NO BODY NO CRIME, interesting exploration of the old saw's veracity

NO BODY NO CRIME
TESS SHARPE
MCD Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Murder either bonds you or breaks you.

Rural PI Mel Tillman knows this well. She's seen her fair share of bloody cases and botched cover-ups. But killing with someone? That is a different kind of mess all together, and Mel's got real experience with it.

No one's heard from Toby Dunne since Chloe Harper's sweet sixteen party—because the birthday girl and sixteen-year-old Mel buried him so deep in the backwoods, no one's ever finding him. Mel loses little sleep over it—Toby had been terrorizing them.

What she does lose sleep over is Chloe, the girl with whom she survived that horrible night in the woods. Chloe, the girl she fell in love with. Chloe, the girl who disappeared and hasn't been seen in more than six years.

Tasked with locating Chloe by her family, Mel can't resist the call of a good chase, or finding the one who got away with her heart (and with murder). When Mel finds an armed and vigilant Chloe living off-grid in a highly booby-trapped patch of Canadian wilderness, she realizes that Chloe had been expecting someone other than her ex to come looking for her. The thing that's kept Chloe going for years is that she's kept Mel safe by running. Now, the truth must come out as they run for their lives once again.

Because when they buried Toby Dunne in the backwoods, they buried something else, too. Something Toby took. And the powerful family he stole it from? They'll do anything to get it back.

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My Review: Crimes are sticky. Like blood, though obviously not all crimes are bloody, but if you've ever cleaned up after a nosebleed you know the phenomenon. The crime here is...complicated. Some people deserve to be unalived. Sometimes a crime is simply balancing the scales.

Those are the best stories to read. They ask us to distinguish among shades of grey. I prefer this to black-and-white stories more often than not. In this case, Mel and Chloe commit a crime. It's not murder, because the killing was richly deserved self-defense. It was what they did afterwards that was the crime: They tried to conceal the body. This is where stuff gets sticky. *gleeful hand-rubbing*

As a work of fiction, then, we've got seriously good stuff to work with. What works the best for me, an old cisqueer white guy, is the soul-searching the young women do together. It feels like the sorts of conversations I had with the boys I wanted to...be with...when I was that age. It's part of a narrative strategy that shifts PoVs to tell parts of the story without an omniscient narrator taking us out of the immediacy of the action...which the soulful chats stop dead. So, well, where's your personal balance point? Do you want the action before the bonding talks? I don't, so this worked for me.

What I didn't really connect with as well was the overly specific conflict between Mel and Chloe. They debate extremely small points and so I get uninvested. It's in character for people this age, but it just gets so tiresome to someone who can think "in three months this will not matter." But more importantly there are just too many voices competing for attention, which gives me a headache. Shaving it down to just Mel and Chloe, I cared more about their actions and their thoughts. Rick is funny, and a fun character, but could easily and profitably been limited to appearances within the women's PoVs.

I'd say this read is solidly executed, though not perfectly for my reading tastes. If you've watched Yellowjackets and resonate with its flow, this book will delight you. It was a solid "A" in my reading.

IN TONGUES, among other things, a coming(!)-of-age story perfect for the Fire Island beach

IN TONGUES
THOMAS GRATTAN
MCD Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 37TH Lambda Literary Awards for Gay Fiction.

The Publisher Says: A young gay man upends the lives of a powerful art-world couple in this steamy novel of self-discovery.

It’s 2001, and twenty-four-year-old Gordon―handsome, sensitive, and eager for direction―takes a bus from Minnesota to New York City because it’s the only place for a young gay man to go. As he begins to settle into the city’s punishing rhythm, he gets a job walking rich Manhattanites’ dogs. But it isn’t until he stumbles into the West Village brownstone of two of his clients, the powerful gallery owners Phillip and Nicola, that Gordon learns how much the world has hidden from him―and what he’s capable of doing in order to get it for himself.

A lush, heart-quickening novel about family and art, sex and class, and the terror of self-discovery, Thomas Grattan’s In Tongues chronicles Gordon’s perilous pursuit of belonging from the Midwest to New York and, later, to Europe and Mexico City. As he floats further into Phillip and Nicola’s exclusive universe, and as lines blur between employee, muse, lover, and mentor, Gordon’s charm, manipulation, and growing ambition begin to escape his own control, in turn threatening to unravel the lives, and lies, of those around him.

Anchored by winsome lyricism, glinting intellect, and a main character whose yearnings and mistakes come to feel like our own, In Tongues crackles with fierce longing and pointed emotion, further confirming Grattan as a rare chronicler of young adulthood’s joys and devastations.

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My Review: I kept making dirty wordplay on this title as my review's first line. Trouble with that is nothing I can come (!) up (!) with is steamier or hornier than the book itself is.

This is NOT straight-people safe. This is not, in all honesty, a book to read at work, or on public transport, unless you're wearing very, very loosely pleated trousers. Or baiting your hook.

It's also not one-handed reading, I hasten to add. The story is very much the point of the sexual situations, not the other way around. Think of it as Ripley made for PornHub not Netflix, nor perish forbid that neutered but pretty-to-look-at theatrical film. That perhaps overplays the calculation and manipulation that Gordon commits to in achieving his goal of finding himself (between two powerful people's bodies), and discovering his true inner self(ish bastard). But make no mistake that Gordon is very much a Young Man from the Provinces who very clearly knows what he left behind he deliberately rejected. Now he needs to understand how to work his natural gifts while he's got youth and a complete absence of the will to say "no" on his side.

The reason I resonated so deep(!)ly to the story is Author Grattan's way of making it: Episodic, dreamlike, in the flow. That knocked off the meaner interpretations I leapt to about Gordon's thoughtlessness, his lack of a core concern for how his behavior might affect others. It is not yet in him (!) to be calculating. It is, in other words, a case of his being canny versus being savvy. Gordon instinctively responds to the way others see him and shows them that side. A savvy operator would, instead move to seduce those who have what he wants. Those people are often false-feeling and mistrusted, Gordon is too real in his desire to be desired to give off a warning signal, a fake vibe.

Absence of an organizing principle often gets mistaken for aimlessness. Author Grattan takes on a daunting task of presenting the story of Gordon, void of course, and needing thus to use authorial sleight of hand to keep his reader from feeling lost and unconnected the way Gordon is. That is a supremely difficult thing to do. For the most part I think his choice of sexual contexts serves admirably to ground and connect us to Gordon. There's so much pleasure in reading the elegant prose of the story, and so much about the emotional nature of those around Gordon to keep a lit-fic reader going. Particularly telling is Gordon's relations with the old guys in the story. He might not lust after them as they do him, but he desires...something, some meaningful intangible benefit to go with the tangible exchanges between them; does he get it? He doesn't know, because he doesn't know what he's looking for, The older men get what they want though likely not what they need, which is again intangible: connection. A future. Raising more than a flagging half-staff, shall we say.

This is consonant with my own life.

My half-star docked off dissatisfaction was Gordon's religious father begging for his son's withdrawn love. That's not so baldly expressed, of course, as I've done but it honestly does not ring true at all. Religious fathers with gay sons imght want to convert them to straightness but making themselves emotionally vulnerable? Nope. I don't, honestly, see that happening between most any father and son. And that joined a certain vague sense I could never coalesce around an actual idea, that Gordon was not really interested in himself enough to attract the caliber of men he does. That's as close as I can come to articulating a kind-of Forrest Gumpishness about him that did not jibe with narrative.

Lovely writing made the ending work. Lesser talent would've fumbled that one, and it was a close-run thing even so. A book I recommend to gay-male readers of literary prose.

All others, at your own risk.

IF I SURVIVE YOU, available today so RUN! Get you one!

IF I SURVIVE YOU
JONATHAN ESCOFFERY
MCD × FSG
$18.00 trade paper, available now

SHORTLISTED for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award!

Read his "Books That Made Me" Guardian interview.

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

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller.

In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”

Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You center on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. After a fight with Topper—himself reckoning with his failures as a parent and his longing for Jamaica—Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin, Cukie, looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net.

Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful.

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My Review: When I think about braided-stories novels, there's always a little frisson of fear in my response. I don't always think it's the best idea to try to make a novel out of things that don't fit together naturally. If there's an organic flow among stories, what stops the author from making it into a regular novel-style novel? Why this technique, not another that doesn't make The Market shudder deep in its bones? All we ever hear is that stories are hard to sell, collections are death in the stores, writing stories is just as hard as writing novels but even less remunerative. I'm inured to this cant of can't by now. It's done its damage. I look askance at connected collections.

What, then, is the reason I decided to read this iteration of the story-novel? There's no one thing, there's a constellation of tweaks and trips. I find the idea of books others can't "understand" tempting. I am all for creative uses of the many kinds of English out there waiting to make my acquaintance. I'll walk a mile for a good story about people who just...can't...because they're my people. Because whatever else divides us, we have one thing in common: We don't Belong, and others do. That's worth a lot of effort...which, for the record, I did not think was needed in reading this book. The second story is in patwa but the rest? Not a bit of it.

It pleases me to use my time-honored technique called the Bryce Method to explicate the wonders herein to feast upon.

In Flux is, like so many of these stories, told in the Satanic Second Person, that chest-pokey "you" that's so often a shortcut to getting the reader's defenses down and their sympathy engaged for the object of the story. It can be overused, but this is a short story and it's about seeking identity starting in 1980s Miami (of all the schizophrenic places!) so it's perfectly appropriate. Right down to the chest-pokeyness. It's a meditation on the condition of being Other, it's a jeremiad against the idiocy of American skin-color-itis, it's a serious look at how being in the liminal spaces refuses to be an identity while defining your every move, action, and thought.

You've been thinking about your mother's list of European grands and how your parents still speak so highly of the British school system that educated them, pre-Independence, and you think of all the Rastafarians who extol Ethiopia and Mama Africa. But what you want to know is contemporary middle-class twentysomethings. You want to know how you might feel had your family never left.

What does it mean to be me? isn't fresh ground to till, but it's an evergreen for a reason. We all need an "against" to find our own "for" side. (Trelawney even has a college-time brush with a gay man, *gasp*) I am, therefore I think about this. Where Trelawney ends up, he began...like all the rest of us, really. 4 stars despite the sore chest from the poking

Under the Ackee Tree I have heard others say this is where they got off the train. I found the shift into a mild version of Jamaican English (many Caribbean folk work where I live, I've heard the real unAmericanized version) welcome. Topper's a man whose life wasn't what he wanted or expected. He's no better, no worse than any other man of our generation, just a bog-standard Boomer.

You go out to the patio and wonder why everyone is turned around in them chairs, peering off into the dark, but it then you hear it: loud grunt and dull thud. And you see Trelawney' silhouette under the ackee tree, all with ax in him hands. And him talking to himself now. And him swinging the ax. ... And you wonder if it's you must be defective since you ruin everyone.

It rang true, this exploration about identity that can't ever really be escaped. I felt Topper's uneasy rage, his angry inability to see past his own ideas. He's one of the billions of people who just...stopped. Them whose worlds reached a place and they said "this far...no further." Usually without volition, without awareness, without calculating the cost. There's always a cost so do nothing without knowing what it is and being ready to pay it. 4 stars offered with the fellow-feeling of someone whose day is done

Odd Jobs makes a nonsense of "there are lines I will not cross":

It was elegant, almost, the way they worked in unison. If only my family had found me such a unifying force. I recognized it then, like petrichor, or some misplaced scent from childhood, not the familiar weight of existence crushing my lungs, but the awakening urge, the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.

You know it when it bites you. If it never has...you won't. 4 stars for the honest rawness of stupidity

Pestilence channels the rage, the outrage, that only a less-loved child can summon forth. When the parent is, politely, gormless, the child's rage, outrage, can't ever find a single scrap of release. It festers and rots inside the adult. It never, ever goes away, nor (I say now in my oldness) should it. Few emotions are ever unmixed, none felt in adulthood can be, so that incandescent hating fury is all most of us ever get of the pure, unalloyed aliveness.

And Topper's insensitive, uncaring head deserves that baptism by bile. 4 stars for clarity and fearlessness

Splashdown brings Cukie, a bit player in "Pestilence" above, into the limelight. His long-absent father, Ox (short for "Lennox"), reappears in Daphne's life to get to know Cukie. Daphne, maternal auntie to Trelawney and Delano, isn't much for forgiving Ox. But she needs someone, anyone, to get Cukie away from her, to do what she can't: get him out of his head. Maybe Ox...?

Ox delivers those goods. That's never really a good thing, you know. It leads where you'd expect it to lead.... 4 stars

Independent Living gave me the heebie-jeebies. I've been exactly where those people are...unhoused, no safety net, and no one knows better than Trelawney how the people feel who never once expected to be where they are. And there's Trelawney, making a pittance doing the bidding of the corporate office that cares nothing about the people who live there.

Well...most of the bidding. And not always a good job of it. But there's a line for everyone. One they won't, can't...don't...cross. 4 stars

If He Suspected He'd Get Someone Killed This Morning, Delano Would Never Leave His Couch provides the answer to the question, "who is 'the man who can't catch a break,' Ken?" for once and for all. 4 stars

If I Survive You barely has time to make its case for its closing lines before they become, inexorably and inevitably, the words that no two people ever quite seem to arrive at in the same moment, at the same place.

You feel sad about her sadness, and sad for the both of you because your wounds are not particularly original, however genuine. You tell her what it's like to not be the favorite, to be the opposite of the favorite, and she tells you, "Try being an only child."

After doing things that you can't take back, after behaving in unforgivable ways, after all the seamy, seedy, bad-for-you crap has made you into a battle-worn hulk of emotional flotsam, there is at last no other choice but to follow the only advice we all ignore. Nope, not tellin' ya what it is, but you'll know it when you read it. 4 stars

40: A Novel, more than I expected and as much as I'd hoped for from Heathcock

40: A Novel
ALAN HEATHCOCK
MCD x FSG
$27.00 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author Alan Heathcock comes an American myth of the future: a vision of civil war, spectacle, and disaster of biblical proportions.

In a future America ravaged by natural disaster, pandemic, and political unrest, a fundamentalist faction emerges. As the Novae Terrae gain power, enticing civilians with bread and circuses, a civil war breaks out between its members and the US government.

Mazzy Goodwin, a young soldier, only wants to find her little sister, Ava Lynn. One day, she wakes in a bomb crater to find wings emerged from her back. Has she died? Been gifted wings by God? Undergone a military experiment?

The world sees a miracle. Mazzy is coaxed into seeing it as an opportunity: to become the angel-like figurehead of the revolution, in return for being reunited with her sister. Her journey leads her to New Los Angeles, where the Novae have set up the headquarters for their propaganda machine—right in the ruins of Hollywood. Aided by friends old and new, she must navigate a web of deceit while staying true to herself.

Told in sharp, haunting prose, as cinematic as it is precise, Alan Heathcock’s 40 is a dizzyingly fantastical novel about the dangers of blind faith, the temptation of spectacle, and the love of family. In a tale by turns mythic and tragic, one heroine must come to terms with the consequences of her decisions—and face the challenges of building a new world.

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My Review: Regulars to this blog will recognize the name Alan Heathcock from my warbling my fool lungs out about his collection, Volt: Stories. One big reason for that is that Author Heathcock does not mess around when he makes his imagery work your brain:

"...I knew it'd come to this, you say. I knew I was right. The power of knowing the despair you ordered has finally come to pass makes you feel like a god. Let's be honest. It's what you want. You want this world to collapse. Want people to be every awful thing."

–and–

Grief was a demon of possession. When people talked of time healing wounds, they only meant that over time you become accustomed to that demon inside you, and what at first felt like an invasive presence, alien and nefarious, slowly became integrated into your being, the imp of sorrow crouched within you for the remainder of your days.

I don't know how much clearer the man can be than that. I can feel these words, see the world through their gravity lens, perceive the distorted light that comes from every other direction than the original one to form the ghost of the initial thought behind them.

Which is why I, devout atheist and committed anti-religion crusader, read a whole novel about a post-apocalyptic world run by and for evangelical evil-doers with hearts colder than emptiest space. Which is why I'm here telling you to go and get one of these books, these beautifully designed books (that jacket design!), or to pre-order the Kindle version so you'll open the device tomorrow morning and join Mazzy and Ava Lynn in the hellscape that Jo Sam the evangelist of doom designed and brought forth.

Betrayal is only the beginning of Mazzy's journey. It's certainly true that she's not a trusting, sunny-hearted soul for a single second of her life. Her sister Ava Lynn calls out the only tenderness she allows herself to externalize. The child, whose fate is not ever easy, confounds Mazzy in her extremely self-possessed certainty. Mazzy being incapable of a single sustained good mood for more than the absolute minimum of time, she envies Ava Lynn and vows to protect her. Which, this being a novel, means that Mazzy is unable to do so.

The amount of manipulative chicanery Mazzy experiences after she (unexpectedly and without external stimulus) becomes winged is, of course, the bulk of the novel's action. Her bewingèd state makes her very valuable to the evildoers around Jo Sam the evangelist, unsurprisingly, and so they use Ava Lynn to extort obedience out of Mazzy. The sheer outrage I experienced over this...! It's an effective tool, of course, the safety of one's child (dead mother) being hard coded into our protective circle by evolution. That it is never a violent threat, "we will hurt her," made me able to continue to read the story. They keep Mazzy from being with Ava Lynn to keep her working for their vile controlling cause.

The day dawns, of course, when Mazzy is no longer suitable for their use; a series of things occurs that, in several moments, made me think I was being played by Author Heathcock. It's a pleasure to report that he played fair...but the ending of the story is still a major surprise. Yes, I saw the twist coming, but I think that's to be expected. A truly successful twist, in this case, means the expected event occurs but something you-the-reader would've dismissed as improbable happens after. Job done, Author Heathcock.

I'll say that, after reading many, many chosen-one narratives and even more post-apocalyptic religion-used-for-evil tales over the past seven decades, I'm not sorry I read this one. I think it's well-made and well-written, I suspect it's something the author has allowed to simmer for a very long time before committing to words for others to read, and I'm pleased with the results he has achieved.

MANYWHERE, nine short but powerful fictions in debut collection

MANYWHERE: Stories
MORGAN THOMAS
MCDxFSG
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Author Thomas wins a 2022 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Morgan Thomas's Manywhere features lush and uncompromising stories about characters crossing geographical borders and gender binaries.

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas's shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas's subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery.

A trans woman finds her independence with the purchase of a pregnancy bump; a young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themself in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag, and in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father.

Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories resound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Morgan Thomas uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves in turn shape the people we become. Ushering in a new form of queer mythmaking, Manywhere introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent.

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My Review: Whenever I read new story collections, I try to think of the reason(s) the writer had for writing that story, for including those words in a selection of them intended to make a reader form an idea of their creator. When that test gets me into a swivet, a frustrated screaming match with that absent author, I know I'm onto something worth following to the end of the trail. I had that sensation reading Morgan Thomas's words from the beginning.

As an example, there's "Taylor Johnson's Lightning Man." This was one of those fantastical reads that grows as you recede from the words but get the feelings so much more powerfully as memories. Those high places got scaled again in the strange, futuristic "Transit," in which the story's liminal between-space left me slightly sadder that I'd been born. There's no way that much longing and unrequited need can not teach you the truth of samsara. And the less-than-desired results of reading other stories, eg "Alta's Place," bring that into ever-sharper focus. The balance of going with Author Thomas's peripatetic imagination to its manywheres comes down on the positive, occasionally excellent, end of the literary map's scale.

In the time-honored tradition of this blog, I shall use the Bryce Method to elucidate my opinion of each piece within the whole.

Taylor Johnson’s Lightning Man poignantly discovers a trans ancestor in a folk-tale told by a non-conforming cisgender parent. The ways we all need to feel Seen and accepted are many, innumerable perhaps, but real drivers of identity and success. It's a charming story, all centered around photography as it reveals and conceals:

But they're waiting for you upstairs, the Board of Special Inquiry. Of course, you'll have to bring them a photo. You choose one of the good, familiar photos. In it, you sit in your hat and spectacles, facing the camera, your head tilted just a little to the right, your mouth a firm, flat line.
"At the risk of saying too much," I say, I'm a fan of that photo. Everything I am is because of that photo."

It says just enough. Magical realism does Ellis Island. 4.5 stars

That Drowning Place is a polyphony in one voice, "we", for people with Hansen's disease who lived in Katrina's path, who lived as long as they could in a place that no one else wanted, and who eventually got themselves neighbors in the relocated Cajuns, not entirely voluntarily. But the price of joining the rest of the world? Not small. "They" are everywhere. And we'd best get ourselves ready for it. There will be a LOT more of "them" soon.

You can't hide from the water forever.

The end of all things: The water. 3.5 stars, a story that repays close attention and makes demands.

Transit posits a weirdly different climate-changed Louisiana, one with the most delightful little town of freakishly supernatural beings...shades of Sookie!...only it's on a major train corridor, and it's got a faux (?) vampire visiting as the world around drowns and leaves them stranded on their way back from an institution for the anorexic desiring not to be Women.

"If I wasn't a girl would you date me?"

Happy grinned and I knew I'd lost her. "If you're not a girl, then what are you?" Happy pulled her bottom lip in against her teeth, her incisors poking out long and sharp. "Someving supernatural?"

"I'm whatever. I could be whatever."

If that doesn't break your heart. Broke mine. 4 stars

The Daring Life of Philippa Cook the Rogue has the best line I've read yet:

It's astounding that {she} has any memory of that day at all, though I suppose it's true that as the lanterns darken yesterday, they brighten yesteryear.

Excellent! And perfect for this oddball tale of a transwoman/hermaphrodite (it's not totally clear which) in Colonial Jamestown. Epistolary delight, a truly moving account of the terrible price being forced to choose a binary identity exacts on those not inclined to the absolutist demands of The World. Moving, terribly sad, ultimately a joyful reading of Reality trumping the fantasy of the past we're sold as the one immutable truth. 4 stars

Bump tells us of Louie, their lover Len, and Len's wife Melinda, as they navigate the shoals of Figuring Family Out. It isn't, I know you'll be shocked to learn, a smooth process.

We. A word I hated. A word that declared to the listener, You Are Not One of Us.

Louie's "country Cajun" Nana, who lives with them and is supported by them, is also the sanest person in this piece. She just gets on with her life, making her needs known and dispensing The American Way advice to her increasingly reality-challenged grandchild: taken to wearing a pregnancy bump, in competition with Melinda's actual baby ("the aphid"), Louie gets trapped in the implicit lie at work by failing to correct a co-worker's presumption that it's a real pregnancy.

More hijinks ensue and, in the end, Len's unusual family comes apart. You know already who's "we" and who isn't. 4 stars

Alta's Place makes me so sad...what is persecution if not denying a person a living, a house, a way not to starve and/or freeze? Why is this so hard to comprehend?

Because this is the land of the free to discriminate, and the brave if you don't put it to the test, Othered people will tell you. Being from here, or elsewhere, Othered people will tell you what refuge means: Not Wanted, go away. (Cory, the party of the second part in the dialogue, is a drip.) Not the best of these stories. 3.5 stars

The Expectation of Cooper Hill shed a little light on the war of the medical profession against all those who didn't want to medicalize everything a human body does. It's been a long, expensive peace; maybe we should get back to warring. A woman being a midwife seems like a pretty good alternative to going into a hospital.

But I don't love the idea of the world as it was, either, though maybe that's how things are headed. 3 stars

Surrogate meditates on the gigantic cost of environmental degradation, the cruelty of expectations loaded onto a relationship, and the tyrannical hold of Hope on our spirits. Brighten, in need of a purpose, tells her husband Orson that she's decided to become a surrogate for $50,000. He does his best to dissuade her. He says really clearly that he'd rather she didn't. She does anyway.

As the rural poverty of Arkansas makes Orson's job at the fracking facility a good one, and as she's sure their well isn't polluted, Brighten makes a mistake by drinking tap water while carrying her surrogate child. The problem of being alive in this ugly, dirty world has never been more stark than Brighten's corner of it. 4 stars

Manywhere finishes the journey with a Vegas trip. A transmasc narrator, Charlie, is sure that caring for the father that walked out of her mother's life the same way he walked into it...unexpectedly...and now that Charlie's caught up with him, he's filled their life too. And now, a peripatetic life led the two of them back to each other only this time with one major difference: Obligation.

Who's obliged to whom? There's never only one answer to that question and this exploration of it doesn't offer anything pretending to be it to the reader. But the scourges of mental illness, loneliness, unhappiness follow people no matter where they walk to or from or around. There is, at last, no longer any way to be out of reach of the sorrow we inherit from all the ancestors we never met. 4 stars

TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON, latest thriller from Pavone delivers a little too much

TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON
CHRIS PAVONE
MCD Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: You think you know a person . . .

Ariel Pryce wakes up in Lisbon, alone. Her husband is gone—no warning, no note, not answering his phone. Something is wrong.

She starts with hotel security, then the police, then the American embassy, at each confronting questions she can’t fully answer: What exactly is John doing in Lisbon? Why would he drag her along on his business trip? Who would want to harm him? And why does Ariel know so little about her new—much younger—husband?

The clock is ticking. Ariel is increasingly frustrated and desperate, running out of time, and the one person in the world who can help is the one person she least wants to ask.

With sparkling prose and razor-sharp insights, bestselling author Chris Pavone delivers a stunning and sophisticated international thriller that will linger long after the surprising final page.

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My Review: Unreliable narrator tells unbelievable story with murky stakes attached to its outcome. And here I am giving it four stars.

Doesn't make sense, does it. Or does it....

What Author Pavone does is set the reader up for something from the get-go. Unlike many thriller writers, that "something" isn't glaringly obvious. What sets this thriller in motion is an older woman married to a handsome younger man. Who ups and disappears from their hotel room on an international trip.

Prepare the violins, right? Welllll...yes but not for her, as you'll see. Her fear at this catastrophe seems...performative...to the authorities who look at her late-middle-aged self, see the muffin she's so recently married, and all but say out loud, "well, little lady, what exactly can you expect? Men do stray...and he's been gone less than a day. Give him time to sober up and pay the, um, lady. He'll be back." But she's not having it.

Why is she not having it? It does, after all, make a grim kind of sense. Before their short marriage, she didn't know her husband well...he's a relative stranger, so why is it she's carrying on so?

Wheels within wheels, and here we are rollin' along beside Ariel...has that name, one the lady chose for herself, made its real force felt in you yet?...as the story's necessary force carries us along, stopping for some info-dumpy conversations/monologues/set pieces. It's not like there's any point where Author Pavone sticks it to us, the sad little readers wondering what the living hell possessed this hard-edged survivor to do something so stupid as this mishegas results from. And both parties are hard-edged survivors. So what's the situation underlying the story? It's a thriller! You *know* there is one.

The phrase "ripped-from-the-headlines" is a cliche to my generation of Movie of the Week veterans. It got a bad name for shoddy, indifferent storytelling. But it never needed to be that way, did it. What happens that makes the newspapers is a joyous rioting street party of story plots. Read this one and find out what the right dance partner can give.

I can't give the book all five stars because, despite the clarity of storytelling purpose that snaps into focus as the ending twists us up, there is a prolixity of speechifyin' that really grated on me. (I'm lookin' at you, Griffiths.) And the Epilogue is just a shade over the top I most wanted not to go over. But the story is a deeply, involvingly, satisfyingly real one, and I encourage y'all to read it.

DESTROYER OF LIGHT, second novel from Afrofuturist monadnock Brissett & SORROWLAND, sad, powerful, painful read

DESTROYER OF LIGHT
JENNIFER MARIE BRISSETT
Tor Books
$25.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Matrix meets an Afro-futuristic retelling of Persephone set in a science fiction underworld of aliens, refugees, and genetic engineering in Jennifer Marie Brissett's Destroyer of Light

20 Must Read Space Fantasy Books for 2021—BookRiot
Most Anticipated Fall 2021 Sci-fi, Fantasy & Horror—BiblioLifestyle

Having destroyed Earth, the alien conquerors resettle the remains of humanity on the planet of Eleusis. In the four habitable areas of the planet—Day, Dusk, Dawn, and Night—the haves and have nots, criminals and dissidents, and former alien conquerors irrevocably bind three stories:

*A violent warlord abducts a young girl from the agrarian outskirts of Dusk leaving her mother searching and grieving.
*Genetically modified twin brothers desperately search for the lost son of a human/alien couple in a criminal underground trafficking children for unknown purposes.
*A young woman with inhuman powers rises through the insurgent ranks of soldiers in the borderlands of Night.

Their stories, often containing disturbing physical and sexual violence, skate across years, building to a single confrontation when the fate of all—human and alien—balances upon a knife’s-edge.

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My Review: ↡↡↡ HEED. THE. CONTENT. WARNINGS. BELOW. ↡↡↡

Humanity is clinging to existence on the tidally locked planet called "Eleusis." Their enemies, the krestge, have destroyed Earth (no one knows why) and evacuated them to Eleusis without doing anything more to complete the extermination (no one knows why). But life must go on. Being humanity, you know what this means: infighting, resource grabs, atrocities, all the usual stuff.

We follow the entire nightmarish fight between people, used in the sense of "humans," who would do better to question the hows and whys of the aliens who exist among them, as the entire planet careens towards some climactic cathartic cleansing of...of...of what, exactly? Is it time for Humanity to finish its extinction at the hands of its squabbling selves? Or is it just barely possible that this awful mirror is held up to make Humanity confront its worst and most enraging aspects?

You don't know Author Brissett's work if you think she provides an answer to that question.

Intricately interconnected strands of Eleusis's enhanced and unenhanced human remnants, violently abusing themselves and each other, aliens with the demonstrated capacity to end the entire human lineage sitting still and doing nothing are some of the mainstays of this book's architecture. The manner in which Author Brissett makes one care about the architecture is, in common with the subtle and unjustly undercelebrated Elysium, left for you to discern. The clues are there. The point of the read is to get out of it what you put into it. While I myownself am indifferent to spoilers, having watched The Crying Game decades ago and thinking The Big Reveal was...kinda obvious...but in any event anticlimactic, I still think you'll enjoy the read more if you're left to mull over the roles of the krestge, the enhanced humans, the nature of the need for child soldiers, and the book's title. Hang on until the ending, and you will feel so very rewarded for your efforts.

There is MUCH to unearth. The pleasures in these words are very significant.

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

SORROWLAND
RIVERS SOLOMON
MCDxFSG
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

A 2021 NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 LOCUS AWARD—BEST HORROR NOVEL! Winners announced 25 June 2022.

The Publisher Says: Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.

But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future - outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.

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

My Review: ↡↡↡ HEED. THE. CONTENT. WARNINGS. BELOW. ↡↡↡

There are almost no good people in this world, and Vern meets the worst of them. What makes this a deeply satisfying read is that teenaged Vern, in their unbelievable indomitable drive to thrive not just survive, manages to do exactly that. Overcoming all-too-real obstacles? Check. Guiding new lives through a terrible world, explaining how to be better? Check. Vern raising their children is the single brightest take-away I have from this unhappy story.

Loving, worshipping, and bowing down to folks who harmed you was written into the genes of all animal creatures. To be alive meant to lust after connection, and better to have one with the enemy than with no one at all. A baby's fingers and mouth grasp on instinct.

If I were to seek my mental filing system's catalog for closest comparables, I'd have to go with Toni Morrison's deathless Beloved admixed with Octavia E. Butler's more trenchant Kindred, as written for Quentin Tarantino to film. Yes...violence and menace are imbued in every scene. No, it isn't a splatterfest. Yes, every single thing that happens evokes an emotional response. No, there are no "answers" or fancy nostrums to help us deal with the underlying hate, like the lava in a volcano, erupting for as long as it erupts.

Going against tended to end more rightly, more justly, than going with. People were wrong. Rules, most of the time, favored not what was right, but what was convenient or preferable to those in charge.

If you've read 2017's An Unkindness of Ghosts or 2019's Blood is Another Word for Hunger, you're ahead of me in this realization. If you haven't, read this book. You will not regret your introduction to the magical prose that Author Solomon uses being this story. I'm willing to bet you'll get on to their back catalog after finishing the read. If not, if this is just all too much for your sensibilities at the present, read their free online short work that's part of The Verge's "Better Worlds" project: St. Juju.

This writer is a Talent in a world that needs more of them.

RED MILK, weird title (so what else is new) for Sjón's latest & best

RED MILK
SJÓN (tr. Victoria Cribb)
MCDxFSG
$12.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A timely and provocative novel about a mysterious Icelandic neo-Nazi and the enduring global allure of fascism.

In England in 1962, an Icelandic man is found dead on a train bound for Cheltenham Spa. In his possession, policemen find a map on which a swastika has been drawn with a red pen. Who was he, and where was he going?

In a novel that reads as both biography and mystery, the internationally celebrated novelist Sjón tells the story of Gunnar Kampen, the founder of Iceland's anti-Semitic nationalist party, with ties to a burgeoning network of neo-Nazi groups across the globe. Told in a series of scenes and letters spanning Kampen's lifetime—from his childhood in Reyjavík during the Second World War, in a household strongly opposed to Hitler and his views, through his education, political radicalization, and his final clandestine mission to England—Red Milk urges readers to confront the international legacy of twentieth-century fascism and the often unknowable forces that drive some people to extremism.

Based on one of the ringleaders of a little-known neo-Nazi group that operated in Reykjavík in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this taut and potent novel explores what shapes a young man and the enduring, disturbing allure of Nazi ideology.

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My Review: There is so much that goes into making a person's life. So many moments of seeming ordinariness, so many times unremembered but never forgotten.

Author Sjón absolutely understands this, relies on it, makes me aware of how unaware I am in my life. Living it day-to-day it's unremarkable. After it's over, as it's ending...those are the times reflection becomes available to the average person. Author Sjón takes that truth and makes it the structure of the novel.

We're reading the life of Gunnar after it's over, after it's been picked apart and examined...this book reads like an evidence box would, pick up this letter, what did this key open...and that lets us contextualize the story as the tragedy it really is.

I was gobsmacked to learn this is a based-in-fact story, this was a real person, the ending is factual. How Gunnar came to hold beliefs so horrible to me was all in the oblique and the sidewise and the interstitial parts of the text. Lest that sound Arty and pretentious, I hasten to say that there is no better way I evoke an honest emotional response than this. Author Sjón trusts you to Get It. He allows you not to know.

I'll take that sense of being allowed to find the truth in the fiction over being spoonfed any day.

What I hope you'll enjoy, resonate with, in this read is that quality of discovering the meat of the life Gunnar led, and placing the pieces in order for yourself. While you're never left in doubt about your position in time, you're not going to get everything there is simply by that means.

I think it was a real, living person that I found in this novel. Would I have "liked" him? I don't think so. But I wouldn't have known him the way I do because Author Sjón showed him to me in this simple, elegant piece-by-piece fashion. I like novel-Gunnar a little bit. He was so very empty. He found something to fill what a human can't live without having full. AND it was something awful. Something vile, foul...but it filled the void.

I understand the souls whose quest to be Whole leads them in dark, ugly, despicable places that one fraction better.

Thank you, Author Sjón. I can get better at being a good version of me after this read.

SHARKS IN THE TIME OF SAVIORS, a glittering gem of a debut QUILTBAG novel

SHARKS IN THE TIME OF SAVIORS
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN
MCDxFSG Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

PENAmerica Hemingway Award for Debut Novel Winner!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on a rare family vacation, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls overboard a cruise ship into the Pacific Ocean. When a shiver of sharks appears in the water, everyone fears for the worst. But instead, Noa is gingerly delivered to his mother in the jaws of a shark, marking his story as the stuff of legends.

Nainoa's family, struggling amidst the collapse of the sugarcane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favor from ancient Hawaiian gods--a belief that appears validated after he exhibits puzzling new abilities. But as time passes, this supposed divine favor begins to drive the family apart: Nainoa, working now as a paramedic on the streets of Portland, struggles to fathom the full measure of his expanding abilities; further north in Washington, his older brother Dean hurtles into the world of elite college athletics, obsessed with wealth and fame; while in California, risk-obsessed younger sister Kaui navigates an unforgiving academic workload in an attempt to forge her independence from the family's legacy.

When supernatural events revisit the Flores family in Hawai'i—with tragic consequences—they are all forced to reckon with the bonds of family, the meaning of heritage, and the cost of survival.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME AN ADVANCE REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I stared at the cover of this ARC for long, long minutes when I opened its garishly orange bubble-mailer. It is *lush* and deeply, for the shark-o-phobic like me, disturbing; its colors unsubtle reminders of the intensity of tropical existence, its acrobatic predator giving me the heebie-jeebies while reminding me that its life-force greatly exceeds mine, its lust for eating casts my puny efforts at survival into the shade; and its typographical choice, the handlettered look of the information about what I was holding, capped off my impression that this was vital and urgent storytelling.

My jam, in short.

Families suck. The one you were born into probably isn't the one you'd be happiest growing up in. This is an immutable law of existence and a giant gift to storytellers everywhere. But the fact is it's what you got, and you got to work with it for the rest of your life. That's hell and that's a gift. What it leaves most of us with is an aching, unfillable void of loneliness. But what your family would be, could be, is a nest of itchy twigs that poke you to go find and build and be something entirely other to its system:

Years already I'd been trying to understand what was inside me, while the rest of the world was trying it to tear it out.
–and–
There was this one philosophy class I been in at the university, where the professor was talking about force. He said people think force and power is the same thing, but really force is what you use when you don't got power.
–and–
Whenever I've made a choice in my life, a real choice... I can always feel the change, after I choose. The better versions of myself, moving just out of reach.

The voices of these characters whose family, that awful itchy nest, is wrapped in a golden mist of mythological reality, are shouting their horror and pain at the void inside them, the one that Being Different opens in all of us...and who could possibly be more different than a boy saved by a shark? Author Washburn will gladly fill you in on who: The whole damned crew, that's who, every single life suddenly changed without any notion of consent. Gods don't ask, they give-take. There's never a single uncomplicated act in a god's repertoire, that is not how the Universe works. Author Washburn knows this. He has plumbed some depths in order to bring this story to us.

If a god is a thing that has absolute power over us, then in this world there are many. There are gods that we choose and gods that we can't avoid; there are gods that we pray to and gods that prey on us; there are dreams that become gods and nightmares that do, as well.
–and–
I wanted us together, wanted them to feel with me the big nameless thing we'd worked our way into, a silence like the presence of our own private God.

He knows his god-onions, don't you agree? I get the distinct impression that he's been on the end of a god's pole before. He knows too much for it to be otherwise, imagination can not create this level of Knowing. (And anyone who wants to argue that imagination is all there is is firmly directed back to philosophy class. I got no patience to have that discussion on the forty-seventh anniversary of the first time I had it, thanks awfully.)

It's funny to say it, but this book's exuberant life-force is, at its heart, about silence.

I go itchy with want, thin on sleep. I feel her fingers in mine. The way we could be both hard and soft on each other. Her sandy voice calling out as I climb one exposed cliff after another. ... All night this all goes through me, the four hours of sleep I get.
–and–
The more I understood what we were all made of, the more everyone I'd touched stayed inside me, still crying out, showing me their injuries over and over and over and over and over.

The cacophony that is silence, the absence of color that is white, the depth of addiction and the height of passion: All facets of the same unfillable void. We do contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman famously said of himself. And still there is room for more: More life, more joy, more more more...and there can never be enough, because the essence of wanting is needing and without wanting there is no point whatever to any of this.

Take a match and hold it to the strip, start the strike. Somewhere at the microscopic level there are whole worlds of hot light that gather and jump to the match tip. That's what we were.

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