One slight drawback: experiencing the work of any of the interview subjects is left as a homework exercise for the reader; Brand Thinking is strictly text-only. It’s an interesting counterpart to more visually oriented books like Sean Adam’s Masters of Design (Sean Adams is himself one of Millman’s interview subjects).

needs more demons? No. I thought this book was terrific. Recommended for anyone interested in branding and identity design.

Black Mass lays out, in eminently readable and often shocking detail, the incredible story of how Bulger and Steve Flemmi co-opted the Boston FBI, using their role as informants against the Mafia to eliminate their rivals and evade other local and federal law enforcement agencies. They even “tipped off” the Feds to crimes they committed (or ordered), casting suspicion on players they would like out of play. I read the first chapter thinking Black Mass must be a glamorized and highly speculative account — and then I reviewed Lehr and O’Neill’s copious and rigorous notes on their sources, and revised my opinion. (This was a two-bookmark book for me: one for the body of the text, one for the endnotes.) In fact, Lehr and O’Neill, career journalists both, are studiously careful to avoid speculation (or any possible grounds for libel). They stop short, for instance, of suggesting that Bulger and Flemmi’s “handler” at the FBI, John Connolly, or his boss John Morris, might literally be described as gangsters with deep cover as FBI agents. Lehr and O’Neill point out Connolly’s boyhood in Bulger’s turf, and the amazingly paltry quantity of established bribes to Morris, and leave the reader the option to make inferences. (Morris allegedly sold himself out for roughly 7 grand and some wine, which even in 80’s dollars seems awfully cheap.) Lehr and O’Neill are likewise cautious in how they characterize Whitey Bulger’s relationship with his brother, former President of the Massachusetts Senate, William Bulger. But they do ensure that I will never look at the State Street building quite the same way again.

I did form some reservations as I read the book. First, the extent to which Connolly and Morris are demonized tends to largely exonerate others in the FBI. Second, many events presented as fact in the book are primarily sourced by sworn testimony from professional criminals — individuals for whom lying effectively is an essential skill. (Lehr and O’Neill are careful to note when testimony disagrees, in fact, but almost always portray one version as authoritative in the main text. Finally, Lehr and O’Neill’s role in shaping the story clearly renders them very much non-impartial: their own reportage helped focus public opinion and create pressure to prosecute Bulger and to examine his relationship with the FBI. So I’m not inclined to accept absolutely everything at face value; their are clearly agendas at work. But the preponderance of evidence that it’s all mostly true seems overwhelming.

needs more demons? nuh uh.

needs more demons? no.

In several specific chapters it struck me as not only reminiscent of several Arthur C. Clarke works, but also evocative of older and less cerebral earthlings-struggling-to-comprehend-and-survive-a-strange-environment tales (Farmer’s “World of Tiers” Burroughs homages, in particular). But it’s also firmly in the post-Singularity sub-genre of science fiction, and informed by recent thoughts about space-time geometries, among other things.

On one level it’s the story of Cley, a young woman in the far distant future who may be the last “original” human (or at least the closest to homo sapiens) and her struggles to escape a powerful (but helpfully imprecise) entity bent on her destruction. But it’s also a rumination on how intelligence might differ, on the breadth and voracity of life, and on the value of the human spirit — and humanity itself — in a vast and indifferent-seeming cosmos.

It worked least well for me when Cley is among the “Supra” humans. The Supras intelligence supposedly outstrips ours, their lifespans are measured in centuries, and their physiologies are substantially different — they’ve dispensed, for instance, with external genitalia. But Benford’s portrayal of their society seems almost parochial, with unquestioned assumptions of heterosexual orientation, serial monogamy, and sexual jealousy as a motivating factor. When one of them courts Cley, the dynamic is all-too familiar from Woody Allen movies. (To be fair, Supra society is not Benford’s primary focus: our viewpoint character, Cley, looks in on them as an outsider; maybe some of the assumptions about the rules of that society are Cley’s as much as Benford’s. And I’m glad Benford doesn’t dwell on them too much; they suffer from the frequent problem of portraying supposedly hyperintelligent beings: they seem capricious and supercilious at best, emotionally retarded at worst.)

I liked the book better after Cley and her companion, Seeker After Patterns, a hyper-evolved and not-at-all-played-for-laughs distant descendant of raccoons, take their leave of the Supras. But the novel also becomes curiously hermetic at that point; Cley and Seeker talk to each other, but not much to others. Still, I enjoyed some of Benford’s descriptions of space-borne life. And Seeker is an interesting character, among the more convincingly rendered non-human intelligences I can recall. (And success in this portrayal is critical to Benford’s overarching thematic goal of exploring the diversity of intelligence.)

I found the novels’s resolution less than satisfying. There’s an element of deux ex machina, which, although the groundwork for it is well laid, still seemed a bit pat. But there’s a lot to admire about Beyond Infinity; it was certainly thought-provoking and I suspect it will be memorable as well.

needs more demons? it’s a bit hard for me to distinguish between “flaws” and things are just not to my taste.

* when I read the afterword I learned that Beyond Infinity is actually an expansion and reworking of an earlier sequel to a Clarke book.

What I was after was simple: the end of the record industry as we knew it. I wanted to see the collapse of the major labels’ stronghold on music . . . since we despised the way they did business, we figured we’d be only too happy to stand by and watch it happen.

Benatar’s co-writer Patsi Bale Cox remains very unobtrusive throughout, the book feels very much like sitting down for a long and engaging conversation (well, monologue) with Benatar.

needs more demons? no.

More wordily:

On the fifth page of of Brain Thief there’s an editing gaffe that had me staring at three short paragraphs for a good minute trying to work out what Jablokov had intended to convey. This is noteworthy because it’s such an aberration. If there were any rough patches later on, I was far too caught up to notice; Brain Thief ’s tightly coiled plot is like some finely machined watch in the act of exploding.

Brain Thief marks the first time I read a physical book and wished I was reading an electronic copy instead. This was partly because I spiked it with a dozen bookmarks for passages that exemplify Jablokov’s prose tightrope-walking between evoking classic noir and sleek sci-fi flavor (”He wore a black suit jacket, which Bernal pretended to himself he could identify as Armani,” “an old gray-water recovery unity with dangling filters made of nylon stockings stood next to a high-end rotating composter that smelled of rotting meat”, “the warbling bleert of an old dial-up modem”, “heavy batteries . . . everything in the modern world had become small and light, except the very heart of their power, which still had a Victorian mass”, “a warm day, the first day when the warmth seemed sincere rather than a smile pasted on a lurking winter” — Jablokov’s dialog crackles, too, although it’s harder to excerpt without running afoul of spoilers). But it was also because I kept needing to flip back to review previous scenes as new twists evolved my interpretation of events (Brain Thief rewards close and careful reading).

I’m not entirely clear on how eligibility for the major SF awards works, so maybe Brain Thief can still garner at least a (richly deserved, in my opinion, because there’s some serious thoughtfood under the thrillride) nomination for best novel. But I think it may not. Brain Thief is packaged as science fiction, but if you absolutely had to choose, it’s more a mystery novel with science fiction elements than a science fiction novel with mystery elements.* Perhaps that will keep it from being seriously considered as an award candidate in either genre. Which leads me to a thought about all the calories fans and critics (myself included) put into micro-classification: genre identification is helpful if it leads you to something you enjoy, but it’s harmful if it excludes something you might enjoy.

Brain Thief is also mostly set where our kittens hail from — between Boston and The Berkshires — and has some slyly mutated takes on some New England institutions which endeared it to me even more.

* Brain Thief reminded me of Rian Johnson’s terrific film Brick in how it incorporated the traditional elements of noir fiction into non-traditional noir setting, bringing a startling freshness to well-worn genre tropes.

needs more demons? good gravy, no.

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.

A sextet of short stories by D. Harlan Wilson opens the collection. Wilson is big on present tense, and characters with attributes instead of names: “the man in the silver handlebar mustache”, “the little boy”, “a bodybuilder in a purple spandex G-string.” He favors dream-like illogic over anything resembling coherent plot. His prose is often very concrete and mechanical: “[He] sniggered, then began moving his tongue around the insides of his mouth so that his cheeks poked out.” Wilson claims Kafka as in influence to the extent that he titled a short story collection The Kafka Effect, but nothing drives these stories the way Kafka’s paranoia and the tension between the individual and society/The State drove his. None of them really grabbed me.

Bizarro first came to my attention via the impressively lurid titles of Carlton Mellick III’s novellas, here represented by The Baby Jesus Butt Plug. It’s probably not a bad litmus test: the titular object is not a molded toy-in-the-shape-of, it’s an actual clone of the Savior, and if this seems simply too offensive or too mechanically improbable, then Mellick is probably not for you. The shock-for-its-own-sake aspect leaves me cold, but beyond that the obvious metaphor of (ahem) internalizing belief systems and its consequences on a couple whose beliefs become disparate is explored with something approaching emotional resonance. Meanwhile the nightmarish milieu doesn’t make sense to me, but it seems to make sense to Mellick’s narrator; there’s something approaching internal consistency. I might cautiously experiment further with Mellick.

I didn’t enjoy Jeremy Robert Johnson’s Extinction Journals while I was reading it, but its grotesque imagery has stayed with me more than anything else in the book. And I have to admit that while marrying the hoary last-man-and-woman-in-post-apocalyptic-wasteland cliché with the popular notion that cockroaches are the critters most likely to survive a nuclear holocaust struck me as a tad obvious (not to mention really gross), I had never read anything quite like it.

Kevin L. Donihe’s The Greatest Fucking Moment in Sports was for me the anthology’s first clear win. It has some weak spots — the back and forth between a pair of news commentators seemed trite, but on the whole it was surprising and held my interest. I may have a soft spot for it in part because the “sport” is cycling (and not, as the title might have led you to expect, copulation).

Gina Rinalli’s Suicide Girls in the Afterlife seemed a bit too familiar — a bit of Neil Gaiman, a dash of Kelly Link, a dollop of Beetlejuice — but if it’s maybe too indebted to obvious sources, I like those sources. Promising.

Andre Duza’s Don’t F(beep) with the Coloureds goes in quite a different direction than its inflammatory title might suggest. It reminded me a lot of a 1988 film, only (naturally) darker, and grosser. I liked the story-in-story structure (although I would have liked to see it pushed a little further) and thought some of the expository chunks could have been more smoothly integrated, but give it a qualified thumbs up overall.

Vincent Sakowski offers up one two short-shorts, one of which feels a bit like a Robyn Hitchcock song rendered in prose, and one which is tired and vile, and the pretty nifty long short story “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Ragnarok.” Its embittered modern couple, Vogue and GQ, have just enough depth to be more than tropes, and the intrusion of mythic elements offered a few interesting twists. The mood reminded me a bit of Leslie What’s “The Goddess is Alive, And, Well, Living in New York City,” only (naturally) darker and grosser. I may seek out more from Sakowski, although the story I really disliked leaves me somewhat distrustful.

I was a little annoyed by a persistent tic of Steve Beard’s Survivor’s Dream: it uses a boatload of definitive articles, maybe to evoke a childlike narrative voice: “She was hiding in this ship”, “It had a domed roof held up by these thick white pillars,” et cetera. It seemed excessive, but afterward it occurred to me that plenty of writers from the lit’ry side of the street play with not dissimilar tactics, e.g., Kathy Acker or even Vonnegut’s “So it goes.” (Of course I’m sometimes annoyed by those, too). Other than that, Beard manages a kind of impressive balancing act between multiple, contradictory narrative threads tied together by a pervasive mood and Beard’s flat, unmusical prose. I would have liked it better if it had been shorter.

John Edward Lawson’s Truth in Ruins is one of the most hyperbolic entries in the entire anthology. In Lawson’s grim future humanity is divided into serial killers and profilers, with genetically engineered “Humanzees” poised to take over after humanity’s failure. It’s self-consciously, cartoonishly, uber-violent, and narrative chunks are jammed together in ways that emphasize their incongruities, like a movie made of nothing but jump cuts. I sort of liked it, although I had to skim over some stomach-turning bits.

Three of Bruce Taylor’s short stories, “The Breath Amidst the Stones” and “A Little Spider Shop Talk,” and “Of Tunafish and Galaxies” are perhaps the most conventional entries in the collection: weird, for sure, but coherent, reminiscent of Leiber and Lafferty. I liked them. I thought the last, “City Streets” was less successful.

needs more demons? maybe kinda sorta

Narrator Hanna Järvinen is more than a little crazy (literally; she prefers “manic depressive” to “bipolar disorder”), and when she runs away in search of her absent mother she finds that Portero, TX is arguably even crazier than she is. I don’t want to spoil any of the plot surprises (and there were a few that blindsided me) but I will mention a few of the things I really appreciated about this novel:

• Hanna has to figure out a lot of things about what’s going on in Portero, and instead of beating the reader over the head with her revelations Reeves usually assumes that the reader comes to realizations at the same time Hanna does.
• For once, most of the interpersonal conflict, particularly between the romantic principals, doesn’t stem from misunderstandings that could be cleared up if people would just talk to each other.
• Hanna makes some very poor choices in the course of the book, but not only does Reeves do a good job of keeping her sympathetic, it’s easy to see how Hanna’s bad decisions look reasonable to her at the time.
• It’s an honest-to-goodness self-contained novel, instead of one book padded out and published in separate volumes. (Reeves forthcoming novel Slice of Cherry, which I’m impatient to read, is apparently also set in Portero, but doesn’t sound like a direct sequel.)
• No vampires!

I didn’t think it was perfect — I thought there were a few issues of internal consistency; the “rules” of Portero didn’t feel rigorous. And some of the characters’ actions strained my credulity. But on the whole, I liked it quite a bit.

Whiny quibble. I read the “nook” edition of the novel, and every ellipsis in the text was rendered as a question mark. Distracting. Hopefully it’s been fixed by now.

needs more demons? more than adequately supplied on the demon front.