Review of Paul Cleave’s “Trust No One”

Awesome, and available August 4th.

“Trust No One” is Paul Cleave’s first novel that does not involve the core cast of Christchurch characters from his other books (serial killer Joe, Detective Tate, etc.) and is a fantastic example of a writer who understands how to diverge from his comfort zone and experiment with a new topic/format while still delivering for his readers! Cleave has said himself that “it’s like nothing else [he’s] written before – but still has the style of the other books” and that’s a spot-on assessment. I was sucked in by the expected conversationally gritty narrative, gripped immediately by the tragedy of the main character’s situation, horrified by the prospect of losing one’s mind and being helpless to prevent it, and greatly disturbed and fascinated as I came to realize that Alzheimer’s is the lesser of the story’s many evils.

The main character, Jerry, a crime writer who uses the pseudonym Henry Cutter, has been diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s. What begins as a well-meaning attempt to cope with his disintegrating life rapidly spirals into a nightmare as Jerry begins to lose his grip on reality, unable to discern truth from fiction, memory from imagination, and friend from foe, relying heavily on his “Madness Journal” which proves anything but complete, or reliable. As with all of Cleave’s work, the story is unpredictable, and the answer/conclusion you expect is not the one you get. Cleave does not play nice, he plays with brass knuckles, and every character pays his or her pound of flesh while Cleave keeps you guessing, questioning everything, even the reliability of the narrator. Does Jerry actually have Alzheimer’s? Does he have a split personality? Is he genuinely a crazed psychopath—or is someone using his illness against him to make him believe that he is? What is real and really going on here? Well, I highly recommend you get your hands on a copy and find out! Cleave, yet again, does not disappoint.

Books That Got Me Thinking Differently About Writing…Part Two

A disturbing subject delivered with dignity.

I genuinely LOVE Mo Hayder (the Jack Caffrey series anyway – I’ve yet to read her stand-alone novels). To me she represents the best in gritty crime/suspense paired with a prose style that is practically literary fiction. I don’t believe it is categorized as such, but in my humble opinion, it should be. Her stories are layered, gripping, lyrical, and among the very few that manage to make me grimace, wince, and even sometimes, put the book down and walk away (or lie awake).

This second book in the Caffrey series, The Treatment, is the “worst” in terms of its ghoulishness, and it’s the kind of book you love to hate…or perhaps hate to love? And what it ultimately taught me is that a good writer can tackle a reprehensible subject – pedophilia – so long as it is done with dignity and tact. It’s a fine line, a tricky balance, all eggshells and thin ice, but when done well it will blow the top off any so-called “thriller” or “horror” out there. I’m not saying that I, personally, am ready to tackle such subjects as of yet, but this has given me permission to experiment and be as fearless with my premise or my theme as Hayder is, and as I am with my characters. There are dark crimes and true evil in this world, and literature shouldn’t necessarily shy away from them just because they are uncomfortable or taboo. What literature – and all media – needs to avoid is the glorification of these crimes, however inadvertent or unintended. Hayder has shown me that a talented author can make a novel double as both a warning, and entertainment.

I Might Not Be A Better Writer In California…

…but I would be a happier one. #Monterey

“Perhaps the very ‘otherness’ of what I experience in California makes the place so rivetingly alive for me. The sheer inscrutable mysteriousness of the place – why are people so friendly at the grocery store? – to the unusual – the deeply unsettling experience of watching a distant hillside burst into flames – makes me aware of the high and the low poetry of this place” – Marisa Silver

(http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/oh-california/?_r=0)

Latest Background Noise?

It’s epic. It’s pertinent.

I’ve rediscovered Fall Out Boy, old and new, and it’s motivating. Energizing. Applicable. What else keeps me focused on the cursor and the word count these days? Standouts are R.L. Burnside, AWOLNATION, and Hollywood Undead. Anything relentless, gritty and driving…ideally like my people, a.k.a. “characters.”

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature” – Ernest Hemingway.

Shoot for the (Hollow) Moon.

Someday Baby.

Writing is a Disease.

Secret confession: most days I wish my “characters” were real.

Book Review Combo – “Heartsick/Sweetheart”

1st book – good. 2nd book – DeflateGate.

I thought author Chelsea Cain had a great premise with her first novel “Heartsick” – a detective (Archie) is kidnapped and tortured by an unrealistically beautiful serial killer (Gretchen) posing as a psychologist. She lets him live (not a spoiler alert because the novel starts two years after this event, and the circumstances are revealed in flashbacks). In the first novel we find Archie divorced, depressed, addicted to pain killers and weirdly obsessed with Gretchen. She’s no Hannibal Lecter – her beauty is Barbie-esque and her psychopathy is a little flat – but she’s intriguing as a foil to Archie’s more angsty, three-dimensional character. I was fascinated by the warped Stockholm Syndrome that had (seemingly) developed between Archie and Gretchen during his torture sessions. However – and spoiler alert – in the second novel “Sweetheart,” that all changes.

Archie’s creepy obsession/attraction is revealed not to have stemmed from him spending time as Gretchen’s victim, but was in fact already present because they’d had an affair BEFORE she decided to mutilate him. Alas, there was no Stockholm Syndrome, no warped, unnatural infatuation to explore. After the mystery surrounding the main characters’ chemistry and connection fizzled, and the ending was too neatly tied up in a series of events that didn’t seem true to the story, I decided not to keep reading this series (there are at least six books, possibly a seventh). I’m very disappointed; the first book was a lot of fun, and showed great promise.

Books That Got Me Thinking Differently About Writing…Part One

It wasn’t the plot twists that gave me an eye-opener.

I held off on reading this book for a long while, until perhaps a year before the movie came out (and I held off on seeing that, too). I’m not one who adopts trends quickly, and if a book is too popular I shy away from it just like I do Steele and Clancy, and several other mass-market authors who’ve become, in my humble opinion, too commonplace and unexciting.

So when my friend and coworker finally did convince me to read it, she then had to convince me many more times to stick with it. The characters were downright unlikable – and this is coming from a reader and writer who loooves flawed characters, conflicted heroes and compromised heroines – and the pacing was, at times, slow. Halfway through the novel I put it down and read something else that I enjoyed better in a fraction of the time. Ultimately, however, I returned and finished it because as a writer, and as a student of writing, I’d been hooked by Flynn’s writing style.

It was stream-of-consciousness. It wasn’t particularly eloquent or high-brow, and at a times it was downright gritty. There were other times when I struggled to separate the characters’ voices; I could’ve been reading Nick, or Amy. Yet it worked. It told a story. A raw-knuckled, unpleasant, uncomfortable story. The ending (spoiler alert) – Nick deciding to stay by Psycho Amy to salvage their child’s upbringing – is disturbingly haunting. And more than that, it gave me the confidence to abandon the struggle to perfect over-styled, over-weighted lyrical prose in my futile attempts to mimic the likes of Gabaldon, to be great, and write. As Jack Kerouac said, “It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.” So thank you, Gillian Flynn. It’s because of you that I shelved my 265,000 word four-book schizophrenic opera and wrote an abrasive but honest detective story from the heart. And I like it infinitely better, and myself infinitely better for finding my own voice.

The Devil’s Detective – One of the Best Books I’ve Read in Awhile

I received this book for free in exchange for a review on Goodreads. However, being totally honest, I would’ve purchased and read it anyway, even if I had not won the contest. I’m always on the lookout for a new take on the detective story, and “The Devil’s Detective” is certainly it. Unsworth’s main character, Fool, is an “Information Man” tasked with investigating rapes, assaults and murders, although there are so many, and they’re never going to stop, that usually he and his two colleagues stamp the file “Did Not Investigate” and close the case. After a delegation from Heaven arrives, a fresh body is discovered without its soul, and everything changes.

This has been one of the few novels I’ve read recently that I loathed putting down. It hit a lot of the right marks—I was gripped by the writing, had no clue where the author was taking me, I genuinely liked Fool, was fascinated with this strange new world, and could not get enough of the graphic descriptions and bizarre rules and characters. Unsworth has a fantastic imagination, a wonderful grasp of prose and produces a gritty, visceral, despairing and utterly realistic—if you can call it that—Hell. It’s exactly what I’d imagined Hell might be like, spending eternity in a depressing, irritating hole like the RMV or an ER waiting room, only with the threat of physical injury and violent, disgusting monsters ready to abuse, enslave or torture you. And ultimately, you know you have no one to blame for your misery but yourself. In Unsworth’s Hell, humans cannot remember who they were or what sins they’ve committed, so they go through the motions entirely unsure how to repent, or what they’re even repenting for. The hopelessness is perhaps the most heart-wrenching aspect of this book.

The only con here is that the ending felt underwhelming. Not awful, not even poor, but definitely not as compelling as the build-up led me to expect. I think it’s due in part to the lack of development of some of the characters. Without spoiling anything, several of the central characters felt peripheral, like I didn’t know enough about them, or encounter them often enough to feel invested, and so the “big reveal” failed to evoke the punch of betrayal or surprise. I’d suspected who the culprit was for some time, and though the ending was one hell of an action scene, I almost wished for a heated tête-à-tête between Fool and the villain instead of a knock-down, drag-out fight. That being said, the conclusion/dénouement fit perfectly, the right balance of tying off loose ends and staying true to the demoralizing, relentless engine that is Unsworth’s Hell. I highly recommend this book—though only if you have a strong stomach. It is not for the faint of heart.

“Art” of the Query Letter

Writing query letters is like doing calculus (or whatever she’s doing).

 

This is a topic I’ll be coming back to more, but for now just let me say #@$%! and then smash my head off my dining room table. I say dining room table and not desk because I don’t like to write at my desk. I spent my entire life sitting at one in one form or another, and I spend 32 hours a week (sometimes more) sitting at one in a particularly hellish place – a cubicle. So is a desk conducive to creativity for me? Nope. Dining room tables, over-sized armchairs, hotel room beds and sofas are where the juice flows. But that’s a tangent for another time.

And actually, writing queries isn’t so much an art as it is uncovering the secret of the universe. After losing so much hair my husband noticed, I decided to pony up for a consultation and paid $150 to a professional via Grub Street to hack into my query letter. I’m not going to reveal all his secrets because then the guy won’t get paid, but I have to say – it was well worth it. Even after all of my research and reading and studying example query letters, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Now I’m about 50% more confident. For some reason I understand the concept, but when it comes to applying the formula, I get writer’s block. My plot suddenly becomes Everest and I’m standing at the bottom in a sports bra and sneakers attempting to climb.

Cue the editor. First, it’s not about cramming your letter with your entire plot. It’s about setting up the context – where does your story take place and in his words, why it’s “cool.” It’s about the character arc and showing what the character desires, some conflict and how the character changes – also without being too wordy. It’s also about introducing the main characters – hopefully not too many – while avoiding confusion. Most of all, it’s about doing your homework on each and every agent you intend to submit to so you don’t come across like a telemarketer making a cold call. All this in just 350 words, give or take.

Sounds “easy” until you try, and then you can’t get out of your own way. Which is why – and don’t call me a traitor here, because I held out until I received a few rejection letters and then swallowed my humble pie – it’s worth it to shell out the bucks and take a class or hire a pro. They can tell you what’s extraneous, what requires more info, and redline all the crap that’s better saved for your synopsis (if you get to submit one). The painful truth is, you can learn only so much on your own, and then you need the feedback massacre. It only hurts a little. Okay a lot, but it’s worth it. And like I said, this won’t be the last time I rant on queries. Now that mine is as “complete” as it’s going to be, I’m going to put it in front of an agent and see if it holds up. Pray that it holds up, more accurately. That will be a double-swipe deodorant day for sure.

On the Nook Now – CivilWarLand In Bad Decline

One of the funniest and most formidable literature I’ve read in awhile.

One of my new literary “heroes” is George Saunders. I’m behind the eight ball, having only been introduced to him in my GrubStreet writer’s workshop this month. We read and analyzed “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” as an example for how to build a believable but very fictional world. This short story is also the title of the entire work, which consists of 6 short stories and a novella, which I downloaded to the Nook. Saunders is laugh-out-loud funny, graphically sobering and thought-provoking at the same time. I love his settings, his characters, both the pathetic and evil, and the flawed, dystopian universe he’s created. I wish I had more eloquent literary review to offer but alas, though I’ve spent the past 10 weeks trying to read like a writer, there’s an overpowering segment of my brain that just loves to read as a reader, enjoying art for art’s sake, enjoying the story, contemplating its broader meaning. When I read solely to dissect and critique I feel like a psychopathic medical student, slaughtering an innocent just so I can stick my hands into their gooey insides, finding out what makes the body tick. Though literary autopsies are necessary for aspiring author growth, they’re not always the most pleasant of undertakings.

The other thing I love about Saunders? His text is chock full of sound bites. For those of you who love quotable gems like me, have a peek: “I ask if that’s a threat and he says no, it’s a reasonable future prognostication” or: “I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.” Amen. Speaking of amen, if you Google Saunders quotables in general, you get this: “[F*] concepts. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”

New releases – The Fray & American Authors

Two new albums I’m waiting for are The Fray’s Helios and American Authors’ Oh What A Life. They’re a departure from the darker stuff I’ve been listening to, like She Wants Revenge and Lana Del Ray. Helios is set to come out on Feb 25, with the other being released on March 4. Both Amazon MP3 and iTunes have a couple of the pre-released songs for sale. “Love Don’t Die” from The Fray is excellent, and you can’t go wrong with “Believer” or “Best Day of My Life” from American Authors. Dying to hear the rest, praying it’s just as good – if not better!