Bear, by Julia Phillips: My brilliant friend! I had the privilege of watching this book come alive from its beginnings, yet its final form still managed to astonish me. The element of not-quite-fantasy juxtaposes sharply with the brutality and mundanity of everyday life.
If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, by Leigh Stein: My other brilliant friend! I also had the pleasure of reading the early stages of this gothic novel meets hype house, but I went in unaware of the final twists and turns. Acerbic and hilarious.
The Illegals, by Shaun Walker: A history of undercover spies from the Bolshevik era to the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation. I enjoyed the comprehensiveness, but it was tricky to keep track of all of the different characters. I wouldn’t have minded a cast list, or even a deeper dive into fewer long-term undercover “illegals.”
The Compound, by Aisling Rawle: Fun in a Black Mirror way, where there’s an equal feeling of “future dystopia” and “present reality.” I enjoyed reading it, but the characters felt thinly sketched and – as I’ve sometimes felt with quasi-apocalyptic novels – I often was more interested in what actually had happened in the outside world than what was happening in the compound. Still, it was somehow fun and incredibly bleak at once.
Murderland, by Caroline Fraser: I think this book is easiest to appreciate – and I did appreciate what Fraser was doing – if you consider her thesis/question (essentially, “the Pacific Northwest has had so many serial killers in part because of the enormous environmental degradation that exposed children to toxic chemicals like lead and arsenic”) as more of a framing device than a genuine argument. If I took it as a claim, I’d want her to discuss the many other kids who grew up there who didn’t become violent, or serial killers from other parts of the country (she does nod to this in discussing Texas and Richard Ramirez). Of a piece with that is her focus on the dangerous and failed bridges in the Seattle/Tacoma area – another example of human hubris and how industry and “progress” can do harm. So – I was willing to go along for the ride. I had trouble, though, with the sheer detail of each and every violent crime, which felt like a catalog of horror that has already been extensively written about elsewhere and didn’t add much here.
