Other than the links on the right side of the page, you really don’t see much about my books around here any longer. I haven’t released anything new in six years or so, maybe longer, and most of the time I’m pretty convinced that that particular door is gonna stay closed. Part of the problem is that writing fiction, for me, has always been like pulling teeth– I can knock out any sort of nonfiction prose at length and quickly, but I would spend hours staring at a blank screen and not writing anything, and eventually the pain and the self-torture had to stop. COVID didn’t help, obviously, but it would have happened anyway, I think.
Part of the problem is Skylights. Skylights is near-future science fiction, which is always rough, no matter what, but I was stupid enough to attach certain events in Skylights to actual dates, which put the book on a timer for when bits would become Objectively Wrong, and several of those years have passed by now. In addition, the prologue of the book is explicitly tied to the main character’s recollection of the Challenger explosion. That’s not automatically a problem, not yet, but it made Gabriel the oldest character in the book, and he’s going to keep getting older until his inclusion no longer makes sense.
I have been tossing around the idea (for years now, for the record) of doing a second edition of Skylights that basically gets rid of all of the dates and adjusts the prologue so that it doesn’t automatically age my main character into his late forties or early fifties for a while now. I’ve not done it because 1) it’s kind of pointless, especially since I’ve blown up the sequel more than once already, and 2) I feel like if I’m going to bother revising Skylights, it ought to be in the context of relaunching my writing “career,” such as it is, and I’m not at all prepared to do that.
And then I hit a throwaway detail in Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger book, and bam, everything fell together. I’ve got a way for the prologue to work now, based on something that actually happened, and I can slide Gabe’s birth forward enough that by the time the book is out of date again I won’t have to worry about it. I even came up with a better reason for him to be on the trip in the first place; I was never entirely satisfied with Zub’s reasoning for bringing him on, and I think I’ve got a better idea now.
I’m not sure why I’m telling y’all this, other than another example of my habit of working through my thoughts by writing about them. I mean, I could just quietly update the text on Amazon and not worry about it; I might have to adjust the cover by a fraction of an inch somewhere or something like that, but once the writing part is done, it’s not a lot of additional work. And there are times where I miss being able to call myself an author. The problem is that authors have ideas, and I don’t have any. It’s not like figuring out how to move Skylights onto a floating timeline helped me solve the plot snarls and ridiculousnesses that multiple drafts of Sunlight kept falling into.
I should probably at least put a document together and write out some notes about how it was going to work, though, so that I can get it back later if I need it.
I had two different possible plans for tonight’s post, and I’m putting both of them away for the time being– one of them because, well, it’s a book review and because of a family event tonight I haven’t finished the book yet (and, to be honest, I may need to ruminate on this one for a minute before writing it anyway) and the second because there is another related family event in a couple of days that might be a more appropriate venue for it.
Unfortunately, that leaves me with “Damn, it was hot today! One more day of school! I’m weirdly anxious about summer school!” and I kinda wrote most of that three times this week. I told the kids I had a game planned for tomorrow, one where I was going to let them throw things at one another, and it didn’t hit me until late in the day that overseeing kids throwing things at one another was going to make getting all of the end-of-the-year shit that I have to do done a bit more complicated. So that will be interesting, and I’m expecting a late night tomorrow night.
I did get confirmation that they are definitely planning on me teaching two grades at once for summer school. So that’ll be interesting.
Anyway, I gotta go find a bunch of activity pages for the sub on Friday before I can sleep. So I’ll catch y’all tomorrow.
Watch: once this post goes live, I’ll get another email, and this whole thing will turn out to have been real, only now I’ve pissed her off.
Suddenly it occurs to me that the fact that there has been a delay in this person replying to me is actually evidence for it being real. Surely, surely I’m not actually being ghosted by a scammer, right? These people are nothing if not persistent.
At any rate: last week I got an email from someone purporting to be an Editorial Director at a publishing group that shall remain nameless, as will the actual person. That person showered several paragraphs of praise upon The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 and then asked me what my future plans were for the series and whether I currently had representation. Which, obviously, I don’t, seeing as how I haven’t written a single word of fiction since Covid hit.
The praise felt a lot like AI. Which, y’know, suspicious, especially when coming from someone who was purportedly an editor.
I did some research. The publishers were legit and the person was a real person. I allowed myself to get excited for a moment, then noticed that the email address was clearly not from any kind of official work email. A personal email address? Maybe, but it added additional tingles to the Spider-sense. Plus there was no actual promise of anything in the email, or was there actually an ask, so if this was a scam, they had multiple steps planned for it.
I went to LinkedIn. The editor was there, too. I dug up the work email and sent a quick message: a more polite version of hi, is this real?
I got an immediate response saying that the person had retired in December and that the email address was going to be shut down in January. It is May; clearly this did not happen. LinkedIn made no mention of being retired and the website of the company still refers to this person as if they are currently employed.
Also, this provided a reason for the personal email, right? Maybe they’re retired, but not retired-retired, if that makes any sense.
So I did two things, wanting to see where this was going, especially if I could get some posts out of it: I responded politely and with some interest to the original email address, but I also sent a message to the person’s LinkedIn, with a brief explanation of the situation and basically saying Hey, I don’t quite trust this, would you mind letting me know if it’s real?
And now it’s several days later, and I haven’t heard from either of them. The editor doesn’t appear to be especially active on LinkedIn, and their messaging system is opaque at best, especially concerning messages from people you aren’t already connected with, so that’s not terribly surprising, but I was expecting a pretty quick response from the original email– either you’re real, so you’re looking forward to hearing from me, or you’re not, in which case you’re still interested in … whatever it was you had in mind in the first place. I’m still not completely clear on the angle, to be honest.
It also occurred to me that whoever sent the email very well might be monitoring the blog, so maybe an explanation is the post from the day it happened saying I thought I was being scammed? Maybe they just dropped it at that point, realizing it was futile.
Either way, this didn’t end up being nearly as entertaining as I wanted it to be, dammit.
Does anybody know what this thing is? Several of them have popped up on intersections near me; I’m pretty certain they aren’t cameras because, well, they don’t look like cameras and some of them are on intersections that definitely do already have obvious cameras. There also tend to be just one or two per intersection and so they aren’t covering all four directions. I mean, it looks like a bell, but as far as I can tell they don’t make any noise and why the hell would anyone be mounting bells on the roads at intersections anyway?
I was dead to the world by 8:00 PM last night, and considered making it twice in a row tonight. I can’t explain it; I am genuinely not having bad days at work by any standard but my god am I coming home exhausted. I’m back to wondering if signing up for summer school was a mistake again, but I still feel like passing up all that money for a job I’ll be done with by noon every day is a horrendously poor decision.
In other news, I got an email today that is almost certainly a scam. I’m following up on it; if it’s a scam, it’s a quite detailed one and I’m going to follow it down the rabbit hole until the part where they ask me for money just for the lulz. If I’m wrong and it’s not a scam, it’s big news, but obviously nothing I can share just yet.
(It’s gonna be a scam. It’s definitely a scam. But at least I’ll get a post or two out of it.)
Buckle in, as this is going to be a bit meandering, but you’ve no doubt read my book reviews before and know to expect some degree of that, and frankly “a bit meandering” is a fair description of large parts of Tom’sCrossing anyway.
We’ll start with this: I bought this book out of spite. I don’t know anything about Mark Z. Danielewski as a person; as far as I know he has no social media presence, or at least I’ve never encountered anything from him, and I’ve never read an interview or anything like that. My only previous knowledge of his existence was from his book House of Leaves, a book I have never read and I kind of hate. The reasons I hate House of Leaves are probably not something I need to go into too deeply for this post, but I will give some brief notes:
That the word “House” is supposed to be in blue; note that that is the case where the book is mentioned on the cover of Crossing up there.
That the book frequently has blocks of sideways text;
That the book’s fandom is excessively incel-coded and are very much the type of people who will recommend House of Leaves to you no matter what kind of book recommendation you have asked for. Dark fantasy? Have you read House of Leaves? Potboiler romance? Try out House of Leaves. 1940s etiquette manual? Let me tell you about House of Leaves.
These three things combine to make this book a big nope for me even if I might like it otherwise. I particularly refuse to read it because reading it might, somehow, make one of its fans happy, and I don’t want to do that.
A second thing: I like big books and I cannot lie. I currently have three other 1000-plus page books on my TBR, and at 1,232 pages I am pretty certain that Tom’sCrossing is the longest book I have ever read— Brandon Sanderson’s Wind of Truth has more pages, but the text on Crossing is smaller and denser and I’m pretty sure the wordcount is significantly higher. I saw this book in Barnes & Noble, thought “Oh, shit, Mark Danielewski wrote a new book,” then made the mistake of picking it up and noting the length and all the sudden I owned it. It is possible that I bought this book out of some bizarre need to stick it to House of Leaves, which is an inanimate object and does not have feelings.
This, an excerpt from page 34, is what you should expect from the prose in Tom’sCrossing. Yes, I read this on my Kindle; I bought the hardcover and then checked the book out from the library, because I’m not holding that huge fucking thing in my hands for twelve hundred pages.
Note a few things:
There is not a single gerund in the book that ends with -ing. The g is dropped on every single one, including gerunds that are nouns; this book is very concerned with horses, and the word “geldin” really got on my nerves for some reason.
Excessively long sentences. There are only nine sentences on this page, and sentences that take up entire pages or the majority of one are far from uncommon.
That the narrator is the most highly-educated hick in the history of Utah. The dialect leads you to expect a certain kind of prose and then the book hits you with at least gettin a taste of a place where the bonds of birth and fortune have loosened their hold.
I rather expected to hate this book, to be honest, and I was hoping to hit something objectionable enough within the first couple hundred pages that I could put it down. By page 34 I was griping about it on a Discord I’m a member of. Around page 75 the language clicked.
This is one of the best fucking books I have ever read, and guys, I am so salty about that.
I am normally a Story Guy. I am a Setting Guy. I am rarely a Character Guy and even more rarely am I a Prose Guy. The story for Tom’sCrossing is serviceable but simple— it’s a Western, and it involves fulfilling a final promise to a dead friend by freeing two horses that are destined for slaughter. The main character is a teenager named Kalin, and his friend Tom tags along with him for most of the journey despite being dead. Tom’s sister Landry also comes along; she is not dead, at least most of the time. (Nearly every character in the book spends some time being dead, for the record.). Along the way the two get framed for a murder by the wealthiest family in town, the Porches mentioned in the above excerpt.
The setting? Sort of Utah, although it’s not our Utah, and the now of the book is also sort of the future, I’d estimate around 2045 or so, although the story being told is set in late October of 1988. Why is it not our Utah? Well, there’s some simple stuff, like there being a town in our Utah named Provo but none named Orvop, which is where the book is set, and then there’s weirder stuff like renaming Joseph Smith to Joseph Mith, which I thought was a typo for a while until it kept happening. Many of the book’s characters are Mormons, as you might expect from a book set in Utah, but the word “Mormon” is never used, although there is some criticism of The Church toward the end of the book. (Danielewski is not a Mormon, but apparently spent a good chunk of his youth in Utah.)
Also, when things that feel like specific references to Mormonism come up, they’re often changed too, beyond just the Joseph Mith stuff. The angel Moroni is renamed, and there are occasional scriptural references to books that don’t seem to exist. I actually went and found my copy of the Book of Mormon to check a few of the references; they aren’t in there, I swear.
Also, it appears that everyone in the world is fully conversant with all of the events in the book, even the ones that they would have had to have been present for; the book frequently cuts away to provide comments from random other people like the Reed Beacham mentioned above. Adding to the weirdness, nearly every time one of these random people is brought up, the book mentions how they died.
I also have the feeling that if I knew the Iliad and the Odyssey better I’d have picked up on some stuff. It’s been a while since I read either. This isn’t some kind of clever conjecture on my part; there is at one point a several-page conversation between three people about which characters in the book line up most precisely with characters from the Iliad. The book interprets itself. It’s nuts.
It’s the prose, y’all. I could bathe in this book’s language. About once every page or two Danielewski will hit you with a sentence or a phrase that will literally stop you in your tracks with its beauty. It’s 1200 pages long and I read it in eight days, during most of which I was also tearing apart my house.
I suspect I’m not quite smart enough to fully appreciate what’s going on in this book, to be honest. There’s a reason I make fun of Litratcher so often around here; I dislike pretentiousness in general, and while I’m very much not a The Curtains Were Blue guy, I also like my narratives nice and straightforward. I am not, as I frequently admit, the world’s most careful reader, and in fact the speed I read at frequently hurts me on more complex books. But, God, once this one had me, it had me, and I’m so glad I didn’t cave to my baser instincts and put it down after the first 40 pages just so that I could say I’d tried.
The worst thing? I think I might have to read House of Leaves now. And there is literally no higher praise that I can imagine giving to a book than that it made me decide to read House of Leaves.
A quick spot of extra blogwanking before I make it the second day in a row with two posts: yesterday topped out at 22,638 pageviews and 13,898 visitors, meaning that it was my highest-traffic day by about ten thousand views, which is insane. As of 6:08 PM today, we’re at a comparatively sedate 5,043 pageviews, still probably a top-20 day if not better than that.
Also, today marks seven hundred days in a row of posting to this site. I’m not going to pretend every post has been stellar, but I haven’t missed a day in nearly two years.
This is the 666th day of posting in a row, for those of you who are into nonsense.
Every time I pick up my phone or turn on my computer, the world has gotten measurably worse since the last time I looked. I wish that was an exaggeration. It’s not. Remember when we invaded a foreign country, killed a bunch of people, arrested and kidnapped their leader and brought him back to America for a trial? That was eight days ago. It’s out of the news.
Oh, and it may turn out that it was a coup engineered by Venezuela’s Vice-President, who manipulated the pedophile rapist felon currently running our country into doing what she wanted. He apparently posted today that he was the “acting president” of Venezuela; they can have him. Frankly at this point I’d welcome an invasion. Just make sure you do it when he’s in Florida; DC has Black people in it and they don’t deserve his bullshit. He’s already destroyed half of the White House so if England or Canada or Cuba knocks the rest of it down again I really don’t give a fuck at this point.
The idea that there is nothing that I can do is slowly driving me mad. I mean, I can pretend. I could go downtown and stand in the cold with a bunch of people and yell some slogans; no one is listening. There were protests downtown today and yesterday. They didn’t even make the local news. I could call my Senators and my House representative; they’re all Republicans and I assure you not one of them gives a fuck. All that would do is get me put on a list, and let’s be honest, I’m probably already on a couple of them anyway. I could take the week off and go to Minneapolis and do … something. No fucking idea what.
Weird, to think that living in a red state is actually protecting me to some extent right now. I’ve heard tell of the occasional ICE vehicle spotted around town but nothing has made the news, and I’ve heard nothing at my school about any immigration raids or anything similar. None of my students have abruptly stopped coming to school. Somebody posted on Reddit the other day in a local board asking what we thought we would do if ICE started going door-to-door in our neighborhood. I had to answer that I didn’t know, which absolutely terrifies me. I’m old and fantastically out of shape and I have a son and a wife to worry about. Even if I could convince myself that vigilantism of some sort was the answer I am literally not physically capable of it. Sure, if someone comes knocking on my door I can refuse to tell them anything about my neighbors. They’re actually doing that in MN right now. Literal highway checkpoints, too. I can’t do a damn thing about any of it.
The idea of going out in a blaze of glory gets a lot less glorious once you realize what it would most likely consist of is a couple of ineffectual wild swings and a heart attack. My wife and I have talked about getting a gun or two for the house; we mutually decided against the idea at the time (for the record, just as a reminder, I hate guns. This has not changed) and now I’m wondering if we should revisit it. But, seriously, for what? What ultimately made us decide against the thing in the first place is that there are four people in this house and all four of us are on psych meds and we both know that any gun in the house is much more of a danger to the four of us than it would ever be to any theoretical intruder. Is the idea that I might at least take one of the fuckers with me when they show up worth it? This isn’t the movies. There’s no Red Dawn scenario here. I’m as likely to successfully defend my family with one of the swords that are already in the house as I am with a fucking gun.
What else am I supposed to do if somebody shows up, call the police? The police haven’t chosen the people over ICE even a single time yet. They aren’t going to. They’re not here to protect us and they never have been.
I don’t have a pithy way to end this. It’s all more swearing and fantasies about violence from here on out.
Pretty covers though, right? At least they have that going for them.
There have been a couple of wins so far in January as far as my reading goes, but on the whole I feel like the misses have well outweighed the hits. And I’m writing this particular piece not to shit on these two books but because the way they didn’t work for me felt very similar: in both cases, I feel like the author never bothered to clearly define some kind of fundamental aspects about how the world of the books worked.
The Bookshop Below, as you might guess, is about a magical bookshop. The book is set in the real world, more or less, but there are these bookstores scattered around — it’s not clear exactly how many there are, but they feel a bit too important for the number of them to be limited to the few we hear about in the book. At any rate, the stores are sort of sentient, and so are the books in them, and they only allow the people they want to find and enter them, and a lot of the time when people buy books from the bookstore they’ll trade a personal memento or a tooth or a lock of hair or, in what feels like a bit of an escalation, a firstborn child for the book they walk out with. The main character is a high-end book thief who ends up owning one of these bookstores, and the story goes from there.
I am not someone who demands that magic be rigorously defined in the books I read. Brandon Sanderson is kind of the king of the meticulously crafted magic system, where he can end his books with charts and diagrams of the twelve different schools of magic that exist and how they interact and blah blah blah. Tolkien, on the other hand? Gandalf and Saruman and Radagast are wizards, and shut up is how their powers work. It’s difficult, reading LOTR, to say the words “Gandalf can’t do that.” His powers and his magic don’t work like that. Now, there is tons of lore out there and histories of Middle-Earth and all that, but at no point does Tolkien sit the reader down and explain how shit worked.
The thing, though? Tolkien knew how shit worked, he just didn’t explain it. You cannot make a reasonable argument that JRR Tolkien pantsed his way through LOTR even given the tonal shift between The Hobbit and the rest of the books. The man knew what he was doing, he just didn’t think you needed to know.
And the problem with The Bookshop Below is that I finished the book unconvinced that the author had really sat down and worked out exactly what was going on in her own book. And maybe this is me punishing the book for not being the book I wanted; I’ve certainly had moments like that before, but the books in this story are doing things like flooding the bookstore because they’re unhappy, and I feel like if you’re going to have a setup like that, maybe you devote a little more attention to your worldbuilding. There’s also this whole big thing where the magic of the bookstores and the books is powered by The River, which connects all the stores, and which at least some of the payments for the books are given to, but it’s not at all clear what the deal with The River is either, and I really felt like the book kind of ended up collapsing under its own weight by the end.
I read Alma Katsu’s Fiend today– it’s less than 300 pages in a pretty big font, so this was not a huge achievement– and it was deeply disappointing. The issue with Fiend is that all the characters are part of the same family, and the family runs this massive multinational corporation that has made all of them massively rich. There is a lot of talk about what is going to happen when the patriarch of the family (who is weirdly referred to by his first name throughout the book, including by his own children) dies, and who is going to inherit the company, and also who will become head of their “clan”, and I guess those two people don’t have to be the same person, blah blah blah. It’s treated as a given that the company is extraordinarily dirty, and there’s lots of talk about whether this son or that daughter is tough enough to run the company, or whether they should try to change how things have always been done; you’ve seen The Godfather, you get the idea.
I don’t think Alma Katsu had any idea at all what the Berisha Corporation actually does. The synopsis calls it an “import-export” company, but that’s immensely vague, and it’s not clear at any point what the company is actually for. There is talk of sweatshops and exploitation and there’s a Whistleblower at one point, but the whole thing is very these people are bad, and this company is bad, just trust me, and … it doesn’t take much for me to accept that a multinational corporation is evil! I’m all in on the “capitalism bad” train! But give me something here. Even the scenes where these people are at work makes it really clear that the author never bothered to think through what anyone’s actual job was, and interestingly this book also seems to exist in a world without email. People have cell phones and there’s a stray mention or two of AI so it’s not like it’s set in the past; it’s just a big weird blind spot.
Blech. The world’s descent into hell is accelerating on a daily basis so far in 2026; I’d appreciate it if I could at least have something good to read.
