1970s – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

One good thing about being sick is that in between naps, coughing fits, randomly snotting all over my pillow and light hallucinations, I can get a fair amount of reading done. I was really hoping not to lose two more days this week but this is legitimately the sickest I’ve been since the last time I had COVID and right now I’m just hoping to be functional enough to go in on Monday.

Anyway, The God of the Woods is real real good, a missing persons story worthy of Tana French at her best, and you ought to read it. The story bounces around from the 1950s to the end of 1975, set mostly at a summer camp in the Adirondacks, a camp run by a multigenerational wealthy family that appears to own or employ most of the town it’s set in. The twist here is that while Barbara Van Laar has gone missing in 1975, her brother Peter Van Laar (the fourth, no less) also disappeared at the same camp fourteen years prior. The book bounces around several different timelines, giving a host of characters both inside and outside the family and inside and outside the investigation time as POV characters, and does a great job of both juggling multiple mysteries and character arcs and tying them all up in a satisfying fashion at the end. I have said this before; I am not the world’s most careful reader, unfortunately, and I’m further impaired by this bastard of a head cold I’ve got going on right now, so the fact that I was able to keep up with a mystery novel that was jumping around between three different timelines and half a dozen characters without completely losing track of what was going on is a testament to the author’s skill. I wasn’t aware of Liz Moore before this, and buying the book was a bit of a dice roll (to be honest, the title had me thinking there were going to be some spec fic/ horror elements, and … I admit, having finished the book, I’m not sure I get the title) but it’s one I’m glad I made and I’ll be checking out more books by her in the future.

Short and sweet, I know, but as I said, I’m kind of dying here, so just trust me on this one. You’ll like it.

One of the more underrated aspects of the recent Netflix Luke Cage miniseries was the attention it paid to black literature. In particular, a conversation about author Donald Goines during one episode instantly sold me four of his books– and by instantly, I mean I literally opened the Amazon app on my phone and ordered the books in between scenes. Goines’ Kenyatta series– Crime Partners, Death List, Kenyatta’s Escape, and Kenyatta’s Last Hit, have been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of weeks now waiting for me to finish the Hamilton biography and get to them.

I read all four of them today and yesterday. It sounds like an accomplishment, but they’re not very long– only Last Hit tops 200 pages– and I’ve been off from work.

Imagine Conan, but written in the 1970s– dear God, there is nothing more 1970s than these books– and set in the ghettos of Detroit and Los Angeles instead of Cimmeria, and you actually have a pretty good idea of what these books are like. The prose is occasionally, to put it mildly, terrible– see the excerpt above– but the books have so much energy and passion to them that I couldn’t put any of them down. Goines’ literary career lasted something like five years and he released over a dozen books during that time before being found shot to death in his home. I hate to bring in a Hamilton reference again, but it’s appropriate: the man wrote like he was running out of time, and his Wikipedia entry speculates that he wrote to stave off heroin addiction. The Kenyatta series is frantically-paced in the best way; it’s as if Goines physically needed to get the story out of him as best he could and barely glanced at it before moving on to the next one.

Think about checking them out, is what I’m saying, even if the page above makes you cringe. Do it anyway.