What I Read In May

 June is now here but the weather is giving everything EXCEPT summer vibes and I'm about sick of the rainy dreary gray days we've been putting up with all spring. I hope it's been nicer where you are, wherever you are. 

I've spent all month reading indoors and blew through 14 books total (one was for publicity purposes, so I won't include that one down below). That's nothing to sneeze at, and heck, if I can keep that kind of reading up for the rest of the year, I'll not only knock my reading goal out of the park this year, but I'll also maybe, possibly, slightly stand a chance of outreading what I've bought. Ok. Who am I kidding? That's never going to happen but a girl can dream, can't she? 

Enough jabbering though... let's see what I read this past month, and determine how badly bookstagram influenced my choices and/or let me down LOL!! 

One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford

As the book opens, it's a few months after the London government manages to contain a zombie outbreak, and we watch as the country is slowly starting to return itself to a semi-normal way of life. Here we follow Kesta, a scientist who is desperate to discover a way to restore those who were infected with the virus. And she's harboring a pretty massive, motivating secret - her husband, who was bitten and turned. She's got him drugged and locked up in their apartment as she and her fellow co-workers work tirelessly to discover the origins of the virus in the hopes of developing a cure.

Conceptually the book was great. I appreciated how it humanizes the zombies, who appear to have retained some of their memories and personality, while also exploring a fairly creative cause for the outbreak AND that it shows what it could look like if the government was able to catch it in time, identify and destroy all of the infected, and attempt to get people back to living their lives. But it was a little slow and tried my patience along the way with some of its repetitiveness and with Kesta's overall approach to literally everything. Yes, I get it, Kesta loves her husband and will do whatever it takes to make him well again, even treat her BFF and co-workers like shit or as simply a means to an end. She bordered on obnoxious and was wholly unlikeable, even in the face of what she was up against. And yet everything seem to mostly go her way, and everyone seemed to mostly forgive and support her and it was all just a smidge too convenient for me.

One Yellow Eye explores love, grief, and the maddening desire to do absolutely anything, and I mean ANYthing... to find a way to bring your loved ones back from the brink. And c'mon, that cover?!? It's so dark and moody! I just wish the book was a better match for the vibes that cover gives.

For fans of books like Wagner's The Only Safe Place Left is the Dark; Davis-Goff's Last Ones Left Alive; Hunter's The End We Start From; and Malcom's And Then I Woke Up. 

I've always said that I don't think I'd have what it takes to survive a zombie apocalypse. Though I would try like hell, I just know that I'd never make it. I'd probably die early on, in a stupid accident or starve to death if a zombie didn't bite me first. So I've never really spent time a lot of time thinking about how I would react if my husband was infected and I was the one left alive. Though that's exactly what Leigh Radford is doing with One Yellow Eye.

Leutogi by HT Boyd

Nope.

Who are all of y'all giving this thing 4 and 5 stars? C'mon. You read what I just read, right?! It was awful. And not in a 'omg body horror got me all cranked up' awful, either. And I was soooo hoping for some good, gross body horror. Sigh.

This was 270 pages of a disgustingly selfish woman treating everyone around her, including her disabled son, like they were all pieces of shit or just a means to an end. She was loathsome and preachy and such a spoiled bitch that I wished with all my heart that things would end horribly for her.

Don't read it. Let me spoil it for you.
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It doesn't. It doesn't end horribly for her. And that is the true horror here.

My apologies to the author, who kindly offered me a review copy. I wanted to like it. I really did.

God Jr by Dennis Cooper

Ooof. Grief fiction but with video games.

This is my first Cooper and I don't want it to be my last, though I fully understand this one deviates from his usual style and is considered tame compared to his other books. It's been sitting on my shelf, intimidating me for over 10 years, and I'm glad I finally pulled it down last night.

Jim is grieving the death of his teenaged son. A death he is responsible for. A death that has left him crippled and wheelchair bound. He becomes locally famous for building a monument in his yard. His son's drawing come to life. A structure that his son drew obsessively. And when Jim learns that the structure is part of a video game his son used to play, well, Jim picks up the controller and dumps all of his grief into the game.

Imagine carrying the weight of that. Imagine having to live with the guilt and the memory of killing your kid. Just imagine it.

"death's the end. It's erasure. It's so heavy we decide the dead are just invisible and mute. Death's so bad we'd rather go insane than know that one of us is nonexistent"

"Try making up a world where having killed someone you love isn't important"

Ugh, Cooper. You hit me right in the feels, you jerk.

If you liked this book, you may also like Joshua Mohr's Farsickness. It shares a similar hallucinatory, break from reality, video game-esque feel.

Person by Sam Pink

I had been given this review copy from the author waaaaay back in 2012. I've read quite a few Sam Pink books and loved them all so I'm not sure why I left this one lingering on the bookshelf unread for so long. But I just finished God Jr by Dennis Cooper and I was in the mood for more weird guy fiction and Sam Pink will always scratch that itch.

Person follows a slacker dude around town while he walks the streets of Chicago, swings into a liquor store, talks to the local homeless guys (and himself), worries about how smelly his armpits are, lounges on the floor of his room in his sleeping bag, and splits oranges with his deadbeat roommate.

I love the "other version" chapters that pop up, like re-do's of what was just done or a parallel version of what would have happened if he had made a different choice. And the choices are as banal as what he does in the park after he leaves a chick's house, or what he and his roommate say to each other after they get back to their apartment with their hands full of beer.

And the whole book is filled with fun nuggets like:

"My history is the history of things imagined and not- happened."

"I detect some new kind of ouch in my headhole and it feels permanent."

"Sometimes I definitely feel a sense of accomplishment but it's never after accomplishing something."

And how about that vagina face? Huh? HUH?!

Are you sleeping on the Pink? Because you really, really shouldn't. His book are the bomb.

Gliff by Ali Smith

Goddamn banger is what this is.

A dystopian novel that makes you work for it and I'm here for every flippin' page of it.

In a near future in which data is king and someone is watching your every move, where whistleblowers and rebels are marked for re-education or worse, our non binary narrator Bri/Brice/Briar and their sister Rose have been left behind while a man named Leif attempts to locate their mother and reunite the family.

Stripped of their home and campervan, the siblings hunker down in a strange unfurnished home with a week's worth of canned food, and tentatively explore the neighborhood. Rose befriends a boy whose father runs a horse abattoir and uses what little money they have to buy one of horses, a grey gelding she names Gliff, while Bri meets a woman named Oona and a group of squatters who crack their world wide open.

The book then bounces between this timeframe and a five year jump into the future where we learn that the siblings have been separated, and our narrator, now a "re-educated" high ranking supervisor in one of the packaging plants, meets a Delivery level worker who knew their sister.

Nothing is explicitly spelled out. So much is still left up in the air. But it's not about the destination. It was never about the destination. And that's a-ok.

The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

Everyone everywhere is reading and loving this book, and here I am with another unpopular opinion.

I thought it was good, don't me wrong. I listened to it, and thought it was well narrated. The pace was fine, the tension and overall wtf factor was pretty ok, but didn't it just drag on and on and kind of keep repeating itself? Couldn't it have benefited from being just a little shorter? Or was the repetitiveness supposed to really help us get into the characters' heads? because all it did for me was solicit some eye rolls and heavy sighs from time to time.

It's a really interesting premise - a group of friends are hanging out in the wood, stumble across a weird staircase that seems to lead to nowhere, one of the kids climbs it and jumps into.... nothing. gone. vanished from sight. And twenty years later, the remaining friends are pulled back together, and find themselves standing in front of another staircase in the woods, determined to climb it and find their missing friend.

Tons of Stephen King vibes here. Very relatable, flawed characters. And just enough wtf energy to keep you tuned in and questioning what the heck is going on. All the ugly must rise to the surface before anyone can be redeemed... and even then, will it be enough to get their friend back? Will they ever find their way back home?

A story of friendship, fears, and one that reminds you to give your inner demons some space to breathe. They have, after all, made you who you are.

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L Peck

Eh. #Bookstagram let me down a little with this one. It was just ok. Nothing super special. Not a book I'd be running around telling other people to read but if they asked me about it, I'd not deter them from giving it a try.

It's actually quite a scary hell for bookworms like us - being told you'll be surrounded by near infinite shelves of books, stuck in that endless library until you find the story of your life, where almost every book you pick up is complete gibberish, and where every night, every book gets returned to its place.

I can't pinpoint exactly what bothered me, and I generally liked it, but I wasn't wowed or hanging on to the edge of my seat with it.

If you are into books like The Divine Farce by Michael Graziano, or The Hubris of an Empty Hand by Mahyar Amouzegar, that focus on religion from very unique angles... you'll find something very similar here.

The Sofa by Sam Munson

So long haunted house horror. Say hello to haunted couch horror!

I was so stoked to land a copy of this one. I've been a fan of Two Dollar Radio for a long time and this book just screams "read me"!

A man and his family return home from a day at the beach to find that their couch has been replaced by a smaller, slightly musty one. No signs of forced entry. Nothing else stolen or broken. Just... the couch. The incident and the strange, smelly couch wholly unsettle the man but his wife and two sons don't seem to mind much, especially once the police report has been made and a new couch is on backorder. And they also don't seem to notice the random flushing of the toilet and the faucet turning on in the downstairs bathroom when no one is in there, and they don't appear to be haunted by peripheral glimpses of a man with a bowler hat and glasses and a bushy mustache, either. But he does and he is. And he's worried he's losing his shittin' mind.

I read this in one sitting you guys, it was just so unsettlingly fun. I mean imagine it, the place you were the most comfortable, where you stretched out, kicked back and relaxed, now no longer feels safe, but begins to feel malevolent and malicious.

The tight prose and mental mind fucking really gets under your skin. Psychological horror with possessed furniture? Hell yeah, sign me up. Just promise me you'll leave my couch out of it!

Also, can we talk about how fabulous that cover is?!?

These Memories Do Not Belong To Us by Yiming MA

Great cover, #meh content.

I requested a #reviewcopy copy of this one when it was pitched to me because I thought it sounded pretty badass. A future in which China succeeded America in a war, and people have devices installed in their head allowing them to store and share their #memories. A future where the government employs Censors whose job is to review your memories for banned content, and where being caught in possession of banned memories can have you sent for reeducation or worse, have your memories and those of your family wiped permanently from your memory bank.

Sounds wild right? Only, the book is less focused on all of that and more focused on the memories our narrator's deceased mother left for him, and his desire to share them widely before he is caught being in possession of them. So we're reading a collection of interconnected memories that mostly have nothing to do with him or his mother, but focus on the banned historical memories/experiences of others from before, during, and after the war. Memories of a plane crash and the damage it wreaked on a small island community; of a frowned upon relationship between the son of Chinese Royalty and a white American orphan; of the Chrysanthemum Virus that killed millions of people; of an armless swimmer who beats the odds, to name a few.

Think Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami. Think The Book by M. Clifford. Think #1984. Think #Fahrenheit451. Think of any book in which the government has complete control over what you see and hear and think and say.

And then discovering the book is more about individual memories and less about the actual situation everyone finds themselves in. Less about the fighting back and survival in this new reality and more about accessing memories before they are wiped away or modified. Less about uncovering the truths that the government is so desperate to hide and more about hoarding what's true for as long as possible.

As I write this, I realize this wasn't a bad book at all. I just wanted it to be more than it was and because of that, I disappointed myself.

This one fell victim to the whole "it's not you, it's me".

Lost in the Garden by Adam S Leslie

#bookstagram you just keep doing me dirty! Thank goodness I bought this as an ebook and didn't drop full price on the print copy. Geesh.

I guess I was expecting this to be the book of the year, the best thing I've read, an all-the-stars kind of read based on how everyone was going on about it. And maybe that's part of the issue I had with it, maybe I set the expectations way too high and let you guys influence me too much. Maybe the poor thing just didn't stand a chance.

I didn't hate it but I was expecting to love it. Like all caps L.O.V.E love it. Like crush it against my chest when I was done reading it love it. Only instead, I thought it was just ok.

It's road trip, folky horror. It's slow and unsettling. It definitely takes it time to get there, doesn't it? And when it finally does, it left me wondering why it took so long. Don't go to Almanby. That's the word on the street. Anyone who goes there never comes back. Well, it took our trio over half the book to get there, and when they got there, all they kept asking themselves is why they didn't listen to everyone.

Me, I'm over here doing the opposite. I'm all like maaaan, why did I listen to everyone, lol.

Q: How often do you find yourself on the other side of the book fence?

Q: What's a book that everyone loves to death but you felt criminally failed to live up to the hype?

Mayra by Nicky Gonzalez

All of these horror books sounding pretty dang good but not fully delivering is starting to harsh my mellow you guys.

An old friend rings up, back in the area again, and invites you to hang with them at a secluded rental house in the middle of the everglades. You were too young to know it then, but they were a bad influence on you but you're aware of that now and worry that you might not find each other likeable now. But you go, reluctantly, and are surprised at how easily you pick things back up.

They forgot to tell you that their boyfriend is there, which was a little weird at first. And then they share that it's not actually a rental but a house the boyfriend inherited from his family, and it's kind of mazelike trying to find your way around inside but you're feeling at ease and kind of peaceful, the stress of real life slipping off your shoulders and you start to lose track of time and then... well... there's a lot of flashbacks, I mean A LOT of flashbacks and then there's this journal under the bed of the room you're in, which you start to read and which makes no sense until it kind of does and then everything just seems to sort of stop making sense.

The weird doesn't hit until we're almost at the end of the book, so the whole time I'm like yeah, ok, where's the horror, and even when it does finally shows itself, it's like meh, THAT's what I was sticking around waiting for? Nah. Not ok. That was crap.

The 'horror' probably comes from the horribly long wait for the criminally horrible payoff.

The Seas by Samantha Hunt

good god, how have I been sleeping on Samantha Hunt all these years? Are you guys reading this? Why hasn't anyone told me to read this?!?

Oh my heart. It is wrenched. This book is everything - magical, mystical, haunted, grief drenched...

Fuuuuuck. THIS is what a mermaid story should look like. It gets all the stars.

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

Ugh. I hate nothing more than reading a book that works very hard at making me dislike the protagonist and then pulls the kind of crap this one did towards the end that makes me change my mind and get all verklempt and shit.

I'm holding back one star because that was a dirty trick you played, Charlotte. A really, really dirty goddamn trick.

Q: What's your position on tearjerkers? Do you willingly go into them ready to be destroyed or do you avoid them at all costs?