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.
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.
Helen Schulman’s Lucky Dogs beguiles readers with its profane bluntness and spellbinding cast as it explores and exposes the misogyny of the Harvey Weinstein trials. Meredith (a fictionalized Rose McGowan) and the victim of Weinstein (“The Rug,”) writes that during the assault, The Rug’s “pubes got in my mouth. I felt that hair on my tongue for like the next six weeks.” Schulman’s instinct to revel in irreverence is part of what makes Lucky Dogs an electrifying read.
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.
My experience with Craig Clevenger, in a nutshell: I was unfamiliar with the man’s work before this year. In early June, I noticed that Rob Hart recently interviewed Clevenger and, in his introduction to that interview, had a lot of enticing things to say about Clevenger up until this point. I’m generally fond of writing that could be described as Weird Noir, and my interest was piqued. I picked up Clevenger’s Mother Howl at a Barnes & Noble just north of the Bronx the day Cormac McCarthy died and read the book not long afterwards. The first thing I did upon finishing it? I ordered copies of Clevenger’s previous novels.
So, yeah, I liked it.
I’ve got a buddy back in Jersey who just bought a house. When I stopped by he was putting in new kitchen appliances and the whole place still smelled like the styrofoam wrap new electronics come in. My buddy is an engineer and makes small but, as I understand it, very fundamental parts for airplanes. He took me out to the backyard and we drank Modelos from the can while his neighbors splashed in a pool. The air smelled delicious. I thought about a rejection email I had received earlier that day and thought: what the hell am I doing with my life?