You're an Animal by Jardine Libaire

 

Published by Hogarth on August 8, 2023

You’re an Animal is a domestic drama about an unconventional, makeshift family of misfits who develop a bond as they struggle to live off the grid in Texas. Ray misses his affiliation with a motorcycle gang. Staci is still coupled with Ray but feels “vaguely unwelcome in the world” as she recalls the self-help lessons she learned in addiction recovery programs. Coral doesn’t speak — she scarcely acknowledges that the others exist — but Ernie can’t stop fantasizing about making a white-picket-fence life with her.

The novel begins with a group of outlaws living on a compound in Oklahoma. Tim is married and has a new baby. Tim’s uncle owns the property but is in prison for gun crimes, making Tim the de facto property manager. He also manages the meth operation. Tim is thinking about abandoning the compound and making a new life.

Assorted tweakers and bikers come and go. Coral was dropped off by Tim’s half-sister after Coral’s grandmother died. She is better than Tim's wife at nursing his baby. Ernie is the meth cook until a new arrival with a better recipe takes over. Several people make meth deliveries but Tim only trusts Ernie to pick up cash.

The communal relationship works (more or less) until a fire consumes the meth lab. Ray and Staci are shopping for supplies with Ernie and Coral when the fire breaks out. Ernie has also collected money for meth sales, so they have a supply of cash. On their way back, they see smoke coming from the commune. They also see police cars. Deciding that their best option is to disappear, they eventually rent an isolated home in Texas, where they use their skills to start a new meth lab. They learn that Tim survived the fire, but he’s essentially abandoned them so they decide they won’t return his money. Ray is concerned that Tim will find them, creating tension whenever a car parks near their property.

Most of the novel’s drama comes from the domestic relationships formed by the four characters who make a home in Texas. They plant a garden. They hang out. At some point they are joined by a cheetah who is used to living with humans, so the reader will inevitably wonder whether any of the characters will be clawed to death. While the plot as I describe it sounds bizarre and insubstantial, the story is absorbing.

Ray and Staci have relationship issues, aggravated both by Ray’s unfaithful actions while they still living at the compound and by Staci’s growth, her realization that her current life of sobriety isn’t working any better than her earlier life of addiction. Ernie either has a fear of intimacy or a fear of being rejected. Perhaps those fears are two sides of the same coin. Ernie is paralyzed when he considers how to express his feelings about Coral. The fact that Coral doesn’t speak, rarely makes eye contact, and spends most of her time wandering alone in the woods doesn’t make a meaningful connection easy. Well, except for the cheetah, who seems to have a better understanding of Coral than her human friends.

In a refreshing change from most modern relationship dramas, the story offers closure. We know the fate of each character. We know whether couples will get together, stay together, or break apart, at least for the present. We even know what happens to the cheetah. The final scenes treat the reader to a significant surprise without resorting to melodrama. Three cheers for throwback storytelling that doesn’t leave all the characters in the wind, delegating to the reader the task of writing an ending to the plot.

Near the novel’s conclusion, Ernie has an epiphany that might provide valuable insight for others, even if they aren’t meth dealers. He regrets “always wanting what he didn’t have. Life was a series of situations, you find the good in each one, that’s all you can do, because none will last.” Other characters have their own moments of awareness. As domestic dramas go, this one is more interesting than most, not so much because of the plot (which is just a vehicle for the characters to grow or change), but because the characters are so far outside the mainstream that they represent a more primal version of humanity than most of us are used to seeing.

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The Details by Ia Genberg

First published in Sweden in 2022; published in translation by HarperVia on August 8, 2023

The Details is about “lives within our lives,” our “smaller lives with people who come and go.” The novel’s narrator, a woman who is aging into her senior years, recalls fragments of her past, memories triggered by fever, “people filing in and out of my face in no particular order.”

The narrator reminds me of the recurring “Sprockets” sketch on SNL. Mike Meyers played Dieter, a pretentious, humorless, self-absorbed German art/film critic who hosted a talk show. Dieter had little interest in his guests, whose responses to his questions typically made him feel “emotionally obliterated.” The protagonist in The Details suffered from some of the same self-inflicted melancholy when she was younger. In the grip of fever, however, her sense of self recedes and she embraces joy sparked by random memories of having lived. Or so she claims.

To be fair, the narrator asserts that even her younger self, always observational, was capable of “letting myself go and directing my attention outward,” where she found “a sharper sense of being alive” in “the alert gaze of another.” My impression is that her outward-directed attention is largely directed at mirrors or their human equivalent — people who reflected her attitudes and desires.

Like Dieter, the novel’s narrator is a brooding intellectual. She values deep conversations and rejects everything that is too shallow or superficial to meet her standard of worthy interaction. She condemns MTV and television shows in general (“To get absorbed by a show, to let yourself be swept up, would have been a sign of mental lassitude”). She has the same attitude about magazines, political debates, and conversations at family gatherings, viewing them only as “incidences of current trends, available to interpret for a deeper understanding of the world.” She doesn’t like people who tell anecdotes (“a form of chronic illness that attaches to some people”). Like Dieter, she is a humorless critic of her surroundings.

The narrator has fevered memories of four people who played important roles in her life. She first shares her memories of Johanna, a woman of velocity whose enthusiasm contrasted with the narrator’s inertia. She remembers Johanna’s kindness and kisses, their general agreement about literature (both are fans of Paul Auster), and Johanna’s encouraging remarks about the narrator’s writing (in contrast to lovers who didn’t want to read her writing, or those who wanted to read her writing but “didn’t get it, or who got it but had nothing intelligent to say.” The narrator’s relationship with Johanna made her feel safe because “she had started on me and wouldn’t give up.” The narrator is stunned by Johanna’s “sudden and brutal departure.” Perhaps the narrator believes Johanna gave up, but my sense that is that the narrator gave up on moving toward the future and Johanna grew frustrated with the narrator’s inability to set or achieve goals.

Before Johanna, the narrator shared an apartment with Niki. While Niki was messy, moody, and impulsive, she was also brilliant and funny. Their relationship was intense until Niki left for Galway with a guy named James. The narrator accepted Niki’s father’s request to track her down when Niki’s mother became ill. The quest proves Niki to be capricious and emotionally unstable, although it isn’t clear that the narrator sees her that way.

The third memory is of Alejandro, who arrived at the turn of the Millenium. Alejandro danced on stage for a jazz band. The narrator has deeply meaningful sex with Alejandro, sex that permits her “authenticity in the midst of this act, without a single thought in my head, without imitation, to be permitted to wreck my life once more.” What this means, beyond the narrator’s impression that they made a connection, is unclear to me. In any event, he became the lover against whom all other were measured. When Alejandro disappeared from her life under ambiguous circumstances, he left ambiguity in his wake. There seems to be a pattern of lovers suddenly leaving the narrator, but the narrator never asks herself whether she might be responsible for those abrupt departures.

Birgitte, a woman adrift who was shaped by her childhood trauma, is the fourth memory. Her shallowness, conflict avoidance, and “absence of personality” would not seem to make her memorable, but Birgitte is the narrator’s mother. She gave birth to the narrator during a “psychotic break.” For a time, she was into psychology and astrology and crystals and tarot cards, apparently giving them all equal weight. She was (according to the narrator) a “seeker,” a derisive term that implies “a pose, a new way of being superficial.” Divorced from Birgitte for fifteen years, her father cried when she died, wept for “a life lived but also spilled.” The narrator has little to say about Birgitte. Perhaps the narrator is choosing not to remember anything positive about her mother, the things that made her father mourn Birgitte’s passing.

Readers who are turned off by paragraphs that run for two or three pages should look for a different book. The density of the text requires some concentration. Some readers don’t want to make the effort. I don’t fault those readers, but I don’t fault writers for not catering to readers who prefer short chapters and plentiful paragraph breaks so they know where to place a bookmark.

I am probably similar to those lovers of the narrator who have “nothing intelligent to say” about the author’s writing. The narrator is something of a Debbie Downer. Not to stereotype, but whenever I pick up a work of Scandinavian literature, I prepare myself for an aftermath of depression. The Details fits that pattern.

I appreciate the details that accumulate in the pages of The Details. I appreciate the narrator’s ability to discuss failed relationships without obvious bitterness. I appreciate the concept of people who play important roles in our lives before they drift away or choose to disappear.

The novel is marketed as a book that demonstrates how connections shape a life, but I don’t see much shaping. How did the significant people in her life affect the narrator? I’m not sure. Her take seems to be: They were here, they’re gone, life moves on. I get that. I expect that we are more inclined to think about people who come and go as we gain age and experience. I suppose there is value in illustrating the transitory nature of most relationships, but I came away from The Details with an equal mix of admiration and indifference.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Deadlock by James Byrne

Published by Minotaur Books on August 8, 2023

It would be difficult to find a more likeable tough guy protagonist than Desmond Limerick. He isn’t a pacifist, but he prefers to avoid violence when he can. Unfortunately, he has a tendency to make enemies who want to kill him. He might kill to solve a problem on occasion, but he has a moral compass that limits his use of violence for retribution. He can be creatively nonviolent when people need to be punished. There are nevertheless times when he concludes that threats must be eliminated to protect people he cares about.

Deadlock is the second novel about Dez, a former soldier from the UK who attained the legendary status of gatekeeper. He opens locks and gates and holds them open until the mission is complete. He’s retired from a military life and isn’t seeking similar work in the private sector. Rather, he’s moved to the US where he plays his guitar and enjoys his life. At least, that’s the goal.

A young woman named Raziah, whose band Dez occasionally joins, asks him to help her sister, who has been facing threats in Portland. Laleh was writing a profile of a forensic auditor who was looking into Clockwork, a Portland tech firm that does all sorts of good around the world. After the auditor died, someone apparently worried that Laleh learned something from him that she shouldn’t know.

Dez goes to Portland, thwarts thugs who plan to kill Laleh in her hospital room, then makes a plan to keep the sisters safe. In the long term, that plan requires him to learn why Laleh has been targeted so he can eliminate the threat. As he unlocks various doors, he learns that Clockwork has been infiltrated by criminals who have a clever scheme to gain and shelter ill-gotten wealth. I won’t discuss the details but I will say that, while some of their criminal tactics are familiar, the ultimate criminal goal it’s a surprisingly original. Kudos to James Byrne for coming up with something new.

Dez endeavors not only to keep the sisters alive, but to help the older sister understand her younger sibling. He makes a new female friend (a Russian bar owner named Veronika) and patches up a relationship with a British SIS agent whose career he might have destroyed during his gatekeeping days. The novel’s plot and subplots arrive at tidy resolutions. Is there anyone who doesn’t enjoy a well-crafted thriller?

Dez’s attitude, reflected in snappy and very funny dialog, contributes to his likeability. He has other traits that make him a terrific thriller hero, including humility, a sense of fair play, and fierce loyalty to his friends. Laleh is astonished that Dez hasn’t tried to sleep with Raziah, but she’s only nineteen and Dez sees her as a talented singer/songwriter, not as a conquest. He isn’t sanctimonious about right and wrong — he’s able to make flexible moral choices — but he always does the right thing, even when that he does morally questionable things for the right reason. There’s enough nuance in his character to make him interesting and enough integrity to make him admirable.

Byrne keeps the story in constant motion. Action scenes are more inventive than readers encounter in standard thrillers. Dez is often the target of shootings but he tends not to use guns. He prefers to settle disputes by outthinking his enemy but he has no problem using his fists. One powerful punch is typically all he needs to subdue a foe. He improvises weapons as needed to win battles. Dez's ability to think and plan sets him apart from action heroes whose idea of thinking is to decide which gun to use next.

Deadlock is every bit as good as The Gatekeeper. At a time when most tough guy series have gone stale, it’s good for action novel fans to have a new thriller hero keeping the genre fresh.

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Walk the Darkness Down by Daniel Magariel

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on August 1, 2023

In the heat of an argument, Les hates Marlene, knowing that he will wake up the next day and “see his wife through the wound and rot of loss.” Their marriage has had many reasons to fall apart, not the least Les’ insistence on working on a trawler as a scalloper, a job that keeps him away from home weeks at a time during the summer. Yet they remain together.

Understandably, Les and Marlene aren’t dealing well with the loss of their daughter. Most marriages are torn apart when a child dies. Walk the Darkness Down suggests why that might happen and how it might not.

On the trawler, Les is self-loathing. He enjoys the pain when he opens scallops by digging the sharp shells into his stomach. When Marlene interacts with his crew members at a party, she can’t understand why Les prefers their company to hers. Working on the trawler after the party, Les can’t understand why he became the kind of man who would frighten his godson, the child of another crew member.

When Les is at sea, Marlene brings hookers home to her apartment, cleans them up, feeds them, and lets them enjoy an evening of comfort. The hookers are managed (pimped) by a man named Bill. He knows about Marlene but she pays for their time so he’s content, provided the hookers return to him.

Marlene thinks she uses the hooker visits as a distraction from pain. Perhaps she is trying to replace the daughter she lost. Perhaps she wants someone to rely on her. Perhaps she wants to save someone because she couldn't save her daughter. At the novel’s end, Daniel Magariel violates the rule against showing rather than telling by explaining Marlene’s true motivation, or at least the one she has settled upon to explain her unlikely behavior.

The novel’s first turning point arrives when Marlene realizes that a hooker named Josie needs her help and that helping Josie will be impossible unless she changes her own life. Only later does Marlene learn that Les has knowledge of Josie that Marlene has not discovered. Will helping Josie save or destroy their marriage?

Despite its concluding sense of optimism, Walk the Darkness Down is grittier than most domestic dramas. The death of their child has isolated Marlene and Les from each other, forcing them into their separate realities when they need each other the most. “You’ve got to abide with your darkness” a character learned from her grandmother. Les and Marlene are living in dark places and struggling to fight their way toward a dim light. Marlene is “a fitful puppet of her own petulance.” Les takes out his anger on members of his crew. The death of their child caused not just heartache but unwarranted blame and resentment. Why and how the daughter died — why Les and Marlene refuse to drive on the driveway of their former home — is tragic.

Magariel’s detailed descriptions of scalloping on a trawler add interest and realism to the story as well as tension when a storm threatens. The crew members are like a second family to Les, maybe a more important family than the one he has. They contribute family drama of their own to the plot. That drama grows with each trip to the sea, eventually giving the story its most vivid moments.

Magariel’s prose is precise and expressive, but there are times when his dialog doesn’t ring true. Characters who deliver significant monologs all speak in the same voice. People in Bill’s line of work can be surprisingly lyrical, but Bill’s prose doesn’t capture the language of the street. Les gives a lengthy, rather eloquent speech to his wife about his feelings as their marriage nears a breaking point. Nothing in the description of Les prior to that point suggests he’s capable of expressing those thoughts with such nuance, even if he suddenly learned to gain insight from introspection. An interior monologue near the end also gives the impression of having been written for Les rather than being the product of his own mind.

Still, it’s nice to imagine that a brooding man might have an epiphany that opens him to insightful and healing discussions. The story’s grittiness complements its softness. Les and Marlene each recognize their harshness. They want to be more caring toward each other, if only they can figure out how. Walk the Darkness Down has more than a few genuinely moving moments. The ending suggests that marriages on their way to destruction might be saved. Les and Marlene debate whether love is enough. That’s an unanswerable question, but the novel confronts it without flinching. Readers might debate whether the story and its ending are credible, but any doubts about the plot are easily overcome by the depth of Magariel’s troubled characters and his robust prose.

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Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden

Published by Tor.com on July 25, 2023

Scorn’s big brother is a weather station mounted to the top of a tall building. Scorn’s mother is human, a bigwig behind CometCorp, one of the corporations that compete for supremacy as the passive world government does nothing to stop them. Scorn is not his mother’s biological offspring; like his brother, he is an AI that she created. The construct of family is changing; Emergent Properties suggests an additional way in which it might change in the near future.

Scorn has chosen to be a journalist. As the story begins, he realizes he must have come upon a big scoop. He doesn’t know what it was, as the recent past is missing from his memory. He evidently didn’t get a chance to make a backup before his chassis was destroyed. The death of his body might have been accidental but Scorn doubts it.

Note: I’m using the male pronoun to make this review easier to read. Scorn has no gender because what use does an AI have for gender? His preferred pronoun is ze. His becomes zir and so on. Gender-neutral or gender-inclusive pronouns have become common in science fiction, to the dismay of the pronoun police. It makes sense to me that a genderless AI would have a genderless pronoun. It doesn’t take long to get used to it, although the pronoun will likely trigger the state of outrage in which some sf fans (among others) prefer to live.

The journalistic investigation Scorn was conducting apparently took him to the moon, where his chassis came to an end. He plans to return but he’s running out of robots to carry his consciousness. Asking his mother to help is out of the question. His little spider robot is hard to kill but it doesn’t function well in the human world, where hands and height are useful.

Scorn dodges creative attempts to assassinate him as he makes his way back to the moon in search of a story that someone wants to keep him from telling. The nature of that story is the mystery that underlies the plot.

Emergent Properties combines action and politics in a future that will be recognizable to science fiction fans. Corporations are essentially nation states. Corporations have power while what passes for government has none.

The details of robotic communication and AI interaction with humans are familiar but entertaining. The reveal — the truth that Scorn uncovers — might be a bit farfetched, but farfetched is easily forgiven in science fiction. The present is crazy; why shouldn’t the future be crazier?

Scorn is undergoing a sort of evolution. His software allows him to simulate emotional responses, but authentic emotions might be emerging on their own. Although not a focal point, the story touches upon freedom and autonomy for sentient beings.

The inclusion of AIs in a family and their impact upon the family dynamic is more original than the novel's other sf concepts. The novel’s other animating ideas have been explored repeatedly, but a lack of freshness does not impair the reader’s ability to enjoy the thriller that leaks out from the background facts.

While this novella-length work is fun, it might have been better as a longer book set in a more detailed, carefully-imagined future. Emergent Properties reads like the start of a work that needs greater depth and an original spin on its borrowed ideas. At the same time, if Aimee Ogden decides to write more stories about her adventurous AI journalist, I would welcome them.

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