Books I'm Reading

very Pale Fire in style and metafictive elements, with the opening being a straight riff on the opening of Lolita, this was absolutely a horror writer's modern take on Nabokov, with a few dashes of House of Leaves (minus the house?). prose was excellently stylized to Nabokov, I even saw a few of the words I learned thru him back in the day. the only other author I had to keep a running list of words to look up at later times. I dunno, it's been like over a decade since I read Pale Fire, but I still heard Kinbote in Art Barbara.

I also went into this not expecting a horror, which I think helped soften the blow of what it actually was, and knowing it was something else, well, I appreciate what it actually turned out to be.

rly wanted to love this one, because I loved Black River Orchard and Chuck is cool. but ultimately this book reminds me of that meme of the horse, half of it drawn beautifully and the other half a stick figure. I realized in the last few years that horror endings usually suck and I'm OK with that but this started going downhill like, half-way and never ramped back up. I thought it was gonna be "IT" plus "House of Leaves" and it is, thematically and vibe-wise, but thing is... both those books are long as fuck and this one is very medium. so we get a loooot of emotional backstory deus-ex-machina and villian deus-ex-machina near the end. since so much of this book relied on the emotions and relationships of the MCs, we could have gone with a ton more pages dedicated to that (saying this knowing most of the whole book as it is is already dedicated to that!)

can you meditate in the middle of a bloody zombie apocalypse? if so, then this is a meditation. on: how it feels to grow up in a female body + sexual and religious trauma AT THE SAME TIME. Sophie is 16 and is feeling some changes... she's tempted by the devil himself to look at boys. but wait, doesn't that mean she's infected by the zombie-rape disease sweeping across America? or does it just mean she's a normal girl? what's the difference????

talk about the beast with two backs.

HE JUST KEEPS WRITING FUCKING FANTASTIC NOVELS WTF. NEW FAVORITE AUTHOR UNLOCKED. on to the next one!!!

Suffers greatly from middle-book syndrome in the trilogy. Lots of action, but kind of nonstop in a blaaah way. Still decent writing and building upon the world, but if this was a first book I'd not have much praise.

a totally unhinged autistic fever dream featuring the top most common trigger warnings you can imagine. a gen z-esque don quixote on ketamine. WIIIILD. cover was perfect for this.

what a psychopathic bitch ♥♥♥♥

hmmm. meh. Started off pretty solid, and I was eating up the worldbuilding and the characters until about half-way thru I realized there was no real plot, it was just an exploration of sorts into hunger, humanity, desire, etc. all fine and good but by 80% I was struggling not to DNF and nothing would have happened if I did, apparently.

damn what the fuck is with Eric LaRocca? why do I keep reading his works? I don't know! but I do! every release! I look like a fan, and yet the entire time I'm reading this novel, I'm scoffing at how immature the writing is.

a few examples of the lazy, juvenile writing: 1) "As I x, I y" aka worst sentence structure that makes zero sense grammatically 9 out of 10 times. I wish I bookmarked for examples, but it will go something like this: "As I put my plate down, I take a bite of my dinner." (not a real sentence from the book). You CANNOT DO X... AS YOU DO Y! You do one then the other. sometimes this sentence structure can work e.g. "as I scrolled my phone, I pat my cat" (also not a real sentence from the book) but LaRocca did not do that. kind of a pet peeve of mine, but it stood out.

2) "I COULDN'T HELP BUT" oh my god I'm so tempted to find a PDF of the novel to ctrl+F this phrase. oh my god. I started yelling out whenever I saw one to my wife. it is so often, sometimes in the same page or even paragraph. it adds nothing! why couldn't you help! LaRocca couldn't help but use the same filler phrase over and over :/

3) the refrain. "At dark, I become loathsome." Ok, I like it as a title and it fits the vibe of his other titles, but it was used as a chorus frequently and yet added nothing. it felt very shoe-horned, as if LaRocca had read that one Chuck Palahniuk essay on using choruses and decided to give it a whirl, not understanding how to make it work. it could have been deleted and nothing would have changed. the guy also very quickly was like "oh I guess I'm loathsome in the daytime now too" so??

now that I'm writing this I realize I could go on, but I won't, and I feel terrible even writing this because I imagine LaRocca reading it and I feel kind of mean :/ but I rarely have big crit feelings while reading, and this one was just too much to ignore.

also there is what I said before: I dunno why, but I KNOW that I'm going to read his next release ANYWAY. I don't even LOVE the genre, but maybe the fact that I don't mind it, (even the animal scene), maybe that's enough reason to say I am a fan of the genre? I dunno. mixed feelings.

A super realistic and terrifying look at our near future. Like near-near, like nowish. This was a tender and frightening head-on exploration of what it means to raise children in a damaged world, with a focus on technology and climate. I kept making notes like "so real!" I think the author did a fantastic job of what it feels like to be barraged and pummeled by capitalism. At the tender heart of this book's center is how beneath the concrete and the AI and the bots and the fire/smoke/earthquakes/flooding/fear/terror/etc., we are human animals trying our best.

wow. what a masterclass in worldbuilding. all of the delicious weirdness of China Mieville without the inaccessible language (I say this as a fan of Mieville's inaccessible language). no infodump, just pure and clear immersion in a strange wormy fungal beastial land.