PINEAPPLE, a comic novel about the end of civilization told in verse...wait! Come back! It's good!

PINEAPPLE
JOE TAYLOR
Sagging Meniscus Press
$22 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Welcome to Los Alamos, where the big-brained boys and girls are at it again. But atoms have turned passé: now it's the Higgs boson, which they are using to develop a clean, efficient weapon of mini-destruction, mysteriously dropping bodies into junior black holes within a fifty mile radius. Moreover, they're accomplishing this perfidy in comic rhyming quatrains. Can an intrepid group of six amateur do-gooders resolve the mystery and prevent the unleashing of this new WMD?

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. ALSO, I'VE KNOWN THE AUTHOR FOR A QUARTER CENTURY.

My Review: But anyone who's ever had a chance to hear my mouth on the subject of poetry knows that the best a friend who commits versification can hope for is silence from my general direction. It's better than what I'm likely to say, I assure you.

The sharp-eyed among y'all will note that this is a review, and carries a star rating, and isn't a bad rating at all. What gives? Well gather round, kiddies, and let Uncle Daddy tell you a little tale.

Waaaaaay back in the Mists of Time, I was a literary agent. A manuscript sailed over the transom one day, a humorous and bitter comedic romp about the North American Executive council of witches and their attempts to come to grips with a very, very bad madre of a witch in Florida (where else?) who was upsetting the cosmic balance in a big, nasty way. I was hooked. This was a decade before the paranormal book boom and I was sure the sheer verve and delight of the novel could ignite a movement.

Publishers disagreed.

It was Joe Taylor's manuscript that I couldn't, to my eternal chagrin, sell. But never mind, Joe was publishing good books via Livingston Press! Maybe I could, you know, movies or...but no. Sad to say, nothing ever eventuated except my snarky correspondence with Joe and a number of laugh-out-loud funny phone calls over the years.

So one fine day not so long ago, I got a missive from Joe telling me about this wizard idea he had for a comic novel about quantum mechanics (he's prone to saying things like that, I wasn't especially worried) where the End of the World was going to be brought about. Uh-huh, sounds cool, I said. Then Joe said IT: "I'm going to write it in rhyming quatrains."

"Are you out of your MIND? Joe, do you not WANT people to read your stuff?!" I shouted at my computer screen as I typed those very words.

Having heard the identical sentiments from me before about his dialect novel Oldcat and Ms. Puss, Joe tinkled a merry laugh and went about committing versification concerning quantum physics and the End of the World.

It's a darn good thing he doesn't listen to me. This is a comic novel of sharp, biting wit. This is poetry *about* something, not just its own pit-sniffin' self. This is what Daniel Defoe would be doing were his rotting zombie corpse to get access to a PC and a blogging platform.

It's impossible to quote poetry in a review. Well, damn near. And narrative poetry? Fuggeddaboudit.

It was a dark and bleary night. Which means,
I s'pose, Ol' Sol done gave it a rest.
Dave's dad, bandanna in teeth, was last Sol'd seen.
Now Ms. Moon watches two Hansons, a harsher test.

Do you think, by the way, sun and moon
communicate? Morse code? Telepathy?
Ah, but I promised no spiritual loony tune.
Still, it'd be nice to think they share empathy.

Nice layers of humor in there, doncha think? Suns and sons and moons and loonys...Joe knows how to make a word nerd grin, always has, and bless his cotton socks for it.

Will this book light everyone's fire? Nope. Will it light yours? If you're reading my blog, chances are it will. *I* liked a book of poetry! Even Joe was gobsmacked about that. Go on, be a devil, try out a small indie press's big indie author's seriously weird novel-in-verse. Hey, even if you hate it, you're gonna score big on the cooler-than-thou meter (see what I did there? haw) just having it on the coffee table.

WHITE SILENCE, a suspenseful thriller to give your Disaster Magnet friend

WHITE SILENCE
JODI TAYLOR (Elizabeth Cage #1)
Headline Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: "I don't know who I am. I don't know what I am."

Elizabeth Cage is a child when she discovers that there are things in this world that only she can see. But she doesn’t want to see them and she definitely doesn’t want them to see her.

What is a curse to Elizabeth is a gift to others – a very valuable gift they want to control.

When her husband dies, Elizabeth’s world descends into a nightmare. But as she tries to piece her life back together, she discovers that not everything is as it seems.

Alone in a strange and frightening world, she’s a vulnerable target to forces beyond her control.

And she knows that she can’t trust anyone…

White Silence is a twisty supernatural thriller that will have you on the edge of your seat.

My Review: I cannot believe I did it voluntarily. I mean, I'm completely current in Author Taylor's The Chronicles of St Mary's series...eight novels, eleven novellas and stories released...so I can't plead ignorance of her vicious, violent, eviscerating cruelty. I have been reduced to a quivering heap of snot and tears by Author Taylor on more than one occasion. It's not like I didn't buy the book aware of what would happen to me.

In fact I was unable to read a part of the book around 16-17% because it triggered my personal issues around claustrophobia. I solved this by skipping ahead to the next chapter and inferring what happened from what was then going on. It was too much for my frail little fleur of a heart to live through Mrs Cage's horrid experience, and then in the chapter I skipped to there was an equally awful moment of encavmaphobia (google it) when I thought "oh right then, I'm going to close this file and quietly remove the book from my Kindle" but, at the end of the day, left it on there and just didn't read anymore.

Two months passed. I finished a romantic novel, last in a series I've been following despite the absurd and disgusting and overused winking trope that author insists on fouling her books with, when I thought to myself, "Self," I thought, "never in all the history of personkind would Author Taylor have a character *shudder* wink at another character. You are safe, Self, so finish up White Silence at last."

I did. I am so glad. (There was no winking.)

While Elizabeth Cage doesn't have a smooth ride in this book, she does have a fascinating psionic power and the range to use it. She is clearly unmoored by her beloved husband's death. She forms an attachment to a damaged spy that came rather out of nowhere. Her life is turned upside down by several of Author Taylor's trademark dreadful, sadistic maulings of her readers' emotions. I mean characters' arcs, silly me.

There is so much that happens in this book that giving a book report is almost desirable, but I shall refrain because spoilers make people very angry. Suffice to say that each event in the book will have repercussions within seismic shifts atop temporal tsunamis. Absolutely nothing is as it seems, which we know from about the 90% mark on, though the full and devious range of Author Taylor's sadism hasn't come anywhere near to being tested or revealed.

*happy sigh*

So I tell you true, reader, the Disaster Magnet (aka Jodi Taylor follower via the Chronicles of St Mary's) that you love will adore this book. You will get so many bonus points with your Disaster Magnet that you could come out as a 45 supporter or Brexiteer and earn no more than a hurt look and some tutting. And it will guarantee several hours of dead silence as your beloved slurps it down in which you can watch sports or planetary explosion movies or even go out with your buds and get no more than a vague wave and distracted "take your mother with you."

POTIKI, almost forty-year-old Kiwi tale of lives changed by modernity

POTIKI
PATRICIA GRACE
University of Hawaii Press
$20.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Roimata and her family have rejected cities and unemployment to return to the land. Here they live a rural life, fishing and farming just enough for their own plates. But when they are approached by property developers, they suddenly find their land, livelihood and community under threat.

It is the younger generation who prove that it is possible to fight back: Manu, child with nightmares, who was schooled at home and fostered a new heart in the community; James, the wood carver, who will retell their genealogies with his hands; Toko, the Prophet Child who knows he won't live long, and who warns as a young boy that the stories will change; and Tangimoana, lawyer, daughter and wilful loner, who sees 'the strength of a branch to be not in its resilience, but in its ability to spring back and strike.'

With its layers of stories and shifting perspectives, Patricia Grace has crafted a spirited and moving novel showing that 'good can come from sorrow, new life from old.'

My Review: Simply stunning. Almost perfect. A pearl in the oyster (I love me some oysters!) of reading life.

It will not appeal to everyone, as it has many words and concepts untranslated (or untranslatable, I can't be sure which) from Maori. It unfolds, as I feel the best stories do, at its own pace. It's 30 years old and that means the events of the past referred to by Roimata and Hemi are in the 1940s and 1950s. 21st-century readers are cautioned not to think that New Zealand is the same; also that it's changed utterly. Like the US with its fraught "racial" divide in politics and culture, New Zealand has its own fault lines and seismic cultural rifts.

The dreamlike poetry of the first half of the short novel makes one think that the story will fit comfortably into a magical realist groove. The second half takes up the story's 1980s crisis in a less otherworldly tone, but with the same sense of rootedness and cultural sanctity as the first part.

MALAGASH, Canada's New Weird which is really old weird and superbly crafted

MALAGASH
JOEY COMEAU
ECW Press
$11.99 ebook platforms, $15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Sunday’s father is dying of cancer. They’ve come home to Malagash, on the north shore of Nova Scotia, so he can die where he grew up. Her mother and her brother are both devastated. But devastated isn’t good enough. Devastated doesn’t fix anything. Sunday has a plan.

She’s started recording everything her father says. His boring stories. His stupid jokes. Everything. She’s recording every single “I love you” right alongside every “Could we turn the heat up in here?” It’s all important.

Because Sunday is writing a computer virus. A computer virus that will live secretly on the hard drives of millions of people all over the world. A computer virus that will think her father’s thoughts and say her father’s words. She has thousands of lines of code to write. Cryptography to understand. Exploits to test. She doesn’t have time to be sad. Her father is going to live forever.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU.

My Review:

I thought Malagash would be a small town, but it is not even that. One long road, a twisting paved red loop around the north shore of Nova Scotia. There's a tractor sitting in a field. A dirt bike leaning up against a shed. We pass a pen of llamas, who look bored as hell. The Atlantic Ocean itself comes right up to drive along beside us. Then it slips away.

The way he sounds, talking to my little brother, is different from how he sounds when talking just to me. I feel certain that it means something different too, even though the words are the exact same. This particular softness in my father’s voice is meant only for Simon.

There are parts of my father that he shows only to Simon. Parts he shows only to my mother. What if I had never heard this? What if I had never realized this?

It is a fact parents feel compelled to deny: Your relationship with each of your children is different. Each one has a different way of being themself, therefore a different side to show you and you to them. Sunday realizes this, and in realizing it pops a pustulent buboe on the buttocks of every parent/child problem: "You liked {sibling's name here} better than me!" And no parent ever says the simple truth, "Differently, darling child, never better." Routine denials, love all equally and other such impossibilities...Sunday does this wonderful bit of thinking for us all, and arrives at the correct answer. Comeau should win an award or two just for this.

I tell him that it will be our father's ghost. His memory. His echo. I tell him that a virus need not do harm. That not all self-propagating code is malicious. Our father's virus would never delete files. Would never steal passwords or spy on the intimate moments of strangers. Would not spread like cancer, but like a story. Would slip through fibre optic cables to cross oceans, would pass like radio waves through the walls of houses that nobody even knows are haunted. A ghost story that computers tell one another in the dark.

And with that, I died a little. I was utterly forlorn at the idea of a love so strong and sure emanating from a child to a parent. I never experienced that from either side. It made my own grieving heart stop with the loss I felt...not the loss of either parent, not the loss of my child, but the loss of love and family. I feel no love for my siblings, felt none for my parents, all of whom were adults when I was able to know them and self-absorbed, unkind, unpleasantly stridently needy adults who had no desire to listen to the likes of me.

Profound sadness? Not really. Regret? Grief. Poor younger me.

And the family I could have formed? Not to be. Death, despair, misery, but no family.

So reading this book was a giant act of catharsis and a huge relief to me.

THE DOOMED CITY, Soviet-era scary predictive fiction

THE DOOMED CITY
ARKADY AND BORIS STRUGATSKY (tr. Andrew Bromfield)
Chicago Review Press
$13.00 ereader platforms, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely considered the greatest of Russian science fiction masters, and their most famous work, Roadside Picnic, has enjoyed great popularity worldwide. Yet the novel that was their own favorite, and that readers worldwide have acclaimed as their magnum opus, has never before been published in English. The Doomed City was so politically risky that the Strugatsky brothers kept its existence a complete secret even from their best friends for sixteen years after its completion in 1972. It was only published in Russia in the late 1980s, the last of their works to see publication.

It was translated into a host of major European languages, and now appears in English in a major new translation by acclaimed translator Andrew Bromfield. The Doomed City is set in an experimental city bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its sole inhabitants are people who were plucked from Earth's history and left to govern themselves under conditions established by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable. Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a diehard believer in the Experiment, even though he's now a garbage collector. And as increasingly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'll say this about the Strugatsky Brothers: They had *fearless* imaginations, tempered by fearful souls that quailed before publishing this nihilistic, absurdist, deeply subversive book in Soviet Russia. Completed in 1972, shelved until 1989, and published in a professional English translation only in 2016, this stateless satirical look at the amoral roots of True Belief in a System reads as well in 45's Amurruhkuh as it did in Brezhnev's USSR.

Voronin, our astronomer-turned-state-official, is an ideal. He is every system's beloved child, the True Believer who makes excuses and finds reasons instead of asking, "...the fuck...? Are they kidding with this?" As experience teaches him to question, he sidesteps. He changes his beliefs without batting an eyelash, a clue to his essential hollowness. For all that he is an eager participant in all the City's shifts of philosophical direction, the reason he can do so remains unexamined: He's complicit in the acts of the State, not driven by a desire to enact a Vision. His lack of an inner compass is rather amusing given that almost the entire novel is an internal monologue. I myownself found this a delightful twist, enjoying the musings of a centerless man as irony. Others might find that conceit wearing.

The things I found wearing were the astoundingly sexist and anti-Semitic attitudes of the characters (and, I suspect, the authors as well). There are horrible words used in connection with the two women I can recall at all...they might indeed have been the only two women mentioned, for I can summon no other woman to mind...and Katzman's presence in stereotypical fashion was not obviously played for ironic effect.

Given my track record for objecting to these facets of other older books, why am I giving this one the Full Five? Because, my friends, the story of a city between an unscalable wall and an endless abyss recommends itself to me as a parable for all of human life, and the awful attitudes of the PoV character are part and parcel of the falling, failing world that the Strugatskys were lampooning, dissecting, parodying, itemizing. These facets seem to me, even though I suspect and believe they were presented unironically, to be so much of a piece with the Experiment being ridiculed that I could easily make them objects of fun. Nonetheless they are there and merit mention lest an unsuspecting reader trip over them and feel blindsided.

Boris Strugatsky, in his Afterword, says it all and best:

How to live in conditions of ideological vacuum? How and what for? In my opinion this question remains highly relevant even today—which is why City, despite being so vehemently politicized and so categorically of its own time, potentially remains of interest to the present-day reader—provided that this reader has any interest at all in problems of this kind.

SEA OF RUST, a scary, funny, beautiful End of the (Robotic) World novel

SEA OF RUST
C. ROBERT CARGILL
Harper Voyager
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: It’s been thirty years since the apocalypse and fifteen years since the murder of the last human being at the hands of robots. Humankind is extinct. Every man, woman, and child has been liquidated by a global uprising devised by the very machines humans designed and built to serve them. Most of the world is controlled by an OWI—One World Intelligence—the shared consciousness of millions of robots, uploaded into one huge mainframe brain. But not all robots are willing to cede their individuality—their personality—for the sake of a greater, stronger, higher power. These intrepid resisters are outcasts; solo machines wandering among various underground outposts who have formed into an unruly civilization of rogue AIs in the wasteland that was once our world.

One of these resisters is Brittle, a scavenger robot trying to keep her deteriorating mind and body functional in a world that has lost all meaning. Although she does not (cannot) experience emotions like a human, she is haunted by the terrible crimes she perpetrated on humanity. As she roams the Sea of Rust, a large swath of territory that was once the Midwest, Brittle slowly comes to terms with her raw and vivid memories—and her guilt.

THIS WAS A LOVELY SURPRISE BIRTHDAY GIFT. THANKS HONEY.

My Review: If you're a fan of cynical, witty anti-heroes who do what they have to do to survive in a world that doesn't much like them, read this book.

The one truth you need to know about the end of a machine is that the closer they are to death, the more they act like people.

If you're a fan of noir stories of monolithic world-dominating systems that give dissenters only a tiny sliver of room to exist, read this book.

Magic was just something people liked to believe in, something they thought they could feel or sense, something that made everything more than just mechanical certainty. Something that made them more than flesh and bone.

If you want to read a fast-paced tale about survival against the odds, read this book.

These are the things that life is all about. These moments. It’s not about the rituals. It’s not about getting by. It’s about the stack of tiny little moments of joy and love that add up to a lifetime that’s been worthwhile. You can’t measure them; you can only capture them, like snapshots in your mind.

If you like the idea that nothing anywhere ever lasts, for good or for ill, this book should head your list of reads to come.

"You're not wrong, Jimmy. That's why we're all out here. To get through one more day."
He nodded, looking wistfully out into the street. "I miss it, you know. Being a bartender. But the people. I mostly miss all the people."
Most dying robots do. People gave us a purpose. Something to do all day, every day. At the end, I suppose, you spend a lot of time thinking about that. It's harder to get by when getting by is all there is.

Brittle, aka Britt, is our PoVbot. (I had no idea until this good moment that I'd been longing to type that always.) She is a she, a Caregiver bot, and she survived the war of extermination against the humans. She then survived the robot-vs-OWI...One World Intelligence...mainframes. There were six OWIs, now there are two surviving mainframe AI monoliths, and the battle is on between them to make all the bots left independent of the mainframes into facets (mobile extensions of the OWIs' superintelligence).

There's a weird sort of comfort in knowing that AIs compete ruthlessly for the same scarce resource that humanity's been competing for since forever: Subjects, foot soldiers, followers, believers, call them what you like. It could be an artifact of the concept "AI" being modeled after humanity's own rapacious, exclusionary concept of "intelligence." I tend to think not, as I fall into the darkly despairing cynical worldview camp. All advanced intelligence is primitive and savage because it's got perspective and sees its own destruction as inevitable, therefore there's no need to be "good" because this is it.

Oh dear. That makes life pointless and authority nugatory. Better shore up The System! Go tell some lies.

And my brethren and sistern, there are some *whoppers* that this book holds back from you only revealing at the end. Or The End, if you will allow me the punchy but cheesy overemphasis. It is a slow burn, this lie that Britt tells us. It is clear to me it's a foundational myth, and so escapes the opprobrium heaped on untruth in both human and bot society. But it might just merit that opprobrium after all, you'll have to decide for yourselves. Because you'll be reading this excellent novel. Honest and truly you will, or you'll regret not knowing what Cargill wants us to know.

I'll leave you with this unspoilery observation made by Britt early in the book. I think most of y'all will agree that it's an essential truth, a verity, a fact of deep meaning:

Respect for the dead is a human notion meant to imply that a life has meaning. It doesn't. Once you've watched an entire world wither away and die after tearing itself apart piece by bloody piece, it's hard to pretend that something like a single death carries any weight whatsoever.

And that, my olds, mes vieux, is exactly where we are.

THE BOOKSHOP, Penelope Fitzgerald's Fanfare for the Common Woman Afoul of the Powerful

THE BOOKSHOP
PENELOPE FITZGERALD
Mariner Books
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop - the only bookshop - in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence's warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one.

My Review: Florence Green is my current idol of Resistance. She has lived quietly and unassumingly in Hardborough, a small East Anglian seaside town, and realized that her life was simply passing and not being lived. So she took her small inheritance and opened a bookshop.

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.

Of course, she takes out a loan against the freehold of her premises to start the business. The sums are risible by today's standards, since this is 1959, but they seem enormous to Mrs Green. She sets out to stock her business with the remainder stock of her former employers in London, then contacts publishers' sales agents to visit and display their wares:

Those who made it {to her shop} were somewhat unwilling to part with...what Florence really wanted, unless she would also take a pile of novels which had the air, in their slightly worn jackets, of women on whom no one had ever made any demand.

This being 1959, a certain degree of wincing at this self-deprecating, or merely invisibly sexist, humor is to be granted; but Fitzgerald wrote the novel in 1977 or thereabouts, as it was first published in 1978. Was this mildly misogynistic sally meant to be read with a raised eyebrow, or was she simply oblivious to its sexism? I don't know, but I'm guessing it wasn't ironic based on the tone of the tale. It's very funny either way.

Life as a business proprietor is not stress-free. Mrs Green is a busy, busy woman. Many are the factors she is required to balance in her running of the business. Yet summer comes but once a year, and after all what good is living in a seaside village if the sea is invisible?

She ought to go down to the beach. It was Thursday, early closing, and it seemed ungrateful to live so close to the sea and never look at it for weeks on end.

It's always seemed odd to me how many people I know here in my own seaside city who simply don't pay the slightest attention to the ocean that surrounds us!

Mrs Green has failed to do one crucial thing in opening her shop: Get the town's Great and Good on side. In fact, when she is invited to the local county set's meeting place, she receives a very simple and direct order to cease and desist her plans to open her shop in the Old House, which it transpires the local grande dame wishes to put to another use. To everyone's blank surprise, she does not back down. The invisible battle lines are drawn:

She had once seen a heron flying across the estuary and trying, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel which it had caught. The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape from the gullet of the heron and appeared a quarter, a half, or occasionally three-quarters of the way out. The indecision expressed by both creatures was pitiable. They had taken on too much.

The battles go in Mrs Green's favor...until they quite memorably do not. The quality do not like being told no.

But the battles are waged fully! Mrs Green is not one to lie down and say die!

Courage and endurance are useless if they are never tested.

The tests are, in the end, simply more than Mrs Green has the resources to withstand. The state gets involved. The lawyers and the banks are not on her side. The town isn't willing to pull themselves out of the primordial muck of How Things Are Done to rally to her aid.

It was defeat, but defeat is less unwelcome when you are tired.

And yet Florence Green stood tall until the last moment, only leaving Hardborough when her very last farthing is needed to buy her way out of the morass that her impertinent refusal to bow before the quality has landed her in.

For that reason, I recommend this book for your 45-hating, Resistance fighting, Yule giftee. It will give them a rock to stand on.