Review: We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons

Posted on May 28, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A young mother, in denial after the death of her sister, navigates the dizzying landscapes of desire, guilt, and grief in this darkly comic, highly anticipated debut novel from Kimberly King Parsons, author of the story collection, Black Light (longlisted for the National Book Award).

The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit’s best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for an idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. They’ll soak in hot springs, then sneak a vape into a dive bar and drink too much, like old times. Instead, their getaway only reminds Kit of everything she’s lost lately: her wildness, her independence, and—most heartbreaking of all—her sister, Julie, who died a few years ago.

When she returns to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle into her routine—long afternoons spent caring for her irrepressible daughter, going on therapist-advised dates with her concerned husband, and reluctantly taking her mother’s phone calls. But in the secret recesses of Kit’s mind, she’s reminiscing about the band she used to be in—and how they’d go out to the desert after shows and drop acid. She’s imagining an impossible threesome with her kid’s pretty gymnastics teacher and the cool playground mom. Keyed into everything that might distract from her surfacing pain, Kit spirals. As her already thin boundaries between reality and fantasy blur, she begins to wonder: Is Julie really gone?

Neon bright in its insight, both devastating and laugh-out-loud funny, We Were the Universe is an ambitious, inventive novel from a revelatory new voice in American fiction—a fearless exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, friendship, marriage, psychedelics, and the many strange, transcendent shapes love can take.

Review:

For better or worse, Kit, the narrator of We Were the Universe, has an inner life that is far more dangerous than her exterior life. When we meet her on the park bench, watching her three year old, Gilda, bullying her way through the playground, she is fantasizing about having a romantic relationship with the mother on the bench next to her, and affair that his steamy and satisfying and also outside of her marriage. This escapism is consistent in her life, always clouding the boringness of marriage and motherhood, and always largely relevant because she is doing her best to avoid thinking about her dead sister, her hoarder mother, and the life that she now has that is so far away from her teenage years. 

For better or worse, Kit is a compelling, well constructed character. Kimberly King Parsons writes a woman who knows she is having issues with the loss of her sister coming only months before the birth of Gilda, and it was easy for her to switch one love with the other at the beginning, but now the cracks in the facade are causing problems in her life. She is starting to have panic attacks, become unreliable, and the fantasy world that she hides behind is starting to seep too much into her daily routine. This all feels like a natural progression, and what she does not realize is that she is surrounded by the people that notice these changes in her quicker than she has notice it herself. Her husband, Jad, is a fairly minor character in the novel, smaller even that her friend Pete who takes her to Montana for a weekend to get her away from Gilda and her life for a few days. Both Jad and Pete are supportive and only want the best for her, and you can feel the honest concern by them. This this brings wholesomeness to her life at a time when everything is growing more chaotic, impulsive, and falling apart. 

For better or worse, We Were the Universe is a debut novel that is just as compelling and wonderful as Black Light, the short story collection that preceded this. Some readers might not like that this is heavily about motherhood or that Kit is doing her own things without regard to her family, her child, or those around her, but Kimberly King Parsons does a great job making this story her own and telling it only how she can tell it. She writes characters that feel like they could be walking down the street next to me, and I would not think anything of it until they stop to dig through a trash can because they see something salvageable. Every story told by her has been fabulous, and this has made me want to go back and reread Black Light.

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

Other books by Kimberly King Parsons reviewed:

Black Light

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Review: Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru

Posted on May 10, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty, power, and capital’s influence on art and those who devote their lives to creating it.

Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height—the greater public panicked in quarantine—and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn’t recovered from the effects of a recent Covid case.

When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see Alice, a former lover from his art school days. Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won’t recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property—where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well—setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion.

Gripping and brilliantly orchestrated, Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time to deliver an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind.

Review:

Blue Ruin, the third in a theme based trilogy by Hari Kunzru, is a novel that starts with Jay delivering groceries during the beginning of the Covid pandemic. He is very sick and living in his car due to his roommates kicking him out for not wanting to catch what he has. When Jay sees that the person who he is delivering groceries to is not only a ghost from his past but someone who ghosted him years early halfway across the world, he thinks it is a side effect of his sickness. Alice was his girlfriend, lover, and drug friend at a London art school, until she ran off with Rob, another artist and friend, while Jay was lost in his drug use. Now that they are facing each other, years later and thousand of miles away, the old feelings and rivalries quickly boil over. 

The main thing that keeps this triangle together (and tears them apart) is art and their individual theories on what art means. Jay is the one who does not believe that art should not be any sort of commercial commodity. Rob has built his life on selling paintings and his biggest struggle in the moment is creating six paintings that he has already been paid to paint. While Rob works to fulfill his obligations, Jay has always done things on his own terms, leaving art behind during a final art performance, to travel the world and do whatever he needs to do to survive. In the scheme of things, Jay is much more revered for disappearing than Rob is for having years of consistent art production. This difference in philosophies and work is what keeps the wedge drawn between the two men, and makes sure the tension is high enough to where where they will never get to the same place that they were when they were young.

Kunzru raises the question. “Is art a commodity, and if so what is it worth in a society that is struggling just to survive?” By setting Blue Ruin during Covid lockdown, where none of the characters know if society is going to collapse, and they are certain that they are witnessing the end of America, is there even an importance in creating new paintings? Kunzru has created a space where Jay in his anti-commercial art makes more sense than Rob working every day trying to get paintings finished. The only other book I have read by Hari Kunzru is White Tears, and I honestly expected a much weirder story, one that becomes more surreal and convoluted, but instead we get a story that is pretty straight forward, one that has more interest in conveying a question to the readers and hoping for a discussion than turning into a art project on its own. Due to the direct manner of the story, Kunzru is making me think more about the questions that are asked and feelings that are conveyed, because this is more important than letting the style become a distraction. 

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

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Review: Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Posted on May 1, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

The funny, sharp, and surprising story of the shooting of a Brooklyn drug dealer and the people who witnessed it—from James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird

In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known in the neighborhood as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Causeway Housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range.

The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride’s novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird. In McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local NYPD cops assigned to investigate what happened, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.

As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters—caught in the tumultuous swirl of New York in the late 1960s—overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth finally emerges, McBride shows us that not all secrets can be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in compassion and hope.

Review:

Deacon King Kong is a novel set in Brooklyn, 1969. The Causeway Housing project is changing due to the introduction of heroin, and the biggest drug dealer in the projects, Deems Clemens is shot by one of the deacons of Five Ends Baptist Church, Cuffy Lambkin, also known as Sport Coat. Sport Coat is an old drunk who immediately forgets that he shot Deems, blowing off his ear. When people are coming after him for vengeance and justice, Sport Coat haphazardly navigates through the danger. Also with Deems shooting, rival drug factions see this as an opportunity to muscle into Deems territory. This one strange event opens up a huge plot to take over control of the heroin trade in the project. Deacon King Kong is part crime thriller, part comedy of errors, part social commentary, and completely a redemption story. 

All of the characters in Deacon King Kong are well constructed, but none of them are as entertaining and create as much empathy as Sport Coat. He is 71, lost his wife after she walked into the harbor, and has drank himself blind since. His favorite is King Kong, a homemade hooch that he drinks from basement to basement in the project houses. He has a few odd jobs that do not get in the way of his drinking, spends a great deal of time talking to his dead wife, and by the time he shoots Deems, he is so lost in booze and his grief that he does not understand why Deems would be mad because he was always so good to Deems. His blindness to the situation, and the way that he walks through the scenes oblivious to everything in the world besides where he is going to get his next bottle, makes me think of the phrase, “God takes care of babies, fools, and drunks.” God is taking care of Sport Coat throughout this novel, protecting him while he lives his life, walking through a tornado not seeing all of the problems swirling around him. 

Everything that James McBride writes wins awards and for good reason. If you are not interested in the stories that McBride tells, come for the writing. The way that he structures scenes and stories, the way that we understand the history of all of these characters and the neighborhood, makes me as the reader feel like I am sitting with McBride in the basement of a building on wooden crates, passing a bottle of booze back and forth, while McBride tells me the stories of the neighborhood, about what happened after the deacon of the church shot the local drug dealer. There are some lines in this novel that made me laugh out loud, but there are also parts, particularly about race relations, that really make me pause and think. There is poignant modern political and social commentary mixed in with a story set in the late sixties, and we can see that McBride is using this story not only as a funny and entertaining neighborhood crime story but as a vehicle to remind us that nothing much has changed in sixty years.

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Review: The Art of Running: Learning to Run Like a Greek by Andrea Marcolongo

Posted on April 27, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

The inspiring story of how one of Europe’s most original and compelling classicist learned to run—and live—like a Greek 

Much has changed since the day in 490 BCE when the indefatigable Athenian herald Philippides made his legendary run and delivered to the people of Athens news of their city’s victory over the Persians. One thing, however, hasn’t it is still twenty-five punishing miles over rough terrain from Marathon to the Acropolis.

Each year, all over the world, thousands of professional athletes and millions of amateur enthusiasts replicate Philippides’s enterprise, many running with such gusto that one could be forgiven for thinking the fate of Athens once more hung in the balance. 

Why do we run? To what end, all the effort and pain? Wherefore this love of muscle, speed, sweat, of testing one’s limits? The Greeks were the first to ask these questions and to wonder why we choose to measure ourselves in this way against others; they were the first to formulate the adage, mens sana in corpore sano; they were first to interrupt war, work, politics, the daily routine to enjoy public celebrations of athletic prowess. The Greeks invented sport! Sport as something separate from labor or war; activity as an end unto itself and a form of entertainment for others. They were also the first to understand how regular physical activity, victory, and loss connected to our emotional and mental well-being.

As the pandemic entered its second year, despondent, isolated, and apprehensive about the future, the internationally renowned classics scholar and best-selling author Andrea Marcolongo discovered running. After years spent with her head and heart in the books, trying to think like a Greek, she set out to learn how to run like a Greek. In doing so, she not only deepened her understanding of the ancient civilization she has spent decades studying, but also discovered a great deal about herself. 

In this spirited, generous, and erudite book, Andrea Marcolongo shares not only her erudition but her own journey to understanding that a healthy body is indeed, and in more ways than one might guess, a healthy mind.

Review:

David Lynch has talked about daydreaming being important to his creativity, and it is important to find a safe space to let your mind wander. In The Art of Running: Learning To Run Like a Greek, Andrea Marcolongo uses running as her safe space to sort out what running means to her and how she is continuing a tradition of running like Pheidippides and his twenty five mile run between Marathon and Athens that famously ended with him collapsing after announcing victory. This act by Pheidippides is the romanticized beginnings of the modern marathon, even though the Greeks themselves had no interest in running this far if it was not for a military reasons. With Marcolongo being a person who fell in love with ancient Greece as an teenager and running as an adult, it only makes sense that these two loves would eventually meet. The Art of Running is Marcologo’s journey in training for a marathon between Marathon and Athens, and she knows the best way for her to stick to training is to write a book along the way.

The book does have many insights into how the Greeks felt about running and althletics in general, but a majority of this book is Marcolongo’s insights into what running brings to her and what she feels like as a woman in her thirties training for her first (and possibly only) marathon. Some of the ideas that she brings up are interesting and honestly motivating for someone like myself who does run but struggles with consistency and with a pace that is growing slower and slower.

One of her observations that really strikes me:

“I don’t know if it’s the clearest sign of growing old, but at a certain point, without warning, the reserves of talent that we once greedily drew on begin to run low. It’s terrifying to find them gone, in short supply, insufficient. Replenishing them through training and dedication, physical and intellectual, is hard but necessary work.” p. 120

Not only is this something that puts a simple concept into words that make sense, it is something that can motivate those who have felt like they have lost a step, not only with running but with every talent. The truth about running is most runners, the largest population who will read a book about running, are in my age group (late forties) and older. When you participate in any sort of race, whether it be a 5k or a marathon, the most competitive categories are the 50s and 60s age groups. These are people who have switched from the talent of youth to discipline and training. 

There are not many books on running, mostly because the idea of a book about running is pretty boring. Runners say “My sport is your sport’s punishment”, so many probably feel like a book about running would be punishment as well. Fortunately Andrea Marcolongo writes a book that is more about what athletics means, to her, to the Greeks, and to life in general, than about the day to day sludge of individual runs. Anyone who is a runner should pick this up because it fits well in a small library of motivating running books. Anyone who does not run should pick this up because it is not really about running as much as it is about how finding that safe space to let your mind wander, to connect concepts to one another, and to continue to work your talents even when it is no longer as easy to get results.

I received this book from Europa Editions in exchange for an honest review. 

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Essay 002: Kurt Cobain

Posted on April 8, 2024 by ghostvillehero

This past week was the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain. Many people who were closer to him and/or more insightful than me have written many articles about him. This is only my experience this week.

I pulled out my Nirvana albums and listened to Nevermind and In Utero specifically. While listening to them, I spent a great deal of this time thinking about the past and what the future could have been like if Kurt Cobain was still alive.

  1. The past:

I was fourteen when Nevermind was released. The first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the radio, I knew this song was something different, something that really spoke to me as a fourteen year old. I scraped a few dollars together and went to the mall to buy the cassette single of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with “Even in His Youth” as the B side. I liked the songs and wore out the tape. At the time, our local library had cassettes to rent, and when they got their copy of Nevermind (with a sticker conveniently censoring the cover), I snagged it up and listened to it nonstop for the entire two week rental period. I loved all of the songs, and even though the radio was playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” over and over, I liked the B side of the cassette much better than the hits on the front side. Eventually Nirvana became a juggernaut. While all of my classmates were loving Kurt Cobain, I was listening to other bands from Seattle area, particularly Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, and anything put out on the Sub Pop label. I revisited Nirvana many times throughout this period, but I really connected to some of the other bands. Not to say that I did not think that Nirvana was masterful, I just liked other bands more at the time. 

This all seems like lightning in a bottle. Nirvana was not supposed to really capture the country and the music industry by storm. Every kid my age should not have had a copy of Nevermind or a smiley face Nirvana t-shirt. When I relisten to their albums now that I am 46 instead of 14, I can feel that by the time In Utero was released, Kurt Cobain was feeling the same way. The songs on In Utero feel strained in a way, like Kurt was having a hard time pulling these songs out of the depth of his being, the tug-of-war bringing him to the brink of death. He is telling us he is ready to be done with the station that life has given him.

These observations are easier now because of the events that took place after In Utero, his struggles with stomach issues and addiction, his disenchantment with the fame and spotlight he had been thrust into, all of the success that became afflictions on his career. In Utero was released in September 1994. Seven months later, he was dead. In Nirvana’s three studio albums, one album of B-sides, and an acoustic MTV concert, we are given a body of work that feels complete, like Kurt had said what he wanted to say and knew it was time to stop. 

  1. The Present

One of the most honest things that I can say is that Nirvana is that they are a great band for young people. I was fortunate enough to be a teenager when Nirvana was releasing new music, so I can tie some of their songs into my feelings about the world, my dissatisfaction with life. Nirvana’s songs were a companion along my dark teenage journey. There are lyrics that I can quote today that sums up exactly how I felt at the time when they were released. 

“I’m so lonely, that’s okay, I shaved my head. And I’m not sad

And Just maybe I’m to blame for all I’ve hurt, but I’m sure

I’m so excited, I can’t want to meet you there, and I don’t care

I’m so horny, that’s okay, my will is good”

~Lithium

Of course from fourteen to seventeen the other thing that really interested in besides music was girls. There are Nirvana lyrics I sang as loud as I could in my bedroom, pretending to sing to a girl I had a high school crush on. The two songs that really spoke to me were “Lithium” and “Breed”, even though in retrospect, they both seem to be pretty crass songs to sing to woo girls. At that age, I was attracted to the songs because I felt the emotion that came with them, like I honestly believed that Kurt was in the same place I was, in his bedroom, pouring his heart out to his unrequited love, but with each repetition, the song lost a little hope but grew a little bit of bitterness. 

I relisten to these albums now and see them as a part of the time capsule to my youth, songs that came out in my formative years, songs that felt as if they were written for me in that moment. These are songs for my 17 year old self, not for my 46 year old self. I am not diminishing the greatness of Nirvana. Nevermind as a whole is pure magic. I am saying that when I have listen to Nirvana now, I feel as if I am no longer the target audience. While I have grown older, Nirvana has stayed the same. Kurt Cobain died thirty years ago, and their growth as a band has stunted, whereas my growth has mercilessly continued. 

The song that really strikes me in a new way now, listening to them thirty years later, is “Pennyroyal Tea”. There are some wild theories on the internet about the meaning, but I see it at the shallowest of them. Cobain is singing about his stomach issues, which caused him to turn to heroin as a pain relief. He sounds like an old man, filled with regrets, trying to fix the most base of his pain with some herbal tea. This makes sense to me.  

  1. The Alternate Universe

While I listened to In Utero, I started to think about what Nirvana would have been like if Kurt Cobain had not died. My theory is that they would release one or two more albums as Nirvana, Dave Grohl would have started Foo Fighters, and Kurt Cobain would have released a short album of new songs every ten years or so. The songs would still be about decaying self-worth and dissatisfaction, but with the topic turning to growing old. Nirvana might get back together to record a few more songs, but they would not tour, simply because Cobain would never want to be in a band that tours their Greatest Hits. The legacy of Nirvana is much better the way it is, and Kurt Cobain will forever be one of the strongest voices of the teenage struggle. 

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Review: There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

Posted on April 2, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A poignant, personal reflection on basketball, talent and allegiance, and of course, LeBron James—from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America

While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture’s most insightful critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the 1990s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jumpshot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.”

There’s Always This Year is a classic Abdurraqib triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. It’s about basketball in the way They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is about music and A Little Devil in America is about history—no matter the subject, Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.

Review:

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, cultural observer, music lover, and die hard Ohioan. He grew up in Columbus when Lebron James was playing high school basketball in 100 miles away in Akron. He drove this distance to watch James play. He also drove 143 miles from Columbus and Cleveland to watch the Cleveland Cavaliers, with and without James. With a few exceptions, all of There’s Always This Year takes place within these miles, and Hanif Abdurraqib has not only written an ode to Ohio and Cleveland sports but a treatise on being an underdog and living a life of loss, frustration, and being underestimated. 

Cleveland is his sports town, but Columbus is his hometown. Hanif grows up in Columbus, one year older than Lebron, going to parks and basketball courts throughout the city, not only to play but watch those players who are local legends, and even better than those playing in the NBA, destinies unfulfilled. His personal life is also on this same trajectory. He does not graduate high school and live a life that leads to fame and recognition, but in the end, it is the mentality of being the underdog, the grit from growing up rooting for sports teams that are not meant to do much of anything, that keeps his focus and striving for better.

Lebron James is the catalyst to the timeline of the book. He is the example of the King who has come to Cleveland to make the team better, to win championships. The hopes of him being their basketball savior is dashed when he announces in 2010 in an ESPN special called “The Decision”, his intentions to leave Ohio and win championships in Miami, which he does. Abdurraqib dedicates one of the four quarters of this book to Lebron leaving Cleveland, how the city reacted, and how much he enjoys the fallout for the Cavs the next year. The return of Lebron to Cleveland in 2014 is met with the landscape of a city and of a country that has changed. Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson by police in August. Tamir Rice was killed by police in November. These events and the protests and unrest that results, is something that deeply affects Abduraqib, makes him contemplate the way basketball can be an escape, but this is just a way that we hustle ourselves into living with the unthinkable happening around us.

There’s Always This Year is a deep meditation that made me think long after finishing a chapter or even a paragraph. I have walked around the house late at night thinking about how we hustle ourselves. What it means to be a person who lives and dies for a sports franchise that does not live up the hopes of the beginning of the year. How we always love the underdog until the underdog starts to win. How we are put into a system where everyone is essentially an underdog, and unless we come together in the face of adversity, like in the Nike promo that Lebron James did when returning to Cleveland, then we do not stand a chance. This is a book that I will return to at a future date. It is one of those books that impact you in a way that you cannot forget. I am positive that each time I read it, I will find new ways to look at the meanings and feelings behind every single word of There’s Always This Year.

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Essay 001: Numbers

Posted on March 28, 2024 by ghostvillehero
Credit: PeterHermesFurian/Getty Images

I enjoy numbers in a casual way. My Garmin watch tells me that I average 9,761 steps every day and that my resting heart rate is 55 (I do know this heart rate is not completely accurate because it is using my watch and not an actual heart rate monitor.) I wear a CPAP at night, and first thing in the morning, I check the app, go through the numbers of how long I wore it (usually just over four hours), what my average CPAP pressure was (8.6), and how many times I took it off through the night (2). If a publishing company has a product with a number on the spine, like the numbers on physical Criterion Collection DVDs, the books from Grindhouse Press, or pretty much every record label, I want to collect them all. Of course I also like to look at the amount of views this site gets every day and every month. I sometimes check the various numbers many times throughout the day. All of these numbers are fun to look at, but the weird thing about my constant monitoring is that I do not think about improvement, that there is not elation for when I am doing better, nor is there sadness, shame, or guilt that comes from not doing as good as I should be doing.

When I go through the numbers, I do two things. The first is that I look at the numbers that are good and ignore those that are not so good. My V02 Max on my Garmin watch says my fitness is in the bottom 15% of my age group. I am always chasing my CPAP to make sure that I stay slightly above the 70% compliance that is needed for the insurance company not to take the machine back. I look at the sheer amount of Criterion Collection releases and know I’ll never be close to getting them all. My social media numbers are good, but I do not do much to grow the numbers. I also do not do much to improve on any of these things. 

Most of my casualness is due to a general lack of focus on details. I do not spend a great deal of my life looking at the details. Like a smooth rock that water has been rushing over for decades, my outlook has become one where things will get done and they will look good enough, but if you look closely at the details, you can see severe flaws. For example, I clean the kitchen. From the doorway, the countertops shine and the smell is one that you associate with a clean kitchen, but if you lift the toaster or look in the corners, you can see crumbs and dirt that I did not clean. My casualness toward details can be a blessing but mostly it is a hindrance. The blessing is that I do not obsess about social media, about follower and like counts. I only produce and publish things I like, so I cannot be disappointed when others are not interested. My downfall is that I get too wrapped up in the idea that nobody is really paying attention, so I miss deadlines, take extra days off, and I do too many things with a shortcut. 

The thought that I have been dwelling on, the idea about this that has been stuck in my head and has made me write this, is that in most cases, attention to detail only takes another minute or two. There is not a great amount of time loss because I take a few extra steps to make sure that things are finished properly. This is easier to think about than it is to put into action. Sure I can say to myself, “I’m going to always take an extra minute to look at the details in everything I do,” but sounds overwhelming, and it is easy to quit when I am overwhelmed. Instead I can pick one thing in my life that I will purposefully slow down to make sure that I accomplish it with detail in hopes that this habit will change into a bigger habit. The goal is to eventually see those numbers, and the ones that I so casually ignore will start to get better. 

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Review: In the Valley of the Headless Men by L.P. Hernandez

Posted on March 27, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Nahanni National Park is one of last truly wild places on earth. Accessible only by plane, and only when the weather cooperates, it’s the perfect place for estranged brothers Joseph and Oscar to have an adventure following the death of their mother. Gillian, Joseph’s first love, invites herself along in the spirit of friendship. The park is much more than beautiful. It’s mysterious, with legends of giants and hidden, prehistoric animals. And among its few visitors, an outsized number of violent deaths inspire its second, more seductive name. While dreaming of the future, the group finds themselves confronted by the past. Far from home and far from help. In the Valley of the Headless Men.” LP Hernandez is one of the most entertaining and much needed voices in horror fiction’s new vanguard.” – Brian Keene

Review:

Nahanni National Park is one of the last unexplored places in Canada, due to it’s remote location in the Northwest Territories. There is a large oral tradition about that area, stories that involve giants, mammoths, vanishing native tribes, and men found decapitated in the valley. This backdrop lends to the story of In the Valley of the Headless Men by L.P. Hernandez. The story starts with Joseph and his half-brother Oscar cleaning out their mother’s house after their mother’s death. Oscar finds a cache of letters from Joseph’s father. The last of the letters tells Joseph to go to Nahanni National Park because this is where he is. Joseph, Oscar, and Joseph’s ex-love Gillian, set out for this strange valley to find Joseph’s father. 

This is not the real reason for the journey. The real reason is that all three of the characters are pulled to this remote valley is because they have something in their lives that they have lost. Joseph is dealing with the loss of his mother and his estranged father. Oscar also has lost his mother but is a recovering addict that starts to show new signs of withdrawal as soon as they enter the forest. Gillian is still thinking about the baby that she and Joseph lost while they were together. In the valley, these lost things become powerful influences, and all three lose their own sense of reality. The cyclical concepts of finding what has been lost while getting lost further and further into the mystery and horror of a place makes all three of them question reality, themselves, and whether they are going to get out alive. 


When I first started reading In the Valley of the Headless Men, I thought that this is a pretty simple setup, a grown man finds out his dad might be waiting for him in a remote forest. The truth is Joseph, Oscar, and Gillian are all looking for something deeper, something to console the grief, and it really takes them going to Nahanni National Park and feeling like they are going to die there to make them understand the truth. I did not expect the impact that L.P. Hernandez has in writing this story, the story of exploration, not only of a strange land but of the inner turmoil that has caused all three of them to take the directions in their lives that they have taken. Weird cosmic horror, nature horror, and psychological horror collide in a story that has much more depth than I initially expected. This story and this region will stick with me for longer than I ever anticipated.

Other reviews of books by L.P. Hernandez:

Stargazers

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Review: Happiness Falls by Angie Kim

Posted on March 20, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Bookshop, Amazon

Synopsis:

When a father goes missing, his family’s desperate search leads them to question everything they know about him and one another–both a riveting page-turner and a deeply moving portrait of a family in crisis from the award-winning author of Miracle Creek.

“We didn’t call the police right away.” Those are the first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean-American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing.

Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything–which is why she isn’t initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don’t return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia’s brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.

What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the whereabouts of a father and an emotionally rich portrait of a family whose most personal secrets just may be at the heart of his disappearance. Full of shocking twists and fascinating questions of love, language, race, and human connection, Happiness Falls is a mystery, a family drama, and a novel of profound philosophical inquiry. With all the powerful storytelling she brought to her award-winning debut Miracle Creek, Angie Kim turns the missing person story into something wholly original, creating an indelible tale of a family who must go to remarkable lengths to truly understand one another.

Review:

Happiness Falls is the highly anticipated follow-up to Angie Kim’s debut novel Miracle Creek. In Happiness Falls, we are introduced to a family, the Parksons, father Adam, mother Hannah, the twenty year old twins, Mia and John, and the youngest, Eugene, who has nonverbal autism and Angelman syndrome, a genetic disorder that presents as constant smiling, laughing, and signs of happiness, regardless of the situation. When Adam disappears on a walk by the river with Eugene, the investigation takes several turns, revels secret lives, and events bring the family closer together.

There are a some elements that Angie Kim chooses when telling this story that makes this novel much better than it could have been. First, she has Mia be the narrator. She is twenty year old, home from college due to Covid shutdown after secretly changing her major and breaking up with her secret boyfriend. Mia is snarky, unreliable, and too smart for her own good. Seeing the story through her eyes also brings an element of slanted reality, one where she finds intelligence to be a tool for power and most of those around her aren’t nearly as powerful as her. Even though Mia could be seen as a bit of a brat, she is an unpredictable narrator, and this makes the story feel a little more unnerving and dangerous.

Second, Angie Kim uses science and philosophy as the glue to hold the mystery of Adam Parkson’s disappearance together. With Mia being the narrator, she also has someone who is interested in the things that her father was working on when he disappeared, who understood that this research could also be a piece of the puzzle. I love the incorporation of hard science in a narrative that does not typically lend to this type of content. It reminds me a little of when the sitcom The Big Bang Theory came out in 2007. I encouraged my friends to watch it simply because it was different than most of the typical dumb dad sitcoms and reality shows that were popular at the time. The Big Bang Theory has some light science in the middle of a comedy, which made it a little smarter than what we were watching at that time (the two most popular shows when TBBT came out were American Idol and Dancing With the Stars). Happiness Falls reminds me of this, but it leans a little heavier on the science than TBBT. The mystery unfolding is weaved through all of the scientific work that is being done by Adam Parkson, and this is a clever aspect to the storytelling. 

The third thing that really makes Happiness Falls stellar is the true reason for the novel. Eugene is the only witness to his father’s disappearance, and he is nonverbal. In society, we see people who are nonverbal as people with lesser intelligence. Angie Kim uses her experience as someone who came to the United States from Korea and learned English in a way that she could understand it better than she could speak it. This causes everyone around her to talk to her as if she was less intelligence, simply because she could not speak her thoughts. When she learned that this happens in many nonverbal people, she decided that this is the basis for Eugene, and Happiness Falls as a story is a true advocate to help eliminate the disparity between how we treat verbal and nonverbal people.


I listened to the audiobook of Happiness Falls, and more times than not when I am listening to an audiobook, I’m just listening to the story and am not really engaged. Happiness Falls is one of those rare occasions where the structure, narration, and story pulled me in completely, and I listened to it for hours at a time. There are a few weird threads in Mia’s narrative that do not get resolved, but as a whole, this is one of the best novels that I have listened to. I am still thinking about it’s impact every day.

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Review: Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk

Posted on March 15, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. A breakout, genre-blurring novel from one of the most exciting new voices of Latin America’s feminist Gothic.

It is the twilight of Europe’s bloody bacchanals, of murder and feasting without end. In the nineteenth century, a vampire arrives from Europe to the coast of Buenos Aires and, for the second time in her life, watches as villages transform into a cosmopolitan city, one that will soon be ravaged by yellow fever. She must adapt, intermingle with humans, and be discreet.

In present-day Buenos Aires, a woman finds herself at an impasse as she grapples with her mother’s terminal illness and her own relationship with motherhood. When she first encounters the vampire in a cemetery, something ignites within the two women—and they cross a threshold from which there’s no turning back.

With echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and written in the vein of feminist Gothic writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado, Thirst plays with the boundaries of genre while exploring the limits of female agency, the consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures.

Review:

Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk is a Latin American vampire novel split into two parts. The first part is set in the 1800s and starts with a female vampire escaping her hunters in Europe by hiding on a ship. The ship lands in Buenos Aires, and she makes a good life for herself. The second part is modern day, where a woman is given a key to a crypt by her dying mother and meets the vampire. Both sections are good, but the first section is brutal, fast paced, and engaging. The second part is more about mortality, loneliness and longing, and the agony of watching the slow process of a mother dying. (It is never stated but the deterioration of her mother makes is feel like she has Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative disease where the patient slowly loses function of both skeletal and smooth muscles, until the respiratory muscles finally fail). Both parts are good, but so different, with different tones and feelings.

The writing is sharp and beautiful. This is no doubt a novel from an Argentinian writer. The style of most Latin American writers are long paragraphs that tell the story more than show the story. There might be a year or ten years on one page, everything summarized. This is also why many Latin American novels are fairly short. The style of these novels means that you have to be a very good writer, someone who does not spare a single word, and you have to find a good translator. This translation by Heather Cleary is very readable and engaging. Yuszczuk’s talent is writing a story that is compelling in a style that should not work as well as it does.

When I was reading the first part of the book, I realized that I do not really read many vampire novels. I do not find them to be top of my list of horror subjects. I do have a list of top five vampire books and movies, but I do not consider myself an expert in the subgenre. I do know that I always have this feeling that vampires should be sexy, that biting someone on the neck is the way that they feed but also foreplay toward something more sensual. Many vampire stories that I have read hint at this or ignore it completely, but this sensuality is front and center in Thirst. The vampire story is a subgenre that has been written so many times that there are not many new things that can be done with this story, but Thirst does utilize the parts of the vampire mythos that really makes the story entertaining. 

I received this as an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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