The Company We Keep: Drive-By Truckers’ Homecoming and the Fan Community

Posted on January 18, 2021 by pagesofjulia

Continuing with DBT and Wes Freed (see also this review from last week), here’s another big beautiful coffee-table book about the Truckers and their fans. The subject here is more focused than the Truckers generally: it’s about the annual event called Homecoming, a three-night series of shows at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, DBT’s “home” even as members have moved away over the years. In particular it concentrates on 2018’s Homecoming, when this book was being put together. There’s still quite a bit of band info and history, but the annual event and that ‘fan community’ of the subtitle are front and center.

The Company We Keep was put together as a fundraiser for the incomparable Nuçi’s Space. As such it’s a lovely effort; I’m always glad to give to this cause. As a final product I think it’s less than perfect; I would like to see the fan interviews, in particular, more carefully edited and proofread, that is, both for grammatical errors and for redundancy and long-windedness. Some sections and writers could have used more context or introduction. It can sometimes feel indulgent of the fan community, as if they are talking among themselves and to one another, and I’m welcome to listen in but it’s not really for me as much as it’s about themselves. Ironically, with themes of friendly inclusiveness, the book feels a little exclusive, a little in-group.

Despite being a glossy, large-format production, this book contains quite a bit of text. There are chapters about the rock show itself; opening bands; the club; the town; Nuçi’s Space; the fans; weddings, wakes, and friendships; and more. It’s led by a foreword by Patterson Hood, and I’m always glad to hear from him in any form. I marked a few points that felt like they encapsulated different parts of why I love this band so much. Hood: “Cooley and I have always written songs that used geography as an anchor to hold down some big ideas or stories.” Jay Gonzalez: “[Patterson]’s always trying to break down barriers, to bring people together socially and otherwise.” Gonzalez again: DBT is “a ‘lyric band’… but the music matters too, otherwise there’s poetry for that. And good lyrics are not ‘like poetry,’ it’s about how the music and lyrics work together, and Patterson and Cooley are definitely songwriters [not poets].” Trae Crowder (a comedian who’s opened for them at Homecoming): “My whole life I had never understood why being from the south and speaking with a drawl meant that you had to look and think and act and feel a certain way, and I could tell that DBT were wondering that same thing, and they were doing it out loud. This band was for me, by god, and has been ever since.”

Carter King, of Futurebirds (another opener), contributes an essay I found really well done as a piece of writing, regardless of its content (also sympathetic and hilarious). Reading more about the good work of Nuçi’s, including the Camp Amped Band, is always rewarding. I was thrilled to learn about a fan who’d written his undergraduate thesis about the Truckers; it’s available here. (I went and read it, too, and while a lot of the music theory went right over my head, it’s another well-designed piece of writing, entertaining and with some clear ideas to boot.)

These were high points. I regretted a few details – the need for editing; the in-group feel. But there was good Truckers content, and a good cause means I’d have no regrets even if it had had far less to offer.

Rating: 7 notes.

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The World of the Woodchuck by W. J. Schoonmaker

Posted on January 15, 2021 by pagesofjulia

I come from a place without woodchucks (or groundhogs, or whistlepigs, or whatever you prefer to call them). Now I live in a place where I get to watch them root and run around and sun themselves from my office window, or on dog walks. This is an exciting novelty for me. I’ve been looking for a book to learn more about these funny, personable little creatures, and I’ve been having kind of a hard time, but I did finally find this 1966 publication, The World of the Woodchuck (part of a series, A Living World Books, from J. B. Lippincott).

It’s a fairly simple collection of naturalist knowledge about woodchucks, part of the family Sciuridae (tree squirrels, ground squirrels, flying squirrels), genus Marmota, group monax. (My local species is the Marmota monax monax, or Maryland woodchuck.) W.J. Schoonmaker (zoologist, photographer, illustrator, educator, and lifelong resident of New York state) compiles all the information he can find in chapters titled “Meet the Woodchuck,” each of the four seasons, “Relation to Man and Other Animals,” and more. His writing style is mostly straightforward, a comprehensive catalog of stories and facts from his own considerable observation of woodchucks (and other animals) and the work of other naturalists and farmers, hunters and friends. He has a clear affection for his subject, when he describes them smiling and showing fear and love, or telling stories like the “comedy” of a black dachshund that chased a woodchuck and then got chased in turn.

I am left with a similar affection for Schoonmaker, who can be unintentionally funny (noting that three chucks he found with overgrown incisors were each “alive when killed”). The book is definitely dated in its language and style, and perhaps in its emphasis on the question of whether wild animals are useful to humans in terms of hunting, farming, and recreation – we have only partially moved past that perspective, but this does feel like the perspective of an earlier era in ecology. However, Schoonmaker observes, “It is believed that every plant and animal fits somewhere in the great plan of Nature, and the woodchuck definitely occupies an ecological niche in this scheme.” I can’t say if the body of knowledge about woodchucks has expanded since this book was published, but I have been looking in vain for more to read about them, so The World of the Woodchuck may remain the authoritative monograph on this subject. I learned a fair amount. The chambers of a woodchuck burrow adhere to dimensions with variation of only an inch or so between individuals (even individuals of different sizes). Woodchucks can climb trees, and they both ascend and descend headfirst. They hibernate in winter (I last observed my across-the-street neighbor on November 10, which is kind of late – we had a warm fall here). They are herbivores, and playful as puppies when they’re young, although they have to spend a lot of time eating and thus less time playing than a puppy does – it takes a lot of eating to prepare for hibernation on the caloric content of alfalfa and clover. They can eat a third of their weight at a time.

This book is no great work of research or fine writing, but it gave me what I needed, with a charming authorial voice and plenty of pictures. I’m glad I found it.

Rating: 7 accounts of the courage of woodchucks.

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At the Edge of the Haight by Katherine Seligman

Posted on January 13, 2021 by pagesofjulia

In this quietly compassionate novel, a young homeless woman stumbles into a crime scene on the edge of Haight-Ashbury, and eventually reconsiders how she got there.

Katherine Seligman’s gripping debut novel, At the Edge of the Haight, explores a community on the edge of a historic setting and on the edge of getting by, with a compelling protagonist and an array of issues to wrestle.

Twenty-year-old Maddy Donaldo lives in present-day Golden Gate Park, after Jerry Garcia and Janis Joplin are long gone, with a sort of chosen family. There’s Ash, “a skinny upside-down triangle” of a young man, “the most no bullshit guy around” with a talent for effective design of cardboard panhandling signs. Quiet, gentle, strawberry-blond Fleet has a pet rat named Tiny. Spike-haired Hope talks to everyone; she’s good with the tourists, but a bit of an instigator, too. And, most importantly, there’s Root, Maddy’s devoted dog. Together the friends scavenge food, find shelter, protect one another and navigate their tricky streets. It is Root who leads Maddy into the bushes in the first pages of this absorbing novel, where she stumbles upon a young man taking his last breath, and a man standing over him.

Maddy knows immediately that this sight will haunt her, that she is danger. She’s been handed a problem she didn’t earn; quickly the death of the boy named Shane follows her. The cops have questions. A man shows up at the local shelter and identifies himself as Shane’s father and asks for Maddy’s help. She gets to know Shane’s parents, Dave and Marva, and finds her loyalties beginning to split. Dave is a birdwatcher; Maddy observes the creatures, human and nonhuman, who live with her in the park. She investigates Shane’s murder, and along the way alienates her friends and finds herself nudged toward her own past, which she most wants to avoid.

At the Edge of the Haight is told in quiet prose from Maddy’s first-person point of view, so the reader is privy to her thoughts and fears, including an interiority that both protects and isolates her. All other characters are secondary, but this is a novel captivating in both its story and its characters. It is concerned with the social ills of homelessness, including addiction, mental health challenges and economics, without becoming polemic. The mystery of Shane’s death is a side plot, not the central focus; rather, it’s the situation that pressures the tenuous life Maddy has set up in the park. Seligman’s San Francisco is colorful and detailed. Readers are drawn into a challenging world with sympathetic characters, but it is Maddy’s internal turmoil that makes this novel memorable.

This review originally ran in the December 11, 2020 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 green apples.

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The Art of Wes Freed: Paintings, Pin-Ups & Possums

Posted on January 11, 2021 by pagesofjulia

I know Wes Freed’s artwork via the Drive-By Truckers, one of my greatest musical loves, and this visual art is inextricable for me from that music. Freed writes, “I don’t separate the drawings and paintings I create from the music I make, or from the music I listen to and love so much.” So there you go. I was an easy sell for his book, which comes in chapters by category of art (of which DBT is the biggest), and with a foreword by Patterson Hood.

I can’t imagine how many DBT pieces Freed has created over the years; this can only be a tiny sampling. Next are rock’n’roll legends, including Hank, Johnny, Gram Parsons, Bowie, the Dead, and more; one of the prints that hangs on my wall, of a scene from a Jason Isbell song, is included. (My Townes Van Zandt is absent.) There’s a chapter of Capital City Barn Dance fliers – that’s a monthly show put on by Freed and his then-wife for years. It was interesting to see the kinds of acts who played those shows, and see how much crossover there’s been between my musical tastes and the bands Freed has worked with – Cracker, Camper van Beethoven, the Supersuckers, Those Darlings, and more. I shouldn’t be surprised! Then there’s artwork from Freed’s own bands, some from a comic strip called Willard’s Garage, and photographs of sculptures and cutouts. I would love to someday own a big, solid Moongal like he makes in three dimensions. (I would also like more Freed-drawn tattoos. Time will tell.)

This is a beautiful, large-format, glossy, full-color production. It contains few words: just Hood’s brief foreword and a still-briefer intro to each chapter by Freed. The rock’n’roll legends chapter includes captions. I guess I’d love to learn a little more, but it’s the art that we’re here for, and I can’t get enough of it. I’d buy another several volumes this size just to see more of Freed’s perfectly recognizable, wacky, intoxicating imagination in action.

Rating: 9 moongals.

If you would like to consider owning some Freed art, too, check out his Facebook page, where he posts new prints for sale. They’re quite affordable and he is nice to work with.

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My Alexandria by Mark Doty

Posted on January 8, 2021 by pagesofjulia

I read this quotation the other day, and I’ll let it open this review.

Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument.

–Joseph Joubert, essayist

I first know Doty from a prose work that informs my love of objects in writing. (Plenty on Still Life With Oysters and Lemon here.) So it’s not surprising that there are lots of lovely, striking details and things here, in the first Doty poetry I’ve attempted. “What was our city / but wonderful detail?” What, indeed.

These poems feel perfect, crystalline, like they couldn’t be any better or any different. Each word is so carefully chosen. I love the internal rhymes and the music, and I love the enjambment, and the images, and the surprises. I still don’t feel like a very expert reader of poetry, but these have everything I feel like I want a poem to have. There are clear themes throughout the book: death, mortality, grief, with references to the author’s partner dying of AIDS and of others in the same situation. (I found that subtext easy to see, but I know a little of Doty’s life story, so I’m not sure how visible it would be to a reader who doesn’t.) It’s not a book of grief, though. It’s a book of seeking meaning and a way to carry on, of trying to see beyond death, and it’s a book of really seeing the world. Something else I recognize from Still Life is a constant, serious attention and observation.

What I think the title, My Alexandria, brings to this collection: a reference to a storied place no longer quite accessible, where things were famously better or at least very good, but in ways we can’t see from here.

Not for the first time with Doty, I noted many lines I want to keep forever. From a poem called “The Wings” (which takes place in part at the auctions that I know, from another book, Doty and his partner Wally used to attend together),

Some days things yield

such grace and complexity that what we see
seems offered.

I love that enjambment (made greater by the stanza break).

Later in that same poem,

An empty pair of pants
is mortality’s severest evidence.

This is something Doty does so well, the distillation of concept into an object.

And from the poem “No” (I so love turtles),

the single word of the shell,
which is no.

Besides these, my favorite poems are “Esta Noche,” “Chanteuse,” “Fog” and “Brilliance.”

I had success with reading these poems aloud, which I’m sure is always a good strategy, but one I don’t always use. Also, reading very slowly. Many of Doty’s perfect, perfectly fleshed images take several lines to come together, and I need to grasp them completely. It takes concentration. As much as I love a poetry reading, these are not images I could take in by just hearing them. I need to take my time.

Poetry is still hard, but so rewarding, when done this well.

Rating: 8 fused layers.

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Blue Moon by Jack Reacher (audio)

Posted on January 6, 2021 by pagesofjulia

I’m going to say this is the best Reacher I’ve encountered in a while. They can be a little up-and-down. But this is classic, vintage Reacher: he blows through town without intending to stay. He sees a (relatively minor) injustice about to play out, and sticks his toe in. Events snowball; he has no fear; he takes on each progressively trickier scenario until he’s chest-deep in it, but he keeps winning. He meets a nice woman and they have an intense, time-limited, but ultimately satisfying time together, both in terms of the sex and the other action. He rides off into the sunset (so to speak). What’s new here is that he builds up a little posse; I can’t think of another example offhand in which he teams up with more than one other person (or maybe two). I found the mix of characters in that posse fun, even if they’re not super well developed. This is a Reacher book, after all. We know better than to get too attached to anyone else.

Other reviewers (on Goodreads and the like) are frequently not so pleased with this installment as I am. For one thing, to each her own; some of Child’s more highly-rated novels have not been among my favorites. For each book, a reader in a time and place, is part of it. Some of the complaints I saw noted that the plotline is unrealistic in many of its details: two rival gangs, Albanian and Ukrainian, in a mid-sized middle-American city (I sure wish I knew which one, but Child doesn’t like to specify), get into a sort-of turf war, with Reacher in the middle. Really, he’s responsible for the body count each ascribes to the other. Many, many deaths receive almost no police response (because the gangsters have bought off the police, naturally). Reacher is Superman. His short-term girlfriend takes up the fight with surprising alacrity. It’s true, all of this is wildly unrealistic; but buying into that is absolutely part of the Reacher experience. I didn’t find this one any more so than usual. If realism is a concern, I’m not quite sure how you got to be a Reacher fan. Oh – and some reviewers were bothered by the excessive violence. Now, if violence is a concern, same answer: Reacher may not be for you. That said, this novel definitely has a higher-than-average body count, so take note.

All the usual good stuff plus a little new good stuff (but not too much, because familiarity is part of the comfort). I am comforted.

This audiobook is narrated by Scott Brick. I have been missing Dick Hill’s work, but Brick has been growing on me, I suppose; I enjoyed this performance. It felt like returning to a place I know and love. Yes, a place of unrealistic plot lines, superheroes, and lots of violence. The good news is it’s only fiction, friends.

Rating: 7 cell-phone pictures.

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Scattered at Sea by Amy Gerstler

Posted on January 4, 2021 by pagesofjulia

Quick housekeeping announcement: it seems to be time to return to a three-day-a-week schedule here, at least for a while. I’ve got so many reviews to share with you! See you back here this Wednesday.

Thanks, Vince, for the perfect recommendation.

Amy Gerstler reminds me of Amy Leach, in the best ways. Her poems are pleasingly filled with objects, with stuff, as forecast by her epigraph, from Lao Tzu: “He who obtains has little. He who scatters has much.” While well-grounded in real things, these poems are simultaneously concerned with spiritual and conceptual themes, too. I appreciated the organization into five sections: Kissing; Womanishness; Dust of Heirs, Dust of Ancestors; What I Did With Your Ashes; Only at Certain Sacred Locations. I felt each section hung together recognizably. (This already represents more success than I sometimes find with a poetry collection.) I loved as well Gerstler’s versatile tone – she can make me laugh and cry, and snort at her irreverence, and sit quietly with her reverence, all within a few lines. This was an easy, rewarding read.

That title, What I Did With Your Ashes: awesome. So suggestive in so many directions. I love it.

And the collection’s title, too: Scattered at Sea makes several suggestions to me. I think of scattering ashes, of marine life, of detritus, of wide dispersal across seven seas, and of scattered minds. The cover art (which extends to the title page[s]) suggests again that mess of stuff that always pleases me so. When I travel into poetry, I’m always a little less comfortable, but the stuff-n-things comfort me.

I like that these poems occasionally rhyme. It feels like each rhyme is more effective for its rarity – kind of like in prose, actually.

I propose that the poem “Disclaimer” is a reverse hermit crab, in the sense that Suzanna Paola and Brenda Miller define a hermit crab essay: one that takes the form of a different kind of text, like an essay in the form of an instruction manual or doctor’s notes or recipe. This is a poem in form, but its content feels taken from a different form. I liked how that lit up my brain.

Here are a few of my favorites lines.

On waking, if seized by an urge to munch shrubs,
give in.

Chew dew-bejeweled weeds till they complain

…as I sip this morning’s cocktail, an eye-opener
after last night’s revels: bitters mixed with curds of cloud.

Now the whole inscrutable crew has lost my vote.

One should give light to the whole world,
And when that gets tiring, lie down on various gregarious grasses.

And besides those quoted above, some of my favorite poems include “Fall On Your Knees,” “Ancestor Psalm,” “Extracts From the Consoler’s Handbook,” “He Sleeps Every Afternoon,” “Miraculous,” and “Sassafras.” I am waiting to discuss with Vince my questions about “Childlessness,” which has two stanzas that feel very different, almost opposite each other. Is there a name for that? It leaves in question the narrator’s final stance on childlessness. I often appreciate such ambiguities.

I can see myself continuing to reread and study this one. Scattered at Sea is a good fit for me; full credit, Vince.

Rating: 8 sexual identities glittery as tinsel.

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Maximum Shelf: Finding Freedom: A Cook’s Story: Remaking a Life From Scratch by Erin French

Posted on December 21, 2020 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on November 30, 2020.

Erin French grew up in rural Maine, in the outdoors and in her father’s diner, where she began helping out in the kitchen at age 12. After a few years at college, she returned home to Maine, and faced challenges including young single motherhood; a difficult marriage and more difficult divorce; opening and then losing her first small restaurant; addiction and recovery. Eventually French moved back to her hometown of Freedom, where she would start again with her wildly successful The Lost Kitchen. These travels, pitfalls and victories she recounts in Finding Freedom: A Cook’s Story; Remaking a Life from Scratch. Renovation and redemption–of spaces and of herself–are central to her story.

This memoir begins mid-scene, with the nine-months-pregnant narrator, age 21, on break from a 16-hour shift at the family diner. The opening showcases the detailed, richly sensory food writing that permeates these pages, then flashes back, to describe French first entering the diner at age five; observing her father’s love for his work, his drinking and his limited ability to show love for his family; working in the kitchen and dreaming of escape. Finding Freedom centers around food, from childhood in the diner to young motherhood, when French supported herself with a small business baking cakes, cookies and pies, working retail in a cooking supply store and for a catering company. French picks up skills and ideas along the way and builds confidence until she is able to open a supper club and then the first The Lost Kitchen on the Maine coast. By this time, she has also picked up a husband, Tom, who turns out to be a heavy drinker, controlling and eventually abusive. From her problems with depression and anxiety, and the excruciating hard work and long days of restaurant work, she picks up prescriptions for Xanax, Ambien, Klonopin and more. This chapter of French’s story ends in rehab, with Tom seizing custody of her child and shuttering The Lost Kitchen, including “every whisk, every spoon, every spatula, and knife.”

But the cook (French resists the title “chef,” having no culinary degree or formal training) is scrappy, hard-working and resourceful. She adopts a dog, moves into a cabin without electricity or running water, fights for custody of her son and gets back into the kitchen. She first converts a dilapidated Airstream into a food truck for roving outdoor fine dining events on farms, in orchards and fields. And then another opportunity shows itself: the old mill in Freedom is finally gutted and renovated into the perfect, romantic setting for a small but picturesque dining room. The Lost Kitchen is reborn. Within a few short seasons, its limited reservations must be filled by postal lottery, more than 20,000 postcards “pouring in as though it were the North Pole.”

The spaces French occupies are lovingly built and restored. The first The Lost Kitchen is housed in a former bank building, a three-story gothic flatiron she describes in tender, glowing terms: “One by one I folded back the old wooden shutters and flung open the tall windows, letting light into spaces that had been dark for so long…. The place was dripping with character, with its hardwood floors, high ceilings, thick period molding, and doors with frosted glass and heavy hardware.” Its owners choose to take a chance on renting to French after a personal meeting and homemade meal. This process repeats with The Lost Kitchen’s reincarnation in Freedom: “The quiet rumors had been spreading around town about the old mill’s restoration, the same way they had about me.” In between, French must clean out and redecorate the cabin she lives in post-rehab on her parents’ land, and the Airstream trailer she uses to get on her cooking feet again. As the book closes, she has just purchased an old fixer-upper farmhouse “the color of strawberries.”

French excels in describing her passion for cooking and for pleasing people via food; she’s at her best detailing the foods themselves, and her mouth-watering writing is the heart of this memoir: “Hard-boiled quail eggs as bar snacks that you could peel-n-eat and dunk in a dust of celery salt.” “Fresh-from-the-fryer nutmeg-laced doughnuts.” “Fried chicken. Served cold, crispy, and juicy…. We could just hold it up in the air as the boat screamed through the waves to catch a bit of salty breeze before devouring it to the bone.”

Cooking and baking, flower arranging, the fine art of plating and the writing of this memoir contribute to a profile of a woman driven to create beauty even out of pain. The narrator’s voice is vulnerable, her trauma is real and visceral but, by the end, this is a delicious, feel-good redemption tale.

Rating: 6 nasturtiums.

Come back Friday for my interview with French.

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From Hell: Master Edition by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

Posted on December 14, 2020 by pagesofjulia

From this list of horror novels (linked from Shelf Awareness, and thank you for that), I found From Hell, which has been a wild ride. It’s a graphic novel, it’s historical fiction, and yes, it’s horror, but none of these terms suffice. The master edition I invested in was totally worth it for the 40-page appendix (in tiny type) explicating every smallest point of the novel itself, and detailing all the research involved, where fact meets fiction, and Moore’s reasoning behind the conclusions he’s drawn. The meticulous and thoroughly-explained research was its own gripping story, and Moore’s voice in that appendix is frequently hilarious – when’s the last time I laughed out loud at an appendix?! – self-deprecating, clever, and smart. I marvel at what feels to me like rather a new form. (The only comparison, obviously, is the Maus books.)

The novel itself is a fictionalized version of the Jack the Ripper murders, their investigation, and the conclusion(s) drawn and not drawn in 1888 and the years that follow. I entered this reading not knowing much about Jack the Ripper – I knew he was a historical serial killer in London who targeted poor sex workers, did terrible things to them, and was never caught; I think I would have figured his victims at five. That’s about it. I’m not at all sure that a reader more knowledgeable of these events would be a better reader of this work; I had plenty to help me along with the included appendix, although I think I would often have been lost without it. At least, I would have missed many of the subtler references. I strongly recommend the master edition for this reason. On the other hand, with nearly 600 pages, this large-format, hardback work is indeed a phonebook, and I confess I had a few physical difficulties with it: not only size and weight, but somewhat hard-to-read printing (both the tiny-print appendix and the hand-lettered graphic novel) on glossy pages that threw some glare. I had to use more light than I usually do to read. Totally worth it, though.

Jack the Ripper is an interesting case, because it’s very well-known (even if you know as little as I did, you’ve certainly heard of it), but not well-understood. As Moore lays out here, there have been umpteen theories and suspects offered, but few solid conclusions; and now too much time has passed, and we’ll never know who really dunit. There is also something tantalizing about the time period (late nineteenth century) and the intersections of historical figures, of which Moore takes full advantage – those opportunities are clearly part of what’s drawn him to this subject matter. As he writes in a second (graphic) appendix, sort of a meta-narrative about JtR history and research and the birth process of this book, Moore was in 1988 “thinking seriously about writing something lengthy on a murder. The Whitechapel killings aren’t even considered. Too played-out. Too obvious.” And yet here we are.

It is one of Moore’s theses that “in many ways, the 1880s contain the seeds of the twentieth century, not only in terms of politics and technology, but also in the fields of art and philosophy as well. The suggestion that the 1880s embody the essence of the twentieth century, along with the attendant notion that the Whitechapel murders embody the essence of the 1880s, is central to From Hell.” Indeed, this is not just a fictionalized account of a series of brutal murders (and the conspiracies and power structures that executed them), but a carefully research account of 1880s English society, including the roles played by the royals, the Freemasons, law enforcement, medicine and technology, homophobia, misogyny, and economic forces. It is a broad investigation into history across traditional academic disciplinary lines (which is a special love of mine), and again, that appendix makes it a rich study to dip into, leaving me with high confidence in the facts that serve as structure to this fiction. It is broad and rich in concept, too, part ghost story and philosophical probe. There are depths to be plumbed here; a person could write a dissertation on this surprising book.

There’s plots and there’s plots!

I’ve been writing about Alan Moore as if he’s the author of this book – because I understand that he’s the storyteller, and clearly he’s the voice of the appendix. The other listed author is Eddie Campbell, who I understand is responsible for the graphic art itself. He is referred to in the appendix as a separate entity, often humorously: “I have decided to ignore the increasingly surly protests of my co-author, Brisbane’s own Mr. Campbell, and make Victoria herself the instigator of events.” Notably, Campbell is credited for fastidious research for his visuals: “Suffice it to say that any adequate appendix listing Eddie’s sources in the way that I am listing mine would be twice as long as this current monstrosity, which in itself looks set to end up twice as long as the work to which it refers.” The appendix’s self-deprecations amuse me. “[There is another source] to which I would refer the interested reader (I assume there’s only one of you).” I am very open to the occasional self-reference, as when a character in the story predicts: “Mark my words, in ‘undred years there’ll still be cunts like ‘im, wrapping these killings up in supernatural twaddle, making a living out of murder…” and the appendix: “Abberline’s eerily precognitive comments are my own invention. They are also, in their way, a form of shamefaced apology from one currently making part of his living wrapping up miserable little killings in supernatural twaddle. Sometimes, after all you’ve done for them, your characters just turn on you.” You get the point: I am tickled by this narrative voice, and tickled by the research narrative in itself. I can scarcely imagine this book without Moore’s appended guidance; I wouldn’t have gotten half as much out of it.

The novel is horrifying, as is appropriate for its subject matter. It is complex in its explanation of the murders, conspiracies, investigations and cover-ups, including that supernatural angle. I think it’s a hell of a wild ride in itself, but it was the additional material that made this one a complete standout for me personally.

Rating: 9 points of research, decision, and imagination.

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Auberon by James S. A. Corey (audio)

Posted on December 11, 2020 by pagesofjulia

Early in listening to this novella, I was pleased to be returned to the world of Corey’s imagination (and guided by the familiar reading voice of Jefferson Mays, thank goodness). By the time I looked up and saw that it was half over, I felt a little perplexed by the failure of the plot to draw me in. By the end, I felt frankly disappointed. It was a mildly entertaining return to the worlds of The Expanse, and I do not regret it, but this installment is not a stand-out. I recommend it for completist fans only; Auberon is not a good representation of the extraordinary power of this series.

Auberon is a recently settled planet, even more recently under the control of the far-reaching arm of Laconia. The novella begins when Laconian Governor Rittenaur arrives to take power, hoping to establish a firm but not abusive government. His wife, Dr. Mona Rittenaur, is to take over research operations. In an early scene (and one of the more gripping ones), a sinister older man named Erich with one bionic arm threatens the new Governor, referring to an old Earth western frontier tale: “silver or lead?” he asks, meaning will this leader be purchased by bribe or take a bullet? In the end it is a different vulnerability entirely that will expose Rittenaur to the forces on Auberon.

I found Erich’s scenes (and the bionic arm itself) the most compelling parts of this story. The characters of Governor and Dr. Rittenaur, and the moral challenges they each face, were perhaps meant to be the central and most moving bits, but I found they both fell a little flat, perhaps for lack of development. The original/central foursome of The Expanse–Holden, Naomi, Amos and Alex–captured my heart completely (and make the whole series work), because they are complex, loveable but conflicted, deeply, fully developed as characters with backstories. A little more investment in the Rittenaurs might have made this novella work, but such is the challenge of the novella-length story. (For the record, Corey has sometimes knocked this shorter format out of the park. Just not here.) For me, Auberon didn’t really work. It was a fine few hours, but like I said, I don’t especially recommend it. I’m looking forward to the next Expanse novel or novella, though! This one just whetted my appetite again.

Rating: 6 automatic movements.

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