It wasn’t quite perfect. I strongly suspect a dose of roman à clef, which means in part that while most details are contemporary, a few jangly notes seem to belong to an earlier decade. More significantly, Donnie is maybe a little too oblivious to some of the clues he’s thrown (God knows teen boys can be plenty clueless, but the reader may get impatient waiting for him to put pieces together). But overall I liked this very much. Lyga consistently avoids obvious, pat plot choices, and I found his characters believable and emotionally compelling.

needs more demons? No. and I will absolutely, positively read more from Lyga.

I wasn’t always a cigarette-smoking bad girl. Not by any means. In seventh grade, I made a fairly conscious decision, as a matter of fact, to try on some juvie shoes over my straight laces. . . I figure someday, maybe during college, or, hell, even after if I’m really feeling it, I’ll just take the juive shoes off, dust off my Mary Janes, and here’s good Lily. Give her an A+ and a job, please.

Finally, the novel is set in Long Island, and the protagonists are fans of New York’s American League baseball team. That’s actually not what bugs me. My issue is that to show support, they will don a “Yankee cap,” singular, which to me sounds like it should be a Confederate flag in a universal “No” circle. Maybe it’s a Long Island quirk?
But these are minor concerns, and I think this book gets an awful lot dead-on right. It doesn’t moralize. The teens aren’t “good kids” or “bad kids,” just kids trying to muddle through the best they can. (Their parents are another story; they are decidedly “bad parents.”) Lily, Noah, and Simon’s voices are distinct, credible, and compelling – Brezenoff doesn’t downplay their flaws to make them more likable. The overlapping narrative structure means that a few of the same events are seen from multiple perspectives, and they’re a little different: the dialogue and action don’t match exactly which I think is quite a nice touch, demonstrating the subjectivity of memory and how we all engineer our own stories a little bit.

needs more demons? on the contrary, completely held my attention despite the total lack of genre plot elements.

My first CD Baby order was #17697, for 8 discs, in 2000. When I got the now-famous colorful shipment notice I thought I’d actually been the first brand new customer to order as many as 8 albums. I thought the email had been crafted for me, in particular. I felt special.

A little later, I placed an even bigger order, and it happened to be while CD Baby was moving across the country. It was delayed long enough that I eventually contacted support, and I promptly got a very nice and apologetic email from Derek Sivers himself (along with the discs, in short order). Again, I felt special.

Later on I learned that everyone got the crazy shipment notice, even for ordering a single disc, and that at the time Derek emailed me, he was one of just two people in the CD Baby “organization.”

And for a little while I felt less special. But eventually I realized that a key part of CD Baby’s value proposition for customers — artists and purchasers alike — was making everyone feel special.

Which, when you think about it, is no small trick.

Reading Sivers’ story of how and why he started, grew, and sold CD Baby, I was strongly reminded of interviews with Dischord’s Ian MacKaye. Partly because they say some of the same things, particularly about not having business growth as a goal. Both describe awkward conversations with “suits” who really can’t grasp this.

But both also display an element of self-contradiction. Sivers says the money didn’t matter — an easy thing to say when your life is not severely constrained by the lack of it — but he did, after all, build a music store, not a music give-away service. Perhaps more tellingly, some of his biggest regrets are about decisions with significant cost impacts. And although Sivers repeatedly says that growth wasn’t a goal, but not only did he consistently make decisions that furthered growth, one of his most provocative epigrammatic guidelines is explicitly about facilitating growth. (It’s to try to make your business practices support double your current volume, which sounds very smart. If you, you know, want to grow the business.)

These cavils aside, this is a pretty great book. Sivers is unusually candid about his mistakes as well as what he did right, and he’s lucid and entertaining. (He says he learned to prize clarity and brevity when crafting emails to CD Baby’s subscriber list, and demonstrates mastery of both here.) You’ll probably be thinking about the contents of this brief book for much longer than the time it takes to read it.

needs more demons? no.

I think my biggest issues with World’s End are primarily about the plot, and fall into two groups. First, characters keep making screamingly bad choices. You know the horror movies where somebody says, “hey, let’s split up so the monster can pick us off one by one”? That bad.* Second, the abilities of the antagonists didn’t seem consistent. They’re more or less invincible until the plot requires them to take a defeat, and then they’re suddenly vulnerable to a pitiful ruse. (You could argue that Chadbourn is employing a venerable tradition of underdog characters fighting mighty evils, but I would counter that the protagonists’ actions would still benefit from a little more credibility.) It’s also a druggier book than I prefer, and suffers a little from the wish-fulfillment guy-irresistible-to-women thing that bugged me so much about Stieg Larsson.

*to be fair, the villains as well as the heroes have some boneheaded moments.

needs more demons? Just not my cuppa, I’m afraid

Ry’s grandfather, Lloyd, took his first cup of coffee out onto the screened porch, sat down on a glider, and waited in the dark for the birds to start chirping. Between him and the sun, there was a thin bit of earth and a thick wall of trees, still black with night. As he sipped, the first rays of the sun found tiny gaps to poke through. Tomorrow he would pour the pot of coffee into a thermos to bring out onto the porch so he didn’t have to go back inside.

and

A stray moonbeam found the way through a window and fell in a faint square on the faded carpet, leaving the darkness around it blacker and more velvety.

or, a bit more representatively, the novel’s opening:

Wait a minute.
Was the — had the train just moved?
Ry turned his head to look at it straight on, but it sat on the tracks, as still as the lumpy brown hill he was climbing. As still as the grass that baked in gentle swells as far as he could see and the air in the empty blue sky.

I love the novel’s structure. It sets up expectations and then delivers something slightly different. (It made me think of the “There once was a farmer who took a young miss in back of the barn where he gave her a … lecture” song, although it’s nothing like as gimmicky or obvious.) I love that it repeatedly made me laugh out loud in delighted surprise, even if the delightful surprise was ratcheting the novel’s tension to an almost uncomfortable degree. I love that I had absolutely no idea, even in the last handful of chapters, if this book sided with the “everything turns out basically ok,” “okay with a dollop of tragedy,” or “dude, major bummer!” camp. I love the authorial voice, and especially how it assumes the reader is smart and paying attention, and often leaves conclusions for the reader to draw.

Things I’m less sure about: Perkins is pretty deliberately playing with the elasticity of the reader’s credibility, I think, and somewhere near the end I struggled to keep mine from snapping. And the more I think about it, the more I think the dénoument is tonally completely appropriate, that is, that it should be a little unsatisfying. But that unsatisfyingness is only satisfying in retrospect.

Regardless this gets 5 stars from me on Goodreads even if it blows my credibility to give anything 5 stars, and I strongly suspect I will purchase multiple copies of this novel in my lifetime because I’m going to want to lend it to people who will want to lend it to people, and so on. And I really won’t mind.

needs more demons? absolutely not.

Another hat-tip to Janet for the recommendation

If you have little patience for books that spend a lot of pages recapitulating introductions to characters and plot points of previous books, you’ll appreciate Peterfreund’s determinedly in medias res approach. It had been nearly a year since I read Rampant, and I had a little trouble getting back up to speed with Peterfreund’s cast of secondary characters.

One thing I’ve noticed about Peterfreund’s novels: they’re not plot-driven in a conventional external event sense. There are external conflicts for the characters to overcome, but the primary through plot arc is likely to be internal, and not necessarily obvious from the outset. Meanwhile, the most significant external plot drivers don’t necessarily manifest in the first few, or even several, chapters. Ascendant is no exception, and for a while I thought it was suffering a bit from middle-act-syndrome: there’s a strong sense of Things Are Not As They Seem hanging over many of the proceedings, and many plot elements with a span beyond beyond this novel. (Without getting too spoiler-y, the 64K$ question here is, “Can humanity and unicorns learn to just get along? And if so, how?”)

But the final third or so of this novel really kicks into high gear. I think I read it in a single sitting. And while at least one more novel is clearly in the offing, a) I don’t mind, and b) this one achieves a more satisfying degree of closure than I thought it was going to.

needs more demons? the distribution is a little lumpy, perhaps, but no.

Arguably, AC/DC’s story — certainly since 1980 — doesn’t afford many opportunities to dive deep. There’ve been the expected substance-abuse-related departures, some with eventual triumphant sober returns. The band earned a bit of Moral Majority outrage (although not as much as, say, Judas Priest). They’ve continued to release workmanlike albums, about which many of you can sense the contributors struggling to find good things to say. The still-living band members have a reputation for avoiding groupie shenanigans and don’t slag each other off in the press. Compared to the likes of Metallica or Pink Floyd, they offer little drama.

In 1980, of course, they lost Bon Scott, the frontman and lyricist behind all their classic seventies releases to “misadventure” (straight-up alcohol poisoning, Sutcliffe establishes, no vomit involved). After scant weeks they were in the studio with new singer Brian Johnson, recording Back in Black, an unassailable classic (not the best hard rock album, nor even the best AC/DC album, but if you’re only going to ever hear one hard rock album in your life, still the one you should chose). Sutcliffe gives no credence to longstanding rumors that Scott wrote some of Back in Black’s lyrics; Johnson credits Scott’s spiritual presence with helping him craft songs like the mighty title track and “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Those two songs have always seemed closer to me to Scott’s cheerful “gutter poetry” than anything else I ever heard with Johnson’s credits on it. (Confession: I’m pretty sure I bought Flick of the Switch in college, but it was the last AC/DC record I owned, so there are still Johnson-penned lyrics I haven’t heard.)

This is the thing about AC/DC that’s struck me as a bit sad for the past three decades. Johnson’s a capable singer and front man, but for me the enduring magic of AC/DC is split roughly half between those miraculously simple, dense, and catchy riffs, and Scott’s demented, puckish, persona. I can’t imagine Johnson ever coming up with anything as off-handedly brilliant as “Problem Child”’s slurred aside, “even my mother hates me,” or making violence as funny (or alliterative) as “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” does. I think it’s telling that the nicest thing the essayists find to say about the several “comeback” albums is that some of the songs have a spirit similar to one of Scott’s songs (or something from Back in Black).

The book definitely delivers on the “ultimate illustrated” score, with plenty of album sleeves, tour ads, backstage passes, ticket stubs, and promo items to accompany the many, many live shots of Angus Young grimacing, and of the rest of the band too. (You might wonder if there’s a Dorian Gray-styled picture of Angus Young squirreled away somewhere, although excluding his hair.)

needs more demons?

The Accidental Demon Slayer delivered barely enough novelty to keep me reading through it’s first half, but I thought it picked up significantly when it got around to dealing with the main plot arc. Kudos are also due to Fox for writing an actual self-contained novel; I feared at one point that she was setting up a quest that would take several episodic-encounter-filled novels to resolve, but The Accidental Demons Slayer delivers a reasonable amount of closure.

I suspect that some of the authors with carefully generic, low-on-identifiable-ethnicity names churning out “paranormal romance” by the reamful will eventually be revealed to be stables of ghost writers in the “Victor Appleton” mode. But I don’t think Angie Fox is one of those, primarily because The Accidental Demon Slayer had a few howlers that I wouldn’t expect from a professional ghost writer*, like this description of an “industrial shower”: “It didn’t have a curtain, no real floor even. The water drained into a metal pipe that pushed up about an inch out of the concrete floor.” I also noticed a continuity problem in the novel’s obligatory sex scene. First there’s, “I stared at him, unable to speak, as he slowly unfastened each white button on my blouse,” followed in two pages by, “He yanked my shirt open, sending buttons flying.”

But despite its flaws, there’s some spark here. I have the sense that Fox was writing exactly the type of book that she really wanted to read as much as writing a book filling rigid marketability requirements. And even if it’s not exactly the type of book I want to read, I liked it well enough that I’ll probably read more from Fox.

*or a semi-conscious copy editor!

needs more demons? A few more demons might not have hurt.

On the other hand, this is a pretty creepy book. Narrator Will crushes hard unsurprisingly, on his step-sister Lulu in adolescence. Initially she seems — to him, at least — to reciprocate his unsiblingly feelings, but after the set-up chapters it becomes clear — to everyone except Will — that she doesn’t anymore. And Will. Does. Not. Let. Go. He’s gripped by the fallacious notion that there’s some magic formula that will rekindle Lulu’s affection for him. It leads him to do some pretty shitty stuff, and at times it was difficult for me to ride along in Will’s head. (Narrator Will is looking back from an unspecific older/sadder/wiser vantage point and frequently reminds the reader that he’s “not proud” of this or that; I read this as an attempt on Evison’s part to ameliorate Will’s unsympatheticness, but it didn’t quite work for me. And maybe I should admit that I’m not a stranger to the “find a way to make her love me again” myth, because that probably impacted my gut emotional reaction to Will’s transgressions.)

It made perfect sense to me that one of the novel’s back-jacket pull-quotes was from Tim Sandlin. All About Lulu has a slightly similar dynamic to Sandlin’s Skipped Parts, particularly that the viewpoint character is dramatically less emotionally mature than the more worldly crush object. My reaction also followed a similar dynamic; I was initially charmed by Skipped Parts, but found it (and the following books) increasingly disturbing as they progressed.

I’m curious to see what’s next from Evison; I hope he explores some different thematic territory.

needs more demons? I actually felt there was a demon surfeit, although maybe that’s in part because the book woke up some of my own.

I liked My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands much better than the other one, partly because it’s raunchier, but mostly there’s something approaching character development. I also thought it was funnier.

needs more demons? I do find it kind of amusing to imagine a smallish demon horde materializing at one of Chelsea’s parties and giving her more significant challenges to overcome than a shortage of Ketel One vodka*. And you know what? I think she might think it was funny, too. That is, if it happened to somebody else.

Hopefully she got some free cases for all the product placement.