I wasn't going to do these this year but looking at too many shitty lists and yelling at them is forcing me. Plus I'm pretty sure Taco would make that sad face he makes and I just can't have that.
I'll start with a longtime favorite of mine, Dan Simmons and his novel Drood. It's a fictionalized account of the final years of the life of Charles Dickens when he went a bit wonky. It's narrated (very unreliably) by Wilkie Collins who was a popular writer of the time (and should be more widely read now) and was a friend (and enemy) of Dickens. Since this is a Simmons novel it's not just historical fiction but is dark and disturbing and complex and weird beyond measure. There is also no need to like Dickens or to have even read a single word he ever wrote. Simmons, you can do no wrong.
Next is Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood. It's a follow up to her excellent Oryx and Crake, a post-apocalyptic dystopian wonderland. Read both of these and thank me later.
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem is a kind of alternate reality story of Manhattan (ugh, New York) that makes wonderful use of magical realism (yay!). Not very plot heavy it more uses its characters and weird and yummy writing to drive it.
What to say about Lev Grossman's The Magicians that will do it justice? Well since it's about people going to a school of magic it draws comparison's to Harry Potter but it's nothing like that. This is very much not for kids. It's part love letter to fantasy tales like Narnia and Oz and part study of what it's like to want something so badly it makes you feel like you're dying and even when you get it, it's still not enough.
Incognito by Ed Brubaker. A supervillain forced to go into witness protection told in Brubaker's style? Yes please.
The Unwritten by Mike Carey. Fantasy + speculative literary geography + dark fantasy + metafiction + ...yeah just pick up the first collection and read it, it's too much to try to blurb about.
Other (very) worthy releases:
The Red Tree - Caitlin R. Kiernan
Dark Places - Gillian Flynn
The Domino Men - Jonathan Barnes
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death - Charlie Huston
Breathers - S. G. Browne
The Financial Lives of the Poets - Jess Walter
And many many more. Get reading, slackers.
1 comment:
Ahem.
Drood: I still don't have a copy. Fuck you, Barnes & Noble, for not carrying it past the week it came out. When I figure out another place to order it, I will do so, because: fuck you, Barnes & Noble.
The Magicians: I have my copy, but haven't read it, purely because it hasn't percolated to the top of my pile yet. Martin's rather amazing blurb on the back cover sold me and then some. Grossman does a lot of work for the extras on the Watchmen DVD. I'm emotionally torn. But OMG MARTIN"S BLURB.
The Red Tree: I preordered my copy because I'm told it helps. I haven't made it to the book yet purely because I insist on reading her books in published order. She's a goddamn amazing author. Go read her blog. Now. She puts the most human face on writing I've ever seen. Every other fucking author on the face of the goddamn earth owes her a debt of gratitude and oral sex.
The Domino Men: I have a copy, but again, it hasn't percolated to the top. I bought it solely on the strength of his previous book, which was fucking awesome.
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death: I. Love. Huston. I'm still working through his other series, so I haven't read these yet, but I will. Oh yes. I will.
Breathers: Granted, I'm a zombophile's zombophile, but this book was goddamn awesome. Some of the bleakest, blackest humor ever. So awesome. Go read. Now. Twice. No, three times. No wait, that was me. Still, go read.
The rest: Why haven't I heard of these? You're holding out on me. I'm going to hold out on you. Which pretty much means you're going to have to wait 15 seconds for sex next time.
13 if it's Thursday or a full moon.
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