Book 30 of 2018

What a great little novel! It's a classic haunted house tale with a multi-dimensional twist. Once you figure out what's happening to the victims you wish, as many do at horror films, that you could intervene somehow and stop them from doing what they are about to do. That's what makes dramatic irony so cool, right?

Of course a few of the victims are really distasteful people, so it's fun to see them get their occult comeuppance. But even they don't deserve this fate. Well, maybe the cop does.

As in Cloud Atlas, Mitchell keeps track of multiple narrative lines and characters and they are all fully fleshed out with profound and individual and entertaining back stories. Of course these lines and characters all end in a similar manner because their fate is pulling them gravitationally toward the singularity of Slade House. We get to experience this same fate from different points of view, and that's a fun exercise for a writer, to imagine how different people would experience and describe the same sorrowful fate. And Mitchell shows off by keeping them in character as they are snuffed--the things they notice and how they notice them are well done.

The little alley where Slade House hides itself is carefully and quaintly wrought. All of the settings are classic ghost story with 21st century updates. The House itself is truly entertaining, and its means of haunting is unique.

And the book, though creepy and harrowing, is also funny as hell. All good haunted house novels blend humor and despair. Mitchell does so quite well.

A great Halloween read. You can finish it between handing out candies Wednesday.

Books 28 and 29 of 2018

One of my favorite genres is the drug revelation memoir. I love reading authors attempting to describe going off the rails. I think of Walter Benjamin writing about hashish, or Aldous Huxley waxing philosophically about mescalin, or Castaneda's descriptions of peyote trips, or Burroughs, etc.

One of the coolest and most interesting thinkers and describers of such experiences was Terrence McKenna. And McKenna and his ideas are a large part of Lin's book. In fact, the only parts of the book which are at all interesting are when Lin is summarizing McKenna. Which leads me to ask why the hell anyone would read this book when they can just read McKenna or watch him on YouTube.

Because--no offense to Mr. Lin--this is the most boring book I've ever read about this topic. Or any topic. It's pointless. It's meandering. It says nothing new. Even the passages about depression and feeling alienated are dull...and another of my favorite genres is the descent into madness memoir by people who feel isolated and alienated and depressed.

How can a writer with any skills at all write tedious and wholly unimaginative descriptions of DMT and salvia divinorum experiences? I simply can't get my head around it. He smokes DMT and spends pages describing feeling distracted and paranoid and moving in and out of a tent he built in the corner from a blanket. He can't make a salvia experience at all tangible or interesting? Even Miley Cyrus can do that.

Nobody cares if you felt suspicious for six hours straight after she shared her DMT with you. How many pages can you spend giving her the hairy eye-ball while she wonders what the fuck your problem is? What did you see or feel inside that realm? That's what's interesting. McKenna and virtually every other writer creates edge-of-the-seat, earth-shattering descriptive passages of breathtaking wizardry about DMT. Lin's passages sag like over wet noodles. I remember as a novice writer in the Temple University MA program how Toby Olson complimented my description of a mushroom experience and pumped me up with lavish praise during a workshop, only to say "but anyone can write a good trip, it's almost cliched."

Mr. Lin--anyone can write a good trip. Why couldn't you? I read something by you before and that was better than this, but not better enough that I would want to read whatever you published between then and now. And after having read this, I definitely do not want to read whatever you published between that and this, because this was so bad. Sorry, dude.




Thank goodness Ms. Due provided a cleanse for the above atrocity. This is a fine selection of creepy fiction, and runs the gamut from traditional ghost stories which are finely crafted and inhabit an interesting niche to more action/adventure sci-fi thrillers. I particularly liked the one about demons in a Florida swamp who take over infants for a while in the summer--has a nice sardonic tone and delicious Twilight Zone moral! And best of all are the rather intense post-apocalyptic stories at the end. Definitely should go on your Halloween reading list.