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It’s been a long time since I read an Agatha Christie book. I read a few Poirot stories as a teenager and liked them, though I found them distinctly inferior to Sherlock Holmes. But this is, as the title suggests, a Halloween story, and so of course I had to read it.

It starts out at an English country house, where Mrs. Rowena Drake is throwing a traditional children’s Halloween party, very much in line with those described in this handbook. Among the adult attendees is Ariadne Oliver, a mystery writer and friend of the great Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot.

All is going well until one of the young attendees is found drowned in the tub used for apple-bobbing. Making this even more suspicious is the fact that earlier in the evening, the young girl had proclaimed to everyone at the party that she had once witnessed a murder, though she refused to disclose details.

Ms. Oliver at once contacts her mustachioed friend, and he sets to work on interviewing the attendees at the party. As he does so, more mysterious intrigues begin to emerge about life in the seemingly quiet little village—he dredges up past murders that might fit the bill for what the poor child might have witnessed, as well as a complicated scheme of apparent forgery committed by a now-missing au pair girl. (Yeah, I had to look it up, too.)

The middle of the story dragged a bit, as it seemed like it was just Poirot going around talking to one person after another who laments that crime is worse nowadays because the justice system is always making excuses for criminals, looking for reasons to let them go only to have them kill again. “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, etc.” There really is nothing new under the sun. If there was one thing that surprised me about this book is how very modern it felt. I think of Agatha Christie as writing a more genteel sort of mystery, but parts of this were surprisingly direct. Strange that so dark a book could be dedicated to P.G. Wodehouse!

In the later stages, our elderly detective ties the threads together and works out who must be responsible for the crimes. Simultaneously, however, another murder is about to take place, under sinister, vaguely ritualistic circumstances, and it’s a frantic rush to stop the lethal hand in time.

Is it a great book? No, I don’t think so. Parts of it were a drag. On the other hand, other parts were quite interesting and, as I said, felt surprisingly relevant. They say the most enduring books are about human nature, which makes them timeless. That certainly would be the case here. If you want a good mystery to read at Halloween, about the darkness which lurks under the benign veneer of English country estates… well, read Hound of the Baskervilles. But if you want a second one to read after that, Hallowe’en Party is a good choice.

Now, I said above that the story is timeless, and so it could be adapted, like Shakespeare, into a different setting. And no doubt this is what the great Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh had in mind when he decided to adapt it to the setting of post-World War II Venice in his 2023 film, A Haunting in Venice, starring himself as Hercule Poirot and Tina Fey as Ariadne Oliver.

I like Kenneth Branagh. He’s a great actor (who can forget his St. Crispin’s Day speech?) and he directed one of the few Marvel superhero movies that I have both seen and enjoyed. I also like Tina Fey. (“How could I not? I’m entranced by those mud-colored eyes… that splay-footed walk… and that whole situation right there…”) Seriously, though, I like both leads and of course the whole thing is set at Halloween. What could go wrong?

Well… a lot.

First of all, it’s not really accurate to say A Haunting in Venice is “based on” or “adapted from” Hallowe’en Party. You can’t even really say that Hallowe’en Party “inspired” A Haunting in Venice, even though the cover of my edition of the book does say that. I think it might be correct to say that A Haunting in Venice was “suggested by an incident in” Hallowe’en Party. Even better might be to do as W.S. Gilbert did with his play The Princess, which he called a “a respectful operatic perversion” of a poem by Tennyson. “A cinematic perversion of Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party” pretty much fits—no need, I think, for the “respectful.”

In the Branagh Version (not to be confused with The Browning Version) Poirot has retired to Venice, disillusioned with life, humanity, and God. Until one day Ariadne Oliver shows up and asks him to join her at a children’s Halloween Party being held at the palazzo of a wealthy diva whose daughter recently drowned by falling into the canal. But, to quote Richard and Linda Thompson, “did she jump or was she pushed“?

So, to cheer herself up, the grieving mother has decided to hold a party that features a shadow puppet show about the vengeful spirits of dead children as entertainment, followed by a séance to communicate with her dead daughter’s spirit. Make it make sense, I dare you.

Poirot quickly finds proof that the medium conducting the séance is a fraud. Even so, it does appear there is something ghostly and mysterious happening in the creepy palazzo. For example, the medium has Poirot put on her cloak and mask, after which he goes to bob for apples and has his head shoved under the water, but survives. The medium appears to be a slight, thin woman. How would her cloak even fit the portly Poirot? She may be a medium, but he’s definitely a large! Ba-dum tss. I’ll be here all week, folks.

But the medium won’t, because she gets mysteriously murdered while Poirot was being nearly drowned. This prompts Poirot to lock everyone in the palazzo, since they are all now suspects. Except not Ariadne, because she’s Poirot’s friend, so he enlists her help to solve the case. And they’ve got a tall task before them, because you see, it turns out that they are operating in a universe where nothing makes sense and normal rules of logic do not apply. It is the detective fiction equivalent of Calvinball.

In the end, Poirot figures out what really happened, which is more than I can say for myself. All I know is it’s a sordid tale of murder, revenge, betrayal, and ends up showing that you can never really trust anyone. Naturally, this helps Poirot rediscover his passion for work and apparently restores his faith in humanity???

And the stupidest part is, I sort of enjoyed it. The story may make absolutely no sense whatsoever, but the acting is good, and the aesthetics are absolutely top-notch. The vibe of being in a haunted palazzo during a storm on Halloween night is carried off beautifully, so much so that it takes a while before you notice how inane everything is. It’s like eating all your Halloween candy in one night: in the moment, it’s delicious, and it’s only afterward that you feel sick with the consequences. 

A Haunting in Venice is the epitome of style over substance. It looks amazing, and maybe if it were just a generic thriller, that would be enough to go on. But the whole appeal of detective fiction is the pleasure of seeing how all the pieces fit together in a logical chain. You can have a weird, supernatural story where tons of things are left unexplained. Some of my favorite stories are like that. Or you can have the denouement where the genius investigator explains how all the seemingly-unrelated events are actually part of a coherent whole. But ya can’t have both! 

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Book cover for 'The Sorcery of White Rats' by Adam Bertocci, featuring a silhouette of a girl against a vibrant, magical background with decorative elements.

How many books have you read involving prophecies about magical young people destined to save the world? I know, I know; it sounds like the tiredest trope in the world. Seemed like every work of YA fiction in the early 2000s had a premise like that.

Yet Mr. Bertocci, whom long-time readers will know from his slice-of-millennial-life short stories, takes this well-worn premise and makes it his own. I admit, when I read the synopsis of his debut novel, I was concerned he might have abandoned his own unique voice in favor of something clichéd but marketable.

I needn’t have worried. After only a few pages, it was clear that this would be no ordinary magical adventure. Bertocci has not forgotten the things that make his short stories powerful, but has instead fleshed out his typical themes into fuller form.

The story follows two young women, Bristol and Monroe, who are in the awkward mid-twenty years and still trying to figure life out. That is hard enough, but when Monroe awakens one day speaking in a strange voice and relating a terrifying vision of the end of the world, well, it really harshes their mellow, as people used to say.

Bristol takes Monroe to see her former friend, Xochitl, a neuroscientist who answers with scientific rationalism which is probably correct and deeply unsatisfying. Still not knowing whether to expect the end of the world or not, they are unsure what to do with themselves. Actually, they already were. But, you know, now it’s more so.

Bertocci has a way of writing that’s unlike anything else I’ve ever read. His conversations don’t read like scripts; but evolve organically, hopping from topic to topic, and making unexpected callbacks to earlier subjects. Like real people talking, in other words.

Interwoven throughout the action of the story are interviews with the three leads, commenting on what they did in the moment and how it all culminates in the surreal rooftop finale. 

And what exactly was the rooftop finale? Well, I’ll give you a hint: shades of Majora’s Mask. Earlier this year, I reviewed a book about a man plotting to destroy the sun to escape the dreariness of his life. The Sorcery of White Rats is an inversion of that, in more ways than one. Just as the ancients regarded the sun and moon as somehow opposite, so Awful, Ohio by Jeff Neal and this novel are similarly opposed. And yet, like the yin and yang, each contains a drop of the other, and their apparent opposition is in fact a system in perfect, harmonious cosmic balance.

More than that, I cannot say. Let’s just say that Bertocci does a great job of making it all feel real. I’ll leave it to you to discover how  far his commitment to the bit goes.

Now if you’re like me, you’re probably asking: “is this a book I can read during the Halloween season?” After all, October 31st is right around the corner, and one naturally hesitates to read, watch, or do anything that distracts from the Halloween spirit for even a single minute of this most excellent season. (At least I do. Everyone else does that too, right?)

Well, I’m glad to say that the author of that great Halloween short story Samantha, 25, on October 31 did not disappoint.  It is not a Halloween story per se, but it is certainly weird and magical enough to fit the mood of the season. So, hesitate no longer! Get thee to your preferred purveyor of fine literature and nab thyself a copy of The Sorcery of White Rats.

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Longtime readers might remember that a few years ago I did a retrospective series on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and various adaptations of it. Had I known about this book at that time, I would have included it, because it’s another fine riff on the classic tale.

Our protagonist is Josie Penninger, a young woman cursed with the ability to see spirits. She lives in present-day Sleepy Hollow and makes a living working in her mother’s coffee shop and communicating with ghosts in her spare time.

But one day, a stranger comes to town, taking an interest in the prize of her mother’s collection of Sleepy Hollow paraphernalia: a copy of A History of New England Witchcraft said to have belonged to Ichabod Crane himself. The controversy over whether or not Ichabod Crane existed does nothing to diminish the value of the book.

From there, things get wild. Josie finds herself caught up in an inter-dimensional war in the spirit realm, involving the ghostly guardians of the town, a wise-cracking ghost hunter, and of course, the headless Hessian himself.

The plot is rather complicated, as it involves time-travel and all the mind-bending complexities that go along with such a story. But the dialogue is fast-paced and fun, and the action is like something out of an ’80s movie. The creative decision that ghosts can be shot makes for some easy-to-follow battles.

Nothing better summarizes this book than this simple fact: there is a scene where the Headless Horseman wields an M134 minigun. If this doesn’t tell you what kind of story this is, I don’t know what will. And, most delightfully, this scene is illustrated, so we get the full visual of an 18th century mercenary decked out in ammo belts.

That’s what this book is: classic folklore wedded to the sensibility of a Schwarzenegger movie. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, check it out.

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Book cover of 'Betrayal of Trust' by Geoffrey M. Cooper, featuring a woman in a lab coat with long hair, holding a bloodied syringe, set in a medical environment.

What’s better than a Brad and Karen thriller from Geoffrey Cooper? A Brad and Karen and Martin Dawson thriller! If you read earlier books in the series, you know him as the soldier-turned-medical-researcher who is a good friend of Brad, and who has helped the duo out in the past. I always enjoy his scenes, and so I was delighted when he teamed up with them again, assuming he would once again heroically help them all work as a team to catch the killer, as he’s done before.

Well, the way it all works out in this book is a little different. But I can’t say how. Sorry, you’ll just have to read it. What I can say is that the book is about a mysterious killer who keeps striking important medical researchers. Brad and Karen’s theories regarding her motives are forced to evolve with each crime, until eventually the pattern emerges in an unsettling way.

But what I think I liked best of all about this book is what the title refers to. The betrayal in question could be multiple things, including one possibility that isn’t even connected directly to the killer. I like ambiguity and mystery, leaving things up to interpretation. For one thing, it’s what helps keep critics like me in business. 🙂

Jokes aside, this is another good book from Geoffrey Cooper. I have only one slight, nit-picky complaint. As always in Brad and Karen books, part of the fun is the good food the protagonists enjoy as they try to crack the case. But I felt like in this one, it was always a lobster dinner.

Now, lobster is no doubt a northeast staple, so I can’t claim its not authentic. But I want variety! One lobster dinner is okay, but can’t we have some other delicacies, too?

I kid, I kid. This isn’t really a complaint, or if it is, it’s only the kind of complaint a long-time fan of a series can make. Like the Star Wars fans who wish there was a movie all about Porkins or somebody; it’s the kind of complaint that comes from a place of love, and I always love reading a Brad and Karen adventure.

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You all know the story of Mothman. Well, maybe you don’t, but I do. Basically, in 1966 and ’67, there were numerous reports of a strange winged creature appearing in West Virginia and Southern Ohio. Towering and intimidating with its evil red eyes, the monster haunted the hills of Appalachia, terrifying people on lonely roads at night.

And then, in December 1967, as the feeling of fear built to an awful climax, the Silver Bridge collapsed, killing 46 people. And the Mothman was never seen again. (Or was he?)

John Keel was witness to many of these events. A Fortean writer in the business of chasing UFOs, he interviewed many of the citizens in and around the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia during this period. As well as many other oddballs who appeared, behaved very strangely, and then vanished.

If Keel’s account is to be believed, there was something very weird going on in West Virginia, and indeed, in the United States generally, during this period. There can be no doubt that there was “something happening” there, even if what it was “ain’t exactly clear.” (You can pretty much throw in the rest of the lyrics too; they all fit. And it’s worth noting that song was written in 1966!)

Keel was an entertaining writer, and the way he starts the book is very clever. He plays around with the way an event is described to remind the reader that things are often not what they seem. It’s the literary equivalent of Gene Wilder’s entrance as Willy Wonka, establishing right from the start that you can never be sure whether you can trust this character.

Unfortunately, while Keel could spin a good yarn, and his tales are often quite interesting, he never really does manage to establish what exactly we’re supposed to make of all the goings-on that he reports. A bunch of people saw and heard unusual things, including prophecies of various disasters, some of which happened, some of which did not, and some of which are too vague to say. I’m sorry, but if some non-human intelligence wants to impress me with its ability to forecast the future, it’s going to have to do better than “there will be unrest in the Middle East.” 

As an account of an eerie and surreal atmosphere, not to mention a history of the UFO craze in the late ’60s and early ’70s, it’s an engaging tale. As an attempt to prove any of Keel’s theories regarding preternatural phenomena, it’s kind of a failure, since the entire thing is nothing more than a compendium of what Keel either claimed to have seen himself or been told by others, with no supporting hard evidence. 

You will find my reaction put better than I could ever hope to express it in the words of Leonard Nimoy on The Simpsons:

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One thing about me is that I don’t like stories featuring violence against women. There are certain works of fiction I’ll just never be able to enjoy for this reason. For instance, the movie Strange Days. Although in many ways it sounds like something I would be interested in, I have never seen it because of certain plot elements.

I knew, just from the cover and the description, that this book was not the sort of thing I would normally read. But, Adam Bertocci is one of my favorite authors. I have enjoyed many of his literary short stories, usually featuring millennial women in a post-college malaise but otherwise unharmed. As I’ve said many times, Mr. Bertocci is the voice of our generation, and his fiction deserves to be widely-read.

And another thing about me is that I respect versatility and a willingness to experiment. So when I saw that an author noted for his wit, insight, and gently ironic sense of humor had written a horror story, I was naturally intrigued. And, not without trepidation, I picked it up and began to read.

The book tells the story of Wade, a high schooler who recently ended his relationship with Kiki Malone, shortly before she died in a car accident. The entire school and surrounding sleepy town of Red Corners is in mourning for the effervescent young girl, gone too soon.

But Wade’s relationship with her is far more complicated, and the circumstances that led to their breakup are more than just a simple school crush gone awry.

For the first three-quarters or so, the book is in many ways a standard Bertocci story. Witty and ironic, with more than a little clever one-liners. Some of the humor is more offensive than Bertocci’s usual fare, and this is because it comes from Wade’s friend Aaron, who is the epitome of the snarky, wise-cracking, too-cool-for-school loudmouth that I think every school has. But even Aaron has feelings—he just chooses to conceal them beneath a veneer of being an insensitive jackass.

And for those first three-quarters or so, I was thinking, “Oh, maybe I needn’t have worried. This isn’t so bad after all.” Like M.R. James before him, Bertocci knows that the really effective horror story has to first lull the reader into a false sense of security. James did it by making you think you were reading a normal Edwardian comedy of manners before he broke the seals and let slip the demons. Bertocci, of course, is not writing in the early 1900s, so he has to pitch for what qualifies as “normal” for his audience—that is, the typical American high school.

Then, in the final pages, the trap is sprung. The nightmare unfolds, in unsparing detail. And at the end, as is often the case with effective horror, we are left with more questions than answers. Who did what to whom, and why? Multiple answers suggest themselves. The influence of The Turn of the Screw looms heavily over this book. It’s what I call the “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?” school of horror.

Well, I got what I was afraid I would get. But note the use of that word, “afraid.” It’s horror, isn’t it? If you read horror, and you’re afraid of it, and your fears prove justified, well… isn’t that the highest compliment you can pay a work of horror fiction?

This isn’t for everybody. It wasn’t even for me, but I still greatly admire how Bertocci crafted it. Is there anything darker than what lurks in the mind of an average high-school kid? This is what the book asks, and the answer is unsettling. If you want something raw, disturbing, and haunting, then this is most assuredly for you.

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A woman with gray hair and glasses holds a cake in front of a lighthouse, promoting the book 'Candy Apple Curse,' an Autumn Cozy Paranormal Mystery, by Eva Belle.

This book is the sequel to Harvest and Haunt: An Autumn Cozy Paranormal Mystery, which I reviewed last year. This one is much shorter, and isn’t so much a mystery as it is just a straight-up fantasy novella. Nova Powers is once again drawn into a case of supernatural doings when her aunt Grace is poisoned. Investigating the crime leads Nova to the door of a mysterious woman named Mary Lightning, who runs an occult bookshop. (Side note: once I make my fortune, perhaps I should open an occult bookshop.)

But, as in Harvest and Haunt, what matters here is not so much the plot. Nor is it the characters. No, here it’s all about the setting. Or, as the youth of today are apt to say, “the vibes, man.” (Usually, they say these “vibes” are “off” right before I tell them to get off my lawn. But I digress.)

These books are for enjoying of a cool Autumn evening, with a gentle rain and the Halloween lights glowing in the mist. The Pacific Northwest is ideal for this sort of thing, as David Lynch well knew, and Eva Bell does as well. The atmosphere does practically all the work of establishing a pleasingly eerie Autumn mood.

It’s true that I would have liked more emphasis on the mystery aspect, and I don’t think there were any scenes as memorable as in the first book, when Nova finds her yard filled with cornstalks on a dark and windy day. And I missed some of the supporting characters from the first book as well.

On the other hand, the end of the book includes what looks like a delicious cookie recipe, so there’s that. You’ve got to like any book that gives you instructions on how to enjoy the same meals as the characters you’ve just read about. Kinglsey Amis was entirely right about food making us feel more drawn into the world of the story, and that’s all you can ask from a cozy mystery.

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They say not to judge a book by its cover. Well, you certainly shouldn’t let your judgment of the cover be your final judgment. Your assessment of a book should be based on a whole host of factors. Still, a cover is the first thing you see, and it makes a difference as to whether  you read the book or not.

I picked up this book because I saw the cover on Twitter, and it looked interesting. Simultaneously pulpy and punky isn’t a combination you often see.

As it turns out, it has only a tangential connection to the book itself, and I’m still not sure exactly who the characters depicted are supposed to be. There is a woman who wears gear not unlike that seen here, but she is described repeatedly as being dark-skinned. Also, this scene looks sort of urban or industrial, and most of the fighting takes place in open terrain.

The book is about a rebel insurgency trying to overthrow the monarchical government of the planet Sparta. In response, the Spartan kings hire a mercenary unit, Falkenberg’s legion, to assist them in putting down the rebellion.

I admit that the details of “who” and “where” and “why” were all rather unclear to me during the first quarter of the story or so. But this is not the first book in this series. Depending who you ask, it’s either the 2nd, 3rd, or 5th book in a series. But someone on Twitter claimed it could be read as a standalone, and if you can’t trust strangers on Twitter, well, who can you trust?

And in the end, they were kind of right, because after a while enough details became apparent that I could sort of follow who the characters were. Skida Thibodeau is the woman leading the rebellion, Prince Lysander is the acting ruler of Sparta, and Falkenberg is a mercenary leader. There were a bunch of other characters too, including a former prostitute turned mercenary and a corrupt Spartan senator. It wasn’t all clear, but the main players were vivid enough that I was interested in what they were doing. And I appreciated the multiple shout-outs to T.E. Lawrence and Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

The cyberpunk cover notwithstanding, this book is military sci-fi through and through. It’s actually more military than sci-fi, with legions (ha!) of analogies by the characters drawn from the history of Earth warfare. The final battle sequence feels like accounts of present-day warfare, in that it’s basically all frantic radio chatter among commanders of various units.

More than anything sci-fi, this book reminded me of a Tom Clancy novel. Actually, it’s better than most of the Clancy books that I’ve read, in that the characters felt real, as opposed to cardboard cut-outs. But the basic Clancian elements are there: the clean-cut elite anti-terror unit vs. the terrorists and their slimy politician supporters form the fundamental conflict of the story.

And of course, the plot is a thinly-veiled fictionalization that allows the author(s) to expound on real-world political issues. Pournelle, at least, seems to have had approximately the same political alignment as the aforementioned Clancy, and his Cold Warrior mentality comes through here, as the entire plot has strong echoes of many a U.S./Soviet proxy war.

All told, it was pretty good. Probably even better if you read it in sequence. But then again, there’s something to be said for just being dropped in media res. After all, the oldest work of military fiction still in existence starts out that way!

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Book cover for 'The Jump' by Mark Paxson featuring a silhouette of a construction crane against a sunset backdrop with the tagline: 'Nothing is as it seems, everything is as it should be.'

Every now and again, you get an opportunity as a reviewer to tell the world about a book before the world has had a chance to form an opinion on it. It’s rarer than you might think. When you review a classic book, most people have already at least heard of it. When it’s a book by a famous author, preconceived ideas based on that author’s other works are bound to color how it is perceived.

But this is a new book, by an indie author who I am honored to call a friend and who has yet to become widely known to the world at large. And more’s the pity for the world, because once you read Mark Paxson, you don’t stop reading him. You eagerly anticipate his next work.

Let’s say you are among the select group of people of taste and discernment who already do read Paxson. I am in this group. I’ve read his collections of short stories, and his literary novella, and his legal drama. I’ve read his coming-of-age novel and his psychological thriller.

Are you seeing the pattern here? Or, more accurately, the lack of a pattern here? Mark Paxson doesn’t write the same book twice. He experiments. He takes risks. He dares. He wins.

Which brings us, finally, to The Jump. What kind of a book is it?

Well, it’s about a dystopian United States where the President has declared martial law and sent squads of thugs, known as “the President’s Men”, to terrorize the population.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. That this is a commentary on current events. Maybe you don’t like commentary on current events in your fiction. But I promise you, it’s not what you think. Stick with it. Don’t assume that it’s some lazy attempt at relevance-by-real-world-reference like we get from so much of the commoditized entertainment industrial complex these days. It’s not that at all.

Which is not to say it is not relevant! Oh, it’s plenty relevant, to be sure. We’ll get to that, fear not.

By the way, I won’t explain what the title means. It’s not a spoiler, because it’s explained in chapter one, but the way Paxson describes it is unforgettable. I should know, because I read the opening of this story nearly a decade ago, and it stuck with me all these years.

The Jump tells the story of a man named Richard Bell, on a quest to avenge his wife’s death, which he feels he can only do by punishing the man responsible: the President.

Following after him are his children, who soon realize their father is out for revenge. Separately, father and children journey across the shattered remnant of the USA, witnessing haunting visions of Americana fallen into decrepitude, and patrolled ceaselessly by the President’s Men.

Along the way, they meet an odd collection of characters, such as Tobin J Oxblood, another man haunted by the loss of the country he once knew. And then there’s Tum Tum Run, my personal favorite character. I won’t say anything about him other than he’s like if Tom Bombadil found his way into a Tom Clancy novel. If that doesn’t make you want to read this, nothing will.

Needless to say, it’s a long, strange trip. As the cross-country journey leads inexorably towards Washington D.C., the central theme, taken from the President’s book of maxims, is hammered home again and again:

Nothing is as it seems. Everything is as it should be.

To quote another American President: “Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.” It is repeated in the book like a leitmotif, as well it should be. It’s really the key to the whole story.

I won’t say more about the plot here. Just know that it begins as a dark story of despair and revenge, and ends up in a place you would never expect given where it started. It’s a brilliant, mind-bending, plot-twisting odyssey through dystopia, told at every step with the emotional, almost poetic writing we expect from a Paxson novel. 

But now we come to the really important question: what was the author trying to symbolize in this book?

Okay, okay; this started as an in-joke for the Writers Supporting Writers group and our viewers. None of us are huge fans of analyzing the symbolism in fiction, and when I said I would discuss that in my review of this book, it was really a lighthearted comment.

And yet… the question nagged at me. There can be no doubt, after all, that every author is influenced by his or her time and place, the milieu in which they live. The Count of Monte Cristo is a classic that transcends its setting, but would Dumas have written quite the same book if the conflict of Bonapartism vs. Royalism had not been on his mind? So it is with all of us.

And moreover, each reader interprets any given book in a different way, based on his or her own particular experiences and beliefs. If I did not play video games like Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Fallout: New Vegas, if I had not recently read books like The Image by Daniel J. Boorstin and The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, I would not have come up with the interpretation I am about to lay before you. But I did and I have, so I will.

The first thing to know, per Boorstin, is that, dating back to the 19th-century, America (along with the rest of the world) has been transformed by what he called “the graphic revolution”. Thanks to printed matter, photography, film, television and finally the internet, people receive news in the form of transmitted images, so much so that thinking of the image of a thing is more common than thinking of the thing itself. 

The second thing to know is that the human mind is primarily built on its facility for imitation. The smallest unit of a thing to be imitated is a called a meme, an analogue to the gene in the biological world. Thanks to Boorstin’s Graphic Revolution, these memes can now be transmitted instantly around the world, leading to people imitating “viral” (the word is more apt than many realize) fashions, fads, ways of speaking, etc.

This is the world of the internet, the super-connected noösphere of de Chardin; the world you are in right now as you read these words, and the one I am in while I am writing them. We are able to bridge the temporal displacement between my writing them and your reading them effortlessly, thanks to DARPA’s miraculous invention.

And note that that this is not quite the same thing as the real world. You know, IRL. Meatspace. There is a certain overlap, but the world of physical reality is still separate from the interwebs.

How does all of this relate to The Jump? Well, here it is, ladies and gents: Berthold’s Unified Theory of What The Jump is Symbolizing. Are you ready?

What happens in The Jump is what would happen if the world of the internet could be transmuted into physical reality.

That’s why so much weirdness abounds. The President in The Jump is effectively the influencer-in-chief, requiring the population to mimic whatever fad his algorithm chooses to promote. (Remember, an algorithm need not necessarily be electronic or computer-based, but is an ancient mathematical concept. The word is an Anglicization of a Latinization of the name of a 9th-century Persian mathematician.)

Similarly, especially towards the end, the story is increasingly full of metafictional references to other things. I’ll give you a hint: there’s a nod to The Princess Bride at one point. These fourth-wall-breaking Easter Eggs are more than just in-jokes; they are symptomatic of a ubiquitous feature of internet culture, i.e. pop culture references. Only here, they are shown in the physical reality of the world itself, rather than in the form of reaction GIFs.

In some sense, the act of “the jump” for which the story is titled is the concept of “rage-quitting” as manifested in real life. Which of course has a very different effect than when it is purely a metaphor for logging off. And yet, as biosphere and noösphere continue to converge… well, it does give one pause, that’s all.

Anyway, that’s my take on it. Of course you might ask, did Mark mean to do any of this? Well, I haven’t asked him, but probably not. But what do we mean when we say we mean something? Do I mean to write every word in one of these rambling reviews of mine before I sit down and type it out? Not really. At the end of the day, I’m just a monkey with an unusually high capacity for imitation and a really powerful typewriter. So I just start hammering them keys and see where it takes me.

The important thing, though, is that you really need to read The Jump. You might think my interpretation is complete BS, and that’s fine. One of the signs of a great work of literature is critics preparing bogus interpretations of it. The work is strong enough it can withstand any cockamamie reading anybody wants to give it. 

But people do have to read it! This step cannot be skipped. Set aside whatever political biases you may have, be you Republican or Democratic, Whig or Tory, Bonapartist or Royalist, and approach the book with an open mind. I can almost guarantee that by the end it will not be what you expected at the beginning. And above all, it will make you think.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

by on

One of the things we writers like to talk about are the so-called “rules of writing”, if such things even exist. Mostly, we come down on the side that there are no rules. But I don’t know that I’ve ever met a book quite as dedicated to rule-breaking as this one.

It’s not just the “usual” writing rules that get violated in Awful, Ohio. The basic rules of spelling and grammar come in for a sound thrashing as well. On the first page, the author uses “was” when it should be “were.”

And then there’s the matter of the words themselves. What are words, after all? Nothing but symbols, signifying sounds, that we, as a society, mutually agree to mean things. There’s nothing inherent in them that says the symbols composing the term “elephant” must correspond to the thing they describe. If language had evolved differently, “elephant” might have meant what we mean when we say “teacup” instead. It’s arbitrary. And yet, language works because speakers of a given language are trained to follow these conventions. Words are ultimately just agreements between writers and readers.

Except not in Awful, Ohio. Frequently, the author uses some word that just cannot mean what it is conventionally understood to mean in the context.

Not to say that there aren’t clues. For example, the word “ration”, which can be either a noun referring to some limited quantity of something distributed according to a schedule, or a verb meaning the act of distributing same, is here used to mean “rationality.” Clearly, the words have some etymological connection, but this is in no way a standard usage.

I’ve often criticized Lovecraft for his overuse of adjectives and repetitive, long sentences. But in HPL’s prose, the overused adjectives typically meant the thing they were generally understood to mean. Now imagine if they didn’t. Imagine if sometimes, in one of his fits of purple verbiage, the horror-master of Providence had just started throwing out malapropisms and you had to guess what he actually meant. That happens frequently here.

In short, the author has chosen to break the most basic rule in all of communication, the fundamental agreement as to what things mean. Clearly, he is far more committed to the idea of rule-breaking than even I am, and I think of myself as a real iconoclast.

That’s an introduction to the prose style. I say “introduction” because I suspect linguists could write whole papers, perhaps hold whole conferences, analyzing the writing in this novel. But we haven’t the time for that now, we have to get along to the plot, which is the story of a man named Troy Slushy. Troy has grown bored with his factory job in the town of Awful, and just wants to get away from it all and spend time with his wife, Lacy.

Troy’s plan for how to escape the tyranny of the industrial labor force is an unusual one: to destroy the sun. His reasoning is, since the sun wakes people up to go to work, eliminating it means they wouldn’t have to. This is of course the same sort of confused logic underlying cargo cults, but we can ignore that for now. Things are going to get much weirder before we are through.

While plotting to destroy the sun, Troy still has to go to clock in at his place of employment, Mad Ted’s Uckin Hot Auce factory. Now, you might say, shouldn’t that be “hot sauce”? Well, it might. Throughout the text, the product the factory makes is called “hot sauce.” But the factory name is always written without the “S”. Why is this? We don’t know.

The aforesaid “Mad Ted” is a dictatorial figure who oversees the workers on his hot sauce assembly line from a mirrored pod hanging over the factory floor. Mad Ted is reclusive and mysterious, and what little information is available about him comes from the dubious source of an investigative reporter named Wilsie McHickoryboob.

If you haven’t noticed yet, the names in this book are absolutely bonkers. Later on, we meet Doink McTriggers and Sammy Ammo. The latter was once a kindly transient named Samuel Amiable, but changed his name when he was transformed into a ruthless criminal.

I think you’re starting to get an idea of how insane this book is. But really, I’ve only scratched the surface of it. Our author sometimes gleefully ignores the rules of basic causality, which makes for a very unpredictable plot.

Now, here’s the part that may surprise you.

I really enjoyed this book. The way the story works out is quite funny, and in the end, surprisingly satisfying. One thing that doesn’t become clear until fairly late in the game is that the plot does have a certain logic to it; albeit a very strange logic.

I heard about this book from a friend who did not finish it. I read it and enjoyed it, so recommended it to another friend who likes wacky humor. He also did not finish it.

So, 66.67% of those polled couldn’t stand it. But that’s a small sample size. I’m sure if we cast a wider net, we could get those numbers up to more like 90%-95%, at least.

I’m under no illusions about this. Most people who attempt to read this are going to give up because it’s so bizarre in so many ways. The writing is truly hard to decipher in points. Sometimes a book is hard to read because the author uses too many large, obscure words. Sometimes a book is hard to read because of basic mistakes in grammar and spelling. It’s rare to find a book that is hard to read because of both. Usually sesquipedalian types have a good handle on the fundamentals.

But I could get past this. And the reason is simply that I respect a willingness to experiment and try different things. Anytime you do that, you’re risking disastrous, embarrassing failure. But you’ve got to do it if you want any hope of ever hitting it big. Everybody remembers the moon landing. Almost nobody remembers all the test rockets that blew up on the launchpad. But you can’t get the one without the other.

If you like extremely strange, wildly experimental fiction, and can look past a whole slew of typos, grammatical errors, and just flat-out incomprehensible things, Awful, Ohio is a surprisingly fun story.