As a whole, though, the book didn’t work for me. Which could be almost as much about me as about the book.

I generally think it’s lame when a review of fiction or film criticizes the unlikeability or lack of empathy with characters, but the funny man was both contemptible and dull in a way I found hard to get past and impossible to root for. Partly this is because the novel’s theme requires both the standard rags/riches/rehab plotline and that the character be largely a cipher, a stand-in for the concept of celebrity with minimal individuality. But I’m also just not very interested in the phenomenon of celebrity. I’ve thought that at a certain level celebrities stop being human by most useful definitions of the word since Warren Zevon’s song “Splendid Isolation” pointed it out to me. I’m often weirded out when real people express opinions about the moral choices of the mysterious people in magazines with only first names in the headlines. So maybe I’m just fundamentally not the right audience for this book.

I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about it, both while reading it and afterwards, so it had that going for it.

And I should mention that even if I didn’t like the book, I enjoyed some of its descriptions, for instance,

The woman is young, like right out of journalism school, and she had that green smell about her. She is tiny and dark, with short hair sculpted into a soft fin across the top of her head. She wears black exclusively. Her ears are small and pointed. She looks like an elf as raised and outfitted by eighties new wave musicians.

needs more demons? kinda.

needs more demons? no.

needs more demons? not really.

I don’t know how any nerd could not love the knuckleball, or, as I prefer to call it, the “chaos pitch.” It’s thrown — at the velocity of a cheetah, mind you — with almost no rotation. Its path to, and hopefully over, the plate is determined, as much as anything else, by the eddies formed by the ball’s stitches* as it shoves its way through the air.

And to me, the knuckleball is emblematic of baseball’s appeal. As much as fans love to describe the game with statistics, the game is interesting because statistics can’t accurately predict what happens next. And nothing embodies that like the knuckleball. As the pitch leaves Wake’s hand** he has scarcely a better idea of its trajectory than anyone else.

No one personifies the knuckleball for me like Tim Wakefield, perhaps the last of baseball’s greats to throw the pitch. As I’ve learned about the game over the past 8 years or so, he’s been the constant inconstant: sometimes brilliant, sometimes terrible — often both in the same game, or even the same frame. I dearly love to see him win, but I admire him most in the grim losses where he grinds through out after painful out, sabotaging his stats and saving the bullpen’s arms. There’s an equanimity to him in these innings, a grace and lack of ego that seems very rare in professional sports. Then again, it’s awe-inspiring to see a guy pitch one of the best games of his career in his forties.

Massarotti’s book*** opens with some historical context on the knuckleball, outlining the careers of pitchers whose careers ended before I became a fan of the game, and describing the pitch in relation to the rest of baseball’s arsenal. Then he dives into Wake’s career, wich mirrors many of his games: improbable comebacks against long odds, devastating setbacks. Longtime Boston Herald writer Massarotti offers some interesting insights throughout. His analysis of what it costs a team for a pitcher to record each out uses some suspect math, but still makes a convincing case that Wake has been quite a bargain for the Sox. It’s also fascinating to see well-documented history through Wake-colored-glasses; Schilling’s bloody sock performance in game 6 of the 2004 ALCS is a mere aside, primarily relevant to the state of the rotation and how many days of rest Wakefield has going into the World Series.

The book is marred by some copy editing gaffes, with a score going from 5-0 to 4-1 to 5-2 in the 2003 ALCS perhaps the worst. And it’s written as if Wake’s career was effectively over in 2010, with no opportunity to contribute significantly to the 2011 season. That’s not quite how it worked out, but of course, most folks had written him off in 1994, too.

needs more demons? Despite some flaws I found it both entertaining and illuminating.

* or, in baseball parlance, “the stitches of the ball.”
** i.e., “the hand of Wake”
*** Massarotti and Wakefield confusing refer to themselves as author and writer, a fallacy I won’t perpetuate. The book is written in the third person; Wake’s voice is present as an interview subject.

• His prose juxtaposes lyrical, even pastoral imagery with the ugliness of urban decay. The book is full of description like, “There was a moon low in the sky, like an albino’s eyelash. What light there was came from the stars, or the ineffectual blocks of orange in the pub windows,” and “A layer of slate-colored cloud had slide across the sky. Only the thinnest edge of light trembled above the staggered horizon, like hope receding.”
• Sometimes he approaches the apotheosis of horror with subtlety and occlusion, in phrases that left me sure something grotesque and horrible had happened but not always sure exactly what.
• Then again, sometimes he opts for stomach-wrenching clarity or the well-worn use of metaphor and simile to project characters’ unease onto innocuous settings, like, “the exposed bones of more demolished houses on our dwindling street.”
• Williams’s sense of place is often extraordinary. The protagonist’s search for a mysterious London street in “Nest of Salt” left me feeling almost as if I’d traipsed some of the same blocks. (On the other hand, I found the Venice travelogue of “City in Aspic,” less convincing, as if Williams were laying out his tale with a city map at his side.)
• Williams’ characters, with few exceptions, are either unhappily alone or on the cusp of realizing they’d be less unhappy if they were alone. He’s eerily good at portraying guttering relationships:
  

  Crumbling farmhouses; fields freshly opened by the tractors, the soil dark and dense, brown as wet leather; long gray roads. They turned on to one now, flanked by elm trees, an object lesson in perspective.
  “Now there’s pretty for you, Molly said.
  “There are moves to pull trees like that down,” Ian said, and then mentally kicked himself for once again putting a downer on things. Why couldn’t he just agree occasionally? It was what she wanted to hear.

  (supernatural elements enter only at the end of several of these stories — if at all — as tensions between the characters reach a climax, which heightens my overall impression that Williams is very consciously using literal, physical horror as an externalization of his characters’ internal, emotional horror.

• Scattered through the volume are a handful of supernatural entities or tropes that one might name, or have encountered previously. “You could arguably describe that one as a ‘ghost story,’” one might say, or “the twist of that one was a bit like a certain Twilight Zone episode.” And there’s at least one bona fide “serial killer” within these pages. But even the relatively comfortable, recognizable sources of horror are transmuted in Williams hands. Overall, this is one of the most original and surprising works of dark fantasy I’ve read in some time.

Despite its many strong qualities, I found this a difficult book to finish. Partly it’s the familiar problem of the single-author short story collection: it perhaps over-emphasizes the extent to which an author revisits certain themes or uses certain literary devices.

But the problem here is substantially mine: I prefer my horror to have more likable characters and/or a little more potential for redemption. Not every story in this collection is relentlessly grim, but many are, and I found the cumulative effect oppressive.

For what it’s worth: Williams seems so quintessentially British that I found the (US-based) publisher’s use of American spellings for words like “color” almost distracting.

needs more demons I may have to go with “needs fewer demons” for once.

I frequently found this book hard to read, partly because some of the stories are dense and thorny, but also because the spectre of Wallace’s life, particularly his early, untimely, and self-imposed exit from it, looms large over its contents. It’s difficult to read “Suicide as a Sort of Present,” a story featuring a depressed young man struggling with the gap between his own perfectionism and high external expectations of himself, without seeing it as eerily predictive. It’s tempting to look for explicitly autobiographical elements in other stories as well: does the narrator’s resentment of the son in, “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, The Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs a Boon,” represent resentment that Wallace felt (or feared) his own father felt toward him? Wallace is perhaps too tricky to try anything so obvious (several of these stories devolve around confusion about the identity of the narrative voice and how distanced it is (or isn’t) from what it recounts, and/or from Wallace’s own voice and attitudes*) — maybe the story is about Wallace’s fear that he would be unable to unreservedly love his own hypothetical offspring. Then again, maybe suggesting that the superficial reading is too obvious to bear serious consideration is actually a sort of double-feint.

One might even go so far as to regard some of these stories as coded cries for help. I think, besides being absurdly reductionist, this would fundamentally miss the point. If Wallace’s stories frequently concern the necessity and difficulty of communication between human beings, they don’t exclude fiction as a fraught and intrinsically unsatisfactory mode of communication. In many of these stories you can sense Wallace pushing at the limitations of narrative fiction, trying to brainstorm a way around them. Sometimes he almost succeeds.

Reading the best of these stories is like watching a sleight-of-hand artist explain a trick as it’s performed, and still being fooled. Some of the stories that at first seem among the weakest, like “Tri-stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko,” with its broadly parodic character names and elaborate but stilted sentences, eventually turn out to be among the most densely layered and surprising.

Nowhere is this more evident than in “Octet,” which at first seems to be an almost sophomoric exercise of trite, almost jokey moral dilemmas. It’s the sort of story I don’t want to reveal details about, but not only did I find it worth the effort, I ultimately found it the single most moving piece of fiction I read this year.

needs more demons? Fighting the desire to whinge here about how I wish Wallace had had a few less demons himself. Maybe (to borrow a conceit from his hideous men) without the torment of those demons, he wouldn’t have been such a powerful writer; then again, maybe there’s no causal relationship. No easy answers, in life as in his fiction. Also in summing-up-terms should note that this is a very rare book in that even the stories that I didn’t think were very good (and there were a few) seem to fulfill a structural purpose in what is an unusually cohesive book for a short story collection. Finally, although I’m willing to presume that it is well-intentioned, and am curious about the degree to which director John Krasinski regards the film as successful and particularly whether he thinks it was affected either for good or ill by studio pressures, I thought the film version of this book was dreadful and completely misrepresents what I perceive as the book’s core objectives, but I’m nonetheless grateful to it for impelling me to actually read the book, the first of the several Wallace volumes I haven’t read that I’ve been able to get through since 12 September 2008.

*As inferred from the voice and attitudes expressed in Wallace’s non-fiction, with the acknowledged proviso that said voice and attitudes are necessarily, at least in part, fictional constructs. This is most nakedly presented in the titular brief interviews, where Wallace employs a number of distancing devices, like malapropisms to which Wallace would never succumb and labeling the men’s attitudes “hideous” to start with; the men themselves also employ distancing devices, including “happened to a friend of mine”-style layering obfuscations.**

**In addition to previously noted difficulties with reading Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, it’s also difficult to consume large quantities of Wallace’s prose without succumbing to temptation to qualify or expound upon a point in footnote form. This is perhaps also an opportune place to note that Wallace’s storied use of footnotes is the most abundantly evident, if superficial, indication of his frustration with limitations of narrative fiction, representing a challenge not only to its linearity but to the notion that divisions such as “main stream” and “sidebar” are useful and/or intrinsically meaningful.

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.