YOUR NAME HERE, well...mine was, is yours?

YOUR NAME HERE
HELEN DeWITT & ILYA GRIDNEFF
Dalkey Archive Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A major literary event over two decades in the making, Your Name Here marks the seismic return of Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai), and will introduce readers to the riveting voice of Ilya Gridneff.

A book of unparalleled scope and vision, Your Name Here is a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books. In this death-defying feat of ambition, collaborators Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff weave together America’s “War on Terror,” countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, dream analysis, multiple languages, emails, images, graphs, into something wondrous and unique.

A metafictional Pygmalion story reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman‘s Oscar-nominated Adaptation, or Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler; Your Name Here is a rare work of art that captures the process of becoming itself. A reminder that a masterpiece and a doomed voyage look the same at the start.

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

My Review: A literary landscape infested with "pullulating DaVinci Codeed masses" decried, a celebration of Arabic language and literature "unthinkable fifty, even ten years ago", a six hundred-page high-concept literary jape that does gymnastics sophisticated enough to impress the literati and cow the middlebrow into quiescence...did I get it? does anyone get it?...this will gatekeep the hell out of Literature and that's a shame. It's fun. I know a lot of people will bounce off the idea of first, second (ugh) *and* third-person narratives in thirty pages, still less the nods and winks to multitudes of novels, writers, stories, movements, that form the matter behind this book. It's a lot. It's meant to be a lot. It's not making the read easy for you.

In 2026 you have immense resources, all free to use and instantly available 24/7/365. to follow rabbit holes to look stuff up. I love that fact, I enjoy that experience; that means I enjoy this read. (I'm not calling it a story, it's not one, it's either no story at all or skatey-eight skabillion of them.) If you're worried someone is Judging You for your uneducated, unsophisticated take on Your Name Here, you're right—they are doing that; turn it around. Judge them for being so snobbish. For making this complicated, convoluted read a critical darling...question their motives, impugn their legitimacy to judge what is or is not Literature. Challenge gatekeepers; good ones, who want to protect standards and increase others' knowledge bases, rise to the challenge to say *why*; snobs sneer and walk away.

Both responses are valid and supported...somewhere...in the text.

I'm not hopeful that masses of y'all will be rushing to get your ten-dollar ebooks of this title. I realize what I've said so far is going to break some brains, tire some eyes, and fail to ignite the fuel of fun that lies inside this chunky book. It's a commitment of time and energy. It's arch, the way Ducks, Newburyport and Milkman (two books I deeply enjoyed) were arch: playing very complex games with The Rules℠, like pretending Pynchon and Italo Calvino aren't difficult to read, will always put some readers...intelligent readers, people who love the act of reading as much as anyone can...right off a book.

I'm hopeful you'll give the book a try. Take it slowly, read it in chunks. Stop wherever it changes tense, for example, and come back later. Try, in other words, different ways to relate to reading a novel. This is a novel that can reward you making that effort if anything you read can.

I've been gate-kept out of offering my opinion on this read because so many have praised it immoderately, and so many have slagged it off so intently for the same reasons others have praised it. That makes writing about a book in any kind of helpful (or intended to be helpful) mode an invitation to those who do not agree with one's opinion to get mouthy. That's tiresome and tiring, and I really did not want to get into it.

I read the most fulsome and the most dismissive reviews I could find. It was amazing to me the precise same book I read, described in similar terms to each other, could lead to such very different personal conclusions. It made me feel the work was well worth calling still more attention to, because this dichotomy of opinion can't be solely about craft; it's about the point of the read.

I found it to be a worthwhile use of my shrinking supply of eyeblinks. I can't give it a perfect rating, I was never panting to get back to it or chewing over some insight until long into the night. It's snobby in the same way I am. It's beautiful in the way I resonate to but know others won't. It's too long.

And I would read it again.

VLADIMIR SOROKIN'S PAGE: Oprichnik's Russia duology

THE SUGAR KREMLIN (Oprichnik's Russia #2)
VLADIMIR SOROKIN (tr. Max Lawton)
Dalkey Archive Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 trade paper, preorder for fulfillment tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A puzzle of colorful, sardonic episodes that come together as a portrait of totalitarian society as a whole.

Sugar Kremlin follows the near-future universe of Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, crafting a set of 15 chapters that all return to the symbol of the The Sugar Kremlin. Thousands of these creations are being given away to citizens on the street, from lucky children to secret political dissidents, torture-obsessed civil servants, sex workers in a nearby bordello, and more.

As Sorokin moves from story to story, he draws the reader through the dark streets of life in Russia, creating a metaphysical encyclopedia of the Russian soul through a deceptively sweet sugary treat. Presenting a wide variety of genres and tones, Sugar Kremlin lays out a frightening vision of speculative mercilessness and quirky political horror.

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

My Review: Not a novel. A collection of fifteen stories set in the storyverse of Day of the Oprichnik but without overlapping or recurring characters. The structure here is centered around a literal "sugar Kremlin", a treat made of sugar in the shape of the Kremlin that's like an Advent calendar or a fruitcake or other holiday treat in ubiquity and celebratory affect.

That alone makes this unnerving, dystopian fantasia of a 2028 Russia unsettlingly like the Project 2025 US we're living in. The characters are constantly munching on, consuming, discussing the lusciousness of, this nutritionless pure sugar abomination.

On the nose much, Author Sorokin?

Expect the usual transgressive behaviors (I've been uneasily eyeing my hammer), the expected degradation and cruelty, the obligatory violent and vicious conduct. Sorokin is not going to coddle your imagination. The stakes here are too high. This duology (this one published in 2008 in Russian, 2025 in English, printed now that Dalkey Archive's under new ownership) is a trumpet blast, containing every dissonant and perverse note in Literature's instrumentation, to get the reader to see, really see, what is going on. It's been the brief of this press since its founding in 1984.

What made this a slightly-less-stellar read than Day of the Oprichnik for me was the episodic nature of stories...they don't really synergize to create a paralyzing terrified awareness of the overarching story's validity and possibly even applicability to 2025 US life. It's not what stories do, nor are they supposed to. What they've done as collected here is make the whole feel more melodramatic than dramatizing reality as a novel does. I was a bit thrown by a story titled "The Queue" because that's also an (unrelated) novel by Author Sorokin. It was brief but it threw me out of my flow state.

I am, then, one of those who are not au fait with Author Sorokin's contention that "The contemporary world is so complex and protean that it is no longer possible to describe it with linear prose and squeeze it into a traditional novel's structure." (From his interview with Joshua Cohen that forms the Introduction to the book.) I read a lot of linear novels; they do a creditable job of linear presentation of an inherently nonlinear world; I do not see that what I've just read has a notable advantage over, say, The Words That Remain (a linear-prose novel that presents complexity, pathos, cruelty, and love effectively). I readily stipulate that I'm possibly missing the point of his statement, or too dull of apprehension to get more than a dim gist of it.

Nonetheless, I experienced this read as a collection of well-made stories ready to épater les bourgeois as they...we...so badly need literature to do. Author Sorokin is ready, willing, and able to do this duty, with verve and panache, and scatology and violence.

It needs doing. It needs reading.

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

DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK (Oprichnik's Russia #1)
VLADIMIR SOROKIN (tr. Jamey Gambrell)
FSG
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Moscow, 2028. A cold, snowy morning.

Andrei Danilovich Komiaga is fast asleep. A scream, a moan, and a death rattle slowly pull him out of his drunken stupor—but wait, that’s just his ring tone. And so begins another day in the life of an oprichnik, one of the czar’s most trusted courtiers—and one of the country’s most feared men.

Welcome to the new New Russia, where futuristic technology and the draconian codes of Ivan the Terrible are in perfect synergy. Corporal punishment is back, as is a divine monarch, but these days everyone gets information from high-tech news bubbles, and the elite get high on hallucinogenic, genetically modified fish.

Over the course of one day, Andrei Komiaga will bear witness to—and participate in—brutal executions; extravagant parties; meetings with ballerinas, soothsayers, and even the czarina. He will rape and pillage, and he will be moved to tears by the sweetly sung songs of his homeland. He will consume an arsenal of drugs and denounce threats to his great nation’s morals. And he will fall in love—perhaps even with a number of his colleagues.

Vladimir Sorokin, the man described by Keith Gessen (in The New York Review of Books) as “[the] only real prose writer, and resident genius” of late-Soviet fiction, has imagined a near future both too disturbing to contemplate and too realistic to dismiss. But like all of his best work, Sorokin’s new novel explodes with invention and dark humor. A startling, relentless portrait of a troubled and troubling empire, Day of the Oprichnik is at once a richly imagined vision of the future and a razor-sharp diagnosis of a country in crisis.

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My Review: From the vantage point of late 2025, a post-Putin neo-medieval Russia in 2028 sounds...oddly optimistic...as well as wrong. From 2005's standpoint it probably seemed more likely; even though nothing in this book could be called hopeful, it was probably sounding good to Sorokin just not to have Little Vladdy Pu-Pu on the tsar's throne.

Predictions always miss something. Usually they're too optimistic, too hopeful, and weird to say that's the problem with this bleak prediction-fest. *waves at Little Vladdy Pu-Pu on his throne* I'm not entirely convinced the religious fervor of the Oprichnia, as revived from the days of Ivan the Terrible (an epithet with multiple valences in English, all of them applicable to the bearer then...and by extension now), is not active in 2025 let alone 2028.

With his characteristic OTT revulsion-inducing behaviors foregrounded, this book is automatically beyond the pale of all too many squeamish readers. I would say "try to get past it" but honestly...don't. One is meant to be revolted and put off by it, much as the 1972 John Waters shocker Pink Flamingos is not meant to titillate but shock and offend (fifty-plus years on, it still does). The world Author Sorokin posits is intended to be just as appalling and revolting, to disgust you and repel you! The entire reason to hold a dark mirror of satire up is to draw attention to the wrongness and cruelty of the world being posited. By no means is it accidental that so much of it is grimly familiar. The theocratic angle is the one not quite fully rolled out by our allegedly separate government. Just wait.

This edition was published in 2011, and it is only more relevant and more horripilating in 2025's world of ICEstapo and wholesale social upheaval caused and inflamed by the most powerful in our country.

THEIR FOUR HEARTS, intense, appalling, urgent, amazing

THEIR FOUR HEARTS
VLADIMIR SOROKIN (illus. Gregory Klassen; tr. Max Lawton)
Dalkey Archive Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: ?5*? but on what scale....

The Publisher Says: In many respects, Their Four Hearts is a book of endings and final things. Vladimir Sorokin wrote it in the year the Soviet Union collapsed and then didn't write fiction for ten years after completing it—his next book being the infamous Blue Lard (q.v.), which he wrote in 1998. Without exaggerating too much, one might call it the last book of the Russian twentieth century and Blue Lard the first book of the Russian twenty-first century. It is a novel about the failure of the Soviet Union, about its metaphysical designs, and about the violence it produced, but presented as God might see it or Bataille might write it.

Their Four Hearts follows the violent and nonsensical missions carried out by a group of four characters who represent Socialist Realist archetypes: Seryozha, a naive and optimistic young boy; Olga, a dedicated female athlete; Shtaube, a wise old man; and Rebrov, a factory worker and a Stakhanovite embodying Soviet manhood. However, the degradation inflicted upon them is hardly a Socialist Realist trope. Are the acts of violence they carry out a more realistic vision of what the Soviet Union forced its "heroes" to live out? A corporealization and desacralization of self-sacrificing acts of Soviet heroism? How the Soviet Union truly looked if you were to strip away the ideological infrastructure? As we see in the long monologues Shtaube performs for his companions—some of which are scatological nonsense and some of which are accurate reproductions of Soviet language—Sorokin is interested in burrowing down to the libidinal impulses that fuel a totalitarian system and forcing the reader to take part in them in a way that isn't entirely devoid of aesthetic pleasure.

As presented alongside Greg Klassen's brilliant charcoal illustrations, which have been compared to the work of Bruno Schulz by Alexander Genis and the work of Ralph Steadman as filtered through Francis Bacon by several gallerists, this angular work of fiction becomes a scatological storybook-world that the reader is dared to immerse themselves in.

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

My Review: Before I begin, let me say:
→H↔E↔E↔D↔T↔H↔E↔C↔O↔N↔T↔E↔N↔T↔W↔A↔R↔N↔I↔N↔G←

If you need a content warning for gore, body horror, transgressive...anything...horseman, pass by. This is Sorokin, of Blue Lard fame, playing Literature's organ with the unsettling pedal fully depressed and the weird stop pulled all the way out. Comme d'habitude, then.

So, the audience now being self-winnowed, I'm going to tell you as little as I can about the transgressions and more about why I care enough to suggest you read this tooth-ripped bloody gobbet shoved in a sweaty gym sock of a book. Because you still can, that's why. This is a litmus test for collapse. If you read it and are not repulsed fairly often, you're probably on the barricades now. If you read this and think, "oh my gawd how'd he geta away with THAT?!" twice a chapter, you're marching somewhere, and shitposting about the 2025ness of it all, and postcarding the hell out of red districts. Everyone else, the "this is repulsive!" to the "this should be banned!" folk, why are you even here? It is not safe for you to be reading anything here when you're under curfew. Off to The New York Times, now, quick as you like, no hands outside the windows!

Like Blue Lard, like Moderan, like everything Burroughs or Dennis Cooper ever wrote, this weird, janky, slightly collapsing edifice of artifice requires you to participate. Very few things in the content-consuming 2025 we live in *require* you to participate to make them work. Sorokin's works aren't simple, even simplistic, slickly made entertainments, they are viscera of story hoicked out of places you didn't think there was spare narrative flesh. There wasn't spare narrative flesh. Vital organs of awareness and complicity and oblivious cruelty are wrenched out and held up before your dumbfounded gaze...and the chapter-opening art adds to that impact.

Sound unappealing? It's not here to appeal to you, it's here to make you reach inside yourself and find the pieces...they're only going to be pieces, I don't think inchoate monstruous sadists read my blog...of these characters in crises they did not make, or try to make better in any way. It is in all of us to look away, to accept pretty surfaces on ugly things, ugly selves. That response is not possible while reading Their Four Hearts.

And that's the point of reading it. I think it could do you a power of good between retches.

RUMENA BUŽAROVSKA'S PAGE: Macedonian tale-teller new to the Anglophone reader

I'M NOT GOING ANYWHERE
RUMENA BUŽAROVSKA (tr. Steve Bradbury)
Dalkey Archive
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Razor-sharp social commentary, Jane Austen for contemporary feminists unafraid to confront a dark world

In her latest translated volume of collected short fiction, Rumena Bužarovska delivers more of what established her as “one of the most interesting writers working in Europe today.” Already a bestseller across her native Macedonia, I’m Not Going Anywhere is an unsentimental and hyperrealist collection in which Macedonians leave their country of origin to escape bleakness—only to find, in other locales, new kinds of desolation in these dark, biting, and utterly absorbing stories.

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

My Review: Seven stories, all centering women and their feelings; few socially acceptable, none positive.

Not having participted in heterosexuality for quite some time now, I am left utterly verschmeckeled by its continued existence. Exactly no women whose writing gets attention write of happiness connected to men. In romantic fiction, after the couple is established, the story ends; and none of them start with happy straight people. Of my own personal knowledge, there are almost no women really happy in their state of making eternal compromises and settlings they make to maintain relationships to their men. Why are y'all bothering? It's not great for anyone involved to be in what amounts to prison with a cellmate you condescendingly tolerate at best, despise and detest at worst.

Well...no one's makin' me do it, so my only interest is an outsider's appalled fascination. Self-inflicted harm seems so wasteful. Not one of these stories is going to challenge my observation's validity; that Author Bužarovska is a multi-award-winning chronicler of straight women's experience suggests to me that she's on to something or the kudos wouldn't flow.

Strap in...we're headin' into the venerable institution of the Bryce Method to examine a little of what she is talking about in this collection.

The Vase reminds me of the drunken fights, the rage and hatred of being Stuck, stuck with-stuck in-stuck under, that there bursts out the sudden overpowering need to break shit just to make the world hurt a little bit like you are. That time in my own life was hellish. It's all right here in a few pages.

With every drink I am getting more and more pissed at him, and at his mother for not dying. The idea that she is sitting there all sick and hideous in her living room like a neglected houseplant, watching stupid soap operas all day, enrages me.

The poison of disappointment and the rage of thwarted entitlement eat caustically away until they spill out, paradoxically, as acid recrimination. 4 unhappy stars

Blackberries charts the course of a passive, purposeless thirty-three year old as she aimlessly moves towards the scene of a dreamlike past to test whether she was even real as a child. Her memories of the place guide her in opening the old cottage her grandparents had. The scenes of domestic contentment shining in front of her dingy present include memories of a vivid friend from that past; these seem to conjure the now-woman from the stones, summon her back to this crumbling haunt from her passionate intense life in the US. A tiny flicker of life, a spark of connection, then the fog descends again.

Was it even real? Does it matter if it isn't? She is never going to burst into glorious flower, like her childhood friend. There is no mass in her to go critical. 4 stars

I flick on the living room light: it works. I flick on all the light switches: everything is working; nothing is amiss. But it can't be, I say to myself. Nothing is ever right. That's just how it looks.

Tsi-Tse brings the cost of settling instead of settling down to the diametric opposite of the earlier stories' impoverished as well as unhappy lives. Elena thought she escaped Macedonia's grinding poverty by marrying an American man with a good job and moving to New Mexico. She found loneliness, isolation, and motherhood's endless unmeetable demands. She also failed to disentangle herself from her ill, needy father. Returning to Skopje when he has a stroke, she's in the eternally tempting path of cheating because her high-school crush Jovan has been in email contact...ain't the twenty-first century grand?...and the lure of Home is so deep...dreams are, after all, deepest when one is dreaming. Pesky reality has no chance to screw things up in dreams. Pity dreams can't last. 4 stars

I'm Not Going Anywhere is Riste-the-incel's humiliated homecoming to his Mama in Skopje after his hottie wife and teenaged daughter finally work up the nous to trade up men. The escape to Australia that he participated in gave them the scope to do better than his bitter, furious, abusive self. Now he's unloading all his pent-up anger on his mother, a portly, poor, elderly woman whose life has clearly been spent as some man or another's dogsbody.

After throwing a tantrum about his mother's goulash being inferior, he storms off to get some veal and show her how it's done. This leads ro a reckoning with his past that he clearly expected to go differently than it did. I found spending time in Riste's company thoroughly unpleasant. 3.5 stars

Medusa pilots us to what, from the off, I was certain was going to be a grisly cocktail party with a pair of Balkan academics visiting some very, very nouveau riche fellow-countrymen in that couple's ever-so-new-money new-build mansion. It doesn't help that the guest's husband is in the sights of the host's wife....

We've been to that party, or at least those of us over a certain age have, and it's a grim, brutal evening. In this telling of it, it very much is that awful, brutal evening for all concerned. 4 stars

Cherokee Red brutalizes a gay kid with a homophobic father whose immigrant status marks the whole family out in ever-so-sunny, ever-so-hot Phoenix...about as far from Macedonia geographically and culturally as a place on Earth can get.

You never know what words will fall where they can do the most damage, do you, and yet there most people are spouting the most revolting kind of hatred and ignorance without a care in the world. Bitter anger, hatred, self-loathing all wound up in a bloated, bombastic, shouting boozehound's nightmarish effusion demonstrating his nithingness. 4 stars

The 8th of March plunged me back into the bad memories of being in alcoholic relationships. The utter, appalling humiliation of Vesna-the-drunk stirred up bad old days, and brought a giant rush of anxiety my way. Horrifyingly cruel, this portrait of self-pity and utter, abject, appallingly public humiliation is easily the most perfectly realized of the whole collection. No alcoholic needs any help destroying their life, but sometimes Life provides them a stage. Harrowing. 5 stars

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MY HUSBAND
RUMENA BUŽAROVSKA (tr. Paul Filev)
Dalkey Archive
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Adulterers, cheats, hypocrites, bad seeds—in My Husband, Rumena Bužarovska turns her wry and razor-sharp gaze on men, and on the lives of the women who suffer them.

In these eleven devastatingly precise and psychologically unsettling stories, we follow the female protagonists’ thwarted attempts at intimacy, ranging from pretense, to denial, to violent and ultimately self-destructive acts. This smart, funny, provocative collection demonstrates the profound skills that have made Rumena Bužarovska one of the finest contemporary writers of short fiction in Macedonia. This story collection Mojot Maž in Croatian, (My Husband in English), won the Edo Budiša Award for Best Short Story Collection.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: At eight or nine pages apiece, these stories can't be subjects of my usual Bryce method of synopsizing each one individually. That way spoilers lie, and y'all're very likely to go nuts about them spoilers. In a certain way, though, no matter what I say it'll be a spoiler because in eleven stories nothing changes. Women marry cads and bounders and abusive jackasses who treat them like dirt. Much of a muchness, then.

The reason I finished the book was that the author's voice, as translated by Paul Filev, is raw, blunt, almost brutally rageful; never less than seethingly aware of the injustice of "belonging" to a man and being subject to his will and whims. I cartainly won't re-read it. I'm glad I did read it in the first place. It's the first work translated from Macedonian that I've read. The author seems to be, based on the limited biographical information I can find in English, a big literary light in Macedonia.

Based on this first collection of hers to appear in English, I can see why. Her sort of caustic honesty isn't going to be to everyone's taste, but I found it to be to mine.

VLAD by Carlos Fuentes...Dracula in MEXICO CITY!!

VLAD: A NOVEL
CARLOS FUENTES
tr. E. Shaskan Bumas
Dalkey Archive (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Where, Carlos Fuentes asks, is a modern-day vampire to roost? Why not Mexico City, populated by ten million blood sausages (that is, people), and a police force who won't mind a few disappearances? "Vlad" is Vlad the Impaler, of course, whose mythic cruelty was an inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula. In this sly sequel, Vlad really is undead: dispossessed after centuries of mayhem by Eastern European wars and rampant blood shortages. More than a postmodern riff on "the vampire craze," Vlad is also an anatomy of the Mexican bourgeoisie, as well as our culture's ways of dealing with death. For -- as in Dracula -- Vlad has need of both a lawyer and a real-estate agent in order to establish his new kingdom, and Yves Navarro and his wife Asunción fit the bill nicely. Having recently lost a son, might they not welcome the chance to see their remaining child live forever? More importantly, are the pleasures of middle-class life enough to keep one from joining the legions of the damned?

My Review: Well now. This is a later work by Mexican national treasure Fuentes, published (in serial form) in Spanish in 2004, as a book in 2010, and in English in 2012, the year of Fuentes' death. Here in abundance is the glorious, sensuous language of Fuentes' fearless imagination:

At night in our marital bed, Asunción is like the salamander of myth; cold that shall burn, burning that shall freeze; fleeting like mercury and stable as a precious pearl; devoted, mysterious, surprising, flirtatious; imagined and imaginative...No talk, all action.

This is a man discussing his wife, with whom he has made two children! Most men would barely be able to summon up that woman's hair color. Not Fuentes' husband, no indeed, he catalogs his wife's wicked sexy ways. Which, being wise to the source material of the book, lets the non-comatose reader in on the fact that all will soon fall to poo-poo in a big bad way.

Lawyer Navarro meets his senior partner's old schoolmate Count Vladimir Radu as soon as Asunción, in her role as real estate agent, delivers the required house; the scene of the meeting, a spacious and monochromatic modern villa in a fancy mountainside neighborhood, is more creepy and eerie than it would have been if Fuentes had gone the expected route and made Vlad ("all my friends call me Vlad" says the Count, in a bone-chilling moment of ersatz bonhomie) a slave to Old World notions of proper decor and architecture. Something about ancient evil in a Bauhaus-y minimalist setting, well, it made my neck hairs rise.

There sits relentlessly alive and ponderously restrained Yves Navarro (perhaps named so in honor of French writer Yves Navarre? a sensualist, like Fuentes and like Navarro, only gay), noticing the physicality of the repulsively ugly Count, taking inventory of his flaws and repulsed yet seduced by his demeanor:

His hands were eloquent. He moved them with disagreeable elegance, he closed them with sudden strength, and he didn't attempt to conceal the strange abnormality of his long glassy nails,as transparent as his windows before he'd had his house sealed.

I hesitate to use this phrase, but Count Vlad comes to life (!) in this description. It's economical and still replete with imagery that functions as subtext. Ethan Bumas, the lead translator, did good (if mixed, more on that anon) work capturing the dandyish archness of Fuentes' prose without spilling over into parody.

Yves is only at the tip of the stake, as we who have read Dracula know, he is on course to losing everything to the immortal evil Count. His beloved Asunción, she of the freezing salamanderly sexytimes, has fallen asleep after conjugal congress. Yves, in a moment that makes me want to smack him upside the head, is having straight-guy angst about whether Asunción has, errrmmm, achieved her desired completion. He frets about this for a good long while, uninterestingly enough (STRAIGHT GUYS: IF YOU HAVE TO ASK THE ANSWER IS NO, GET USED TO IT OR GET OVER IT), before slipping into a dreamlike state in which Vlad is under the marriage bed. Yves touches the glass-nailed corpse-hand as he reaches for his slippers. He is, understandably enough, flipped out; he convinces himself to go back to sleep, though. Next morning:

In my dream someone had been in my bedroom but then that someone walked out of it. From then on, the bedroom was no longer mine. It became a strange room because someone had walked out.

That...that right there, that short passage of simple sentences using simple words, that explains the heart of the horror of vampire novels. Vampires steal your life. They don't cause your death, unless you're lucky. They steal life and I do not know a more horrifying terrifying knee-knocking pants-pissing concept than that. The Weeping Angels of Doctor Who fame have the same effect on me that this retelling of vampire lore does.

So, of course, by the end of this short novella, Yves is utterly and abjectly alone, despite being granted his heart's secret desire. He is dead. His life was stolen in that awful moment above; he valiantly pretended not to notice, not to know, to deny; he fails, of course, and his failure leads him to a simple act now, in his new undeath, fraught with misery, horror, hellish cruel simulated joy:

He gets in his car.

Now why, with the positive statements I'm making about the effect of the book, did I rate it under 4 stars? Because of two things that annoy me, and one thing that I have no evidence to support but find plausible and therefore ohfagawdsake-worthy. Annoyance the oneth: Translate Spanish or don't. Mixing the two is Bad. For example, Vlad's house (which seems to be a famous one designed by architect Ricardo Legorreta, about which more anon) is first described as being in "Lomas Heights" *wince* which translates to "Hills Heights." Nuh uh. Lomas Altas is a specific house in the Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood in Mexico City. "High Hills" or "Steep Hills" would work as a translation of that, but why bother? And later in the book, the house is described as being in Bosques de las Lomas, which name is not translated (means "Woods of the Hills"). Translate or don't! Don't shilly-shally!

Thing the twoth: Yves ponderously repeats his wife's name, his daughter's name, his employer's name, and all in 122 pages. If the book was 722 pages and chapters went by without these characters being mentioned, a little refresher wouldn't come amiss. In this space, it's an annoying rubber-headed hammer whacking my kneecap every fifth page. STOP! In the same more-is-actually-less vein, there is a longish and unnecessary recap of Vlad the Impaler's life and career. It served no purpose and is all stuff most readers likely to pick up a Fuentes book will either know or not want to fuss with. No padding needed, folks, when the story's already good.

As to the plausible-but-unproven detail, I return to that famous midcentury house, Casa Loma Alta. Fuentes was a highly cultured man, and likely knew Legorreta the architect and so would probably have known his work. The house was, I am fairly sure, owned most recently by a Chinese-born drug dealer whose 2007 arrest produced over $200MM in cash and an arsenal in some tunnels dug under the house. This set-up is ready-made for Fuentes, that inveterate myth-maker, to appropriate for his relocated vampire; and it provides that little roman à clef touch that haunted me (!) as I read the book. Drugs and drug barons stealing the lives and wealth of the bourgeois Mexicans, with neither party paying even the slightest mind to the millions of average Mexicans ground under their fancy car wheels and/or fangs. Listen, if it rang that bell in me, an American, how loudly must the whole carillon have rung for Fuentes' Mexican audience? That being said, there's the awkward sense in this book of is-it-or-isn't-it a roman à clef, never addressed and never refuted. It gave my reading a jarring neither/nor quality.

I'd still say it's worth a read, since it's short; but don't pay full price.