Near Enemy

                           Why is this slowly becoming the month of books I really want to like but are laid low by really stupid ideas for endings? That's a terrible theme for a book blog, and in this case, where the ending ramps up to nowhere, it's especially egregious. Near Enemy enraged me when I read it, not because of its amazing depiction of a paranoid post-terror New York where anyone with money plugs themselves into a virtual world and forgets about the outside, but because the final sentences lead off into nowhere. Now, I have not yet finished Adam Sternbergh's first novel, the highly-acclaimed Shovel Ready (released a few months prior to Near Enemy), but I would hope it doesn't leave off unfinished at a random point before the assumed climax, or I would be forced to conclude that the man is one of those people who tells long stories at parties that go absolutely nowhere, trails off right when it sounds like it's going somewhere, and then never returns to it. 

                           But maybe a book with no ending won't bother you nearly as much as it did me. Maybe you will await the third installment on tenterhooks-- not your tenterhooks, of course, it's much more fun to use someone else's, but tenterhooks all the same. Maybe you'll see it as some kind of artistic choice. A terrible, terrible artistic choice. I'd suggest taking this one out of the library, or if you can find it for free somewhere by some miracle. But unless you're a disappointment fetishist, I'd strongly suggest that perhaps you don't buy this book. It's a lot of buildup for a few lackluster reveals and a plot that eventually ends just when it was getting good.

More, as always, below

The Stars My Destination

      

             

             Before this book, I didn't have a high opinion of Alfred Bester. The one book I'd read by him, The Demolished Man, came highly-lauded, but failed to capture my attention, and between a plot I was sure I'd already read before and a narrative structure that fell apart with the protagonist, I just couldn't get into it. It had some great ideas, don't get me wrong, people have been using that "earworm beats telepathy" gimmick for well over the fifty years since the book initially came out. But other than some fantastic ideas, Bester was kind of just one of those people I didn't get. 

                        That was, of course, until I was suckered in again by two things. First, that Bester is one of the originators of the "New Wave" science fiction movement, a movement that tried to merge lit-fic with genre fiction with a lot of great success*. Second, that out of all the people who have told me about this book, only Ellis has ever told me anything bad about it, and even then, it was a matter of taste. We'll get to that matter further down the page. So, because I found a free full-text version (sadly without the weird typographical experimentation) and it had been recommended to me enough times, as well as being (along with Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, and The Space Merchants among others) a kind of proto-cyberpunk book that kickstarted several genres and conventions now used today**. So, with nothing better to do, I sat down to read it, since it was easy enough to get my hands on and keep coming back to. 

                          And my verdict is, we need more books like The Stars My Destination. It's a whirlwind of science fiction, some interesting ideas about obsolete technology, and more than that, it's a fable about human potential the likes of which no one's managed to replicate. Buy this book. Buy it for your friends. Buy it for your neighbors. Buy it for your enemies, who knows, maybe they'll start to appreciate you more. Not reading The Stars My Destination, this strange cyberpunk/horror/soft-SF novel, is a great disservice. Even if you hate it, it at least deserves your attention for the time you'd take to read it. 

LA Confidential

         

         
         So the rundown is as follows: I love this book. I think it's one of the best crime novels I've ever read, and that James Ellroy, along with Raymond Chandler, is one of the few people who actually gets noir. The characters and dialogue are definitely the high points of the work, as well as a plot that twists and turns in just the right way, so each new revelation drives home the point that everyone involved is in over their heads. It's a very dark, beautiful book about flawed characters trying to find a way to take out the worse people before they themselves are consumed. Ellroy has a good handle on the "shades of grey" areas, and while his heroes are not particularly sympathetic, they are compelling enough to care what happens to them and part of the fun of the book is how they grapple with their personal demons. Not that a book like LA Confidential should ever be considered "fun".

            The downside is, the book is very dark and more than a little brutal. There's a lot of racist slurs bandied about, and some homophobic insults. All of this is presented without flinching or restraint, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The book is about a case involving a brutal sextuple homicide, pornographic books, and stolen drugs. It handles it in the most direct and unflinching way possible, with all the language and graphic content that entails. That they had to rework a few sections of the plot to keep the film at an R rating says more than enough. While the language and content works for the time period and the atmosphere Ellroy wanted to evoke, it's still gonna be too much for some people.

More, as always, below.

Crooked Little Vein

  

 "Let me be the Virgil to your Dante"

-Repeated line

"If you think I'm telling you about having sex with Trix, you're insane"

- Entire text of Chapter 17

           I first came across Warren Ellis through his work on comic books. He had a blackly comic style that I felt really suited where comic books should be, instead of the Saturday morning four-color morality jamboree they seemed to be at the time. Yeah. I was that kind of pretentious. Years later, I'd forgotten about him for the most part when I found Crooked Little Vein on the "Mystery" shelves of a Barnes and Noble in LA (We'll talk about what I was doing in LA another time. Suffice it to say, I haven't been back). The little black book piqued my interest somewhat, but at the time I didn't want to buy anything. I left the store with the book on my mind. When I got to Santa Fe, where I was going to school at the time (at a lovely institution called the College of Santa Fe, which has sadly been corrupted and blighted in recent years), I put in a request for an interlibrary loan and immediately read it cover-to-cover in the space of about a week. And I loved it so much I read it again. The first time I read it, I was laughing like a maniac at the early chapters, up until chapter ten or eleven. You'll know which ones I mean. (Hint: Saline) The book had everything...adventure, suspense, romance...To me, it was perfect. When I went back and read it later, it wasn't as great as the first time, but it's still a book that I'm proud to own.
           Crooked Little Vein is a story centered-- much like last week's offering of Naked Lunch, around control, sex, and violence. Private investigator Michael McGill is a "shit magnet"-- a man who attracts bizarre and often frighteningly grotesque events. Because of this "gift", he is hired by the most decidedly psychotic Chief of Staff of the United States to find the country's secret second constitution. The book was traded from Richard Nixon to a prostitute, and from there descended somewhere into the seamy underbelly of society, from one group of "perverts" to the next. The Chief of Staff wants this book back because inside it are the clues to somehow "reset the country" and save everyone. Mike hooks up with a heavily made-up, tattooed girl by the name of Trix and the two of them set off across the country to find the book. On their path they encounter a bunch of old money Texans who would fit right in with people like the Bushes and the Sawyers, a frightening Las Vegas pimp, and many others.But when they find the book, is it even worth using to reset the country?
           Crooked Little Vein is insane. There is no real way to describe its insanity. What makes it work, though, as opposed to other "gonzo" or "bizarre" mystery stories, is that every element is treated with respect, and with the straight-facedness it deserves. Each time I've read it, I've discovered another story, each one fitting into the first but somehow completely unnoticed. The first time, it was just a comic road novel about encounters with perverts and shadowy Men In Black. The second time, it was a sendup of the private detective genre. Most recently, I found all of that to kind of be secondary, because it's a love story about Mike and Trix and how these crazy events push them apart and eventually back together. But each element fits together as part of the piece. It's all of these things, and more. That I can keep coming back to the book and read the same words over and over again but find something new about them every time I do is a major component of the book's charm.
           Another element that makes the book work is how it goes about parody. Many people think parody is an easy genre to work in. I certainly used to. But as I got older, I began to realize the secret of parody-- No matter how outrageous it is, you have to commit to the premise and go at it with a straight face. You can't giggle, and you can't wink at the audience. That's what makes it funny-- everyone acting like what they're doing is normal even though it's the height of absurdity. With Crooked Little Vein, it takes things one step further. Instead of simply parodying the genre, we have a parody acted by straight-faced people who talk about Godzilla fetishism and "roulette parties" while we inhabit the head of the only sane, innocent person in the entire cast. Mike, while not a complete audience surrogate, is enough of one to draw us in. By reacting as any sane, vanilla person would, he gives us someone in a mass of mildly unsympathetic characters (even one of the heroes isn't exempt, given her stances on bestiality) to anchor ourselves to. Also, his reactions to slowly being driven insane by the things he's forced to uncover offers a nice comic counterpoint to the characters who treat most of this stuff as normal. 
              Yes, it is Mike who guides us through this, whether it be his casual observations at the start of the book that a super-rat has peed in his coffee, or his horrified reaction to Junior Roanoke's "womb thing" in the Texas section. Mike is a much more noble hero than past private eyes that have been featured here, mainly because he has to be an innocent for the book to work the way it's supposed to. Because he's mostly an innocent and a nice guy, his eventual stand at the end of the book has that much more meaning to it-- he's sick of being pushed around and told he's out of his element or that he's too nice. For the last few chapters, he takes control of his situation, and we believe it and root for him because for the whole book, he's been floundering around out of his depth. We empathize and sympathize with Mike because in the same situation, we'd be Mike...scared and offended and freaked out by half the things we'd be seeing. So having him as the main character works wonders.
              There are rough patches, though. Some of the foreshadowing goes absolutely nowhere, as if there were plotlines that were discarded straight off instead of kept, or things to keep the ending from its initial outcome. Mike and Trix have a series of arguments in the final sections of the book that are pretty much just there to drive a wedge between them, and while part of me can see Mike arguing about it, it just seems like a way to get him out of the apartment. The book recovers wonderfully by the next two chapters or so, though, and keeps clicking right along.
              In the end, this is a book that should be read and enjoyed. People may find it "offensive" or "crude", or "shocking for shocking's sake", and while I acknowledge that this is not a book for children, it is the duty of mature human beings to face this sort of thing diplomatically, not with outrage, and accept that filth exists. And as for the people who say "shocking for shocking's sake" or other such things, and think they're being profound, nothing-- nothing in the written word that didn't have "by Howard Stern" written on it has been written purely to shock. No, not even bizarro or the works of Garth Ennis. You ought to be ashamed of yourselv-- I'm drifitng. Point being, this is a fantastic book, less dirty and more coherent than Naked Lunch and still completely enjoyable. The main character is someone whom you can really identify with, and the cast plays their roles masterfully well, be it the tiny, freaky Chief of Staff or the massive bodybuilder from Cleveland whose friends want Mike to "party" with them. This is a book that should have a much bigger audience than it does, and it annoys me that barely anyone has heard of it. Read this, if you feel the same way I do then buy it, otherwise take it out of the library. No matter how you feel, it'll be a trip you won't soon forget, and one that will elicit some kind of emotional response. It is a part of my private collection, and I am proud to keep it there for as long as I live.


Next Week: A direct one-eighty from this perversion, insanity, sex, and violence with Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures by Walter Moers.
             
       

Naked Lunch

           

  "Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole how to talk?"

- Doctor Benway

       

           Long ago (okay, only about eight years ago), when I lived in a much more repressed set of circumstances, Naked Lunch came on the Sci-Fi channel. To me, it was that film that kept getting referenced on Farscape and had all the cool makeup effects. To my parents, it was an R-rated movie about a ton of disgusting sex, spousal homicide, psychotic episodes, and drug use. Yeah. We had those sort of cultural differences a lot. But my dad, after the umpteenth time I asked him if I could watch it, made a deal with me. If I read the book, I would be allowed to see the movie. He thought that would stop me. Instead, I exhausted every possible resource I had to find the book and read it. And boy, was I happy with what I read. While this wasn't the first book I'd ever read with nonlinearity and surrealism, it was the first book that felt like an experience. It was nasty, hilarious, dark, and scary all at once. It was dirty, sure, but the dirty nature of the book felt justified. It had its own style; a mix of tough-guy junkie slang, science-fiction dystopia, sex scenes by and for people completely detached from reality, and monsters that shouldn't even exist in the darkest corners of the mind. William S. Burroughs is quite literally H.P. Lovecraft on acid. 

                    Naked Lunch tells the story of Bill Lee...sort of. Bill is a junkie who is about to get pinched in New York City. The cops have put an undercover officer in a white trench coat on him, as well as tracking him with a man named The Disk who sniffs out the junk in peoples' systems and pounces on them. So Bill flees, first to Mexico and then to countries that may be imaginary-- such as Interzone, Annexia, and Upper Baboonasshole. Throughout the book, though, the story becomes a guide to these rather nightmarish places through Bill's eyes (as there is really only one narrative voice, and it never tends to change), with such characters as psychotic cowboy A.J. (one of the few heroes in a sense), the memorable and incurably insane Doctor Benway, and the disgustingly hedonistic Hassan sometimes taking center stage. The various characters vie for control through a series of violent, shocking, and sometimes even explicitly sexual maneuvers that eventually (literally) rip the world apart to make sure they're the ones who're able to feed their addiction to power, while Lee seeks only to feed his own habits for drugs and company.

                   While seemingly easy to explain like this, the plot is all mostly implied and inferences from the book's structure. Things move in weird, rambling sketches from place to place, the ellipses in the text being the main way of telling when a scene's shifted mid-chapter. Despite this, the book is incredibly descriptive, each scene playing out in vivid, vivid detail. The details actually help immerse one in the book, and at the same time, help the book work its way inside your head. Naked Lunch is an experience, and that experience is mutual. Every time I read the book, I find different things, things I've missed, or things I hadn't thought of the same way as when I last read it. The thing unspools in insane, almost non-Euclidian ways, moving towards a cataclysm that, while not quite changing everything, does change quite a bit. 

                   But despite all of this, the book is fantastic. It creates an atmosphere with a twisted sense of humor and a satirical look at what humanity will do if their addiction to control goes too far. It's crude and vile in certain aspects, but brilliant in others. While it's offensive, it's necessary, and when viewed with a sense of humor and a certain detachment, it's hilarious. Lee's tough-guy film noir tones give an interesting view of the vicious world he inhabits, and each of the characters lends their voice, creating a nasty but altogether amusing and interesting world. It's a book that's about the atmosphere as much as the plot or any characters, and overall it's brilliant. There's literally a whole world in there to explore, and every bit of it is actually worth spending time with.

                  While the insanity and grotesquerie aren't for everyone, and the hanging/sex scenes (supposedly an indictment of capital punishment) are a particular example of this, it's a book I'd wholly recommend. While many people who will take the book seriously may have difficulty seeing the humor, and while it would be very easy to get offended by this book, I'm proud to make it part of my personal collection, and one I'd read over and over again. Also, you'll learn what the words "Steely Dan" actually refer to, among a great many other quotes and references that have permeated the world's cultures. Every time I read it I discover something new, and it's meant different things at different times in my life. It's easily a classic in my book, and I am more than happy to recommend it to my audience and my friends alike. Read this book. You may not like it, but it's something everyone should at least try.

Next Week: Yet another dose of perversion and insanity (though in a more linear form) with Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein. It's good to see you all again, by the way.

Sandman Slim

"L.A. is what happens when a bunch of Lovecraftian elder gods and porn starlets spend a weekend locked up in the Chateau Marmont snorting lines of crack off of Jim Morrison's bones. If the Viagra and the illegal Traci Lords videos don't get you, then the Japanese tentacle porn will. New York has short con cannibals and sewer gators. Chicago is all snowbound yetis and the ghosts of a million angry steers with horns like jackhammers. Texas is criscrossed with ghost railroads that kidnap demon-possessed Lolitas to play strip Russian roulette with six shells in the chamber. L.A. is all assholes and angels, bloodsuckers and trust fund satanists, black magic and movie moguls with more bodies buried under the house than John Wayne Gacy. There are more surveillance cameras and razor wire here than around the Pope. L.A. is one traffic jam away from going completely Hiroshima."

- James Stark

                 I have a secret. Or maybe it isn't. Either way, I always wanted to grow up to be Philip Marlowe. Or not even Marlowe, but just someone with that same hard-boiled attitude and dedication to what is right at any costs. Spade, you see, would get the job done. Marlowe would do the right thing, even if it meant the job went to crap. He rarely ever got the girl, the money, or anything more than beat senseless. But things were done right. He survived, he fought, and he always wound up doing the right thing. It was someone I could look up to when I was younger. So when something has that distinct, gritty film-noir flavor, it's already got me hooked. This has led me from good things, like Garrett and Nightside to bad things, like some of the more moronic cyberpunk novels, to weird things, like Crooked Little Vein. 
                 At the same time, I've always had a love of urban fantasy, starting with the book Dark Cities Underground. Urban fantasy seemed darker, somehow, and nastier...more concrete. Interestingly, I seem to have sidestepped most of the modern connotations of urban fantasy, and gone more for the weird ones. And believe me, or maybe just believe the quote above the text of this review, this is a weird one indeed. 
                 Sandman Slim begins with James Stark, the antihero and our protagonist, being spat out of Hell and into a garbage pile. He immediately punches out a man described as a "Brad Pitt lookalike" and grabs his clothes and stun gun. After being stuck in Hell for almost a decade, he's managed to escape and is looking very hard for the people who sent him there in the first place. Within short order, he clears out a bar full of skinheads, finds one of the mages who got him dragged off to Hell, endures several gunshots to the chest, and slices his head off (It's okay, he survives). Stark wastes no time telling everyone he's back home with large, explodey signals, drawing the attention of more than just the mages he's come to kill. Enemies and friends begin charging out of the woodwork as it turns out that Stark's vengeance may not just satisfy his urge for blood, but success may mean saving the world itself. But to finish things off, Stark will have to contend with a Homeland Security-funded angel, satanist skinheads, a sadistic race of dead celestials known as the Kissi, and his archnemesis, the charismatic Mason.
                   What I like most about the book is the feel. It's a good read, but it's a very uncompromising one. Stark is very much on the darker side of the heroic scale: a brutal, caustic man who will finish his quest at any cost, and damn the implications and results. In one of two large, explosive setpieces, Stark destroys a block of Los Angeles fighting with his adversary, Parker. He does not apologize for this act, nor does he seem to feel any regret or remorse, other than letting Parker get away more or less intact. Where most books would be engulfed by their secondary elements (such as romance or fantasy lore subplots) or try to make their hero seem good despite it all, Slim goes the opposite route. Stark isn't any better than the denizens of LA, but his motives are a little more pure. He's a monster, but he's needed because the monsters he fights and kills are ten times worse. In short, Kadrey has taken the crime fiction idea of an antihero back to its roots-- a criminal who does the right thing to further his own motives, rather than to further the greater good. 
                       Another element I like is the way Kadrey sets up his scenes and characters. He has a good grasp of the dialogue, from the tough-guy phrases snarled by the hardened Stark to the down-home platitudes of the Homeland Security chief. He also has a good grasp of set pieces. The climactic battle in a rather twisted specialty nightclub feels like it could have been ripped straight from John Woo, with its gunplay and theatrics. The broad-daylight battle with Parker could have easily fit in a Michael Bay film, if Michael Bay had any sense of taste whatsoever. 
                        If you look at Kadrey's influences and references, you find anime, B movies, the music of Tom Waits, film noir, and gritty crime fiction-- none of which really adapts to a literary style (save the latter), but it all fits together. The images it evokes keep the book moving and keep hitting the right emotional and energetic notes. The references also add a certain amount of cinematic quality to it-- films are more likely to reference topics as vast as anime, Richard Stark's Parker novels, the memoirs of Vidocq, and a great many others, but Kadrey does them effortlessly, without even drawing attention to them. 
                       Another strength the book has is the supporting cast. Stark interacts with a staggering variety of characters, from an enigmatic antiques dealer named Mr. Muninn who seems to know everything about everyone to a hipster girl who works in Stark's video store and wants to learn how to do magic. Each one has  their own voice and their own personality, and aside from some of the "holy warriors", none of them blend together. Add to this the meticulous descriptions, and the book takes on an interesting cast-- you can actually see things happening, rather than simply reading and imagining. It's the cinematic quality that makes the characters "pop out" from the page, and what keeps the book moving along at a breakneck pace.
                         If there are any weaknesses to the book, they would be Stark's personality. He is definitely a tortured man, and you definitely get a sense of that, but it gets to be a bit much when he's a prick even to his friends and those who help him. Sometimes, with people like the angel Alita, this results in amusing exchanges, but one begins to wonder exactly why he's telling his good friend Vidocq to fuck right off? It makes the book as a whole turn away from Stark as a hero and wonder if he didn't deserve to be dragged into Hell, even if he was a good person before he was yanked off and his girlfriend died. 
                          But in the end, despite the flaws of its main character, it is a fantastic book. It takes urban fantasy back to what it was originally-- taking the fairytales, myths, and legends of our time and melding them with the dark, modern setting. It involves a chase scene through Hell, womanizing alchemists, gruesome villains, and a cameo from Satan in which he rifles through a collection of movies on "the Devil", searching for something to steal and watch at home for entertainment. I recommend this book because it's a fantastic read from start to finish (the fact that it pushes all my buttons aside), because it's fun, and because Richard Kadrey takes the genre where everyone else holds back, flinches, and goes "No, no, that's not right." It's an action movie, a payback thriller, and a dark fantasy all rolled into one, it's original, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. 


Next Week: Life's Lottery by Kim Newman, or, if either of my interlibrary loans come through, Kill The Dead  by Richard Kadrey (the sequel to this week's book), or Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe Valtat.

Review: Private Midnight by Kris Saknussemm

                   "The Darkness is gone-- because We can see in the Dark..."

- Genevieve Wyvern 

                    Once upon a time, before the Sam Reader Memorial Book Club existed in any form whatsoever, I used to talk books with a great many people, but in particular, one person whom I will name Greg for the convenience of it. Those of you who know me probably know Greg and know his real name. Good for you. One of these books was a strange little novel called Lint by Steve Aylett. I'd read it in two days, and the next time I saw Greg in class, I told him "Seriously, Greg, you have to read this. It's fucking hilarious."
                     And read it Greg did. It took him slightly under a week, to my recollections, and he handed it back to me on a bright Friday afternoon, at which point I asked him, "So, what did you think of it?"
                     Greg paused, and then looked at me and asked, "How the hell can you recommend this to someone? How can you hand someone a book going 'I know you're going to want to punch me for making me read this, but...'"
                     I persisted. "But the book was good, right?"
                     He paused again. "Well...yeah, but it was fucking weird!"
                     The reason I mention this is because I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to review and recommend a book that I don't think many people will like. Not for any reason based on Kris Saknussemm's writing ability or anything, but because it's just too freaking weird for words.


In short, I'd press this eagerly into your hands, but you'd probably punch me for making you read it.