Berger thought that the book was the best thing Blomkvist had ever written. It was uneven stylistically, and in places the writing was actually rather poor — there had been no time for any fine polishing — but the book was animated by a fury that no reader could help but notice.

…words which could easily be applied to the novel itself. Like the protagonist Blomkvist’s book, which is mostly fact-dump appendices, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is angry, and its twin plots are intricately detailed, very much in favor of other niceties.

One of the issues Larsson is angry about is sexual violence perpetrated on women. Another thing I found problematic about this book is how Larsson deals with this theme. Like the old saw about anti-war films inadvertently glorifying war, this can be tricky territory to write about. It took a long time for Larsson to convince me that he was wasn’t just being lurid, sensational, exploitive, and playing to exactly the wrong audience; some readers might lose patience (or their lunch) waiting for the authorial viewpont to become clear.

Finally, what with the author and the male protagonist both being magazine editors, it’s tempting to suspect that Blomvkist might be an idealized version of Larsson himself. Given that, the proportion of the novel’s female characters who throw themselves at Blomvkist sexually seemed more than a little icky, not to mention a bit juvenile.

needs more demons? I realize there’s a lot of hubris involved in making value judgments about a book as popular as this, but if your taste is similar to mine, you might prefer to invest your time in a slightly more literary thriller.

On the bright side, although it’s the first of three volumes, it delivers closure on its plot and character arcs, so there’s no lingering hunger for resolution to impel me to read further.

needs more demons? not so much.

Jacobs’ blend of ingredients is not dissimilar to Spurlock’s: a lot of subjective experience, a dab of underlying science, a few gags, a bit of analysis, a few insights. (Probably my favorite aspect of The Guinea Pig Diaries, much of which was originally published as articles for Esquire, are the codas to each essay, in which Jacobs discussed how each project did (or didn’t) continue to affect his life after its conclusion.) But I think it’s fair to say that the emphasis is on entertainment, with educational value as a secondary focus.

Jacobs’ nine “experiments” and the resulting chapters all follow the same basic template. Some seemed goofier than others. I thought “What Would George Washington Do?” was the weakest, but it demonstrates the general form. In it, Jacobs follows Washington’s personal code of conduct for a month (sort of an abbreviated, watered-down version of Jacobs’ own The Year of Living Biblically) with a side-order of biographical tidbits; in the process he comes to realize how uncivil our society is, and how much he dislikes shaking hands.

The fascinating meta-lesson of Jacobs’ experiments, though, is that he consistently finds that adopting a given behavior — even very artificially and deliberately — winds up changing his attitudes about the behavior he’s adopted. Funnily enough, I recently arrived at the same realization (perhaps sparked by some of the things I read in Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open) and so I’m currently engaged in a few different Jacobs-style experiments with the goal of altering my mindset through behavioral changes. (For instance, I’m trying to defuse my anger at unsafe and law-breaking bicyclists. So far, it seems to be helping.)

needs more demons? the essays do get a bit samey if you read them all back-to-back (which is awfully easy to do). The incursion of an extra-dimensional evil entity would have broken up the pace a bit, for sure.

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.

I’ve mentioned Henry Jenkin’s introduction to Interfictions 2 once already. In it he makes an excellent point about genre: when we read genre fiction, we want it to conform somewhat to our expectations of the genre — but we also want it to somewhat confound our expectations to provide some measure of novelty (”It never happened quite that way before”). My biggest problem with The Gates is that I found precious little novelty in it. I’m not sure I’ve read another novel in which themes of the implications of modern experimental high-energy physics on the existence of elemental evil are juxtaposed with a plot about a plucky lad and his plucky dog who must foil a demonic invasion- — but virtually every individual element of this book seemed so familiar I still had the nagging sense I’d already read it.

Another major problem I have with The Gates is that the previous times I encountered its individual components, they were better. Connolly has a penchant, for instance, for writing longish clumps of unattributed humorous dialogue that recalls (among others) Terry Pratchett and Donald Westlake. But Pratchett and Westlake are much funnier. Connolly seems to be striving for punnish name-based humor and an outlandishly omniscient narrative point of view in the mode of Pratchett or Douglas Adams — but locales like “666 Crowley Road” strike me as goofy, not funny. I can forgive Samuel Johnson (the plucky lad) having a pooch named Boswell — blame for that bit of cutsie-poo could be laid at Samuel’s parents’ feet — but giving a present-day researcher at CERN the surname Planck just seems baffling.

My last big problem with The Gates is that it felt sloppily constructed to the point of insulting its audience. It bumps along its rollercoaster track of conflicts and resolutions without the slightest regard as to whether it all makes any sense. Members of Connolly’s demonic horde are invincible when he needs to notch up the body count, but otherwise generally susceptible to any random utensil that comes to hand.

I think I would have been disappointed by this book even if I’d encountered it when I was fourteen.

In an odd twist, the thing I enjoyed best about The Gates is that it references the universe’s reaction to the Large Hadron Collider, and I read it while stories about papers published (by Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan) asserting more-or-less that the universe is sabotaging the LHC in order to maintain its own integrity were making their way into the popular press.

needs more demons? More demons wouldn’t really help.

The prose of Gloriana is frequently gorgeous — it’s rich and evocative and pays homage to its obvious influences without being derivative. The book has many fans, all I must assume, with stomachs made of sterner stuff than mine. But if you start reading it and find yourself disturbed the first time you encounter a female character subjected to non-consensual, sexually-infused terror, my advice? Quit while you’re ahead. It’s not exactly a pervasive theme, but worse lurks in later pages.

Also: considering this is the author for whom I was willing to endure hours of junior/highschool ridicule to be enthralled by the sorecerous adventures of Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, et al, Gloriana is really kinda slow-moving, and very sparing of actual fantastic elements.

needs more demons? scale really, really doesn’t apply here. I think Gloriana is very successful at being the novel it is — it’s just fundamentally not to my taste. I’m not even sure I should write about it, except for the theoretical “if your taste is like mine steer clear/if your taste is not like mine jump right in” value.

But such a thin summary doesn’t do this rich, strange, book justice. Part of what it makes it work is the wealth of specific detail — Addison spent considerable effort researching the medical treatment and rehabilitation of burn victims, among other things, and it shows. The narrator begins the novel as an atheist whose strict empiricism goes somewhat beyond normal skepticism; paradoxically, I found that his disbelief in the sculptress’s stories made them more credible.

The book fits together like a puzzle box, with stories-within-stories and multiple resonances between the present and the (possible) past. Addison generally navigates this complex terrain deftly, but there are mis-steps: it’s obvious enough that the narrator, with his misshapen, ruined face is the gargoyle of the title; having him also sculpted in gargoyle form seems to belabor the point. Addison employs some authorial devices that are jarring by modern standards — the narrator addresses the reader directly and there’s at least one substantial chunk of “I didn’t know this then, but” exposition (in fairness, the narrator is setting pen to paper with previous authorial experience of writing porn movie “scripts” and few scraps of poetry; perhaps any clunkiness is deliberate on Addison’s part). A key chapter of the novel, which incorporates elements of myth and a much older work of literature, fell flat for me.

But despite a handful of flaws the book was engrossing, moving, and ultimately satisfying. It joins The Raw Shark Texts and Alive in Necropolis as the third remarkably strong debut novel I’ve read in the past few months, and I’ll be looking forward to Addison’s next.

needs more demons? Nope, the gargoyle comes with a doozy.

Goodnight Steve McQueen is the story, mostly, of a unsuccessful career musician whose girlfriend issues an ultimatum: make something of the band in a few month’s time, give it up … or else.

The book’s overall plot, wit, rocky-relationship-focus, and exuberant Britishness probably make comparisons to Nick Hornby inevitable, and The Times (London) trumpeted “If you liked High Fidelity, you’ll love Goodnight Steve McQueen,” in a pull-quote on the galley I read. I’d be more inclined to say, “If you liked High Fidelity, you might like Goodnight Steve McQueen, too,” but I think it’s a more useful reference than most book-jacket blurbs. Wener is less resolutely, “put away childish things,” than Hornby, and her book may have less thematic heft. Otherwise she stands up well to the comparison. Her relationship analysis struck me as more nuanced, and she’s quite possibly funnier than Hornby — I have the sense that some gags sailed right over my yank head, but this was still a multiple guffaw out-loud book (I was also moved to share paragraphs at a time with my wonderful girlfriend). Perversely, I also found Wener’s first-person narrator more credible as a male human being than the typical Hornby protagonist. A few of the turns of the band’s so-called career seemed a bit improbable, but then, it’s a tautology that successful — or even just long-lived — bands are improbable.

As a longtime unsuccessful* musician myself, I must also note that, for someone who once had a major label deal and a respectable string of (UK) charting singles, Wener’s depiction of the small-club/empty-room, stinky-rehearsal-space slog is almost painfully acute.

*(By society’s standards, if not mine)

Needs More Demons? Nah.

Needs More Demons? Nuh-uh.