VONNEGUT’S WAR: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five, fascinating story of a fascinating book's creation

VONNEGUT’S WAR: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five
SUSAN FARRELL
Bloomsbury Academic (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Banned, burned, and censored, Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is widely regarded as one of the greatest (and most controversial) novels of the twentieth century. Fusing vivid biography with popular history and close textual analysis, Vonnegut's War tells the fascinating story of the making of a modern classic and the writer that created it.

New archival discoveries and recently released oral histories give us the fullest account yet published of Vonnegut's real-life prisoner-of-war experiences at Stalag IV-B and Dresden, which heavily influenced Slaughterhouse-Five. A recently discovered trove of letters introduces us to his first wife, Jane Cox Vonnegut, and her influence on his writing. Along the way, we also encounter UFOs and aliens, grapple with the shadow cast by the Vietnam war, and unearth the stranger-than-fiction tale of David Irving's The Destruction of Dresden, the historical reference behind Vonnegut's writing about the Dresden firebombing.

This book sheds light on one of America's most beloved writers and explores how cultural forces helped to shape a modern masterpiece of storytelling.

Susan Farrell is a professor of American Literature at the College of Charleston. She has published two previous books on Vonnegut and founded the International Kurt Vonnegut Society.

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My Review: Billy Pilgrim shaped many an internal landscape after his appearance in 1969. My older sister encouraged me to read Slaughterhouse-Five when I was fourteen or so; I did, and was genuinely not the same person after the read. I've always been sure war and other kinds of industrial-scale killing were wrong, and tools of oppression and manipulation used by "Them" (the ever-shifting, always-there overclass) to ensure no individual of any class ever truly feels secure for very long. It read to my young self like the bravest kind of art, made to tell ugly truth in carefully crafted images. It was sublime. (I stand by my 2014 review.)

As a middle-aged man I read the story again, on the fortieth anniversary (more or less) of the first read. Same story, different reader, similar conclusion reached...though with nuances like a shocked certainty that Billy Pilgrim was Vonnegut's PTSD personified, that the entire exercise was a therapy session shaped into a narrative of brutal honesty and deep personal exposure underpinning artifice, maybe art, maybe just the complete relatability of honest, truthful self-examination made public.

Twenty more years have passed. I'm not drawn to the text for another read, too few eyeblinks left to me and too much good stuff as yet unread. This book, telling the story of how Slaughterhouse-Five came to be over the course of more than twenty years in the eventful, interesting life of Kurt Vonnegut. It was a long-term, multi-partner effort to shape Vonnegut's trauma into the glittering form we possess now. Access to much material previously off-limits to researchers makes the role of Vonnegut's much-maligned first wife in shaping the narrative more evident. We all, in the twenty-first century, have a very, very different understanding of gender dynamics than was available to any but the most advanced academic thinkers during the years Vonnegut was composing Slaughterhouse-Five. His evident misogyny went well beyond the cultural norms of his era. It's not emphasized in the book nor is it glossed over; this is at heart an academic book, though, so it sticks to its lane more than a purely popular one would. As a factor in the creation of the work in question the reprehensible misogyny and abuse Vonnegut doled out are in the DNA of the story. It's discomfiting to read the clear-eyed portrait of Vonnegut in the throes of creation. Confronting the damage he (knowingly, deliberately) enacts on those around him is unpleasant, as I've grown my mind around the work he's done over the majority of my approaching seventy years on Earth. The older I get the more I realize how little has really changed since the men who wrote the "idol with legs of iron, and feet of clay" quote appearing in the Bible sharpened their styluses.

As Author Farrell's pursuit of the reality behind the making of Slaughterhouse-Five she does the hard work of giving perspective to the acts of its creation in the context of the times. Who was this WWII veteran trying to find perspective on his experiences reading, talking to, using as sounding boards? Could this specific novel have come to be in 1949, 1959, even 1965? I remember the ferment of those years, the way my older-than-most parents were constantly blindsided and upset by the world changing so much so fast...Vonnegut was younger than they were so I realized with a start in reading this book. It adds a piece to my vision of Slaughterhouse-Five that I'd never had. It takes reading a book written about a book getting written to bring perspective to my settled opinion of a story published almost sixty years ago. Do you need a better illustration of why reading, writing about reading, and close and careful analysis of stories are more important than ever in a world getting "AI" shoved down its throat?

What this read did for me it can do for you and for others. No "AI" (properly "LLM") can do what Author Farrell did here. Human brains make connections among data points derived from deep research. They're what creates the synthesis of information that synthetic entities steal to regurgitate to the uncritical as new and insightful ideas. It's true, they are new and insightful; but if you've read the stolen source material, you realize how the scam works. It's new to you, not freshly newly thought up. This is why controlling the world's IP is such an incredibly important part of the scam.

My proof is here, in this well-written, thoroughly researched story of the making of a story that defined the emotional state of a man, and thereafter of a generation.

THE CHILDREN, YA fantasy monadnock looks at the storytelling tapestry from the other side

THE CHILDREN
MELISSA ALBERT
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An intoxicating, haunting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother’s beloved fantasy series, contend with the vine-like creep of legacy, memory, and magic.

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods.

In one, she lives in the wooded shadow of her family's isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of her mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where her magical adventures have made her a household name. In reality, Guinevere's childhood isn't the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine: she and her older brother are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the lichen-clotted woods they’ve made their playland. As Edith Sharpe’s books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame—until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith’s series unfinished and her children the sole survivors.

Now an adult coasting on her mother's name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family's legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere’s childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she's spent the last twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark history lies behind their mother’s creative genius?

Wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, The Children whispers to you from the hallway outside your bedroom, lights flickering as you turn the pages of a book that didn't seem so scary a moment ago. It's a story for anyone who's ever revisited an old favorite and found it cast in a darker light, the line separating magic and memory blurring as the gap widens between the authors we imagined and the people they turn out to be.

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My Review: Does George RR Martin have kids? Maybe one called "Dayana" or something? He's on track to die before agreeing to finish his astoundingly beloved fantasy series, like Edith...and to many of us not-fans it feels as though there's some kinda dark bargain involved in its globe-spanning popularity.

In the age of severely overprivileged fandoms for what is revoltingly, but accurately, called "IP," this story could not cut closer to the bone. There's a certain inevitability in Edith's appalling betrayal of her children, using them as close models for her fantasy characters. "Write what you know" taken to a dark extreme by a parent who gave little but took much. A bargain her children had no say over. It supports them to this good day. In a sense that's fair enough since it took their developmental years out of their own control.

Guin is the kid who bought in, albeit resentfully, to the hype and has become an apologist for Edith and her invasive behavior. Perhaps she's just making hay while the sun shines, perhaps she's getting her own back for the neglect and emotional absence of her self-centered parents...failed actor father, family-supporting writer mother. She's created a hollow kind of fame out of monetizing her childhood marked by the celebrity lifestyle her parents cultivated in place of actually being parents. Guin's project is to keep the spondulix rolling in. Brother Ennis has chosen a more rigorous path, though still cashing in on his beginnings, by becoming An Artist. Fame has followed, but he's chosen to cut Guin out of his life. Throughout this story we're in Guin's PoV so we're only told what she knows about why.


"Guinevere" is a terrible name to hang on a kid. It practically slams the door on an ordinary childhood because the teasing would be brutal. It's really of a piece with Edith's fantasy life-turned-hugely successful fantasy world: Guin's fated to be an unhappy princess who's become a queen in a realm not her own, and not of her choosing. "Nomen est omen" test case number skatey-eight skabillion. It feels as we're reading along as though Author Albert, author of multiple popular children's books, started wondering about how this creation thing works as a force outside your authorial control. It's clear Guin is traumatized. By what? Her parents are the first in line for blame. But she and Ennis are orphans. The fire that consumed their childhood home and killed their not-good parents was not caused by the parents themselves. What did cause it? How does...does...that unsolved mystery explain Edith's massive cultural juggernaut "The Ninth City?" It's eaten their lives, not knowing but knowing too much, not understanding but seeing more than they should. Ennis isn't working with Guin on solving what she sees as a strange mystery. It is as always up to Guin to do the work, shoulder the burden.

Author Albert uses the psychological reality of Guin's parentification to explore women's roles in our capitalist culture. It's also clear that there are...oddnesses...in this family system that clearly come from the psychological stress of bearing all the load on the females, woman and girl, in the system. When one looks at it out of the corner of one's eye there are ununsual things that cause unease in we-the-reader. They're not remarked on or attended to in the narrative. They are there and quite uneasy-making though...the woods, how cliche, have eyes and are watching you.

The fire destroys as fires do. No more parents, no more books to keep the mmoney comingin, no more brother because he buggers off leaving it to Guin to pick up such pieces as she can to make what she—she alone—will from the wreckage. The number of abandonments Guin suffers would warp anyone in her shoes. Her response...to take it all on, put it to the best use she can...is what fuels this novel of reckoning with her ghosts.

Literal ghosts? Probably, at least of a sort. Edith might not have been as inventive as her adoring and demanding fan base thinks.

It's here the missing fifth star is explained. The tinges of horror, of fantastical things not seen just beyond our line of sight, all crystallize in the last approximately ten percent of the story. I saw why, and saw the point, but I'm less interested in the fantastical than in the truly chilling psychological novel that precedes the ending. That is not to criticize the ending as a natural result of the preceding story. It absolutely fits, it's quite clearly signposted early on. It's definitely one of several possible results of the story as told.

Just not the one I would've preferred.

BLOOM, what we all hope we'll have space to do but more often do not

BLOOM
ROBBIE COUCH
Gallery Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of If I See You Again Tomorrow comes a delightful and heartwarming novel about family, love, grief, and one precocious houseplant, that reminds us of the beauty of living a life in full Bloom.

Morris Warner is withering away. After the sudden death of his husband, Fred, he has shut himself off from the world. No more going to movies with friends, or swims in Lake Michigan, instead preferring the quiet loneliness of his history books and Jeopardy episodes with only the cat to hear his answers.

Morris’s stepdaughter, Sloan, feels like she has nowhere to grow. She’s about to get married to the man of her dreams, if only her mother will let her actually plan her own wedding and trust her to build her own life after her father’s death.

Jade is drying out. Literally. As a plant in Morris’s home, she and her plant housemates have been slowly wasting away, leaf by falling leaf, since Fred’s death and Morris’s lack of care. She needs to come up with a plan to make her new owner come back to life, no matter what it takes.

New York Times bestselling author Robbie Couch’s Bloom is a wondrous novel where family, love, kindness, and yes, Mother Nature, triumph.

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My Review: Masses of w-verbing = one star irrevocably, irretrievably gone.

Y'all need to stop that. Jade wouldn't like it, stolidly practical being that she is. Neither do I.

It's the PoVs...Jade the succulent jade plant, abandoned by Fred's untimely passing and neglected by Morris; Morris the bereft widower of Fred, who's really withering up and giving up his life from grief (been there, bud); and Sloan who's Fred's youngest daughter, stuck in a cesspit of grief for her favorite parent and still going through with her ghastly, Babbitty mother's vision of what her wedding to her one true love Todd ought to be.

It all kicks off as Sloan has a bridezilla moment in the florist shop and runs right TF away from her bickering mother and aunt as each tries to force her own choices on Sloan. Even though she's never been close to Morris, her father's teaching colleague and now his widower she runs to her dad's house to talk to Morris about walking her down the aisle. Maybe a giant middle finger at her mom, who got left by Fred for Morris ten-plus years ago...but also, the more Sloan tries to get up the nerve to ask him for the favor, a damned good idea. She had Morris as a teacher in the aftermath of The Affair, that turned into the happy marriage. Her Babbitty mother was not likely to be supportive of Sloan spending a lot of time with the happy couple. So she has never really been in close contact with Morris for long, and so does not already know how destroyed he was by Fred's death.

It causes Sloan to stop thinking about her rage at her Babbitty mother to begin to do things with and for Morris, starting with rescuing Jade from the dark corner she was absent-mindedly shoved into and forgotten by grieving Morris. It's how Jade survives, even thrives, as the story unfolds with its very grown-up restructuring of family ties among all these players and more. Todd isn't a flashy or noisy character, yet he loves Sloan enough to get along with her Babbitty mother, her snotty sister, her gross brother and invisible brother-in-law.

Deserves a damn medal, does Todd.

I'll cut the book report short to observe the story continues its gentle way through the different parties as each processes the grief and the inevitable regret of loss sinking in, in the most surprising ways that you can never see coming. A lot of old hurts...Sloan was never the daughter her Babbitty mother wanted her to be, Morris was the love of her Babbitty mother's one great love's life with all the terrible pain that brings, Jade is dealt a violence and fears she will actually die this time...all interleafed very deftly, very structurally appropriately. You don't need to know details until you get there.

I'd say the ending felt...irresolute...but it feels exactly like the endpoints of real-life complex family situations feel. It's not The End, it's the place the strands come together, cross into a knot and start a new strand of everyone's interrelationship. If you liked Remarkably Bright Creatures or Love & Saffron, this will appeal to you.

CULPABILITY, a bruising, honest look at family, love, and the scary time we live in

CULPABILITY
BRUCE HOLSINGER
Spiegel & Grau (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$30.00 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending September 15, 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Set at a summer rental on the Chesapeake Bay, a riveting family drama about moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence, from the bestselling author of the “wise and addictive” (New York Times) The Gifted School.

When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret, implicating them each in the accident.

During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie’s future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei’s odd behavior tugs at Noah’s suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident—suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal. When Charlie falls for Monet’s teenaged daughter, the stakes are raised even higher in this propulsive family drama that is also a fascinating exploration of the moral responsibility and ethical consequences of AI.

Culpability explores a world newly shaped by chatbots, autonomous cars, drones, and other nonhuman forces in ways that are thrilling, challenging, and unimaginably provocative.

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My Review: I am not used to this plot twist. The consequences of a fatal car crash? How many times...the crash was caused by AI doing the driving? *sits bolt upright*

That by itself gets my undivided attention. Of course you'd expect something more complex in the way of complications to sustain a novel-length story. You get it in the form of many, many questions, many...let's call them "obfuscations" by people who should know better, and many evil-intent lies told by scumbags.

It really is a novel of the moment. It's not a nonce book, though it has trappings still new to our culturally changed time. The real, deeper exploration is, as we're ever and always confronted with, how far will you go to protect someone you love? That is an evergreen plot because there is no one answer, no one way to think about your own answer, and a never-ending carnival of reasons the question keeps needing an answer.

Tragedy strikes an ordinary family somewhere every minute of every day. When the world is in the midst of an upheaval like the ever-increasing dominance of AI...which doesn't exist, it's really just a handy term for "data-mining executive algorithms" or some less punchy way of saying "fast, fancy databases"...the question of culpability (and Culpability) is a great way to interrogate personal responsibility. It's always worth interrogating. The parents who broke the rules and trusted AI to backstop them? Culpable. The kid who was, well, a bog-standard overconfident kid? Culpable. The vile scum who unleashed an ill-considered AI tool on the world without effective controls?

Do I even need to type it?

It was a very effective choice, making the mother an AI researcher; it left us without a clean shot at our tech-billionaire villain. (Wouldn't matter to me if he was the kindest, most fleecy-li'l-lambkin of a good guy; anyone involved in this AI nightmare of surveillance and control, with corporations acting as the Stasi, the KGB, and the CIA rolled into one, is guilty of something far worse than mere negligence.) The author's made it impossible to assign all blame in only one place. That means we're all left to think through who owes what to whom, in guilt terms; what happens as a result of our decisions is the root of all family relationships. This family's in crisis, but the way they got there? That started a long time ago.

Really back when these two Millennial solipsists had children; nay, when they hooked up the first time. No one seems to like anyone else in the autonomous van that wrecked; no one seems to know why anyone else feels the way they do; the parents are aware of their kids as entities but don't seem to understand why they're acting the way they are. In many ways, I got the impression that Author Holsinger was using the AI-aided disaster to interrogate whether the family in the van is a family at all. Are they in any fundamentally-human way related, or are they merely biologically similar in statistically significant degrees? The AI plot, then, is both point and pointed; we're asked to think about consequences, and should not stop at the simplest ones.

It's a story familiar in its outlines and so makes that deeper probing far clearer in purpose and execution. Because I've read a zillion family-in-crisis tales, that fact of defending your young was just expected and unsurprising. The last half of the story, after the consequences were pretty much on the table, was where I engaged my deeper reading skills. We're led to contemplate, and to contextualize, love and guilt and privilege and responsibility as a nexus; if you could do that without applying it, and its results, to yourself, I think you're deluded.

It is obvious Culpability was a carefully selected title. Guilt and responsibility twined like snakes around each other, and around duty and obligation. These are topics readers love in their stories because they are truly universal. The ending of this story is not going to please everyone. It is absolutely the best ending to my thinking, because it foregrounds the single greatest weakness of trusting, as in "with your life," A System:

Humans are chaotic, and no system will ever manage chaos.

THE IMAGINED LIFE, a very apt title about the illusions Life makes up for us

THE IMAGINED LIFE
ANDREW PORTER
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed writer, a taut, elegiac novel about a man trying to uncover the truth about the father who left him behind

Steven Mills has reached a crossroads. His wife and son have left, and they may not return. Which leaves him determined to find out what happened to his own father, a brilliant, charismatic professor who disappeared in 1984 when Steve was twelve, on a wave of ignominy.

As Steve drives up the coast of California, seeking out his father’s friends, family members, and former colleagues, the novel offers us tantalizing glimpses into Steve’s childhood—his parents’ legendary pool parties, the black-and-white films on the backyard projector, secrets shared with his closest friend. Each conversation in the present reveals another layer of his father’s past, another insight into his disappearance. Yet with every revelation, his father becomes more difficult to recognize. And, with every insight, Steve must confront truths about his own life.

Rich in atmosphere, and with a stunningly sure-footed emotional compass, The Imagined Life is a probing, nostalgic novel about the impossibility of understanding one’s parents, about first loves and failures, about lost innocence, about the unbreakable bonds between a father and a son.

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My Review: When your life in the present collapses, you look to the past. It's natural to make the trip back over any life, no matter how deeply quotidian it was. To know who you are you need a vantage point to look at the whole of it from and kidhood's the natural one to choose.

There's a reason this plot's an evergreen; for a reason as basic as growing old, that much-resented thing no one guaranteed the privilege of doing. Among male writers, anyway...Falconer by John Cheever, Montana 1948 by Larry Watson are two favorites of mine. I hope you're all at least passingly familiar with them so the next bit will make sense.

Looking for your father is probably the most commonly human thing a man does in his life. Fathers are often gone, voluntarily or not...wars, jobs, or simple absence of love for the mother are all ordinary reasons for Dad to book it out the door. Does it pay to know why? I can only say it's so uniquely difficult to accomplish this feat of vanishing now that maybe it did then, but not now.

Which is at the heart of my issue with this book: It evokes a day I lived in, and does it well; but it took the narrator decades to decide to search for his father with today's incredible web of tech? Then when he decides to do it in the ashes of his own family, it's to find out who's to blame for his brokenness? Therapy first, my dude, then when you have a framework to cope with the damage done to you, find the perp. It isn't like he didn't have literal decades of living in the modern world to figure out he was wounded. It's a realistic thing, taking your time to find out the wounds inflicted on you. It's not like there's a timetable. The reason it didn't sit all the way right with me is down to my having lived through those years where awakening followed awakening. The narrator's way too smart and too savvy not to have seen them, too.

Still and all, I read the story with a lot of nodding along, a good bit of emotional investment, and a strong interest in seeing where the resolution to his growth spurt would lead. I was...okay with the resolution. I'm making my issues loom large only to show y'all why a full four stars is such a strong testament to Author Porter's writing talents.

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

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

Rating: 5* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

I didn't. 5 impressed stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How perfect. 5*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earth, Speak is rock bottom. Harrowing. 5*

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

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

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

THE JOHN WILLIAMS PAGE: STONER; and THE MAN WHO WROTE THE PERFECT NOVEL: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life

THE MAN WHO WROTE THE PERFECT NOVEL: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life
CHARLES J. WILLIAMS
University of Texas Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An “engrossing” biography of a brilliant novelist underappreciated in his own time who became a twenty-first-century bestseller, from the New York Times–bestselling author (The New Yorker).

When Stoner was published in 1965, the novel sold only a couple of thousand copies before disappearing with hardly a trace. Yet the quietly powerful tale of Midwestern college professor William Stoner, whose life becomes a parable of solitude and anguish, eventually found an admiring audience in America and especially in Europe. The New York Times called Stoner “a perfect novel,” and a host of writers and critics, including Colum McCann, Julian Barnes, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Emma Straub, Ruth Rendell, C.P. Snow, and Irving Howe, praised its artistry. The New Yorker deemed it “a masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man.”

This biography traces the life of Stoner’s author, John Williams. Charles J. Shields follows the whole arc of Williams’s life, which in many ways paralleled that of his titular character, from their shared working-class backgrounds to their undistinguished careers in academia. Shields vividly recounts Williams’s development as an author, whose other works include the novels Butcher’s Crossing and Augustus (for the latter, Williams shared the 1972 National Book Award). Shields also reveals the astonishing afterlife of Stoner, which garnered new fans with each American reissue, and then became a bestseller all over Europe after a Dutch publisher brought out a translation in 2013. Since then, Stoner has been published in twenty-one countries and sold over a million copies.

“Like Williams, Shields know how to tell a good story, one that will appeal especially to those interested in the ins and outs of the publishing industry and the ups and downs of a writer’s life.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

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My Review: My earlier reading of Author Shields' excellent And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life made me eager to read this book about John Williams. My as-yet unblogged review of Stoner is below, to add the needed context to my ideas about this book and its subject.

I think the reason this book never got to pop-culture awareness, in spite of Stoner's tremendous success in the twenty-first century, is simple: John Williams is a shitty human being. I mean, men of his generation more often than not were shitty, and abusive, and sexist...homophobic...by our standards of acceptability, irredeemable in ways even Armie Hammer and Neil Gaiman don't approach. Tempus fugit; sic transit gloria mundi.

No one would get away with Vonnegut's misogyny and sexism today, yet here's a man who wrote one of the most horrendous, harridanly women in literature...Edith Stoner...irredeemable even in victim terms, as her malevolence is obvious long before her husband rapes her. What I could never figure out is why she hated Stoner so much, he was never any kind of promising except of failure and disappointment. She wasn't duped; she married the real him, looking down on him every step of the way.

And Williams' life? He insisted Stoner was fictional. I myownself, after reading this book, think otherwise. The litany of grievances against life, work, colleagues (he had no friends that I thought deserved the name), all of it: Stoner. So how does he, Williams, get a pass from the literati? Beats me all hollow, though I suspect it's merely a matter of time.

What made me enjoy this book so much was the factual reporting of his life story: The multiple infidelities and marriages; his early infatuation with theater; his early love for Look Homeward, Angel, that adolescent's dream book; his admiration for Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton in the film of A Tale of Two Cities (I shudder even typing that sentence fragment, go look at the link to see why; oleaginous much?). These facts and many more make as comprehensible and clear a picture of the man who could author Stoner as well as the proto-Blood Meridian Western-but-don't-tell-him-you're-calling-it-that Butcher's Crossing as one could ever hope to find.

Violence, in John Williams' œuvre, is less physiologically present than in McCarthy's. It's not dwelt on with loving, prurient, in my view pornographic lingering money shots of prose. It's, well, I guess my best match between vocabulary and feeling is clinical. John Williams was undoubtedly an acoholic, an abusive and distant man, and the way to be all those things is to be removed from one's emotional states, to devalue and deny empathy while, paradoxically, demanding that very feeling for one's characters as they enact worse and worse things on their victims.

Should one who has not read any Williams, but would like to, read this biography? Not with any expectation of still wanting to read his work. It's a good way to learn how you'll respond to the work itself though. I don't know how knowing about the real person doing the writing of the books we know and love should make us feel. It varies, I suppose, from reader to reader, from writer to writer.

I'll go out on a limb and say that, for $2.99 on Kindle, the answer in this case is "absolutely do read it." Author Shields is enough of a talented storyteller to make time spent learning how nasty one person can get worth one's time.

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

STONER
JOHN WILLIAMS
NYRB Classics
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending September 23, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

I BOUGHT A PAPERBACK FROM THE PUBLISHER FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. THANK YOU, PAST SELF.

My Review: I went into this read thinking it'd be another wildly overpraised midcentury modern grimfest. I was happily proved wrong, though that is the last time I will ever use the word "happy" in conjunction with this tale.

A story about a small Prufrockian man, doomed from the get-go to a disappointing existence unworthy of the descriptor "life" by any but the most generous definition of the subject. Author Alex Preston (Goodreads profile link), in a 2015 review he blogged, said of Stoner:

With each of Stoner’s defeats, he backs further and further away from us, his voice becoming more distant, his character less alive on the page. At the start of the novel, I was yelling at him to grow a pair. By the time he lets his wife sacrifice their daughter on the altar of her motiveless malignancy, I’d given up on him entirely. I read through to the end because I wanted to see if...there would be something elegiac, a note of quiet redemption in the final passages of the book. There wasn’t.

Scathing! Angry, upset, and not wrong in any way. Yet, as Author Preston's fury warms my heart, I am required by my own appreciation of the story to admit that I found these very things to be the raison d'etre of the novel, and the beating heart of John Williams' artistry. He told a failure's life in a failure's language; he accepted Stoner as the small, ungreased cog in a small, janky machine full of others like him that Williams himself was.

So, while very aware of this divisive thematic and stylistic choice will not be to everyone's taste, I can honestly and wholeheartedly say it was very much to mine.

Casey Affleck was set to portray Stoner in the film! (Although ten years on, I think we're safe to assume the project has spluttered out.) This was excellent news! I...enjoyed, liked, all those words seem full of misplaced chirpiness applied to Stoner's small, cramped life...resonated with this novel and after seeing Mr. Affleck in Manchester by the Sea I can only be happy and grateful he might yet assume the leading role in it.

THE BEE STING, Paul Murray's calling-card book

THE BEE STING
PAUL MURRAY
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?

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

My Review: This book is A Lot. Long, deep, densely packed.

I enjoy reading anything that plays in the quantum fields of many worlds. The idea of one.little.change. making all the difference in one's life is very empowering, as well as nonsense, and honestly hazardous. All of those are reasons we love to mess with it safely in our fiction. Here Paul Murray goes full-tilt boogie down this waterslide, wets us to the bone in the spume of his landing, and completely destroys our hairdos.

Is it good anyway? Well...honestly...yes, but in a curious way no. Want to laugh hollowly at the folly of the merely mortal? Come hither, disciple dearest. Want to process your grief at the titanic (or Titanic) sinking of the life you planned? This is your altar call. Or is the appeal of a stonking novel immersive and redemptive reading? Hie thee hence, pilgrim. Nothing for you here...there is no redemption here, no one's gettin' what they think they deserve before the Apocalypse that's looming calypses. Need rigorous copyediting with Oxford commas, periods, line breaks, and other such embankments to channel the flow of the words? Ite, missa est. No communion cookies for you, though madeleines will be served in the Sodality of Marcel's post-tea.

Digressive is my word for this seemingly Irish specialty of novels (Milkman's another favorite) that don't give a feck for your English rules. Me, I'm down with it, I like things that don't slavishly straiten their gates to some Authority's pre- and proscriptions just cuz. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of the culture wars! Whatever you do, don't be boring!

That said...well, honestly I found the central thesis of the family tedious and predictable: Dad's crushed, Mom's hogtied and struggling, Junior's got his antennae out so far they can find meaning in electric currents imperceptible to an ammeter, Sis is in thrall to the Mother of All Crushes on the most dreary poseur in all of literature...really, does this need retelling? The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, To the Lighthouse, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and every Colleen Hoover book ever written fill these separate niches extremely ably...have for most of a century. (It felt like a century passed when I read 102pp of It Ends With Us. *shudder* I {mildly mis-}quote that nasty little creep Truman Capote: "That's not writing, that's typing.")

So my bag was mixed. I loved parts, liked most of it, and was impatiently awaiting liftoff that never quite generated enough thrust to get me over the literary Kármán line. Hence my stingy-feeling 3.5 stars. It might be stingy but it's waaay better than most stuff I read and toss aside. I'm really umpressed with Author Murray's swinging for the fences in all his writing and storytelling. I mean, mad respect for going toe-to-toe with the twentieth century's greats (and megabestselling hack Hoover)! But coming for the monarch isn't safe lest you fail to slay them.

No slaying here, though some serious wounds were delivered.

VANTAGE POINT, good times don't get better than watching rich people dally and fall

VANTAGE POINT
SARA SLIGAR
MCD x FSG (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Succession meets Megan Abbott in this seductive Gothic suspense novel about the dramatic downfall of one of America’s most affluent families.

The old-money Wieland family has it all—wealth, status, power. They’re also famously cursed. Clara and her brother Teddy grew up on a small island in Maine in the shadow of their parents’ tragic deaths, haunted by rumors and paparazzi. Fourteen years later they’ve mostly put their turbulent past to rest. Teddy has married Clara’s best friend, Jess, and the three of them have moved back home to take over the sprawling, remote family mansion known as Vantage Point. Then Teddy decides to run for the Senate—an unnerving prospect made much worse when intimate videos of Clara are leaked online. The most frightening part is that she doesn't remember filming any of them. Are the videos real? Or are they deepfakes? Is someone trying to take down the Wielands once and for all?

Everyone thinks Clara is losing her grip on reality, but she knows the videos are only the beginning. Years ago the curse destroyed her parents. Now it’s coming for her. Brimming with palpable tension, Vantage Point reveals a twisted web of family secrets and political ambition that raises questions about the blurred lines between public and private personas and the nature of truth in the digital age.

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

My Review: Do I hope this is what happens to the richest .01% of families? Yes. Would I sit by and watch with huge schadenfreude while amplifying the most embarrassing, hurtful moments on social media despite the pain it might cause the family in question? Oh my goddesses YES! Extra speedy sharing if they issue statements deploring the hurtful invasion of privacy, and I'll find a way to automate the 24-hour-a-day posting process if they're tech scum!

This book and me? Destined to be besties.

Sounds like a five-star rave is incoming, doesn't it?

Nope. When the shock-twist ending is the same ending you've been telegraphing all along, you don't get five stars. It could be some meta thing, playing on my expectations for a twist in a thriller by not giving me one; I don't tend to read thrillers for that sort of playfulness (which is usually disappointing and annoying anyway). Why it bothered me was that the author was flagging the ending in what felt like every chapter, most unsubtly; then that's what happened; so why'd I read all this intermediate red-herring-ing?

Because this gothic, soapy, OTT strange-fest was fun. I liked reading it. It wasn't groundbreaking, or paradigm-shifting; no one promised me it would be. I was told I'd have a good time eagerly watching the twisted ending of a hypercapitalist family.

Check.

Would I have liked it more, if...fill in personal crotchet here? Sure, I can play that game all day and most of the night with almost anything. But this book delivers what it promises, and you'll have a good time getting there.

SNAKE ISLAND: A Novel, another good "discover Australian culture through violence" thriller

SNAKE ISLAND: A Novel
BEN HOBSON
Arcade Crimewise
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of Cormac McCarthy, Phillip Meyer, Fargo, and Justified, a gritty rural noir thriller about family, drugs, and the legacy of violence.

In an isolated town on the coast of southern Australia, Vernon Moore and his wife, Penelope, live in retirement, haunted by an unspeakable act of violence that sent their son, Caleb, to serve time in prison and has driven the couple apart. Ashamed, they refuse to talk about him or visit, but when a close friend warns Vernon that Caleb has been savagely beaten, he has no choice but to act to protect their only child.

The perpetrator of the beating is a local thug from a crime family whose patriarch holds sway over the town, with the police in his pay. Everyone knows they trade in drugs. When Vernon maneuvers to negotiate a deal with the father, he makes a critical error. His mistake unleashes a cycle of violence that escalates to engulf the whole town, taking lives with it, revealing what has been hiding in plain sight in this picturesque rural community and threatening to overtake his son.

Told from shifting perspectives at a sprint, in language that sometimes approaches the simple profundity of parable, this gritty debut was hailed on its Australian publication as “a darkly illuminating thriller that soars across genre constraints . . . [and] engages with pressing contemporary issues while exploring timeless questions. Hobson writes as if his life depends on it” (The Australian).

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My Review: The comps in the first line of the description are spot-on. This is a very *Australian* book, though. It could not have happened in the US or Canada in the way it's presented here. For one thing Author Hobson is careful to set his scenes in rural Victoria state, not some generic hot dry small town. The action is intense, and it's really the point of the read.

By which I mean a compliment...the violence in the story isn't pointless, purposeless activity to distract the reader from something...and a knock: The characters are, to be polite, thin. It is a feature of the majority of high-violence stories that the characters are not the most thoroughly fleshed out. I didn't expect them to be. I was, to my surprise, not particularly able to see how I would've known these were retirees, and their son an older man, had I not been explicitly told so once in a while. Many older couples have that kind of relationship that doesn't look very active from the outside. These two, estranged by their shared shame in their son's terrible actions, barely even register as a unitary family. I'm not implying this is unrealistic, only that it makes the course of the story less comprehensible. Penelope in particular comes across as...detached.

This not being what I was reading the book for, I mention it to others who find the absence of a character to root for a deal-breaker. This is a book about a couple living in an Australian coastal town whose lives are upended in a violent, shaking wind; they then go on to ignore their feelings in that very Australian way; then as the violent wind morphs into a whirlwind, they are forced to find a new and better response to their awful, transformed lives.

The mystery is, will they? I won't tell. I will tell you that I left this thriller entertained and glad for its availablilty in the US.

THE HEIRESS, enjoyable mildly thrilling novel inciting you to eat the rich

THE HEIRESS
RACHEL HAWKINS
St. Martin's Press
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: THERE'S NOTHING AS GOOD AS THE RICH GONE BAD.

When Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore dies, she’s not only North Carolina’s richest woman, she’s also its most notorious. The victim of a famous kidnapping as a child and a widow four times over, Ruby ruled the tiny town of Tavistock from Ashby House, her family’s estate high in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

But in the aftermath of her death, her adopted son, Camden, wants little to do with the house or the money—and even less to do with the surviving McTavishes. Instead, he rejects his inheritance, settling into a normal life as an English teacher in Colorado and marrying Jules, a woman just as eager to escape her own messy past.

Ten years later, his uncle’s death pulls Cam and Jules back into the family fold at Ashby House. Its views are just as stunning as ever, its rooms just as elegant, but the legacy of Ruby is inescapable.

And as Ashby House tightens its grip on Jules and Camden, questions about the infamous heiress come to light. Was there any truth to the persistent rumors following her disappearance as a girl? What really happened to those four husbands, who all died under mysterious circumstances? And why did she adopt Cam in the first place? Soon, Jules and Cam realize that an inheritance can entail far more than what’s written in a will—and that the bonds of family stretch far beyond the grave.

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My Review: This book should have a subtitle: "Schadenfreude Unbound" feels about right. Soapy, sudsy storytelling that plunges nasty, unkind, entitled rich idiots into a decades-long feud à la Succession, fighting over money, fighting dirty, being hateful to each other and everyone around them...the poor bastard who actually inherits the family estate and fortune had my complete sympathy for running away. I'd've done the same.

My introduction to Author Hawkins was her largely unloved-by-fans (most I know gave it about three stars to my four) novel THE VILLA (which review is linked). I liked it fine. Like this book, it was escapist suds with a mote of social commentary. This was handled in a way that it could be text or subtext, depending on the reader, and the mood.

The family-secrets trope is evergreen. I can always get behind a good story of how awful families are to each other! The more money is involved...and there is an ocean of money in this one...the more awful behavior there is. Cam, our heir-apparent, is the victim of bullying by his cousin-of-sorts Ben as they are growing up...and yet it is Ben who contacts Cam when the disrepair of Ashby House (modeled on Biltmore, the Vanderbilt mansion outside Asheville, North Carolina) becomes too much for the Southern-Gothic, heavily derivative "family" he's left in possession of it to handle on their own resources...they are far too Refined to earn their own money, do you not see? As he's the heir to all the money, and the property, but won't take them into his possession, no one can do anything without his say-so and he won't say so.

I got a frisson when I thought about how much that email must've hurt babbitty, bullying Ben.

Cam and his wife Jules, who tell the story in alternating chapters, are to all appearances a happy-enough suburban couple. They set out to assess the situation in person. The trip is from Colorado; not a minor jaunt. They arrive, and while Jules had until now had no real idea of the scope of Cam's background's wealth (a thing that set my BS filter into fine-mesh mode...no particles allowed through), she has a crash course now. Her impoverished childhood, and the sheer opulence of Cam's adoptive family's digs, sets off a major lust in Jules to stop being a hardscrabble never-was and settle in to being utterly secure.

Financially, anyway.

The adoption of a nobody by the heiress whose fortune is being fought over is unsurprisingly very unpopular with her family. The third PoV in the novel is letters sent by the dead Ruby to an unknown recipient that go a long way to explain her thinking...there are good reasons for it...and the book uses them effectively as spikes to hang the twists and turns of the plot onto. I do not particularly think that the ending was a natural outgrowth of the set-up. I was not convinced that Jules and Cam were happily married at the beginning, given the amount of uncommunicated stuff in their relationship. That this money exists and is legally her husband's money is bound to give her some Feelings. That his wife is seduced by the trappings of wealth that he saw through and rejected is bound to give Cam some Feelings. They were not ignored, these factors, but they got less oomph than I thought was their due.

I can only get up to three and a half stars because these factors kept me from getting to the ending with the author. A very entertaining book, a good commentary on the fragility of relationships, a brutal take-down of the superrich and their appalling sense of entitlement...all yes, and all positives. The ending being of a piece with the set-up...well, not for this reader.

Go into it with a heart full of malice for rich people, and enjoy the hell out of it on that level.