THE JAGUAR MASK, a beautiful tale of working with people not like you to accomplish things that need doing

THE JAGUAR MASK
MICHAEL J. DeLUCA
Stelliform Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Felipe K’icab doesn’t know who he is. He only knows he was born different than his human family, and he can’t relax unless he’s blasting reggaeton in his cab weaving through the streets of Guatemala City. The jaguar mask and his other human faces keep him safe–until El Bufo, a corrupt ex-cop, commandeers his cab and drags Felipe into a murder conspiracy investigation, trying to expose the foreign-backed regime’s ecocidal and genocidal past.

Cristina Ramos knows who her mother’s killers are. After witnessing the murder in a vision, she struggles to keep her grieving family from falling apart. When El Bufo’s relentless vendetta throws Felipe into her life amid increasing civil unrest, Felipe and Cristina must overcome generations of institutionalized silence, uncover the secrets of their powers, and forge a path to justice, or else be swept away by another wave of violence.

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My Review: A werejaguar and a corrupt ex-cop drive a revenge/vengeance plot that cuts the nonsense out of criminally culpable ecocide. Different agendas make them extremely effective in cooperation. Cristina adds a psychic flair to a deeply unlikely scoobygroup, all with very different...even conflicting...agendas for their actions.

But those actions are all in immediate harmony, so they go well. Proof that people with different agendas are well-advised to focus on an immediate goal that suits each. Let the longer-term issues go; make common cause with anyone who can help you get urgent business done; keep your ears open for what those you're working with do not know they are telling you because all information is useful.

Ki'cab, our werejaguar, is the most immediately appealing and relatable character for me. He feels unsafe in his home, so goes to the big city and flourishes in his own patchwork piecemeal way. His human mask is the one that fits least well, perfectly understandably given how awful Humanity is, how poorly the weres fare at their hands. I'm with ya all the way, soul sibling. He has many masks, though, and wears them to accomplish different tasks for which he needs to be a slightly different guy. It's fascinating! I love that Ki'cab lives with a woman who loves and commits to life with Aníbal, her transmasc boyfriend. I love that he cares more for the needs and dignity of his friends than for abstractions like Morality and Legality. Felipe Ki'cab, you're the human in this book that I want to grow up to be.

El Bufo and Cristina are decent enough characters, each is presented as a human being with motivations and reasons for their lives and actions; it's no fault of writing or characterization that I'm less interested in either of them. Cristina's got the grief of knowing the truth, seeing it clearly in front of her eyes, and not being able to alter its happening (Cassandra deserves a better rep in our culture); El Bufo ("The Toad") is presented such that empathizing with him is hard.

Hard for monoglot readers will be contextually-clued-in words from Spanish; I hear this, but it's so incomprehensible to me y'all find it troublesome to read "foreign" words when this amazing tool the internet will tell you what anything you don't know means in English. I'm more empathetic with those unfamiliar with Guatemala, as my own acquaintance is nodding at best, relying on a friend who lived there ages ago. I find learning about places dimly familiar or utterly unfamiliar fun; if you don't treat them like Mordor or Arrakis, places impossible and unreal, and just get on with reading.

I'll say that the beginning say 15% will challenge you. It is not entirely in medias res, but gets really close to it. If that's just intolerable to you as a reader, this might not be the read for you. I can't offer an all-5 rating because of that, but can say I think you'd do well to give the sample a read. Maybe the prose will woo you in....

THE HENRY HOKE PAGE: OPEN THROAT, how did Author Hoke think of a puma being queer?! & STICKER, queer boyhood through the lens of stickers

OPEN THROAT
HENRY HOKE
MCD x FSG
$25.00 hardcover, available now

PICADOR OFFERS THE TRADE PAPERBACK ON 4 JUNE 2024. It retails for $17.00.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In elegiac prose woven with humor, imagination, sensuality, and tragedy, Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world told by a lovable mountain lion.

A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting the welfare of a nearby homeless encampment, observing obnoxious hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. “I have so much language in my brain,” our lion says, “and nowhere to put it.”

When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call “ellay.” As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief, while scrambling to avoid earthquakes, floods, and the noise of their own conflicted psyche. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?

In elegiac prose woven with humor, imagination, sensuality, and tragedy, Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world told by a lovable mountain lion. Both feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings mythmaking to real life.

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My Review: From the off, I wasn't sure about this...how did Author Hoke think of a puma being queer?! What kind of twee nonsense is a whole novel told from the point of view, nay, in the voice of, an animal going to be?!

Oh me of little faith.

What dazzles and delights me about this read is the meditations on being and becoming a sentient individual in the shadow of trauma and persecution, being and becoming an existential threat to creatures you're not able quite to emulate but whose world you inhabit. It's never about you, the fear and the anger; it's about what They bring with them into the tiny corner of space They condescend to allow you to roam in so long as you don't transgress Their amorphous, undefined boundaries.

Oh wait...that's pretty much a perfect summation of being queer in the cishet world.

Right there came my happiest moment in this read. I felt so exactly in tune with this puma. I felt so completely free to be in his head, and to enjoy his meditations on what the hell it is humans think they're doing. It's not quite what our lion thinks it is, of course, but he's a savvy old survivor with very keen senses...so he's often Right even when he's factually incorrect.

Of course, I'm tiresomely wedded to certain perceptual filters, and kept jumping a little in my seat when the cat would describe, eg, cars as being metal objects...what's a cat know about metal, my ill-tempered filing elf who lives in my brain rent-free and refuses to come up with words and/or data when I want them but freely kibitzes on minor points of fantasy in excellent reads, wanted to know. The cat who knows about metal should also know what a lighter is, and call it by name. Irritating damned elf needs to get a grip on what its actual job desciption requires.

So no five full stars. If fantasy is to work, it needs to make internal sense and be consistent in its fantastical dimensions...see Chouette for a similarly batshit crazy idea that works on this specific level better than Open Throat does.

But don't think for a second I am warning you off this short, concentrated, pithy read. I am not. I am waving my arms at you to get you to join me over here in the scrubby, hot, dry edgeland with this wonderful old cat as his world, never safe, takes on another configuration of threat.

He and I? We're hangin' as we await some kind of ending. Whatever we once thought we were doing, it's no longer what They want us to. And there's a pont in life where the reality of the exercise reveals itself in blinding bright light and inarguable simplicity. It's very much a before-and-after moment in one's life.

“I’m old because I’m not dead.”


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

STICKER
HENRY HOKE
Bloomsbury USA
$14.95 trade paper

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Stickers adorn our first memories, dot our notebooks and our walls, are stuck annoyingly on fruit, and accompany us into adulthood to announce our beliefs from car bumpers. They hold surprising power in their ability to define and provoke, and hold a strange steadfast presence in our age of fading physical media. Henry Hoke employs a constellation of stickers to explore queer boyhood, parental disability, and ancestral violence.

A memoir in 20 stickers, Sticker is set against the backdrop of the encroaching neo-fascist presence in Hoke's hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, which results in the fatal terrorist attack of August 12th and its national aftermath.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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My Review: Twenty little meditative essays inspired by a ubiquitous part of 1980s and 1990s childhoods: Stickers. (GAWD how I hated the damned things. "Easy release" my lily-white one! I was still finding them on the undersides of chairs and backs of paintings in 2010.)

Author Hoke shines in these quick hits of memory, bringing the reader back into his world as it was and thinking about his various challenges...disabled mother in a wheelchair, absent father, being queer in Charlottesville, Virginia...and the roots his white self has in the South, with all the freight that implies.

He reckons with comparatively large parts of his ancestral racism; he states that, with all its contradictions, he intends this read to make his identity "...a little more tangible." Without being acquainted with the gentleman, I feel that I have a picture of him as a person that would never be obtainable through any more rigorous, structured look at what makes a person into the unique self they are. No, it's not autobiography, or even memoir, it's that rare thing : The reflective essay, the thoughtful, loosely organized look into the back corners of the closets and the darker recesses of the attic for the bright, shiny things once delighted in and now gathering patina and dust in unused parts of one's mind

I enjoyed myself as I wandered around with Author Hoke as he showed me his once-prized gewgaws and knick-knacks. Join us for a good old wander.

THE STRANGEST, or "Meursault for the Modern Cyberworld"...outstanding!

THE STRANGEST
MICHAEL J. SEIDLINGER
O/R Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Michael Seidlinger has dared tackle one of the literary classics of the 20th century literature and reimagined it for the 21st: and in Albert Camus’ anti-hero Meursault, at once apathetic and violent, unable to connect with his fellow humans, Seidlinger exhumes a perfect metaphor for the Internet Generation. Zachary Weinham, anchorless in terms of morals and committed to nothing except commenting on comments and their comments etc., finds himself involved in the sinister machinations of Rios, someone he meets in a bar, and allows himself to be set up—whether out of apathy or a desire for self-destruction it’s hard to tell. A murder ensues. Shunned by his friends and associates, not sure of what he has gotten into, Zachary heads for confrontation with society—and his own moral values.

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My Review: Routine blog readers will recall Michael Seidlinger's name. The Fun We've Had was 2014's 6-stars-of-five read; Mother of a Machine Gun, a novella deconstructing Identity and Motherhood from a son's perspective; Falter Kingdom, Anybody Home?, all of them four star-plus reads for me. This book's appeal to me wasn't as immediate or as visceral as the other reads were. I'm somewhat trapped in Meursault's Otherness via Camus. Exploring his identity further didn't necessarily strike me as urgent, and there's nothing Michael Seidlinger creates that stops short of Urgency.

I've said of him before:

Every writer needs a trope. Seidlinger's is musical brevity. He'd be called a poet if he made less sense.
–and–
Seidlinger is what a mating between Djuna Barnes and Samuel Beckett would've produced: Illusionless in his pessimism, joyful in his schadenfreude, and both human and humane enough to wrap his bitter pills in pretty words.

I stand by those words, I believe them to be fair in their assessment of his talent and his presentation of it. So this book? It came out almost a decade ago and...I wasn't a fan, exactly, because...well...Meursault.

In my never-ending quest to tie up loose ends, since I can't tie Michael up but *can* finish reviewing the DRCs of his work that I have, I thought a real review of this book to end 2022 would feel condign.

When taking on classics, there are two ways to approach them from a positive energy field: Hommage or retelling. Leave it to a poet to say, "naaah," and enter into a dialogue with the piece. The Stranger, subject of Camus's astonishing and ever-fresh novella of Meursault's crime and punishment, is now about Zachary, The Strangest...the man, like Guy is to Bruno from Strangers on a Train, whose blankness is observing the surfaces of a mediated landscape with no concrete referents. Only what is outside The Strangest is real. This, of course, means he has no reality because his internal world is only the external world reflected on the shiny, frictionless surfaces of his many mirrors. Like a human Hubble Space Telescope, he has only the visible light of distant, unreachable reality to furnish meaning and encourage existence.

What makes that so dangerous is visible in the social-media obsessed, whipped to a froth "activism" and "radicalization" of many, many empty shells with AR-15s. Nothing outside can give a person a core, as Camus made plain in Meursault's completely avoidable descent into murder. And here, though it's framed by a modern concern unknown to the Camus of 1944, we're going down the same rabbit-hole. No core? Barely a shell! Constantly obsessed with fitting in, The Strangest isn't ever going to achieve that.

"For a line to exist, it would first have to be crossed."

You can't fit if you have no shape.

And that is the thing, in 2015, Michael Seidlinger saw and said that, to my slight embarrassment, I did not pay enough attention to. The way that Meursault would go along the hot and sandy beach in Algeria to get along was fundamentally different from The Strangest's endlessly, heatlessly reflective but never reflexive attempts to build Reality from the weak material of light. There is no real reason not to murder someone, a lot of someones in fact, if there is no texture or heft to the world for you. It's light, from a screen or from a geometric solid, it's only light and therefore has only the meaning your analysis gives it.

If light and its shadows are all you possess, there is no reason to obsess over life and fate and pain and grief. Death is only the light going out, only the local light covered or extinguished. Light still exists. Shadows and darkness aren't real.

Maybe one of the most chilling meditations I've read in 2022. I can't call it perfect...it's cold and disconnected, so doesn't make the impact something so impartant should...but I can call it excellent. Highly recommended for serious thinkers about twenty-first century life and society.

APPLESEED, Matt Bell's breakout big-ideas big book or I miss my guess

APPLESEED
MATT BELL
Custom House
$27.99 hardcover, available now

TRADE PAPER EDITION AVAILABLE FOR $17.99

Shortlisted for the inaugural Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction! Winners announced 21 October 2022.

Rating: 4.75* of five

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK FOR 2021!

A BEST-OF-2021 PICK FROM NPR BOOKS!

The Publisher Says: In the vein of Neal Stephenson and Jeff VanderMeer, an epic speculative novel from Young Lions Fiction Award–finalist Matt Bell, a breakout book that explores climate change, manifest destiny, humanity's unchecked exploitation of natural resources, and the small but powerful magic contained within every single apple.

In eighteenth-century Ohio, two brothers travel into the wooded frontier, planting apple orchards from which they plan to profit in the years to come. As they remake the wilderness in their own image, planning for a future of settlement and civilization, the long-held bonds and secrets between the two will be tested, fractured and broken—and possibly healed.

Fifty years from now, in the second half of the twenty-first century, climate change has ravaged the Earth. Having invested early in genetic engineering and food science, one company now owns all the world’s resources. But a growing resistance is working to redistribute both land and power—and in a pivotal moment for the future of humanity, one of the company’s original founders will return to headquarters, intending to destroy what he helped build.

A thousand years in the future, North America is covered by a massive sheet of ice. One lonely sentient being inhabits a tech station on top of the glacier—and in a daring and seemingly impossible quest, sets out to follow a homing beacon across the continent in the hopes of discovering the last remnant of civilization.

Hugely ambitious in scope and theme, Appleseed is the breakout novel from a writer “as self-assured as he is audacious” (NPR) who “may well have invented the pulse-pounding novel of ideas” (Jess Walter). Part speculative epic, part tech thriller, part reinvented fairy tale, Appleseed is an unforgettable meditation on climate change; corporate, civic, and familial responsibility; manifest destiny; and the myths and legends that sustain us all.

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My Review: When I read Author Bell's 2013 novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, it was a startling experience. Sadly, it came at almost exactly the same time as my epic emotional collapse so I've only recently reviewed it. Let me tell you now, in brief, why I think it was an extraordinarily good read: Myth-making never ceases, no culture is without its myths; that book was an exploration of The Couple Myth at length; and there is no better way to make myths than to put the most complete possible vocabulary of the day around them. Appleseed is a fuller exploration of this technique applied to Climate Change.

What myths are we exploring this time...is there a myth-set tale that this three-handed sonata plays on? Yes...the title's the first giveaway, there's a definite connection to the Johnny Appleseed myth made from John Chapman's actual life spent planting the American West with economically useful apple trees in advance of the settlers coming to Ohio (yes, that *was* the West then, surprising isn't it two hundred years on).

Nathaniel, older human brother of Chapman the faun, does the work of finding the way, avoiding the humans who would hurt or kill his behornèd brother of the golden eyes and hoofed legs. Chapman knows the land, even the land he's never been on. It is his nature. And we all know what happens to Nature, don't we. The greater glory of a christian god is costly, always and in all ways; do you wish to continue past the point of no return?

John lives in our near-term future, a recycler busily trying to undo the Works of Man that Chapman and Nathaniel, in their innocence, believe to be Progress instead of progressive rot. He travels alone when we meet him...he is looking for his (female, of course) buddy/pal/squeeze because, well, humans need each other. His dystopia, an Amercan West (the one we know as such today) is tinder-dry, eczema-dotted with our dams and roads and ghosts of towns that he wants to render inoperable and irreparable. Needless to say, the corporate entity that actually, formally, owns the whole expanse doesn't like some rando ruining perfectly usable infrastructure. Especially now that all those pesky people aren't cluttering it up. The slow reveal of why John and his ex are doing what they're doing to re-wild the West is a piece of misdirection I can't quite bring myself to spoil...but suffice it to say the era of mythmaking about Man's Plenipotentiary Powers à la Sisyphus is not over yet.

And then there's C-432. This being lives many, many lives in our distant, glacier-scraped future. This way of live is enabled by spelunking the crevasses that always open in craters and reclaiming for reuse whatever materials from the time before are reclaimable. We're not-quite told that C-432 is a clone host for the consciousness of an earlier human...or maybe faun? note initial...and this iteration/incarnation is a risk-averse, therefore old, entity facing the reality that a scavenger doesn't produce anything so will, inevitably, pass from the scene. As a way of life it is severely limited.

But, in each of these story lines, there is a leitmotif, a through-line, that Author Bell resurfaces for your easter-egging pleasure. The Loom might be my favorite fictional technology ever; the uses of the scavenged materials, the most poignant. The apple...the choice that C-432 has to make...there are absolutely delightful connections made among these grace notes. The complexity of the read is one of its pleasures and I encourage you, like you would with any rich and calorific consumable, to go slowly...make it last. Think about it as you go to sleep, dream its scenes as you're processing its sweet, sonorous prose.

So why, if I'm practically crooning my pleasure in hopes of luring you to read it, am I rating it less than five full stars?

Because, while I as a lifelong inhabitant of this country appreciate its US-centered myth-making and its implicit acceptance that our (in)actions are largely responsible for this disaster, it feels wrong to simply dismiss with a cursory glance the planet-wide scale of it. Because there's a weird, unnecessary straight-man sex scene that jolts progress to a halt while we indulge y'all's ugly needs. Because the ending...while interesting...wasn't anything like the rest of the book so felt merged from a different FTP with middling success.

None of those things rise above the level of quibbles because the gestalt carries the day. There is such a beautiful tapestry woven of these lovely words. I've avoided quoting them to you because, well, which ones? Why those? Where's the perfect quote for this idea...this one, that one, no no the other one...and it got headachey trying to figure it out.

What didn't get headachey was this phrase, this simple phrase, that says everything the book and the future need you to know: "No matter what you do, there will never be more time left to act than there is now."

A call to arms, a fable of consequences, a myth of magisterial beauty and magical urgency.