THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD, second bite of the apple for a story I neglected in 2014

THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD
BILL HILLMANN
Tortoise Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Chicago’s Far North Side, a few decades ago—a rough-and-tumble place, awash with racial tensions and petty crime.

Joey, the youngest child in a mixed-race family, is pushing his way up through the cracked pavement of a chaotic life: parish festivals and block parties on long summer nights, fistfights in back alleys on boring empty days, long walks up and down Clark Street pocketing envelopes of collection money for his older brother, Lil’ Pat. It’s easy enough to pretend it’s all normal, until he sees Pat murder a man in a neighborhood drugstore. Now he’s haunted by the memory of blood pooling on the green tiles under the flickering fluorescent lights, torn by the conflict between love of family and disgust over what they do—and desperate to survive the insanity without being swept up in it.

This revised second edition of Bill Hillmann’s modern classic features a new introduction by Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh. It’s a perfect primer for a great book that deserves a place alongside the likes of Nelson Algren and James T. Farrell on the top shelf of Chicago literature.

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

My Review: I read the first edition of this around 2014, and wasn't very impressed. It was too fragmented, too unorganized (not disorganized...there was too little structure to call it that). So Curbside Splendor, the prior publisher, never got a review for that ARC they sent me. Naughty of me, I know, and sorry to their shade for being so thoughtless.

This time round, I'm not sure why, I felt less put off by the read eleven years on. It's still a bit more episodic for my liking, but has more a feel of purpose, of intent behind the disjunctures. I'm not going to nominate it for the awards circuit, in fiction anyway, because it feels a lot more like a roman à clef now, a memoir in a lot of makeup.

I could invest more in the story being told, the decay of a moral code and the complete surrender of decent people to evil blandishments making brummagem promises we, the readers, know for sure and certain will be broken. If it sounds like a dream come true, an answer to all your prayers, and you say "yes", prepare for the worst. The kind of people who make big promises without clear plans and transparent methods intend to use you then throw you into the machine you helped them make.

That's decidedly true here, we see it happen again and again. I wonder if under-sixty me had just not yet grown inured to the terrible cost of stupidity...? It's in your face, it's omnipresent, it is the welkin the suffering stooges cry into.

And I can't even work up schadenfreude. It's happening all over in 2025 and it makes me deeply ill; but I can't laugh at "Them" anymore.

THE SURGE is Author Adam Kovac's second release of this deeply felt story of men in combat mode

THE SURGE
ADAM KOVAC
Tortoise Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Larry Chandler knows what his fellow soldiers don’t—that war scars you and haunts you, leaving you with memories you’d prefer not to face. They’re all National Guardsmen serving together in Iraq, but he’s already done a stint in Afghanistan, whereas they’re fresh-faced youngsters on their first tour. The new soldiers are eager for something more interesting than life on a firebase, or boring guard duty at isolated outposts—and they’re about to get their wish.

Adam Kovac has written one of the great novels of The Forever Wars—one that captures both the dust and grit and sweat of soldiers on patrol, and the surrealism of their lives back on base. (Where they might be checking Facebook and ordering lattes one minute, and dodging mortars the next.) In its first edition, it earned comparisons to the likes of Hemingway, Mailer, and O’Brien; this revised second edition promises to find it the audience it so richly deserves.

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

My Review: I'm connected with Author Kovac across social platforms for ages now, because we support and repost stuff that falls into a leftier, less manosphere-friendly vibe. I got a copy of the DRC from his publisher without mentioning it to him, when one fine day he slid into my DMs asking if I wanted to read it.

Thus proving the old adage "you know your own."

Another old adage proved in this read is "be careful what you ask the gods for lest their answer be 'yes.'" Larry Chandler muses at one point that he doesn't know what to do with the genuine, but not civilian-life-friendly, love he feels for fallen comrades. It's real, this unnamed grief, but it's so very not part of the life your friends, family, spouse at home are leading that you can't see what you can do with it.

For me, that was the emotional heart of this read. In The Yellow Birds, Bartle has a job of work to explain how he survived and another man didn't. In Matterhorn, one of my annual 6*-of-five reads, Waino Mellas had the same gigantic realization in Vietnam. If you're sensing a theme, you're on my signal pretty tightly.

Why I read these war-experience novels by veterans is easy to explain. They are always real and honest; they carry some burden the veteran wants to put down; and they are almost always so polished in the author's writerly imagination that some genuinely lovely turn of phrase leaps out at me:

"People, man, they won’t shut up. Watch. They’ll keep asking what you’re going to do now that you’re back home. Compared to life downrange, I think it might be impossible to find anything as interesting."
–and–
"Civilian world. It’s a dead end. Man knows where he stands here. Where he belongs."

Terse, not flowery, not fancy, but impactful like the sound of an IED just out of sight is.

Why I like reading these stories is also easy to explain. I will never have an experience like this. Even if, as I suspect is the case, this inner conflict ripping up the US does not end without bloodshed, it will not be like this. War has moved on since the Aughties Iraq War. Drones do more killing than people do. I think that will lead to less empathy than even The Surge's men learn to experience. Now you'll simply see the aftermath of killing not commit or participate in it as a group.

I have the luxury of knowing I'll be dead before all that long, so might...probably will...miss most of it. Poor Author Kovac, having lived it, written about it, and now seen it coming again on home soil, just has to gut it out. I'm sorry, my dude. If it's any consolation to you, this story is excellent, and you're a dab hand at bringing your readers along with you as you make a narrative happen for us.

If you're in the modern world and wondering why the right-wing-nuts are whining about men being "too empathetic," read Adam Kovac's novel. Empathy is what war pounds into your skull. If you start out with it, with what it takes to learn it out in the killing fields, maybe...just maybe...you won't do it on command.

That makes this very good story a public mitzvah as well as a pleasure to read.

ALONE ON THE MOON: A Soviet Lunar Odyssey, alternate history of the Space Race!

ALONE ON THE MOON: A Soviet Lunar Odyssey (Altered Space, #5)
GERALD BRENNAN
Tortoise Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: May, 1970. A two-person Soviet crew approaches the moon, ready to accomplish the greatest feat in human history—provided they can overcome their own petty jealousies, and the unforgiving harshness of space.

Alone on the Moon chronicles a Soviet moon mission through the eyes of Boris Volynov, a backup who’s been pressed into service helping Alexei Leonov (a man he despises) attempt humanity’s first lunar landing. Thoroughly researched, it’s a detailed and plausible rendition of two larger-than-life personalities facing incredible challenges. It’s also a meditation on luck, trust, the nature of observation, and the burden of being chosen—plus the way our personal narratives can shape (or poison) our perceptions of the present. Do the stories we tell ourselves shape our fate, or can we write a new chapter? The answer awaits.

The titles in the Altered Space series are wholly separate narratives, but all deal with the mysteries of space and time, progress and circularity. Each one is an ensō of words in which orbits of spacecraft, moons, planets, and people allow us fresh perspectives on the cycles of our own lives.

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

My Review: Remember Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut of Mars series? Alternate space race with hugely accelerated stakes, a lot of international and interspecies cooperation? Like, even women going to the stars?!? Well, that tore it. I had to have more space-but-not-this-way stories.

So here I am reviewing the next most different take on the Space Race...a Soviet first-lunar-landing story! And I hated it!

More precisely, I hated the narrator: Bitter Boris the Bore. Banging on about how unlucky he is, how a Jew is always held back, how deeply he hates Alexei the Golden Boy...his nickname's fuckin' BLONDIE facryinoutloud!...and his tedious wife, the chilly withholding climber.

I'll never read this book again. But goddam what a story! What a sheer, pulse-pounding rocket ride of a story!

The whole burden of the refrain "unlucky" is simple: Don't be different. Don't stand out. Be there but never be noticeably better than anyone in power unless you're so good there's not a corner that they can sweep you into. Because they will. In other words, big organizations are all alike and whatever alphabet the nameplate's are printed in the behaviors are the same.

What happens to Boris is utterly terrifying. At every turn, his shot is blocked. His spot is taken. When he gets to do anything,it goes wrong. Not just people, then, but gawd hates him. And it's no wonder they do, he never met a joy he couldn't squelch or a happiness he couldn't chill to absolute zero. Even his son is being raised by this dark, unhappy cloud of a belief that nothing goes right because it's inevitable.

Yuck.

What this does for Blondie, the first man on the moon, is give him a partner in space who believes it's all going to shit anyway but he's going to check, recheck, then check the recheck so no one can say it was his fault. He calculates things Control has already fed into his computer. He's always got a finger on the cut-off switch so he can make the computers and the thrusters and the machinery of every sort obey his calculations. Which are, of course, correct. Blondie's always been the fair-haired boy and the lucky one so he's just indifferent to the details.

And do you know what? He should't've been *quite* so sanguine. I delight in that bit. I thrilled to the ways the inevitable problems that crop up got handled, solved, and Boris vindicated. There's a reveal at the end of the book that wasn't a surprise to me, there's a lot of technical stuff that will likely put off a casual reader, and there's the basic problem of feeling whined at for almost 300pp. But there was no damned way I was closing this book until I was sure the story ended...well.

And that's why it gets four whole stars.