Steven Erikson: Willful Child

I thought this started out very strong, but even though its episodic, aimless nature is explicitly part of the point, I was ready for it to be over well before it was.

Rachel Lynn Brody (ed.): Hot Mess – Speculative Fiction About Climate Change

The handful of stories in Brody’s collection clearly have an agenda of raising consciousness of and concern about the implications of climate change. Socially or politically motivated art is tricky: it can succeed in communicating its objectives without necessarily exhibiting the general hallmarks of literary merit. In literary terms, I found Hot Mess a mixed

John Warner: The Funny Man

There’s a lot of craft I admire in The Funny Man. Initially, chapters alternate between the titular character’s first-person narration of his manslaughter trial in the present, and third-person narration of the funny man’s career arc. (For a while I was mildly irritated by the funny man’s namelessness, but it’s eventually justified; the novel is

Lou Beach: 420 Characters

I expected that limiting the length of a short story to 420 characters — as counted by Facebook’s software, spaces and punctuation included — would come off as a gimmick rather than an artistic constraint, but this collection of a hundred and fiftyish micro-stories is pretty amazing, in several dimensions. The first thing I noticed

Libba Bray : Going Bovine

At the outset of Going Bovine, Cameron Smith, a quintessential teenage underachiever, finds out he’s under an unusual death sentence: he’s contracted Mad Cow disease. With some supernatural aid, he breaks himself out of the hospital and goes on a whacky road-trip to save both himself and the universe — or then again, maybe he

Alan DeNiro : Total Oblivion, More or Less

DeNiro’s first novel (following a well-received string of short stories) presents a transformed near-future America: the nation is beset by anachronistic invaders, ravaged by a mysterious plague, and technology stops working. DeNiro pulls off the neat trick of making his surreal world feel internally consistent, largely because it’s grounded by the narrative voice of Macy,

Steve Hely: How I Became a Famous Novelist

How I Became a Famous Novelist is a tidy, and very funny, example of simultaneous multi-layer cake having/eating. Bitter Pete Tarslaw decides the best way to get back at his ex-girlfriend is to write a chart-topping novel. He inventories the best seller list, discards genre fiction as requiring too much actual work, and decides to

Beard, Donihe, Duza, et al: The Bizarro Starter Kit (Orange)

I hoped The Bizarro Starter Kit would help me figure out if I’d like bizarro fiction, a genre self-defined by a loose collective of writers with a shared love of cult/trash cinema. It didn’t. The Bizarro Starter Kit makes the case that there’s too much going on for me to dismiss it, and too much

Gary Shteyngart – Super Sad True Love Story

Super Sad True Love Story reminded me in bits and pieces of several other near future satire/dystopias (all of which I thought were more successful), among them Wallace’s infinite Jest and Hal Hartley’s film The Girl from Monday, but most of all David Marusek’s Counting Heads. Marusek’s book is much more science fiction-y and action-oriented,

Stanislaw Lem: Mortal Engines

Stanislaw Lem is one of the many authors I’ve always meant to read something by. I’ve even picked up a handful of his books over the years with noble intentions of follow-through which have, to-date, gone unfufilled. So picking Lem’s Mortal Engine from the freebie box I’d commited to availing myself of only if I