Lots and Lots of Serial Killings: A Review of Michael J. Seidlinger's My Pet Serial Killer

I usually write reviews to get people thinking about books that I love, but I wanted to talk about Michael Seidlinger’s My Pet Serial Killer for different reasons. Mind you, I do love this book. However, I think there is a significant chance that this book will be misunderstood by a lot of people.

I think there will be an easy tendency to give into with this book to dismiss it as ‘serial killer fiction.’ People could easily spend their time focused all on that, like they did with American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. After all, it does involve serial killings — lots and lots of serial killings:

Hazel with her, big surprise, hazel eyes had that cherry flavor and he used saw blades he found in the alley on the way to her apartment.

Dawn was a musician of some sort, or at least she wanted to be. He talks about how she tasted wrong, just wrong, not like any of the others, and how he reacted, one end of the guitar as far into her as possible before she couldn’t take any more.

Hannah was his second gunshot. He got the gun barrel really deep inside her and he’s talking about how she really liked it, “Didn’t even ask if it was loaded or not,” and how she was honey-flavor too. The trigger pulled he made sure to be out of there in no time.

Ingrid was tattooed in all the wrong places but had the flavor of strawberry; her clitoral hood pierced, he tasted her for what felt like an hour, her moaning and loving it, gripping the back of his head, smothering his face with her flavor, as she oozed out more, mid orgasm, ecstatic…He did a little piercing her, piercing there, and she enjoyed it until he took the piercing gun right inside of her and pierced something that wasn’t meant to be pierced.

It is graphic. It is horrifying. However, there is much more going on.

To me at least, this book isn’t really about serial killing. It’s about Claire, nightmarish, frightening Claire. Claire is a forensic student who finds Victor, the serial killer, and makes him her pet. She houses him, finds him victims, and tells him what to do. She takes control of her pet serial killer and makes him satisfy her desires:

I’m wanting him to say it, and say it again. One more time.

He’s hesitating so I begin to pull him away but then he buckles, “I’m yours! I’m yours!” And then I’m telling him it’s all easy if you’re willing to do everything I say. As long as he lends every inch of himself as well as every aspect of his work, to me, everything will be taken care of. He’ll never be found and I’ll do all the finding for him.

No one will ever be the same.

*

The mystery will consume everyone and I’m the only one that’ll have known every inch. I’ll have seen everything before it turned into common knowledge. I’ll have been there, telling him what to erase and what to keep. And I’ll be saying to him every line that no one else will hear.

Claire is cold, though certainly is passionate at moments. She views people clinically, pondering how unseeing they are of each other and themselves, thoughtlessly performing roles that are mechanistic and pitiful. They have no ‘fight’ in them, and she needs someone who does. The important question is whether Victor has enough ‘fight’ within him to satisfy Claire . . . or whether anyone does.

Seidlinger has a great deal of subtlety in My Pet Serial Killer. It seems so easy to only see the killing, dramatically rendered as it is, and to not consciously register what lies beneath. I think readers will get it all on some level, but perhaps not at the forefront of their minds. Instead, I think they could get caught up in the surface happenings and only talk of this as a ‘serial killer book.’ To me, that would be a mistake. It would miss everything.

In summary, if I have one piece of advice to give you when reading My Pet Serial Killer, it’s pay close attention. Don’t assume that this is just a slasher-thriller, because it’s not. There are devious psychological manipulations going on while you read, and they reach much further than the confines of the pages. Like so many in the book, if you aren’t careful, Claire will be doing things to you as you read that you won’t even begin to guess at.  Victor would certainly tell you, there are consequences to only seeing Claire’s surface instead of ‘finding’ her.

Human-Animal Nature Through a Generational Family Saga: On Gary Anderson's Animal Magnet

Some of my favourite reads of all time have been the books I’ve found out of the blue. I found Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay and The Death Guard by Philip George Chadwick at a garage sale. They went on to influence everything I’ve ever loved about science-fiction/fantasy novels. I found “It” by Raymond Hawkey while studying in a dusty corner of the North York Library. I then went on to read Hawkey’s Wild Card, and Side Effect voraciously. His murder-mysteries prophesied advances in bio-engineering and the popularity of the internet as a social medium. I was enthralled. I read these quite a while back and since then I’ve continued to search for great texts from authors who are off the beaten path.

This past December, I went down to Hart House for The Toronto Small Press Book Fair. I’m an independent zine fan (even made one myself– as many did in college).  There I met Vincent Ponka at a table for Emmerson Street Press. Somewhere in our conversation I mentioned that my favourite novel of all time was James Joyce’s Ulysses. Actually, I might have yelled it out, as I’m prone to do.

He then went on to recommend Gary Anderson’s “Animal Magnet,” adding that it was both a thought provoking and a meaty read. I bought it, put it in my pocket, picked up a few chapbooks, and left impressed with the selection at the fair. I cracked my new read open and dived in on the subway home.

My father and I transitioned in two opposite directions: He from the civilized to the savage and I from the savage to the civilized. He from the bed to the hammock and I from the hammock to the bed. Father had no intention of taking me back to civilization — ever; he desired only that I stay with him in the wilds of the Amazonian rainforest. For what he had come to realize, with an immiscible clarity unattainable in unaltered states, is that civilization is an artificial system superimposed upon the natural world. Nothing more than a semblance of order forced upon nebular chaos.

There are books that stick with you because of their language or style. There are others that make you identify or fall in love with its characters. Animal Magnet touches upon all of these things. It is a fascinating exploration of human-animal nature through a generational family saga. At two hundred and seventeen pages, this book isn’t as huge as Ulysses, but it is epic. Each chapter is set up to tell the tale of the successor’s through varied perspectives and sometimes through different protagonists. The chapters stand alone as full short stories, but one story cannot exist without the other one before it. Anderson weaves these stories through the language of the characters’ time and place, thus enlisting mixed prose and even transposing chapters to cleverly pull the reader in and out of the novel.

I couldn’t put this book down. In its pages I found an old Western news magazine, (The Curious Case of the Man who Loved the Bearded Lady and the Dog-Faced Boy Who Mourned Him), a science fiction (Big MOFO Specting You), and even a play on magical realism (Heart of Larkness). Anderson utilizes basic animal instinct descriptors and humor to move the story forward even when its characters decide to stay still.  Sometimes when a character or generation decides to move on, we are made to question their intentions: Does evolving beyond animal instinct give us meaning, or are we running away from meaning with knowledge? The characters answer in either constructive or destructive epiphanies. Some of them find purpose while others go insane, but even in their insanity they end up finding reason.

For Georges, the pregnancy is a revelation. It seems as if all his life he has been trying to read a book in a language that is foreign to him. Page after page, he has searched for a shred of meaning, a word that makes sense, a word, a phrase that rings true. Now suddenly, he understands perfectly, every word, every sentence, every nuance. Something has changed, not in the book itself, but in him.

In an interview with Open Book Ontario, Anderson says, “. . . Animal Magnet, which has some scenes that probably deserve a nod from the Literary Review and its Bad Sex in Fiction Award. However, in keeping with the novel’s theme of humanness and the human/animal dichotomy, I felt that the sex had to be there — up front and over-the-top.”

He goes on to say, “For me, the sex in Animal Magnet can’t be read straight — these scenes are satirical in nature, if not actual satire. I don’t think I could have written them any other way.”

I found the sex scenes to be both over the top and quite accurate; it’s expected in a book about animal instinct and humanity.  Sex can be seen as a driving force to capture a cathartic moment in time in order to prolong it (There is the whole animalistic need to procreate, but can’t that also be seen as a way of stopping time or to continue our own mark on the world?). Anderson writes these scenes satirically so that the reader gets caught becoming a delighted voyeur or an unwilling participant in those moments. It’s an interesting effect.

Is it our basic animal instinct to move forward, or is it to stagnate while reveling in our passions? As humans do we feel isolated by our ability to express thought through language?  Do we search and philosophize ourselves away from happiness? Animal Magnet poses these questions to our individual thirst for the things beyond our basic survival.

There’s a tragic certainty to the book’s conclusion and one that I’m still thinking about since I’ve finished it. I’ll let you figure that out when you pick up a copy, which I urge you to do so. I’m dying to talk with others who have read this book. I would like to read an in-depth “spoiler-alert” review or analysis. Animal Magnet not only engages you, it makes you think about your own motivations and your own threads through time.  It’s the individual as icon: moving forward like an accidental hero passing through the now, motivated by its animalistic urges and the call of its human heart.

They'd Have Yelled If They Found Out: On David S. Atkinson's Bones Buried In the Dirt

Bones Buried in Dirt is a collection of short stories that are linked together to form a novel. This is a literary format that can either go brilliantly, or it can go horribly, terribly wrong. David definitely has written a work that falls in the brilliant category.

The stories are all from Peter’s point of view and follow him from around the age of four or five all the way to around twelve. In these stories, Peter goes through everything from neighborhood wars (“The War”) to first crushes and girlfriends, with sexual experimentation along the way (“Training Part 1” and “Training Part 2”).

I became so immersed in the stories that at times, I almost forgot that the author wasn’t a kid, that these weren’t being told straight from a child’s mouth. David captures the way a child thinks, the way he acts, and the rationales he forms to explain things perfectly. In “The Virgin Mary Tree,” Peter’s friend Joy  has run off into a potentially dangerous situation. Peter wants to stop her.

We were really going to get in trouble if something happened and we hadn’t helped. My parents would have yelled at me and asked me why I had just let her go. Her parents, too. They’d have said she was our friend and we were supposed to have helped. Or maybe they wouldn’t have said it. They’d have thought it though. They’d all have thought it when they looked at me. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t even know what was going on.

He isn’t able to stop her.

I thought I could tell them all I tried. I thought maybe that was going to be good enough. I walked back to the hole in the fence. I might have even gotten in trouble for having been in the graveyard. I wasn’t supposed to go there at all. I still went a lot, but my parents didn’t know that.  They’d have yelled if they found out I went in. Or maybe worse.

Peter’s reaction reminded me so much of when kids do face situations that are outside of their normal contexts. They can’t see exceptions to situations.  Peter can’t see that his parents probably would not have gotten angry with him for being in the graveyard in this situation, because he’s never had a prior situation in which they wouldn’t have become upset at his breaking a rule.

In another story, Peter’s dad has to sit him down and talk to him because a neighbor was just arrested for molesting boys. Peter’s dad wants to make sure that this hasn’t happened to Peter, and Peter is more concerned that prior activities he and his friends engaged in will get him in trouble. The timing in this story is so tight. I could feel myself in both his and his father’s skin, David caught both characters in such a perfect way.

“You can tell me, Peter,” my dad pleaded.  “You have to know you can talk to me.  If something like that happens, it isn’t your fault”

“He never did anything! Honest!”

My dad took a deep breath and exhaled loud.  “Good” he finally said.

I tried not to look at him, but he was looking at me.  I just wanted him to stop. I already told him nothing happened. It made me keep thinking of training.  My head wouldn’t stop twitching, like I couldn’t get my neck to sit right.

David does an amazing job with character descriptions. In just a few words, he sums up a character, and almost everything after that the character does or says, fits in with the original picture he gave of the character.

In his last story, “Cards,” we meet a character named Danny, who is only in this one story. Yet, from the very first description of Danny, I knew him and all his further actions made sense and fit with the picture painted at the beginning.

Danny looked up a little. He sat on a swing like a big old slug. Not swinging really, just swaying around a little scuffing the dirt with his shoes.  The dirt got his black sweat pants all dusty. He probably didn’t care. He always had those dingy things on.

I enjoyed how the stories deepened from one into the next. I felt that it perfectly captured the evolution of what is important to us as we age.  In the first story, Peter is upset over a balloon.  In later stories, he’s upset about way more intricate social relationships. And finally, in the last story, you begin to see the beginnings of an adult empathy to Peter.

There was very little I didn’t adore about Bones Buried in the Dirt or David’s writing. However, in a couple of the stories, Wooden Nicklepayback being the one sticking in my head, David ends the whole thing too abruptly. He does this in a lot of the stories, but in most of them it fits with a child narrating or with the story itself. But this type of ending doesn’t work every time. Also, the only one adult to adult character interaction in the entire book, between Peter’s dad and a neighborhood rival, PJ’s dad, feels false. It’s awkward, but not in the “we don’t know each other but your kid’s beating on my kid’s” way, which might be what David was trying to achieve. It fails though and just feels awkward.

This was a fascinating book to read. I loved it, I loved how I remembered things from when I was a kid because of it, things I felt or said or did.  I loved watching Peter grow up. Certain images that David painted in Bones Buried in the Dirt are still lingering with me days later.

One of the bonuses to reading this was David’s providing me with the best 80s hairstyle description ever.

She had long, nasty brown hair that was all wavy and stuff.  Her bangs rolled up in one of those dumb shredded wheat puff things, like she’d been messing with hairspray again.

Rebranding “An Offer You Can’t Refuse"

Oh man, do I love a good critical look at modern-day commercialism. These days, it feels like commercialism is bordering on becoming its own religion. There are almost way too many examples to pick out one… and in saying that, I am reminded of the consumerific world we have been living in for at least a decade. Read: overabundance. Categories for preexisting categories. Incremental improvements on a single piece of technology every six months, maybe sooner. The preference for exceedingly clever job titles like “VP of Client Strategy.”  What happened to simply calling it “fantasy,” buying a piece of technology and using it for as long as it works; what happened to calling someone by their first name? We are living in such a world where we have so many choices that we are beginning to have trouble keeping track of what it means to be adequate.

It sort of feels like we’re in a deep haze, getting high off commercials, free samples, and the freedom to choose. I used to be able to say previous sentence as something positive; however, it is 2012 and it sure feels like it. Eric Raymond’s book, Confessions from a Dark Wood, is written and structured to meet the daunting standards of modern day readers. They want to be entertained; they want sentences that immediately grab them, with scenes that match what can be found in films. Thankfully, Raymond achieves the rare; he balances social commentary with a highly entertaining narrative full of humor, deceit, and, yeah, there’s even a little porn in there too.

I’m not going to talk too much about the book, but I do feel it’s necessary to explain the gist, the initial premise. Nick Bray, Dark Wood’s starring actor, is every bit like any other young male trying to make a go of it in New York. He’s poor, working a dead-end job, and has quickly faced the dreary fact that his “dreams” are DOA. This is his life, and he can’t be any more certain of it than he can the differences between the sex machines used at Purv, a fetish website he works for as video editor. When his father dies, Mr. P. J. LaBar enters his life and offers him a rebranding of sorts of the popular phrase, “an offer you can’t refuse.” Nick is desperate. He takes the offer. We all would. The results of his decision, well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.

Raymond writes in prose that reminds me of the best Douglas Coupland has to offer (Generation X, Life After God, Player One) meshed with the pinpoint detail reminiscent of David Foster Wallace. The narrative functions as a high-wire narrative arc based on the impulsivity of a high-life fantasy. The back of the book, as well as throughout the its pages, Raymond uses the term “post-idea economy.” I love that term. It’s true. The global economy is the “post-idea economy.” Long gone are the days of disparate marketplaces functioning concurrently. Overabundance requires studios, agencies, and firms, like LaBar Partners Limited, to define items in a sprawling marketplace of the indefinable. Though the product might take on a tagline, title, and price-tag, it can no longer be “just a candy bar” or “just an energy drink.” It must be distinguishable. It must ensnarl our split-second attention spans.

Think about it: You could read this book, or you could simply go on Facebook and waste a few hours. For any book to gain an audience, it needs to be captivating enough to create a vacuum wherein all invading distractions are null and void.

Will this book do that for you? I can’t be sure, but it worked for me.

Hell of a read, I tell you.

I’ll confess I wrote this recommendation for two reasons: to praise a great book, and to get your attention. I’m sure you’d expect nothing less from a book recommendation. Read this book and realize that the more we try to speak of, and recommend, products, the more we are selling ourselves in hopes of being heard.

An Interview with Roxane Gay

For this series I’m asking writers I love to recommend a book. If I haven’t read it, I read it. Then we talk about it.

In this installment, I’m talking with Roxane Gay about Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins.

Roxane Gay’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2012, New Stories From the Midwest 2011 and 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, NOON, Salon, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and many others. She is the co-editor of [PANK]. She is also the author of Ayiti. You can find her online at http://www.roxanegay.com

* * *

Colin Winnette: I’m interested in why we read what we read. Why we pick up the particular books that we do, and why we keep at them. What brought you to Battleborn? What led you to read it for the first time, and why did you want to talk with me about it here?

Roxane Gay: This book was sent to me by a publicist at Riverhead. I hadn’t even heard of it, but once I started reading, I couldn’t put the book down. I was excited to discuss the book with you because it has been, by far, my favorite book of the year in a year of great reading.

CW: Most, if not all, of these stories focus on characters who are struggling with the past, and who will likely continue to struggle after the story’s end. In your opinion, what is the function of a book like this? To observe and report? To capture a state, or states, of being? Are there therapeutic efforts here? All/none of the above?

RG: I’m sure writing is therapeutic for many writers but I think there’s a lot more than that going on here. This is a book about how strength is forged and how sometimes, we cannot help but succumb to our weaknesses. The collection’s title really shapes how the stories are read and really helps each story capture this sense of what it means to be battleborn.

CW: Or, more specifically, what did the book offer you?

RG: As I read these stories, I wanted nothing more than to keep these stories near me, always. There is such control and grace in each story. Watkins tackles complex and intense subjects but there’s no melodrama here. Not only did I derive an immense amount of pleasure from reading Battleborn, I learned so much as a writer.

CW: What is a story like “The Diggings” doing in a collection like this? It was one of my favorites, but it’s certainly an outlier.

RG: I don’t really think “The Diggings” is an outlier. On the surface it seems like that because it’s set during the Goldrush and it’s a story about brothers but it’s also a story about desire and desperation and suffering and you can see those themes in most of the stories in this collection. I tend to think of this book as a masterclass. The range of stories is simply amazing and so when I consider Diggings within the context of the rest of the collection, I think, “Of course.” Not only does it fit thematically but it also fits with the diversity of the overall collection.

CW: I recently drove from Texas to California. We passed through Las Vegas on the way and eventually began to see the brothels in the small towns that surround it. It was a peculiar sight: rows of 18-wheelers and compacts alongside a few double-wides marked with a sign that read something like “Shady Ladies Ranch.” Watkins takes on one of these brothels in “The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous.” A lot of us have images of the places written about in the book — Vegas and the surrounding desert are iconic images — but few of us have experienced the intimacy of a life lived there, or even an extended visit. Watkins gives us insight into these intriguing places, or helps us imagine them a little more fully. How did you react to the function of place in this book? In many ways, the book is its setting, and those who populate that setting.

RG: Place is everything in this book, an inescapable gravity for the stories. I felt totally immersed in the stark beauty — both natural and manufactured — of the West and how that starkness shapes the people living within that landscape.

CW: Which story sticks out to you as best exemplifying what this book has to offer? If you could only recommend one story, rather than the collection, which would it be, and why?

RG: My favorite story is “Rondine Al Nido,” but my first instinct was to say that every story is the best in its own way. “Rondine Al Nido,” though is something else. The narrative frame intrigues me because it keeps you sort of off kilter. The story is disturbing but we see these rather unpleasant moments unfolding in really subtle increments. The horror, for lack of a better word, builds so slowly that it becomes almost bearable. The elegance of how this story was told takes my breath away.

Growing Out of this Darkness to Find the Light: On Scott Dominic Carpenter's This Jealous Earth

Let me start out by saying this isn’t your typical review. The book I’m talking about, This Jealous Earth: Stories, by Scott Dominic Carpenter, is one I’m publishing through my own press. So rather than a review, consider this a discussion of said press (MG Press), our mission and how I ended up where I am, and, specifically, why we’ve chosen Scott’s book as our debut publication.

And it all starts with a single fact: I hated Michigan growing up. I hated the seasonal changes (damn you, allergies!), I hated the food, and, most of all, I hated how flat everything was. Oh, how I dreamt of mountains! Of adventures! But like many youths disaffected with their birthplace, sometimes a wider lens is all that is needed, and this hate grew to a begrudging respect once I moved away to Los Angeles, and eventually, upon my return home, that begrudging respect became unadulterated love for the place I had been so quick to abandon. I couldn’t, for the life of me, get over how beautiful everything was, like it was the first time I had ever seen it, and the uniqueness of the region, the very same things I had looked down on before, were now the very same reasons keeping me there. And thus, this fire for the Midwest, specifically, promoting authors and poets from here, was born.

And boy, does it blaze hot today.

I co-founded Midwestern Gothic in late 2010 with one of my best friends, Jeff Pfaller, as a way to harness our collective passion for the region — and, truly, to try to help turn around what we saw as a gross underestimation of the literary talent present here. Sure, there have been nationally renowned authors from the Midwest that have reached super-stardom (Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Chuck Klosterman, to name a few), but what we set out to do was to try to change people’s collective perspective of the region: rather than see a single Midwest author who’s “made it,” crawled out of the despair here (as is so often depicted in media) to success, we wanted to show everyone that this is a true hotbed of talent ripe for the picking. That while there are the big name people you may have heard of, there are loads of other fantastic authors and poets and journals and presses equally as worthy of admiration you may not know. And, perhaps most importantly: that our unique circumstances here have bred into us a literary fierceness unlike anywhere else in the country.

Here’s what I mean, and I’ll be frank: The Midwest is dirty (in parts), dingy, full of hardworking folks — blue-collared, if you will — and I think the history here, the historical devotion to farms and factories, the nitty gritty, our mostly-congenial attitude (with a slight bit of snark), has produced very distinct literature . . . literature that, I believe more than any other region, holds a mirror up to us. Shows us the darker sides of life, of ourselves, the parts we may want to gloss over and not think about. But it’s not just about being dark, it’s about growing out of this darkness to find the light. And you can’t very well do that if you don’t embrace it.

And that was why we were so thrilled when we received Scott Dominic Carpenter’s manuscript for This Jealous Earth, a collection of shorts that take the reader on various journeys, all intimate in their own way, filled with characters that might, at first glance, be labeled as irritating or unwelcome, but eventually grow on you, sneak up in your subconscious until you can’t stop thinking about them. These are people faced with decisions that may not seem tremendously big, but will alter their lives one way or the other. And these are the sorts of things we experience every day, right? What is life if not for a series of decisions, of various tensions affecting us, day in and day out. And it’s through these collective experiences — wrought with humor, I might add, another great facet of the Midwest psyche — that you fully grasp what he’s done: held that mirror up to us. Shown us the good, bad and ugly of ourselves. Shown us what we like to pretend may not be a part of us, but is buried somewhere. And this makes the stories that much more enjoyable, even easier to glob onto, because what’s in these pages is you. And maybe the collection doesn’t ask and answer big questions about life, solve any major dilemmas or, even, get any national dialogs going. But it doesn’t need to. It’s an intimate experience Scott’s created here — no matter where the story is set, no matter who these people are, you are there with them.

This Jealous Earth is the first publication of Midwestern Gothic’s newest endeavor, the micro-press MG Press. Our goal runs parallel to that of the journal — highlight Midwestern authors — but differs only in the focus: in this case, book-length fiction with a singular point of view that really worms and worries around the foundation of all things Midwestern. Sure, it may seem nepotistic for me to recommend a book I’m publishing, that I have a stake in, but truly, it is one of the best short story collections I have ever read, one that made me appreciate my home even further and come to terms with the grimy side of my being in one fell swoop — recognizing in that darkness something a bit familiar.

And then, a surprise: a speck of light. Hope.

As Beautiful as it is Dangerous: Richard Calder's Dead Trilogy

This book is a weapon: heavy and dense and as beautiful as it is dangerous.

Of all the books I’ve read in my life, this is the one that seems to have no analogue, to exist in its own frame of reference, a maelstrom of language, sex, violence, and transcendence. Every sentence is a dance pirouetting on the knife’s edge, wavering between the sublime and the horror.

In his Dead trilogy (Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things), Richard Calder creates a cataclysmic future where the difference between nature, technology, reality, time, life, death, and imagination all swirl and blend together, becoming more and more indistinct as the narrative unravels at a dizzying pace only to somehow come back together as something both magnificent and visceral.

The kinetic language will sweep you up until you’re reeling from the poetic. The first novel contained in the trilogy is certainly the most straightforward, if one can even use that word here. It’s fitting that it’s printed as a trilogy because the second two novels are so inextricably bound that to read one and not the other is to dive in an orphic nightmare and leave drowning.

You will get lost. Unbelievably so, as you try to figure out what is dream, what is reality, what is psychosis. Let it take you. Throw the maps and ciphers away. Allow Calder’s world and imagination to swallow you, even as the sun burns out and the night’s left blank and desolate. Crawl, if you must, on hands and knees, because at the end of the tunnel is a light, and it burns so bright you’ll won’t remember the miles you wandered, lost and alone.

It’s odd writing a recommendation for this, because it’s very likely you’ll hate it. Maybe you’ll hate me for convincing you to read it, but that’s a chance I’m willing to take. This book, truly, is like no other book I’ve ever read. Fearless and brilliant.

So read it. Then read it again. Hold it close and let it whisper its nightmare into you, become infected by its disease, because it will transform you, and, somehow, it’ll make you better, a bit closer to the sublime.