One of those "what's going on?" kind of books.

I won't bother explaining the plot or characters because they mostly don't exist. It's more of a "vibes" book about a guy wanting a girl, specters of nuclear war and an ice-pocolypse, armed guards and Kafkaesque corruption, and then weaving in and out of first person, third person, present, past, back to the present, and on and on.

The best parts were when it was just settled on the plot and moving through the interesting setting but all the spinning round and round got very tiresome and it took me 5 days to finish this relatively thin book.

There's something there, and if you wanted to marginalia the hell out of it and find all of the allusions, metaphors, and deep philosophies there's a lot to be found but I kept comparing it to The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe with the same type of "nameless protagonist in a weathered Hell and a girl in danger in the middle" but had so much better structure and prose.

In the end, it was a'ight.

The writing and dialogue are great, I really know the characters in and out, and the set up was bang pow bam but once the "hunt" started it all felt fairly anticlimactic. Big traps laid just to wash over in 2 sentences then on to the next. It felt, and is, thin and fun. I'd be willing to give another Parker novel a try.

A classic I'm sure I'll come back to later with more appreciation.

The plot and characters are off the wall but I could never connect with the style and pacing. There would be long sections of one single incident with recursive dialogue and then a bambambam rapid fire series of events and it was hard to find the line other than the sad life of Hazel Motes.

A mandatory and utilitarian novel about the strip mining of the country and people becoming animals, animals becoming things, things becoming capital, capital becoming trash. The novelization of Marx mixed with survivalism that made me take walking breaks to cut the tension.

Every Joe Rogan dickhead who wants to return to the old times should have to read this book at gunpoint and write 700 word essays on the hubris of man and stare at the void for 72 hours uninterrupted.

I didn't laugh, I definitely cried, I hugged my air conditioning remote and played recordings of Lenin and the El Topo soundtrack.

Highly recommended.

This is my first William Faulkner and it won’t be my last, but I’m pretty sure I picked wrong.

I went in not knowing what a Faulkner book even is, what the style is supposed to do, and it seems a story built out of holes. The world isn’t really explained to you. The meat of the book is the characters and interactions and dialogue, but it does become hard to follow because there are some characters who are never named and seen with many characters all talking over each other in slang and circular dialogue.

The whole thing revolves around people’s relationships with alcohol and the illegal world they get shoved into. Temple is a well-to-do high-class student who wants to be involved in that criminal world, and she winds up stuck in a part of the county populated by these criminal hillbillies. There’s a lot of commentary about class and survival, about how surviving is the thing that makes people criminals, and the part that hooked me is that Temple has so many chances to leave. She has people actively trying to get her out and she drags her feet, because she wants to be there. It’s bleak and dark in a way I liked.

The problem is the jumping. It moves character to character constantly and I lost the thread of who was talking to who and what any of them were actually trying to say. By the last third I had just lost the plot, right at the point where it felt like it was finally starting.

Three stars. It’s interesting, it’s not very long, and I want to know more about Temple. I believe there’s a sequel, so I’ll get there. This is a book I’d come back to in a few years with more Faulkner under my belt, and it isn’t one of his better-reviewed ones anyway. Not the place to start, but a fine novel.

I’ll be upfront: my enjoyment of Ridley Walker got worse the longer it went on, and yes, it was the made-up language, which is probably the main reason you’ve heard of this book, that was a massive detriment to its longevity and readability.

The novel is a post-apocalyptic story set roughly 2,000 years after a nuclear war wiped out most of civilization. The remnants of humanity are left to pick up the pieces in a world that feels like the future from Terminator. Everything is decrepit, broken down, and roving packs of dogs attack anyone trying to survive day by day. Ridley Walker is a "connexion man," a kind of communicator and history keeper for a forgotten era. At the start, his father dies, and Ridley must take up the role.

The language is front and center from page one, it’s a devolved version of English, stripped of most grammar and crammed with mashed-together words. It’s gimmicky at first, but it doesn’t take long to figure out. By the third chapter, you’re breathing through it just fine. Mixed in are modern terms like "nuclear bomb" and "computer," but since the characters don’t know what those are, they’ve been reimagined as myth and legend.

I'm sorry to say this about a classic, but I wasn’t impressed. The language starts off as simple phonetic spellings, but by the fifth or sixth chapter, it just sounds like Jamaican Patois, or, worse, Jar Jar Binks.

The real problem is that this gimmick drags everything out as long as humanly possible. If a character needs to ask, “What are we gonna do to protect ourselves from the other gangs?” it becomes a multi-page slog that reads like five-year-olds mumbling at each other. Nothing gets accomplished. I kept waiting for a larger plot to unfold, but around Chapter 6, I hit a wall. I didn’t even want to read it anymore. Rather than sitting down for an hour, I could only take it in ten-minute bursts before getting bored and putting it down. It was impossible to build momentum.

There was still a story in there somewhere, but the language hampered it so much that the plot never got off the ground. It never found third or fourth gear. Any large action sequence felt kneecapped and all over the place, requiring multiple paragraph re-reads. Your experience may be completely different, but I could not get into this book.

I appreciate the effort, and I can see how this inspired Mad Max. Still, the language doesn’t lend itself to visual storytelling, especially in a book that has so much visual richness to offer.

Should it be on your TBR? If you’re a big sci-fi or dystopian lit fan, sure. But my enjoyment was severely hampered.

Nights Master is some of the best modern fairytales with demons, elves, long forgotten times, magic, talismans, etc. I’ve ever read.

The book is a set of fairytales mostly circling around the demon Azhrarn who lives in the Underearth. It is a time when the Earth is flat and the Gods have forgotten about, or downright regret, humanity and Azhrarn has free reign over Earth. The tales twist and morph with humans starting as victims and then becoming talking demons themselves, enacting revenge or showing compassion, like an Aeon Flux cartoon following a never ending line of killers. The imagery is vivid and never ending. Every river is laden with metal, every forest glowing, the sun sets and rises at the whims of curses, you could flip open to any random page and find a vista worthy of a Peter Jackson treatment.

It would take spoiler-laden paragraphs to explain all the characters at the center of these tales but it is never boring, it is always moving, as I said villains become heroes and back to villains again, and in the final third when I had that worry it was losing steam the status quo of the world gets flipped upside down and everything changes. The deepest philosophical creations happen in the final fifty pages that bring ideas themselves into existence and left me craving for more.

Reading it I kept thinking “these would be great Wishbone episodes”. It is horrifying, horny, captivating, wonderous, evil, serene, epic,Nights Master delivers it all. Massive recommendation.

Chamberlain's recounting of his years as a dragoon and then bounty hunter in the 1850's Southwest is a mad fish hole film reel of Hell on Earth. It is every bit was foreign and demonic as any fantasy novel. Living demons marching across the barren, burning hot landscape in search of women, whiskey, meat, and work and work usually meant murder for hire.

The first 2/3rds of the book is very straight forward, somewhat uneventful, and reads as any military record might. The prose is some of the best I've ever read and it is easy to pretend this is another Cormac McCarthy novel. His description of the scenery, the desert lands, the mountains, the rivers, the sunsets, are engrossing and breathtaking but it is the final third, the recounting of his time with the Glanton gang that formed the plotline for Blood Meridian, that is the main event.

I hate to sound naive but I was blown away at how much of Blood Meridian came from this book because it made the blood-soaked pages that much realer.

Eating donkeys, murdering fallen comrades out of pity, raids and battles leaving dozens dead, and the ghost of Judge Holden, pederast and all, standing over Chamberlain like the grim reaper pulling the strings of his army of heretics.

This journal is shocking and beautiful and reads better than any Western. Highly recommend.

This is one of those hard to grade books because it's 3 books.

I'll keep it brief but the first novella, The namesake of the collection, is the best one. A story about a planet of mostly clones and what it means when a boy finds out the truth. The worldbuilding is great, the action and story revealing and driven, and the ending nailed it.

The other two stories were less intriguing and I feel like I need to come back to them at a future date. I couldn't get into them and I found myself droning out from time to time and reading them on the go vs. sitting and focused.

This review reflects both Vol 1 and 2 as one whole story.

I was really blown away by this title. Devilman comes up constantly (alongside Fist of the North Star) as the titular manga that inspired {insert your favorite Japanese works ever} and... I see it.

The scope of the story is massive from two million years ago when demons walked to the Earth to thousands of years in the future when humanity has been wiped out. The art style starts very basic, and the first volume is erratic in tone with little cohesion between big story beats.

The jumping off point of the story, Ryo explaining to his friend Akira the entire million year long history of demons, the death of his father, the prophetic vision of the future, just happens with no questions or evidence or action. The exposition dumps are heavy. Then you'll be thrown into a night club with naked women and demon attacks and mass murder then every one wakes up and no one remembers a thing then Akira goes to school for some juvenile riff raff then we're off to the beach then more demon attacks, and on it goes like this.

This entire first volume is still fun to read and I could see the wheels in motion, building something bigger.

Then the second volume takes a drastic turn. You still have disjointed exposition dumps but this time it's about thermo nuclear war killing millions, demons declaring all out war on humanity, the artwork goes from whimsical and minimalist into very technical and detailed depictions of military equipment, ruined cities, and graphic violence that had to have been the most shocking stuff seen for 1973.

The final two acts left me speechless. All of the themes came together: the cold war doomsday panics, mass hysteria, cosmic horror on a planetary scale, what mutually assured destruction looks like, fate and prophecy, the final few pages were as impactful as The End of Evangelion, Griffith pledging the Band of the Hawks, Spike pointing at the camera and saying "Bang", I couldn't believe this manga that started so goofy ended so tragically.

The whole thing spans ~1,000 pages over 6 main chapters but it has the plot density of 5X that length. The status quo of the manga changes with a single page dozens of times. I don't want to say "this deserves a remake", I've heard the Crybaby anime does a great job of this, but something like Berserk carries on the torch Devilman started.

I loved my two days reading Devilman and I am excited to start Violence Jack.

If you're a sucker for post-apocolyptic/present-apocolyptic stories or demons, religious cataclysm, bleak futures, etc. like I am take the time and check out Devilman.

Reading this in 2026, the warnings feel quaint. We know the crimes of the billionaire class more than ever. The Late Stage Capitalism subreddit is some of the most horrifying shit on Earth but nothing changes. 2026 is so much worse than London could have imagined.

The Iron Heel has won.

The first six chapters are dry. They're dinner party debates where Ernest argues with obvious villains and says all the right things. It's the kind of exposition I've never liked.

Once the story moves, there are interesting moments. The concept of global workers striking to stop war? Good idea. But the Iron Heel keeps stomping down resistance, and by the end, the socialist movement is splintered. Nothing really gets resolved.

Despite having the caveat that this is being told in a future where the socialist movements have won at no point in the book is the Iron Heel not in charge. It's a never ending series of down notes.

Worth reading for the historical context, but I'd recommend Super Sad True Love Story for something more relevant.

Donald Ray Pollock is now two for two. He's only written two novels, and both are perfect. I blew through this one in two days, could not put it down.

Like The Devil All the Time, this is populated with a massive cast, a dozen or so main characters and another twenty side characters, and it's clear Pollock has found his wheelhouse. It might read as repetitive if you've read his other book, but it's so damn good I don't care. If you liked The Devil All the Time, you need to read this. It's essentially the same book, but different, and somehow better.

It's 1917, the US is entering World War I, and the story follows three brothers traveling up through the center of Ohio after their father dies. They're illiterate farmhands who've been let off the leash, and they decide to live out the plot of a cheap dime-store crime novel they carry around, a Jesse James-style outlaw tale. The irony is that their journey becomes its own dime-store cowboy story, complete with all the same tropes and clichés, whether they realize it or not. They eventually end up in Meade, where a military barracks being built has thrown the whole town into chaos.

There's a huge supporting cast, including Ellsworth and Una, a dirt-poor farming couple whose son is heading off to fight in Germany, a country they don't even know how to find on a map. Their arc captures what this book is really about: a new world encroaching on people who never asked for it and aren't ready for it. Like Outer Dark and Child of God, there's this constant collision between the old world and the new, men shaving, cars, noise, a teacher lounging in a hammock with a flower behind his ear while these characters can't fathom not working every waking hour.

What really sets Pollock apart is that every single character, every waiter, busboy, shop clerk, scumbag on the road, gets a backstory. You'll pass a random person and get a full paragraph on who they are, how they got there, why their life went the way it did. It's written so well I just wanted to keep reading for the prose alone. I'd genuinely read a 1,200-page Pollock epic with hundreds of characters if he wrote one.

This book is gross. Murderous, nasty, full of knives and gunshots and drunks and hookers. Everyone has gonorrhea, or worms, or missing teeth, or is covered in outhouse filth. But it's funny, Sopranos-funny. There's a barber who keeps cracking jokes about a guy's wife every time he comes in for a shave that's a perfect example of the tone.

Despite the constant looming death as all these characters converge toward the same violent point, the ending is genuinely bittersweet. Some characters you've grown attached to, even the murderous, disease-ridden scumbags, don't make it, and it stings. Others do, and it feels earned. The three brothers are bad guys, but no worse than everyone around them, there's a posse hunting them that's just as racist, drunk, and thieving. And there's a real Robin Hood undercurrent. People don't mind the brothers robbing banks because those same banks put tax liens on their farms and took everything. This is a world that's already a lottery, with winners and losers baked in from the start.

My favorite side character might be Jasper, the outhouse inspector who walks around town with a dead rat on a stick, measuring how full people's toilets are and issuing fines. He's just doing an honest job, but the whole town hates him for it, pure classism over a $4 fine. There's also a wonderfully corrupt cast of judges and cops throughout.

The whole thing reminded me of the movie Running Scared, my favorite bad movie, where a handful of main characters chase the same object and keep colliding with a rotating cast of psychopaths along the way. Bloody, gory, and funny in the same way.

I've been on a run of feeling like modern fiction is toothless, too scared of controversy, too careful. Pollock clearly does not care. Every character here is a disgusting, racist, murdering, backstabbing thief, and he commits to it fully, there's even a genuinely horrifying serial killer subplot that shows up almost out of nowhere in the final hundred pages. It shouldn't work. It does. A perfect novel. If you liked The Devil All the Time, this is mandatory reading.

I was excited when this came out. American Underworld is my favorite trilogy, or at least near the top, so this was my first Ellroy book since finishing it. Since then, I've read the L.A. Quartet and had mixed feelings about each entry. I didn't like The Enchanted much at all. After reading Red Sheet , I think I know why.

Ellroy's prose is one of a kind. You pick it up and immediately know it's an Ellroy book. It's at times fun to read, at times horrific, but you can't take your eyes off the page. It's violent, vulgar, and visceral.

Where American Underworld had about a dozen main characters, plus numerous side characters, and took place over roughly twenty years across locations worldwide, L.A., Miami, Las Vegas, Thailand, Vietnam, Cuba, and encompassed an expansive plot of conspiracies and movements, his other books seem to be based around L.A. with one specific character uncovering one specific crime. That crime is grisly, violent, and awful, but the smaller scale just isn't as captivating.

Reed Sheet is a simple travel around LA crime book about Freddy Otash doing awful things to everyone he meets but it’s repetitive and i struggled to find the point.

I had fun reading this book, but at no point did I think, "Yes, this is a five-star classic, I can't wait to give this to my friends." Not the way American Underworld gave me that feeling.

I think I'm done with Ellroy, at least for now. I had a good time reading it, but I clearly know what he does, and it doesn't hold my attention anymore.

A completely functional modern "neo-noir" crime book with no teeth. A tough as nails former mafia hitman who's actually a private eye with a girlfriend and a dog who doesn't wanna get in too much trouble. Like the last book, the best section was the 25 page setup where all the grit is but it was at no point thrilling, scary, and quite slow.

Blood Standard is a pulpy, hard-boiled detective novel that throws a lot at the wall. I thought it was OK but not great. Too many unnecessary and boring sections dragged it down.

The book I wanted to read was the first couple chapters. The story opens with Isaiah Coleridge, a gangster working for an outfit in Alaska, doing gangster shit. I was super into this section. I have always loved books set in Alaska, like Bone White by Ronald Malfi. But then Isaiah gets kicked out of the outfit and relocated to upstate New York. Upstate New York is just roads, trees, and shit-kicker bars on the sides of highways. He lands on a farm, befriends the owners, and before long he chases down their kidnapped daughter.

From there, the book is uninspired and cookie cutter. Isaiah and a handful of acquaintances move from old pal to old enemy, kick up storms, and track down a few leads. No insightful twists. Just a straight line.

The final quarter of the book is where everything happens. This really could have been a 100-page novella. Everything before section three feels meaningless.

People recommend this book paired with True Detective season one because it supposedly has horror elements. I believe the sequel kicks in those horror elements. But this book was devoid of any of that.

I will read the sequel just because I am trying to find something that feels like True Detective. But this one was a bit mid for me.