GHOST CITIES: A Novel, the trade of creating illusions at apotheosis

GHOST CITIES: A Novel
SIANG LU
Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From an award-winning international rising star, a dazzlingly inventive novel, spanning ancient and modern China, that interweaves stories of romance and showbiz

Inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China, Ghost Cities follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney's Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn't speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work. The incident goes viral under the hashtag #BadChinese and attracts the attention of the eccentric film director Baby Bao, who uses Lu to attract press for his latest film. Bao’s movie, based on ancient legends, is to be filmed in one of China’s “ghost cities”.

How is his relocation to a ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed—then recreated, page by page and book by book—all in the name of love and art?

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My Review: Xiang Lu...notice the author's first name's first letter is the sole difference in these names...is a man with excellent luck. Blagging his way into a job at the Sydney, Australia, consulate of China based on ethnicity and the ubiquity of Google Translate; getting fired when his incompetence at Chinese-language skills is exposed and then pilloried on social media; thereupon being discovered by a Chinese equivalent to Roger Corman, and getting hired to do the publicity on the guy's new film...no way could that be an unfolding, subtle plan on Xiang Lu's part, too much could go too wrong.

After joining Director "Baby Bao" in Port Man Tou, one of the infamous ghost cities of the title, Xiang Lu and Bao join a cast of thousands, and the spirits of Emperor Lu Huang Du and his willed-into-being alters across the multiverse. (Say the "Chinese" names aloud, more than once and with an approximate Aussie accent. It's a hoot.) The Wikipedia articles I've linked to offer some background will also afford a flattering angle of light on this slightly-too-long story, and should be read as they appear for best results. This story is subtle, is layered with jeux d'esprit, and that's the problem. Humor, satire oh dear oh my, is tough to convince people to read. Tristram Shandy and Candide aren't read as often as they're bought; and this skewering of the overweening egos that, in fact, summon their creators' visions into a weird kind of being is not at that celestial level.

Siang Lu is the 2025 Miles Franklin Award–winning author of this odd confection of past and present, reality as we know it and the self-aggrandizing reality-dismissing fantasies of two powerful creators of images. The Miles Franklin Award resembles the US Pulitzer Prize in that it is "...an annual literary prize awarded to 'a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases'." So we know the author is either born or based in Australia; the utter absence of any indication of a translator on this or his first novel, The Whitewash (no US publisher, but available on Ammy's Kindle via the Aussie publisher University of Queensland Press), and the fact he "holds a Master of Letters from the University of Sydney" all rather makes me think he either writes novels directly in English or her self-translates his work. Author Lu also "...has written for television on Malaysia's Astro network. In 2021, {he} won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer for The Whitewash. He is based in Brisbane, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia," (all from his Goodreads bio) so I'm betting he's pretty thoroughly polygot; there's no way in hell this read was made using Google Translate! So the opposite of Xiang Lu he writes in this novel, in other words.

As a story it was fun to read the ever-increasing parallel delusions of Baby Bao and Lu Huang Du, and those delusions' assuming a mirror corporeality and a deeply unsettling unity of purpose. It says so much about the visionaries of the world who dream big and act small and petty. Xiang and Baby Bao's assistant/translator/enabler Yuan (I believe this is a word for cash, get it?) are endlessly discussing how eerie it is that all Portmanteau...I mean Port Man Tou, of course I do!...are so indistinguishable, in their empty expensiveness, chewing over how it takes a powerful mind to snatch low-hanging fruit before others seize it...well, it's all very undergrad-philosophy, very obvious and ye I am absolutely certain that it will zoom over most heads like the starship Enterprise.

Maybe I'm just letting my inner old snob run the show. It made me snerk and chortle and even nod along once in a while. It's a good story, and a fine read. I'm not rating it a full five because I suspect most target readers will feel lost at key moments.

"You know," she {Yuan} says, looking out the window, "I have always had this silly thought that maybe, somehow, every city is the same. So when you go from one place to another, it's simply an illusion of flight. The take-off and landing is a simulation. In reality, you've never left the ground, or maybe you have, but are simply flying around in circles for hours, waiting for the new city to 'load.'"

Either too obvious or too weird or too simplistic, but too-too is likely to be a common response. I'm glad Author Siang made the story and that Simon & Schuster's international-lit imprint brought it out here in the US because it's the kind of story that skewers the pretensions and pretentiousness of people badly in need of it.

I'm so glad this story's coming out now, before the US version of #Jólabókaflóð that we prosaically call "fall new book releases" but are really the Yuletide rush. It could get buried now, of course, but I hope some few of y'all will see the appeal and feel the need to chortle along with Siang Lu and me.

ADA, latest fascinating idea made into a story by the eminent funny intellectual Mark Haber

ADA
MARK HABER
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 5 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: From “one of the most rigorous and serious—and anachronistic—novelists working today” (The Washington Post) comes a raucous new tale plumbing the depths of ego and ardor.

In a remote country in Europe, Gerard Desacroux IX, petty tyrant and French nationalist, wants nothing more than to be reunited with Ada, the object of his desire ever since their brief fling in Paris years before. Though Ada is on her way to visit, there are the unfortunate matters of civil unrest, assassination attempts, and Ada’s affluent (and highly inconvenient) husband to contend with before bliss is attained. Despite it all, Desacroux IX is determined that nothing—neither war, nor ominous weather, nor the rising swell of indignant peasants—shall stand between him and Ada.

Told with Mark Haber’s trademark exuberant absurdity, Ada is a comedy about the mania of power, unrequited love, and the solitude of authority.

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My Review: Berchtesgaden. Are you even serious right now. Berchtesgaden! And Desacroux being shoved out of Paris because of THE Revolution, being scion of a lineage of disgusting fascist scum! Readerly nose, meet authorial fist.

And it *barely* takes him a hundred pages to whomp up this recipe for tart-tongued satire of entitlement. It's a fast-moving read, it doesn't have digressions or discursions to slow Desacroux's millrace of thoughts as he settles into Berchtesgaden (seriously, follow the link above...it makes this read exquisitely funny!) with the intent to claim what is not his for purposes malign and bland at the same time. It goes...not well, really for anyone but most definitely hastens Desacroux's comeuppance.

At every turn, he's hemmed in, he lives in a tine, muddy place of no significance after being thrown off the world stage for utter incompetence and uselessness. Desacroux paces in circles around his "Great" Room, abusing and being abused by Hans the sole servant; when the people rise against him, he retreats into the Sword Closet, an even smaller space than the "Great" Room, one with the trappings of power all around him...and he never grasps a single one, relying on isolation to "protect" him from consequences from his real-world abuses of power. Trapped with the trappings of power, weapons he does not have the skill or the wit to wield, fearful and waspish with it, utterly determined to possess *some*thing so he chooses a woman.

Reliably a safe choice for controlling men throughout history. It's here I got to thinking about Ada, or Ardor, Nabokov's longest work of fiction with its alternative world that so deftly, so lovingly, dissects the loss of the illusion of power by dwelling on its exterior trappings; both puissance, and intimate power are lost, misused, made into glue-traps of self-delusion and narcissism. The title, obviously, is a source of my mental leap from a short satire to a long and complicated exploration of similar themes. The sound of the word "Ada" is important in both works, but I don't think it's ever obvious they're related. Maybe they aren't, in Author Haber's purposeful use of brevity, more than coincidentally resonant and then only in my fevered head. Though I'll counsel anyone who starts this read and feels like abandoning it to read it aloud to youself for a page or two: This is performative language, meant to be performed, to be inhabited like its not-quite-our reality. Make the sounds, speak the vision into your world. It will change your experience for the better. (I do this with Nabokov's prose, too.)

It did make my propulsive experience of this single paragraph of a read more piquant, so I hope it was really in Author Haber's mind nit solely mine. The fate of each Ada, and her illicit suitor, is oddly enough not the real point of the story. It ends not with a bang but a whimper, like most people's lives do without regard to their egocentric self-aggrandizement. It's here that I dock my tenth of a star from a perfect five. Desacroux clearly believes he is fated for the ending of a Great Man, and nothing short of that is an ending. *I* think he deserves to be beaten almost to death, then thrown into a muddy ditch to drown while dying of thirst: "...the importance of literature and books, not the books themselves, I’ve said, quite frankly books bore me, but the presence of books is vital, because the absence of books is quite disastrous, the proximity of books, the symbolic importance of owning books, cannot be overstated, and having books around, read or not, speaks to the intellectual vigor and peerless ambitions of their owner," and "...my grandfather stupidly, ridiculously, decided not only to purchase books and collect books and surround himself with books, which, as I’ve already said, is fine and good, but also to read them, the fool!"

Off with his authorial head, I say in my Red Queen voice, for even crafting these sentences! For sinful wicked shame on you, Haber!

SMOKING KILLS, deeply French story made accessible to Anglophone readers

SMOKING KILLS
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Louise Rogers Lalaurie)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, preorder for delivery on 5 May 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this cozy crime novel with a witty, Parisian black-comedy twist, anti-hero Fabrice can only make smoking pleasurable by committing the ultimate crime

How far would you go to enjoy a cigarette?

When headhunter Fabrice Valantine faces a smoking ban at work, he decides to undertake a course of hypnotherapy to rid himself of the habit. At first the treatment works, but his stress levels begin to rise when he is passed over for an important promotion and he finds himself lighting up again—but with none of his previous enjoyment.

Then he discovers something terrible: he accidentally causes a man’s death, and, needing a cigarette to calm his nerves, he enjoys it more than any other previous smoke. What if he now needs to kill someone every time he wants to properly appreciate his next Benson and Hedges?

Unwilling to return to the numbness of a life without pleasurable smoking, Fabrice launches into a life of crime, finding ever more original murder methods—including the use of a poisonous Ecuadorean frog.

A blackly comic story of addiction and transgression, this is also an exploration of the human need for fulfillment, and the lengths we will go to in order to find it. In the end the book provokes us to question the limits we place on ourselves, and the true definition of joy.

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My Review: Fabrice Valantine is in prison. He is so an unrepentant smoker, as the title implies, that he sees the joy of smoking as superseding others' right to life. Not quite the spin on the title you expected, eh what?

How a professional headhunter (noun Wiktionary serves three senses of the word:
A savage who cuts off the heads of his enemies, and preserves them as trophies.
One who recruits senior personnel for a company.
A pitcher who throws at the batter's head.)
Of these three I think the fairest to apply here is the third; the author intends the second; and implicit in all three is the first) with a genuine love affair with/oral fixation on the dick-shaped tubes of chemicals that, when ignited, provide particulate delivery directly into one's mucous membranes...and those of hundreds of others who happen to be passing by. When absolutely, as a condition of employment, required to stop smoking, Fabrice resorts to hypnotism. It works.

Sort of.

Fabrice loses the pleasure of smoking ("I faced these painful hours with no solace whatsoever, just the dusty taste of my cigarettes and the utter ineffectiveness of the nicotine"), not the need to smoke. Until after an awful, awful accident where someone loses their future to death due to his carelessness, the frisson of smoking returns. So it wasn't permanently removed by hypnosis, only recalibrated to require extreme stimulation to experience it. Being a smoker therefore selfish and self-obsessed, this shows a path forward into pleasure that Fabrice, narrating his story from prison, chooses to follow. But he's careful! He only kills those whose loss won't matter! Isn't he due a reward for, as I often say, cleanin' the gene pool?

A fantastical noir-tinged laugh-out-loud satire of capitalism is one way to see this story. So is a comedy of manners, replete with stock characters (Fabrice as Gordon Gekko leaps to mind). Most of all, though, I want you to read this pinnacle of the translator's art. Louise Rogers Lalaurie has rendered into high-level, delightfully readable English one of the most vibe-dependent reads from the very French pen of Author Laurain. It's not this team's first collaboration...I do not know if the author and the translator worked together to create their magic, but I'm inclined to view the evidence as supporting that interpretation...as the current rush of Pushkin Press's republications attests. I'm a fan because I think Author Laurain chooses his targets well. I'm a fan because the translator understands on a deep level the targets, their cultural position in France, and the sense of the language the author chooses to use and renders it into a different culture recognizably. Her skill is to make this extremely French book humorous in the extremely different cultural valences of English. That is a tremendous skill.

A book to savor like one's last cigarette.

MUSEUM OF DEGENERATES: Portraits of the American Grotesque, a body of work more like a corpse, a lych-gate for your mind

MUSEUM OF DEGENERATES: Portraits of the American Grotesque
ELI VALLEY
O/R Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$44.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Museum of Degenerates invites you to a delirious display of art by one of contemporary America’s most original and incendiary political cartoonists. Eli Valley’s extraordinary work is a scathing indictment of the entire American polity, with a particular focus on the issues of Israel and Judaism at a time when these have moved to the center of public debate and action.

In these pages, Valley tips a homburg to German expressionists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix who featured in “The Exhibition of Degenerate Art,” a 1937 Munich show that sought to ridicule the work of artists critical of Hitler’s fascist regime. In an aesthetic that is strikingly original, Valley also draws on early twentieth-century American Yiddish cartoons and the work of artists who created the helter-skelter exuberance of MAD comics in the 1950s.

Valley’s own art, accompanied here by extensive descriptions of its genesis and context, is a howl of protest against the political, cultural and media elites driving America into an authoritarian abyss. Here is anger, pure and hot, expressed in exquisite detail and, often, disturbingly funny.

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My Review: "Disturbingly funny" from the synopsis above is spot-on. This editorial artwork is disturbing. It can be funny. It disturbed me to find some of it funny. It was a funny kind of disturbing. I'm sure I can recombine those ideas in more apt ways, but I trust my point is made: Épater la bourgeoisie is the modus operandi of this artist. It feels...unsettling, "funny" or weird and certainly unnatural to laugh at the present moment rendered into highly stylized art.

Funny. Sick-making. A moldy shar-pei corpse with a hatespeech ikon in and on it. Somehow it's still funny. Sorta.

Like a zombie movie. Into the fire with you! These zombies don't want braaaiiinnns but roasted flesh.

On every axis I am appalled and offended...less by the artwork than the accuracy of the commentary. Bibi showed his luuuv to the bankster-in-chief by accepting some Gaza deal that kept the dollars flowing. Never mind how ridiculously ineffective it was at justice, or even fairness.

If the revolution needs a poster, let this be it.

I suspect most of y'all are thoroughly turned off by now, so I'll stop. The thing that Eli Valley does is the thing all editorial cartoonists strive to do: exaggerate the ghastly into absurdity. Shock the viewer into recognizing how demented and distorted the discourse he's skewering is. The text of the artist's thought processes and inspirations will make a reasonable person as mad...in all senses...as he is himself.

I'm positive offense is intended by Eli Valley; I'm positive offenseiveness is deployed with purpose, can't say "care" but intent and purpose make up for it. In times of horror, use the horror of the times to motivate the audience to make it stop.

This is not a test. The signal is repeating; the instructions are....

ROUGE, more than a color...a way of life and a (bad) reason to live

ROUGE
MONA AWAD
Simon Element
$28.00 hardcover, available now

One of Literary Hub's Best Reads od 2023!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?

For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.

Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.

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My Review: I had the kind of mother who told her daughters, "you have to suffer for beauty, girls." Noelle reminded me a lot of Mama. Deeply shallow, focused to the exclusion of all else on irrelevancies, fripperies, and appearances, Noelle's my definition of toxic womanhood. Also very much the embodiment of what women were and are told they were supposed to be, to care about, and to focus on.

How horrifying. How titanically wasteful.

And how ripe for a loud, satirical takedown, which Author Awad delivers. Adding a supernatural edge to it, no less.

This kind of dark, menacing take on consumerism's extra-toxic focus on women and the messaging aimed squarely at their money is something I wish more women wrote. I remember my mother's obsessive regimens for her skin and how many perfumey unguents and masks she would bring home from the department store. I never saw the dentist and got one pair of glasses, one pair of shoes a year...she had dozens of these things littering her bathroom counter. Yep. I know this obsession is real.

The reality of it made, for me, the supernatural element...humorous, in a very black and cynical way. Of course there must be some awful, evil outside agent making us feel this way...no rational person would surrender to obsession so easily, you can hear the self-justifiers and excusers say. It was genius for Author Awad to make those evil outside agents the malevolent supernatural entities of La Maison de Méduse instead of the blandly corporate agents of evil called Lanvin, Coty, Revlon, et alii.

This gives her so much more latitude to poke fun, too. She's got her sights on the obsession with surfaces, and the ease of trapping women with such simple lures as beauty and youthful appearance. There's a whiff of colorism in the discussions of "managing one's skin tone" that made me cringe. It rang all the more loudly in my ears after I read her sketch of the beauty obsession that's gripped her middle-aged self in The Walrus (here). What a wonderful, wry way to send up one's own foibles and insecurities, I thought. What a talent this author has to make me, a certifiable man and victim of neglect by a beauty addict, read the story with such intensity and interest.

It didn't hurt that Author Awad wrote in that piece:

A bookseller once told me that when you buy a book, you’re also buying the idea of time in which to read it. A down payment on an extension of life, a shimmer of immortality. With my growing collection of serums, I was perhaps seeking something similarly existential. An illusion of control. A staving off of death.

Yep, as the saying goes, thass me.

Why I'd say to read it is that it's a great antidote to the huge ocean of mediocre man-blaming same-ol' same-ol' women's fiction. It's bracingly honest about the internal roots of obsession without ever excusing the forces outside that drive to turn it, purely for profit, into addiction.

GO BACK AT ONCE, a newly published novel not seen until after Robert Aickman's death

GO BACK AT ONCE
ROBERT AICKMAN
And Other Stories (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$17.95 trade paper, available 11 January 2022

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A gloriously eccentric fantasy by the ‘most profound writer of what we call horror stories.’ Peter Straub

Completed by Robert Aickman in 1975, but unpublished in his lifetime and never before widely available, Go Back at Once is a delicious, delirious comic fantasy about the joys and terrors experienced by two young women seeking to escape the degradations of our technological and conformist age by fleeing to a chaotic, poet-ruled utopia.

Snobbish yet humane, reactionary yet camp, strait-laced yet queer, old-fashioned yet radical, Go Back at Once reveals Robert Aickman as a master not only of the ‘strange story’, but a satirist deserving of a place alongside the mischievous and venomous greats of the inter-war canon: Firbank, Compton-Burnett, Waugh, Powell.

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My Review: I'm quite sure a lot of people will not like this book very much.

Sad, but inevitable; Aickman's work, when outside the unsettling norm of it, is quite an ask. You're going to meet Types, not characters, ones whose existence is actual, but susceptible to change in the century since the story...here based on the Free State of Fiume...is set. There are the expected players, if you've been reading British literature a long time, or are enamored of E.F. Benson or Ronald Firbank. There are the stock situations, eg the defended virtue of one of the leads. There is a tone of facetious, in fact malicious, judgment of those who express any notion of Idealism or Utopian thought.

Am I putting you off? I don't mean to; I want, though, there to be no misunderstanding about the book you're going to read: This is not ghost-story unease-inducing Aickman; this is sharply observant, unsparingly opinionated Aickman. It's not like we don't see this Aickman in his other works (or in his life, just read about how viciously he treated his co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association!); but this novel, centered on Cressida and Vivien as they leave school and move in with Vivienne's Aunt Agnes the free-spirited divorcée, shoves the mean-girl pedal to the floor.

The bitchiness of Aickman's observations is *epic* and unsparing and unerring. His trademark ambiguity is largely absent, in that he's unambiguously making the most savage sport of the people on these pages. It does become rather one-note as time passes in their company. If that note is to one's taste, that's all right. If it isn't, stop reading immediately because it won't change.

I was deeply enmeshed in this story despite its waspish tone. I am, perhaps, a touch on the waspish side, so I empathized with Aickman's desire to bat away the cigarette smoke of Fame and Adulation that surround those whose life-choices make no sense seen face-on. The Great Revolutionaries whose Ideas are Noble, but whose grasp of governance and finance is wanting, are a dime a dozen. D'Annunzio, whose life makes excellent reading, clearly fell into that category. (Though I think the judgment of modern people that he's a stalking goat for fascism is a great deal too harsh.) His treatment here, at the very end of the story, was hilarious if savage. No less savage was Aickman's invented future for Vivien and Cressida, whose identities I am not familiar enough with the literati of the period to tease out...though I hoped for Ivy Compton-Burnett and that Jourdain woman, they're entirely too old...a descent into what was a marriage in all but name, without a single sexual suggestion being made by the author.

Given his own repressed gayness, that can't come as a surprise. Merely being married to a woman (called "Ray" for heavens' sake!) for seventeen years didn't prevent him from being (discreetly!) known to have had liaisons with like-minded men. It was the way of that world, that time. It shows up in this story with lots of queer-coding, the way "foreign" people simply appear naked or are...touchy-feely, shall we say. Given that he died in 1981, one would've thought he'd've made a bit better peace with his gayness; this, however, did not occur. I suspect that he'd be a closet case even had he been born in 1964 not 1914. Some people just are.

One of the great pleasures of this kind of story is its structure. It reminded me a great deal of Candide, shorter journeys but just as much to-in and fro-ing where we are. There's also a lot of wetness, dunkings in the sea, raining, all the cold, clammy feels that brings up; lots of clothes-being-changed, shared, in general a sense of the instability of each character's presentation of self that Voltaire gloried in. Also Candidely is the sexual innocence of the young leads, their almost preternatural resistance to (and embattled saving of in one case) losing their innocent insensitivity to the Charybdis-level undercurrents flowing around them.

It won't be for everyone, but those it's for will batten upon its high-calorie low-nutrition richness.