• half-page half-tone snapshots
• a purported multi-page e-mail* thread between Handler and her siblings
• a purported multi-page letter of complaint from a tenant of her father’s rental property
• whining (in multiple chapters) about the need to write another “stupid book.”

Otherwise it was sometimes amusing and often offensive. And of course it’s been solidly lodged in the bestseller lists since its release.

* I live in Boston.

needs more demons? here’s what’s needed: if I show signs of reading another one of these, I need somebody to stage an intervention.

The novel unspools in dual, snappy, first-person, present-tense narratives. Jill’s story initially seems like it’s going to follow a standard “who do I go to the prom with?” teen romance line, but gradually veers off the rails. Jack’s story starts pretty far off the rails and only gets weirder. It gradually dawns on the reader that the situation is even more messed up than it at first seems. Jill’s mother, despite being in a nominally heterosexual marriage, seems to think she’s in a Joanna Russ novel. She’s completely unwilling to engage with Jack as a human being, but comfortable purchasing pornography to help him purge his male desires.

I was intrigued by Cycler not only because of the unusual central plot device, but also because discussion of it was so polarized. Some folks whose recommendations I take account of, like author Scott Westerfeld, praised it, but I also saw criticism of it for reinforcing sex role stereotypes.

One possible reading of Jill-Jack’s serial hermaphroditism would be as a metaphor for Jill’s discomfort with her feelings of homosexual desire. If you start from this interpretation, the book is implicitly homophobic: Jill’s gay desires are “normalized” by the fact that she’s physically male when she’s (consciously) experiencing them. I think this interpretation is incorrect (or perhaps partly correct, but insufficient). Jill struggles a bit with non-heterosexual feelings in the book, but the novel affords other opportunities for that struggle besides her own duality; the novel itself doesn’t strike me as homophobic.

Another question is whether Jack is too extreme a characterization of adolescent male desire; I didn’t think so. Jack has four days to undergo a month’s worth of teen hormonal churn and he’s effectively isolated from normal society — it’s not surprising that he’s somewhat unbalanced.

I love that the second part of this novel is titled (Re)Cycler, and definitely look forward to reading it when I get through my current library stack.

* insert the same tired rant about how this really is not a complete standalone novel, and doesn’t adequately label itself as an incomplete work. I realize that this is a sad reality of modern publishing, but it still sucks.

needs more demons? no.

An extended battle scene near the end, however, forcibly recalled my issues with the first novel — the descriptions of the participants seemed a little lazy and formulaic, and the confusing, somewhat contradictory, descriptions of the environs interfered with my suspension of disbelief. But if the finale was a little disappointing, it certainly wasn’t enough so to blunt my interest in the concluding volume.

needs more demons? mmmmmmaybe.

Club Dead was fast moving and fun (also sometimes funny), and I still think Harris is fundamentally a better prose stylist/dialogue author than Laurell Hamilton (or her many imitators), but I can’t help being disappointed that the series is moving in a more standard direction.

needs more demons? metaphorically, perhaps.

Three little gripes:

1. The author’s name is Cassandra Clare. The main character’s name is Clary (short for Clarissa). The similarity contributes to my sense of calculation; seems too much like a brand identification ploy.
2. The blocking of several of the fight scenes was unconvincing. I often had no clear sense of exactly how close the protagonists and antagonists were, and worse, I feel like Clare didn’t either.
3. Mostly the novel is limited third-person omniscient from Clary’s point-of-view. I found the handful of omniscient from other point of view segments distracting.

On the bright side, there’s more moral ambiguity than one often gets in these stories, I was genuinely surprised by at least one plot twist, and the set up for the further volumes is promising. I’ll read at least one more.

needs more demons? mmmaybe.

Couch is the story of three roommates who have singular experiences moving an ugly orange couch that is easier to carry in some directions than others. They start out with the intent of donating it to a local charity organization, and wind up carting it — or being carted by it, the distinction is sometimes hazy — halfway around the globe in a quest of gradually deepening mystical significance. It reminded me of James Blaylock’s generally mild and whimsical — but sometimes grim — fantasies in which modern-day characters encounter artifacts with mythic resonances.

Although there’s no explicit justification in the text, I found myself reading with the supposition that the three roommates represent fragmented aspects of a complete person. Computer hacker Thom is intellectual and logical, perhaps to a fault (in one of my favorite quirks of the novel, Thom occasionally even thinks in SQL syntax: “SELECT * FROM the_brain WHERE memory LIKE “%Tree falling in blackberry bushes%”). Erik is more impulsive, less distanced from his id. Tree seems to represent the spirituality of the trio.

I thought it started much stronger than it finished. Parzybok’s descriptions of Portland were much more compelling than the largely allegorical landscape of the last legs of the roommate’s trip. Perhaps perversely, it was much easier for me to suspend disbelief in a couch that weighs less moving in certain directions than to imagine the same couch being carried through untracked jungle without teams of machete wielders. The concluding chapters also reminded me a tad of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in that a journey that was difficult for the protagonists was also a little hard on the reader. Then again, I also finished this novel immediately before and after surgery, with prescription painkillers in my system, so maybe it’s not really quite as hard to follow as I found it.

Couch is published by (my favorite publisher) Small Beer Press, which is basically all the reason to buy it I needed, but the deal was super-sealed by Parzybok’s playlist for the novel at Largehearted Boy. Writers, a deal for you: if you namecheck Veda Hille (and mean it) I will buy your book. Um, I guess unless it’s crazy expensive.

needs more demons? just a smidge.

The key difference is that the film has one additional character. I was surprised at the controversy, because the additional character’s presence makes good dramatic sense to me: the character provides a foil for Coraline; a way to see what she’s thinking without resorting to voiceover narration or the like. But the additional character is male, and it’s been suggested that his presence is a sexist marketing ploy, an attempt to appeal to young males who would otherwise not be interested in a story about a plucky girl hero.

Reading Coraline didn’t challenge my preconception that Gaiman shines best when working with a strong visual partner. I’m not sure, though, what the causal relationship might be: is that because I first encountered Gaiman as a comics writer paired with some amazingly sympatico illustrators, or is Gaiman’s prose fiction impacted by his familiarity with leaving space for the illustrator?

needs more demons? nope.

Huston’s fast-moving noir has a lot more going for it than its possible ability to induce chest pains. It’s also very funny, thanks to narrator Hank Thompson’s singular outlook on life. (Not least of his charms is that even when he’s in fear of his life, he’s preoccupied with the San Francisco Giants struggle for the wild card. The structural divisions of the book reflect Hank’s concern, e.g., “Part One: September 22-28 2000 — Eight Regular Season Games Remaining.”)

Caught Stealing is the story of a more-or-less regular guy (although he has an interesting and unusual backstory) who is suddenly finds himself the target of a nasty clutch of heavies. Hank is an intermittently unreliable narrator in fine noir tradition, but mostly I think Huston’s game is to see how far he can push Hank’s situation and the reader’s sympathies. I was pretty far into this book before Hank took action that I couldn’t justify with some sort of “if I were in that crazy, amped-up situation, I can see how that might look like a reasonable option to me” logic. And by that point I had no problem with “I can how that might look like a reasonable option to Hank,” even if it also made me think, “whoah, waitaholdit I couldn’t go there.”

If you need further endorsement, I had to start reading the second (of three) Hank Thompson books, Six Bad Things more-or-less immediately after finishing Caught Stealing, even though there are already about a gazillion books in my to-read queue.

needs more demons? nuh-uh.

I can’t help but feel it would fare better as a movie than as a novel. Rigler’s dialogue is serviceable, but realizing her setting on film would give it a solidity it lacks. Most importantly, a cinematic version could omit all (or at least most) of Stone’s interior monologues, which drag the book down — they’re markedly more clunky than most of the prose, repetitive (how many times does the reader need to be told that Stone thinks Empire-waisted gowns are unattractive?) and heavy-handed — close-captioning for the thinking impaired, perhaps.

The book’s ending is certainly well-telegraphed — it involves Stone having an epiphany the reader will have seen coming many chapters previous. But it still feels rushed and unconvincing.

Despite the novel’s flaws, there were certainly some amusing scenes, and I was invested enough in the characters to finish it, and I’ll probably even read the upcoming sequel, which promises to reveal how the Regency-era Jane Mansfield fares in 21st-century Los Angeles. (If nothing else, Rigler should be able to render that setting more convincingly.)

needs more demons? yup.

The stories in Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? reflect an interest in perception, reality, and the gaps between them. Philip K. Dick is an obvious, and somewhat useful, referent, although Sheckley certainly has a distinct personality. But like Dick, Sheckley seems interested in the trappings of science fiction mostly for the opportunities they afford to observe the universe from different perspectives.

Take, for instance, “The Cruel Equations.” It’s a science fiction story featuring a robot and spaceship. A human astronaut, Halloran, finds himself outside the robot’s security perimeter without the password to re-enter it. Since his partner astronaut is away for several days, his only option appears to be to outwit the robot logically, in order to convince the robot to let him back into the ship. The set up is much like many of Isaac Asimov’s robot stories — but it’s hard to imagine any Asimov story featuring the sentence, “After some minutes, a creature sauntered out from behind a pile of rocks, whistling.” “The Cruel Equations” is partly an extrapolative logic puzzle in the Asimovian mode. But it’s also an examination of the limitations through which the robot — and by extension, any intelligence — observes the universe and draws inferences about what (if anything) is real. And it’s also funny, and the dialogue between the astronaut and the robot makes me wonder if absurdist playwrights like Stoppard, Beckett, and (especially) Alan Ayckbourn might’ve read some Sheckley (or vice versa).

Labels like “science fiction” and “fantasy” seem ill-suited to Sheckley. Several of these stories have no fantastic or futuristic elements whatsoever, but they are nonetheless decidedly, and distinctively odd. Sheckley’s prose is more evolved than what I think of as typical for “classic” science fiction writers. His well-tuned sense of rhythm encompasses terse, minimal sentences as well as elaborate constructions like “Inside this apartment, all alone and aching of anomie, was a semi-young housewife, Melisande Durr, who had just stepped outside of the volupturaium, the largest room in the home, with its king-size commode and its sadly ironic bronze lingam and yoni on the wall.” Several of these stories were also originally published in Playboy, which seems exactly right: they display the polish I’d expect from (what was then, I believe) a top-shelf fiction market; they also might seem a touch sexist if judged by current standards. (More by omission than commission; the “semi-young” Melisande Durr notwithstanding, many of these stories don’t have female characters at all.)

Needs More Demons? Nope. And I need to read heaps more Sheckley.