Book Review: Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

Blake Butler is one of those writers who've been on my radar for a while, but it took some time to get around to reading one of his books (though I have read some his work published online). I decided to start with his second book, Scorch Atlas.

Scorch Atlas is a novel in stories. Each of the thirteen stories and thirteen vignettes are about a different set of characters, but they all take place in the same world. In this case, a world being destroyed by a series of thirteen plagues.

The vignettes in the book describe the different plagues destroying the world. There are normal disasters like flooding and dust storms, but most of the plagues are bizarre occurrences like rains of blood, teeth, glitter, manure and static.

The earth had learned to scratch its back. In massive columns same as what we'd seen on TV during our worst storms, stretched check-pattern, warbled splatter. As well, the sound of a billion needles wheedling, tearing their tips against the grain.

The stories don't relate directly to the plagues in the vignettes. Instead, the stories focus on people dealing with the destruction of the world in general.

For example, in "The Ruined Childhood," a couple's baby becomes infected with some sort of strange and possibly supernatural disease. The baby's skin becomes covered with gunk and dogs start trying to invade their home to get at it. Finally, they decide to bury the baby and leave it for dead. When the father comes home, he finds that it somehow found its way into the attic and its body has swollen up. The father tries to deal with his wife slowly going insane from her loss and the undead child still growing in the attic.

This was probably my favorite story in the book. A surreal horror story about the destruction of a family and a very atmospheric take on the "evil child" trope.

The child's mother shouldn't see this, the father thought. He turned away and hid his eyes. He went back downstairs and locked the door behind him. He tucked a towel under the crack. Though for hours, through whatever insulation, whatever the silence, the child's voice still slammed his head.

Family disintegration is a major theme in the book. In "Disappearance," a boy's father is arrested after being falsely accused of abusing him and missing a free throw. With his father gone, he completely throws himself into searching for his missing mother. Even with the world falling down around him and eventually being quarantined in his school's gym, he persists until he finally finds her in a very strange place.

I sat on the floor in the neon light with stomach rumbling and sounds of flame and stink of rot. I saw things moving toward me and then gone. I couldn't remember where or why I was. I couldn't find my name writ on my tongue or brain-embedded.

Butler's vivid prose creates striking and relentless images of destruction and rotting. In "Seabed," a man named Randall walks among the ruins of his city and meets a little girl who seems to be the only other survivor. They stumble on a beach and find that the ocean's gone dry. On the ocean floor, they find a house.

The sand cracked beneath their feet. The shore sat scummed over and pile-driven down, pale combs of foam dried at the farthest point where water'd lapped. Cracked shells of land-struck jellies and uncased conch flesh sat overcooking, dried out, picked apart. Whole gulls with their skulls pecked in and post-ravaged by sand mites and worms.

The book also conveys the narrative of the world's destruction through other means besides straightforward stories. For example, "Damage Claim Questionnaire" tells us about a woman's loss of her family through an insurance claims form.

Have you undertaken methods to protect against future loss?

I often think of pastry. My joints creek when it drizzles. The windows have been painted over. I'd never kiss another man. The baby calm inside me, his kick stilled off to numb.

The constant rot in Scorch Atlas is even present in it's design. The pages are covered in burn marks, water damage and smoothed out crumpling to make it seem like a document from a now gone world.

I highly recommend this book. It's a wonderfully written and beautifully designed collection of surreal stories. It has a unique take on the speculation of the end of the world as we know it. While it focuses mostly on personal loss, it still manages to show the scale of death and destruction in such a scenario. I also have Blake Butler's 300,000,000 on my shelf and I look forward to reading that.

Buy Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler here.

Book Review: Everything's Fine by Socrates Adams

I bought this book without knowing much about it. I think I saw it mentioned by some other author I follow on social media and bought it on a whim. I can't say I regretted picking it up.

Ian's job is selling PVC tubes. He's not very good at it. His boss tries to light a fire under his ass by giving him a piece of tube, naming it Mildred and making him raise it as a baby. When that doesn't work, he demotes Ian to the position of Tiny Shit Head, a job that consists of being strapped into a chair and forced to watch a monitor count down numbers. In between his job and taking care of Mildred, he plans and saves for a vacation in the French Alps. He ends up developing a crush on the pretty travel agent, Sandra, in the process.

Although I am not earning a great deal of money, I feel as though my new job is going pretty well. It is a demanding position which carries a large amount of responsibility and is high powered and executive. 

Ian is clearly unhappy with his life, but is clearly in denial about it. He tries to console himself that his sale skills are important, even though he clearly has none. He doesn't even have basic social skills. His denial is very thin however, his unhappiness with the world around him peeks through very often. This scene where he's pushing Mildred in a stroller and it begins to rain, for example.

I imagine the water rising so fast that I have to struggle to keep moving, all of the filth of the pavement licking at my skin. The water will rise all the way up to the bottom of the pram. The water will carry on rising upwards.

Ian feels like the world is drowning him.

He doesn't get much respect either. His boss treats him like dirt, people laugh at him behind his back and even Mildred has some choice words about him.

I don't understand him. I can't work him out. I don't understand why he would come and get me. I am a tube.

What I do know is that he has made me so miserable today that is is almost certainly the worst day of my life so far.

Whether the digressions into Mildred's thoughts are really the tube thinking or Ian projecting himself on to it is rather ambiguous. While Ian plays the role he was given and treats the tube like a baby, it's clear he knows how stupid the whole thing is. It also serves as a metaphor for Ian's own situation.

A tube's natural state is to be part of the plumbing, or more specifically, to carry something from somewhere to somewhere else. When it is not part of the plumbing it will roll about and get in the way and be a nuisance, because it is not doing what it is meant to be doing. It is not doing what it was made to do.

The problem with humans is they don't know what they were made to do. None of them knows what their natural state is.

Ian's pathetic state would be really annoying if he made no attempts to better himself. He does, however, work hard to save money to go to the French Alps. He loses a lot of weight by eating less food, but also gets roped into a ridiculous pyramid scheme. He also makes bumbling attempts to get with Sandra, which ends up landing him in even more trouble.

My two major complaints is that for all the time spent building up Ian's absurd and awful life, he seems to snap out of his complacency rather quickly. When he finally goes on his vacation, his epiphany feels rather forced. There is also a lot of repetition in the book that seems to be trying to help show Ian's trapped mindset, but doesn't really end up contributing much.

All in all, I think this is a solid novel. It's a funny and enjoyable absurd comedy about the emptiness of modern work life. Anyone who's ever worked a shitty job will sympathize with Ian's plight. This book is Socrates Adams's debut, and I think it's a good sign he'll be coming out with something even better in the future. I definitely recommend this, and I look forward to reading Adams's future works.

Buy Everything's Fine by Socrates Adams here.

Brief Thoughts 6

I've got a couple reviews coming down the pipe at Adventures in SciFi Publishing and at least one on here. Here's another entry in Brief Thoughts until then.

If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino 

Calvino quickly became one of my favorite authors after I read Invisible Cities and Cosmicomics. This was his first novel that I read, and I love it as much as his short stories.

The book is told in the second person for the most part. You, the Reader, are tying to read Italo Calvino's new novel If on a winter's night a traveler. You discover your copy is defective and exchange it at the book store. You find that your replacement copy is actually an entirely different novel. You set out to find the complete novels and stumble on an international book conspiracy made up of duplicitous translators, overzealous academics and a beautiful fellow reader that you fall in love with.

This is one of the most readable "postmodern" books that I've read. A lot of these types of books intentionally alienate and confuse the reader. This one's not much different, but the main story is a straightforward enough thriller that it keeps things grounded. It's pretty funny too.

The most interesting thing I've found in the book was the dynamic of reading as a form of personal enjoyment vs literature as a social and political force. While Calvino makes fun of the latter with the goofy academic characters, he doesn't dismiss it altogether. It's clear, though, that Calvino believes that literature is an individual experience to the reader, and that should be primary above sociopolitical considerations.

As he demonstrates in this very novel, it's very possible to create books that work to satisfy the reader as an individual without being completely asocial, apolitical or amoral. Being this is a novel about reading, the fact that people are not free to read as they please in many countries comes into play. The later chapters mock censorship of literature without being didactic or preachy

If you haven't read anything by Italo Calvino, you're missing out on a lot. This clever novel is as good a place as any to start with him.

Buy If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino here. 

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

I randomly picked up this book without knowing much about it or Hermann Hesse, but I'm glad I did. This is a beautiful novel.

The story is about the spiritual journey of an Indian with the same name as the Buddha, who he meets along the way. He finds himself taken by the Buddha's teachings, but can't bring himself to become his disciple. He believes that in order to fully grasp this knowledge, he has to learn it himself as the Buddha did.

I'm hardly an expert on Buddhism. The only things I know about it comes from a few articles and Osamu Tezuka's Buddha series. This novel conveys the basic teachings of it (to my knowledge) very well, however. In an very poetic way too.

Even people who don't gravitate to Buddhist teachings will get a lot out of this book. It packs a lot of emotions in it's short length (only 122 pages in my New Directions edition). The basic lesson that true wisdom can only come through thinking for one's self is probably the most important theme in the work. It sounds trite, but I've never seen it presented so well.

This is a book who's beauty and importance I don't think I can properly convey. Highly recommended.

Buy Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse here.

Book Review: NVSQVAM (nowhere) by Ann Sterzinger

I had actually bought NVSQVAM (nowhere) before The Talkative Corpse was released without knowing much about Ann Sterzinger. I'm pretty sure I had read her blog or an interview with her before I bought it. I never got around to reading it. Even as much as I enjoyed The Talkative Corpse, it took me until last week to actually pick up NVSQVAM.

Lester Reichartsen isn't happy with how his life turned out. When he was young, he was the lead singer of the punk band The Incognito Mosquitos. After he was fired by his band mates, he decided to go back to school to study Classical Letters. Unfortunately, he ended up knocking up his girlfriend Evelyn and got talked into marrying her. Now he has a kid he never wanted, a wife he doesn't love anymore, a job he hates as a teacher at a university in a southern Illinois town he hates and he's working on a dissertation he can barely bring himself to give a shit about.

The problem with getting a doctorate in classical letters, he thought, was not that it was useless. It was that anybody smart enough to actually do it wouldn't spend that much effort on anything but their own creations. Why couldn't he have studied something modern and easy? Then he could have something himself, too.

To make matters worse, his kid Martin is a boy genius. Most parents would be proud of this, but to Lester it's nothing but a reminder of how much of a failure he is. The fact that Martin is a smug, annoying little shit doesn't help either.

Toward the beginning, Lester decides to try to seek therapy at his university's health center. It doesn't go well. At all. This part made me laugh out loud and cringe at the same. It reminded me of my own disastrous attempts of talking to a female therapist who was unable to help me. Like Lester, it came from my own inability to really articulate my problems and a lack of qualification from her for my specific problems. Lester finds out one way that it could be even worse. If you couldn't think about much other than how much you wanted to fuck the therapist.

It occurred to him that she wasn't talking very much. Shouldn't shrinks have some answers instead of just sitting there asking questions and looking lickable? He could feel sweat stains growing on the nice purple shrink chair beneath his male behind. He tried to make a joke to himself about thanking his lucky stars that she didn't have a couch, but it only made him want to scream.

A good portion of the first half of the novel follows Lester, Evelyn and Martin as they visit their extended families for Christmas. Lester absolutely hates his working class father and Evelyn isn't exactly fond of her rich parents either. Both of the visits are ridiculous and hilarious. The contrast between the two precedes the same vein that's mined in the The Talkative Corpse. Idiots exist at every class level. Being working class does not make you good or noble, and being rich does not make you smart or worthy of praise. Ann slings her barbs at every level of society.

Lester's dealings with the bullshit of academia remind me why I decided to stop after undergraduate work, besides the financial burden. Lester manages to finish his dissertation and takes another look at it before he sends it off.

The file finally came on screen and Lester stared at it like a caveman. It seemed to have been written in no known language. He’d been over every phoneme of it thousands of times, and even the English words had no meaning for him anymore; the Latin looked like the transcript of a dispute between squirrels.

I studied Psychology in college. Which is why I now work in insurance. I recall one class on brain chemistry that really took its toll on me. I would study for the tests and feel like I understood the material. Then when I actually took them, I would have the same reaction as Lester. The tests may as well have been written in Latin for all I understood on them. I still have no idea how I managed to bullshit my way through that class.

NVSQVAM is very funny. Lester's antics and Ann's witty metaphors had me laughing out loud several times. Part of the humor comes from footnotes where Ann gives sarcastic explanations of things like the Muppets, Wal-Mart and various music trivia. Such as this explanation of who G.G. Allin is.

Musician of a sort, mostly recalled for pooping on stage.

Or this footnote on Kenny G.

Musician whose success in the 1980s proved conclusively the nonexistence of God.

As funny as this novel is, Lester is not exactly who you would call "likable." He's self-pitying, whiny and often mean-spirited. The way he treats his family is flat out awful. The fact he resents them so much and usually treats them like dirt, however, makes the moments he actually bonds with them seem all the more genuine and sweet.

"Goddamnit, Martin, I will hunt you down and SHOOT YOU if you turn out to be like me! Do you understand?"

These moments also make Lester's fall to rock bottom even more tragic. Much of it is his own fault, but that didn't keep his downward spiral from being one of the saddest things I've read in a long time. I'm avoiding spoilers here, but the ending of this book will punch you in the balls. Even if you're a woman or a eunuch.

Unless you believe in God there's nothing but hell. But there IS nothing but hell, so how can you believe in God?

NVSQVAM (nowhere) is a very funny and a tragic novel of not just the horror of living in the early 21st century, but of being alive at all. Lester Reichartsen is an excruciatingly human character whose life makes you laugh to keep from crying at how awful and pathetic it is. Between this and The Talkative Corpse, I'm convinced Ann Sterzinger is one of the most underrated writers working today. The attention she receives is far too sparse for someone who can write this well. I highly recommend this novel and I'll be picking up her debut, Girl Detectives, very soon.

Buy NVSQVAM (nowhere) by Ann Sterzinger here.

Brief Thoughts 5

It's been some time since I've done this.

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli

In the past, I would have said that Watchmen is my favorite western comic (my favorite manga being Osamu Tezuka's Ode to Kirihito). After reading Asterios Polyp, I don't that's true anymore.

The story concerns an architect named Asterios Polyp who has won awards for his designs, but never had any of them built. We first meet him at the lowest point in his life. His apartment building burns down during a lighting storm, he grabs some of his possessions and heads out of New York. We learn about his past and about his relationship with his ex-wife, a sculptor.

This comic is amazing. The art is excellent, the story is great, the balance between drama and humor is spot on and all of the characters are fascinating. It's one of the best examples of what comics as a medium are capable of.

The only complaint I have about it is the ending. I won't spoil it, but it reminded me of Douglas Copeland's Eleanor Rigby in a bad way. I see what Mazzecchhelli was going for, but it just felt way too contrived and out of left field.

Despite the ending, I still highly recommend it.

Buy Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli here.

Tough Guys Don't Dance by Norman Mailer

I enjoyed Mailer's debut The Naked and the Dead, so I gave this book a try. A noir crime novel seems like a perfect fit for someone like Mailer.

Tim Madden, a writer with a drinking problem, wakes up from a drunken blackout to find he has a new tattoo, blood in his car and woman's severed head in his marijuana garden. He sets out to figure out what happened during his blackout.

Plot wise, the novel is a run of the mill detective novel. Mailer doesn't do much with the tropes or cliches of the genre. That said, for what it is it's entertaining.

What makes this different from other detective novels is that instead of hard boiled prose, Mailer's style is much more affected. Instead of focusing on the plot, Madden often goes on tagents about his past and philosophical monologues about love, masculinity and sexuality.

This a mixed bag. Detective novels tend benefit from being tightly plotted and from their straightforward prose. Mailer doesn't quite pull off this style of writing with this genre. There are some tangents that are ridiculous. Madden's monologue about the phallic symbolism of a lighthouse comes to mind.

Despite that, most of the tangents are actually either funny or interesting to read. My favorite is probably a jab that Mailer takes at a John Updike passage that describes a vagina in the most awful purple prose. Madden praises the passage and proceeds to attempt to write something similar that ends up sounding crude and mean-spirited.

The views on sexuality are not exactly politically correct, but I found them interesting enough that it got me wanting to read Mailer's The Prisoner of Sex.

As far as novels go, this isn't bad. I would recommend The Naked and the Dead over this one though.

Buy Tough Guys Don't Dance by Norman Mailer here.

Duluth by Gore Vidal

The first book from Gore Vidal that I read was Lincoln. It's not a bad book at all, but I probably would have liked it more if I was a civil war buff. Still, it was interesting to read such an unromanticized portrait of a man that is considered by most to be a secular saint. I liked it enough that I picked up Duluth, mostly because Vidal himself considered it one of his best.

This book was more up my alley. It's a goofy and surreal satire of pretty much everything in American society.

The book takes place in a fictional version of Duluth, Minnesota that contains a desert, mountains, a beach and a swamp. There are several plots running through the book, most dealing with the politics of the city. Several of the plots are pastiches of science fiction, police procedural and Harlequin style romance.

Some of Vidal's satire doesn't really work. His mockery of daytime television is a little too obvious and on the nose.

That said, much of the books is very funny and entertaining. He engages in a type of postmodernism that makes for a bizarre but accessible world. My favorite part of the book is probably the antics of the sadistic police woman Darlene Ecks.

While Lincoln seems to get more praise, I would recommend Duluth over it.

Buy Duluth by Gore Vidal here.

Adventures in SciFi Publishing is the Place to Be.

The other website I write my reviews on, Adventures in SciFi Publishing, was recently nominated as a finalist for a Hugo Award in the category of "Best Fancast." I want to say congratulations to the producers of the podcast and website and I wish them the best of luck.

I figured this is a good time to plug the last few reviews I've done on the site.

Black House Rocked by Emril Krestle and Paul Bingham

The Bizarro Starter Kit (Purple)

The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq

I'll continue to write reviews of books that don't fall under the category of "speculative fiction" on this blog, so don't abandon it completely. 

Book Review: XXX Shamus by Red Hammond

I became interested in XXX Shamus because the publisher compared it to the work of Hubert Selby Jr and Irvine Welsh. Since Selby is one of my favorite authors and I've enjoyed what I've read of Welsh, I picked this up. While it certainly has the nastiness of those two authors, it's a little more plot driven. Personally, I'd say it's like a more lucid and explicit Kiss Me, Judas.

Hooper Garland is a private investigator in New Orleans who specializes in finding missing girls. A young woman comes into his office one day and asks him to find her missing sixteen year old sister, Yasmin, who disappeared after she got pregnant. Hooper is reluctant to take the job, because the last girl he found didn't want to be found and tried to kill herself. He's persuaded to take the job, because he has another major problem with women.

All Hooper knew is that when women got near him, it was like flicking a switch on their lust. They lost control. They took control. It had started to make him nervous.

As Hooper works the case he meets the despicable, pitiful and fascinating people involved in Yasmin's life, as well as trying to deal with the ones in his own.

One of the best things about XXX Shamus is that it manages to keep its plot tight and fast moving, like a pulp mystery novel, yet is able to explore the psychology of its characters in depth. This is what keeps Hooper's problem of being irresistible to women from being more than just a male fantasy. All of Hooper's trysts come back to bite him. He grows tired of his inability to form real intimate relationships.

Like Divinity had said, Hooper's entire life was a porno flick, but he wished it to be a romantic comedy.

Hammond's hardboiled prose is what really makes this book. It's straightforward yet vivid and visceral. Reading this book is like a classic noir film playing in your head. Except there's no cutting away when things get dirty or bloody.

Thinking if this were the Fifties, if he were Mike Hammer, there would be all the innuendo and hints but none of the flesh and bodily fluids and smells and sounds. Back then flirting wasn't an invitation for a no-strings-attached fuck.

From the title alone, you can tell this book is not for everyone. It's extremely graphic and very depressing at times. Despite that, I would recommend it to any fans of crime fiction and neo-noir.

Something to note is that Amazon removed this book from their store. Not just from the Kindle, but they refuse to sell new copies as well. Although you can still buy used copies off of it. Why they chose to remove this book for violating the terms of service, when you can buy actual porn that advertises itself as porn off Amazon is a mystery. It sets a really bad precedent for independent authors and publishers on Amazon as well. However, you can still buy XXX Shamus through the crowdfunding site FanBacked.com

UPDATE (10/03/2015): The FanBacked campaign has ended, but Broken River Books is now selling it direct. Buy XXX Shamus from BrokenRiverbooks.com.

UPDATE (03/05/2018): The Broken River Books edition is now out of print. You can pick up the new edition from Down and Out Books here.