THE POWER OF THE DOG by Don Winslow

I've owned this book for years but kept putting it off until now. I got about 50 pages in and knew that I should have gotten around to this earlier and was peeved at myself for wasting time this year on more disappointing reads. This is the type of book that doesn't come around too often. A book that finds the perfect balance between it's attention to detail and research, it's sensitivity to character, and it's great structure, all wrapped up in passionate prose.

Imagine a mix of Traffic, Sicario, and Narcos, with elements of The Godfather and then multiply it by 3, then you'll get a sense of what to expect from The Power of the Dog, which details an epic battle during America's unwinnable War on Drugs, a 30-year battle between DEA agent Art Keller and Mexican cartel lord Adán Barrera, who were once good buddies. We witness the rise of both men within their respective ranks, and as the feud strengthens, they struggle to stay one step ahead of the other, dragging others into the trenches with them, into a war that neither side can truly win.

This was one of the longest books I read this year, but it felt like I sped through reading it. It was endlessly engaging and one of the most compulsively readable books for me this year. Every character was fascinating and I found myself rooting for all of them, especially Art Keller and his unwavering drive to bring down the Barreras, and Sean Callan, a young New Yorker whose fateful actions to protect his buddy leads him into a life of violence where he faces a constant struggle to keep his morals. And it's all very tragic, because all of this violence and death is part of a silly "War" on Drugs where the priorities and the objectives have been skewed big time, a war that should've ended a long time ago.

You know those addictive tv shows that you can't help but binge-watch on Netflix, Prime, or HBONow all weekend? Well, here's one in book form. And guess what? There's a sequel.

GRADE: A

THE SUMMER THAT MELTED EVERYTHING by Tiffany McDaniel

In this debut novel, a surly, crazy old man named Fielding reflects on an eventful summer in 1984 during his childhood in rural Ohio. It was the summer that brought one of the biggest heat waves in history. The summer when Fielding's family invited the devil into their home.  It's a cool concept and a great idea for a coming of age story.

The heat was making people behave on their most terrible side. Maybe it even gave them the confidence to act foolishly, rashly, without real reason. Hands in such heat bloom to fists. Fists are the flora of the mad season.

Many positive reviews are mentioning their surprise that this is a first time novelist. Now I'm not an expert or anything but there were many times when I recognized things that felt like the symptoms of a first novel, and many of these things got in the way of the story really reaching it's full potential. Besides the overbearing nostalgia that gets distracting, the book is also pretty long-winded. McDaniel is clearly a great word slinger, but I'm attracted to writing that finds a better balance between poetry and efficiency, and this could've been half the length and would've been even more effective. At first, I was enamored by the prose, but eventually I was constantly tempted to skim entire passages, especially the seemingly endless stories and fables that the character Sal would start spewing, bringing the pace to a screeching halt. It was as if McDaniel tried to fit as many ideas as she could into the book. I think many readers will find a lot to like in this book, and I think that McDaniel has great promise, but next time she simply needs to just get out of the way a little and let that great story fly.

GRADE: C-

FOUR DAYS by Iain Ryan

This rugged, hard-boiled noir is a solid debut for Australian author Iain Ryan. It's a short, moody crime novel about a broken and self-destructive Brisbane detective with one foot forcefully out the door to retirement, who decides to go all the way out on his own terms and not only solve a haunting murder case, but also confront his demons and the corruption that he's been a part of for years.

It's a gloomy, fatalist story and I really enjoyed Ryan's use of language to illuminate it's flawed hero in Jim Harris. I only wish that less time was spent on the murder mystery element and more time on Jim himself, his backstory, and his struggle for redemption. Because when Ryan does focus on Jim's internal, personal struggle, that's when the book really shines!

The late night phone calls kept coming.
Harris knew this was it this time. It didn't matter who was on the other line or what the world thought of him. He was home now and all the ghosts were interconnected. They all knew where to find him. They were all calling. And they all had the same body.
He waited.
And she eventually came.

GRADE: B-

OFFLINE by Kealan Patrick Burke

The concept here is perfect for a short format, as it's a standalone tale that can't really be expanded on, but feels like it's tailor-made for the short form like this quick story. Yes, it's a gimmick, but who cares, it's a great one. The whole thing is told in a series of a Facebook conversation between a high school girl and her admirer that's been transcribed into official evidence by the police. It's an enjoyable read, the same way I felt about the unexpectedly entertaining Skype horror movie Unfriended.

It's an epistolary story for the millennial age!

GRADE: B

NOWHERE by Roger Smith

A recurring theme in Roger Smith's work is the residue of Apartheid and how the South African people are still affected by those ghosts of the past. That theme is something that you can't avoid when you write in the unflinching way that Smith does about race and class conflict in modern South Africa. The ghosts of Apartheid are always lurking in the background of all of his books, but in this one, his latest, they are brought front and center.

It follows two separate investigations that ultimately connect and collide: in the first, a cop on the outs travels to Nêrens ("nowhere" in Afrikaans) to arrest a racist, white-power Afrikaaner who's created a white-only outpost in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, and in the second, after the South African President murders his #1 wife with a tribal spear, a decorated, retired cop is blackmailed into conducting a sham-investigation to cover up the murder. These two stories come together in violence and reckoning, in grand Roger Smith fashion.

The characters here are some of his best, including a fascinating and complex "villain" in the fixer Steve Bungu, who is also one of my favorite characters I've read about this year. Former cop Joe Louw is also great, a man tortured by the fact that his unavoidable past has put him in a position where he has to go against his usually unwavering ethics.

The book is also a pleasure to read from a story standpoint as I loved the way Smith meticulously laid all of the groundwork and then revealed layer after layer as the story went on until I realized that there was much more to all of it than I expected, a tale of conspiracy and revenge, of a coming to terms with past legacy in a similar way to Brian Panowich's Bull Mountain from last year.

Smith is such a great storyteller that too many readers are missing out on.

GRADE: A-

RIDGERUNNER by Rusty Barnes

All things become clearer in sunlight.

Ridgerunner is a piece of country grit from 280 Steps, in which a part-time wildlife conservation deputy in rural Pennsylvania gets embroiled in a bullet-ridden feud with the Pittmans, the local family of outlaws. Initially I was excited with the prospect of having our hero, Matt Rider, stumble through the book with gunshot wounds and a broken ankle in a cast. I thought this would add an extra layer to the action and the tension that I was pumped to read about. But this plot element either backfired or wasn't used to it's potential because Matt spent a lot of the novel just waiting around. That was my biggest problem with this one: there is almost no urgency. There are serious threats to Matt's family by villains who are largely unseen and can pop up at anytime, but yet Matt somehow finds time to go shopping and sit on the couch. He doesn't even really seem all that pressed about the situation he's in. There are many parts in this book where narrative urgency comes to a total halt and I felt no sense of real danger through most of it.

I wanted blood, and I wanted it now, without my uniform and all the bullshit that went with it.

I also loved the idea of keeping the villains fairly mysterious in order to build their reputation along with the reader's anticipation. But then this build-up didn't pay-off at all and it turns out that the Pittmans are lightweights in a big way, with a climactic shoot-out that's instantly forgettable.  I would normally call the end of this novel "anti-climactic," but then again, it's not really a letdown because nothing really happened in rest of the book either.

GRADE: D

JAMES SALLIS' DRIVE: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL

This graphic adaptation of James Sallis's great novella seems to take its cue in part from the Nicolas Winding Refn movie adaptation, with its neon-infused, 80's nostalgia vibe. One of the first things I noticed in the graphic novel was the color, the magenta and green tones really evoked a similar mood to the movie.



The book, which collects the four comic issues of Drive, pares Sallis's book down to the bare essentials, which isn't always a good thing, especially because a Sallis book is most likely already just bare essentials. Although it keeps the ultra-hard-boiled vibe and some of Sallis's best lines, it loses much of the thoughtfulness and idiosyncrasies that are some of the trademarks of a Sallis book. Also, the abbreviated comic book structure causes it all to seem like a rush, skimming over important elements, like Irina and Benicio, and the Driver's past. This adaptation isn't bad, just not very memorable.

GRADE: C+

SWIFT TO CHASE: STORIES by Laird Barron

In one of the most ambitious books I've read all year, author Laird Barron presents us with a collection of stories that not only play with the mixing of pulp genres like hard-boiled noir, slasher thriller, and cosmic horror, but also build a whole horror mythology as they move along, compiling to become a mosaic novel in which everything is connected. All of the stories revolve around various people that live in a small, cursed Alaskan town, and the horrors that befall them.

"There's a hole no man can fill," says the count. "No amount of love or hate or heat poured into the pit. No amount of light. I am the voice of the abyss."

This is my introduction to Laird Barron and he truly has a voice of his own. I was really impressed with his writing; on a sentence level, it might be some of the best prose I've read all year. Every story has a palpable atmosphere and there are parts of these stories that are truly creepy and stuck with me at night. But I do feel that each story meandered and took too long to get to its payoff. Although I loved the writing, I do feel that the tales were a little long-winded and overstuffed. Because this book reportedly builds on other Barron stories, I wonder if I would've enjoyed this more if I read some of his other work first. There are many things about this book I still don't fully understand, but I was always intrigued, similar to the way I felt after seeing David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. Although it's sometimes confusing and frustrating, it's a unique piece of work and definitely going on my re-read list again so I can appreciate and explore it more.

GRADE: B-

ODD MAN OUT by James Newman

James Newman's new novella shares similar themes to his acclaimed novel Animosity, themes like mob mentality, the nature of hate, and the way that hate is contagious. Eight teenage boys are spending a summer at the brand new Black Mountain Camp for Boys, kayaking, swimming, and playing baseball. But when a secret of one of the boys is revealed and the campers are left without much responsible supervision, normal teasing and shit-talking turns into something much more horrifying.

I didn't fully buy into the descent to hardcore violence that happened in Animosity, but I didn't have that problem here, partially because it involved unsupervised high school boys, with whom anything is possible. Newman doesn't pussy-foot around the subject of bigotry and the ugliness in the way kids treat each other and it was sometimes difficult to read. With me, it felt like Newman was preaching to the choir, but there are many people out there that need to read this book and understand the depths to where intolerance can take you. I'll even go as far to say that this probably should be assigned reading in some high school classes. A strong look at the dark side of human nature.

GRADE: B+

SUNBLIND by Michael McBride

There are tried-and-true, heavily-used conventions in horror fiction, elements like darkness and the cold and snow. They've become things that we equate with atmospheric creepiness, trembling, and goosebumps. But here, Michael McBride skillfully uses bright sunlight and intense heat to instill more terror than most of the horror fiction I've read. Here, it's all about sunburn blisters, and not being able to blink because your eyelids are too dry,
The novel opens with an ace Border Patrol agent discovering the body of a Mexican woman in the middle of the Sonoran desert, a woman that's carved a cryptic message onto her chest. Along with a couple of his fellow agents, he sets out into the desert night to find out what happened to her and her fellow companions trying to cross the border. In a parallel story, the book follows what happened to the travelers from the woman's point of view and we discover the true horror of what happened.

It's a totally ingenious concept, that not only tackles the topical subject of illegal immigration but shows the absolute horror of walking across the hot desert with limited resources. Intense heat from which there's no escape or relief, dehydration to the point where you can't even sweat or cry anymore, snakes, hunger, the cartels and their narcos, and the truth about what you would really be willing to do if you were thirsty enough; just these elements alone and the way that McBride uses them are enough to make a pretty effective scary book. But as if that wasn't enough already, he takes it a step further and ups the ante considerably by introducing a terrifying creature that hunts the group in the middle of all this as they try to make their way through the desert.

The day was not even half over and already I was no longer praying for the sun to set, but for my death, when it came, to be swift and merciful. 

I also really loved the novel's structure, cutting back and forth between the border agents' nighttime search and the first-hand account of what happened. The parallel stories work in tandem, each informing the other and raising the tension in each section even more. And McBride doesn't pussy out and hold back on the horror. There were many times here that my skin crawled and my mouth dropped open because I couldn't believe that this was all happening! And McBride does a great job with detailing the characters as well, especially our main heroine, but also all of the supporting cast as well, even though most of them remain nameless. I noticed a few editing mistakes, but it was a great read for October, one of the best written horror novels I've come across, and definitely the best book I've read from DarkFuse.

Wow.

It was the smell of death, a death for which I had far too recently prayed, but one I now knew I wanted no part of, an abstraction made far too real. I refused to die in this place. Not down here where my soul would forever remain outside of the reach of God, destined to wander the darkness, holding the hand of La Santa Muerte.

GRADE: A