The subtitle of Dirty Snow should have been, Take That Camus! While not a specific counter-punch to Camus’ L’Étranger, Simenon’s dark story of a murderer with no regrets shares a similar bent, neither pulling any punches with the reader. Maybe that is why the book, along with Simenon’s The Widow, which was published in the 40s as well, is so often compared to Camus first masterwork. While L’Étranger is infused with Camus’ humanistic worldview and the influences of his Algerian upbringing, Dirty Snow one-ups the score with Simenon’s cold remove and stripping of existential underpinnings. There is no philosophy to be had here — the world is an ugly place and that’s the short of it.

To call Dirty Snow bleak would be an understatement. It makes Simenon’s own The Man Who Watched Trains Go By read like a Sophie Kinsella novel. You leave this book covered in a disgusting film of human degradation (and yet somehow, all credit to Simenon, eagerly along for the ride). This is a testament to Simenon’s skill at trapping us in the head of man we detest, unable to look away as he drags us through one vile act to the next. There is no letup. We are never given leave of his gaze, never allowed a moment to gasp for clean air. And when the tables are finally turned on this horrible creature, we see the downfall through the antagonist’s eyes, causing our perception of him to change.

Set in an unnamed country occupied by an unnamed aggressor post an unspecific war, the book introduces us to one Frank Friedmaier, a young man who would like nothing more than to make his mark by murdering one of his fellow human beings. And down the toilet of human emotions we go. Frank is in some ways the definitive Simenon antagonist and we’re stuck with him, because there is no protagonist for readers to cheer on. A thug and a petty thief, he is cold, self-centered, childish, and hell-bent on being the black hole in the lives of anyone he comes into contact with. From the moment in the opening chapter where he jams a blade into an officer from the occupying forces, there is no turning back. Having lost his “virginity,” Frank is unleashed. His ego inflates, leading to more emotionless acts of cruelty that he inflicts on anyone in his path.

Simenon’ genius — and what ultimately sets Dirty Snow above L’Étranger in my eyes — comes in the final third of the novel. It was only a matter of time before Frank butted heads with the occupying forces. And here we discover who the true bad guys are. That scumbag Frank, who we’ve grown to hate in the first 2/3 of the book, now seems small compared to these oppressors and what they do to their captives on a daily basis. Simenon is almost responding directly to Camus: sure, anyone can be a murderer, but there is always a bigger thug with a larger stick waiting in the wings. Having been written in the time of Gulags and Nazi camps, Simenon reminds us that there is murder and then there is Murder.

A slight spoiler warning here: At the end of the book, there is a weird note, which William T. Vollman points out in his afterword (and somewhat defends). While some may take this as a poor attempt at a silver lining, I think one could see another reading of it: Frank is out of his head. What he sees is not there, having been pushed to the limits by his aggressors, and knowing full well what fate awaits him. In those final moments, he is dreaming of the only positive future he can conjure. Whereas Meursault found happiness in the indifference of the world, Herr Friedmaier finds no such solace.

Pair with: Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 2 by Earth – The perfect bleak soundtrack to Simenon’s stark, snow-bound nowhere Eastern-bloc country in occupied territory.

It is not surprising that readers, even if they are devout fans of Kōbō Abe, don’t take to The Face of Another in the same manner as The Woman in the Dunes or some of his other novels. It may be because of the uncomfortable feeling a reader gets being stuck in the narrator’s head for an entire novel (much like Camus’ The Stranger). The story is built on the premise of a wife finding her husband’s notebooks which are filled with solipsistic meanderings, repeated excursuses, counter-arguments directed at her, and endless musings about identity and self. But you can forgive the man — after all, he’s had his face horribly scarred and burned in a laboratory fire. He is isolated and alone, even from his wife. But he has a plan, a carefully schemed revenge, and it starts with getting a new face. Thus, Abe takes us into fascinating exploration of identity and self.

The scientist, who is as scarred psychologically as physically, has it in for his wife. The main charge being that she no longer is sexually attracted to him, in spite of her continued devotion. We find out his plans soon enough — to construct a new face for himself out of life-like artificial skin. So much of his journal is absorbed in the beginning with this quest for a new face. Like Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, we follow him step-by-step, the meticulous planning and experimenting until finally we have the entrance of The Mask. The novel then shifts into an identity tug-of-war, The Mask becoming a persona, a separate entity that wrestles with the narrator for control of the same body. And yet, and this is the genius of the book, in spite of the scientist’s new found freedom (no longer being forced to go about in bandages like Claude Rains), he struggles to act. There is an impotence, not dissimilar to his inability to provide sexual pleasure to his wife, that afflicts the narrator. So rather than running amok in his new identity, he struggles to even begin his plan. As his wife later states, “All you could manage was to wander through the streets and write long, never-ending confessions, like a snake with its tail in its mouth.” This leads to, I think, the frustration of some readers with the book. They often feel as if the novel loses its way during these chapters. But the point, perhaps, is that even with this new entity, The Mask, the narrator is still himself, still struggling inside his own skin. His identity can change, but it doesn’t give him the freedom he craves.

The pace picks up in the final third of the book and rewards the steadfast readers who stuck with the story. When the Mask finally puts the scheme into action, things only get worse for the narrator. His struggle to regain himself, absurdly through the actions of the Mask, becomes a folly. In the end, the tables are turned on the scientist. Abe does this cleverly, even turning the narrator into a witness to his own defeat, watching the Mask carry out the scheme that leads to a less-than-desired result. The point Abe leaves us with is that while our faces are an important part of our identity, they are not all.

One note: if you’re even intrigued by the story, do check out the excellent film adaptation by Hiroshi Teshigahara with Tatsuya Nakadai doing a stellar job as the scientist.

Having already been a fan of Caleb J. Ross from his short story collection, Charactered Pieces, it was nice to see him make a big leap with his first novel, Stranger Will. In fact, he jumped himself right into Ira Levin territory with this macabre tale of evil that lives right next door (if not right inside the protagonist). It’s been a while since I have read a solid, eerie tale of actual human depravity — let’s face it, most writers are too zombie and vampire obsessed these days — but Stranger Will hits the mark perfectly. As Levin did with Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, Ross sets Stranger Will in a our world, one too familiar, where a slight twist, a nudge in the wrong direction send’s the protagonist Will into the presence of secret movement that exists just beneath the surface. Their plans… well, without giving anything away, are as nefarious as the old folks in Levin’s satanic opus.

In terms of mood, Ross hits it perfectly. There is a dark grime to the story, similar to the fluids that Will cleans up as part of his job as a crime-scene janitor. The author is daring enough to never let the slack off the line, dragging us further and further into the bleak plot. As you read, you come away with the impression that the sun never shines in Will’s hometown of Brackenwood. Picture rain soaked pictures such as David Fincher’s Se7en and you get the atmosphere. If I seem light on plot details, it’s because I don’t want to give away the main hook, the nefarious deeds Will suddenly finds himself involved in courtesy of one Mrs. Rose, an elementary school principal with a tight grip on Brackenwood. But it involves a bit of “correcting” by strangers in the guise of homeless men. The plot, is taught, well-crafted, and 2/3 of the way in hits you with the right-hook to the head where you suddenly realize everything that came before was just a warm-up for the real action. And Ross, never winks, never let’s down his guard — very important for this kind of tale. He could have tried to temper the darkness with humor, but that would’ve undercut the atmosphere. As written, there is no letup for the reader.

If I had one wish for the book, it would be that in parts the author didn’t overwrite. Ross is a good writer, he doesn’t need to oversell the story or the mood. Certain parts, in dialogue or description, felt as if the author really wanted us to respect his writing (which we already do) rather than serving the story as they should. The only blackmark I could level against the book goes to the publisher who didn’t serve their author well by doing a crap job on the copyediting. Too many damn typos that after a while do start to distract from the story. To their credit however, they did a great job on the cover.

Regardless, Ross has outdone himself on this one. So much so, I think the next book will be another bar raiser for him. And I hope it is a dark, sinister, and eerie tale to top Stranger Will. Ross writes the macabre better than most.

I’m not sure which came first: the photography or the writing. What I do know is that Kristin Fouquet’s love of photography infuses her storytelling. Her tales have that feel of old photographs you discover in a thrift store bin — you don’t know these people, but you can see their lives boiled down into that moment. It’s because of this that the stories in Rampart & Toulouse and her previous collection Twenty Stories never feel over-told. They unfold simply and capture that poignant moment for the character. You don’t need to know the rest. Everything is in that snapshot.

“Becoming Obsolete” and “Paris is the Pretty One” — two of the short stories in this collection that also includes a novella — both capture that quality in Fouquet’s writing. The former is a tale of refrigerators and New Orleans social hierarchy, the latter is a story of two sisters and a horror-show trip to Paris. For the characters in each, there is a line of demarcation, a point of no return that comes to them not as a sudden surprise but a moment they can only accept with resignation. The author doesn’t force them upon the reader, but with some confidence, lets us see what ultimately becomes obvious to the character, even if they are powerless to change that fateful day.

In all these stories, there are wonderful scenes that Fouquet conjures up, never forced, suddenly unraveling in the midst of a story. A woman standing in her bedroom window, watching a bottle of wine in she left in the courtyard, waiting for it’s intended recipient to appear. A Soprano, dressed in a robe and towel, waving her arms while practicing an aria in the privacy of her Paris apartment, unaware of the spectator watching her from across the street. A procession of ad hoc mourners singing “Sweet Sue Just You” as they march from the St. Louis cemetery in New Orleans, honoring a woman they never knew.

Like a perfect photograph, Fouquet’s stories leave one feeling as if they’ve only caught a glimpse of these lives, but that’s enough to tell the tale, and to know the fates.

Jesuachristo, the prose! More than any other writer I have read, Salter could do so much with so little. He has a scalpel-like precision with his prose — it is always just enough, nothing more. Quite a few writers should read Salter if for no other reason than studying how a few simply crafted sentences can say more than endless flowery paragraphs that serve more as literary gymnastics than good writing. The opening chapters of A Sport and a Pastime, where the narrator is travelling via train through the French countryside, read like a Van Gogh painting.

“Canals, rich as jade, pass beneath us, canals in which wide barges lie. The water is green with scum. One could almost write on the surface.

Hayfields in long, rectangular patterns. There are hills now, not very high. Poplars. Empty soccer fields. Montereau — a boy on a bicycle waiting near the station. There are churches with weathervanes. Smalls streams with rowboats moored beneath the trees…. The pattern of fields is passing, some pale as bread, others sea-dark.”

You can see the canvas in those lines, but also get that sense of velocity. And Salter never falters in his precision throughout the length of the novel. Some may grow weary of his delivery, but even at moments where it feels as if the train is going off the tracks a bit, Salter will deliver a single paragraph, so perfectly crafted and beautiful, you’re reeled right back into the story.

As for that story, A Sport and a Pastime could almost be read as Henry Miller trying to rewrite The Great Gatsby. Sex abounds in a lurid tale of a young upper-crust American dropout who falls for a simple French country girl as his mistress — “the real France,” which is more his obsession than the girl herself. Salter, however, is better in his depiction of sex than Miller ever could be. Miller was obsessed with every gritty detail, whereas Salter, being a more confident writer, could give you flashes and glimpses that spoke more to passion and the emotional tie between the characters than where they were placing their body parts.

We’re told of their romance by a much older narrator who reveals that the events are a confusion of his own perceptions and dreams. This is where Salter one-ups Fitzgerald. The narrator admits that this is more a jealous fantasy of his young counterpart’s life than a clear record of actual events. Occasionally their paths cross, but the narrator, whose own love life is stale and uneventful except for lusting after divorcee, is obsessed with that life he cannot live, the interior life of two younger people caught up in one another.

However, the catch, without revealing anything, is that the narrator has age and reality on his side. That French girl is not as perfect as the American would hope. She is the real France, which he’s not quite prepared for. And the narrator knows where this fling is headed. He’s been there, and even in lusting for it as much as the American wants his perfect French lover, he knows both are futile endeavors.

Don’t let the title of this book, or the those of the 20 poems in this collection, fool you. Hosho McCreesh is razor sharp in his poetry. Not a word is wasted. And flying through all 20 in one sitting, you get caught up in McCreeh’s view of the world. It’s soaked in whiskey-and-wine and the disappointment of every challenge that we’ll never be able to overcome. Yet, it has a beauty to it, like a good Mark Lanegan song.

In the first nine poems, McCreesh has an axe to grind. Not with you, or me for that matter, but with us. In McCreesh’s eyes we’ve pissed it all away, or are incapable of redeeming the pile of crap that was handed to us. It’s dark, hell-bent, screaming, confrontational poetry, and in most hands it would be an clichéd and ridiculous homage to Bukowski. But McCreesh has heart and as angry as he is, he empathizes with us. He knows we can’t help it:

“We are forced to search out
small fires, a little light,
some warmth, &
a little bit of
madness
to help drag us through
all this so-called
sanity
It’s usually not much.
It usually doesn’t last
But it helps…

In the second batch of poems, McCreesh gets optimistic, but in his own cynical way. Sure, we’re still screwed, but there are the small victories. And again, it is McCreesh’s economy with words that wins you over. Such as the simple argument he makes in “Seems Everyone These Days Wants Some Magical Cure for Death…”

I want a
cackling, drunken
cure
for lives
poorly
lived…”

Amen to that brother.

You can run but you can’t hide. At least not from your own life. Keith, the self-absorbed protagonist of Ben Tanzer’s You Can Make Him Like You, is sucker-punched by this lesson over and over again. Yet, as one can expect from Tanzer, the blows are at turns funny, tragic, and often spot-on in revealing the anxieties that scratch beneath our own skins.

What ails Keith is life itself. Or rather an adult life with all its complications and irresolvable issues that always require a bit of character sacrifice. His life is neatly ordered and sorted, a well-crafted mix of job, friends and a wife. But there’s temptation everywhere Keith looks. And sure, he would never do anything to ruin his marriage, right? Right? Liz, headstrong and the adult of the two, also won’t budge on having a child, an event that Keith views more as an intrusion than bundle of joy. Order is quickly becoming uncertainty and a lack of control. Keith, who never wants to confront anything and would prefer to suppress these difficult issues with a jog in the cool Chicago air, is better at avoiding life or trying to hide in the checklist of cultural touchstones he surrounds himself with. He ties his emotional issues to romantic comedies, Hold Steady songs, Michael Chiklis’ Vic Mackey character on The Shield, and even Patrick Ewing. So when the kid finally does arrive, and things don’t go as planned, not even Vic Mackey can save him.

At first impulse, if you read the plot on the back of a book, it would all sound a little too cliché. Yet, Tanzer’s love of writing pop stories, that reveling in what can be new and poignant in oft-tread ground, wins the day. His greatest skill — and it’s been this way through all of his novels and short stories — is to take the normal, the everyday we all know and live through, and to turn that into great tragicomedy. Like his protagonist, Tanzer is obsessed with the art of a great pop song: Three chords, three minutes, and out. But the emotion is so pure, you can’t deny it. You Can Make Him Like You hits the reader like that and hits it just right.

Ask anyone who has tried: often those are the hardest songs to write.

Full points to Ginnetta Correli. The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli could have fallen flat on its face with what story-wise is well-trod ground: a coming-of-age tale of a teenage girl. But her bent, the life of the misfortunate title-character as told in a series of vignettes that play more like episodes from a warped sitcom, is original, gritty, raw, and heartbreaking. It is growing-up story as an open wound.

The best example of this is when Beatie’s mom, convinced that she is Lucy Ricardo, goes to her daughter’s elementary school, dressed as a nurse (which she is indeed not), to threaten a teacher she believes has seduced Ricky (or rather Beatie’s actual father who she keeps referring to as Ricky). The shocked teacher, who is indeed not sleeping with Ricky, is no match for the sneak attack, and loses control quickly, along with an American flag that is quickly incorporated into Lucy’s rendition of “Babaloo.” Seen through Beatie’s eyes, you cringe with the child, and yet the absurdity can’t help but wrench a smile out of you.

Using sparse prose, and a TV-script style that fits the title, Correli crafts a tale of a young girl who can’t catch a break. Mom, obviously, is off her rocker. Dad, who should be a rock, isn’t up for the job. The only person on Beatie’s side, without giving anything away, can’t do anything but offer moral support. In an inventive twist on the writer’s part, Beatie’s older-self, who makes appearances from time to time, watching the events unfold on a TV show, knows where this is going, and, like the reader, is also incapable of offering support. Mom and Dad constantly re-enter Beatie’s life, but never for the better. Much like the setting of suburban California in the ‘70s, everyone and everything is decaying here, falling apart, with very little lustre left from the old days.

As I delved deeper, I couldn’t help but think of John Fante’s Wait Until Spring, Bandini. Like Fante before her, Correli is telling a story of first generation Italian immigrants and their children, but not the one most readers expect. It’s not the story of inner-city living, mafia, and ties to the old world, but of the suburban existence that so many Italian families experienced once they spread out through the greater United States. Having grown up in that environment on the East Coast, the heartbreak rings true. There is a sadness to that existence, a downfall that comes from a life that never reaches the dream of American life the immigrant parents clutched to their chests. Fante captured it back in the thirties, and Correli, in her own way, gets it right in this book. For many of these immigrants, the American dream didn’t offer a better life, just a different set of downfalls their children would never recover from.

In the end, Beatie is never quite prepared for what befalls her. Correli is brave enough to avoid the impulse to make this a redemption story. Life is not that simple and Beatie, no matter how much you root for her, doesn’t live in TV land.

Let the story do the talking is the mantra that Scott McClanahan follows. And it serves him well.

This collection of seventeen short stories reads more like a conversation with a fellow patron in a rundown bar along the side of a road in West Virginia. The prose is sparse, cut to the bone, and makes no attempts to dazzle the reader with clever wordplay. McClanahan is confident enough in the tale not to wallpaper it – the grit and the grime will keep you locked in for the duration.

Often a story will kick off as if the reader sat down midway through the narrator’s diatribe.

“And then there was the time my Dad got into it at a NASCAR race in Charlotte.”

It gives the stories a great conversational aspect, where the narrator is really having a talk with the reader, telling him the story of his life.

As for the stories themselves, there is great pain in these tales of the downtrodden, heaps of regret, but also a great black humor that arises when one realizes you’re so completely screwed what else can you do but laugh. And of course there’s great heart in McClanahan’s stories, yet it never drifts into being sappy or cliché. Both “The Prettiest Girl in Texas” and “Poopdeck Pappy” are great examples of how McClanahan can take a single incident, line it with slivers of humor and satire, but also render pure heartbreak for the main characters involved. Then there are stories like “ODB, The Mud Puppy, and Me” where the narrative drifts from folk tale to absurd comedy to bloody horror as the parties involved try render an act of kindness on a suffering animal.

That story really gets to the heart of McClanahan’s bent with this collection: that life can be absurd and horrific, and often even your best intentions will make a mess of things. In these postcards from West Virginia and small towns throughout the south, the characters usually can’t see how the road is going to twist in front of them, and most are inevitably thrown. But in the author’s honest storytelling, that never editorializes, who are we to judge them?

Often it is what you don’t write that matters more. This is the case with Spencer Dew. Reading Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartes, what is more important to the story, and to what Dew is trying to get across, is within the cracks — the unspoken insinuations hidden in the sparse prose.

That’s not to say that Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartes is lacking in anything. It’s a very intelligent, well-crafted, and even deeply emotional. Yet it never falls into any of the traps that one might expect. It has a high concept: a young woman struggling with the grips of a family tragedy buries herself in Henry Adams’ treatise on medieval architecture and his own feelings of insignificance at the dawn of the 20th century (which shares the same title as Dew’s book). It is melodramatic: I’m not giving anything away that the plot involves a death of someone close to the protagonist, who drifts between states of cold removal and emotional train wreck. It has an oft-used device: the book-within-a-book scenario that can become hackneyed in the unskilled hands of too many writers.

Yet, full credit to Dew, he uses all of these to his advantage to craft a story that is completely unique. I wouldn’t dare to say that Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartes is “like” anything. The writing is daring. The minimalist prose says volumes, even having layers to it that are revealed in later sentences or chapters. There is an emotional element to the novel, but it never feels overwrought. Meanwhile, he uses Adams’ own writing — appearing throughout the text as quotes or even dominating chapters — not as an obvious plot device or commentary, but as a mirror of the protagonist’s own struggles. In the end, the protagonist and author share a bond – they are facing the same philosophical dilemmas, almost a full century apart. Adams states:

“The action of dying is felt, like the dropping of a keystone into the vault, and if the Romanesque arches in the church, which are within hearing, could speak, they would describe what they are doing in the precise words of a poem.”

The protagonist responds:

“Maybe so. But it would be a harsh, dark poem.”

Perhaps, that is the nut of it. What Dew has crafted is a dark poem. In Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartes, death is easy, fathomable even. Life, especially one without any connections or purpose, is the fate you should fear.

Postscript: I have to give extra points to Dew and his publisher Another New Calligraphy who did a stellar job on the design of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartes. From the great cover, to the transparent pages within the book, to the build-it-yourself cathedral that was included with it, they made the design as interesting as the prose.