Will Give Book Recommendations for Food, um, Donations
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In honor of the day, here are some recommendations for books I’ve read and enjoyed recently (TV and film recommendations will come later in the day). Remember, you can only get this material here—well, actually, also on my blog and my tumblr and on social media. But my experience has been that most of you are a bit too lazy for that, so if you want book recommendations here where you don’t have to look for them, cough up that cash!
First up, over the last two months I have made my way through Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series. That’s probably a bit of a low-hanging fruit situation, since French, and this series in particular, have been among the hottest names in mystery fiction for more than a decade. But if you’re like me, and are lukewarm at best on the mystery genre—and perhaps even more so in the case of mysteries starring police officers—you might want to know what convinced me to give this series a chance, and kept me going all the way to the end.
Dublin Murder Squad is a series of six books, each following a different detective on the titular squad as they investigate a murder case. The mysteries are well drawn, and their unraveling involves a lot of interesting detail about the workings of the Irish police force and legal system (as the detectives repeatedly remind us, their job is less to solve the mystery as to put together a case that the prosecution can successfully pursue). But the heart of all six novels is less in the mystery as in their detective protagonist, who invariably discovers that the case has some personal resonance for them, which can lead them to self-destruction or epiphany, and sometimes both. These are gripping psychological thrillers, and masterful demonstrations of the art of constructing an unreliable narrator, who will spend hundreds pages assuring you that they are fine, even as it becomes alarmingly clear how not-fine they are. In addition, French expertly weaves folklore into her stories, so that some of the books in this series are in a delightful superposition between mystery and fantasy. And she has a lot to say about how the social and economic convolutions that buffeted Ireland in the last few decades—the financial downturn of the late 20th century, the 90s tech boom, and the 2008 financial crisis—have affected Irish society. Each of the novels is a microcosm of a different part of Dublin that also reveals how these financial currents have affected how Dubliners see their lives—and how they are drawn into crime and violence.
Of the six novels, my favorites are In the Woods (2007), which is almost all the way to folk horror, and whose unreliable narrator is a queasy masterpiece of character construction; Faithful Place (2010), which perfectly captures a small, working class Dublin neighborhood and one deeply dysfunctional family living there; and Broken Harbour (2012), which turns a new housing development, left half-built and crumbling after the financial crisis, into a terrifying new kind of haunted house. The books are only loosely connected and can be read in almost any order (one exception: the second novel, The Likeness (2008), should really be read after In the Woods), and whichever one you pick up, I think you’ll find a lot to sink your teeth into.
If you’re looking for something more in the fantastical vein (not to mention, more recent) you might want to check out Premee Mohamed’s The Siege of Burning Grass. It’s set in a lightly fantasized alternate world where two empires have been at war for decades, wasting countless lives on a conflict neither one can hope to win. The story follows the founder of a pacifist movement who is captured by the army and sent to infiltrate the opposite side, accompanied by a bloodthirsty soldier who views his pacifism with disdain. The two embark on a hallucinatory journey across a blasted wasteland, to frontline bases overseen by despairing officers, and into the stronghold of the enemy, along the way debating their conflicting philosophies, and putting the protagonist’s commitment to non-violence to the test. It’s an excellent example of how fantasy can be interesting not because it imagines magic or superpowers, but because it can build a world from the ground up and ask questions about it that make us think about our own—in this case, the psychological cost of seemingly endless war, and the difficulty of wrapping your mind around the alternative.
Finally, for some short fiction fun, Elwin Cotman’s Weird Black Girls is an excellent mix of the otherwordly and the all-too-real. The seven stories collected here are all about African-American life, often with an emphasis on people who are activists or members of the counterculture. Some of them are firmly rooted in the fantastical—”The Switchin’ Tree” takes place in a rural community in the early 20th century, where black parents looking to impart some discipline are compelled by the titular tree to abuse their children for the smallest infraction, finally descending into Lovecraftian horror. Others are seemingly naturalistic—the main character of “Triggered” finds herself caught in the orbit of a narcissist who uses social justice buzzwords and activist cred to obscure her monstrous behavior. And others defy categorization. In “Tournament Arc”, two middle aged black nerds, knocked about in the wake of COVID and “anti-woke” legislation, decide to run a LARP fighting tournament at a nearby convention, and are nonplussed when real fantasy creatures sign up. The title story takes place in a world in which an 18th century witch caused Boston to rise high into the air, resulting in bizarre alterations to both the city and the nation around it. If you’re into weird, slipstreamy fiction with some very obvious ties to our world, this collection is worth looking up.
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