book review

This is what a book series is supposed to look like.

This is what a book series is supposed to look like.

And these.

This is NOT what a book series is supposed to look like.

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I could have titled this segment “Be a Geek” but I don’t want to give non-geeks the wrong idea.

But also, you’re a geek. Maybe you aren’t a traditional geek, immodestly obsessed with science fiction and fantasy books, films, and other paraphernalia, but you go hard for your hobbies, interests, and likes. You might be a sports or political geek, or a music or film geek. You might be a foodie or love gardening. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re pursuing some creative geekery.

Put simply, a geek is someone who loves what they love, passionately and unapologetically.

Some of my favorite books are those in which the writers put it all on the page, not only their passions or deep background knowledge, but all the fringe elements and garnishes that make the work uniquely theirs. The kind of inside knowledge that you can’t get from research; you have to live with it. The kind of book that could not have been written by anyone but that single author.

Today’s examples come from the world of comics, where, by definition, writers have to be comfortable indulging their interests. It’s easier now that superhero film franchises make multi-millions at the box office, but still – the people who write and draw comics aren’t doing it for the money or prestige. No one is writing about superheroes with a Pulitzer in mind.

Because I’m a Gen X writer, both of these examples also come from the 80s. I could have found more modern examples, but the surge of high-quality, independent comics publishers from the mid-80s – much of it self-published – is one of my geekdoms.

With Aztec Ace, writer Doug Moench created a comic that combined a vast range of interests: time travel, the Aztecs (naturally), Depression-era America, Sigmund Freud, comic books and pulp magazines, and philosophical paradoxes. The result is a compelling, intelligent, and yet action-packed science fiction/mystery adventure comic. It’s Dr. Who for conspiracy theorists, with gams and boobs.

The title ran for 15 issues in the 1980s, at the time a solid number for an offbeat non-superhero comic published by a small independent company. It ended rather abruptly, but 35 years later, it has been collected in a gorgeous hardbound edition, with a new story.

In Time², writer/artist Howard Chaykin explores an other-world where time is experienced at a different level, and where demons, advanced robotics, and zombies co-exist. Film noir mobsters, city politics, urban renewal, Jazz-era New York, and sex collide in Chaykin’s most personal work. Chaykin has said he did not expect Time² to find a large audience, either at the time of its creation or more recently, when the first two graphic novels were collected in hardcover, along with a new full-length story. He proudly affirms that – damn the torpedoes – these stories were for him.

In addition to zombie jazz musicians (above), the comic featured haunted horny police cars…

Sex robot serial killers…

…and legally binding wills that required a black widow murderer to cohabitate with her undead husband for five years before she could inherit his estate.

When he launched the series, Chaykin was coming off his very popular American Flagg! series, which itself was an amalgam of Chaykin’s interests in speculative fiction, late stage capitalism, pop culture, sex kinks, and soft-core porn, which formed the foundation for a series of stories that were part science fiction and part political thriller, with frequent interludes for quickie encounters between the protagonist and various side characters, and sometimes side characters with each other. Only Raul the talking cat missed out.

The 80s were a grand time for comic artists with vision, who were unafraid to indulge their interests and passions in their work. Aztec Ace and Time² are both well-remembered, but I wouldn’t consider either very well known. I’d love for them to find a wider audience, by whatever means.

Others I could have mentioned: Cerebus (sword and sorcery, religion, political satire, gender politics); Zot! (super-heroes, science fiction, art deco); Love & Rockets (science fiction, punk music, magic realism, South American politics, Archie comics). Yes, those are all from the 80s, too. With the exception of Zot!, they all wore their sexual proclivities on their sleeves. That probably says something about me, too.

What kind of novel or story would combine my multiple interests? If I were writing the most indulgent work imaginable, it would likely feature some combination of tough women and mean gays, exclusive clubs, kid gangs and chosen families, political intrigue, family dynasties, comic books, early 20th century European literature, ghosts, Nazis, writers and artists, time travel, talking apex predators, secret societies, conspiracy theories, Celtic mythology, alternate worlds, and doppelgangers.

It would explore themes of identity, purpose, individuality and authenticity, spirituality, alienation, belonging, and sacrifice, wrapped up with more questions than answers. There’d be awkward sex, casual violence, vengeance, loss, family secrets, love’s cruelty, passion for creation, and resistance and dignity in the face of life’s absurdity.

It would definitely mash up genres (SF, fantasy, horror, true crime, murder mystery, superhero, alternative history) and if I could work in an Excel spreadsheet, ice cream, and a dinosaur, I’d be in Heaven.

What about you? If you gave yourself, permission, what’s the most balls to the wall indulgent story you could concoct?

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Writers may find it difficult to bring attention to their work. Thanks to the internet, there are so many more people writing and places to publish and books available for free that it takes a lot of money, luck, or both to rise above the din.

Authenticity can help. In addition to being good for your soul, authenticity makes you more relatable and more memorable. Pursuing your passions – rather than chasing the market – can help you attract like-minded people, the very people who are most likely to enjoy, follow, and share your writing.

So be different. Take risks. Write what no one else is writing. If you follow as many blogs as I do, you’ve probably seen tips like “write a great premise!” and “create interesting characters!”, without any practical advice to back them up. Even when a blogger goes a bit deeper, their recommendations tend to come from the shallow end of what they personally find interesting and likely to sell well, rather than what’s truly unique.

Unlike this week’s look at being honest on the page, you can probably think of many examples of novels with attention-grabbing premises: A mystery told from the POV of an autistic boy (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time); a boy goes on a quest to solve a puzzle left behind by his father, who died on 9/11 (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close); a group of residents in a retirement community solve cold case murders (The Thursday Murder Club); etc., etc.

But even the most interesting genre novels – and I love them – are written in a fairly straightforward manner. Characters are introduced, the action rises and falls, the hero falters but probably wins the day, even if the win is not complete or what he expected. The drapery is unique but the scaffolding is familiar. Rarer, though, are those books that play with structure or language.

China Miéville’s The City and the City plays with storytelling and reader experience in an interesting way. In the book, considered part of the New Weird genre, two Eastern-European city-states simultaneously occupy the same physical space. Citizens of each city can see and interact with their counterparts in the other, but are forbidden by law from doing so. From childhood, they are trained to “unsee” the residents and buildings in their sister city, on penalty of being disappeared by a secretive organization known as the Breach. Miéville recreates the eeriness of his setting, describing what his narrator sees and shouldn’t see and unsees, before he introduces the concept of the blended cities. Thus the reader is left to figure out what’s happening. It’s incredibly disorienting and takes time to get accustomed to. In effect, by dropping the reader into the story world without explaining how it functions, Miéville trains the reader to see the world in the same way its citizens are trained to see only their part of it.

Miéville also uses description in an interesting way in The Last Days of New Paris, an alt-history novel in which Paris is still occupied by the Nazis in 1950. Along with guns and hand grenades, weapons of war include living Exquisite Corpses, real-world manifestations of surrealist art. Exquisite Corpse was a parlor game in which images were created by multiple players – usually artists, because of course – each contributing an element in sequence, based on agreed-upon rules. Here’s a classic example.

Want to experience creative brain-freeze? Imagine coming into a novel cold and reading a detailed description of the above and trying to imagine it as a living creature attacking a band of French resistance fighters. The description makes no sense, even upon multiple readings. You might wonder if your copy of the novel is missing some words or if perhaps you’ve had a mild stroke.

When I say that most writing advice isn’t structured to encourage risk-taking and authenticity, this is the kind of work I have in mind. Presented with The City and the City and The Last Days of New Paris in draft, the average writing guru would have argued for more context clues or backstory in the early scenes. While Don’t Confuse the Reader is great advice for novices, when that rule is set in stone, we risk losing our ability to surprise, challenge, and delight the reader as well.

Most of us will not rise to the occasion as well as China Miéville or my next inspiration, Alan Moore, whose personality, talents, intellect, and interests are uniquely suited to creative puzzles and complex plots and themes. However, if we’re going to learn, we might as well look to some of the best.

In his short story collection, Voice of the Fire, Moore creates 12 fantasy stories set in the same geographical location in England over the course of multiple centuries, beginning at the end of the Stone Age and continuing through medieval, Victorian, and modern times. Linked by geography, theme, and imagery, the stories are told through the points of view of various characters, including one that presents quite a challenge for the reader.

In “Hob’s Hog”, set in 4000 BC, the narrator is a stone age halfwit who is chased away by his tribe after the death of the mother who protected him. Whether Hob is developmentally challenged or merely an evolutionary left-behind we can’t know, but his vocabulary is extremely limited by modern times. Moore has said that he restricted himself to using some 1,200-1,400 words for the entire 45 page story, which required some creative combinations and permutations to convey what Hob sees and experiences in a way that a modern reader can grasp. Here’s how the story begins:

“A-hind of hill, ways off to sun-set-down, is sky come like as fire, and walk I up in way of this, all hard of breath, where is grass colding on I’s feet and wetting they.

There is not grass on high of hill. There is but dirt, all in a round, that hill is as like to a no-hair man, he’s head. Stands I, and turn I’s face to wind for sniff, and yet is no sniff come for far ways off. I’s belly hurts, in middle of I. Belly-air come up in mouth, and lick of it is like to lick of no thing. Dry-up blood lump is come black on knee, and is with itch. Scratch I, where is yet more blood come.”

You can see that Hob’s ability to describe himself and his world is constrained. He has no words for behind, atop, smell, stomach, taste, or scab, or even the self-referential me, my, or myself.

Try that on for 45 pages.

It’s not easy to read and there’s certainly no skimming any of its pages, not if you want to follow the whole story. It took me as long to read the first story as it did the remaining twelve. While the story was challenging, the reward was worth it, and I imagine Moore felt the same when he finished writing it.

Few of us will master our craft to the point where we can create a sense of disorientation in our readers or box in their worldview with a limited vocabulary, but we can be bold in our own ways and it never hurts to challenge ourselves. You don’t have to confess a dirty secret to put a lot of yourself on the page.

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For the next few weeks, I’m going to revisit one of my favorite themes and – in my opinion – one of the most important tasks facing any creative writer: Being authentic.

On the plus side, being authentic is as easy as being yourself. There’s only one you and you know that person from the inside out. And if you don’t know yourself, you should. You’re amazing. If you’re not sure where to start, I can recommend some books.

On the down side, writers are inundated by advice that can drain the personality from your work. The market demands such and such. Readers insist on thus and so. If you tried to implement the various have-to’s set forth by the hive mind, your writing might become technically more proficient, but also practically indistinguishable from the manuscript produced by the monkey to your left.

You’ll still find plenty of advice urging you to put yourself into your work – and God bless all of it – but even that guidance is often couched in terms that are intended to render you palatable to the market, whatever that might be this week. You will never read an article in…let’s say Writer’s Digest…urging you to ignore the desires of agents and publishers. No matter how good their advice may be, their articles are intended for writers who want to be steered into the publishing funnel.

I prefer writers who march to their own drum, who write what they want, in the genre and form they want, and who publish in whatever format they want. I would much rather read the interesting but imperfect output of a writer who poured their passion into their work, than a technically well-crafted novel constructed to reach the largest possible audience mass, which could have been written by any anonymous author who mastered the formula. A feature piece in Rolling Stone might be better written, but give me the folded and stapled DIY zine published by a couple of kids who are consumed by love for their favorite local band. One cinematic bomb like Megalopolis is worth 25 by-the-numbers summer blockbusters.

That doesn’t mean we eschew excellence. Excellence and authenticity are not mutually exclusive, but your first responsibility is to yourself. You can become the best possible version of your writing self without one whit of regard for what other people think about your thoughts, passions, dislikes, philosophies, experiences, and observations. In fact, I’d say that’s the latter provides you with the best route for achieving the former.

Of course, being authentic does not mean being half-assed. If you’re going through the bother of writing, you might as well have craft skills. Those skills will help ensure that your authentic self is presented in the best possible way and that your readers pick up what you’re putting down. You may still fail, but do so by ambition, not through laziness.

Let’s call it the Build it and They Will Come School of Writing. Be yourself. Pursue your passions. Avoid the easy answer. Be great. The people who will appreciate you for who you are will find you. They may be outnumbered by the crowd who want the book equivalent of Hallmark Channel Christmas movies, but that smaller group is more valuable than rubies. Those are your people.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to talk about some writers who did it their way, who infused their work with their idiosyncrasies, geek interests, intrusive thoughts, political POVs, and secrets Batman couldn’t beat out of most people. As always, your mileage may vary, but IMO, these are writers who did it dirty and got it right. I guarantee every one of them were told not to do it that way, and every one got blasted by critics for doing it anyway.

I have a half dozen or so books to discuss over the next few weeks. Today, I’m resharing a post from last year, about a writer who wasn’t afraid to be ugly.

Writers are told to write truthfully and to be authentic. Be brave. Don’t hold back. Put yourself on the page. I’ve given that same advice here on the blog a few times.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott says that if people wanted you to write nicely about them, they should have behaved better. Notwithstanding issues of libel, your experiences, your emotions, your pain, and your successes belong to you. You can and should write about them, even if the particulars are disguised as fiction.

For all that advice, I don’t see too many people sharing examples of what it means to be raw and truthful on the page. Who’s done it successfully? How did they do it? What worked? Someone may throw out a villainous protagonist, like Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley or Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, or the unreliable narrator in Fight Club. But they’re not exactly what I’m looking for in this context. At heart, most of us can’t relate to such characters. I have no doubt that Patricia Highsmith lived vicariously through Tom Ripley, using his victims as stand-ins for people she would have liked to club in real life, but catharsis isn’t necessarily the same as emotional truth.

Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield may be a good example. J.D. Salinger portrays Holden’s crisis of faith in heartbreaking detail, showing how grief can render us irrational and unlikeable. That’s probably something Salinger experienced himself. Most people wouldn’t enjoy spending an evening around such an obnoxious boy, but by the end of his story, we understand the source of his anger. While he annoys many readers, the chip on his shoulder is shrouded in black crepe, ultimately rendering him sympathetic.

But what about truths that aren’t disguised as fiction? Could I find an example of a writer who didn’t distance themselves from their worst aspects via a fictional character? As I brainstormed this topic for the blog, this memoir leapt to mind, a book by someone bold enough to put her ugliest self on the page.

Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession by Julie Powell

In Cleaving, Julie Powell – most famous for her first memoir, Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen – in part shares her obsession with learning to render butchered animals. After a few false starts, she lands an apprenticeship with Fleischer’s, a family-owned butcher shop in upstate New York. Powell’s experience at Fleischer’s takes up a good half of the book, and she doesn’t hold back on the details. A reader may be either fascinated or repulsed by her descriptions of the butchered and skinned animals, how they are rendered, and what’s left when the process is done, but the writing is sensual and compelling.

However, the story of Powell’s apprenticeship is merely the brown paper wrapped around the real meat of the memoir, the emotional butchery done to Powell’s husband, Eric, via Julie’s ongoing affair with a former lover.

Again, Powell doesn’t hold back. She does herself no favors in her writing. She gives no reason for the affair, other than physical obsession. She doesn’t pretend that it’s love. Her husband is aware of the affair throughout, yet doesn’t seek a divorce. Sadly – selfishly, cruelly – neither does Julie. Instead, she desires both the comfort of her marriage and the physical thrill of her affair, regardless of the emotional turmoil her husband suffers. Even when the affair ends, Powell waits for messages from her former lover, like a junkie craving a hit. When she’s gone from home too long, her husband suspects they are together, the trust in the marriage broken.

Throughout the memoir, I waited for a reversal – a reason for the affair, a realization on Powell’s part, or a change in her outlook that would lead her either to end or fix her marriage – but Powell doesn’t give herself that out. She remains unfathomably selfish and fails to identify what she’s missing or what she seeks.

And yet, I still rooted for her to figure it out. Even through the final pages of the memoir, I wanted Powell to share what she learned, what insight she gleaned from this years-long trainwreck she created from her marriage, but she withheld this from the reader. It would have been easy to craft a pat ending or convince the reader that she’d learned her lesson, but the final tone is a messy one, as life often is. She declines to rescue her reputation, which is brave AF.

Strangely, had this been fiction rather than a memoir, I’m sure I would have hated the book. Somehow, diving into the mind of a messy human is a much easier ask than following a selfish fictional narrator. In fiction, we crave resolution, catharsis, some lesson learned, or an emotional change. In this case, we might want a punishment.  We’d root for Eric to find the resolution Julie denies him. Powell doesn’t give the reader any of that, which is very true to life. We behave in ways we can’t predict, that contradict our morals and beliefs. We hurt people we love. We don’t learn lessons. We don’t find our motivation. We simply are, and sometimes that’s not attractive.

This wasn’t an easy read, especially as the version of Julie Powell in my head is the cute Amy Adams movie version. I was left with admiration for Powell as a writer, while disliking her immensely as a person. You don’t have to reveal yourself as fully as Powell does in Cleaving, but if you want a good example of a writer allowing herself to be raw and truthful on the page, you can start with this memoir, whose writer wasn’t afraid to be ugly with a capital Ugh.

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Set in the earliest days of the French occupation by the Nazis in the summer of 1941, Suite Française is an unfinished set of short novels by the French-Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky.

The first short novel – Tempête en Juin (Storm in June) – follows the lives of multiple Parisians in the days immediately prior to the occupation of the capital city, as the French army is failing at the eastern front. The citizens veer from faith in their military to disbelief in the possibility of defeat to panicked flight before the oncoming Germans. Major characters include the Michauds, a middle-aged couple who work for a large bank; their boss, an adulterous boob who gives away their seats in an evacuation car to his mistress and her luggage; the Michaud’s son, an injured soldier; a pompous writer and his mistress; and a wealthy family fleeing the bombardment of Paris for their additional home in the south. As chaos erupts, Némirovsky’s characters make difficult choices, rise to higher moral standards, abandon their principles, and bully and steal their way to survival. By the end of this short novel, an armistice is reached and a bit of normality returns.

In the second short novel – Dolce (Sweet) – characters in Bussy, a country town in the suburbs of Paris, adapt to life under occupation. The mother of a prisoner of war chafes at the burden of putting up a German officer in her home, while an escaped POW believes another officer has designs on his wife. Brief affairs spring up among the German soldiers and young women from the town, and even some of their elders find themselves less resentful of their occupiers, who spend freely at their shops. While mostly disconnected from Storm in June, the novel features a few minor characters in expanded roles, including the family who took in the injured Jean-Marie Michaud. The Michauds and the wealthy Pericands are mentioned in passing. The novel concludes with the occupying soldiers departing for Germany’s eastern front, after the invasion of the Soviet Union begins.

A third novel – Captivité (Captivity) – was outlined but never written, and would have featured some of the characters from the first two sections connecting with the resistance. Fourth and fifth novels – potentially called Batailles (Battles) and La Paix (Peace) – exist as nothing more than titles in Némirovsky’s notebooks, as the war had not yet played out. “It’s really in the lap of the gods since it depends on what happens,” she wrote.

Sadly, Némirovsky would never truly complete any of this work. She was arrested in the summer of 1942 and sent to Auschwitz, where she died of typhus.

Written while Némirovsky was living under occupation after abandoning Paris with her family, the two completed novels chillingly capture the chaos and urgency of people facing an imminent invasion of their homeland. Morally smug characters who believe their wealth renders them immune to disruption find themselves grubbing for food and transportation, fleeing burning buildings, and placing survival above their principles. Others surround themselves with material goods and comforts, valuing them more than the lives of refugees or even their co-workers. In Dolce, one of the main characters falls in love with an occupier and another cajoles her neighbors for donations for refugees while hoarding her own goods and dining with German officers.

Deftly written and morally complex, Suite Française places the reader in the heart of Paris and its people. I can’t remember a novel where I felt so literally within the story world, which isn’t surprising, sadly, given that’s exactly where Némirovsky herself lived and died.

Started the year off finishing a short story collection, The Worst Years of Your Life: Stories for the Geeked-Out, Angst-Ridden, Lust-Addled, and Deeply Misunderstood Adolescent in All of Us, edited by Mark Jude Poirier.

This one has been on my TBR shelf for a while. The copyright date is 2007, which sounds about right. The price sticker on the back is from Borders, so that tells you something. It’s not the longest-waiting book on the TBR shelf.

The stories all feature protagonists in middle or high school, or a mix of both. It’s a solid collection that doesn’t get repetitive, given the mix of eras, nationalities, sexes, and sexualities of the main characters.

Surprisingly – my bias is showing – editor Mark Poirier’s story “Thunderbird” was one of my favorites. I find that an editor including their own work in an anthology is usually more a testament to their ego than their ability to hold their own, but I was nicely surprised by this story of a closeted gay middle schooler dealing with bad friends and bullies while coming to terms with his burgeoning sexuality.

Other standouts are stories from George Saunders and Nathan Englander, both of whom write about the people in your neighborhood from a child’s perspective. Jim Shepard’s “Spending the Night with the Poor” is a painfully real examination of the relationship of two girls from different social classes, neither of whom understand how their different lifestyles will affect their friendship or how to navigate those differences.

The collection also includes some delightfully creepy fiction from A.M. Homes, whose “A Real Doll” documents a boy’s relationship with his older sister’s Barbie; and Stanley Elkins, whose “A Poetics for Bullies” gets into the head of a neighborhood little asshole who terrorizes weaker kids until his comeuppance arrives.

The charms of a few entries were lost on me, particularly those whose youthful protagonists involved with drugs, sex, and crime. I was a sheltered kid and a very late bloomer, so I have no entry point for these kinds of stories. In my head, I know that thirteen and fourteen year olds – and younger – get into all kinds of things, but the experience is so foreign to me the stories felt more like science fiction than slice of life. But that’s a personal reaction, not a criticism of the talent.

A good collection that worth seeking out.