Other Fiction


The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murakami

Toru Okada has quit his job. A man with no ambition and a faltering marriage, he's content to take a breather from his career, spending his time cooking and listening to music. Then his cat goes missing. What follows is a rather surreal descent into a world of prostitute psychics, demonic politicians, and war stories. Then things get really weird.

Review:

At its core, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a story of memory, loss, human relationships, and the horrors of war. Told at various points through flashbacks, letters, newspaper clippings, dreams, and plain old narration, it's quite the expansive tale. Frankly, a lesser author could not have pulled this off. The plot is fractured and casually slips off onto tangents. But that's okay. Despite some startling changes in setting, Murakami never loses sight of the overall feel of the story. Besides, the plot actually takes a backseat to the many fascinating characters who populate it.
If you hadn't guessed, Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author. Even though this book was not originally written in English the translation is still excellent reading, and the unique style of the author shines through. I thought The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was an excellent book. A very strange book, but a very good one all the same.



Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami

(From the back cover) “Kafka on the Shore is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home—either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister—and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder…”

Review:

Even more surreal than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore is another excellent effort by Murakami, where he once again displays his talent for characterization. The people Kafka encounters will stick in your mind long after you put down the novel. The real stars of the story are Nakata and the truck driver Hoshino, who get fully one half of the book. Their antics alone would be enough to fill the novel, and it is a shame that we only get to see them every other chapter. The titular Kafka is a rather dull character in comparison. Sadly, this novel is not quite up to par with the Chronicle. This time, Murakami’s rather fractured way of storytelling seems to hinder the plot rather than help it along, but even then, his talent is enough to make Kafka on the Shore a unique experience all its own.


House of Leaves
by Mark Z. Danielewski

(From the back cover) "Johnny Truant, a wild and troubled sometime employee in a LA tattoo parlour, finds a notebook kept by Zampano, a reclusive old man found dead in a cluttered apartment. Herein is the heavily annotated story of the Navidson Report. Will Navidson, a photojournalist, and his family move into a new house. What happens next is recorded on videotapes and in interviews. Now the Navidsons are household names. Zampano, writing on loose sheets, stained napkins, crammed notebooks, has compiled what must be the definitive work on the events on Ash Tree Lane. But Johnny Truant has never heard of the Navidson Record. Nor has anyone else he knows. And the more he reads about Will Navidson's house, the more frightened he becomes. Paranoia besets him. The worst part is that he can't just dismiss the notebook as the ramblings of a crazy old man."

Review:

A book about a book about a documentary that never existed, House of Leaves is a monstrous, labyrinthine mass of text. With jumbles of print that look like a word processer's vomit and pages upon pages of footnotes from fictional editors, this book is not for the literary purist or the faint of heart.
House of Leaves is in a genre all its own, satirizing literary criticism as tattoo-parlor-assistant-turned-editor Johnny Truant enthusiastically compiles footnotes by the deceased Zampano. Unfortunately, Truant finds himself suffering a nervous breakdown of sorts as he battles his issues with drugs, sex, and an enigmatic evil force. Highly recommended to fans of experimental literature.



Satan Burger
by Carlton Mellick III

(From the back cover) “Absurd philosophies, dark surrealism, and the end of the human race…
God hates you. All of you. He closed the gates of Heaven and wants you to rot on Earth forever. Not only that, he is repossessing your souls and feeding them to a large vagina-like machine called the Walm- an interdimensional doorway that brings His New Children into the world. He loves these new children, but He doesn’t love you. They are more interesting than you. They are beautiful, psychotic, magical, sex-crazed, and deadly. They are turning your cities into apocalyptic chaos, and there’s nothing you can do about it…
Featuring: a narrator who sees his body from a third-person perspective, a man whose flesh is dead but his body parts are alive and running amok, an overweight messiah, the personal life of the Grim Reaper, lots of classy sex and violence, and a motley group of squatter punks that team up with the devil to find their place in a world that doesn’t want them anymore.”

Review:

Don’t start reading this book with any sort of expectations. The author’s work has been described as dark, surreal, sacrilegious, twisted and intelligent, and Satan Burger seems to fit this description quite nicely. I recommend you not try to take it too seriously; otherwise you won’t have any fun. Note the cover- that image perfectly sets the tone of the book.
Satan Burger is a short book, a little over 200 pages and a fast read. However, the world it portrays is such a bizarre, vivid place, that it is easy to get caught up in the hyperkinetic and rather disturbing plot. Yes, there is sex, blood, and gore in this story. The writing style is appropriately bizarre, but makes an odd sort of sense. The narrator refuses to use proper grammar, finding himself in a world of such chaos and insanity that it is often necessary to make up his own words and sentence structures. It feels like an experimental story, and there are some flaws in the author’s attempt to describe his strange world. But if you like strange stories, don't get easily offended, and/or have an open mind, I highly recommend you give Satan Burger a try. You’ll hopefully find it entertaining, and at the very least, different.



The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists
by Gideon Defoe

(From the back cover) “Not since Moby-Dick… No, not since Treasure Island… Actually, not since Jonah and the Whale has there been a sea saga to rival The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, featuring the greatest seafaring hero of all time, the immortal Pirate Captain, who, although he lives for months at a time at sea, somehow manages to keep his beard silky and in good condition.
Worried that his pirates are growing bored with a life of winking at pretty native ladies and trying to stick enough jellyfish together to make a bouncy castle, the Pirate Captain decides it’s high time to spearhead an adventure.
While looking for some major pirate booty, he mistakenly attacks the young Charles Darwin’s Beagle and then leads his ragtag crew from the exotic Galapagos Islands to the fog-filled streets of Victorian London. There they encounter grisly murder, vanishing ladies, radioactive elephants, and the Holy Ghost itself. And that’s not even the half of it.

Review:

Tongue-in-cheek humor at its finest. Despite the childish precept behind this book, there’s a startling amount of sophisticated humor along with the silliness. Enjoy jokes at the expense of John Merrick, footnotes about The Bishop of Oxford, and fascinating factoids about bananas. Not to mention the sea shanties, scurvy, and ham. Stay on the lookout for more books from The Pirates! series.



Neverwhere
by Neil Gaiman

(From the back cover) “Richard Mayhew is a plain man with a good heart—and an ordinary life that is changed forever on a day he stops to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk. From that moment forward he is propelled into a world he never dreamed existed—a dark subculture flourishing in abandoned subway stations and sewer tunnels below the city—a world far stranger and more dangerous than the only one he has ever known…”

Review:

I have long considered Gaiman’s stories “fantasy for those who don’t like fantasy.” This isn’t an entirely fair description—fans of the fantasy genre are sure to appreciate his work—but there is a certain grittiness that makes Neverwhere feel real and fantastical at the same time, placing it firmly outside a genre defined by dragons, trolls, and hobbits. Delivering both wit and suspense, Gaiman has a keen sense of storytelling, and he knows how to create a vivid world without letting on too much about it. The people who populate the "London Below" are a colorful and engaging bunch, and there was never a portion of the book that I thought of as "dull."



The Mist
by Stephen King

The morning after a violent thunderstorm, a thick unnatural mist rapidly spreads across the small town of Bridgton, Maine, reducing visibility to near-zero. Whoever goes out into the mist doesn't come back. Artist David Drayton finds himself, his son, and his neighbor trapped with other members of the community in the town supermarket. As the isolated group begins to realize the full extent of horrors hiding in the mist, they find themselves under siege not only by the things waiting outside, but by the threat of psychological breakdown as the community fractures and they begin to turn on each other...

Review:

Clocking in at roughly 130 pages, The Mist may be short, but it stands out as one of King's finest horror efforts. The fear comes not just from what is seen, but from the possibilities of the unknown hiding outside. Furthermore, the novella does far more than simply rely on its horror aspects. Like any good Stephen King story, The Mist is an excellent work of suspense and human drama as the people of the town crack under the pressure of the unfathomable. It is a genuinely scary story. Never published individually, The Mist can be found in the Stephen King compilation Skeleton Crew.



Roadside Picnic
by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Twenty years ago, a number of artifacts of incomprehensibly advanced technology appeared in six sites across the earth. The places where such artifacts were left behind are areas of great danger, known as "Zones." These areas, where the physics of matter are warped in mysterious and dangerous ways, have been walled off and regulated by the governments of the world. A frontier culture emerged along the margins of these Zones, including people who risk their lives in illegal expeditions to recover these artifacts, which do not obey known physical laws. Red Schuhart is one of these “stalkers,” a veteran scavenger and black market dealer of the bizarre technological wonders. Living a criminal/outsider’s life in city near one of the Zones, Red is trying to support his family any way he can…

Review:

Good science fiction is good fiction. Originally written in Russian in 1971, Roadside Picnic remains very good fiction. Despite its age, the book reads like something modern. This is partially thanks to the authors’ style—by paring it down to the bare essentials, there’s nary a word out of place, putting this novella at a slim 150 pages or so. The story never loses sight of its thematic elements, while the atmosphere is consistently bleak and slightly creepy. The only thing that bothered me was a sudden switch from first person to third person point of view early on in the book. I have no idea why the authors chose to do that.
Red, his family, and his friends are fascinating and very human, and it’s great to see a character like Red who is so nicely developed over the course of the story. The Zone itself is a bizarre and sinister place, and the chapters spent there are always interesting. An unwary visitor could find himself crushed, burned, melted, electrocuted, or torn apart in any number of ways. What made this work so refreshing to read, at least for me, was that there is no attempt to explain the impossible anomalies of the Zone through science. Some characters have dedicated their lives to deciphering the phenomena, and yet they haven’t been able to figure out a single thing. The character Red is in no position to speculate; he just knows how to avoid getting killed. The Zone is a place that defies logic, and I was glad that the authors kept it that way. If you’re interested, this book is available for online reading here or for free download here.



The Mists of Avalon
by Marion Zimmer Bradley

(From bookrags.com) "The Mists of Avalon is an epic tale of love, loyalty, betrayal, kingship, and magic. It takes place over several decades and two generations of families. It tells the fabled tale of Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table. Taking a different view from the legend, it is told from the perspective of the women of Avalon. These powerful women use their magic and wiles to fulfill the will of the Goddess and place a king on the throne of Britain, as well as later take him down from it."

Review: Reviews for this book have proven to be at such extremes that multiple viewpoints are welcomed.

Point of View #1:

Words cannot describe how much I hate this book. An epic tale of empowered women, yes, but also an incredibly boring slog through ridiculous plot twists and pathetic villains. So what if it has a noble message of gender equality and divine feminine nature; that doesn't change the inherent boringness and weak plotting. Of course, this is just my opinion; some people loved those aspects of the book. But really, there was so much for me to hate. Gwenhwyfar has pitiful motivations for wanting to destroy an entire way of life and, despite the authors best efforts, remained a wholly unsympathetic character. I wanted to reach into the pages and kill her myself, so bored was I of her innecessant whining and posing as a victim. By the end of the book, I neither understood the half-baked motivations of most of the villains, nor did I even care. The protagonists were just as bad, or perhaps slightly less irritating. What some people claim to be "deep characterization" struck me as "soap opera antics." Very few characters felt "real." Perhaps the hypocritical nature of many characters was supposed to make them seem more "human," but it simply made me dislike them more and understand them less. When a book relies on characterization this much, and fails so hard, the end result can't be good. All in all, this book was a tremendous waste of my time. It did not give me a new perspective on life other than that I now think the books sucks. Every time I thought things were taking a turn for the better, just when I thought I might start liking some part of it, the book got worse. So much worse. The only character I took a liking to was executed and stuffed into a tree. Go figure. Not even the tentacle-sex scene was worth it.



Back to Home