Books

CURIOUS TOYS (2019)

September 21, 2021

I discovered the novel CURIOUS TOYS via a ‘most exciting upcoming horror novels in 2019’ post and was immediately gripped by the fact that it took place in 1915 Chicago and featured carnival workers. Buy me a ticket for that ride!

Upon reading it, it brought back memories of Lauren Beukes’ THE SHINING GIRLS (finally being realized as an Apple TV+ mini-series after many setbacks, under the title SHINING GIRLS). Both take place in old Chicago, both feature a predatory serial killer who kills young girls/women, and both have far more to say about women living in Chicago than to be victims, and both are well-worth your time.

(That said, CURIOUS TOYS isn’t nearly as high-concept as THE SHINING GIRLS, but to explain why would wade into spoiler territory, and I’ve digressed enough.)

CURIOUS TOYS starts off in Little Hell, a.k.a. Little Italy, a section of Chicago mostly ruled by the ‘Black Hand’ mafia. If you’ve seen CANDYMAN (the original — I can’t vouch for the latest as I have yet to see it) then you’ve seen the locale of Little Hell, as the Cabrini-Green projects were built there. If you’re wondering, Little Hell was named that because of the monstrous industrial factory there that lit up the horizon like a nightmare, and was often used by the Black Hand to incinerate bodies.

14-year-old Pin is a young, headstrong, burgeoning but confused queer girl, moved from Little Hell to live in a shack on the Riverview Park carnival, passing the summer until Pin can enrole in high school. Her stern, young mother has wrangled a job as a fortune teller, and dresses Pin as a boy ‘just until it’s safe.’ Pin does odd jobs for the ‘She-Male’ carnival performer Max (barkers declare him as ‘half-man/half-woman’), mostly delivering drugs to Chicago’s nascent film production studios, including screenwriter Lionel who works at Essanay Studios, which briefly produced many of Chaplin’s early films.

One day, Pin witnesses a girl a few years younger than her jump in a boat for the ‘Hell Gate’ water ride with an older man. She sees the man return solo, and she investigates the ride and finds the dead girl’s body.

What follows is a trifurcated detective fiction story, featuring real Chicagoan outsider artist Henry Darger — who has tasked himself with overseeing the girls in Riverview Park — and ex-detective, current Riverview Park muscle Francis Bacon (no relation to the artist), and Pin trying to track down this killer of girls.

Despite the fact that author Elizabeth Hand lives primarily in Maine and London, this is a surprisingly in-depth historical detective fiction novel that does right by Chicago. I’m familiar with the Riverview Park because of the old Riverview Tavern that was located by Roscoe & Damen. The Riverview Tavern not only had great burgers, but they also had a ton of Riverview Park memorabilia artfully placed around the significantly sized pub. (Sadly, they closed a few years ago. Hopefully they found a good home for the memorabilia.) While the Riverview Park was centrally located at Roscoe & Western, it took up a surprisingly large area of northern Chicago while it was active, until it closed in the mid 1960s.

As you may have guessed by some of the quoted terminology used above, some elements of this story may be problematic. I can’t go into most of them without delving into spoilers, but I believe Elizabeth Hand does attempt to contextualize them, but I feel the need to note it. (I’m not the only one to question this: if you aren’t afraid of spoilers, see https://www.npr.org/2019/10/20/771315664/curious-toys-gets-itself-into-unnecessary-trouble )

That aside — and that’s a pretty big unspoken matter to set aside but, chances are, if you’re reading this and would be upset by it, you know what I’m talking about — it’s an exacting, thrillingly, plotted tale about the city I hold dear, and the city I love to learn about, and I especially appreciated the epilogue, but I wish the author had handled the crux of the book differently.

If you’d like to know more: Chicagoan mystery novelist Lori Rader-Day (UNDER A DARK SKY, -also- well-worth your time, and the author of the upcoming DEATH AT GREENWAY) interviewed her during the CURIOUS TOYS press tour.

SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHAM (1968)

September 7, 2021

I haven’t read all that much from Joan Didion — I loved PLAY IT AS IT LAYS and enjoyed select essays I’ve stumbled over through the years. I’ve seen PANIC AT NEEDLE PARK, read a couple of other novels, and watched the recent doc on her. In other words, I’m not extremely well-versed with her work, but I am familiar enough to know when a writer has clearly been influenced by her.

I’ve been ragging on myself as of late for my absolute inability to read influential works in any proper order, and I’m especially kicking myself here regarding SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHAM — a collection of previously commissioned essays — which I explicitly picked up because Emma Cline (THE GIRLS, DADDY) lists it as one of her favorites.

It features Didion penning a number of deep-dives into classic Hollywood, just as the studio system is beginning to crumble. (She has a singular essay about how Howard Hughes represents America and I’m absolutely shocked it wasn’t mentioned in Karina Longworths’ recent opus regarding him, SEDUCTION.) She interlopes on the set of John Wayne’s THE SONS OF KATIE ELDER. I discovered that SLEATER-KINNEY’s album THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD has that name partially because SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM is Carrie Brownstone’s favorite Didion collection. (Yes, it’s technically a line from Yeats’ poem SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM but it’s most certainly a nod towards Didion, as she writes about the importance of the poem in the preface of her collection.)

The most surprising revelation came in GOODBYE TO ALL THAT, when Didion discusses living in New York City for eight years. Obviously, Didion’s best known for perfectly describing living in California, and I’d never suspected she’d spent such a long time away from it. I should have known, given the fact that PANIC AT NEEDLE PARK is a character piece about junkies living in NYC, but I assumed she’s spent some time living there to research a piece. Instead, she lived a long journey there in-between heading back to California.

Unlike Cline, SLOUCHING isn’t my favorite of hers, but it is up there. I imagine some of the pieces will stay with me for years, while one or two I’ve already forgotten. I’m guessing any proper Didion fan has already consumed it but, hey, I hadn’t, and it’s never too late to dive into a classic.

GIRL ONE (2020)

September 3, 2021

GIRL ONE, Sara Flannery Murphy’s second novel, is a multi-faceted, complex piece of feminist thriller, self-described as ‘ORPHAN BLACK meets Margaret Atwood’ which is a succinct way to label it. The story kicks off in the 1970s, where nine girls were born over time by nine women, without the need of sperm, procreating exact younger copies of themselves. However, the scientist behind this method was Joseph Bellanger, an older man with a wife and two sons, but he still felt like the nine girls were also his kin, and he wasn’t shy about showing them off to the media.

All of the women and girls live on the Homefront, a compound located in rural Vermont. One night, a fire breaks out and Bellanger and Girl Nine (Fiona) fail to make it out. All of the scientific notes — which were never shared with anyone — go up in smoke. The fire is blamed on a rabble-rousing preacher who proclaimed that this event would bring about the end of men, and said Bellanger would burn in hell. He was convicted of setting fire to the compound and thrown into jail. The women detach from each other and try to live separate lives with their daughter.

Fast-forward to 1994. Girl One, Josephine Marrow — or Josie — was the first born, and she’s had a fractured relationship with her mother, Margaret Marrow, especially after she declared to her mother that she wished to continue her ‘father’s’ work. In the midst of her exams at the University of Chicago (genre writers really love both Chicago -and- Vermont, as it seems like two-thirds of the books I read take place in either region), she hears about her mother’s home catching fire, and that her mother cannot be found. Josie sets out to locate her, which inevitably intertwines her with the other Homestead mothers and daughters on a journey of discovery.

This is not a subtle work, but it’s not meant to be. It is primarily — but not completely — focused on exploring the desperate throes of a patriarchal society when threatened. The nine girls were pilloried by many as the downfall of men and society in general, at least until Bellanger’s death. The girls — most of them women by now — still have to suffer a litany of labors at the hands of men in order to get the answers they need, and it becomes increasingly clear to Josie that they’re seen as dangerous aberrations.

Reading this over the past week, I’m obviously struck by the parallels with the enacted abortion restrictions in Texas, the power struggle and suppression and, while anyone who has been paying attention to the GOP over the the years has seen this coming, it’s heartbreaking, and GIRL ONE wrangles that frustration and anger and turns it into one hell of a well-constructed tale. (It’s worth noting that Murphy lives in Utah.)

While the prose occasionally falters, it’s thrillingly plotted. Even better, all of the women are more or less assholes in one way or another, with traits like being: aloof, vain, willful to the point of blindness, over-protective, or overly combative. No one here is quintessentially heroic, but they are human, and you root for them because you realize their flawed traits are born out of necessity. It’s a very inventive and engrossing take on, not only, the Frankenstein tale, but also witch folklore.

Girl One

(One more thing: it’d make one hell of a TV mini-series.)

THE ORCHID THIEF (1998)

August 27, 2021

Susan Orlean’s THE ORCHID THIEF is a real-life character profile of one John Laroche, a plant dealer working for a Florida Seminole plant nursery. Laroche has a plan — a heist, really, even though it’s sanctioned by his Seminole nursery boss — to lead a few Seminole co-workers into Florida’s Fakahatchee Strand, land that Seminoles have the legal right to take wild flowers from, and leave with several ghost orchids which Laroche will then clone and he and the Seminoles will profit from. Laroche sees it as a win-win.

Unfortunately, he and the workers are caught, and then the legal rights of the Seminoles are called into question.

While it sounds more like a legal thriller, the case simply simmers in the background for the bulk of the book. Instead, it’s really Susan Orlean trying to understand the personal and zealous obsession of orchid collectors, as well as scrutinizing the growers and dealers who live as aberrant fringe elements in an inhospitable environment (mirroring the deviancy and adaptation of orchids themselves), while also spotlighting the tenacity of the Seminoles to live on their own terms.

Over the better part of a year, Orlean travels to orchid shows, swamps, nurseries, and encounters some savvy strange folk, some natural inventors and businessmen, others are oddities that eke out an existence. The line connecting all of her subjects? They all want more flowers, and they want more -interesting- and -different- flowers. It’s never enough, despite the fact that the flowers often die due to undesirable conditions or lack of knowledge as to how to sustain them. It’s not enough to see the orchids in their natural habitat — it’s a need for possession and ownership.

Orlean’s claim in this investigation is that she’s trying to understand this obsession, but I think she does. She’s there to collect stories, collect enough to make an enticing piece — not unlike some of the orchid events. It’s what she’s done as a journalist for THE NEW YORKER her entire life. She puts herself in severely unsafe situations for the sake of her collecting, not unlike Laroche.

It’s a fantastically woven and admirable work; a once-in-a-lifetime confluence of events and personas that embody themes both small and large, personal and political, beautiful and ugly.

http://www.susanorlean.com/author/books/the-orchid-thief/

THE TURNOUT (2021)

August 20, 2021

I have not been shy about boosting Megan Abbott over the years; QUEENPIN — her third novel — was a foundational text for me. Upon initially reading it, I asked myself the same question that I’ve asked myself upon consuming other transformative works: “You can get away with this?”

QUEENPIN is a lurid and lusty piece of neo-noir about a smart but young woman who falls in doing accounting work for questionable people, and matters quickly escalate into a very combative piece about two willful women butting heads and committing increasingly terrible acts.

That’s Abbott’s oeuvre in a nutshell. She’s all about the power dynamics of female relationships, appetites, and those who take advantage of the those facets. Perfect material for neo-noir but — as Abbott quickly sussed out — also well-suited for young adult novels, of which she penned a handful of (including the cheerleading YA-noir DARE ME, which she adapted into a canceled too soon USA TV show).

THE TURNOUT is the first book of hers in some time to feature an adult protagonist and players. Granted, it still focuses on extraordinarily physical youth-centric endeavors — this time ballet — and has a number of teen flashbacks, but the endgame here is all about the adults and living with the wreckage of their youth.

It’s a tale of two sisters — Dara, a flinty ice queen, and Marie, mercurial and immature — who run their dead mother’s ballet studio. For years, Dara and Marie and Dara’s husband Charlie, also an ex-dancer who grew up alongside them, lived under their dead parents’ roof. Marie decides to move out, opting to live in the attic of the studio, which used to be their mother’s private space.

A fire breaks out in the studio and they enlist Derek — a smooth-talking contractor — to repair the space while they prepare for their annual NUTCRACKER slate of performances, and matters spiral from there.

Abbott’s prose and internal monologues have traditionally been her strengths, but THE TURNOUT has a lot of repetitive dialogue between characters, a number of redundant explanations, and the plotting also feels a little too neat, a little too exacting.

However, this is still an Abbott book, and those are nitpicks. It is vividly enthralling, with rich and complex characters about an under-examined artistic and physical medium, there’s more than a bit of du Maurier regarding how Abbott treats the dilapidated house and studio, and she definitely sticks the landing. It’s well-worth your time if you’re into off-beat thrillers and personas.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611535/the-turnout-by-megan-abbott/

IT NEVER ENDS (2021)

August 15, 2021

I’ve been following Tom Scharpling for a while: he was involved with every episode of MONK, my first adult TV mystery love (yet again, I stupidly worked my way backward and wouldn’t see COLUMBO until a number of years after MONK’s finale); I’ve tuned into THE BEST SHOW intermittently over its long life; I’ve laughed along with his banter with Marc Maron on WTF, heard him as Steven’s father on STEVEN UNIVERSE, and I now eagerly look forward to every Monday drop of DOUBLE THREAT, his weekly podcast with Julie Klausner.

If there’s any thorough-line with Scharpling’s work and comedy, it’s that he’s earnest and never malicious. He doesn’t punch down. He’s a nakedly honest funnyman who wears his heart on his sleeve, someone who is unafraid to admit to times when he’s openly wept.

Unsurprisingly, his memoir IT NEVER ENDS, is similarly earnest, honest, and emotional, while often laugh-out-loud funny. While Scharpling has had his ups and downs, and he has battled a number of personal issues, he’s always straightforward with the reader, and he is well-aware that he hasn’t suffered some of the many hardships as many others have. However, he also realizes that his personal journey hasn’t been easy for him, and he conveys his insecurities and depressive attributes in ways that are extremely relatable, and he hopes that the reader can learn from his experiences.

It’s a quality memoir, one that excels when it’s recounting stories rather than describing them. While it’s as amusing as you’d expect from Scharpling, it’s far more interesting and deeper than you’d suspect, and worth your time.

https://tomwroteabook.com/

DADDY (2020)

August 12, 2021

I loved Emma Cline’s debut novel THE GIRLS, about a flailing fourteen-year-old girl who falls into a Manson-esque cult chock full of flawed members. Although I normally eschew short story collections and opt instead to reach for a novel, I didn’t want to miss out on more material from her.

DADDY is about similarly flawed folks — selfish, myopic, self-destructive, and/or hedonistic people — but they’re all intriguing examinations of individuals dealing with families, both biological and otherwise. Cline certainly has a number of themes and go-tos for her imagery, but they don’t feel overly redundant, and her prose is crisp, clean, but never clinical. If you’re looking for a number of tales about likable individuals learning life lessons and rightening their path, look elsewhere. Also, if you’re looking for shorts that end with a sense of closure, you should steer clear. If you pursue it, you’ll find a satisfying ensemble of fractured humanity.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/251796/daddy-by-emma-cline/

NIGHTSHADE (2020)

July 20, 2021

I initially picked up Annalena McAfee’s NIGHTSHADE because of the cover, but the front-cover puff quote from THE OBSERVER really grabbed me: “A glorious novel. … Full of twisted sexuality, art and power. … Brutal and unforgettable.” It’s a rather generic remark, yes, but I bought it because I wanted a ticket for that ride.

It did not disappoint, and the puff quote is entirely accurate. I’ll note in advance that, due to how the book is paced, this is a very difficult novel to summarize and I’d hate to give anything away.

Protagonist Eve Laing is a prickly, spiteful painter in her sixties who has had some success with her realistic portrayals of flowers in her works, notably in substituting flowers for the London Underground tube map. She’s brainstormed a new work, one focused on poisonous flowers, which is meant to be her magnum opus.

At first, NIGHTSHADE feels in the vein of Margaret Atwood’s CAT’S EYE (a personal favorite) in that it’s an older creative substantially reflecting on their artistic and personal life while navigating a city.

Then it takes a turn. Then another. And another.

It takes a while to unfurl but, if you have the patience for it, you will be rewarded.

http://www.annalenamcafee.com/nightshade.html

THE SECRET TO SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH (2021)

June 15, 2021

I’ve been a bit disheartened to see that this release wasn’t as buzzy as it should have been, considering it’s the first new graphic novel from Alison Bechdel (DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR, FUN HOME) in almost a decade, but so it goes. Hopefully it’ll gain some traction, but I do fear that the subject material was ill-suited for a pre-post-pandemic time.

As you might expect, it’s another fantastic memoir from Bechdel, and visually far more vibrant than anything else she’s done so far. I balked a bit when I heard that, since I’ve always found her stark line work and muted use of colors to play towards the tone of her material, but Holly Rae Taylor’s minimalist watercolors never trample over Bechdel’s pens and, most certainly, emphasize the physical exertion Bechdel’s put herself through over the course of her life.

To summarize: THE SECRET TO SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH is about Bechdel’s lifelong obsessions, first and foremost exercise, but also work, writers, and her attempts to find a proper, healthy balance, one of which I think practically anyone can empathize with. (Personally, there were more than a few passages of her self-reflection that reminded me of the ways I’d try to exhaust myself pre-pandemic.)

Some of the material will naturally be familiar with you if you’ve read her prior memoirs, but very little of it feels like a retread. While the tale of her experience, and her examination of writers’ lives such as Jack Kerouac, Margaret Fuller, and Dorothy Wordsworth make for compelling reading, what really drew me into this piece was how perfectly paced and managed it is. It’s a brilliant showcase that demonstrates how she’s evolved from someone who thought of herself as a ‘just a cartoonist’ to someone who not only knows how to write and visually tell a story, but also to do so in deeply multifaceted way. Her use of visual elements, be it with animals or simple background objects practically demands a re-read, but she also knows exactly when to throw in a callback to forty pages before in way that is leading, but not obvious, and twists it into more than just a callback.

I can’t neglect her sumi-e-esque splash pages, all of which are glorious and deviate from her traditional style, but are never superfluously thrown in to break up any ‘potential monotony’ of telling a paneled story.

It’s a tremendous accomplishment, one that I look forward to revisiting.

https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/the-secret-to-superhuman-strength/9780544387652

An aside: I received the book as part of a Chicago Humanities Festival incentive: pay X $$ and you get the book (via Chicago’s fantastic Seminary Co-op bookstores), plus access to a live virtual interview between her and artist (and friend) Nicole Eisenman. It was the most delightful piece of pandemic virtual media promotion I’ve seen. I could have listened to them talk for hours, and you can hear the same conversation via the link below:

One last thing, which might be a bit of a brag, but: Bechdel not only signed my pre-order copy, but also drew herself as a chickadee. If you read it, keep an eye out for chickadees.

FAMICOM DETECTIVE CLUB: THE MISSING HEIR (1988/2021)

June 10, 2021

When the original FAMICOM DETECTIVE CLUB: THE MISSING HEIR was released in 1988 (solely in Japan for the Famicom add-on Family Computer Disk System) it was deemed an adventure game, but nowadays this HD remaster for the Switch would almost certainly be labeled a ‘visual novel’, even though the HUD does feel quite a bit like a verb-based LucasArts SCUMM interface. (I’ll define the difference as: adventure games rely on puzzles to break up the narrative storytelling. Visual novels lack puzzle-based obstructions, relying on narrative-based ones, although THE MISSING HEIR does have one very weak puzzle that reminds me of Sierra’s MANHUNTER which, if you’ve ever played it, should make you wince.)

THE MISSING HEIR, written by Yoshio Sakamoto — also responsible for many METROID games, as well as KID ICARUS and WARIOWARE — features a bit of interactive detective fiction, along with a lot of soap opera: the head of a family business has died, and the heir cannot be found. An extremely young detective — around the age of 17 — has been brought in to investigate, at the request of a long-lasting butler of the Ayashiro family.

Unfortunately, the young detective — who, as in the style of the times, you named yourself — has taken a tumble and has amnesia, and essentially has to restart his investigation into the Ayashiro family.

I don’t want to give too much away about the tale so, apart from a few frustrating interface facets — there are times where you have to select certain menu options five or six times before a character will open up (rule of thirds, folks) — it’s a enjoyable but slight murder mystery, one of which is completely in my wheelhouse, and I’m looking forward to playing the HD remaster of the prequel, THE GIRL WHO STANDS BEHIND.