Rachel Cusk
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux ($26)

by Sally Franson

It may come as no surprise, given the title, that Rachel Cusk’s latest novel appears as neatly structured as a term paper. The eponymous word appears exactly twice in the book—once at the beginning, once at the end—and between these slender bookends stand ten tidy chapters, each one devoted to a nearly anonymous female narrator’s conversations with a series of loquacious interlocutors, mostly male strangers during a trip to Athens, Greece.

Cusk, who along with such contemporaries as Ben Lerner and Karl Ove Knausgaard has trumpeted the primacy of autobiography over fiction, shares a number of similarities with the novel’s narrator. Both are British writers and writing teachers; both are mothers and divorcees. Yet Faye, who is called by name only once, is not so much a character but an embodiment of a distinctly feminine wound. Like an amphora in ancient Greek pottery, Faye’s throat opens not to speak but to accommodate the enormous volume of her companions’ personal histories. In response to this narrative imposition, Faye cannot or will not define herself, and instead allows these other selves to flow into her like water. “You might feel,” she tells a female dinner companion in the wake of several such encounters, “as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist.”

In Cusk’s universe, womanhood is negative space, the blurry leftovers after men stake their territory. This manifests in chapter-long dialogues that function as monologues, and the imbalance vacillates between humorous and obscene. When Faye’s neighbor on the flight to Athens bothers to ask a question, she feels the “conscious effort” of the inquiry; a fellow writer, after unburdening himself for hours at a cafe, asks: “What about yourself . . .working on something?” only as she is packing her bag to leave. These moments are relayed pitch-perfectly, without an ounce of shrillness, as if Cusk anticipated and thereby disarmed accusations of same-old feminist rage. The writer, married, does not ogle or sexually harass their waitress, but rather “watch[es] the waitress moving in and out of the shadows” after declaring, “Oh, run away with me.” To inhabit a female body is to be exposed and negated simultaneously.

Indeed, while Faye’s male companions act (at one point her neighbor lumberingly attempts seduction), the women react, bewildered, recursively masticating on male misdeeds without the ability to digest them. In the book’s final chapter we meet Anna, a British playwright who has lost her facility with language following a brutal mugging, and through her halting narrative the book’s title finally clicks into focus. By listening to her male neighbor speak voluminously during her flight to Athens (note the parallel design), Anna “found in her own nature a corresponding negative . . .began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank.” Since the mugging, Anna has been able only to language experience via summary. Why write a play about jealousy, she wonders, if it can be encapsulated in the word itself? When she finally describes the attack, she puts her hands to her throat and chokes a one-sentence “squawk” almost inhuman in its release.

This traumatic moment stands in unsettling contrast to the pages and pages of voluble monologues by men whose access to narrative offers proof of triumph over the intensity of their experiences. What’s a woman to do, the novel seems to ask, if she—for reasons internal and external—cannot language her experience? Or if, when she does, it is summarily dismissed?

The answer, Cusk suggests, is for women to scrape themselves empty—of language, of feeling, of desire. Faye cannot bridge the dark chasm that exists between what she wants and what she is offered, so she decides “to want nothing at all.” In the face of male excess, power lies in asceticism; in the face of male chatter, silence. Silence may prevent knowability, but knowability is exposure. And exposure, for women, leads only to abandonment. The “need to possess” Faye wholly proves, over and over, to be the desire to “use her temporarily.” On the one hand, silence isolates; on the other hand, it at least “put people out of one another’s reach.”

It’s a troubling conclusion, ill-fitting in a culture armed with a marriage industrial complex, but Cusk makes a strong enough case that even the most optimistic romantics will be left uneasy. Life does not favor the living, Cusk reminds us. Better to dry out as ancient pottery, petrify oneself as old wood. Only then can one avoid the ravages of experience. “Yet if people were silent about the things that happened to them,” Anna wonders, “was something not being betrayed?” The novel itself acts as the object lesson to this question. With Outline, Cusk has shorn fragments against ruin and created something whole, devastating, and imminently worth reading.

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Alejandro Zambra
Translated by Megan McDowell
McSweeney’s ($15)

by Jeff Alford

Named after the catch-all computer folder, Alejandro Zambra’s My Documents collects an array of meditations on writing and wayward memories of growing up in Chile. To Zambra, an exciting story isn’t as important as the confidence with which it’s told. The short stories in My Documents lean toward the universal: football matches, girlfriends, and hazy sketches of one’s extended family make up most of the action in this collection. The tension here is how to let the elements of a story transcend their sources and evolve into something bigger.

Zambra explicitly toys with this idea in a handful of self-reflective moments. “I was a blank page, and now I am a book” closes “My Documents,” the first story in the collection. Zambra tries to widen the distance from the narrative emptiness of a “blank page” in later stories: “The teachers called us by our number on the list,” opens “National Institute,” but “I say that in apology: I don’t even know my character’s name.” In “I Smoked Very Well,” the narrator is unsure if he is “opening or closing parentheses.” These characters each search for some way to be larger than the story they’re given.

“I Smoked Very Well” is particularly notable; a seemingly autobiographical journal about writing, quitting smoking, and attempting to leave some kind of lasting impression in the world of books. The piece possesses a mundane simplicity but is told with zealous overconfidence that carries Zambra’s prose into something exclamatory, even in its concessions:

I am a person who now doesn’t even know if he’s going to go on writing, because he wrote in order to smoke and now he doesn’t smoke; he read in order to smoke and now he doesn’t smoke. I am a person who no longer creates anything. Who just writes down what happens, as if it would interest someone to know that I’m sleepy, that I’m drunk . . .

The exceptionally bright narrator of “I Smoked Very Well” repeatedly quotes other authors in his digressions, and the narrator (and Zambra, by extension) tries to follow suit and come up with aphorisms of his own: “Cigarettes are the punctuation marks of life,” he proclaims; “What for a smoker is nonfiction, for a non-smoker is fiction.” The act of making these generalizations is more revealing than the actual quips: this is a self-assured author striving to be memorable, knowing that in a world in which all is documented, simply being read is not enough.

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Pattiann Rogers
Penguin ($20)

by Kimberly Burwick

Two days ago, the word of the day on Dictionary.com was Atticism, meaning concise or elegant diction. Yesterday, it was mirepoix: a flavoring made from diced vegetables, seasonings, herbs, and sometimes meat. Perhaps it is no accident that both words recall the environmentally voltaic poetry of Pattiann Rogers. In Holy Heathen Rhapsody, her latest in over a dozen collections of poetry, the speaker is at once enchantingly sophisticated while maintaining a tenderfoot, almost toddler-like, lens.

Read almost any interview with Rogers and you’ll find she usually mentions childhood. Not always her childhood, but the rich, infantile sensory observations that often encompass one’s early interaction with nature. She says, “Watch young children outdoors. It’s very rare to find a young child who is not enthusiastically curious about the life around him, whatever form that life takes . . . And dandelions, even to my five-year-old grandsons, are amazing and beautiful. And they are right to be so amazed. The life forms on our earth are amazing to children, and they remain amazing for many adults” (Poets & Writers, 2008). In Holy Heathen Rhapsody, Rogers centers this raw excitement within a larger voice of sang-froid. The result: a coolness of observation with an animated, sparkling nucleus.

Constructivist learning theory holds that we construct our knowledge of the world through experience. A child who touches milkweed marks it as soft, fluffy. One watches a seagull steal old chips from a beach and comes to know the bird as the scent of potato and oil, garbage and salt water. Rogers not only recognizes this in theory, she uses it as substratum in her poems. In “Summer’s Company” she writes, “The sun is a total green of light / inside a single mimosa seed riding / inside the sky-green and river- / green of its buoyant pod canoe [see how the green fronds / of the rain unfurl, spooling away / in the ocean’s current.” In syntax and image, such active watching is indicative of both the governable world of childhood, malleable in its raw essence, and the calmer more scientific world of adulthood.

Though Holy Heathen Rhapsody rests upon the idea of a child’s “image-mapping” on the natural world, it also shares the pivotal view of Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods (2008). He argues that allowing children to be fully immersed in nature “has to do with knowing that the earth below us and the sky above us has meaning and we have a place within that meaning.” Rogers is so keenly in sync with this paradigm that diction itself becomes a rich re-immersion in the environment. In her poem “Co-Evolution: Seduction,” we are quickly mesmerized by “Summer, everyday, the flurry-hover / of feeding hermit hummingbirds / and clear-wing moths, bee-pause / and butterfly-flutter on shaking petals.” Spellbound by alliteration and word choice, one not only visualizes but feels the toddler-like sensations of thrilling “flutter-hover” and theatrical “bee-pause.” The tension builds. Later in the poem, “bumblebees with magic keys are everywhere / opening snapdragons with magic locks.” Here, what Rogers engineers with diction plunges into internal rhyme. The effect is pure, unadulterated merriment—nature without retrograde or political rhetoric, but rather with bloom and glare.

Beyond diction and sound, there is yet another way that Rogers uses the child-like voice to assuage responsibility with coy animation. In “Courting With Finesse, My Double Orange Poppy,” she begins, “I know I said I loved you / but I was drunk at the time /on citrus ice and marmalade.” A classic child’s rebuttal, the phrase nearly functions as litotes, as it is an affirmation of the love of one’s flora by way of the negative connotation of drunkenness. Formally speaking, Rogers further fuses informal ode with dramatic monologue. In the fourth stanza of the poem she admits, “And perhaps I did sing to you / of unfolding fringed petals / delicately crumpled first in the bud / but it was really the unwinding / orange nub of the early moon / that I described with some rapture.” Thus, the resulting voice is embossed with playful glorification while also bearing the stamp of a seasoned observer.

Rogers clearly knows a child’s marking of the natural world may not be veridical. Still, she’s not only interested in the facts of the bucolic, not only “the moon” but the associated leaps of the “paralyzed swallow of its toothless / mouth.” Such jumps are not only important for their connotative mastery, but for their halting ability to bring us back to the astonishment of childhood, “and into the deeps, / goosegrass, witchgrass, panic / grass crowfoot grass and nutgrass.”

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David Grubbs
Duke University Press ($23.95)

by Will Wlizlo

In case you missed the headline, yet another music streaming service was launched this spring. Called Tidal, it differentiates itself from similar platforms like Spotify and Pandora Internet Radio by the quality of the recordings and exclusive access to new work from musicians. Rap mogul Jay Z, French discobots Daft Punk, and Madonna are just a few of Tidal’s many high profile backers. In an unspoken way, Tidal bridges two times: the heady nights of the hi-fi analog era and the everything-on-demand fire sale of the digital morning. It underscores how the way we listen to music has changed in a half-century—and that now, both ways are the only way we want it.

The tension between the ever-righteous vinyl shop and the ever-changing online marketplace makes David Grubbs’s recent Records Ruin the Landscape such a timely and interesting work of cultural history and analysis. Specifically examining the disruptive legacy of 1960s experimental musicians and classical composers like John Cage, Grubbs takes a long look at changes in how music has been conceived, written, performed, and recorded in light of the passage of time and development of new technologies related to the listening experience. “Given emerging media and related shifts in listening practices and access to documentation,” writes Grubbs,

the ongoing conversation about experimental music will continue to focus on the mediation of recorded sound and its distribution, whether in material or digital culture. These histories will remain, like landscape, successions of perspectives—and, in all likelihood, perspectives mediated through forms unfamiliar to contemporary practice.

Echoing Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message, Grubbs makes a compelling case that the ways we listen to our favorite Jay Z album, a Cagean prepared piano sonata, or some other genre that hasn’t been dreamed up yet has an incredible impact on how we evaluate, remember, and present those sounds to future generations of musicheads.

Lucky for living musicheads, access to recorded sound has been thoroughly democratized, and we now live with the opportunity for near-infinite media consumption. The progression from LP to cheaply reproducible compact disc opened the music listening public to a wide array of until-then inaccessible archival recordings. The advent of the MP3 and eventually online streaming services has widened that access further. Anyone with a library card and a basic understanding of Google has near-instant access to 6,000 years of the most esoteric human cultural production. As of this writing, more than thirty million songs are available to listen to for free on Spotify, with 20,000 more tracks added every single day.

Contrast this brave new world with the glory days of avant-garde music. Most of that scene’s participants—whether as artist or audience—lived in certain neighborhoods of New York City, Berlin, or London. It was an exclusive clique with an even more exclusive vocabulary. Performances were frequent but held in underground venues. Recordings of this music were scarce and comparably expensive. And listeners’ ears hadn’t yet adjusted to the wild improvisation of free jazz, rampant genre coupling, or the palette of sounds that were forcing their way into the traditional understanding of “music.”

Enter the ringleader of the movement, John Cage. He was one of modern music’s most divisive innovators, an eccentric mushroom forager, and outspoken hater of records. In fact, the title of Grubbs’ book is taken from a conversation in which he likened a recording of music to a postcard: pretty and sentimental, but a terribly inaccurate experience of the landscape pictured. “Repetition has always been experimental musicians’ most fundamental objection to recordings:” writes Grubbs of this Cagean tension; “they are not true to the nature of performance because you can listen again and again.” If a postcard is a frame to look at a landscape repeatedly, think of the idyllic sunset behind the Italian mountain as the light that obscures the old silver mine where local police stamped out a bloody labor strike. You only see the perfect, untrue sunset.

Cage’s anxiety hinges on two competing ideas about the experience of music (especially the experimental variety). First, that a composition or improvisational arrangement will by nature never be played the same way twice. Thus, it should be recorded as often as possible to tease out the various manifestations that loose instructions can generate. The second and competing notion is that because the composition encourages no fixed representation, there shouldn’t be a fixed representation. No recording, no “postcard.” Ever. Instead, the compositions are meant only to be experienced live—and maybe not for the benefit of the listener.

A perfect example of this tension might be found in the work of La Monte Young, an admirer of Cage. Composition 1960 #10 (To Bob Morris), for instance, eschews the regular notation one expects from a composition and instead instructs the player of the piece to “Draw a straight line / and follow it.” Or consider another, Piano Piece for David Tudor #1:

Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to. (An Anthology of Chance Operations, La Monte Young, published by L. Young & J. MacLow, 1963, Bronx, NY, p. 117)

How exactly does one draw a straight line with a viola? And what is the sound of a hungry piano? With such loose guidelines, an archive of various interpretations would be both fascinating and amusing to sift through. Their inherent elements of improvisation and performance art encourage endless possibility and creativity. Yet the intensity, novelty, and sheer thrill of audience immersion and passive participation in such improvisation are lost in a stray MP3 or grainy YouTube clip.

Additionally, by recording music, more than just the experiential thrill of its original performance deteriorates over time. Context gets fuzzy too. An easy mistake with increasing access to historic music is to forget how obscure those recordings and information about them were in the past. Grubbs provides a perfect example in a little-known punk album by Henry Flynt and the Insurrectionists’ called I Don’t Wanna. (Flynt is best remembered, if remembered at all, for genre-bending experiments such as fusing Indian classical music with Deep South hillbilly fiddle.) The album has the napalm-hot vitriol of punk with lyrics deriding foreign policy, the Draft, and a national shift toward conservative groupthink. It seems like a perfect cultural artifact of the Vietnam era, and it is. But the only problem is that it wasn’t made public until 2004. “A listener can easily forget that this music went unheard for decades in spite of its status as a bracing artifact of the year 1966,” writes Grubbs. “This disorienting listening experience—what do you mean that people weren’t talking about this album in 1966?—points to anachronisms that often accompany the reception of archival releases.”

Anachronisms like the one described above are increasingly unavoidable, as new and old fans now find these works most readily via online archives and streaming platforms. Repositories like UbuWeb and the Database of Recorded American Music fill in the gaps more popular services miss. The boons and challenges of the information age apply to listeners too, especially its effortless ability to overwhelm. After sorting through hundreds of hours of archival music, for pleasure and research on this book, Grubbs writes (with a more than a hint of nostalgia), “There’s something quaintly reassuring and reorienting and of a human scale about touching bottom, about experiencing an archive—be it that of an individual composer or musician or of an electronic-music studio or radio show—in the fullness of its contours. . . . don’t expect this moment to come again.” While access to music widens, it becomes more challenging to connect individual recordings to a narrative chronology or individual tones from sonic innovation. Archives, despite advances that enable the storage of more information, are losing some of their usefulness.

Grubbs draws on Kenneth Goldsmith, founder of the online archive UbuWeb, for a number of insights, including these choice words about radical access to digital media: “Democracy is fine for YouTube, but it’s generally a recipe for disaster when it comes to art.” Grubbs also quotes visual artist Jasper Johns, who said, “The best criticism of a painting is to put another painting next to it.” These two quips presented side by side show the challenges and opportunity of reconsidering the work of fifty years ago with the tools of the present.

Records Ruin the Landscape is level throughout. Grubbs’ concerns of oversaturation are balanced against optimism for the omnivorous ears of new listeners. But his careful consideration of and deep research into the subject matter is full of implications, not just for experimental music geeks, but also for the genre’s practitioners, academics, and the art intelligentsia. The current music listening environment is increasingly like a tourist shop beneath an Italian mountain. Inside, there are thousands of postcards to consider, and outside, the sun is beautifully setting. Where do we look?

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Joseph Harms
CreateSpace ($13.99)

by Jane Franklin

There is much to admire in this self-published Midwestern horror gothic—it contains amazing landscapes; the writing moves beautifully between the realistic, the satiric, and the lyric; and the whole thing operates as a denunciation of patriarchal religion and patriarchal sexuality. It also has a beautiful and well-designed cover (still too rare in self-published works). But Baal is both strangely sexist in its treatment of female characters and gleeful about its use of disabled and non-standard bodies as symbols of depravity and evil. It is a fascinating and accomplished book, but a flawed one.

Baal reworks the familiar story of two youths on the cusp of adolescence who discover that while Satanic evil is real, human evil is even worse. Cassius and Max live in an anonymous Michigan town, a place that brings together all the banal American evils: industrial decline and poverty, covert and overt racism and homophobia, religious hypocrisy and domestic violence. In the forests and rye fields beyond the town, they encounter monstrous beings; in the town itself they commit greater and greater acts of violence to fight back against the religious and patriarchal order that crushes them. In the end, the two worlds are shown to be the same.

Patriarchal violence and patriarchal sexuality are the substrate of the book. All fathers are violent and those fathers who are not sexually abusive seem, like Cassius’s drunken stepfather, continually to hint at this possibility. The bad father who hits you is part of the great chain of fathers, linked to the spiritual leader who conceals and justifies social violence and to God the Father who is also Satan. In Baal, there is no outside to this father system, only war against it from within, and all fathers are the Father of Lies.

To create this atmosphere Harms gives Baal its own language, rapid, dense and baroque—a language of darkness briefly and brightly lit, of the edges between nature and the city. Front-heavy and full of run-together words, the sentences have odd rhythms. They are difficult at first reading, then sharp and vivid, as when Cassius reflects on God:

Us untouchables born from the yawning mouth of a tree dead a thousand years in the center of a wilderness yet imagined who crawl from the dirt to return to the dirt and in our allotted time, make of telephonepoles corpseornamented alters to the real God who blesses every war waged by one alone and blesses none made by many. But Cassius could not pretend more than an instant that such a God existed.

Harms well describes the particularity of the waste places of the world, spaces we know intimately when we’re children—the territory where the suburb fades away into woods, a certain rotted tree marking a boundary unvisited by adults, the way it feels to walk through the semi-abandoned empty farmland on the edge of town. His landscapes are beautiful and nostalgic even when menacing, full of the gold of the rye fields and the drift of leaves. “Beyond the dark alleys between homes,” writes Harms, “the sussurant corn by lapidary moon cut and metalized looked like the foamy wake of a wave about to break.” But in these waste landscapes anything can happen. Nature isn’t a refuge.

This is the world as Bad Place, ruled by a Bad God. Cassius encounters a variety of believers, each attempting to put an acceptable face on the world. All make their cases; none convince. There are the trivially self-serving and ugly homilies at the church his mother forces him to attend, of course, but also powerful consolatory discourses like this from the African American security guard working a grotesque church youth event:

"Let me tell you something, kid . . . There is no white god. White people can’t believe in God ‘cause they think he’s white. But there is a black God. Giant and mighty. And he snuff you out you so much as bad mouth him in an empty room . . .
. . . 'Cause he know about pain and torture, son. He know about murder and rape. He know about stealing for food and killing for food. He know about being an outcast. 'Cause he was born an outcast . . . Black God sees us trespassing with blood and knives and guns and he weeps and begs us, son, begs us to come to him for forgiveness because he knows he’d have done the same thing in our shoes."

But all these discourses are inadequate to the sheer material evil of the world that Cassius encounters. Evil returns, generation after generation, seemingly unstoppable, steadily worsening: “Since the great fires what had happened here and there and mostly during wartimes happened everywhere in the city at all times.” Cassius and Max go to war against the Bad God, to fight what can’t be fought, to kill what can’t be killed.

For most of the book, Cassius is a compellingly written character. Sometimes he appears as a realistically portrayed bright, angry, frightened teenager, sometimes a prophetic voice, sometimes an outlet for the author’s own discomfiting comedy. He would be a stronger character if he weren’t right all the time, though, or if he were purely an allegorical figure and Baal an inverse Pilgrim’s Progress. Again and again, other characters are self-deluding and hypocritical, and Cassius calls them out. He is always right, always better, always heroic even when weak and in despair—and it starts to make the deck seem stacked in his favor.

We’re meant to see Cassius as the book’s moral center, but his actions are driven by the same logic as the actions of the fathers he fights—his morality is based around homosocial love for the males with whom he commits violence; his own violence is justified by threats of violence to women; he identifies himself with a fantasy of female experience while finding real women only unloveable hypocrites and naives.

Female characters in Baal are good (and ultimately dead) or else they’re bad examples who are schooled by Cassius. Almost all of them want to sleep with him except the ones he actually wants—but nothing good, plot-wise, comes of being a girl who friendzones Cassius. Most implausible is the sequence where the church secretary, old enough to be his mother, flirts aggressively with him in front of his entire religion class. Cassius attempts to seduce her and then helpfully tells her, “If you weren’t confused, you’d kiss me tonight.”

Cassius’s savage war against the Chief of Police is motivated by the Chief’s abuse of his daughter and the complicity of the Chief’s neighbors, something Cassius hears about second-hand. He gives a great deal of thought to the feel of the sexual abuse the daughter must endure, and to his “duty” of violence. Unfortunately the daughter herself is virtually absent from the novel. This is doubly frustrating because some of the most subtly written scenes in the book depict Cassius’s conversations with his mother and with a sexual partner, Tina—at least until they veer off into Cassius’s sage corrections of petty female misapprehensions.

Readers should also be aware that Harms’s characters use racial and homophobic slurs freely. Cassius is white and straight; his best friend Max is black and coming to terms with being gay. At one point the boys pretend to be a gay couple, mockingly and with grotesque exaggeration, in order to anger and disgust their enemies. The book’s handling of queerness and race seems sometimes almost to tip over into a kind of masculinity-sentimentality, but the book also manages to treat race, racism, queerness and homophobia all as aspects of the world rather than as special problem topics or as things which must not be named. Many horror novels are haunted by racism and homophobia; relatively few center gay characters or characters of color.

Perhaps the most difficult to accept aspect of Baal is its treatment of bodily difference. From the very first scene, when evil is introduced via a hermaphroditic man with Downs syndrome, Harms uses grotesque, rubbernecking descriptions of age, disability, and body size to signal the presence of evil. In the final, apocalyptic sequence, disabled bodies are torn apart and victimized, while Harms refers to each one as “a Downs.” Much is made of the fatness of these disabled men, and of what Harms perceives as their sexual childishness and ambiguity.

Fatness, indeed, justifies almost anything here. Fat Rosemary in “religionclass” is, naturally, a hypocrite and a bully, and we’re meant to sympathize with Cassius, Max, and their friend Henry as they target her. Tina’s mother is called “the Cow”; per the narrative, she has chosen to become too fat to get out of bed, just as she chooses to lie in her own shit. Fatness justifies the book’s rape joke—not only do we hear Henry repeat the old canard about how a fat woman is too ugly to be a rape victim, but Cassius reflects that “Henry is right, nothing is sacred beyond laughter.” No one laughs at Cassius, but the reader is invited to laugh at this trio of fat women.

Baal, in short, risks reinscribing for the reader the very hierarchical, hateful, violent father-system it denounces at a rhetorical level. That is by no means all this intelligent, creepy book does—but it is impossible to ignore.

Baal is a beautiful, fascinating and thoughtful horror novel—a Midwestern regional novel in a genre that tends to be either placeless or coastal, and a novel which names and foregrounds race and sexuality. But it still reiterates some of the more conservative horror tropes: abused and dead girls as fascination and motivation for the boys and as titillation and motivation for the reader, boys as heroes and moral actors, the physically different as a marker of evil. Perhaps future work from Harms will be as innovative about gender and embodiment as Baal is about language and region.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015