This feels so much like a Dexter clone, I expected him to show an affinity for Cuban sandwiches.  A young teen, whose father was a legendary serial killer, trained him to follow in his footsteps one day.  Only the teen now uses his powers of sociopathy to help track serial killers.  However.  The serial killer might have been sent by his father.  Or maybe his long thought to be dead mother?  Or someone else?  That’s where the mystery elevates itself.

I honestly cannot remember if I read House of Leaves.  I owned it.  I remember paging through it. But if I did, it melted part of my brain.  Danielewski books up like Donnie Darko, over artsy-fartsying his typography in ways that have beardos parsing it like Bible Study.  This is the first of a purported 27 volumes in his epic spanning new series.  But this one is actually kind of accessible.  I dug it, and I’m down to see what he does with the future sets. […]

I don’t know what it is lately with young adult dystopian trilogies where they just can’t pull the trigger on the endings.  And I’m a huge Wendig fan.  This just felt like it got too big to handle.  And then he Harry Pottered the ending with a cheater of an epilogue.  It’s like this great big exciting amazing world he builds for us, and then only let’s us see just a wedge before shutting the door on it all.  If it were a bedtime story, […]

Atlas Shrugged was fiction used to promote the propaganda of Objectivism.  So it was weird to read My Year of Meats, which was fiction used to promote the propaganda of the dangers of American meat processing.  Because I agree with what she was saying and respect it.  So it made me enjoy it?  But at the same time, I’m still getting beaten over the head with an obvious message.  So it was baffling.

Dexter the television series and Dexter the book series veered apart from one another after season one, and technically during.  The books have always been a little overly poetic, a little florid and mincing, but that’s okay.  After the TV show shat the bed and then rolled facefirst in it and then started singing Zippidy-Doody in brownface, Lindsay had a unique opportunity to right the wronged.  And he did.  Kinda.  Was the ending satisfying?  Yee-ah? Does it leave potential for more?  Ma-aybe?  Still.  Better than a […]

This is my second Cormy Mac, so if I had to sum him up, I’d say BLEAK.  This one is like some kind of rambling Steinbeck that fell out of someone’s backpocket into the sluice grate of the slaughterhouse.  After repeated scalps being peeled from still screaming victims, and endless infants being cracked open like decorative gourds, and people’s brains spattering cacti, you just get desensitized. Which I guess is the point.  But jeezum crow.  What a slog to get there.