Monkey droppings: The Good, the innocuous, and the ugly

The monkey's done a lot of 'high lit' reading lately.

Time to go genre, clear the palate, get some junk food.

Healthy, well-regarded junk food.

Subway, not Arby's.

Three reviews, hot and fresh and ready for the table. One good, one innocuous (bad seemed too harsh), and one ugly (think Hollywood-ugly, not ugly-ugly).

THE GOOD

Lanceheim (HarperCollins, 2010)
by Tim Davys

"Without doubt, faith is worth nothing."

In 2009, Tim Davys (a pseudonym) released the English translation version of Amberville, the first in what I have now discovered to be the Mollisan Town quartet. It was a hardboiled noir dealing with issues of faith, death, fate, and existence. It was also populated exclusively by stuffed animals, automatically appealing to a strange side of me that enjoys unique literary examples of anthropomorphization (Hello, Winkie! Hello, Hal Jam!).

I loved Amberville, and tore into its sequel Lanceheim with gusto, expecting another tale of Eddie Bear and his investigatory exploits. Imagine my surprise (and later delight) at finding Lanceheim to be an entirely different beast, set in another section of Mollisan Town (segmented into the quarters of Amberville, Lanceheim, Tourquai, and Yok), this time not a detective noir but a parable, a play on the Christ mythology that takes on many of the same themes of Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ yet plays them far more intriguingly (and I really enjoyed Scoundrel Christ).

Lanceheim follows two separate narrative paths: on one, the reader follows Reuben Walrus, a famed composer seeking a miracle following a diagnosis of quickly oncoming deafness; on the other, a fellow named Wolf Diaz recounts his life as friend and later servant to Maximilian, a strange stuffed animal with unusual powers and a gift for speaking in obtuse parables. As in Amberville, the residents of the city live in fear of death, or in this case, "the Chauffeurs," dark figures who arrive without warning and remove stuffed animals who have reached the end of their lives. New residents are manufactured by Magnus, their (for lack of a better word) god, and Maximilian, with his charisma and lack of guile, is starting to threaten the religious hierarchy that uses fear of Magnus to keep the populace of Mollisan Town in check.

"I intend to create a Retinue," said Chaffinch, "which is neither afraid to believe nor to listen. The stuffed animals in this city are suffering. You know that, Wolf, you know it well - the terrified pursuit of success and material happiness that never has an end. Weighed down by the dogmas of the church. The thought of the Chauffeurs, and that they might come any day whatsoever. Stuffed animals are to be pitied. And if we can give them solace, we must do so. If ten stuffed animals can repeat what I say, what Maximillian has taught us, we are ten times more effective."

Davys comes across heavy-handed at times, more so than Amberville, and oftentimes Lanceheim falls prey to speechifying to get its point across. Yet again, Davys uses the conceit of a world of stuffed animals to bring forth serious questions of faith, dogma, and politics that would weigh down more realistic portrayals. Lanceheim is a less satisfactory novel than Amberville, too episodic, but it still retains a startling power, particularly in its remarkable twists near the end. I look forward to the next novel Tourquai with particular delight.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES A LOT

THE INNOCUOUS

The Good Fairies of New York (Soft Skull Press, 2006)
by Martin Millar

"Right, you two," said Dinnie, stomping back into the room. "get out of here immediately and don't come back."

"What's the matter with you?" demanded Heather, shaking her golden hair. "Humans are supposed to be pleased, delighted and honored when they meet a fairy. They jump about going, 'A fairy, a fairy!' and laugh with pleasure. They don't demand they get out of their room immediately and don't come back."

"Well, welcome to New York," snarled Dinnie. "Now beat it."

Ah, whimsy. So easy to get tired of.

That's not fair, but sustaining whimsy over 200+ pages is hard. Far better if you taint your whimsy (yikes, now there's a sentence I've never typed before) with a healthy dapple of cynicism a la Vonnegut, or a dose of giddy mean-spiritedness a la Douglas Adams. You need balance, take the salt with the sweet.

Martin Millar almost pulls it off with The Good Fairies of New York. The cult urban fantasist (his Lonely Werewolf Girl sound likes a good time) sprinkles whimsy all throughout his tale of misplaced fairies making their way in the unScotlandlike boroughs of New York, but makes sure to add rude jokes, violence, obscenities, and various naughty bits to keep his ethereal heroines grounded in filthy reality. And it's fun, but too slight to resonate after completion.

The Good Fairies are Heather and Morag, thrown out of Scotland for inadvertently desecrating a fairy clan's sacred banner. Heather takes room with the disconcertingly awful Dinnie, "an overweight enemy of humanity [and] the worst violinist in New York," while Morag moves in across the street with Kerry, a free spirit suffering from Crohn's disease and attempting to complete a flower alphabet for a Community Arts award. There are also rock 'n' roll ghosts, Italian fairies, Chinese fairies, an awful version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, mythic flowers, horrible fiddle-playing, homeless people, and more subplots and diversions than you can shake a wand at.

It's all handled with a fair amount of aplomb; Millar is an amiable storyteller, and at its best Good Fairies reads like Neil Gaiman-lite, or a more sedate Terry Pratchett. But the story structure and its constant narrative momentum leave every character a cipher; I wanted to grow to like Dinnie, I understood that Kerry was adorable, but never did I actually appreciate them beyond their postings as serviceable plot movers. I can see that Millar is a talented fantasist, and I look forward to revisiting his imagination, but The Good Fairies is only diverting, too flimsy a tale to last.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES, BUT ONLY SO FAR AS THAT GOES

THE UGLY

The Fall (HarperCollins, 2010)
by Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan

Well, 'ugly' might be overstating it. The Fall is fairly entertaining. But these vampires, man, they is ugly.

The direct sequel to last year's The Strain, The Fall is part two in author Chuck Hogan's and director Guillermo del Toro's Strain Trilogy, about a vampire epidemic taking over the world. In this world, vampires ain't the usual vaguely European dandies in capes, they are virus-laden monsters with a six-foot stinger that extends from their throats to grab and infect any person unlucky enough to be nearby. Continuing from the previous instalment, we join our hardy gang of vampire killers (including an epidemiologist, his young son, an elderly vampire hunter, and a New York exterminator who takes to monster slaying with ease) as they hunt down the Master, the one rogue vampire responsible for an outbreak which shows every possibility of destroying mankind permanently. Or at least moving us substantially down the food chain.

The authors tell their story well, jumping from attack to attack, but as with The Strain, the real problem is a lack of actual scares. The vampires lack personality, and the story moves forward so rapidly that there is no time to learn to empathize with the heroes. What we get is a fast-paced Hollywood monster movie from two men who should know better. Del Toro knows his monsters (Cronos, Mimic, Hellboy) but as he proved with Pan's Labyrinth, he can provide depth to join with his imagination to result in something truly spellbinding and wonderful (side note: del Toro's finally giving up on his adaptation of The Hobbit is likely a great loss to filmgoers, and his recent troubles in getting a Tom Cruise-starring adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness is a personal grievance). Hogan, in Prince of Thieves, proved himself an able craftsman who can weld interesting characters onto classic action scenarios. Working together, the result should be a near-classic, and its managing to be merely entertaining is a severe disappointment. I'm not turned off enough to not look for the finale in 2011, but The Fall is a wasted opportunity, a lark by two talents slumming it.

VERDICT: MONKEY THINKS IT'LL DO UNTIL THE NEXT DIVERSION, HEY, SOMETHING SHINY!

Monkey droppings - talking animals galore!

The lonely Monkey, seeking companionship away from humanity, reads some Canadian novels about talkative animals.

Seriously, I must have a jones for anthropomorphism. Several of my favourite novels have animals (and objects) exhibiting human characteristics - The Bear Went Over the Mountain (bear), Firmin (rat), Winkie (teddy bear), Skinny Legs and All (can of beans, sock, painted stick, and spoon). On the tellybox, current favourite characters include Tim (bear) from The Cleveland Show and Brian (dog) from Family Guy. Don't know what it means.

I'm also the guy who loses emotional control when an animal bites it in a movie, but chows down on seconds of popcorn during examples of gratuitous human violence.

So, now you know something about me.

Come, Thou Tortoise
by Jessica Grant (2009)

My dad used to say I was a chalant. A lost positive. Nonchalance, he said, is indifferent to mystery. Nonchalant is one of the worst things a person can be. You hang on to your chalance.

So, I hears about this book, see? About a lopsided young woman and a verbose pet, and I thinks to myself, I thinks "Damned if that doesn't sound a lot like Erika Ritter's novel The Hidden Life of Humans."

And then I shake my head, and I can speak clearly and concisely again. And I find the book. And I am blown away.

The book is Come, Thou Tortoise, a critical Canadian darling that has already won author Jessica Grant a few awards, most recently the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Like Ritter's work, it alternates narration between an odd young woman and her pet; Ritter used a dog, whereas Grant employs a tortoise. Unlike The Hidden Life of Humans, with its mundane writing and medium sitcom-level humour (think Two and a Half Men, but in print, and with a canine in place of Charlie Sheen), Come, Thou Tortoise is an affecting and lyrical piece of work.

The odd woman, in thankfully Grant's only nod to overt preciousness, is Audrey 'Oddly' Flowers. Oddly is competent, intelligent, and yet, well, odd. So very odd. In the first chapter, thinking him to be a terrorist, she disarms an Air Marshall and barricades herself in a plane restroom. Yeah, she's odd.

Oddly has been living in the U.S. for awhile, but is returning home to Newfoundland to visit her ailing father. After her run-in with the Air Marshall, she boards a flight to home, a plane laden with Newfoundlanders. "The sound of Newfoundlanders on a plane: If sarcasm were generous, that is the sound."

Oddly leaves with friends her beloved Winnifred, a tortoise which is her last connection to a past lover. Winnifred, as befits an ancient soul, has a more sedate yet no less unique opinion of the world around her.

I am a pretty powerful tortoise. I walked across the desert once, about a century ago. All the way from Texas. Slow like the camel in Lawrence of Arabia...All along the way I passed overturned tortoise shells, picked clean by birds. Pretty discouraging. But I kept going. Why. Because I had heard stories about trees a hundred feet tall. I had heard about rain. And why should a tortoise not have rain in her life.

As Oddly comes to grips with her new obligations (her father, a scientist, actually passed away), Grant weaves a strange, comic novel that is as moving as it is funny. It says a lot that I find myself playing certain scenes over in my head weeks later, wondering at how Grant found such new ways to view the world.

Even as Oddly goes completely off the rails, in a loose plot that contains conspiracy theories, missing uncles, offbeat wordplay, and strangely eternal mice, Grant keeps the plot running with effortless efficiency, somehow rooting its absurdities in reality. There is very little in the way of overt wackiness, and Grant's writing never becomes irritatingly coy or overbearing. Oddly and Winnifred are winning characters (Winnifred is given far less to do, but that's for the best), and Grant populates her pages with all sorts of endearing characters. Especially Uncle Thoby, a relative from England, holder of the family secrets and saddled with one arm longer than the other.

Come, Thou Tortoise, with echoes of Vonnegut by way of the gentler humour of Miram Toews, is strange. So strange. And like Oddly, so very, very lovable.

VERDICT: MONKEY DAMN NEAR LOVES

Beatrice & Virgil
by Yann Martel (2010)

I don't get it.

Not the novel Beatrice & Virgil; that I get, and will return to it shortly. What befuddles me is the immense amount of hatred that has been levelled toward Yann Martel's follow-up to Life of Pi.

The reviews so far have varied wildly, from praise to admiration to dislike, and then to loathing of a most disturbing sort. There is one particular blogger, a popular (and quite smart) writer, who proclaimed Beatrice & Virgil, amidst a diatribe so hyperbolic and obscenity-laden it completely loses focus, to be the worst novel of the decade. I won't bother linking to the post: enough has been written about it that it's not hard to find, and quite frankly, the post is so ridiculously over-the-top that it calls into question (for me) everything he has previously written. I'm not unfamiliar with exhibiting an arguably unreasonable hatred for a novel (see this James Patterson post as example, as well as my upcoming review of Chuck Palahniuk's latest), but if this gent thinks Beatrice & Virgil is the worst novel of the decade, he doesn't read near enough.

B&V concerns Henry, a famous author taking a sabbatical from writing. His previous novel was a major hit, but his follow-up work - a flipbook that would contain a story and an essay, both concerning a Holocaust - has been turned down by his publisher as lacking in commercial appeal. Henry moves with his wife to a new country, where he does his best to ignore his storytelling urge. But a fateful meeting with a strange old taxidermist reignites his passion.

Make no mistake, this is no Life of Pi. Instead of a fable, Martel works within the genre of direct allegory, as his author struggles with the dilemma of presenting the Holocaust within the realm of art.

No such poetic license was taken with - or given to - the Holocaust. That terrifying event was overwhelmingly represented by a single school: historical realism. The story, always the same story, was always framed by the same dates, set in the same places, featuring the same cast of characters...And so Henry came to wonder: why this suspicion of the imagination, why the resistance to artful metaphor?

The taxidermist fuels Henry's imagination through an absurdist play the old man is writing, a Beckett-like fable involving Beatrice, a donkey, and Virgil, a howler monkey. As Henry learns more of the play, he becomes obsessed with discovering a way to encapsulate the horrors of the Holocaust within his art.

This is not an easy subject, but Martel's take on it is artful and airy. Almost too airy; unlike Life of Pi, where the fantastic elements were rooted in a devastatingly believable narrator, none of Martel's characters in B&V rise about the level of being a tool to the parable. Martel is not so much telling a story as he is expressing an opinion, and this does the work a disservice.

Okay, so, it's not Life of Pi (a novel with its own fair share of detractors, although I do not count myself among them - I love the book, practically unconditionally). Martel lets his ideas on allegory overwhelm the potential of his narrative. But so what? The book is eminently readable, literate, and poetic, and leaves the reader filled with questions that demand a reasoned response. How to present unimaginable horrors within an artistic context is a puzzle that may never be answered, but must be continually addressed. So why the utter animosity? If you expected Life of Pi 2, sure, you'll be disappointed, but the deluge of hatred that has spewed forth is all out of proportion to the work itself. If you want to complain about poor allegories, go read some Paulo Coelho (talk about an unreasonable hatred).

Myself, I'll take Beatrice & Virgil for what it is, an imperfect quest to solve an impossible question. It's not perfect, but it made me ponder philosophical and artistic theories, which puts it head, shoulders, waist, and knees above anything Coelho ever wrote.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES A LOT

Monkey Droppings - Angry butterflies and raging toys; The Voice of the Butterfly & Amberville

Two novels today, one old, one new, each strange and bizarre, and both worthy of your consideration.




The Voice of the Butterfly (2001) by John Nichols

“We have become inured to the tragic consequences of human personality on a rampage, and our disinterest is casually destroying The Meaning of Life on Earth.”

John Nichols has sadly faded from public view as of late. While his New Mexico trilogy (including most famously The Milagro Beanfield War) is a justly-celebrated series on the ongoing rape of the land and the effects of said rape on its inhabitants, Nichols has kept a lower profile for the past decade or so, slowing his output, releasing a few novels to some acclaim but less impact. This is a horrible error that must be corrected.

The Voice of the Butterfly shows that Nichols has not lost his taste for satire nor his anger at the continuing destruction of the Earth. While the New Mexico trilogy had flights of craziness, Butterfly finds Nichols in full-on Tom Robbins mode, spewing forth sentences of breathtaking insanity and wordplay. You have to have a love of over-the-top writing to fully appreciate this novel, but if you are thus equipped, you are in for one hell of a treat. A bizarre, hilarious, profane, and tremendously entertaining rant, The Voice of the Butterfly is a raging voice in the wilderness, crying out for common sense and decency over money interests and rampant consumerism.

The butterfly of the title is the Phistic Copper, an obscure little insect whose entire existence as a species is threatened by development prospects. The Butterfly Coalition, led by lefty eco-lover and librarian Charley McFarland and his slipping-into-dementia ex-wife Kelly, is frantically trying to get the word out. The developers, a slimy bag of reprobates you should be lucky to never meet in reality, will do everything and anything to push the project through.

This is not exactly a subtle satire, and nor is it unbiased. Far be it from me to equate a character’s beliefs with that of its author (a charge often leveled against me for arguably good reasons), but when Charley opines, “If the radical right had its way we’d all be church-going polyester heterosexuals driving around in white Cadillacs eating meatloaf and wax beans while mammoth bulldozers leveled all our forests and even hummingbirds were extinct,” it’s hard not to feel that Nichols may be wearing his heart on his sleeve. When you combine that with the fantastic names Nichols comes up with for his characters—unwieldy Pynchonesque monikers such as Farragut Wallaby, Edna Poddubny, Charity Gingivitis, and Mookie Dirigible walk through the pages—you get a rollicking socio-political trek through both the worst and the best of America.

Like Robbins, there is just so much overt burlesque wildness one can take, and it can be somewhat tiresome after a while to see the well-meaning but limp liberals crushed under the unthinking monstrosity of Republican ideals again and again. But Nichols unhinged is an astonishing thing, and if you are pure of heart and stout of will, The Voice of the Butterfly is a weird, wonderful ride.

GRADE - B+

Amberville (2009)
by Tim Davys

"Here I stand, hiding, he thought, inside a stall in a men's restroom along with a drug-intoxicated homosexual prostitute gazelle who is particularly popular with the masochists of the city."

How, I ask you, could I not fall a little in love with a novel that has sentences such as that?

I have a true soft spot for the anthropomorphization of animals (animate and inanimate) when it comes to literature. William Kotzwinkle's The Bear Went Over the Mountain is one of my all-time great reads, with bear-turned-novelist Hal Jam a creation of sublime delights. Clifford Chase's Winkie, a dark satire involving a teddy bear accused of terrorist activities, was one of my favourite novels of 2008. Penn Jillette's Sock took the lovable sock monkey to deliriously obscene new heights. Not to mention the Douglas Adams-esque hilarity found within the pages of Robert Rankin's The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse, as a teddy bear detective tries to unravel the clues and save his beloved Toy City from a serial killer. And let's not forget that beloved graddaddy of animal satires, George Orwell's Animal Farm.

Tim Davys would initially seem to be taking the same tact as Rankin, creating in his new novel Amberville an entire city of stuffed animals who fear their eventual removal from the city when their names fall on the fabled 'Death List'. But as Davys travels the back alleys of a decidely unfriendly world filled with enough unsavory characters and degenerates to fill several Spillane ominbuses, the Swedish author shows his creation to be nothing less than a pure-blooded film noir mystery thriller sans humour to leaven the situation. These may be stuffed animals, but there is nothing cute about them. As a novel, Amberville is more in line with the dark noir of Gary Wolf's Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (a novel leaner and meaner than the movie adaptation [great though it is] would have you believe).

Eric Bear seems to have it all; a good job, a sexy wife in Emma Rabbit, and a lot to live for in Mollisan City. But his past comes rushing back in the form of Nicholas Dove, an underworld heavy who has discovered that his name is likely on the Death List. Nicholas wants Eric to have his name removed, or Emma is dead. But does the Death List even exist?

Amberville's main flaw is that, despite its trappings, it takes itself utterly too seriously. For a time, it is uncertain why Davys would even bother shoehorning the toys into a decidely classic mystery plotline. But it soon becomes clear that stuffed animals can, by their very nature, possibly unearth answers that more 'realistic' characters never could.

"All stuffed animals have asked themselves questions of life and death at some point, when young or old. Why must the factories manufacture new animals? Why must those who were already living in the city be carried away by the Chauffeurs? Why did they all live in open or concealed terror of what would happen in the next life? And who had established a system so cruel?"

By placing his gritty mystery into the framework of a breathing toy city, Davys is able to explore questions of mortality that a mere human sleuth could never hope to answer. Who are we? Who is our creator? Why do we die? A stuffed animal could hypothetically live forever, but the existence of a Death List calls into question tricky issues on morality and religion that could otherwise never be answered. And Amberville asks some questions that could make certain elements of society cringe with outrage. When Eric's brother Teddy muses, "Religion [was] a two-edged weapon. It was all a matter of daring to believe in the unbelieveable which in all other contexts was described as stupidity," it's hard not to wonder how some people might take such questions.

Which, aside from an assurity of plot and character, is Amberville's major strength. Aside from it's classic mystery underpinnings (done up in an often spectacular fashion), Amberville raises philosophical questions that encourage further thought. Amberville is a classic noir, filled with ambiguity, menace, and deceit. It also has a brain, and isn't afraid to use it in search of meaning.

GRADE - A-

A quad of reviews -Paul Auster, Sky Gilbert, Brian Evenson, Clifford Chase

Just some quick reviews today, to clear out the pile. But they're all good novels, with one certainly earning a berth on my all-time favourites list.

Man in the Dark
Paul Auster
Henry Holt, 2008

Paul Auster is a novelist known for taking chances. His New York Trilogy is a classic of post-modernist weirdness. The Music of Chance is a sterling character study. The Book of Illusions is a spectacular, romantic ode. Auster is not known for shying away from a challenge. But Man in the Dark is unusual even by those standards.

It all takes place in the space of one night. August Brill is an author recuperating from injuries sustained in a car accident. As he suffers through a sleepless night, he thinks up a story in an alternate timeline, where the twin towers never fell, and the U.S. has been split in a civil war over the Bush-Gore vote debacle. As the night wears on, the plot progresses, only to be abandoned by Brill as his grand-daughter starts up a conversation about the murder of her boyfriend.

Even by Auster standards, the plot of Man in the Dark beggars description. It has little form, and doesn't resolve itself rather than merely end as the sun comes out. But Auster isn't being lazy; he uses the rambling narrative as a device to touch on issues such as war, love, fear, and hope. In one night, Brill covers much of what North Americans habitually stress themselves into knots over. There are no clear-cut answers, and Auster doesn't pretend to have a solution. "The weird world rolls on," one character mutters, and that's as good a summation of Auster's alternately frustrating and magical novel as any.

Grade: B+

Brother Dumb
Sky Gilbert
ECW Press, 2007

Who is Brother Dumb? Many have speculated, but the best guess as to the identity of the famous yet unnamed memoirist Canadian author Sky Gilbert brings to life is J.D. Salinger. He makes mention of his initials, his sporadic output, his past marriages, his forays in religion; I'm no Salinger expert, but the parallels between Brother Dumb and Salinger are stark and unmistakeable. I don't know why Gilbert would choose not to mention Salinger by name, but considering Salinger's penchant for suing people who use his name (see his famous wranglings with W.P. Kinsella over Kinsella's use of Salinger as a character in his novel Shoeless Joe), it's a safe bet that Gilbert did not want the hassle.

Anyway, the novel is not presented as a mystery to be solved: instead, it's a character study of a man who considers himself humble but is anything but; who says he has a love of people but hates everyone he meets; who yearns to be a silent monk ("Brother Dumb") but in reality cannot shut up. Gilbert's author is a crank, a crotchety old man, and it's no mean feat that Gilbert manages to make the coot likable.

Gilbert's pseudo-memoir is a study in loneliness, and an unflinching portrayal of the temperament of the artist. The author never apologizes for who he is, and indeed, cares far more for his fictional creations than his flesh-and-blood acquaintances. There's undeniable pathos in Gilbert's exploration of how far man will go to have his real life emulate his imagination. The author is a lonely, lonely man, and mostly of his own choosing, but if he's insufferable as a person, he's wonderfully entertaining as a character.

Grade: A-

Last Days
Brian Evenson
Underland Press, 2009

This novel hasn't yet been released, but I can't imagine Brian Evenson being annoyed at some pre-publication praise.

Ostensibly a mystery, Last Days concerns the travails of Kline, a police officer who has recently been parted from his hand (and not by choice). After a series of mysterious phone calls, Kline is forcibly convinced by a strange duo to return with them to their compound, as he is the only person capable of solving a crime. What the crime actually is differs from person to person. Oh, and every individual Kline meets is missing at least one body part. And they parted from their appendages most willingly. I don't wish to give too much away, but when you learn from the publisher that Last Days is a lengthening of Evenson's short story "The Brotherhood of Mutilation," you kind of get a hint as to where it might be headed.

The cover copy presents Last Days as a "down-the-rabbit-hole detective mystery," and like Alice in Wonderland, Kline finds that his presumptions concerning morality and freedoms mean nothing in the situation he is in. Correspondingly, the reader is left as ignorant as Kline, and can only hold on. Last Days falls squarely in the genre of 'the condemned man who has not been told the charges', and is a sterling example of paranoid fiction.

What is Last Days about? Is is a condemnation of fanaticism? Certainly, the acts of Kline's abductors are cult-like, but Evenson is more concerned with keeping the reader off-guard with left turns, misdirection, and some gut-churning violence. It goes without saying, I dug it a lot. Evenson's plot is unsettling and eerie, an equal mixture of Franz Kafka and David Lynch. As Kline winds himself deeper and deeper into Evenson's labyrinth (is the book really only 170+ pageslong?), his options for extricating himself become fewer, especially when he finds himself between warring factions. The ultimate ending, a complete abandonment of the self, is severe and uncompromising, somehow reminding me of the bleak despair of the finale of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, as Neville submits to his fate and becomes the monster.

Last Days is gruesome, perplexing, reprehensible, cruel, and freaking marvelous. I'll be tracking down Evenson's other novels ASAP.

Grade: A-

Winkie
Clifford Chase
Grove Atlantic, 2006

When I stopped and thought about it, I was struck not so much by how much Winkie reminded me of the works of William Kotzwinkle, but more by how few authors use Kotzwinkle as a template. Kotzwinkle has been a preeminent satirist for much of his writing career, and many could learn from his unique sensibilities. Yes, it's all well and good to emulate Vonnegut (register him for sainthood, in my opinion), but Kotzwinkle's novels offer delights both sublime and ridiculous. As does Winkie, a charming, shaggy, ultimately heart-rending tale of the yearning for freedom in a society that craves its scapegoats.

Winkie is a teddy bear with a dream: freedom. After decades of entrapment as a immobile object, Winkie takes it upon himself to leap to his feet and take action, running to the woods, living off the land, and somehow giving birth to a daughter, Baby Winkie. However, fate is indeed cruel, as Winkie becomes mistaken for a unabomber-style terrorist and is tried in a kangaroo court so outrageous it makes the Guantanamo trials seem reasonable and well considered.

Winkie is a bizarre little creature, both as cuddly object of childhood adoration and as literary object of my adoration. It's part allegory for the insane times we live in, with our fear of the other and our incessant need to blame others for our problems. It's part exploration of the outsider. But Winkie's true heart lays in Chase's plea for acceptance and tolerance. Winkie may be a bear, but he's far more rational a being than most people, and far more accepting of the world's mysteries. Winkie's journey is a journey every thinking being must take, and it's rather frightening that a teddy bear is more equipped to deal with the world than most functioning adults.

Winkie is, for me, that rarest of novels: a novel I wish I had written. There's magic in it.

Grade: A+