Dead End Jobs: The Dead Take the A Train

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Julie Crews takes the nasty jobs.

If something eldritch is trying to lay eggs under your skin to prepare the way for the end of the world, she’ll flay you open, jam her arms up to the elbows into your chest cavity, carve the fucker out, sew you up and send you on your way, only mildly traumatized.

Whatever it takes to get by in New York City, after all. That and support her cocaine habit.

The Dead Take the A Train is not for the faint of heart. It’s gory and gruesome in new and inventive ways that I found invigorating as long as I wasn’t eating at the time.

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Inside Man: Double Threat by F. Paul Wilson

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"healing crystals" on a table

In F. Paul Wilson’s Double Threat, the main character, Stanka Daley, is a con artist who makes the fateful, life-changing decision to hide out in a desert cave while on the run from some angry housewives she scammed with a fake car contest.

While Daley, as she prefers to be known, hides in that cave, a strange slug-like creature drops on her head and knocks her out. When she comes to, she stumbles to the house of Juana, a local who watches over the cave and who informs her that surviving an interaction with the alaret, as the creature is known, is a vanishingly rare occurrence, and that she will now serve as Daley’s guide.

Daley isn’t sure what to think when Juana tells her that her life will change forever, but she soon finds out what she means when she starts seeing a man following her and hears his voice in her head. Is she going insane, or did something far stranger happen to her because of the alaret?

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Oh, What a Year in Reading (2021)

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A book lying in leaves

Despite the general state of the world, 2021 was actually a good year in reading for me. By the end of the year, I’d read 105 books, which is close to my previous all-time record from 2017 when I read 111. My secret? I read a lot of manga because my brain was mush.

Honestly, though, I think it would take a lot for me to have a genuine reading slump. I had a much harder time focusing for the first half of 2020 and still read a hugely respectable 75 books that year. That’s an unqualified success by just about any standard.

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Inner Workings: LaserWriter II by Tamara Shopsin

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LaserWriter

Tamara Shopsin’s debut novel, LaserWriter II, is slim and largely plotless, and yet somehow manages to be charming and totally compelling.

It’s a very quick read, but it has stuck in my mind in the weeks since I finished it.

LaserWriter II is a coming-of-age story about Claire, a young woman who gets a job at Tekserve, a famous (now long-closed) Apple repair shop in New York City in the 90s. She starts in intake and then moves up the ranks into repair technician. Along the way, she discovers that she is really good at repairing obscure and discontinued printers.

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Truth is a Mystery: Magic for Liars

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Magic for Liars has a very cool cover, but I think it led me astray. I was expecting something a bit more dynamic based on that design and the book’s excellent title, but the resulting story was only competent and a bit unexciting. I did like the book well enough, and would definitely be game for reading work by Sarah Gailey – I’ve seen raves for just about everything they’ve ever written – but maybe I’d prefer the ones about carnivorous hippos?

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Color of Life: In by Will McPhail

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I think I experienced a bit of synesthesia while reading In by Will McPhail.

The book is largely done in sketch-like black and white, the characters little more than outlines on a white background, except for moments when Nick, the main character, experiences real human connection. As soon as he makes that connection, the pages burst into fully painted, dynamic scenes, and I oftentimes felt like I could hear the sounds of crashing waves or the swell of some imaginary film score in my head. It made the whole thing quite extraordinary.

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Not Much There: Fangs by Sarah Anderson

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Sarah Anderson is best known for her Sarah’s Scribbles web comics, where a big-eyed, spiky-haired version of herself deals with introversion, anxiety, and the vagaries of modern life in a humorous, relatable way. Those strips are the exact sort of thing that people love to share on social media.

When I heard about her new book, Fangs, I was intrigued because it sounded so different from her oftentimes silly work in Sarah’s Scribbles.

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