book reviews

Review: The Sluts, Dennis Cooper

Dennis Cooper and I have been on a collision course my entire life. I’m embarrassed for having taken so long to discover him, but I am making up for lost time (I’ve read seven of his books this year and am currently on my eighth).

It started with The Sluts. After having this book recommended to me constantly on GoodReads and other book sites, not to mention popping up routinely on BookTube, I finally took the plunge. Not knowing anything about him, I feared that maybe he was less a novelist and more a shock merchant. I’ve been burned by extreme authors in the past.

I read it in a day, and it immediately rocketed into my top ten all-time favorite books. The prose is electric and the text moves at a reckless pace.

Published, and set, in 2004, The Sluts came out right before the social media boom. It’s an epistolary novel told through the tools of the old Internet: dedicated websites, bulletin boards, even faxes. I won’t pretend that I didn’t enjoy the nostalgia of it.

But though it is twenty years old, The Sluts is a novel for our current time. It is a metafiction filled with unreliable narrators and all the hallmarks of the post-truth world. It occurs in an insular and mistrusting web community and incorporates a healthy dose of fan fiction.

The star of the show is Brad, a sex worker of exceptional beauty and questionable age and mental health. He is the soiled dove who captures the imagination of dozens of connoisseurs on an escort review website. Some want to save him. Some want to abuse him. Everybody wants to hire him.

At a certain point, it becomes clear that whatever you want Brad to be, he is, so while Brad is the central character of the novel, in the end we know nothing about him. The only information we have about him is discussion board gossip posted pseudonymously.

Ultimately, this turns the focus of The Sluts back on the reader. What do we know of any character in any book other than what a faceless author has provided on the page? How do we distinguish between true fictions (primary storylines) and artful lies (metafictions), and why do we distinguish between them in a book that we already know isn’t real?

It’s fitting that Cooper essentially places the reader in front of the computer in this story. Every day, we’re fed information from a screen. It’s up to us to discern truth and fallacy. We interact with strangers, read their reviews of movies, appliances, restaurants… even (gasp) books.

In the end, though, it comes down to the user, alone behind their keyboard. We find whatever we seek online. It’s a digital Plato’s cave where not only are we seduced by a false reality, but we are tricked into believing that we have agency over that reality.

The reader chooses which Brad reviews to believe and which to discard, thereby projecting our own fantasies and anxieties onto this ethereal sex worker who is pure dream or pure nightmare.

Trust me, this is a deeply engaging novel that will shake you to your philosophical core.

Review: Cows, Matthew Stokoe

Cows is the rare book that can be filed under both extreme horror and literary fiction. It earns its notoriety for its unflinching descriptions of despair, abuse, bestiality and coprophagia, but what elevates it above the edgelording of most extreme horror is Matthew Stokoe’s beautiful, evocative and squirm-inducing prose.

“Riding the backs of his corpuscles, leaping onto them from his stomach wall and through the thick gray coils of his intestines, not giving a shit what his heart wanted, the hard black grit of Mama’s catabolized meals jammed itself into his flesh and fat and gristle.”

Friends, that’s page one.

The story follows Steven, a young man whose life is like something out of a Quay Brothers film. There’s no origin story. He just exists in a dreary and oppressive Skinner box with his abusive, corpulent mother on the outskirts of an unnamed city.

When we meet Steven, he is starting a new job at the meat processing plant. He spends his day shoving chunks of butchered bovids into a grinder. At home, his mother feeds him rancid food to keep him weak and belittled.

Thanks to television, however, he strives to one day be normal and happy — just like a perfect sitcom family. He wants to share that life with Lucy, his upstairs neighbor.

When his foreman, Cripps, promises to turn Steven into an alpha male, he follows his lead, believing it will win him the happiness he seeks. So, along with a freakshow of co-workers, he commits rites of passage that will send even the strongest gag reflex into hyperdrive.

At first, it appears to work. Steven begins a paraphilic relationship with Lucy and stands up to his mother. He even assumes the duties of preparing his mother’s meals (read the book to get the irony of that last statement).

But that changes after Steven has a dialogue with one of the cows.

*Record scratch*

No, I didn’t say he has a monologue (or even a moo-ologue). He has a conversation with a cow that has escaped the slaughterhouse and tells Steven that he’s headed down a bad path. The cow also asks for his help in getting revenge on Cripps.

OK, that’s a lot, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. It’s not an easy book to discuss because, well, it’s strange and it inspires strong and varied feelings. It amuses as much as it disturbs and is at times deeply existential (wonderfully so) and at others surreal (mixed bag).

It felt a lot like reading The 120 Days of Sodom. At first it’s horrifying and difficult to read. Then it becomes comical and over-the-top. By the end, you’re reckoning with the novel’s philosophical intentions — not in spite of, but because of that journey.

Without a doubt, the most compelling relationship in the book is between the complementary spirits of Steven and Lucy. Steven attributes his unhappiness to what he lacks. He believes it exists out there, same as it’s portrayed on TV. If he could just get past the obstacles in his way he could be happy.

Lucy, on the other hand, chalks up her unhappiness to something sick within her. She is on an endless quest to find and destroy the poison she believes lives inside her body. She dissects animals, looking for this diseased part of the anatomy. She urges Steven to examine the cow innards on her behalf. She has an endoscopy hose that she uses to map her discontent.

The result is an endless cycle of drudgery, abuse and disappointment. The only moments of joy Steven experiences is when he’s having sex with Lucy, having sex with his side piece (ahem… a cow) or torturing and killing his various enemies. Those are the moments when he feels vital, alive, powerful.

But it turns out the talking cows were right. The path he’s on will not lead him to happiness. Ironically, Cripps is also right, when he tells Steven, “Don’t be frightened by the sickness. It lessens each time until it ceases to be felt.”

It reminded me (too much) of when I worked in an animal shelter years ago. For the mental health of the staff, we were only required to perform euthanasias one day a month — and those were some of the worst days of my life.

After the first time, I spent twenty minutes dry-heaving in a bathroom stall and sobbing like a child. The next time, I needed some alone time, but didn’t feel as sick, and I felt less so with each procedure. The last time, my eyes watered, but no tears fell. The sickness was gone.

In Cows, that’s a feature, not a bug. If you eat enough shit, you get used to the taste (literally, in the case of this book). Likewise, if exposed to enough killing, abuse and exploitation, you become desensitized to that as well.

But as Steven learns, that is a very different feeling than happiness.

Review: The Mean Reds, Dale Bridges

“The mean reds are horrible.” So said Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Her opinion may have been very different if she’d read Dale Bridges’ debut novel of the same name. Holly uses the term “mean reds” to describe generalized anxiety. “Suddenly you’re afraid, and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?”

Bridges serves up a bender of mean reds with a whiskey back and a cast of scoundrels, stoners and a slacker narrator who’s a magnet for absurdity.

Our story follows Sam Drift, a film reviewer, pothead and hopeless romantic who nurses his heartbreak with alcohol and noir cinema. Life is… fine, let’s say, until an adult entertainer is found dead outside a local strip club — ostensibly from a slip and fall in the alley.

For some reason, Sam’s misguided publisher assigns him to the story, to the ire of everyone else in the newsroom. Of course, there’s more to the story of the dead stripper than meets the eye.

On top of all that, Maggie, the girl who stole his heart and his movie idea, is back in town for a big film festival.

It’s a neo-noir worthy of the Coen brothers. In fact, the back cover copy describes it as The Big Sleep meets The Big Lebowski. A fitting description, but personally, I find it more in league with J.G. Ballard’s Cocaine Nights — satirizing high society with a punkish sneer.

This is a fun read for fans of classic cinema and noir fiction, and the first novel from an author to watch.

GoodReads: The Cipher

The Cipher by Kathe Koja

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Reading this in 2023 was like opening a time capsule. As with many of my favorite books of the early ’90s, it features acerbic humor, feral sexuality, over-stylized prose and a gutter-punk aesthetic that dares the reader to keep turning pages. High-octane body horror.



View all my reviews

Review: Kindred, Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a novel that will hijack your mind, body and spirit for a while. And it will not return them in nice condition.

Seriously, this book will break you.

It begins when Dana, a black woman living in 1976 California, gets transported to a plantation in 1815 Maryland. She saves the life of an impetuous and accident-prone boy, Rufus Weylin, who is the son of the plantation owner. She learns that he will go on to father one of her ancestors, and it’s up to Dana to ensure he survives long enough to sire the child.

Butler’s genius is on display from the opening pages, and Kindred is perhaps her most powerful novel. Understandably, the antebellum south is a dangerous place for Dana, but the nature of her time jumps is unpredictable and equally hazardous. She doesn’t know when she’ll be displaced, or where she’ll be taken to, so when she’s back in 1976, she never leaves her home or drives a car for fear of what might happen.

This is a brilliant move on Butler’s part. Without agency in the present, Dana becomes enslaved in both timelines, simulating the forced relocation and dehumanization of slavery. It’s demoralizing, and to survive, Dana must endure the injustices and humiliations of history.

She remarks, “I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”

However, Dana is the perfect foil for the plantation’s owner. She is educated and strong-willed — a writer who “dresses like a man” and is as much a culture shock to the people of the plantation as they are to her.

Kindred is the most horrifying yet pitch perfect novel I’ve ever read. It was impossible to put down, but at the same time I couldn’t wait until it was over. The hardest part to endure, for me, was the banality of it all. The atrocities are accepted as a matter of course, and for all his cruelty and ignorance, the plantation owner, Tom Weylin, is more dispassionate than hateful — at least relative to other slave owners at the time.

“[He] wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves,” Dana observes. “He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.”

The systemic nature of slavery makes it all the more horrifying. It’s not merely the theft of another’s freedom, but the institutional structure that codifies injustice and the extrajudicial violence that enforces the status quo.

More than four decades after its publication, Kindred remains an unflinching study of America’s greatest shame — and an indictment of a culture still unwilling to reckon with its past.

Review: One’s Company, Ashley Hutson

Reading Ashley Hutson’s debut novel, One’s Company, I was reminded of a quote from Arthur Schopenhauer: “A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”

The same goes for Bonnie Lincoln, a twenty-first century Schopenhauer of sorts and the narrator of One’s Company, whose only ask of the world is to leave her be.

I can relate — a lot, actually.

I share Bonnie’s brutally honest view of humanity and her desire to simply be left alone. Also like Bonnie, I grew up in a trailer and my favorite show as a kid was Three’s Company. On a nightly basis, we would eat dinner on TV trays while watching reruns of Jack and Janet, et al.

While for me that is a happy memory, for Bonnie, there is a much darker connection. The show is where she goes to escape from a life of pain. Both of her parents die young and the family that takes her in is murdered during a robbery — in which Bonnie is also assaulted and left for dead.

While in recovery, she watches Three’s Company from start to finish, over and over, and it helps her manage the trauma.

When she wins a hefty jackpot in the lottery, she plans her escape from the “small insults of being alive.” She buys a remote patch of land and — with the discriminating eye of a museum curator — hires a team of contractors and designers to reconstruct the Three’s Company sets as real buildings for her to live in. They recreate Janet’s flower shop, the Regal Beagle, the Roper’s utilitarian flat and  Ralph Furley’s swingin’ bachelor pad.

Most importantly, they build a replica of apartment 201, where the main characters lived and where Bonnie intends to spend the rest of her days living through each season, portraying each of the characters in turn, and adapting her hair and fashion as the role demands.

She goes so far as to set up a labyrinthine network of attorneys, investors and delivery services so that she can never encounter another human being again. All is going well until an epic storm and an unsuspecting trespasser destroy her solitude.

Initially, I found an analog between Hutson’s tale and J.G. Ballard, who often used synthetic, sequestered environments to critique modern society and its attempts to conquer the natural world — particularly through its garish, mid-century architecture.

But the deeper I got into the story, I realized that Hutson took the idea of the manufactured world and inverted it to some degree. Rather than living in a synthetic environment of someone else’s making, Bonnie is in one of her own. With Ballard, the breakdown of society causes the disaster. For Bonnie, the disaster is when society inevitably encroaches on her private world.

“I should have known. Escape would not be allowed. There is no escape from other humans, from being human.”

And then things really get weird. This is when you realize that while you thought you were wading in shallow water, Hutson has slowly been guiding you into the deep end and is now holding your head underwater.

I really enjoyed Bonnie’s nihilistic humor. She maintains her comedic tone even as the story gets darker and darker. The book hits its stride when it becomes something of a philosophical argument for solitude and raises questions such as, does an individual have an inherent right to solitude? Why does an individual have to engage with society against their will? And who decided that human interaction was so great anyway?

This is dark comedy done well — and the perfect book for the misanthrope in your life.

Review: The Twilight Zone, Nona Fernandez

One of the most powerful and unsettling films I’ve ever seen is 2018’s La Casa Lobo, an animated nightmare based on the real-life atrocities of the Pinochet regime in Chile. The film brought the horrors of that period to life within the confines of a single building — the viewer felt trapped in the claustrophobic wolf house.

Chilean author, Nona Fernandez, offers a more macro perspective in her equally powerful and hauntingly poetic book, The Twilight Zone.

To call this a work of fiction would be insufficient. It’s a blend of narrative storytelling, including fiction, journalism and memoir, which brings that period to life greater than reportage alone. During Pinochet’s US-backed military junta, beginning in 1973, thousands of people were disappeared, tortured, sexually abused and often killed. The fates of many of those are still unknown. Their deaths have been reduced to statistics.

The book’s narrator — a documentary filmmaker — attempts to restore their voices by speculating on their ultimate fates and showing them as more than numbers or victims. This is a delicate literary maneuver that, if handled poorly, would come off as pandering or even exploitative. However, Fernandez delivers it with such grace that it feels empowering and restorative.

Her master stroke in this novel, though, is the incorporation of popular culture.

One of the challenges of understanding history is context. It’s easy to distance ourselves from historical events and think of them as separate from our own timeline. However, Pinochet’s atrocities are not ancient history. They occured in my lifetime, and Pinochet himself only died in 2006.

Fernandez uses pop culture to drive home that point, starting with the book’s title — although I prefer the untranslated title, La Dimensión Desconocida. It sounds more appropriately menacing when it doesn’t share the name of my all-time favorite television show.

During the memoir sequences, Fernandez spends her afternoons watching reruns of popular American television shows and juxtaposes this with the atrocities that were being perpetrated against her fellow Chileans at that time.

It’s an unnerving contrast, particularly since I was watching those same reruns in that same timeframe. She takes it further by placing us inside the premiere of the narrator’s documentary film about Pinochet. It was relegated to the smallest screen of a multiplex that had dedicated all of its big rooms to superhero movies in varying degrees of high definition.

The narrator and her mother were the only ones in attendance, and they had trouble hearing the documentary over the surround sound explosions and dramatic overtures rattling the walls.

Literally, popular culture was drowning out the voice of Pinochet’s victims. The Twilight Zone is a good reminder to not let popular culture distract us from present-day atrocities. It’s an engrossing, hard-hitting journey into the dark heart of humanity.

Review: The Book of Accidents

Meet the Graves: Nate, a Philadelphia cop; Maddie, an artist; and their teenaged son, Olly, an empath who is a routine target of bullies at his school. When the family has a chance to move to Nate’s rural childhood home, they see it as an opportunity to escape the craziness of the big city.

But they soon learn that rural Pennsylvania is the scariest place of all.

Strange things happen immediately: Maddie’s sculptures begin coming to life. Nate begins seeing the ghost of his abusive father, except slightly different than he was while alive (left-handed, for example).

As for Olly, the change of scenery doesn’t make much difference at first — he’s still a bully magnet. In his darkest moment, though, a one-eyed stranger shows up and chases off two jocks who are trying to drown him. The mysterious stranger introduces himself as Jake, a fellow teenager, who lives by himself, doesn’t go to school and seems to have magical abilities.

With his new friend to protect him, it seems that Olly’s nightmare is over, but in truth, he’s about to sink to depths he never could have imagined.

The Book of Accidents is an entertaining and well-written book. It’s a page-turner with classic horror tropes such as the struggle between good and evil, supernatural entities and the power of underdogs when they’re forced to tap into a strength they didn’t realize they had.

Personally, I like my horror to be on the darker side, so while this was a fun read, I didn’t find it scary or disturbing. I also couldn’t put it down, so I definitely recommend it as a summer read.

Spoilers below

Wendig does not give us a color-by-numbers haunted house tale. There is a science behind the supernatural. What at first appear to be ghosts turn out to be the product of parallel timelines bleeding over into this one. This creates opportunities for characters to make peace with their pasts through alternate versions of themselves and others.

I found the scenes between Nate and his dead father particularly touching.

There were some structural shortcomings, however. The magical system, for lack of a better term, is never fully understood by either the reader or the characters, giving the ending a deus ex machina feel. And while using a multiverse setting was useful for the plot, it also lowers the stakes for the reader — if there are multiple versions of each character, an individual death isn’t as devastating.

It also negates the freewill that drives a good vs. evil narrative. Is the Graves family good by choice or by chance? If an evil version of them necessarily exists (as it must in a many-worlds reality), is that version truly evil?

At a certain point, I put quantum mechanics aside and just enjoyed the book for what it was: a fun, unique, well-constructed horror novel that probably won’t keep you up at night — but it will keep you reading through to the end.

Review: Plain Bad Heroines

Going in, I knew very little about Plain Bad Heroines. After the holidays, and in the thickest part of winter, I was in the mood for something epic and escapist. At more than 600 pages, Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines seemed like it might be just what I was looking for.

It was exactly that and more.

It put me in mind of Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics (one of my all-time favorite novels), with its richly layered mysteries and plot twists, and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, due to the fairy tale-esque narration.

There are three narratives driving the story. First, we have the historical storyline concerning a series of odd deaths at a New England boarding school for girls in the early 1900s. Running parallel with that is a modern-day attempt to adapt the tragedy into a horror movie. Meanwhile, the film’s director — clearly a student of auteur theory — has secretly rigged the entire set with hidden cameras and jump scares to incorporate a found-footage element that will blur the line between film and documentary.

As intended, it drives the actors to question their sanity and wonder whether the old boarding school truly is cursed. And if so, was it cursed by the tragedy or had it been hexed long before the school even existed?

Finally, we have the meta narrative, which glues the timelines together with the help of an omniscient, unidentified narrator. The meta narrative weaves in the true story of Mary MacLane, a turn-of-the-century author and feminist whose scandalous 1902 memoir documented her same-sex affairs and is central to the plot.

The use of paratext in the form of footnotes and postscripts further blurs the lines of fact and fiction. I’ve always found footnotes in fiction kind of gimmicky, and, from my days in an MFA program, overdone. But in the postscript, Danforth explains their significance: it’s a nod to the many historical queer narratives that have been lost, destroyed, altered and buried within small-font annotations throughout history. “You can often find us,” she writes, “quite literally, in the margins.”

It adds another layer to an already sad and beautiful tale — a tale perfect for the dark night of winter.

Review: The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club

Doug Henderson has written an anthem for all the geeks and outcasts from the Rust Belt. His wonderful debut novel transported me back to the early 1990s, when me and my friends would haunt Twice-Loved Books and various used record shops in and around Youngstown.

We went to metal shows all over northeast Ohio, so obviously, I related most to Albert, the chaos agent of Cleveland Heights. He works at a record store, listens to death metal and has a wardrobe consisting of black band T-shirts and jeans.

The action begins when he joins an LGBTQ D&D group who meet every Thursday in the back of a comic shop. He is a welcome addition to all members of the party except Ben, the protagonist. Lacking in nerve and self-confidence (as well as a job or apartment), Ben is flustered by Albert’s intrusion.

He complains to Celeste, the dungeon master, “He’s too good looking to play D&D.”

Behind his objections, of course, is an irrepressible and terrifying attraction. The tension between them drives the novel, fueled by Henderson’s sharp prose and humor.

There is so much I love about this book, and I wasn’t ready for it to end. Henderson certainly laid the foundation for an epic, with a large ensemble cast, including the gamers, a rival vampire role-playing group and some banker bros (including Mooneyham, a member of the campaign who hasn’t yet come out to his coworkers).

Mooneyham is perhaps the most compelling member of the group. While the others are traditional geeks, Mooneyham is an alpha male with locker-room charisma who hides his inner nerd beneath a power suit. He is annoying, but as the novel progresses he shows depth and vulnerability. He is less open about his sexuality because, as he explains, the others were misfits whose reveal was not a huge surprise. When Mooneyham comes out, it will be a bombshell. It might also derail his career.

Unfortunately, this storyline fizzles into a missed opportunity. Henderson has built up many interesting characters, but the novel’s brevity doesn’t allow their arcs to fully develop.

And while a common (and often justified) critique of cis-het male authors is that they struggle to create well-rounded female characters, this is not exclusive to straight men. The group’s women, Valerie (cis) and Celeste (trans), have a ton of potential that isn’t realized. I wanted their stories to be more significant.

But ultimately, the book is about Ben and Albert, and their journey is portrayed brilliantly. It’s a strong debut, and I look forward to where Henderson takes us next. Personally, I would like a sequel. I love this group of adventurers and want to spend more time in the geek shops of northeast Ohio.