review July 10, 2019

Facts and Mysteries

The novel as found document has a long history. The gothic novels that helped establish the horror genre—think Dracula, think Frankenstein—often take the form of found documents, of reconstructions of uncanny events pieced together from letters and diaries. More recent novels have updated this concept in inventive ways: Ryan Chapman’s Riots I Have Known takes the form of an online prison journal, and Sarah Hall’s dystopian novel Daughters of the North is made up of computer files, which may or may not have been tampered with.

Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s 2009 novel Human Matter, now appearing in an

culture August 07, 2017

The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt

It’s fair to say that Samantha Hunt doesn’t care much for straightforward realism. The protagonist of her first novel, The Seas (2004), is a young woman living in an isolated coastal town who’s convinced that she’s a mermaid. The Invention of Everything Else (2008) is set during the waning years of Nikola Tesla’s life, but includes a subplot wherein one of the supporting characters may have traveled through time. And her most recent novel, Mr. Splitfoot (2016), abounds with ghosts both literal and metaphorical.

For Hunt’s characters, belief in a thing may be enough to make it real. As an

culture March 07, 2016

A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson

In “The Blood Drip,” the story that ends A Collapse of Horses, the new collection from Brian Evenson, two men on a postapocalyptic frontier have gathered beside a fire. Well, one of them might not be a man, exactly—a ghost, perhaps, or a hallucination? But still, it’s an archetypal scene: two men, a roaring fire that’s the only light and heat in sight, and the aftermath of violence. One offers to tell a story; the other wavers. The first makes his case: “It’s just a story. A story can’t hurt.”

In “The Blood Drip,” the story that ends A Collapse of Horses, the new collection from Brian Evenson, two men on a postapocalyptic frontier have gathered beside a fire. Well, one of them might not be a man, exactly—a ghost, perhaps, or a hallucination? But still, it’s an archetypal scene: two men, a roaring fire that’s the only light and heat in sight, and the aftermath of violence. One offers to tell a story; the other wavers. The first makes his case: “It’s just a story. A story can’t hurt.”

Evenson’s body of work stands as a long and ominous proof that stories can, in fact, hurt. His

culture November 25, 2013

The Revolution of Every Day by Cari Luna

This year, Jerry Stahl’s Happy Mutant Baby Pills and Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens both incorporate the Occupy movement into their narratives. In The Revolution of Everyday Life, Cari Luna portrays a group of squatters living on the Lower East Side. Economic anxieties, it seems, have begun to seep into our fiction.

The place where dispossession, whether by choice or by circumstance, meets underground culture is having its moment in the literary sun right now. Jerry Stahl’s Happy Mutant Baby Pills and Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens both incorporate the Occupy movement into their narratives, the former as part of a politically charged cavalcade of idealists and realists at odds, the latter as the latest in a series of distinctively American revolutionary movements. One of the plotlines in Jonathan Miles’s novel Want Not centers around a young couple squatting on the Lower East Side in 2007, and their

Tobias Carroll