Nathan Ballingrud has appeared there a few times, and he has a collection, North American Lake Monsters, that's very good if you want to try him out on his own—he's sort of like the blue collar Raymond Carver of horror.

Just started Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, which is amazing so far: a tense, dryly witty, understated, and beautifully written suspense/survival story.

Laird Barron is consistently great, and while I also find the Datlow best horror collections to be a little uneven (I really liked volumes two and four, for what that's worth), I'm grateful that they introduced me to him, since he's a perennial favorite. He even has a tribute anthology in his honor that's also great,…

At this point I think the universe is trying to tell me I'll meet my end in a desert, planetary location of said desert optional.

I enjoy The Hook as a suspense novel—the guilt, surprising lack of guilt, and increasing madness work very well—but I love it as Westlake's backstage tour of writing as a profession, even if some of the details are no longer true. But the sheer, crunchy, this-is-how-it-works-ness of that book is sublime, and the…

The Night Watch is the only one I don't like—I think it hits a point where it tips from somber to dour.

I keep being loaned copies of Dune by people who promptly disappear from my life, leaving me no way to return it to them. It's an eerie enough pattern that I finally got them out of the house by donating them to a prisoner book drive.

Currently reading Ruth Franklin's new Shirley Jackson biography. I have the occasional quibble with it—Franklin harps on Jackson's troubled relationship with her mother, but everything she cites in support of that feels very minor—but overall I'm really enjoying it. It's smoothly written, thorough, and thoughtful,…

The inevitable Diaz essay collection cannot come soon enough, can it?

Yeah, I would definitely tackle that one last, and maybe even some distance after the final book. It works way better as a special feature than an actual novel in its own right.

I've been reading the most recent Best American volumes—I just finished Junot Diaz's Best American Short Stories 2016, which did a great job of widening the series's perspective to something more global and also more diverse in genre terms (Ted Chiang! The incredible unease of "Cold Little Bird," which I'd easily put…

I've been spite-buying a lot of things lately out of the sheer pleasure of spending my recreational money on things that might irritate the coming administration (and, you know, wanting them anyway), and Lowery's book was one of them.

I like Le Guin's novels (though I'm with other people in this thread in preferring The Dispossessed to Left Hand of Darkness) but where she really shines for me is in her short fiction, which often has a really exhilarating combination of ideas and elegant prose. The collection The Birthday of the World is one of my…

Some small, angry part of my heart still holds a grudge against King for letting the Calla patois into the revised Gunslinger.

Oh, hey, I just reread the first four. (This is why I sometimes don't do my own separate comment on these threads—by the time I've worked my way through, you guys have got me covered already.) And yeah, I'm more of a fan of Wizard and Glass than some, but I think the "intrigue" in Mejis drags down what could be a…

The LA Quartet (and the Underworld USA trilogy) are so immersive in their characters' viewpoints, and in the viewpoint of a very specific narrative voice, that I tend to register all that without being bothered by it until I hit something that feels like it goes past prejudice into meanness and past meanness into…

I thought about that, but I think there's always too much of a risk they'd release the video: after that, no matter how much evidence was on her side, she'd probably never be able to get another job as a principal again. She could still decide to do it, but she would have to get to the point where she was okay with…

Also weird given that the shots go in the shoulder and the side of the lower torso, so it's more like "Vice Principals shoots for the heart in more ways than one, but none of those ways are the most literal way, which is to actually end its first season finale by shooting someone in, as opposed to near-ish, the…

There's also the fact that while Gamby explicitly said he would be okay with Russell becoming principal, Russell kind of danced around reciprocating. If it's not Russell, I definitely think they're at least setting it up for Gamby to plausibly think it's Russell.

And in my own.