Supermarket by Bobby Hall

So this is how it feels to take a man’s life. Forced to kill for one’s own survival.

I looked down at the puddle of blood by my feet, locking eyes with my own reflection. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead. How’d I get here? I was just a dude who worked at the grocery store.

Now here I was, standing over a man I murdered.

So begins the debut novel of Bobby Hall, a Maryland native who dropped out of high school, escaped the slums, and went on to achieve world-wide success as rap artist Logic. He also answers to Bobby Tarantino, Young Sinatra, and the 1-800 Guy (jkjk).

For transparency’s sake, you should know that Logic has been one of my favorite rappers for years, and I’ve been anticipating the release of Supermarket ever since he first began hinting at a novel in 2017. I wanted so badly for Supermarket to be as brilliant as Under Pressure and as recklessly fun as Bobby Tarantino II. Regardless of my affinity for Logic, however, I want to approach this review as objectively as possible. Too many die-hard fans are determined to adore whatever an artist releases without question or critical thought, and I think that’s unfair to the artist. I respect Mr. Hall enough to treat Supermarket with the honesty that any new writer should be given. Leading someone on is no way to show your support. So, here goes.

The back cover describes Supermarket as a “darkly funny psychological thriller,” but it’s really more of a psychological comedy than anything. The book follows the life of Flynnagin E. Montgomery, aka Flynn, a 20-something-year-old, recently-dumped, aspiring writer with some serious mental health issues. In order to kickstart his writing career and make some steady money, he takes a job at a local supermarket, where he falls in love with a cute coworker named Mia, befriends Tyler Durden 2.0, and rapidly loses his grip on reality.

If reading the opening quote gave you a sense of foreboding, you’re not alone. As badly as I wanted to love Supermarket, the distractingly primitive writing made for a conflicting experience straight out of the gate. That opener actually encapsulates many of the problems that pepper the rest of the novel. For one, it’s cliche’d as all get out. The second sentence is incomplete. The tone is jarringly informal (“how’d,” “dude”). The tenses are inconsistent (“Now here I was” ). Not to mention, can you really see your own reflection in a puddle of blood?

Honestly, the book felt like it was written by a crude-mouthed high-schooler. Which makes sense, given that Hall never graduated high school. There’s far too many commas and sentence fragments for a smooth flow. The prose is riddled with cliches and attempts at being cutesy. The characters use each others’ names every other sentence.  There are hahaha’s, ummm’s, nah’s, etc., as if the exchanges are text conversations rather than dialogue. The amount of ALL-CAPS, exclamation marks!!, reaaaallyyyy drawn out worrrrrds, and other flamboyancies make the prose downright exhausting on the eyes. One Amazon reviewer writes, “I was really blown away with how well written it is,” and I’m sorry, but reviews like these are objectively wrong. A brief but representative example:

“Mia, let’s get out of here, the store’s about to close,” I said.
“Chill, Flynn, we work here, and I need to find the perfect pomegranate,” she said.
“Mia, let’s go, I’m hungry,” I said, pulling her forward with my arm.
“Flynn, Jesus, okay.”

And one more for good measure:

“Do you listen to Tame Impala?” she asked.
“No, never heard of them,”I said, shaking my head.
“You’re kidding me!! You haven’t listened to Currents?!?” she yelled.
“Haha, nah, I haven’t. Is it any good?”
She stared blankly at me.
“Is it any good? ‘Is it ANY GOOD?’ HE SAYS! It’s amazing, Flynn. A true modern classic! I’ll have to grab you a copy from the Vinyl Village.”
“Oh, I love that place!”

Unfortunately, overlooking the prose to the actual meat of the story proves equally grim. The plot starts off with a decent push but rapidly loses momentum, petering off into fragmented episodes interrupted by frequent internal monologues. The twists are so heavily foreshadowed that it feels like the author is ribbing you every chapter and whispering, “Get it? Huh? Do you see it yet? See what I did there?” The “big reveal” was so obvious from the outset that Hall had me convinced I was missing something. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never did.

There is very little in Supermarket that hasn’t been done before. I’ve seen reviews comparing it to Fight Club, Naked Lunch, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is unsurprising but also unfair, because Hall simply borrows content from them without adding anything new to the mix. I wasn’t kidding about Tyler Durden 2.0 — the Frank character literally is Tyler from Fight Club. And the parts of the book that aren’t borrowed from other writers are taken straight out of the author’s own life. For instance, the description of Flynn’s coworker girlfriend, Mia, made my heart ache. Because whether he realizes it or not, Hall is clearly describing his ex-wife, Jess Andrea:

She was an absolute beauty! A twenty-five-year-old, Spanish-speaking, tan-skinned, 5’6″ supermarket model with jet-black hair; an amazing body; a warm, welcoming energy; and a radiating smile. She was the only thing in the entire store that felt real. She was a combination of Jessica Alba and Rashida Jones. Random mixture, I know, but damn, was she gorgeous.

The only truly redeeming quality to be found in Supermarket is Hall’s depiction of depression and anxiety, and how the two combined can hold a person hostage in their own mind. Obviously the author has fought his own battle with mental health, which makes the passages describing Flynn’s struggles the most vivid and powerful. For example, describing a time in Flynn’s life when he could barely leave his bed:

I felt hopeless. Not even sad. Just nothing. I couldn’t even cry. The thought of writing was an unimaginable feat. It was a depression so low and flat that I couldn’t even envision suicide as a solution.

Another passage describes the physical experience of an anxiety attack with disconcerting accuracy:

At that moment, everything around me began to flicker, as though the lights were being sucked from the room, then instantaneously brought back.  My hearing became muffled, then ceased altogether. A high-frequency pitch shot into my head, like in those old war movies when a soldier experiences shell shock. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion and yet superfast at the same time.

Flynn is stuck in a loop, like a hamster in a wheel. He’s trapped in the supermarket. For anyone else who feels trapped and helpless, unable to see beyond their current circumstances, a slave to their own mind, there is an empowering message hidden within Supermarket. Beneath the juvenile prose, flamboyant characters, and uninspired plot lies a message about the power of the mind and the importance of mental health. It is possible to break free. As Hall writes in the acknowledgements:

I have used words and creative freedom to better myself. Whoever may be reading these words, I hope you have the courage to do the same through any form of creative expression. It has been a long road, but I too, finally, have escaped the supermarket.

It’s hard to stomp on a book too much when it was written with such whole-hearted motivation and positivity. I admire Hall for the courage and vulnerability it took for him to step outside of his rap niche and dabble in a new medium in order to further spread his message. It must have been terrifying. That said, artistically, Supermarket is a flop. There’s no getting around it. And if you insist that it isn’t, maybe you should try taking off those glasses as thick and rosy as the book’s cover.

---

I’d say this book is a waste of time.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

Here the other day they was a woman put her baby in a trash compactor. Who would think of such a thing? My wife wont read the papers no more. She’s probably right. She generally is.

I’ve had an inexplicable fascination with No Country for Old Men for a very long time, even before watching the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-winning film adaptation. Twice over Christmas break I attempted to pick it up, and both times lost steam within the first couple dozen pages. Settling back down into the routines of the post-holiday grind, though, I picked it up once more, and the third time was indeed the charm. I tore through it by the end of the week.

You see, No Country is not the most accessible of novels. In order to fully immerse his readers in the bleakness of his world, McCarthy abandons the use of quotation marks in dialogue altogether, as well as most punctuation and grammar rules. Breaking into this world might be challenging for readers in the same way it would be challenging to listen to someone tell a story in a foreign accent. The deeper you venture, though, the more the words begin to spring off the page. The dialogue drips with wickedly dark humor. Scenes of bloody shootouts practically pulse with adrenaline. The characters look you straight in the eyes. And by the final pages, I felt like I’d mastered a new language. The lack of quotation marks that so irked me in the first few chapters no longer even registered as I swept through the pages.

Although a definitive time period is given (1980) and a nonfictional county serves as the backdrop (Terrell; population 810) , the story transcends its setting with an eerie timelessness. It could be 2027. It could be 1908. Nothing would change the course of the three interwoven trails we follow: those of Llewelyn Moss, Anton Chigurh, and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.

Moss stumbles upon the open grave of an illegal drug deal over the Tex-Mex border gone very wrong. Knowing full well that he may be signing his own death warrant, he flees the scene with the dealers’ $2.4 million in cash. In the wake of Moss’s disappearance, Sheriff Bell investigates the bloody crime scene and, quickly realizing the danger Moss is in, strives to protect him and the young wife he’s left behind.

Hired to recover the stolen cash is psychopathic assassin Anton Chigurh, arguably one of literature’s most blood-chilling villains. He is a man of few words and fewer emotions. His weapon of choice is a captive bolt pistol, which kills instantly and leaves no bullets. Insane though he may be, he holds to a warped yet unwavering set of principles. As someone explains it to Moss, “Even if you gave him the money, he’d still kill you for inconveniencing him.” The only way to survive an encounter with Chigurh is the fifty/fifty chance of a coin toss, if he deigns to offer you the choice.

There is so much more boiling beneath the surface of this sun-parched tale than a simple western saga. McCarthy examines morality—the senselessness of evil, the absurdity of altruism—with unflinching honesty. His characters serve as mouthpieces for entire world-views without ever sacrificing their own authenticity. He probes deep into questions about the nature of our world and leaves the wound open for the reader to explore. And he does it all in the midst of a story never bogged down by heavy exposition or stilted internal monologues. For example, look at the way Sheriff Bell posits the idea that perhaps there’s Someone good looking out for us bumbling humans after all:

People think they know what they want but they generally dont. Sometimes if they’re lucky they’ll get it anyways. Me I was always lucky. My whole life. I wouldnt be here otherwise. Scrapes I been in. But the day I seen her come out of Kerr’s Mercantile and cross the street and she passed me and I tipped my hat to her and got just almost a smile back, that was the luckiest.

People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they dont deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things. I dont recall that I ever give the good Lord all that much cause to smile on me. But he did.

I can safely say that I’ve never read and never will read anything even remotely like No Country. After reading up on Cormac McCarthy, it sounds like the author himself has never written anything else like it. Give yourself time to settle into the rhythm of his world and suddenly it will sweep you away, shock you, and sear you with a heat so powerful the burn will be sure to leave a mark.

---

I’d say this book is the crème de la crème.

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

Life isn’t happily ever after… It’s work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves that burden of it, either. You’ll be let down. You’ll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But you roll up your sleeves and work – at everything – because that’s what growing older is.

Dennis Lehane is one of those authors everyone in the literary crime niche worships, and so I feel obligated to sing his praises, but maybe I’m just not quite there yet.

Mystic River is the story of three little boys in Boston: Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle. One day, as they’re playing in the street, a car rolls up carrying two men who look like plainclothes officers. They order Dave to get in the car with them, and he obeys. Only later in the evening when the other boys tell their parents what happened does everyone realize Dave was abducted by child molesters. One horrible week later, however, he escapes his abductors and returns home, and the three little boys continue shakily about the business of growing up—into an ex-con, a cop, and a misfit. Then one day, decades later, Ex-con’s daughter goes missing, Cop is assigned to investigate the case, and when a body is found, word gets around that Misfit is acting suspicious.

For me, the characters are the stars of this show. The plot sometimes feels contrived, a little too perfectly sewn together, but the three boys make it work for them. None of them are simple characters—not even simple-minded Dave Boyle. I knew where the story was going about halfway through, but what kept me reading wasn’t curiosity about what would happen next; it was curiosity about if and how the characters would change in the process.

Honestly (and as a writer, this feels mildly like blasphemy), it’s Lehane’s prose that keeps this from being a home run for me. The style is so self-aware that I started to feel second-hand self-consciousness wading through the heavy exposition. I couldn’t get over the feeling that Lehane was trying too hard. The words are not relaxed. There are run-on sentences, endless conjunctions, over-use of slang and one-word dialogue, and, what bothered me most, repetition. A very serious, chronic case of repetition. To the point where it started to feel like the characters were parroting each other. Sometimes Lehane made it work for him, but most of the time it felt clunky and pretentious. Here’s an example of one of the times he made it work:

Jimmy took the glove and he felt bad about it. Sean would miss it. Jimmy took the glove and he felt good about it. Sean would miss it.

In the above passage, the author succinctly and effortlessly describes Jimmy’s mixed emotions about pocketing his friend’s baseball glove. To me, that’s a decent example of the show-don’t-tell principle. But then there’s passages like this one, that just made my eyes glaze over:

He looked at them hanging from her hand. He looked at the floor. “I was kneeling over him.” He shrugged. “I dunno. I guess it splashed up, like on the shirt.
“Oh.”
He met her eyes. “Yeah. Oh.”
“So,” she said.”
“So.”
“So, I’ll wash these in the kitchen sink.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” she said, and backed out of the bathroom, left him standing there, one hand fluttering under the water, waiting for it to get hot.

… Yeah, there’s a lot of that. Particularly in the dialogue, which tends to water down the recognizability of each character’s voice.

Despite the heavy-handedness of Lehane’s style and the predictability of the plot, it’s hard not to love Mystic River. There is a rawness that rings true in each of the characters, particularly in their reactions to the curveballs life throws their way. The line between protagonist and antagonist remains blurred. As in the real world, each character is made up of equal parts good and evil. They are all so tangibly human. I look forward to rereading this one in a few years, because the psychology is so complex that I’m confident there’s much I missed the first time through.

---

I’d say this book is worth a trip to the library.

Red Dragon by Thomas Harris

 To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after. […] You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It’s all there and you just have to find it.

The Silence of the Lambs introduced me to Thomas Harris and Hannibal Lecter earlier this year, and I was a bit nervous going into Red Dragon (published seven years earlier), because I thought it couldn’t possibly be on par with Harris’s masterpiece. As it turns out, I was very wrong.

The story follows FBI profiler Will Graham who is coerced out of retirement in order to consult on a case involving a serial killer nicknamed the Tooth Fairy, who is slaughtering whole families in their quiet suburban homes. The further Graham gets sucked into the case, the further he finds himself drifting apart from his wife and stepson, and the more old wounds begin to ache from his past. Along the way, he finds himself turning to the jailed Dr. Hannibal Lecter for insight into the killer’s mind, against his better judgment.

The plot of the novel is tight and evenly paced. The story never feels rushed, and it never lags; Harris carries the story with a cold surety to its conclusion. I actually thought that there was a stronger sense of humanity to Red Dragon than Silence of the Lambs, as the plot is almost completely executed by the characters. Meaning that the plot doesn’t move the characters forward; the characters move the plot forward. Harris never falls back on contrivance or convenient coincidence; he instructs his characters to do the work for him, which is the secret to truly excellent story-plotting. Early on in the novel, we already know “whodunit,” but there is so much else that we feel we have to know about the why of it all that knowing the killer’s name hardly matters. Graham’s hungry, uncomfortable need to crawl inside the mind of the Tooth Fairy is contagious, drawing the reader into the chase on a psychological level and keeping them pinned there from start to finish.

Also like Silence of the Lambs, we are presented with not one but two unmatchably unique serial killers. As I’ve said, it’s so rare to come across a dynamic, original, legitimately frightening killer in crime fiction. Nevertheless, Harris births new killers one after the other with disconcerting ease. Lecter plays much more of a supporting role in his debut novel, leaving center stage to be dominated by Francis Dolarhyde, the Tooth Fairy, one of the most bone-chilling characters I have ever encountered—certainly on par with Silence’s Buffalo Bill (who remains the scariest son-of-a-gun in all fiction, in my humble opinion).

The killers aren’t the only characters who shine. It would be a crime to categorize any of Harris’s characters as simple. Every supporting role is carefully cast, from Dolarhyde’s feisty blind coworker, Reba, who unwittingly touches a monster’s heart, to Freddy Lounds, the over-eager pulp journalist who Graham can’t get off his back. Will Graham himself, though, may be one of my favorite fictional detectives. He is gifted with profound empathy, and through his character, Harris truly makes us feel the weight of knowing another person. As one character describes it, “He can assume your point of view, or mine – and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It’s an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.” The double-edged nature of Graham’s talent for perception is further masterfully outlined in this passage:

Graham had a lot of trouble with taste. Often his thoughts were not tasty. There were no effective partitions in his mind. What he saw and learned touched everything else he knew. Some of the combinations were hard to live with. But he could not anticipate them, could not block and repress. His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved. His associations came at the speed of light. His value judgments were at the pace of a responsive reading. They could never keep up and direct his thinking. He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers. There was nothing he could do about it.

Even more than the tight-knit plot, the psychological depth, the mastery of horror, or the 3-D characters, perhaps what I respect most about Red Dragon are the words themselves. As I noted when reviewing Silence, Thomas Harris writes cold, hard prose like nobody’s business. In my opinion, he is the reigning master of the literary adage: show, don’t tell. His use of words is unflinchingly economical—descriptive, never artsy; self-assured, never self-aware. He comes across as a quiet, intense artist, not the kind of person who talks to hear their own voice.

When he does use metaphors and clever turns of phrases, he keeps them simple, so that they always pack a punch. For instance, he may describe how Jack Crawford “bellied up to a door,” Freddy Lounds “hurried into Crawford’s silence,” or how Dolarhyde “bore screams as a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone.” One of my favorite passages describes Graham’s state of mind after a draining day in one hundred-dollar sentence:

Graham was tired, resentful, fatigued to a child-minded state in which his standards of measurement were the first ones he learned; where the direction ‘north’ was Highway 61 and ‘six feet’ was forever the length of his father.

While you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t recognize The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon is often overlooked, stuck beneath the shadow of its block-buster younger sibling—which is a true shame. Having devoured Silence, I cracked open Red Dragon with high expectations, but was surprised even still to discover that its power and quality matched The Silence of the Lambs in every possible way. There are no cheap thrills to be found here. Thomas Harris is a master, and Red Dragon is a thriller of the highest caliber.

---

I’d say this book is worthing splurging for hardcover.

Birdman by Mo Hayder

That? That’s a body? He’d thought it was a piece of expanding foam, the type fired from an aerosol, so distended and yellow and shiny it was. Then he saw hair and teeth, and recognized an arm. And at last, by tilting his head on one side, he understood what he was looking at.

This novel materialized out of nowhere and swept the breath clean out of me. It was only on a whim that I downloaded this audiobook to my phone. I’d never heard of Mo Hayder or any of her books. Normally on my hour-plus commutes to work, I split the drive-time fairly evenly between music and an audiobook. After the first few chapters of Birdman, I knew I wouldn’t be able to listen to much of anything else until I finished it.

I tend to be extremely skeptical about modern crime novels. The amount of overused tropes, twists, and tired writing that pollutes popular fiction nowadays is a source of great disappointment to me. See, I believe that crime fiction at its best is more than a chase, a twist, or a chill; it’s meant to be a reminder of just how broken and helpless we humans are. Crime fiction has the advantage of exploring themes of justice and redemption with more poignancy than any other genre. As terrifying and blood-curdling as Birdman is, what makes it stand out to me is the way in which Hayder explores these dark complexities of the human condition, to include discussions on racism, prostitution, and drugs.

The backdrop. Detective Inspector Jack Caffery steps up to investigate his first case as lead investigator with London’s murder squad, and it’s a doozy: the body of a young woman found in Greenwich, so mutilated she is barely recognizable as human. Four more corpses soon follow, all with same ritualistic mutilation, including one particularly bone-chilling signature discovered in the post-mortem examination. Caffery knows he’s dealing with a serial killer. The problem is that the rest of his squad quickly becomes preoccupied with the wrong suspect, a local black drug dealer—and for all the wrong reasons. Meanwhile, Caffery is haunted by his own demons and struggles to keep his personal life from interfering with the investigation.

There are so many subplots running through the story, and Hayder weaves them together expertly so that I was never bored or impatient. The characters are dynamic and vivid, particularly DI Caffery, who is very much the Nordic antihero but lovable nonetheless. There are characters I hated, characters I pitied, and characters I couldn’t get enough of. It’s also difficult to create a unique serial killer when it seems everything’s been done before, but this one is quite unlike any I’ve ever encountered. Damien Goodwin did an exceptional job narrating the text, and his scope of voices—all so different while sharing that same distinct south London accent—was just delicious.

It’s been a long time since I read a mystery that completely duped me. Birdman did, and not just once. This was by far the most spellbinding audiobook I’ve ever heard; Mo Hayder and Damien Goodwin had me in turns gripping the steering wheel, grimacing, chuckling, shivering, and yes, even gasping. Fair warning: if you can’t tell by the opening quote, this one’s not for the faint of heart. There were passages even I had trouble getting through (and this from someone who loved Silence of the Lambs). But boy was it worth it. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited for a series.

---

I’d say this book is worth owning.

Twenty Letters to a Friend by Svetlana Alliluyeva

No matter how cruel or harsh our country may be, no matter how often we stumble and are hurt, no matter how many undeserved wrongs we may endure, no one who loves Russia in his heart will ever betray her or give her up or run away in search of material comfort. Her beauty, tranquil and wise, shines like a soft, sorrowful light from the pale sky. It will survive everything and go on forever.

I’m still not precisely sure how I stumbled across this book—a first edition, no less—but I picked it up to read the other day and scarfed it down within the next forty-eight hours. Svetlana’s letters are some of the most intimate, delicate, psychologically-fascinating autobiographical works I have ever read. Yes, in large part, the book’s magnetism can be accounted for by the fact that her father was none other than Joseph Stalin himself, but there is more to it than that; Svetlana herself is a thoughtful, introspective, and very conflicted individual, and the way she puts her memories to paper is both captivating and haunting.

Perhaps my favorite part about this book was the pamphlet I found slipped inside the cover from the publishing company, sponsored by “The American Book of the Month Club.” I read through this little leaflet before diving into the book, and the amount of passive-aggressive jabs in it left me bracing myself for an altogether pathetic book. Here’s just a snippet of what the Book of the Month Club has to say about Ms. Alliluyeva’s work:

First, it cannot be claimed that this is a great work of art [read: our apologies for forcing this book on you]. The author is not an experienced professional writer. She has simply set down, in spontaneous fashion, what lies heavy on her heart and lives within her memory. She is clearly a woman of good will and character, of a rather innocent cast of mind [read: of low intelligence]. Biological accident gave her for father a man of ill will possessing a complex and evil mind. The contradiction between father and daughter has produced a book that of necessity is enormously interesting [the writer’s use of the word necessity makes their reluctance palpable].

What remains is a transparently sincere human document, often moving in its very lack of sophistication [taste the disdain?], that shows us a Stalin which no historian, no scholar, and indeed no other Russian could show us. What remains is a pathetic [yes, pathetic] yet never overwrought account of the tragedy of a strange family […].

Now, having read the book in full, I am left baffled, indignant, and admittedly a bit amused at America’s inability to say something nice about a Russian in 1967. Every single compliment veils scorn and judgment. While Svetlana may not be a professional author, her words paint vivid portraits of her family and the life they shared in Russia, and her perception into the personalities and motivations of her parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles is remarkably keen. She is introspective, humble, and, despite what the Book of the Month Club may imply, highly intelligent. In particular, I found myself entranced by the psychological complexity of her relationship with her father, Joseph Stalin.

Svetlana gives her readers a glimpse at a side of Stalin the history books will never illuminate: Stalin the father. Svetlana’s childhood was far from perfect, but despite being the daughter of the most powerful man in all of Russia, she was neither spoiled nor neglected as a child. While she remains candid in recounting her father’s bullying ways towards her brother Yakov (who eventually committed suicide), she also recalls his love for the outdoors, his longstanding jokes with her, his games, and his many kisses. To Russia and the world, he represented fear and power. To Svetlana, he was simply father. She doesn’t sugarcoat his monstrosities, doesn’t apologize for his sins, and doesn’t beg for our sympathy. She tells her story as it needs to be told: with care and candor. I love the way another reviewer described the power of Svetlana’s memoir:

Allilueva’s memoir is sensational, but it is anything but sensationalist.  Her prose is simple and clear, and her narrative style reminiscent of the child she was back then.  Even the familial tragedies – her mother’s suicide, the unrelenting destruction of the Alliluev family and, yes, the death of her father – are described plainly, in matter-of-fact language. This does not mean that Twenty Letters is devoid of emotion.  With next to nothing standing between us and the horror of those events, we are hit with their full emotional impact.  Not for a moment does the author try to elicit our sympathy; she simply relates how it happened.  This is the opposite of the misery memoir. [source]

There’s not much more can, or even should, be said about Svetlana’s letters. Whether she intends it or not, they illuminate a coexisting love and repulsion within her heart for her father, Stalin. She loves him with the unshakeable love of a daughter, yet she refuses to ignore the pain and death he wrought upon his family, his country, and the world. It’s this enigma of conflicting emotion, love and hatred, that make Svetlana’s letters so deeply haunting. I am not likely soon to forget them—or her.

History is a stern judge. It’s not for me but for history to decide who served the cause of good and who that of vanity and vainglory. I certainly don’t have the right.

---

I’d say this book is worth splurging for hardcover.

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

And what I know from my studies and from my life is that there is no such thing as a true event. We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed.

 Ordinary Grace. One of the greatest literary cons of our time. You heard it here first. Now, from the outset this book seems to have everything going for it. Tasteful, vintage cover art. The prominent stamp of the Edgar Award. Gushing accolades from the likes of Dennis Lehane. Banner of a New York Times bestseller. Allusions from critics to the likes of To Kill a Mockingbird. Predictions like “destined to be hailed as a classic work of literature.” In what has now become my refrain when picking up new books, stubbornly naïve as I am, I found myself thinking, what could go wrong?

Set in small-town New Bremen, Minnesota in the summer of ’61, Ordinary Grace is the coming-of-age tale of 13-year-old Frank Drum, the son of a Methodist pastor and a wildly artistic mother with the voice of an angel. Over the span of one summer, Frank and his stuttering kid brother, Jake, experience a crippling wave of deaths and tragedies in their community that force them to discover together the “awful grace of God.”

Does the synopsis sounds familiar? There’s a reason for that. Do you find yourself recalling titles from your high school reading list like To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Sawyer, East of Eden, or My Antonia? There’s a reason for that, too. Ordinary Grace rips pages out of various timeless classics and patches them all together again to create something Krueger hopes readers will mistake for his own. Frank Drum’s saintly father looks far too much like Mockingbird‘s Atticus, and once you realize that, it’s easy to see that Frank himself is just Jem Finch in disguise. There’s all the southern spunk and tomboy fun of Tom Sawyer, the gritty undertones of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and plot twists I didn’t even enjoy when Willa Cather used them. There is scant little about this book that Krueger can in good conscience call original content.

The reason Ordinary Grace feels so much like a classic is because it steals everything that remotely smells like Pulitzer material from those classics that have already been canonized and throws it all together into one giant melting pot of tropes and contrivances. In that sense, I suppose you could in fairness call it an American classic. If this sort of thing intrigues you, please don’t read ahead, as spoilers will be mentioned. I hesitate to even call them spoilers, though, because Krueger foreshadows each “plot twist” with the weight of an anvil, so that halfway through the book it’s already blatantly obvious how every loose end will be tied.

That’s right; Ordinary Grace is the literary equivalent of Oscar bait. Don’t believe me? First, you have your wise and slightly aloof father figure. Then you have your lovable tag-team of overall-wearing brothers, one with a rebellious streak and one with a chronic stutter and a suspicious amount of wisdom for an eleven-year-old. You have your misunderstood Native American to stir up the race issue. You have your repressed homosexual to stir up the sexuality issue. And then you have your angelic older sister who covers for said homosexual by posing as his girlfriend. The angelic older sister is, spoiler alert, mysteriously murdered, and only after her death is it discovered that she was secretly pregnant with an older man’s baby. When it comes to light that the baby was not her boyfriend’s because their relationship was platonic, the “boyfriend” inevitably kills himself rather than face the shame of his sexuality. Naturally, the Native American must be framed for the angelic sister’s murder and is forced to flee town. And in the midst of it all, at his sister’s funeral, you have your textbook miracle where the stuttering eleven-year-old kid brother inexplicably loses his stutter mid-prayer, never to have it return.

Perhaps what offends me most deeply about Ordinary Grace are the religious undertones Krueger so cleverly exploits. For instance, because Frank Drum’s father is a pastor, we are expected to accept his words as gospel truth. Indeed, Krueger is quite the master con; the novel’s tone is so thickly and perpetually reverent that, for goodness’ sake, there has to be something important beneath it all. This is where the comparisons to Mockingbird sprout. But there is a purity to the legacy of Mockingbird that Ordinary Grace could never hope to touch. Why not? Because while on the surface the two may appear similar, at the core they couldn’t be more different. Mockingbird gives us the essence of everything a coming-of-age story should be: an innocent child struggling to come to terms with the cold truths of our world. The beauty of Mockingbird is that with all of its memorable colors and characters and questions, the entire web is built upon truth, simple and pure. We are all broken people. There is sin—murder, envy, lust, prejudice—lurking in every heart. We all need grace, but none of us deserve it.

William Kent Krueger would have readers believe that Ordinary Grace is built upon the same sturdy foundation of truth, but the heart of this book is neither sturdy nor true, but rather a denial of all truth in favor of embracing your truth, whatever your truth may happen to be. Because for Krueger, the “awful grace of God” means that no matter what you decide is true for you, it’s valid. In this way, for all its efforts to appear classic, Ordinary Grace is actually extraordinarily postmodern in its ideology.

Even when Krueger hits on deeper truths, he manages to muddy-up the waters. For instance, he describes being gay as something as natural and ingrained as being born with a stutter. Young Jake, in comparing his own stutter to the deceased Karl’s sexuality, tells his brother sagely, “There are some things you can’t run from, Frank. […] Who you are. You can’t run from that. You can leave everything behind except who you are.” Yet, Jake’s parallel begins to fall apart when one takes into account the fact that his stutter is later spiritually healed. The punch loses its impact thanks to shoddy, overbearing execution.

Before closing, might I just add that the prose itself was nauseating? Why am I reading review upon review gushing about how lyrically and breathtakingly Krueger writes? The man doesn’t even know how to use a comma. It’s almost as if he spent so long daydreaming about the school-kids who would one day be assigned to read Ordinary Grace that he consequently packed each sentence with as many gooey literary turns of phrases he could shake out of his head.  It’s sickening. There is no change of tone. No break. We are never allowed a breath of tight, clean, normal writing. The book completely lacks humility. Two chapters in and my head was already reeling. And because I know this opinion is bound to be met with skepticism (after all, Dennis Lehane loves it!), here’s just a glimpse at how bad we’re talking here:

Mrs. Brandt slipped a cigarette free and tapped it on the lid of the gold case and put the case away and brought out a gold lighter with a  little sapphire center. She slid the cigarette between her rubied lips and flipped the lighter open and thumbed the striker and touched the flame to the tip of her cigarette and lifted her head high like a wild animal about to howl and below out a flourish of smoke.

Still don’t believe me? Have another:

The air was warm and still and the grass of the cemetery which Gus kept watered and clipped was soft green and the river that reflected the sky was a long ribbon of blue silk and I thought that when I died this was the place exactly I would want to lie and this was the scene that forever I would want to look upon.

Not quite convinced? This is one of the last passages in the entire book (and then I’m done, I promise):

We drove north out of the valley and onto rolling farmland. We followed back roads that were a mystery to me and that threaded between fields of corn and soybean and cut alongside farmyards and skipped through towns that were there and gone in less than a breath and finally we dipped into a valley much smaller than the one carved by the Minnesota River and filled with emerald alfalfa fields outlined by clean white fences. We turned off the main road onto a long dirt lane that led to a house with a big barn and several outbuildings all canopied by the leaves of a dozen great elms. A woman stood in the shade near the house watching us come and when Gus pulled up she stepped forward to great us.

Honestly, this book is so condescending it makes me itch. And what’s both so funny and so infuriating is that there’s nothing original or praiseworthy enough to excuse any level of condescension whatsoever. There’s all of the bait, but nothing worthy of an Oscar (or rather, a Pulitzer). Krueger is an excellent con, but a shameful artist. Please, do yourself a favor and pick up To Kill a Mockingbird instead.

---

I’d say this book is kindling.

Bonfire by Krysten Ritter

“Strangers make you feel like family should be the most important thing. Blood is thicker than water, that kind of thing. How are you supposed to act when it’s not?”

The thumbnail for this review breaks my usual mould of cover shots, because I never would have given this book a second glance if it wasn’t for the the author. One should always be dubious of books written by celebrities, but this one claimed to be a psychological mystery, and Krysten is a sweater-knitting, pet-crazy, dark-souled kindred spirit of mine, so I had to give it a try. (Also she plays Jessica Jones, the only good thing to come out of Marvel. So there’s that.)

As it happens, Bonfire has received generally favorable reviews, if not particularly enthusiastic, since its October release. The tricky part is trying to determine how many of these favorable reviews stem from an appreciation for Krysten Ritter and how many actually stem from enjoyment of the book itself. That’s what led me to write this review; yes, I’m a huge fan of Krysten, but I also like to think I have good sense when it comes mystery novels.

The premise of Bonfire follows a familiar pattern: small-town girl moves to the city and becomes an attorney, but a case draws her back to her hometown to confront the demons she had hoped to bury in the past. And beyond that, frankly, there’s not much more to the story. Abby Williams, the heroine, is essentially Jessica Jones minus the teeth. The plot (what there is of one) involves corporate corruption to cover a dirty secret with roots running back into Abby’s childhood. In many ways, it reads like an underdeveloped step-sibling to Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects. There’s the broken family relationships, the old high school scandals and rumors, the alcoholism, and plenty of mixed-up feelings and motivations on the part of Abby Williams. In fact, the story revolves exclusively around her feelings and memories, with little else offered to engage the reader.

The exposition is primitive verging on mediocre, though there are frequent, vivid sparks of personality in the descriptions that made me smile. I appreciated that the book wasn’t littered with gratuitous language and innuendos, as many self-conscious new writers tend to assume that the “edgier” the better. Krysten didn’t fall for that trap, and I love that. In fact, overall, Bonfire felt more like a young adult novel than the psychological thriller it purports to be. The overuse of simple and incomplete sentences left me feeling hungry after each chapter, like I’d sat down expecting a full meal and was fed only scraps. There’s nothing satisfying about the prose; instead, it feels sparse and juvenile, marked by far too many blunt paragraphs and overly-sarcastic narrative quips from Abby. The pacing lags and then jumps and then dawdles like a distracted puppy, with no sense of driving purpose. The final twist I thought was decent, if a bit rushed. Whether it be the character development, plot, tone, or theme, though, there is very little that could be called cohesive about this book.

Did I think Bonfire was fantastic? Candidly, no. Do I think any less of Krysten Ritter, having read it? On the contrary, props to her for stepping out and doing something different. Writing a novel is incredibly hard work, and for a first-time author with no prior experience in the field (that we know of), she managed to pull together a tight, enjoyable little mystery that surely won’t bore readers. As long as you go into it with the right expectations, Bonfire promises to be a good time. It’s a clean, easy popcorn read. In fact, I think with a few tweaks Bonfire could have been released as a young adult novel and would have done quite well. While I wasn’t impressed by the writing chops, the story itself has a genuineness about it that’s hard to begrudge. I certainly enjoyed it. It’s clear that Krysten believed in this project and gave it her best effort. If she decides to continue honing her skills as a writer, I’m excited to see where she goes next.

---

I’d say this book is not my cup of tea.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

“I suppose it is that sickness and weakness are selfish things and turn our inner eyes and sympathy on ourselves, whilst health and strength give love rein, and in thought and feeling he can wander where he wills.”

Somehow I made it through my B.A. in English — with a concentration in literature, no less — without ever being forced to read Dracula. I’ve felt cheated ever since, and when I discovered the audiobook was in our library on Audible, I eagerly downloaded it for my long commutes.

If I had actually picked up the book and read it during the evenings, I don’t know that I would have finished it without resignation, to be honest. The melancholy atmosphere is packed so thickly into the words that I could only listen to so much of it before the gloom began to feel burdensome. Sometimes after listening to it on the way to work, by the time I arrived I would leave the car feeling sapped and empty. But then, such is the effect of a genuine gothic tale.

If you’ve read and enjoyed Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, or Frankenstein, odds are you’ll relish Dracula. It has all the beautifully depressing hallmarks of gothic literature. The story moves slowly but purposefully forward, peppered with the voices of the sane and the insane, the victim and the avenger, the loved and the lonely. What sets Dracula apart from the rest of the genre is the unique flavor of narration Stoker uses; instead of one unifying narrative voice, the novel is parsed out into snippets of various characters’ diaries and letters, with the occasional news stories thrown in for colour. This gives the novel an investigative feel and adds to the mystique of the vampire’s legend.

Dracula is everything a classic gothic novel should be—it represents the very essence of the genre, in my opinion. If you enjoy dark, brooding, lofty period pieces saturated with philosophical diatribes, you’re in for a wicked treat. If, however, you don’t particularly enjoy everything a gothic novel entails, you may find it difficult to get through Dracula, given its slow pace and somewhat pretentious narrative tone. Even still, it’s worth the read if only to understand the origin of the vampire craze. And besides, you wouldn’t want to miss out on great lines like this:

 “Doctor, you don’t know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself. No, you don’t; you couldn’t with eyebrows like yours.”

---

I’d say this book is worth a trip to the library.

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

Silence of the Lambs? Seriously? Yes, yes, I know. But this is one instance where my own expectations turned out to be so grossly ill-founded that I feel obligated to set the record straight. If you’ve never read this book because you’ve always assume it’s brimming with blood and guts and flesh-eating nightmares, stop right there and hear me out. That’s all I ask.

Now, this is not a frilly book. It’s not literary or eloquent. That’s not to say it isn’t extremely well written. From the opening lines, there’s a calm control about the prose that builds your trust in Harris with each passing chapter. He writes with dignity. That’s the best word for his style, and that’s what I least expected to find between the pages of one of literature’s most infamous horror stories. Yes, there are cannibals and serial killers, but Harris doesn’t revel in supplying our imaginations with all the gory details. In fact, there’s not one scene where we witness Buffalo Bill skinning one of his victims, and there’s not one scene where we witness Hannibal Lecter eating human flesh. Yes, these things happen, but the author never stoops to rubbing our faces in them. We are forced to acknowledge that such monsters exist, but Harris is much more interested in drawing them out as humans than in using them for cheap scares.

That said, the brilliance of The Silence of the Lambs is, I think, best explained by Thomas Harris’s remarkable talent for showing, not telling. Every creative writing workshop under the sun hammers into our heads the importance of this principle. As Chekhov famously said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Regardless of the kind of story you aim to write or the type of emotion you hope to evoke, the key to engaging readers lies in allowing them draw their own conclusions instead of forcing yours. Harris never lets us experience firsthand Hannibal or Buffalo Bill’s crimes; he only gives us glimpses of these monsters through the eyes of the protagonist, Clarice Starling, letting them grow as dark and menacing in our minds as we let them. It’s not the writer’s job to tell you what he wants you to know; he must show you. Here’s a brilliant example from the book—completely unrelated to serial killers, as it happens, but incredible in the amount of information Harris stuffs into so few words. FBI cadet Clarice Starling is trying to pressure a guard into giving her access to Hannibal Lecter’s cell. The guard replies:

      “I’m not a turnkey here, Miss Starling. I don’t come running down here at night just to let people in and out. I had a ticket for Holiday on Ice.”
He realized he’d said a ticket. In that instant, Starling saw his life, and he knew it.

Now, everyone knows Hannibal Lecter. But while Dr. Lecter is certainly the most infamous character in the story, to me he wasn’t nearly the most frightening. The award for most nightmare-inducing villain I have to give to Buffalo Bill. Lecter is intelligent and humorous and polite, but Jame Gumb, alias Buffalo Bill, doesn’t know what he is. Where Lecter regards his human prey with a keen, calculating perception, Gumb doesn’t even recognize the girls he attacks to be human. Legitimately the most chilling line I have ever read was when he tosses a bottle of lotion down into the well where he’s keeping Catherine Martin captive and says to her:

“It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told. ”

The contrast between these two killers adds a unique flavor to the story. Even their names couldn’t be more different; where Hannibal is always referred to as Dr. Lecter, Buffalo Bill’s mother misspelled his name on his birth certificate, dropping the “S” in James, and he’s insisted on going by Jame ever since. Again, Harris paints a stark picture by showing, not telling, who these killers are by way of a few carefully-selected details.

Lecter, by the way, is wickedly delightful. You will never meet another character like him, and once you’ve met him, you won’t ever forget him. He is a conundrum: the epitome of well-bred manners, yet at the same time an unapologetically cannibalistic serial killer. As Clarice observes, “It was as though committing murders had purged him of lesser rudeness.” We don’t ever really see the murderous side of Lecter up close, and so the many allusions to his appetite for human flesh remain coyly humorous, as in his famous quip to Clarice during their first interview:

“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”

If you haven’t noticed, the villains are the stars of the show here. It’s not that there’s anything to be found wanting in Clarice—she’s a fun, well-rounded, memorable character and someone we’re eager to believe in. But what makes this story one for the ages is how utterly and uniquely terrifying both Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill are. It’s hard enough to create one memorable villain; somehow, in one book, Thomas Harris has given us two. Even more incredibly, they never steal the spotlight off one another; rather, Jame Gumb and Hannibal Lecter reveal two very different, very dark sides of humanity, playing off each other across the plot with a cold, discomforting sort of elegance.

Most bafflingly of all, Harris succeeds in all of this without filling our minds with excessive blood and gore—on the contrary, he denies us the opportunity to see his monsters at work, almost as if both are too terrible for us to behold. This is the most resounding example of the power of showing vs. telling that I have ever read. It’s fresh, dignified, terrifying, perceptive, and all-around brilliant. That’s right, I said it — The Silence of the Lambs is a class act.

---

I’d say this book is worth splurging for hardcover.