Take me away from the horror

Gratitude and book reviews

Greetings from Haymarket, Virginia!

What you’ve heard is true. I’ve thrown myself into the meat grinder of fate. I am one of the millions of people clogging airports, train stations, and highways this week, hoping to avoid being stranded in a deserted tollbooth in subzero temperatures .

I’m currently at my brother’s house where I’ll be spending Thanksgiving before heading up to West Virginia and—weather permitting—hanging out with my father, but it’s all very touch and go at the moment.

Lately, the universe has been showing me that what little control I have over my life is illusory. It’s been a week of setbacks and people having my back. So I’m grateful to be here, happy to be healthy, and thankful to you, faithful readers, for valuing the work I do. Now get stuffed.

Ten autobiographical book reviews

Can book reviews be autobiographical? Because these kind of are. I’ve been promising you book reviews for so long that I’ve now got a big pile of them.

A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez: I got a e-galley of this book and read it on my phone over the course of several sleepless nights during my travels this summer, which is either the best way to read the book or the worst. As much as I love Enrique’z mammoth novel Our Share of Night, I don’t love her stories, which is frustrating because I really want to like them. She’s doing something different, and I can’t put my finger on it, because her stories travel along familiar grooves—families in conflict, physical deformities, haunted houses, the long shadow of political violence—which is why reading them on my phone in fits and starts in various stages of jet lag and sleep deprivation isn’t ideal.

I love the imaginative leaps she takes and the way class seeps into every corner of her fiction, but I didn’t flip for these stories the way I thought I would. I had high hopes for the title story, set in part at LA’s Cecil Hotel, but ultimately it didn’t make a lot of sense to me, too many characters, too much going on, the ending too abrupt. (My favorite story is “The Refrigerator Cemetery.”) What I loved about Our Share of Night is that it builds toward something bigger than its parts, the great engine of story, while filling the reader with dread. That feeling was largely absent in my experience of reading A Sunny Place for Shady People, which I think says more about the manner in which I read them than the stories themselves.

Songs for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson: This should be called Songs for the Unraveling of the Mind. Or Songs for the Unraveling of the Reader. That’s how this reader felt. I listened to these stories in the car and after two or three or four or five I realized I’d read these stories before. The strange thing was I couldn’t remember how any of them ended. A story would start. “This sounds familiar…” I’d think, and then I’d drive here and there, trying to puzzle out the ending only to discover that I couldn’t do it. My mind was a blank. In Evenson’s stories, blankness is a stand-in for unreliability of the senses, of memory, of reality. Let me give you an example, show you what I mean.

“Leaking Out” is about a man who breaks into a house at night and can’t find his way out. It’s a very typical scenario for Evenson. Alone in a strange place where lostness is not unexpected, but Evenson’s genius is there are many ways to be lost, many many ways, and the worst thing about the experience is the doubt that goes along with it. (I think it would be a terrible thing to go on a hike and get lost in the woods with Brian Evenson.) But this particular story has an ending that is quite vivid. Unforgettable even. But it came as a surprise to me. Again. The good news is apparently I can keep reading and rereading Evenson until the end of time because I’m not going to remember a fucking thing.

Prom Mom by Lara Lippman. I was complaining to Sean Carswell about how formulaic contemporary American crime fiction has become and he recommended Prom Mom. So when I left Morro Bay for Davis, I started listening to Prom Mom. It starts off with a teenager named Amber Glass on her prom night in 1997 when something very bad happens, something so heinous she’s labeled Prom Mom by the local papers. The story then moves to 2019 when Amber moves back to the neighborhood she fled 22 years before. Just when you think you’re getting a clue as to what she’s really up to, the point-of-view shifts to Amber’s high school boyfriend and then to his current wife. Hijinks ensue. People are not who they seem. And then the pandemic hits and the tension really starts to rachet up--but only to a point. The book straddles the fence between crime and domestic thriller but gets hung up on marital drama for long stretches. Stephen King said in his blurb he didn’t see the twist at the end coming, but I don’t see how that’s possible.

The Fever by Megan Abbott. The thing about Megan Abbott novels is you can’t read them back to back because her preoccupation with the secret lives of young people lends a certain sameness to the set-up. At least that’s what I thought before reading The Fever, which is easily her weirdest book. My initial response to Prom Mom was Lippman was encroaching on Megan Abbott’s turf, which proved not to be the case, but this whet my appetite for that Megan Abbott-type feeling, and since she’s Megan Abbott, she has it in droves.

I’d downloaded The Fever to my Audible queue years ago and never listened to it. So while I drove between Vacaville, Davis, and Sacramento while visiting my daughter last month, I listened to the story of a strange fever that slowly infects a group of loosely associated high school girls in terrifying fashion. Abbott’s novels feel like hothouses: flimsy self-contained structures stuffed with feral characters churning with desires that threaten to bring the roof down on top of them. What is the fever exactly? An adverse reaction to the toxic lake? Illicit drugs? Sexual power manifesting as a kind of sickness? Or is it something altogether sinister and supernatural? I’m not going to spoil the ending but in her desire to deliver a surprise I think Abbott lands on a conclusion that is less than satisfying and isn’t entirely earned, but is still a hell of a ride.

Take a deep breath. You’re almost halfway there.

Fever House and The Devil by Name by Keith Rosson. I’m a big fan of Keith Rosson’s work and when I heard he was writing a novel that centered around a punk rocker with all kinds of occult weirdness, I couldn’t wait, but then I got sidetracked writing a strange punk rock saga of my own. By the time I finally got to Fever House, its sequel, The Devil by Name, had been released. I devoured them both and then I interviewed Keith for Message from the Underworld last week.

Death Valley by Melissa Broder. I read this as a palate cleanser between the extraordinary violence of Fever House and The Devil by Name and in some ways this is even heavier. You know how people say that grief isn’t linear? That’s the territory that Broder explores. There are scenes as mundane as checking into a Best Western and scenes of hallucinatory beauty inside of a cactus. Not recommended for someone who has recently lost someone, but a great read for someone navigating the aftermath of that loss. A deeply felt meditation on the derangement of grief.

Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera: This is precisely the kind of counterfactual experiment I love: Benito Juarez spent his 18-month exile from Mexico in New Orleans but we know almost nothing of his time there. Herrera paints a vivid picture of Juarez’s days where he plots to liberate his homeland while confronting the barbarity of the slave trade in the United States.

Artists in Times of War by Howard Zinn. After the election, the first thing I did was log out of all my social media devices. There was something jarring about seeing everyone on my feed go into a state of mourning and then get sucked into stories and reels about cute animals, tattoo artists, and old people falling out of boats as if nothing had happened. Seven Stories Press announced it would be offering a free e-book a day for seven days. The first one was Artists in Times of War by Howard Zinn. I downloaded it and started reading it that night, and I’m so glad I did.

It’s a short collection of Zinn’s speeches revised for the page. The first one centers on the idea of transcendence and how “the artist transcends the immediate.” This is exactly what I was looking for. “The artist is taking us away from the moments of horror that we experience everyday—some days more than others—by showing us what is possible.” I haven’t processed the election, have essentially turned off the news and stuck my head in the sand, but these essays helped me get back to work. The second essay “Emma Goldman, Anarchism, and War Resistance” taught me something new about San Diego history. Emma Goldman traveled to San Diego with Ben Reitman who was abducted and tortured in the countryside. I went down the rabbit hole and learned all kinds of things about the event, which led me to Stingaree, San Diego’s Barbary Coast where vice went unchecked until it was finally demolished. Safe to say I wouldn’t have learned any of these things scrolling through Instagram.

I’m with the Band by Pamela Des Barres: Fascinating deep dive into the scene on the Sunset Strip and in Laurel Canyon during the ’60s. I love listening to authors read their own work and Des Barres kept me company during some of my late-night drives back to San Diego from LA, OC, and the desert. I especially enjoyed the stories of Des Barres’s all-girl performance group, the GTOs, and its association with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Just a wildly creative scene. Fascinating that Des Barres has outlived virtually everyone she writes about and is still a creative force. The moral of the story has nothing to do with love or sex but a far simpler truth: keep a diary.

Thanks for reading. If you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. I have more books and zines for sale here. I hope you’ll consider ordering my latest collaboration The Witch’s Door and the anthology Eight Very Bad Nights.

Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get my deepest gratitude and Orca Alert! on most Sundays. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, crime, and killer whales.