I have always loved Joyce Carol Oates’ writing.  I love her combination of long, flowing sentences and short, choppy fragments.  Little Bird of Heaven is lovely to read, even when the story is heartbreaking.

Krista Diehl’s family was fine before “the trouble” came.  Her father, Eddy, ran a construction company.  A handsome man, he was well-known around town as a bit of a flirt and a bit of a drinker.  Her mother, Lucille, a stay at home mom, her teenaged brother, Ben.  A happy family until trouble came along in the form of Zoe Kruller.  Zoe was small-town beautiful — she had an exotic name, she was everyone’s favorite at the ice cream shop, she sang with a little rock band on Saturday summer nights at the town bandstand.  When she is found murdered — strangled in her bed — the prime suspects are her estranged husband, Delray, and her lover, Eddy Diehl.

The story is told by 2 narrators — Krista and Aaron, Zoe’s son.  Aaron discovered Zoe’s body the morning after her murder and he may have lied to provide his father with an alibi.  Krista’s family has been torn apart by the revelation that Eddy has been carrying on a long-term affair with Zoe.  Gossip swirls around them as it does in any small town:  Zoe is living apart from her husband and son, she has “male visitors” who are being investigated by the police, there are stories about drugs and prostitution.  Ben and Krista have to deal with the whispers of their classmates.  It is particularly hard on Ben, who goes to school with Aaron.  As a small-town girl myself, I felt great sympathy for those two kids, living in that particular fishbowl.  Oates’ depictions of the raw side of rural life has always seemed very genuine to me.

Banished from the family home, Eddy is reduced to sneaking visits with his daughter after school, driving around town, stopping for dinner at the County Line Bar.  Ben wants nothing to do with his father.  Lucille’s relatives have closed ranks around her; she has her pills and her mysterious phone calls.  She conspires with her son and watches her daughter like a hawk.  Krista still wants to love her father.  She doesn’t believe he could be a murderer and she resents her mother for keeping him out of her life:

I thought Yes I know he has wounded you.  He has betrayed you.  Yes I know you are hurting but I don’t care, I am my father’s daughter and not yours.

Aaron, on the other hand, is on his own.  He and his father live in the same house, but they are no longer really father and son.  He works in his father’s garage and is just waiting to turn 16 so he can quit school.  There are drugs and alcohol and women — Aaron is part Seneca Indian and looks older than he actually is — and there is Krista.  The daughter of the man Aaron believes killed his mother.  An under-age high school girl who has fallen in love with him.

Already in ninth grade at the age of fifteen Aaron Kruller was five feet eleven inches tall and weighed 150 pounds looming over his younger — mostly Caucasian — classmates with the gleaming menace of a switchblade among bread knives.

The murder and its aftermath create a bond between Aaron and Krista.  Eventually, years later, they are brought together again with a chance to gain some closure, an opportunity that brings Krista to an important crossroad.

Joyce Carol Oates, born in 1938, has written more than 40 novels, including several books written under her pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.  Her work has been honored a number of times: she won the National Book Award (them), the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellent in Short Fiction, the Bram Stoker Award (Zombie), and the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize, among many others.  She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University and, since 1978, has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

My copy of Little Bird of Heaven was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

I saw the movie, Let the Right One In, last year and was immediately drawn in by it.  The stark settings and minimal dialogue gave the film a sense of isolation and dread.  Nothing good could happen in these surroundings.  As soon as I found out the film was based on a book, I had to have it.  It just took me a little while.

The book, Let the Right One In, resurrects all the chills the movie gave me.  Oskar is a lonely 13-year-old boy — chubby, friendless and a bit homicidal:

Strangely enough, he already knew the name of his victim, and what he looked like.  Jonny Forsberg with his long hair and large, mean eyes.  He would make him plead and beg for his life, squeal like a pig, but in vain.  The knife would have the last word and the earth would drink his blood.  Oskar had read those words in a book and liked them.

The Earth Shall Drink His Blood.

So, imagine this lonely boy, playing on a deserted playground in the middle of winter, surrounded by cinder-block apartment houses and Swedish forest.  He meets a girl, Eli – a strange girl — and the two of them develop a complicated relationship.  She tells Oskar she cannot be his friend (although she doesn’t tell him why), but she doesn’t act like she isn’t a friend.  Still, she hasn’t bathed and she isn’t dressed for the cold — just a thin pink sweater, no gloves, no coat.  When Oskar asks her why she isn’t cold, she simply says, “I guess I’ve forgotten how to.”

Eli is impervious to cold, remarkably strong for a girl her age, and only comes out at night.  Hmmm….

Eli also has a caretaker.  A much older man, who may or may not be her father, and who has decidedly sketchy motives for associating with a young girl.  Eli, we find out, is not above trading on those motives when she has to.  Things become even more complicated when Oskar begins to suspect that the new family on the block has a connection to a recent murder.  One body becomes two and a potential killer turns up in the hospital, horribly disfigured, and many more people are drawn into the devastating mix.

Frequently, I find that I either love the book and hate the movie or vice versa.  In this case, I found they worked together very well.  If I’d read the book first, some of the scenes in the movie involving Eli’s history and Oskar’s relationship with his father would have resonated more deeply — there is a lot of subtext there, a lot going on below the surface, only hinted at on film.  Seeing the movie first, I could place pieces of the story in a visual context, with my memory of the landscape and look of the places involved in the story.  If you’re not familiar with either, I would suggest reading, then watching.

I was fascinated by the book.  I kept thinking about the relationship between Eli and Oskar.  Eli appears fragile, but she is preternaturally strong.  She is most definitely older than her years.  She encourages Oskar to stand up to the bullies that make his life miserable, but what are her motives?  The book fills in a lot of blanks — about Eli’s past as well as Oskar’s — but that doesn’t necessarily make the picture clearer.  It certainly makes for a fascinating story.

Let the Right One In

It’s finally here! The Green Books campaign: 1 Day, 100 bloggers, 100 green books, 100 reviews!
Today, there are 100 books being reviewed on 100 blogs around the web, promoting good books and good environmental policies. The boooks are printed on 100% recycled paper. Eco-Libris encourages readers to “balance out” their books – plant a tree for every book you read. It’s a smart idea, and one small way to start going green in your everyday life. And the whole plan did get me a copy of Going Fast, so it’s a win-win situation.

It took a little convincing to get me to read this book. I got an email about the book and they almost lost me with “as only a dog could tell it.” A dog telling the story is almost always a recipe for disaster. In this case, instead of disaster, there’s a pretty terrific story and a narrator with an interesting viewpoint (and one heck of a vocabulary for a terrier).

Enzo is a mixed breed pup adopted by Denny — a good-hearted young man who races cars when he can find a sponsor, and draws much of his philosophy of life from the racetrack. The book starts late in Enzo’s life and the story is told in flashbacks: meeting Denny’s wife, Eve; the birth of his daughter, Zoe; the highs and lows of his racing career. Enzo wants very much to be human — he is convinced that he will come back as a man in his next life. He’s already practicing:

“Sometimes if I’m watching the History Chennel or the Discovery Channel or PBS or even one of the kids’ channels — when Zoe was little I’d end up spending half the day trying to pry goofy jingles out of my brain — I learn about other cultures and other ways of life, and then I start thinking about my own place in the world and what makes sense and what doesn’t.”

Enzo has an interesting take on a lot of things (he believes that cleaning up dog droppings is the penance people do for keeping their dogs under such strict control). He sees and hears everything that goes on in the house and he has his own unique interpretation of things. He is fascinated by the television, he loves watching tapes of Denny’s races, and he has to deal with his jealousy over Denny’s relationship with Eve. He distrusts Denny’s inlaws and, sadly, Denny would have been much better off if Enzo could have warned him.

Denny’s life has a lot of happiness, but it also has tremendous tragedy. His wife Eve develops brain cancer, and the only one who knows it is Enzo.

“When Denny was away and Eve fed me and she leaned down to give me my bowl of food and my nose was near her head, I detected a bad odor, like rotting wood, mushrooms, decay. Wet, soggy decay. It came from her ears and her sinuses. There was something inside Eve’s head that didn’t belong.”

His meddling inlaws make the situation more difficult. Denny is too trusting to see that they have their own agenda. It was painful to read these sections — an attentive reader will see what’s coming, just as Enzo did. Denny wants to do the right thing, even when the bad luck just continues to pile up, and Enzo is his constant companion. In the end, they come through together.

Enzo made me laugh. I loved his observations on people and the things we do. I loved his obsession with having thumbs and a small tongue. I loved the way he was always planning for the day when he would be a man, trying to imprint his soul with all of the things he had learned. Most of all, I loved his devotion to Denny. This poor guy needed a best friend and Enzo was a real trooper. I’m not usually a big fan of sentimental books, but this is an exception worth making.

Marina Marks is a fake psychic. She developed a keen ability to read people as a method of self-preservation – it helped her survive her drug-addicted mother and the string of shady boyfriends that hung around them. Her mother stuck a deck of tarot cards in Marina’s hand and she became a revenue stream, one more way to scrape the money together for another buy. And it protected Marina:

“Her razor-sharp powers of observation and her natural talent with her mother’s worn-out set of tarot cards saved Marina from molestation on more than one occasion, because while these men were too morally impaired to see the wrong in having sex with a girl her age, they were too scared to attempt the same thing with a freaky little witch. At least, most of them felt that way.”

Marina has turned her self-preservation into a lucrative career: she provides “intuitive counseling” to rich people who need to fill up their empty lives. She has her own guiding principles – she never gets emotionally involved with her clients, she doesn’t mind taking their money but she never drains them completely – but she breaks those rules twice and she pays dearly for it. In Florida, desperate to get away, she makes a mistake with a client. Although she tries to make good, it’s already too late. But when she opens her heart to a man she meets through her work, strange things begin to happen.

One of the things I found most interesting in the book is the way we get to see the damage Marina does, without meaning to. She gives her clients what they want – she reads their body language, absorbs their subtle clues and uses her understanding of human nature (including its darker aspects) to discern their situation and point them in the direction they want to go. The problem is that she gives them sonething to cling to, tells them that the universe has endorsed their idea. So when she tells a young man that this time he has found true love, he clings to it desperately. He clings to it no matter how hard the object of his affection pushes him away, to the point of destroying himself. She gives him an excuse to follow a terribly self-destructive path.

Marina meets an unusual man and unusual things begin to happen: she finds that she’s no longer faking it. She sees things. She knows things. And she doesn’t know how to deal with it. This is unlike anything in her experience.

“That Marina was now having visions that could be considered psychic and that those visions were not only unregulated and indecipherable but ruining her business as a psychic created a kind of cognitive dissonance within Marina that was impossible to reconcile.”

But she needs to come to grips with it quickly, because suddenly there is a lot at stake.

The Grift was an engaging read – it moved quickly and drew you into Marina’s story. She is thinks of herself as damaged, but she is really a survivor. She overcame a terrible childhood and made a life for herself. When her grift becomes her gift, you really hope that she can pull herself together.

My copy of The Grift was an Advanced Reader Copy; get your copy from Amazon.com.

Gary Gray wants nothing more than to be “normal.” He wants to fall in love, get married, have children, go to church, go to Disney Land and live the American dream. He’s got one little problem, though: he’s in love with his roommate, Russ, and lusting after other men is frowned upon at Southern Florida Christian College.

God Says No is the story of a deeply religious man coming to terms with his homosexuality. And whether he likes it or not, Gary is gay. He tries to hide it — in college, he pays a fellow student to pretend to be his girlfriend. When he begins dating Annie, they sneak around, planning late-night rendezvous, not to have sex but to raid the refrigerator in the cafeteria where Annie works. When he finds out Annie is pregnant (after one fumbling night, with passion inspired by a run-in with Russ walking across campus), Gary does the right thing, plans a wedding, and tries to get God to help with his plan:

“Lord, I can’t live this way,” I said. “You’ve got to change me right this instant. I have to be normal by Saturday.”

In less skillful hands, Gary would be a cartoon character. He is black, fat, raised by Bible-thumpers. He loves Disneyland and Waffle House. He believes that ordinary things like wrong numbers and bus advertisements are actually signs from God. But author James Hannaham has created a lovable, funny character that I found myself rooting for, even when I rolled my eyes and wanted to throttle him.

His mistakes are numerous: he gets married to try to convince himself he’s not gay. He is unfaithful to his wife, engaging in risky bathroom sexual encounters with strangers. In what has to be a moment of insanity, he leaves his wife and daughter behind, starting a new life under a new name, with a plan to work out his evil SSAs (same sex attractions) in the gay bars of Atlanta, all so that he can go back to his family a changed man. When he moves in with Miguel, he decides that if he doesn’t have sex, he can still stay on God’s good side:

“…why would He make you fall in love and then strike you dead for obeying Him? Clearly, the Lord didn’t mind the love part of homosexuality. It was the sex part that got Him mad. If two men could love each other without giving in to animalistic urges, I bet they could still be good Christians.”

When Gary’s experiment in living as a gay man (“the year of free checking”) comes to an abrupt end, he tries a “pray away the gay” rehab center, where counselors attempt to help men reconnect with their masculinity by teaching them auto repair and the rules of football. But this is an ongoing theme for Gary — he has prayed his entire life for God to take away these urges with no success. Pep talks, Group Share, board games and Masculinity Repair are not going to help him. Neither will the fact that he has the hots for his rehab roommate.

He finds the program, Resurrection Ministries, to be a surprisingly unforgiving place. When one of their number goes missing, he is shocked that no one among his friends seems at all interested in looking for him or bringing him back to the fold. Instead, they deride his lack of discipline and suggest he is “probably better off shooting up with his tricks.” But he sticks with the program, even though he knows, deep down, he is not defeating his desires.

Even when I laughed at Gary and some of his more ridiculous ideas, my heart broke for him. He was obviously hurting and he did not want to disappoint the people in his life — his mother, his wife, his daughter — who were counting on him. He did not understand why God wouldn’t help him, change him, get him on the right path. It is incredibly well-written, full of humor and heartbreak.

James Hannaham has written for Salon, The Literary Review, Open City and Nerve, as well as The Village Voice, Spin, Blender, Out, Us, New York and The Barnes & Noble Review. He is also the brother of a friend of mine, so I was thrilled both to read the book and to really enjoy it.

First of all, an apology. I wrote this review ages ago and it has been stuck in Draft mode. I’m really annoyed about that because it’s a book I’ve been telling friends to go out and buy right away! Luckily, it’s not too late…

Web Goodhue is a jerk. He’s down to his last friend, he’s got no job, he sleeps all day and he is going nowhere. At least, that’s what you see on the surface. There’s a lot more to Web than you see at first glance – a lot of good in him, and a lot of hurt. When his best (only) friend Chev insists he take a job with their buddy Po Sin, Web doesn’t have much choice and he’s too tired to argue about it.

That’s how Web ends up cleaning crime scenes. It’s a gruesome job, but it has its own brand of humor. (Really, any job like that – crime scene cleanup, paramedics, embalmers, cops – you’ve got to have a sense of humor just to survive.) Web’s better nature gets him sucked into the maelstrom, all to save the pretty girl.

The relationship between Web and Chev is the best part – if not the funniest part – of this book. On the surface, they’re a couple of slackers, hanging out together and scrounging a living; dig a little deeper and there’s a lot going on. Their lives have been intertwined since they were kids and it has brought them lifelong friendship, great joy and great tragedy. The reveal is very skillful – layer by layer, we get to see a little more of Web and what’s happened to bring him to this point. By the end of the book he is a long way from the unemployed slacker we start out with.

The story is one wild ride – there are smugglers and tattoo artists and The Guild and blood and gore and sex and more. It was really, really funny (in a dark and morbid sort of way) and I genuinely liked Web and Chev, Gabe and Po Sin, and the crazy people they come up against. Mystic Arts had me rooting for Web and I was not disappointed. A great ride and a fun finish.

According to Wikipedia, Web’s character will be further developed in future books. That’s great news, because I loved Web and Chev, and I really want to see what happens to Web and what becomes of their friendship.

It’s always a revelation to me when I read a book by an author who is new to me, only to find out there is a stack of older works out there that I need to get my hands on! Charlie Huston is the author of a number of books I am looking forward to reading: the Hank Thompson series (Caught Stealing, Six Bad Things, A Dangerous Man) and the Joe Pitt series (Already Dead, No Dominion, Half the Blood of Brooklyn, Every Last Drop and My Dead Body), among other books. You can also check out his blog, PulpNoir.com.

My copy of The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death was an Advanced Reader Edition; order yours at Amazon.com.

“This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as nontraditional grammar, split infinitives, and the odd wank . . . If that’s the sort of thing you think you might enjoy, then you have happened upon the perfect story!”

Apparently, this is going to be my summer of “literature classics the way I wish they had been written.” First, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and now a new take on King Lear. (By the way, I just requested an ARC of Mr, Darcy, Vampire, so there could be more Mangled Classics in store.)

In Honors English, I was not terribly fond of King Lear, although I like Shakespeare in general. The play just had too many betrayals, too many people meeting bad ends when they deserved better (I know, I know, tragedy and all that) for me to really enjoy it, but I didn’t care about them enough to be really moved by it. This is a tale that would never have made it past the high school censors, but that every student would be able to recite, chapter and verse. This isn’t just a story about a king and his daughters. According to Pocket, King Lear’s jester and his apprentice, Drool, this is a story about just one thing…heinous fuckery. Indeed, heinous fuckery most foul.

There are dozens of passages I could quote, but most of them are PG-13 at best, R-rated through most of the book, and a couple of passages would garner an NC-17. There is plenty of bonking, shagging, wanking, and humping. The players are described as dog-frothing mad, flesh-tearing harpies, craven hose-beast, catch-fart and other things I couldn’t repeat in a blog tht children might read. There are buckets of bat wank, monkey spunk, camel spit and git-seed; if that sort of thing offends you, steer well clear of this book. And in case you have trouble with some of the more archaic words and phrases, Moore helpfully provides definitions:

1. Saturnalia – the celebration of the winter solstice in the Roman pantheon, paying tribute ot Saturn, the “sower of seeds.” Celebrations involved much drunkenness and indiscriminate shagging. Observed in modern times by the ritual of the “office Christmas party.”

Moore plays a little fast and loose with the Bard’s work (thank heavens), adding some intrigue, some witches, a number of bawdy songs and a lot of indiscriminate shagging. He admits to having made “a dog’s breakfast of English history, geography, King Lear, and the English language in general.” The role of the Fool is far larger in his version, Pocket being the hand behind the scenes that turns the wheels and directs the action. Of course, he doesn’t always know precisely what he’s doing, but he follows the directions he gets from the girl-ghost haunting the castle (there’s always a bloody ghost) and he has good instincts. The ending is much happier — at least for some characters — than in the original, but then, in the original, just about everybody ends up dead. Here, too, some players meet an untimely and violent end, but that’s to be expected.

I found myself quite wrapped up in the Fool’s story. Pocket has not had an easy life (although it was considerably more pleasant than that of Thalia, the anchoress who befriends him as an orphan boy). He cares deeply for his friend and apprentice, Drool, and is infuriated when Drool is mistreated. Although he shows a rough and tumble exterior, there are a few instances that reveal the soft underbelly, such as his sadness at the fate of his little horse, Rose.

All in all, this book kept me giggling all the way through. It was a quick read, as I was caught up and swept along from the very beginning. It was precisely the sort of entertainment I needed on this business trip. One thing is for certain — the next time I see King Lear, I will be stifling giggles as I watch the tragedy unfold.