George Pelecanos is a polymath who understands the Washington D.C. – area more than most authors. He was born in Washington D.C., he currently lives in Silver Springs, and he has fictionalized life in the beltway through scores of crime novels and story collections. Pelecanos’s creations are stark, also witnessed through his work as a TV writer and producer. His credits in this space include The Wire, about illegal drug trade and institutional corruption, The Deuce, about New York’s sex trade in the 1970s, and We Own This City, about police corruption.
Journey Into the Self: On Vincent Czyz’s “Sun Eye Moon Eye”
Vincent Czyz’s novel Sun Eye Moon Eye traces the post-genocidal, and by extension post-apocalyptic, journey of Logan Blackfeather, a Hopi “of mixed descent.” On the surface, Logan’s story revolves around coming to terms with his father’s death; the suicide of the abusive uncle who replaced him (as titular father only); the knifing of a racist truck driver for which he is sent to prison and then a psychiatric facility; and his slow reemergence into the world via the therapeutic trinity of love—his relationship with Shawna, a woman he meets on the lam in Manhattan—art—his return to composing the music he’d given up on in the midst of trauma—and ethnic reconciliation—reclaiming his heritage from the legacy of colonialism and settlement. On a deeper level, Logan’s journey is really about his dwelling along the margin of where the waking world—one of broken families, addiction, poverty, deracination, violence—meets an animist dreamscape—southwestern geography fused to a Hopi mythography.
Academic Horrors, Visceral Landscapes: On Matthew Cheney’s “Changes in the Land”
More horror fiction should have footnotes. Bennet Sims’s A Questionable Shape has forever connected the footnote to the concept of the undead, and I seem to recall a few turning up across John Langan’s nestled narratives. Matthew Cheney’s Changes in the Land features a few as well, which is understandable given that one of its characters is, in fact, an academic. “A horror novel with an academic at its core?” you may ask. “What’s so frightening about that?”
A Theological Coming of Age: On “The Gospel of Orla” by Eoghan Walls
This recent novel by Northern Irish poet Eoghan Walls has an intriguing, Magrittian cover: it wraps around from front to back with a lively green backdrop, punctuated with sparse tufts of grass. Between the title and the author’s name on the front page is the 3D cutout of a cross. Unexpectedly, the cross is not centered and frontal, but slanted and on the ground, in the grass. Looking closely, it is possible to see a sliver of pale blue through it (another sky? another world?) and the silhouette of a bicycle entering it. I can’t think of a better way to visualize this enigmatic story. So much of Walls’ novel takes place outdoors, in the no man’s land that is the contaminated nature at the edge of urban areas; bikes are a big part of the action; there is a girl who metaphorically must carry a big cross of mourning and suffering on her shoulders and there’s a strange man who calls himself Jesus.
Three Uncanny Guides to Revelation and Horror
Samantha Mabry’s Clever Creatures of the Night is a master class in atmosphere with a literary bent and a few surprising turns up its creepy sleeve. At once a murder mystery, a post-apocalyptic narrative, and a story about friendship, this novel about a missing friend and some strange young people living in a house by themselves is as tense and enigmatic as it is entertaining.
Punk Rock Body Horror: On Alison Rumfitt’s “Brainwyrms”
One of the first books I read in 2023 was Alison Rumfitt’s novel Tell Me I’m Worthless. There’s a small subset of books I’m fond of that seem to follow a traditional narrative path, right up until the point that they don’t. Brian Evenson’s Last Days is one, as is Percival Everett’s Assumption. Rumfitt’s debut fits in here as well: it’s something of a haunted house story, but as the novel continues on towards its conclusion, it got weirder; Rumfitt moved away from the tropes of haunted house narratives to push towards something deeper and scarier about trauma and inheritance.
Lost and Found: The Charms of R.B. Russell’s “Fifty Forgotten Books”
I was doing some holiday shopping a few weeks ago in Princeton’s Labyrinth Books when, on the new release table, something caught my eye. If you are reading this, you’re probably aware of the allure of a book titled Fifty Forgotten Books solely based on the title; the retro cover and blurbs on the back from the unlikely duo of Washington Post critic Michael Dirda and Current 93 mainstay David Tibet piqued my interest further.
Black Punk is the Movement of the Future: On “Black Punk Now”
Coming on the heels of Shotgun Seamstress, the collection of zines by the same name edited by Osa Atoe, Black Punk Now — edited by James Spooner and Chris L. Terry — expands the definition of black punk by including many fiction and non-fiction texts, as well as comics. The fiction varies from fantasy to sci-fi to gripping political tales that examine the nature of friendship, identity, and the problem of class structures. The non-fiction texts include essays on how to create DIY zines and how to opt out of the surveillance and policing tactics of the digital age, as well as lyrical pieces that explore grief, pain, and the relationship between the older generation and the younger. Atoe reappears in the book where she interviews the musician and polymath Charlie Valentine, and there is a screenplay for a short film by Kash Abulmalik about young Muslim brothers, one of whom is a punk, and their relationship with their parents. Collectively, all the texts in the book develop our notion of what Black punk is about in all its complexity; politically fierce but tender as well, musically varied, queer, or straight, white or Black; it’s about the new revolution which won’t be televised because it’s off the radar, secretive, nomadic, creative, imaginative, not bound by walls, codes or laws.