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Review: The Night Circus

The Night Circus
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Some of you are going to absolutely love this book. I didn’t, but then, that’s just me. Read my other reviews, the things I’m in to, you can probably figure you why this one wasn’t exactly my cup of tea. I read it mostly because the title was intriguing, a book club I’m in had read it before I joined, and it was immediately available at the library.

The story’s not bad, and the writing is consistent. It’s languid, not quit torpid, (although to me it was). Sensuous, sensual, whatever. Although most of the imagery is, by force, black-and-white, Morgenstern paints a vivid picture.

However, I might not have read the book if I had known how dreamy it was going to be. It’s call The Night Circus, but the circus itself , in the novel, is called The Circus of Dreams. I can’t stand reading about dreams. Not just that they’re pointless, cop-outs used by writers who can’t be bothered to stick to their own rules. Dreams are weird, grounded in nothing substantial or meaningful, completely alien—and therefore boring—to anyone except the original dreamer. Or, they’re written about in a way so utterly unrealistic. No one knows why or how we dream, so how can any writer hope to relate dreams in a way that does anything except remind the reader she’s immersed in artifice?

That said, the dreaminess of the Night Circus is not all that bad. Morgenstern offers up a cozy atmosphere, the kind that the “curl up around a good book” type of reader will enjoy getting lost in. There were times when I was counting pages as I read, but others times when I was surprised how much I’d gotten through.

So, while I should give this book two stars, I’m going to add one more out of respect for what Morgenstern has managed to construct—a fantasy, an illusion held together as much by the reader’s willing complicity as by tricks of light and word choice. Just like the circus itself.

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Review: The Killer Inside Me

The Killer Inside Me
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The whole time I was reading The Killer Inside Me, I kept thinking, “I hope he gets away with it.” What’s that say about me? I’m a product of 21st century entertainment, where serial murderers and sociopaths are portrayed as sympathetic killers. If the post-modern era set everything topsy-turvy, and the so-called post-post-modern era mired itself in self-reflective absurdity, where are we now? This is the post-ironic age (can’t wait for the era that doesn’t need a “post-“ in its name) and we take our bloodlust very very seriously. Well, so did Thompson, back in the day, to stroke the cliché’.

Because if Thompson’s Lou Ford is a sociopath, he’s a real one, and not the Hollywood version of the last twenty years. He does not delight in horror, enjoy cruelty, or in any way feel enriched by murder. Nor does he find identification in the self-hatred that murder brings upon him. Murder is a means to an end, even while he understands and accepts that society says its wrong. But here’s the important part: Lou Ford doesn’t think too hard on why he has no trouble murdering even while society condemns it. This is not a novel about a man conflicted.

What’s it about then? That depends on you (as it should). Thompson doesn’t moralize, proselytize, or preach. He gives you a character who does what we fantasize about doing all the time, and doesn’t solve your inner conflicts by punishing—or rewarding—his hero.

When I read Pop. 1280, I had no idea of Thompson’s reputation, which I was glad of—I went in uncynical. Less so with The Killer Inside Me, which is more or less the first draft of Pop. 1280. I would encourage you, if you’ve got the edition with the preface by Stephen King, to skip that preface and first read chapter one. Read the preface when you’re done—it’s more like an academic review than a preface, more like an introduction for those who’ve already read the novel once or twice already.

Not that the plot’s the point. Not that Thompson’s message needs you to be surprised and shocked. That’s because Thompson doesn’t have a message. Someone asked me, while I was reading this, what I had in my hands. I said “The Killer Inside Me” and she said “The killer inside you, huh?” We laughed about that, but honestly, I don’t think that was much of a slip.

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Review: Necropolis

Necropolis
Necropolis by Michael Dempsey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Necropolis—review

First there was cyberpunk. And then there was steampunk, and we started using “punk” to describe advanced technology tied to a certain aesthetic. You could call The Flintstones “stonepunk” if you want, and the works of Terry Pratchett are a kind of “magepunk.” So, why not “noirpunk”?

Which is the direction Necropolis tries to go, although it doesn’t last. You’ve got your wise-cracking detective, dames, roscoes, alcohol, thugs, hopeless cynicism. You’ve also got your plasma pistols, holograms, AIs, and advanced biological sciences. Not a bad mash-up. The more Marlowe parts of Philip K. Dick and the overlap of Sterling and Gibson with a sprinkling of Brown/Grisham/Chrichton.

Do I sound like I’m damning with faint praise? Good. Because, yeah, at first, we get the noir, and the sci-fi takes a back seat, like it should. But as the story keeps going, there are literally visual shifts to other aesthetics. The New York of the future, you see, has it’s 40s throwbacks, but also its 20s and 60s. yes, each of those eras has contributed, via good writers, to the hard-boiled detective trope. But for me the novel lost consistency.

The plot of Necropolis is nice and twisty (without being overfilled with clichéd “surprises.”) and Michael Dempsey does a good job of taking advantage of the science he’s invented to create a context that doesn’t require cliff-hangers or deus ex machine. So it’s fun to get through. There’s some politics and some moralizing and some romance, but they’re not too hard to gloss over.

If we’re lucky, Dempsey will do some more like this. I’m not looking for a sequel, but some more noirpunk would be great. Phillip K. Dick was great, so modernized version (ain’t that an ironic thing to say about a sci-fi novelist) would be great.

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Review: Stardust

Stardust
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So here’s epic fantasy—the kind that takes up several fat volumes—crammed into a thinnish tome. What, a “tome” can’t be thin? Read Stardust, and come back to me; you’ll see what I mean.

The thing is, I say crammed, but maybe you will want to use a different word. I say crammed, but respectfully, because I really don’t have patience for several fat volumes anymore. I did as a kid. As I kid, I devoured Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. A few years later, I couldn’t get enough of Roger Zelazney’s Chronicles of Amber. By the time I got to Tolkien, well, I had lost that wonderlust.

And yes, I fully realize that my not having read all of Tolkien makes any fantasy review I write illegitimate.

My point is, I was glad to have Gaiman gloss over for me all the parts I would have glossed over if he had spread this out over thousands of pages. Actually, Stardust reads like an abridged version of something else. For me, that’s a plus.

For others, I’m guessing, a minus. If there are two types of people, those who love to read fantasy and those who don’t, I’m guessing the fantasy people read more non-fantasy than the non-fantasy people read fantasy. This is my confusing way of saying this book will attract fantasy-lovers and then utterly disappoint them.

I’ve seen some refer to Stardust as “a fairy-tale for adults.” If so, then that’s just an insulting way of saying that fantasy readers are not fully mature and this book is for actual grown-ups. But I disagree. Yeah, there’s a graphic sex scene and some graphic violence, so it’s not for kids. But fantasy isn’t for kids either, these days.

Stardust is, though, for people like me who maybe want to dip their toes in some fantasy but don’t want the year-long commitment. Does that make it shallow? Well, yes—but all fantasy is shallow to non-fantasy people.

The problem’s not the book, though; the problem is the act of being judgmental. Toss away adult cynicism, and Stardust is a fun little ride.

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Review: Pop. 1280

Pop. 1280
Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This started off like parody of a western. Not that I’ve read any westerns. Except for Robert Coover’s [b:Ghost Town|156195|Ghost Town|Robert Coover|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348568393s/156195.jpg|150728], selections by [a:Percival Everett|31723|Percival Everett|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1267321326p2/31723.jpg], and Trevanian’s [b:Incident at Twenty-Mile|30895|Incident at Twenty-Mile|Trevanian|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1328033210s/30895.jpg|31227]. Oh, and [b:Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West|394535|Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West|Cormac McCarthy|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1335231647s/394535.jpg|1065465] by Cormac McCarthy. Maybe it’s this last one I should speak to the most when tryin’ to wrap my noggin’ around Pop. 1280. Because as it got its rhythm, this novel stopped being just a silly parody, and something a little more subtle, a little more insidious.

What is evil? I say, simply, it is seduction. And nothing more. Evil is not merely cruel, bloodthirsty, hateful, spiteful, or any of the thousand disgusting things we have shoved down our throats in movies and TV shows and books overfull of slick characters with shiny hairdos. Evil is having temptation thrown in front of you, and you doing with it what you know you should not do.

Evil, then is automatically an intrinsic force. It’s something already inside ourselves. When you read a book like Pop. 1280, with its goofy language and crazy characters and zany situations, you can’t help but giggle, and guffaw, and laugh out loud. And then you’re nodding your head. Your cheering on the main character, everything he’s doing. You want him… well, not to necessarily succeed, but to get on with it.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a moralizing tail, proselytizing obfuscated, a parable to hang your hat on so’s you can go out and do good works. It’s just a novel about the Sheriff of Potts county, the women he’s loved and the men he’s hated. It’s a novel about self-discovery. And it’s evil. You’re going to end up discovering a thing or two about yourself before you get through it all.

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Review: Ex-Heroes

Ex-Heroes
Ex-Heroes by Peter Clines
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well that was a rock n’ roll good time. I’ve read a few zombies novels and none of them were very good. Until now. Heck, this was better than just better. This was actually pretty damn kick-ass. Watchmen, Avengers, Heroes,Walking Dead, call up whatever comparisons you like. Here’s a bunch of superheroes, familiar enough to be believable but not so familiar to be cheap copies. Zombies, but Clines gives them a new nickname, and enough gore to keep you scared but not too much to just demoralize and gross you out.

Some love, but not too much. Some inter-personal animosity, but not too much. Some moralizing, but not too much. Can you dig it, a zombie novel that’s neither existential or nihilistic?

Clines nerds-out in a few places, and while I’m not saying he loses control, there’s definitely sections where momentum nearly gets the better of him. But so what. What’s a tiny jot of inconsistency when you’re watching zombie heads getting shot, crushed, chopped off, torn asunder. What’s a little repetition.

Oh, and spoiler alert, for a change, we get the zombie origin explained in no ambiguous terms. So refreshing. Then again, the hero explanation isn’t ever mentioned, but… well, I guess one out of two ain’t bad.

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Review: I Am Not A Serial Killer

I Am Not A Serial Killer
I Am Not A Serial Killer by Dan Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dexter Jr. Or how about just Dexter’s portrayer, Michael C. Hall, as a teenager, if Six feet Under was written as a Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off. You’ve got the morgue, the gruesome murders, the kids, the small town, the dysfunctional family, a few bullies, a nice old man, absent father, the monster inside hungry for blood and mayhem and fear. Fun stuff to plow though on a Tuesday morning.

I read this one mostly because I saw the title to the sequel, Mr. Monster, and decided I’d start the series and see how it went. A bit of The Talented Mr. Ripley. A bit of Stephen King’s novellas Apt Pupil. Maybe even a touch of John Dies in the End? I’m reaching, I know. I guess I want to justify giving this only three stars, even though I finished it in one sitting. A real gripper. A page-turner.

But not very ambitious or accomplished, in my opinion. I’ve discussed this in other reviews: are books about kids for kids? I Am Not A Serial Killer is not for kids. But it was hard to get close the main character. And the plot was fairly simple. And the killing very convenient. I guess it read like a first novel, which it is. I suppose I just wasn’t ever convinced by the main character’s inner dialogue.

Still, for what amounts to a simple slasher/thriller, it was a fun few hours of entertainment.

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Review: An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal’s Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media

An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media
An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal’s Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media by Joe Muto
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Pretty disappointing. Two stars because I’m rounding up, but I can’t call it one star since I didn’t hate it. But there’s nothing revelatory in this so-called tell-all. Should we be surprised that the people who work for and run Fox News know they’re not Fair and Balanced? This is something we figured out, accepted, and got over years ago.

And to be clear, this book isn’t really about Fox News, very much. Mostly it’s about ‘The O’Reilly Factor.’ And mostly, its apologetic, even praising Bill O’Reilly more often than not. I’m not saying the book should have been a hateful screed eviscerating the guy, but when Muto writes “The mere existence of this book… is going to make this next line surprising… I actually like Bill O’Reilly,” my reaction was a loud “No, really?” dripping with sarcasm.

I suppose it’s my own fault, judging a book by its cover. The cover if this one has, in caricature, pictures of O’Reilly, Palin, Coulter, Susteren, Beck, Rove and Hannity. Palin gets a few paragraphs, including Muto’s saying that she’s a very attractive woman, that the cameras don’t do her justice. Coulter is a very nice person off air. Beck is a loony, and everyone at Fox knew it. Rove is a smart guy. Hannity pulls in ratings less than O’Reilly’s, and Susteren is in third. Wow. That’s a real foxhole you got there, Joe.

The book is subtitled “A Liberals’ Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media.” I’m afraid this is a seriously slanted description. A self-confessed ne’er-do-well tosses his liberal sensibilities aside to get a job, and moves up the ranks a bit before getting bored and chucking career away on a whim. Hardly an odyssey. And “the Heart of the Right-Wing Media”? Maybe, but drinks in a bar with production assistants, trying to figure out where to live in Brooklyn, breaking up with girlfriends… that’s now what I’d call the heart of anything.

Cutesy asides, footnotes, moments of self-deprecation related ad nauseum, and the meager recounting of that laughably inconsequential and utterly pointless three days as Gawker’s ‘Fox Mole’… all of it detracted from what meager bits might have made this an interesting “insider’s” view. But only might have. The best thing I can say about this book is that if you want to know what it’s like to be a TV news producer, there’s a few details here for you. Mostly it sounds dull.

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Review: Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Reading this I was reminded of some other novel Everett wrote where some writer complained that his books, academic and impenetrable, where nevertheless shelved in the “African America” section of the bookstore. Which at the time was a send-up of political correctness—but now we’re in this post-ironic age and I feel like more he(the character) was complaining about First World Problems. After all, if Everett’s a writer’s writer, then for every book he writes that’s put on a shelf, there’s thousands and thousands of others written by writers who will never even be shelved at all.

I’m not calling Everett a whiner or a hypocrite, but I am going to paint him with the same brush I paint Joyce, which is to say, he’s got to be, at least, messing with us. I plowed through this impenetrable novel of his in a day, half a day, actually, and I don’t know what I got out of it—but I don’t feel like my time was wasted.

This is a novel that deconstructs itself as it goes. It’s for people who like Everett. It’s for people who smugly thought they were in on the joke, in Glyph, when he made fun of intellectuals, and who now must know they’re the joke’s sole source of irony. This is an ambitious novel, or would be if a lesser writer tried it, but Everett’s been to more than a few rodeos, so let’s swap ambitious for inevitable.

Math and Philosophy and Western Sensibility and Pharmacology and Radical Sixties Politics and Race and Geriatrics and Infidelity and Photography and Zeitgeist and … and you know what, I can’t recall any kind of existential angst. How is that even possible in a novel written after 1980?

Linguistics, Meta-Linguistics, Russell’s paradox. I guess that’s how.

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Review: The Player

The Player
The Player by Michael Tolkin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this one a few weeks ago, maybe a month, so this review will be sparse. I apologize. I’ve read a few other books since then, and reviewed them, and what with one thing and another, I’m only getting to this review now as a disciplined approach to dividing my day into productive chunks. I’m in the middle, almost exactly the middle, of another book at the moment, and I don’t want to not get anything else done because I’m only reading it.

I saw the movie version of The Player years ago, back in the day when people rented VCRs and a few chunky tapes and took them home for a night of popcorn and pausing to use the bathroom. Such heady stuff, this emancipation from fascist movie theater continuity. (Sorry, sorry, I tend to write a little like whatever I’m currently reading. I should have written this review a long time ago). I only recently realized that it was a novel first, and written by the same person who wrote the movie. That bodes.

I’m wont to insist you can’t expect movies or books to be the same, and I’m guessing Tolkin feels the same way, because the book and movie are nothing alike. The movie is thrills and hubris and tragedy and bitter triumph. The book is much more subtle than that… it reads not unlike a kind of Less Than Zero with movie-execs instead of teenagers and scripts instead of angst. (You thought I was going to say drugs, but I’m talking about the Ellison’s book, not Kanievska’s movie).

And yeah, I’m sure Altman’s treatment of the script is the real reason the movie and the book are so different. But let’s move on. The one thing I liked about The Player is that Tolkin puts the “big plot twist” right there in the beginning instead of using it to “wow” you at the end. It’s nearly unbelievable, but then you have the rest of the novel to see how everything in Hollywood is plastic, without the novel being merely another sordid tale of jaded cynicism. This is Camus’ The Stranger told backwards, but with an upward trajectory and a few more pastels.

It’s a quick read, too, devourable in an evening, as Tolkin’s rhythm and pacing are nice and tight. If you’ve stumbled across a trade-size paperback edition of The Player in a used book store and wonder if your memories from 20 years ago are going to ruin the read for you, as I said: never fear. Tolkin’s style is his own, and even if it’s not a roller-coaster ride, it’s a pleasant ride nonetheless.

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