The Sinners by Ace Atkins

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on July 17, 2018

If he lives to the end of The Sinners, Quinn Colson plans to get married. His friend Boom Kimbrough is supposed to be his best man, if he live to the end of the novel. Lillie Virgil, now working as a federal marshal in Memphis, plans to attend the wedding, if it happens (fortunately, nobody in The Sinners is trying to kill her). Fannie Hathcock, who runs the local titty bar, is not invited to the wedding. You’ll need to read the earlier books in the series to understand the history of those characters. And you should read the earlier books, because the Quinn Colson novels are lively, funny, and thoroughly entertaining.

The Sinners involves the intersection of Kimbrough, Hathcock, and the Pritchard family, which has a reputation for stock car racing and selling marijuana. Kimbrough has a truck driving job, but he’s not happy to learn that the cargo he’s hauling isn’t entirely legitimate. Heath Pritchard, having served his time in Parchman, is back in town, much to the displeasure of his nephews, Cody and Tyler, who took over the family drug business while their uncle was behind bars. Heath’s return coincides with the murder of one of Fannie’s employees (they have a troublesome habit of getting themselves killed). Quinn works on finding the killer when he isn’t avoiding the task of making wedding plans, but his investigation is only part of a much broader story of local crime and its connection to organized crime.

The setting is the same as other books in the series: a small redneck community in fictional Tibbehah County, Mississippi, whose residents exemplify confederate values: white supremacy, religious hypocrisy, and ignorance disguised as righteousness. Atkins’ characters are always nicely balanced. Quinn is a decent man who feels guilt about his less exemplary conduct. Hathcock, who doesn’t even try to be exemplary, is becoming one of my favorite Atkins characters because she’s smart, speaks her mind, and doesn’t need a bunch of people who think they can make American great again “trying to tell me how to run my business because they were born with a pecker between their bowed legs.”

The story races along, leading to eventual car chases and shootouts, but the action is secondary to drama that come from the characters’ interaction: the dynamic between Heath and his nephews; the friendship between Quinn and Kimbrough (a bond that is threatened by an act of violence); Hatchcock’s response to the criminals who seek firmer control of her operation. Ace Atkins always tells a good story, and he does it again in The Sinners, but his characters make the Quinn Colson series special.

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We All Love the Beautiful Girls by Joanne Proulx

First published in Canada in 2017; published by Grand Central Publishing on August 28, 2018

We All Love the Beautiful Girls is an intense examination of an eventful year in the life of a married couple and their teenage son. The first days of January introduce two couples in their 40s playing Pictionary:  Michael and Mia Slate, Peter and Helen Conrad. Michael and Mia have been married for two decades but still enjoy a vigorous (and rough) sex life, complete with a safe word that Mia never invokes. Michael and Peter are in business together. The Slates’ son, Finn, is finishing high school. The Conrads’ daughter, Frankie, has an ambiguous teenage friendship with Finn, who has a sex buddy relationship with an older girl named Jess when she isn’t with her rich boyfriend, who is the brother of Finn’s best friend. The novel is set in a prosperous community in Canada.

The drama begins in February, when Michael discovers that Peter has taken over ownership of their business by abusing Michael’s trust. The only thing that distracts Michael from the shock of discovering that betrayal is the realization that Finn is well past his curfew. In segments of the story told in believable language from Finn’s point of view, we follow Finn to a party where teenage drama and a combination of alcohol and drugs leave him upset and wasted. Finn nearly freezes to death, leading to the loss of his hand. Every word in this section of the novel conveys tension; it is completely absorbing.

Finn continues to narrate part the story from his first-person perspective while the rest of the story is told in the third person. The first-person focus on Finn lets the reader understand the family dynamic from a perspective that Finn’s self-centered father and self-pitying mother cannot provide. The story follows the characters through a number of confrontations and potentially life-altering events as they struggle to move beyond their respective crises.

To some extent, We All Love the Beautiful Girls is a relationship drama. Can the long and intense friendship between Mia and Helen survive Peter’s betrayal of Michael? Can either marriage survive? What about Finn’s friendship with Frankie and his romantic (from his perspective) relationship with Jess, who is probably engaged only because of her boyfriend’s wealth? Can Finn’s friendship with his best friend survive the fact that they betrayed each other with their careless actions?

Finn’s friends and their parents are breaking up for all the usual reasons, “like every other human being trying to survive love on this planet.” Michael hits baseballs and smokes weed with a kid who might be turning into a surrogate son, a stranger to whom he can open up, something he seems incapable of doing with Finn. For his part, Finn is convinced (with reason) that his parents don’t understand how he feels and aren’t doing enough to help him cope with his loss. Mia at least understands that having a child means loving him in difficult times — “no quitting” — but Finn’s parents struggle to find the right way to express their support.

While the novel examines characters in the context of familial and other relationships, it also probes deeply into the interiors of Michael, Mia, and Finn, each of whom must probe their own interiors, to find themselves, during the course of the novel. Michael is rooted in anger that he can’t express, that always bubbles just below the surface but threatens to manifest itself in senseless violence. Mia is feeling her age and, while flirting an old friend who represents Michael in his lawsuit against Peter, wonders if rejuvenating her sex life would rejuvenate the rest of her life. Michael and Mia can’t agree upon an approach to Finn’s disability, while Finn is understandably self-conscious, doing his best to ignore or conceal his missing hand while refusing to participate in therapy or to wear a prosthetic.

The last third of the novel brings each family member to a climactic moment, one that requires a choice to be made. The cliché is that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, but that isn’t always true. Finn wants to believe it, but the novel’s most powerful question is whether Finn and his parents will gain strength from or be destroyed by their losses. Some of their initial reactions to adversity might be shameful, but that only makes them human. Yet bad actions often have consequences that are more severe than intended, and people who make poor decisions, as well as their victims, must live with the resulting harm. The novel illustrates that the things we do to make ourselves feel powerful may actually weaken us by forcing us to recognize and live with the consequences of our destructive impulses.

We All Love the Beautiful Girls tells a smart and nuanced story, blending themes of love and karma with themes of pain and anger. The story balances depressing realities against hope that people can overcome their worst tendencies and can address the horrors that befall them. The story’s touching, poignant moments never feel contrived or melodramatic, although Finn’s meditations on love and Mia’s remonstrations with Michael and repeated comments about the difficulty of forgiveness and the importance of not quitting on your kids sometimes seem like a heavy-handed attempt to scream the novel’s lessons at readers who might not otherwise get it. Still, the strong characters, dramatic plot, and sharp prose easily overcome the novel’s few flaws.

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Night Hawks by Charles Johnson

Published by Scribner on May 1, 2018

Many of the stories in Night Hawks address questions of religion or philosophy. Toshiro Ogami, the “imitation priest” in “Kamadhatu: A Modern Sutra,” left the monastery because he did not have the political or family connections needed to rise in his religion. He translates English books into Japanese while rehabilitating an old, abandoned temple. An African American woman whose book he is translating finds him there. Quite inadvertently, she helps him overcome his self-doubt and find the harmonious unity that has always eluded him.

“Idols of the Cave” is told in the second person, putting the reader in the shoes of a Muslim American soldier who is being court martialed after tumbling into a cave in Afghanistan that had once been occupied by Buddhist monks. A treasure trove of ancient wisdom sparks a discussion between the Muslim soldier and a Christian major and an outcome that Aristotle might categorize as either comedy or tragedy — the court martialed soldier does not know which characterization would be more accurate.

“The Weave” describes the theft of wigs and extensions made from human hair from a salon by a former employee who believes she was unjustly fired for burning a customer. The hair comes from the heads of Buddhist women who are shorn in order to let go of all things cosmetic. The story, narrated by the thief’s boyfriend, is about letting go of the things that turned the former salon employee into a thief, including her pain and “the absurdities of color and caste.”

A student of Socrates, presumably Plato, narrates “The Cynic.” He laments the condition of postwar Athens, the prevalence of people who aspire to power rather than good, who learn from sophists how to disguise truth and perfection, and at the same time challenges the wisdom of Socrates, Aristotle, and particularly Diogenes, who forces Plato to consider the possibility that it is more important to be than to understand.

Other stories are closer to home, but are still informed by philosophy, particularly by Buddhist thought. A Seattle cab driver in “Occupying Arthur Whitfield,” ruminating about the unfair divide between the 1% and the rest of us, burglarizes the home of a wealthy man, only to learn that the differences between the rich and poor are often less significant that the suffering that all human beings share. A similar lesson is learned in “Welcome to Westwood,” when the narrator, irritated by the loud music played by a neighbor, learns to replace his irritation with compassion.

“The Night Belongs to Phoenix Jones” is a fictionalized account of the narrator’s encounter with a real-life black man in Seattle who gained some fame by dressing as a superhero and fighting (or, as the police viewed it, committing) crimes. The point of the story is that people have the power to invent themselves, perhaps the most important superpower of all.

Another real-life African American, the playwright August Wilson, is the subject of “Night Hawks,” a story written as a wide-ranging conversation that touches on the soul of the artist, the difference between tough exteriors and sensitive interiors, “the ambiguous state of black America,” and the tragedy of art that never reaches the audience that most needs to see it. Reality intrudes on intellectualism when the two men observe the night hawks who roost at an IHOP at 3 a.m., a juxtaposition that suggests the importance of art as a refuge from the violence and suffering that surrounds us all.

The remaining inhabitants of Earth in “4189” are immortal, but some of them use a forbidden drug that helps them imagine they might die, which is essential to appreciating a moment of time. But death, the only forbidden fruit, becomes the only taste that Shane and his lover crave. This story is about a society that subordinates individuality for the collective good. With its surprise ending, this is one of the best science fiction short stories I’ve read this year.

A song that contains a map to freedom for runaway slaves is at the center of “Follow the Drinking Gourd.” On the silly side, “Guinea Pig” describes an experiment in which a student briefly inhabits the mind of the researcher’s dog.

All of Charles Johnson’s stories are carefully polished gems. This collection demonstrates Johnson’s versatility, blending philosophy with the reality of modern street life. It is the product of a warm, generous, and thoughtful mind, the kind of enriching fiction that offers a chance to take a break and feel grateful for life and for artists who help us understand the possibilities it offers.

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Blood's a Rover by Harlan Ellison (Jason Davis, ed.)

Published by Subterranean Press on June 30, 2018

The introduction of Blood’s a Rover explains how Harlan Ellison’s brilliant novella, “A Boy and His Dog” (eventually filmed as a pretty good movie starring Don Johnson) was followed by some other stories in the same universe, and a treatment for a television show that NBC decided not to pick up, and an eventual full-length novel that Ellison started to write before suffering a stroke. This volume collects much of that material. The series is set in a post-apocalyptic world reduced to “radiation and rubble,” overseen by “the new masters of desolation: vicious roverpaks of parentless young boys … and their telepathic dogs.”

Placed in chronological order (as opposed to the order in which Ellison wrote them), the volume starts with “Eggsucker.” Blood, the dog who narrates the story, has been with Vic for about two years when the story starts. By the end, they’re thinking of splitting up, each blaming the other for an incident that will definitely require them to leave town. But they need each other even if Vic’s refusal to listen to reason (Blood being the reasonable one) sometimes impairs their partnership.

“A Boy and His Dog” sends Vic in search of a girl Blood found for him. After a harrowing experience together, the girl flees, and Vic pursues her over Blood’s objection. She lives in an underground version of Topeka, which Ellison uses to lampoon the notion that Midwestern Christian “values” make their adherents superior to people who are less judgmental and more open to experience (and I say that as someone who lived most of his life in the Midwest). The story is gripping from its inception until Vic makes his way out of Topeka with the girl, but the story saves its best moment for a gut-punch surprise in the very last sentence. One of the story’s themes involves the meaning of loyalty, and how true friendships are those that survive adversity (as opposed to plastic “use you and lose you” friendships). One of the story’s messages — a classic Ellison message — is, if you find security in living a dull and uneventful life, that’s your choice, but don’t force conformity to your social ideals on people who understand that freedom begins with the freedom to disagree. “A Boy and His Dog” might be Ellison’s best story. It’s certainly in the top three.

“Run, Spot, Run” takes place a few days after “A Boy and His Dog.” Vic is having some trouble coping with his actions, and Blood is having some trouble coping with Vic’s dreams. I don’t want to spoil the story so I’ll just say that it comes with the kind of gut-punch ending that was Ellison’s trademark.

“Blood’s a Rover” is the unproduced screenplay. The story brings back Vic and introduces a new character, a girl named Spike. Unsurprisingly, Vic doesn’t like Spike much, but Blood plays peacemaker because a girl and a boy and his dog have a better chance of survival than a boy and his dog — as Blood eventually proves. The screenplay doesn’t have the same bite as the original story, and certainly isn’t as compelling as Ellison’s best teleplays, but it would have been fun to watch.

Scattered throughout the volume are snippets of Blood’s wit and wisdom.

The volume was released shortly before Ellison’s death. It is something a true Ellison fan (in the sense of fanatic) will want to have. Other readers might be better served by picking up Ellison’s The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, an excellent story collection that includes “A Boy and His Dog.”

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Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett

Published by Crown on August 21, 2018

I read a fair amount of science fiction but not much fantasy. At the first whiff of dragons or magic, I usually find something else to read, but some writers (J.K. Rowling, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, J.R.R. Tolkien) wield their own kind of magic by turning fantasy into a reality that the reader readily accepts. Robert Jackson Bennett is one of those writers. Bennett is a master of building worlds that defy our current understanding of physics, while operating in a realm of perfectly ordered rules that seem entirely plausible, even if they aren’t the rules that govern our own universe. His careful world-building makes Bennett one of the best of the current fantasists — that, and his ability to create sympathetic and principled characters who wage epic battles against the kinds of evil that are recognizable in our own universe.

Foundryside shares some similarities with Bennett’s excellent Divine Cities trilogy — primarily in a setting that seems to be drawn from the Middle Ages — but the element of magic in Divine Cities was based on divinities (entities with godlike powers), while Foundryside (the first installment of the Founders trilogy) makes use of industrial magic, or magic that has been harnessed for industrial purposes, to the profit of the four merchant houses that control it.

Bennett sets Foundryside on an Earth-like world in which sigils do the work of technology. The scriving (drawing or inscribing) of sigils onto an object convinces the object to accept a different reality: wood believes it is stone, wheels turn because they believe they are on a downhill slope. Sigils were apparently created by hierophants of the Occidentals, a long-dead civilization thought by some to be equivalent of angels. The merchant houses manufacture the scrived devices, which pretty much belong to the affluent and powerful. The Tevanni empire is based on the power of scriving, which might be the equivalent of machine code in the world of technology.

It is against that background that we meet Sancio Grado, a thief whose particular talent is the ability to touch inanimate objects and to know them — where they’ve been, how they are structured. She can pick a lock or open a safe because locks speak to her. She can touch a hand to the floor and picture the entire building. The power comes with a heavy price, and her goal is to gain enough money to rid herself of the talent, which comes from sigils on a plate that is implanted in her skull.

The story begins with Sancio stealing a small box for a client. Succumbing to her curiosity, she opens the box and finds a key. They key has a consciousness, a snarky personality that it reveals by speaking to her telepathically. The key’s name is Clef.

The man in charge of security, who should have been protecting the stolen key, is Gregor Dandolo. Sancio is the novel’s protagonist, but Gregor is the novel’s selfless hero. Other important character are Gregor’s power-driver mother, a scriving genius for the Dandolo house named Orso Ignacio, his less self-centered assistant Berenice, a few freelance scrivers, and a true force of evil (whose identity the reader must discover). The plot is too complex to summarize, but it essentially involves the reader in Sancio’s perilous adventures as she tries to prevent something really bad from happening while coming to terms with her true nature.

Foundryside might be seen as a cautionary tale of the risks associated with artificial intelligence and transhuman existence. When people build a god (in the sense of a self-aware superior being), and then look for ways to make themselves in their god’s image, they might become as capricious as gods are reputed to be.

Or Foundryside might be seen as taking on the enduring themes that are common in Bennett’s work: the misuse of wealth and power; the importance of freedom and of freeing the subjugated; the internal battles that people wage to find and maintain their better selves. His main theme in Foundryside is: “Any given innovation that empowers the individual will inevitably come to empower the powerful much, much more.” Bennett always stuffs a good mixture of action and contemplation into his novels, and the good news is that there are two more to come. I didn’t love Foundryside quite as much as the Divine Cities trilogy, but I enjoyed every page.

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