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.
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.
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.
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.
When reading a book about music, it’s generally a good sign when I find myself jotting down notes on artists to check out and albums to buy. In the case of David Keenan’s England’s Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground, recently reissued by Strange Attractor Press, it’s not spoiling much by saying that I was reading it with several tabs open: to AllMusic and Bandcamp and Bull Moose Music and Forced Exposure, eyeing reissue editions and complete discographies and obscure side projects. It’s that kind of a book, told with both rigor and enthusiasm, and making for a compelling read.
Two seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time, and it is in the spirit of that timeless adage that I will make the next two sentences. Michael Cisco’s novel Pest is about a man who is also a yak, and Michael Cisco’s novel Pest is one of the more accessible works in the bibliography of one of the nation’s most singular writers of full-bore Weird fiction.
Michael Silverblatt has been interviewing, analyzing and deconstructing important writers and their books for decades. He does this on Bookworm, a weekly talk show out of KCRW, Los Angeles.
His approach to his guests is variably devilish, insouciant, quite often brilliant. During one of these, David Foster Wallace actually said: “I feel like I wanna ask you [Michael] to adopt me.”
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.