Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson

So much of cyberpunk attempts to ape Gibson's style without realizing what makes it so special. Blade Runner is set in a broken world of dark grays and synthetic food. No sunlight, fake humans, broken society. The Matrix is a post-apocalyptic science fiction epic in which human life has been all but extinguished, taken over by humorless robots. Cyberpunk media nowadays often depicts human society on death's doorstep, hanging on by a thread. The world, and, by extension, its rulers—our human species—are already dead. We just don't know it yet.

William Gibson may be a cynical bastard, his bleak outlook sometimes bordering on dark humor, but his world is anything but dead. On the contrary, it's packed so full to the brim of living, writhing humanity that it jumps out at you on nearly every page.

He remembered the litter of the old man's chamber, the soiled humanity of it, the ragged spines of the old audio disks in their paper sleeves. One foot bare, the other in a velvet slipper.

This isn't the romantic life-begets-life, happy-go-lucky style of humanity, but the Dostoyevskian irrationality of the human animal on full display. Gibson's characters are hopeless drug addicts, violent malcontents, sexual deviants, empty shells filled with emotional scar tissue. But through all of this, they're intensely human. They're equal parts numbness and societal ennui as they are emotionally wild, angry, lustful. They make poor financial decisions on a whim, they get high before a big job with full knowledge that the comedown will affect their capabilities, they become emotional and, by extension, reckless; which puts them in great danger. Neuromancer bleeds humanity—a special sort of irony for a science fiction novel about the activities of an artificial intelligence, and one which was penned in the 1980s. And so much of what makes this novel special for me is an all-powerful artificial intelligence being faced with such irrationality. It's brilliant and impactful and caused a lengthy bout of introspection for me in which I identified certain episodes of my life in which I, myself, had acted so irrationally.

As unpredictable as the human animal is, the end tally of all of our actions often seem angled toward the same goal: Happiness. Fleeting as it is, impossible as our chase for sustained contentedness might be, we still reach for it. With hard drugs the night before a big job, with lustful, meaningless sex, with pointless consumerism.

Gibson's world is special in its richness, density, texture, and the layers present in each new locale our dirty, globe-hopping "protagonists" set foot: There's new tech on top of slightly out of date tech on top of corrugated iron, rust, broken pipes, and dirt which seem as if they're relics of the 19th century. Gibson's gift for layering his world is readily apparent and his scene-setting opening paragraphs are exquisite and unforgettable. His admirable quality as a writer of prose only enhances the impact of such stage-setting. It's a pleasure slipping into Gibson's world, and such is certainly why this novel continues to remain popular decades after its publishing.

The grungey hipsterism this book constantly displays is fully campy, almost corny, but somehow it all works. There's such an original feel represented by this world, its characters, and this plot. It's quite unlike anything else, science fiction or otherwise. Neuromancer deals with technology slipping its lead and running amok, and it deals with humanity's betrayal of itself through its own irrationality. The prescience of the former made it a noteworthy science fiction novel on its release; the latter makes a continually impactful work that is still widely read and enjoyed to this day.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) by Raymond Carver

It was a white moon and covered with scars. Any damn fool could imagine a face there.

As I made clear in my review for Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, I love Raymond Carver.

What he does is like magic. His combination of a compelling scene, genuine characters, and gruff voice always seem to come together as a sum more than their parts. It's amazing to me he can pack so much emotional payoff in sometimes as little as just ten pages, and using such spare prose. He's a master of subtlety; a master of the craft who's able to impart big feeling is small action and with few words.

This collection of short stories sees Carver regularly rely on the common motif of broken relationships. Right off the bat, Why Don't You Dance? is a great example of this, fashioning a poignant narrative on the life cycle of relationships in typically spare prose over a short length that has the same impact of stories exponentially longer. The majority of the stories present in this collection take place in and around the ruins and the downslide of relationships that are doomed to fail, or have already. These are something all adults have experienced at least once in their lives, and they have always left their mark on us and changed us somehow. Thus the experience of reading them hits all the more harder. Carver's characters are not good people; they're lazy, incompetent, petty, and bitter. But we can relate to that, too, because—if we're being honest with ourselves—we've all experienced such character flaws in ourselves, just like we've experienced doomed and broken relationships.

A small wax and sawdust log burned on the grate. A carton of five more sat ready on the hearth. He got up from the sofa and put them all in the fireplace. He watched until they flamed. Then he finished his soda and made for the patio door. On the way, he saw the pies lined up on the sideboard. He stacked them in his arms, all six, one for every ten times she had ever betrayed him.

Some of the images Carver creates here are far more striking than anything I recall in his previous collection (such as a boy seeing his mother kissing a man 'with the television going' while spying through a window, a mentally disabled man and his attachment to his bass pond, and others). He also has a penchant for disarming the reader with his subtle, everyday depictions of working class life, only to hit them with a burst of unexpected violence or tragedy near the end of the stories.

Carver's brilliant and this is masterful work. The best fiction is that which turns a mirror toward us, forcing us to admit to ourselves our flaws and idiosyncrasies, and become better, more self-aware people, and Raymond Carver's collections of short stories do just that.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

For Whom The Bell Tolls (1937) by Ernest Hemingway

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.

There's so much to like in this book. Hemingway's writing is genuine; his knowledge feels authentic and he's choosing to depict a conflict that doesn't receive much attention, despite its outcome dictating the next several decades of Spanish history. The Spanish Civil War is viewed by many as a tragic lost cause, but the nuance present in both sides and the greater global conflict that was simmering at the time provides an intensely fertile ground for morally gray characters and factions and timeless, enthralling storytelling. The questions asked by this book are numerous, and nearly all of them are compelling: Is the lesser of two evils really worth fighting for, even if it means you're essentially fighting for evil? Which types of people would choose to fight, and which would abstain? Do two wrongs make a right? When, if ever, is it acceptable to answer atrocity with atrocity? How do human beings act and think when faced with death?

Hemingway's depiction of guerrilla warfare seems so authentic. There's a hurry-up-and-wait structure to the entire book that seems appropriate to what I understand of military campaigns, the popular adage that war is ninety-nine per cent boredom and one per cent sheer terror seems apt. The cast of characters throughout more than half of the book spend their time keeping a post, scouting, eating, and drinking, with not much of anything happening. The guerrilla nature of the war shows itself with the lack of discipline of several of the main character's comrades-in-arms; a man leaves his post to hunt a rabbit, for example. The left's guerrillas hide in caves in the woods, sustained mostly by their need not to fight for the right. The right, with their warplanes, and finely maintained cavalry, seem a tier above, rendering the conflict's appearance even more hopeless for the left. But any sympathetic drive to root for the underdogs is dampened by Hemingway's deft touch in painting both sides as being vulnerable to executing the same atrocities. Early in the narrative, a scenario recounted depicting the savage execution of suspected Fascist sympathizers is brutal enough to encourage us to pick a side only after having ingested a sizable boulder of salt.

War is ugly; civil war is uglier, and I applaud Hemingway for pulling no punches in its depiction. It'd have been too easy to have made one side too sympathetic, and Hemingway resists the urge, making the narrative that much more enticing and thought-provoking. For Whom The Bell Tolls is not a smash-the-fash treatise for unthinking banner-wavers. He further humanizes the Republicans and Communists; depicting those of the Party in their full bureaucratic sloth and incompetence, an image which would only become so popular and recognizable decades later. Both sides are riddled with human fallibility, both sides equal parts detestable and sympathetic. The fascists and the communists may be equally guilty of cruelty, ignorance, and malice on a grand scale, but at the end of the day they're made up of human beings, and the further you focus down to the individual, the more we recognize ourselves in them. The more we realize—hopefully, if our heads aren't so firmly planted within our asses—that we are all capable of the same atrocities, given the circumstances. That war is hell, and we are all its devils. Such an idea is well-worn and almost cliched in our modern day, but back in Hemingway's 1937, it must have been rather refreshing to read.

Hemingway in Spain

The more I've read of Hemingway, the more I've felt that there's a core flaw in the way he writes relationships. It makes an appearance in A Farewell to Arms, as it makes an appearance in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In both books, the core "romance" feels utterly shallow. On making contact with the guerrillas in the hills, Robert Jordan meets Maria, a beautiful young Spanish woman scarred by the conflict at the heart of the novel. The two fall for one another almost immediately, and instantly begin a tryst. When separating this relationship from context, it's ridiculous. There is no common interest, no connection between these two characters. Robert Jordan is a hardened, competent soldier, likely very attractive. Maria is a young, comely woman herself. That's it. That's the romance. There's no series of conversations in which the two get to know one another's morals and interests, what makes each tick, etc. They're just attracted to one another and they begin sleeping together. The relationship doesn't hold up to any scrutiny whatsoever, and I found myself bored to tears by it, rolling my eyes at each instance in which Jordan professes his undying love for his beau, whom he had just met 2 days ago and knew very little about.

However, when considering the context of the great conflict occurring around them, I believe the connection makes more sense. It's even remarked on by Jordan himself, partway through the novel in a conversation with Agustin; that their relationship occurs the way it does because they lack time to get to know one another. I think there's more to it than that, and I think the characters are aware of it. As with A Farewell to Arms, I began to view the relationship as two doomed people latching on to one another; the two of them shipwrecked and drowning sailors desperately grasping for driftwood after a storm. They aren't actually in love with one another, they're just desperate for something to hold onto; an endgame, something to look forward to, a prayer to chant to themselves in the quiet moments, when the war seems hopeless—"I will take Maria with me and marry her after the war... We'll go live somewhere quiet". Maria is Robert Jordan's candle in the dark, his vision of a better time once the conflict is over. His hope that life can go back to normal, that the conflict might end and he might settle quietly once more. A rationalization he tells himself, when knowing, just beneath the surface, that he is overwhelmingly likely to die in the hills at any moment. Such is the hopelessness of the conflict he finds himself embroiled in.

Whether Hemingway intends this to be the case, or whether he's just inept at depicting a meaningful, deep relationship between two human beings is anyone's guess. After reading The Sun Also Rises, I tend toward belief in the former rather than the latter. And, in any case, Hemingway is dead—both proverbially and literally—and his literature lives on for us to interpret as we will.

For Whom The Bell Tolls is a deep, nuanced view of civil war, of war in general, of soldiers and death and duty, and what all of those things force us to experience when we're faced with them. And, perhaps most compelling of all: The change they force in us if we're lucky enough to survive them. How we act in the face of death is part of what makes us human, after all. A human being's mortality tends to define us, and I think that's at the core of what Hemingway writes. Not just in this book, but all of his books.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Lonesome Dove (1985) by Larry McMurtry

I was at a college house party once, more than a decade ago. I had just gotten an insignificant job writing about video games for an online publication. It didn't pay much, but I was a broke college student who enjoyed writing and I had been playing video games since before I could read, so it was a good match. I had been discussing this with one of my good friends when an acquaintance butted in. 

He was a friend-of-a-friend type; the kind of person who sits on the periphery of these conversations and, rather than seeming awkward, radiates a haughty, above-it-all air with a shit-eating grin that makes you want to toss a blunt object into their teeth like they're bowling pins.

Let's call him Jake.

Jake was not a tall fellow, but what he lacked in length he made up for in thickness. He had bleached blond spiky hair, embarrassingly poor tattoos, and the kind of beach muscles that would make a Jersey Shore cast member blush. I didn't know him well, but he seemed an affable enough sort when we did make small talk. I don't even remember how we came to know him—probably a friend of one of my girlfriend's friend's boyfriend's.

Jake made his entrance into my periphery and loomed under me. "You're still playing video games!? You gotta stop playing video games, man." He chuckled, subtly imparting to me how ridiculous my hobby was, and how silly it made me look. His comment was timed to perfectly coincide with the end of the conversation that was happening just prior—my friend to whom I was just speaking had already ambled on and was now out of earshot of Jake's comments.

This was nearly 15 years ago, but I can still remember Jake's sneering face in my mind's eye.

I was completely taken aback. Video games and those who play them have never enjoyed a sterling reputation, of course—and that reputation has decreased exponentially during the years since this conversation happened. But Jake's words were an openly made, mocking criticism the likes of which I hadn't heard since I'd been called a nerd in grade school.

At first I didn't respond, just gaped at him like an idiot, which likely confirmed his judgment of me.

"Well, they are paying me," I eventually managed, and left Jake to wallow in his smugness.

I assume that justification meant little to him—someone who wouldn't be caught dead doing such a detestable thing as playing a video game, paid or not—and, to be honest, the justification itself meant almost nothing to me. I'd have gone on playing video games whether I was being paid to or not, simply because I loved them. A few days later, after the embarrassment passed, I thought again about the incident, recoiled, and became internally angry about it. Who is he to judge my hobbies!? That anger eventually dampened, too, and gave way to introspection. Jake's statement left a lingering question in my mind: Why do I play video games? What is it that I enjoy so much about them? Why can I sit down at my computer desk and be so wholly locked into this experience that it would take a monumental sense of responsibility and discipline to move myself away from it? Why, when I think back on certain periods of my life, do I immediately think about which video games I was playing around that time?

And, further: Is this all of this adoration artificial? Maybe they are just a complete waste of time, and I've been tricked into thinking otherwise. Perhaps video games satiate my mind the way cotton candy might fill your stomach when you're hungry—completely lacking in any actual substance, and better replaced by something more substantial. Maybe everyone sees this except me, and I'm being a fool about it.

I am nothing if not a hobbyist, and over the past 15 years I've asked myself these kinds of questions about my hobbies many times:

"Is this worthwhile?" 

"What value does this offer me?"

"Is this enriching my life?"

The process has become what I consider to be a healthy habit with regards to how I spend my free time. In recent years I've begun to develop an answer to that question when I've asked it of my lifelong infatuation with video games.

Video games can be deceptive to those who play them, and even moreso to those who don't. On the surface, it's easy to see why they're so attractive: They look beautiful (especially nowadays), they provide a steady dopamine drip by feeding the player bite-sized rewards for accomplishing menial tasks, and they immerse their players with heaping doses of escapism, allowing them to forget their troubles—sometimes to great fault, as gaming addiction is a very real thing which destroys lives by allowing the player to so effectively ignore their problems while their entire life crumbles around them.

But for me, games go beyond those minor benefits, and their value easily eclipses their pitfalls. My favorite moments in games often come when I feel a completely foreign sense of place; when I'm existing, as another person, in a place so foreign to me that I'd never have thought it up on my own. My senses are assaulted by this notion of otherworldliness and my brain regularly struggles to accept such a novel experience.

I'm on a planet far out into the depths of the Milky Way, staring at twin suns as the wind howls around me.

I'm on horseback in a quiet orchard in a fantasy world, trotting slowly along past a giant windmill.

It's 2029 in Prague, and I'm taking a moment of respite in my apartment as an unsettled city howls curses around me.

So when I think of what actual value it is that video games impart on my life, I'm left ignoring the moment-to-moment satisfaction of leveling up or getting a new piece of gear, and instead focusing on this intense feeling of having been at such a unique place at a certain point in my life. The experience of existing in this reality alone, of adapting to its rules and thinking critically about its events, is a worthwhile endeavor even in a vacuum, but it's profoundly affecting within the context of the current challenges one is faced with in their life; playing a game about human social relationships after a difficult break-up, or a game which examines a struggle you know about personally such as substance abuse. Even something as simple as an open world game which takes place in a city to which you've been.

These places may not exist in reality, and few of them are experiences which you could have in the real world. But these fantastical experiences have bled into my psyche and the challenges they've proposed to my thought processes exist now not only as a memory, but as a part of who I am; a part of the way I think about and affect the real world around me. I've lived other lives, I've spoken with people who do not actually exist. I've considered their problems and how I might impact them. I've enriched my own life experience and thought processes with each new "place" I visit, and I truly believe I've become a more empathetic, considerate person because I have played so many video games.

The Dunwich Horror (1929) by H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft is undoubtedly a master of atmospheric writing. His strength is in setting scenes and crafting an appropriate mood with which to manage the experience he's looking for from his readers. The opening paragraph of The Dunwich Horror is a fine example of this skill:

When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprizing uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or in the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Beyond that, though, I have to make the striking confession that I think I hate H.P. Lovecraft's work.

Reading Lovecraft's stories are, to me, the horror equivalent of reading a trashy romance paperback on a crowded train. You've got to have significant self-confidence to take undampened pleasure in reading this sort of thing in public. Lovecraft's naming conventions and otherworldly jargon always read undeniably cheesy to me. The actions which take place in the story and his characters' absurdly overdone gravitas in reaction to them always strike me as so unnatural and overly saturated that I find them impossible to take seriously:

"Ygnaiih ... ygnaiih ... thflthkh'ngha ... Yog-Sothoth...." rang the hideous croaking out of space. "Y'bthnk ... h'ehye ... n'grkdl'lh...." 

"Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah ... e'yaya-yayaaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... h'yuh ... h'yuh ... HELP! HELP! ... ff—ff—ff—FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!..."

Perhaps that's part of the charm. I have never been a fan of camp. It often falls deafly on me and I gather no amusement from it whatsoever. I feel a lot of the same vibe shared between Lovecraft's stories and cheesy '80s horror films. So maybe that's what I'm missing here. Either way, the content of these stories and the way in which they are told is not something that appeals to me, and given that I am now several stories into Lovecraft's oeuvre, I expect they will never appeal to me the way they appeal to Lovecraft's fans.

Undoubtedly inspired by far better writers such as Poe, Lovecraft falls into some of the same complaints I have with Poe's work (although I love him, generally); he relies on some of the same woefully overdone dialogue in fruitless attempts to reconstruct the vernacular of the time period which he depicts:

"An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the rud hed jest caved in like the storm hed blowed it over, only the wind wa'n't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' ye could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she yelled agin, an' says the front yard picket fence bed jest crumpled up, though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then everybody on the line could hear Cha'ncey an' ol' Seth Bishop a-yellin', tew, an' Sally was shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse—not lightnin' nor nothin', but suthin' heavy agin' the front, that kep' a-launchin' itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nuthin' aout the front winders. An' then ... an' then...."

I won't mince words here: This is utter garbage. I cannot stand it, and I refuse to read it. Perhaps I'm missing out on key story turns by skipping this stinking trash, but I'd rather stop reading the story than plod through this kind of thing. I level the same complaints towards Poe when he resorts to this crap, and Lovecraft has no excuse because folksy vernacular has already been depicted in a far better manner by writers prior to him from which he ought to have taken inspiration.

I find it more than passing amusing that some works created in the modern day which are undoubtedly inspired by Lovecraft appeal to me far more than the work of the man himself. I think this is a credit to his imagination and the atmospheric quality of his writing, but also affected by his lack of ability as an actual storyteller and his lack of properly managing the tone of his stories. They've never struck me as particularly terrifying, either; this could be due to the fact that he so often leans heavily on fear of the other; that which is foreign to us. This was surely more revolting and disconcerting to one such as Lovecraft, who is often criticized in modern circles for being a racist and a xenophobe. Such an enlightened, open-minded thinker as myself is utterly unaffected by such archaic thinking. Kidding aside; this brand of horror doesn't work for me, although the otherworldliness of his cosmic horror is something I do find enticing. I suspect his aesthetic is strongly responsible for why I gravitate towards Lovecraftian horror, but not Lovecraft's horror.

The more of Lovecraft I read, the less I like him. Which is ironic considering that Lovecraft relies so much on the horror of the unknown, the unknowable, and the other... And his mythology is so much more strange and enticing when you know very little about it.

⭐

Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck

Everyone who reads classic literature as an adult has picked up a book they were forced to read as a teenager and had a completely different experience the second time around. I had just this experience with Of Mice and Men, and I've had it before with certain other books that are part of the typical American educational curriculum—my recent re-read of The Great Gatsby provided a similar experience.

I'm not an educator, nor am I particularly well-versed in raising children. But I still can't help but criticize the choice to make this book such a cornerstone of teenage literary education because there seems to be so little for children and teenagers to relate to within its pages. The gentle giant trope could be one, sure. But what felt most poignant for me was Steinbeck's clear reference to the American dream, and his constant depiction of how hopeless the lives and futures of these men (and the woman) are.

American adults are constantly enraptured by the future. We're thinking about retirement, house maintenance, debt management. Marriage, children. We're thinking about our five-year-plan, or relocating to a more affordable or more luxurious area. We're considering career changes. I'd go as far as to say this kind of thinking is a universal aspect of daily American life. And these characters are no different in this regard. They dream big, but they're their own worst enemies. They constantly plan to grow a stake of money with which to buy land, but they end up blowing it on whoring and gambling, or being struck by misfortune, and their best-laid plans (of mice and men OHHH, HE SAID IT! HE SAID THE TITLE!) going awry. This is something intensely, viscerally understood and feared by adults, and a thought I believe is probably hopelessly lost on children and teenagers who've never had to provide for themselves and who've never been dominated by their dreams for—and worries about—the future. It's why I believe I garnered nothing from Of Mice and Men when I first read it as a 13-year-old, but the story ended up resonating so strongly with me as a 35-year-old.

We're constantly confronted with the other face of these characters' dreams; their doubts and learned cynicism. Candy—the elderly, maimed white man who's forced to allow his dog to be euthanized—is a figure who has almost nothing left to hope for, but still allows himself to believe in the dream of owning and working his own land. Crooks, the beaten-down black man, even taps into this hope briefly, before being cruelly cowed once again by Curley's wife in a blunt exhibit of the racial power hierarchy that was excruciating to read. These characters are facing lives and tribulations far more extreme than yours truly, and probably more severe than most of the folks with access to the internet reading this write-up. But modern readers are still readily able to relate to them. We've all sat at our desk at work, dreaming about quitting our job and picking up and moving to Europe, or thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, or volunteering in Antarctica—only to be swiftly removed of this possibility once our student loan payments and credit card bills come due later in the month.

John Steinbeck

The story carries on in this manner nearly throughout; relatable and all the more poignant and tragic for it. Candy's dog and a character at the end of the story fail in their tasks and are euthanized, no longer able to provide for themselves and dealt with in a manner meant to end further suffering. George is tragically forced to destroy the symbol and the constant reminder of the existence of all of his hopes and dreams. The characters who experience frustration when denied the means to reach their dreams often lash out at one-another in helplessness; Curley's wife is unnecessarily cruel to Crooks, as Crooks was unnecessarily cruel to Lenny beforehand. Curley is frustrated with his existence and finds life unfulfilling and lashes out at anyone unlucky enough to be near him. These people damage each other constantly and their frustrations lead to in-fighting when cooperation makes so much more sense, but they simply can't help venting their dissatisfaction. Their cyclical lives continue on like Ouroboros, perpetuating their misery, still retaining a grain of hope but ultimately being discarded once their usefulness is gone. Crooks and Candy themselves both rally against this inevitable obsolescence—Candy is aged and maimed but insists on his ability to work, Crooks' body is failing him but he stubbornly continues to cling to what little he has. The book asks us what these people have to live for. They'll never escape these circumstances, but hope is nevertheless present, inextinguishable. 

It's an excellent, tight novella and there are few wasted pages. Steinbeck succeeds in depicting contemporary slang in a manner far better than some of his peers alongside whom he stands in the pantheon of American literature. Perhaps the only bone I have to pick with the story is the jarring, out-of-character visions Lenny seems to have in the closing pages. I found them so irrational and unnatural as to wonder how they made it into the text without being edited out. Lennie is not a person who's capable even of moment-to-moment problem-solving or planning; how is he suddenly able to roleplay a conversation with George, or his long-dead Aunt? It felt a bit too melodramatic and indulgent to me, and I think the conclusion of the book plays out far better without its inclusion.

Regardless, this is a book well-worth reading. It says a lot about American life even today, and it says a lot about the human condition: How unceasingly we dare to dream, how frustrating life can be when those dreams are dashed, and how we're all-too-ready to take that frustration out on each other when our hopes turn to ash and we're forced back to the drawing board. Contrary to the tragic arc of this book, it actually left me hopeful—hopeful for the future, and inspired not to give up on my grand plans and dreams, most of which will likely never come to fruition but remain important nonetheless.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) by Thomas Pynchon

Maybe I've begun reading Pynchon at the wrong place. I picked up his short stories as a neat, bite-sized introduction to his work, and found them rather wanting. Pynchon himself seems to consider them of poor quality. Continuing along the same logical route, I chose to pick up his shortest novel to continue getting to know him.

Pynchon's zaniness and irreverence is perhaps the main draw, but such a sense of humor is lost on a stodgy clod like myself, so I've got look for other stuff to enjoy here.

Above everything else, this book is messy. Pynchon just can't seem to help himself from diverting into every boondogglesome alley, as if every single tidbit of a story that forms in his mind must be forced into this book, no matter how poorly it suits the current narrative. A primary offender is the ridiculous play which eats up 10 pages of real estate near the end of the first third of this book, in which we're treated to a pointless and comically violent depiction of Renaissance Italian politics. These diversions might work better in a longer novel, or one with a strong narrative root driving it forward, but they feel far too scattered in a novel of such short length.

The novel is filled with oddball diversions such as this and left me skimming them all before too long. Far be it from me to criticize one of Pynchon's literary stature, but the value of such diversions was completely lost on me. I didn't find them comical or topical, but bloated and useless. Rather than expanding on or enhancing its themes or the story it's trying to tell, it feels unfocused and messy. Pynchon is 50 years too early; he's the millennial with a twitter account who thinks his every passing thought is worth sharing, except he's got a typewriter instead, and a horde of postmodern readers who seem to gobble up such nonsense.

Reading Pynchon often feels like listening to someone with ADHD who just did way too much cocaine, but his talent as a nuts-and-bolts writer is undeniable. When the going's good, I'm quite enjoying myself. His description of Mucho early in the novel felt lifelike and poignant, for example. But he seems to miss much more often than he hits, which makes for a jagged, tiresome experience.

This book is like a literal pile of garbage; there are tons of pieces of random, useless detritus (shown here in the form of disparate paragraphs) thrown together into the refuse bin that is this novel, jumbled up, and then congealed together by the permeating, noisome slime that is its main plot line.

Or perhaps I'm just too stupid to get it?

I think it's time to pick up something lengthier and more substantial next. It's probably not time to tackle Gravity's Rainbow yet, but something like V. or Inherent Vice might be more suitable.

I'm still holding out hope that I one day will be capable of reading and enjoying Pynchon, but that hope seems to dwindle a bit more with each story of his that I pick up.

⭐

Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov

Not going to be carrying this one around in public.

I read a used, dog-eared copy of Lolita that I purchased at a local library sale for next to nothing. The very first thing I read colored my expectations quite strongly. It wasn't the first page, nor the title page, nor even the dedication. It was right smack on the cover, a quote from Vanity Fair celebrating the work:

"The only convincing love story of our century."

Knowing the premise of the book, I thought; "wow, I wonder how Nabokov is going to pull off telling a genuine love story between a pedophile and a preteen girl".

The answer is: He doesn't. Not at all. Because that's not what the book is about.

Either the Vanity Fair commenter is a complete nincompoop and somehow managed to read a saccharine love affair into this grotesquely creepy, savagely predatory account, or the commenter shares my opinion and the publisher put this quote on the cover with the intention of warping their readers' expectations. Because if this is a love story, it's a love story only in how much Humbert loves himself.

There are two things most readers already know about this book even before picking it up: 1) It's a controversial story about a pedophile and his affair with a 12-year old girl. And, 2) It's extraordinarily well-written. Both of these are true. I expected the twist to be that I would be made to sympathize with the narrator, Humbert Humbert, on some level or other. But I never found myself coming close to the point of sympathy. From the get-go, Humbert is a rather blatant psychopath. He reacts with complete nonchalance to a death early in the story, he casually plots to murder others throughout, and for the vast majority of the novel he cares little for Lolita herself beyond what she means to him. Humbert isn't a gray hero or even a pitiable villain. He exists in this story as little more than a vampire; some monster of the night who manages to get his fangs into poor Lolita and spends the rest of the story slowly sapping her; consuming her essence, wearing her out, and grinding her down to a nub. He cares to preserve her only for his own enjoyment, admitting frequently that once she grows, he'll no longer be enamored with her. Were he to lose her, he would care only insofar as the absence of her affects his own life. He's an utterly selfish, predatory scoundrel, and we're given no reason whatsoever to sympathize with him. Nabokov himself agreed with this view of his narrator, calling Humbert "a vain and cruel wretch" and "a hateful person" in the Paris Review in 1967.

Although it's undoubtedly ballsy to tell a story of a pedophile in the comparably conservative 1950s, the true accomplishment of Lolita isn't just its controversial premise. Lolita herself gets little of the spotlight. She has hardly any dialogue, and what we do hear of her often does little more than describe Humbert's borderline insane obsession with her as an angelic superbeing:

Lolita had been safely solipsized. The implied sun pulsated in the supplied poplars; we were fantastically and divinely alone; I watched her, rosy, gold-dusted, beyond the veil of my controlled delight, unaware of it, alien to it, and the sun was on her lips, and her lips were apparently still forming the words of the Carmen-barmen ditty that no longer reached my consciousness.

In other, rarer episodes, the narrative depicts her as a rather typical young teenage girl; fawning over boys, playing tennis, sunbathing. For a love story to ring true, both characters must be genuine. No, Nabokov's real accomplishment in Lolita is the character of Humbert's unique voice and the quality of prose he uses to depict it. The character is so viscerally revolting that I found myself making cringing faces—almost subconsciously—while reading his words. And this isn't limited to Humbert's more overt displays of pedophilia. His worldview, his flamboyant way of speaking (particularly about himself), his dislike for the other people in the story, his single-minded obsession with possessing Lolita and the sociopathy he displays in its pursuit all qualify. He is a repulsive, disgusting character with no redeeming qualities. Reading Lolita is like reading a monster story from the point-of-view of the monster.

Vladimir Nabokov

And therein lies the twist. Lolita is colored with such odiousness by its narrator while simultaneously being one of the most gorgeous things I've ever read. Nabokov himself called Lolita "my love affair with the English language", and it shows. I don't believe I've ever read such consistently beautiful, fluid prose. Nabokov is at the peak of his powers as a writer, despite being confined with his second language—English—rather than his native Russian. Lolita is overly descriptive and undeniably flamboyant—indicative by itself of its narrator's high view on himself—but not so much so that it becomes over-the-top and a chore to read, like other writers who aspire to such high levels but succeed only in making their fiction an overly fatty, impenetrable mess. It rides along a narrow road and accomplishes both aesthetic beauty and consistency with its narrators voice. Additionally, Humbert's anti-social nature and cynical observations are often quite clever and darkly humorous. It seems that Nabokov succeeds in everything he intends to depict, despite comedy (especially dark comedy) being exceedingly hard to produce on the written page.

Such quality often carries the book as it stumbles onward through some dry spells in which nothing much is happening. Were it anybody else writing this story, I'd probably have set it down during one of two road trips in which we spend dozens of pages reading not much more than Humbert's obsessive fawning over his victim. Humbert is detestable, but Nabokov's talent as a writer keeps him from weighing too heavily on us as we read. Some of the stress incurred from reading such a putrid human being is dissipated by Nabokov's deft use of gallows humor through the work. Aside from Nabokov's colorful descriptions of Americana, there's not much to these passages in which Humbert and Lolita simply dip between motels. But these sections often feature depictions of the American west that are so gorgeous they're often worth the price of admission just by themselves, absent of any context:

And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called “sage brush” appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic.

Man, just look at that. I'd read Nabokov describing almost anything—it's stunning.

I knew quite a bit about this book before I ever read a page. And I had pretty high expectations from it. It managed to meet those while also surprising me a bit. It's extraordinarily written, it says important things and made me think deeply about its themes, and it imparted on me life experience I'd never have gained otherwise. It challenged me with a deep, genuine character whose beliefs and experiences attacked my own with each page.

All of these things are why I read fiction, and so Lolita succeeds.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Slow Learner (1961-1964) by Thomas Pynchon

The short story collection Slow Learner is my first exposure to Pynchon. I wonder if I've made a mistake and should have begun with one of the novels, such as V, or The Crying of Lot 49 instead.

Beginning with The Small Rain, I was struck immediately by some of the odd dialogue present (Pynchon seems to have confused Canadian accents with Southern), and the sex scene towards the end was curiously written. But I liked the character of Levine and the backdrop of a town destroyed by a hurricane and how the setting challenged Levine's worldview and lifestyle.

A bit rough in patches but it served as a decent enough introduction, I suppose.

The second story I found far more palatable. It's casually poetic, witty, fluid, dryly humorous, and more than a bit weird, Low-lands has me beginning to see what people adore so much in Pynchon. What I most enjoy about postmodern writers is the skill with which they render daily ennui interesting, and Pynchon does that well in the initial half of the story.

Pynchon is the second author (the other being Haruki Murakami) I've read lately who, in his own words, admits to disliking his early writings and tears them down in a foreword as amateurish work. Far be it for me to disagree with these legendary, masterful writers, but I've quite enjoyed the early material of both of them and found it worthwhile as a lead-in to later, more polished, and higher quality work.

Interestingly, Pynchon's story reminds me of a more humorous predecessor and obvious influence of Murakami's work in the surrealistic turn Low-Lands takes in its latter half, where we find our hero literally crawling down the rabbit gypsy hole and exploring an underground network of tunnels dug into a garbage dump in which a whole society of gypsies live in order to marry a three-foot-five-inch gypsy woman named Nerissa and help raise her pet rat called Hyacinth.

I swear I'm not making this up.

Up third, the story Entropy contains a few beautiful and genuinely humorous scenes that are well written, but both are constantly tempered by Pynchon's reversion back to having his characters talk at me as if he had a bullet list next to his typewriter filled with themes and ideas he had to force into this story by any means necessary. This doesn't work for me, and if Pynchon continues like this, I don't think we'll be able to be friends.

I could chalk this one up to being very-much-not-my-thing--I usually like my short stories subtle, laconic, and peppered with a bit of ambiguity; all of which Pynchon—in his overwritten style jam-packed with random factoids and obscure references—represents the polar opposite of.

I've heard that Entropy serves as a great introduction to Pynchon's unique style, which was made famous in his later work such as Gravity's Rainbow, which I'm building up to reading by first sampling some of his short stories. This is a bit worrisome since I didn't much care for this one. But I have a feeling his style will work better with a bit more polish and the more ample legroom offered by the novel versus the short story. We'll see.

Under the Rose, unfortunately, did nothing to dissuade the opinion formed by the prior story. Surely reading Raymond Carver's short fiction and John le Carré's spy fiction immediately before this didn't do any favors for Pynchon's brand of short spy fiction, which falls short of the high mark set by each. I found Under the Rose to be little more than an exercise in dry tedium. It's another story that probably works better in a longer format. I didn't feel I was given enough time to get to know these characters, indeed the only thing noteworthy about the characters are their silly names. The setting could have been an interesting one, but we're kept from spending much time there by a plot that trips forward monotonously, allowing for little life or character to the people in the story as it reaches a conclusion surely meant to have more impact than it does. Pynchon seemed more comfortable commenting on boring minutiae than filling out his characters. I found the entire thing a silly bore and loathed it.

I found the final story, titled The Secret Integration, to be a far more compelling one—at least initially. We're given a number of characters who instantly jump off the page at you, colored with Pynchon's trademark wackiness. The premise of a group of mischievous, memorable youths is whimsical and charming, but the serious edge Pynchon sets to it (the racial integration of a Massachusetts school during the American Civil Rights movement of the '60s) all but dissipates as Pynchon wastes his story mostly rambling on tangents about the various minutiae present in the story such as political figures of the Berkshires' past. I suspect this is just sort of Pynchon's thing: he seems to like vomiting his deep knowledge of useless, irrelevant facts onto the page right in the middle of a narrative that was really beginning to get interesting 8 pages ago when this meaningless diversion just got started. I didn't find any of these expository tangents engrossing enough to warrant their inclusion.

It's not all bad, though. This is the most well written story of the collection by far, featuring moments of virtuoso talent from Pynchon's pen. But the lack of a strict editor sees Pynchon waste this potentially entertaining story, and it fizzles out before it can make much of an impact, then ends.

Now that I've finished Slow Learner, my initial thoughts seem true: I do think I made a mistake reading this first of all Pynchon's work. It seems uneven and rambling, but I can see a glimmer of what folks must like about his work. So I'll pick another Pynchon up soon and hope that the good stuff shines through more often and more strongly, but for now I can't shake the fact that Pynchon's style just isn't for me.

⭐⭐

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) by Raymond Carver

One day a thousand years from now, whoever is living on this planet will unearth some of Carver's short stories from some old, burned out bookshop they've just excavated. They'll get to work meticulously translating it and they'll learn everything they need to know about latter-half 20th century American culture just from his work. Raymond Carver is our Geoffrey Chaucer and his short stories are our Canterbury Tales. He reminds me of Ernest Hemingway in that his work is almost always more than the sum of its parts. His prose is simple, dirty, and direct. But what he says with it is profound in his muted way. Reading him feels like brushing your hand against some dirty slate, or chucking an old, broken cinder block into a refuse pile. His short fiction is the holey work glove of 20th century American literature. And I mean that in the best possible way. If Hemingway had lived forever, perhaps Raymond Carver is what the injuries and trials of later life would have crushed him into.

Carver manages to capture everything about daily American ennui with such sparseness and subtlety; our insecurities and failures, our hopes and dreams, our faded love for one-another and our boredom and lack of inspiration. These stories are no more than vignettes into everyday working class life, but they're often so poignant and relatable for that. Carver's characters feel so real, sad, detestable, and pitiable. Mostly insecure, unsuccessful, cigarette-ash-covered and beer-soaked middle-aged men, they feel like your creepy uncle. Everybody has the unfortunate privilege of knowing somebody like these characters. So many of them have this putrid, embarrassing artery of insecurity running through every fiber of their being and polluting everything they do. You can trace it from their actions back down to their core like branches to the trunk of a tree. Their insecurity damages everything around them.

In the story They're Not Your Husband, Earl's insecurity tears his wife down—seemingly a hard-working, earnest woman, at least from what we're shown. It's painful for us to witness, and even harsher when considering how real it feels, despite being fiction. It begs us to question Earl, himself: Is this a man who's down on his luck, as it would seem? Or is this perhaps a man whose own shallow, passive aggressive actions have led to his unemployment? Maybe it's so affecting because we can all see traces of ourselves, at our worst, in Carver's characters. Like looking into a filthy mirror. Carver makes sure to get out of the way and let his characters do the talking with simplistic, direct prose and dialogue. And his stories are more affecting for it.

I discovered him via an interest in Haruki Murakami's work and hearing that Carver's short fiction was a strong influence on him, and never is this clearer than in the story Are You A Doctor? A phone call from a strange woman, a chance encounter peppered with romanticism... And someone making tea.

These sorts of chance encounters and the mystery that accompanies them are now a thing of the past, and the mystery that makes them provocative is somewhat lost on those of us living in the modern world, in which any name can be googled in ten seconds on a smartphone. A phone call from a stranger will never again be as mysterious as it once was, but Carver's story helps those raised in the era of smartphones understand how dangerous and compelling such a meeting once was.

Another story titled Nobody Said Anything features an expertly crafted narrative voice of your typical hormone-flooded teenage boy—a horny, lonely creature playing hooky from school and searching for something that would more entertainingly occupy his worthless time. The kid's loneliness goes from typical to pitiable to depressing over the short course of the narrative. The closing lines of the story manage to flip our feeling of him completely from mild disgust to pity.

Civilization's continuing consumption and desolation of nature seemed to be a theme running through the undercurrent of the story. The airport encroaches on the creek the boy fishes to such an extent that the fish are bloated and unrecognizable, its waters are ground down to a slimy trickle when they used to be surging and flush with healthy fish. The boys' fishing represents this as well, as they gleefully and methodically pursue their warped prey in order to kill and dismember it in a fashion that renders their actions more savage than you'd expect. It feels like Tom Sawyer written in the dark, postmodern hopelessness of Cormac McCarthy rather than the satirical gallows humor of Mark Twain.

What's in Alaska features more humor than most of the others, which was a nice change of pace. Many of Carver's stories are so bleak and grey that it helps to have a palate cleanser once in a while. I also enjoyed the layers to this one, as it's heavily hinted that one of the characters is cheating on another with a third.
My overall favorite is probably Jerry and Molly and Sam which sees a man decide to abandon the family dog, eventually ending in his experiencing an epiphany. The story is so heartrending and the change in the narrator is so genuine and real that finishing it left me reeling. I had to set the book down and take a break afterwards just to think about it, and it's amazing to me that a story clocking in at fewer than 20 pages can have such an effect.

There's always a lot packed in to the few pages Carver dedicates to each story. I never feel good after reading him, but that's not really the point. I don't think 'fun' is the right word to describe his stories, but there is joy in reading them for me—perhaps because I'm in a better place in my life now but can still easily recognize poorer times passed in which I felt bled through with the same negative emotions and existential anxiety that these characters seem to, and I can subconsciously, optimistically urge them onward towards more hopeful, carefree lifestyles once they become more aged. So reading them is cathartic and—unexpectedly—generates optimism within me.

The value of good literature is that it imparts life experience onto us. It allows us to live and feel life situations we'd never experience ourselves. And although some of these early stories are a bit too subtle for their own good, Carver's still excellent at drawing emotion from the reader with so little. Even past death he continues to create a love for the medium of the short story within his readers regardless of demographics and interests. He's certainly done so for me over the past year.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury

There's a special king of ire you can raise among fans of the Star Wars franchise by suggesting the whole damn thing isn't science fiction at all, but rather fantasy in space. Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 mines a similar vein of having all the trappings of science fiction present simply for genre appeal, but it features none of the intelligence that makes the subgenre compelling in the first place.

Fahrenheit has futuristic fireproof structures, robots who butter bread for their humans, and houses constructed entirely of television-screen-walls. This book has got a glossy coat of science fictiony paint, but peel off that outer layer and you'll find that what's underneath is a pretty bog standard, empty-headed dystopia with very little concern for the actual science (both soft and hard) portion of the science fiction moniker.

This might not seem very important given the book is a dystopia first and a science fiction novel second, but the real bone I have to pick with Bradbury is how flatly this book falls on its face when considering the soft sciences it relies on to build its world and thus make its point about where Western civilization was headed in the 1950s and 1960s with the advent of the television. Bradbury's book lacks both the intelligent foresight of Huxley's Brave New World and the strong narrative structure of Orwell's 1984 and replaces it with little else but his rampant insecurity and incapable worldbuilding, the latter of which is perhaps what was most offensive about Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury's creation is artificial, incoherent, and completely falls apart if you think about it for more than 5 minutes.

Bradbury would have us that government has replaced books and classic liberal thinking with television as a control device. He'd have us believe that liberal arts have been all but abolished. Classic subjects in the western canon such as literature and history are no longer taught, replaced with seemingly vapid and obedience-inducing classes on television and sports and various other opiates-of-the-people. A scary thought, especially to his core audience of folks who enjoy reading literature—myself included.

But, with the absence of these classes, which are fundamental to a child's ability to learn in the first place, how are these characters even literate? Why is there a need to burn books at all when such a civilization would presumably be incapable of producing an adult capable of reading one? Further, what kind of education provides the bedrock for a civilization with such advanced robotics and technology as are present in Fahrenheit 451? Who is designing these groundbreaking new pieces of technology when children are supposedly not even taught to think critically in any fashion whatsoever? How is this society still capable of urban planning and complex public transportation? Air flight? War? The extraordinary new technologies our modern society is populated with are far from a given, which is why they've never existed in the tens of thousands of years of human civilization until just the past century. Bradbury's poor worldbuilding betrays a lack of understanding of how a modern, developed society even functions. Ironically, this book doesn't seem to understand the importance of basic critical thinking and open-mindedness to a functioning, wealthy society, despite railing against its potential extinction and rallying Bradbury's readers behind the importance of these ideas. The flimsiness and logical incoherence of Bradbury's world — something that should be the foundation on which the rest of the story converts itself organically via its plot and characters into the points he seems to want to make — wrecks the entire thing. It's infuriating, and I refuse to keep reading it.

It's a popular notion that the best children's literature is also enjoyable for adults. Fahrenheit 451 is the opposite; it's literature for adults that's so stunted and poorly conceived that it could only be genuinely enjoyed and resonant to teenagers. This is straw fiction set up by a grumbling fan of the medium of the novel who views new technology as a perversion of everything he loves. It's a pontification about the evils of stuff he hates that other people are wrong to like. It's a book with a message that works only on the outermost surface and fails at every deeper level within.

Fahrenheit 451 is "old man yells at cloud" dressed up in fancy clothes. It's old folks in the '30s telling you that jazz is just noise, in the '50s telling you that television will rot your brain, in the '70s telling you that KISS are satanists, in the '90s telling you that video games will make you shoot up schools. If this book succeeds as a cautionary tale or a prompt towards open-mindedness, it does so accidentally, in showing the dangers of becoming so secure in your own bubble that you end up dismissing new forms of media outright, rather than considering the potential strengths of such new media. Look at what television has done in the decades since Bradbury penned this novel. Some of the most successful creations of artistry have been created in this new golden age of television.

I've had one run-in with Mr. Bradbury in the past and found him so reliant on simile and purple-prose as to be unreadable. I suppose the best thing I could say about Fahrenheit 451 is that it's far more readable than Something Wicked This Way Comes, but instead of trying hard to be literary with its prose, it tries hard to be literary with its themes. Unfortunately, it fails in this manner just as badly.

Sorry Ray, but I think I hate your work.

⭐

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) by Ray Bradbury

This review's probably going to make a lot of people mad. I'm sorry if you like this book; really, I am. But I couldn't stand to read any more of it. And yes, I know I'm just some random idiot on a website. Far be it from me to criticize a legendary writer like Ray Bradbury, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Bradbury's writing is so egregiously fat with purple prose that if you had showed me some of these paragraphs and told me that a try-hard high schooler had written them I'd have believed you. Seriously, even I don't try this hard to be artful and profound in my dollar-store-website reviews. I found myself reading some of these lines multiple times just trying to grasp what the fuck was even going on in the damn scene since Bradbury had described it in the most obtuse, impenetrable way—for the sake of no more than making the sentence as amusing and pretty as possible. I can only hear about a tattoo artist described as seated rapturously alongside his ceaseless melancholy, stinging himself with a dagger of bees! so many times before my eyes roll themselves right out of their sockets. In the beginning I was struck by Bradbury's endless, artful adjectives and his rambling nature, considering the book nearly more poetry than prose. By page 100, though, they were beginning to wear me out. And by page 150, they were absolutely unbearable. Maybe there's a decent story in here somewhere, but I couldn't dig my way through the piles of lard to find it.

I realize this is very much up to personal preference. If you like extremely stylized prose then you'll probably love this novel. I didn't hate every second of it, but I do hate it.

⭐

Ligeia (1838) by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe entrances us with a similar story to Morella (which I loved), but to lesser effect. His typical overwriting is present and has a strong effect on our tally of the narrator's sanity (or lack thereof). Portions of the short story are startling beautiful despite their nearly purple nature, and the climax—although good—did not affect me as much as Morella's did.

Still good stuff from Poe.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Call of Cthulu and Other Weird Stories (1917-1935) by H.P. Lovecraft (In-Progress)

I can certainly see the appeal of Lovecraft, and I don't have much to say that hasn't already been covered in any random review of one of his short stories you could chance upon. His building of atmosphere is up to par and perhaps even excels past some of the more well-respected literary horror I've been reading, and digging into some of these stories in the '20s must have been an absolute trip. That said, it's tough for me to adequately critique it given my modern biases considering his style has inspired so much genre media since the time when he was writing, be they short stories, novellas, television, film, or even video games.

His prose probably wouldn't be described as tight and I couldn't shake the feeling that some of these short stories could have been produced by one of my high school contemporaries clad in goth garb back in 1999. I can understand the praise for his ability to build atmosphere though I found many of his stories don't give me the claustrophobic sense of mind-altering madness he probably intended. Many of his creepy-crawlies thus far have felt more cartoonish than anything actually inspiring otherworldly awe, visceral revulsion, or knee-jerk, xenophobic odium. I do long for the sense of cosmic foreignness Lovecraft seems dead-set on inspiring.

Maybe I just need a few more reps of Lovecraft to fall into a groove and acquire the taste. I'll push further into this come next Halloween season — there's just too much on my plate right now.

The Gold Bug (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe

19th century writers and ruining their stories by depicting unintelligible dialect phonetically; name a more iconic duo.

Look, I finish almost everything I read. And I really do like Poe. But I just can't do it with this one. There's probably a very good story in here somewhere, but Legrand's African American servant Jupiter's illiterate dialogue is so frustratingly constructed that I simply can't bring myself to continue bludgeoning through it to get to the good stuff. Reading The Gold Bug is a miserable chore and I have much better things to do with my time (and better books to read) than to waste it decoding this nonsense.

"Keeps a syphon wid de figgurs on de slate --de queerest figgurs I ebber did see. Ise gittin to be skeered, I tell you. Hab for to keep mighty tight eye pon him noovers. Todder day he gib me slip fore de sun up and was gone de whole ob de blessed day. I had a big stick ready cut for to gib him d--d good beating when he did come --but Ise sich a fool dat I hadn't de heart arter all --he look so berry poorly."

Pardon my French, but: Fuck this shit, Edgar. You're better than this. It goes past style value. This is bad without even applying the lens of 21st century ethics and criticizing this in a racial fashion. I'm not reading this for literary purposes, but for enjoyment. And this sort of dialogue is such a chore to decipher that it completely destroys my ability to read and enjoy the story.

When it comes to dialect and dialogue, let's have more Twain and less Poe, please.

⭐

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) by Shirley Jackson

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this review! Turn back now if you haven't read We Have Always Lived in the Castle yet!

I've never read a writer capable of crafting such genuinely engrossing mentally unstable characters as Shirley Jackson. I found myself enthralled by Mary Katherine Blackwood, who is a human being so different from myself that she's interesting just for that, without even considering how real and intriguing the character is beyond such differences. It took a few pages for me to get used to her quirks but she was so skillfully crafted that I felt I had come to know her very well by the end of the story.

The conflict which takes place in the story felt a bit manufactured, but it was entertaining nonetheless and I also enjoyed the blunt scumbagitude of Charles Blackwood. For the majority of the story, it feels as though we're observing the Blackwoods far after the climactic, world-shifting event has already occurred. It makes for a bit of a lull in the story's first half as we get to know how dysfunctional and broken daily life has become for this family, but I suppose this period is necessary to fully come to terms with the odd situation we found our protagonist in, in addition to warming to her mental instability, which often presents itself as quirky and cute with a dark streak that bursts forth often out of nowhere and without warning.

By the end of the story I realized that my previous notion of this story occurring after-the-fact might not have be completely accurate. We're past the climax of the grander story, sure. But following the conclusion of this one I began to grasp how the seed of this story grew in Jackson's mind. Not as an aftermath, but as a prelude—We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a story about how the crazy ladies who live in the burned out, overgrown house came to be. You can see the Blackwood house growing into the house of legend that children are afraid of, and the Blackwood sisters themselves being the scary old ladies who steal children and cook them and eat them. And the way the story comes together to form this in its closing pages is absolutely brilliant. It was a subtle 'Aha!' moment that I was allowed to form in my own mind rather than having it foisted on me with a clumsy, contrived plot twist.

Jackson touches on some interesting questions regarding guilt and conscience, too. How it affects people, or doesn't affect them. But the mark those questions have left on me is still fresh and they're something I'll need to consider further as I put some more time between me and finishing this excellent book.

This is a brilliant piece of fiction. Probably more solidly constructed and more polished than The Haunting of Hill House. It's beautifully written and Mary Katherine is one of the most memorable characters I've read. It's subtly off-putting, more than a bit creepy, and it took me completely out of my comfort zone. It posed some questions to me that I haven't considered before and it presented me with a human character populated by thoughts and motivations completely foreign to my own, and I can't possibly ask more from reading a work of fiction.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Black Cat (1840) by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe's prose is pretty wordy by today's standards, but he avoids the same pitfalls Lovecraft dives headfirst into because he's very to-the-point with the actual content of his stories. Poe's lilting style suggests that his perpetually unreliable narrators are not quite in their rightest mind, and it's subtly offputting for that. He's nowhere near as subtle as a Shirley Jackson, but her work frequently reminds me of his—neither are blatant enough leave you bored by another maniacally insane narrator.

The more demonstrably insane a character is, the more boring, one-dimensional, and unrelatable they seem to become. And so depictions of insanity are always way more interesting and when they sprout from a kernel of logic that grows into such otherwise unstable action. It's why we love characters like the Joker, Tyler Durden, or Hannibal Lecter. We've all been in moods that'd see us burn a pile of money, or blow up a credit card company, or eat someone's liver with some nice fava beans and Chianti.

Okay, so maybe not the last one. But you get my point. Dostoyevsky's fond of prattling on about the inherent irrationality of humanity and how it torpedoes our repeated (and inevitably failed) attempts at crafting a Utopian society, and Poe totally gets that. Except rather than axing a landlady in the noggin, he chooses to axe his wife in the noggin. And drink tons of booze and write poetry, too (which sounds like a fuckin' party to me, let's go).

This reminds me a lot of The Tell-Tale Heart —so much so that they could be companion pieces. It's a fantastically morbid work of art that had to be a stunningly realized piece of short fiction when it was produced in Poe's contemporary era. And it leaves me wondering: "How the hell did this guy have any friends?" I mean, if one of my buds wrote something like this, I'd probably be making a concerted effort to avoid them. Or at least to make sure they spent as little time as possible in the same room as my pets.

Poe's brilliant, and I find it interesting that the man himself has been so overridden by the pop culture
persona his work has mutated him into—like a real-life version of Frankenstein's monster. I mean, I own a pair of socks with Edgar Allan Poe's face all over them. And really, can you imagine what he'd have thought about a freaking NFL mascot being named after one of his works? It's completely bizarre, but I find it hard to argue that his work and his persona aren't each so interesting and worthwhile that they're not deserving of the utmost honor that is being completely perverted by modern American corporate interests in order to make a quick buck.

So here's to Poe, whose face adorns my socks and whose stories haunt my mind.

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The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842) (Dupin, #2) by Edgar Allan Poe

I really love Poe, but this is just too damn dry.

Perhaps this much dry detail about a murder may have been intriguing and curiously morbid in a society less permeated with all sorts of depictions of bloody viscera, but for us modern folks steeped in true crime fiction, slasher-horror, and everything in between, there's a distinct lack of humanity and emotion in this story to attach ourselves to.

Poe's knowledge of the science of violence is not trivial considering the contemporary era in which he lived (where 'miasma' was the hot infection theory, and actual germ theory was still just a budding, abstract idea), and it serves him well in much of his other work, but you can see why the storytelling polish present in Conan Doyle's later Holmes stories were a necessary, welcome evolution to the detective-mystery fiction of Poe's Dupin. I wasn't a huge fan of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, but it's still superior to The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.

I assume this isn't skippable if you want to read the (apparently) far superior The Purloined Letter (I haven't read it yet!), otherwise I'd be comfortable urging Poe fans ignore this entry entirely and jump right on to the final—and perhaps most famous—Dupin episode.

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A Dog's Tale (1903) by Mark Twain

"The more I see of some people, the better I like my dog." — Mark Twain

Skillfully penned with moments of wry levity that Twain is known for. It's also quite deep in its examination of how casually human cruelty is often committed. While human beings don't have a monopoly on dealing death and pain to other species, we're certainly the most well-practiced at it, and one of the few species who revel in dispensing such things for purposes of pleasure. Perhaps animals are not possessed of human emotions or intellect, but those are not always attributes necessary to experience suffering, nor does a shallower view of suffering make it any less considerable or more bearable.

I'm too sad to write any more and I want to go hug my dog now.

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