Sleeping with my dog

Book: Dogfight and Other Stories

Author: Michael Knight

Published: 2007 (Grove Press edition)

Pages: 162

Literary fiction could use more dogs. Not as, like, metaphors for our animal nature, or the fleeting fragility of life, or whatever, but just as normal hangers-on that occasionally assist the plot in moving along, like in these stories. 

I appreciate the realism of these stories' emotions while finding their plots too slight to carry all of it. Notable exceptions are "Smash and Grab," about a burglar who gets caught and tied up by the teenage daughter he didn't realize was still at home (but even in that one she shows no reason for her whimiscally changing moods about whether to let him go or not) and "Amelia Earhart's Coat," which has nothing to do with dogs and everything to do with a little girl's 1930s delusions of grandeur about her family and their friend Earhart. It was the only one that felt like the author stretched himself beyond his own experiences and managed to surprise himself with how genuine he could write from someone else's perspective. 

So the whole thing is going on the bookshelf mostly for that one story and the strength of the author's resistance to animal sentimentality.

  

Still hunting

Book: The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing

Author: Melissa Bank

Published: 1999 (Penguin)

Pages: 274

I wish this book was as cool as its title and structural premise.

It’s another book about a slightly weird girl growing into her sexuality. She makes bad choices, believes guys she shouldn’t, gets lonely enough to almost fumble her one (last?) chance at a good relationship but saves it by blurting honesty at the guy who really wants to hear it.

The first bit, about when she’s fourteen and her older brother brings his much older girlfriend to a weekend at their family’s shore house, is great. She’s all sorts of bluntly adolescent insightful, and her parents are real people, and her brother tries too hard with the best of intentions.

But after that, it gets progressively less interesting and therefore more depressing by (accidentally?) proving that growing up dulls you into being normal if you do it right. I reserve my right to refuse that for at least another 22 years.

Seriously, though, the emotional depth just sort of goes away even as she’s talking about how her dad’s battle with cancer affects her romantic relationship with a much older man who refuses to take care of himself. The parallels, they are everywhere, but they don’t make me care. She says she’s devastated and lonely, but I don’t believe her.

I’m gonna start a new end-of-post categorization called “Bookshelf, Donation Pile, or Trash” for each book I paid money to own. Such as this one, which I’ll go ahead and place in the Donation Pile. It’s not offensively terrible. It’s got some good parts, one or two insights. It’s just too boring to keep myself, because I know what will happen. I’ll get a hankering for a re-read because the title’s so nifty, and then I’ll get disappointed all over again and lament the time I could be learning something new. Off to the (used bookstore that will give me money for it? That could happen! I read it in another blog this morning! Y’all, my rent went up) place that needs books.

Pushed him down a well

Book: Dolores Claiborne

Author: Stephen King

Published: 1993 (Viking)

Pages: 305

Crusty old New England lady lets loose about the time she murdered her husband by pushing him down the well! Now she’s testifying in the suspiciously similar death of her fellow crusty old New England lady employer! Aw, yeah, Stephen King, you work that regional dialect into one break-less story and add a complete solar eclipse just for good measure. We know how you do.

It’s such a pitch-perfect voice the whole way through. And the story leans completely on the horror of what regular human beings get up to when they get mean. The eclipse is nothing except the way to conceal revenge and heartache. It’s a straightforward psychological dissection channeled through a lady who would snort at that phrase and say she doesn’t know about no psychology, she’s just tellin it like it happened.

I got into it a little bit more than I got into Thinner because the narrator was so well-defined. If the mullet King is wearing in his author photograph is any indication with the copyright dates, these were of roughly the same writing era for him. A good vintage.

Donation Pile, Bookshelf, or Trash? Bookshelf. It’s not my favorite King book, but it’s my favorite voice of his.     

Time to eat?

Book: Thinner

Author: Richard Bachman

Published: 1984 (Signet)

Pages: 309

Free Comic Book Day, you guys. It means half-off Heroes and Dragons’ fairly new section of used books, too, and Liberry Tom had just sent me a list where Vulture ranks Stephen King books, and I’ve been wanting to read Thinner ever since I learned Richard Bachman was a thing, and $4 for a good-condition hardback, and…well. Second verse, same as the first.

To the story!  Spoilers ahoy!

It’s a combination of King’s sense of macabre justice and Bachman’s ability to blaze through that with slightly more gore and a lot less padding. This fat lawyer dude runs over an old Gypsy lady while his wife is touching him in the car and he gets off manslaughter charges because he knows the judge and so the Gypsy lady’s dad curses the guy to lose weight until he dies. Lawyer dude starts wasting away, hunts down the Gypsy man to make him take off the curse (using a handy mob connection he picked up through his firm work). Along the way, lawyer dude grows intense hatred toward his wife and how she hasn’t been cursed for her role in all this until by the end he decides to throw the curse onto her and live happily after with his daughter. But the curse is contained in a pie that the mom and daughter both end up eating as a make-up gesture from a fight they had while lawyer dude was out, and so in the end he’s like, “Fuck it, won’t be worth living after this starts working on  the daughter I still love” and eats some too, putting the curse back on himself.

A few things:

• Once it gets to a certain point, his thinness is constantly described as scaring people, like literally causing strangers to turn away in horror, yet physical descriptions of him are a hell of a lot less gory than his fellow lawyer who got him off (skin turned into an alligator-like hide) and the deputy sheriff who tussled with the Gypsies when they were setting up their camp (they cursed him with face-boiling acne).

• I sense faint racism in how the Gypsies are a big part of the story yet are written with much less nuance and sympathy than the guy who ran over and killed one of them. Bachman is usually better at streaking his antagonists with complexity so neither side gets a hold of the moral high ground.

• Very nice blend of psychological cracking up and driving plot. Yet it didn’t dig as deep into me as I thought it would.

• I have my next reading project, which will be to get through all the Stephen King books I haven’t read yet. That’s mostly the Dark Tower series, plus a few strays like Cujo and From a Buick 8 and Desperation.

Glad I finally got to read this one. It reads like a graceful hybrid between King and his alter ego.