The Passenger, Manhunt, Foe, & a reading list for spooky season I will not get to
oops it's october
I always goof up my reading list with impulsive holds at the library, which inevitably all come in at the same time and pile up. Not with time-crunch impossibility like The Old Days of hard copies, but the little dance of keeping my Kindle on airplane mode and requesting audiobooks vs eBooks as a result creates annoying traffic jams.
At the moment - between airplane mode Kindle holding a small stockpile of library books I have to finish before syncing again, my phone holding currently checked-out audiobooks from the library, and the IRL book club I’m in – I’m juggling Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, and Iain Reid’s Foe. Only that middle one really advertises itself as “horror”, so I guess my reading list – much like the weather in NYC until recently – is still gearing up to spooky season.
The Passenger (the last book, along with its companion novel, that Cormac McCarthy wrote before his death last year) is one of those difficult texts immensely improved by reading the whole-ass Wikipedia plot summary before reading it. It’s one of those books where the book is less about the plot and more about the conversations people have while a plot is ostensibly happening. The kind of thing that a media illiterate society immersed in self-policing spoiler culture would hate. Go ahead. Read everything that happens in the book before you read the book. You are free! Now you can enjoy the book!!
Manhunt is one of those interesting cases where it has received universal critical acclaim but I know one dissenting opinion among my friends who didn’t like it. These cases usually make me way more interested in reading a book; what happens when the text runs up against personal taste and just doesn’t click. A quarter of the way into the book, I agree with some of my friend’s criticisms: the writing is not very good. Some of it is a strength I personally do not have (the detail of the action scenes, in particular), but the dialogue is fairly Whedony. It’s quippy in a way that can strain credulity, as though someone will be running for their lives and let loose a series of piquant jibes about their assailant’s likely privileged upbringing. I almost certainly should not have done the audiobook for this one, since, while I have issues with the narrator which are not the fault of the author or text, I also think audiobooks work particularly badly when the writing is very Whedon-influenced. The boundary between the quippy authorial voice and the characters as different characters breaks down in this medium (audiobook coming from one person’s mouth) in a way that would be less obvious in another (normal book you read with your mind).
Both of these, intriguingly, have made me reflect on my first draft of my own novel, which has been top of mind looking it over lately and thinking, huh, it might be close enough to done where I can move onto starting the second draft. McCarthy was a huge influence on me, having read All The Pretty Horses in high school. Quippy Whedonism is, unfortunately, subconsciously deep within me. The Passenger sets up a nice little mystery, but it’s more so the backdrop rather than what the book is about; my own novel has a similar “this happened, but it’s not the important part and it only barely gets explained” thing, and it’s nice to read a book that does this for me to study. It is also, on the opposite side of the coin, interesting to read a book like Manhunt that has elements I don’t like that I worry my own novel also has: trying a bit too hard to be funny without actually being particularly funny, without really giving different characters different voices at the expense of the author’s wit, etc.
I think also, if I am interested in the concept of ever learning anything, I’ve decided to see if starting Manhunt over reading the actual book since the audiobook isn’t clicking with me will improve my experience. At last, this blog about reflection might actually result in reflecting.
For reasons completely forgotten, my book club has begun reading Iain Reid’s Foe, a novel in which a married couple living in a remote, rural area is informed the husband is on the short-list to be conscripted into a space colony program, but don’t even worry about it they’re going to make a cyborg husband-clone for his wife. Sure. Everything checks out so far.
My girlfriend finished reading it before I even got started and was disappointed, describing it as something that could have been a good short story, but instead is one of our least favorite types of novels: a novel in which the whole thing is premised on the reader believing the twist is going to be satisfying. Now a hundred pages in myself, it doesn’t offer much else: the characters are largely nonexistent, way too many scenes of the narrator just thinking and asking the same questions over and over again, and the premise is still too far-fetched to not be suspicious. Like, it’s page after page of “isn’t this all suspicious?” and it’s like yeah of course, but what’s the story though? Is the story the tale of the reader brute-forcing through three hundred pages until the book just tells you what was going on, because it sure seems that way so far.
But what’s most amusing to me is that my girlfriend started telling me about some of what’s going on and I started reading myself, much of the book is like: so weird this guy got selected for this mysterious project! so weird he doesn’t remember much if anything about his life before he met his wife! And this all started feeling a little familiar.
The video game plot bullshit alarm started firing in my head. Video games love a plot about memory loss, time loops… and now I’m here like good lord, is my IRL book club going to get derailed by me talking about video games again because this is a real video game–ass plot? I asked my gf if the twist was something along the lines of my hunch, and then described the “they’ve done this all before, they’re stuck in a loop of losing their memories, etc etc” plot of Final Fantasy: Stranger of Paradise, and she said it wasn’t that, but I was on the right track. So maybe it’s actually going to be more so Nier: Automata, which I can’t wait to also try to explain to my book club if so.
Will keep you all posted on my experiences of: only gamer in book club. More as this story breaks.
Looking over my last reading list and what else is in my Libby queue, knowing full well I’m not going to get to all or any of these, I think these are what I’m gonna try to get to next while I’m in ThE sPoOkY mOoD:
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Agatha Christie) - I’ve heard a few times this is a Good one, and I haven’t read much Agatha Christie!
We Keep the Dead Close (Becky Cooper) - trying to see if I actually like true crime or just liked My Favorite Murder before it got cancelled for selling out to Amazon
The Black Dahlia (James Ellroy) - same deal
Standard plugs zone
I’m doing irl distribution for GUNKYARD, a NYC-based zine/newsletter listing local small indie shows. See a tiny concert if you happen to live where I live!
Did you know I’m a copy editor for The NYC Thorn, the NYC-DSA’s weekly roundup newsletter of local political news? If you live in NYC, essential reading imo; I’d been reading it for years before I joined!
I have a review up at Kissing Dynamite of Ashley Cline’s two new chapbooks of 2023: electric infinities and cowabungaly yours at the end of the world.
Speaking of Kissing Dynamite, did you know I am Book Reviews Editor there? I write reviews of small press/self-published poetry books, but I also will edit your reviews of small press poetry books. So: hit me up if 1) you’re a poet with a book coming out, or 2) you’ve got a review of a poetry book you want to write! Surely everyone’s dream is writing poetry reviews under the mentorship of one half of the team behind Bad Books, Good Times. Who could ask for more