The last decade has seen an increase in works from Katherine Dunn’s archive seeing print, from her ruminations on profanity to a posthumous story collection. Dunn’s bibliography covers a lot of thematic territory, and while Geek Love is her best-known work, it’s far from her only book worth discussing. Also notable about Geek Love: among the accolades it’s received is a nomination for the Bram Stoker Award.
Some horror stories play on primal fears and anxieties; others work by creating monsters so unsettling the reader will have no choice but to flinch. David Simmons’s stories often pursue a third path: creating a profound sense of a world where nearly everything has gone wrong, like a trap door carved in morality that you can’t avoid.
I’ve been reading Scott McClanahan’s work for a long time — long enough to know that Fights!, his new novel, is not his first book with an exclamation mark in the title. (That would be Stories V!.) But there’s also something about Fights! that made reading it substantially different from the experience of reading McClanahan’s other work. And maybe that’s why I’m writing this, which is less of a review and more a case of me figuring things out using […]
From reading the first fifty or so pages, a reader might be left with two key impressions of Paul Tremblay’s novel Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep. The first is that it represents something of a return to Tremblay’s crime-fiction roots, albeit with a science fiction twist; the second is that, as the title suggests, it’s an homage to Philip K. Dick. Both are true, up to a point, but this book also represents something of a genre-straddling sleight of hand.
In our afternoon reading: thoughts on Play Time’s new album, fiction from Henry Bean, and more.
There’s a kind of transcendental experience to be had while watching the skies; there’s also a lot of isolation that comes along with it. In his new book Master of Starlight, DW Ardern tells the story of Olivier, an astronomer who calls a Moroccan hotel home. Gradually, Ardern reveals the reasons for Olivier’s de facto exile at the same time as two important figures from his past re-enter his life. It’s an evocative, unpredictable character study, and I sat down with Ardern over coffee to learn more about it.
Brad Neely’s body of work encompasses everything from absurdist comic books to a revisionist take on a certain early president; he’s also written about the life of Ulysses S. Grant. His latest book, Creased Comics, encompasses decades of his work; in the pages within, readers will find everything from feral leprecauns to an especially enthusiastic shark. I spoke with Neely about a range of topics, from Arkansas punk to his fondness for history.
In our morning reading: thoughts on “Assorted Crisis Events,” good reading on soccer, and more.