→ August 12, 2026
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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.

Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter might be the most overtly violent novel I’ve ever read; it certainly is if measured by the volume of blood spilled, since it’s a vampire story at its core, but one Jones uses to retell the story of the Marias Massacre, in which U.S. troops killed about 200 Piegan Blackfeet women, children, and infirm or elderly men who were in their undefended camp. It’s a story of revenge and grief and the endless toll of genocide, where the American colonizers saturated the ground of the west with the blood of humans and buffalo, and where the vampire is both hero and monster, avenging his people while leaving destruction and death everywhere he goes. (It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel this year.)

The novel opens in the present day, as Etsy Beaucarne, a professor trying to complete a research paper that will improve her tenure application, obtains a long-hidden manuscript that was written by her great-great-grandfather Arthur Beaucarne, a pastor in Miles City, Montana, in 1912. A desecrated corpse was just found outside Miles City, and another will be found shortly, with no clues at all as to who has killed these men or why. Arthur is then visited by a peculiar Native American man named Good Stab, who wears sunglasses all day, who refuses to eat or drink what Arthur offers, and who says that he is there to confess, apparently familiar with the Catholic sacrament of penance. Over the course of many days, Good Stab describes how he was killed by a white man, but lived, thanks in some way to the supernatural powers of the vicious killer known as the Cat Man, and went on to become a vampire – almost immortal, feeding only on blood, but in this case taking on some characteristics of the creatures on which he feeds, with the blood of his own people the most powerful for healing and for providing him with strength and energy. Good Stab begins his undead life as an instrument of vengeance for the Blackfeet people and the buffalo, killing every trapper and hunter he finds and destroying their traps and weapons to prevent others from using them, but as time goes on, he becomes more wanton in his killing until an eventual Boss Battle with Cat Man himself that takes place over several years.

Meanwhile, Arthur has his own demons; he has not killed, but he was there at the Marias Massacre, and is carrying a heavy load of guilt and shame for his failure to do anything to stop the murders of innocents, which in turn led him to take up the cloth as a form of penance of his own. His voice is quieter than Good Stab’s, and he is especially weak next to the superhuman strength of his penitent, but he stands in as the voice of those who stood by and watched as their fellow colonizers wiped out entire peoples across the Americas along with decimating the buffalo population.

Jones chooses an epistolary-adjacent format – they’re not truly letters, but Good Stab’s soliloquies interrupted by diary entries from Arthur – in what I presume is an homage to Stoker’s Dracula, an epistolary novel itself that comprises letters and diary entries as well. Where Stoker’s vampire is pursuing women in a sort of sexual conquest, killing his first victim to make her a vampire as well, Good Stab’s violence is aimed primarily at men, first at the white men who are destroying his people and their way of life, and then later at anyone who can sate his thirst and keep him alive. His desire for vengeance ends up destroying his inner self, which might be a soul in another context.

The novel is extremely violent, to a level that makes Cormac McCarthy’s violence seem mundane. Blood is, of course, a core part of the plot, and the most obvious symbol in the book, but the ways in which Cat Man and Ghost Stab kill beyond just getting the blood they need to heal and survive are gorey and often stomach-churning. I understand that some of this is just Jones’ representations of the depredations of genocide; I’m sure the colonizers did these things and worse to the natives they abused and murdered. It doesn’t make it an easier read, especially when Jones lingers on some of the more violent deaths.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is also heavy with metaphor, starting with the blood itself, a symbol of life and the importance of family, clan, and tribe. Good Stab drains his victims of blood, leaving them empty, lifeless shells, not dissimilar to how the colonizers leave the ancestral lands of the people they wipe out – people for whom blood ties hold stronger meaning. Skins, and taking the skins of animals and later people as ‘robes,’ appear as a metaphor for race and the artificial distinctions between people, even people who should ostensibly be on the same side. It’s a novel replete with the kinds of literary techniques that will make it fodder for academic papers for years.

I’ve largely avoided giving anything like an opinion so far on The Buffalo Hunter Hunter¸ because I am of two minds on the book. It is a powerful fable, a searing indictment, a retelling of a shameful moment in the history of the United States. It’s also violent as hell, to the point of distracting from what I interpreted as its aims, and Good Stab’s remaining humanity is often hard to see through the blood, making him a less compelling character than he might have been had he been more discerning in his choices of victims. The chapter where he and Cat Man have their ultimate fight goes on too long, while the final conversation between Good Stab and Arthur is probably too short. I recommend it, with qualifications. It is a strong work of contemporary and indigenous literature, and it’s also very hard to stomach in many parts. Your tolerance may be quite different from mine.

Next up: Percival Everett’s God’s Country.

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→ August 10, 2026
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The Killing Moon.

Before she became the N.K. Jemisin, first Black woman to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel and first author to win that award in three straight years, she was an acclaimed but at least less-known author of sci-fi and fantasy novels and perhaps better known for her speech standing up to the Christian nationalist shithead Theodore Beale, a.k.a Vox Day, who was so mad about it he later tried to blow up the Hugos entirely. Then Jemisin published The Fifth Season and became a literary superstar, quite deservingly so, putting the focus squarely on her writing output.

The Killing Moon is one of her five pre-Hugo novels, a work that stands alone but that came with a sequel published a month later (The Shadowed Sun), forming the “Dreamblood Duology.” Reading it now, it’s easy to see the seeds that eventually grew into Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, and in some ways it features even stronger character development than those three novels worked into their vast plotlines, producing a book that’s lighter thematically but incredibly fun and gripping to read.

The Killing Moon takes place mostly in two rival cities, beginning in Gujaareh, where power is shared between the Prince, who succeeded his father to the throne, and the clergy of the Hetawa temple, who practice magic powered by dreams called narcomancy. Some clergy members known as Gatherers can enter dreams and reap “dreamblood,” which is an extremely powerful substance with addictive properties, while they can also guide dying people gently into death – or kill those the temple has deemed ‘corrupted.’

The story follows Nijiri, a young acolyte in the temple who becomes the protégé of an elder Gatherer named Ehiru, who is dealing with a spiritual and professional crisis after losing his focus during a gathering and failing to capture the target’s soul, leading to its destruction; and the ambassador from the neighboring city of Kisua, Sunandi, who visits Gujaareh in her professional capacity but becomes the target of an assassination plot involving Ehiru and Nijiri. The three of them begin to work together to unravel the conspiracy behind this scheme, to determine who or what is harvesting souls in Gujaareh beyond the purview of the Temple, and to stop a potential war between the two cities.

Jemisin creates a rich world here where religion, politics, and human frailty combine to create a world of deep uncertainty, where there are no clear ‘good guys’ and even our heroes are suspect. She reveals the mystery, or at least most of it, to the reader before the characters figure out what’s happening, so it’s not purely a mystery, but there is a mysterious element beyond the mere fantasy setting, where it isn’t clear who is actually pulling the strings – and why. The trio of heroes divide and conquer, moving to Kisua and then back to Gujaareh, even as Ehiru finds himself fighting a dark force inside of him that would make him a weapon for the very people he’s trying to unmask.

Jemisin does something interesting with religion in the plot of The Killing Moon that I haven’t seen before, at least not this effectively. Religion in this world is both a tool for succor and spiritual enlightenment and a tool of oppression, control, and self-enrichment. It is a balanced, honest portrayal of the role of religion in the last few hundred years of human civilization. I was tempted to say she comes out on the negative side of the ledger – it is certainly easier to interpret it that way if you weight the evil done by and through religion in this book more heavily than the kindnesses and solace it provides – but decided that was ultimately my own bias at play.

Although it certainly seems like Jemisin wrote the two novels as a single story, given their publication dates, The Killing Moon has a clear and decisive ending – and an extremely satisfying one that gets the right characters into the right positions, without relying on something beyond the worldview she’s created. Nijiri gets a proper end to his hero’s journey, more than Sunandi does, with a clear arc that takes him from the innocent apprentice to a man worthy of rising to the inner-circle status of his mentor. It made me want to read the second book, without actually needing to do so to complete the story.

Next up: I’m past the halfway point in this year’s winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel, Stephen Graham Jones’ horror novel The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.

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→ July 27, 2026
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Vigil.

George Saunders is one of the modern masters of the short story, and his one previous endeavor in the longer form of the novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, is a masterpiece that earned him the Booker Prize in 2017. His second novel, the slight fable Vigil, is just as clever and whimsical and creative, and ultimately a huge disappointment.

Jill Blaine is a spirit, maybe an angel, although I don’t know the hierarchy well enough to say what sort, who is visiting the nearly dead fossil fuel executive KJ Boone on his deathbed and confronting him with the havoc he has wrought on the planet through his successful career in industry. She can do this by revisiting memories upon him, although he will get more of this from his daughter when she visits, as well as some other phantoms, including a never-named French inventor and two former corporate cronies who seem very much like the Marley & Marley of the story. There is no traditional arc of redemption here; Boone will die, and we’ll see how much he’s able to even accept complicity in the destruction of the planet, while Blaine herself has some accepting to do around her death at the hands of her husband’s nemesis.

I wanted to like Vigil, because I have liked everything I’ve read by Saunders, and in interviews he comes across as an earnest humanist and someone deeply in love with the craft of writing. This book ain’t it, to put it mildly. Lincoln had its heart at the center of the book, while Vigil has its heart on its sleeve and can’t stop showing it to you. The characters are not that interesting, even though Saunders makes a real effort to give Boone some depth, while creating some moral complexity by pointing out how much of modern life is possible because of the exploitation of the planet’s petroleum. There’s more gravity here in Boone’s life story, the kind of look back that’s a common trope in fiction from Citizen Kane to The Late George Apley, than there is in the attempt to get some sort of deathbed conversion from him, and that leaves the book feeling maudlin rather than meaningful. What exactly was the point of the exercise here? Are we to empathize with Boone, who had agency and used his resources to debase the planet and silence opposition, if he has a brief moment of clarity before dying? It’s a slice of life story, or perhaps a slice of death, but in the end leaves us no wiser than we were when we began. For a writer of Saunders’ talent and stature to push this wisp of a story into the world, and to do so as his second novel in the wake of a first one that remains one of the best novels of this century, is more confusing than anything that happens in the book itself.

Next up: Changing it up with Anthony Horowitz’ Close to Death.

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→ June 18, 2026
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Flashlight.

A ten-year-old girl, Louisa, is walking on some rocks on a beach with her father at night, using a flashlight to light their way. The next thing she knows, she wakes up feeling half-drowned on the beach, and her father has vanished. It will be decades before she and her mother Anne get the whole truth.

Susan Choi, who won the National Book Award for her 2019 novel Trust Exercise, once again plays with narrative structure and unreliable narration in Flashlight*, a longer and more ambitious novel that leans heavily on a stranger-than-fiction slice of history to illuminate (pun intended) the four very eccentric characters within the story. It’s unfortunate, however, that they are all so unlikeable, making so much of this 500-page book a chore to read despite the smart prose and sensible pacing.

* Da da da dee, da da da, da da da da.

Saying too much about the plot risks spoiling the big twist, although I have to say I saw it coming almost from the start. (I’ve said before that I am not a reader who typically sees twists coming or successfully figures out the culprits in books; in this case, I was helped by a couple of clues and the fact that I know the real-world story that Choi used as her basis.) What I can say is that the story then moves back to how Anne and Louisa’s father, variously known as Serk or Seok, each grew up, including Anne giving birth to a son, Tobias, who goes to live with his father. The plot passes quickly to Louisa’s birth, her early years, and then to life after Serk’s presumed death by drowning, which happens as Anne is experiencing neurological symptoms that I think any reader will recognize as early signs of multiple sclerosis. Louisa becomes a very difficult and cruel teenager who can’t wait to escape to college and shuts her mother out for most of her life, while Anne’s life is largely filled with tragedy and disappointment. Tobias, meanwhile, pops back up a few times, eventually settling in as an itinerant samaritan who takes a particular interest in being a kind big brother to Louisa, when he’s not wandering the world or hanging out in Buddhist temples.

The plot twist is really secondary to the four character studies that constitute Flashlight, so if you do figure it out, it likely won’t materially alter your experience reading it. I did find some of the resolution to be exhausting to read, not because of the details, which are true to life, but because it was such a tonal departure from everything that came before – well, except that there’s more suffering, there is a lot of suffering in this book – at a point where a reader might expect the plot’s movement to accelerate towards the ending. Choi does craft indelible characters, even if at least two of them in this book kind of suck, and none of the four generated the empathy I’d expect to feel for at least one protagonist in any serious novel. Tobias is a wisp of a person, but the other three are well-rounded and hard to forget – and, even when they didn’t deserve it, I was still rooting for any of them to get something like a satisfying ending.

I couldn’t get there with Flashlight, even though it is well-written and well-crafted. I couldn’t avoid comparing it to one of the books she cites in her acknowledgements as an inspiration, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, which is a better plotted work, one that mixes its suffering with dark humor, and takes the reader to more interesting places. It may be an unfair comparison – there are only so many American novels that touch on North Korea, and only so many ways to get into the topic – but ultimately Flashlight came out on the losing end.

Next up: C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game.

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→ June 1, 2026
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Sorrowland.

Rivers Solomon’s debut novel An Unkindess of Ghosts was a marvel of ingenious plotting and superb character development, using its generation ship as a setting without excessive focus on its mechanics, instead exploring racial caste systems through the literal stratification of its residents across higher and lower decks by skin tones. Their second novel, Sorrowland, shifts its setting to a modern-day gothic milieu, following a queer Black woman who escapes from a Christian cult’s compound in California, only to find the real world inscrutable and inhospitable to her and her two infant children.

Vern Riley was raised at in the Blessed Gardens of Cain, which began as a sort of Black autonomy movement but morphed, as cults often do, into something more insidious when one man took control of the group and converted it into a cult of personality, complete with control regimens and isolation from the outside world. Vern was even forced to marry that first leader’s son, Reverend Sherman, who took over when his father died and continues to suppress the group’s members, including strapping all cult members down while they sleep. She flees one day while pregnant, giving birth to twins in the woods near the compound, beginning a flight that will take her across multiple states, exposing her to a civilization she barely knows or understands, before her eventual return to try to liberate those still in Sherman’s grip – including her mother and brother – and the exposure of the malevolent forces propping up the entire endeavor.

There is a lot going on in Sorrowland, to put it mildly, from the obvious exploration of racism and racial stratification in American society, as well as religion’s role as a tool of oppression, to allusions to the Black power movement and to government efforts to fight it like COINTELPRO. The Blessed Gardens of Cain may be a Black cult, but there are parallels to the Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, and the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, the last of which received significant press attention when two women who escaped told their stories in a new book. (The temporal precedence is backwards, but the cult Solomon envisioned sounds a hell of a lot like the ACMTC.)

The book could easily have been weighed down by all of its meaning and metaphor, but Solomon gives the readers a compelling, complex protagonist in Vern, who pairs extreme innocence in the ways of the outside world (and the people in it) with strong survivalist skills honed in her time in the cult. She’s on the run almost immediately, first from what she believes is a demon chasing her in the woods, and later from enforcers associated with the cult trying to track her down. She does all of this with two infants and later toddlers in tow – the novel skips ahead in time at several points – giving the whole novel an adventure/horror vibe to keep it moving; every time I thought the story would bog down in its seriousness, something would happen to keep the pace moving.

Sorrowland is still a gloomy read – I can’t say the title didn’t warn me – as Vern runs into obstacle after obstacle, seldom of her own making, and even the denouement only provides partial satisfaction, although I’d argue a fully happy ending would have been unrealistic and out of sync with the remainder of the book. Solomon also explains some of the more mysterious events of the plot with a clever detail, the one bit here that takes this novel into the world of science fiction, although again those elements are there in service of a broader point.

I still prefer An Unkindness of Ghosts, as that book’s protagonist Aster Gray was even stronger than Vern and the mystery within that book was even more compelling, although Solomon set a high bar for their next novel to clear. (They also wrote a novella in between the two called The Deep, a collaboration with Daveed Diggs’ rap trio clipping.) That novel also had better pacing, perhaps because it seemed to try to tackle fewer serious themes, with Sorrowland a more ambitious work. This book was one of two winners of the Otherwise Award in 2021, given to sci-fi or fantasy works that explore or expand our understanding of gender; explaining how Sorrowland does so might risk spoiling some of its secrets, but it’s a worthy honoree that also gets into queer themes and how Vern’s journey is even further complicated by her intersectionality. That Solomon could take something this dark and still make it an exciting read is a testament to their talent as storyteller.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air.

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→ May 22, 2026
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Angel Down.

Cyril Bagger is a malingerer and a coward, hanging back in every battle his troop encounters in the hellscape of France during World War I, which leads to his selection for a group of five disposable heroes who are ordered to go retrieve a shrieking wounded soldier from the battlefield. The shrieker isn’t a soldier, however; it’s an angel, and she seems to appear as someone different to everyone who sees her.

Daniel Kraus won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angel Down, the slightly experimental novel that puts us in the trenches with Bagger and company. The entire novel is written as a single sentence, broken frequently into paragraphs and chapters, with every paragraph starting with the word ‘and.’ It’s a fast-moving, extremely graphic work, contributing to the growing body of grotesque novels of the Great War, but ultimately the gimmick wears out its welcome, and the remainder is 1917 with magic.

Bagger is our protagonist, and as the book begins he and four other idiots are selected for what appears to be a suicide mission by the mad modern Major General Reis, who was born with just one arm. (The New York Times’ review refers to Reis’ willingness to “single-handedly prolong the war,” which I have to assume is a tasteless reference to the birth defect.) When Bagger and the teenager Arno, who is desperate for anything resembling a family and clings to Bagger as a combination of a father figure and an older brother, reach the weeping angel, Bagger is overcome by the light that pours out of her and assumes she is one of the fabled Angels of Mons. When they bring her back to the trench where the other three knuckleheads await, it becomes clear that everyone who sees this angel sees something different – something they want or need, like a carnival attraction, a mother, a girlfriend left behind in the U.S., or later a weapon to win the war. Bagger sees her as some sort of salvation, but she also turns out to have supernatural healing powers, which allow him to strike a devil’s bargain with the angel later in the story.

Kraus’ strength here is in the ways in which the angel becomes a device to reveal the interior thoughts, desires, or intentions of his various characters, often in horrifying fashion. No one, save perhaps Bagger, sees her as an independent being with agency. Every character has been ground down by war to a sharpened point, and their needs become paramount, even if they are malicious or deranged or outright insane. The angel, who is never named, becomes a sort of prism through which each character is refracted, broken down into their component parts so we can see how thin the whole actually is.

The use of the literary device of a single sentence screams “gimmick” to me, although the frequent breaks prevent it from turning into Finnegan’s Wake (he says confidently, having never read past the first page of that inscrutable work). It does not add anything to the text, and starting every paragraph with “and” for 280-plus pages results in the word disappearing from view; you just stop seeing it and start with the next word. I also found Kraus’ florid descriptions of the violence to be too over-the-top, even though many reviews have praised that aspect of the novel; if you’ve ever cringed at the sound of someone’s head getting crushed or bashed in, like the death of Michael’s stepfather in The Wire, there are dozens of sentences in Angel Down that evoke that revulsion.

I don’t know that the canon of World War I literature needs more entries, and Kraus’ choice of that conflict in and of itself should at least invite some skepticism going into the work. He creates one strong character and some intriguing if shallow secondary ones, but leans too heavily on verbal sleight-of-hand and depictions of violence to pad the often superficial narrative. It’s a quick read, at least, but not an especially deep or satisfying one.

Next up: I’m reading Jo Walton’s The Just City at the moment and finding it unusually dry compared to her other novels.

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→ August 12, 2025
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The Tainted Cup.

Nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup marries the classic detective story with high fantasy novels, with a story narrated by the detective’s assistant (think Archie Goodwin) because the detective can’t do the leg work (think Nero Wolfe), set on a world where civilization is constantly threatened by enormous aquatic creatures called leviathans that crash through the city walls and flood the town. It’s a slow build, but Bennett sticks – pun intended here – the landing, and by the end of the novel, both of the central characters have been so well developed that it felt like the middle of a longer series.

Din is the very young, very green assistant to an investigator named Ana, and finds himself at the scene of a very bizarre death: A military official with powerful connections, Blas, has been found disemboweled, killed by a mutant plant called dappleglass that essentially kills its host by sprouting a giant tree. The corpse is impaled upon the branches when Din arrives, and he finds that the wealthy family on whose estate the murder took place is away while their servants range from uncooperative to hostile. The murder turns out to be a small piece of a much larger conspiracy that runs all the way to the top, so to speak, as Blas was just one person killed in this manner and the body count will continue to rise over the course of the story.

In the world of The Tainted Cup, people – I’m assuming they are people, at least – can be augmented in various ways that enhance certain abilities at the cost of others, or perhaps of their health, sanity, or longevity. Din is one such augmented person, called a ‘sublime’; he’s an engraver who has the equivalent of an eidetic memory, ‘engraving’ everything in a scene into his mind through the use of specific chemical scents. Ana is an eccentric, not a sublime, but with superlative powers of deduction, choosing most of the time to remain blindfolded so that she can focus better on the problem at hand. She seldom leaves her lair, never visiting the crime scene, instead sending Din out to gather the information and report back using his engraving powers, making her a fantasy heir to Nero Wolfe in multiple ways. (If only she loved orchids.) Their relationship isn’t that interesting, at least not yet, as Din is so clearly the subordinate, and is often the straight man to Ana’s barbs and witticisms, although as the novel ends, multiple small events start to shift that balance of power to a more equal one and the door to a more Nero Wolfe/Archie Griffin sort of relationship opens.

Bennett has also built a fascinating world here, where humans are at the mercy of a larger species that threatens them, and the empire’s ability to maintain order and control of its people is at least in part predicated on their ability to protect them – or persuade them that the empire is their only protection. The investigation into the murder(s) exposes a complicated back story of multiple levels of corruption and a past catastrophe that killed scores and rendered an entire canton of the empire uninhabitable, a crime that ripples through their society to this day. It’s a complex supertext above the simple narrative of the detective story, and the latter allows Bennett to give the former so much detail and texture – the investigation propels the plot forward, and no one ever stays in one place, literally or figuratively, for very long.

The Tainted Cup is more detective story than mystery, however; I don’t think the reader is supposed to figure out whodunit, given that Ana figures out the culprits over a period of time, with one of the assassins identified with probably a third of the novel to go – except, of course, they’re an accomplice rather than the mastermind. I enjoy both genres, but the detective story depends much more on the strength of the detective character(s), while the mystery is usually driven more by how clever the plot is. Bennett has created two reasonably compelling characters already, with enough interplay in the last few chapters to start the development of their relationship and foreshadow a more interesting (platonic, to be clear) one in future novels. Ana could easily have fallen, or fall in the future, into cliché; she is odd, certainly, as Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes and Poirot are, but in different ways, and she’s a stronger detective character than Inspectors Alleyn or Montalbano, to name two other series I enjoy. Din shows more growth within this specific novel, as he’s young and naïve and wedded to formal traditions that Ana finds amusing or just silly. By the time we reach the conclusion, he’s learned substantial things about himself, and found his voice in a way that was almost as satisfying to read as the solution of the main mystery itself.

Next up: I just finished Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which I fully expect to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year. I think it’s the best one and I think it checks a lot of boxes.

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→ July 29, 2025
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Headshot.

I’ll start off the review with the conclusion: Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot, one of the three novels shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize this year by the nominating committee that the board passed over in favor of Percival Everett’s James, is just not very good. It’s probably the best of those three, but that is damning with faint praise. I’ve often suspected that the Pulitzer process was skewed by non-literary considerations, but never more so this year.

Headshot follows a series of eight relatively anonymous and uninteresting teenaged women competing in a boxing tournament held in an empty (maybe abandoned) warehouse in Reno, with modest prize money that hardly justifies the investment in time and pain required of its contestants. Bullwinkel uses the tournament as a gimmick to give personality sketches and life stories, backwards and forwards, for the various contestants, showing a broad range of archetypes but a surprising lack of insight into what makes any of these young women tick beyond some very general tropes (e.g., sibling rivalry). The plot is extremely beside the point; I don’t even remember who won the tournament.

Indeed, I barely remember anything about these characters, and I’m flabbergasted by all of the reviews specifically praising the characters as the novel’s strength. They’re not all the same, far from it, but they are all fairly boring. Most of them box because they have some kind of hole inside they’re trying to fill – broken families, bullying, dead-end lives – but the sheer number of characters means none of them gets the kind of page time they’d need for any depth, never mind actual development.

And some of those characters’ names are amateurish. Artemis Victor is one of the best of the eight boxers – she may have won the fictional tournament, I don’t know – but I’ll call Fowl on that one. Others just have weird character traits that don’t add to their definition, like the one woman who has memorized pi to 50 digits and uses it as a sort of mantra/coping strategy, like meditating, but appears to have no other interest in math or just school in general.

There’s a deep sadness throughout the scenes in the ring and around it, even though Bullwinkel’s descriptions of their later lives at least hint at richer futures to come – families, marriages, careers, lives longer than many people who get hit in the head this often end up with. (There’s no mention of concussions or CTE.) Those are the stories that mean something here, but the structure leaves them as afterthoughts because the focus is far more on what’s happening in the ring and in the girls’ heads as they prepare to fight or trade punches. That just leaves those flash-forwards feeling like throwaways, sops to lighten the mood of what is overall a rather depressing novel, because it’s easy to say “and then she had a good life” rather than exploring just what that meant and implying that this tournament, which loomed so large in the girls’ minds as it happened, turned out to be irrelevant in the grand scheme.

I don’t know what the committee was thinking here with the three choices, all written by women, none of which was even good enough for me to recommend. Everett’s James is one of the best novels written this century. Kelly Link’s The Book of Love was also eligible, and is better than any of the three shortlisted novels by a country mile. Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars was better. I’m sure there were other works of literary fiction more deserving than these three novels. The Board made the right call.

Next up: I’m slowly making my way through Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup, nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel.

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→ July 1, 2025
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Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride.

Will Leitch’s Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is the heart-warming story of a police officer and divorced dad of an 11-year-old son who discovers he has terminal brain cancer and decides to die on the job so his son can get more cash in death benefits. It’s definitely the most enjoyable book you’ll read about dying of glioblastoma this year.

(Disclaimer: Will’s a friend – someone I’ve actually spent time with on multiple occasions – so there’s just no way I was going to be objective about this book. If I had disliked it, I just wouldn’t mention it at all, so bear in mind that this is one time you can actually accuse me of bias and be correct.)

Lloyd is a cop in Atlanta, the son of a decorated, hard-nosed, military-minded cop who was a sort of legend in the force himself until he died of a heart attack, possibly hastened by the case of a serial killer that he couldn’t solve. He learns at the very start of the book that his headaches are caused by an aggressive type of brain tumor called a glioblastoma that will kill him in a matter of months, and do so in ugly fashion as he starts to experience memory loss, extreme mood swings, and pain in his head he describes as “lightning bolts.” He doesn’t tell anyone at all about the diagnosis – not his son Bishop, his partner Anderson, his boss, his ex-wife, nobody but his doctor. He realizes that his life insurance policy isn’t going to do much for his son, paying for about a year of college if they’re lucky, and realizes that there are large payouts coming to any officer who dies in the line of duty, so he decides to find a way to do just that, only to learn that he’s a pretty good cop and not that good at the dying part.

Lloyd’s letters to his son, which he calls his ten edicts, are interspersed throughout the narrative and lend some gravity to the proceedings, which otherwise are quite jovial for a story about a guy with a time bomb in his brain and a gun at his hip. (To say nothing of his car, which is a weapon in its own right when Lloyd’s behind the wheel.) Those poignant interludes are an accurate reminder of every parent’s nightmare – that you won’t be there when your kid grows up to experience all of the big moments, to tell him how to change a tire or ask someone on a date, to answer the phone (or a text) when something’s wrong and they need their mom or their dad. The real genius of the book is that those moments aren’t sappy or maudlin, which they could so easily be. They read as honest and clear, probably clearer than any of us could really be if we sat down and thought too hard about what writing that kind of letters really meant, and as a result they hit some big emotional notes without dragging down what is otherwise a fast-paced novel with some great action sequences once Lloyd decides he has a literal death wish.

I would still rank Will’s first novel, How Lucky, as my favorite of the three, because I think its protagonist, Daniel, is such an incredible, compelling character, and I love the way the tension builds in that story. That’s not a knock on Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, as they’re different books with clearly different goals. There are even nods in this book to Will’s second book, The Time Has Come, that I won’t spoil, and a few other Easter eggs scattered here and there. I’d say Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is his most earnest book, but I feel like that word has morphed into a backhanded insult, like a pat on the head for a writer who’s mailed in the emotional stuff in most of their previous works. It’s very thoughtful, getting the details right in the important ways, and even in more trivial ways, like details of what an Atlanta cop’s daily routine might be like, that most readers wouldn’t even notice. (I only realized it after reading the acknowledgements.) It’s a novel with a big heart that earns your response through its honesty, with a strong main character and some levity to get you past the fact that the main character is staring death in the face from page one.

Next up: I actually finished Rita Bullwinkel’s gimmicky, Pulitzer-finalist novel Headshot last week and am reading Masashi Matsuie’s The Summer House.

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A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond.

A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond lives up to the absurdity of its name, although I’m not sure if it reaches whatever the goals of its authors, Percival Everett and his colleague James Kincaid, may have had in writing it. It’s an epistolary satire, written entirely in the form of letters and emails between those two, a foppish dandy named Barton Wilkes who works in Sen. Thurmond’s office, an editor at Simon & Schuster and his assistant, and others, as the plot to write the book of the title becomes increasingly convoluted and the behavior of several people involved becomes unhinged.

The aide to Sen. Thurmond, Barton Wilkes, is positively nuts, as I think is clear from the first few pages. He proposes the book to Simon & Schuster, arguing that Sen. Thurmond is uniquely qualified to opine on the subject of Black people in the United States since Civil War, in part because he was alive for pretty much all of that period. Somehow, he gets an editor, Martin Snell, interested in this preposterous proposal, possibly through some acquaintance with Snell’s assistant Juniper, and the project progresses far enough that Everett and Kincaid come in as ghost-writers. The plan is that Wilkes will send them the Senator’s notes and they’ll turn it all into a book somehow. Of course, the Senator’s actual involvement in or awareness of the project becomes an open question, Wilkes and Snell both appear to be perverts, Everett and Kincaid can’t stop sniping at each other, there’s a possibly mobbed-up rival editor at S&S, and somehow Juniper’s sister ends up part of the story, too.

The obvious target of the satire is Thurmond, who was Senator for about 120 years and spent most of that time pushing white nationalist ideas, particularly anything related to segregation. He split off from the Democrats after World War II, running for President in 1948 as a “States Rights Democratic” candidate and carrying four states. (Since then, only one third-party candidate has earned any electoral votes, another racist windbag, George Wallace, in 1968.) The Thurmond in this book is well aware that he’s about to die and wants to both set the record “straight” on his legacy and possibly grease his path into some sort of afterlife. Everett and Kincaid don’t want any part of whitewashing (pun intended) the Senator’s grim history, and it’s not like they’re getting much money from the project either, although it seems to offer some professional benefits to Kincaid within the story. (I wondered if he was even a real person, but he is, and his specialty is on the sexualization of children in Victorian literature and culture.) Thurmond’s an easy target and the two take him down rather efficiently, although they could obviously have spent even more time lampooning him as a sort of Foghorn Leghorn in Nazi garb and discussing the legacy of his legislative initiatives.

What I didn’t understand was all of the frippery around that part. Snell and Wilkes both seem to be sexual predators of a sort, and Juniper spends most of the novel trying not to become the victim of either of them. Juniper then finds himself farmed out to Vendetti, the editor who definitely does not have mob ties, a switch which ends up putting two people in the hospital. It’s not homophobic, and I’m not sure either Snell or Wilkes is ever identified as gay, but the authors seem to play these two men both trying to sleep with another young man for some kind of humor I didn’t exactly get.

In the end, this book also didn’t land for me, just like American Desert, although that had the benefit of a more coherent narrative and more of Everett’s brilliant prose. This book is comical, and has plenty of laughs, but mostly it’s just so unrealistic that you’ll wonder what we’re doing here.

Next up: I just finished my friend Will Leitch’s newest novel, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, and started the last of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalists, Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot.

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