Month: July 2024

Review: Revenge is Best Served Boiling Hot

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★★★★

Meet wildly paranoid and sociopathic Jane Morgan. She’s a midlist author with a dismal career; an obnoxiously superior, unsupportive husband; and a deep wellspring of jealousy and rage.  Being half-Asian has always been a source of shame for her because her family is poor and she’s not slim, glamorous, and beautiful.  She thinks she deserves to be one of those Crazy Rich Asians.

She hates herself as “wildly mediocre,” hates that husband, her career, social media influencers, successful writers, and especially hates California where she grew up because it’s the worst place in the world for someone antisocial like her:

“It’s too loud, too sunny, too fucking friendly. Everyone gets revved up on kale smoothies and cocaine so I can’t even get a tub of hummus without the Trader Joe’s checkout lady grinning at me and calling me honey and asking me how I’m doing and what are my plans for the weekend?  Californians just can’t help themselves.  If I stayed there any longer I was bound to kill someone.”

Jane’s rancid, roiling sarcasm doesn’t simply cut with a razor throughout the book, it wields an axe–and that’s perversely entertaining in this dynamic thriller.

When Jane did her creative writing masters at Oxford University, she became obsessed with Thalia, a gorgeous, charismatic, and wealthy woman in the same program. Thalia seemed to like her, which astounded Jane. Their lives mesh in reality and fantasy as the book goes back in forth in time, taking readers deeper into Jane’s pathologies. 

Sutanto has a superb ear.  She’s given Jane a dazzling, dark, compelling, sometimes appalling/sometimes hilarious voice of a woman trapped inside her own head who hesitates at the simplest reply because she has to make sure that it sounds “normal.” After all, she thinks that her “thoughts are spiders waiting to leap from my tongue and poison everything they touch.”  And they’re worse than that since she often thinks of stabbing people just to shut them up.

She can also imagine walking through a museum “with a little razor, casually slicing apart priceless canvases” because “there’s just something about perfection that makes [her] want to defile it.”  Plain Jane is a ferocious savage inside.  Does Thalia tame her?

Some readers might find the multiple plot twists in the final chapters excessive.  All the same, Jane and Thalia’s story is a cunning exploration of hero worship, shame, internalized racism, and the splendors and miseries of female friendship. On top of everything else, it’s a sharp and knowing satire of publishing: “Anyone who thinks that publishing is a meritocracy is not in publishing.”

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has reviewed for The Washington Post as well as several Michigan radio stations, one of which aired his interview show. His guests there included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and Erica Jong.

 

Strangers on a Crazy Train: Book Review

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★★★

So there are these two contract killers who meet on a train to Paris.

That’s not the start of a joke. It’s the opening of It Had to Be You, an often bizarre novel labeled “romantic suspense” by the publisher. 

Jonathan and Eva are lonely and self-pitying sociopaths who feel most alive when they’re killing someone and earning huge fees from the respective agencies that send them out to commit murder. When they first meet on that Eurostar train, they end up having wildly intense and athletic sex on a luggage rack in the baggage compartment.

Sound improbable?  Well it’s even more so when you consider that drug-addled Jonathan has a bullet in his chest as well as what might be a concussion.  Also improbable: the fencing class where Jonathan’s neck gets cut by the teacher even though his face mask should have included protection for his neck. Likewise the scene where the two killers have a seven-course meal together at a tiny French restaurant whose owner’s name is Gestalt (!) and we only hear about the salad and the snails. Given that Jonathan’s a metrosexual sophisticate in Tom Ford suits, it’s weird that he doesn’t even discuss the wine.

After that first erotic onboard collision, he and Eva have been drawn back together because Eva feels that he ghosted her when in fact he just passed out in one of the train’s toilets. But he must be a horrible person for mistreating her, and because her job is killing horrible people, she becomes obsessed with revenge.  So she gets assigned to take him out. Jonathan, on the other hand, had plans for blockbuster sex on his mind, not murder. He’s been longing for one more magnificent encounter with Eva because he is “obsessed, magnetized, dangerously in lust.” 

Their paths cross again and again through the book with multiple plot twists amid the sex and violence. Both hired killers are surprisingly reflective about their lives, their outsider status, what it’s like to stalk and kill an assigned victim. This can sometimes makes for mordant comedy as when Eva thinks, “I know he’s lying to me, even though I’m lying to him, too….it’s how every relationships starts.”

But there are also lines that are laughable in and of themselves: “I want to touch her, but not so much, not all at once.  It is overwhelming.  I have been cooking her for so long that she burns.  I need to take her in slowly.  Blow on her first.” They’re almost redeemed by spots of lovely writing when the author describes Paris, something she excels at.

The publisher is targeting fans of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Killing Eve, and perhaps folks who remember Prizzi’s Honor. It’s ultimately a very dark book that draws you deep into Eva and Jonathan’s sociopathy and trauma. Can they have a lasting relationship while the body count around them keeps mounting? The sketchy last pages seem to say yes because they feel like they’re setting up a sequel.

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has also reviewed books for The Washington Post and several public radio stations in Michigan.

Review: Goth Girl, Interrupted

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★★★★

Agnes Corey isn’t your typical New York editorial assistant.  She hasn’t earned a degree in publishing, didn’t go to a ritzy college, and her past is “a story of abandonment, foster homes, petty crimes, and state institutions.”

She works at a near-bankrupt Manhattan legacy publisher that hasn’t had a best seller since the early 1990s and is likely to be swallowed up by a conglomerate. That might explain why even as a probationary hire, she’s grossly underpaid, earning much less than the current real-life average salary for her job.

Corey is troubled, vulnerable, poor, plagued by nightmares and memories of her mentally ill mother. Adding to the misery is being so broke she can only afford to live in a crummy hostel until luck and daring take charge of her life. She’s hired to help a famous, reclusive author of a very Gothic novel adored by millions, the novel that put her publishing house on the map. Fans have been ravenous for more content from author Veronica St. Clair, a sequel to be exact, because the first book had an ambiguous ending.

The mansion Corey comes to at night and in the rain (of course!) is like every castle or mansion from Anne Radcliffe through the Brontës to Shirley Jackson and beyond: eerie, overwhelming, oozing menace and mystery. Even better, it was once a mental institution and like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, it seems a bit mad itself.

The author name checks plenty of celebrated Gothic works, and the novelist’s name even echoes the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily St. Aubert.  Goodman deftly deploys time-tested Gothic tropes: scary scenery, shadows, the damsel in distress, exploring dark corners, paranoia, claustrophobia, imagined phantoms, dreadful weather, real and misplaced fears–and of course the house that seems like a brooding, malevolent being.

The author can even make the West Village in Manhattan seem creepy and mysterious–at least at night.  She also writes good satire of the publishing business while giving it the ironic hipster appeal of vinyl and flip phones.

As the novel develops, Corey’s nightmares are so intense that they bleed into her everyday reality, in part because she’s a sleep walker. When she starts taking dictation from the reclusive author whose life might echo the storyline of the original best seller, is that fact or fiction?  Is she a remotely reliable narrator?  If she is, can we trust Veronica St. Clair?  The novel more and more feels like a Russian nesting doll as stories keep appearing within other stories.

Readers may either be fascinated or thrown by the way the book slowly drifts into a tale of drugs and Goths in New York whose soundtrack could easily be Lou Reed’s Street Hassle. And the focus on Corey’s dreams can sometimes feel excessive.  For a deeper immersion in the Gothic style, I highly recommend Sarah Perry’s brilliant, beautifully-written novel Melmoth which revisits the 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin and turns it inside out.

Lev Raphael spent his senior year of college reading all the classic Gothic novelists, some of them in period editions.  The author of twenty-seven books in genres from memoir to mystery, he has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other outlets. His most recently published short story “Lost in London” is a Gothic ghost tale.