So... not a bad month overall. 10 books in total. Not as many as July but more than I read in June, and some of them were heavy on the page count too, so I'll take it! I also rocked my Goodreads goal so now it's all low pressure reading for the rest of the year, haha, although I still have a bunch of albums to complete in my The Cure 2023 Reading Challenge over at goodreads. (if you haven't joined that challenge, it's not too late!)
Sooo. Let's check out what I read below:
The Handyman Method by Nick Cutter and Andrew F Sullivan
I had really high hopes for this one. I loved Cutter's The Troop, and really enjoy reading Sullivan's books... but The Handyman Method just didn't meet my expectations.
I listened on audio, and the narration was very well done. But even with a good narrator, the writing and the storyline itself just felt so uneven and blergh. In the beginning, there was not enough going on, and then all of a sudden, there was too much going on all at once.
Don't get me wrong, there were some pretty creepy moments, and a few nasty body horror things that made me want to vomit in my mouth - and helloooo those were totally Cutter's influence, right? I mean, yuck! The pliers and fingernail thing.... if I was reading that shit, I would have skipped over it completely. Having it READ to you is just, nope. No thank you. That's a visual I could have done without.
Not a book I'd be recommending to others, though I do seem to be the outlier here. If you've read it, I'd be really curious to hear what you thought.
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
I picked this one up off my shelf after finishing Laura van den Berg's Find Me which was book #1 in my great book blurb reading experiment.
I had purchased a copy of Await Your Reply way back in 2011. So long ago that I can't even recall what initially had caught my interest in it, other than the fact that I grabbed it a local library book sale (based on the $2 sticker in the upper right hand corner of the cover, lol). So I decided to pull that one down and read it next.
Ugh you guys. This one was rough for me. It was slow as all get out. We are introduced to three individual storylines - Ryan who is getting to know his estranged father Jay, Lucy who has run away with her history teacher George, and Miles who is on a mission to locate his missing twin brother Hayden. Any reader worth their salt knows that these groups of characters are going to end up connected in some way, but man... does Chaon really make us work for it. And there's a period, pretty deep into the book, where you're like, ok, yeah, I think I got it, I think I know where you're going and Chaon just keeps on taking his sweet old time.
I swear I grew more gray hairs just from the sheer boredom of it all. And then once everything finally gets spelled out, it's like, oh... really? that's how we're going to leave things? that's great. that's just flippin' wonderful. asshole.
The messed up part... I thought about DNFing it a few times, but didn't against my better judgement, mostly because I want to give this book blurb reading experiment a real fighting chance and giving up only two books in felt kind of cheaterish. So... where to now?
Well, I am going to move on to Book #3 to see if I can get this experiment back on positive ground.
Super Normal by Josh Denslow
I really loved Josh Denslow's collection Not Everyone is Special... so much so that I did the publicity for it back in 2019. He has a knack for writing fun, quirky characters and plopping them into familiar but slightly off-kilter situations. And in his debut full length novel Super Normal, he definitely kicks it up a notch!
This was such a cute book.
Beth, Taylor, and Denise are siblings who have grown apart. They are each not exactly living their best lives at the moment. Beth, for example, just slunk back to her mom Edna's house after running away from her live-in girlfriend Fran. Taylor is trying to make it big as a musician but can't seem to catch a break. And Denise was just caught coming out of the bathroom naked by her one-night-stand John's fourth grade son Phillip, who also happens to be one of Edna's students.
In the middle of all this, the three of them are suddenly pulled back together again due to their mother's recent terminal diagnosis. While this might sound like a very conventional start to a story, these three characters are anything but typical. Their father, who passed tragically after a deadly reaction to a bee sting, had super strength - like the "pull a tree right out of the ground roots and all, and pick up a car so he can fetch his daughter's ball from under it" kind of super strength - and he passed some pretty wild super powers on to his children.
Though they've spent most of their lives hiding those abilities, they find themselves in a situation where maybe, just maybe, if they work together, they can help John locate his son Phillip who has gone missing shortly after accidently discovering Denise's super power.
It's like Disney's The Incredibles, only for adults. Slighty less comedic, steeped in familial turmoil where the humor counterbalances the heaviness, yet still fun enough to have us imagining who might be cast to play the role of each character on the big screen. Because without a doubt, this needs to be made into a movie!
The Ferryman by Justin Cronin
Justin Cronin was one of the writers who blurbed the last book I read (Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, which I did not really dig). While I had already read Cronin's book The Passage years ago, it was the only book I'd read by him and I had strongly disliked it. But then I saw that he had just released this one, and yes I'm aware I am already kind of breaking my own rules, I thought this was a good time to give him a second try, so I went out and bought it and man, I am so glad I did! (book 3 in my book blurb reading experiment)
Clocking in at over 500 pages, I'm not going to lie, it felt like a daunting task and I worried about what I was getting myself into (part of what I disliked about The Passage was how dang looooong it was) but after reading the first couple pages, I was hooked!
Proctor is a ferryman on the island of Prospera, a completely sealed off utopian environment where people live comfortably and thrive, having survived something referred to as "the horrors", an unclear catalysmic event that wiped out most, if not all, of humanity. It's Proctor's job to transport the residents of Prospera to the Nursery when it's time for them to retire, where they will be reborn into a new reiteration of themselves and eventually rejoin the population back on the island. It's something most Prosperian's look foward to and Proctor finds a lot of joy in helping them through that part of their transition. Until he gets the call that'll he be transporting his father Malcom.
Malcom's mental status begins deteriorating quickly between the time Proctor picks him up and gets him to the ferry. His father begins to mumble cryptic things, telling Proctor "you're not you" and "the world is not the world" and he whispers one nonsensical word "Oranios" that lingers with Proctor long after he leaves him.
This experience sets Proctor down a path of new discovery, of chasing after answers he may never find, and it's a journey he may never fully return from...
If you haven't read this yet, it gives off major The Island, The Truman Show, and Shutter Island vibes! It's a total mindfuck of a book but in the absolute best way!
Liminal by Bee Lewis
This was a book that's been sitting on my shelves for a little bit. Initially drawn to it by its cover and the fact that it's published by an indie press, I snagged a used copy and then promptly forgot about it.
This was a weird one for me. It's isolation fiction with some psychological thriller and magical realism mixed in. While I enjoyed it overall, it felt extremely unbalanced and I found myself skimming the forest dream scenes which really didn't add much to the storyline besides its oozing creepiness.
In Liminal, which is really the perfect title for this book, Esther is pregnant and has decided to follow along with her husband's plans to move into a shuttered station with the hopes of renovating it into a writer's retreat. She's not thrilled with the idea of living out in the middle of nowhere to begin with, but when she discovers the lack of wifi and the relentlessly thick fog that refuses to lift which disallows her the chance to explore the property, she quickly begins to regret decision.
On top of that, her husband Dan, who has been caught keeping things from her in the past, is acting more and more secretive... disappearing for hours at a time without telling her where he's going, coming back with incomplete or odd explanations, and then claiming she's the one acting strange. He also seems to have created an immediate bond with Mike, their nearest neighbor, who Esther has mixed feelings about.
The book continues to follow Esther closely for the remainder of their first week in the new place. As expected, Dan's behaviors continue to cause Esther mental stress, Mike continues to demand Dan's time and attention, and Esther, already unsettled by a repeating dream in which she is being hunted in the woods around her property, makes up her mind to find out just what is going on with her husband.... which leads to some unexpected revelations.
Out There Screaming edited by Jordan Peele
This book was recommended to me by the publisher because I had read and enjoyed Fever House. I also saw some other reviewers rating it fairly highly so I thought I'd download it to see what all the fuss was about.
Anthologies can be tough. In addition to identifying stories that compliment one another thematically, you have to ensure the voices within the stories are also aligned and support the overall feel or vibe of the collection. With that in mind, this collection was weirdly uneven for me.
Having some familiarity with Jordan Peele's approach to horror through his films, I was expecting the stories within this anthology to be more twisted than they actually were. Don't get me wrong, there's a nice mix of sci-fi, supernatural, magical realism, and psychological horror here and the good ones were really good - especially Eye and Tooth, The Other One, Lasiren, Pressure, Dark Home, Flicker, The Grief of the Dead, and A Bird Sings by the Etching Tree - but the rest were all tossable.
Looking forward to getting to know some of these authors better in the future!
Abandon by Blake Crouch
#book4 of the #bookblurbreadingexperiment wasn't horrible. But I've definitely read better. And I don't think I'll be reading any more by him...
For those of you following along, Blake Crouch blurbed my last read, Justin Cronin's The Ferryman. I hadn't read Blake before, though I knew he wrote Dark Matter, which seemed to be an internet darling back when it first released. Knowing my not-so-positive history of reading books that get a lot of buzz, I decided to go with Abandon because (1) it was one of his less popular titles and (2) it sounded like the one I would enjoy the most out of his vast backlog. And I had read a few online reviews, so I went into it armed with the knowledge that, while the description made it sound spooky and weird, there was no actual supernatural elements to the storyline.
It's the story of a mining town where all of its residents mysteriously up and vanish without a trace on Christmas day in 1893. The book alternates between two timelines and does a nice job pacing the reader through the set up in both spaces, walking us through the events that took place leading up the disappearances, while simulatenously following a journalist named Abigail and her estranged historian father as they travel to the abandoned town in present time with a pair of paranormal photographers to visit the ruins and see what they can see.
Part small town western, part survivalist fiction, and not at all shy when it comes to the bloody stuff, Abandon showcases the darker side of humanity and the lengths some people will go to to get what they want.
And so where do I go from here? Well, Abandon has blurbs from both Harlan Coben and Andy Weir. I haven't read Coben before but honestly, after looking at each of his books, I can't find one that I think I'd enjoying reading. And I promise... I looked! So while I've read already read Andy Weir and absolutely loved The Martian, and would be breaking my rule AGAIN... I'm going to order myself a copy of his novel Project Hail Mary to see if I can keep this experiment going just a little longer.
An Ordinary Violence by Adriana Chartrand
I requested a digital review copy of this book based on (1) the cover, because uhm hello it's gorgeous, and (2) it sounded like it would be right up my alley. And in more capable hands, it might have been.
The storyline is a bit of a jumbled mess and tended to be difficult to follow. It's also very uneven. Chartrand leverages flashbacks to help set the stage and build character backstories. But rather than devise one method of delivery for those, she sometimes inserted them directly into the current storyline differentiated by italics, and other times, she created an entirely separate chapter for it, which was titled 'Toronto'.
Chartrand also hints at some supernatural elements throughout the first 2/3rds of the book but rarely spends time fleshing them out. Instead of having the effect I think she was going for - leaving the reader feeling creeped out and unsettled - it just left me confused and disengaged. And when she finally lifts the curtain and shines the spotlight on the cosmic weirdness, I had more questions than anything else. Her lead up did nothing to help me understand what was happening when thing that happened happened. Or why it was happening. Or how it even came to happen.
Interestingly enough, I had considered DNFing it twice... once at the 40% mark and again at the 60% mark but, against my better judgement, I hung in there because some of the more positive reviews alluded to things being slow and eventually picking up. So here I am, again, uspet with myself for not listening to my gut. When will I learn?!
If you normally like what I like, trust me when I say, you wouldn't be missing anything if you decided to skip this one.
Whalefall by Daniel Kraus
Beaky from Whalefall is the new Winston from Cast Away!
Soooo... I really loved the audio narration but didn't really love the story itself. Is that weird? Like, I think if I was reading it, I would have wall-chucked the book a hundred times because of how ridiculous it was. But listening to it... I was actually enjoying the suspense of it all. So yeah, weird.
I won't tear it apart too badly, since part of the whole idea behind reading fiction is the understanding that we're going to have to suspend our belief and allow ourselves to get sucked into the un-reality of it all of but c'mon man... being in the stomach of a whale, ok Geppetto, I got you, no worries, but like...how the heck did he KNOW some of the things that were happening OUTSIDE of the whale? And the items that the whale swallowed, how wonderfully convenient for Jay. And all the life lessons his father and sisters and mother taught him that might help him get out of this pickle...I mean whale... lol...
It was a love/hate relationship the entire time. Because c'mon Jay... where are you? where ARE you? WHERE ARE YOU? WHEREAREYOOOOOU?!
Nestlings by Nat Cassidy
Oooh. I really liked this one.
If you check out my recent review of Adriana Chartrand's An Ordinary Violence you'll see me venting about how poorly she handled the set up and suspense of the strange goings-on in her novel. She should take a look at Nat Cassidy's Nestlings to see how it's done right!
OMG does this man know how to keep his readers creeped out the entire way through the book. He teases us with this delicious sense of dread right from the very first pages and manages to stretch it out forever without it feeling old or tiresome. That oh-no feeling, that nagging question of what in the holy fucking fuck is going on, it never goes away, even when you think you've started to figure out what's happening. Heck, even AFTER the big reveal, he still manages to keep that nail-chewing, anxious feeling going and going and going.
The only thing I could have done without was the spiders. Yuck! But everything else... yasss queen!
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