KILL DICK, a strangely compelling long stare at too-smooth, too-shiny surfaces

KILL DICK
LUKE GOEBEL
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending April 19, 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A fever dream, Kill Dick is a literary thriller that plunges into the chaos of Los Angeles where addiction, privilege, and corruption combust.

At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be she’s an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, and Susie’s ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to her father’s ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together.

Then there’s Peter Holiday, a disgraced professor running a rehab scam so audacious it’s almost admirable. When their lives collide, Susie and Peter are dragged into a web of privilege, corruption, and violence, where every escape leads deeper into the rot.

Dark, satirical, and razor-sharp, Kill Dick is a modern literary thriller that unflinchingly dissects wealth, exploitation, and the perilous line between survival and self-destruction.

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My Review: Health scammers, like Peter Holiday in this story, might be the lowest scum on this wide, green Earth. Preying on those desperate for their very lives...! My mother's father fell for the Laetrile scam in the 1970s. Luckily he survived more than a few years after it was exposed to all as a hoax, but it cemented my powerful disdain for health scammers as it was an expensive lesson. Fast-forward from my family's 1970s to Susie Vogelman, our PoV character, in a circle of hell called the glittering world of too-rich too-dimwitted 2016 LA.

What's worse than an addict without morals or boundaries? Worse even than an enabler of the addict? The addict turned enabler. Susie, who apparently never so much as once looked into a mirror that showed her anything except her surface, is a participant in a lot of different kinds of enabling in this story. It's very well done, it never lets the pace of revelations slacken, but it also never once shows even a glimmer of realization in Susie or her coterie of criminally negligent creeps. But their surfaces are pretty! And their credit cards are limitless!

I wanted to shake Susie into awareness of her hollowness, lest she implode causing still further damage. But Author Goebel is careful to make this world honest by giving it consequences despite no one in the cast being anything but appalling. Bad things are going to happen, and I didn't care about the consequences to any of the cast just to the folks who were victimized by the cast. The suppurating wounds of vapidity exacerbated by the absence of empathy (honestly, I'm not sure Susie in particular even has a theory of mind) in every character are never allowing anyone to escape dire consequences.

When they come I was deeply surprised to feel...sad is too strong, sympathetic is in the wrong emotional register, wistful is too kindly meant...to not feel triumphant? I think that's closer. I was eager for the comeuppances to be passed around, and Peter the scumbag to get seconds. After all, this was the moment that the country saw Trump installed in entirely the wrong kind of government housing. What use is fiction of not to redress horrifying imbalances?

Showing them to us, forcing us to see that the rot is there even when it's plastered over, and there are ways you can recognize it despite the glittering surface. Less wish fulfillment than cautionary tale. It's well done. Author Goebel (Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours via the deeply cool publisher FC2) has storytelling chops. He has very cool film scripts in his CV, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Anne Hathaway in them. His current publisher is Kate Gale's always interesting and frequently tastemaking Red Hen Press. Given these bona fides why is this not a full-five review?

Because I got uneasy as I crested the halfway mark, feeling I was still outside Susie's world with my sarcastic voyeur of a guide being invited to laugh at and judge these buffoons. It's what they deserve! is implicit in each and every moment I'm in the story's flow. Which, fair—it is indeed what they deserve; but is it your point, Author Goebel, to stop there or is it to force me-the-reader into looking deep into the shine of these surfaces and ask myself "why are you still here with these tacky people." I didn't think it was terribly clear what your purpose was; the only reason that was an issue is its consequence of popping me out of the story-flow to examine the whole read again and again.

That's a big ask, but your story is a national bestseller so I guess it worked. I'm glad it did, and does, and will do the trick again in future.

WHAT I KNOW ABOUT JULY, stalking is a real, dangerous crime with consequences

WHAT I KNOW ABOUT JULY
KAT HAUSLER
Meerkat Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Simon Kemper is on the up and up–he’s out of rehab, and his band is gaining moderate success around Berlin. But out of the corner of his eye and over his shoulder, he’s always aware of her. The stalker. She’s at every show, no matter what city. She sends hundreds of postcards to his label. Worst of all, she acts like she knows him. Like she owns him.

When the stalker disappears at one of his shows, Simon is the prime suspect. Initially an effort to clear his name, his search for July quickly becomes a deeper psychological quest: to prove that his fears were warranted? That she couldn’t have given up her obsession that easily? The threads of July’s disappearance turn out to be tangled into every corner of Simon’s life: a trusted band member, a tenuous new love interest, a resentful ex, and the self he’s supposedly left behind.

Narcissistic, insecure, and consummately relatable, Simon is the anti-hero of his own life—trying to want to be better; hoping that’s enough.

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My Review: Enjoyable story of a guy, pretty average musician, pretty average addict, making an effort to clean himself and his life up. Then there's the small issue of a woman obsessed with him, called July. There's a weirdness in her obsession: how does she know so much about him?

I really wouldn't like this oft-told tale much at all...why do men without much going for them seem to attract women so easily and then get them obsessed?...because it feels like fantasy fulfillment. Ever since Fatal Attraction it's been peopling the landscape of thrillerdom.

What caught my attention was the vanishing of July. I've been stalked online, I know the worst of it is the sheer absurdity of a person's unsought, unencouraged, obsession causing the object real consequences. But this story adds a different layer in the stalker vanishing and leaving a void that must be filled by some sort of legal resolution. This is Germany, after all, and there must always be a resolution or whatever rent on the social fabric it is remains open and actively pursued. July was always going to get a period at the end of her sentence in Simon's story.

That it proved to be a weirdly condign chapter, not sentence, in his story, one that involved unexpected other players and motives, was the reason I didn't dismiss the read. The reason thrillers satisfy me is they offer more...open-ended...solutions to the the grosser insults to Ma'at's order. In this story the results of the crime committed were equitably meted out. That they were also unorthodox felt much more satisfying than milder law-n-order solutions available to the author.

I was not initially drawn into the read. What happened was I had put the story down, thinking it would be another male-fantasy tropefest; I couldn't quite shake it though, kept processing it behind the noise of Life, because the author's a woman. Why would she choose to write that?

She didn't. I came back and finished the story thinking I'd at least get an answer to why one character felt...wrong...and, well, yes indeed that was the point. It wasn't clear to me why the ending was heading in a direction that seemed very much at odds with what I thought it was going to be. That was a satisfying twist, Author Hausler. I enjoyed it.

So, lesson learned: attend to the still, small voice that suggests you're not quite seeing what you think you are. A solidly crafted thriller about a dangerous crime that never gets the belief the victim deserves unless they're very lucky.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ, Native American author Morgan Talty bursts onto the literary radar bigtime

NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ: Stories
MORGAN TALTY
Tin House Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, American Academy of Arts & Letters Sue Kaufman Prize, The New England Book Award, and the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree

A Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Chautauqua Prize 2023, and Barnes & Noble Discover Book Prize

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, NPR, Esquire, Oprah Daily, and more

Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy.

In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty—with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight—breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family’s unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a dealer, discovers a friend passed out in the woods, his hair frozen into the snow; a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s projects the past onto her grandson; and two friends, inspired by Antiques Roadshow, attempt to rob the tribal museum for valuable root clubs.

A collection that examines the consequences and merits of inheritance, Night of the Living Rez is an unforgettable portrayal of an Indigenous community and marks the arrival of a standout talent in contemporary fiction.

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My Review: When a new voice speaks in a jaded crowd, it feels like being next to a rocket launch does. The sound is so loud, so intense, its pressure unbalances your legs and knocks you back on your heels.

Morgan Talty, laddies and gentlewomen. From the first story, where we're confronted with cultural touchstones not in upper-class white peoples' frames of reference, we're in assured hands...the limning of the setting, the colors of the relationship dynamics, the milieu, all in three paragraphs...and challenged to accept the entire package as it is.

"Fucking bullshit, fucking goddamn winter, what the fuck."
I laughed.
"It ain't funny, Dee."
"Look," I said. "Do you want me to cut my braid too?"

I shall, comme d'habitude, use the Bryce Method to assess the stories one-by-one.


Burn is the story I quoted above. A short, sharp shock, a shot across the bow of your luxury literary yacht, a foghorn on a sunny cruise. Disorienting by design, this is your chance to return to familiar shores.

I didn't. 5 impressed stars

In a Jar follows David studying his fractured family as it re-forms in unfamiliar ways. His much older sister, first an absence, then a hard sharp corner; his Mumma, inscrutable to kid-eyed David, touchy and strange; Frick, a man new to David and in a place his abandoned father once didn't want.

All the surprise in this concatenated chain of beings comes from knockings in walls, from jars of ill will, from refrigerated poisons ingested through other mouths. 5 more stars

Get Me Some Medicine follows low-life Fellis...the one talking to Dee in the quote all the way above...as he and Dee scrape the bottom of the barrel, drain the butt-end-filled last can of beer, and do themselves no good whatever doing it.

You can't save people. Nor should you, after a while, try. I don't think these boys, these pushing-thirty boys, can be saved. And neither do they. Dee is, at the very least, possessed of glimmers of self-awareness; Fellis, none. 4*

Food for the Common Cold shakes the ugly bits you never tell your partner loose. David, eleven now, can't quite grasp why Frick is so angry; Mumma can't tell him, he's too young; his Dad's far away and shut out like always; so it festers and seethes, finally David lances the boil out of fear for his mother, and out it all oozes for everyone to see, smell, and finally clean up.

Leaving David sick with, what, a cold? A cloggy, soggy cold? Maybe, maybe more. 4.5*

In a Field of Stray Caterpillars gets useless shitty Fellis even deeper into the badness, as he's now got Dee driving him home from his ECT treatments then spending the night there...and Dee's got a white woman on the line, knowing there's never going to be a good ending to that story, still running from what he knows he needs to do by using Fellis.

And this night, the one we're joining the boys to live through, is in the midst of a major mating season overload. The reek of the rotting animals mirrors Fellis and Dee's vacuity by filling the world with a passing stink that won't even result in better-nourished weeds. Fellis is so far gone the nurses are taking about putting a port in him so they don't have to hunt for a vein when they need to fry him with ECT.

How perfect. 5*

The Blessing Tobacco is a family...David's family, now with his much-older sister home...coming to terms with the end of an elder's life, when her body will not die at the same rate as her mind. It's just terrible and painful and all folded in with each others' craziness, fear, and anger.

Outliving your mind is a terrible curse. Outliving your family? Oh. It's scalding water on an icy windshield. 5*

Safe Harbor isn't...when is it ever? How do you ever know when you're going to have that moment of final fear? The one that changes your orientation in the world, the one where you are not the same person between seconds? David becoming Dee doesn't happen in front of us. But happen it does and we don't know him one speck better than before. 5*

Smokes Last brings me face-to-face with one of my most beloathèd addictions: cigarettes. I despise smokers. They reek, they're so unbelievably selfish, taking up all the air in a room and then flinging the leftover chunk of spit-soaked stinking garbage wherever and however it suits them, slowly drowning in the phlegm they hack onto streets and sidewalks for other people to deal with.

And here's fourteen-year-old David shovin' one into his mouth, "just suck a cock! it tastes better and at least somebody's happy!" I want to (maybe did) shout at him. He and his buds out bein' hooligans, beatin' each other up, chuckin' rocks...kids are so much the same everywhere.

Growing up. Not getting any guidance. No wonder what happens happened. 4*

Half-Life is the sharp part of the descent. It's harrowing and appalling and brutally bitterly honest. 4.5*

Earth, Speak is rock bottom. Harrowing. 5*

Night of the Living Rez would've been more palatable if it'd been zombies, or pugwagees; instead it was all over the fucking TV because of course it was and, if it'd been a white woman, it would've been self defense. 5 appalled stars

The Name Means Thunder burns in my head. The sheer horror of what happens when you can't undo a deed. The never-ending awfulness of life's worst moments defining you, charting your course. Too many undone deeds that lead to a done one. The worst of it is: you can't not see it in every moment of every awful undone deed. 5*

Morgan Talty's debut. Can you even imagine having this in you and no way for it to come out that won't change...everything.

WHEN THE TIDES HELD THE MOON, my first merman/human romance!

WHEN THE TIDES HELD THE MOON
VENESSA VIDA KELLEY
Erewhon Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In Coney Island, true love rises to the surface. With lush illustrations and buoyant prose, Venessa Vida Kelley forges an unforgettable New York fairytale.

Benigno “Benny” Caldera knows an orphaned Boricua blacksmith in 1910s New York City can’t call himself an artist. But the ironwork tank he creates for famed Coney Island playground, Luna Park, astounds the eccentric sideshow proprietor who commissioned it. He invites Benny to join the show’s eclectic cast and share in their shocking secret: the tank will cage their newest exhibit, a live merman stolen from the salty banks of the East River.

More than a mythic marvel, Benny soon comes to know the merman Río as a kindred spirit, wise and more compassionate than any human he’s ever met. Despite their different worlds, what begins as a friendship of necessity deepens to love, leading Benny’s heart into uncharted waters where he can no longer ignore the agonizing truth of Río’s captivity—and his own.

Releasing Río could mean losing his found family, his new home, and his soulmate forever. Yet Benny’s courageous choice may just reveal a love strong enough to free them both.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Give the author your most intent awareness as you read this statement of her purpose in writing this wonderful (if just slightly too YA-inflected, bye half-star!) illustrated novel.

The character of Benny is, from the start, someone I loved. His self-talk is laced with Spanish, which I find pleasant. I know lots of y'all don't like "foreign" words in your reading, but there aren't a lot of better ways to get you to think about how Othering works, how much it costs. If *you* don't want to make minimal efforts to grasp another's thoughts if they happen not to be in English, why on Earth should they make any effort for you?

Moving on.

The idea of the story is finding True Love is awakening to the belovèd's essential commonality with you as you understand yourself.

Riding the exciting, brightly lit, antigravity-simulating speeding circle to nowhere

Discovering that commonality is often a matter of luck, of being the right place...and in the right receptive state...relative to the belovèd. Benny has the unfathomable good luck to be exactly where his belovèd needs him to be, to possess (through coping with his own exoticized, colonialism-imposed identity) the precise skills necessary to make his belovèd free from horrifying, degrading circumstances, and the right life experiences and wounds and battlescars to know what this degradation really is, both inside and out.

It's a novel, y'all. Of course he does.

The funny thing about degradation is it's never univalent. It degrades the powerful to use their power this way, makes them and their ideology wrong in fundamental ways. It uplifts the degraded into positions of being the focus of the powerful's imaginations, of being the means by which the powerful define their power. It creates a bond and a camaraderie, an essential amount of community and connection among those being subjected to it.

No one you love is too heavy to carry

Degradation contains the seeds of its own destruction. Remember that. I assure you the powerful do. It is the source of divide-and-conquer tactics.

Benny and Río, his merlove, are in that powerful position of being too weak to elicit a violent response from their oppressors. They're the ones who must exert force to accomplish their goals, so it pays to be under the radar. Their love blossoms over the accustomed obstacles of the Hurt/comfort subgenre of romance. It does so even more powerfully than most because Río is not human and cannot live in a human world without a LOT of devoted infrastructure.

I'll spell it out for some of our more entrenched worldview-havers: This is more than an exploration of gay men in love and building their own world across serious cultural boundaries. If that's as far as you've seen, you're correct. But "if he could see inside my dreams and see himself there" is the early stop on this train. This is also a metaphorical exploration of transgender reality in our world. It's never been easier to be trans; it's never been harder to be part of the overculture, because now that same easier existence thanks to a crude but improving infrastructure means They can see you. It's a distorted view, but you're no longer invisible to them.

To find a mate you have to be visible

But what a beautiful, Technicolor dream world awaits!

HENRY HENRY, unlikable people are so much more interesting to read about, aren't they?

HENRY HENRY
ALLEN BRATTON
The Unnamed Press
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

WINNER OF THE 37TH Lambda Literary Awards for Gay Fiction!

The Publisher Says: Henry Henry is a queer reimagining of Shakespeare's Henriad, transposing the legend of Henry V's wayward youth into 21st-century Britain in the years leading up to the Brexit referendum.

Henry Henry follows Hal Lancaster—22, gay, Catholic—as he spends his first years out of Oxford floating between internships, drinking with his actor friends, struggling through awkward hook-ups, and occasionally going to confession to be absolved of his sins.

When a grouse shooting accident—funny in retrospect—makes a romance out of Hal's rivalry with fumblingly leftist family friend Harry Percy, Hal finds that he wants, for the first time, to be himself. But his father Henry is an Englishman: he will not let his son escape tradition. To save himself, Hal must reckon not only with grief and shame but with the wounds of his family's past.

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My Review: So, the plot's not a big mystery...Shakespeare did the set-up half a millennium ago, if you haven't read it that's on you and your life choices...but brings the subtect of queerness into full textual focus.

This will make some homophobic numskulls very angry. Good.

I was sexually abused by my mother the way Hal was by his father. The many shamings and abuses, the cruel holdings-up to those gone by, of Hal as a person by his father; and maybe more importantly as a sexual being by the idiocy of religion; and the nastiness of steadily belittling him, all poured acid into my eyes. The playbook of controlling mechanisms are all right here: These awful things happened to me, too, Hal, and I really, really want to hug you while murderering your father. The ugly shadow, dirty smudgy tobacco-smoky brown-grey, that will always separate you from your deeply belovèd Percy who can, in the miraculous way of one truly and purely loved, make Hal clean again, can't be banished. Not with his abuser and the filthy miasma of their god suspended in Hal's breath and between the red blood cells in his veins.

What worked best, then, was the reality of a psychologically abused son in the grip of a sexually jealous and sociopathic parent who expresses their power by coercing the child into sexual servitude and then blaming the child for not being strong enough to live a normal life. What was not necessarily so easy was the mapping of the story onto Shakespeare's "Henriad." It's been a while since my Shakespeare days, but the whole point of the Henriad wasn't to map out Prince Hal's survivorhood, was it? It was meant to explain how, after his rebellious rageful youth, he snaps into focus when he hears the strumpet shriek of Power. Of course, if you don't know the outline of the Henriad, none of this matters because it will sail past you. Suffice to say that book-Hal is a nasty piece of work (though for a reason), and play-Hal is a nasty piece of work too (though for different ones). The father/son conflicts, the verbal cruelties each inflicts, are all in the plays. The thing that isn't in the plays is Hal's self-awarness, or so I recall. Play-Hal is nasty and abusive to kinder people than he deserves to have around him and then, when he attains Power, he changes; book-Hal is more reflective, more aware that he is in fact wrestling with demons that have warped him and could kill him if he does not get the upper hand.

What that meant to my reading of the story was that I half-hoped there would be some mercy for the lost and the left behind. What it actually meant was the book ended before I got a sense that the story was over and all the threads dangled.

Not my favorite kind of ending. Appropriate to the subject matter. Truthful and completely honest. Just...dissatisfying, a lot like the life it limns for Hal. He is not satisfied; he cannot be satisfied; he can only dimly conjure any awareness that satisfaction could exist but can in no way craft any kind of response to those around him that would result in anyone feeling satisfied. It is, as a novel, bitter and hateful and cruel; but it is beautifully said and spoken in clear, unhistrionic tones.

A very big ask, this read. Go in with your Shakespeare goggles on and come away shocked at what a new generation of response to him has uncovered. Go in unaware of the Henriad and the dangling ends might bother you more. Shakespeare took three plays (four, if we're stuffy about it) to resolve the Lancastrian dynasty's fate. Author Bratton tried to squeeze it into less than four hundred pages so no wonder he wasn't all the way successful.

Fully successful or not, the clarity and honesty about the pain that abuse and hateful religiosity of Hal's world make it a highly rewarding read.

MONKEY GRIP: A Novel, a loud BANG! of brightly-colored paint in a very pale cultural landscape

MONKEY GRIP: A Novel
HELEN GARNER
Pantheon Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The novel that launched the career of one of Australia’s greatest writers, following the doomed infatuations of a young, single mother, enthralled by the excesses of Melbourne's late-70s counterculture

The name Helen Garner commands near-universal acclaim. A master novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, Garner is best known for her frank, unsparing, and intricate portraits of Australian life, often drawn from the pages of her own journals and diaries. Now, in a newly available US edition, comes the disruptive debut that established Garner's masterful and quietly radical literary voice.

Set in Australia in the late 1970s, Monkey Grip follows single mother and writer Nora as she navigates the tumultuous cityscape of Melbourne’s bohemian underground, often with her young daughter Gracie in tow. When Nora falls in love with the flighty Javo, she becomes snared in the web of his addiction. And as their tenuous relationship disintegrates, Nora struggles to wean herself off a love that feels impossible to live without.

When it first published in 1977, Monkey Grip was both a sensation and a lightning rod. While some critics praised the upstart Garner for her craft, many scorned her gritty depictions of the human body and all its muck, her frankness about sex and drugs and the mess of motherhood, and her unabashed use of her own life as inspiration. Today, such criticism feels old-fashioned and glaringly gendered, and Monkey Grip is considered a modern masterpiece.

A seminal novel of Australia’s turbulent 1970s and all it entailed—communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs, and sex— Monkey Grip now makes its long-overdue American debut.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Novels belong to times and places. This novel is absolutely a product of its time...the 1970s...and place, settler-colonial Australia. Now we are fifty years (close enough) on from that time, we see it very differently. The term "settler colonial" as an example had not been articulated in any but the most ardently leftist circles and is now much more a part of the cultural conversation. What Garner has to say about a liberated woman of the 1970s hits very differently now than it did then. Nora’s descent into sexual obsession and drug abuse was transgressive in a different way. Now, in a conservative social landscape developed in reaction to that bright bohemian moment, Nora seems appallingly neglectful, pretty much criminally culpable for her treatment of Gracie as an expendable accessory to her own life. We think that differently about children and their needs. Thank goodness.

A point that was clear then that we of the 2020s often seem to ignore is that Gracie...of necessity...has a dad. Nora is living her own life without so much as a thought for Gracie. And so, I remind is all in our desire to tut over this, is Gracie’s dad. In the 1970s that was so ordinary an outcome that nothing whatever is made of it, nor is Javo’s hostile indifference to anyone’s needs except his own. He is, after all, A Man. Nora, by the end of the tale, is the only sufferer for her actions. Her resentful neglect of Gracie, product of an unhappy stab at marriage, really stood out for me as she simultaneously pined after the job of riding herd on Javo of the wild blue eyes and the clearly terminal smack (heroin, for the youths who might read this) addiction. As always, the inconvenient thing about children is that they need meals, clothes, baths, every day. Junkies like the adult-but-younger Javo, in contrast, can be left in their own mess, and no one does a double-take.

The reason this book sprang out at people back in the day was that it was still very much Not Done for a woman to write about women’s desires for sex, and about the bright shining fact that the reason drug culture took hold was that taking drugs feels really good. It gets a user out of their doubtless boring and routine life. That it also takes them over and ruins that boring tedious necessary engagement with living one’s life slowly emerges as Nora stays focused on herself and her addictions to sex and drugs. The shock value of this, then, was that it was a woman writing about it without stuffy moralizing and overt message-making. Yes, she has been in this out-of-control relaationship but she does come to know it must, and is at the, end. Nora does not ever think about the impact of any of this on Gracie.

I do not pretend to like Nora, or to think I would voluntarily pick up a book about her. I’m glad that I read Monkey Grip because the prose is terrific...elliptical, imprecise, and poetic...and the fact that this is based off Garner’s own life is much better known now. This adds a depth of field to my reading of the nearly plotless events that occur. The fact that Garner spent her energy in this difficult-to-sell way, then transmuted that sort-of wasted life into a work of very loud art in a very beige cultural landscape, made me admire her for her honesty, and for her clarity of purpose in writing it as a novel. She could have written a mea-culpa memoir, and been forgotten in a year.
What we get instead is a book that, for its story and its storyteller, was a loud BANG! of brightly-colored paint in that very beige cultural landscape. It would take over a decade for Australian writers to follow Helen Garner into the Fitzroy Baths and soak some of the settler-colonial stiffness out of their storytelling muscles.

NORTHWOODS, deeper than I expected by the end of the read

NORTHWOODS
AMY PEASE
Atria/Emily Bestler Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The dark underbelly of an idyllic Midwestern resort town is revealed in the aftermath of a murder with ties to America’s opioid epidemic in this unputdownable and thrilling debut that is perfect for fans of James Lee Burke, William Kent Krueger, and Mindy Mejia.

Eli North is not okay.

His drinking is getting worse by the day, his emotional wounds after a deployment to Afghanistan are as raw as ever, his marriage and career are over, and the only job he can hold down is with the local sheriff’s department. And that’s only because the sheriff is his mother—and she’s overwhelmed with small town Shaky Lake’s dwindling budget and the fallout from the opioid epidemic. The Northwoods of Wisconsin may be a vacationer’s paradise, but amidst the fishing trips and campfires and Paul Bunyan festivals, something sinister is taking shape.

When the body of a teenage boy is found in the lake, it sets in motion an investigation that leads Eli to a wealthy enclave with a violent past, a pharmaceutical salesman, and a missing teenage girl. Soon, Eli and his mother, along with a young FBI agent, are on the hunt for more than just a killer.

If Eli solves the case, could he finally get the shot at redemption he so desperately needs? Or will answers to this dark case elude him and continue to bring destruction to the Northwoods?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The steady erosion of the workforce in rural areas is pushing a major crisis in substance abuse to epidemic proportions. This is what underpins the story that debut mystery writer Amy Pease chooses to tell us.

Eli, our main character, is self-medicating with alcohol (the legal drug) his PTSD, his marriage ending, and the loss of his career in the US Fish and Wildlife job he's done since leaving Afghanistan. His mother Marge does what any good parent would do, scrapes him up and gives him a purpose: As sheriff in a drastically underfunded department, she hires him to be a deputy. No one can say it's only nepotism, since he was a soldier, then a game warden, and so what if he's her son? Should she overlook his attendance problems and his increasingly frequent panic attacks from his entirely self-"managed" PTSD? In reality, no. In the book, she does, and it goes pretty much unexamined. As does a lot of the painfully obvious skulduggery rampant in the town...in the name of "going along to get along."

No good deed goes unpunished.

Eli comes across a murder that will make the entire town take stock of what they all know but won't discuss. In this way it resembles "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" in its exposé of complicity by silence. The silences run deep. The town's got many dirty little secrets, and Eli has the end of the thread that unravels the curtain hiding them in the murder of a teenaged boy. That it involves a local drug rehab center...for rich people...is the meat of the sandwich. There is a LOT of drug use in Shaky Lake, Wisconsin, and no one from the town gets help at that rehab...nicely done, Author Pease. There's a lot to unpick in the way this story attacks many facets of the status quo. This is, in fact, the reason I gave it four stars. If I was going solely on its literary merits, maybe three would be more like it. The pacing is slow, the way the author uses descriptions is odd...though it was the way I stumbled upon my fourth star...and the completely unprofessional behavior of Sheriff Marge towards her deputy Eli wouldn't pass the most casual law-enforcement scrutiny.

The action in the book, as in direct conflict, takes place in the last quarter or so; until then, one's got to be kept reading by the investment made in the characters. The frequency of Eli's panic attacks as he responds to the initial call for a disturbance of peace and thus discovers the dead boy became a cause of problems for me. I got jittery every time I was forewarned of another social situation that would trigger Eli. It's a state of negative arousal, so I wasn't at all sure I wanted to keep reading. His lack of proper help, at apparently any turn in his post-service life, turned out to be my dark little clue of what the author was doing. The lights came on for me when I realized the only places she was using descriptive words that were more than merely functional was when Eli was in the woods, or among the wealthy people in his resort-ridden town. The safest and most unsafe places in Eli's world were heightened, thus counterpointed.

Clever. Subtle. Make the contrast unmissable, once you've seen it. The plot's main driver becomes less the murder of that poor kid, and more the hideous disfiguring sense of entitlement that Eli smacks into as he shakily grasps the threads of motive behind the murder. After the dead kid's girlfriend disappears and the FBI gets involved...why that would occur remains hazy in my mind...even then, Eli and Marge are just kept in their place. That the resolution of the case comes at the cost of Eli's illusions about his world, and his mother, is down to the outsiders. Yet nothing is going to change, it feels like to me; the perpetrators are not let off scot-free but there's no sign of some wider awakening....

Honestly, I was in two minds about how to rate and focus on the review until I thought back on the larger exposé aspects of the story as told. Eli is a suffering everyman, a person used and discarded by the very world he's served and is still serving as being broken therefore useless. What I felt the author was doing in making Eli's panic attacks so frequent yet so pointedly timed, was a kind of human kintsugi. Much like the narrative device in A Man and a Woman, it's something that must be allowed to pervade one's sense of the story. To bring it into sharp relief would've made the author's deeper purpose, the one I perceived anyway, too on-the-nose. No exaggeration intended, it truly changed my perfectly okay read of a first mystery, possibly a series-starter, into a very pleasant read of a solidly crafted, well-aimed novel.

Good one, Author Pease.

THE DEADLY DREAMS PAGE: NO ONE LEFT TO COME LOOKING FOR YOU, chasing dreams goes bad & AFTER THE LIGHTS GO OUT, chasing the bad dreams

AFTER THE LIGHTS GO OUT
JOHN VERCHER
Soho Press
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A harrowing and spellbinding story about family, the complications of mixed-race relationships, misplaced loyalties, and the price athletes pay to entertain—from the critically acclaimed author of Three-Fifths

Xavier "Scarecrow" Wallace, a mixed-race MMA fighter on the wrong side of thirty, is facing the fight of his life. Xavier is losing his battle with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), or pugilistic dementia—a struggle he can no longer deny. Through the fog of memory loss, migraines, and paranoia, Xavier does his best to keep in shape while he waits for the call that will reinstate him after a year-long suspension.

Until then, he watches his diet and trains every day at the Philadelphia gym owned by his cousin-cum-manager, Shot, a retired champion boxer to whom Xavier owes an unpayable debt. Xavier makes ends meet by teaching youth classes at Shot’s gym and by living rent-free in the house of his white father, whom Xavier has been forced to commit to a nursing home because of the progress of his end-stage Alzheimer’s. Dementia has revealed a shocking truth about Sam Wallace, and Xavier finally gains insight into why his Black mother left the family when Xavier was young.

As Xavier battles his aging body and his failing brain, each day is filled with challenges and setbacks. Then Xavier is offered a chance at redemption: a last-minute comeback fight in the largest MMA promotion. If he can get himself back in the game, he’ll be able to clear his name and begin to pay off Shot. But with his memory in shreds and his life crumbling around him, can Xavier hold onto the focus he needs to survive? After the Lights Go Out is a haunting, unflinching look at the aftermath of a career in MMA—as Xavier forgets everything around him, you'll want to remember every single word.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU. **see content warnings**

My Review: This is one rough ride of a book. There are people whose road through life is not paved, has many potholes, throws up gravel and clouds of caliche dust as their bald-tired forty-year-old chassis bounces and shakes over to one ditch, down into another. And that is who we're with here. Xavier is not, was never, expecting a limo ride, not even waiting for a cab ride...he's still rollin' but the roll is slow and it's not getting faster.

The bad marriage he came from was made worse by its permanent poison-gift to him. His mother was Black and father white, so he knows something a lot of people don't have to: Not belonging to either side in a war isn't being neutral. That's a gift only those with a clear side, one that can't be denied, are given. He's mixed. He's mixed up, he's mixed it up in fights his whole life. No one wanted him on their team so he used what strength and speed he could find to go one-on-one with other rage-filled testosterone-poisoned Others.

Now nearing forty, he's sure he's got no future. So is everyone else but they never thought he had a present. His efforts to get one more headline bout in Mixed Martial Arts are, as we meet him, wavering in and out of existence in front of eyes that don't connect to his brain right anymore. The voices he hears clearest are the ones in his battered head, they aren't competing with tinnitus. At least they aren't the ones telling him things he doesn't want to hear...his father, foundering under Alzheimer's disease's heavy burdens, doesn't remember him but does remember how to hate, his chances to fight again, more, are steadily melting away and there's nothing else he can do to make a living.

The life of someone always on the margins is, realistically, never going to turn into a happily ever after. Xavier never once thought it would. He chooses his own adventure, like he always has, right up to the last bitter dreg from the cup.

Author Vercher tells this deeply moving, unbearably honest story in direct, immediate prose. He selects the small images...a texting app's continuation icon of dots keeping him on tenterhooks about his future, the feeling of hanging his hand out the window while driving his dad's old car bringing back the times he did the same thing as a kid...that make Xavier real. That keep him, however fleetingly, locked in to the present moment. They work very well, are sharp but still small enough to make them fit right on everyone.

What isn't quite as smooth is the passages where Xavier is learning his mother and father, very late in life from my point of view, are fully human people. What Author Vercher does to make Xavier aware of his mother's full humanity was a scene both a little long as well as underdeveloped. It needed not to feel rushed as Xavier learns Evelyn was a very different person than the mother he had. The issues around dementia were handled very well, in my experienced opinion. When Xavier realizes that disinhibition is part of the course of dementia, it rocks his world. It did not need to be played out in the over-the-top manner that it was. Honestly, the choice to make Xavier's pathology so very foregrounded wore on my patience at times. Every reader has their own crotchets...these are mine.

Perfection not being of this Earth, I can honestly say that your Yule gift cards, spent on this deep and emotionally honest journey, will not be wasted. This second novel tells me that Author Vercher is a gift to the readers who want to get into a story and come out changed.

Bravo, good sir.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

NO ONE LEFT TO COME LOOKING FOR YOU
SAM LIPSYTE
Simon & Schuster
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A darkly comic mystery by the author of Hark and The Ask set in the vibrant music scene of early 1990s New York City.

Manhattan’s East Village, 1993. Dive bars, DIY music venues, shady weirdos, and hard drugs are plentiful. Crime is high but rent is low, luring hopeful, creative kids from sleepy suburbs around the country.

One of these is Jack S., a young New Jersey rock musician. Just a few days before his band’s biggest gig, their lead singer goes missing with Jack’s prized bass, presumably to hock it to feed his junk habit. Jack’s search for his buddy uncovers a sinister entanglement of crimes tied to local real estate barons looking to remake New York City—and who might also be connected to the recent death of Jack’s punk rock mentor. Along the way, Jack encounters a cast of colorful characters, including a bewitching, quick-witted scenester who favors dressing in a nurse’s outfit, a monstrous hired killer with a devotion to both figure skating and edged weapons, a deranged if prophetic postwar novelist, and a tough-talking cop who fancies himself a retro-cool icon of the homicide squad but is harboring a surprising secret.

No One Left to Come Looking for You is a page-turning suspense novel that also serves as a love letter to a bygone era of New York City where young artists could still afford to chase their dreams.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU. **see content warnings**

My Review: Coming home to my era of Manhattan living in this story was a pleasure. It has Author Lipsyte's requisite snarky, biting wit. It felt like I was back in the after-hours club post-Save the Robots listening to the coke-fueled motormouthing. Oh my...I've said too much.

But it's true, this is the way it felt, and looked, and even smelled.

What I think makes this a good read, then, is its way of being in harmony with my own memories. It's an evocation of a vanished time and place. So how will it hit someone whose memories aren't like mine?

Right on the funny bone.

Later, we go get a drink at the Jew-Hater's bar.

The merry old pogromist, with his lovely shock of alabaster hair and craggy fascist visage, pours us free shots with our beers. Maybe he means to lubricate his audience.

"The Yids, they cut the penis," he says, casual, as though relaying news of an off-season baseball trade. ... "God makes people perfect. The penis, perfect. Why cut it up? Only the Yid thinks of that."

The bland face of evil, played for a few yuks...if you're going to work as this book's audience, you'll need to see that as humor. Offensive and crass and humorous.

Otherwise this isn't a story I think you'll get into. And you'll need to want to get into it...the blizzard at the end of the book needs to feel like we felt then, a suspended moment of possibility, a confusing intersection of many corners all hidden behind drifts and shockingly cold winds forcing your face away from the way you started out wanting to go. That moment in the narrator's life was one where there were many ways to go. He went too far away from the one he thought he wanted and it took a blizzard to show him where he had to be.

Author Lipsyte won't be going back to the days of wine and roses, as the old saying has it; he's fifty-four now, and this story just couldn't come from anyone not fifty-four. My viewpoint, ten years ahead of him, was different enough to make this fun trip to a time I loved familiar enough. I wouldn't have seen it from this angle but it was still speaking to me.

Over forty-five? Give this a read today. What else is that gift card for if not to try to time travel?

ON SPINE OF DEATH, laugh-out-loud cozy mystery & THE STORYTELLER'S DEATH, Ann Dávila Cardinal's mystery-tinged fantasy

THE STORYTELLER'S DEATH
ANN DÁVILA CARDINAL
Sourcebooks Landmark (NON-AFFILIATE Amazon link)
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From International Latino Book Award-winning author Ann Dávila Cardinal comes a gorgeously written family saga about a Puerto Rican woman who finds herself gifted (or cursed?) with a strange ability.

There was always an old woman dying in the back room of her family’s house when Isla was a child...

Isla Larsen Sanchez’s life begins to unravel when her father passes away. Instead of being comforted at home in New Jersey, her mother starts leaving her in Puerto Rico with her grandmother and great-aunt each summer like a piece of forgotten luggage.

When Isla turns eighteen, her grandmother, a great storyteller, dies. It is then that Isla discovers she has a gift passed down through her family’s cuentistas. The tales of dead family storytellers are brought back to life, replaying themselves over and over in front of her.

At first, Isla is enchanted by this connection to the Sanchez cuentistas. But when Isla has a vision of an old murder mystery, she realizes that if she can't solve it to make the loop end, these seemingly harmless stories could cost Isla her life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A young-adult fantasy-with-mystery that utterly charmed me. When Isla's unusual ability to recall, if that's the word, the stories of her family's past. If it involved one of her ancestors, she can see it! Like she was there! What a fascinating, and honestly useful, paranormal ability to have. She's got a window into her family's past that could be hugely important because, well, History is nothing but His Story and isn't it the greatest thing ever when Her Story can be told?! I was so excited!

"Reality" had to intervene, stupid boring reality!, just like it always does...not everything that happened in the past was pretty. We know this, but Isla can see it because her abuelita, on her death, passed the mantle of being a cuentista, Story-Woman, to her. Suddenly Isla's mother's sad descent into alcohol abuse and her consequent abandonments of Isla with her grandmother in Puerto Rico made more sense...it's never explicitly said, but Isla's mother seems like someone who really couldn't handle the very dark gift of becoming a cuentista. Isla's painful childhood of betrayal and loss and coping with mental illness's consequences uniquely prepares her to cope with the true burden of Remembering her family's history. And it gives her the strength to right old wrongs.

What a great idea, right?! And what a great market to target with this message, that everything that happens to you can be used to build something wonderful if you use it that way; something I truly wish more people were taught from little on up to spike the victim gun we tend to hold at our own heads. Isla's struggles with grief...her own, her mother's...at her father's early death were not dwelt on or minimized. Her mother's ongoing struggles with alcoholism are honestly, forthrightly presented as the major issue they can't help but be, yet aren't sensationalized or pounded into dust as the hobby-horse gets ridden. I was completely delighted with the storytelling voice, as well. In all, this sounds like a five-star rave, doesn't it...so why's there a "4" in front of the "5"?

Because, in service of speed I suppose, Isla faces next to no obstacles in her quest to understand the decidedly mixed blessing of becoming a cuentista. Anyone she needs to speak to, they're still alive and they're available now and they're eager to help. Hmm, that's a bit too easy...then there's the underexamined role of colonialism (internalized and not) inherent in stories about Puerto Rico's past and how that impacts her grandmother's growing up, her mother's choices, the whole kit and caboodle. The stories and their injustices were, it's true, redolent with the issues of racism and colorism, but these factors could have benefited from some further reflection in Isla's viewpoint's evolution. It's a small niggle. And it's way more than outweighed by the delight I felt in immersion into a family whose language world is Spanish-inflected English. This is something I very much enjoy and, while I'm bringing it up to you as a positive, there are readers who won't feel comfortable with it and thus might make their decision to read the story or not on that factor.

On the whole I wish they would take the plunge and get the book from the library. Try the waters! There's nothing to lose except a small investment of time in that case. The strong possibility, in my view, of broadening one's horizons a bit more is well worth the risk. It's a lovely story and Cuentista Dávila Cardinal has the chops to bring you along on one really excellent ride.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ON SPINE OF DEATH
TAMARA BERRY (By the Book Mysteries #2)
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 mass market, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Don't miss the second installment of this gripping and funny bookish cozy mystery series by Tamara Berry! This case isn't just cold, it's practically frozen shut...

In the aftermath of solving their first murder, bestselling author Tess Harrow and her teenage daughter Gertrude have decided to stay in Winthrop permanently. Now that they've made some updates to their cabin in the woods, they're turning to the family hardware store that Tess inherited and converting it into the town's first independent bookstore. But when renovations unearth bones from a cold case and send them toppling—literally—onto Tess's head, the work comes to a grinding halt. With the whole town convinced that her grandfather was a serial killer, Tess has to call in a fellow horror author for reinforcements. Together, they'll come up with a perfect story to make all the clues fit...and solve a mystery more than thirty years in the making.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Not many writers will 'fess up to their weirdest research methods. Tess Harrow doesn't have a lot of choice...she's tied to a chair in a basement struggling to get free (research!) when the floor above her collapses. That, my friends, is how you open a story!

When Tess, a bestselling thriller writer and mother of a teenaged girl, needs to make a big change in her life, the opportunity to take over her late grandfather's hardware store and cabin in small-town Washington State arises. Teenager in tow, off Tess hares. It's quite clear that she won't be running a hardware store so she does what so many writers say they'd love to do and decides a bookstore is what the town needs! (The town was not consulted, but never mind.)

In the course of renovating the store, a skeleton is uncovered in a...peculiar...place. Then there's another one! All in her dear old grandfather's store! Was her belovèd grandfather a murderer?! Or if not, was he an accessory to murder? Either way, Tess wants to know (let's face it, she's stumbled into one helluva tale) and the local Sheriff doesn't much want to speed his investigation up just for this high-handed Bigfoot author from out of town. There are Procedures. They're there to make a case solid and an answer to the Big Questions of who, what, when, and why (where being known in this case) trustworthy and that's what matters to his law-enforcement officer self.

Tess, coming at this from three angles and none of them inspiring her to patience (store owner, granddaughter, thriller writer), naturally clashes with Slowpoke McPutt-putt. The sparks must fly, mustn't they, to make the needed heat for the series to rise to new heights? Add in the teenager's discomfiting fascination with Sylvie the coroner's job (to the point that she's shadowing the poor thing really, really closely as a school project), and there's a lot of moving parts. That's what makes the read so much fun...the way Author Berry keeps all the balls in the air and manages to cast your attention into the blind alleys she needs for it to be distracted by...well, it's fun to be in the presence of a skilled practitioner at her peak.

The renovations, the bodies, the people who just *happen* to be not quite who they say they are, the motives for the locals to take sides on the uncomfortable rooting about for answers to the Big Questions...all are standard elements handled in deft ways. They aren't surprises. They aren't meant to be, and they're all the more welcome for not being. I think the series will have legs because it's already got a smile of its own. It's presenting your ma'at-sensing organs with truth and justice but they're not as simplistically presented as they can sometimes be in series mysteries. There's thoughtful commentary on the way of the world, there's a damn-near evergreen scented evocation of the way small towns in the piney woods operate, there's the always-fun fish out of water growing into a local institution trope...remember Northern Exposure?...and it's done with panache, if not philosophical depth.

Great for the season's snatch-a-chapter-in-line reading habits because it's already episodic!

THE 16th SECOND: The Wild Life and Crazy Times of Colt Michael–What Really Happened & A UNION LIKE OURS: The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney

A UNION LIKE OURS: The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney
SCOTT BANE
Bright Leaf
$24.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: After a chance meeting aboard the ocean liner Paris in 1924, Harvard University scholar and activist F. O. Matthiessen and artist Russell Cheney fell in love and remained inseparable until Cheney’s death in 1945. During the intervening years, the men traveled throughout Europe and the United States, achieving great professional success while contending with serious personal challenges, including addiction, chronic disease, and severe depression.

During a hospital stay, years into their relationship, Matthiessen confessed to Cheney that “never once has the freshness of your life lost any trace of its magic for me. Every day is a new discovery of your wealth.” Situating the couple’s private correspondence alongside other sources, Scott Bane tells the remarkable story of their relationship in the context of shifting social dynamics in the United States. From the vantage point of the present day, with marriage equality enacted into law, Bane provides a window into the realities faced by same-sex couples in the early twentieth century, as they maintained relationships in the face of overt discrimination and the absence of legal protections.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Never have the words "it takes one to know one" been put to a more positive, more constructive use than in Scott Bane's double biography of F.O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney. Bane and his husband, journalist David Dunlap, are the same generational distance apart...fifteen years as opposed to twenty...that F.O. and Russell were, and face some of the same cultural mismatches that they did. Like them, the author and his husband are in it for the long haul. It grounds this work in a shared lived experience, then, and explains the recognition that Bane brings to the delight and the toil of building a life together. Romance is about passion and excitement, discovery and laughter; marriage is about farts and morning breath, balancing the checkbook...and laughter. Can't laugh together? Won't last. These men loved the same things, art and culture and their upper-class life; but they always stayed in touch with the interpersonal fundamentals that provide a rock to build on.

From their providential meeting aboard the ocean liner Paris, F.O. and Russell were companions. F.O.'s youth, the fourth of four children of divoced parents, was spent in Tarrytown, a short train trip from Manhattan and its gay-sex paradise that he took full advantage of. He was a boarder at the Hackley School, a Unitarian-run college prep organization that gave him the freedom from his (slightly neglectful, it sounded to me) mother to come and go as he would within curfews. It was also a more-or-less accepted thing that boarding schools would have sexual experimentation in them. It's not different now, but it was more laissez-faire then, so long as it didn't transgress limits. Russell's life, as he was from an even-wealthier family, was less structured around upper-middle-class concerns; he was eleventh of eleven children, and accordingly largely left to his own devices. Like F.O., Russell went to Yale and was brought into Skull and Bones; unlike F.O., he was not focused or driven. The artistic urge that Russell pursued wasn't driving him, the way F.O.'s ambitions were driving him; the direction F.O. would take wasn't set but the passion for reading, literature, was there and the organizational zeal was too, yet to be married. They were equally well matched in their shared passion for men, though again at ends of a spectrum: F.O. loved sex and sexuality, with men; Russell loved men, and expressed it through sex.
This 1926 portrait from RussellCheney.com of F.O. in Florence shows how tenderly Russell regarded his "Matty"
These men, then, were perfectly suited to each other, their union fated and destined to be one that was harmonious. Though it certainly faced challenges...Russell's alcoholism and health issues, F.O.'s political convictions drew unwanted attention, the pair swapped places as the financial backer of their life together...it was an enduring institution in their lives. F.O.'s tender care for Russell as his alcoholism took over his life was exemplary. Author Bane and his husband have faced down other health challenges together, which really informs the way he writes about the frailty of the person you love overtaking all other concerns. As the love of my life died of AIDS 30 years ago this past May, I am very clear about this cost and the willingness the committed spouse has to bear it. I felt so...validated...by this multilayered reflection of my own life.

The ending of the book was hard to read. It's a given that people will die; it's not a given that this will ever be easy, will ever be quantifiably manageable. F.O.'s ultimate inability to save Russell from the consequences of his alcoholism felt so tragic to me. It's always true that an addict loves their addiction, but we always hope they'll love us more. Sadly for F.O., Russell couldn't love him more than the booze. After Russell's 1945 death at the then-venerable age of sixty-three, F.O. entered the long-term partner's decline. It was exacerbated by his ongoing conflicts with a severely conservatizing society, his employers' attitude towards his politics, and the vast shoreless ocean of survivorhood.

In the end, F.O. Matthiessen, a monadnock of literary theory and a champion of modernist literary products, could not face the world without his center and mainstay. He took his own life on (appropriately) April Fool's Day, 1950, at forty-eight. We are much the poorer for his absence from our cultural conversation far too soon.

I hope you'll read this fascinating, well-made and thoroughly sourced life of two fine gay men. In #PrideMonth, how can you resist?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE 16TH SECOND: The Wild Life and Crazy Times of Colt Michael—What Really Happened
TED A RICHARD
W. Brand Publishing
$22.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The 16th Second is the autobiography of a small-town gay boy from Deep South Louisiana who survived homophobia, alcohol and drug addiction, sexual abuse, rape, and HIV/AIDS to become somebody that no one, not even he, expected.

The story winds through his childhood, where Ted had become accustomed to coming in second. Weaving a tale of drama, heartache, and failure to the path leading him to figure out what it takes to come in first, and why it mattered.

His childhood recollection of “never being good enough” morphs into a world of delusions of grandeur as his search for fame seems to never materialize which causes him to create his own definition of fame.

It is a story of redemption and success after years of searching helped him realize that he had to let go of the fame of the past (which never existed), and begin living in the present in order to secure his future.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: My fellow old gay Texan guys: Remember Colt Michael? Here he is again! If you read This Week in Texas in the 1980s like I did...well, you'll remember Colt Michael. I now know he was Ted Richard, a Catholic Cajun boy. We even worked for the same department store (me before him), Foley's. Never met the man then, but I know him better now than I ever would've had we met in our 20s. (Though seeing the photos from the 1980s editions of TWIT was really cool.)

What I thought most about was how similar we were in the outlines of our experiences...losing a gay high-school friend to vehicle accidents, being brought to know our real sexual natures by older men whose experience was just perfect for the awakening, being raped by trusted authority figures (his a priest, mine my mother)...and how very much we both lost to AIDS. My goddesses, what a scourge.

What makes me rate this book as a four-star read, then, is that sense of fellow feeling, and the way he writes. It's like having a conversation with him, he definitely "writes the way he talks." That worked for me; it might or might not for you. How much do you want an excitable old gay guy whoopin' and hollerin' in his Cajun accent right in your ear? Do what I did, read a chapter a day, and even those who maybe don't want to have the whole experience all at once will likely enjoy it.

As to why you'd want to read it...learn something from your elders? relive a little corner of your past? experience a life very unlike your own? Whatever resonates. I hope you'll give Ted/Colt a few hours of your time.

JUST BY LOOKING AT HIM, clever, amusing, witty even! But...

JUST BY LOOKING AT HIM
RYAN O'CONNELL
Atria Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Read this interview with Author O'Connell on LitHub!

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the star of Peacock’s Queer as Folk and the Netflix series Special comes a darkly witty and touching novel following a gay TV writer with cerebral palsy as he fights addiction and searches for acceptance in an overwhelmingly ableist world.

Elliott appears to be living the dream as a successful TV writer with a doting boyfriend. But behind his Instagram filter of a life, he’s grappling with an intensifying alcohol addiction, he can’t seem to stop cheating on his boyfriend with various sex workers, and his cerebral palsy is making him feel like gay Shrek.

After falling down a rabbit hole of sex, drinking, and Hollywood backstabbing, Elliott decides to limp his way towards redemption. But facing your demons is easier said than done.

Candid, biting, and refreshingly real, Just by Looking at Him is an incisive commentary on gay life, a heart-centered, laugh-out-loud exploration of self, and a rare insight into life as a person with disabilities.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: No one, looking from the outside in, will ever know what others are enduring, surviving, overcoming...or hiding. The author's got a track record of blowing the doors off handy hiding places...go watch his first show, Special, if you're in any doubt...and he's brought his unsparing honesty to bear on fiction about the supremely ableist gay-male world. Being a gay male, that's what he knows, so that's perfectly fair. It's a solid, explanatory fact that the author, writer for and star in the Peacock revival of Queer as Folk as well as the creator of the Netflix series Special based on his differently-abled-gay-guy memoir I'm Special and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves, is also the partner of Jonathan Parks-Ramage of Yes, Daddy fame.

This, then, is a Personage within QUILTBAG creativeland. I expected that I would be treated to outstanding stories told in superbly structured chapters.

I didn't get that.

I did get the expected honest and unflinching, no-bullshit presentation of Elliott's struggles with what I'd call impostor syndrome, fear of rejection, and a huge self-confidence deficit stemming from being gay and having cerebral palsy. I got hefty doses of snark and sarcasm; I got unblinking acknowledgment of the harm divergent career paths and the temptations of sudden financial freedom present in a couple's life. I got the eternal, and unwinnable, struggle of people to be monogamous when there is a vast smorgasbord of yummy side dishes available in any number of technologically assisted ways.

It was a lot of fun to read the author's one-liners, eg: "Lately I’d been feeling more and more that monogamy, like capitalism or keto, wasn’t sustainable, but I couldn’t be sure Gus was on the same page." It was not quite as much fun to have the funny one-liners be the book. It's like reading a really hilarious Twitter thread. (Seriously...seventy-four chapters is way, way too many for three hundred-ish pages.) After a while, enough with this...I'm working harder than I think I should have to to get the laffs. It's the comedy set that goes on too long, the Saturday Night Live skit that refuses to end.

It's also the man's first novel, these are common problems with comedic first novels, and there's not one thing in here that I didn't think belonged; it's just that it belonged in a slightly different structure. There's a great deal of sexual material and a great deal of discussion, in what I found slightly cringe-worthy (ie, dismissively dealt with via humor) terms, of substance abuse. It really highlights a very significant issue I felt as I got deeper and deeper into Elliott's story: He's really blind to his white cismale privilege. He's disabled, and an addict; but he deals with those problems from a very, very high platform that puts him in reach of all kinds of support and help.

Lamenting the innocence of 2012 wasn't a great idea, either, Author O'Connell. Things were easier? For men like us, maybe, but things are only getting better too slowly for others not white, not male, and not well off. We're still MILES ahead in this miserable race called "being American." Using self-deprecating humor to deflect negative awareness of one's privilege isn't a viable strategy in this day and age. (Maybe that's what the author meant about 2012 being easier?)

On balance, then, while I laughed and even found a lot of the self-reflection (primarily done at the end of the book) moving, I was too aware of some problems with the way this book was conceived and executed that, quite honestly, I didn't expect to see in 2022's publishing environment.

NIGHTCRAWLING, new voice in fiction from Oakland (!)

NIGHTCRAWLING
LEILA MOTTLEY
Alfred A. Knopf
$28.00 hardcover, available today

Now an Oprah Magazine Favorite Book Of 2022!

One of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2022

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A NEW YORK TIMES WRITER TO WATCH - A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system--the debut of a blazingly original voice that "bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole" (Tommy Orange, best-selling author of There There)

Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent—which has more than doubled—and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed.

One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.

Rich with raw beauty, electrifying intensity, and piercing vulnerability, Nightcrawling marks the stunning arrival of a voice unlike any we have heard before.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Nineteen! NINETEEN!! Author Mottley is all of nineteen, twenty minus one. And she's written this amazing, full-throated roar of defiance in the face of the overwhelming, outrageously powerful white hegemony that controls Oakland and California as a whole. I am revolted that this story flowed as naturally as a river does to the sea out of Leila Mottley, but it did and readers should bear witness with her as Kiara, at a revoltingly early age, learns that men will pay her to use her body for their pleasure.

It's a painful awakening. It's a godsend of money. It's a trap, it's baited with the exact things Kiara needs to walk into the trap, and it's painfully obvious that her world is over. It's a new world entirely, now that she's the one paying the rent.

I will say that, to the sensitive fleurs among us, this story will not go down well. It's honest, it's angry, it takes nothing from you and gives everything to you, and it's a gift so bitter that it makes you wish you hadn't opened it because now you know and can't pretend you don't.

We're always trying to own men we don't got no control of. I'm tired of it. Tired of having to be out here thinking about all these people, all these things to keep me alive, keep them alive. I don't got no air left for none of it. Maybe {her frenemy} is right, it's time to let go, to let one of them take over, take care of me. But I can't stop thinking about {the} call, if {her brother} is alright, if maybe he's got enough money to help us out.

In the middle of a dreary afternoon spent doing something horribly hard, watching her mother as she dies, avoiding a gang of teens who could easily have decided she was a target, riding a bus on a hot afternoon and getting into her rent-due apartment...she wonders how she can help her older brother. Because now, next to making the rent, she's got a much, much bigger problem: How to keep that brother alive. Literally not-room-temperature alive.

That {bad moment from childhood}'s sort of what this feels like: the helplessness of it. Like standing on the road that leads to here and noticing a path you didn't know existed and not being able to take it. Like the road that leads to here was never the only road and time made me forget that until these sobbing moments when I remember, when the fog clears and I'm looking back and there's a fork on the ground, another way.

That ought to ring a bell in us all. If you're an adult, you most likely found yourself nodding along and recognizing those emotions. You'll likely recognize the others about regrets and about consequences and about prices you can't pay to avoid. This is that kind of a story, it's that kind of a world that Kiara and her wide found family live in. And those who make it out? They change addresses. They can't really change when so much around doesn't. This life is what you make of it, true, but is your inward being as malleable as all that?

What makes me so happy is that Author Mottley is here, is the one telling the story to my white-person eyes. I'm so happy that someone in publishing saw this manuscript, heard this rage-filled, sorrow-drenched scream of pain and said, "there's a proud, fine writer being born here, let me put the privilege and prestige of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., behind it and make people listen." So, listen: If you're wondering if this isn't more misery porn, or worse, disaster tourism, then I'm going to bring it to you fresh, this ain't that. (My Texas bleeds through when I want to make sure y'all're listening.)

When I was in the agenting business many long yars ago, an ancestor of this story came across my desk. I loved it. I loved its vernacular honesty and I loved its visceral reality. I wanted to make people read it...stop them in the halls of our building and say "just this bit right here! you'll love it!" and I was talked out of it. See, I'm white, and male, and even then that meant my privilege wasn't going to sail that beautifully loud sound-cloud out onto the lakes of white-people culture. Publishing might be doing better, but it's still the world where I was told to my face by an editor about a non-fiction book by and about African-Americans (as the polite term was then) I wanted her to buy, "who will buy it? Black people don't read."

Thirty years on I'm still appalled by that memory.

And thus it's extra delightful to me that I'm reading this auspicious debut from a young Black creator with the colophon of a very, very distinguished house that made its cultural capital a century ago by taking just these sorts of chances. (Joseph Hergesheimer won't mean much to most of y'all, but he was quite a noise on the 1917 Knopf list....) I couldn't do it; someone could, though, and that it's taken this long to make the waves it's already making (LitHub loves it, forevermore! That's Establishment imprimatur enough right there!) is, well, for me personally both validating and frustrating. I wish I'd done it; I'm thrilled it's been done.

Don't deny yourself this treat. I can't say I liked Look Homeward, Angel a whole lot, but it was a clarion call, a loud voice in full cry, saying, "there's a new way to do this!" That's what Nightcrawling is, that loud voice. Spend some extra time with her and learn what will make you sad to know.

THE GUNCLE, a sweetly sentimental look at family, love, and their powers

THE GUNCLE
STEVEN ROWLEY
G.P. Putnam's Sons
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Patrick, or Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP, for short), has always loved his niece, Maisie, and nephew, Grant. That is, he loves spending time with them when they come out to Palm Springs for weeklong visits, or when he heads home to Connecticut for the holidays. But in terms of caretaking and relating to two children, no matter how adorable, Patrick is honestly a bit out of his league.

So when tragedy strikes and Maisie and Grant lose their mother and Patrick’s brother has a health crisis of his own, Patrick finds himself suddenly taking on the role of primary guardian. Despite having a set of “Guncle Rules” ready to go, Patrick has no idea what to expect, having spent years barely holding on after the loss of his great love, a somewhat-stalled career, and a lifestyle not-so-suited to a six- and a nine-year-old. Quickly realizing that parenting—even if temporary—isn’t solved with treats and jokes, Patrick’s eyes are opened to a new sense of responsibility, and the realization that, sometimes, even being larger than life means you’re unfailingly human.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY AFTER MONTHS ON THE WAITING LIST. USE THOSE LIBRARIES! WE'RE HOW THEY LIVE.

My Review: Last year's big beach read was damned near perfect for the job of being gay enough to really show people how this shit works in real life without making straight people squirm. No fewer than 26 (twenty-six!) mass-media straight venues listed it as a must-read! TWENTY-SIX! Ten years ago, I'd've fallen over in a heap; now I'm mightily impressed. And that, mes vieux, is what we call "progress" of the best sort.

But really, can you fault their discernment?

“You’re forty-three!” Maisie bellowed.

“Who are you, the DMV? Lower your voice.”

“That’s almost fifty!” Grant’s eyes grew big.

Patrick took the jab, then closed his eyes and bit his lower lip; the observation was just shy of a hate crime.

–and–

“Canada is harmless and the prime minister is a total snack, so we can do Paw Patrol. But another time, because we have to move beyond brunch and start planning our day. What are you guys thinking, do you have anything on your calendars?”

–and–

Books should be an experience, he thought, not a trophy for having read them.

Really, the most delicious Negroni (Aperol! faugh!) of fun and profundity for the masses! I can absolutely recommend this book to straight women, gay guys over thirty, and the very most adventurous straight men and lesbians.

...wait...that's it? That's the review?

Honestly, it could be. That's what the reviewer does, right? Tell you and those like you if a book is worth reading, and identify that group to the best of their ability. Illustrate with relevant (in the reviewer's opinion) examples, do one's best not to spoiler things for the sensitive fleurs who, inexplicably, still read reviews but don't want to know anything that happens in the artwork in question. But the twenty-six (!) media outlets that yawped about this book in 2021 already did that. (They did not tell you, however, about being assaulted in the sensibilities by twelve {12} w-bombs. It was an invasion of the eye-disease-having winkers. Ick.)

So, let me tell you a little something that is a spoiler, but is also something you really need to know: This is also a book about loving more than you fear being hurt. This is a book about processing loss, making its deforming agonies fit into a shape that will carry you through the rest of a life; this is a book about the unique, unusual pain of losing your mate as a gay man.

Regular readers know that I've had my share of losses, incalculably awful ones, and met them without a lot of inner strength due to my own beginnings among women who judged, and felt comfortable expressing their contempt for, me. I'm not going to rehash the stories, they're spread all over this place, but the fact is I understand Patrick well. He found his Joe...who chose him to be his family...and he had his RG bestie Sara, who also chose him to be her family to the point she married his little brother. His family, then, was born, found, made. He felt it was his...and gawd laughed her evil laugh.

Joe, gone in an instant, his life taken before his body stopped working; Sara, withered and wizened by illness, slowly slowly vanishing, and Patrick losing again...this time with higher stakes, loss built on loss. And Sara? Well. That's the loveliest thing about this book. Sara, whom we meet briefly in flashbacks of her loving bestieship with Patrick, is honestly like Nut the sky goddess and the goddess of Mothers as she was The Mother. Her role is pervasive, her life is not over...never truly will be...but she is, for all that, a space not an object. And that is so exactly like motherhood that it's really a little terrifying....

The word "Guncle" is a portmanteau of "gay" and "uncle" which I trust won't surprise readers of my words. It's a way of refining a relationship that is largely, in the twenty-first century, fungible. I called men "Uncle" who were neither married to my aunts nor related to my parents. It's a standard feature of life now, we claim relationships and make of them things that we're interested in having or being. The family Patrick has built is so deeply rooted that Guncle Patrick is GUP, the Guncle, anything you want because he's still building his identity. As we all should throughout our lives, after Joe's and Sara's deaths, Patrick is reinventing himself in this summer-long story of a clueless gay man taking on the role of grief counselor and rock of support to two kids and, finally, himself.

"Coming of age" is a phrase that, when applied to novels, shows, films, and other cultural detritus, causes my stomach to churn with acid produced by the "flight" part of the famous response. I hated being a teenager and I don't much want to experience that horrible time again in art. Any art. But the simple fact is, we come of middle-age, we come of old-age...we aren't ever Finished Products. That's for characters created to show us their intended side, their best profile. This book's biggest and best gift to the reader of middle or older years is that: Patrick comes of age, again, as he processes his intense and life-altering grief with humor and wit, with stakes far beyond his own self, with clumsy but real love and, finally, respect for the role of loss and sadness, for grief's immense and unending weight.

Lift weights for strength. Do yoga for flexibility. Nourish your body with the tenderest care and attention to its needs. Because it is the vessel that will support your huge burden of grief and sadness, your light and love, your voice as you speak your truth.

Gym bunny GUP did. And Author Steven Rowley led us there without making it a trudge, or selling it short; I didn't just think up that stuff and say it here, I found it all in this light, easy-to-read novel about a man asked to do the impossible. Again: Heal.