We are well-served to remind ourselves that humans are predators, monsters with hard leather shoes. But like most things human, our monsters come in a variety of shapes and guises. The phrase “human monster” tends to conjure up serial killers. Hannibal Lecter, for example, or The Prophet from Meg Gardiner’s recent book, Unsub. Alas, you need not be a member of this club to lay claim to the title of monster. With My Absolute Darling, Gabriel Tallent demonstrates that one man, Martin Alveston, with one victim, his daughter Julia, can provide more than enough monster. Tallent writes like an angel, which is to say that he sees the beauty but knows the devil.
My Absolute Darling is set in the forests of Northern California’s Mendocino Coast, and the prose is appropriately lush, rich and dripping. Martin Alveston lives as far away from polite society as he can. He distrusts technology, the modern world, and comfort. He’s well-armed, and he’s taught his ripening daughter well how to use those guns.
Julia, AKA “Kibble” (Martin’s name for her) AKA “Turtle,” is smart. precocious and has been truly twisted into knots. Early on, after pages of gorgeous nature writing and scene setting, those same prose talents are applied to a scene of graphic abuse, as experienced by Turtle. It’s horrifying beyond belief. Consider yourself warned and advised. The writing is powerful and the story is told from Turtle’s perspective. What we see, that Martin does not, is that he has created a hero equal to his evil. As much as we loathe him, we love her.
But that’s not totally true, and here is where Tallent’s talent shows. Martin is prone to rants about Our Modern Life, and Tallent gives him some pretty persuasive arguments. He’s not just evil and twisted, he’s pretty smart. But his daughter is smarter, and she has the advantage as it were, of having been raised by a monster. The dynamic between father and daughter is becoming increasingly unstable. Turtle’s grandfather is still on the scene and on the remote rural property where they live. Turtle herself is in school, barely, where she attracts the attentions of her teachers and fellow students. My Absolute Darling turns out to be a taut bow, ready to fire at the slightest provocation.
The true pleasure of this novel is to experience Tallent’s astonishing prose as he carefully crafts two towering characters in his exquisitely rendered world. Every time Turtle meets a teen friend, picks up a gun, talks to a teacher, is abused by her father (not too often, thankfully), or even just hangs with him in a moment of simulated normalcy, the readers wants to stand up and cheer her on. We become invested in these characters, in this landscape. We want it to break and we want it to work.
My Absolute Darling is a powerhouse. Readers might see Turtle as a nascent superheroine, but she needs no super powers. She (and Gabriel Tallent) will kick your reading ass from here to eternity and back. The deal with monsters is this; make ’em evil, make us hate ’em. Make us believe in them. (All too easy in Martin’s case.) Then introduce us to the human who is their match. In this example, Turtle. The problem for predators is the existence of other predators.
The problem for Gabriel Tallent is that he chose arguably the most difficult and off-putting subject in our culture as the topic of his novel. But in our conversation, we discuss how and why he chose this perspective. I do admit that while I read I had to occasionally remind myself that the setting was California, not Appalachia. Tallent is extremely well-spoken and he took an unusual route in writing the book, which we do discuss. Follow this link to hear our lightning round conversation, or listen below.
Follow this link to listen to our long-form conversation, or perhaps you and your cubicle mates will just listen below to a discussion about human monsters
In Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright applies his witty, restless intelligence and superb writerly craft to explore, to map out, the terrain between the Buddhist language of mindful meditation and enlightenment and 21st century psychology, informed by neuroscience. The result is a very funny, engaging, even page-turning story that manages to be a light-hearted deep-dive into the human paradox of self, not-self, nothingness and we can save the world, one breath at a time.
Buddhism can seem to offer up a series of incomprehensible paradoxes, key concepts that can seem inconceivable and thus off-putting. Wright is a master at confronting these head-on in a hard-headed manner that cuts through the confusion. One of our very human intuitions is that all of this should be pretty damn simple. That’s not exactly true. What you will get from Robert Wright and Why Buddhism is True is that of course it is not simple. But it is very, very human.
We love the ineffable, from terror to charm. Shockingly, terror is rather easy, but there is a lot to be afraid of in this world. Charm – the word implies magic, does it not? – is considerably more difficult. Consider this, then, the Miracle of the Summer. Less by Andrew Sean Greer has more charm than you’ll find in one place anywhere. Greer has crafted a lovely book about love and given it a cast of characters who will charm you. A glass of wine, a back porch in the sun, and you are set.
Whip-smart and wonderful, Less has a mannered, classic feel to it. This is due in part to its clever narrative structure, which proves to be closely tied to plot and character. But it’s also clear that Andrew Sean Greer is having a good time, that he wants to share the joy. And joy, like love, terror and charm, is ineffable. Only in action, only in language is love clear. Immerse yourself in Less and you’re going to find just how moving the ineffable can be.
From the very first paragraph, Meg Gardiner’s prose and style give will give readers the confidence that they are in for a solid story, well-told. The supple strength with which Gardiner writes prepare her to lay out the subtler parts of her story. Caitlin’s father was a storied cop, until he came up against The Prophet, a serial killer modeled on Zodiac. Consumed by the case, Mack Hendrix let a far-too-young Caitlin see photos of victims, of just what he was up against. Twenty years is not too long for Caitlin to wait. Vengeance has no expiration date.
So yes, I did ask Meg Gardiner if these characters were going to be rolled into Criminal Minds, because they’re making something based on this book and its sequel(s) for CBS. I will let listeners hear for themselves her answer, but to my mind any filmed production benefits from a prose beginning, because a book ensures there will be a story [usually]. I think readers and listeners will hear just how smart and fair Gardiner is, and yes, fair is important when you’re talking about someone who creates characters you plan on spending valuable time with. 
As D’Arc begins, Mort(e) and Sheba have managed to eke out a relatively stable life on the frontier. In a remote cabin, they raise the giant warrior ants, and try to recover from the war. But Mort(e) is a legendary figure and the events set in motion by the Queen are not yet done. A new race of intelligent monsters is creating a civilization under water, but they’re looking to the land. A city of beavers finds it is being threatened by a giant monster and there’s a serial killer foot in the tinderbox capital where all animals try to get along with one another and humans.
What makes Robert Repino so much fun to talk to is how much fun he is clearly having writing The War With No Name books. And believe me, you will have fun as well! Repino is an outlier. He’s a literary school graduate who does not come to genre through conventions and magazines and short story writing. He even confesses a bit of embarrassment at not having a kitchen window epiphany novel to his name. I think his freedom from the usual genre associations works well for his writing, and his publisher Soho, not known for SF, deserves a lot of love for taking on this work. We tried to keep matters spoiler free, beyond, “That was a helluva scene.” 
The Clockwork Dynasty begins carefully and economically, but not slowly. Wilson expertly crafts a scene out of time, immersing us in the scents and sounds of age. But as we become comfortable, he ups the urgency. In the present, June has happened upon a story she was not supposed to see, bringing her and all those around her into peril. As she flees, we are taken to another perspective in 18th century Russia, that of Peter, an automaton created to help and perhaps replace Peter the Great. He too, must flee, and clearly his path will cross June’s, a meeting that is likely to make things worse for both rather than better.
Consequently, this is a novel that might seem to have a more specialized appeal than proves to be the case. Don’t be fooled. The Clockwork Dynasty is big-scale crowd-pleaser with smarts and heart. It admits a sequel, but not from the edge of a cliff. Even if it proves that your motives for doing so are not your own, even if our destiny has been shaped by beings we do not know to exist and could not comprehend if we did, your time reading The Clockwork Dynasty is time well spent.
Uh oh. Between the dark shadings in Joel’s voice, it’s easy to guess something is going to go wrong. The clever bit is that the first things to be proved wrong are our assumptions about teleportation. As Joel points out, it’s an incredibly violent proposition. To be sure, it seems to be almost pristine. But, down and dirty, it involves annihilating your body as it is converted into data that is transmitted to another point where a new copy of your body is (hopefully) rebuilt. Viewed this way, what we take in the SF genre to be a straightforward process is really quite fraught with the potential for errors.
For all the newfangled aspects of The Punch Escrow, perhaps the most pleasing aspect is very old-fangled, which is to say that this feels like a classic science fiction novel. It has the science, the thrills and the satiric humor that mark some of the best work of the previous century, without any sense of being deliberately “retro.” The Punch Escrow does what the best SF is supposed to do; it transports you to a future that feels real, with smart science and an equally smart sense of story. Your encounter with teleportation manages to teleport you with no technology involved.
We first meet Sig, a kid in an America that is somewhere in the gray zone between discombobulated and dystopian. Sig is fierce to the edge of feral, and he’s being rounded up as an illegal immigrant and sent back home – to America. As we meet Tania, a (US) government employee with lots of questions about both sides of the matter, we begin to wonder, where in the hell is this taking place. Is this meant to be our future? It’s not exactly the future and that’s your first clue that Christopher Brown has something much more nuanced and interesting than “dystopian” prescience.
It’s also critical that this is not Another Book About the Dire, Awful World. Things are bad in Tropic of Kansas, but not entirely so. There’s a soupcon of “getting-better-ability” even in the most horrific situations. This isn’t dystopian or utopian fiction, but just, what you might call “Topian,” which is to say a system that has Humans in it and thus is incapable of reaching Heaven or Hell. We can imagine both, but we know in our hearts that it’s Purgatory for us.
Shannon is not an easy man to write about, but the authors manage to create a seamless single voice with which to examine what proves to be a very American success story. To do so, they find the perfect scenes and prose to match, to wit, a story from Shannon’s youth about his use to electrified fences transmit coded messages on the wires. The authors are clear on the fact that this was not uncommon, but they write the prose and paint the picture so that readers cannot help but be thrilled in this intimation of what was to come. It is but one of many quiet moments that reverberate into the present.
It’s a great, if unhappy, story, impeccably and compellingly well-told by Wartzman, who elects to follow the history of relations between employees and those in charge of four major American corporations; General Motors, Coca-Cola, General Electric and Eastman-Kodak. In just a little more than a hundred years, America has journeyed from welfare capitalism to corporate welfare. Wartzman keeps his eye on the liminal space between those in charge and those on the line, taking readers from the creation of what we now understand to be The American Dream, to its peak, and then through the decades in which it is nibbled to death by ducks. And here we are.
