Danny's Picks

At the heart of any crime noir is a mystery, usually involving murder in some capacity. What sets the genre apart, though, is that the mystery doesn’t matter. We don’t care whodunit, mostly because the story exists in a world so scarred that no traditional justice or resolution will ever set things right again. Noir is all our morbid sensibilities condensed into a single narrative. What matters is the settings and the language. These are the tools a noir writer uses to engage their audience. In Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Chaos, this is done masterfully. The book is the first in The Marseilles Trilogy, and uses the city as a completely fleshed out, endearing yet frightening character and further as a metaphor for race relations in France. Full of booze, violence and frequent allusions to classical poetry and the blues, this book stands as a treasure for Noir fans.

Lies, deceit, grandstanding, backroom deals, backstabbing, and the creation of some of the most iconic characters and story-lines in modern history. This is the history of Marvel Comics. Author Sean Howe takes us through over a century, from the very beginning in a dingy office all the way to present day with Marvel owned by the monster corporation Disney. The strength of this book is that its interest is in the artists and the writers rather than exhausting us with the history of the characters, which any good comic fan already knows anyway, and Howe presents this refreshingly devoid of sentimentality. The artists and the writers come, they leave, and come back. They quit in grand gestures, as stances against exploitation of the creative staff, sometimes solitary and sometimes in groups, usually returning because there are just not that many paying gigs for that trade. Their professional lives parallel the comics they write. The superheroes that die and come back and are stuck in stasis are really the creators who keep telling their stories. On the surface there is no permanence in their world, but really it’s only the illusion of change.

The title suggests that David Denby will provide us an answer, but Do the Movies Have a Future? is not interested in solutions. In this collection of essays and reviews, Denby breaks down the evolution of the movie industry and how the marketing departments of studios have taken over the production of films. This is a bad thing. He doesn’t just focus on the negative, though; he dedicates significant parts of the book to directors that are still doing important work and reviews recent movies that resonate for him. What separates this particular book from the many others lamenting the decline of American film is that Denby isn’t really interested in saving Independent Film but wants to save the mainstream movies. The mainstream might be bloated and shallow, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be, if we can just get it out of the hands of the marketers.

Alan Heathcock’s debut is a collection of stories revolving around the fictional Midwestern town of Krafton. The writing, almost cinematic in its detail, creates a world and characters so fully realized that their tragedies become our own. Death, murder, post-traumatic stress and mourning permeate throughout the collection. From a young man returning home from Iraq and forced to do something terrible to a sheriff hunting down a child killer, Heathcock does not shy away from taking his readers to the darkest parts of humanity, but he never leaves us hopeless either. It’s as if by confronting this darkness, the citizens of Krafton have an opportunity to win, or lose, their souls. A volt is charged into their lives and sets them on a path that will change them forever. These themes, along with Heathcock’s precisely controlled prose, pitch-perfect dialogue and pacing like a freight train, will leave readers devastated, and eagerly awaiting his next book.

In his newest story collection, Stay Awake, Dan Chaon isn’t interested in beginnings or endings. Instead, he stays focused on that ambiguous and terrifying middle. Most of the stories focus on people struggling to maintain their mental well-being, and consciously failing, in the face of descending insanity. From the opening story, “The Bees,” whose climax is still haunting me, all the way through to the end of the collection, these tales seem designed to make us feel uncomfortable and anxious. Chaon is remarkably successful in this. This is not a comfortable read by any means, but stories whose (lack of) resolution will stay with you a long time after reading them. Some say the short story is dead. Well, Chaon is proving them wrong with this collection, showing just how much power you can pack into a concise and succinct story, ripping the world from underneath the reader.

This book, I’ll admit, surprised me quite a bit. What starts out as a collection of high brow fat jokes turns out to be a surprisingly warm story about a good man in a situation he never asks for while also displaying a cutting commentary on contemporary politics. The set-up: William Howard Taft wakes up in our current world after a hundred year hibernation and becomes reluctantly immersed in the current political scene when a grassroots movement, inspired by him, springs up. Heller paints his character as a good man trying to trying to redeem the name of Taft, tarnished by an unsuccessful presidency, while trying to figure out what has and hasn't changed since his time as commander in chief.