June 2020 Reads

Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone was a weird collection of vignettes all focusing on a provincial German village in God-knows WHAT time period (1890? 1950? Modern day, but they're so cut off from society that they seem old-fashioned? Who knows)! Anyway, every chapter focused on a different child in this village, and their relationship with everyone else in said village, and the effed-up things they do to each other (up to and including: sibling murder, a lot of child rape, incestuous teen pregnancy, the burial of infant skeletons...) It was weirdly inconsistent, too; so a boy is sent to juvie for daring someone to dive in an icy river, but a man grinds his daughter's face against broken glass and faces no consequences? I like creepy towns, but I struggle with short stories. They leave me asking "Was there any point to all this?"

The Vegetarian is a somewhat famous novel focusing on an unremarkable South Korean housewife, Yeong-hye, suddenly deciding she won't consume any animal products anymore. This sends her life spiraling, as her husband calls her family in to force her, with increasing violence, to conform. This can be read a lot of ways, and probably rewards multiple reads (as well as being a different experience for readers of different cultures). It could be viewed as straightforward-- a mentally ill woman starves herself in an effort to "become a tree." It could be read as commentary on the Korean patriarchy, though the author insists that wasn't her intention. It could be a window into female compliance, conformist culture... Honestly, I don't know if I'm yet ready to say anything decisive about this book; only that I really enjoyed how strange and unique it felt.

I had high hopes for The Whisper Man, but it failed as a ghost story AND as a police procedural. There wasn't enough of either of those elements, let alone a good mesh of the two. It lacked focus (too many unnecessary characters), the titular 'whisper man' (having been arrested some decades prior) only gets about two brief scenes. The scene everything is building to only lasts a few pages, so that barely any peril is felt at all. The "main theme" of the bond between fathers and sons is barely touched on, and so attempts at deep introspection feels cheap and unearned. Not to mention the sparse, blunt writing was very poor. This failed on all accounts.

Now here's a strange one. Exquisite Corpse isn't most peoples' cup of tea-- it's bleak and explicit and nasty. All the expected trigger warnings apply, as do a few unusual ones-- it's been a minute since I last read a graphic necrophilia scene! The author's passion for New Orleans really shines through, and though I've read a lot of erotica in my time, it's never been like THIS before; grotesque and honest and shockingly intimate; always leaving me unsettled and uncomfortable. (And not just the serial killer/cannibalism aspects; the sex scenes between "normal," breathing characters felt just as uncomfortable, if not more so.) I liked parts of this book; namely, the purple prose, the addressing of serious subjects (corrupt police; realistic depictions of homeless HIV+ youth in the 80s; poverty in Cajun communities, etc)… But the dialogue was badly written, and this had no apparent point or plot. It didn't go anywhere; it was just disturbing scenes stapled together for shock value, with a disappointing (lack of) conclusion.

Another one for the "best of 2020" list. I am so, so in love with Bunny… A full five stars from me. If you read my review for this book, you'll see I didn't TALK much about it, and instead used gifs from various trippy, girl-centric horror movies to capture the aesthetic. This is both because Bunny is very hard to describe, the twists are all spoiler-heavy, and it's pretty 'style over substance.' Sometimes that bothers me, but in this case, I was VERY on board with it from beginning to end. Shallow, cult-like "mean girls" creating very literal Frankenstein-esque monsters in the name of scholarly excellence? Exploding rabbits? Fight Club-esque twists? Bone-dry commentary on academic elitism? Sapphic themes? Blood and guts splattered all over My Little Pony figurines? Sign me the FUCK up.

Well, The Family Upstairs was a better thriller than the Whisper Man, anyway. (Not that that's hard to achieve...) It's about an (adopted) young woman who discovers she's inherited a multi-million dollar mansion that, of course, comes with the dark history of her parents' cult suicide. She tries to unravel what happened to her family... Particularly to her older siblings, who have never been found. Again: I don't really care for thrillers. I find them shallow and silly. This one, despite some unfortunate implications (did the ONLY gay character really NEED to be a sociopath???) won points from me for being more about a family's struggle to survive frightening circumstances than a medium in which to thrust twists upon a jaded audience.

The first book in the Dublin Murder Squad series, In the Woods, takes everything negative I've ever said about thrillers and police procedurals and throws it out the window. Apparently, the genre CAN be elevated to "this might actually qualify as LITERATURE" standards. At 600 pages/a 20-hour audiobook, this was a HENCH tome. From my understanding, every book in this "series" is told from a different detective's POV. Every detective on the squad has one particular case they can't stand (Rob, our oh-so-flawed and unreliable protag, can't bear crimes against children. Naturally, In the Woods is hinged on the ritual rape and murder of a 12-year-old). Because this case is so PERSONAL for Rob, because it thrusts him into his own childhood trauma, we get to see his entire life unravel. Flashbacks, meltdowns, the dissolution of friendships, squad partnerships... This was a very cerebral hero's downfall, in that no clear answers are given, and much is left to reader interpretation. I look forward to how the rest of this series will break the well-intentioned Murder Squad, one by one.

I don't often count comics/manga towards my yearly reading goals, simply because they take less than an hour for me to read, and that feels like cheating. So while Blood on the Tracks, Vol. 1 was AMAZING, it won't be on my '2020 Read List.' Mein gott, though; Shuzo Oshimi has got subtle visual horror down to a science. His art is very subdued and realistic, and through clever angles he manages to put you in the place of a child watching his mother go quietly, violently insane. We (the audience) feel just as powerless and fragile as Seiichi, while everything in the background hints at things being Not Quite Right. I'm a lover of all things gory-horror... Yet it was THIS quiet little story that managed to make me feel truly horrified. Well done, Oshimi, you creepy fucker.

However, manga CAN be counted on my list if they're over 400 pages long. Monster, Volume 1 tells the story of Doctor Tenma, an exceptionally skilled Japanese neurosurgeon working in a German hospital. He chafes under the corrupt, money-grubbing policies of the facility, nearly losing everything when he ignores his boss's orders to tackle a high-profile case (the mayor) in favor of a random little boy, insisting that all lives are equal, and it's a doctor's responsibility to treat his first patient; not the more important one. While such moral convictions are commendable, they come under question when said little boy turns out to be the personification of pure evil... I loved this. I'd recommend it to any adults who loved Death Note when they were younger.

Herman Koch's The Dinner has been on my TBR for uhhhhh several years now. Translated from Dutch (I've read a lot of translated works this year...), it reminded me a lot of American Psycho, in that it's all upper middle class characters (who all not-so-secretly despise each other) meeting at a fancy restaurant to discuss absolute inanities. Whether or not they adopted a black child to earn political campaign points; the quality of the obscenely expensive wine; what to do about the arson and murder their teen sons committed... Yeah. This is a miserable and bitter little read about the shallow elite, and the crimes they get away with. I won't say I "enjoyed" this, but the writing was pretty good.

Oh a whim, I re-read the first book in Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series. Yes, it is YA trash. (And I mean TRASH. I'm not saying YA paranormal romance is INHERENTLY trashy; there are some entries of value in the subgenre. But is this one of them? AbsoLUTELY not.) But if anyone knows me, they'll know I'M trash for fairies. And not cutesy little boyfriend-material fey, either; I'm talking "will kill you and kidnap your children for funsies; the stuff of nightmares" fair folk, straight from Celtic mythology. And this series has PLENTY of that. Yeah, Aislinn is a Mary Sue of a protagonist, and the author's self-indulgent love of all things punk shines through every sentence, but this is one of the few series regarding fairies (and ESPECIALLY one of the only YA series) that actually captures what I LIKE about fairies. They're chaotic, selfish, vain entities who act only in self interest and have little to no value for human life. They're unpredictable and scary. They're SUPPOSED to be unpredictable and scary... They're monsters that SHOULD be up there in the horror pantheon with vampires and werewolves, but their continuous misrepresentation prevents that.