Fiend by Peter Stenson

Published by Crown on July 9, 2013

Although I'm convinced the world doesn't need another zombie novel, Fiend twists the genre in an interesting way. The title could refer to zombies, or it could refer to the dope fiends who are the novel's protagonists. They were metaphorical zombies, spending their lives "walking that thin line between suicide and preservation," even before a plague killed everyone and began reanimating corpses. Fiend is about living as a drug addict more than it's about zombies, but it may be necessary these days to add zombies to a novel in order to get it published. In any event, zombies are always good for a laugh, and the early chapters of Fiend offer some very funny moments. At the same time, an addict's misery isn't funny at all. Peter Stenson makes it feel raw and real. The metaphor, addict as zombie, is apt and effective.

Two meth addicts, Chase Daniels and Typewriter, think they're hallucinating when they see a little girl disemboweling a Rottweiler. They flee after a violent encounter with the girl. The world seems to have emptied itself during the 168 hours they were busy getting high. They eventually realize that only meth addicts survived the plague. Fortunately for Chase, his ex-girlfriend is still an addict and still alive. Chase is determined to find her, but his more immediate mission is to find more meth.

Chase is the novel's narrator. Meth is "the one and only constant" in his life, his reason for living. Part of the novel is Chase's eloquent love letter to drugs. "Yeah, they demand a lot of attention and effort, but their love is legendary, their compassion endless." His description of addition, his need to get high and his revelry in the result, the pain he caused his family, the devastation of his life, is compelling and convincing. His anguish in some of the novel's more violent moments is touching.

I love Chase's descriptions of his friends, particularly Albino, who lives in the woods and cooks meth. Heavily armed and seriously paranoid, Albino has the best chance of surviving because "he's that guy, the one who thought people were coming to slit his throat since he was old enough to crawl." Chase watches his ex-girlfriend make a speedball and thinks about "all the things that caused her to use her skills and deft hands for the mixing of drugs instead of transplanting kidneys."

Maybe drugs will kill you, but in Fiend not having drugs will kill you, and that's what sets Fiend apart from other zombie novels and from other "my life as an addict" novels. Can meth addicts -- "outcasts, the people America wants to pretend aren't walking the street" -- create utopia, as Chase imagines in his highest moments? Can the addicted do anything to advance the survival of humanity? Maybe they're just another kind of zombie, but they need to try, because "a junkie without hope is as good as dead."

Stenson writes with real power. Some scenes are brutal, and not just those involving zombie violence. The strongest scenes involve characters trying to deal with each other, to cope with their own insecurities and weaknesses. Fiend asks whether zombies are any more dangerous than frightened, living humans, but zombies are really just a vehicle that lets Stenson tell a larger story: the story of what it means to be a flawed human being, as are we all. Because of its creative use of zombies to tell a story that isn't about zombies, I consider Fiend to be one of the best zombie novels I've encountered.

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The Right Side of Wrong by Reavis Z. Wortham

Published by Poisoned Pen Press on July 2, 2013

Cody Parker is driving through one of the few snowstorms he's seen in his life when a shotgun blast, combined with an icy road, sends him skidding over a cliff. The shooting and the crash are bad enough, but when Cody is about to be eaten by a pack of wild dogs, he knows he's having a bad day. Cantankerous Constable Ned Parker is determined to learn who ambushed Cody. The motive for the attempted murder turns out to be implausibly weak.

As is typical of Reavis Wortham's Red River novels, the most enjoyable chapters are narrated by young Top, whose conversations with his foul-mouthed cousin Pepper always make me laugh. They're the first to meet their new neighbor, an eighty-plus cowboy named Tom Bell. He's mysterious about his past, so you know Top and Pepper are going to learn something about him that they aren't supposed to know.

The other series regular, Deputy John Washington, is helping the Parkers bust up a still when they discover two buried bodies. The body count eventually rises. Washington and the Parkers, with an assist from the elderly Bell, make it their mission to end the killing spree. The story drags a bit until the final third of the novel, when the action moves to Mexico with gun battles galore. Still, compared to the first two novels, our heroes barely break a sweat in this one.

The Red River mysteries always create a strong sense of time (1966) and place (Lamar County, Texas). Dialog rings true, as do Wortham's scenes of racial tension in an area where whites, blacks, Mexicans, and Native Americans coexisted without mixing. Times are changing in Lamar County -- burlap sacks of "marywana" are showing up -- and Ned is no more pleased about that than he is about the world's dwindling supply of old fashioned manners. While all of that gives the book a realistic atmosphere, Wortham's reliance on homey bromides and fishing stories to fill the middle pages is starting to feel overdone.

In the first Red River mystery, Wortham blended the traditional elements of a crime novel with the chilling elements of a horror story to create a small masterpiece. He followed that formula with less success in the second novel, but still produced a story that made tension palpable. In The Right Side of Wrong, Wortham opted for a more traditional thriller/mystery plot. I enjoyed the result, but this novel doesn't generate the suspense that Wortham created in the first two. Of the three Red Rivers mysteries that have appeared to date, The Right Side of Wrong is the least successful.

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Lotería by Mario Alberto Zombrano

Published by HarperCollins on July 2, 2013

Luz Maria Castillo is eleven. She's been in a government facility for a few days with only a deck of Lotería cards from home. Her sister Estrella is hospitalized, in critical condition. Luz feels responsible for Estrella's injury but its cause remains a mystery through most of the novel. Luz refuses to speak. Her aunt Tencha wants her to talk to the counselors, to open up, because that's the only way to get her father out of jail. Luz' counselor interprets Luz' silence as a reaction to trauma. Instead of speaking, Luz follows Tencha's suggestion to write down her thoughts. She writes as if she were speaking to God.

In her journal, Luz tells a series of stories about her life, memories of her past, each inspired by the picture on a Lotería card. Whether all of the stories are literally true is unclear; Luz reminds us that we each tell our own stories in our own ways. Some of the stories are cute but seemingly pointless (that's to be expected when random memories are triggered by pictures) while others bring Luz' life into sharper focus. To an extent, her story is typical of an immigrant family transplanted from Mexico to the United States, struggling to assimilate and coping with discrimination. On a more personal level, Luz describes parents whose domestic life transitioned from romance to violence, a father whose rough discipline leaves its mark on both of his daughters and a mother who (in Luz' view) abandoned them. Mario Zombrano makes it possible to understand and even empathize with Luz' father while, in the same moment, condemning his abusive behavior.

It's also easy to understand Luz, a girl who doesn't understand herself. She questions her role in her family as well as her identity: Is she Mexican or American? Is she good or bad? Does she have religious faith or has that, like so much else in her life, been lost? Luz is young but she will clearly spend many years trying to define herself. While I wasn't always convinced that the narrative voice was that of an eleven-year-old, I was usually too absorbed by the story to wonder at the maturity of its narrator.

Luz' stories come together in a powerful but touching narrative as she weaves her way, card by card, to Estrella's injury and her father's incarceration. While the mood is somber, Zombrano occasionally lightens the tone with playful sentences. This is one of my favorites: "I took guitar lessons for a year but quit because my teacher smelled like tomato soup."

There is a certain amount of untranslated Spanish in the book. Some readers won't like that. If you don't speak the language, you might want to have your laptop open to a translation website while you read. The extra effort is rewarding.

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Long Lankin by John Banville

First published in 1970; revised edition published by Vintage on July 2, 2013

Originally published in a slightly different form in 1970, the current incarnation of John Banville's first book collects nine of Banville's short stories. Banville's skillfully crafted sentences are pregnant with meaning, his language is rich and evocative, but even more can be mined from the silences between sentences, the words left unspoken. In "Wild Wood," for instance, three boys in the woods talk about a woman who was murdered. The meat of this story is left untold; Banville leaves it to the reader to fill in the empty space. Similarly, most of the action in "Summer Voices" revolves around an old (possibly crazed) man who shows the body of a drowning victim to two children, a brother and sister. The real story, however, involves the relationship between the siblings, an innocence lost before their encounter with the dead body.

Nature, and particularly the sea (an instrument of death in "Summer Voices"), are recurring symbols in the stories. The sea surrounds the protagonist in "Island," a writer who, full of ambition when he leaves Ireland, grows stagnant while living on a Greek island. Or so says the woman he's with, the woman he's about to leave because she's too easy to understand.

Religion and death, estranged families and madness are recurring themes. "A Death" refers both to a death in the family and to the death of love. An old man at a funeral, ranting of evil and desolation and godless times, sparks the renewal of a discussion a couple must have had countless times before. Peter and Muriel, the lead characters in "Lovers," visit Peter's father before they leave town to start a new life -- a man who, having seen everything in his life slip away, is eager to meet his own death, but only after making sure that his son's hopes will also die. In "De Rerum Natura," a demented old man, bald with bandy legs like "an ancient mischievous baby," is attuned to the life that surrounds him, including the pigeons in the bedroom and the rats in the kitchen, but cannot make the same connection with the son who shudders at his "malevolent, insidious gaiety." But how much of the father lurks in the son?

One of the most thought-provoking stories (again, because of how much is left unsaid) is "Nightwind." A failed writer hosts a party where a murderer lurks on the premises and a friend makes a pass at his wife. The writer talks about the unhappy citizens of "the new Ireland" who are "trying to find what it is we've lost" but it is the writer's own losses -- of pride and ambition and his child -- that dominate his thoughts.

A couple of stories, I must confess, I didn't fully appreciate: "The Visit" concerns a girl whose mother died in childbirth. She waits to meet the father she's never seen, but her attitude changes after she talks with a strange little man on a bicycle. Julie, a student in "Sanctuary," discusses her fears of moving away as she prepares to leave her professor, Helen, with whom she has been spending the summer. Julie's fears are compounded by a visit from a black-clad stranger who seems to know Helen and who has come to say goodbye. Even the stories about which I was less enthused, however, provide early evidence of Banville's uncommon ability to conceal layers of meaning within simple stories.

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House Odds by Michael Lawson

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on June 25, 2013

John Mahoney is the minority leader in the House of Representatives. His daughter Molly has been arrested for insider trading. Mahoney turns to his fixer, Joe DeMarco, to get Molly out of trouble. Is Molly guilty? Is someone trying to frame her to put the squeeze on her father? The fast-moving plot involves a lobbyist, a shady investment manager, a crooked casino manager and the mob boss who employs him, a former NFL linebacker, assorted thugs, devious politicians, a hyper-aggressive SEC lawyer, and an unsolved murder that occurred while some of the characters were still in their college years.

Politics is a dirty game and Mahoney is a dirty player, which means his go-to-guy DeMarco isn't your usual squeaky clean thriller hero. In the Washington of House Odds, bribery and blackmail are business-as-usual. Apart from the creative wrongdoing that keeps the plot moving, Mike Lawson peppers the story with the everyday shenanigans of congressional politics: the tricks pulled by the out-of-power political party to become the in-power political party; the use defense appropriations bills to fund projects that have nothing to do with defense. Lawson has fun with the nonsensical babbling that substitutes for political discourse in the House of Representatives, as well as the scuzzy nature of politically motivated federal prosecutions. If you're cynical about politicians (and who isn't?), this is the book to read.

Fortunately, Lawson writes with a light touch, avoiding the overbearing attitudes that too often mar novels set within a political milieu. Politicians of both parties are dirty in House Odds; this isn't a partisan rant. The scheme that Mahoney cooks up and that DeMarco executes to get Molly out of trouble would make Machiavelli proud. Some of the novel's events are just a little too convenient for the real world, but given the novel's tone, I was willing to accept the unlikely for the sake of amusement. House Odds is the sort of novel you can read while giving your brain a rest, the literary equivalent of junk food: not particularly nutritious, but satisfying.

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