THE 2024 MIMSIE AWARDS!

As of today, Sunday, December 15, 2024, I have read 106 books since January 1. I have mentioned before that I get irritated when I hear people bragging about reading an enormous number of books each week, or month, or year. To me, that’s like bragging about eating ten great meals a day. If you’re consuming food that fast, you probably don’t understand what food is all about. Likewise, if you read 500 to 700 pages an hour (as academic snob Harold Bloom claimed he did), you seriously don’t understand what reading is all about. I am somewhat embarrassed to note that I have been consuming books at a rate of about one every three days, but allow me to present a half-hearted defense of my literary gluttony.

A lot of the books I read are actually books that I am re-reading. And generally, when I re-read a book, I am doing it in order to write an essay about it, an essay that I hope to publish and make some money from. When I saw that Netflix was going to drop a new miniseries based on Tom Wolfe’s 2001 novel A Man in Full, I decided to re-read the novel so that I could write an essay about how well David E. Kelley’s miniseries compared to Wolfe’s book (not very, as it turned out). Wolfe’s book runs slightly over 730 pages in hardback. It is a massive novel in the manner of the great 19^th century social comedies of writers like Balzac and Dickens and Thackeray. I read it shortly after it was first published and I remember wrestling with it for weeks on end, being alternately enthralled and exhausted by it. When I began re-reading it, I found myself skimming through certain passages of it, such as Wolfe’s tedious evocation of background noises. Wolfe wrongly believed himself to be a master of onomatopoeia, and thus he filled his books with passages such as these:

Buh buh buh buh bubba boooooo uh-ooooooooooo, the long soft ripe soupy notes of Grover Washington’s saxophone…Scrack scrack scrack scrack scraaaaaaaaacccccccckkkkkkkkkk, the grinding screech of the attic fans…Motherfuckin’ motherfuckin’ motherfuckin’ motherfuckin’, the motherfuckin’ chorus of one and all…Thragoooooooom thragoooooooooom, the roar of the toilets flushing…Glug glug glug glug glug glug glug, the sucking noise they made when they finished flushing…and then Motherfuckin motherfuckin’ motherfuckin’ motherfuckin all over again.

That’s a description of what one character hears when he sits in his jail cell at night. Stuff like that appears on nearly half of the book’s pages, and it starts to grate like a jailhouse attic. After awhile, I stopped skimming these passages and skipped them entirely. I also skimmed my way through some parts of the book that I remembered fairly vividly from my initial read. Thus I read Wolfe’s doorstop in just three or four days. But when I finished it, I felt like I knew it even better than I did after my first read. I also went back and read reviews of the book by John Updike, Norman Mailer, and a few others. I also read Wolfe’s essay “My Three Stooges,” in which he defended the book against the insults hurled at it by Mailer, Updike, and John Irving. Re-reading the novel, and reading about the novel, and then watching David E. Kelley’s TV adaptation of the novel, and then writing about both for Quillette, made A Man in Full seem like a major part of my 2024 literary journey. Thus I don’t feel guilty listing it among the books I read in 2024, despite the fact that I did a bit of skimming here and there.

In a similar vein, when I heard that the streaming service MGM + had adapted George R. Stewart’s classic 1949 sci-fi novel, Earth Abides, for TV, I decided to use that fact as an excuse to write an essay not just about Stewart’s novel but about the entire genre of post-World War II apocalyptic novels set in California. I am a longtime fan of Stewart’s and had read Earth Abides at least twice before. Thus, I did a bit of skimming when I was re-reading the book this time around. One of the California apocalypse novels that I re-read for the essay was Richard Matheson’s 1954 classic I Am Legend. This is a short novel (approx. 25,000-30,000 words). I’ve read it several times through the years, beginning when I was a teenager. I was a huge fan of the early film versions of the novel (1964’s The Last Man on Earth, and 1971’s The Omega Man), and I have read plenty of other work by Richard Matheson. I skimmed a bit while re-reading I Am Legend but, because I am so familiar with the material, I felt like I had once again relived the sad tale of Robert Neville in full. On the other hand, I began re-reading Philip K. Dick’s 1965 novel Dr. Bloodmoney and found myself so disenchanted with it, that I wound up skimming parts of nearly every page. As a result, I haven’t listed it among the books I read in 2024.

One of my favorite books of 2024 was Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go, a nonfiction work about apocalyptic novels and films. I acquired it in order to do research for my California apocalypse essay. Rather than read it straight through, cover-to-cover, I looked up titles I was especially interested in (Earth Abides, I Am Legend, etc.) in the index and then sought out what Lynskey had to say about them. But even after I had finished writing my essay, I continued to delve into Lynskey’s 500-page tome. In the book, Lynskey writes quite a bit about John Wyndham and his so-called “cozy catastrophe” science fiction novels (The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, etc.). I became so intrigued by what he had to say that I not only read (or, in some cases re-read) a handful of Wyndham’s novels, I also read some similar novels praised by Lynskey, including The Death of Grass by John Christopher (a penname for Sam Youd). I went back to Lynskey’s book again and again throughout the year, looking for apocalyptic book recommendations. I haven’t managed to read the entire book, and I probably never will. But I spent so much time with Lynskey’s survey of end-of-the-world stories that it felt like a major part of my 2024 literary project. In fact, it was sort of indirectly responsible for inspiring me to write my own sci-fi novel – Hey, Hey, Yesterday – which I serialized on Substack (more about that in a bit).

At any rate, in my capacity as Quillette’s unofficial authority on pop fiction, I re-read quite a few books this year – including Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City; Joe Klein’s Primary Colors; and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War – so that I could write essays about them, and I occasionally skimmed my way through an overly familiar section. Nonetheless, I read enough of those books, and I read enough about those books, that they stood out as significant parts of my reading year.

I don’t believe that the reader of a book should consider himself a galley slave to the author. Likewise, I don’t believe that a film viewer should consider himself a galley slave to the film’s director. I am not a fan of excessive gore or violence in films, and I will happily fast-forward past such things when I am viewing a film at home on TV. If I have a DVD that offers both the theatrically released version of a film and the director’s cut, I will almost certain watch the theatrical version. In my experience, directors’ cuts tend to be self-indulgent and overlong. Many of the classic novels I have read in translation have been shortened in some ways by the translators. Constance Garnett’s translations of classic Russian works such as Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and The Brothers Karamozov, have been criticized through the years for prudishness and for omitting the gory details of fight scenes or the steamy exchanges of passionate lovers. But her major translations still have plenty of fans and have remained in print for a century or more. You can find longer and, perhaps, more accurate translations of great Russian novels and stories, but you are not required to. Many classic works of literature written in languages other than English are often slightly abridged when translated for contemporary American readers. Les Miserables, The Tale of Genji, The Three Musketeers, Don Quixote, the Ramayana, the Mahabarata, the Shahnameh – these are generally offered in editions that have been altered in ways to make them more accessible to contemporary Americans. Sticklers for the authors’ original versions may sneer, but I have enjoyed many of these modernized books. When I read Don Quixote, I chose the version translated by Samuel Putnam and included in The Viking Portable Library’s edition of Cervantes’ work. In his introduction to this abridged version, Putnam mentions several of the things he has deleted from the novel (usually tales-within-the-tale narrated by some random character and having little to do with Quixote and his quest). Putnam’s intro contains several observations such as, “I have had no scruple about deleting the goatherd’s meandering tale at the end of Part I.” And, “The captive’s story I have kept but condensed…” And [T]ake the romance in the latter chapters of Part I, which involves the two pairs of lovers. It is more than a little trite and bookish in flavor with complications that are finally resolved in a highly unconvincing deus ex machina fashion. This entire episode could, I think, be dropped without loss if it were not so interwoven with the main plot. I have accordingly condensed it insofar as possible, keeping only so much of it as was necessary.” I think of myself as someone who has read – and greatly enjoyed Don Quixote – but a literary purist might argue that I’ve not actually read the novel as Cervantes wrote it. Of course, this is true of every novel I’ve ever read in translation, abridged or not. And I am okay with that.

Even when I am reading a contemporary novel in English, I will sometimes skim or skip things. I generally find the practice of prefacing each chapter with long quotations from other books to be pretentious, annoying, and unnecessary. If each chapter is prefaced with a brief poem by Emily Dickinson, fine. I can handle that. But oftentimes the chapters of a novel set, say, in the Middle Ages, will be prefaced with long excerpts from nonfiction books about the era. This strikes me as either a vainglorious attempt by the author to show off how much research went into his novel, or else the work of a novelist who fears that his own writing is insufficiently authoritative to stand on its own. Generally, I feel that if a novelist wants to include a either a poem by Emily Dickinson or some fascinating fact from Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror in her book, she ought to find a way to incorporate it into the actual text. If the first one or two of these chapter prefaces prove unnecessary to my understanding or enjoyment of the novel, I will often simply skip the rest of them. Forty-one of the forty-two chapters in Jason Matthews’ excellent spy thriller Red Sparrow end with a recipe. I happen to be a foodie, so I read each of these recipes. But they have no bearing whatsoever on the plot of the novel and you could skip them and still thoroughly enjoy the novel. That kind of skipping doesn’t strike me as dereliction of the reader’s duty to the author.

I rarely do any skimming or skipping if I am reading a novel for the first time, but I do make occasional exceptions. Michael Crichton’s novels – particularly The Andromeda Strain and Airframe – occasionally include page upon page of computer printouts containing information that makes no sense to me. I just skip these printouts and let the subsequent narration explain their meanings to me. Earlier this year, I was reading a great medical thriller by Tess Gerritsen called Harvest. The main story concerns a young doctor, Abbie DiMatteo, who uncovers a secret cabal of medical men who are illegally harvesting organs and implanting them in wealthy people who need life-saving transplants. Apparently, in America, there exists a nationwide database of people in need of a transplant, and organs have to be doled out on a first-come-first-served basis (there are some exceptions, based on need, to this rule). If you need a new heart, your doctor puts your name on the heart-recipient list. You can’t use wealth or privilege to jump to the head of the queue. But the evil doctors in Harvest are enriching themselves by selling organs to the highest bidder. Many of these organs are harvested from young orphans living on the streets of the former Soviet Union. These kids are put on large transport ships in Russia and other former Soviet states and then shipped to the U.S., where their organs are harvested in secret shipboard operating rooms. To preserve their organs, the kids are kept alive and relatively healthy during the trip over. Naturally, they won’t survive the removal of their organs. Every fifty or sixty pages, Abbie DiMatteo’s story is interrupted so that Gerritsen can update the reader on the status of the children being brought from Russia for illegal organ harvesting. These passages, featuring children being horribly treated while at the same time they are led to believe that they are being sent to America to be adopted by loving families, were just too heartbreaking for me to endure. And they didn’t seem to be advancing the plot much. So I decided to skip the passages about the abused children until the ship reached America and their stories merged with Abbie DiMatteo’s. I enjoyed the novel a great deal, but I don’t regret skipping parts of it. Generally, when reading a book (or watching a film or TV show) I skip any passage involving the abuse of children or animals. Fortunately, I tend to avoid books that I suspect might contain graphic animal or child abuse, so I don’t have to do a lot of skipping when I read.

At any rate, of the 106 books I’ve read so far this year, I did a little judicious skimming in about twenty of them, mostly because I was re-reading a book I was already fairly familiar with. Thus, I am not quite the book glutton I may appear to be. I am not entirely happy about the fact that I am able to read a lot more books these days than in years past. I am 66 years old and, since leaving my job at an Amazon warehouse back in 2022, I have been unable to find another part-time job, despite having applied for dozens of them. No one seems to want an old man with few marketable skills – go figure! For the last two years, I have had plenty of time on my hands, and I have generally filled it by reading, writing, baking, and playing my banjo. I enjoy all those things, but I wish I had a little less time on my hands and a part time job that could get me out of the house a bit more and help supplement my Social Security payments. Ah, well, I shouldn’t complain. For a booklover, I’m in a pretty enviable position.

I generally begin my year with some sort of reading goal or agenda, and 2024 was no exception. My late mother was a devout fan of the gothic romance novels that proliferated in the middle of the twentieth century, inspired partly by the huge success of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. When I was growing up, our house was filled with cheap paperback books whose covers invariably featured beautiful young women fleeing in fear from spooky-looking old houses. I used to gently tease my mother about these books. They all looked so similar and so…cheesy. But my mother read more than just gothic romances. She loved pop fiction, and our bookshelves also contained cheap paperback copies of everything from Rosemary’s Baby to Jaws to The Exorcist to The Thorn Birds. It was through her that I acquired my passion for popular fiction. When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, in her late seventies, she lost her ability to read or to communicate coherently about much of anything. I realized then that there was a lot I should probably have been asking her about through the years, questions about her life, and about her interest in books. It was now too late for me to do that, but I thought that I might gain some insights into my mother by delving into the gothic romance books that she loved so much. For the last ten or fifteen years, I have included some gothic romances in my reading diet, and I have generally enjoyed them quite a bit. More recently, I acquired a few serious literary studies of the entire mid-twentieth-century gothic-romance-novel boom. So my plan for 2024 was to read a lot of gothic romances, as well as books about the genre, and then write an essay explaining what this exercise taught me (or failed to teach me) about my mother. The very first book I read in 2024 was a 1969 gothic romance appropriately titled You’ll Like My Mother, which was written by Naomi A. Hintze. Like most gothic romances, this one was very short, only 159 pages, and I read it in a day. It was definitely cheesy and had some eye-rolling plot twists and character behavior, but it was also fast-paced and engrossing. It seemed like my Year of Reading Gothic Fiction was off to a good start. Alas, as with my New Years resolutions to lose some weight, my reading goals often go awry shortly after the beginning of the year. Such was the case in 2024.

Another one of my reading goals for 2024 was to read some crime fiction set in Santa Barbara, California, and then write about it. I’m fascinated by the way that some of California’s most upscale communities have inspired so many classic crime novels. In previous years, I’ve read a lot of crime and crime-adjacent novels set in Malibu, Pasadena, and other high-end California communities. Santa Barbara is the setting of most of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone novels (although both author’s fictionalize the city as Santa Teresa). For years, I had heard that Newton Thornburg’s 1976 novel, Cutter and Bone, was not just one of the best crime novels ever set in Santa Barbara but also one of the best crime novels ever set in California. Years ago I read and enjoyed his 1984 novel Beautiful Kate, but for some reason, I never got around to reading anything else by Thornburg. But my Santa Barbara project gave me an excuse to finally crack open my copy of Cutter and Bone. The book was so good that, upon finishing it, I immediately acquired a copy of his 1973 book To Die In California, another crime novel with a Santa Barbara setting, and began reading it. My Year of Reading Gothic Romance Novels and Crime Books With A Santa Barbara Setting seemed to be off to a great start. But it is difficult to stick to a reading plan when you are also determined to make money by writing about popular fiction for publication. As each new year approaches, I go online and see what famous novels might be celebrating a significant anniversary. In 2024, Earth Abides celebrated 70 years in print, and I Am Legend celebrated 75 years. Also, both Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Jaws turned fifty years old in 2024. So I re-read both of those books in an effort (successful!) to sell essays about them to Quillette. At about the same time, my editor at Quillette asked me to write about the whole Amityville Horror phenomenon because the MGM + streaming service had just released a multi-part documentary about it. For that essay, I not only re-read the original Amityville Horror book by Jay Anson, I also read Anson’s only other book, a novel called 666 (I skimmed so much of it that I won’t even list it among the books I read in 2024), as well as the books The Intruder, by Pat Montadon (surprisingly good), and Night Stalks The Mansion (weird, but not in a good way), by Constance Westbie and Harold Cameron, both of which were, like The Amityville Horror, marketed as true stories about haunted houses. As I recall, my Amityville Horror essay ended up not even mentioning 666, The Intruder, or Night Stalks the Mansion. I did write a separate essay about various Amityville wannabe books, but as yet I haven’t found a home for it. I’ll probably post it on Substack someday soon. At any rate, all this job-related reading totally derailed me from my two major literary goals, and I never got either project back on track. I can’t say that I regret this too much. I enjoyed reading almost all of the books that I wrote about for Quillette (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance being a major exception).

Despite the fact that my Santa Barbara and Gothic Romance projects got derailed, the year 2024 was marked by three fairly ambitious reading projects, none of which was actually planned. In January, I was in a Sacramento used bookstore when my eye was caught by a biological thriller called The Cobra Event, written by Richard Preston. The book was published in 1998 and I’ve seen it hundreds of times over the years in bookstores. I believe the reason I never took note of it is because it was published a few years after his nonfiction book The Hot Zone became a massive bestseller. If you are as old as I am, you may remember the buzz that accompanied the publication of The Hot Zone, a book that had originally been excerpted in The New Yorker. Stephen King proclaimed that it was “One of the most horrifying things I’ve ever read.” The publisher seemed to make every effort to make potential readers think that the book was a novel rather than a work of nonfiction. Blurbs on the paperback edition claimed the book to be “more terrifying than any sci-fi nightmare” and “a riveting thriller” and “an infectious page-turner” and “swashbuckling reading” and “a spine-chilling narrative” and “a fast-paced gripping medical thriller.” Lured by these come-ons, as well as by the recommendation of a usually reliable book-loving friend of mine, I rushed out an bought a copy of The Hot Zone in the late 1990s. Alas, I am not a huge fan of nonfiction books. I prefer my thrillers to be novels. The Hot Zone did, indeed, include a lot of gory and horrifying descriptions of how the Ebola virus attacks the human body, but it is a rather diffuse work of nonfiction that bounces around among various real-life scientists and sufferers, various years, various outbreaks, and it includes a lot of straight-forward science writing that simply isn’t all that engrossing if what you are looking for is a fast-paced medical thriller. It was an admirable book but it didn’t grip me the way a good novel always does. And I think I just probably assumed that The Cobra Event was another nonfiction thriller that used bookstore owners occasionally accidentally shelved in the fiction section. Thus, I took little note of it for years. But, in January, something inspired me to pull the book off a shelf at The Book Worm and take its measure. When I discovered that it was an actual novel, I bought it. According to my diary, I began reading it on January 14. Here’s how I ended my diary entry for January 15: “I sat up in bed till nearly ten reading to the end of ‘Cobra Event.’ It read like a collaboration between Michael Crichton and Thomas Harris ‘The Silence of the Andromeda Strain’ or, perhaps, ‘The Red Cobra.’ At any rate, it was a real page-turner. I loved it.”

For me, The Cobra Event was the first great thriller of 2024, and it didn’t just whet my appetite for more thrillers, it specifically got me craving more bio-medical thrillers. By January 16, I was online perusing lists of “the best bio-medical thrillers” and “great thrillers about disease” and “page-turning biological novels” and so forth. One book whose title popped up frequently was Cold Storage, a thriller about a killer fungus from outer space, published in 2019 and written by screenwriter (Jurassic Park, and many others) and director (Stir of Echoes, and many others) David Koepp. As it happens, I’m a big fan of Koepp’s film work, and I already had a copy of Cold Storage on my shelves, although I hadn’t read it yet. So I immediately set about reading my copy of Cold Storage and ended up loving it. I loved it so much, in fact, that I ordered a copy of his only other novel (to date), Aurora, published in 2022. This one wasn’t technically a bio-medical thriller, but it was about a solar storm so powerful that it knocks out nearly all of the electrical power on planet earth, leaving mankind to try to survive for months on end without any of the appliances and other conveniences that we take for granted. This is a plausible scenario. In 1859 a solar flare known as The Carrington Event blew out nearly all of the electrical devices on earth. Fortunately, at that time, telegraphs were about the only electrical devices in use. Aurora was every bit as good as Cold Storage – gripping, fascinating, terrifying, fun, over-the-top, suspenseful – and after reading it I cranked out two essays, each one celebrating one of Koepp’s novels. The essay celebrating Cold Storage is titled Great Big Gobs of Greasy Grimy Zombie Guts and was published on Substack on February 21. The essay celebrating Aurora – Boring Title; Thrilling Novel – was published on February 29. I won’t quote from them here, but I suggest that you check out both those essays or, even better, just buy both novels and settle in for some great pop fiction.

While searching for bio-medical thrillers online, I came across plenty of titles I was already familiar with, including Earth Abides and I Am Legend. It was when I noticed that both of those novels would be celebrating significant anniversaries in 2024 that I got the idea to write an essay about California novels of the apocalypse. But, while I was gobbling up Calipocalypse novels, I also continued to hunt for other bio-medical thrillers in the vein of The Cobra Event. One such book was Gwen in Green, a cult classic from 1974, written by the late Hugh Zachary. The book was mentioned by Grady Hendrix in Paperbacks From Hell, his brilliant 2017 study of the cheesy horror fiction boom of the 1970s and 1980s. The book was recently republished by Valancourt Books, featuring an introduction/appreciating by Will Errickson, whose author bio says he “co-wrote” Paperbacks From Hell (his name doesn’t appear on the cover but the title page credits the book to “Grady Hendrix with Will Errickson”). Gwen in Green is more of a botanical thriller than a biological one. It also qualifies, sort of, as a gothic romance. It tells the tale of a young married couple, Gwen and George, who move to a remote and largely undeveloped part of North Carolina’s Tidewater region, where they hope to build a home to escape the rat race in. It turns out that the land is cursed. Anyone who tries to cut down its old-growth trees or drain its swamps is likely to meet a horrific demise. Every generation or so, a woman comes along who can actually communicate with the land on a subconscious level, so much so that she becomes a sort of human defender of the land, helping whatever malevolent presence keeps the property largely undeveloped fight back against the men who would despoil it. It’s a weird novel, and it incorporates a sort of feminist message (women are of the land and protective of the natural world; men simply want to rape the land) with a lot of raunchy sex scenes that seem to have been aimed at Playboy magazine enthusiasts. At one point, the beautiful Gwen lures a young construction worker named Billy away from his bulldozer and into a secluded part of the property he is razing. She tells him to take off his clothes and he says, “You first.”

She nodded, shed the blouse in one graceful motion, loosened her hotpants, let them fall. She had a thick, brown bush and sweet-looking legs. She kicked the hotpants aside. Billy’s throat was dry. He took a step toward her. She said, “Now you.”

Billy obligingly begins to undress but this encounter isn’t going to go the way that he is hoping. In fact, it will end disastrously for him. Under the influence of the natural world that workers like Billy are trying to tame/eradicate, Gwen has become some sort of avenging earth mother, determined to protect her offspring. Gwen in Green is not a great book, but it is never dull. It seems to have been a sincere attempt to write a thriller that takes into account a lot of the ecological concerns that were beginning to turn the environmental movement into a major political force back in the 1970s (the first International Earth Day was held in 1970). Its weird mix of horror, environmentalism, raunchy sex, feminism, suspense, and disquisition on marriage makes it unlike most pulp thrillers of the era. It wasn’t the biological thriller I was hoping for, but I’m glad I read it.

About fifteen years ago, I read a novel by Tess Gerritsen, best known for her series of crime novels featuring Boston Police Detective Jane Rizzoli and Medical Examiner Maura Isles (the books were adapted into a TV series called, appropriately, Rizzoli & Isles). I no longer remember which Gerritsen novel I read back then. I remember liking but not loving it. I believe I made a vague promise to myself to seek out more of her work, but I never got around to doing so. Until 2024, that is. When I was looking up biological thrillers on the internet, Gerritsen’s name came up over and over again. I thought this was odd, because I assumed she wrote only Rizzoli and Isles crime novels. But I did a little online research and learned that Gerritsen is a bit of a Renaissance woman. Her birth name was Terry Tom, and she is the daughter of a Chinese immigrant and a Chinese-American. She was born in San Diego in 1953. She received an undergraduate degree from Stanford and then got a medical degree from U.C. San Francisco. She practiced medicine for several decades and her husband is also a doctor. Tess Gerristsen is both a classical pianist and a violinist, as well as a composer of classical music. She began her literary career in the mid 1980s, while on maternity leave from her medical career, and published a series of romantic suspense novels that were directed primarily at the readers of Harlequin romances and other low-prestige paperback publishing ventures that specialized in women’s fiction. Gradually her novels began leaning more heavily on thrills and suspense than on love and romance. Her 1990 novel Under the Knife, published by Mira Books, a division of Harlequin Enterprises, is more Robin Cook than Danielle Steel. In 1996, she published her first great thriller novel, the abovementioned Harvest. The book has garnered nearly eight thousand reviews on Amazon.com and has a rating of 4.6 stars out of 5. This is a thriller worthy of comparison with Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. I recounted the plot above, so I won’t repeat myself. What makes the book excellent is not just the expert pacing and plotting but the fact that it was clearly written by someone thoroughly steeped in how American medicine works, how hospitals are run, what a medical doctor’s workday is like, and so forth.

After Harvest, Gerritsen published several more top-notch medical and medical-adjacent thrillers. Her novel Gravity is a masterpiece, comprising a thriller set on the international space station, a bio-medical thriller, a love story, and various other gripping elements. Published in the year 2000, you could say, depending upon how you calculate these things, that it was either the last great American thriller of the 20^th century or the first great one of the 21^st. In either case, it is excellent. In 2001, she published The Surgeon, the first (and probably the best) of the Rizzoli and Isles novels, but even that book, as the title suggests, leans heavily on Gerritsen’s medical training. By my count, she has now published a total of 35 books. Her two most recent novels are spy thrillers. She is a gifted and prolific writer of popular fiction, but for some reason I largely ignored her until 2024. While looking for bio-medical thrillers, the first Gerritsen title I acquired this year was Bloodstream, published back in 1998. Here’s my diary entry for March 18, 2024: “Read more of ‘Bloodstream.’ Finished it at ten. Very good. A creepy biological thriller like ‘The Cobra Event,’ ‘Cold Storage,’ and ‘Gwen in Green.’” If that sounds like less than effusive praise, well, it was late at night and I was too tired to effuse much. But I enjoyed Bloodstream so much that I would go on to read another twelve novels by Gerritsen over the course of the year. Bloodstream is a science-fiction novel about a deadly fungus that has plagued the teenagers of a remote Maine town for generations. (Gerritsen and her husband live in Maine, which may partially explain why Stephen King is a huge fan of hers.) It can be enjoyed as a thriller, a horror novel, a crime novel, or a gripping medical story. After finishing Bloodstream, I got hold of a copy of Harvest and devoured it. Next up was The Surgeon, a medical thriller as well as a Jane Rizzoli crime novel. She followed it up with The Apprentice, also a bit of a medical thriller and the novel that introduced Maura Isles. In 2019, Gerritsen published The Shape of Night, a romantic suspense novel that was a bit of a throwback for her. In an essay for Substack I compared it favorably to both Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and the 1947 film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Look up my essay (published October 18) if you want to know more about The Shape of Night. I enjoyed it a great deal, though it was less serious than most Gerritsen novels. Next I read Life Support, an excellent 1998 medical thriller. Many of Gerritsen’s thrillers use multiple timelines. An excellent example of this is The Bone Garden, a standalone thriller from 2009 which toggles back and forth between the present day and the 1830s, when a serial killer nicknamed the West End Reaper is terrorizing Boston and Oliver Wendell Homes (not the Supreme Court Justice but his father, a legendary Boston medical man) joins forces with those who hope to stop him. Maura Isles makes a cameo appearance in the present-day part of the story but this isn’t a Rizzoli and Isles novel. Gerritsen’s 2015 novel, Playing With Fire, is another standalone thriller that operates on two timelines, one in the present and one in Europe during the Second World War. Gerritsen put her musical background to good use in this story about a mysterious piece of music, composed by a Jewish prisoner at Italy’s only concentration camp. The sheet music is discovered in 2015 by an American musician, but when she plays it on her violin, it produces a seemingly disturbing effect on her toddler daughter. Danger, mystery, and suspense ensue. The past is often a big part of a Gerritsen novel, and she seems to be as fascinated by history as she is by medicine.

Among her many virtues as a writer is one that sets her apart a bit from other genre writers. She has an almost religious reverence for the dead. Dead bodies are commonplace in crime and mystery dramas, but they are mainly just used to set the story in motion. This changed a bit with the rise of the forensic crime novel/film/TV series, which began in the 1970s with the popularity of the TV crime drama Quincy, M.E. and really took off in the 1990s, when Patricia Cornwell published Post Mortem and its many sequels, all of which were bestsellers and followed the exploits of a fictional Virginia medical examiner named Kay Scarpetta. Now, suddenly, fiction writers were paying more attention to the dead, allowing them to act as “silent witnesses” in their own murder investigations. But still, oftentimes, the dead remained fairly minor characters in their own murder stories. As a writer of medical thrillers, Gerritsen explores not just murder victims but other deceased persons as well – victims of disease and disaster and historical cataclysms. Her 2008 novel, The Keepsake, has a lot to say about both Egyptian mummies and European bog bodies. She writes with clear disgust and hostility about the Victorian Era practice of bringing Egyptian mummies to England for irreverent uses. Here’s an Egyptologist character explaining the situation to Jane Rizzoli in The Keepsake:

“There was once a thriving international trade in mummies. They were ground up and used as medicines. Carted off to England for fertilizer. Wealthy tourists brought them home and held unwrapping parties. You’d invite your friends over to watch while you peeled away the linen. Since amulets and jewels were often among the wrappings, it was sort of like a treasure hunt, uncovering little trinkets for your guests…It was done in some of the finest of Victorian homes. It goes to show you how little regard they had for the dead of Egypt. And when they’d finish unwrapping the corpse, it would be disposed of or burned. But the wrappings were often kept as souvenirs.”

Her 2007 novel, The Bone Garden, taught me about the anatomy riots that took place in 18^th and 19^th century America. Back then, medical schools had no reliable source of corpses that could be used for the study of human anatomy. Thus, many medical schools hired grave robbers (often referred to as “resurrectionists”) to dig up the bodies of the recently deceased and bring them in secret to the school’s vivisection department. In fact, impoverished students sometimes put themselves through medical school by acting as paid ressurrectionists. Again, Gerritsen writes with barely concealed contempt about the treatment of the dead by these so-called medical men. Here’s an exchange between two of her characters”

“Becoming a doctor was one of the few ways to advance in society. Physicians were respected. Although while in training, medical students were viewed with disgust, even fear.”

“Why?”

“Because they were thought of as vultures, preying on the bodies of the dead. Digging them up, cutting them open. To be sure, the students often brought condemnation on themselves by their antics, by all the practical jokes they played with body parts. Waving severed arms out the window, for example…My father and grandfather were doctors, and I’ve heard these stories since I was a child…When I was growing up, my grandfather told me a story about a student who smuggled a woman’s corpse out of anatomy lab. He put it in his roommate’s bed, as a practical joke. They thought it was quite hilarious.”

“That’s sick.”

“Most of the public would have agreed with you. Which explains why there were many anatomy riots, when outraged mobs attacked schools. It happened in Philadelphia and Baltimore and New York. Any medical school, in any city, could find itself burned to the ground. Public horror and suspicion ran so deep that all it took was a single incident to touch off a riot.”

In a Tess Gerritsen novel, the dead are more than just silent witnesses of their own deaths; they remain fully human and as deserving of respect and dignity as any living person. Even the long dead – mummies, bog bodies – get treated with respect in Gerritsen’s fiction.

Her books are filled with fascinating scientific and historical information. In addition to all the info about mummies and bog bodies, The Keepsake also taught me about the Lost Army of Cambyses, a fascinating historical incident (possibly apocryphal) about an army of fifty thousand Persian soldiers that simply vanished without a trace in the Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago.

I intended 2024 to be The Year of the Santa Barbara Crime Novel and The Year of the Gothic Romance Novel. Neither of those things really came to fruition. But, among several other titles, 2024 became, for me, The Year of the Bio-Medical Thriller and The Year of the Tess Gerritsen Novel.

In addition to Richard Preston’s, Tess Gerritsen’s, and David Koepp’s bio-medical thrillers, I read several others deserving of mention. I gave in to all the hype surrounding Alex Michaelides’s 2019 mega-bestseller The Silent Patient, a psychological thriller that has an astounding 337,970 reader reviews on Amazon.com and an equally astounding 2,575,165 reader ratings on Goodreads.com. I always figure that approximately one percent of a book’s readers probably take the time to review it on Amazon.com. If so, that would mean that The Silent Patient has been read by more than 30 million people, which boggles the mind, because I thought it was utter rubbish, and I have a fairly high tolerance for bad popular fiction. But The Silent Patient didn’t strike me as merely bad or boring, it struck me as evil and despicable. The novel has some whopping surprises embedded in its tortuous plot, so I’m not going to spoil the book for you by writing a detailed review of it here. The book is beloved by millions, so if you are all curious about it, you should read it. My reaction seems to be a minority one, although when a book has nearly 350,000 online reviews, you can certainly find plenty of naysayers among them. The Silent Patient by itself has probably outsold Tess Gerritsen’s entire literary oeuvre. It has certainly sold far more copies than David Keopp’s two biomedical thrillers or Richard Preston’s The Cobra Event. This is depressing to contemplate, because Michaelides’s book is poorly written, populated by one-dimensional nonentities, and provides no real genuine thrills, just a few shocks and surprises that are the literary equivalent of Hollywood jump scares. It was easily the worst book I read in 2024. Nothing else even comes close to the level of awfulness found in The Silent Patient.

Carriers, published in 1995, was one of the better bio-medical thrillers I read in 2024. The book is credited to Patrick Lynch, which is a joint pseudonym for authors Philip Sington and Gary Humphreys. It seems likely that the novel was inspired by Richard Preston’s 1992 New Yorker article Crisis in the Hot Zone, which tells of an Ebola outbreak and was later expanded into the 1994 book The Hot Zone. Certainly the publishers of Carriers were hoping to create a connection between the two books in the minds of thriller lovers. The cover of the paperback edition features an excerpt from a USA Today review that reads: IMAGINE A BUG ONE HUNDRED TIMES MORE CONTAGIOUS THAN EBOLA. IT’S HATCHING IN THE INDONESIAN RAIN FOREST IN CARRIERS…” The back cover quotes a review that (somewhat confusingly) says, “This – along with Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone – is the fiction/nonfiction guide into the modern world of unknown diseases.” I point this out not to belittle the accomplishment of “Patrick Lynch.” Pop fiction has a long history of taking horrifying news stories – the advent of the atomic bomb, for instance – and turning them into riveting worst-case-scenario fictions such as Fail Safe and On the Beach and The China Syndrome. Sington and Humphreys were smart to take Preston’s nonfiction tale and crank it up to eleven via a novelistic treatment. Carriers is intelligent, well-written, and fascinating. My main problem with it was that it just seemed too darned ambitious. The story includes dozens of important characters. The action takes place all over the globe. The authors crammed in a lot of back-story that was necessary but frequently slowed down the primary narrative. Nonetheless, I’m glad I read it. It has garnered only 90 reviews at Goodreads.com but many of them are ecstatic in their enthusiasm for the novel. The book reminded me a great deal of Lawrence Wright’s 2022 pandemic thriller The End of October, which I read last year. Of the two, I think Carriers is much the better novel. But both seemed to suffer from being excessively ambitious, trying to say everything that could possibly be said about a deadly worldwide pandemic, when a more focused narrative would have probably made for a more gripping read. Both books also bear a strong resemblance to the film World War Z, another thriller about a worldwide pandemic and one family’s efforts to avoid becoming victims of it. World War Z succeeds because it stays fairly tightly focused on the Brad Pitt character and his wife and children. Carriers and The End of October would have been more successful if they’d adhered to the World War Z playbook. But World War Z is based on a novel that was published more than a decade after Carriers, so Patrick Lynch didn’t have the option as using is as a template for his own thriller. Nonetheless, Carriers is still a worthwhile thriller.

The Syndrome, a bio-medical thriller by John Case, was published in 2001, and it is another bio-thriller authored by two people (husband and wife Jim and Carol Hougan) employing a single pseudonym. A year or two ago I read and enjoyed an earlier bio-thriller of theirs called The Genesis Code (about an attempt to create modern-day clones of Jesus Christ – a reversal, sorta, of the plot of The Boys From Brazil). The Genesis Code was another thriller that suffered from being a bit too ambitious and scattered but was nonetheless pretty entertaining and intelligent. Alas, The Syndrome takes a different bio-medical what-if (brain implants that can render a human being pretty much a robotic slave of whoever controls the “neurophonic prosthesis”) and stretches it way beyond the breaking point. The book is smart and features some great ideas, but the authors try to cram too much into this story, which makes it confusing and, ultimately, exhausting. The Hougans wrote seven novels under the Case pseudonym and each Hougan also wrote solo novels under their own names (they were both journalists and produced a lot of nonfiction also). I may give their work another try at some point, but The Syndrome sort of soured me on them a bit.

I read The Cobra Event in early January and spent much of 2024 trying to find a bio-medical thriller that could surpass it. I found several that came close – Cold Storage, Bloodstream, etc. – but no book I read this year was as thrilling as The Cobra Event. Curiously, though Preston hasn’t written any other solo novels, he was hired by the estate of Michael Crichton to complete Crichton’s unfinished thriller Micro. That book was published in 2011. I attempted to read it a few years later. At that time, the name Richard Preston didn’t mean much to me. I knew him only as the author of The Hot Zone, a nonfiction book that didn’t really thrill me. My attempt to read Micro petered out after about one hundred pages. I wasn’t much disappointed by the experience. Unfinished novels that are completed by a second author after the original author has died are rarely any good (see, for instance, Poodle Springs, begun by Raymond Chandler and completed decades later by Robert B. Parker). I moved on and forgot about Micro. But after being blown away by The Cobra Event, I went looking for more fiction by Preston and that’s when I once again came across Micro. It is the only other work of fiction to which his name is attached. Now, suddenly, I was eager to give Micro another chance. I’m a big Crichton fan and I loved The Cobra Event. I decided that my earlier failure to appreciate Micro was probably my own fault. Now that I was a fan of both Crichton and his posthumous collaborator, I was sure to enjoy Micro. Wrong! I still couldn’t make it past the halfway point of this novel (which, as the title implies, deals with miniaturizing human beings a la Honey I Shrunk The Kids). Desperate for more fiction by Richard Preston, I went looking into his background and discovered that he is the brother of Douglas Preston, who has written or co-written something like forty novels. His best-known work has been written in collaboration with Lincoln Child. When I was a clerk at a local bookstore I sold quite a few Preston & Child novels to my customers but I never bothered to read any myself. Now I wandered down to that same bookstore (I no longer work there) and purchased a copy of Relic, published in 1995 and the first collaboration between the two men. Relic was an okay piece of pulp fiction and seemed to be intended as a mash up of Jaws and Jurassic Park. I enjoyed it although it was often a bit longwinded. Douglas Preston worked for eight years at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and he seemed to want to cram his novel full of information about how museums are run, the internal politics, the turf wars, and so forth. This stuff is occasionally interesting but it slows down the story. Also, I detected a slight pompousness to the writing, as if the authors felt that they need to talk down to their audience. After reading Relic, I sought out Douglas Preston’s first novel, Jennie, about an ape who is raised to believe that she is a human child. Last year I read Karen Joy Fowler’s novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which tells a similar story. For some reason my personal library contains quite a few books with ape or monkey protagonists of one sort or another – Eva by Peter Dickinson, Congo by Michael Crichton, Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, Dark Inheritance by the Gears, Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boule, etc. So I thought perhaps I’d read a few more monkey books and then write an essay about the genre. Alas, I got bogged down in the early stages of Jennie and put it aside, thus causing my monkey project to stall out. Part of my problem with Jennie was that I detected that same pompousness of tone that had marred Relic, but in Jennie it seemed even more prominent. I suspect that the pomposity of the Preston & Child novels comes from Preston. I haven’t read his 2008 nonfiction book, The Monster of Florence, but this review on Goodreads.com, written by someone called Erica, seems to cleverly capture the pomposity that is apparently endemic to Preston’s writing:

Preston: Well, my New Yorker article about the Monster of Florence won't be published now thanks to 9/11, so I think I should write a book instead.

Editor: But will Americans really be that interested in unsolved lovers lane murders in Italy? We already have the Zodiac Killer and the Son of Sam. Let's make this book about you instead.

Preston: You're right. I am, after all, a Bestselling Author.

Editor: And don't let your readers forget it! I want at least one reminder per page that you're not just any old armchair detective, but a Bestselling Author.

Preston: I did move to Florence in the first place to work on my next novel... I never finished it, but I'll include a page-long plot description so my readers know what a genius I am.

Editor: Don't forget to name-drop all the interesting people you met.

Preston: I'll be sure to include the blue blood Italian nobility I became such close friends with. Even they were impressed by my writing skills! Did you know that Thomas Harris wrote Hannibal in this town? And that Harris was inspired by the Monster?

Editor: Okay, be sure to include that on every page as well so your readers make the connection that you're just as good as Thomas Harris. Now, who is this Spezi?

Preston: He's an Italian journalist that most Americans have probably never heard of, so I'll be sure to minimize his voice in my writing. He was arrested in the course of our investigation, but that's not the story here... the story here is how I helped him out using my influence as a Bestselling Author.

Editor: And this book will be your next bestseller! Be sure to write about how incompetent the Italian police are, just to give everybody Amanda Knox vibes.

Preston: Who?

Editor: Don't worry about it.

A little pomposity isn’t the worst thing in the world, so I may read some more Douglas Preston novels in the future, but I have little faith that any of them will rise to the level of Richard’s lone solo foray into the field of novel writing. It’s a shame that Douglas was the Preston brother who chose to devote himself fulltime to writing novels, because Richard is so much better at it.

Now, let’s get back to Philip Sington – one half of the writing team known as Patrick Lynch. As it happens, Patrick Lynch isn’t Sington’s only pseudonym. He has also published a solo novel, called Two Storm Wood, under the name Philip Gray. Carriers was a solid piece of popular fiction, but Two Storm Wood is a near masterpiece and it satisfies the requirements of several major genres. It is a historical novel, a war novel (WWI and its aftermath), a horror novel, a romance, a mystery/crime novel, and it even flirts a bit with the fantasy and ghost story genres. I’ve read tons of WWI fiction, but I’ve never read one like this. The foreground story is set in the killing fields of France in 1919, shortly after the end of the war. I never gave much thought before to what happened when the war ended. I just assumed that all the British soldiers stationed in Europe – primarily France – just went home when the hostilities ended in November of 1918. Many of them did. But nearly a million of them couldn’t go home because, well, they were dead. And the British people didn’t like the idea of their fallen heroes lying in unmarked graves all across France. And so the British military undertook the enormous task of trying to exhume as many dead soldiers as they could from unmarked graves in French fields, identify them, and then ship them home for reburial. This, needless to say, was a grisly task that involved all kinds of body horror as men who had died gruesomely in battle and been left to rot in the ground for months or years now had to be exhumed. The task proved so arduous that the British military enlisted the help of the Chinese Labor Corps, a group of nearly 100,000 valiant men that I’d never even heard of before. These were mostly Chinese farm laborers recruited by the Brits during WWI to perform supporting roles for British troops so that more British soldiers could be sent to the battlefront. Although these Chinese laborers weren’t employed as soldiers, at least two thousand of them were killed during the war. And afterwards, the British paid many of them to remain in France and help exhume dead soldiers. Ordinarily, according to this novel, a fear of ghosts would discourage Chinese men from engaging in such an undertaking but, fortunately for the Brits, Chinese men fear only Chinese ghosts. British ghosts don’t frighten them. In fact, the Chinese don’t seem to believe that white men possess such things as ghosts and souls, and having just witnessed the white men of Europe massacring each other by the millions for the past five years, they can’t be blamed for harboring these beliefs. Thus, the Chinese laborers joined the British soldiers in the wretched business of digging up mutilated corpses in order to help posthumously repatriate them. Philip Gray/Sington does a good job of conveying the unspeakable horror of this task to the reader. I read a lot of novels in 2024 about horrific viruses that eat away the organs of human beings, funguses that essentially colonize human brains and turn their hosts into zombies, and corpses that explode in the international space station, where globs of their entrails and blood and viscera float through the weightless living quarters and spread their filthy infections to the living – but Two Storm Wood was probably the most grisly book I read all year. If you’re not familiar with the word “lingchi,” consider yourself lucky. Philip Gray provides a nauseating description of the practice in Two Storm Wood, and it’s only one of several god-awful examples of man’s inhumanity to man described in hideous detail in the novel. The book takes its title from a French field known as Two Storm Wood, a place where some horrific war crime appears to have been committed and then covered up. Powerful, sinister, and possibly even supernatural forces seem determined to keep the secret of Two Storm Wood literally buried beneath the ground. But those forces haven’t reckoned on the determination of one plucky young British woman, Amy Vanneck, a sheltered girl of the middle-class, who defies her entire community by insisting on traveling to France shortly after the end of the war in order to discover the fate of her lover, Edward Haslam, who is missing, presumed dead, and believed to have, at the very least, deserted his battalion during the height of battle and, possibly, even participated in the abovementioned hideous war crime. Before the war, Edward was a meek music-loving academic. He was a pacifist who opposed the war from the beginning. But when the fighting broke out, he eventually did his duty by the British people and enlisted in the military. Amy believes that he has been scapegoated for crimes that he didn’t commit and now cannot defend himself against. She also believes quite strongly that he may be still alive, hiding out somewhere in France until he can clear his name. And so she sets out for France – where both the British and French respond to her presence the way they might to a turd in a punch bowl – armed with almost nothing but her wits and a soul-deep conviction that Edward Haslam isn’t/wasn’t the coward he’s been condemned as.

Two Storm Wood is strongly reminiscent of Sebastien Japrisot’s brilliant 1991 novel A Very Long Engagement, another story about a young woman who sets out in the aftermath of WWI to find out what has happened to her fiancé, a soldier who was accused of shirking his duty and is believed to have died a coward’s death. But Two Storm Wood is neither a rip-off of nor a pale imitation of Japrisot’s novel. It has its own unique characters and plot twists and story structure and narrative voice. It is a very British story, whereas A Very Long Engagement is a very French one. I have described Two Storm Wood as grisly, hideous, horrific, and gruesome – and it is all of those things. So why did I enjoy it so much? Because it is a lot of other things as well. It is thrilling, mysterious, compelling, romantic, engaging, well-written, beautifully plotted, and features a marvelous heroine. It also has a few of those shocking plot twists that make you feel as if the floor has collapsed beneath your feet. For most of the time that I was reading it, I was convinced that Two Storm Wood would turn out to be my favorite book of 2024. It came close to winning that honor but Philip Gray didn’t quite stick the landing. After the mystery of what happened at Two Storm Wood is resolved and Edward Haslam’s fate is revealed, the novel continues for a bit too long, tying up loose ends that didn’t really need tying and explaining away things that might have been better left mysterious. The book is probably about twenty pages too long. This isn’t a major problem but the book was unputdownable for so long that I felt disappointed to find it overstaying its welcome. Nonetheless, this is a novel that I will almost certainly reread at some future time. The cover of my paperback edition has a great tagline: “1919. THE GUNS ARE SILENT. THE DEAD ARE NOT.” If you chose to read it, I guarantee that it will be one of the most unsettling thrillers you’ve ever encountered. Long after you’ve forgotten the specifics of the plot, there are things in this book that are likely to go on haunting your nightmares.

Amazingly, Two Storm Wood was only the second best of the Philip Sington novels I read in 2024. Under his own name, Sington has published three novels. The only one I’ve read is The Valley of Unknowing, published in 2012. The story is set in East Germany (generally referred to in this novel as The Workers’ and Peasants’ State, though it is anything but) in the late 1980s, a year or two before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, and The Workers’ and Peasants’ State. The protagonist is Bruno Krug, a middle-aged writer (and plumber) who published a single novel, The Orphans of Neustadt, in the late 1960s that, somewhat like The Catcher in the Rye or On the Road, became a cult hit amongst angsty, disaffected young people. It was successful across the globe but is especially revered by young East Germans, granting Krug a status among them similar to what J.D. Salinger had among young American hipsters in the 1960s. Krug followed up the novel with a less successful story collection and has written nothing since. Because his novel brought favorable attention to the East German literary scene, the state has granted him the status of People’s Champion of Art and Culture and given him a fairly nice apartment to live in and a stipend of some sort. But he also must work occasionally as a plumber, fixing toilets and faucets for workers and peasants, in order to make ends meet. He is approaching fifty and hasn’t published (or even written) anything in a long time. His publisher remains on friendly terms with him because Bruno’s novel is still fairly popular. For years people have urged Bruno to write a sequel to his celebrated novel, which had a famously unresolved ending and seemed to be written with a sequel in mind. Alas, Krug has turned out to be a one-novel wonder. And The Orphans of Neustadt never got the sequel so many fans were waiting for. But as The Valley of Unknowing opens, all that is about to change. In the opening pages of the novel Krug finds himself becoming infatuated with Theresa Aden, a beautiful young Austrian student who is studying the viola at an East German music school. Apparently, back in the day, when students from West Germany, Austria, and other nearby countries failed to get accepted into prestigious western universities, they sometimes chose to study at East German universities, which weren’t as picky about who they let in. Krug finds himself attracted to Theresa but there is a problem. She herself is infatuated with a young Wolfgang Richter, a cocky but talented young writer and political activist who frequently makes fun of Bruno King in his work. At this point, Bruno’s longsuffering publisher, Michael Schilling, gives Bruno an anonymous manuscript (no title, no author’s name) and asks him to read it and give an opinion of it. Reluctantly, Bruno takes the manuscript home with him and discovers that, although the characters’ names have been changed, the novel is clearly a sequel to The Orphans of Neustadt, which takes up where that novel left off. But, whereas The Orphans of Neustadt avoided any kind of political commentary that might upset government censors, this anonymous sequel is full of content that would get both the author and the publisher jailed if it were ever put into print in East Germany. Krug is both fascinated and outraged by this extension of his intellectual property. But he isn’t much worried about it ever being published. No one in East Germany would be suicidal enough to defy the government censors by publishing a book so replete with inflammatory content.

This plot summary covers only about the first twenty or thirty pages of the novel (I gave the book to a friend, who also loved it, so I don’t have it handy and can’t be exactly sure how many pages my summary covers). After that, all sorts of wild plot twists ensue but I don’t want to spoil any of them by revealing their nature here. The publisher compared the book to the excellent 2006 German film The Lives of Others, and it is a worthy comparison. The Valley of Unknowing has the kind of plot twists and shocking revelations that are more commonly associated with pulp fiction, but this is a fairly serious literary endeavor (the author’s wife grew up in East Germany and knew its horrors) albeit also a fairly comical one. The book is part Franz Kafka, part madcap adventure, part social commentary, with dashes of John Le Carre and Len Deighton thrown in for good measure. At times it also reads a bit like the work of Stephen King who frequently writes about fiction writers who find themselves in trouble (see Secret Window, Secret Garden; 1408; The Shining; The Dark Half; Bag of Bones; Lisey’s Story; Misery; ‘Salem’s Lot; and many others). Towards the end it also becomes unexpectedly moving (just as The Lives of Others does).

The book has garnered only 63 reviews at Goodreads.com, but many of them are ecstatic and reflect my own feelings about it. Reader Anna Kennedy writes:

“Oh I loved this book so much!! A beautiful gentle but powerful read, I was swept along in its current and was mesmerised by the emerging story as it was played out in its paranoia and self-doubt of an older man struggling with a young love which reflects his receding fame and success in East Germany. Highly recommended.”

Another reader, Jo, writes:

“This book was not only fascinating in its depiction of the German Democratic Republic two years before it fell, but also in the character of Bruno Krug, the writer at the centre of the story. Although Bruno's character is so flawed in many ways I never lost sympathy with him, I think because his flaws were so very human and primarily motivated by love. He does not come across as an evil man but simply a weak one and even though the prologue has already set the scene for a less than happy ending, the hope is there that he will find one.

“Sington's writing is a joy to read, there were so many lines and paragraphs I reread and tried to remember for their wisdom and their beauty and in contrast to the dreary scenery he describes so well, there was a lot of comedy in the book. Bruno's quest for toothpaste in a socialist state, for example had me smiling and this happened often in the first half of the book. The theme of betrayal, however, runs throughout the book: by the state, by informers and by lovers and so ultimately this is a somber book yet I found it a poignant, often exciting and engaging read.”

I couldn’t have said it any better myself. The book reminded me a lot of German author Sascha Arango’s 2014 novel The Truth and Other Lies, which is about a successful German novelist whose career is built upon a colossal lie. I read that book about a decade ago and loved it. I thought it was full of amazing plot twists and I enjoyed watching the evil protagonist trying to weasel his way out of one jam after another when it appears that his secret will finally be revealed. After finishing The Valley of Unknowing I immediately ordered a used copy of The Truth and Other Lies and then set about rereading it. Had I not read it so soon after finishing The Valley of Unknowing, my admiration for Arango’s novel might have remained undiminished. As it happened, I enjoyed the reread, but I now think that The Truth and Other Lies is a fairly superficial piece of entertainment (nothing wrong with that) whereas The Valley of Unknowing is both entertaining and a serious commentary on human nature. Arango’s book was published two years after Philip Sington’s and may have been partially inspired by it, though not in a plagiaristic way. I recommend them both.

If I didn’t already know it, I would never have guessed that Carriers, Two Storm Wood, and The Valley of Unknowing had all been written (or co-written) by the same person. All three books are incredibly intelligent, well-plotted, and fascinating. But Carriers reads like the best of Michael Crichton’s work; Two Storm Wood, while it bears some resemblance to A Very Long Engagement, is too original to be usefully compared with the work of any other contemporary popular writer; and The Valley of Unknowing, while it occasionally gestures towards Le Carre and Kafka and Stephen King, could never be mistaken for the work of any of those writers; it has a unique voice and a style all its own. And, unlike both Carriers and Two Storm Wood, which drag out a bit towards their finales, Sington stuck the landing in The Valley of Unknowing. The book didn’t end too soon or too late. I wouldn’t trim a single page from it. I’m not sure why Philip Sington isn’t better known. Maybe he should stop hiding behind so many pseudonyms. I think you can skip Carriers unless you are a hardcore fan of bio-medical thrillers, but anyone who loves a gripping and intelligent read ought to seek out Two Storm Wood and, especially, The Valley of Unknowing. Books like those are the reason readers like me write blogs like this.

Okay, so 2024 didn’t become The Year of the Santa Barbara Crime Novel nor The Year of Reading Gothic Romance Novels, but it did become The Year of Reading Bio-Medical Thrillers, The Year of Reading Tess Gerritsen Novels, and The Year of Reading Philip Sington Novels. What other titles can we assign to my reading journey of 2024? One such title could be The Year of Reading Calipocalypse and Caldystopia Novels, or books in which California is the setting for an apocalyptic or dystopian story. As mentioned above, I spent a good deal of time writing an essay that would celebrate both George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. An abridged version of that essay, titled Abiding Legends: George R. Stewart, Richard Matheson, and the Birth of the Calipocalypse, was published at Quillette in July. A few months later, I posted the unabridged version of the essay here at Substack. Naturally this project required the reading or re-reading of a lot of apocalyptic fiction with a California setting. One of the novels I read for the project was Jean Hegland’s 1996 cult classic, Into the Forest. Several years ago I watched the 2015 film adaptation starring Ellen (now Elliot) Page and Evan Rachel Wood. I remember finding it mildly entertaining but nothing special, despite being a big fan of both Wood and Page (whose last names describe phases of the transformation of a tree into a book). Thus I wasn’t expecting to be dazzled by Hegland’s novel. But Hegland exceeded my expectations. Into the Forest may not be an all-time masterpiece of apocalyptic fiction, but it is a worthy entry in the genre. Just as George R. Stewart, in Earth Abides, largely ignored the more cinematic aspects of a worldwide apocalypse – large crowds of people flooding hospitals, somber TV newscasters delivering terrifying reports of death and destruction, politicians addressing the nation via radio and TV, etc. – and focused instead on how America’s manmade infrastructure – bridges, dams, reservoirs, roads, etc. – would quickly begin to fail without the proper maintenance, Hegland focuses on how a nationwide apocalypse – the result of a hemorrhagic fever that sweeps across America along with more fatal strains of TB and AIDS – two teenage sisters living alone in a rustic cabin located thirty-two miles outside of Redwood, California. Their parents have fallen prey to the pandemic and the sisters must somehow learn the survival skills necessary to stay alive in a world without any grocery stores, electricity, gas station, or police departments. The sisters occasionally get word of what is going on in far off places such as Los Angeles, Sacramento (my hometown) or even Boston, but for the most part focuses primarily on Eva and Nell and the few square miles that circumscribe their world. Their family life was somewhat fraught with dysfunction even before the death of their parents. But now things are immensely worse.

In some ways, Into the Forest qualifies as a bio-medical thriller, but readers seeking something akin to World War Z are likely to be disappointed. The various plagues that are rapidly depopulating America go largely unmentioned by Eva and Nell. They are too busy trying to keep themselves fed and to avoid being raped or murdered by marauding strangers to spend much time worrying about the fate of the rest of the U.S. And even if they did care to learn more about what was happening outside their own small piece of the world, they’d have almost no way of acquiring that knowledge. Into the Forest is a very claustrophobic and interior novel, two things I generally am not thrilled by in a work of fiction. But Hegland makes it work. Once I accepted the fact that Eva and Nell were not going to set off on a quest to seek out a community of fellow survivors somewhere in the Bay Area or L.A. or Sacramento, but were determined to simply stand their ground, I got into the spirit of Hegland’s novel, which is primarily a character study of two very different sisters and their struggles not only to survive but to get along with each other. This is definitely a “your mileage may vary” novel. I can imagine plenty of pop fiction fans being bored or disappointed by Into the Forest. My enjoyment of it came, in part, because I am a northern Californian, am familiar with the Redwood area, and I enjoy reading dystopian fiction with a specifically northern California flavor to it.

While researching George R. Stewart, I read his classic 1941 novel Storm, which details the progress of a massive Pacific storm that unleashes snow and rain that threatens to flood all of northern California and possibly wipeout all the city of Sacramento (the construction of the Folsom Dam in the 1950s severely reduced the possibility of Sacramento being wiped out by a flood and may even have been inspired, in part, by Stewart’s novel). This inspired me to seek out novels that seem to be heirs of Stewart’s storm, including Nathanial Rich’s 2013 rain-apocalypse Odds Against Tomorrow, which applies the Storm formula to New York City, and Lily Brooks-Dalton’s 2022 The Light Pirate, which applies it to the entire state of Florida. I wrote in detail about both Storm and The Light Pirate in Wanda and Maria: A Tale of Two Storms, which I posted to this blog on April 5 of last year. I suggest you seek out that essay, because I am not going to recap the novel here. I just want to point out that The Light Pirate, like Into the Forest, is a novel that is primarily interested in how an apocalyptic event affects female lives, specifically the lives of girls just growing into womanhood. Neither book struck me as a stone-cold masterpiece but they were both entertaining and thought-provoking.

Before we leave the topic of weather, let me mention another writer whose work I enjoyed in 2024, a woman named Beth Streeter Aldrich (1881-1954). In February, I read and greatly enjoyed her 1933 novel, Miss Bishop, which I described in my diary as “a cross between Good-bye, Mr. Chips and John Williams’s Stoner.” Miss Bishop is about a young woman who joins the first graduating class of a new American university in the Midwest. After graduation, she is hoping to spend maybe a few years teaching before getting married and then settling down to raise a family. Alas, fate has other things in store for Miss Bishop and she spends nearly her entire adult life teaching at the university whose inaugural graduating class she was a part of. It is a somewhat sentimental tale but is also filled with hardship and suffering and a clear-eyed view of how society treated childless, unmarried, working women in the early part of the twentieth century. I enjoyed it so much that I instantly sought out more of BSA’s novels. In short order I read her 1928 novel of pioneer life in Nebraska, A Lantern in Her Hand, and its 1931 sequel, A White Bird Flying. One of the interesting things about A Lantern in Her Hand is that it deals with man-made climate change. It tells the tale of a husband and wife, Will and Abbie Deal, who, shortly after Will returns from fighting in the Civil War, leave behind their Iowa home and travel by covered wagon to Nebraska to take advantage of the government’s Homestead Act. Like a lot of other pioneers they are hoping to farm several hundred acres of Nebraska land. But in the 1860s, Nebraska was an inhospitable place for farming. It was flat as a fritter and had almost no trees to break the powerful winds that swept across the landscape and made the winters incredibly harsh and cold. The pioneers that moved there knew all this. They also knew that if they planted long rows of tall trees they could create windbreaks that would literally alter the climate of the region. But it would take a long time for those trees to mature. And the pioneers knew that many of them would likely go broke or die before the windbreaks grew tall enough and strong enough to fend off the winds that frequently leveled the corn fields in the springtime and exacerbated the brutal blizzards and freezing temperatures of the winter. Early in the novel, when Abbie is exhausted and wants to give up, Will tells her (the italics are all in the original), “The land hasn’t turned against us. It’s the finest, blackest loam on the face of the earth. The folks that will just stick it out…You’ll see the climate change…More rains and not so much wind…When the trees grow. We’ve got to keep at the trees. Some day this is going to be the richest state in the union…the most productive.” Aldrich points out that it was J. Sterling Morton, a prominent Nebraska newspaper editor and businessman, who originated Arbor Day in America. On the first Arbor Day, held on April 10, 1872, one million trees were planted in Nebraska, and it wasn’t done for decorative purposes. It was done to alter the climate and slow down the winds. Liberals who think that climate change is an unintended consequence of fossil fuel use might be surprised to discover that mankind has been doing things to the planet to alter the weather for thousands of years (William Cronon’s 1983 nonfiction book, Changes in the Land, documents how the first American colonists altered the climate long before fossil fuels were in use). Conservatives who insist that mankind cannot alter the earth’s climate might be surprised that mankind has been doing so for thousands of years. In fact, those hearty pioneers who settled the West, and who are so beloved by conservatives, wholeheartedly believed that men could alter the climate, and they set out to do exactly that in places like Nebraska.

There is a popular saying, first coined by G. Michael Hopf, that goes, “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.” It is kind of a silly and simple-minded summary of how history works, but it contains at least a kernel of truth. And nowhere is that truth better illustrated than in A Lantern in Her Hand and its sequel, A White Dove Flying. The first novel focuses almost exclusively on Abbie and Will Deal and their generation (born in the 1840s) of American pioneers. The hardships they faced as they moved west and helped settle the country were such that a modern-day American probably couldn’t even imagine facing them, much less surviving them. These pioneers had to build their own houses, dig their own wells, grow their own food, mill their own flour, raise their own poultry and cattle, plow their own farmland. They were hampered by diseases and harsh weather and insect infestations and natural disasters and failed crops and just the overall brutality of the work they had to do. Born in the 1840s, they began marrying and starting families in the 1860s and 1870s. Their lives remained hard until, if they were lucky, they reached old age. Their children, born mostly in the 1870s, witnessed much of this hardship. Many of those children didn’t survive until adulthood. But those who did generally had a bone-deep admiration for the hearty pioneers who had raised them. The sons (and daughters) of the pioneers generally had much easier adult lives than their parents did. Many of them became bankers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, professors, and so forth. These people began producing offspring in the 1890s and the early 1900s. Those children had no actual experience of the hardships of pioneer life. They heard from their parents and grandparents just how harsh life on the Nebraska prairie (or some other western landscape) was back before the West had been settled, but they often grew bored with these stories. In the novel A White Bird Flying, Aldrich focuses on the children and, primarily, grandchildren of Abbie and Will Deal and their generation of Nebraska pioneers. Abbie’s grandchildren will grow up to be part of the Flapper Generation of the so-called Jazz Age. Many of them will go to college, swill a lot of gin, drive flashy cars, party a lot, bed-hop a lot, and generally be a lot less admirable than their pioneer grandparents and the middle-class professionals that raised them. Abbie lives long enough to see some of this, and is saddened by it. Even towards the end of A White Bird Flying, the few ancient survivors of the Pioneer Generation are still marveling about how easy their grandchildren’s lives are. A forty-mile journey that might have taken days to complete in 1870, can now be made in an hour or so by automobile. And the old timers are also sometimes amazed by how thoroughly they helped to alter the climate. At one point, Aldrich puts us into the head of one of the ancient pioneers, writing: “He visualized the sloping roof [of his old prairie cabin] – he had built it steep so the great prairie snows would not pack on it. Queer how the country had changed – very little snow last winter, they told him, and in the old days, the great blizzards half buried the house and stable all winter.”

When summarizing the story of Abbie and Will Deal, a famous quote by President John Adams may be more appropriate than the G. Michael Hopf quote about hard times and strong men. Adams wrote: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

Will Deal’s generation of American men were soldiers in the Civil War and then, afterwards, went to war with the natural elements and other hostile opponents that made settling the West such a brutal chore. His children studied medicine and law and math and science. Their children often studied art and music and dance and such. Certainly some of Will’s grandchildren turned out to be loafers and ne’er-do-wells, but every generation produces its bad apples. Hopf would seem to be arguing that we shouldn’t make life easier for our children and grandchildren. But Adams saw that as part of his duty. So too did Will and Abbie Deal.

I love pioneer fiction, and much of the best of it has been written by women such as Bess Streeter Aldrich, Willa Cather, Mildred Walker, Peggy Simson Curry, Dorothy Johnson, and so forth. A Lantern In Her Hand used to be a staple in most school libraries, but the recent hostility directed towards so-called settler-colonists by liberal academics has unfairly cast aspersions on the people who settled places like Nebraska and Kansas and Wyoming and other harsh western environments. Aldrich doesn’t paint these settlers as saints. She simply points out that, for all their faults, they tended to be very hard-working people whose lives were harsh and brutal and frequently short. I enjoyed all three of the Aldrich novels I read in 2024. And I hope to read more of her work soon. I suppose 2014 could also be labeled The Year of Reading Bess Streeter Aldrich Novels.

Benjamin Capps is another great historical novelist whose work I love. A few years ago I read his novel A Woman of the People, which was inspired by the life of Cynthia Parker, who was kidnapped by Comanche Indians as a little girl and raised by her Indian captors to be a fully assimilated member of the tribe. Parker’s life has inspired dozens if not hundreds of novels, including Douglas C. Jones’s excellent 1983 novel Season of Yellow Leaf and its 1984 sequel Gone the Dreams and Dancing, but Capps’s novel is one of the very best of the lot. In 2024 I read his 1965 Western novel, Sam Chance, which is a tale of the transformation of Texas from a fairly dangerous (Indians, rustlers, bandits, natural disasters, etc.) open range cattle country to a much more tamed and citified capitalist mecca-in-the-making. Sam Chance is of the same generation as Will Deal. Like Will, Sam served as a soldier in the Civil War, but for the losing side. Both men ventured out west after the war in pursuit of opportunity. Each man had to endure immense hardship during his effort to make something of himself. Sam became much more of a conventional success than Will Deal. Starting with just a few head of free-range cattle, Sam, over the course of fifty years or so, creates a family cattle and real-estate empire somewhat similar to the one that John Dutton inherited in the TV series Yellowstone. This is another book that vividly depicts the way the American West was transformed from a wild frontier into a civilized and incredibly rich (for some, at least) land of opportunity over the course of just three human generations.

My favorite Western novelist is Elmer Kelton, and he and Capps were friends and colleagues. Both men were born in Texas, in the 1920s, to fathers who were cowboys and ranchers. Both men died in the first decade of the 21^st century. In 1987, when Southern Methodist University Press brought out a scholarly edition of Sam Chance, Elmer Kelton wrote the afterword for it, in which he noted, “If American literature had to settle for just one novel that typifies the experiences of the early Texas cattleman through the heady days of the open range and its twilight, and beyond to the beginning of modern ranching, the introspective Sam Chance might well be the best choice.” The word “introspective” is an odd adjective to apply to Sam Chance, because the novel is filled with action and danger. But I think Kelton chose the word carefully in order to alert the reader to just how literary and intelligent the novel is. It not only depicts the wildness that swirled around the early Texas cowboys, it takes you into head of one of those cowboys and shows just how such men saw the world. The novel reads kind of like a prequel to Kelton’s own 1973 masterpiece of cowboy fiction, The Time It Never Rained.

I can’t explain why Kelton has become a relatively widely known and highly regarded writer while Capps has been largely forgotten. On Goodreads.com, only three readers have posted reviews of Sam Chance, and only 20 people have assigned it a rating. By comparison, The Time It Never Rained has garnered 272 reviews and over two thousand ratings (Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses have several hundred thousand reader ratings between them, though neither feels anywhere near as authentic or lived-in as Sam Chance). Capps is so obscure that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry, despite having won multiple Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America, and a slew of other writing awards as well. After the M.F.A. industrial complex colonized university writing departments, it elevated the status of novels written in some sort of mannered style over novels that depicted their subjects much more authentically but which were written in a traditional style. As a result, novels like A.B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky and The Way West have begun to lose their place in the American literary canon while novels like McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers have become assigned reading in courses about the literature of the American West. This is a shame. Reading Blood Meridian will teach you a lot about McCarthy’s literary technique, but very little about the Old West as it really was. In the reference book Twentieth-Century Western Writers, James W. Lee notes that Capp’s novels provide their readers with “serious depictions of the real life on the frontier, which explore serious themes of cultures in confrontation, and recreate the people – both whites and Indians – who lived on the plains a hundred years ago.” Those novels also tell some damn entertaining stories, as well.

I mentioned above that I used Everything Must Go, Dorian Lynskey’s excellent survey of 20^th century apocalyptic fiction, in order to research my essay on California novels of the apocalypse. Lynskey’s book also had plenty of good things to say about the apocalyptic novels of British writer John Wyndham, best known for his 1951 masterpiece The Day of the Triffids. I read Triffids as a teenager but was disappointed by it because it seemed relatively tame for an end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it novel. But Lynskey’s enthusiasm for the novel, and for the work of John Wyndham in general, inspired me to re-read Triffids, despite the fact that it wasn’t a Calipocalypse (it is set in England) and, thus, couldn’t help me much with my essay. This time around I found the novel much more satisfying. Lynskey notes that Wyndham was famously criticized by Brian Aldiss for writing “cozy catastrophe” novels – i.e., books about apocalyptic events that focus not so much on the big picture but on the way these events play out among a small group of people, most of whom Wyndham allows to survive the disaster relatively unscathed. Maybe it is my advanced age, but nowadays I find myself bored by literary or cinematic Armageddons that focus primarily on blood and guts and bombs and warfare and such. I like the idea of exploring apocalyptic events through the eyes of people who are not warrior or combatants but merely ordinary folks trying to stay alive. Wyndham, naturally, didn’t invent the cozy catastrophe. Earth Abides is also a bit of a cozy catastrophe. It is possible to read that novel and envy the characters their return to the natural world, and to find oneself longing for the depopulated world they live in. More contemporary novels, such as Into the Forest and The Light Pirate, also have a rather cozy feel to them. But Wyndham was probably the all-time master of the cozy catastrophe. I didn’t know it at the time, but re-reading Triffids was going to be the gateway to another of my major literary projects of 2024: The Year of Reading John Wyndham Books.

After Triffids, I read, in a short span of time, a whole spate of other Wyndham books: The Midwich Cuckoos, The Chrysalids, Chocky, The Kraken Awakes, Consider Her Ways, The Seeds of Time, Web, The Trouble With Lichen, and Jizzle (a story collection that, for an obvious reason, was re-titled Technical Slip when it was recently republished). This may sound like a lot of books to read in a month or so, but Wyndham’s novels are generally closer to novellas rather than full-length novels. Books like Web (140 pages in paperback), Chocky (154 pages), and The Chrysalids (199) can generally be read in a sitting or two. And even the longer novels, such as Triffids (233 pages) and The Midwich Cuckoos (213) can quite easily be read in a day or two. In fact, they tend to be so compelling that I think it would be difficult to prevent oneself from gobbling them up in just a few sittings. I certainly couldn’t do it.

In some ways, the John Wyndham binge was the most important reading project of my year. For years I’ve been annoyed by the way that so many big budget Hollywood time-travel films – Edge of Tomorrow, The Tomorrow War, The Adam Project, etc. – all tend to devolve into mere monster movies. For me, the time-travel story seems like the popular film/literary genre that most readily lends itself to an exploration of serious subjects and to philosophical musings. The time travel story can be used to illuminate mankind’s actual past or to ruminate on its future. In some films, such as It’s a Wonderful Life, it can be used both to revisit a character’s past and to see a preview of a possible future. There was a time when big budget time travel films – Somewhere In Time, Back to the Future, Groundhog Day, etc. – featured no monsters and hardly any violence at all. These movies mused on subjects such as, “What if you could go back in time and meet your parents before they became your parents?” And, “What if you had an infinity of days in which to improve yourself by learning a wide variety of new talents – how to speak a foreign language, how to play the piano, etc?” But nowadays, Hollywood filmmakers seem to use the time-travel genre merely as an excuse to play with monsters. For a long time, I’ve wanted to write a time-travel story that is both an exciting adventure and largely free of violence, a story in which the characters use their wits and their knowledge of the future to avert a looming disaster in intelligent ways – a story that features absolutely no monsters. I wasn’t really sure how to go about doing this until I read Wyndham’s 1968 novel Chocky. This isn’t a time-travel novel. It’s a story about a highly intelligent alien in a galaxy far, far away that finds a way to communicate telepathically with a twelve-year-old boy in mid-20^th-century Britain. Although it involves alien contact, the book contains no monsters and no real violence. You might call it a “cozy contact” novel. But it is a novel in which the characters rely exclusively on intelligence and psychology to solve their problems. I’m not sure just why, but Chocky opened up a door in my imagination and showed me how to write a (largely) non-violent adventure tale in which time-travel (or, at least, communication with the future) is a major element. My diary entry for July third ends with this note: “Read ½ of J. Wyndham’s ‘Chocky.’” My diary entry for July fourth begins like this: “I read to the end of ‘Chocky’ and loved it. In fact, it inspired me to outline a similar novel of my own. I spent two hours writing a 1400-word first chapter. Am very excited about it.” I finished that first draft two months later on September 4. I posted a relatively polished draft on Substack on election day, November 5. And none of that would have happened if not for Chocky. So The Year of Reading John Wyndham Books may be the most important project I undertook in 2024.

Although Chocky was not a time-travel tale, Wyndham wrote quite a few stories about time travel. Prior to The Year of Reading John Wyndham Books I wasn’t even aware that Wyndham had written much short fiction. But in 2024 I read three of his story collections, The Seeds of Time (as the title implies, most of these deal with time paradoxes), Consider Her Ways (which contains a very moving time-travel tale called A Stitch in Time), and Technical Slip (formerly: Jizzle, which is about a monkey named Giselle, whose new owner doesn’t know how to pronounce the French name).

Another surprising thing for me was how feminist much of Wyndham’s fiction is. Several of his stories are about women and how the work of raising children falls disproportionately upon them. Margaret Atwood contributed an afterword to the NYRB Classics edition of Chocky in which she says of The Midwich Cuckoos: “In my opinion, Wyndham’s chef d’oeuvre is The Midwich Cuckoos; it was published in 1957, just as I was seventeen and going off to university, so it was a good time for me to be thinking about the consequences of being impregnated by an alien while unconscious, then giving birth to an alien species that ruins your life. The Midwich Cuckoos was certainly a graphic metaphor for the fear of unwanted pregnancies as experienced by teenage girls of that pre-birth-control era…Wyndham must have been connecting strongly with the collective unconscious.”

The title story in Consider Her Ways and Other Stories is a post-apocalyptic tale in which all the men have been eradicated from the earth by a virus. But even in this post-apocalyptic world, mothers remain at the bottom of the caste system. The story contains a sharp critique of 20^th century womanhood and capitalism that is even more powerful (and heavy-handed) than America Ferrera’s speech in Barbie. A spokesperson for the women points out that, “At the beginning of the twentieth century women were starting to have their chance to lead useful, creative, interesting lives. But that did not suit commerce: it needed them much more as mass-consumers than as producers – except on the most routine levels. So Romance was adopted and developed as a weapon against their further progress and to promote consumption, and it was used intensively…They were brought to a state of honestly believing that to be owned by some man and set down in a little brick box to buy all the things that the manufacturers wanted them to buy would be the highest form of bliss that life could offer…It was a wretched state of affairs brought about by deliberately promoted dissatisfaction; a kind of rat-race with, somewhere safely out of reach, the glamorized romantic ideal always luring. Perhaps an exceptional few almost attained it, but, for all except those very few, it was a cruel, tantalizing sham on which they spent themselves and, of course, their money in vain.”

Though his books are full of observations that could be described as political, Wyndham’s politics are not easy to pigeonhole. The children in The Midwich Cuckoos (like the pod people in Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, published two years earlier) can be seen as symbolizing communists because of the way that they all look alike, behave alike, and eschew nonconformity. Likewise, the effort by the British government to take control of the children after they are born seems like it could be a critique of the contemporary nanny/welfare state, in which the government, not parents, decides what is best for children, and god help the parent who decides to home-school a child or engage in some other small act of rebellion against the establishment. Wyndham seems to have been both a devout feminist as well as a devout anticommunist. His work seems to have gotten only more vital and relevant with the passage of time, which may explain why the last decade or so has seen his work reprinted by a variety of publishers, many of them quite prestigious. In 2014, Penguin brought out new editions of Consider Her Ways, The Seeds of Time, The Kraken Wakes, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Chrysalids, The Trouble With Lichen, and The Day of the Triffids. In 2015, NYRB Classics brought out new editions of Chocky and The Chrysalids. Since 2022 Modern Library has been republishing various Wyndham titles in handsome trade-paperback editions that contain introductions by prominent younger authors such as Kelly Link, Kate Folk, and Alexandra Kleeman. Stephen King once called Wyndham, “Perhaps the best writer of science fiction that England has ever produced.” He seems to be enjoying a moment of resurgence lately, something I was unaware of until 2024, when he and I spent quite a few moments together.

Dorian Lynskey’s book also had a lot of good things to say about John Christopher’s apocalyptic novels, especially The Death of Grass. Christopher appears to have been heavily influenced by Wyndham, as evidenced by the fact that he wrote a number of apocalypse novels including an entire series of books about an invasion of earth by aliens known as “tripods.” Published in 1957, The Death of Grass felt very much like a John Wyndham novel, but not quite as cozy. If you enjoy Wyndham’s work, you should also like The Death of Grass. It tells of how mankind is threatened by a plague that kills not people but grass. Once there is no grass left to feed the cattle and other ruminants with, famines begin to kill off large numbers of people. It is a very creepy and disturbing piece of fiction. Curiously, ten years earlier, in 1947, American science-fiction writer Ward Moore published a novel called Greener Than You Think, in which a genetically-altered strain of Bermuda grass becomes so invasive that it eventually threatens to kill off every other living thing on planet earth. After reading The Death of Grass, I got hold of a copy of Greener Than You Think and began reading it. But the novel is more of a social satire than a compelling narrative, and I got bored with it after awhile and put it aside. Perhaps I’ll go back to it in 2025. A better treatment of a similar idea can be found in Wyndham’s novel Web, published in 1979, ten years after the author’s death. It tells of an eccentric English billionaire who wants to found a utopian community on a remote Pacific island, called Tanakuatua, that was once used to test atomic bombs and remains highly radioactive. The island has been abandoned for years and, from the air, appears to be forever shrouded in cloud cover. But those aren’t clouds that cover the island. They are spider webs. Spiders, unlike, say, ants, are not social creatures. They don’t behave cooperatively. But radiation has somehow caused the spiders on Tanakuatua to become cooperative creatures. And they now move across the island in packs of hundreds of thousands, devouring everything in their path. No human has set foot on the island in decades, so the spiders have had to content themselves with devouring birds and snakes and such. The utopia-seekers who have set off for Tanakuatua are in for a nightmarish ordeal. My copy of Web is 140 pages long and I read it in a few hours, but it unsettled me more than all but a handful of the books I read in 2024 (Two Storm Wood was easily the most unsettling novel I read last year).

That about sums up my major reading projects of 2024, but let’s talk now about some of the interesting one-off books that I read. A few years before his death in 2021, my friend Don Napoli, creator of a blog called Reading California Fiction, introduced me to the work of pop-fiction writer Ramona Stewart (1922-2006). He was an admirer of her 1946 noir novel, Desert Town. I have not yet obtained a copy of Desert Town, but through the years I have found copies of some of her other books in various Sacramento used bookstores and purchased them. She is probably best known for her novel The Possession of Joel Delaney, a novel of demonic possession that was published a year before William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. Stewart’s novel was made into a film, starring Shirley MacLaine, in 1972, one year before the film version of The Exorcist was released. I enjoyed the Stewart novel but not as much as I did the Blatty novel. In fact, Stewart’s novel seems to have been inspired by Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, which is also a much better book.

For years I have wanted to an essay about all the pop fictions of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s that were inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Novels about sexually active teenage girls were a thriving genre in that era, and even some young-adult novelists, such as Norma Klein, made a good living writing about teenage girls and sex. Often these books were not cheap pieces of exploitation but genuine attempts to wrestle with the dilemmas posed by teenage sex. In 1975, Ramona Stewart published a novel called Age of Consent, whose front cover advertises it as a book about “A pair of teenaged Lolitas playing games of lust and seduction.” The back cover of the paperback reads: “Vickie & Trude are two adorable 14-year-old girls, bright, well-mannered, lovely to look at, educated at the very finest schools. They are also into drugs, dirty books, and X-rated entertainment. And they are very determined to get into real sex as soon as possible. They even have their sex expert all picked out – a dynamite fortyish superstud named Lambert, who is about to be offered pleasure beyond his erotic dreams – and perversely right out of a nightmare.” The Philadelphia Bulletin described it as, “A saucy romp, horny enough to make any dirty old man’s blood boil, but with a chilling ending.” Saucy romps about teenage girls ruining the lives of adult men were fairly commonplace in the 1970s. The genre also gave us several major motion pictures, such as 1980’s Little Darlings, starring Kristy McNichol and Tatum O’Neal, and 1993’s Crush, starring Cary Elwes and Alcia Silverstone. Nowadays the genre has fallen out of favor, and all sex between teenage girls and older men has to be portrayed in our current pop culture as the result of the girls being preyed upon by adult male pedophiles.” So be it. As an entry in the pop culture genre that never really had a name but could be described as the teenage-girls-seduce-older-man story, Ramona Stewart’s Age of Consent is slightly above average. Stewart evokes the sultry south Florida atmosphere of babes, boats, beer, and bikinis with great relish. The book was advertised as a sex romp but it is actually more of a character study of two adolescent mischief-makers. I read it a few years ago and enjoyed it, but it was nothing special.

A few years ago I read a 1980 political thriller by Ramona Stewart called The Nightmare Candidate. It, too, was readable but unexceptional. I skimmed through it again in 2024, because my Chocky-inspired novel is a political thriller that references a lot of other political thrillers, and so I began scouring books such as The Nightmare Candidate and The Manchurian Candidate for material that I could use in Hey, Hey, Yesterday (the title of my Chocky novel). After reading The Possession of Joel Delaney, Age of Consent, and The Nightmare Candidate, I became convinced that Ramona Stewart was a sort of journeyman pulpsmith who specialized in knocking out cheap but not entirely unskilled imitations of hit novels such as Lolita, Rosemary’s Baby, Three Days of the Condor, and The Parallax View. And that, indeed, was part of her identity as a writer. But in 2024 I read her 1963 novel, The Surprise Party Complex, and discovered that Stewart was also capable of producing work of great originality and subtlety. The Surprise Party Complex was published as a novel for grown-ups but, nowadays, it would probably marketed as Y.A. Its main character is Pauline Howard, a fifteen-year-old girl who lives a peripatetic life with her ne’er-do-well father, O.K. Howard, a traveling salesman/conman whose current scheme is selling stock in a tin mine that might not even exist. Pauline is intelligent and ambitious and dreams of being a foreign correspondent. As the novel opens, it is summertime and O.K. and Pauline have just arrived in Hollywood, California, after a long drive from somewhere east of the Mojave Desert. The reader is left to suspect that O.K. may be on the run from the law, or from some angry investors. At any rate, O.K. and Pauline rent a room in a seedy old Hollywood apartment complex called The Pyrenees. The story takes place over the course of a single summer in the early 1960s. It is probably the least-plotted novel I read in 2024, and I generally dislike plotless novels, so my fondness for The Surprise Party Complex, well, surprised me. At the Pyrenees apartment complex, Pauline makes friends with two other teenagers, a girl named Chris and a boy named Jamie. Chris is fond of judo and monitoring police radio calls. Jamie affects a worldliness that he doesn’t really possess, talking about fine wines and French food, when in fact he has lived a rather seedy life. Chris and Jamie’s mothers are just as irresponsible as Pauline’s father (all of the parents are single in this novel). Chris’s mom is a floozy who hangs out in cocktail lounges looking for love; Jamie’s mom is a mysteriously wealthy barbiturate addict (it turns out she earned her wealth by selling her once-thriving brothel). The novel is short – 192 pages of fairly large print – which may account for why I wasn’t much bothered by the lack of a plot. This is basically a story about three rootless kids who find friendship and a bit of adventure during one fairly ordinary Hollywood summer. At one point, Jamie’s wealthy mother decides that she is going to send Jamie off to a military school so as to get him out of her hair. At that point, Chris and Pauline start jokingly talking about ways that Jamie could kill his mother in order to avoid military school. As it turns out, Jamie takes the suggestions seriously and, late in the novel, makes an inept attempt to poison his mother by grinding up an overdose of barbiturates and dissolving it in a bottle of the champagne that she stocks her fridge with. This seems like it might lead to some exciting plot dramatics, but Pauline comes along and fairly easily thwarts this half-hearted murder attempt. The novel does actually conclude with a shocking death, but it comes out of nowhere and not much suspense leads up to it. What made the book so enjoyable for me were simply the three kids – Pauline, Chris, and Jamie – and their interactions with each other. Other than the failed murder attempt, they don’t engage in any genuine mischief. They mostly just smoke and drink and hang out on the roof of the Pyrenees talking about what the future might hold for them. The novel came out about a decade after The Catcher in the Rye, another largely plotless novel about teenage angst. Of the two, I vastly prefer Stewart’s novel. I could never make myself care about Holden Caufield.

I suppose I should explain the book’s odd title. Pauline, an avid reader, has read about people who suffer from a so-called “persecution complex,” the belief that some shadowy “others” are out to get them. Pauline, as it turns out, possesses the opposite of a persecution complex. As Stewart explains: “Instead of the sense that she was being persecuted by a group of people who were following her, or wiring her brain to receive their radio waves, or blowing poisonous gases at her, she had a feeling that a group of people were watching her like guests hidden about the house while the birthday child enters. When the time was ripe, the lights would go on, the guests would appear with birthday cake and candles, and a party more marvelous than imagining would begin. She had what might be called a Surprise Party Complex.”

The writing in The Surprise Party Complex isn’t flashy but it is often quietly humorous. Here’s a brief scene between Pauline and Jamie at a dance: “He pulled out his gold cigarette case and offered it to her. She took one, lit it, and they smoked at one another moodily.” As a lover of well-plotted genre fiction, I wish that Stewart had leaned into the plot of this tale a little bit more. The materials were right there in front of her. She could have made Jamie’s attempt to murder his mother a bit more serious. She could have had O.K. Howard’s past catch up with him in some serious way, perhaps a visit from the FBI or from some unhappy investor in one of his spurious get-rich-quick schemes. The shocking death at the end could have been foreshadowed earlier, or else tied in to Jamie’s murder plot. But I suspect that Stewart wrote exactly the book she wanted to. She seems to have had a knack for character studies. Alas, the book didn’t seem to garner much attention either from critics or book buyers. It seems to have echoed in a well of silence. Which may account for the fact that, in the 1970s, she turned to writing heavily-plotted thrillers such as The Possession of Joel Delaney, The Apparition, Sixth Sense, and The Nightmare Candidate.

After finishing The Surprise Party Complex, I became determined to get hold of a copy of Desert Town and finally read it. Perhaps that will be one of my goals for 2025.

Another really good one-off read in 2024 was Shadow of Cain, a 1981 legal thriller written by Vincent Bugliosi and Ken Hurwitz. Bugliosi, famously, was the L.A. District Attorney who prosecuted the Manson murderers in court. He also co-authored (with Curt Gentry) Helter Skelter, the bestselling true-crime book of all time. Bugliosi wrote or co-wrote sixteen books, but Shadow of Cain is one of only two novels in his bibliography, along with 1987’s Lullaby and Good Night (co-written by William Stadiem). Shadow of Cain is the story of Raymond Lomack who, on Christmas Eve, 1959 guns down six of his former high-school classmates. Because Lomak was a teenager at the time of the murders, he was given a relatively light sentence of just twenty-one years in jail. The story then leaps forward to 1980, at which point Lomak has served his sentence and has just been released from San Quentin. Now close to forty years old, Lomak appears to be a changed man. He is humble, and religious, and he is seeking work as a welder, a trade he learned in prison. In a stroke of good luck, he comes to the attention of one Tex Harnett, a multi-millionaire ex-cowboy from Texas who owns an NFL team (presumably the Dallas Cowboys, because Tex always refers to them as “the boys”) and $32 million worth of real estate in California and other western states. Tex is also a devout Christian who believes that everyone deserves a second chance, even murderers. So he hires Raymond to work as a handyman on his vast Southern California estate. Raymond moves into a room on the property and things seem to be going well for him at first. Trouble arises, however, when people in Raymond’s orbit begin dying mysteriously. Naturally suspicion falls upon Raymond. But Bugliosi and Hurwitz do a good job of keeping the reader in doubt. Is it possible that Raymond really is a changed man? Could these murders be unconnected with Raymond? Are they being committed by someone who wants to frame Raymond, perhaps some associate of Tex Harnett’s who doesn’t like how close the two men have become?

Eventually the story culminates in a courtroom trial, and here, understandably, is where it really shines. Bugliosi understood how American murder trials operate better than probably anyone who ever lived. His book has none of the silly nonsense you’d find in an episode of Perry Mason. Neither the prosecutor nor the defense attorney is allowed to suddenly introduce some surprising physical article into evidence. Criminal trials operate according to strict rules. Before a piece of physical evidence can be introduced to the jury, the judge has to approve of it being entered into evidence, and the opposing attorney has to be made aware of it and given time to prepare a strategy for dealing with it. About fifteen years ago I served as a juror on a Sacramento murder trial. One of the most fascinating things I learned during the trial came when the judge gave us our jury instructions. Among many other things (I believe the jury instructions were forty pages long), we were told that, as jurors, we could interpret direct evidence any way we wanted to, but circumstantial evidence had to be interpreted in a special way. If a piece of circumstantial evidence could reasonably be interpreted in a number of different ways, we were required to interpret it only in the way most favorable to the defense. This had a big impact on our jury deliberations. The defendants were two members of an African-American street gang and they were accused of participating in a shooting a Sacramento gas station with some rival gang members. Some jurors argued that the fact that our defendants pulled into the gas station in the first place was evidence that they were looking for a fight with the rival gang. I pointed out that they may just have been seeking to fill up their gas tank. Some jurors snorted at this. But I got nearly everyone on the jury to agree that it wasn’t unreasonable to believe that our defendants pulled into the gas station merely to fill up the tank of their car. At that point, I read from the judge’s instructions which noted that circumstantial evidence with more than one reasonable interpretation was always to be interpreted in the way most favorable to the defendant. Some people were swayed by this, but others simply ignored it (an American jury has almost unlimited powers once it leaves the courtroom and begins its deliberations). I have mentioned this rule regarding circumstantial evidence to people many times, usually when criticizing how phony a particular legal drama is, and most people seem to think that I have gotten it wrong. Shadow of Cain is the only work of fiction in which I’ve seen this rule stated. The authors write: “Smith focused sharply on the instruction the judge would give the jury that if one reasonable interpretation of the evidence in the case pointed towards guilt and another towards innocence, they were legally obligated to adopt the interpretation pointing towards innocence.” I’m no lawyer or legal expert, but over and over again, during the courtroom scenes of Shadow of Cain, I found Bugliosi and Hurowitz’s description of how a murder trial works aligning with my own experience as a juror who spent more than a month sitting in on a murder trial.

Another surprising thing about Shadow of Cain was the sympathy the authors displayed toward the protagonist, Raymond Lomak. Whether or not he was guilty of the 1980 murders chronicled in the novel, he was certainly guilty of the six murders he carried out in 1959. Bugliosi wasn’t known for being soft on crime or sympathetic to mass murderers, but in this novel his and Hurowitz’s portrait of Lomak is a surprisingly sensitive and nuanced one. After reading it, I found myself wishing that Bugliosi and Hurwitz had collaborated on an entire series of legal thrillers. I enjoyed Shadow of Cain more than either Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent or John Grisham’s The Firm, the two novels that are generally credited with inaugurating the legal-thriller boom that began in the late 1980s and early 1990s and has been going strong ever since.

When writing about the many women who have written great fiction about the American prairie, I mentioned above the author Mildred Walker. Her novels The Brewer’s Big Horses (1940), Winter Wheat (1944), and The Curlew’s Cry (1955) are all favorites of mine and, as far as I’m concerned, masterpieces. In 2024 I read her 1951 novel, The Southwest Corner. It is a short book, only 144 pages of fairly large print, and full page illustrations preceding each chapter. I would estimate its length at about 35,000 words. As a result, I expected it to be slighter than the longer works I had read, but it turned out to be every bit as fully fleshed out as all the others. It is a very moving tale, one especially meaningful to old farts like myself. It tells of an 83-year-old woman named Marcia Elder who has lived all her life in a big, three-story house situated in a rural area outside Rutland, Vermont. She has long prided herself on her independence, but lately she has found it more and more difficult to get by on her own. As a result she places and ad in the local newspaper: “WANTED: agreeable woman to share pleasant living with able-bodied, vigorous old lady of eighty-three with small capital, in return for all property at her death.” The ad is answered by a 55-year-old woman named Bea Cannon. When she comes to interview with Marcia, Bea Cannon doesn’t seem especially agreeable. She is talky and a bit pushy but otherwise not too objectionable. Reluctantly, Marcia signs a contract, giving Bea the role of her companion and caretaker in exchange for all of Marcia’s worldly wealth when she dies. Alas, Bea Cannon will turn out to be a bit of a villain, setting up a battle between two strong-willed women that will play out over the majority of the book’s pages. I’m surprised that the book was never adapted as a stage play, because it would make a great two-hander. Bea is only slightly less terrifying than the Annie Wilkes character in Stephen King’s Misery. But Marcia, even at the eighty-three is still pretty resourceful. If you’ve never read anything by Mildred Walker, this might be a good place to start.

One of the first writers my wife and I shared a passion for when we first met back in 1979 was Ken Follett. We both loved his 1978 novel The Eye of the Needle. We got married in 1980, and our passion for Ken Follett’s fiction continued as we gobbled up copies of Triple, The Man From St. Petersburg, and The Key to Rebecca. Eventually I drifted away from Follett’s work, but my wife remained a fan long enough to enjoy his most successful novel, 1989’s The Pillars of the Earth, which has sold roughly 27 million copies worldwide and spawned various video games and TV spinoffs, as well as four sequels written by Follett. I have been wanting to return to Follett’s work for quite a while, but the massive size of his books has daunted me a bit. I decided early in 2024 to make it The Year of Reading Ken Follett Again, and I planned to finally tackle Pillars of the Earth and some of his other massive historical novels. I didn’t quite live up to that ambition, but I did manage to read two fairly hefty historical novels by Follett, 1993’s A Dangerous Fortune and 1995’s A Place Called Freedom. I enjoyed them both a great deal. They were not as impressive as some of the great historical novels I have read in recent years – Shaman’s Daughter, by Nan Salerno and Rosamond Vanderburgh; Seventrees by Janice Young Brooks; Omamori by Richard McGill; The Seeds of Singing by Kay McGrath – but they were highly enjoyable. They were filled with melodrama and sentimentality, but they were also cleverly plotted and contained a lot of history that was unknown to me. I particularly enjoyed A Place Called Freedom, about a young Scotsman who escapes a miserable life in the Scottish coal mines and escapes to London, only to be framed there for a capital crime. He escapes the noose only by agreeing to be shipped to Virginia and serve as an indentured servant for on a tobacco plantation. According to Follett, in the 1700s, if a Scottish worker above the age of 21 worked for longer than one year in a coal mine, he became virtually a legal slave of the mine’s owner. The worker could never leave the mine owner’s employment after that. The book is filled with all sorts of other odd (and horrifying) facts about Scottish, English, and Early American history. But Follett makes the history lesson go down easy by dressing it up in all sorts of derring-do and romance and violent action. Just as A Place Called Freedom begins in 1766, A Dangerous Fortune begins a century later in 1866, with the mysterious drowning death of a student at an exclusive school for boys. One of the boys involved in the incident is the heir to a great British banking fortune, and the drowning incident will continue to follow him as he attempts to rise to the top of the family firm. Follett appears to have written the book as a way of illustrating the rise of the modern British investment banking business but, as in A Place Called Freedom, he shrewdly allows his history lesson to play out as a wildly entertaining – and occasionally kinky – costume drama.

I don’t think Follett’s work achieves the same level of pop-fiction mastery achieved by, say, Frederick Forsyth, in his novels. But, seeing as how I have yet to read Follett’s masterwork, The Pillars of the Earth, I should probably not claim to be an expert on it. At any rate, I enjoyed the two Follett novels I read in 2024 and hope to read more in 2025.

One living British author who has attained Forsyth’s level of mastery is Robert Harris, the author of Fatherland and many other great thrillers. In 2024 he published Precipice, an historical thriller that, like much of his work, is inspired by actual events, in this case a secret romance that sprung up near the beginning of WWI between British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, a married man, and the 36-years- younger Venetia Stanley, the daughter of a married couple who were friends of Asquith and his wife. Asquith’s frighteningly cavalier behavior during the course of this romance threatened to put his nation into great peril. I reviewed the novel at length on September 22, on this very blog, so I won’t go into great detail about it here. This book ranks near the top of his oeuvre, but not quite on the same level as Fatherland, Act of Oblivion, and An Officer and a Spy, which are my three favorites.

Another great standalone novel of 2024 was The Safekeep, written by Yael Van Der Wouden, a Dutch-Israeli author. The novel is set in 1961. The main character is a young woman named Isabel, who lives alone in a home that her family acquired in the early 1940. The home is located in a rural part of the Netherlands, the province of Overijssel, situated about two hours from Amsterdam. Isabel’s parents are dead and the house technically belongs to her elderly uncle, who is committed to leaving the house to Isabel’s older brother, Louis, a sort of irresponsible playboy. The uncle believes that Louis will eventually settle down to raise a family, and at that point Isabel will be expected to vacate the house and let Louis move into it. Isabel has another brother, Hendrik, who is gay and has no real interest in occupying the family home. The three siblings are close but do not get along very well. Into this hotbed of secrets and resentments comes Eva, Louis’s latest hot young girlfriend. Louis must leave town for a month or so on business, and he wants Isabel to put Eva up at her house. Isabel is horrified at the idea. She is a loner and a bit of a misanthrope. She wants nothing to do with Eva, who strikes her as a shallow and silly young gold-digger. But Louis insists, and Eva seems eager to move in with Isabel despite Isabel’s obvious dislike of her. This is a fairly simple set up, but one with all kinds of potential for dramatic developments. And, soon enough, dramatic developments begin to flow fast and furiously. Alas, the greatest pleasures of the novel are the many surprising (but not totally unpredictable) plot twists that are packed into this relatively short (260 pages) book, so I can’t tell you much more about it except to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it and heartily recommend it. It is a book that should satisfy both literary snobs (it is intelligent, stylishly written, and deals with important issues) and pop fiction fans (it has some great plot twists and plenty of…well, I probably shouldn’t say).

I began the year determined to read a lot of crime fiction set in Santa Barbara. I ended up reading only three books that qualified. One was Ross Macdonald’s The Chill. I like Macdonald but I feel that he has long been overrated as a writer. His Archer novels strike as being well below the level of Chandler’s and Hammett’s best books. In fact, I think Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective series, for one, is a better series of California crime novels than the Archer series. I also think Macdonald’s wife, Margaret Millar, was a better novelist than he was. His high reputation is due in large part to the fact that he had some important supporters in the world of elite publishing, including John Leonard when he was the editor of the New York Times Book Review, and Eudora Welty, who championed his work whenever she could. I was expecting The Chill to be just another okay entry in the Archer series but, after taking awhile to warm up to it, I found myself enjoying the book a great deal. It wasn’t an all-time masterpiece of crime fiction, in my opinion, but it captured its milieu – Santa Barbara and environs, academia, the mid 1960s – in ways that felt authentic and well observed. The story includes a kind of kinky relationship between one main character and his mother, and I am told that this was meant to be a shot at Raymond Chandler, who was married to a woman old enough to be his mother (Chandler was dead by 1964, but Macdonald nursed a long-held grudge against him because of some criticisms Chandler had made of his work). At any rate, The Chill was a solid piece of Santa Barbara crime fiction.

But Newton Thornburg’s 1976 novel Cutter and Bone has got to be the greatest Santa Barbara crime novel of all time, and one of the greatest crime novels in the American canon. I have long heard about the greatness of this cult-classic novel but, for some reason, never got around to reading it until 2024. About ten years ago I read Thornburg’s 1984 novel, Beautiful Kate, and enjoyed it. I made a plan to read more of his work, but then it slipped my mind. Cutter and Bone was the second novel I read in 2024. A lot of time has passed since then, and I can’t currently find my battered paperback copy, so I’m not going to attempt a complete plot recap here. You can find those elsewhere online. The main characters are a couple of fairly unlikeable Southern California losers named Richard Bone and Alex Cutter. The novel is fairly subtle but those names are not. Richard Bone (a double phallic name like Woody Johnson and Peter O’Toole) is a gigolo, a handsome thirty-something stud who abandoned a wife, two daughters, and a career in sales back in the Midwest and moved to California hoping to spend his days bedding rich and unhappy housewives (Warren Zevon’s song “Mr. Bad Example” might have been written about him). He has more or less succeeded in this plan, but he is chronically broke. He lives in the home of a Vietnam War veteran pal named Alex Cutter, who has a wife and baby that Alex largely ignores. Cutter, as his name implies, was seriously wounded in Vietnam. A land mine blew deep cuts into his face and also destroyed a couple of his limbs. He gets by on a various modest disability income provided by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He uses crutches or a wheelchair to get around. His beautiful young wife, Maureen, remains true to him, but Cutter treats her like dirt. Bone, true to form, tries to bed Maureen, but she won’t have him.

This doesn’t sound like promising material to work with, but it gets better when, one night, Bone’s car breaks down on a Santa Barbara freeway and he has to walk home to Cutter’s place at midnight. While walking home he witnesses a man bringing a vehicle to a screeching halt, pulling a rolled-up rug out of the trunk, and dumping it into a garbage container before squealing away again. Bone doesn’t think much about this incident. He’s too selfish to care about anything but himself. He eventually makes it back to Cutter’s house, which sits on stilts on the side of hill that looks down on a residential area below it. While Cutter and Bone sit and chat on the deck, they notice that police cars are gathering down at the bottom of the hill. Cutter wonders what is going on. Only then does Bone mention what he saw earlier on his walk home. Cutter becomes convinced that Bone saw someone dumping a body into the trash. Bone isn’t convinced this is true, but the next day, a story in the newspaper confirms that, sure enough, the body of an attractive naked girl was found in a trash container just below Cutter’s property. Cutter encourages Bone to tell the police what he saw. Bone doesn’t want to get involved. Eventually, however, he unwisely allows himself to being cajoled into contacting the cops and reporting what he saw. As expected, the cops drag him in and treat him like a suspect in the murder. Bone is relatively young, has no visible means of support, and rather shaggy in appearance. Thus the cops treat him like a dirty hippie who might well have once been a member of the Manson family. They rough him up, but when he refuses to admit to any crime, they eventually cut him loose. Bone would like to think that the whole incident is behind him now. Alas, his trouble are only starting. Alex Cutter becomes convinced that a wealthy businessman named J.J. Wolfe, a meat packer from the Midwest, murdered the dead girl while he was in town recently on a business trip. Cutter’s logic, such as it is, strikes Bone (and the reader) as specious. Cutter is a drunk who likes to hang out in bars and loudly denounce the capitalist system that led him to Vietnam and destroyed his body. Nonetheless, Cutter’s is a much stronger personality than Bone’s. What’s more, Bone has nowhere else to live other than Cutter’s living room, so he has to at least pretend to think that Cutter might be on to something. Eventually, the two of them decide to drive off to Missouri and confront J.J. Wolfe (another heavy-handed character name) in his lair. This will eventually turn into the American road trip from Hell.

I won’t give away any more of the plot (I’ve probably given away too much already), but suffice it to say that Newburg’s novel combines a pretty damn good mystery story with some seriously dark and disturbed protagonists, as well as some antagonists who are even worse. Even better than Ross Macdonald captured Santa Barbara in the 1960s, Thornburg captures Santa Barbara in the 1970s. By then the glow had worn off of the youth movement of the 60s. The Vietnam War and Watergate had soured much of the country’s patriotism and optimism. The stockholder-value-trumps-everything-else attitude of the Reagan Era was already starting to take hold in wealthy enclaves such as Santa Barbara, making it an awful place for marginal characters like Cutter and Bone, not to mention Cutter’s poor wife and child.

When I finished reading Cutter and Bone, I told my wife that I doubted I would read a better novel in 2024. And it turns out that I was right. Which is not to say that Cutter and Bone was my favorite novel of 2024. I admired the hell out of it, but I am not a big fan of the literature of total despair. There is absolutely no crack in Cutter and Bone that allows the light to get in. The lives of the protagonists start out hopeless and bleak and go downhill from there. But even a cockeyed optimist like me can recognize genius in a dark work of art when it is as blazingly obvious as it is in Cutter and Bone. This is a book that impressed me as much as Hemingway’s The Son Also Rises or Steinbeck’s East of Eden. For some reason, the Pulitzer Prize committee opted to hand out no award for Fiction in 1977, the year that the best book of 1976 should have been honored with an award. In a fair world, Cutter and Bone would have won all of the major literary prizes that year. As it is, it remains largely unknown, going in and out of print over the years, cherished only by a small cult of worshippers. It is a great American novel, but few people have actually read it.

After reading Cutter and Bone I immediately ordered a copy of an earlier Thornburg novel, 1973’s To Live and Die in California. Although I didn’t think this book was as great as Cutter and Bone, I enjoyed it more, because although it deals with the darkest of tragedies – the death of one’s child – it wasn’t quite as bleak as C&B. It’s the story of a successful Midwestern rancher (Thornburg himself once operated a successful Midwestern cattle ranch) whose son goes on a cross-country hitchhiking trip, hoping to see America before he gets drafted to serve in Vietnam. One day the rancher gets a call from the Sheriff of Santa Barbara, California, telling him that his son has committed suicide by jumping from a cliff high above a Santa Barbara beach. The Sheriff wants to ship the body home to the Midwest. The father says to keep it in Santa Barbara. He’ll catch the next flight to California so that he can accompany the body home himself. But the father doesn’t believe for a moment that his sunny and well-adjusted son committed suicide. He thinks there is another explanation for his son’s death. And he’s determined to stay in Santa Barbara until he gets that explanation.

This novel, like C&B is also both an excellent mystery and a true work of literature. But, unlike in Cutter and Bone, the main characters are mostly sympathetic and honorable. This made it easier to read and enjoy. But it also made it a bit more conventional than Cutter and Bone. I never got very far in my Santa Barbara Crime Fiction project, but I doubt I would ever have found a better Santa Barbara Crime writer than Newton Thornburg. It’s a shame that’s he is largely forgotten.

One of my major writing projects for Quillette in 2024 was a piece about the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Jay McInerney’s 1984 novel, Bright Lights, Big City, which was the first book to come out of the so-called literary Brat Pack, a group of writers that also included Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, and Donna Tartt. Bright Lights, Big City is the tale of unnamed young Ivy League grad who lives in New York City and works for a prestigious magazine (also unnamed, but obviously The New Yorker) and nearly destroys his life of promise and privilege by partying, drinking, and snorting up massive quantities of cocaine. Towards the end of the novel, it appears that he might be finally getting his life back on track. I liked the book when I first read it in 1984 and I still like it. By chance, after reading BLBC, I read Douglas Kennedy’s 1997 thriller novel The Big Picture, which reads as though it might be a sequel to BLBC. I wrote an entire essay about this called Bright Lights, Big Picture, which I posted to Substack on July 25, 2024. I’ll give you an abridged version of that essay here.

The Big Picture is an excellent thriller. But it also feels like an extension of the story McInerney told in BLBC. Mind you, I’m not accusing Kennedy of stealing anything. As noted, BLBC tells the story of a young man, with an elite education, who lives and works in New York City. He married a woman named Amanda, but after her career as a fashion model began to flourish, she left him. He works as a fact checker at a prestigious unnamed magazine. He allows his close friend Tad Allagash to coax him into partying his blues away by going out night after night and getting drunk and coked up in various trendy New York clubs. By the end of the novel, we learn that the narrator’s feeling of emptiness stems not so much from the departure of his wife but from the death, from cancer, of his mother, which took place a year before the book begins. In fact, he seems to have proposed to his wife primarily to make his mother happy. Her death has left him unmoored. Once he realizes this, he seems, at novel’s end, to be on the road to getting his shit together. Tad Allagash has introduced him to his cousin Vicky, who, unlike Tad, appears to be a responsible and highly intelligent person. The reader is left to imagine that the narrator and Vicky will soon become romantically involved and, eventually, marry and become a boring yuppie power couple. At the time the book was published, this seemed like a reasonable assumption. But, because many of the biographical details of BLBC corresponded with McInerney’s own bio (he was, for instance, a fact-checker at the New Yorker), anyone who read the book after about 1995 or so probably figured that the narrator, like McInerney, would end up making somewhat of a hash of his personal life. McInerney is currently on his fourth marriage, and has also had relatively long-term relationships with Rielle Hunter (who later became famous as the mistress of presidential candidate John Edwards) and model Marla Hanson (his first wife was model Linda Rossiter; his current wife is the sister of Patty Hearst and the aunt of model Lydia Hearst; he seems to have a thing for models and wealthy socialites, and more power to him).

Anywho, it is easy to imagine that the narrator of BLBC and Vicky Allagash got married sometime in the late 1980s, moved to Connecticut, and had a couple of children together. It’s also easy to imagine that, after failing as a fiction writer, the narrator went back to college to get a law degree and is now commuting daily to New York City where he works for a prestigious law firm. And it’s also easy to imagine that, by the mid 1990s, both the marriage and the legal career had begun to pall. After all, this was a guy who dreamed of being the next F. Scott Fitzgerald and now he spends his days writing wills for rich people.

That is pretty much the set-up of The Big Picture. (Major spoilers ahead!) The main character (he narrates in the first person, however, not the second) is Ben Bradford. He once dreamed of being a photographer in the mode of Richard Avedon. But, after college, he allowed his father to talk him into getting a law degree, just in case his artistic ambitions didn’t pan out (the narrator of BLBC makes a lot of his life decisions based on what he thinks will please his father). So here he is, living in the suburbs with a son who is about five and another who is only about six months old. His wife, Beth, who, like the narrator of BLBC, once dreamed of being a novelist, is now trapped at home with two children. She is miserable and resents her husband for steering her away from her literary ambitions. She wrote three novels and had a good literary agent shop them around but couldn’t find a publisher for any of the books, probably because they were all about unhappy upper-middle-class white suburban housewives who resent their husbands. Ben, like the narrator of BLBC, has begun drinking heavily and abusing (prescription) drugs.

Beth and Ben have a neighbor named Gary Summers, whom Ben loathes. Gary fashions himself a freelance photographer but rarely has any of his work published. Nonetheless, his parents left him a small trust fund when they died so Gary can spend his days indulging his fantasy of being a photographer. Gary and Ben are roughly the same age and have the same general build. Gradually, Ben begins to suspect that Beth and Gary are having an affair, trysting during the daylight hours when a nanny is looking after the kids and Ben is off in the City. This, naturally, infuriates Ben. One night, he goes to Gary’s house to confront him about the affair. They quarrel and, in a blind rage, Ben strikes out at Gary with a wine bottle (Gary is an annoying wine snob; sort of like Jay McInerney who now writes quite a bit about wine). The glass bottle breaks and cuts Gary’s throat. Gary bleeds out quickly. Ben, not surprisingly, freaks out. But only for a moment. He comes up with a rather ingenious plan for slipping out of both a murder charge and his failing marriage. Luckily for Ben, the killing of Garry Summers occurred shortly after Beth and Ben had fought (verbally) and Beth had taken the two boys and gone off to stay with her sister and brother-in-law. She has told Ben she wants a divorce and she wants him to spend the next week or so finding a new place to live so that she can move back into the house with the two boys. This gives Ben an opportunity to pull off a deception that has been used in hundreds of old movies (think of Bette Davis in A Stolen Life). He asks a friend if he can borrow his sailboat for a few days. He tells the friend that he thinks a couple of days out on the Atlantic ocean off the New England coast will be good for him. The friend obliges by making the boat available to him. Ben’s plan has a lot of moving parts but, essentially, he puts Gary’s body on the boat and then rigs it to blow up when it is out at sea. The explosion will look like an accident, the kind of screw-up a novice sailor like Ben, who doesn’t really know much about boats, might well initiate. Meanwhile, Ben goes about stepping into Gary’s old life. He sends out an email to all Gary’s acquaintances (he doesn’t have many) and tells them that he has a photography assignment in Baja California and is likely to be gone for awhile. No one really cares (Beth will be too devastated by the “death” of her husband to worry much about Gary’s plight). And so, Ben Bradford, the lawyer, becomes Gary Summers, the freelance photographer. He hits the highway in Gary’s MG and begins a road trip across America. He has plenty of camera equipment and, for the first time ever, he is able to pursue his passion for photography full time (thanks to the quarterly checks that show up in Gary’s bank account). Being a lawyer, Ben was able to use various legalistic ruses to gain himself access to Gary’s credit card accounts, bank accounts, etc.

This scenario seems like the kind of situation the irresponsible narrator of BLBC might find himself in if his second marriage began to pall. The Great Gatsby is a novel about reinventing yourself – well, to be more accurate, it’s a novel about how disastrous it can be to try to reinvent yourself. And Fitzgerald’s ghost seems to hover over BLBC. Meanwhile, BLBC seems to hover over The Big Picture. The Big Picture contains several references to the New Yorker, a magazine that plays a big role in BLBC. Both Ben Bradford and the narrator of BLBC seem obsessed with high-end clothes, watches, wallets, cars, etc. Both men are married to women who prefer their careers to their husbands. Both men drink to excess and abuse drugs (though Ben is nowhere near the world-class cokehead that McInerney’s narrator is; poet Peter Davison once noted that if you replaced every instance of the word “cocaine” in BLBC with the word “chocolate,” it would become a children’s book; he didn’t mean it as a compliment).

Despite all the above spoilers, I haven’t completely ruined The Big Picture for you. I’ve described only half the plot. McInerney is a product of the MFA industry and studied under Raymond Carver, a writer whose fictions tend to end ambiguously and eschew high drama and narrative fireworks. McInerney, for my money, is a better writer than Carver. BLBC is very funny and has some clever plot turns. But McInerney seemed determined not to give his novel a big Hollywood ending of any kind. The story just sort of peters out, which is a defensible artistic choice. Form follows function, and the function of BLBC is to show just how miserable and exhausting a life of nonstop partying and drug abuse truly is. Eventually, those partiers all either just peter out and move on with their lives, or else they die. Kennedy, to his credit, is not a writer in the Raymond Carver mode. If this were 1940, he’d probably be writing Bette Davis movies. He’d probably resent my saying so, because it looks as though he considers himself a serious literary man, but The Big Picture has much more in common with the novels of John Grisham than the novels of, say, John Updike, and thank god for that. Kirkus Reviews summed up The Big Picture like this: “A startlingly unoriginal story whipped up by Kennedy’s overdrive pacing and mastery of detail.” That backhanded compliment doesn’t give Kennedy enough credit. Almost every single twist you can insert into a thriller has probably been used thousands of times before. We read thrillers not so much for original plot twists but to see those plot elements recombined in new and interesting ways, in milieus that haven’t been done to death, with characters who aren’t straight out of Central Casting. For a first (sort of) novel, The Big Picture is amazingly assured and polished.

I think both Bright Lights, Big City and The Big Picture are still very much worth reading. But if you want a really mind-blowing experience, read them back-to-back, as I recently did. With just the tiniest bit of imagination you can easily read The Big Picture as an extension of the story that McInerney began in Bright Lights, Big City. If you could somehow go back to 1984 and combine the two stories into one grand American epic about the rise and fall and rise and fall of an ambitious American yuppie with artistic pretentions it would probably be greeted by the literary establishment as a masterpiece. Bright Lights, Big Picture – the best American novel that never was.

In May of 2024, I published an essay called The Golden Age of the TV Miniseries, in which I heaped praise on the many recent miniseries that have been made from classic pop fictions such as James Clavell’s Shogun, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Walter Tevis’s The Queen’s Gambit. I concluded the essay with a list of great pop fictions that I thought deserved the modern miniseries treatment. These are books that were either never before adapted for TV or cinema, or were adapted poorly the first time around. Among the titles I mentioned were Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, Walter Tevis’s The Hustler, Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, and Joseph Wambaugh’s The New Centurions. I didn’t re-read all of these but I did re-read both Gorky Park (1981) and Fatherland (1992), and I was stunned by how good they both still were. Time (and the fall of the Soviet Union) has done nothing to diminish just how brilliant these books are, and how relevant they remain in a world in which authoritarian governments are enjoying an upsurge. These two books almost demand to be read back-to-back, because Gorky clearly influenced Fatherland (in a good way). When I first read Fatherland back in 1992 I didn’t notice the obvious parallels between it and Gorky Park, which I had read a decade earlier. This time around, I thought I had discovered some brilliant literary secret, but a little bit of research on the internet showed me that, back in 1992, plenty of reviewers of Fatherland caught the similarities between the two books. This in no way diminishes what Harris accomplished with that book. He took the basic premise of Gorky Park – an honest cop in a corrupt authoritarian regime tries to conduct a fair investigation into a grisly murder but is frequently thwarted by government bureaucrats – and moved it from the USSR of the late 1970s, to an alternate version of the early 1960s, a version in which Germany won the Second World War and Hitler and his Nazi party are now firmly ensconced in power. Although the two books share a basic premise, they are also very different from each other. Gorky Park is practically operatic in its grand sweep – from Moscow, to Siberia, to New York City – and its immense ambition. It’s difficult to overstate just how brilliant Cruz’s novel is. It is one of the highlights of 20^th-century American crime fiction, even though it is mostly set in Russia. The hardback edition was blurbed not by American pulp fiction writers but by Harrison Salisbury, the New York Times’s Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter on all things Russian, and by Peter Matthiessen, a National Book Award-winning novelist and co-founder of The Paris Review. Matthiessen wrote: “A strange and marvelous book – ingenious, intelligent, gripping, and beautifully made – dominated by the rare and wonderful figure of a true hero.” If you’ve never read either book, or if it has been years since you last read them, I urge you to read them back-to-back and enjoy seeing the way two great pop fiction writers each handle similar material in brilliant by different ways.

Faithful readers of this blog know that my true passion is for thrillers. In July of 2024, I published an essay on Substack about the 1994 thriller Kolymsky Heights, by Lionel Davidson, which Philip Pullman called the best thriller he’d ever read, and Anthony Horowitz proclaimed the best thriller ever written. I wouldn’t go that far. It’s not the best thriller I’ve ever read, nor the best thriller ever written. It has a number of faults, which I noted in my essay. But Kolymsky Park may well be the most ambitious thriller ever written. It takes parts of Gorky Park, Jurassic Park, Last of the Breed, the James Bond novels, much of Frederick Forsyth’s oeuvre, and dozens of other classic thrillers and stitches them into a vast crazy quilt of adventure and derring-do. Parts of it drag and parts of it positively race by. The good outweighs the bad by about ten to one. I’d rather read a flawed near-masterpiece like Kolymsky Heights than a perfectly executed but not very ambitious conventional thriller. My essay on Lionel Davidson’s novel is full of spoilers. So, if you plan to read the novel, don’t read the essay first.

The King of Contemporary Thrillers is, in my opinion, the aforementioned Frederick Forsyth. Through the decades I had read most but not all of his fiction. This year I decided that one of my projects would be reading all of the Forsyth fiction I hadn’t yet finished, so that I could write an essay in which I ranked all of his books from first to last. I published that essay here on Substack back on May 3, 2024. I encourage you to read it. Becoming a Frederick Forsyth completist meant that I would have to go back and finish the three Forsyth novels that I had started and never finished – 1994’s The Fist of God, 1996’s Icon, and 2006’s The Afghan (a sequel of sorts to The Fist of God). I had abandoned each of these years earlier and couldn’t remember much about them, so I read each of them all the way through in 2024. And this time around I didn’t have any difficulty getting into the narrative flow. All three of them were very good, but Icon was my favorite and it felt the most relevant, because it dealt with a cruel authoritarian who rises to power in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Although Vladimir Putin wasn’t a major figure in world politics at the time the book was written, Forsyth seemed to have anticipated the rise of Putin or someone a lot like him. The book was written at a time when a lot of western pundits were still very optimistic about the possibility of Russia becoming a western-style democracy someday. But Forsyth seemed to already know that that wouldn’t happen any time soon. All three of these novels have complex, multi-part narratives and incorporate some of the major geopolitical news stories of the last forty years – the fall of the U.S.S.R., the first Gulf War, the War on Terror, the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, etc. – into their plots. No one has ever done this as well as Forsyth. He has the pop-fictioneer’s ability to weave a compelling story, and he combines that with a foreign correspondent’s understanding of how geopolitics really work. And though I have now read all of his books of fiction as well as his memoir (the only Forsyth books I haven’t read are his two nonfiction works about Biafra), I don’t think I’ll ever be done reading his work. I occasionally return to his two excellent story collections (No Comebacks and The Veteran) whenever I want a good, short, gripping reading experience. And I expect that I will re-read many of his novels in the years to come.

I read three graphic novels in 2024. The first of these was Patrick Ness’s 2011 Y.A. novel A Monster Calls, an award-winning book with tens of thousands of ecstatic reviews at Goodreads.com. I didn’t like it. It seemed trite, heavy-handed, schmaltzy, and just not that interesting. I also read Final Cut, written and illustrated by Charles (Black Hole) Burns, which came out in September and received lavish praise in the New York Times Book Review. I enjoyed it and thought it was beautifully illustrated, but the story didn’t strike me as anything special, and I did not share the Times’s high opinion of the book. Finally, I read Resident Alien Omnibus Volume 1. My wife and I got addicted to the Resident Alien TV series when it was streamed on Peacock. When we ran out of episodes to watch, I ordered a copy of this book, which contains the first three volumes of the comic book that inspired the TV show. I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to. The comic books are very different from the TV show. The TV series is almost entirely comic, despite the fact that it deals with an alien invasion of the earth, the possible extinction of our planet, and various nefarious plots and detestable villains both domestic and from outer space. The comic books are not as slapstick or farcical as the TV show. In fact, each of the three stories contained in the first omnibus is a standalone crime drama in which the title character (Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle, the Resident Alien) seeks to solve a murder. As in the TV show, Harry’s overriding concern is to return to his home planet, but while he is here (posing as a small-town doctor) he also tracks down murderers. As much as I love the TV show, I kind of wish the creators of the series had stuck closer to the original comic books. I liked the way each issue of the comic works as a standalone tale. The Resident Alien Omnibus garnered far less praise (or even attention) in the mainstream press as either A Monster Calls or Final Cut but, for my money, it is the best of the lot.

I don’t normally read a lot of nonfiction books except as research for some writing project of mine. This year was no different. But several of the nonfiction works I read this year were really enjoyable, nearly as much fun as novels. I have already mentioned Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go, a survey of books and movies about the end of the world. I highly recommend it. I also read Yunte Huang’s 2010 book Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History. This was a thoroughly fascinating double biography of Chang Apana (1871-1933) and Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933). Biggers was the creator of the Charlie Chan character, who was one of the most famous fictional detectives of the early 20^th century. Apana was the real-life Honolulu police detective upon whom Biggers partially based the character of Charlie Chan. Both men lead fascinating lives. But, as the title notes, this book is primarily a study of Charlie Chan himself, his origins, his life as a literary character, his Hollywood incarnation, his impact on American culture, and his somewhat tarnished legacy. Yunte Huang is a Chinese-born American. I was expecting his book to be a thorough trashing of Charlie Chan as a racist stereotype. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Huang is a fan of Charlie Chan and that his book is largely favorable in its treatment of all its subjects: Apana, Biggers, and Chan. Had it been written much later than 2010, Huang might have had trouble finding a publisher for it unless he had agreed to make it more about racism than about Charlie Chan. After the Great Awokening that began around 2015, publishing a celebration of a character like Charlie Chan, who has been widely (but usually unfairly) criticized as a racist stereotype, would have been fraught with difficulty and might have brought a boycott down upon the publishing house and any bookstore brave enough to carry the title. In fact, even long before the Great Awokening, Asian writers were beating up on Chan. A 1993 anthology of Asian-American fiction was called Charlie Chan Is Dead. Huang’s book is a fond, but not uncritical, look at a beloved icon of American crime fiction. I wish he would write a follow-up about Mr. Moto.

In researching my piece about apocalyptic fiction set in California, I read The Life and Truth of George R. Stewart, by Donald M. Scott. For a short book (246 pages), this biography of the author of Earth Abides packs a ton of fascinating information about its subject and his literary work. I loved it and I wish some major publishing house would pay Scott to expand his book into a full-length study of the life and work of George R. Stewart.

For an essay I wrote about Earl Scruggs, I read Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown: The Making of an American Classic, by Thomas Goldsmith. This was another short (200 pages) book that was simply jam-packed with fascinating information about one of the most iconic Americans of the 20^th century.

While researching my essay on Bright Lights, Big City I read two fascinating works of nonfiction. The first of these was Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Fiction, by Dan Sinykin. The other was The Triumph of the Yuppies by Tom McGrath. I recommend them both.

And finally, I also greatly enjoyed Michael Ruhlman’s Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America. I am a grocery store groupie. I love grocery shopping and even worked very briefly in a grocery store. I enjoyed this book which combines a journalistic account of the rise of the American supermarket (hailed by one expert as the single greatest accomplishment of mankind) with a more personal tale of how food and grocery stores created a bond between the author and his late father. Ruhlman focuses primarily on a grocery store chain in his home state of Ohio, but through that story he manages to capture truths about the entire grocery industry. This book was much more fascinating than I expected it to be. In the last few decades, the American supermarket has been heavily criticized by so-called food experts – most notably Marion Nestle – and nowadays Big Grocery is often demonized as much as Big Pharma is in some leftwing circles. But Ruhlman challenges Nestle’s criticisms of the American supermarket. He shows that many of her criticisms just aren’t true. Nestle claims that food staples such eggs and milk are kept in the back of a store so as to force consumers to pass through aisles filled with tempting nonessentials, a tactic grocers employ to maximize impulse purchases. Ruhlman points out that milk and eggs and such are kept at the back of the store because it makes the most sense to put giant refrigerated units in a place where they can be accessed from behind when being restocked by the store’s employees. He shoots down a lot of other supermarket myths as well.

All right, I haven’t yet listed every book that I read in 2024, but I have reviewed all of the best of them. And now it is time to hand out Mimsie Awards to those books that I consider especially worthy of attention. I read so many books by Tess Gerritsen that I am not going to try to decide which ones to award a Mimsie to. I am simply going to Gerritsen a special Lifetime Achievement Mimsie for the entire body of her work. (If forced to pick, I’d say that Bloodstream was my favorite of her novels, but Gravity is probably the best of her novels, followed closely by The Surgeon and Harvest.) I am going to do the same for John Wyndham. He gets a Lifetime Achievement Mimsie for his work. I am leaving off the list great novels such as Gorky Park and Fatherland and Children of Men and Earth Abides that I reread in 2024. And, as you will see, I am also, for the first time ever, awarding a Mimsie to a book that doesn’t actually exist. And now, beginning with the best book of 2024 and moving down from there, are the 2024 Mimsie Award Winners:

Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg

The Cobra Event by Richard Preston

The Valley of Unknowing by Philip Sington

The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden

Cold Storage by David Koepp

Precipice by Robert Harris

Two Storm Wood by Philip Gray (aka Philip Sington)

To Die In California by Newton Thornburg

Miss Bishop by Bess Streeter Aldrich

A Lantern In Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich

Aurora by David Koepp

The Southwest Corner by Mildred Walker

Bright Lights, Big Picture by Jay McInerney and Douglas Kennedy

The Death of Grass by John Christopher

Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson

Sam Chance by Benjamin Capps

The Surprise Party Complex by Ramona Stewart

Into the Forest by Jean Hegland

The Shadow of Cain by Vincent Bugliosi and Ken Hurwitz

Charlie Chan by Yunte Huang

Everything Must Go by Dorian Lynskey

Grocery by Michael Ruhlman

That concludes this year’s edition of The Mimsie Awards. I hope that 2024 brought you as many great reads as it brought to me. And I hope that 2025 is even better for all of us avid readers.