needs more demons?

The Half Life of Stars is the novel with which I officially stop thinking of Wener as a the former front person of a band I liked who’s now writing books, and start thinking of her as a novelist who used to be in a band I liked.
It’s certainly not perfect — two chapters of [...]

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The Perfect Play is a novel about a young woman coming to terms with her abandonment issues via a quest for her vanished professional gambler dad. Audrey Unger is a mathematical genius, but her penchant for periodic drastic upheavals of her life has left her a chronic underachiever. As the clock seems to be running [...]

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Dennis Wheatley’s supernatural thriller The Satanist is so ugly and offensive that I often found it unintentionally hilarious. It revolves primarily around the attempts of a special branch of British intelligence to unravel the schemes of a cult of communist Satanists (some of whom are also, no joke, ex-Nazis).
The novel was first published in [...]

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Apex Hides the Hurt is a slippery little book. On its surface, it’s the story of a nomenclature consultant — tellingly, he himself goes un-named — who is summoned to a small town to break the unlikely deadlock of its triumvirate City Council: the young (white) technology tycoon in the Gates/Bezos mold wants to rechristen [...]

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If Wener’s name seems familiar other than as a novelist, it’s probably because she led the 90’s britpop outfit Sleeper. I’m generally skeptical of songwriter-to-prose-slinger transitions — the skillsets involved have little overlap, it seems to me. But Wener’s songs often had such a strong narrative sense that they were almost short-story like, and my [...]

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It was Leslie What’s contributions to Small Beer Press’s pretty-much-mostly slipstream zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet that made me really take note of her name. Her stories for that magazine fit what I think of as the general mode of slipstream (or interstitial, or new-wave fabulist, or whatever you want to call it) fiction.
My [...]

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