Reviews
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Review of The Ideal Candidate by Damian Murphy
In the small coterie of occult authors working today, Murphy is the ‘ideal candidate’ for your reading list. Whereas other comparable authors remain relatively obscure, most of his books are readily obtainable. This slim volume collects two reprints from extremely rare editions and one new novella and is a worthy…
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Review of Shantytown by César Aira
Aira is best enjoyed in small portions, I find. Seems like the longer his book, the less interesting it becomes. In this still bite-sized tale, a shantytown and its resident bodybuilder hog the spotlight. While not particularly moving, the story is undercut with some emotional resonance. The plight of those…
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Review of My Struggle: Book Two by Karl Ove Knausgård
I only decided to continue with the series after reading the author’s other series. The first book in the series got on my nerves. Perhaps I am now more accustomed to his rambling approach. I enjoy the more essayistic sections. Probably, I will enjoy each volume more than the last.…
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Review of Feast of the Assumption by David Vardeman
I’ve read all of Vardeman’s books. You should too. He is a unique and unusual author. Like some of his other long-form drama stories, this one is told entirely through dialogue. Actually it is a polylogue, a fusion of quirky voices discussing a bizarre situation. At least six main characters,…
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Review of The Snow / A Neve by Justin Isis
An understated, precisely detailed story taking place in Japan, involving a household crowded with people and objects. The serious tone complements the everyday subject matter. A current of existential awe seasons an otherwise light tale from a talented storyteller. A reminder that clogged toilets, old video games, a peculiar fascination…
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Review of My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless
Reading My Heart … is a bit like being lovingly mugged by a philosophy major wearing clown shoes. Homeless — the cryptic, multi-published, mononymous author — offers a novel that vibrates on the frequency where abject despair becomes indistinguishable from slapstick. The result is a book that lurches, wheezes, and…
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Review of Maldoror and Poems by Comte de Lautréamont
To read Lautréamont; one is mugged by him in a mental dark alley, beaten with a cudgel of heresy, left marveling at the strange, beautiful bruises. If Pascal was a mathematician of the spirit, Lautréamont is the original gangster edgelord of literature: a refuter of Pascal’s humble trembling before God,…
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Review of Marshland by Otohiko Kaga
I waited with trembling breath for over a year as the publication was delayed. Since I’m always on the lookout for new translations of Japanese literature, I often poke around Dalkey’s offerings.This is a historical novel in which a former convict going straight gives keen observations, exercises patience in his…
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Review of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
An epic account of a manuscript that might’ve never seen the light of day. Though Greenblatt greatly exaggerates the general influence of said document, the realm of lost classics, buried classics and unrecovered masterpieces has always fascinated me.He takes a Bloomian view of the canon, completely excluding all Eastern cultures…
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Review of Wailing Madness Shame and Death by W. Gavin
A mysterious book. With no description on the back, and only a few hints in the product description on Goodreads, and no author profile, and no previous works by the author to compare it to, one has no choice but to leap in blindly. And it ends up being another…
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Review of The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne
A great bedside companion book for weighing down your overburdened nightstand. Good for audiobook as well, for picking up at random places. Amusing musings, profound quotations, and rambling essays on odd and useful topics.Montaigne retired at 38, which in the 16th century was old, and decided he would do little…
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Review Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide by Charles Foster
Ultimately a pointless book, unless you desire to imagine alternate perspectives in a vague way. You will never be a badger, so what does it matter what a badger thinks when it chews on earthworms? It may help you empathize with badgers, but you don’t need this book to tell…
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Review of It by Stephen King
A gratuitous lump of a novel about an amorphous entity that prefers to appear as a clown in order to torment kids and vulnerable adults, often but not always murdering them in the most shlocky ways imaginable. The main characters are kids for a lot of the book, and when…
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Review of All God’s Angels, Beware! by Quentin S. Crisp
QSC’s output is typically speculative. His stories do not fit into typical categories otherwise. This rare edition includes some gems. For the first 3 tales, I was not enthralled. I found them lumbering, dreamy, wistful. They take place in Britain. A lot of the extraneous description and interior monologue might’ve…
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Review of Under the Skin by Michel Faber
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Gender swap of the typical hitchhiker’s abduction fear response.Uncouth otherworldly behavior.Dehumanization, objectification, it’s all about perspective.What is human?What monsters lurk beneath our fleshy exteriors?Two is a crowd. Who would search for you if you got into the wrong car? Anyone?This narration may get under your…
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Review of All The Lovers In The Night by Mieko Kawakami
A slowly paced romance. The sheepish first-person narrator lives a solitary, repetitive existence, two-steps away from becoming a hikikomori. Her relationships are explored in several unremarkable scenes containing a lot of small talk and quaint dialogue. The author has a tendency to conduct most scenes at restaurants, with two characters…
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Review of The Sons of Ishmael by George Berguño
An eclectic collection by a master of the short story form, thankfully rescued by Snuggly Books from its former out-of-print state. The Introduction constitutes a tenth story in the volume, relying on the supremacy of the anecdote to elaborate the author’s mindset. The final section ‘About the Stories’ can be…
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Review of The Exaltation of the Minotaur by Damian Murphy
Whatever forms D. M.’s stories assume, whatever mantles of obscurity they adorn, they remain an inspiration. In the Hieromantic Mirror, we are introduced to a sultry protagonist engaged in more investigations of the uncanny and underlying uncertainty of societal constructs. Like most of his characters, she is a seeker after…
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Review of The Sad Eyes of the Lewis Chessmen by George Berguño
Taking inspiration from Icelandic sagas, mixing in old-fashioned atmospheric horror tale aesthetics, as well as provincial, unsettling conversations at far-flung cafés, the reading experience may be enhanced if you enjoy the work of Bulgakov and Flaubert. The Sad Eyes of the Lewis ChessmenFlaubert’s AlexandrineThe Leviathan at RifskerThe Son’s CrimeBilly Goat…
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Review of The Aristocracy of Weak Nerves by Justin Isis
In Justin Isis’s most daring publication so far, the reader is asked to tour a philosophical zoo and peer into an abyss—not a void, but a liminal space populated by undisclosed presences and imbued with esoteric forces. The two long tales exemplify a depth of subtext and an often baffling…
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Review of Alice Through the Needle’s Eye: A Third Adventure for Lewis Carroll’s Alice by Gilbert Adair
Overall, a diverting bedtime story. Where you might get mightily lost in the original duology and vibrant Disney film, this reads less like a worthy successor and more like a valiant side-quest. Ample punning propels our precocious protagonist into petty arguments with pompous anthropomorphized plot devices in the form of…
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Review of The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgård
Rather well-balanced weirdness. Put me in mind right away of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Subsequent volumes failed to sustained my pique. But they carry on an intricate tale, interlarded with intrigue. Prevalent are the themes of life and death. How do we find meaning and meaningless in each? Heavy helpings of…
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Review of Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
Vegetarianism for edge-lords. Sure, there are some pros and cons to consuming meat,—who among us has not read Ruth Ozeki’s Year of Meats?—but the taboo of cannibalism is more persuasive than the supremacy of meat in our gustatory culture. The author seems to forget that hundreds of millions of people…
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Review of Nick and the Glimmung by Philip K. Dick
Surprisingly absorbing children’s fiction from grandmaster of social s-f from the pulp era. Nick is a kid with a cat. Earth is a planet that banned cats. So the family has to move to Ploughman’s Planet, where aliens like wubs, werjes, father-things, and printers, among other species, all waging war…
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Review of Happy Bunny and Other Mischiefs by Rebecca Gransden
Beginning with a descent into uncanny horror, the collection invades other genres, reaching tentacles into Realism, science fiction, and magic realism with aplomb, grasping at philosophy, abstraction, and startling dream-logic, but maintaining a steady undercurrent of tension while germinating unsettling horror elements. Ever think, when you’re adjusting the stats on…
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Review of I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
The ideal audiobook experience. I’ve attended many workshops and critique groups which were obsessed with the “Show, Don’t tell,” mantra, which some writers seem to regard as the be all, end all rule of writing.For me. I enjoy narration, even hundreds of pages of narration at a time. I don’t…
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Review of Life of Chuck
Life of Chuck is a symphony dedicated to the quite awesomeness of living that hits a discordant note in its structure. Still, many people will forgive its missteps and find it a worthwhile watch. Life of Chuck is an exploration of what gives our relatively short lives meaning, while constantly reminding us of the cosmic…
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Review of Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart
I would normally drool over a book about a rabid watch-collection, because I have been a rabid watch enthusiast (at least in theory) but found my eyes rolling of their own volition while enduring this second novel I’ve read by the author. While it’s fun to say to yourself, I…
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Review of M Train by Patti Smith
Coffee-addict Patti Smith returns with another engrossing memoir-thing. She writes well about writing. I find my reading tastes lining up with hers. She conveys her burgeoning obsession with visiting writers’ graves in far-flung places, touching down in Japan and hunting down the resting place of Akutagawa, Dazai, Ozu and others.…
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Review of The White Book by Han Kang
Han Kang describes white things well. But it would’ve been more intriguing if the pages were black and the text was white. You can achieve this by getting an ebook and turning your kindle to Dark Mode.I would not call these interconnected stories, but rather, observations orbiting a theme. An…
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Review of The Onyx Book of Occult Fiction by Various
The first modern anthology brought to you by Snuggly Book in their definitive series, numbering 6 volumes thus far. The editor is none other than the pre-eminent author of the occult working today. In his introduction, Damian Murphy invokes a wide-range of authors tangential or central to his understanding of…
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Review of Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates
I often wish JCO would write more science fiction. This felt a bit like A Handmaid’s Tale. The initial sections describing the system of rewards and punishment, how society has morphed into this recognizable, twisted near-future I found less compelling than the love story at the heart of the novel.…
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Review of Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland by Carlton Mellick III
One of his longest works, something labored over for longer, it seems, and continued in an equally long sequel, I found myself at times missing the brief length of his accustomed method and not necessarily wanting it to go on as long as it did. It had its moments, but…
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Review of Breathe by Joyce Carol Oates
A heart-rending meditation on grief. Our protagonist’s battle with losing her partner encapsulates all the stages, every sidereal and ethereal sentiment imaginable.Shaped within the austere landscapes of New Mexico, through achronological snippets of her university life, in and out of the hospital as Gerard succumbs to a generic illness, our…
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Review of Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Shteyngart knows how to bring the beef. Politically incorrect ranting, raving, and livestreaming.Much chuckle-worthy correspondence featuring an upper middle-class Jewish American, a Korean American and her family, and an upper-upper-upper-upper class American CEO-type with sub-human morals. Highly polished, irreverent bashing of this, that, and the other. Prescient, but really just…
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Review of Black Boy by Richard Wright
A harrowing memoir of a sensitive artist. Having read most of Wright’s books by now, I wasn’t expecting to be blown over by this as I was.Memoirs don’t often strike home for me, but this may be my favorite of the handful I’ve read.A rounded picture of the author is…
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Review of Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
Didion’s clear and poignant reportage is always thrilling. Here, perhaps, her most famous pieces evoke a now-distant time when America was defined by resistance to war, and droves were trying out the Hippie lifestyle, spawning great protest music and a whole body of literature. Ranging from California, to New York,…
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Review of The Blood-Guzzler and Other Stories by Rachilde
An interesting introduction to Decadent literature. Or a good choice for those already familiar with the genre.Rachilde is apparently a big deal in the genre, having sparked much controversy in her time. I wonder why I hadn’t heard of her until recently.Bravo to Snuggly books for making readily available, a…
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Review of The Troika by Stepan Chapman
The first Philip K. Dick Award to go to a small press. Jeff Vandermeer published this when 120 other publishers declined it. Chapman was a very accomplished author with hundreds of short stories in high profile magazines way back in the days of what I consider the most entertaining science…
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Review of The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright
A posthumously published novel by Wright, who told this story in his collection Eight Men. The expanded version is full of pathos and rage. Injustice in America was nowhere better elaborated than this author’s poignant works.This makes for a great shorter foray into the awful relations between races at this…
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Review of Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates
My experience with JCO books is that sometimes she gets into this mode of extreme, frenetic pessimism. Near-continual verbal abuse. Characters spouting off like they have a compulsive speech disorder. Extreme levels of repetition. She continues circling the topics she often reverts to, without moving the plot forward. That is…
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Review of The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (Fairyland, #4) by Catherynne M. Valente
Gorgeous beyond belief. Her diction and vocabulary rarely misstep. She ensorcells with glittering scoops of wordplay piled high. It’s a rodeo show of intriguing imagery starring absurdly well-read children.We start out with the changeling scenario. A troll boy’s feeble attempt to pass as a human child. When he meets a…
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Review of Evening in Paradise: More Stories by Lucia Berlin
Hard living. Child rearing. Drug use. Wild desert landscapes. New Mexico, Paris, Mexico. Small town dramas, rocky relationships. Kids playing in dangerous locales. “Hillbillies.” “Gaunt” people. A young girl’s coming of age. Violent men. The tyranny of life without money. With her signature gorgeous prose, Berlin’s stories remain gloriously readable.…
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Review of 2024 on Goodreads by Various
This year I gave away around 200 books but bought around the same number. My room overflows with cheap paperbacks. The public library was helpful, though they have been removing an alarming number of audiobooks from Hoopla, Libby, and Boundless. Still, when I walk in, they get my holds out…
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Review of The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai
Dazai stays in character with this autobiographical short novel about a sad author attempting to reconnect with his lost youth by hanging out with (or harassing) schoolboys. By sharing in their game, he attempts to recapture the sense of adventure and perhaps the inspiration he has lost in his dissolute…
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Review of Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata
Strange and unsettling lightly speculative fiction from a provocative author. Like with her previously Englished novels and story collections, Murata returns with a surprising novel of pointed social commentary. Though this one was too heavy-handed for my taste, it included enough nuance to captivate me most of the way through.…
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Review of American Gothic Tales (William Abrahams) by Various
A recommendable collection full of some stories I’ve read before and some unusual choices. Plenty of classics like “The Veldt,” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and “A Rose for Emily. But I preferred my encounters with the less-commonly anthologized ones like “Death in the Woods” by Sherwood Anderson, “The…
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Review of Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki
A great, sleazy Japanese novel in the tradition of Ryu Murakami and Shuichi Yoshida. I would love to read all of her books. I read and loved her two previous short story collections. So far, her most interesting book in English is Terminal Boredom. She broke from traditional Japanese realism…
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Review of Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates
A more succinct example of Dark Academia than The Secret History, and in my opinion, better. Better yet, it can be read in one sitting. The only criteria I require a book to fulfill to earn a five-star rating from me is that I can’t stop reading. And this book…
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Review of The Universe as Performance Art by Colby Smith
A collection of eccentric tales. The author has also released a novella and a nonfiction book. With this publication, he gathers a few pieces previously published in Neo-Decadent Anthologies, along with 14 previously unpublished stories. I think the best of the lot is “Hellenic Dropout.” This is probably not the…
L. S. Popovich 