree to which the intended audience can identify with the protagonists).

If you judge Generation Dead by its cover, I think you could be excused for thinking it’s one of these books:

However, despite some common plot elements Generation Dead is a completely different sort of novel — more serious and more ambitious — and it’s hard to imagine someone looking for a Twilight-esque experience is going to be very satisfied. In fact, it’s a little hard for me to imagine many readers being completely satisfied by Generation Dead — its symbolism seems muddled, although that’s arguably deliberate, and the abrupt ending leaves many elements unresolved. The dénouement makes thematic sense, but it also feels a little as if it was chosen as an alternative to answering or addressing some of the questions the narrative raises.

But I definitely give Waters credit for trying something different, and I found his book interesting, if not completely successful. In Generation Dead some deceased teens rise again as zombies unlike virtually any other treatment of the undead I can think of. They shamble around, but they don’t rot or eat brains, and one of them even goes out for the football team. Waters plays a little with zombieness as metaphor for alienation, but he’s more interested in contrasting the zombies’ externally imposed alienation with the internally imposed alienation of teens in the goth/punk subculture. The social treatment of the undead (or in the novel’s politically correct phrase, “the differently biotic”) is also an extended metaphor for real world bigotry (and one perhaps best not too closely examined). Waters’ third-person omniscient voice delves deeply into the motivations of his human characters, including the nastiest, a memorably self-aware bully, while leaving the zombies oblique and mysterious.

Quibble: I think writing about counter-culture music credibly is something that writers from outside the culture can often best deal with by making up band names. Waters mostly acquits himself well, but the number of times Michale Graves (a.k.a. the singer for The Misfits who was neither Glenn Danzig nor Jerry Only) is mentioned suggests that Waters’ source on Graves’ prominence in the goth/horrorpunk/metal scene might have been an interview with Graves himself.

needs more demons? just a few.

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.

Leviathan opens with the assassination of the Serbian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the event that precipitated the first world war in our universe, and threatens to do so in Westerfeld’s alternate history. But in Westerfeld’s timeline, some technologies are much more advanced in 1914. Europe is split between the Darwinists, whose array of fantastic genetically engineered creatures include living airships, and the Clankers, who shun biotech in favor of walking tanks and legged land battleships — like steampunk versions of Star Wars’s walkers.

Despite my longstanding eagerness, I approached Leviathan with slight trepidation. I was worried it would be too militaristic. It wasn’t — there are battle scenes, but the principal characters are working to avert or contain the war, which for me is a crucial attitudinal difference. It’s also written for a younger audience than Westerfeld’s other books (12 and up, according to Simon Pulse). I was slightly embarrassed to be devouring an illustrated “chapter book” at a brainy event like a Lorrie Moore reading — but that didn’t stop me. Westerfeld’s characters — a Clanker princeling and a Scots girl passing as a young airman in the British air navy — are as engaging as in his other books, and the plot is tightly paced and exciting. And Keith Thompson’s illustrations are pretty cool.

What really knocks me out about this one is the world-building. Westerfeld’s alternate history is strange and compelling. For my taste, the artificial ecologies upstage the mechanical constructs. Westerfeld laces them with some mostly credible chemical underpinnings, so there’s even some potential educational value (although the reader might come away with the mistaken belief that undiluted hydrogen has an odor in our universe).

Like my favorites of Westerfeld’s books, Leviathan has a slightly subversive side — he clearly feels no compunction to give equal time to “intelligent design.” The novel is pro-evolution enough that I wouldn’t be surprised to see it banned from some school libraries.

One drawback: it doesn’t end with a literal cliff-hanger, but it’s not entirely satisfying as a stand-alone novel. I sure hope I don’t have to wait three years for the next one.

needs more demons? no.

It’s certainly not perfect — two chapters of dialect monograph seemed particularly weak and, the tone is inconsistent (some satirical material about beautiful-people-wannabes is funny, but doesn’t completely mesh with the rest of the novel).

But it’s substantially more ambitious and thematically complex than Wener’s previous books, and mostly she pulls it off. The 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger both literally triggers and figuratively overshadows some of the dysfunction of Claire’s family; when her brother Daniel disappears, she’s convinced she’ll find him in Miami.

What ensues isn’t always strictly credible, but it has a consistent core of emotional truth. It’s also more tightly structured than Wener’s prior books. I thought the chapter heads were especially adroit, starting with the very first, “Obviously a major malfunction.” The eerily flat words spoken by a stunned announcer moments after the explosion are a perfect metaphor for Claire’s family’s inability to directly confront its unhappiness.

Maybe I found The Half Life of Stars particularly affecting because my own less-than-fully-functional family past includes a trip to witness a rocket launch (although my trip to the Cape was actually low on emotional trauma; it’s my favorite nuclear-family vacation memory).

needs more demons? nope.

I didn’t find the portrayal of the high-stakes poker world very convincing. Maybe it really is like all the movies, I dunno. The dynamic between Unger and her reluctant poker instructor Big Louie is a little too pat. And the ending seemed weak — Wener sets up situations where it’s just a little too obvious what the resolution has to be, and then draws the curtain down before a key scene.

But on the whole I liked this book. Unger is an engaging narrator, and Wener’s a keen observer of middle class life — her portrayal of a sad little local casino was every bit as compelling as that of the high-stakes room wasn’t.

This Perfect Play doesn’t lean as heavily on Wener’s previous experience in the music industry as Goodnight Steve McQueen did, but it does have a good handful of hip music references. At one point Audrey worries that her inability to grok nu-metal means she’s growing old, then she finds herself enjoying some of it. Been there, done that!

needs more demons? just a smidge.

The novel was first published in 1960 — seven years after Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man won the National Book Award. But although The Satanist is unmistakably set during the Cold War, it — and Wheatley — seem to belong to another era altogether. The Satanist is ridiculously racist and sexist. Wheatley’s female protagonist, for instance, a recently-widowed, gold-hearted, ex-hooker, is willing to bed a Satanist or two for King and crown, but she has “limits beyond which she was not prepared to go. She had never even spoken to a coloured man until she met Ratnadatta, and had all a normal white woman’s prejudice against physical contact with them.”

Wheatley is leeringly suggestive about sex, conjuring such spectres as a “lesbian negress,” but what action there is occurs discretely offscreen. He’s not nearly as squeamish about violence, and has no gentlemanly reserve about describing violence done to ladies (or, anyway, ex-hookers). That aspect I couldn’t manage to laugh off.

Wheatley also frequently pauses the narrative to inject what are presumably his own reactionary opinions. Once his riff about how a preemptive nuclear strike by the West was the only way to forestall a domino theory Soviet victory could have been genuinely frightening. Now, thankfully, it’s laughable. Unfortunately we are still beset with small-minded folk who might endorse Wheatley’s implication that modern art is created by and for communists, Satanists, and other deviants: “…the monstrosities in stone, meaningless daubs on canvas, and ugly compositions of sound now being produced could bring pleasure to few people other than those with twisted minds.”

Wheatley’s grasp of the modern era is sometimes baffling:

…he pressed a switch at the side of the square black box he had brought up to the bedroom the previous afternoon. Mary was still dozing when his voice issued from the box. Harshly it commanded: “Get your clothes off!”

Sitting up she stared at it. She had heard of, but never seen, a tape recorder.

And his prose is sometimes befuddling:

While they ate a pleasant meal, they reviewed the extraordinary case of Otto Khune and his twin and, when they had got to the cheese, reflected gloomily on the risk that would have to be run if Otto were allowed to hand over to Lothar the fuel formula in desolate moorland country that could be kept under observation only from a distance.

Far and away my favorite aspect of the novel emerges after it takes a James Bond-ish, madman-holding-the-world-hostage turn. Wheatley’s elite special forces have a highly developed set of priorities:

“…Before you go any further, though, you say the story is a long one, and I am expecting a few friends in for dinner quite shortly. I take it everything possible is being done to trace these stolen drums of our special fuel?”

“Everything, Sir.”

“Very well, then.” Sir Charles stood up. “It is now too late to put my friends off, but I can put off a couple who were to dine with me. If I can be of no immediate help this long story of yours will keep for an hour or two, so I suggest that the three of you should return at eight o’clock and tell it to me over dinner.”

and:

.. I naturally went all out to get him. I not only alerted Special Branch, but got the Chief Constables of all the Home Counties out of bed to lay on networks in case he made for some hideout on the East or South coasts. After half an hour I’d done all I could so, having told the Office to call me if they got him, I put out the light and went to sleep again.

and:

After they had had a round of drinks they all felt better, and over the good meal that followed they were able to discuss the matter with relative calmness…When they had finished their meal C.B told Barney that …he was to go home and to bed…it was agreed they should all meet at Verney’s office at nine o’clock the following morning.

Not exactly 24!

Needs More Demons? Oh my stars and garters, yes it surely does.

The consultant, even in careful third-person, is clearly a narrator of some unreliability. He has suffered what he refers to only as a “misfortune,” the details of which are only gradually doled out in his reminisces, but which has left him with a limp, a profound anti-sociability, and an ambiguous, undeniable, but non-crippling stain on his professional reputation. Whitehead’s prose is a meticulous marvel: sparing of adjectives and adverbs, generous with the remoteness and blame-shedding of passive voice, it often uses pronouns and unattributed dialogue to convey a confusion that perhaps mirrors the consultant’s mental state. Even most of the named characters are blank, generic: Field, Goode, Lucky, Tipple.

The novel is sprinkled with references to actual brands like Kleenex and Band-Aid, but Whitehead also unambiguously describes brands we know by other names, like “Admiral Java”:

It was not the first time he had been saved by the recognizable logo of an international food franchise, its emanations and intimacies. No matter what time zone you happened to be in, the Admiral’s doors pushed in with the same slight resistance, freeing the vapors of the latest excursion into Africa, South America, or Blend. He listened to the sound of the brewing machines, their staccato gurgling. It was black gold bubbling from the earth’s crust, the elemental crude. He approached the teenagers with a smile, and they smiled back. All over the nation teenagers served the sacred logos and he thanked God for the minimum wage.

and “Ehko”:

Statistically speaking, a good part of the Western world has played with Ehko. It was one of the most popular toys in the world. The plastic pieces came in different interlocking shapes, the same four or five hues. Once you learned how to hook the pieces together with that little snap sound, you yourself were hooked for a good stretch of childhood. The tiny bricks were easily misplaced, but the kits came with extras and the prodigal pieces returned eventually, coaxed by brooms, even if it took years.

It’s possible, I think, to frame the novel’s underlying thesis in a single pithy sentence that the nameless consultant would once have approved of, but that would do a disservice both to Apex Hides the Hurt and its prospective readers. I recommend taking the elliptical trip with the consultant, to an everyplace/noplace that might (or might not) be called Winthrop, toward an epiphany that might (or might not) gradually unfold.

A personal aside: once upon a time, I accepted an invitation to deliver a talk at a conference. As luck would have it, a major deadline loomed the week before the conference, and I arrived at my hotel with a laptop computer and the grim necessity of conjuring a compelling presentation out of whole cloth in the scant hours before I was scheduled to deliver it.* Huddled over the uncomfortable desk with the curtains shut tight, I found the banging on my door and the shout, “Housekeeping! Housekeeping!” evoked exactly the same irrational terror that the menacing bellow “Gasman! Gasman!” had when I was out of work and half out of my mind in my slummy first apartment. I have to wonder if Colson Whitehead once had a similiar experience.

*I did. But since I didn’t submit my abstract in time for inclusion in the conference proceedings, no evidence remains. Which has a certain congruence, it seems to me, with Apex Hides the Hurt.

Needs More Demons? At first I thought perhaps, but, on reflection, decidedly not.

Goodnight Steve McQueen is the story, mostly, of a unsuccessful career musician whose girlfriend issues an ultimatum: make something of the band in a few month’s time, give it up … or else.

The book’s overall plot, wit, rocky-relationship-focus, and exuberant Britishness probably make comparisons to Nick Hornby inevitable, and The Times (London) trumpeted “If you liked High Fidelity, you’ll love Goodnight Steve McQueen,” in a pull-quote on the galley I read. I’d be more inclined to say, “If you liked High Fidelity, you might like Goodnight Steve McQueen, too,” but I think it’s a more useful reference than most book-jacket blurbs. Wener is less resolutely, “put away childish things,” than Hornby, and her book may have less thematic heft. Otherwise she stands up well to the comparison. Her relationship analysis struck me as more nuanced, and she’s quite possibly funnier than Hornby — I have the sense that some gags sailed right over my yank head, but this was still a multiple guffaw out-loud book (I was also moved to share paragraphs at a time with my wonderful girlfriend). Perversely, I also found Wener’s first-person narrator more credible as a male human being than the typical Hornby protagonist. A few of the turns of the band’s so-called career seemed a bit improbable, but then, it’s a tautology that successful — or even just long-lived — bands are improbable.

As a longtime unsuccessful* musician myself, I must also note that, for someone who once had a major label deal and a respectable string of (UK) charting singles, Wener’s depiction of the small-club/empty-room, stinky-rehearsal-space slog is almost painfully acute.

*(By society’s standards, if not mine)

Needs More Demons? Nah.

My inadequate definition of slipstream is that it almost always uses some of the trappings and motifs of speculative fiction, but compared to “traditional” fantasy or science fiction it’s much more concerned with literary qualities like style, voice, mood, and theme. It’s correspondingly less concerned with plot, and, to a lesser extent character development (at least in a realistic mode).

Although Olympic Games sprouted, more or less, from the slipstream story “The Goddess is Alive and, Well, Living in New York City,” the novel itself strikes me as more fantasy than slipstream, and it takes off in tangents that give the whole work a different feel and larger scope. This is definitely to its benefit; I found myself much more caught up in the story of the supernally-gifted, reclusive artist called Possum, and his ensorcelled love Penelope, and less interested in the modern world doings of Zeus and Hera. For the most part I thought What did an excellent job of steering clear of genre clichés, despite the familiar territory. The tone is mostly light, but never broadly comic, and certainly not without emotional resonance. The novel reminded me in bits and pieces of several different authors, but it didn’t seem specifically derivative of any one particular voice.

A quibble I can’t stop myself from including: If I’d judged this book by its cover, I never would’ve picked it up. Michael Dashow’s cartoonish illustration evokes the wrong mood entirely — it seems much more suited to a more overtly comic fantasist like Robert Asprin or Terry Pratchett.

I sometimes feel a little hamstrung by using Needs More Demons? as a metric, but, anyway, it doesn’t.