THE NEVER-OPEN DESERT DINER

Name: THE NEVER-OPEN DESERT DINER
Author: James Anderson
ISBN: 978-1-101-90652-1

by James Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 22, 2016

Anderson dedicates his book in memory of such masters of hard-boiled noir as Ross Macdonald, Robert B. Parker, and James...

bookshelf

The great tradition of hard-boiled crime novels finds new and promising territory in the Utah desert.

Carrying its own cult following after having been published independently last year, this debut novel is a stirring, atmospheric, and even mildly surreal variation on the “mean streets” detective fiction of Raymond Chandler; only it’s not “mean streets” here so much as a stretch of desolate highway—State Road 117—in northern Utah. The loners, drifters, dreamers, ranchers, and survivors who live along this road get almost all their supplies from Ben Jones, a strapping, half-Indian, half-Jewish independent trucker whose sense of humor is as dry and (almost) as bleak as the surrounding landscape. One day, Ben breaks from his daily routine long enough to notice the scattered remains of a half-built housing development whose only completed building “stuck out like a sturdy tooth on an empty gum.” The first time he passes by, he suspects a woman’s squatting there but can’t quite make her out beyond remembering an “oddly striking” face; the second time, he gets a much better look: the same woman, naked, sitting on the porch, playing a cello without strings; the third time, as you might have expected, she’s pointing a gun at him. And we’re off and running on a witty, rollicking, and somewhat bent mystery/romance whose mostly supporting cast includes an itinerant preacher who spends his life lugging a large wooden cross up and down the highway, a pregnant-and-sassy Wal-Mart clerk taking economics college courses, a reality TV producer whose offer to make Ben a star may not be all it’s cracked up to be, and, most important of all, the widowed septuagenarian owner/operator of the novel’s eponymous diner, an empty but well-maintained relic of better days, much like its volatile, two-fisted proprietor whose coarse belligerence cloaks many secrets, at least one of which is literally too awful to behold.

Anderson dedicates his book in memory of such masters of hard-boiled noir as Ross Macdonald, Robert B. Parker, and James Crumley, and it’s the latter’s gift for poetic description, antic violence, and roadside gothic that resounds most in what one hopes will be the beginning of a beautiful series.

Pub Date: March 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-101-90652-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LULLABY ROAD
by James Anderson

- BOOK REVIEW
I CAN SEE IN THE DARK
by Karin Fossum ; translated by James Anderson

- BOOK REVIEW
EVA'S EYE
by Karin Fossum ; translated by James Anderson

bookshelf

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

bookshelf

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.