Recursion by Blake Crouch

Novelist, screenwriter, and show runner

Recursion is the second novel I've read by Blake Crouch. The first was Dark Matter (2016), a race-to-the finish thriller involving the many worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics. In the earlier novel, a professor of physics is kidnapped and thrown into a device that shifts him into a parallel universe. Who did this to him and how to get back to his own life are just a few of the problems he must solve. It may sound a bit cerebral, but Dark Matter was actually quite a fun read; I understand it's soon to be a streaming series from Apple TV+.

Review

Recursion is built upon a similar premise. The story opens with a detective named Barry Sutton who, in 2018, tries to talk a potential jumper down from a ledge. She's suffering from a recent phenomenon called False Memory Syndrome (FMS), in which people confusingly recall whole chunks of their lives that they never lived. Barry is unsuccessful, but he becomes obsessed with understanding why the woman did what she did. His detective work eventually leads him to the source.

In alternating chapters we meet a researcher named Helena Smith who, in 2007, driven by her mother's worsening condition, is trying to develop a method to reverse the effects of Alzheimer's disease. She is working on a way to record memories and then restimulate those memories in the brain. She is, unfortunately, getting nowhere fast until an eccentric tech billionaire steps in and offers to fund her research at a level she never dreamed of on the condition that she agrees to work with his team in complete secrecy.

Based on that description, you can probably imagine how the two storylines begin to come together. But there's a twist, and, if you're intrigued, I'd strongly suggest you skip the rest of my review and go read the novel. 

* * *

Helena's Elon-like benefactor, Marcus Slade, helicopters her out to an abandoned oil rig off the coast of northern California that he has retrofitted into a state-of-the-art laboratory exclusively for her use. With an unlimited equipment budget and a team of assistants, Helena's research proceeds by leaps and bounds until it hits a wall that Marcus insists can only be overcome by having a human subject's heart stopped at the moment the memory transfer takes place. This is an insane-sounding notion that neither Helena nor most of the assistants will go along with, but Marcus eventually gets his way. And that's when something unfathomable happens. Helena realizes that when the subject died during the transfer, the device didn't just restore a memory, it literally sent the subject back in time to the point at which the remembered event first occurred. (A bunch of clever hand-waving makes this sound semi-plausible.)

How did Marcus know this would happen? Well, this isn't Marcus' first rodeo. As a research subject, he died in the device once himself; he just needed to get back to the point where the device gets invented again for the first time, and living through history a second time gives a person the chance to make a lot of smart investments along the way. 

As he takes control of the device, Marcus begins to propagate its use among people who have strong regrets about their past. But here's the catch -- and I've never seen anyone apply this to a time-travel story before -- when you change the past, you still remember your old life, and all the people whose lives are affected by the changes also remember their other lives. Those FMS memories aren't false at all. The more people use the device, the wider the circles of overlaid memories become, and the deeper the layers of memories become. Affected people don't remember their other lives, though, until they reach the day in history when the recursions first began; then all the memories come flooding back. For everyone.

As Barry and Helena's lives become intertwined, they set out to find a way to stop the Armageddon that occurs when hostile nations realize the reality disruption is coming from the United States and fire nuclear warheads to stop it. The title Recursion becomes even more relevant as Helena goes back to a starting point before the device was invented and tries again and again with Barry's help to stop everyone's memories of all the alternate timelines from hitting them when they reach the day that it began. It is a seemingly hopeless quest, and as Helena fails again and again, dies again and again, meets and recruits Barry again and again, reliving hundreds of years, her mind begins to fail.

Admittedly, the novel slows down a bit with the repeated attempts, but Crouch is too good a writer to wear out the reader's patience. He also uses the repetition and the way Barry and Helena experience the passage of time differently to meditate on relationships. Crouch isn't so focused on the twists and turns of his temporal thriller that he doesn't take time to explore the human dimension. I look forward to reading his next one.

Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino

The filmmaker as critic

I think Tarantino is a brilliant filmmaker, and I always enjoy listening to him talk about movies. His unabashed love of action, horror, kung fu and other "disreputable" genres is refreshing to someone who isn't always enamored with the sincere, slow-moving art-house films and Oscar bait that more respected critics seem to favor. If you share his tastes in that regard, you might want to check out the Video Archives podcast Tarantino co-hosts with his fellow filmmaker Roger Avary after you finish reading Cinema Speculation.

Review

In this book, Tarantino focuses on a slice of (mostly) 1970s American cinema. For some reason Cinema Speculation doesn't have a table of contents, so I'm going to provide one here: "Little Q Watching Big Movies," "Bullitt (1968)," "Dirty Harry (1971)," "Deliverance (1972)," "The Getaway (1972)," "The Outfit (1973)," "Second-String Samurai: An Appreciation of Kevin Thomas," "New Hollywood in the Seventies: The Post-Sixties Anti-Establishment Auteurs vs. The Movie Brats," "Sisters (1973)," "Daisy Miller (1974)," "Taxi Driver (1976)," "Cinema Speculation: What If Brian De Palma Directed Taxi Driver Instead of Martin Scorsese?," "Rolling Thunder (1977)," "Paradise Alley (1978)," "Escape from Alcatraz (1979)," "Hardcore (1979)," "The Funhouse (1981)," and "*Floyd Footnote." Obviously the time period covered here roughly corresponds to what is known as the New Hollywood (or American New Wave). The old studio system was dying, and Hollywood was experimenting with new directions that tended to be auteur-driven, explicitly violent, morally ambiguous, and less conventional in narrative structure.

Quentin Tarantino was born in 1963, so he was still just a kid when this ferment was beginning to take place. (He was, for instance, five years old when Bullitt came out.) But, as is revealed in the first chapter, "Little Q Watching Big Movies," by 1970 his mother and stepfather were taking little Quentin with them to enjoy the counterculture programming at the Tiffany Theater. He learned quickly that if he kept his mouth shut and his eyes open, the adults would continue to let him tag along. Because he was allowed to see movies the other kids couldn't, Quentin felt like he was the most sophisticated kid in his school class.

After the introductory chapter, the book settles into a groove of discussing -- chapter by chapter -- movies from the late sixties and early seventies that made a strong impression on young Tarantino. His analyses are often revelatory, sometimes including first-hand information that the older Tarantino got directly from the directors or screen writers. He also, amusingly, incudes his impressions as a naive kid watching these movies for the first time, explaining how scenes can work even if you don't fully understand what's going on. Tarantino's digressions can often wander far afield, which has the potential to be annoying but I find them entertaining.

"Second-String Samurai" is the first BIG digression from what we had assumed was the groove the book had settled into. In chapter seven, QT takes time out to talk about his favorite Los Angeles Times movie critic, Kevin Thomas. Tarantino begins by talking about the Times' main movie critics: Charles Champlin (basically a tool of the studios), followed by Sheila Benson (wholly unfit for the job), and finally Kenny Turan (a "real" critic but a particularly nasty one). Tarantino had little use for any of them but greatly appreciated the Times' second-string critic, Kevin Thomas, who not only went to see the art-house, foreign, and exploitation films the other critics didn't have time for, he had a deep appreciation and understanding of them which Tarantino learned from. While Tarantino didn't always agree with Thomas' opinions, he described the way Thomas approached exploitations films as being like a devoted sports writer writing about a good high school team -- always rooting for them.

In "New Hollywood in the Seventies," Tarantino breaks down what he sees as two distinct directions filmmakers took during that period. The Anti-Establishment Auteurs -- who included Altman, Rafelson, Penn, Peckinpah, Cassavetes, and others -- looked back on the old Hollywood and didn't like what they saw. They aspired to make films in the spirit of Fellini and Truffaut rather than Hawks or Wyler. These directors made movies that were often unsettling and hard for audiences to understand. Perhaps in reaction, they were soon followed by the first generation of filmmakers to have attended film school. These "Movie Brats" included Bogdanovich, Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Lucas, and Spielberg. What set them apart from their predecessors is that they were film geeks -- they loved old movies, including genre movies, and, at least in some cases, wanted to make the best genre movies ever made.

For most of the rest of the book, Tarantino returns to his rambling, discursive discussions of specific movies as the decade wears on. "Sisters" dives into the early filmography of his favorite director, Brian De Palma. "Daisy Miller" serves in part as an excuse for remembering the largely forgotten actor Barry Brown. "Taxi Driver" illuminates how screen writer Schrader and director Scorsese conspired to remake The Searchers as a contemporary revenge thriller, while "Cinema Speculation" imagines how the film would have been different if De Palma (who was originally slated to direct) had made Taxi Driver instead. And so on. The book concludes with a fond reminiscence of Floyd Ray Wilson, a guy who dated his mother's friend and lived in their house for a while. Like Tarantino, Floyd also loved movies, and he had a profound influence on young Quentin's thinking. He also ultimately moved Tarantino, in an unexpected way I'll leave it to you to find out, to write one of his later movies.

This is an immensely entertaining and informative book for anyone who likes Tarantino or shares his movie-watching sensibilities. The one knock I have against it is that the book is poorly edited. I give it credit for distinctly retaining Tarantino's voice, but far too many typos and grammatical errors made their way into the final text. Surely HarperCollins can do better than this for their authors!

Ace Doubles by Eric Brown

Brown writes human-oriented science fiction

Ace Doubles is a short novel (or novella) about a middle-aged science fiction writer named Ed Bently whose career has stalled out. After delivering the bad news to Ed that his current editor at the publishing house of Worley and Greenwood has not only rejected his latest manuscript but gone so far as to sever their relationship, Ed's agent tells him not to worry because he's already lined up a lucrative job that he can knock out in no time. Ed's first thought is that it's probably a Doctor Who novel but then quickly realizes he doesn't have the connections to get picked for a job like that. Instead, it turns out that a YouTube superstar named Tuppy Cotton wants to write a science fiction novel and has asked her publisher if Ed can be persuaded to "help" her with it. Her previous novel, ghost written by a horror novelist, earned huge profits for the publisher. The payday for Ed, if he accepts the assignment, is a flat fee of "thirty grand." Dollars or pounds isn't clear, but either way it's more than Ed earned on his last several duds. Going against his better instincts, he accepts because he badly needs the money to pay off debts.

Before going any further with the plot synopsis, I'd like to talk about the title because it's that (and not the bland cover art) that persuaded me to pick up the book. In 1952, Ace Books published its first "double" title, a pair of mysteries, Too Hot for Hell backed with The Grinning Gizmo. Ace published the books in a format called tête-bêche (head-to-toe), where two novels are bound together, one rotated 180 degrees from the other so that there are two front covers. The publisher logo read, rather clumsily, "Ace Double Novel Books," but they were known to fans simply as "Ace Doubles." Ace published mysteries and westerns, along with other genres, in the double format; but the science fiction doubles were the most popular and soon came to dominate the line.

In the novel, Ed Bentley is approaching sixty. He thinks back nostalgically about the Ace Doubles he discovered in used bookstores as a teenager, which caused him to fall in love with science fiction in the first place. A list of Bentley's novels have titles that are so similar to the titles of Brown's books that the autobiographical elements are unmistakable. When Bentley reminisces about Ace Double authors such as E.C. Tubb, Philip E. High, and Robert Silverberg, there can be little doubt that these are favorites of Brown's. Bentley's favorite author, George Lattimer, is fictional, but one wonders if Brown had a specific author from that period in mind as the model.

Ed's worst fears about what a YouTube star might be like prove to be unfounded. Tuppence Cotton (Tuppy to her fans, Penny to her friends) is smart, personable, and talented. While she's no writer, her draft for the novel contains good, workable ideas, and she's modest enough to happily accept Ed's changes and additions. As he settles into the mansion she owns, the two of them develop a productive and happy working relationship. To Ed's astonishment, he learns that the home Penny owns once belonged to George Lattimer. It's a coincidence that would strain credulity, except for the fact that it's not a coincidence, as we come to learn.

As short as the novel is (114 pages), it's built on character and develops at a leisurely pace. Much of Ed's journey is a reckoning with and acceptance of loss as he teaches others to deal with it, too. And, as much as Ed is a hard-headed realist, he will also have to confront something inexplicable and science fictional before the novel ends. The story that he hears from the aged and dying George Lattimer feels very much like a call back to Brown's 2011 novel, The Kings of Eternity, which I highly recommend. (In fact, you should go read that one first.) Ace Doubles is a light, quick read that reveals the appropriately double meaning of its title at the end.

Chocky by John Wyndham

 

Wyndham's full name, John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris,
gave him lots of fodder for pseudonyms

Historians of science fiction often speak of the years 1939–1942 as "the golden age." But it was more like a false dawn. The real golden age arrived a decade later, and—what is not always true of golden ages—we knew what it was while it was happening.

--Robert Silverberg

When I first ran across that statement by Silverberg a few years ago, I instantly concurred. While the roots of the science fiction I love were in the 1930s and 40s, the real flowering of the genre came in the 1950s. One of the best writers of that period was John Wyndham, whose works include The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Chrysalids (1955), and The Midwich Cuckoos, aka The Village of the Damned (1957). Wyndham had written earlier novels in the 1930s and 40s, under different pseudonyms, but they haven't stood the test of time like his output of the 1950s and 60s.

Review

Chocky came out in 1968 and was the last of Wyndham's novels to be published during his lifetime. The story is told from the point of view of David Gore, who is married to Mary. They have two children, Matthew and Polly. At the outset, the younger of the children, Polly, has an imaginary friend she calls Piff. Polly's antics involving the invisible Piff are annoying to everyone else in the family, but, eventually, to everyone's relief, she forgets her imaginary friend and moves on. David and Mary are, therefore, very unhappy when their older child, Matthew, begins to exhibit signs of having an imaginary friend of his own. For one thing, at twelve he's too old for that sort of thing, and, for another, his imaginary friend Chocky causes Matthew a great deal of consternation. Chocky is always asking perplexing questions that no one can answer and expressing opinions that go against Matthew's own.

Eventually David seeks advice from an old college friend named Alan who is now a psychiatrist. But, after meeting Matthew and spending time with him, Alan isn't so sure Chocky is imaginary. Chocky says things that Alan doesn't think Matthew could have thought of himself. In going over his assessment with Matthew's parents, Alan makes the mistake of comparing it to the old-fashioned idea of being "possessed." He later retreats from that word because Chocky doesn't seem to be controlling Matthew in any way, but Mary is so disturbed by the notion that she wants nothing more to do with Alan.

As time goes on, however, Matthew learns to let his mind go blank and allow Chocky to take control of him. S/he teaches him how s/he sees the world and in the process teaches him how to draw and paint. His art teacher is so amazed by this efflorescence of a hitherto unseen talent that she asks Matthew for one his drawings. On another occasion, an accident occurs and Matthew and his little sister are swept into a fast-flowing river. Chocky takes control of Matthew, who can't swim, instantly teaching him to swim and having him hold his sister's head above water until they can be rescued.

By the way, I'm using the construction "s/he" because, in exchanges with Matthew, the entity makes it clear that gender is unknown where s/he comes from. For convenience, though, David and Matthew eventually settle on referring to Chocky as she/her because to Matthew she seems more feminine than masculine. (In 1968, non-binary pronouns weren't really a thing.)

David also begins to think Chocky might somehow be real, but Mary clings to the belief that s/he is merely a product of Matthew's mind. Alan comes back to David with the suggestion that they take Matthew to a renowned psychiatrist he knows, Sir William Thorpe, who has recently been appointed to a high government position because he is so highly regarded. With persuasion from Alan, Thorpe agrees to see Matthew. When Matthew later describes the experience to his parents, it's obvious to them that Thorpe hypnotized Matthew during the session, which they find disturbing. But they have to wait for his report. When it comes, David is disappointed because Thorpe dismisses all of Matthew's experiences as common manifestations of typical psychological issues that boys go through -- which is obviously ridiculous -- and assures them that Chocky will fade away soon enough.

And, indeed, shortly thereafter Chocky does leave Matthew, which saddens him. He had grown used to sharing thoughts and understanding with Chocky. Though they are concerned about his depressed state of mind, his parents hope this is the beginning of a return to normalcy. Nothing is going back to normal anytime soon, though, because Matthew is kidnapped after school one day. The only clue to the kidnapping is that a boy from school saw Matthew getting into a car with a man.

Weeks later, Matthew finds himself in another town and goes looking for a policeman to get help. The police question Matthew, examine him medically (finding that he has received many injections), and return him to his parents. He explains why he got into the car with the man (who said he was looking for the Gore house), and tells how the next thing he remembers is waking up in a hospital with a cast on his leg and that the doctors and nurses explained he'd been in a car accident and that it was broken. Everyone was nice to him and said they were using a new technique that would heal his leg quickly. In a couple of weeks, the cast was off and he was ready to go home. Then he woke up in an abandoned car in a strange town.

The implications become obvious: Thorpe understood he was dealing with an alien entity and agents of the government kidnapped Matthew to inject him with drugs and extract all the information they could. Seeing how badly things were going wrong, Chocky had left Matthew. But, late one night, s/he returned a final time to fully explain her mission. I believe the book would have been better without the last couple of chapters. Readers had enough to fill in the blanks, and going through it all methodically to make everything explicit robbed it of some of the narrative pathos and wonder it had built up.

That said, Wyndham had a delightful way of unspooling the story, making everything feel homey and familiar while slowly introducing elements of strangeness. The imaginary friend that turns out to be real is a staple of horror stories, but Wyndham never ventures in that direction with this story. He is more interested in provoking questions and contemplation. He suggests that progress is made by actually looking at the things you think you already know and questioning your assumptions. Toward the end, Chocky explains that s/he reaches across the void to other minds because "intelligent life is the only thing that gives meaning to the universe." I'll buy tha

The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman

 

Possibly the only writer on esotericism who's also a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The Secret Teachers of the Western World is an exploration of the ideas that have, collectively, come to be known as Western esotericism. It is a survey book that ranges from the teachings of the 6th-century BCE pre-Socratic philosophers to the metaphysics of the New Age movement that grew out of the cultural ferment of the 1960s. It's a fairly long book (460 pages) but, because it covers so much ground, it suffers a bit from the problem most books of this type have: it explains a little about a lot of things but not a lot about anything in particular. It is also a fairly dense book, not in the sense of being obtuse or hard to follow, but rather in the sense of being packed with so much information that the reader is forced to slow down considerably to fully take it all in.

The word "esoteric" means secret, or belonging to the select few. Another word that is often used in the context of Western esotericism is "occult," which means hidden. As Lachman points out, esoteric or occult beliefs can, to some extent, be thought of as rejected ideas, i.e., rejected by mainstream Western religion, philosophy, and science. Thanks to cheap printing and the ubiquity of the Internet, however, there's really nothing "hidden" about these ideas at all anymore. With the click of a key you can order any volume of arcane and occult lore your heart may desire and have it delivered next day, and you would be hard pressed to find a general bookstore today that doesn't carry a selection of tarot cards, astrology guides, and wiccan spell books. As for "rejected," many practices that were borrowed from the East and thought of as esoteric in Western culture -- such as yoga and meditation -- have gained widespread acceptance and respectability. The study of the Western esoteric tradition, as such, has even begun to find academic respectability.

Lachman touches on just about everything that has contributed to Western esoteric thought in the great span of time that the book covers. In his assiduous tracing of the connections between one esotericist and the next, Lachman provides a detailed roadmap for the serious student but perhaps too many byways for the average reader. In Lachman's defense, though, he has written separate, in-depth books about several of the more important figures he touches on lightly here, including Swedenborg, Crowley, Steiner, Blavatsky, and others.

I should mention that Lachman has a spin on esotericism that sets this book apart from a purely straightforward history of Western occult philosophies. He has been greatly influenced by the work of the Scottish researcher Iain McGilchrist, in particular his book The Master and His Emissary. McGilchrist's work centers on our divided brain and how the two hemispheres interpret the world differently. The simplistic model we're all familiar with is that the left hemisphere is analytical, or logical, and the right is wholistic, or intuitive. Lachman believes that much of what characterizes Western esoteric thought is a right-brained approach to understanding the world as opposed to the left-brained approach that characterizes mainstream Western thought. That's a superficial sketch of what Lachman is getting at, but it would be hard to explain further without writing at length. I'll just say, it leads him to some valuable insights that have affected my way of thinking about these topics.

In my mind, I group Gary Lachman with other writers like Mitch Horowitz, Mark Booth, and Richard Smoley who explain esoteric thinkers and occult ideas to a popular audience with a certain degree of objectivity but also of open-mindedness toward their subjects. At nearly five hundred pages, The Secret Teachers of the Western World may be more than you want to read straight through, but it's a useful reference if any of the subjects covered interest you.

The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy

"I use she or they pronouns but I’m not nonbinary."

This is a short novella of just over a hundred pages. Based on the evocative art featuring an upside-down stag reminiscent of the American edition of King's The Outsider* and the Alan Moore quote ("Scary and energetic...") on the cover, I assumed this was a horror story; but it really belongs more to the paranormal fantasy genre.

Review

Told in the first-person, the story opens with our protagonist Danielle arriving in the town of Freedom, Iowa. It was the last place her lover Clay had lived before he came west and killed himself, and she's come here to try to understand the reason for his suicide. These people were his "pack." Freedom was a ghost town that has now been repopulated by squatters. It is a collective of punks and anarchists who live off the grid and share food they get from "dumpster diving, farming, and food bank handouts;" municipal water turned back on illegally; gas from propane tanks; electricity from solar panels. No one enforces any rules -- a sign says "Everything for Everyone" -- and yet no one gets out of line. The community cooperates harmoniously.

What takes this community from unusual to supernatural is the presence of Uliski. On her way into town, Danielle has seen an unnerving red deer with three antlers, one growing from one side of its head, the other two from the other side. The deer's muzzle is dripping blood from the rabbit it has been eating, the rabbit's chest splayed open. Later she discovers that there are many other animals -- goats, geese, lambs -- with gaping wounds where their chests had been, yet apparently alive. The zombie animals are the lieutenants of the blood-red deer called Uliski. One day, not long after her arrival, Danielle watches, along with other members of the town, as the walking-dead barnyard animals corral a man until the red deer approaches, rears on its hind legs, and kicks him to death. Uliski then tears the man's heart out.

Uliski is a guardian spirit, or perhaps a demon, that has by witchcraft been summoned from the river to protect the town. If you do nothing wrong, Uliski ignores you. If you do evil, Uliski rips you open. The deer was summoned by four people, one of whom was Clay, and one of whom was the man Danielle just saw killed. The remaining summoners are sure that they need to banish Uliski if they can, but another faction in the town believes that Uliski needs to stay. And there you have the basic conflict that sets up the rest of the story. Eventually the cops will try to move the squatters out of Freedom, which leads to a glorious battle between, shall we say, pigs and deer.

Danielle will find the answers to her questions. While the book has a satisfying ending, it does lead to a second volume called The Barrow Will Send What It May that picks up where this leaves off.

Margaret Killjoy is a transfeminine anarchist and black-metal musician who brings lived experience to her depictions of squatting and living off the grid. Since reading the book, I have discovered that she has a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff that, in her words, "explores the great rebels and weirdos of history." She's also published a book called Mythmakers & Lawbreakers that consists of her interviews with anarchist writers and features an intro by Kim Stanley Robinson. I don't know what her background with magic is, but I suspect she has some experience with wicca. All of these elements combined make for a unique and refreshing perspective. Her website is birdsbeforethestorm.net.

The Next Time I Die by Jason Starr

Your next stop is the twilight zone

The Next Time I Die is published by Hard Case Crime, a company that specializes in producing crime novels with covers that are reminiscent of the mass-market paperback hardboiled novels of the 1950s and 60s. Based on appearances, you might expect this to be another straightforward crime novel in the line, but it actually has a science-fiction twist. Starr has said that for this novel his "biggest influence was Philip K. Dick’s novels, especially his early ones, such as his brilliant alternate reality novel, Time Out of Joint."

Review

Steven Blitz is a criminal defense lawyer who has taken on a high-profile client named Jeffery Hammond, a darling of the New York art scene who also happens to be a psychopathic serial killer. Steven thinks of himself as a virtuous man, but he's also honest with himself about the fact that he's much more invested in making his name with this case than in looking out for his client's interests. He's doing prep work for the case late one Friday evening when his wife, Laura, comes into his home office and announces that she wants a divorce. Laura is manic depressive and often goes off her lithium. Though he tries to calm her down, Laura keeps yelling that she wants him out of the house, to the point that he decides the best course of action is to pack an overnight bag and drive to his brother's house. After all, he still has to get the work done before the trial begins on Monday morning, and he can't do it in the midst of a tempest.

On the way to his brother's place, Stephen almost loses control of the car as it skids on ice in a tight turn and almost hits a tree. A bit later in the drive, nerves still on edge, he decides to stop at a convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes. In the parking lot, an older man is having an altercation with a young woman, demanding that she get back in his car, which she doesn't want to do. Going against his self-preservation instincts, Steven decides to intervene and ends up getting into a scuffle with the man, who stabs him and drives off. As he lies in the parking lot, watching his own blood turn the snow red, Steven has the sensation of being in a spinning glass ball that shatters, and then darkness descends.

He wakes up in a hospital with a tube down his throat, shocked that he's still alive. As he gradually comes around, watching CNN on the TV across from his bed, he begins to realize things are off. A war is brewing between Pakistan and India. A chyron on the screen refers to President Gore. The nurse explains that he was in a car accident and suffered a concussion when the car hit a tree. When his wife is allowed in to see him, she is gentle and loving in a way she hasn't been toward him in years. Then she mentions their daughter, but Steven knows they don't have a daughter. Though at first he believes he is being subjected to an elaborate hoax, Steven comes to realize over the next few days that he has somehow undeniably slipped into another timeline.

While Steven tries to settle into the new version of his life without giving away the fact that it's all new to him, he keeps slipping up because so many things -- big and small -- are different. (As best he can tell from a bit of online research, this timeline seems to have diverged from his own somewhere around 1998.) But many things about this alternate life are better than they were in his "real" life. This Laura is much happier and healthier; he has a sweet, young daughter; and he is much wealthier because his investments have all been sound and he's a full partner in the law firm. The Hammond case doesn't exist. Through a bit of online research, however, he discovers that Jeffery Hammond exists in the new timeline. (Is Hammond a murderer here, too, he wonders; but one who just hasn't been caught?) Steven also discovers that the other version of himself wasn't such a good guy. He conducted extramarital affairs, and, worse, he committed a serious crime that is still under investigation. The new Stephen has to find a way to navigate these complications and to save his own neck despite the fact that he wasn't there when these things happened.

I had few quibbles with the novel. The protagonist's attempts to follow up the case that he had been working on in his other life seemed unlikely to me. And his interaction with a character named Justin, who we meet later in the novel, seemed very much out of character for this version of Steven. But those were minor issues. The changes to the world in the new timeline were amusing (for instance, Blockbuster is the leading streaming service in the country), dealing with the complications caused by the other, "bad" Steven created interesting situations, and the pacing and nimble style keep you engaged. It's not the kind of book that's going to stick with you, but it's a perfect entertainment for a lazy summer afternoon with a cold pitcher of sangria in arm's reach. I read it in a day.

Norwood by Charles Portis

You'll never read a funnier writer

Charles Portis is the thoughtful kind of novelist who, having published only five, makes it easy for the reader to be a completist. He was also thoughtful enough to make them all fun and worthwhile to read. True Grit (1968) was his most famous but Norwood (1966) was the first. The successful movie adaptation of True Grit in 1969 led to an unsuccessful and unfaithful movie version of Norwood a year later. Do yourself a favor and avoid it at all costs.

Review

Norwood begins with Norwood Pratt's hardship discharge from the Marines at Fort Pendleton in California. His father died and there was no one to look after Norwood's sister Vernell. On his bus trip back to Ralph, Texas, kindhearted Norwood befriends a couple who are traveling with their baby and invites them to stay at his place for a while. The next morning, Norwood discovers that the couple left during the night with the television, a shotgun, and two towels. How they got out of town with the TV is anyone's guess.

Vernell is a "heavy, sleepy girl with bad posture." While Norwood takes up his old job at the Nipper service station, Vernell mopes around the house. Eventually getting tired of having grimy stuff fall in his face and hair while greasing trucks, Norwood pushes Vernell to carry her own weight by getting a job waitressing at the local coffee shop. That backfires on Norwood when Vernell marries a disabled vet named Bill Bird who hangs out at the coffee shop all day reading Grit and Parade and brings him home to live with them. The laugh-out-loud conversation between Bill and Vernell at the New Ralph Hotel Coffee Shop is as good as anything Twain ever wrote.

Norwood owns a cheap guitar, knows how to play three or four chords, and is a walking almanac of information about country music. His life's ambition is to get over to Shreveport and make it big on the Louisiana Hayride radio show. One night, by chance, outside the roller rink he meets Grady Fring, insurance salesman, car salesman, self-proclaimed Kredit King, and talent scout, among many, many other endeavors. Norwood and Grady share an interest in watching the girls skate. Fjring explains that he is "connected with a New Orleans talent agency and that part of my work takes me around to many... highway institutions." Always helpful, Norwood replies, "That Creswell girl is a good skater." Fring offers further elucidation: "You will understand, Norwood, I am not necessarily looking for skating skills."

Eventually, Fring talks Norwood into doing a job for him, a simple job that will pay well. Norwood is to drive a car to New York, where Fring says that he can get a better price for it than he can locally. When he shows up for the job, Norwood discovers that he will also be towing a second car as well as taking along a passenger -- a young woman who is one of the "talents" Fring has identified. Thus begins the road trip from Hell. Along the way, Norwood will befriend a midget who got fired for getting too fat, rescue a rooster with a superior intellect, and meet his possible future wife. And then he has to get back.

Does Norwood ever make it onto the Louisiana Hayride? I will leave that for you to find out. But here's a hint: the book is not a stupid Hollywood movie starring Glen Campbell. You can start with this book or with any other (though Gringos is my personal least favorite), but you gotta read Charles Portis.

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews

A hard-living son of the South who wrote like an angel

Anyone who's read a Harry Crews novel doesn't need me to tell them what an incredible writer this guy was. I'd never, until now, gotten around to reading his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, probably because it had fallen out of print for some time and first-edition copies were pricey. When I saw the new Penguin reprint at a local bookstore, I had to pick it up.

Review

It's a short book (174 pages in the Penguin edition) and a fast read. Except for a couple of brief skips forward in time, it only covers the author's life up until around age six. But what an eventful six years they were! Harry Crews was born in the Deep South in the middle of the Great Depression, and his early years chronicle a harsh level of poverty that is hard for most of us to imagine today. For many in the rural South during the Depression and World War II, electricity and flush toilets were marvels heard about but not experienced. Even the world-expanding miracle of radio was unavailable to the desperately poor. I often wonder how a few people who come from such limited circumstances are able to become such fine writers. That in itself is a miracle and a mystery not amenable to explanation.

A theme that runs through much of the book is Crews' early-childhood love of storytelling, both the hearing and the doing of it. A tenant family of black farmers lived on the land where Crews grew up, and his best friend at that time was their little boy, Willalee. Harry, Willalee, and Willalee's little sister Lottie Mae would entertain themselves by sitting on the floor with the Sears "wish book" and making up stories about the flawless people in that catalog, with their perfect clothes and many possessions. "The federal government ought to strike a medal for the Sears, Roebuck company for sending all those catalogs to farming families, for bringing all that color and all that mystery and all that beauty into the lives of country people."

The old woman who lived with Willalee's family was known to all as Auntie. While his mama, Myrtice, would never deign to cook possum (it's "just like a buzzard"), the way Auntie made it was the best thing Harry ever tasted -- first parboiled, then stuffed with sweet potatoes and baked in the oven. Auntie was the only adult who would join the children in making up stories about the people in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. "Auntie was too strange -- weird even -- for the big people. She belonged with children, being as she was, full of the most fantastic stories and marvelous comments upon the way of the world and all things in it, whether of the earth or air." When Harry was bedridden because of a terrible accident that left burns all over his body, Auntie would sit up with him for hours and tell him stories. "She loved to talk about anything with snakes in it," he wrote. Auntie's often grotesque and fantastical stories made a deep impression on the young writer-to-be.

Harry's daddy had died when Harry was only two years old. His mama then married his father's brother, Pascal. Harry admired Pascal greatly, but his new father eventually became too enamored with whiskey and would disappear for weeks at a time. When he returned, loud and often violent fights would often ensue between his mama Myrtice and Pascal. One night, the fight ended in Pascal firing a shotgun into the mantlepiece, narrowly missing Myrtice. she gathered up the boys, left the house, and moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where she got a job in the King Edward Cigar Factory spreading tobacco leaves flat on a metal plate so they could be filled and then rolled. Harry never went back to the farm or saw Willalee and Auntie again. In Jacksonville, Harry became friends with a boy named Junior Lister, who taught him the art of stealing and selling ill-gotten goods. When the stealing got too dangerous, Harry talked his way into a job sweeping up sawdust in the back of a butcher shop; but the job didn't last a day. A man ran into the shop, grabbed a butcher knife from the knife block, and stabbed himself to death with it while Harry stood there watching with his broom in hand. "You don't have to worry about this," the man told the frightened boy as he was dying.

"Why?" I said.
"The knife feels good."
"Godamighty," I said.

Amongst the book's many tales of desperate people doing desperate things to survive, here was one who decided to give up. "I'm through with it all now," he concluded. "Somebody else gone have to look after it."

Five months after moving to Jacksonville, Harry's mama moved back to Georgia with him and his brother and made a down payment on a small farm not far from where they'd lived before. The memoir relates some of the events that happened after Myrtice and the boys moved to the small farm, hired a hand named Mr. Willis, and bought an old mule named Pete; but it does not go much beyond that point. Crews joined the Marines during the Korean War and was able to get a college education thanks to the G.I. Bill. At the very end, Crews briefly relates a story of coming back to visit his kin in Bacon County, Georgia, and realizing that he had grown apart from the place but that the place would always be a part of him.

I think the most powerful writing in the book comes in chapter 10, which tells the story of the terrible fight which led to Harry's mama gathering up the boys in the middle of the night and walking with them to her brother Alton's place. It goes on to recount the shocks of adjustment that came with leaving behind a rural life that could have belonged to the previous century and moving to a city with running water and flush toilets, neighbors living side by side in row houses and apartment buildings, mothers going off to work in a factory, and children roaming the streets on their own. "The only way to deal with the real world was to challenge it with one of your own making," Crews wrote. "For a long time after that, the next six months, from March to August, lived in my memory as a series of scenes, flashes of actions lit down to the most brutal detail under a blinding light." It would be hard to find a better description of the work Harry Crews left behind.

The Inugami Curse by Yokomizo Seishi

Yokomizo was encouraged by another classic Japanese mystery writer, Edogawa Ranpo

The Inugami Curse (aka The Inugami Clan) was first published in Japan in serialization from January 1950 to May 1951. The time period of the novel is the 1940s, with the Japanese invasion of Burma forming a backdrop. 

Review

Yokomizo was influenced by Western detective novels, which he hoped to emulate. He especially admired John Dickson Carr; but those unfamiliar with Carr might think of his work as being reminiscent of better-remembered British Golden Age mystery novelists like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. Yokomizo's series detective, Kindaichi Kosuke, appeared in 76 novels and has several idiosyncrasies, including a stammer and a tendency to wildly scratch his always-disheveled hair when he gets excited. In The Inugami Curse, Kindaichi hardly does any detective work at all, simply observing events while being as puzzled as everyone else, until everything clicks into place in his mind near the end. As in an Hercule Poirot novel, the final chapters consist of Kindaichi gathering everyone into a room, along with the chief of police, and slowly unravelling the mystery to everyone present, extracting confessions in the process.

The novel begins with the death of the wealthy patriarch of the Inugami clan, Inugami Sahei, "at his lakeside villa in Nasu at the venerable age of eighty-one." The Inugami clan is an unusual family because Sahei never married. Instead, he kept three mistresses (all deceased by the time the novel begins), none of whom he made his legal wife. With them he had three daughters -- Matsuko, Takeko, and Umeko. The three daughters each have a son -- Kiyo (for Matsuko), Take (for Takeko), and Tomo (for Umeko). Takeko and her husband also have a daughter named Sayoko.

Although Sahei died wealthy, he had been born into poverty. Nonomiya Daini, the priest at the Shinto shrine in Nasu, took Sahei in as a young man. He was a penniless drifter (like a stray dog). Daini, in his forties at the time, was married to Haruyo, a young woman in her twenties. The sexual relationship between the priest and his wife was not strong, but the handsome young drifter became the lover of both of them. Sahei eventually moved out, and it was believed that the relationship between Daini and Haruyo became stronger as a result because they soon had a daughter named Noriko, who would herself eventually bear an extraordinarily beautiful daughter named Tamayo. Noriko and her husband both died when Tamayo was young, and the now-wealthy Sahei took her in and saw to it that the granddaughter of his revered master was treated as a special guest on the estate.

Sahei had always treated his daughters with a certain level of contempt, and that attitude extended to their husbands. Upon his death, the reading of the will revealed that Sahei's vast fortune and business empire would not be left to any of them. Instead, most of it would be left to Tamayo, but only if she married one of the three grandsons (Kiyo, Take, or Tomo). The situation was complicated by the fact that Kiyo, the grandson Tamayo favored most, had been hideously wounded in the war. His nose had been cut off and his face scarred beyond recognition.

Is the man in the mask that hides the deformed face really Kiyo? Will Tamayo choose to marry, instead, the brutish Take or the shifty Tomo? Complications ensue, and then complications compound upon complications, as murders and kidnappings take place and hidden identities are revealed.

If your tastes run to modern hardboiled detectives, Nordic noir, or forensic police procedurals, Yokomizo may not be for you. If, however, you enjoy old-fashioned British drawing-room mysteries in which the detective solves crimes mainly by observing and thinking, then The Inugami Curse will be just your spot of tea. Like the tumblers of a lock falling into place, every baffling enigma that has surfaced in the course of the novel is fully explained in the final chapters as private investigator Kindaichi sits the players down in a room and goes over the events with them.

Character development is not a strong suit of the author, at least not in this novel. We basically learn enough about the characters so that their moves around the chessboard are credibly motivated. Many of the details of the crimes committed depend on coincidence to a greater degree than most contemporary readers are likely to find plausible (one chapter is even titled "A Series of Coincidences"), but such contrivances aren't unknown to readers of the classic mysteries of the 30s and 40s that inspired Yokomizo. Those quibbles aside, it's an entertaining read for the cozy reader, not the least because of the glimpses into Japanese culture that few of us in the West are afforded in life. Plot twists and intriguing turns of events come quickly and often enough to keep the reader alert, and the short chapters with their cliffhanger endings make it imperative for that reader to keep turning pages.