What Are You Reading Now.

The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort (★★★★★)
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz (★ 1/2)
The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig (★★★)

I'll just do three books so that I can type twice as much on each! Megapost. Forgive my typos, it will take many passes and I might not spot them all.

(I'm putting a footnote at the top. Sanatarium != Sanatorium. One is for crazies, one is for people wanting to rest and recoup.)

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The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort (★★★★★)

A young man recounts his life of sex, drugs, and excess as the leader of a brokerage firm. He's absolutely depraved and unscrupulous. And funny too. If you've seen the movie, then you understand what's here. The story starts with his early life joining the firm, when he's shocked at the amoral behavior. It sort of skims by the takeover, but he basically seizes the whole operation and becomes the most deranged of all of them. He lives for the sell and to manipulate clients into buying rigged stock purchases. He has all sorts of ways to game the system and is raking in millions.

I see a lot of reviews that downvote this because the MC is a nasty, cutthroat guy. I think they're missing the point. A great lead has a need, and Jordan Belfort definitely has that. He wants power, money, sales, sex, quaaludes (his drug of choice). He is sarcastic and profane, and I'm laughing at all his antics. As a grounding influence, he does love his daughter and expresses it well on paper. There are some very tense moments around the birth of his son, too. Those little moments humanize him. Reminds me a bit of those interludes in "American Psycho," where the reprobate MC shows his humanity by reviewing music albums, and it almost seems like a different person is speaking. Back to Jordan: he's a risk taker and has all the negative traits that go along with that. His strongest skill, other than being immune to drugs in an Ozzy Osbourne sort of way (read Ozzy's biography, it's funny for similar reasons), is that he is a motivational genius. His speeches whip his employees into a frenzy. The Strattonites, he calls them. They're funny too. I've got yet another opportunity to post my favorite funny video clip. I found a longer version of it. It sums up the Strattonites in the company "Boardroom." This is exactly how this book feels, Meshuggah included.



My favorite excerpt follows. Jordan has gotten ahold of classic, super-powered quaaludes. The modern equivalent are apparently knockoffs. Some "collector" was hoarding them in a safe and Jordan buys him out for a crazy price. He's warned of severe consequences with these and that he should be extremely careful because they can put him in a coma. He takes one, nothing happens. He waits and waits and then takes another. He waits more time, tries another and heads out in his car. While he's away, they kick in. He has to get back to his car. He's going to drive home (which is insane) but can't even stand. So what does he do?

I rolled onto all fours and tried standing up, but it was no use. Every time I lifted my hands off the carpet I tipped over to the side. I would have to crawl back to the car. But what was so bad about that? Chandler crawled, and she seemed to be fine with it. . . . There was my car…ten stairs down. Try as I might, my brain refused to let me crawl down the stairs, scared at the very possibility of what might happen. So I lay down flat on my stomach and tucked my hands beneath my chest and turned myself into a human barrel and began rolling down the stairs…slow at first…in complete control…and then…oh, shit!…There I go!…​

So it was maximum entertainment for me. Maybe it rushes at the end a bit. There is a part 2, where he must survive in prison. That's saved for Book 2.

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Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz (★ 1/2)

Okay, I'm not going to say too much here. I wanted to give this a lot of stars. I guess I was prejudiced knowing who the author was and the end he faced. (Poland, 1942. I think you understand.) I wanted to give more, but . . . I'm sorry. I see the other ratings on this (4+ stars, very highly rated), and they are doing what I wanted to do for the same reasons. Historically, the author is presented as one of the Polish greats. I'm judging this by words on the page though, and I'll be honest in my assessment.

I thought this was a short novel, but it's a short story collection. I've even read some of the stories in it already. They feel something like a cross between Chekhov, Kafka, and Borges, which you would think I would like. I've read all of those guys and love them. The problem here is the sameness of the delivery. It is flat. Monotone. There are lines that are cleverly stated and beautiful when you consider them on their own, but every, every, every line is the same. It is absurd metaphor upon metaphor stretching over entire stories. The ideas repeat between stories too. There's a fascination with July nights, people snoring, barrel organs, and such. The author rambles on about these in what is basically high prose. You could break the lines apart and they'd work better as free verse.

Some of the ideas are genius. Take the title story. A son takes his DEAD father to a sanatorium where he can rest and recover. He checks up on him. The sanatorium takes dead patients and keeps them at ease so that they don't know they have died. That's awesome. This is the best story in the book, but it's not very well realized. It's very stream of consciousness, and there's no discernable plot. Though it's the least overwritten, it's still overwritten. Kind of reminds me of Lovecraft's dreamscape stories in the way it meanders lazily forward.

I wish I liked this more.

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The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig (★★★)

I don't like this author as a person. Not in the slightest. Now I used to quite a lot. Back in the day I bought all of his writing ebooks from his website, or it might have been a humble-bundle buy, I can't remember. I still have some of his paperbacks on my shelf, and I would recommend his website and his books to writers. (Notice I have never mentioned those here. This is why.) Those books were off-the-wall and inspirational, and they still are, but . . . hmm. This guy needs to take his computer and set it by the curb for disposal. He needs to drop his television off beside that, and just ignore politics and current events. Maybe he needs to visit a sanatorium, haha (see the last review). With enough years, he will turn sane. He was working on Star Wars books for Marvel but was fired for the "negativity and vulgarity" of his tweets. He's basically an out of control Twitter warrior. You've seen plenty like him. They all have a lot of northern machismo and consider themselves to be foreign policy experts. I think there was another reason he was let go from Marvel, or his fans do, because he has a particular writing style that is, let's just say, non-serious. It does show up here too. I'll discuss that below.

This book is about a family (father, mother, son) who are facing the supernatural. The father inherits the house of his violently abusive dad, and moves his family in there so that they can get out of the city. His son is deeply emotional and city life is ruining him. The wife needs somewhere to work on her sculptures. So they move back to small town life, and the now ex-cop father works with Fish and Game. I like that premise, that return to simplicity. It's what I feel Wendig needs to do for himself. I wonder if he even sees the parallel there? Maybe he does. Anyway, the problem is that the father starts seeing his dad, now dead from cancer, standing in the shadows of the house. He has a pistol in his hand, but it's the left hand, not the right, which doesn't make sense. As if any one this does. The father sees strange figures watching the house from the woods. It's all pretty ominous and ramps up to hell on earth stakes.

Now let me say something good here. I've been trying to read 2021 horror, and so far this book blows the others out of the water. There is no comparison. Those other writers seem like amateurs compared to Wendig. This is one of those quick-chapter books (80 chapters total, or thereabouts), and I'm usually unimpressed with those. All of them I've read so far have been egregious nonsense, just one-star blather filled with scares suited for soccer moms. This book understands the form though. Wendig really makes it work. The story moves with purpose, flipping between mother/father/son for POV (with a few others later). The plot takes real turns. Alliances are made that you cannot predict. The stakes keep rising. It is a true page turner and is clearly written by a pro. Wendig is deeply imaginative (no hair standing on end and other cliches). On the page he fears nothing, and I respect that.

This should have been a four-star book. Maybe 4 1/2? There are some pacing issues toward the end that seem odd. It felt like he rushed certain scenes because the page count was climbing, and there were a few events that just didn't hit right for me. They were almost there, but . . . eh. Almost. They didn't ruin things. Like I say, 4 1/2 stars tops if those were addressed, a solid 4 out of 5. But . . . my problems with this:

• Everyone sounds like Wendig.
  • They are vulgar and filled with snark. Imagine ten David Spades crammed into a phonebooth.
  • The mother sounds like Denis Leary on a rant. Really. Read her dialog in his voice. It fits perfectly. I don't buy that this is a woman.
• Gross metaphors.
  • Several times I wanted to set this down.
  • I don't mean that "this is too brutal for me!" I mean that the images were puerile.
• Everyone has Wendig's politics.
  • Imagine that. Even the ex-cop would love Wendig's Twitter feed. That's not believable.
  • He manages to ascribe "bad" politics to one of the villains, of course. I'm shocked. He should have just put a red baseball cap on the guy.
  • There's no "vote for candidate X", but there are constant reminders that the author has politics-on-the-brain.
• Absurd amounts of vulgarity
  • I did a search for F-bombs, just out of curiosity. 267. They are eventually reduced to punctuation and carry zero impact.
  • Putting this in perspective. Your average Stephen King book might have about 20.
  • I guess Jack Ketchum's "The Girl Next Door" had a similar count. Here it's more "fun" than brutal, but still distasteful, IMO.
• Whedon-speak.

By the last one, picture your average Marvel movie. Ten 9-11's are going off in the background, the whole city is dying, and Dr. SpiderThor makes some kind of pop-culture quip about "letting go of his Eggo." That's the kind of stupidity I'm talking about. You would have to be a psychopath to laugh and joke while people are being slaughtered. I'm not talking about a solider's gallow humor; I mean the disassociated indifference of a creep with pin-prick eyes. It's weird. Marvel does this all the time and so does Wendig. (He even kind of looks like Whedon. I think there's some soy-face memes with Wendig in them, his smiling mouth open like a carnival clown's, like he's about to catch a grapefruit or scream, maybe both.) Story-wise, it ends tension. That's what a joke is, quick tension and release. You do that in a horror story and it eliminates dread. It defuses the moment. I'm not saying it can't be done. (I liked "John Dies at the End," for instance.) But there are several scenes that are ruined by blasé jokiness and cutesy onomatopoeia. This is what some of those Star Wars fans were complaining about. I understand them. I want my horror to be deeper. Just a personal preference.

I guess I wish he had more self-control. Still, the book is solid in spite of these flaws. It's better than what these days typically offer for page-turning horror.


Eggo waffles recalled over possible listeria outbreak.

 

I’ve just finished reading the Lie Tree, and the sub-plot was all sorts of things. Fantasy story, crime story, supernatural, murder mystery and YA all wrapped up in one book.

 

I loved "The Terror" too. That was my first Dan Simmons book. After I finished it, I bought a first print. I would have bought a signed first print but they cost way too much. Luckily Simmons lives in my state, and if I ever see him doing a signing, I'll take my copy to him.
The authenticity of that book was just astounding. You'd swear he spent his life at sea, like Melville or something.