The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell
What I had thought was going to be a fairly standard teenage narrative was obviously going somewhere else entirely.
Silence Once Begun – Jesse Ball
Essentially, Ball poses the question: “Can any of us can truly know ourselves, let alone the others around us?”
Hill WIlliam – Scott McClanahan
An attempt to physically break the memories out from the lockbox in his head, pain be damned.
Having outside information easily available means I’m going to reference it, which in turn means I’m interrupting the actual text of the novel regularly to seek out more information on that text…which sounds suspiciously similar to the way I read news articles and blogs on the internet.
Davis’s sentences channel that half-state between consciousness and unconsciousness, that foggy place where you realize you’re waking up but are still enraptured by the vivid imagery that’s been parading through your head all night.
Lord of the Rings allows me to escape my limited perspective for another world; A Song of Ice and Fire forces me to be acutely aware of that limited perspective, and to evaluate it in relation to the world around me.
It’s that weird ghost of electricity in the faces of the people you love.
Where much of the horror genre frantically casts a flashlight around the area between the known and the unknown, Brian Evenson’s stories are more concerned with the knowable and the unknowable. They wonder why you’re even bothering with that flashlight.
Love Among the Particles – Norman Lock
Calling attention to the artificiality of his creation gives Lock (and us) the chance to consider what actually determines the “real.”
Crapalachia – Scott McClanahan
Crap-e diem.