steveatwaywords's reviews
1212 reviews

Yes, I too discovered the film first, and now finding this novel took a little doing. And while the novel and film are based upon the same original premise (that zombie-like behavior results from an infection of language itself), the novel is altogether different, both superior and faulty in its approaches.

The real strength of the novel is, thankfully, its style and Burgess's background in the functions of language. From the first paragraph, readers are unbalanced, recognizing eventually that the very problem that will creep its way across Ontario--a kind of aphasia--is internalized in the authoring and reading itself. Readers experience character inner desperate and chaotic dialogue, but also we lose track of events as real or imagined, psychoses or graphic mortalities. It's forgivable that some readers might reason that the first 60 or more pages are mere figments of our protagonist.

And our protagonists in this first half of the book themselves suffer from mental disorders; ironically, this offers them some protection from the "healthy" citizens who succumb more easily.

But the novel moves to a second half where the narrative camera pans back, and we see the discussions of doctors and other field experts. We are offered new characters who are living in the early days of the zombie "apocalypse:" children who are now homeless and without support systems as local authority falls apart; media personalities who continue to live as ever, treating this newest phenomenon as spectator sport. The horror, of course, is not in the zombies at all but our response to them.

Along the way, Burgess digs us deeply into the linguistic plague that has emerged from our evolution, firing and misfiring on what lies latent in our morphemes and collocations.  And here, then, the foreground and background of the horror story shift: it is not merely that zombies are a metaphor for the perils underlaying communication; it is that (failed) communication is the subject to which a zombie story is occasionally attached. Narrative arcs fall apart, protagonists vanish, and we are left with events, only as significant or poignant as we have the language capacity to attach to them.

I understand (I think) Burgess's deconstructive goals here--as language falls, so even does the structure of the narrative we read. If so, though, this could have been handled either more forthrightly or altogether less so. As it stands, while both parts of the novel require some careful navigation by readers, the first half rewards; the second half endures. 

This, for me though, is an overall small matter compared to the larger conceit he undertakes. Pontypool--in its microcosmic film setting or more expansive book form--remains my favorite take on the classic creature, the un-dead who are all of us under a certain arrangement of persuasive noises.

Why would I expect to love a 1960s story about a pregnant woman in New York, even if I already knew that it wouldn't go as planned? I didn't. I had seen the film, knew the story, thought (foolishly) that the book had nothing more to offer. 

And it doesn't. Not really. Roman Polanski's film is almost a shot-for-shot, line-by-line recreation of the novel, highly effective but for its small changes . . . and the fact that Levin's words still resonate differently on the page than from the visual image.

Unlike most writers of horror, Levin--who really isn't one--offers us an anesthetized, almost objective style of description through much of the story. This is the modern world; people speak small talk; they do domestic chores; they hope for a job; they shop for apartments, even lie sometimes to get what they want. Levin relates all with equal detachment, a minimalist in connotation and metaphor. We are lulled, even when some neighborly eccentricities step just a bit further than comfort. 

Levin's relating of Rosemary's dreams, too, are in a surreal detachment, often blending into the waking text in the non-sequiturs of image and givens that we all know. So when the dreams are also nightmare, we are forgiven for tossing these off along with Rosemary--just part of life. 

Polanski's film delights a bit more in the nightmare, though, and because the dreams are offered as equivalent to the waking world under the camera lens, viewers see them as equally credible; the horror is revealed quite early as consequence. Finally, when in Levin's book we are offered--at last--the fruits of the horror, the build-up works so effectively that we are shocked by this clarity of evil. (In contrast, inexplicably, Polanski deviates from the book and shows us nothing at all but Rosemary's expressions, defusing the horror which he in practice spoiled earlier, anyway.)

And while I have spent too much time in comparison/contrast, this goes to demonstrate how effective is Levin's horror here, and while I knew the story going in, I was still delighted by more own sense of terror along the way.

Sloane is a new discovery for me, mostly because these are the main two novellas he wrote and--unless you are digging in to cosmic horror specifically--you might miss him. But don't.

Yes, for a writer of the 1930s, there is something staid and patriarchal about his characters and settings. But after some sighing over his era, we find some potent writing and ambiguous slow-burn horror. Combines with a kind of whodunnit plot structure and his stories move into really original territory. 

What I was drawn most to is his character development. Sloane's protagonists (or his antagonists and minor characters) are not "simply" any one type, singularly motivated, or stereotypically founded. They trip, make mistakes, misspeak, get distracted (usually by women), remain too passive at awkward moments, wonder just a bit too long, miss important details, even while working fairly diligently to accomplish their tasks. They're people, and we can understand them for it.

When applied to his antagonists, we really find ourselves not thinking of them in that way. Struck by grief, walled in by poor past choices, determined to complete their work, broken by circumstance, we understand their choices, even sympathize--is it any wonder that, largely, conflict is not about good vs. evil but more often, "Is this a safe and wise choice?"

Of course, behind all these relationship challenges lurks something quite terrible, and while we come to learn its general nature as these stories progress, we are not permitted to look directly at it (that way, says Lovecraft, lies madness). But I don't think this is a matter of Sloane's being unable to describe the unnamable "things" that wait beyond the natural world. Rather, he understands that the nature of horror lies in the weight of our imaginations. 

In the movies, we are always waiting for the creature to finally show itself. And when it does, we too often throw ourselves out of the movie experience and judge its believability, its CGI, its measure as a creature we might kill with a handy screwdriver.  Sloane would rather leave us with dread that his horror is far larger, more implacable, and that its physical threat to us is the very least of our worries.

Not as ambitious as Master & Margarita and not as funny as The Fatal Eggs, The Heart of a Dog nonetheless has plenty of Bulgakov satirical absurdity, wicked fun, and biting puns. Where it might fall short, at least for me, is in its shifting focus which can perplex readers who wish to follow its themes.

The first portion of the novella is from the creative and absurd perspective of the titular dog, a stray adopted and offered a lavish lifestyle before the experiment. Furball's sensibility is common, gustatory, and apprehensive at all the wrong moments (not unlike many humans). When subjected to an operation and granted human pituitary and sexual organs, the resulting transformation is matched by a move in point of view. We oddly read much of his progress through the documents of the doctor. Finally, when we see the final incarnation of Poligraf Poligrafovich Furballov (!), we are offered a third person point of view of the action, where our titular victim now externalizes a wide range of offensive opinions and invective.

The result is a work with satirical themes around the dehumanizing work of politics, the politics of class and of science, eugenics, and the normalizing of manners and propriety to protect it all. Another work of Bulgakov which was never published in his lifetime but offered about in the underground samizdat, it is easy to understand both its appeal and repression.  Need a quick read that offers some intellectual chuckles? This is a good choice.

Moody, surreal, and fairly plotless, Zuo Ma is a respected member of the Chinese indie comics scene, and I can appreciate the drive of that movement to reject the commercialism which continues to produce pulp-minded tropes and plots.  More, I can appreciate, too, that there is a value in autobiography, in personal reverie, in confessionalism that is offered through a graphic novel medium. After all, why can't one simply offer detailed and personalized pen and ink art which honors key memories of their lives and why can't we slow to appreciate them? 

All this is very very personal, of course, and it clashes absolutely with the moment we produce a massive compendium as we have here, offered to the larger publishing world for its paying consumption. Other reviews make this clear: too personal, the art quality is not strong enough, a lack of storytelling, too many disconnected stream-of-consciousness dream sequences, etc.

Those reviewers are not wrong. If you want Night Bus to match what graphic novels have come to represent, it will absolutely fail. And for Zuo Ma, who offers his own doubts about the value of his work throughout, recognizing that a lone artist writing into the hungry spaces of capital is a grisly task requiring some negotiation and compromise.

Still, while I fall largely with the harsher critics of this work, I have no need to pile on here.  Night Bus has some beautiful moments of simpler times, of nostalgia and childish dreams, of a refusal to surrender to those hungry modern machines, and though I personally found too little pleasure in the ambling length of this work, I can't help but wonder at its value and necessity, of a single boy, dreaming and drawing.

This highly ambitious and complex work demands a great deal of its readers: without investment in the dislocated fragments of narrative/poetry/performance, it will (and apparently has) seemed incoherent.

Kapil offers auto-narrative/textual/performance art, poetry not bound by the confines of literature, and it in part follows her/an artist's struggles with the installations of an artistic program. But this is hardly--not remotely--its goal, merely a means to reach into other spaces.

Maybe try it this way: when we speak of a sympathetic relationship, we speak of connection to another. But how far might this connection extend when that sympathy is to the echoes of victimized women across history or geography? And how might that sympathy realize itself when art is it conduit?

Such as experience is dizzying, sacrificial, (de)humanizing, profoundly illuminating even when it is in shadows and fragments. This, in some part, is Ban en Banlieue. "This," Kapil writes, "is bibliomancy."  What childhoods are only our own? What does "radical modernity" demand of us? Even the expected structure of the work we read is under scrutiny; and so what responsibility do readers have in the narrated aesthetic of violence before us? Can we claim none?

Yes, Kapil (and her sympathized victims) demands much of her/their readers. Is it too much to ask? Only if we treat this book as mere . . . poetry.

The premise for this collection is interesting enough: Gather some of the most talented directors of horror films and have each write a horror short story. The trouble is, of course, that the craft of writing well changes across different media: and most of these directors have little clue what a short story looks like, let alone what makes one successful. 

This is not to say that everything here is bad, but the number of winners is far below what I might expect from an anthology, perhaps one in ten. Overall, though, I found far more pleasure in this book when I began treating everything as a pitch for a film: Yes, if this story was a movie, it could be really good. But its breadth and lack of detail or interiority really makes it out of scale for the short story to work. 

More than twice, we find sentences like "We follow the car and see Gwen through its windows. . . ." written as if our narrator is, instead, a camera. Or, "She crept quietly through the dark room and CLICK! CLICK! tried the light switch." So much for quiet, there, Mr. Onomatopoeia. 

Writers like Sarah Bolger and C. Robert Cargill are here, Owen Egerton and Lola Blanc (who offers a tale as topically taboo as it is psychologically horrifying)--these authors stand out for understanding the task handed them. For most of the rest, the stories are eminently forgettable, as written (but might make for a decent film some day, if expanded).

Dark Matter Ink and David Lawson, Jr. put this together, and I wish they had offered more guidance to their submitters (and more editorial support--much more). They built upon Cargill's Covid-era "porch beer talks" and expanded the reach. Great idea, good enough apparently to already offer a Volume II. But after almost 400 wearying pages of Volume I, I won't be reading it.

While I am not a fan of memoir, per se, Mendelsohn's Homeric ode to his relationship with his father sold me almost completely.

Mendelsohn runs a freshman college seminar in Homer's Odyssey, and his "difficult" father decides to audit the course. Afterwards, they even take a theme cruise together. Throughout, he reads and re-reads his father's obstinacies, but his interpretation is always missing something. If this sounds like a parallel to book interpretation, you've got the primary conceit of the book.

And it works. Along the way, readers learn a great deal about Homer's work (and even for one who taught it for many years, there were several discoveries for me!). [It helps to have read Homer, but Mendelsohn offers enough exposition to make this pre-requisite not essential.] 

And finally, as we learn that his own understanding of the epic is not complete, neither of course is his understanding of his (more complicated than he thought) father. It's a wonderful self-discovery paralleled to the literary questions of heroism, masculinity, isolation, and love. 

This is an extraordinarily niche bit of scholarship. If this is not your field, it is far far too expensive a book to be worth the read.

If this IS your interest, however, you are in for a re-organization of the shifting field of literary fiction tourism. Macleod methodically and clearly lays out her approach and then sets about for the better part of the relatively brief work to detail what she means from her various categories and what is currently happening within them. This is, therefore, a fairly time-sensitive and dry book that does not offer any "insight" so much as it updates what is happening (and to some extent, why).

Fortunately for the fast-reader, the entire book can be consumed in a few hours. Macleod offers ponderous introductions ("In this chapter I will," "This next section will"), unimaginative topic sentences, and almost needless chapter summaries. In between, when we are are fortunate, we learn of some new trends or consumer motivations. In the end, however, I was wishing for an infographic to do the job.

I sound soured. I am. I heard about this book in the works, awaited its publication, and then discovered its outrageous cost. For . . . this? Fortunately, I tracked down an eBook version in a local university library. I urge potential readers to do the same, if an overview of this tiny but otherwise fascinating pocket of the industry is your interest. About 10 pages of notes and that infographic idea was feeling about right.

What might Macleod have done to make it more satisfying? Field work, interviews, contrasting strategies and their effectiveness, or perhaps even her own speculations/thinking of the efficacy and/or ethics of some of the re-creative approaches. The readerly community is often quite savvy about what it wants and why; I'd like to think the industry is responsive to it.  

This review is for both Volume 1 and Volume 2, Preacher Compleat, as is were.

Much as already been said of the series' audacity in events, language, violence, and the like. It's a hard R-rated work or worse. If that's not for you, move on, and quickly. Don't look back. 

But the most important part of Preacher is its ambition. It assembles some of the most wild assortment of characters, builds thick backstories both grubby and/or divine, and works to make them gel in a great arching 66-issue series of adventures (75 when you add in the "extras"). Few take on so much or do it with such obvious glee and abandon.

That said, abandon is often also reckless, and there are plenty of moments where the story falls to weaker tropes and turns: super-governmental conspiracies, hyperbolic and offensive characterizations, and too-simply motivated divinities all live here, all too predictable, even lazy in their conception. When combined, the primary storyline strikes us as too basic, without nuance of even much complexity, and a first-year divinity or civics student might imagine something more. By around the 1400th page of reading, I was nodding wearily at yet another round of the Rocky and Bullwinkle show with the Grail, placing bets on which body part Herr Starr would lose this time.

So it doesn't always work as story. What multi-year graphic series does? Where Preacher is at its best is with the troubled collisions between its three protagonists. Each has the spotlight at length and even then we don't know if we've understood them completely (in fact, they realistically surprise themselves even to the end), and I found myself desiring even more of them (despite a possession, a betrayal, a few addictions, or the odd resurrection here and there). 

Preacher probably solidified Ennis's career going forward, and with good reason. It's a bit of a niche sell for its controversial art and writing, but it's that same quality that makes it stand apart (only works like Saga might compare IMO). Wisely, too, though, Ennis resolves the lengthy work

on its strongest characters and sets even its divine scale aside for them.

. I left, unexpectedly, satisfied.