Late City by Robert Olen Butler

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on September 7, 2021

Robert Olen Butler’s new novel explores the harm caused by a parental or social insistence that “real men” must behave in a way that allows the world to witness and appreciate their manliness. More broadly, Butler suggests that harm is done whenever people of either gender are made to deny their true selves.

While the novel’s title may have more than one meaning, the obvious reference is to the late city edition of a newspaper — the edition that comes at the end of the news day, the one that reports all the day’s events, when it’s too late to add anything new. After 115 years, Samuel Cunningham is at the end of his life, looking back at key events as if they were a series of news stories, the late city edition that recounts all of the news of a life that’s worth reporting.

Sam recounts those stories from a nursing home bed, where he resides as the last living veteran of the First World War. He reviews significant episodes in his life because it is finally time to die. A gender-fluid God (“don’t concern yourself with pronouns,” God tells Sam) is in the room as Sam approaches death, forcing him to give an accounting of his life, to voice his regrets and admit his mistakes, to gain an understanding of his relationships with his parents, wife, and son before God determines Sam’s eternal fate. Since the story is told from Sam’s perspective, whether or not God is actually present or the manifestation of a dying delusion isn’t important. Real or imagined, God is a device that prompts Sam’s self-critical evaluation of his life.

On its surface, Sam has lived a fine life. He grew up in Louisiana, where his father taught him to hunt with a rifle. Seeing his father abuse his mother but being too afraid to intervene, Sam lies about his age and joins the Army as World War I begins, sneaking off in the night, saying goodbye only to his mother, protecting her with a postcard to make his father believe that she had no advance knowledge of his plan.

Using the hunting skills he learned from his father, Sam becomes a sniper. He kills more than a hundred men, envisioning one of them as his father, a vision that doesn’t stop him from pulling the trigger. Sam learns that war is about “millions of men being forced to become somebody who has to dig a hole in the ground and then go down in it or jump up out of it and die a ferocious, savaging death when you just want to be a farmer or a teacher or a sale clerk or a guy stoking coal in a tramp steamer.” People not being allowed to be who they want to be, and how that denial of self-determination harms society as much as the individual, is one of the novel’s key themes.

Sam befriends a man who gives comfort to wounded soldiers in the trenches, hugging them and even kissing them when they believe they are being held by their mothers. When it comes time for Sam to do the same for his friend, Sam needs to ask himself whether he is capable of that kind of intimacy.

At the war’s end, Sam moves to Chicago, a destination far from Loouisiana. He has long loved newspapers and has a talent for writing, his only talent apart from killing. He finds a room in the home of a war widow, earns a job as a cub reporter at a progressive newspaper by writing a sensitive piece about the city’s race riots, marries and has a son. In another key scene, when his son is eleven, Sam explains that being a man means having the courage to kill other men to protect a country. That discussion, a few years later, motivates Sam’s son to join the Navy just before the US enters World War II.

From the end of the war until Sam’s visit from God, shortly after Trump’s election, Sam lives with the consequences of how he shaped his son’s life. It is only at the end of Late City that Sam comes to understand the truth about his son, to understand the harm to which he has contributed by failing to love him unconditionally and with his whole heart. He has a similar revelation about his wife, about how his and society’s expectations shaped the woman she became.

Late City isn’t a story about toxic masculinity. Sam is a decent but misguided man, a product of his time who, by rejecting racism, is a better man than many of his peers. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He truly loves his wife, even if he gives more attention to his career than to her. He wants to observe the world and report it rather than being part of it. But Sam could have been more than decent. He could have been a helper, not just an observer. He could have been more open and accepting.

After Sam learns those lessons by considering his life in retrospect, the novel’s final pages give Sam a small opportunity for redemption. That's a sweet and touching moment.

The story concentrates on Sam’s life from the First to the Second World War. The years that follow feel rushed, although they do bring Sam’s wife and marriage into sharper focus.

I caught myself holding my breath during a few tense moments in Late City. At other points, I was genuinely moved by the story. I disagree with the New York Times reviewer who called the novel outrageously sentimental. It isn’t a literary sin for authors to make readers feel something. Obvious emotional manipulation for its own sake is a drag, but the emotional response that Butler induces comes from a place of honesty. I did not feel manipulated by forced sentiment. Rather, I empathized with Sam’s belated realizations that, at three or four times in his life, he was less of a man than he should have been, no matter how many enemy soldiers he managed to kill.

The novel’s honesty extends beyond Sam’s examination of his own life and becomes a commentary on a society that forces good people to lose their own identities by conforming to standards imposed by others. Perhaps readers who cling to antiquated standards will deny the truth or the beauty of Late City. Readers with open minds might appreciate this heartfelt story of the mistakes a decent man can make during a long life.

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Revelator by Daryl Gregory

Published by Knopf on August 31, 2021

As horror novels go, Revelator is creepy rather than frightening. The horror does not manifest as a vampire or demon or any other destructive entity that seeks to enslave or destroy the human race, although the possibility that such an entity might reveal itself underlies the story. For most of the novel, the entity that places Revelator into the genre of horror fiction doesn’t threaten anyone except the series of children who serve it, and it probably doesn’t intend to hurt them. Only at the novel’s end do we learn the true nature of those children and of their relationship to the entity they serve.

Alternating chapters focus on the life of Stella Birch in 1938 and 1948. Stella’s family has long resided in a mountainous area of Tennessee that is about to become part of a national park. Inside the mountain lives an entity Stella calls Ghostdaddy. Others in her family call it the God of the Mountain.

A long line of Birch women, all born to absent fathers, have communed with the Ghostdaddy. They enter the mountain and receive the word of Ghostdaddy. Since they are apparently recipients of the mountain god’s revelations, a religion has grown from the communions. The religion was not founded by the women who actually commune with Ghostdaddy, but by a man who purported to have a better understanding of the revelations than the women who receive them. For each new generation of women, the word of the God of the Mountain has been transcribed in a series of books, accompanied by commentary furnished by a male family member who believes he better understands the god’s true meaning.

Stella is a child in 1938. She wants to read all the books of the women who came before her, but her Uncle Hendrick won’t allow it. Hendrick has appointed himself the current interpreter of the God of the Mountain’s words, as spoken through the Birch women. Hendrick would like Stella to produce as many revelations as possible, but her mother Motty doesn’t think Stella is ready. Hendrick defers to Motty as the oldest surviving Birch woman. Stella has her own mind about things and discovers truths about Ghostdaddy before Motty is ready to reveal them.

In 1948, Stella returns to the mountain because Motty has died. Sunny becomes the next Birch girl to commune with Ghostdaddy. Stella wants to shield Sunny from that experience while Hendrick wants to keep Sunny to himself. He’s moving the family religion to a broader audience and needs new revelations to cement his position. Struggles eventually ensue between Stella and Hendrick, between Stella and Sunny, and between Stella and Ghostdaddy.

Daryl Gregory adds color to the story by giving Stella a role in the family moonshine business with her Uncle Abby. She also has a quasi-romantic relationship with a preacher’s son. Something strange happens when Motty slaughters pigs, but you’ll have to read the book to understand it. All of that background helps Gregory portray Stella as an interesting and sympathetic member of a strange backwoods family.

The backwoods tendency to invent bizarre religions and to sucker others into believing them is a key component of the story. It might also be a thinly disguised commentary on the negative impact that backwoods religions have on their adherents. The backwoods church that most of the characters attend before they learn about the God of the Mountain doesn’t allow women to speak. On the other hand, the God of the Mountains is a real entity that demands a form of worship, even if it isn’t much of a god. Unsurprisingly, all of Hendricks’ interpretations of the god’s “revelations” prove to be completely wrong. Such is the nature of fringe preachers.

Stella views herself as a monster. If people knew what she is capable of doing, others might see her that way too. The reader will more likely view Stella as someone who had to play the hand she was dealt, and who played it with courage and compassion.

If Revelator isn’t particularly scary, the story’s creepiness — the ending, in particular — offsets the absence of chills. The atmosphere is appropriate to a horror novel, the story has a good pace, and the depiction of backwoods religion adds to the story’s interest.

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In the Watchful City by S. Qiouyi Lu

Published by Tor.com on August 31, 2021

The Gleaming, like the Force from Star Wars, is a connective energy shared by all living beings, although only a few have the ability to access its power. Anima, a node in the city of Ora, has that ability. Ær job (æ being the pronoun that Anima uses to describe ærself) is to watch over Ora and protect its inhabitants, a job made possible by ær ability to (1) access the Gleaming, and (2) transfer her consciousness to animals and control their movements while æ inhabits their bodies.

Anima’s ability to body-hop might make her a valuable protector if she kept a gorilla handy, but she’s usually jumping into birds and lizards, critters that contribute little value to a rescue. Anima is frustrated when she tries to prevent a suicide by drowning and learns that it isn’t easy to herd a school of fish. A node named Enigma needs to remind her that she can’t protect everyone and that her real duty is to “create a society that provides for its citizens . . . where no one is invisible, where we can meet the needs of every one of our people” by “protecting our sovereignty.” Just how hopping into dogs and frogs might accomplish that lofty goal is unclear. It seems very much like an excuse to maintain a surveillance state, but the purpose of surveillance is equally obscure.

Anima is a node in Ora, a city on a world with squirrels and geckos that might be Earth but for its two suns and the Skylands. Nodes can “fold the Gleaming” and thus look through the eyes of anyone who is infused with the Gleaming, but only nodes in the inner sanctum can body jump. While Anima is jumping among animals, her body rests in an amniotic bath that apparently moisturizes her skin. Anima’s jurisdiction as a protector of Ora ends at the “aerospace border” that separates Ora from the Skylands above. Like much of the novel, the Skylands are too underdeveloped to add anything but question marks to the story.

A visitor named Vessel escapes Anima’s notice, a feat that should be impossible, when he enters Ora with a collection of mementos. Each memento comes with a story. Vessel relates some of those stories to Anima. A fish scale, for example, leads to a story about a woman’s moral dilemma as she decides whether her personal comfort should be derived from the exploitation of mermaids. A cup inspires that story of an athletic competition that sparks a riot. A marionette controller leads to the story of a man who tried to bring his dead brother back to life. The stories, each complete with a teaching moment, are more interesting than the novel that surrounds them.

Vessel wants a memento from Anima, but she attaches a condition to her willingness to part with it. Like so much else in the novel, Vessel’s reason for needing Anima’s memento to complete his collection is unexplained. Anima’s decision concerning her contribution of a memento is the story’s final dramatic moment, but it is underwhelming. What will Anima do? is a less important question than Do I care? S. Qiouyi Lu’s enviable prose stye fails to overcome the story’s failure to amount to much, but some of the internal stories are worth reading for their standalone value.

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Several People are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

Published by Doubleday on August 31, 2021

If I were to attach a label to Several People Are Typing, I might go with absurdist or experimental. A more apt description might be “really, really funny.”

One of the technology trends that I’ve managed to avoid is called Slack. If I’m getting this right, Slack is a messaging app that businesses use to enable internal communications and conferencing. Slack users apparently have the ability to add emojis to their communications. According to a blog post at Vice, nobody is quite sure what the “dusty stick” emoji means. That ambiguity is milked for its full laugh potential in Several People Are Typing.

The novel consists entirely of chat dialog in Slack message rooms used by the New York office of a public relations firm. Clients rely on the firm for crisis management. When Pomeranians start dying because their dog food has been poisoned, they turn to the firm for positive messaging to restore the faith of dog owners in the deadly product.

Early in the novel, a member of the firm named Gerald is working at home on a spreadsheet that he has made to compare the merits of various winter coats so he can decide which one to purchase. That task somehow transports his consciousness into Slack, where he has rather unproductive conversations with Slackbot, a Clippy-type helper that refers Gerald to the Help Center for answers to his questions about why he is stuck in a program. Gerald can easily communicate with other employees via Slack, but they think he is trying out a “bit” when he complains that he is stuck inside Slack. Gerald’s co-employee Pradeep eventually heeds Gerald’s entreaties, goes to Gerald’s home, and finds Gerald’s drooling body slumped over a keyboard. Pradeep takes this in stride, in part because Gerald pays Pradeep to tend to his body while his mind adjusts to living inside of Slack. Slackbot eventually “wakes up” and decides he would like to live Gerald’s physical life while Gerald is stuck in Slack. Slackbot’s idea of living is largely limited to eating and sex, although he enjoys sunsets, at least when they appear in a gif.

Much of the story’s humor comes from random office absurdities. A new employee arrives in the office on a snowy day, finding only one other employee who made it to work. They promptly have sex on the boss’ standing desk, to the detriment of the desk. They discuss their dalliance on Slack, secure in the knowledge that the boss never exercises his authority to read private communications on Slack. A “wrong send” nevertheless clues the rest of the office into the romance. Before that happens, the male in the relationship seeks advice in private rooms about Valentine’s Day — specifically, how to avoid celebrating it with his new casual lover without seeming like a dick for avoiding it, a problem I instinctively understood.

An employee named Lydia has a growing concern about the howling she always hears, as if wolves are at her door. Another employee develops a concern when Lydia disappears and nobody else in the office remembers that Lydia ever worked there. Such is life in the modern office environment.

The novel satirizes office relationships, professional and personal, as well as working (or not working) from home, a mode that is popular with the firm’s employees, who never seem to do much work even if they’re in the office. It satirizes managers who ignore questions (like, “when are you going to send me the information I need to finish this project?”) and employees who gossip (i.e., all employees). Of course, it satirizes dusty stick and the culture of using emojis as ambiguous shorthand, including the tendency to “thumbs up” any remark when no better response comes to mind.

Perhaps the novel merits an analysis of the serious observations it makes through satire, but I was too busy giggling or guffawing to consider anything beyond its humor. Every page of Several People Are Typing made me laugh. Many pages made me laugh more than once. Considering how gloomy the world can be, I give high marks to books that are as clever, smart, and funny as this one. For readers who appreciate wackiness, Several People Are Typing might be the year’s must read.

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Lightning Strike by William Kent Krueger

Published by Atria Books on August 24, 2021

Lightning Strike is a prequel to the Cork O’Connor series. The story begins with Cork being sworn in as the new Sheriff of Tamarack County in Northern Minnesota. After a county resident complains that he's the first “redskin” to become sheriff, Cork recalls his father, Liam, who also held the sheriff’s position. Cork’s memories take the reader to 1963 when Cork was a pre-teen, delivering newspapers and hanging out with his two best friends, Billy Downwind and Jorge Patterson. Jorge’s mother is Mexican and Billy, like Cork’s mother, is Ojibwe.

Like all good mysteries, Lightning Strike is based on misdirection. Three deaths occur, apparently unrelated, but mystery fans will understand that multiple deaths in a mystery are always related. The mystery is the culprit’s identity. William Kent Krueger plants clues that might help the reader guess the answer, but he also sets up several other suspects who might have a motive for committing at least one of the murders.

When Cork and Jorge visit a clearing on the Shore of Iron Lake known as Lightning Strike, they are shocked to find Big John Manydeeds hanging from a rope. An autopsy reveals a high blood alcohol content, which is consistent with the cases of empty whiskey bottles found behind Big Johns’ home. People on the rez all believed that Big John had stopped drinking and are unwilling to accept the fact of his apparent suicide. They are suspicious of Liam’s apparent unwillingness to investigate the death, viewing Big John’s demise as another case in which white law enforcement turns its back on Indians.

Murder suspects accumulate after Liam, prodded by his wife and mother-in-law, begins to consider the possibility that Big John didn’t kill himself. Big John may have been carrying on with the wife of Duncan McDermid, who owns the local iron mine, but the local judge isn’t interested in issuing search warrants related to that investigation because McDermid is white and powerful. Big John also had more than a few fights with his stepbrother, who happens to be Billy’s uncle. At least three minor characters make repeat appearances, which mystery fans will realize is enough reason to put them on the short list of suspects.

A couple of plot elements distinguish Lightning Strike from typical mysteries. The spirit of Big John seems to appear from time to time, perhaps assisting the investigation of his murder, although never in a way that can’t be explained without a belief in spirits. Believe what you want, the story seems to say.

Cork plays a key role at several points as he searches for clues or contributes helpful insights. His efforts are credible — he makes no deductions that are beyond a child of his age — but the central role of a kid in a murder investigation gives the story a certain charm. Cork learns some life lessons as he ponders both Christian and Native American spiritual beliefs, ultimately recognizing that he’ll need to travel a long path before he finds satisfying answers about the meaning of life and death.

The theme of white hostility toward Native Americay.ns and Native American distrust of whites gives the story some weight without making it preachy. Lightning Strike is, at bottom, a well-crafted mystery with likeable characters. Action scenes at the end add a level of tension by placing Cork in danger. The novel is a good end-of-summer book for readers who are ready to transition away from beach reads but not quite ready for the heavy literary diet that winter might bring.

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