Fiction notes

I can’t do reviews anymore, I don’t think. It’s partly a matter of time — I just don’t have the time to do an adequate job — and partly that I feel weird about it now that I’m actually getting more writing of my own out there. I think you’ve gotta pick a side.

But I’m reading a lot, and there’s books I really really want to point to. So, in no particular order:

I’ve been saying this everywhere, but read Megan Abbott’s The End of Everything. I finished it in one day last weekend. Pretty much did nothing that day but read, leaving my kids to do whatever the hell they wanted. Which it turns out was to watch the History Channel’s Haunted Houses, read scary books, and have my 5-year-old boy mount a remarkably efficacious campaign of terror on my 7-year-old girl. She didn’t leave my lap for twelve hours, and it was a very long night, but, shit, what a book. I haven’t read one that moved me like that since probably Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke or Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

Read Allan Guthrie’s Slammer. Len Wanner recommended this to me during a conversation we were having about the way an aesthetic of violence makes some readers, and writers, uncomfortable. It pretty much ensures I’ll never try my hand at a prison novel, ever. For the same reason I’d steer clear of, say, writing a novel that featured a melancholy Dane as the protagonist.

Okay, I haven’t read Seven Spanish Angels yet, because I don’t have a Kindle and reading on my cell phone is starting to hurt my eyes. (Related: just sent my carry gun off to get a new wide notch rear sight and a brass bead on the front, more on that coming.) But I need, badly, to figure out a way to read this one. Here’s a summary from Stephen Graham Jones’ website, where he discusses the nigh epic route to getting this book published:

Life isn’t easy in El Paso, Texas. Neither is death. Caught between them is crime-scene tech in-training Marta Villarreal, trying to work a case that may very well be her last. And she’s having to work it without her assigned homicide escort, who’s also kind of her boyfriend, and would look a lot more innocent if he would just come in, answer some questions about all these dead girls. Have the Juarez murders come north of the border now, or is it a copycat? And, why these women, why now? For as long as Marta can remember, the El Paso sun has baked the ground into a hard shell, so the dead can’t climb out. Not this week, though. This week the dead are all over town. And Marta may be among them.

I’ll read it one way or another, and soon. I don’t believe I have a choice. And then I’ll say more.

Lastly (and speaking of the need for a Kindle, since I feel kinda like I’m stealing by downloading the .pdf) Crimefactory #7 came out today. Haven’t read it yet either, but that’s another sure thing.

All right, back to doing whatever the hell it is that I do.

Update: Changed the title of this post from “Crime fiction notes” to “Fiction notes.” Because I’m sick of pretending that making a distinction between crime fiction and literary fiction makes any sense at all.

Update II: Also: