Angela Slatter The Briar Book of the Dead

Angela Slatter’s The Briar Book of the Dead fits like a magic slipper.  From the beginning, she makes a brand new world instantly familiar and welcoming.  Silverton is a small town with all the gothic attributes one associates with dark fairy tales.  The Briar witches live here and run the town with the lightest of touches.  The people are safe and prosperous, and the witches are safe from prosecution by a distant church.  Ellie is a Briar but not a witch.  She’s powerless in the world of the supernatural, but a natural bureaucrat and politician.  She makes sure all the non-magical work gets done, while her sisters keep the supernatural low-key and generally unobtrusive.  It’s a good deal until it comes undone.

As people and things go missing, Ellie discovers she can talk to ghosts.  It’s not the power she wanted, but it’s what she has.  Slatter leads the reader down a dark, delicious trail of murder and mystery, crafting strikingly realistic characters and an unreal world with ease.  She integrates mystery and the supernatural into the lives of a large cast of memorable characters, living and dead.  The feminism and politics that underlie her creation are ever-present and enjoyably supercharged by her imaginary embellishments. 

The Briar Book of the Dead is a pleasure to read because readers get to disappear into a lovely world that soon becomes embroiled in a tense mystery.  It’s very fast paced, as every step into greater danger feels like a right, reasonable decision made by smart people.  Slatter’s ability to orchestrate action and character is remarkable, and even the walk-on characters are memorable.  Moreover, she’s created a whole and diverse world to explore and leaves you wanting more adventure.  Her prose is gorgeous, which helps all of her creation have the whole feel of a place you could actually visit.  All that you needs must do is to open The Briar Book of the Dead.

Angela Slatter teaches writing, and The Briar Book of the Dead is a master class in how to do everything you might need or want to do in a novel.  Here’s a link to our spoiler-free discussion of the novel or let yourself be spellbound by pressing go below.

Gwendolyn Kiste The Haunting of Velkwood

We are a haunted species.  Memories of our mistakes, regret for what we have – or have not – done, the inadequacies of our responses to straightforward conundrums, our bad judgments of ourselves, all of them follow us relentlessly, accompanied by the intuition that they will outlast us, surviving our deaths no matter what we do to hasten our own demise.  Talitha Velkwood was not there when her suburban neighborhood disappeared, in an event that remains inexplicable.  Some 20 years on, she’s alive, sort of, scraping the bottom of a hand-to-mouth, minimum-wage existence.  The world has mostly moved on from The Velkwood Incident.  Talitha tried to leave home, but it follows her still.

With The Haunting of Velkwood, Gwendolyn Kiste reveals herself to be an author able to plumb the depths and heights of emotional, involving fiction.  This is a compelling and powerful novel, strikingly original in concept, deeply chilling, but filled with the colors of life, death, love, and memory.  Talitha’s narrative is both mournful and joyful.  

Talitha is taken away from her life of regret when she’s contacted by Jack, who represents a group of paranormal researchers.  They want her to return to her old haunts.  The world has let Velkwood pass by because nobody can get into the suburban block.  Jack and those working with him believe that Talitha can.

Kiste approaches the story with a melancholy intimacy.  Her prose is crisp, her plot is delightfully demented, but most importantly, her aim is true. The Haunting of Velkwood takes readers straight into the unreal even as it carries us forward with a very human heart.

Kiste masterfully turns a visit to an American suburb into an Otherworld journey.  Talitha discovers a battered, buffered past where time is lost, and memories are found.  Her friends from the neighborhood who also “survived,” Grace and Brett, are also haunted by the choices they all made in a past all would prefer to change or forget.  Kiste offers an eye-popping journey, and manages to find a beautiful, all-too-human surreal world at the heart of her book and her characters. The Haunting of Velkwood is a big-screen reading experience of our own smaller-than-life stories.  

Happily, Gwendolyn Kiste finds joy in her ability to craft unreal narratives of the highest quality.  Here’s a link to our conversation about The Haunting of Velkwood.  She is dark of mind, but also incredibly kind. It turns out that a conversation about regret with Gwendolyn Kiste offers a glimpse of memory at its best.

Jeffrey Rosen The Pursuit of Happiness

How do we understand the intended meaning of the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” as used in the Declaration of Independence?  Language changes quickly, often and drastically.  Words are added and discarded, as definitions shift.  It’s an important question.  Jeffrey Rosen to decided that understanding what was written then could be discovered by reading what the framers themselves read.  Happily, they left excellent notes about this, and Rosen’s report comes to life as the entertaining book The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.  Rosen’s answer to his own question turns out to be a delightful tribute to the power and import of reading, and then writing about what you’ve read.

Rosen’s strategy is straightforward and pretty simple.  For the authors of the Declaration, happiness was not pleasure, but the result of a life of virtue.  They were quite specific about these virtues, as many read the same ancient texts on the matter.  He pairs each of twelve virtues (order temperance, humility, industry, frugality, sincerity, resolution, moderation, tranquility, cleanliness, justice and silence) with a different founder/framer/author.  He makes no apologies for obvious hypocrisies like slavery and women’s rights, and often finds that some of his characters had the same questions.  He looks at their reading, writes sonnets about his and their work and discusses how their personal lives reflected their understanding.  

The resulting hybrid of history and self-help (you’ll learn a lot about your own aptitude for happiness) is thoroughly engaging storytelling shot through with understated psychological analysis.  And because Rosen confronts our personal and national sins with such low-key honesty, never showing judgment, the reader is easily able to bridge the gap between then and now.  The quotes from ancient and historical sources are handled well, with the effect of making you want to plow through Rosen’s reading list. 

The upshot is that early on, you’ll feel authentically inspired as you read this book. The history is fresh and exciting.  You’ll want to implement the plans for “moral improvement” the founders used.  They’re doable and make sense.  You’ll want to read books, and there are lists at the back to help.  You’ll want to write notes.  You’ll see the worthiness of work and writing. The Pursuit of Happiness is serious and fun, and proves to be an excellent example of virtue as a source of happiness.

Jeffrey Rosen needs no history to be inspiring.  But he wields it well in our interview.  Here’s a link to download it, or pour yourself a Sam Adams ale and listen below.

Laurie R. King The Lantern’s Dance

The mystery genre is almost an oxymoron.  The setup is deceptively simple: problem, solver, solution. The execution is anything but simple, and in the literary combination of these opposing qualities lies the pleasure of reading.  With The Lantern’s Dance, the eighteenth book in the Holmes-Russell series, Laurie R. King embraces her metafictional notions and characters, offering readers an exponential multiplication of genre, complexity, and flat-out fun. The Lantern’s Dance is a rip-roaring historical mystery that levels up as readers realize the Great Detective himself is one of the problems requiring a solution.  

The story spins out in three streams.  Russell and Holmes arrive at the scene of a crime.  The victim is Holmes’ son Damian.  Damian’s origins are themselves quite handily imagined in previous novels of the series and effectively explained here.  Holmes takes Damian and his family to safety, and follows clues away from the scene of the crime. Russell, lightly injured, remains behind, where she finds a journal with lots of cryptic, critical information.  As Holmes, Russell, and the journal tell their tales, the stories twine together.  Historical explorations and backdrops are created with telling detail.  The plot plunges forward and backward in time.  Complex character arcs play out with enormous satisfaction.  King lets the narrative characters drive the novel, and reading is resoundingly effortless.

The upshot is that The Lantern’s Dance is a joyous reading experience.  It’s fast, often funny, and emotionally resonant.  It’s smart in a manner one experiences after finishing, when you have time and space to think back on what you read and realize just how crafty crafty can be.  

In our conversation, Laurie R. King and I managed to illuminate and discuss many a part of the novel while keeping the whole quite pleasantly misty.  Take a tour of the internal moor by downloading this link, or listen for clues below.

Chris D’Amelio Life and Death at Cape Disappointment

We like our heroes larger than life, to the extent that “larger than life” is practically a prerequisite for heroism.  Alas, we are, at best, life-size.  How then might we describe those who are heroic?  In his memoir Life and Death at Cape Disappointment: Becoming a Surfman on the Columbia River Bar, Christopher J. D’Amelio offers an excellent example realistic heroism.  

In this book, you meet an everyday sort of fellow, married with children.  His chosen career as a member of the US Coast Guard puts him in the path of yes, life and death at Cape Disappointment, a Coast Guard station in Washington state.  He meets this harsh landscape, not just as a man, but a married man with children, entranced byi his demanding, dangerous job.  What makes a hero? In this book, it’s not (just) man versus nature, it’s man versus life.

This is not to say that Life and Death at Cape Disappointment is a domestic drama; it’s not.  If you’re coming here for watery dangers and tales of rescue, you’ll find a lot to like.  D’Amelio tells a number of tales, from heartbreaking to sobering to “Are people really that dumb?”  He enjoys and is rather addicted to the danger.  He’s good at his job, and the writing [with Reid Maruyama] is crisp and clear.  

But there’s more than just a series of greatest ocean danger hits here.  D’Amelio also has a home life, made difficult by his other marriage to his job.  He strikes a balance, not easily.  We get the details of domesticity that are emotionally engaging, sans bombast and self-import.  The result is an engaging weave of low-key middle-income married life and the hard work of derring-do without the aid of high-tech gadgetry or fantasy superpowers.  

Life and Death at Cape Disappointment has a lot of appeal.  D’Amelio clearly has an attraction to heroics, but the life he actually lives is very much “life sized,” and that’s enough.  D’Amelio’s memoir describes the sort of heroism that is the reward of a life lived every day by those who think of themselves as husbands and fathers, the heroes we actually know.

Chris D’Amelio is every bit as low-key and engaging in person as he is on the page.  Here’s a link to download our conversation, or you enjoy your derring-do and your mildly safe lubberhood by listening below in the happiness of your home.

Andy Greenberg Tracers in the Dark

The virtue of cryptocurrency was flouted in that word; Bitcoin, its progenitor, was described as anonymous and untraceable. It was meant to usher in a new age of faceless transactions as a means of giving its users freedom from the financial surveillance of business or government entities. Unsurprisingly, freedom lagged far behind unscrupulous criminality, and the first result was an influx on websites that offered the sales of illegal stuff with no consequences. Welcome to the 21st century!

As a journalist for Wired, Andy Greenberg was on the case early. He bought Bitcoin when it was cheap. And when the early dark web sites started showing up – for example Pirate Bay and The Silk Road – the IRS and law enforcement also wanted to track the webmasters down. It was supposed to be impossible. But given the structure of Bitcoin, all the data was there. An oddball group of academics and law enforcement officers managed break the unbreakable and trace the untraceable aided by online criminals who made what were in retrospect rookie errors.

It all comes together in Greenberg’s Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, which follows a twisted trail through four major busts featuring IRS-CI agents, Bakersfield cops, academics, start-up techno-geniuses, and a variety of mostly sort-of young men hoping to make it big. And they do, until they don’t.

Greenberg manages to keep up a sense of toe-tapping tension and inject it with a science-fictional sense-of-wonder. He keeps the info-dumps terse and enjoyably informative and crafts careful characters on both sides of the law and the readers’ moral sensibilities. 
The cases he follows his LE protagonists through are varied in nature and engagingly explained. He masterfully combines true crime reporting with explorations of rapidly-maturing technologies as they are abused and analyzed for weaknesses by actors on all sides. He understands the appeal of anonymizing communication and the dangers of invisible surveillance, but is inclined present the facts he uncovers and leave readers to discover their own opinions.

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency is a compulsive experience that reads like a “cyber-thriller” with the thrills of being a non-fiction vision of our science-fiction present. We live in a world of unsuspected wonder with wonder-filled suspicion. The usual suspects are now quite unusual, hoping to remain quietly anonymous. Greenberg cuts through a variety of veils with a wickedly entertaining knife.

Andy Greenberg is clearly at home here in our non-anonymous future. Here’s a link to our conversation, or listen below, with an audience of non-anonymous spies.

Priya Guns Your Driver Is Waiting

Damani Krishnathan is a driver for RideShare in an unnamed city.  She’s barely holding it together.  Her father has recently died, and she lives at home with her mother, who is not holding it together. She has a group of friends that she spends slivers of time with when she’s not working or taking care of her mother. An encampment of immigrants just outside the city is becoming an ever-increasing addition to the social unease and malaise that is tightening its grip.  This is a good day.

It picks up when Damani bumps into a pedestrian with her car.  The pedestrian (Jolene) is not hurt, but she is beautiful (and rich and white), and Damani quickly realizes she is falling in love. 

Your Driver is Waiting is a fast, compulsive read, propelled by Damani’s first-person narration.   Her outlook is pragmatic and her voice is hilarious.  Guns, who took the movie Taxi Driver as a loose inspiration, carefully crafts a Kafkaesque vision of capitalism as an almost Lovecraftian presence, a formless monster draining the life out of those in its grip, which is pretty much everyone.  For a few shining moments, Damani and Jolene look like a match made in heaven even if they reside in a current day dystopian hell.  But hell hath a bucketload of fury, more than enough to engulf a city.

Your Driver is Waiting makes great writing feel easy.  In one sentence, Guns can be sweet, funny, harrowing and insightful.  She creates a city and Damani’s friends with the sort of specificity that feels real, while the anonymity of the setting lends the story a surreal sensibility.   You’ll laugh a lot while reading this, then develop real feelings for the characters.  (I did.)  When you sleep, you’ll have nightmares. (I did.)  Rest assured you’ll read this as fast as possible, and that after, you’ll find yourself seeing the world through Damani’s eyes.  You’ll feel better for gift of Guns, and worse for the world.  You might be tempted to do something.  It’s unlikely you’ll want to drive – or call – a ride-sharing service.

Unsurprisingly, Priya Guns is even more entertaining than Damani.  Hear her voice by following this link to the podcast file, or fasten your seatbelt and listen in place.  RideShare requires all passengers observe the rules of safety, even if you are certainly, eternally, unsafe.

Natalie Haynes Divine Might

The stories of Greek myths, those enduring tales of gods and goddesses, are ever-appealing and pertinent because the Greeks portrayed their immortal rulers as such human characters.  With every turn of the tide, with every day and change, they are there to act as mentors and mirrors. In Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth, Natalie Haynes snatches the mirror from Perseus to reveal the image of our 21st century Medusa.  It turns out we’re complicated, hilarious, and still inclined to underestimate women. 

Haynes plunges right in and takes readers on a very modern tour of very ancient characters. From the first page, it’s clear that Haynes has her own story to tell, and that she will do so in a manner so engaging that the book will prove impossible to put down.  With every sentence, she combines keen insight, common sense and a delightful sense of humor as she steps readers through ancient history, modern interpretations (read: Disney), and brand-new conclusions about the stories that have an eternal shelf-life. 

Haynes has the sort of talent to make everything she writes about – from the Muses to the Furies – compellingly relevant, intensely personal (to both reader and writer) and laugh-out-loud funny, the latter in a manner that directs the humor to the here-and-now.  The insights she brings are brilliant in a way that light up the subject (and the reader) and livens up the prose.  She’s quite nimble in her exposition, with the ability to take the reader on intellectual journeys that cover millennia in a few minutes of reading. 

The structure of the book is straightforward, and yet the reading experience is varied and always fun.  While it’s obviously about goddesses and written by a (very smart and funny) woman, Divine Might is not really feminist.  Haynes is a humanist, and the mirror she holds up is an equal-opportunity entertainer.  Her writing is utterly captivating.  Once you find your way into this book, you’ll not need to lash yourself to the mast.  Her voice will keep you riveted.

As for the interview, see above.  She’s equally riveting when speaking about the book.  Avoid the unupholstered plank, seek the Comfy Chair and follow this link to download our chat, or listen below and be riveted in place.  De-riveting is left as an exercise for the listener!