At the start of the year I had an idea for a book project I have been thinking about for some time. I don't think that I am going to go for it quite yet, but I have been wanting to get back into writing about books on this blog. I am going to keep the project under my hat for the moment in case I do decide to start it up in the near future.
However, I do want to shake off some of the dust and start posting again, so I thought I would do a few quick notes about the books that I have read so far this year as a way to motivate myself to keep coming back.
Kill Creek by Scott Thomas was recommended to me by a colleague who shares an interest in gothic and horror novels. This book is a few years old at this point but I had not heard of it or the author. I have been more interested in postmodern horror over the last couple of years and have been working on a couple of scholarly projects involving the genre lately (perhaps more on my conference presentation upcoming?). After reading the synopsis, I was excited to start reading this book.
This starts out as a haunted house story that brings in tech media and internet fame. A young tech bro running a horror fansite -- which he insists is so successful that it is actually just a pop culture site -- invites 4 horror authors to a curated event in this haunted house to livestream a group interview. Each of the authors brings their own personal baggage with them, experiences weird things, and then heads home. The novel takes a turn here in an interesting direction. Upon returning home, each of the authors becomes obsessed with writing a new novel about the house that they were in and, upon checking notes with one another, discover that they are all writing the same novel.
I won't reveal what happens next here for the sake of anyone interested in reading this novel, but I will say that this was a suspenseful and exciting novel to read. Thomas' work plays with the conventions of the haunted house story, blending in the personal demons that each of the authors in the book contend with. The read is fun and the ending took me by surprise in a way that I have not experienced in a long time. Definitely worth the read.
Famous is the latest work by Blake Crouch. I have enjoyed Crouch's work for some time. I think Recursion was the first novel I read and I have worked my way through the Wayward Pines series and several other stand-alone novels. This novel breaks tone and genre from a lot of his prior work. I have come to expect carefully crafted time-travel plots or some other sci-fi adjacent work but Famous strays from this. To be honest, this read more like a Chuck Palahniuk novel than it did a Blake Crouch one. The cover of this novel boasted an A24 movie adaptation which, sorry to say, I won't be watching. This book didn't do it for me. I have read better from Crouch and I hope to see a return to form in future novels.
Finally, I took a recent read through an older book: Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon. I have read a lot of Chabon over the years and have always liked his work for its attention to character and devotion to pop culture fandom. I was blown away by The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay when I first read it in graduate school. This book is not a novel but a collection of essays loosely centering on the topic of a gen X author reaching middle age and reflecting on his life. This topic, as a somewhat younger member of gen X reaching middle age and considering my own relevance, is one that I find sympathetic. Chabon writes about his experience parenting and attempting to expose his children to art and music that he enjoyed, he writes about his first experience carrying a diaper bag while still wanting to appear masculine. One of the essays that hit me the hardest was one in which he describes briefly meeting David Foster Wallace at a Democratic party event. In all, the essays work as an expression of the time. Some have aged better than others but the book was worth a read, overall. It would probably work best for the demographic I fit comfortably into and might have limited returns venturing outside of that.
