Powers refuses to be silenced, which translates to a lot of (intentionally) heavy-handed dendrological metaphors, a lot of (non-ironic) talk of rediscovering the beauty of nature and much (sincere) discussion of how humans are terrible and short-sighted and doomed in the way of a Greek tragedy. Essentially, a lot of trees. However, the fact that such a premise feels tiring, and the metaphors ham-fisted, and the views unsophisticated only confirms Powers’ point. There’s nothing hip or trendy about this message. There is no cultural capital to be earned, no badges of honour to wear, no quick redemption to cash in at the next available opportunity.

The problem with such a blunt method of writing is that it will not work for everyone. Being whacked over the head with our own lunacy might cause the already convinced to sit up and take more immediate action, but is likely to turn away many more who feel undeserving of such a beating. Which means, with complete admiration for Powers’s efforts, there is still a need for subtlety and nuance.

Lauren Groff’s latest short story collection Florida represents one of the best examples of this alternate take on climate fiction. Whereas The Overstory presents nature as a central character and climate change as a capitalised THEME, Groff instead presents them in a more natural way, just as much a fact of life in her vision of Florida as the characters themselves, despite no explicit pontificating on the subject. Importantly, the nuance here is not so-called ‘balance’ where opposing views are given airtime. Climate change is still happening. Things are still bad and getting worse, and still no-one is acting quickly or substantially enough. The difference is in the tone of communicating this, and the manner in which Groff positions herself in relation to the audience. If Richard Powers in a teacher or priest, warning of an approaching damnation, then Lauren Groff is a next-door neighbour, going through it with you.

Though the feeling is only occasionally born of direct fears around the climate, the prevailing atmosphere in Florida is one of dread. Large killer cats stalk the treeline (‘The Midnight Zone’), sinkholes open up beneath foundations (‘Flower Hunter’), hurricanes blow gators, gar and ghosts directly into people’s houses (‘Eyewall’). People are just as threatening, such as the strange shopkeeper of ‘Salvador’, or the herpetologist father of ‘At the Round of Earth’s Imagined Corners’ who brings up his son in a house of venomous snakes. However, the creatures of the latter are not so much the primary source of dread but its physical manifestation, the anguine symbolism representing something deeper in our relationship with people, the lizard-brain revulsion outshone by an equally primal desire to belong.

A similar urge underpins fear in all its guises in this collection, the various modes of suffering and death merely variations on personal isolation. Many of the stories involve abandonment, from the aforementioned herpetologist’s son to the deserted sisters of ‘Dogs Go Wolf’ and the grad student’s abrupt slide through the cracks of society in ‘Above and Below’. Thus, Groff’s position feels less ideological than visceral, driven not by some educated understanding or calculated decision, rather a direct and fundamental fear, stories dictated by dread.

This is typified best by several linked pieces which share the same principle character, a noticeably Groffian woman who lives in Florida with her husband and two sons. The Florida of this woman’s world is a canary in the coal mine, a ground zero for the approaching catastrophe. Her anxiety is not concerned with the likelihood of disaster, but rather the scale. Degrees of ruin sorted into a hierarchy—individual, familial, local, regional, national, global—and the question becomes whether a personal calamity will get to the characters before the climate slides into a planetary one. Will they get picked off one by one by a monstrous feline before the sea engulfs the peninsula? Will their house collapse into a sinkhole, killing them before the real trouble begins? Because, while the titular state might be uniquely dangerous, with its cottonheads and gators and mythic black panthers, the real looming threat is more ubiquitous and inescapable. “She had always thought this would be the place to be during the climate wars that she sees looming in the future,” Groff writes, her protagonist finding Paris hotter than she had imagined. “But maybe there is no place to be; maybe all places on a hotter planet will be equally bad, desert and hunger everywhere.”

In the opening story ‘Ghosts and Empties’ we find her wandering the streets after dark, afraid to be in the house because of a propensity to yell, leaving the parenting duties to her husband, who does not yell. However, far from appearing unhinged, the narrator comes across the sane one. Indeed, the blunt aggression could be said to be analogous to Richard Powers’ writing style, a sudden burst of plain-speaking in a world of repression. Who wouldn’t yell, knowing what we know, living how we do?

During the day, while my son’s are in school, I can’t stop reading about the disaster of the world, the glaciers dying like living creatures, the great Pacific trash pyre, the hundreds of unrecorded deaths of species, millennia snuffed out as if they were not precious. I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow date this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.

Florida is out now via William Heinemann (UK) and Riverhead (US).

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Sing, Unburied, Sing served as my introduction to Jesmyn Ward, and it quickly became apparent what all the fuss is about. The novel is crafted from distinctive prose that’s at once poetic and blunt, a voice that’s able to capture not just the struggles that exist within families but throughout contemporary America. It pulls off the tricky task of using an intimate study of single family to explore huge themes across several hundred years of history.

Ward is also an expert in creating a sense of place, conjuring the sights and sounds and smells of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. Some of these evocations are good and rich with a sense of nostalgia, like “the smell of onions and garlic, bell pepper, and celery cooked in butter [that] clouds the air” in the kitchen. But others are not good, a reminder of the harsh realities these characters have to live in. Perhaps the best example of this is the opening scene which depicts the slaughter of a goat, described by the young narrator:

“The smell overwhelms like a faceful of pig shit. It smells like foragers, dead and rotting out in the thick woods, when the only sign of them is the stink and the buzzards rising and settling and circling. It stinks like possums or armadillos smashed half flat on the road, rotting in asphalt and heat. But worse. This smell is worse; it’s the smell of death, the rot coming from something just alive, something hot with blood and life.”

The story centres on Jojo, a thirteen year old boy who’s trying to accelerate his journey into manhood to care for his young sister, and his mother Leonie, who’s locked in eternal struggle with herself, the people around her, and her drug habit. Add to that Pop, Leonie’s stoic father, who is (almost literally) haunted by the tragedy and violence of his youth, and Mam, her mother, who is bedridden with an excruciatingly painful terminal illness. A difficult situation is made worse when the children’s father is released from the prison, and Leonie drags them on a road trip across the state to retrieve him.

The sheer weight of the effects of racism on these characters is crushing, the entirely ordinary and believable people portrayed more like the doomed figures from some ancient epic. On the surface Leonie has few redeeming features, a young woman who shows little love to her children, and who takes every opportunity to take out her anger on them. But, by the end of the story, the reasons for this become clear, and it’s hard to blame her for any of her shortcomings. From personal pain of the sudden death of her brother and the abrupt and uneasy transition into motherhood, to the exhausting daily quest for even a scrap of basic dignity and the momentary relief of drugs, its clear that she is a person, one of many, who is battling against a system that has been designed to keep her in chains.

But, of course, Jojo’s anger at his mother is understandable. He is one of the bravest protagonists of recent times, a boy who is forced to steal food from gas stations and secretly feed it to his famished baby sister, who endures the savage treatment of a suspicious cop, and who is covered in vomit more times than anyone deserves. Through conversations with his grandfather he begins to grasp the the horror and brutality of their cultural history, a revelation that leads to a major plot point near the end of the book, a strand that plays out something like Lincoln in the Bardo meets Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is a tale of hardship and pain that’s stitched with a silvery thread of magic, but perhaps little hope. As Ward says in a Q&A with The Guardian, “Young people have a right to optimism, and rightly so; human beings have grown and developed and accomplished wonderful feats in the world. But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It’s tiring.”

It’s out now on Bloomsbury (UK) and Scribner / Simon and Schuster (US).

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It was a surprise, then, to hear that Egan’s latest novel, Manhattan Beach, was a historical work without much in the way of genre-bending style. Pitched somewhere between crime-noir and domestic novel, the book follows the life of Anna Kerrigan, a girl growing up out of Depression-era New York into a war-time city where women are employed in the naval yard. This novel situation, coupled with Anna’s relationship with her disabled sister, worn-out mother and, most importantly, mysteriously absent and potentially mob-involved father, drives a narrative capable of straddling interior life with more genre-based features, with detective elements of urban thrillers and the rich research of historical fictional. However, while Anna finds herself spread across a range of scenes—family homes, docklands, nightclubs, crime dens—all are tied together by various forms of deceit and deception.

The opening scene finds a pre-teen Anna in the early 1930s, travelling with her father Eddie on one of his ‘work’ business trips, which appear to cast him as a kind of bagman for organised crime. From there, the narrative jumps to the 40s, to a Kerrigan household abandoned by Eddie with no explanation, and Anna working toward the war effort. Slowly, we learn that almost every character has secrets, with Anna more than most. Indeed, it is almost as though she has been conditioned by her father to lie, to occupy a slippery space whenever questions are asked, as though to mislead others is a vital part of self-preservation, a habit done often enough to become instinctive.

To say anymore risks spoiling the book, be it one based on clues and red herrings and mistaken identity. However, it bears saying that fans of Goon Squad and Look At Me, that is, readers expecting something more than glorified pulp noir from a writer such as Egan, should not be so quick to judge. The so-called ‘standard’ narrative not only contains enough signals—implicit communications, miscommunications, passive aggressions—to warrant deep investigative reading, but Egan uses both the character and setting to explore wider themes of American identity. The many-headed monster of organised crime proves a useful vehicle for such examinations, with the characters who find themselves roped into criminal systems not only justifying their involvement, but partaking in various means to obscure the fact, to conceal the truth of their crimes (from others and themselves) to the degree that their actions become abstract and ethically vague. This is just another example of the key theme of deception. Characters lying to shape their identity and gain some degree of agency. Some semblance of freedom. Be it from poverty, or preconceptions and reputation—essentially the forces of the prevailing system.

Jennifer Egan has long detailed an America heading toward some sort of saturation point, where consumerist culture and image-obsessed ideology would soon reach a critical, apocalyptic mass. While the closing segments of Goon Squad suggest a runaway escalation of technology, the tone and timing of Look At Me make 9/11 a kind of extra-narrative denouement. The American Dream, Egan seems to say, is collapsing into clouds of dust—America attacked and wounded, New York City at war—as though some falsehood has been revealed at its no longer impenetrable core. While it would be naive to say that Manhattan Beach traces back to the origin of this Dream, the novel portrays an America ready to inflate it, to display it to the wider world as an opportunity or promise more seductive than any other.

“I see the rise of this country to a height no country has occupied, ever […] Because our dominance won’t arise from subjugating peoples. We’ll emerge from this war victorious and unscathed, and become bankers to the world. We’ll export our dreams, our language, our culture, our way of life. And it will prove irresistible.”

Beneath the exciting plot and readable prose, Egan is still examining the modes and consequences of power in the United States. As such, Manhattan Beach is the introduction to the Look At Me‘s conclusion, the texts book-ending an American fantasy which opened and closed in war.

Manhattan Beach is out now via Corsair (UK) and Scribner (US).

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—Chavisa Woods, ‘A Little Aside’

Things To Do When You’re a Goth in the Country, the latest short story collection by Brooklyn-based writer Chavisa Woods, focuses on those who feel separate from society. Whether they be queer artists or trailer park residents, these are paranoid, poverty-stricken people preoccupied with the myths and mistruths that have filled the vacuum left by an absent government which promised to protect them. Woods’ stories exist beneath the suffocating grasp of convention, detailing the mental gymnastics required to support supposedly moral institutions built on bigotry and hate, in places where residents proudly wave a flag even as the neighbourhood kids are blown up by IEDs in a desert 7,000 miles away.

Opener ‘How to Stop Smoking in Nineteen Thousand Two Hundred and Eighty-Seven Seconds, Usama’ tells the story of an artist returning to their hometown to visit their two brothers. It begins as a classic small-town-outsider-turned-cool-NYC-artist-returns-to-depressing-backwater, with the appearance of an edgy half cousin on the run from a manslaughter charge acting as the desperate illustration of why the artist left town in the first place.

But Woods isn’t satisfied with such black and white distinctions, and paints everyone, even the “bad” characters, in a pretty sympathetic light. There are reasons why people live the way they do, whether that’s rejecting the conservative values of their hometown and moving to the city to make art, rejecting mainstream morals and turning to crime, or adopting a worldview full of intolerance and mistrust. It’s a story that works particularly well in light of Trump’s America, the characters struggling and lost, turning to myth and conspiracy to foster some semblance of excitement or meaning in their lives.

“For months my brothers had been telling me about these green floating gaseous orbs they are coming out of the woods that they think are coming from UFOs out there. But I think it’s more a combination of mold, the meth kid cooking out in the field, and also, last year the EPA cleaned off about fifteen miles’ worth of toxic topsoil from this area…Oh well. Green, glowing orbs are a lot more fun to think about of as alien life-threatening than all that other crap, especially if you’re living with them. Especially if there’s nothing you can do about them.”

There are several stories which take a big step into the weird—be it because the main characters drop acid (‘Take the Way…’) or get steered towards magical realist allegory (‘A New Mohawk’)—but these too are rooted in a malaise that’s very much real. Even the short and furious rant ‘A Little Aside’ feels distinctly of the here and now, taking the narratives spun by Alex Jones and David Icke and countless Youtube channels and presenting them from a raving first person perspective (“I know when it’s coming. I know when it’s gonna happen: 12/21/2121. We don’t got much time left”).

Also told in first person, the title story is one of teenage rebellion, of trying to carve out a niche for yourself in a world that isn’t interested. Narrated by a sixteen year old girl, it tells of huffing whipped cream fumes on a merry go round, urban myths and haunted bridges, smoking beneath the bell tower because there’s nothing else to do. She has plenty advice for any budding rural goths, from harassing army recruiters in the high school canteen to etching pentacles into your forehead with a razor blade (pentacles preferred to pentagrams as she finds pentagrams “a bit of an overkill, and rather silly as satanism is so blasé and reactionary an endeavour”). But perhaps the most striking scene is made when she reads a passage from Ezekiel to the local congregation as part of enforced Bible study:

“I approached the pulpit with my big red bible…chains rattling from my hips,and fucked-up Barbie doll necklaces hanging around my neck; Vietnam ear tokens honouring the violence of girlishness. There I stood before the congregation in the small steepled white church, under the empty cross, exposed rafters echoing barnyards, my eyes painted thick with black curlicues swirling up from my lids to around my temples, and upside-down crosses resting like tears on my cheeks…And I read them their Bible. I read the congregation their sacred text, dressed that way on their pulpit. I spoke in a booming deep-throated voice that, at moments, devolved into a growl, echoing through their sanctuary like it was a black magic road show we were doing […] I read their sacred book and I made it mine.”

The stories are a reminder that despite much of the bluster and bravado it presents internationally, America is a dense mosaic of misfits, many of whom are trapped in damaging cycles by powers beyond their control. Whether dealing with war, drugs, queer relationships or, well… being a goth in the country, Chavisa Woods achieves a tone that’s simultaneously streetwise and sympathetic, and is exactly the kind of fiction we’re going to need to get us through currents times.

Things to Do When You’re a Goth in the Country is out now on Seven Stories Press.

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While there are no schools or ruled paper in the Alexandra Kleeman’s short story collection, Intimations, this feeling is perhaps the closest we’re going to get in any attempt to describe the surreal, anxiety-dream atmosphere stretched across the book. Be they bizarre fables or straighter realist narratives, Kleeman’s stories are imbued with an overarching strangeness. Indeed, many of the characters seem to be facing an exam of one sort or another, though the stakes are raised by their confusion as to what exactly is being measured, by whom, and to what end.

The collection is split into three sections, categorised in the press release as “birth, living, and death.” The first opens with ‘Fairy Tale’, a nightmare in which the narrator’s home is besieged by fiancés and boyfriends, past, present and potential. Her parents look on, as though expecting her to select one, though when she does the piece unravels, chaos disintegrating into a fine, single thread of logic that only she cannot decipher. ‘The Dancing-Master’ is equally unsettling, featuring the titular Dancing Master and his captive-like student trying to perfect his body in motion, while ‘Lobster Dinner’, is an absurd, devious take on the love story, featuring killer lobsters and killing lobsters and lobster-based recipes from summer on the Cape. Strangeness squared, ‘A Brief History of Weather’ closes the section with the most peculiar piece in the collection. Logic obscured as if by a stormy front, the story is either hieroglyphic or pareidolic, as though arriving in neat images and channelled through Kleeman’s pen unedited, arranged according to the direction of the wind or else blind chance.

The majority of the stories in the second section concern a narrator named Karen, though we are left to guess if the Karens are the same person or linked in any way at all. Here Kleeman pivots in a realist direction, the peculiarity left to haunt the spaces between what the characters try to say and what they manage to communicate. ‘Choking Victim’ sees a well-meaning mother grow irrational through neurotic concern, while ‘Jellyfish’ finds a newly-engaged couple at an unnerving holiday resort, seemingly unable to enjoy their milestone. This is made clear by the state of the sea, so chock-full of the Cnidarians of the title that swimming is not possible. “The effect of so many small, identical details multiplied and extended into the far distance was nightmarish,” Kleeman writes. “An optical illusion made suffocatingly real.”

There’s an alienation present in ‘I May Not Be the One You Want, But I Am the One For You’, though cleverly registered as the opposite—Karen, having been isolated from human contact, is the ‘normal’ one, and now suddenly aware of the fundamental oddness of other people, the way they live and breathe and lick their lips, fleshy machines we can never really know. The isolation, it seems, is both the cause and the coping mechanism, the reason the people in her cafe appear so strange and the attempt at escaping into something more digestible. Instead she flees to entertainment in which narrative arcs are followed and people represent simplified ideals of viewers choice.

“She felt thick-brained and inept at the delicate choreography of being nice to people. She had been watching two movies a day, sometimes more. There were almost enough movies around to live your entire life in them. But there was not quite enough.”

The closing section opens with the fancy-dress-faux-pas-turns-murder-mystery of ‘Fake Blood’, where guests at a party debate the relative realism of the killings taking place around them (“But what does real look like?” someone asks). ‘Hylomorphosis’ is Kleeman at her most experimental and abstract, never quite materialising into anything tangible, and ‘Rabbit Starvation’ juxtaposes the fluffiness of white cotton with some hideously dark existential force. Finally, there’s an apocalypse of vanishing objects, ‘You, Disappearing’, which echoes Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things. Here is perhaps where Kleeman’s intent becomes clearest, the tale becoming a melancholic love story as represented by absences, and our inability to see them coming.

“The apocalypse was quiet. It had a way about it, a certain charm. It could be called graceful. It was taking a long time.”

Intimations is out now via Harper Perennial and available in all the usual place. Also, be sure to check out Kleeman’s debut novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine.

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— Omar El Akkad

Canadian-Egyptian journalist Omar El Akkad has experience of human conflict. In his ten years writing for The Globe and Mail, El Akkad covered a diverse range of politically and socially-charged events, from the Arab Spring in Egypt and the US War in Afghanistan, to military trials at Guantanamo Bay and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson. However, there must have been a sense of familiarity by the second and third events, each an example of ordinary people rising against injustices by systems with guns and armour. People made angry, and acting like angry people will.

His debut novel, American War, feels rooted in such understanding. A dystopic imagining of the Second American Civil War, the book takes place in the last quarter of the twenty-first century, each chapter followed by an excerpt from various sources of (fictional) non-fiction that provide the necessary exposition without drowning the narrative. And boy is such exposition needed. El Akkad’s America is one ravaged by climate change, great portions of the country too hot to inhabit or else underwater, while the entire Middle East is now the Bouazizi Empire, a prosperous and stable democracy. The United States are no longer united, north and south split into Blue and Red, a battle of brutal force and insidious insurgency amplified by new technology—cheap guns and IEDs joined by bio-warfare plagues and unmanned, solar-power drones gone haywire, dropping fire indiscriminately.

Perhaps understandably, much of the critical reception has focused on the novel’s link to the current political and cultural situation in the United States. With visible, bare-faced white supremacism joining the already copious amounts of insidious racism across the country, and the bipartisan split between right and left seemingly growing more conspicuous and developed by the day, the term ‘civil war’ has been bandied semi-seriously. The bottom line is that America represents different things to different people, so ‘being American’ has various conflicting and often incompatible definitions that makes any sort of peaceful middle ground seem not just fanciful but downright impossible. In a novel where rebel states in the South secede from the Union in order to continue the extraction of fossil fuels, and both sides are entrenched in the ideological righteousness of their position, parallels are always going to be drawn.

However, the real focus of the novel is not the ‘America’ of the title but the ‘War’—a fact made clear by the quote from El Akkad himself on the front cover (see the epigraph to the article). For all of its futuristic flourishes, this war could be any number of places from the past fifty years. The refugee camps, the suicide bombers, the baseless incarceration and torture. The distant foreign concern, the malicious intervention. The self-perpetuating violence. Angry young people killing angry young people, creating more angry young people. So, beneath the YA-style coming-of-age plot and sci-fi dressing, the novel is a study of radicalisation, of finding identity and purpose within chaos through unflinching world views and gestures of loyalty. The American setting is just the method of grounding this facet of the human condition, marking it not as some geographical, cultural or religious trait but rather the product of suffering and trauma.

American War is out in the UK via Picador and the US through Knopf.

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—Ta-Nehisi Coates

After years as a successful and important career writing for The Village Voice, Time, The Atlantic and others, Ta-Nehisi Coates established himself as a key voice in US journalism. 2008 saw the release of his memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, which he followed with the short but sharp essay collection, Between the World and Me, in 2015. Split into three thematically-linked pieces, the work uses a similar method to that of James Baldwin’s ‘My Dungeon Shook’ in The Fire Next Time, with Coates writing the essays in the style of a letter to his son. His central point is to reinforce visceral, physical nature of racism, and how this determines every moment and gesture in the life of a black person, the murder of Prince Carmen Jones Jr., a college friend of Coates killed by police in 2000, a recurring point of reference.

In the first piece, Coates speaks of the harsh punishments his father would use against him (“Either I can beat him or the police,” he quotes him as saying), and the unerring language and tone of the essays is its own tough love from father to son. The realities of violence are made clear, as are those of white supremacy and atheism, institutional racism, the constant fear. No topic is coated in sugar, no punches are pulled, no real redemption is offered beyond extolling the value of constant vigilance and a knowledge of your position in the world.

And, if this is an uncomfortable truth for Coates’ son, then it is even more uncomfortable for us white people who like to believe in equality in our own passive way. Firstly, there is the bone-deep unease that comes with our sheer inaction, our stasis in the face of an unfathomably conspicuous white dominance. How can kids still get murdered again and again by police officers who face little or no consequence? How can 60% of black men who do not finish school end up in jail? How can we still load people into ghettos and act with indignation or fear when violence and tragedy ensues? It seems, for all the talk and moral reasoning, personal comfort still allows some perceived distance from the suffering that allows us to pretend we can or should do nothing.

Secondly dawns a slower horror, though one very much feeding into the first. Throughout the book, despite the fear and sadness, Coates makes clear the rich sense of identity experienced by black peoples, a sense of belonging achieved through ethnicity and culture that is best highlighted in his eulogising on Howard University. For all of our bluster and trying, white people do not have the same sense of identity. What could be said to unite white people beyond capitalism and power? So instead we must dream, become simulacra of Buck Rodgers and Aragorn and Skywalker, pretend to be all-powerful heroes of importance. The implications of this are clear—the only way to conjure a sense of power is to exert control over others—and the result an emptiness we have no way of filling.

Just as with the inequalities and dangers Coates’ son will face as he becomes a man, there is no quickfire solution that will make our problems go away. We too need constant vigilance, an equal and opposite awareness to that of which Coates holds. We too must arm ourselves with knowledge, a never ending interrogation of who we are and what that means.

Between the World and Me is out now on Spiegel & Grau. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power is out in October. Coates also works for The Atlantic, and writes the Black Panther series for Marvel Comics.

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— Noah Cicero, The Human War

There’s a push and pull at work at the heart of Noah Cicero’s debut novella, equal and opposite forces born of the distant, nebulous nature of global events. Collected into his debut 2003 release alongside two short stories, The Human War follows twenty-something Mark on the night the invasion of Iraq began (“Two hours till war. / It’s six o’clock. Bush said at eight, people must die”). War is not just imminent but live on TV—the journalistic speculation whetting appetites, Bush’s rhetoric something like the tagline of a trailer, the idea of war familiar enough to invoke anger yet abstract and removed enough to feel unreal, something possible to ignore.

In his lower-class existence in Youngstown, Ohio, Mark finds himself paralysed by this dichotomy, unsure whether to scream in protest or forget himself in cheap drink and empty sex. Whether to join the fight just to shock some life into his nerves and bones. As such, the book operates on two speeds or levels. The terse, tumbling prose captures Mark’s awareness of all this line by line, confusion and disillusionment and anger against the futility of it all, while zoomed out the structure of the narrative is a glacial, directionless slide. While internally thrashing and grasping in search of answers, it translates to nothing more than inertia, one pleasureless drift through strip joints and bars, sharing the company of friends he doesn’t know and girls he both loves and doesn’t.

“When I die, there better be a heaven, because I want an answer for this.”

The Human War is out now on Fugue State Press (US) and Snowbooks (UK). Noah Cicero’s latest work, the poetry collection, Bipolar Cowboy, was released in 2015 on Lazy Fascist Press.

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Stretching over 600 pages, the novel includes a semi-mythic colonel, his psy-op serving nephew, Vietnamese double agents, humanitarian nurses, too-young-soliders-turned-crazed-lurps and disgraced navy sailors struggling to readjust to life back in Arizona (the latter being Bill Houston, who will eventually grow/descend into the antihero of Johnson’s debut novel, Angels). By the closing stages, the various narrative strands have twisted and tangled to the degree that confusion arises, the reader in effect joining the characters in the bush and hacking through a literary jungle of their own. How do we piece together these small scraps of experience into something coherent and important? And is it enough to explain and justify the war, or human nature itself?

“It’s got to be about something bigger than dying, or we’d all turn deserter. I think we need to be much more conscious of that.”

Johnson passed away in May, though not before being made aware that he was to receive the Library of Congress’ Prize for American Fiction. Tree of Smoke is out now on Picador and Farrar, Straus and Giroux and is available at all good book shops. Those unfamiliar with his work would be well advised to check out his novels (Angels), novellas (Train Dreams) and short story collections (Jesus’ Son), as well as his essay collection, Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond.

P.S. If you like strange, sprawling books about Vietnam and conspiracies, then you’ll be into David Means’ Hystopia.

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— Joseph Scapellato, ‘Cowboy Good Stuff’s Four True Lovers’

Through a careful give and take between familiar imagery and surrealist flourishes, Joseph Scapellato’s debut collection Big Lonesome is a subversive love letter to The Wild West, skewing archetypes just enough to subvert the myths and tropes of the genre. Split into three sections– ‘Old West’, ‘New West’ and ‘Post-West’– the book stretches the notion of The West into the present and beyond, resulting in twenty-five stories of considerable variation that nonetheless hang upon the All-American themes of individualism, identity and history.

Unsurprisingly, ‘Old West’ is the most traditional of the segments, though this is not to say Scapellato plays it straight. ‘Big Lonesome Beginnings’ sets the tone, a story centred on a saunter of cowboys, one armed with a guitar in place of an absent Her, the others forcing themselves to stay awake so as not to miss what the music has them feeling. “He knew his music would never be a body,” Scapellato writes, “but he played it nonetheless.” From here we are introduced to cowboys of all shapes and sizes, from the eponymous centaurian hero of ‘Horseman Cowboy’ to the puny cowboy of ‘Mutt-Face’ who attempts (unsuccessfully) to drink himself big, each character representing some spin on the masculine mystique of Western mythology. One standout is ‘Thataway’, where a hard-luck cowboy lives in fear of a ‘rile’ which rises within him and (worse) the ‘weepies’ which sometimes follow. Sitting in a laundromat, he meets an odd old man who speaks of the ‘brown boy’ who climbs down throats and hugs hearts but ultimately abandons you. The story grows increasingly hallucinatory, the old man growing more strange and the brown boy manifesting physically. The cowboy comes to learn that beneath his fear of his emotions lies a deeper dread, a dark dead absence that grins behind the early promise of narcotic relief.

“Most nothings showed up where a something used to be, and the gone something was what you used to measure the nothing. This nothing had come from where there had never been anything. There was no telling how much of him it would require, and for how long, and to what end. It was much worse than the weepies” (23).

The jewel at the centre of ‘Old West’ is ‘Cowboy Good Stuff’s Four True Loves’, a piece split into subheadings detailing either a true love (“His First”, “His Second”, etc.) or other notable and metaphorically-ripe events from the cowboy’s life. His first three loves are women—a singing whore, a blushing teacher, a star-crossed senorita—but the fourth is a radio. Finding the cowboy in his old age and sharing wistful wisdom with a local kid (“Music don’t make the world smaller. Just makes you bigger.”), this final section paints loneliness in its true light, comprehensive and all-consuming yet also surprisingly feeble, a force that feels like the default state right up until it is no longer. The result is a Saunders-like sense of compassion and empathy, love appearing at irregular intervals to slap Good Stuff in the face and help him see clearly for however long it lasts.

“The way he saw it, love had always come to him like a thing remembered. Known and new. And now the radio! It received what it was given, and what it received it gave. It gave to those who gathered round. What was far was now” (36).

‘New West’ drags us forward into something like the present day, where the cowboys are still cowboys, yet ones reared on the Western myth. As such, it’s impossible to tell whether this West is one big performance or something intrinsic in the American spirit, loneliness and self-destruction made halfway gratifying by the knowledge of those already lost to the curse, by a nostalgia for something that was never quite yours. Again, the stories range from the mundane to the fantastic, the latter typified by ‘Cowgirl’, where a human female born of a cow traverses life in strange detachment, thoughts and feelings arriving and dissipating without warning, her mind clouded (or not) by a bovine thoughtlessness. ‘A Mother Buries a Gun in the Desert Again’ is a pretty literal expansion of the title, charting the slow sadness of ageing and steady surrender to liquid distractions, while ‘Small Boy’ serves as a direct challenge of the whole Heroic Western trope, asking a variety of people a simple question with the forthright innocence only found in young children. “Why did we kill all the Indians?”

Closing story ‘Snake Canyon’ has a Jon Raymond/Kelly Reinhardt vibe, finding two friends retreating to the wilderness as a salve against day-to-day life. “The air was clean and dry, but flush with the feeling they’d come for,” Scapellato writes. “An emptying out: an emptying in. A reminder that they were made out of their bodies” (95). Disaster strikes, as one of the men gets so badly injured the other must to carry him down the mountain, and the heart of the New West experience is revealed. Having a weird out-of-body experience, the man sees himself saving his friend’s life. At first, he is filled with pride at the vision, though doubts soon creep in as he wishes he was stronger and more confident in his life-saving ability. Finally, he turns to anger, furious at an imagined audience judging his every action, seeing his act of heroism in its less-than-glorious detail, recognising him not as a Western hero but a fallible human. The idea that the truth of the Old West was equally human/cowardly lurks at the back of the story, a vague awareness of some self-imposed amnesia, a blurring of the truth.

“By intentionally or unintentionally overlooking history, American communities could choose to shape and be shaped by imagined futures that, at least initially, appeared untouched by American mistakes, by American embarrassments. Freedom in forgetting” (96-7)

If ‘New West’ is a contemporary West, then ‘Post-West’ is a contemporary Midwest, representing another step away from American history toward the imagined futures referenced above. Still, the characters here seem just as lost, either dizzied by their new-found freedom or else confused by some looming strangeness, as though history lurks just out of view, a gigantic body disrupting the normal forces of life. ‘It Meant There Would Be More’ is one such example, a story examining a couple and their life within an apartment complex where communication feels subtly impossible, every interaction a thin skin atop of a deep recess of fear and feeling.

I took her hand, the one with the keys. I talked about what we were and what we could be.
She took back her hand. “When you talk about us you don’t mean what you say.
“I mean it now.”
“Exactly. That’s it, that’s all” (122).

Focusing on a man who takes his fiance’s dog to a bar, ‘Dead Dogs’ follows a similar vein, the canine triggering a series of patrons to approach with tales of the own, long deceased pets. One-sided and almost entirely for their own benefit, their stories are more like soliloquies, Evan Dara-like monologues whose natural cadences mask a broader sadness. Again the sense is one of stilted communication, people with this urgent need to share what’s inside their heads yet either too embarrassed to do so or else finding words and phrases insufficient, the message degraded upon contact with air. ‘Company’ confronts this head on, with a person trying to get another to talk, or at least know they can should they feel so inclined. The story progresses to a suicide attempt, the sense of danger sharpening the narrator’s plea:

“You’re no addict brother, you’re not insane, you haven’t been beaten or abused or abandoned. You’re okay! You’re okay, so what is it, what is it always, and why have we only ever talked around it?” (174)

What’s striking about ‘Company’, and indeed the majority of the collection, is the push and pull of the past. “I can’t stop plunging my head into the past,” the narrator says, “even though it’s hard to breathe in” (170). Here, times gone are both something to escape and retreat into, to remember and forget, questions and answers and warnings all rolled into one. They come with lessons we’d do well to learn, expectations we’d do well to ignore. Ultimately, Big Lonesome paints the past as something that can destroy us, and as something that could save our souls.

Big Lonesome is out now via Mariner Books, and you can head to the Joseph Scapellato website for more info on the author.

The lure of making a companion mixtape for this one proved just too much. Just like the collection, we’ve broken the playlist into three distinct sections.

Tracklisting:

“Old West”

1) The Rev. J.M. Gates – Death’s Black Train is Coming
2) Ken Maynard – The Lone Star Trail
3) Bascom Lamar Lunsford – Dry Bones
4) Uncle Dave Macon – Walking in the Sunlight
5) Blind Lemon Jefferson – See That My Grave is Kept Clean
6) Harry Jackson – Some Cowboy Brag Talk

“New West”

7) Andrew Weathers Ensemble – You Are Powerful We Are Taking Over
8) Fog Lake – I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry
9) Sawtooth – Dead Dog Eyes
10) Jordan O’Jordan – A Lonely Road
11) The Dead Tongues – Stained Glass Eyes
12) Ben Seretan – Cottonwood Tree

“Post West”

13) Frederick Squire – Old Times Past New Times
14) Dear Nora – The Lonesome Border, Pt. 1
15) Phosphorescent – A New Anhedonia (Live On KEXP)
16) YOWL – Saturday Drag
17) Advance Base – Nephew in the Wild
18) Talons’ – Change

Photo From the Joseph Scapelatto Website / Cover (re)design by Liam Doyle

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