Chilling conversations! Scalding coffee! Room-temperature Catholicism! Find all this and more in my new short story "Violet," available now in the latest issue of The Genre Society.
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My favorite sentence in the book. What an image!
This is a good one. Source material for several episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV program back in the day.
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Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987). The best ghost stories have always underscored the blurred lines between the past and present. They force these mutually exclusive states into uncomfortable proximity, and the resulting perversion of our subconscious
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“One thing I’ve learned . . . Everything seems fine until it ain’t. And then we come to see it wasn’t never ‘fine.’”
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this. A resonating figure for me was Miz Lottie, a spunky and resilient octogenarian who has seen it all and is able to code switch as easily as breathing. It’s this character who utters the defining words of this book:
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Due doesn’t hold back in this depiction, and these passages can be tough to get through. She is a very good writer, and many of the passages positively sing with narrative insight. Things get a bit formulaic and predictable in the final act, but that’s expected and excusable in a novel such as
🧵5/7
This story of a young boy unfairly sent to the 1950 Reformatory of the title in the Deep South that is frequented by “haints” of the dead boys who preceded him narrows its focus on the injustice of thinly veiled prisons that were a part of the apparatuses that helped keep the white status quo.
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And shades of The Underground Railroad with its blending of fantastic elements with sober realism. Heck, there’s even a soupçon of Ghostbusters sprinkled in. And while some of this feels like a bit of a retread, in the end this book manages to solidify into its own entity.
🧵3/7
And ok, there are ghosts, I suppose. But the genre label “horror” does not really jive with this novel. Reading this book is to be, ahem, haunted by the specter of other works before it. There’s Beloved, of course, front and center.
🧵2/7
The Reformatory (Tananarive Due, 2023). The tag on this book lists it as “horror,” but that doesn't seem quite right. Sure, there is the abject horror of the Jim Crow South, and of course there is the horror of children with absented parents.
🧵1/7
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This one reads more as a police procedural, and I found the characters to be engaging and well-drawn. This and GOTW are the only books of hers that I’ve read. I think she does a nice job of world building and character development, at least in the reader’s eyes. Hope you enjoy!
This, coupled with The God of the Woods, has established Liz Moore (in my mind, anyway) as a writer to eagerly await, and I’ll be reading everything she publishes from here on out.
🧵4/4
Some of the better surprises come from the narrator herself; there’s just something to be said about a first person narrator by-the-way-ing critical previously unmentioned information late in the proceedings.
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This is written in a tight first-person narrative, and the pleasures come from the slow build of the family history and the exploding reveals which are so great in number that at least a few are guaranteed to catch even the most astute reader off guard.
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Long Bright River (Liz Moore, 2020). A literary thriller that leans a little more to the thriller side than literary, this book is very readable. The protagonist is a Philadelphia cop who is searching for her drug-abusing sister.
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Presidential turkey pardoned. Still awaiting word on their crimes from the 1970s are the nation’s jive turkeys.
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Easily the book of the year. Prepare to get lost in these pages (and don’t forget to sit down and yell).
🧵4/4
The real thrill here is the unveiling of the mysteries (plural) and the surprising reveals. There’s class drama, there’s sexual politics, there’s a bit of everything you’ve been looking for in your next big read.
🧵3/4
It grabs the reader and propels them along with the same urgency of a Donna Tartt or Pat Conroy. A camper has gone missing from a sleepover camp in 1975, but you really don’t want to know too much more than that going in.
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The God of the Woods (Liz Moore, 2024). This is the book you’ve been waiting for. There’s a mystery, but don’t expect the thin parameters of genre here. This is a robust world-building novel.
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Just finished it. Excellent from start to finish
Stick with it for sure
who’s in on the joke with every page, and so when he swerves into pathos or sadness it is jarring and quite effective.
🧵5/5
Sedaris’ melding of the amusing with the existential belies the true gift of his craft and should give pause to any critics who dismiss him as merely light. He has established himself as a drôle wag slyly winking at you, the reader,
🧵4/5
his long-suffering partner Hugh, and his particular brand of observational humor as he jets about to his many homes around the globe. There is a current that runs throughout these essays, as the writing is tempered by the recent suicide of his sister Tiffany.
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These diary-style essays have become something of a cottage industry for him, and his books arrive every few years as a welcome delight. Calypso hits several of the customary notes that Sedaris fans are used to: his cutesy relationship with his large extended family,
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Calypso (David Sedaris, 2018). David Sedaris can perhaps best be described using words like eccentric, peculiar, odd, fey, outré, curious, and, more often than not, hilarious. Forty years ago he would have just been dismissed as a nut (or worse). I rather like him.
🧵1/5
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