Sterling City (2014) by Stephen Graham Jones

In my own definition of the 'Weird Western' I extend the sub-genre's purview to include fiction set not only in the western United States of the 'cowboys and indians' era, but also that set in the 20th and 21st century western U.S. - as long as said fiction also includes elements of the uncanny or macabre or otherwise outré.  So in addition to books by, say, Arianne 'Tex' Thompson and Guy Adams it would also include books by, say, Joe R. Lansdale and, our man of the hour, Stephen Graham Jones.  (To take an example from a single author's oeuvre, the Weird Western encompasses both the 1850s Texas-Mexico setting of Cormac McCarthy's scalp-hunting odyssey Blood Meridian and the 1980s Texas-Mexico setting of his brutal crime thriller No Country For Old Men.)

This is my third review of a Jones book (the first two are here and here) and I think I can say that his is always a western sort of vantage, albeit a contemporary Blackfeet Native American one.  (That said, explicitly American Indian characters are by no means a guarantee in his fiction.)  His works also always seem to contain some element of the bizarre or gruesome, from out and out genre material, such as zombies and werewolves, to surreal and 'meta' narration of dark and mysterious events and relationships.  And Jones's brand of weird can imbue a range of modes from crime thriller to family drama to horror story, all with loose and blurry borders, often hybridised, and yet always 'literary'.  I've rarely seen someone so joyously and offhandedly mix the 'highbrow' and the 'lowbrow'. (All the 'high' stuff is in the prose style and themes by the way.  It's the content that seems pretty consistently working class, with occasional white collar stuff in the margins.)  There's often a lot of poignancy, and ever an undercurrent of very, very wry (and occasionally bonkers) humour.  (I get these impressions from having dipped into his first few novels as well, an experience I'll return to below.)

So, to a degree, I think all of Jone's work can be said to be of the Weird Western mode, though that by no means captures the entirety of what he's doing.  In fact, his kind of western writing is really just showing us how weird the western USA (and at a larger scale, existence itself) simply is, a fact we are prone to ignore.  Thus our need for prophets like Jones.  And thus advancing my own theory that all good literature is weird literature, all good philosophy is weird philosophy, all good theology is weird theology, etc.   And by the 'weird' I don't mean just the 'messed up' or the morally twisted. Jones's is not a freakshow literature for the titillation of easterners' prejudices.  It's a regionalised mirror that can be held up to anyone from anywhere to show that the comically grotesque carnival shapes are not in the glass but in life.  For all of us.

Reality is weird.

Sterling City is a lovely little meditation on just that.  Coming in at a mere 81 pages, it's a one-sitter for you fast readers out there and a two or three sitter for slowpokes like me.  I don't want to give too much away, but on page one you know there's a cosmic element and by page six you see a big reveal of the creepily weird, which the rest of the novella circles round as a major plot factor.  In tandem with this knowingly pulp element is the story of the breakdown of one man's marriage.  Or rather, the very moment his wife leaves him and his attempt at playing that event cool, and failing to.  Both of these - a grotesquery's arrival and a spouse's departure - would be highly dramatic events in real life, and yet Jones's relentlessly elliptical and indirect style makes them seem almost like things that happen in the corner of your eye.  I mean, he confronts both directly.  You get a juicy view and the weird element in particular is initially surrounded by strong emotion from one of the characters.  But it feels like the view is for mere seconds at a time.  The history of the marriage's troubles and the present bizarre cosmic influences come only in half-understood glimpses for the reader.  Both of these happenings consume the consciousness of the protagonist, yet both seem oddly just off stage for most of the novella.

Similarly, the larger West Texas landscape is fully backgrounded in favour of the farm on which the story unfolds (with one episode in town).  This makes for a tight focus.  It achieves some atmosphere in its concision, mostly focused on farming equipment and farm buildings and farm work.  This is good, and I enjoyed being there in that kind of small psychogeography.  Yet I can't help but feel that the story's possibly a little too long to sustain its own smallness.  After forty pages or so I felt it needed to somehow open out to the greater environs more, and possibly the point of view of more characters.  I enjoyed being in Lee Graves's head, and recognised a little of myself in him, but a story this length needed a little more scope I felt.  It's a fairly minor complaint and by no means ruined the read.  There were, it must be said, about ten pages toward the end that didn't work at all for me.  It was supposed to be a tense scene of the central piece of large equipment almost malfunctioning, but I have no knowledge of this whole area (farming and its equipment and procedures) and the description did not enlighten me, so I was just plain bored.  But again, it was a minor misstep and the story finished well. The denouement of the weird element was especially satisfying to me, gorgeous with alien wonder.

Indeed, this is kind of a story about the Beauty of Monsters, which I can always get behind.  It's also very intentional and explicit about hope in the end, about New Beginnings after the Apocalypses that punctuate our lives. It reminded me of R. A Lafferty in that respect.  This actually makes it incredibly radical among its Horror and Weird Fiction cohorts, which tend, especially among the avant-garde, towards powerful pessimism and bleakness (the avant-garde of the Lit Fic crew can be this way too, and Double-Fish Jones swims in both worlds).  The story doesn't promote hope without any ambiguity mind you.  And from what I've read from Jones so far, he has a number of pieces both for and against hope and lots of places in between.  His despairing pieces, however, are always poignant and humane and even kind of sweet.  He seems to want to hope, even in despair.  That might make him kind of 'out' with some of the Cool Kids of Nihilism, I don't know.  I hugely respect it.

I'd probably give this particular book something like a 3/5, but right now I'm more into Jones for the total package than merely for particular works.  He's a presence, a force.  Following his elusive, yet somehow generous, remarks on Twitter and Facebook round out both his style and substance, just like his 'Acknowledgements' at the end of Sterling City.  (Always be sure to read any dedications or story notes or other authorial 'paratexts' by Jones - he's always telling you a little bit more of what he means and who he is and what he cares about in those things, even whilst deepening the mystery). Any time you see an article written by him, it'll be worth checking out as well.  I'll note here that I'm still trying to find my way into his more 'literary' works.  I read around a hundred pages each of his first two novels, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong and All The Beautiful Sinners, and while both blew my mind on some level, both also kind of lost me with the almost painfully indirect style in which he wrote them.  Mind you, I wasn't really committed to reading them at the time.  I was only dipping and dabbling and when they proved difficult, I shelved them for a future go.  Which I look forward to, along with a ton of his other prolific output, both on the more literary end and on the more genre end. His is an exciting career to follow.

Revival (2014) by Stephen King

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

What to say about this novel?  It was fun to finally get a chance to read something really recent from King.  And don't be misled by my 2.5 rating.  This is not a bad book, just not necessarily a great one. It was not a waste of time, especially if you want to work your way through the entirety of King's fiction like I'm trying to do.  It has important thematic elements that you wouldn't want to miss if you're hoping to trace some of his major themes across his body of work.  Indeed, as regards King's recurring engagement - from his earliest works to his latest - with theological concerns, this novel is very important.  I'm not sure he says much here that he hasn't said elsewhere, but it's one more iteration, important for tracking the sheer quantity of theological content in King's work if nothing else.

I assume most readers will take this story as a damning portrayal of Christian theology, Christian ministers, and Christianity in general.  But King's being far more subtle than that.  First of all, there are a lot of very sympathetic Christian characters in here, such as the protagonist's own parents. Their faith is simple and sensible.  They are taken in by neither scepticism nor fanaticism.  They are devout but generous, and probably represent a bigger swathe of American culture than is generally guessed.

Secondly, if you're paying attention, this is a damning story of the dangers and pitfalls of unbelief as much as belief.  The antagonist is a man who loses his faith after all, and who becomes a very evil charlatan only after this loss of faith.  You could fairly say that he is an illustration of the notion that if you don't worship God, you'll worship something else, probably to your own and others' degradation and detriment. Also, the book's portrayal of crowd-credulity is really about a very general gullibility that affects most Americans when it comes to 'cures' for health issues.  This novel happens to focus on an intentionally deceiving faith-healer and his all-too-willing dupes.  But this phenomenon is not unique to that context, as multitudes every day practice a similarly credulous hyper-faith in regard to both corporate drugs and alternative medicines or health practices.  The wise reader will take the tale as a reflection and warning about this widespread issue manifested in a variety of ways, not just 'tent revivals'.

Finally, as to whether or not this novel is just a lambasting against Christian theology, practice, and persons, it must be noted that though King gives full roar to unbelief here - and indeed, to the Lovecraft-esque belief that we live in an outright horrific, bleak, and cruel universe - he does not give voice only to such unbelief and belief-in-horror.  He gives a tiny space for the possibility that the Lovecraftian view is not only false, but an outright lie.  In this story, the evidence is very strongly stacked against the disbeliever in the Lovecraftian universe, almost overwhelmingly.  Yet King is careful to leave a pinprick's opening for the possibility of hope.  That's not nothing.  It's really not.  At some moments in life, that's all anyone can see or hold onto.  But it might be enough.  At almost the very end of the novel, King's narrator writes:  ‘There is hope, therefore I live.’  (Page 370 in the edition I borrowed from my local library.)  After all, a pinprick is all it takes to burst a bubble.  And lots of worldviews are up for having their bubbles burst, not just religious ones.

This theological aspect of the novel I actually found quite good, and if it were the only consideration, I'd give it more like a 3.5 or 4.  But other elements, of course, factor into it.

The storytelling itself is really quite lovely for about the first third or so of the novel - King at his nostalgic-but-tragic best.  The 1960s rural Maine life is realised nicely and makes for quite a 'cosy' read really, something of a warm but darkening paean to childhood.  The second third of the novel still grips well enough as we catch up with the protagonist as an adult addict, but it starts to lose some of its depth, becoming more of a merely entertaining yarn than a semi-profound meditation on life. By the final third of the novel, when it is supposed to be ratcheting up to its horrific climax, it threatens to become sheer goofy pulp.  That's, of course, what King is here revisiting and paying tribute to:  early Weird Tales horror, and earlier melodramatic Victorian horror.  But he just doesn't pull it off in my opinion. The antagonist, who was already thinning in the second third, has become a cartoon villain by this last segment of the tale, even speaking in a faux-genteel diction that made me cringe.  The antagonist's development into this kind of character could even have been done with some power, making him effectively creepy and terrifying in his ridiculous self-importance and affectation.  But that was not achieved.  

Worse, the horrors themselves, when they are revealed in fullness at the end, are more ridiculous still. I admire the level King was trying to take things to here, but again, to me, it just didn't come off. King is a genius at what he does well, carving out his own territory in horror by combining 'regular' late 20th/early 21st century American life with supernatural violence and terror.  But here, when he strays into the territory of the likes of Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith or William Hope Hodgson or Frank Belknap Long - effective purveyors of otherworldly horrors who already have their own limitations - he just seems out of his depth.  He can occasionally dip into this sort of thing with mixed success, but still somewhat effectively - e.g. 'The Mist' and 'Mrs. Todd's Shortcut' in Skeleton Crew; and occasionally I think he really nails it - e.g. 'I Am the Doorway' and 'Gray Matter' in Night Shift. I'm sure there are other examples that I just haven't read yet.  But here, though I want to like [SPOILER, I guess] the central image of the claw made of faces coming out of the revivified corpse's mouth, it just seems to arrive more or less out of nowhere, with no real atmosphere for it built up, no rationale, no matter how otherworldly or metaphysically weird.  Even the preceding glimpse of the afterlife only strikes me as technically horrific - as in, yeah, that'd be just unspeakably terrible [SPOILER again, of sorts] to be slaves of some unspecified female sort of superbeing, driven by ant-men, but the scene didn't make me feel the horror.  It came closer to making me laugh, not at the horror of such a reality, but at its depiction here.  I again kept thinking of cartoons, and not good ones.  The reason I have trouble even thinking of the above as spoilers is because the horror-reveal came as no real surprise to me when I read it.  Its elements had either already been forecasted and were not substantially developed or deepened here or they were just out of left field, and not in a wow-ing sort of way, but rather in way that robbed them of impact.  

So there you have it, my take:  Revival is theologically interesting, good storytelling in its first third, weakened in characterisation and plot in the last two-thirds, and kind of terrible in its horror-reveal finale.  Still glad I read it.  But more looking forward to catching up on King's 80s output.

Up next:  Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation (2014).