Author: Joan Frances Turner

Type of Book: Fiction, horror, zombies

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s not wholly odd but it’s inventive and it was a great life-saver for me when I realized the zombie-western I wanted to review was too short for me to have much to say about it.

Availability: Published by Berkley Publishing in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: We have reached the final day of my first Zombie Week and I can’t thank all of you enough for making this a fun, instructive and interesting experiment for me. I have dozens of new authors on my radar due to the excellent recommendations people have shared, I’ve learned much about zombies and I’ve met some pretty cool people. Thanks to everyone who commented to my entries and contributed their love of the genre.

And today is the last day to comment in order to win the five books I am giving away. Here’s how you enter the contest to win all five books:
–Leave a comment on any of the Zombie Week discussions.
–You can enter up to five times by leaving a comment on all five of the Zombie Week entries.
–Only one comment per entry will count. So if you comment 50 times in one entry, you’ve only entered once.
–Alternately, you can leave one comment on all five entries at any time you want, as long as you make all comments by 9:00 pm CST on Friday, 4/1/11.

I bought Dust because regular IROB reader, Anton, suggested it. I was in a book store, saw it on the shelf and bought it with Anton’s recommendation in mind. It sat in a stack of books in my bedroom until last week. I was thisclose to canceling Zombie Week because I ended up with problems with two of the books I had planned to discuss. I picked up Dust, not knowing a damn thing about it other than Anton liked it and was happy, happy, happy it turned out to be about Zombies. So I booked it and got it finished in time. Anton and Dust saved Zombie Week. Yay.

There is a blurb for this book and I don’t remember who said it, but it says to the effect that with this book, Turner has done for zombies what Anne Rice did for vampires. Initially I thought that was utter bullshit, but then I thought about it and it may be right. Before Rice, did anyone tell the story of vampires from the mind of the vampire? There may have been some outliers here and there but until Rice, I am unsure if the story of the vampire from the vampire’s perspective was typical. The only other person I can think of at the time who presented the vampire’s perspective in a manner invoking sympathy for the devil was Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and I am unsure who technically got there first, but for better or worse, Rice is definitely credited with giving us the mind of the vampire in a manner that influenced just about every vampire writer since.

And since I have not read nearly enough zombie novels, I don’t know if there are others out there that give us a look into the mind of a zombie, but if there are, then they are in pretty good company with Turner’s Dust. In Dust, Turner really has created not only a zombie culture wherein zombies have personal identities, but has also combined several mythos in order to create her zombies. People die and rise from the dead. The zombies rot but they take years to do it, even centuries, becoming bug-filled, nasty, shambling messes. Eventually the zombies dry out as their flesh and viscera are eaten away, falling to dust. An elderly zombie sounds more like an unwrapped mummy to me. These zombies rise from the grave with sharpened teeth, pointed in a way that reminded me of vampires more than anything else. And these zombies are able to communicate with each other telepathically, which is important because tongues and throats rot away. Unless a zombie turns to dust from old age, they can also be killed if their brains are stomped more or less into oblivion. The condition cannot be spread by bites. It simply happens because of a specific plot device in the book, and anyone can become a zombie when dead. And there is an apocalypse but it would be hard to call it a zombie apocalypse.

The plot, which became a bit drawn out at times, is hard to sum up but I will give it a try, and beware, there are spoilers of a sort: 15-year-old Jessie died in a car accident and rose as a zombie. She lives in a world not unlike our own but one in which zombies are a known evil and many people take pains to make sure they do not rise from the grave by getting cremated. The whys of zombie-creation are too long to go into for a review. When she rises from the dead, Jessie is taken in by a zombie clan, or gang, called the Fly-By-Nights. There are larger, more aggressive gangs that feed on humans but Jessie and her little family live in a wooded area and feed on animals. Despite her deep loathing for hoo (human) culture, Jessie cannot bring herself to kill them or eat them.

Then one day Jessie begins to notice that their clan leader, the reviled Teresa, smells funny and is losing her appetite. A chance meeting with her brother, who is still alive, explains to Jessie all of the strange things that have been happening. Jessie had moved the body of a strange human female who was trying to kill game and eat it but threw up and passed out, and the identity of this woman is also Jessie’s sister, Lisa (this plot is fueled by a lot of coincidence). Jessie’s brother, Jim, aware his sister was a zombie, worked for a research facility that was trying to wipe out the zombies via viral warfare. But their plan failed when they ended up making the zombies more human and making humans near-zombies. There is also a side story of how Jessie’s most beloved friend, Joe, sets her up for a betrayal that could have sent her to her final death. How the zombies and the humans survive this is something I definitely won’t spoil, but in a way, it almost doesn’t matter because as plot heavy as this book is, it is very much a character-driven novel. Knowing the bare bones of the plot isn’t going to mean much because the ins and outs of the zombie cultures, the way they live and interact, is really why you’re paying for this book.

This book will be deeply disgusting for the average reader. It wallows in rot, cannibalism, graphic depictions of animal hunts, human decomposition, vomit, vomit and more vomit, the effects of zombie-on-zombie violence and so much more. Dwelling in the head space I do, I only got creeped out by a couple of scenes and those were scenes that discussed in depth the insect infestations the zombies dealt with. The rest, sadly, became tiresome as the novel went on because the reader gets his or her senses clubbed with all the depictions of nastiness. In a novel this foul, when such descriptions became old hat, you’re doing it wrong, as the kids say.

But until that happens, it’s a fun, nasty, sad, interesting ride. Because we don’t know what Jessie was like when she was alive, save for her anger at her parents’ terrible marriage and the way her older siblings chose to deal with it, it’s hard to know if becoming a zombie changed Jessie in significant ways. Jessie is a hard character to like because she is ruled by self-interest, has absolutely no compassion for anyone except Florian, the eldest member of her gang, and Joe, a complete jerk of a young, male zombie. Jessie is just flat-out unpleasant. It is tempting to say that she is this way because being a zombie changed her but Linc, a sensitive and nice zombie boy, shares none of Jessie’s emotional emptiness. Moreover, Linc, who was beaten to death by his parents, should have far more reason to hate the hoos and his fellow zombies, but doesn’t. One just gets the impression that had she lived, Jessie would have just become a nasty girl who dated assholes who used her. She alludes to this fact herself, and I also wonder if Jessie more or less stayed stalled at 15, even as she aged as a zombie. Nothing in the rule book says we have to have a character whose motivations make sense, who evokes in us any understanding or sense of connection, but it would have helped to have liked Jessie more. There are little glimpses of the person she was capable of being, but it was not until the end that we see any real redemption in Jessie and by then it was a bit too late. It was just too hard to care about her character arc. Moreover, as pitiless as Jessie was, it bled over into how I read this book. When your protagonist is emotionally flat except for anger, much of the book just won’t matter.

Jessie makes the transition to meat-eating zombie very easily despite the fact she had been a vegan when she died. It almost seems like she would have been less contradictory had she become a human-eater, because surely killing animals must have been hard on her emotionally. But this makes little sense, as does her all-encompassing anger and her rage towards her brother but not against the traitor Joe. She does mention that being a zombie gives her a greater appreciation for nature that she had lacked even as a vegan.

And I liked trees and riverbanks now, in a way I never had when I was alive; I’d wanted to save all the animals, but nature bored the piss out of me. This was better.

I wish there had been more moments when Jessie made some sense to me.

But despite failing to connect with Jessie, this book was not wholly alienating. A zombie dies in this book, falls to dust in front of Jessie, Linc and another zombie called Renee (an interesting name for a zombie, to be sure), and the effect it has on them is moving. There are other similar moments of small redemption in the book that help make up a bit for the lack of investment I felt in watching Jessie try to survive. Also, Turner, her characterization aside, took great pains creating the back story for her world that is so similar to our own but also so very different. Learning about the zombie culture and regular culture as they reacted to zombies was fascinating.

Take this scene, for example. Renee has just been brought back to the gang. She is what the zombies call a ‘maldie because she was embalmed with formaldehyde and coming back from the dead is made harder for her. Tasked with helping this newly dead girl, Jessie struggles with modern death and it’s customs.

Ever read how they used to put pennies on dead people’s eyes, to weight them shut? Florian had those. Nowadays, though, they use eyecaps: big plastic lenses with tiny tent-pole spikes on the outside, covering the whole eyeball and keeping the lids anchored like awnings. There’s no way to get them out except to hold the ‘maldie down, peel the eyelids back, and pry them out, hoping you don’t accidentally gouge out an eye. And we haven’t gotten to the really fun part yet – the mouthpiece. It’s always so tempting just to leave their whiny lips sealed shut. With every touch, New Thing flinched like I’d punched her.

“I’m gonna open your eyes,” I said. “They’re sealed shut, that’s why you can’t open them. Okay? You understand?”

No answer. As Mags and Ben gripped her arms, I pried gently at one eyelid; not sewed shut, good. Much easier, I gave the eyecap a little tap, got a grip on it ——

—–and tore her eyelid in two when she wrenched away and let out a muffled banshee-shriek of panic.

Don’t worry, they get her sorted out and then beat the hell out of Renee in an initiation ceremony. And yep, poor Renee gets to go through her zombie life with half an eyelid. This is bad because zombies who go blind are stomped because a blind zombie cannot hunt and drags down the rest of the gang if they have to support their blind gang member.

It could be worse. Jessie only has one arm. Her arm was almost torn off in the car crash that killed her and it had hung from her body, still attached by stretching tendons and pieces of skin. For nine years she had this arm that does not work attached to her but one day her right arm begins to shake. As her fellow gang members mock her, she sheds the limb.

…a phantom dog got its teeth deep into my right shoulder, shaking and shaking, and a tremor shot down to my knees and back up again. The tremor became a whip crack and something snapped painlessly in my shoulder, and my poor useless deadweight arm broke off for good, wet purplish skin sliding off in sheets as it hit the underbrush with a squish and a thud.

Your body reflects all the damage you receive. Broken limbs become unstable, broken ribs make it impossible to sleep and it’s strange that the zombies like fighting with each other so much because they still feel pain and every dreadful fight causes more bodily degeneration that takes them closer and closer to the day when they turn to dust.

And at this point, I feel the need to share some of the more foul scenes. Just because I can. No context because you don’t really need it.

Lisa held my head as I got sick, sick everywhere, puking up everything I’d ever eaten. The thought of meat, of any meat, still made my mouth drip drool and my stomach tighten in anticipation, but then it kept tightening, like an iron band until the meat rocketed back up again and my throat burned with acid.

Dig into this:

So hot they almost steamed, those good fresh deer guts, and warm dripping blood and the solid meaty muscle of a heart still beating as we tore the carcass open, venison like you never tasted it on your little boo-barbecues with the charcoal smoke making it filthy.

Take a whiff of this one, while you’re at it:

Her teeth seemed long for a hoo’s but they were white and squarish like any human’s and just as bad at tearing through hide and thick bones. She gnawed at the little bit of meat she could still get, licked fresh blood from her hands, and then I heard a gurgling sound and she was looking at me trembling in fright, dark bubbles of spume oozing up from her ash-colored lips. She stared down at the torn-apart thing in her hands, warm and dripping blood and viscera and tufts of gray fur, and let out another moan, not of starvation but shame and horror, meat and bile rocketed back up, splattering the linden tree and the soil below…

For the more advanced reader of extreme horror, this is not that bad, really. But this is a mainstream book and it is filled from cover to cover with more of the same. Interesting, really. I wonder how many unsuspecting people picked this up because I bought it at Borders (sigh….).  It was in the literature section.

Like I said above, the only thing in this vast tome of vomit, decay and worse that bothered me were the descriptions of bug infestations in the zombies. Jessie is looking at Joe in this scene:

The maggots and blowflies and watch beetles feeding off him head to toe pulsed with the hungry sucking and clicking of thousands of little mouths: shuck-shuck, in rhythm, and then crrnc-crrnc, biting down. They’d been feeding off him for decades now, feeding on bits of nothing between bouts of silent stasis.

This is mild, compared to many of the bug scenes in the book. Characters are forever crawling with bugs, vomiting up dead bugs, dreading summer because of the bugs. Had I been a zombie, when the bugs came, I would have begged to be stomped.

This book reminded me of two other break-out books by female writers – Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke and The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. The three books have little in common in terms of style and even the subject matter is only connected through slender tendrils of the paranormal and the speculative. What they all three have in common is that all three needed ruthless editors because each one worried to death certain details over and over until I grew tired of the book. In Kostova’s The Historian, all the details of the interminable traveling the protagonist did wore me out. In Dust, the endless descriptions of the characters’ bodily change wore very thin after a while. Because the zombies in the book have a sort of nihilistic flatness to them that means it is hard to feel much urgency, the descriptions of all the hunger, the vomiting, the exhaustion had me, at points, groaning inwardly, “Enough with the puking, I get it, I get it, she’s sick.” “Yes, yes, yes, they are eating rotting corpses yet again, please get on with it!” There is a fine line between expansive, Baudelaire-like interest in rot and misery and stating the grossly obvious so much that it loses its impact. Turner crossed over that line from time to time. The plot also at times was plodding, in a way that is difficult to explain other than to say that my inner editor rose forth several times. Turner’s plot at no point meandered or included elements that were inessential, but that which was essential could have been tightened up. At the end, I was very ready for this book to be over and that sense of negative relief could have been avoided had this book been closely edited.

One other problem I had may be wholly personal to me but I found her sentence structure at times to be strange. There were places where a comma was needed and none was to be had and places where there were so many the eye skipped reading. Her use of semicolons often irked me, as she was less linking two independent but related sentences than she was attaching ensuing action onto the original sentence. There were also times that sentences just felt awkward, with ideas rushed together. There is some sense that perhaps Turner’s characters speech patterns may have changed when they became zombies. Even so, given that this book is a first-person narration, if the narrator’s speech and thought patterns are jumbled, it makes for rough sentences at times, even taking to account any potential motivation. I don’t think we are meant to believe that Jessie’s thinking no longer follows human patterns though, because there are enough normal sentences to make that seem like an invalid idea.

But the problems were undeniably there. Take this sentence, for example:

There were wrapped things too from some obliging butcher, raw cow heart, plastic containers of blood, he opened and lined up on the ground; they ran up to grab them, cried and retched with revulsion, crammed it all feverishly into their mouths.

Among other problems, these are two separate sentences held together with a semicolon. It may be no big deal but if one is going to use semicolons consistently in their writing, it’s going to annoy readers when they are used incorrectly.

This problem is endemic throughout the book, and lest you think I cherry picked all the quotes above so I can be a Grammar Priss, to find this next sentence, I just closed the book, opened it and read for a few seconds and it jumped out:

We left Sam sitting with him and headed for the gazebo, appetites gone, everyone staring sidelong at everyone else for a hint of the secrets they were concealing; I heard the word change in murmured snatches of talk like a coin glinting in a river, pretended it meant nothing to me.

Again, two sentences joined together with a semicolon. They are not independent clauses that should be linked – they are separate sentences. Also note the awkwardness in the sentence after the semicolon. It’s small things like this, when you have written a good book, that prevent the book from being excellent.

Why am I picking on this? Well, I am a grammar perfectionist, even though I know my blog is likely teeming with errors. But a blog is one thing and a novel from one of the largest publishers in the nation, with money and editors behind it, is another. Increasingly I hold in near contempt anyone who actually has the sheer idiocy to actually suggest that self-publishing is for losers who don’t want to work their way up. When you can read a novel released by a major publisher with this many awkward sentences and this many outright errors in punctuation, it increasingly tells me that the feared democratization is at hand and major publishers are skimping on the things that supposedly made them the better alternative in the first place. David Baker’s self-published book I reviewed last year was interestingly vile and cartoonish but pristinely line-edited. His novel easily was better edited than many books from small presses and better edited than this book. None of this should make you not want to read this book. Dust as a whole is strong enough to overcome these bizarre editorial issues. But at the same time, when I spend most of my time reading the small presses and self-published books and I increasingly cannot see much difference between them in terms of content, and when the little guy actually does it better than a major publisher in terms of editing, from the perspective of a reader, it’s hard to mourn the fall the major publishers are experiencing. Writers have an entirely different opinion, I am sure, and I suspect that is a discussion for another time.

So what we have here is a book with a meticulous back-story that I could not do justice to in this review. We have a zombie society threatened from inside and out, a zombie story that combines elements of other supernatural monsters to create a relatively unique subset of creature that is intelligent, hunts, rots and eventually dies in ways different from “canon” zombies. We also have a book that is too long, engages in questionable sentence structure and punctuation, and allows its gore to become repetitive. We have annoying characterizations in a character-driven novel but an expansive, interesting plot. All in all, this is not a bad book and I recommend it but with the caveat that it is very gross in places and the use of semicolons may make your eyes cross. With that having been said, though I could not wait for it to end (there is one hallucination scene that went on for pages that could easily have been cut), the first 200 pages or so went by in a flash and were a pleasure to read. The remaining 175 plodded too slowly and kept recovering the same ground but even so, I am glad I read this book because it showed me a zombie world conceived with care and created some excellent hunt, fight and quest scenes.

And my last reminder: Zombie Week ends today, at 9:00 pm  CST. Please be sure to leave comments on as many of these five entries as you like, with one each day counting as an entry into this contest to win five books. I will announce the winner on Monday. Again, this has been a hoot and I look forward to Zombie Week II, which has to happen now that I have all these great recommendations for zombie books to read. Thanks for helping me make Zombie Week so great!

Author: David Agranoff

Type of Book: Fiction, horror, zombies

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s published by an Eraserhead imprint and while not odd in the vein of complete bizarro, there are enough odd elements in this book that I likely would have discussed it here whether or not Zombie Week happened.

Availability: Published by Deadite Press in 2010, it’s available but wait about a month or so to get a copy, and I will explain the reason for this recommendation.

Comments: Okay, let me get site business out of the way. I am giving away a copy of all five books I am discussing for Zombie Week and one lucky reader will get a chance to win all five of them. All you have to do to enter the drawing to win all five books is to leave me a comment on any of the five Zombie Week discussions. If you want to increase your chances of winning, leave a comment on all five entries. And while only one comment per day per entry will count as an entry to win the books, please leave more comments if the spirit moves you. I rather have enjoyed the comments and conversations that have taken place over the course of Zombie Week.

Now that the site business is out of the way, let me get two unpleasant points out of the way as well. First, this book discusses veganism. It discusses it earnestly while having the social, ethical and emotional honesty to poke fun at and satirize elements of vegan beliefs. But it has been my experience that there are a certain subset of people in this world who read the word vegan, remember That One Time a Vegan Yelled at Me For Eating a Hamburger, and start frothing at the mouth, typing in all caps, posting pics of mutilated animals and behaving like a complete asshat. As a failed vegan whose failure is not the diet but rather that I am a complete headcase, there is nothing anyone can say that I haven’t heard before nor is there any abuse anyone can hurl that won’t already be familiar. I will say that should such behavior start, I will let words stand (no pictures and if you post any you are a terrible person and even your dog knows it). If you are particularly egregious, I will be tempted to post your IP address so a couple of my more paranoid readers can track you down so the rest of us can send you tofu and vegan hotdogs via e-mail. We might slut shame your goldfish. We might even laugh at your socks. None of that seems threatening? No shit, Sherlock, and neither will any attempts to mock vegans. It’s all so dumb, so rise above, okay?

Second, the reason I did not link to the book and recommend waiting a month to get a copy is because this was one of the worst edited books I have ever read. Hands down, it wins the prize, and the problems so abundant and at times over-the-top that if I even attempt to discuss them, readers would think I was either engaging in hyperbole or assholish behavior. I contacted the publishers to ask them a generic, “What the hell, OMG?” and I have it on very good authority that the book is going to undergo a pretty substantial edit and that it should be complete in a few weeks. The editing issues are so bad I would not recommend anyone buy this book until Deadite gives the all clear that it has been cleaned up. Be sure to check back because when that happens, I will update with a link to buy it.

That also means that the person who wins this contest will get four books sent immediately and one book to follow – the contest winner will definitely get a clean copy when it is ready.

Now for the book. Aside from the editing problems, it was clear to me that Agranoff is still a green writer. He has a great ear for dialogue but has a tendency to make all his characters laugh a lot, even when it seems inappropriate. Worse, there’s a lot of giggling going on (am I the only one who thinks a sober, male character who giggles is probably a serial killer, or do others just not find the concept of giggling as creepy and annoying as I do). His characters also point and shake their heads a lot. Not sure what that was about – probably just one of those writer-crutches that a good editor shines a light on and makes disappear. I mention all of this now because with the editing issues that will soon be fixed, that’s all I have to criticize about this book.

Seriously. It’s been a while since I read a book that, editing issues aside, got every damn thing right. Agranoff’s book is clever, satirical, gross, touching, sad, and filled with more pop cultural references than you can shake a stick at. Music, movies, hipsters, Juggalos, books, vegan culture, non-vegan culture. This book is a near perfect example of the saying that sarcasm is the body’s natural defense against stupid, or, in the case of one character, mindless regurgitation of useless pop culture trivia is the best defense against awkward situations.

This book also employs the most traditional use of zombies of all the story-oriented books I will discuss this week. The agent that causes zombie-ism makes people die and come back from the dead. The transition from life to death is slow but the living are sick, and then the next moment, they are zombies. They are brainless, driven only by the impulse to attack non-zombie humans. They tend to arrive in packs but they are not organized – they don’t have the mental capacity for it. These zombies are driven so exclusively by impulse that they no longer know how to climb, how to open doors, how to escape from the buildings many of them died inside. These are creatures that can also eventually starve to death if they don’t have access to fresh humans. The way these zombies came to exist precludes the already dead rising from the grave – if you weren’t alive when the agent struck, you won’t come back.

I had an interesting conversation with the guy over at Bitterly Books in an e-mail exchange. He made an intriguing point – that the zombie tale is essentially one of exile, of a person being isolated from their own society. In the abstract, I think that’s a good way to look at this book – people who were self-exiled in the normal world find themselves the last people on Earth, and even then, some were still isolated and exiled as the world struggled to redefine itself. There are times when I wonder if I am reading too much into books, especially books from branches of the bizarro tree, but then I generally think I am on track, and I feel pretty strongly that this book is quite layered, telling a specific story and relating a specific message even while it entertains us with zombies.

Here’s a plot synopsis: Dani works for Fulci House Press, where she is editing Of Mice and Men… and Zombies. Despite the fact that her zombie-fanatic boyfriend Magik pulled strings to help her get the job, she is sick of zombies within days of starting work, even though Magik plays her his favorite zombie movies in an attempt to draw her in. At a hipster “Bacon Night” at a Portland club, Dani has an awakening and decides to become vegan and Magik joins her, just in time because Stress-Free Meat is being introduced to the country, debuting in Portland first. Animals bred so that they don’t feel pain, stress, boredom or unhappiness enter the market and consuming those meats cause people to grow more and more sick, feeling flu-ey, turning purplish, growing more and more lethargic until they die and almost immediately reanimate as zombies. The vegans who survived this food armageddon descend upon a vegan mall in Portland and together they squabble, kill zombies, and try to keep their ideals in perspective as they rebuild the world. And oh yeah, they do their best to find the best soundtrack to blast while blowing away zombies.

I very nearly stopped reading this book because of the editing issues and I am so glad I kept on because the errors were repetitive enough that I could get used to them and enjoy the story anyway. And there was much to enjoy. Agranoff has a way with dialogue that reminded me of earlier Stephen King works. He is a dedicated vegan in real life but is acutely aware of and clearly sees the the humor in the various factions that make up the vegan community. He also is immersed in all sorts of elements of pop culture, cleverly lampooning the …with Zombies series of books, fans of Insane Clown Posse, and the more negative elements of hipster culture.

I think some of my appreciation for Agranoff’s skills as a writer come from his characterization of Dani. In order to poke fun at vegans and hipsters and Juggalos, those characters must be painted with a broader brush. There isn’t going to be a lot of truth in the obese, chain-smoking Juggalo mom or the stinking, trash-digging freegan who will eat anything he finds in a dumpster, or the strident animal-liberation vegan who feels that shooting zombies is unethical. But there is some truth to be had in Dani.

Dani is an interesting character. I both liked her and was irritated by her. I understood all too well the nausea that comes when one is surrounded by bacon (and I don’t really mind that hipsters dig bacon so much – I have my own theories about hipsters and why they like bacon but that has little to do with this review so I will just shut up about that topic). Having grown up in the South, there were times I could smell bacon in my hair and clothes after a family breakfast and there is no force that will ever make me eat pig again. It’s a visceral reaction when that happens, when a food you have eaten your entire life suddenly disgusts you, and Agranoff very neatly set up this visceral disgust before animal rights veganism is really a plot point in the book. This read as utterly true to me.

Dani hates her job. Yes, most of us would be very happy to be an editor at a press, even one that is as jaded culturally as many consider the press that brought the …with Zombies franchise into the literary landscape. I think we’ve all had that experience – a friend with an enviable job who finds their work day tiresome. Her co-workers are for the most part disgusting or annoying and Dani hates them all. But even as they irritate the everloving hell out of her, Dani is not a nasty person. She loathes her hipster and freegan coworkers, but when one of them seems like she is in jeopardy, she reacts with alarm. Sally eats McDonalds every day, sometimes twice a day, and she’s become slower in speech and movement until she is… wait for it… practically a zombie. Perhaps no one else noticed how sick Sally was because they were all ill themselves. But Dani notices and tries to help reason with Sally that maybe her fast food diet is having a negative effect, all to no avail.

And while I wonder how much this element of the book will resonate with non-foodies or omnivores, I especially appreciated the satirical spears Agranoff throws at Michael Pollan, Pete Singer, Ingrid Newkirk and Gary Francione… I mean Professor Francione. With the exception of Singer (whom I just always found a little… I don’t know… uninspiring?), the rest of these people are not wholly bad, but each comes with a set of problems that have made reflecting one’s political beliefs through food choices and activism difficult. Pollan’s message is ultimately elitist and shows a false concern for animals that will ultimately be killed and eaten, Newkirk has been discredited by the insane and often offensive PETA ads, and I have to suspect that every person who hates vegans loathes them because they tangled with one of Professor Francione’s fanatical acolytes. That Agranoff is willing to dissect veganism and show it, warts and all, means a lot where his sincerity is concerned. That most of it is funny helps and that “Sanger,” Agranoff’s pseudonym for Pete Singer, is one of the first to become a zombie, was one of the best parts of the book.

I was torn over some of the dialogue in some places but then I had to just remember that half the people I know would likely sound the same. Take this exchange, which I hope does not give away too much of the plot:

“Today is a good day to die.”
“Stop it,” Dani shook her head. “We don’t know that yet.”
Bru-Dawg whispered to Mark, “Dude. Who quotes Klingons when they’re dying?”
“It’s an old Native American saying,” Mark whispered back.
“No, I was quoting Klingons,” Magik said.
“See,” Bru-Dawg shook his head. “Nerd.”

I live with a nerd-geek hybrid who shares a birthday with Leonard Nimoy. We will have this conversation, I suspect, when the zombie apocalypse finally comes.

Here’s another section, that seems sort of glib but on second thought is pretty hilarious to me. The worst has happened and the zombie apocalypse has begun and a group of people are at a vegan supermarket in a vegan strip mall. But not all who are in the store are actually vegans. There are a handful of raw foodists, who drank raw milk from Stress-Free cows, and some freegans, including Dani’s gross coworker. One of the store owners shoots Freddy the Freegan in the head, a smart move as Freddy had just turned. But Freddy’s friend remains.

Dani turned her eyes toward Freddy’s other freegan friend. He stood now and walked toward them with his mouth open. Mark pointed his Glock at the freegan zombie. Samantha appeared in the doorway. Emily blocked her from coming in the back room.
“You don’t want to see this, Sam,” Emily pleaded with her as she held her back.
“Stop. Violence doesn’t solve anything!” Samantha screamed.
“I disagree.” Mark pointed the Glock at Freddy’s mostly headless body. “I think it solves the Freegan problem quite nicely.”

And though this is funny to me (and hopefully to others), it also sets up the final struggle, which is not with the zombies, but how the surviving vegans will organize themselves and find a way to live in the world they always wanted and that they finally now have, though none of them would have seen the price the world had paid in human death to be worth it. The last 20 pages of the book are both heartbreaking and inspiring.

But let me tell you this. As much as I found Agranoff’s characterization spot-on, his insight into zombie, hipster, and pop culture to be trenchant and hilarious, and as interesting as the struggle with the zombies was, the best parts of this book were the tests at the end of each chapter. Here are a couple of examples:

Mike Poland would eat a human baby if:
A) It was locally produced.
B) It had not been given growth hormones.
C) A prayer was said thanking the baby for its sacrifice.
D) All of the above.

I guess you sort of have to dislike Michael Pollan for that to seem funny but to me, it was quite amusing.

Or take this one:

The only reason a cow would be on a desert island would be:
A) Some idiot human put him/her there.
B) To prove without a shadow of a doubt that humans being vegetarian is impossible.
C) To film an episode of Lost.
D) To get away from humans.

Okay, indulge me, but here’s one more:

At this point Sally should:
A) Eat her breakfast.
B) Get some rest.
C) Have a drink.
D) Be shot in the head immediately.

These tests are a litmus test of a sort. If, like me, you are enough of a dork that you think this was all very funny, you need to read this book.

So, what we have here is a novel in which traditional zombies do traditional things, like mindlessly attack the living for sustenance and then get shot in their heads. We have a couple of well-developed characters who contrast nicely with some humorous social stereotypes. We have a funny novel with lots of nasty gore of people slowly dying, zombies both undead and finally dead, and the horror of animal husbandry. We have the gut pleasure of watching the apocalypse from the sidelines as the worst happens, people get their guns, establish control and assert their morality as best they can. But we also have a novel that is just a nightmare in terms of editing, and take my word – do not buy a copy until it has been updated, but again, I have it on very good authority that it will be fixed up sooner rather than later. But once that happens, I think the mass of the zombie fans who have showed up here would enjoy the hell out of this book, and I think my regular readers would find this odd and off-beat enough to be worth reading. I also hope some of you zombie fans become regular readers, too. The conversations here and the book recommendations I have received have made me very happy I decided to soldier ahead with Zombie Week.

Now comment so you can enter to win the five books I am giving away, and be sure to come back tomorrow. I will be discussing a book wherein the zombies are probably berzerkers, but there’s a good reason I didn’t review this author’s awesome book that is both indisputably about zombies and awesome. Luckily, this book is also awesome, even though it wanders off the path of true zombies, so don’t miss out.

Author: Michel Faber

Type of Book: Fiction, horror, science fiction, indescribable

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: This is a book that walks the line between standard horror fiction with a literary bent and yet is so deeply disturbing that it is odd by default. So, since I am sort of a bad parent and favor one child over the other, I am discussing it over here because oddbooks is soooo much better than her sister. But I find it pretty disturbing and by my own admittedly uneven criteria, I’m discussing it here.

Availability: Published by Harcourt in 2000, you can get a copy here:

Comments:This is going to be a startlingly short discussion. I am a person who is, to put it kindly, verbose. Wordy. I type too damn much sometimes. I know this. And if I let this tendency go unchecked in this discussion, I will spoil this entire book for you. This is a book wherein crucial plot points are revealed in layers. As you read, Faber reveals bits and pieces that make you wonder what is wrong, why the main character is experiencing back pain, why she looks odd, why she is stalking large, well-built men, and it call becomes clear about a third of the way into the book. The horror continues to unfold apace but in the interest of not ruining this book for anyone who wants to read it, I will have to discuss it in vagaries that may not show the true mastery of this book.

So I will have to do that which I hate doing the most. I will have to ask you to take my word for it. This book is cleverly written. It is full of pathos and a character who is working her way through physical pain, mental anguish, and moral dilemmas that could potentially render her life meaningless and cause her to become in her own mind the worst sort of monster. It is literary fiction, but at the same time, it is extreme horror. There are graphic descriptions of cruelty in this book that are fucking horrible. This is a novel that will give you no comfort, none at all, save for one scene where Isserley, the main character, manages to prevent a dog from starving to death.

The book begins with Isserley, driving along the highway system in Scotland, stalking men who meet a very specific physical criteria. Isserley is in considerable physical discomfort as she flashes her large breasts in an attempt to distract her prey, but until the plot reveals itself you don’t ever really know why it is that the mental picture Faber paints of Isserley seems so imbued with wrongness. Isserley’s shabby little car has been outfitted with a switch that deploys a needle full of knock-out drugs through the car seat where her hitchhiker pick-ups sit and once unconscious, she takes them to a farm where they meet a fate that is later explained in deep, horrific detail. If I discuss much more than this, or even convey my favorite passages, I will spoil this book and it is killing me not being able to wallow in this book to the degree I would prefer.

But I can safely say that if you like books with deep moral dilemmas, you will like this book. If you like books with explicit violence, you will like this book. If you like horror/science fiction crossovers, you will like this book. If you prefer books with excellent characterization and find understanding the heart of darkness compelling reading, you will want to read this book.

The horror is not as extreme as “extreme horror” and it is not a mystery though the plot unfolds to reveal hidden truths. This is not straightforward horror and it is not straightforward science fiction. And for people who like character-driven books, the extraordinary plot in this book may distract. But despite all the things this book can be said definitively not to be, the hybrid that remains is a creepy, disturbing, gut-wrenching, thought-provoking book. I recommend it highly.

Author: Mark Z. Danielewski

Type of Book: Fiction, horror, ergodic literature

Why I Consider This Book Odd: Well, because it is ergodic literature. Full stop.

Availability: You can get a copy here:

Comments: I’ve been away for a while, fellow odd bookers. I sometimes get hung up on a review or discussion and because I am not-quite-right, I cannot move on until I have addressed the issue. I think the problem is that in many ways discussing House of Leaves is not unlike discussing Finnegans Wake. There is an arrogance and hubris involved in thinking you can really get a handle on the entirety of either book. I’ve flirted with the House of Leaves before, but not until recently did I read the entire thing, from beginning to end in one go. By the time it was over my book was in tatters (and I was paranoid enough at the time that I wondered if the book construction was meant to echo the house’s obliteration), I had book fatigue and I barely remembered why I loved it so much in the first place. I left it, didn’t think about it, read some lighter fare and gradually let myself like the book again. Hence trying to review it and sensing that perhaps I understand it but wondering if I am full of shit.

This book. Oh dear lord. I have a wretched habit of bending the page when I find a passage meaningful to me. It’s a foul, filthy thing to do, and as a bibliophile, I hate myself for it, but I was never an underlining or highlighting sort of gal. The hell of it is, I went back to the dog-earred pages and read and read and half the time I had no idea what it was that grabbed me the first time. I comfort myself in my wasted effort that the book was in miserable condition by the time I was through – spine destroyed, pages loose, the front end page fallen out completely. I have no idea what I loved when I was reading it so it stands to reason that this is going to be less a review than a discussion of why I like this book and if it is messy and incoherent, it won’t be the first time and it won’t be the last. All I can say is that when a book is half footnotes, I don’t think it is a cop out to quote chunks of text that speak to me or explain my points.

In this discussion, I need to emphasize two things: 1) In my opinion, Johnny Truant’s story is the reason to read this book and it may seem weak not to address all the text concerning The Navidson Record. But it’s my party, and to be frank, all the details are the trees and Johnny is the forest and I think to analyze all of the endless references and throwaways that Danielewski uses in this book, you miss the humanity of it; and 2) I refuse to change my text color when I use the word “house” or refer to anything having to do with the Minotaur. Just not gonna do it. It seems forced, affected and precious when anyone other than Danielewski does it.

So, with that out of the way, a plot synopsis: An old, blind man by the name of Zampanò dies and in his apartment, Johnny Truant finds an in depth analysis of a documentary film called The Navidson Record. The book recounts Zampanò’s analysis of the film, interspersed with numerous foot notes from Zampanò, Truant and an editor. There is an unnerving catch, however: The film does not exist. Zampanò’s in depth analysis, including copious research, is of a film that does not exist and the resources he quotes do not exist. The analysis becomes so entrenched at times that the reader wonders if the real catch of the book is the “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” minutia that often goes into academic research. The level of introspection given by fictional research into every element of this fictional movie gives the book so much self-referential claustrophobia that the reader finds herself going mad as she reads it, which, of course, is the entire point.

The written analysis of The Navidson Record tells the story of a family that moves into a house in Virginia. The house is seemingly sentient and able to change itself on the inside without affecting the outside measurements of the house. It creepily rearranges itself internally, becoming larger than the outside proportions, finally creating a hallway that leads into a maze. A search party is sent into the maze with disastrous and appalling results, but at the end of the failed missions, the house collapsing then righting itself, The Navidson Record is a love story, wherein an icy and adulterous model, Karen, finds herself fighting to save her relationship with Will Navidson. Yes, I think it is a love story. I realize just about everyone who has read this book may disagree with my assessment, but the enduring themes of this book are, in fact, love. Maternal love fighting through mental illness, self-love fighting through emotional collapse, and romantic love enduring the unthinkable and impossible.

But for me, as I say above, the reason to read this book is to know the tale of Johnny Truant. Johnny tells the story of his life in footnotes to The Navidson Record, letters from his mother from the Whalestoe Institute, a home for the mentally ill, and a diary he kept during and after his immersion into The Navidson Record. Johnny is a drug abuser, and as the son of a mentally ill woman who died institutionalized, it is hard to say what causes Johnny to drift, then dive headfirst, into mental issues of his own, but Johnny is the heart of this book, the love story of Will and Karen and the peril they live through notwithstanding. Johnny’s story of his life, as he reveals it piecemeal, in a manner that makes it hard to know him if you skip a word, is the reason why I continued reading when I felt I just couldn’t take another damn five-page footnote.

If you want a clear outline of this book, there are numerous places online to find such things. You will not find a clear outline here. All you will find is why I love Johnny Truant and how, using one of the most non-linear methods of storytelling ever, Danielewski created a memorable, sympathetic, complex character. A character you almost miss out on in all the analysis this book provokes. Yes, the references to Jonah in the whale in reference to Navidson in the maze juxtaposed with the fact that Truant’s mother died in the Whalestoe are interesting. Trying to piece together all the names in this book, like the weird link between Zampanò and Truant, revealed in the cipher code Truant’s mother creates to send him letters in the midst of her paranoia, can derail you as Johnny’s life unfolds. All those maddening details, little clues that lead nowhere but away from where you need to go.

Johnny is one of the most unreliable narrators ever, and owns his unreliability, admitting that he changed the text at times to allow him to put in a related footnote. But he also doesn’t do much editing, even when Zampanò makes mistakes.

Zampanò himself probably would of insisted on corrections and edits, he was his own harshest critic, but I’ve come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul.

There is no mistaking why this statement, with “of” instead of have (a chronic error in his writing) and punctuation misuse, is important. Johnny, solitary himself, with only a couple of friends and alienating sexual couplings, before long will become a mass of human errors and mistakes, both of which are already manifest in his writing.

Johnny, a tattoo artist, is scarred heavily on his arms, the result of a terrible childhood accident when boiling oil scalded him. Johnny shows, early as a child, how he will handle all the trauma that comes his way.

It’s kinda funny, but despite my current professional occupation, I don’t have any tattoos. Just the scars, the biggest ones of course being the ones you know about, this strange seething melt running from the inside of both elbows all the way up to the end of both wrists, where–I might as well tell you–a sizzling skillet of corn oil unloaded its lasting wrath on my efforts to keep it from the kitchen floor. “You tried to catch it all,” my mother had often said of that afternoon when I was only four.

Johnny will reach out to all the damage that comes his way, even if he doesn’t tell the entire truth about it. For example he tells people that his scars on his arms came from an incident with a Japanese Martial Arts Cult.

Johnny crafts lies into a manageable veil to shield him from the truth – he was damaged as a boy beyond all belief. His mother, losing her mind, tried to strangle him. His father died and he was forced into foster care where he was eventually beaten by a former Marine. His body is covered with scars, he sports a broken incisor.

…scars are much harder to read. Their complex inflections do not resemble the reductive ease any tattoo, no matter how extensive, colorful or elaborate the design. Scars are the paler pain of survival, received unwillingly and displayed in the language of injury.

That Johnny is covered in scars is both a comfort and a form of foreshadowing. All those scars show he has and probably will survive anything.

In discussing the obsession Johnny thinks overcame Zampanò, he gives a pretty good idea what is happening to him as he reads and annotates Zampanò’s manuscript:

As I strain now to see that the Navidson Record, beyond this strange filigree of imperfection, the murmer of Zampanò’s thoughts, endlessly searching, reaching, but never quite concluding, barely even pausing, a ruin of pieces, gestures and quests, a compulsion brought on by— well that’s precisely it, when I look past it all I only get an inkling of what tormented him. Though at last if the fire’s invisible, the pain’s not–mortal and guttural, torn out of him, day and night, week after week, month after month, until his throat’s stripped and he can barely speak and he rarely sleeps. He tries to escape his invention but never succeeds because for whatever reason, he is compelled, day and night, week after week, month after month, to continue building the very thing responsible for his own incarceration.

Though is that right?

I’m the one whose throat is stripped. I’m the one who hasn’t spoken in days. And if I sleep, I don’t know when anymore.

Zampanò is a blind man who created a labyrinth of words to occupy him, to feed his obsession. Johnny is the man lost in the maze. This passage also should give the reader two strong clues about Johnny. Despite being a person who uses “of” for “have,” his intellect is quite keen. More interesting, his passages can often mimic the tale he is reading, using endless comma clauses, repetition, words wandering into a maze. I am all too familiar with this disorganization of thought in the middle of a brainstorm, this need to tell the tale without stopping for metaphoric breath, struggling to be understood. Johnny is breaking down as we read his footnotes, documenting too clearly his decline.

Johnny Falls in love with a stripper he called Thumper. She is most notable for having a tattoo above her privates that boasts “The Happiest Place on Earth.” Despite his drunken, unfortunate couplings with other women, Johnny falls hard for Thumper, and while the reader initially does not see her appeal, it isn’t important. Johnny does. When his life falls apart and he decides to leave his job and apartment, he stops back by the tattoo shop where he works in order to say goodbye and to leave a gift for Thumper. He had earlier had appraised a necklace his mother had left him, worth $4200. Despite sorely needing the money, Johnny makes another choice (and the f substitutions for s come from Johnny’s reaction to an archaic English quote used earlier):

Maybe in some half-hearted attempt to tie up some loofe ends, I then dropped by The Fhop a couple of days later to say goodbye to everyone. Man, I muft look bad becaufe the woman who replaced me almoft screamed when she saw me walk through the door. Thumper wafn’t around but my boff promifed to give her the envelope I handed him.

“If I find out you didn’t give it to her,” I said with a smile full of rotting teeth. “I’m going to burn your life down.”

We both laughed but I could tell he was glad to fee me go.

I had no doubt Thumper would get my gift.

Then Johnny’s tale is no longer told in footnotes but in a journal that is appended to The Navidson Record. The journal is not always in chronological order. Johnny loses his apartment, lives in a hotel but can no longer afford it and ends up on the street, with his journal and a book by Dante. His external life has finally become a reflection of the internal. From his entry on October 27, 1998.

Wherever I walk people turn from me.

I’m unclean.

Johnny lives on the street but he is not completely down. When a troubled woman he slept with, Kyrie, sees him on the street, her unhinged, rich and violent boyfriend, known as Gdansk Man, tries to beat him up. From his entry on October 29:

…yelled something at me, for me to stop, which I did, waiting patiently for him to park the car, get out, walk over, wind up and hit me–he hit me twice–all of it experienced in slo-mo too, my eyebrow ringing with pain, my eye swelling with bruise, my nose compacting, capillaries bursting, flooding my face with dark blood.

He should have paid attention. He should have looked closely at that blood. Seen the color. Registered the different hue. Even the smell was off. He should have taken heed.

But he didn’t.

Needless to say, things do not end well for Gdansk Man. It’s hard to hurt a man as broken as Johnny, who has so little to lose, but the trivially violent among us who never have a problem kicking a man who’s down never notice when blood is bad. Also, I do not know exactly when Johnny stopped using “of” and began using “have” because I didn’t notice it until I typed out this passage. What the hell does it mean or signify? I have no idea except for the fact that perhaps when a man sinks to the bottom, his thoughts come clearer to him, even when he is in the grips of madness.

And then when you, the reader, are exhausted, the book takes a left turn down a dark road. Johnny discovers pictures he took and journal entries he made that he has no memory of, remnants of a psychotic road trip he took to find the house in Virginia. He travels to find the Navidson house, but he is clearly looking for more. Of course, as there is in all the books I have read recently, there is a dead cat. A cat with its head splattered on the pavement and another cat looking on, pensive, possibly grieving. One day I may undertake an analysis of why all the odd books I read seem to involve so many dead cats but for now, all I can say is enough. I’m currently reading 1996 by Gloria Naylor and not ten pages in there is a fucking dead cat. Enough all ready, okay. Anyway, some of the madness Los Angeleno Johnny expresses from his entry on May 1, 1998, in one of his bullet points:

Near the campus of William & Mary, surrounded by postcards thick with purple mountain majesty, and they are purple, I hyperventilate. It takes me a good half hour to recover. I feel sick, very sick. I can’t help thinking there’s a tumor eating away the lining of my stomach. It must be the size of a bowling ball. Then I realize I’ve forgotten to eat. It’s been over a day since I’ve last had any food. Maybe longer.

It is here that I realized that I love Johnny Truant because he is cut from the same crazy I am. Self-neglect leading to hypochondria. Possibly hallucinations. I get this man. The scars, the inability to sleep, the obsessive interests. Fuck, that I maintain this damned site, that I am in any way bothering to soldier through this review when the need for coherence has, in fact, delayed me from working on other reviews for weeks, points to an unhealthy, obsessive nature.

He goes on:

Everywhere I’ve gone, there’ve been hints of Zampanò’s history, by which I mean Navidson’s, without any real evidence to confirm any of it. I’ve combed through all the streets and fields from Distputanta to Five Forks to as far east as the Isle of Wight, and though I frequently feel close, to something important, in the end I come away with nothing.

As I read Johnny’s investigative notes, I found myself surging with hope that he would find the house. Then I remembered that the house in The Navidson Record even within the context of the book did not exist. Then I remembered Johnny himself knew the house did not exist, that Zampanò’s record was the fantastic musings of an incomprehensible mind. And yet he searched and I hoped he would find that which was making him mad.

Then Johnny steps into the realm of the utterly mad. He steps into the Realm of Nine. From May 4, 1998:

In Kent. Nine Years. What an ugly coincidence. Even glanced at my watch. 9. Fucking nine pm.
5+4+1+9+9+8+9 = 45 (or -9 yrs = 36)
4+5 = 9 (or 3+6 = 9)
Either way , it doesn’t matter.
I say it with a German accent:
Nine.

Math of the damned. It can only get worse and it does. Johnny finds the Whalestoe facility. The old mental hospital is abandoned, so he goes inside and finds his mother’s old room. From the entry on July 1, 1998:

Empty. And her bed in the corner. Even if the mattress was gone and the springs now resembled the rusted remains of a shipwreck half-buried in the sands of some half-forgotten shore.

Horror shouldn’t have buried me.
It didn’t.

I sat down and waited for her to find me.

She never did.

Navidson was a photographer haunted by the image he took of a dying, motherless child. Truant is a motherless child haunted by the legend of the photographer. Everything in this book can come full circle if you let it.

From the entry on the same day, Johnny finally finds the place where his childhood home used to stand, a lumberyard now in its place:

There would be no healing here.

I stood by the circular saws and clutched my belly. I had no idea where I was in relation to what had once existed. Maybe this had been my kitchen. Why not? The stainless steel restaurant sink there to side. The old stove over there. And here where I was standing was right where I’d been sitting, age four, at my mother’s feet, my arms flinging up, instinctually, maybe even joyfully, prepared to catch the sun. Catch the rain…

Supposedly I’d been laughing. So that accounts for the joy part. Supposedly she’d been laughing too. And then something made my mother jerk around, a slight mistake really but with what a consequence, her arm accidentally knocking a pan full of sizzling Mazola, while I, in what has to be one of the strangest reactions ever, opened my arms to play the bold, old catcher of it all, the pan bouncing harmlessly on the floor but the oil covering my forearms and transforming them into the Oceanus whirls.

This is not the first time the reader hears of how small Johnny opened his arms to catch the oil, laughing. Like all legends that shape our lives, it is a story he likely tells again and again because it means everything about him. How he was loved. How his mother meant no harm. How even the best memory is tinged with pain. How none of us leave childhood unscarred.

He goes on:

Please bless these arms. Which I found myself looking at again, carefully studying the eddies there, all those strange currents and textures, wondering what history all of it could tell, and in what kind of detail, completely unaware of the stupid redneck yelling in my ear, yelling above the engines and shrieking saws, wanting to know what the fuck I was doing there, why was I clutching my belly and taking off my shirt like that, “Are you listening to me, asshole? I said who in the hell do you think you are?”, didn’t I know I was standing on private property–and not even ending his tirade there, wanting to know if it was my desire to have him break me in half, as if that’s really the question my bare-chested silence was asking. Even now I can’t remember taking off my shirt, only looking down at my arms.

I remember that.

God, will there be no peace for him, a sense that he will arrive at an end of a journey with some comfort and elucidation? I heaved a sigh of relief at his next entries.

From September 2, 1998:

Seattle. Staying with an old friend. A pediatrician. My appearance frightened both him and his wife and she’s a doctor too. I’m underweight. Too many unexplained tremors and tics. He insists I stay with them for a couple of weeks.

September 20, 1998:

I’m much improved. My friends have been taking care of me full time. I exercise twice a day. They’ve got me on some pretty serious health food… Once a day I attend a counseling session at their hospital. I’m really opening up. Doc has also put me on a recently discovered drug, one bright yellow tablet in the morning, one bright yellow tablet in the evening. It’s so bright it almost seems to shine. I feel like I’m thinking much more clearly now… It also allows me to sleep.

September 27, 1998:

I’m healthy and strong. I can run two miles in under twelve minutes. I can sleep nine hours straight. I’ve forgotten my mother. I’m back on track. And yet even though I’m now on my way back to LA to start a new life–the guns in my trunk long since gone, replaced with a year’s supply of that miraculous yellow shine–when I said goodbye to my friends this morning I felt awful and soaked in sorrow… Good people. Very good people. Even as I started the car they were still asking me to stay.

September 29, 1998:

Are you fucking kidding me? Did you really think any of that was true? September 2 thru September 28? I just made that up. Right out of thin air. Wrote it in two hours. I don’t have any friends who are doctors, let alone two friends who are doctors. You must have guessed that. At least the lack of expletives should have clued you in. A sure sign that something was amiss.

And if you bought that Yellow-Tablet-Of-Shine stuff, well then you’re fucking worse off than I am.

Though here’s the sadder side of all this, I wasn’t trying to trick you. I was trying to trick myself, to believe, even for two lousy hours, that I really was lucky enough to have two such friends, and doctors too, who could help me, give me a hand, feed me tofu, make me exercise, administer a miracle drug, cure my nightmares. Not like Lude with all his pills and parties and con-talk street-smack…

Right now I’m in Los Gatos, California. Los Gatos Lodge, in fact. I managed a couple of hours of sleep until a nightmare left me on the floor, twitching like an imbecile. Sick with sweat.

Fucking Johnny. Yes, despite the fact that this journal is not presented sequentially, that I had read October 1998 first and knew Johnny was freezing and hungry in dive hotels, then homeless, then in a fight with Gdansk Man and more, I put that out of my head. I wanted him to have two friends who saved him. I wanted this to be over for him. How did I manage this feat of self-deception that occurred in only a few pages? Not sure. Perhaps it was reader’s fatigue. You sure as shit get it when you read this book. Nonetheless it was heartbreaking when it became clear that there was no deus ex machina for Johnny. Also, since this is the second time Johnny admits to making shit up, it calls into question a whole lot. Like, was he fake responding to a faked record of a non-existent film? What happened here? What, even within the context of the book, is the reader expected to believe? I realized I had to ignore the notion of any narrative truth and just soldier on.

Nevertheless, you get the sense that after he discovered his journal and the photographs from his journey, things begin to change a bit for him. He pawns his guns and makes plans to meet with Thumper, his dream woman. They both are tight on time but they talk.

I could read the signs well enough to know she wanted a kiss. She’d always been fluent in that language of affection but I could also see that over the years, years of the same grammar, she’d lost the chance to understand others. It surprised me to discover I cared enough about her to act now on that knowledge, especially considering how lonely I was. I gave her an almost paternal hug and kissed her on the cheek. Above us airplanes roared for the sky. She told me to keep in touch and I told her to take care and then as I walked away, I waved and with that bid adieu to The Happiest Place on Earth.

We then skip to August 28, 1999. Not the end of the book by a country mile but at last, I have a sense that Johnny will be okay. He jumps trains and lives as a drifter, broke often, sleeping rough. He lands in Flagstaff, Arizona with little money in his pocket but still buys himself soup. He finds a bar with no cover charge and dollar beers and settles in, buys beers for the band, spending his last dollars to do so. Then the band plays a song with the words, “I live at the end of a Five and a Half Minute Hallway,” which is a clear reference to The Navidson Record. Once they are finished playing, Johnny approaches the band and they discuss, somewhat reluctantly, their knowledge of The Navidson Record, telling Johnny they had found the annotated document online. One gives him a copy of his own manuscripts and Truant wrestles with telling them who he is but decides not to. He leaves the bar, falls asleep under a tree and sleeps well until a large dog comes to wake him.

Flagstaff appears deserted and the bar’s closed and the band’s gone, but I can hear a train rattling off in the distance. It will be here soon, homeless climbing off for a meal, coffee for a dime, soup for three quarters and I have some change left. Something warm sounds good, something hot. But I don’t need to leave yet. Not yet. There’s time now. Plenty of time. And somehow I know it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be alright. It’s going to be alright.

Johnny’s quest has led him somewhere, to a place where others read his words and understand him. People even wonder now where he is, know about him. He is a person in the minds of other people, making him real, just as his mother’s words remembered by him keep her real.

Have you ever heard the song Jezebel by Acid Bath? There’s a line that goes, “She screams bloody murder as they chop off her fingers, ‘So this is how it feels to die. But it’s okay. Everything’s okay.’” Then Dax Riggs murmurs, “It’s okay, it’s okay” and you feel calm after listening to the jarring song because in the context of the extreme violence and dissolution, everything is okay. The worst has happened. Just bleeding and extreme pain, but everything’s okay. That is how the revelation that Johnny is going the be “alright” resonated with me. He isn’t technically okay. He’s homeless, he’s broke, but within the context of his life, he’s just fine. And that’s all I can ask from Johnny, I think. No greater revelation other than that he made it out the other side.

It was tempting to attempt to discuss the letters Johnny received from his mother while she was at Whalestoe, because they are in themselves a fascinating part of the book, in my mind outshining all of The Navidson Record in their comment on the human condition. Instead of turn this already too long discussion into a way-too long discussion, I will one day read Whalestoe Letters, Danielewski’s book that compiles all of the letters.

God, I don’t plan to reread this any time soon. Organizing this discussion has been a nightmare, taking me a couple of weeks to crank out because it was hard to organize it, which happens when you discuss ergodic literature. But I genuinely think that this is a book that every reader, even those not enthralled by odd books, should read. Everyone finds something in it that captures them, that niggles at their mind, that does not let go. For me it was Johnny. For you it may be something else, some small thing that I never caught and no one else did, which is not impossible despite the level of analysis that many have put into this monster. Read it.