Wolf in White Van

     

            

        Occasionally, a book will hit you right where you live, and this one did. I can't tell you how or why, because that would give the book away and I really want you all to read this. But I need to tell you why and how. So...okay. Back when I was around fourteen or fifteen, I very nearly had an accident. It was small, and it was something I didn't have to go to the hospital for, but I very nearly had an accident. I wasn't being very careful, and I didn't pay attention because I was angry at my parents, and I almost had an accident. I wish I could tell you more about the whys and wherefores of what was going on, but overall, this book hit me where I lived. And hard. Very hard. 

                   But back around the time I almost had an accident, another thing also happened. This was around the time that play by email games were really taking off all over the place. A lot of homes had high-speed internet for the first time, and this was just starting to become widespread. And I, isolated for the most part as I was save for a few interactions with friends and a school that partly hated my guts because I had no way of explaining what the hell was wrong with me and refused to grow up all the way, found a new outlet. A new safe space. A refuge. And, at the time, though I was driven out of my refuge by the simple fact that, as Depeche Mode said, "people are people" (and I had issues with social stuff. And grammar.), the idea of a refuge from reality stayed with me. But I could always disengage. Go back to being in the real world. Even if I didn't want to sometimes. 

                    Wolf in White Van is about the people who couldn't disengage. The people who went a little too far, the people for whom their refuge is all they have. The people who aren't as lucky to have that disengagement, the way I don't seem to some days. It's a novel about people with a hyperactive fantasy life, because reality is just far enough out of reach. And even more than that, it's about the irrational acts people commit sometimes because the world doesn't understand them, it's about the grief felt when these things happen. 

And it is brilliant.

More, as always, below.

Koko

"So what's it like to kill someone?"

"I can't tell you."

- Unnamed Cabbie and Michael Poole

                  

                   Koko is brutal. It is, perhaps, the most disturbing and uncomfortable book I have ever had the "pleasure" of reading. I phrase it that way because I can acknowledge that the book is well-written, that Peter Straub has an amazing turn of phrase, and that there is a brilliant thread at work here. But what Straub manages to do with Koko is to explore the feelings of trauma, guilt, and psychological suffering felt by its protagonists, to take you inside their heads, and to allow you to identify with them. You yourself may never know the trauma or never know what trauma does to people, but for the time it will take you to read this book, this uncompromising and singleminded work of fiction, the feelings will at least be right. I could not read this book all at once. I may never read it ever again. But hopefully, if you find this and read it, and if you find in it the same things I did, it will leave its mark on you. And that, above all else, is what defines a successful work of literature. If you're never able to shake the feelings it gives you, it's won. It's done its job. 

                I admit when I first started reading Koko, I was turned off by it. The copy on the dust jacket was utterly ridiculous to me after reading so many books that made the same claims. I knew off the bat that this would probably be more psychological thriller than horror novel and started looking for the proper cues to tell me who the murderer truly was. I even complained about how the characters missed an obvious clue about the villain a third of the way through the book. But as I read, I started to see where it was going. I wondered where it would all end up and how. And then when I figured out what the book was really about, the pieces suddenly clicked into place and what I saw as disparate, offhand elements suddenly came together and clicked. Koko, you see, is not a book about four men, or a book about a serial killer, or even a book about the frightening underbelly of urban legends in southeast Asia. It's a book about trauma, guilt, pain, and exactly how far you can push the human psyche until it snaps. 

And it is brilliant.

More, as always, below

Twittering from the Circus of the Dead (mini-fiction reviews part 1)

                   In an effort to communicate my feelings and issues over two of the works I've read, I have decided to do two mini-reviews, as befits the short story and novella I've decided to cover. If this should prove fruitful, I may continue in this manner. In any case, it beats just sitting on them or not talking about them, right?

         I want to know who the hell ruined Joe Hill's day. I don't know who it was, but he's started mining some very dark, depressive, disturbing veins with his craft. It's still brilliant writing. Don't get me wrong, NOS4A2 is a book I hold in high regard and everything I've read from him has been top shelf work. But in taking Hill's body of work as one cohesive whole, even at his most brutal in Heart Shaped Box and 20th Century Ghosts didn't achieve the twisted depths his more current work calls home. And while I may still prefer the earlier work to the later strains, I still find the story an incredible work. 

         I read "Twittering from the Circus of the Dead" at ten in the evening on a rather dull night. Despite having several other tabs open at the time*, I sat there, eagerly turning the page, reading more and more as the story unfolded. By the end, I wasn't sure if I were able to go to sleep at the end of the night. And as each new line of the story progressed, I felt a lovely sense of dread growing bit by bit.  It's an unsettling story, and that it takes such a short time (I read it in one sitting) only adds to the unnerving nature. It's a more concentrated dose, and Hill's always been a master of delivering quick punches in a narrative. In short, this is a brilliant short story, and well worth the meager price of admission. 

          "Twittering from the Circus of the Dead" is the story of Blake. Blake is a teenage girl from California who has been dragged on a trip to Colorado with her family. As the story unfolds in quick 140-character tweets, we learn about Blake's annoying little brother, her overbearing mother, and her beleaguered father. We get tiny snapshots of Blake's life and what she thinks of everything as her family gets up at six in the morning to take the long drive back to their home. For a while, it's easy to identify with Blake. Her annoyances, some small moments of bonding, and her disbelief at her brother's antics. It's an enjoyable family-bonding kind of thing.

But then.

         But then Blake's family pulls in at a roadside attraction called The Circus of the Dead. But then her dad buys tickets to the show from a man who looks plague-stricken. The ticket taker wears a hazmat suit "so he doesn't get bitten." The show involves a stilt-wearing ringmaster clad in only her underwear who tells the audience that the circus took her prisoner and forced her to perform. And that's only the start of the strange and disturbing things in store for Blake and her family. Because when they thought they would be entertained for an afternoon, they found something with very, very sharp teeth. 

           The compressed length makes the story disturbing, and the idea of Twitter as a platform for telling this kind of story, while perhaps not as new as others, gives it a certain level of immersion. Were this told in the conventional style, there would not be much to define it from a thousand other teen horror stories. But it's the medium that makes it terrifying, mainly due to the economy of language. It's what we don't see that's just as terrifying as what we do. Those little 140-character bursts allow the reader to fill in all kinds of unnerving blanks, as the breathless messages grow more anxious and disturbed. Joe Hill handles that economy quite well, and it shows in that he's just as terrifying in this format as any other. Hill's voice is also strong. I can easily believe that this is a teenage girl. The issues come in when occasionally that voice stretches credibility, but there aren't too many of those places, and in the end, it's a fascinating read. 

        Find this. Read this. You can read it on your computer just as easily as anywhere. It's definitely worth the ninety-nine cents, and it delivers a ride that few can in this format. 

UP NEXT: "Clockwork Girl" by Athena Villaverde. 

*I read most of my ebooks on my computer. My Kindle has sadly died a queenly death and Amazon steadfastly refuses to replace or repair it with anything but a newer and sadly inferior model. 

In The Miso Soup

             Okay, the rundown is as follows. This is a good, atmospheric book that explores a large number of themes in a very strange way. It's at once a meditation on violence, a discussion of buddhism and redemption, a possible metaphor for cultural invasion of Japan from the West, and even a minor commentary on the culture surrounding the sex industry. That it juggles so many concepts in under two hundred pages is a feat in and of itself, but the fact that it does it with enough style and atmosphere to keep me interested makes it a great novel in my terms, and one that makes me wish it got into more people's hands. The descriptions are excellent, and the mounting dread leading into the single cathartic moment in the book is handled very, very well.

           However, the downside is that this is a novel more concerned with its underpinnings than the actual plot. Divided into three acts, one for each day during the New Year's celebration in Tokyo, the first act leads up to a catharsis in the second that starts to meander by the third. While the book's unnerving atmosphere continues, and in fact takes the book stranger places in the second and third sections, the lack of a definite ending and the partial abandonment of the plot halfway through could be jarring for some. It's best to think of the book not as a thriller, but as a kind of bizarre meditative piece involving violence, discussion of food, some Buddhism, and sex. That said, if you're looking for a thriller, this isn't the book for you. It's more American Psycho than Psycho, delving into the philosophical and psychological rather than aiming for flat-out horror.  

More, as always, below.

NOS4A2

                  

                Okay, so, the rundown is as follows: Upon opening this book and reading the first two chapters, I immediately thought "Oh, this is Joe Hill doing a sort of Stephen King thing." By two or three hundred pages in, I thought he'd gone soft, gotten kindly in his success. Then his story proceeded to bite me when I was unawares and hang on with razor-sharp teeth. There have been a lot of books that approached the idea of "stolen childhood" and the nature of innocence when it comes to monsters. Few have been as gleefully and delightfully nasty about it as this. This book subverts the usual plotline of childhood magic winning out against adult monsters, turns it inside out, and makes it a hand puppet. And it does it with style and grotesquerie to spare. 

               The bad parts are a tendency to lose itself in its own language a little, some nods and name-checks that I didn't really think fit well, and the way it sort of feels too loose. Like it's trying to cover too much ground, or trying too hard to be like something else. But these are very minor nitpicks, and the book is a relentless, nasty, but still fantastic read. 

           This is a book people should be recommending, and if they are, this is a book people should recommend for many years. It'll stay with the people who read it, I guarantee.