As a whole, though, the book didn’t work for me. Which could be almost as much about me as about the book.

I generally think it’s lame when a review of fiction or film criticizes the unlikeability or lack of empathy with characters, but the funny man was both contemptible and dull in a way I found hard to get past and impossible to root for. Partly this is because the novel’s theme requires both the standard rags/riches/rehab plotline and that the character be largely a cipher, a stand-in for the concept of celebrity with minimal individuality. But I’m also just not very interested in the phenomenon of celebrity. I’ve thought that at a certain level celebrities stop being human by most useful definitions of the word since Warren Zevon’s song “Splendid Isolation” pointed it out to me. I’m often weirded out when real people express opinions about the moral choices of the mysterious people in magazines with only first names in the headlines. So maybe I’m just fundamentally not the right audience for this book.

I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about it, both while reading it and afterwards, so it had that going for it.

And I should mention that even if I didn’t like the book, I enjoyed some of its descriptions, for instance,

The woman is young, like right out of journalism school, and she had that green smell about her. She is tiny and dark, with short hair sculpted into a soft fin across the top of her head. She wears black exclusively. Her ears are small and pointed. She looks like an elf as raised and outfitted by eighties new wave musicians.

needs more demons? kinda.

The first thing I noticed was the vividness of the prose. In the service of these stories Beach deploys striking metaphors and similes, crisp and believable dialogue, and rich and evocative adjectives and verbs. It frankly astounds me that this is his first published fiction.

WIthin the first few pages I was also struck by the formidable range of Beach’s stories. They’re all over the map, both literally, and in terms of tone, setting, even genre and theme.

It’s also impressive how complete many of the stories are. Some not only establish character, setting, mood, but also establish a narrative conflict or even suggest its resolution. A few beg for continuation, to be seen as an excerpt from a longer work — and at least a couple of them are explicitly connected — but most of them don’t. They’re self-contained little nuggets. One of them is almost like a distillation of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle into, well, 420 characters.

I’m tempted to include a handful here, but I wouldn’t know where to start or stop. I almost want to retype the whole book, which would clearly exceed the boundary of fair use. And there’s a generous sampling at 420characters.com; if it’s not quite the set I would have curated, I think it’s fairly representative.

Lest I seem too gushy — I do think it’s far easier to make a great string of 420 characters than to make great strings of 420 characters that tie into a cohesive whole the size of a book, or even the size of a more typical short story. Last paragraphs are much harder to write than first paragraphs, and most of these stories are more like beginnings than like endings. Beach hasn’t proven to me that he can sustain the level of creativity he displays here throughout a work that’s judged by more conventional standards, less dependent on elision. But I really, really, want to see him try.

needs more demons? absolutely not.

Bray explicitly references Don Quixote throughout, but the picaresque novel Going Bovine most called to my mind was Candide, or perhaps even more, a slightly updated and mostly de-ribaldized Candy. (Like Candide, Cameron is young and naive.) Cameron bounces rather fecklessly between various groups of people (Mardi Gras revelers, cultists, and reality show producers among them). Bray doesn’t offer the nastiness of truly great satire, but provides trenchant observations throughout. This bit:

It’s one of those places full of useless junk — state spoons, frosted pecans with a half-life of about two hundred years, tea towels decorated with cranky observations about life, novelty cookbooks, and trivets shaped like lighthouses because apparently the world is clamoring for cute things they can place piping hot casserole dishes on. It’s hard to believe people buy this shit, and even harder to believe they give it to other people as mementos, like, “Hey, we went on this awesome vacation but we brought you back some pickled peppers in a festive, dancing jalapeno jar. Thanks for feeding our cat!”

was particularly fun to encounter in a resort town, with friends looking after our felines.

needs more demons I liked this novel quite a bit, but Cameron’s passivity bugged me, the tone was a bit inconsistent, and I’m a bit ambivalent about the ending. But I give it credit for being much more ambitious than typical supernatural YA fare. And you may never look at snow globes the same way.

I looked at Iowa. Moss-covered, windowless pickup trucks were marooned on the highway running alongside the river. A skinned, headless deer hung from a tree in a flooded backyard, next to a swing set. A trio of hide tents were set up on the flat roof of a strip mall’s bait shop. A small, skinny dog, smothered in mud, foraged along the banks.

and

. . .then there’d be that laugh of my mother’s, clear and clumsy, like a woman tripping over a bell that someone left on a cathedral floor by accident,

Total Oblivion, More or Less is divided into two major sections, and while I liked the book as a whole, I loved the first, and thought it was more successful than the second. The first half is (more or less, mostly) picaresque. Its catalog of weirdness and episodic encounters wraps up just as it’s beginning to feel a touch repetitive. Huck Finn’s shadow is so long it’s virtually impossible for a satiric book with a river boat not to call Twain to mind at least a bit; DeNiro’s ordinary folk confronted with the extraordinary also reminded me of George Saunders, and a smidge (despite a world of stylistic and thematic differences) of Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire.

In the second half, Macy and her family become increasingly embroiled in emerging political conflicts, and one of the characters is gradually revealed to be a sort of archetype. The novel also begins to suggest disappointingly straightforward metaphorical interpretations for the plague and the invaders. There are elements that evoke — deliberately, I’m inclined to think — Swift, Kafka, and Mervyn Peake; I thought at least one of these bordered on the gimmicky.

I also suspect it was a difficult book to decide how to end. DeNiro opts for small “r” naturalistic resolution over big “R” epic fantasy-style resolution — the right choice, but since DeNiro still has a lot of balls in play when the curtain comes down, it feels a bit abrupt. Overall, though, it’s a strong debut and certainly leaves me eager for more from DeNiro.

needs more demons? Let’s go with “no.”

What’s really impressive is that How I Became a Famous Novelist itself clearly follows a best-seller template, although pitched to a snarkier, more cynical audience segment and (thankfully) without The Tornado Ashes Club’s overwrought prose.

Including multiple pages of deliberately bad parody prose and pulling the-joke-is-that-it’s-not-a-joke are risky moves. What makes it work for me is that Hely, bless him, fully commits to his satire: he insults the three most significant audiences for his book: the editors and publishers who decided to buy it, journalists who discuss it, and ordinary people who read it. (A fourth audience, people who make film option decisions, gets a virtual pass, which would seem suspicious if I could envision How I Became a Famous Novelist filmed as anything other than a shoestring-budget indie quirkfest.) Tarslaw’s a bit of a skeeze, but he’s aware of his skeeziness and possibly trending toward future reduced skeeziness, which I thought kept him adequately sympathetic. And when Hely’s authorial point of view shines through Tarslaw’s voice, it just might, y’know, tug at your heartstrings, because, like all good satire, How I Became a Famous Novelist has a hot, angry core.

* You know, “I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison.”

needs more demons? no.

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

I think near-future satire of social technology is very hard to pull off right now: if Where The Ladies At? is real, how can you exaggerate it to a humorous extreme? Some of Shteyngart’s concepts read more as bluntly predictive than satiricial; a few already sound almost passé. (I first heard one of his supposedly edgy future slang terms in the eighties.)

Shteyngart fundamentally failed for me to deliver on the novel’s title: if it’s going to be sad, I need to be emotionally invested in the characters. I couldn’t manage to like Shteyngart’s primary narrator, Lenny Abramov, enough to care about his career struggles or his May-September romance with the Eunice Park, the other protagonist/narrative perspective. I found Park’s character (and voice) even more problematic than Abramov’s — she sounds way too much like a forty-ish man’s idea of a how twenty-ish woman would think, feel, and act (with a hefty dose of into-schlubby-older-men wish fulfillment).

But there was one dimension in which I thought Super Sad True Love Story really shone: as a cautionary fable about the risks of international debt. Shteyngart’s vision of a United States beholden to its creditors, a nation stripped of superpowerdom and emphatically not “too big to fail” rang more true than any of his characters. I thought it was all-too-credible in spirit if not in specifics.

needs more demons? “Demons” is the wrong metric, but it’s lacking something. It might have worked better for me if it were either substantially more or less compassionate to its characters.

The stories in Mortal Engines can be be grouped into two rough categories. Many of them are fables of societies peopled exclusively by robots. Lem’s machine minds regard organic life as a bizarre and terrifying aberration, but they are themselves the polar opposties of Asimovian automatons: they’re more often ruled by emotion than logic. In spirit, Lem’s fables reminded me far more of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift than most science fiction: the societies he depicts are often pre-industrial, if not downright feudal, with “electro-knights” levelling “cyber-lances” at one another in duels of honor. The most striking attributes of these stories are Lem’s ability to look at humanity from an outside and contemptuous perspective (not unlike Swift’s Houyhnhnms) and the strangeness of his imagination: not only does Lem boldly modify virtually any noun with “cyber,” “electro” and myriad variants; but his inorganic life proliferates through the universe in a dizzying array of forms: intelligent crystals, gaseous beings, consciousness spread throughout cities.

Lem’s second mode is a much more conventional SF blend of action-oriented narrative with philosophical overtones. In one of the stories, his recurring space pilot character Pirx confronts a mining robot which runs amuck at a lunar base. Pirx worries not just about surviving encounter, but the moral dimensions of his struggle with the robot. Although these stories were supposedly more realistic, I found it harder to suspend disbelief in them as a 21st century reader , because the resources available to Lem’s moon colonists and other future denizens were often ludicrously anachronistic. It’s a fundamentally unfair criticism of older work, but I’m often unable to overlook what appear (from my vantage point, not Lem’s) to be obvious factual errors.

Needs More Demons? No.