I spent last Thursday afternoon in a Brooklyn theater watching director and co-writer Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and I feel comfortable saying that I’m an admirer of film and book alike. But it’s worth pointing out that Grann’s book — terrific as it is — is not the only literary work to deal with the horrific murders that were aptly known at the time as the Reign of Terror.
I’d have called this review “The Post-Modern Prometheus,” but The X-Files got there first.
There’s a strong case that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — not to be confused with the Kenneth Branagh-directed film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — is the most influential work of fiction published since 1800. There are huge swaths of science fiction narratives in which humanity creates a new form of life only to see it rebel; it’s not hard to place Frankenstein at the heart of that.
It’s hard to find the right words to discuss James Reich‘s new novel The Moth for the Star. Is it a haunting tale of excess and murder in Depression-era New York City? A bizarre story of metaphysical warfare? A psychological study of generational trauma and repression? Arguably, it’s all of the above — along with some astronomy thrown into the mix. I spoke with Reich about his new novel’s genesis and the thematic concerns at its heart.
For many writers and artists, spending time at conventions is a regular part of an annual routine. It’s not surprising, then, that some have opted to use genre and comic book conventions as the setting for stories, including one of Evan Dorkin’s Eltingville Club stories, Nick Mamatas’s novel I Am Providence, and Paul Cornell and Marika Cresta’s Con & On. Now, in the new series True Believers, writers Joshua Viola and Stephen Graham Jones teamed with artist Ben Matsuya for a tale of cosplay and horror set at the Colorado Festival of Horror.
There’s something incredibly rewarding about getting to watch a writer evolve in real time. Case in point: Gabriel Blackwell, whose first few books included memorable postmodern riffs on the works of Raymond Chandler and H.P. Lovecraft. Nearly all of Blackwell’s books to date have had some overarching thematic conceit — from the shorter works collected in Correction to the meditation on the film Vertigo in the novel Madeleine E.
There’s a point early on in M.S. Coe’s new novel The Formation of Calcium when it becomes clear that this is no ordinary tale of small-town anomie. Narrator Mary Ellen, a woman in her fifties who’s increasingly frustrated by her marriage, takes rather extreme measures to resolve things, and then sets out for a new life in Florida. Things do not go according to plan, and Coe’s novel gradually becomes both the story of a woman improvising her way into a new life and an off-kilter take on true crime. I’d enjoyed Coe’s previous novel quite a lot, and this new one left me further impressed by her range; I chatted with her on its genesis, its evolution, and the Florida of it all.
Thomas Mallon’s novel Finale is subtitled “A Novel of the Reagan Years,” and while it shares certain characteristics with his earlier novel Watergate, it takes an intriguing approach to the presidential figure at its center. Here, Reagan is presented obliquely: heroic to some and infuriating to others. Largely set in late 1986 and early 1987, the novel follows a number of politically-connected characters grappling with the issues and controversies of the time.
Given the amount of time that we spend in online spaces, it’s not surprising that many writers have sought to replicate the experience of social networks, text messaging, and shitposting in their prose. Finding a way to do it without stumbling along the way is a little more of a challenge. (There’s an early-2000s novel by one of my favorite writers where the evocation of texting felt so dissonant it took me out of the narrative.) And while many of us have been online for years or decades, it feels like it’s taken literature a little bit of time to catch up.