Best Reads of 2011

Largely, I think, due to reading so many magazines and so many parts of various books for classes, I read the fewest books in 2011 that I did in any year since I started keeping track in 2009. Still, I've ended up with the at least somewhat respectable total of one hundred and nine volumes conquered, and, needless to say, quite a few of those were rather excellent. And so the time has come for the eight best of them, presented in alphabetical order. We begin with…

Reviewed here.

The Wounded and the Slain isn't an exciting book. It's downbeat, instead, not to mention depressing, dejected and dispirited, filled with character and heart and written with a kind of rough poetry. Though there is a crime at the book's center, it's very much a crime with a small c, not a jumping off point to adventure but a tortured, haphazard, regrettable, and, above all, pointless thing. The descent into darkness thing is an inexorable crawl, not a glamorous leap. I don't think you could ever call this a pleasant book, but it's one that'll hit you hard, and it's a damn good one.

Reviewed here.

As stark as it is focused, as streamlined as it is jagged, Red Harvest embodies much of what interests me about the noir genre. Though wholly concerned with matters of justice, this is a compassionless novel, maybe even a(n intentionally) heartless one. Morality here is a brutal force, and the idea of right is relegated to strength and violence. But, in this nigh lawless place, even the lawman, the only one standing up for us, might be corrupt to the core. This is a fast novel, a fun novel, and a damn disturbing one.

Reviewed here.

Like Red Harvest, The Ammonite Violin is disturbing and raw, but here those qualities don't come from bare language, harsh violence, and a lack of emotion but rather from a series of stories that are almost unutterably rich in their composition, filled with overwhelming and enveloping language and positively overflowing with feeling. The longing shown here is the kind of calculated, unbearable, and revelatory longing that might come gushing forth from an excised heart with all the force of the heavy, dark blood that comes with it.

Grimscribe is horror extraordinaire Thomas Ligotti's second collection, and it takes place wholly within nightmare, on the edge of utter dementia itself. Its stories toy with that border, giving glimpses and tantalizing, horrifying hints, leaping across for brief moments where sanity howls before falling back. Amidst it all are several of Ligotti's best tales, including Nethescurial, an insidious and Lovecraftian beast of a tale that can actually be read for free (albeit with an annoying formatting issue or two) here. In my personal rankings, Grimscribe is roughly tied with the author's Songs of aDead Dreamer and Teatro Grottesco for the overall prize of his best work. Suffice to say, this is a brilliant collection.

Reviewed here.

I knew I'd like Sandkings going in, maybe even knew I'd love it, but I didn't know how much. The Stone City is a Science Fiction Weird Tale in every sense of the word, and an absolutely brilliant one at that, fiction that probes the limits of human understanding and strangeness with as much skill as Lovecraft himself brought to the table. This isn't, though, a collection with one centerpiece. Every tale here is filled with breathtaking images and audacity, entire worlds and some of the best characterization you'll ever come across. I know a lot of readers view Martin's older works as a now-done sideshow compared to A Song of Ice and Fire, but doing so is a dire mistake.

Reviewed here.

Embassytown is the rare Science Fiction novel that is not only alien in its choice of colors and its number of tentacles. The aliens shown here are convincingly inhuman, but it's the aspects of language that Miéville uses them to explore that are stranger and more intriguing still. Those concepts are explored in full, taking the humans in the narrative to and past the breaking point, twisting and shattering and reinventing every aspect of their world. Miéville's as skilled as any with coming up with brilliant and challenging ideas, has the ability to ride them for all they're worth, and the talent to present the whole with his fantastic prose. Though it's very different from his early work, Embassytown is no less excellent.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion builds a vivid, colorful, and fascinating world and populates it with larger than life, well explored, and somehow believable characters. I think it says a lot about the novel that I chiefly remember two scenes, one the thrilling, grand, and inventive climax and the other an unimportant scene where the main character eats some rather unpleasant food in a diner. Try as I might, I can't decide which of those I liked best, or which felt more real, and, amazingly enough, the two fit so well into the same narrative that, looking back, they really don't seem all that different in importance at all.

Review to come.

A Fire Upon the Deep operates on a scale so much vaster than what can be easily conceived that the reader's practically pummeled with awe as they turn the pages, and turn them they will. The central plot of A Fire Upon the Deep is a gripping adventure story that takes place amidst an unimaginably complex and fascinating universe, a story filled with grand ideas and with a cast made up in large part of some of the best made and most convincing aliens I've ever seen. A Fire Upon the Deep isn't only one of my favorite books of this year: it's one of my favorite Science Fiction novels ever and even one of my favorite novels.

(THE DUBIOUS HONOR OF) WORST NOVEL

Review here.

Though it also had its fair share of excellence, 2011 packed in more than a few disappointing novels: Boneshaker, If You Could See Me Now, and even the legendary Frankenstein among them. But the latter two had some good ideas, if a fumbled execution, and even Boneshaker was more formless mush than actively bad. Only Wicked Things managed to truly and genuinely piss me off, not because it hadn't met my expectations (though, needless to say, it hadn't) but because it was simply an awful book, one that rambled about aimlessly, setting up numerous hints and clues, and then oh-so-cleverly keeled over dead before resolving anything. Ha ha. Wicked Things tries to be a stylish, plot-based read, but the ending reveal leaves it a thriller that forgot to thrill, a horror novel whose only real horror moment is a and unsubstantiated cheap shot, a novel whose characters are stick figures then jerked out of their unremarkable paths, and a book with nigh no redeeming features.

Dashiell Hammett - The Continental Op

Then I turned on all the lights in the room, lighted a cigarette (we all like to pose a little now and then), and sat down on the bed to await my capture. (p. 111)

Though Sam Spade, famous for his starring role in the Maltese Falcon, might have a higher profile, it's the Continental Op that narrated the lion's share of Dashiell Hammett's fiction, including Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, and the bulk of the man's short fiction. Containing seven stories written between 1924 and 1930, the The Continental Op collection from Black Lizard is filled with tales that perfectly show one of the genre's best on his home turf.

Mystery – the hodgepodge bookstore section for mysteries, crime, and thrillers, that is – is at its heart a rational genre. To boil the genre down to a single glib sentence, the genre is the solving of puzzles. At the opening of the story, the detective, and the reader, is confronted with a situation that makes no sense. Then, like the Scooby gang demasking another supernatural ghost to find a middle aged man, the detective makes sense of the clues and replaces impossibility with a logical procession of events. Any in genre story by Poe, Doyle, or any of their authorial descendants, begins with a series of incomprehensible clues and ends with motive, miscreant, and method all neatly tied up and – if the author's good at what they do – no disappointing coincidences or absurdities remaining.

Dashiell Hammett's stories do not function like that at all, though the Continental Op does indeed go through his own process of investigation. Hammett's aim is not the puzzle but rather the implications of the puzzle, and his stories are not riddles that can be satisfactorily deduced by even the most skilled reader-sleuth hybrid. Hammett's mysteries are mysteries of people and society, not of circumstance, and the Op learns far more by sheer force of will and his own dogged determination than he does from any brilliant analysis of clues.

This is perhaps best exemplified by the collection's first story, The Tenth Clew (available for free here). The Op and the local police find themselves confronted with a murder and a surfeit of clues – or, as I suppose I must, clews. Instead of following the trail to the bloody end, however, the Op disregards all of them and focuses on the man behind them, hunting the personality rather than the evidence. For Hammett, the deduction is, at best, a sideshow, and not only is the reader almost never given all the pieces before the reveal, they're also almost never even shown the Op's process of discovery.

But those are but surface differences. No, the true difference between the genre of mysteries and the writings of Dashiell Hammett is what Steven Marcus discusses in his fantastic introduction. As I said about, mystery is inherently a rational genre. But Hammett is inherently not a rational writer. Like all detectives, the Op reveals the lies of common sense and criminals for what they are, but the truth he uncovers is just as illogical as his foes' deception. Hammett's stories are all but made out of defied expectations, and his revelations are filled with people who are not who they claim to be, crimes committed for reasons incomprehensible, random bursts of violence, and coincidences and hapless fate so twisted as to be delicious. As Marcus says:

Yet what happens in Hammett is that what is revealed as "reality" is a still further fiction-making activity – in the first place in the Op's, and behind that yet another, the consciousness present in many of the Op stories and all the novels that Dashiell Hammett, the writer, is continually doing the same thing as the Op and all the other characters in the fiction he is creating. That is to say, he is making a fiction (in writing) in the real world; and this fiction, like the real world itself, is coherent but not necessarily rational. What one both begins and ends with, then, is a story, a narrative, a coherent yet questionable account of the world. (p. XXI)

For Hammett, the world as we see it is a very flimsy thing, a construction easily sidestepped by both the intending and the oblivious. Identity, for him, is a passing thing, a garb easily donned and discarded. As one captured villain says of their slipping through the cracks: Then I took an apartment on Ashubry Avenue under [an assumed name], and I was an altogether different person. (p. 169, The Girl with the Silver Eyes) (name removed for the sake of spoilers)

Perhaps the Continental Op is a bulwark of justice in such an immoral world, but the Op himself doesn't seem so much moral as amoral, a nameless everyman in appearance and intellect notable only for his force of will. The Continental Op does not share the ambiguity that adorns Sam Spade throughout the Maltese Falcon, but he is also as far as cry from Chandler's Philip Marlowe as he is from Sherlock Holmes. Like in Red Harvest, the Op doesn't care about methods so long as he gets the job done, and his idea of the job is often a far cry from that of his employer's.

In The Golden Horseshoe, we see that the Op's goals are not that of the law, but rather of justice. Providing he can see justice done, the Op doesn't care what story he has to feed the law. In The Main Death, the Op goes one step further. In case too convoluted to ever be won at trial, he takes the law into his own hands, regains the victim's property with force, and buries the facts under a happy outcome. In The Farewell Murders, he reveals that his idea of justice doesn't even extend to seeing the good prosper – he just needs to see the wicked suffer. The Op responds to the continued misfortune and even tragedy of his employer without even a sympathetic word, and he weathers years and false ends all so that, at the end, he can see the guilty hanged.

The Op's justice is a harsh one, and, to him, the guilty deserve no rights at all. When he tells the story of a former cop, Duran, it's clear where his sympathies lie: He used to be captain of detectives in one of the larger Middle Western cities. Once he tried too hard to get a confession out of a safe-ripper, and killed him. The newspapers didn't like Duran. They used that accident to howl him out of his job. (p. 190) I don't believe it's a coincidence that five of the seven stories ends with the following emotionless sentiment: They hanged him. (p. 319)

We've established by now that the thrill of a Hammett story is not the solving of the mystery, but we haven't yet looked into where precisely the thrill is to be found. The answer comes from the prose and the hardboiled, unsentimental, and unflinching interaction of the Op and the world around him. Hammett's writing is clear, terse, and able to both convey volumes of style while simultaneously revealing almost no emotion at all. In the midst of this, the Op often further reinforces his detachment with instances of wit so dry and caustic they're liable to start forest fires: The face she made at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me. I was afraid she'd do it again, so I surrendered. (p. 57)

Among other things, Hammett has a gift for pegging characters in only a few lines and in picking out the one detail that makes them memorable. Alas, while he refrains from over indulging in pointless back stories, he loves to drown the telling and significant details he's created in oceans of white noise and minutia: Age about 30; height about five feet ten; slender, weight about 140; medium complexion; brown hair, suit, and shoes and a gray overcoat. (p. 252) I suppose that, if the infamous police report style of description is to ever find a home it would be here, in a novel about a private detective, but that doesn’t change the fact that such a storm of details leaves the reader with far less, not far more, of a picture than they would otherwise have had. And lest you think that example unique, here's another from the same page: [he was] about five eight inches tall, would weight about a hundred and seventy pounds, had brown hair and eyes, a dark complexion, a flat, broad face with his cheekbones, and wore a blue suit, gray hat, tan overcoat, black shoes, and a pear-shaped pearl tie-pin. (p. 252)

The newest of these stories is eight decades old, and it's true that their levels of gore and profanity feel tame to a modern audience. Their core, however, feels anything but. Hammett's grasp of atmosphere and pace is excellent here, and his ability to build tension is unmatched. After a classic Hammett moment of false perceptions, The House on Turk Street becomes a deadly game of cat and mouse in an unlit house. Other stories, too, are prone to sudden escalations that lead to scenes of violence that are either so brief as to be downright blunt as well as merciless or long, drawn out passages of waiting for the flash of gunfire to give away the enemy. Both styles of action work incredibly well, and each is stronger for the downbeat forced calm that surrounds it.

The Continental Op is a collection of stories that will make your pulse pound. It's also a collection of stories that contain surprising amounts of depth and even revelation. This is an essential read for anyone interested in Dashiell Hammett, noir, mystery in general, or even just good fiction.

Reading in May

I've mentioned my love of Daniel Abraham a fair few times on this blog, and reviewed his short story collection from Subterranean Press, and so I dove into The Dragon's Path as soon as it crossed my doorstep. I can't quite say that the novel possesses as much depth or power as The Long Price at its height, but The Dragon's Path is an interesting and enjoyable book that serves to set up many an interesting thread for future volumes. Review coming.

 The White Luck Warrior, the second volume in the second of Bakker's three connected trilogies, can be easily compared to the middle volume of the first trilogy, The Warrior Prophet. As there, here we focus on an army on the move dealing with supply problems, and so on – but this book lacks the galloping pace of actions and revelations that made that first trilogy such an unforgettable experience. This is not, however, a weak book by any stretch of the imagination. Though I wish more ground had been covered, and less retread, the writing here is powerful and resplendent with metaphors and hidden meanings, and the thematic and philosophical ideas explored are as insightful as the standard that Bakker has set for himself.

Though I enjoyed many of the stories in The Martian Chronicles, I'll admit that, come the collection's end, I still wasn't convinced that Bradbury deserved his legendary status. Now, having read Something Wicked This Way Comes, I'll gladly admit that I was wrong: Bradbury most certainly deserves his praise. Something Wicked This Way Comes is a story about danger and change, but it's also – and most of all – a story about childhood. The exuberance of its characters and the skill of its prose is mesmerizing, and, though the novel does occasionally verge on the saccharine, there are six moments of awe and majesty for every half stumble. This is required reading for anyone interested in our genre's greats.

 Spurred on by my Breaking New Ground challenge, I began Moon Called and found a fast paced and enjoyable Urban Fantasy book with well drawn characters and a generally quietly believable approach to world building. Though Briggs has yet to show herself exceptional in any way, Moon Called is still an enjoyable novel that promises better things ahead.

 Like Hard Man, Savage Night is crime so bleak and brutal it's impossible to react to with anything but a terrified, strangled laugh. Guthrie reacts to the borders of sanity and general taste like most of us view finish lines, and his characters are slammed together so hard and fast that the gruesome mess that's left is likely to leave you as sick as you are satisfied. This is a roller coaster ride of cleverness and tension, but, like all the best four hundred foot drops, it's best to brace yourself before going in.

 Dashiell Hammett's debut is noir writ large, a single amoral detective pitted against an immoral city. Like Savage Night, this isn't a novel that will win any points for restraint, but the laconic honesty of its telling and force of its words is impossible to ignore. Review here.

 Kiernan's Subterranean Press collection, The Ammonite Violin & Others, weaved nightmarish and erotic tapestries out of lush language and surreal descriptions. The Red Tree mesmerizes the audience in a way as different as can be. Here, Kiernan's speech is unadorned and honest, crude and raw and vulnerable. And the image that she paints is both vivid and disorientating, at once horrific and run through with desire.

 I think it's rather well established that I liked Nevill's first two novels, Banquet for the Damned and Apartment 16 a fair bit. I even interviewed the man here.  After all that, I went into The Ritual with damn high expectations – and the book's first half blew even those away. Here Nevill displays excellence in atmosphere and character, creating a taut and terrifying adventure that rivaled anything in Nevill's first two books. And then, alas, the book's second section began, and the characters were gone, and the pacing was gone, and the atmosphere was gone. Review coming.

As I read the first hundred pages of Stone, I was deeply in love. Roberts writes with all the penetrating honesty of a confession and the intricacy of a carefully considered narrative, and his ideas are fresh and riveting. Alas, soon after the imprisoned protagonist wins his freedom, narrative momentum grates to a meandering halt and never returns in force. Still, the ideas that Roberts explores are interesting, and the prose fantastic throughout. I'll be reading more of Roberts in the future for sure, though I hope that his other novels maintain a more even pace throughout.