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.

(I owe Joe Hill’s short story “Best New Horror” for obliquely introducing me to Gallagher by mentioning him in the same sentence as Kelly Link.)

needs more demons? no.

You? Who the hell are you? That’s what someone must be saying right about now. Well, I’m the guy talking. Someone’s always doing the talking, just a lot of times you don’t know who it is or what their reasons are.

and a little later:

Not because I’m Danny or he’s me or any of that shit — this is all just stuff a guy told me.

Danny’s story is a really terrific updated gothic spook story, precisely the sort of tale that John Harwood spins so effectively. The narrator’s story is something quite different: realistic and gritty. I found both equally compelling.

needs more demons? absolutely not.

Turns out it’s not the same badass — each book starts with a (different) felon being released from prison, so the novels are thematically tied, but not necessarily directly linked in terms of plot or character, so perhaps I should have started with the most recent book. Small Crimes leaves me uninclined to investigate further. It is at least a little Huston-esque in its assured first-person voice and fetishistically lean prose, with nary a metaphor nor simile in sight. Of course, much of what made Huston’s Caught Stealing so compelling is that Hank Thompson doesn’t start as a badass; Zeltserman’s job is maybe a little harder out of the gate. But Caught Stealing also worked because it was funny, and a lot of that funny came out of Thompson’s relationship with baseball. Zeltserman doesn’t provide anything comparable to make Joe Denton more sympathetic or — and here’s the real fatal flaw — more interesting. (Denton does have a backstory, and something of an emotional internal life, but it’s strictly color-by-numbers; his most distinguishing trait is that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.) Huston’s plot played around with the conventions of noir suspense, where Zeltserman’s plays straight through them, leans awfully hard on coincidence, and has at least one twist that won’t seem twisty to any alert reader.

It’s probably not a fair comparison — Zeltersman was clearly striving for an updated take on Jim Thompson in this novel, and it’s maybe worth mentioning that my appetite for Thompson isn’t boundless either. But a point-by-point comparison with Jim Thompson’s novels wouldn’t do Small Crimes any favors either.

needs more demons? at least needs to put the demons into some less standard configurations.

I wasn’t a hundred percent wrong, but almost. Jinks quickly downplayed the Potterisms, and Evil Genius became the most suspenseful young adult novel I’ve ever read, bar none. The way the tension kept ratcheting up and the pervasively paranoiac atmosphere reminded me of no one so much as Patricia Highsmith. I could usually tell when something was about to go horribly wrong, but seldom guessed exactly what it was; once it really got cranking, Evil Genius held me riveted right up to the last page.

Also like Highsmith, I thought Jinks did a good job of keep the reader’s sympathy with Piggot, even when he’s undertaking not particularly pleasant pursuits. In fact, some of Piggot’s less lovable behavior struck a little close to the bone, reminding me of how being picked on in my own adolescence sparked some grandiose revenge fantasies. I wonder if many of the people who eventually grow up to be novelists and/or volunteer critics on the Interwebs — not to mention readers drawn to a book where the bad guys are at least nominally the protagonists — might not have had some similar dark thoughts at one point or another.

Evil Genius additionally impressed me because its smart people consistently really sound smart (if twisted). It’s sprinkled with mentions of mathematics, chemistry, and, particularly, computer hacking topics that are much more credible than the usual fictional depiction.

One the negative side, near the end I had trouble keeping track of all the crosses and double-crosses — but then again, many of the characters were in the same bind.

needs more demons? no.

…a car horn rendition of “La Cucaracha” sounded outside. I looked out the sidelights of the front door to see a white van with foot-long wrought-iron ants welded along the roof, making it look like a giant motorized sugar cube at a picnic. The termite guy.

His name was William Watson, and he was carrying a black vinyl binder at least six inches thick. “Call me Bill,” he said twice, once as he shook Greg’s hand, once as he shook mine. Bill was a short, skinny man of about sixty with a well-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and ears that were as gnarled and meaty as tree fungus. He listened to our tale of the previous night’s insect horror with his eyes turned toward the floor, his head cocked as though he were an oncologist and our complaints might hold the first subtle signs of a malignancy larger than we were prepared to face.

I liked Novak’s debut novel Five Mile House, which shares protagonist Leslie Stone, a troubled ex-cop with a lot of baggage. Innocence demonstrates exactly the sort of progress I’d hope for from an author continuing to improve her craft: it’s more nuanced and subtle, more solidly structured, told in a more authoritative set of voices.

The end was a tiny letdown, with most of the plot threads gathered up just a little too neatly and too quickly. The one significant stray thread is likewise a hair too expected, like the question mark floating into a film’s “The End” title card.

In general, though, if I enjoyed every suspense novel as much, I’d read more suspense novels.

needs more demons? no.

Initially I found The Séance a bit too similar to its predecessor, but it eventually reveals itself to be significantly different. Without wanting to spoil it too much, it pays homage to a different set of earlier works than The Ghost Writer, and it introduces a handful of genuinely surprising notions into the maybe-ghost trope. One particular device seems so appropriate — and so creepy — I can’t believe dozens of other writers haven’t exploited it. Maybe they have, but I’ve never read a work using quite the same trick.

Unfortunately, although the climax proper is appropriately hair-raising, the novel finishes rather weakly, with a hard-to-digest expository lump.

Despite my reservations, I recommend the book unhesitatingly to fans of a good old-fashioned spook show.

* Séance is actually set in the latter part of the Victorian era, and Harwood evokes the milieu far more successfully and convincingly than a great many writers who set fiction in the time period.

needs more demons? no.

The first few chapters and that foreknoweldge, in fact, gave me the impression that ths was going to be Huston’s misguided pander-to-the-fanbase book, like those Irving Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk novels I didn’t actually read, but always assumed from the reviews recapitulated themes from their breakthrough books while cranking up the gross-out quotient.

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death does bear superficial resemblance to Caught Stealing, and it leads with basically all of the commonalities: like Caught Stealing’s Hank Thompson, Web is a kinda naive but more-than-a-little-disaffected smartass with a complicated and somewhat dark past who gets involved way over his head with some rough stuff. And the first few pages make it plain that Huston’s lack of squeamishness is not at all diminished, while the sharp and salty dialogue seemed pushed almost to the point of parody. I was plenty willing to be onboard for a Hank Thompson retread, mind you, but steeled myself for disappointment after the more complex and satisfying The Shotgun Rule.

I needn’t have worried. Web turns out to be a very different sort of protagonist from Thompson, and the novel’s respective plots become much less similar as they progress. Like The Shotgun Rule, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death displays greater thematic depth than the Thompson books (while still delivering action a-plenty). Anything that seemed gratuitious about the opening was utlimately pretty well supported. And while it took The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death a few more pages to sink its hooks in me, they eventually went deep; I finished the novel in two sittings. Since finishing it, I’ve been trying to figure out if it is my new favorite Huston novel, or if I still like The Shotgun Rule a smidge better. The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death didn’t have any 80’s music gaffes like The Shotgun Rule, but it did have a couple gristly lumps of exposition. Really, I think the two novels are a little too apples-and-oranges to make a clear call, so I’m declaring it a tie.

needs more demons? no. But Huston aficianados may be interested to note that this novel features past-tense narration and even a handful of literary devices like metaphors.

This was almost completely wrong. Huston is not a writer who chooses the easy, predictable path. He does revisit aspects of the previous books: some of the survivors of the previous novels make appearances, Hank’s ambivalent passion for baseball reasserts itself, and the central macguffin of the series continues to haunt Hank in surprising ways.

As I’ve come to expect from Huston, it’s hard to say whether funny or grim dominates; it’s both, not just alternately but sometimes simultaneously. It made me laugh out loud at least once, and probably made me cringe, too.

I still think Six Bad Things is the weakest of the three books, but this novel places it squarely in its context as a middle act. A Dangerous Man is pretty much a non-stop adrenaline surge.

needs more demons? noway.

As in the prior novel, Irby seamlessly melds real historical figures like Harvey Firestone, Joe Kennedy, Gloria Swanson, and her third husband Henri de La Falaise into his fast-moving, twist-filled plot. Also as in the previous book, Irby leans hard on coincidence, mostly to establish connections between his upper- and lower-crust characters, but that bugged me less this time. Once again, there’s enough accurate historical detail that the reader could learn a few things without it ever getting intrusive.

One feature I didn’t mention when I wrote about 7,000 Clams is that sometimes there’s an additional level of irony. Some of Irby’s descriptions of 1928 could easily apply to other years up to and including 2009, viz a northern society lady’s first glimpse of a swank hotel:

[She] joylessly trudges through the well-appointed lobby of the Flamingo Hotel located on the bay side of Miami Beach. It is a huge, hulking barn of pink stucco, with a decor that strikes her as relentlessly Florida: pastels, marine life, palm fronds. Everything is bigger than it needs to be, glossy to the pint of smarmy, overbearing in its irrepressible invitations to “have fun” and “relax,” and above all dedicated to the haughty display of wealth. Why wear one necklace when six will do just fine? These sunburned barbarians talk loudly, guffaw like baboons, and careen about like they have been jolted with electricity.

(7,000 Clams similarly featured a brief trip to a Baltimore cop bar that was almost like a scene from The Wire.)

Here’s my most telling reaction to this book: If Irby writes another novel about Hearn, I’ll certainly read it. But I hope he doesn’t — I hope he finds some other improbably charming lowlife to write about instead — because I’d like to think that after the conclusion of The Up and Up Hearn might get to live out the rest of his days without anything especially suspense novel-worthy befalling him.

needs more demons? nossir.