Three Beach Reads
Quick reviews of novels I read on vacation.
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While you watched the Super Bowl, I studied the book. Literally, Liz and I were on vacation with my folks last week. That meant I got some real reading done. So, below, you’ll find short takes on the three books I read, in the order I read them!
Speaking of book reviews, I just had one book review go up at Sojourners — my take on Jason Kirk’s very fun bildungsroman about a youth group kid that I suspect will resonate with a lot of people who subscribe to this Substack. (Which, if you don’t, you should!)
I also announced that my Apocryfun podcast with Roxy has been promoted from a limited series to a monthly ongoing situation. I appreciate everyone’s support on that. It went over much better than I thought it would. More details to come soon.
White Cat, Black Dog: Kelly Link
Has A24 ever bothered to send a check Kelly Link’s way, or at least a thank you? The studio gets all the credit/criticism for nailing “elevated horror” but, by my lights, Link was the one who really cracked the code. Like The Lighthouse or The VVitch, her stories tend to be unsettling without being exactly scary. In this short story collection, we come across ghosts, vampires, werewolves and the devil herself, but their terrors strike less like a battle axe and more like a samurai sword. You don’t even notice Link has cut you until a few seconds later when you see your body a few feet away, blood spurting from the place where your head should be.
Let’s not call what Link does “elevated horror,” since that phrase understandably sends everyone’s eyes rolling. Her writing isn’t quite fantasy either. It often ends up characterized as “literary fiction” which, as far as I can tell, just means critics like it even if it doesn’t exactly sell great. (Kind of like being a “renowned character actor” means you’re good at what you do but not hot enough to be a true celeb). So I’m not gonna call it literary fiction. In this collection, the form her stories most take most often is some kind of dark fairy tale. Apparently, most of these are inspired by actual folklore, although “The White Cat’s Divorce” is the only one directly pulled from antiquity. The rest are more loosely inspired, in the “There Will Be Blood was inspired by Upton Sinclar’s Oil!” sense.
“Prince Hat Underground,” for example, has fairy tale trappings. Gary’s husband Prince Hat has gone missing and his quest to find him takes him across the earth and into the afterlife, where he meets talking snakes and demons and flying houses. But the writing itself strays far from any “Once upon a time…” type signifiers, and this yarn about a guy called “Prince Hat” who’s lost in hell is told with Franzenian seriousness. One second, Gary is reflecting on how little he knows his husband after thirty years of marriage. The next, a demon has flattened Gary thin as paper to hang him in the closet. This is Link’s gift: To keep readers off balance about what kind of story she’s telling without them ever feeling lost. “Prince Hat Underground” kept me unsteady to the very end (particularly its humdinger of a final paragraph) but I never doubted that Link knew where she was doing.
There’s one significant way Link’s stories don’t really follow the A24 “elevated horror” (ugh!) model, and that’s in how little the fantastical has to do with the metaphor. Every other scary movie in theaters has a ghost that represents grief or an alien that represents racism or something. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But in Link’s stories, nothing is ever so straightforward. “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear” is a short story about monsters and femininity, but it’s not about femininity as the monstrous. Link’s a street magician, distracting you with fine prose and unpredictable stories. You’re busy watching the cup. You don’t even realize she’s slipped the Ace of Hearts into your pocket.
The final story is the only one that does kick off with a “Once upon a time,” but it zigs instead of zags: “Once upon a time there was a graduate student in the summer of his fourth year who had not finished his dissertation.” This story is called “Skinder’s Veil” and it’s my favorite of the collection, a story that feints at ascension before it reveals its true direction: full circle. It is stellar work without a Stephen Kingy jumpscare but left me every bit as unnerved as if I’d just seen my reflection wink at me in the mirror.
Come Closer: Sara Gran
Kelly Link’s metaphors aren’t coupled to the fantastic. Instead, the fantastic and metaphor orbit each other like drunken moons. But Sara Gran’s Come Closer is a different kind of novel. It’s definitely a horror story, and the horror stuff is definitely About Something.
Amanda is a young architect with a nice husband named Ed and a cool apartment. Everything’s pretty good except for a weird scratching in the house she can’t quite identify and a memo to her boss that gets mysteriously replaced with a series of expletives. As inexplicable events start to pile up, Amanda starts to get the inkling that she’s been possessed by a demon, and that demon has some very different plans for Amanda’s life. Being married to Ed doesn’t factor into those plans.
Marriages fall apart. The center cannot hold. You get in some tiny, inconsequential spat with the person you love, open your mouth, and out comes the meanest series of words you’ve ever said to another person. Later, after the dust settles, you try to apologize but just can’t find it within yourself to say what’s so obviously true: that you’re sorry for what you said, you didn’t mean it, and you love them. So the apologies are left unsaid and the distance between you grows — imperceptibly. At first.
These can be pretty common phenomena in any long term relationship but in Come Closer, they’re the work of the devil on your shoulder. Amanda doesn’t say sorry because she literally can’t. She lashes out at Ed because her thoughts and actions aren’t her own. And as this entity takes greater control over her life, her actions get more uncharacteristic, more deranged, more inhuman.
I’m a big fan of Gran’s Claire DeWitt mystery novels, but had never read the spooky stuff she cut her teeth on. Based on Come Closer, I can see why she’s found success writing scary stories. The writing isn’t just propulsive; it is pure jet fuel. Amanda’s mounting dread and the slowly descending veil of dread reminded me of Rosemary’s Baby, the mother (literally! kinda.) of all “girl realizes her life is being taken over by the devil” stories.
But in Rosemary’s Baby, the metaphor is a little woolier, a little harder to pin down. Kinda like Link’s stories. But while Come Closer delivers as a cracking good read, the obviousness of the metaphor distances rather than clarifies her subject. It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to blame our cruelest words, wandering eyes and wickedest thoughts on the devil? Most of us do not have the luxury of demon possession.
Alice Sadie Celine: Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
“Feminist sex romp” isn’t really my usual stock-in-trade but I ran out of books and this one came highly recommended by a friend (whose own novel, Social Engagement, you can and should buy now. It’s on sale!).
Alice and Sadie have been best friends since middle school. Now easing into their post-college 20s, their lives are threatening to take shape. Alice is hot and a little directionless, half-heartedly pursuing an LA acting career. Sadie has more structure, but feels undermined by her mom Celine, a famous feminist academic at Berkley. The novel pivots between the POV of these three women as an unlikely, steamy fling blooms between Celine and Alice behind Sadie’s back.
Blakley-Cartwright does a great job of sketching out her characters’ interior lives and the different ways they blossom in heat. In fact, we spend so much time in these ladies’ heads that their exterior worlds, the other people in their lives and the things they actually say and do are pretty hazy. I’m told that Gen Z doesn’t think sex moves a narrative forward but in Alice Sadie Celine, it’s about the only thing that can.
There’s a lot of time spent rolling eyes at contemporary gender studies, and Blakley-Cartwright’s gentle bullying clearly comes from a place of knowing affection. Celine is a bundle of funny contradictions — a woman who understands a lot about humanity and very little about people, who’s changed the national conversation about sexuality but seems caught off guard by her own at every turn. I don’t have much personal experience in the mother-daughter dynamic, but Sadie and Celine’s relationship certainly rang true to the frenemy energy it seems like many women end up having with their own moms. I personally related a little more to Alice. Not necessarily in being so beautiful that nobody can keep their pants on around me, but in what I will reluctantly call her “Enneagram Nine-ness.” In an acting class exercise, Alice exhumes a feeling “that she was blank and passive, bare and undeveloped,” dissenters her sense that she is “a shadow person, a raw hunk of clay waiting to be shaped” and resurrects the notion that she is a “perfectly acceptable outline who required another person — whoever she happened to come across — to add the substance.” This was basically my self-assessment when I was Alice’s age.
It’s hard to express my frustrations with the book without veering into spoiler territory, but I do wish Blakely-Cartwright had been a little more daring with its hearty brew of potential conflicts. She spends so much time sharpening her swords that I’d hoped for more when it’s time for the characters to actually cross them. Maybe Blakley-Cartwright relates to Alice too. When Alice’s acting coach tells her to “raise the stakes,” Alice balks. “This Alice was not sure she could do. She had never, as a rule, sought out suffering, never been attracted to it.” Girl, same. But then, who is?