Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 5, 2026

I ordered a big batch of used books recently, from multiple sellers. (I'm using Alibris these days, as the one not owned yet by a giant hegemonic behemoth.) About half of them have come in as I type this, so that seems like enough to throw into a post. These are mostly from authors I have "reading projects" about - which means I'm reading a series, or their whole body of work, either in order or over time as I get to it.

Projects can be fun things!

Anyway, here's what's reached me so far, and which I will read at some point (if I don't get hit by a bus).

I read Jimmy the Kid, somewhat puckishly, as part of my Starktober project - reading the whole works of Richard Stark - a decade ago. You see, Jimmy is a book by Donald E. Westlake, in the Dormunder funny-caper-novel series, that is inspired by a book that does not actually exist, Child Heist by Richard Stark. (Donald Westlake also wrote under the name Richard Stark, to make the connection clearer.) I got that one from the library, I think, since I didn't have a copy of the book in the house and I used an old hardcover image for the Jimmy post. (I try to use the cover of the actual edition I read, for pernickety personal reasons.) I'm now planning to read all of the Dortmunder books in order, so I need to have this third book available.

I've been reading P.G. Wodehouse in the "Collector's Wodehouse" series from Overlook Press for ages - I started before my 2011 flood, but, since then, I'm only counting the ones I've read since then and have on a specific shelf. (It gives me an excuse to buy and read books again, especially since I don't have any records or a good memory of what I had pre-2011.) I got two of them in this batch of books.

First up is Ring for Jeeves, a 1953 novel - based on a play, I think - that is the only Jeeves story not narrated by or featuring Bertie Wooster at all. I probably read this when I read all of the Jeeves books in the '90s, but I don't remember ever hitting a Jeeves book not in Bertie's voice, so I dunno.

The other Wodehouse book is Blandings Castle, which I do remember reading - I got to the Blandings books right after Jeeves, I think largely on the recommendation of my former boss Ellen Asher. (She thought Jeeves was OK, but Blandings was sublime. These days, I don't disagree but I really love the Bertie Wooster voice, and also might make a dark-horse recommendation for Uncle Fred.) This isn't (I think) the first time Blandings appeared, but it's pretty early - it's a 1935 collection of stories that's about one-third Blandings and two-thirds "Elsewhere." And from right in the middle of Wodehouse's best period, too, which is a bonus.

I'm also reading through Ross Macdonald's mystery novels about detective Lew Archer - I hit the first one, The Moving Target, this summer, and will probably continue roughly quarterly until I get through them all. But I was missing a few, so I just got:

The 1952 novel The Ivory Grin. I read this one, way back when I was getting into mysteries as a youngster, and I couldn't tell you anything at all about the specifics of this one. I have a vague soup of Lew Archer in my head, and it will be interesting to see what came from which book and what was my own confusion in my teen years. (The only one I have any specific memory of is The Underground Man, which I still think of as the peak of the series.)

The other Macdonald was the 1961 novel The Wycherly Woman, for which all of the random blather above is also true. Blogger wants each image to have enough text to wrap around it to keep it away from the next paragraph, so I'm just typing a bit here to reduce the amount of unsightly white space below. (Probably not enough blathering, though. Never is.)

And last is a Library of America book: Writings by S.J. Perelman. I've spent years grumping about the LoA's tendency to do "good parts" versions of writers I wish they'd do "complete editions" of - Lovecraft is worth keeping in multiple volumes; that old fraud Henry James is not - but I'm clearly an outlier. And I guess I've mellowed a bit over time. I still wish they'd do official omnibuses, because I like to read "books" that I can make posts about here and put down in my reading notebook and count as metrics in a pointless, silly exercise. But a nearly 600-page collection of Perelman - wait, only 600? my old Franklin book is twice that size! - is still a good thing, despite my grumbling. Anyway, Perelman is one of the great funny New Yorker writers, and I think the most distinctive and odd of that crew. I haven't read a big chunk of Perelman for a long time, and I lost my shelf of his individual books in the 2011 flood, so this is a nice thing to have.

Next week, I expect there will be a very similar post, with different titles by many of the same writers, as the other books from this order trickle in. Come back to see if I manage to say anything different - or interesting!

Quote of the Week: Vanishing Passengers

Most men, having started out in a car with a lady friend and discovered at journey's end that she was no longer there, would have felt a certain surprise at this shortage and probably asked a lot of tedious questions. To Lord Emsworth, woken with a respectful prod in the ribs by Albert Voules at the door of Blandings Castle and finding himself alone, it never occurred to wonder about what had become of Maudie en route. He seldom worried about things like that. If women vanished out of cars, they vanished. There was nothing you could do about it, and no doubt all would be explained in God's good time.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings, p.167

The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories by David Small

My first thoughts are trivial, distracting: how long do werewolves live, anyway?

I mean what we might call the Metric Standard Werewolf, beloved from folklore, and not any modern author's bespoke version, for greatest applicability.

Because The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories is a collection of three stories largely about being old, and I have a nagging sense that werewolves don't get old.

Of course, in traditional werewolf stories, they don't get old because they are abominations before God who must be destroyed as soon as they are discovered - but I thought they would live a long time if they could. Or am I conflating them with other Universal Monsters? Vampires are clearly immortal, and mummies generally are, too. Reanimated corpses are already dead - I guess this covers both zombies and Frankensteinian creations - and so presumably don't continue to age in their second life.

This time-wasting activity has not brought me a comprehensive answer, sadly. Mister Google is happy to tell me the details of specific fictional universes - his new shiny AI buddy will synopsize a bunch of them for me - and give vague pointers for continuing research. But the answer seems to be...yes, maybe, no, it depends?

Werewolves can be very old if the story needs that: in some traditions, it's even common. Old and decrepit, not as often - but it's a big folkloric world, and it's rare we can say "that's just not allowed."

I did say my initial thoughts were distracting.

Werewolf at Dusk has three illustrated stories by David Small, author of the graphic memoir Stitches most relevantly, and also a long-time illustrator, mostly of books for younger readers. (He has a Caldecott and several other awards; he's kind of a big deal in that world.) The three stories were created for this book, and they're similar to a comics format but not quite the same: Small's text is set in type on the pages, more like narrative than captions, and his art sits borderlessly on the pages, often just one image per page. But there are comics-style panel transitions between pages, and on pages with multiple images - large parts of this book do read like comics. But it also looks a lot like an illustrated story, of the kind most commonly seen for young readers.

The three stories are: "The Werewolf at Dusk," from a flash fiction written and performed by Lincoln Michel; "A Walk in the Old City," somewhat modified from a dream Small had; and "The Tiger in Vogue," from a 1948 story in French by Jean Ferry and presumably translated by Small here.

The first story is about, as you might have guessed, an old man who is a werewolf - a tired, weak one, with mangy fur and aching joints, after a long life of spending the full moons attacking and killing people. Now, sadly, he can barely tackle "an injured squirrel."

The second story has been transmuted a bit, but still retains that dreamlike feeling: an old man, a psychiatrist who suspects he's starting to go senile, is prone to wandering strange districts of his home city, and has gotten lost. He meets another old man, who at first seems helpless, and encounters some very symbolic elements that make him analyze the dream while still inside it - but he has misunderstood some essential aspects of the situation.

The third story features another old man, but the situation - from a surrealist story set in early 1920s Berlin - is more important than the man himself. He attends a music hall, hoping to avoid one particular act he has come to hate and fear - but that act inevitably plays, every time. A tiger, somehow mesmerized and standing upright in a human-style tailored suit, is led by a redheaded woman through a burlesque of the audience experience in that very theater, sitting in a prominent box, using opera glasses, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, a "little man with tired skin and pale eyes" in the next box - who Small unsubtly draws as Hitler, in case any reader his missed the metaphor - is the real controller of the tiger, sweating and mentally straining to keep him in control. Every night, the act finishes as planned, and the tiger is gotten offstage before he reverts to his animalistic nature and is shoved back into a cage by stagehands. He never actually eats the baby he inevitably is given to hold and coo over.

Again, the Ferry story was published in 1948, with the benefit of hindsight. Small's version has another near-century of hindsight. I don't think the metaphor entirely makes sense, but that's surrealism for you: it is ominous and creepy and feels significant.

The three stories have somewhat different concerns, but all circle old age in one way or another; they work pretty well as a themed collection. I suspect this book might have been bought by a lot of youth librarians going on Small's reputation - and the reps at the publisher, Liveright, might not have tried too hard to dissuade them - but that actual young readers might not have strongly loved this book about age and infirmity and regrets and the impending horrors of WWII.

Then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps the children yearn for stories of old werewolves and ominous tigers. Stranger things have happened.

The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James by Mike Dawson

Like many cartoonists who like to eat and live indoors, Mike Dawson has made books for younger readers. It's a big audience that buys a lot of books - both personally and by proxy through schools and libraries - and that is really happy to have a creator come and do an event at their school, especially when the creator can stand on stage and make drawings on a pad of paper.

For those of us who are adults, we can sometimes miss those books, or notice them but think "maybe that one's not for me." So I've read a bunch of Dawson's comics, but not his middle-grade Fifth Quarter series, for example - and those two books look to be his major output (and probably major income source) of the first half of this decade.

But Dawson had a new middle-grade GN this year, and maybe it looked more appealing to me as a no-longer-tween, or maybe I thought it was time I actually paid attention to Dawson's middle-grade work, or maybe something else.

The book is The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James; it came out in January of 2026.

Geordie James is the viewpoint character, a sixth-grader who spends most of his time in a MMORPG called Dominion, a fictionalized Minecraft or Roblox. He's not good at talking to other kids his age and mostly wants to be left alone to do Dominion and hang out with his dog Crackerjack. He has an older sister - slightly annoying as older siblings always are, but not a major character - and a Scottish architect father who clearly means well but is not very plugged in to what his son is going through. There's no sign of a mother in the current day; she does show up in flashbacks. (Yes, that will be important. No, I won't spoil it.)

Geordie is failing science. His teacher Mr. Fritts gathers him and four other students failing the class - abrasive jock A.C., probably enby Taylor, possibly ADHD Alex, and potential-Geordie-friend Samesh - and tells them they have one chance to turn their grades around. They have to do a group project together for the science fair - the whole class will participate, but these five have to work together - on the topic "our place in the world."

All five of the kids hate this idea for obvious reasons - who likes group projects? - but it's their only chance, so they start meeting...and mostly devolve into playing Dominion together. This at least makes them friendlier to each other, but does not get much work done.

Meanwhile, on the news is a story about a piglet escaping (from what the book carefully does not call a slaughterhouse) and running through nearby towns. Geordie becomes obsessed with the piglet: researches animal husbandry, decides his whole family should go vegetarian, makes his new passion the focus of his work on the group project, and even blows up at A.C. over it.

Things go on from there: Geordie's father tries to ground him from Dominion and schedules "playdates" with Samesh, neither of which goes quite according to plan. The project moves forward in fits and starts. Geordie starts spending a lot of his afternoons and evenings out in a wooded area nearby - something of a waste ground, used as a dump for Christmas trees and other random detritus - where he makes a fort out of what he finds there. Oddly, the Wifi signal is very strong there, and he advances quickly in Dominion there and even shows Samesh the fort he built.

But then there's a plan to redevelop that wooded area - into a park for kids, among other things, so most people think it sounds great - and Geordie's fort is destroyed. He lashes out, smashes a lot of the group project's work to date, and runs off into an ominous and dramatically-timed storm.

This is a book for middle-graders, so nothing Geordie does is irrecoverable or final. We learn what happened to his mother, and the group does manage to finish its project and pass the class. No one ever finds the piglet, but Geordie is sure it's still out there, somewhere.

Dawson gets in little character moments for the other kids and for Geordie's dad - none of them take over the story, but we get glimpses of what their stories might be, if this were a different book. There's a part of me that wants to characterize those as loose threads that Dawson could have tied off more cleverly at the end, but that's too dismissive: this is a book about one character, but he's not the only person in his world. Hidden Dominion is Geordie's story, but it knows others have their own stories.

It's a colorful, cartoony book with a lot of visual appeal: Dawson contrasts the real world with the more saturated world of Dominion and light blue-toned flashbacks to keep the reader visually oriented in space and time. And Geordie is an intriguingly flawed character: he's angry for reasons we'd don't know at first, not good at expressing his emotions, and just plain twelve years old, which is never easy. It is all pitched in a tone and style appropriate for other sixth-graders, which an older reader needs to align to, but it tells a strong story well and Geordie is an interestingly flawed kid hero with elements that many of us may find familiar from our own youths.

Witch King by Martha Wells

It's weird to say this, but I think this is the first time I've read a Martha Wells fantasy novel when I wasn't being paid by the Doubleday Book & Music Clubs (or successor organizations) to do so. I was the first reader there for her debut novel The Element of Fire, and I think I acquired all of her '90s novels for the club (Element, City of Bones, Wheel of the Infinite and The Death of the Necromancer - all excellent, by the way, and well-worth digging back into; I'd recommend Necromancer if you only have time for one). But my plans to do an omnibus of the "Fall of Ile-Rien" trilogy floundered, and then I got laid off...and I haven't been reading at the same pace for the past twenty years.

(Was there also some burnout after several subsequent years of applying to SFnal editorial jobs and not getting anywhere? Could be.)

More happily, Wells has been in the middle of a fabulously successful and award-winning SF series for the past decade - the Murderbot books; you may have heard of them - which I have been reading.

So Witch King was her first fantasy novel in six years when it came out in 2023, and I'm only slightly late in getting to it. (It's the first of what is either a trilogy or duology - the second book, Queen Demon, came out last fall, but I'm not sure if that's the end.) 

It's a complex novel set in a big, complicated world: there's a useful map in the front matter that covers what I think is the entire "Rising World," but does not include a continent further to the south from which the world-conquerors in the backstory emerged. There are at least four types of magic, with some similarities but big differences. It's a world mostly of humans - mortals, Wells's characters tend to call them - but several of those magic-using groups are immortal or very long-lived or can change bodies or some other permutation.

So the opening sets the tone: our third-person viewpoint character, Kaiisteron, Prince of the Fourth House of the underearth, wakes up. He's dead, his former body in a tomb on a small island, just emerging from being submerged in water. Some enemy is going to try to turn him into a familiar, to control his power and possibly destroy his memory. That will not go well for the enemy.

I won't explain all the details of the magic systems - such as the Immortal Blessed, with their sometimes technology-powered devices and their not-always clear hierarchy of Immortal Marshalls and Lesser Blessed; the Hierarchs, those invaders from the south whose expositors derive power from death and burn cities to get power to burn more cities - but I do need to get into demons and witches. (Those are in the titles, after all.)

Demons come from a parallel world - most people think it's under the ground; that doesn't seem to be exactly true - and are a different, serpentine, sapient race. There was some kind of war, centuries ago, between the demons and the humans of the nomadic Saredi people. A peace was brokered in which one Saredi woman, called Grandmother these days, went to the demon world, presumably to marry some demon leader: she has an extensive multi-generational set of offspring now. Since then, demons are a valued part of Saredi society, their souls moving into the bodies of Saredi who died young and unexpectedly (presumably mostly from sickness, not physical trauma). Demons can move their souls from body to body at least that much, bouncing back and forth from the underearth to the mortal world.

Witches are the offspring of demons and mortals - they have somewhat different magical powers than demons do, but the two groups are generally allied to each other. They do not have any direct connection to the underearth mentioned in this novel. Witches seem to have spread across several regions of this world, and are not limited to Saredi lands. Demons, though, do seem to be entirely limited to the Saredi, so it's a bit of a open question where all the witches came from and how they spread so much relatively quickly.

Kai is a demon. He was one of the leaders of the successful resistance to the Hierarchs, after they had conquered most of this northern continent, sixty or eighty years ago. Those leaders formed first an alliance of forces to fight back, then a more durable political coalition (the Rising World of the series title) that formed a continent-wide political structure called an Empire but relying on periodic approval from the individual nations. Kai is the demon who discovered that demons can jump from one mortal body to another, killing the host and taking over. And he developed what seems to be an idiosyncratic, individual magic system based on the Hierarchs' but fueled by his own pain rather than that of others.

Witch King has two plotlines: close to two-thirds of the book is set "now," starting with Kai's awakening in that tomb, defeating the expositor who tried to enslave him, and freeing his long-time friend and ally Ziede Daiyahah, who was also captured in that tomb. The other plotline is set in "The Past," with a few short chapters of Kai's life with the Saredi and then the story of the beginning of that resistance, in a Hierarch regional capital. In large part, the past plotline explains the relationships among the main characters - Kai; Ziede; Ziede's wife Tahren Stargard; Bashasa, who I think became the first Emperor; and a few others.

The past plotline is simpler and starker, once it gets to that Hierarch city: Bashasa leads a group of plotters in what he expects will be a doomed attempt to kill a few Hierarchs and, at best, inspire others to similarly fight back and spark a successful rebellion. The early stages go more successfully than expected, largely because of Kai, and the plotters unexpectedly survive and flee to build that larger rebellion themselves.

(We know the rebellion succeeded from the beginning of the book, or else none of these people would be alive in the "now" timeline.)

In the present day, first Kai and Ziede need to survive and get out of the tomb, then figure out what has happened. A political conference to "renew" the Empire is underway, and they are pretty sure they were shoved out of the way to interfere with that - but in which direction, and exactly what the plotters intend to do next, is unclear. Also, they quickly learn that Tahren is also missing, and finding her becomes their main aim.

This is the first of a series, so the wider issue is not resolved at the end. But the core this-book problem in both timelines - surviving the initial revolt and getting away in the past, finding Tahren in the present - are resolved, to give a satisfying ending. And the joys, as usual with Wells, is the deep characterization and insight into behavior, coupled with magnificent action sequences and a compelling narrative voice - this book is less snarky than the Murderbot books, but Wells is always crisp, focused, and precise in her writing.

Emanon, Vol. 1 by Shinji Kajio & Kenji Tsuruta

One of the core tensions in science fiction is between the pull of a neat idea and the need to actually do something with that idea. It was most stark in the early days, when many SF writers were fumbling fans who could iterate on each other's thoughts but not necessarily turn them into actual compelling stories. But you do still see fans and writers talk about "sensawunda" or arguing that just having a cool new take on some standard trope is good enough.

I think the Emanon series, originally prose stories by Japanese writer Shinji Kajio, might suffer a bit from that syndrome. I've just read the manga adaptation of the first of those stories, "Memories of Emanon," by illustrator Kenji Tsuruta; there are at least three more volumes, so I gather more implications or complications are worked out later.

I'm going to give some spoilers - first general ones that the back-cover copy mentions, and that you'd be hard-pressed to avoid in any case, but later I'm most interested in one particular implication. I thought of it before it came up in the book; I think most SF readers will get there fairly quickly. But I'll warn the more spoiler-averse of you before I mention it.

Emanon, Vol.1: Memories of Emanon is a 2008 manga volume based on the original 1983 story of the same name by Kajio - I've seen references to that story both as a "novel" and as a "short story," so I suspect it's a shortish novella that might have been published standalone at least once - which was translated by Dana Lewis for 2019 English-language publication.

The main character is a young man (explicitly a SF fan, reading a bunch of classic mostly-American SF novels on this trip), traveling on a long-distance ferry in Japan on February 24, 1967. He meets a young woman, somewhat rescuing her from an overbearing drunk, and they start talking - they end up spending most of the day-long journey together. He doesn't get a name in the story; she tells him to call her "Emanon," which means "No Name."

And then she tells him her big secret: she's the once-in-a-generation repository of a vaguely Jungian collective memory. She remembers, absolutely perfectly, the lives of all of her ancestors - it seems to be only direct female-line ancestors, but explicitly back to single-celled creatures that don't have memory to begin with.

The rest of the book is vague philosophizing about that, combined with our unnamed dude yearning for this hot "hippie chick" who is several billions of years older than him. The plot, such as it is, is these two characters talking on this boat over the course of eighteen hours or so.

More spoilers might come in from here, since I'll be talking about how this "immortality" works. Feel free to drop out if you're allergic.

Emanon basically has the memories of being young millions of times, and none of being old [1]: the accumulated memories "transfer" to each woman's firstborn (always female) child. Anyone who has looked at historical records will find such an unbroken strand incredibly unlikely, to put it mildly. (Perhaps there used to be more people like Emanon, but the female lines were all severed? That might come up in later stories.)

Also, what memories do the "former" Emanons have? Do they remember that they used to be able to remember? Surely they don't become amnesiacs at the moment they give birth. Do they never talk about this overwhelming, unique thing with their own daughters and mothers? 

(I suspect Kajio is more interested in what his main character thinks of the hot girl with memories of eternity, not what it's like to be that girl.)

All in all, Emanon comes across as that very hoary SF thing, the "check out this cool idea" story. It's a moody, ruminative piece, focused tightly on this one male gaze at the title character.

I don't blame her for ghosting him when the boat approaches port.

Personally, I find the idea oddly flawed in multiple ways: I don't believe in this one singular unbroken line, I expect there would be a much stronger mother-daughter connection Kajio completely ignores, and the "I remember being a paramecium" stuff is utter bunk. But it does have an interesting idea, and engages it with seriously, which makes it solidly SFnal and worth thinking through. I would not agree with reviewers that call it unique or particularly deep - it's that standard SF thing, a sophomore bull-session put onto the page - but it has an idea and explores that idea with at least some pretense of rigor.

[1] If I were being cruel, I'd point out this is clearly what attracted Tsuruta to the material: a woman he can draw, in any era or place, as exactly his thin freckle-faced model, because she is always young and slim and hot, or else she's not Emanon anymore. He can even draw her half-naked in some ancillary material, even if that doesn't fit into the story at all. Good thing I'm not cruel.

All of This and Nothing: What's a Devil to Do?

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

I blogged about this band once before - but I should note that I'd gotten a mislabeled copy of this song and thought of it under the wrong title for a few months. And all of this is Obscure enough that my confusion made it even worse.

The band is Harley Poe, which I think was a specific project/style for a while in the Aughts, not a long-running band. And my favorite song of theirs - among a lot of competition - is What's a Devil to Do?

I don't think Harley Poe was a joke band, but they were a focused one: they did songs on horror-movie topics (vampires, zombies, cannibals) in a low-fi acoustic style that sounded to me very much like early-period Violent Femmes. (But I didn't see anything from Harley Poe to explain the sound; they might have had a different touchpoint or explanation.)

This song is from the point of view of an evil man - given the grand guignol of so many of their other songs, I tend to assume he's the Antichrist, but the song itself never quite says that outright.

I was created down below
And if it's evil that you're planting
Then it's evil that will grow

Like most of the Harley Poe songs I've heard, it's over the top - but lovingly so, in a way that completely commits to the bit, in the same way that a blues song can be about the singer taming a tornado. And that low-fi sound rocks hard, especially here.

Now Jesus died for them, it's true
But what's a devil to do?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 29, 2026

I'm on vacation this last week of American summer, so I gathered books from all directions - mostly in time for the actual vacation. This post will list everything I got from the library, which I will definitely read this week. Next week will be a post about all of the used books that are still trickling in - mostly for longer-term reading projects, so probably not for right now anyway.

The third (and, so far, last) book in the graphic-novel series by Hope Larson about young musicians is All My Friends. (The first two books in the series are All Summer Long and All Together Now.) It came out in 2021, and I knew it was coming - I'd mentioned it when I wrote about Together - but it took me five years to remember to get it into my hands. This one seems to be more serious-business than the first two; Bina's interest in making music has led to actual professional opportunities, which is a lot for a thirteen-year-old.

John Hodgman would be the first person to tell you he's had a weird career - in fact, his later career seems to be largely commentary about how weird his initial public-facing career was, which fits solidly in the capacious "memoir" category but is pretty quirky. Medallion Status claims to be the book about what it is like to be John Hodgman, in the years after he was no longer on TV as often as he was initially. (It may be about something slightly different; I grumped a bit about Vacationland, his previous book, because the publishers tried to push it as "it's just really funny; don't worry about the topic" when it actually had a solid hook they could have used.)

On vacation towards the beginning of the summer, I read Martha Wells's recent fantasy novel Witch King.  (No link yet; my post goes live on Wednesday and let's see if I remember to go back and add it.) That book had a sequel last year, Queen Demon, which I think ends the series. I don't think I've gotten to two books in a series that quickly in several years, but it's the plan this time.

I probably saw a review of Kay Sohini's graphic-novel memoir This Beautiful, Ridiculous City somewhere, but I have no idea where that would have been. It came out last year, and is about how she moved to New York (from India - so kind of a big deal), what drove her to that move and what she found there. I'm being vague because my knowledge of the book is vague; I'm going to have to read it to find out what it's really about, which is the best way to read, I think.

And last is Black Arms to Hold You Up, a newish book (also last year) from firebrand graphic-novelist Ben Passmore (author of, most recently I think, Sports Is Hell). I tend to think Passmore goes too far, but, then again, I am exactly the kind of guy (white, middle-aged, suburban, comfortable) who would think someone like Passmore goes too far. So I keep reading his books. This one is subtitled "A History of Black Resistance," as in violent resistance to state oppression, but I think there are two caveats to that: first, that it's all in an American context. And, second, that there's some level of fictionalized frame story, involving a version of Passmore, that tells the historical sections. 

Quote of the Week: A Night in Hollywood

In the Hollywood Roosevelt bar she complained of the air and said she felt wretched and old. Nonsense, I told her, but we moved to the Zebra Room. She had shifted to Irish whisky, which she drank straight. In the Zebra Room she accused a man at the next table of looking at her contemptuously. I suggested more air. She drove down Wilshire as if she was trying to break through into another dimension. I had to park the Buick for her at the Ambassador. I'd left my car at Swift's.

 - Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target, p.53

John Cuneo's Good Intentions

John Cuneo is an illustrator: he's done a bunch of New Yorker covers, worked for Esquire, and so on. But, like any artist, there's work that he wants to do that doesn't fit into what clients want him to draw.

So he's had a series of books collecting his other work, over the past twenty years: nEuROTIC, Not Waving But Drawing, Coping Skills. And, just last year, most recently, John Cuneo's Good Intentions.

His style is familiar, and the older book titles vaguely so, but I can't prove I ever read any of them, or point to a specific time I saw a Cuneo illustration. (That's the curse of illustrators: they're hired to provide distinctive and visually interesting work entirely to support something else. Cuneo has done a bunch of celebrity caricatures, as seen on his site, which I expect originally accompanied various profiles.)

So this was probably the first time I saw a bunch of Cuneo work - and definitely so a bunch of work I knew was by Cuneo. Good Intentions collects eighty or so color drawings, in three themed chapters: In the Wild, In the Studio, and In the Home. More than half of the drawings are captioned, but they're not quite cartoons - the captions are wry, descriptive, allusive, narrative.

And, of course, most of the drawings are about sex, one way or another. (That's what "personal work" means for artists, isn't it?)

They're not sexy, though: Cuneo draws mostly lumpy, middle-aged people, with a few more pounds and wrinkles than they'd like, and his loose line and watercolors can give their skin a mottled look, too. His women tend to be slightly more attractive than his men: their faces are grotesque only occasionally, while men are caricatures around half the time. But there's a lot of flesh in this book: tits and ass and dick, often engaged in activities with other people. Again, it's not particularly attractive tits and ass and dick, so don't go here if that's what you're looking for. (You're on the internet: attractive tits and ass and dick are always only a click away, photographic, hand-drawn, or AI-generated.)

So this is an odd book. It's not quite funny - it's not trying to tell jokes. It's amusing, and quirky, and definitely making commentary about modern life and types of people and things like that. It's not unlike a book of cartoons; it's just not aiming for a laugh reaction. And it is quite polymorphously perverse, which could be a bonus or a detriment, depending on the reader.

Proof That the Devil Loves You by Gilbert Hernandez

So Gilbert Hernandez makes his regular comics stories - I almost said "normal," but that's not the right word here - with continuing characters set in a real world. They get pretty rococo; Hernandez is fond of overcomplication and of turning his theme-amplifier knob up to eleven and then trying to twist it up even further. But scenes have the same people in them, and those people have regular relationships that the stories explain and depict.

He also makes stories that are meant to be fictions within his already-fictional world - I think they've all been "movies" so far, but I don't want to be dogmatic. (Hernandez is deeply inventive, both stylistically and formally.) These focus on his character Fritz, who was a basically normal-proportioned woman who worked as a psychologist in her earliest appearances, but at some point turned into a worldwide icon as a bad actress with breasts larger than her head. [1]

I'll take Fritz's unlikely career as read, and the vastly more unlikely worldwide army of Fritz imitators likewise: in Hernandez's worlds, manias just seem to spread, and people don't act rationally except on rare occasions.

But, anyway: there are the core Gilbert Love & Rockets stories, set in a secondary world. Then there are the "movie books," which are comics versions of movies that exist in that secondary world. Hernandez has done a number of these: Chance in Hell, The Troublemakers, Love from the Shadows, Maria M. They tend to be pulpy - they're bad movies; this is on purpose - but they do lean into some of Hernandez's strengths.

That finally brings us to Proof That the Devil Loves You, which is the most recent "Fritz Movie Book," published in 2023. It collects five stories, or story-pieces, that appeared in his serial comics over the pervious decade, somewhat reorganized and expanded...but not into a single narrative.

The descriptive copy hints at this, but doesn't quite say it: Proof is a collection of scenes that don't seem to be from the same movie. In fact, two of the six somewhat separate stories  here might not be from a movie at all. I suspect that Hernandez didn't so much turn these five previous-published pieces into a single graphic novel as he cleaned them up slightly and set them alongside each other, and then walked away.

The six stories - the first has the book's title; the others are untitled - are, roughly:

• In a Palomar-esque small town, a female sheriff is one of a large number of monomaniacs, which leads to tragedy. Meanwhile, the Fritz character is a wacky oddball who may be mentally ill and who seems to die off-panel for possibly thematically important reasons. This actually has a beginning and an end, and is arch and affected but all of that seems to be on purpose; think of it as a misfire from a Wes Anderson type, maybe.
• Three weird creatures drive into Vegas, with a lot of money because of something possibly-criminal that they vaguely celebrate. Strange things happen to them, and two seem to die or disappear, while the third is left to keep gambling, we assume eternally. The other two drive away, in what may be a parallel universe.
• Fritz is an "astronette" who needs to uncap some thing on an alien world. It is difficult, and she has a radio argument with her controllers during it, but she does it. A beam of light streaks off, and missiles try to destroy her escaping ship, but she survives.
• A passel of Fritzes, each in costume for a specific story and called by the name of that story, are in a tall building. The central Fritz is from a movie called Chest Fever; we also see non-Fritz actresses from that movie. The Fritzes talk about their careers in metaphoric ways, change their clothing, travel to different floors, come and go randomly. It is all very philosophical, and ends with our central Fritz transforming, or something. It is also super-obviously Symbolic and Important.
• A Prince Valiant-looking dude with glowing flying boots meets a furry demon-woman (played by Fritz) who, along with her imp sidekicks, tries to kill him in a typically icky Hernandez way. It doesn't take, and two other Prince Valiant types appear to scold her. Everyone swears every other word in a very "modern" way, which is probably important.
• Fritz and some guy - he seems to be connected to her career, an agent or manager or studio guy, and might have a name but it's not mentioned here - wander around, talking about various things, mostly in philosophical mode but using mostly-grounded and specific language (unlike the Fritzes-in-metaphoric-Hollywood-as-a-building before). This is probably "real" within the world of Love & Rockets. It's less artificial than a lot of the similar conversations in Lovers and Haters, and looks like it could actually lead somewhere - so, of course, it closes out the book.

As often with Hernandez, his pages are interesting and his artistic choices bold - sometimes bold in the "that is great" sense; sometimes in the "why on earth would he expect that to work?" sense - and I do believe that he thinks these pieces come together to form an overall narrative. But I think that narrative exists about 65% in Hernandez's own head, with only the remnant actually making it onto these pages.

And, in common with a lot of late Hernandez, this is not the place to start. You don't need to go all the way back to Palomar, but you should start earlier in the Fritz stories, maybe Three Sisters. He's in what we might call a remix period currently, taking many of his core concerns and themes and bouncing them around in different permutations - it can be arresting, but you need to have a grounding in the more conventional stories to get much of anything out of it.

[1] Hernandez's work now features many characters with breasts larger than their heads, and some men with biceps larger than their heads, for reasons I hope that are essentially artistic but that I suspect are not.

Perfect Example by John Porcellino

When you self-publish a comic on any kind of regular basis, you tend to pour all of your creative work into that one outlet. (I don't think there's anything similar in other art forms - non-comics 'zines, maybe, but that feels like a variation of the same idea. Very few media have both the low barrier for entry and the potential/audience to run for an extended period of time that comics do.)

John Porcellino has been making comics and publishing them as King-Cat Comics since 1989; he's done other projects occasionally - the only entirely separate book-length one I know of is Thoreau at Walden - but most of his work gets funneled into that one outlet, for all the obvious reasons.

There are books that generally reprint King-Cat: I've seen two of them in the life of this blog, Map of My Heart and From Lone Mountain. But Porcellino or his editors at Drawn & Quarterly have also pulled out selections that are more graphic-novel-shaped from the long King-Cat archives, including The Hospital Suite and Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man (which I'm pretty sure I read, probably as my first Porcellino, but I can't find any record of it).

Perfect Example is another book like that: it collects the four-part story of the title, plus two other shorter pieces, and a one-pager to open it all up. All this material is from the mid-90s, but it all looks back a decade, to the summer right after Porcellino graduated high school in 1986, in the Chicago suburb Hoffman Estates. D&Q published this package in 2021.

Descriptions of this book can lean into the "aimless teen" cliché - that's not completely untrue, but not everyone has an aim automatically. (Maybe most of us don't.) It is day-to-day, matter-of-fact, about what John and his friends were getting up to that summer - driving around, going to parties, starting relationships, meeting new people, going to concerts (or trying to), all that kind of thing. The exact details aren't as important as the feelings and the motion.

If you've read Porcellino's work before, you know he's had some mental health issues - anxiety, depression, that whole sad ball of wax. This is, to be all comics about it, something like his origin story - or, at least, a time when that was starting and young Porcellino realized it at the time.

Like all of Porcellino's work, Perfect Example is full of clean, single-weight lines in hand-drawn boxes, with a very minicomics, personal look. His writing is focused and minimalist as well: he's not trying to tell a story, but to capture what he was doing, and what it felt like, moment by moment.

Porcellino is a cartoonist of moments: that's how I'd put it. Good ones, bad ones, points of connection and of disconnection - how this one young man was living in the world, what he cared about, and how his own brain was undermining him along the way. This book is a collection of those moments, all from that one summer, organized and arranged to show what Porcellino was like then. I don't know of any other cartoonist who can do this kind of tone and style: simple, unadorned, precise, thoughtful, ruminative, open.

The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald

I have a shelf dedicated to reading projects, in my to-be-read bookcases. It's mostly sat quietly for the last few years, with three half-assembled "projects" slowly disappearing behind other things piling up in front of them. I thought I had to assemble all of the books first; my model was Starktober and similar things, where I read a whole bunch of books quickly - generally one a day - and wrote about them just as quickly.

But I don't read like that now, so those "projects" have sat gathering dust.

On the other hand, I have been reading through authors intermittently, mostly nudged by the presence of Library of America books on my main shelves. Over the last couple of years, I got through all of Dashiell Hammett's novels, and then Raymond Chandler's, that way.

One of the "projects" was to read all of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels. And I just realized I could do that the same way I was reading other authors: one at a time rather than in a big burst. So I think I will.

The Moving Target was the first of that series, and the first novel to appear under the author's pen name. ("Macdonald" was really Kenneth Millar, but his wife, Margaret Millar, was also a crime novelist, with a growing career at the same time, so her husband cycled through "John Macdonald" and "John Ross Macdonald" before settling on the version of his name he kept for the rest of his career. It was always a fairly open pseudonym; I suppose mostly to keep their books just a few feet separate on the shelves.) "Macdonald" had published four standalone mystery/crime novels before this; he wasn't brand-new, and he'd gotten good notices.

So Moving Target comes mostly formed. It's very much in the Chandler mode: Macdonald's series hero Lew Archer is similarly tough and cynical at this point, and Macdonald has flights of language not unlike Chandler's in the course of the novel. It's also, most obviously, a book about a private detective in Los Angeles and its surroundings in the late 1940s - Chandler would have been the glaringly obvious touchstone even if Macdonald had tried to run farther away from him.

As I recall, Archer became more of a viewpoint, especially as the series went on - he was a window into the lives of the people he met, and did less commentary than Chandler. I'll have to see if I still think that, this time through the novels. It's not really the case here: Archer gets knocked out multiple times, kissed by dames, and gives a few major speeches, all of which is solidly in the Chandler mode.

The joke about Macdonald is that all of the Archer books are about family problems, which stem from some event that happened twenty years ago in Canada. (Macdonald was born and lived most of his life in California, but his family was Canadian and he spent his youth in Ontario.) This first one is about families, but all of the cliché elements aren't there yet - there's no Canadian content here.

Archer is hired by a rich woman to find her husband. Ralph Sampson is a Texas oil millionaire, living on his rents and making occasional random deals, drinking too much and flying around impulsively to Las Vegas and elsewhere. Ralph disappeared the day before, after a flight back from Vegas. Archer was brought in by the family lawyer, Bert Graves, who he worked for when Graves was a DA and Archer an investigator in that office.

Graves is involved in a love triangle with Sampson's twenty-year-old daughter Miranda: he's pursuing her in a slightly embarrassing middle-aged way, while she's making eyes at her father's hunky pilot, Alan Taggert. Mrs. Sampson is openly derisive of her husband, insisting - though she's an invalid whose legs don't work after a fall from a horse - that she's going to outlive him. And Sampson, as Archer discovers, has some very odd business connections, including the gangster owner of the Wild Piano club, a thug named Dwight Troy, and a self-declared guru, Claude, who Sampson gave a mountain hunting lodge as a "temple."

Archer chases Sampson's trail for a couple of days, as it becomes clearer that the millionaire was kidnapped and eventually a ransom note appears. He meets a number of women connected to the case, faded movie star Fay Estabrook and ex-con pianist Betty Fraley, and some violent men connected to them.

Most of this takes place near the Sampson mansion in Santa Teresa - Macdonald's invention, a fictional town loosely based on Santa Monica that later mystery writers would also use - and in the mountains and rural roads nearby. That's one of the most clearly 1949 parts of the novel: how empty so much of Southern California was at that moment, with the post-war building boom still building up steam. (The other thing is another post-war sense, that something big had just happened and was over, leaving a lot of men still keyed up, still used to handling dangerous, important work and now trying to settle back into smaller, quieter lives.)

Archer solves the crime - well, crimes, since there's more than just the kidnapping to deal with in the end. A mystery novel needs at least one murder, doesn't it?

This is an atmospheric and smart mystery novel, very much in the Chandler manner and style but already showing clear signs of distinguishing Macdonald from Chandler. Archer is less romantic than Chandler's hero, Marlowe, maybe more of a post-war man in that. And, as I recall, the series only gets better from here.

All of This and Nothing: Barracuda

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

As usual with the Famous songs this year, I'm assuming you recognize this one - probably just from the title. You might not have been around in 1977 to hear it when it was new, but it's been in movies and TV shows and probably video games and web animations and other things I don't even know the right names for. It's got one of the great guitar lines in all of rock.

It's Barracuda by Heart, from their third record Little Queen.

According to legend, it's about A Specific Guy, some music-industry jerk who made ridiculous, horrible comments backstage at some concert to singer Ann Wilson, who almost immediately went back to her room and wrote the song. It has that kind of immediate energy, and it's a great story, so why not?

If the real thing don't do the trick
You better make up something quick

The lyrics are vague and allusive - there's a dolphin, and also the barracuda of the title, which is somehow "lying so low in the weeds" like a snake. There's almost a whole aquatic metaphor going on, and an energetic fan could probably assemble a big, complex explanation on a wallchart, with strings and thumbtacks and circled photos.

But you don't need that. Just the Wilson sisters, voice and guitar, and enough anger to fuel a fine four-minute song.

Oooh, Barracuda!

Quote of the Week: The Vocal Qualities of Rural Aunts

I had already divined who was at the other end of the wire, my good and deserving Aunt Dahlia having a habit of talking on the telephone with the breezy vehemence of a hog-caller in the western states of America calling his hogs to come and get it. She got this way through hunting a lot in her youth with the Quorn and the Pytchley. What with people riding over hounds, and hounds taking time off to chase rabbits, a girl who hunts soon learns to make herself audible. I believe that she, when in good voice, could be heard in several adjoining counties.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Much Obliged, Jeeves, p.16