(Providence Rider art by Vincent Chong)

Here’s how I know that I’m connecting with a book — or, if you prefer, a book is connecting with me:

When I lay down at night to read, the book will generally nibble away at my awakened state. It’s not that the book is boring. It’s just, reading all those little words on a the page or the screen leaves my lids heavy. I start to drift off, my mind shutting down one synapse after the other. After a half-hour or so, I know I’m done.

That’s true nine times out of ten.

But around, mmm, 10% of the time, I find a book so good, my eyelids don’t get heavy. They go the other way. Hell, they get jacked up like the awning outside a double-wide meth-lab. And that’s what happened when I picked up a copy of McCammon’s newest, The Providence Rider. Now, to be very clear about all this, I’m a sucker for anything McCammon writes. I’ve been reading this guy since I was a teenager. His novel, Swan Song, is one of the scariest I’ve read. Boy’s Life made me want to be a writer. I am, without reservation, his target audience. I’m just that way with some authors — Joe Lansdale’s another one. Or Bradley Denton. Or Robin Hobb. Whatever I read of theirs I know I’m going to like.

Now, McCammon’s last novel — The Five, his trippy rock-and-roll horror terror opus — was great, but it was a slow go for me in terms of reading. I felt like I needed to take my time with it, to move cautiously through it, to pick apart all the musical riffs and let the cold septic creep settle into my bones.

My experience with The Providence Rider was the opposite — fast, fun, and frankly, all kinds of fantastically fucked up. (Sorry for the alliteration. It is what it is. Let’s move on.)

The Providence Rider is next in McCammon’s Matthew Corbett series, a pre-Revolutionary War set of stories featuring the up-and-coming “problem solver” (think detective but with a far wider purview). Each book has been a different creature than the one before it, which is a bold choice for a series — the first book, Speaks the Nightbird, has Corbett investigating a supposed “witch” in the Carolinas. It’s something of a meditation on good and evil, faith versus science, a story at the moment the times and tides started to turn for this country in terms of enlightenment. The second book, Queen of Bedlam, is a raucous gallop of an adventure, a thick meaty book that takes Corbett to the early days of New York City and sees him accept a position the adventure-having, problem-seeking Herrald Agency. Then came Mister Slaughter, where Corbett’s story turns into a gruesome manhunt for the brutal slayer-of-men, Tyranthus Slaughter. It’s not exactly a horror novel — but it’s pretty damn close.

And now, The Providence Rider.

Beginning with Bedlam, Corbett’s been tangled up in the schemes of the imperator rex of the criminal underbelly, one “Professor Fell.” Fell has been a distant player for the last two books, his influence keenly felt while he himself remained an elusive faraway figure.

Providence Rider changes that.

Fell comes calling. Though he’s been trying to kill Matthew, he decides that he’ll stay his executioner’s hand if Matthew will come to his private Caribbean island and, during a gathering of Fell’s top lieutenants, help Fell solve a mystery. I’m not big on writing spoiler-heavy reviews, so I’ll just say this: the book is chock-a-block with action and adventure. Continuing on the tradition of doing something a bit different with each book, Providence Rider is Matthew Corbett in a far pulpier tale. We get explosions! Boat chases! Cannon fire! Fights galore! The evil Irish Thacker twins! The mysterious knife-throwing Minx Cutter! Impossible automatons! A lost Indian princess! A giant octopus! A global criminal conspiracy! An earthquake!

It’s got everything. Humor. Sex. Action. Adventure.

(And it’s also got one of the grisliest decapitation scenes in recent memory. McCammon really knows how to skeeve you out during scenes like this — whether it’s the hand-go-bye-bye scene in Swan Song or this page-long description of a head being sawed off at a formal function, his descriptions will squick you out.)

It’s an interesting approach, isn’t it? I think as authors we assume that readers want the same from us again and again — we’ve got this comfort zone in our heads and expect that readers want to remain herded up and huddled together in this safe place where they receive something approximating the same thing each time. But McCammon disproves that — or, at least, he disproves it for me, and given the fact that more of these books continue to reach shelves I have to hope that it’s paying off in terms of sales, too. But it goes back to what I said earlier in my “Don’t Get Burned By Branding” post — what readers will ideally respond to is your voice as a writer, not the genre in which you write. Every author brings with him certain things, be they themes, motifs, character archetypes, unanswered questions, grisly scenes of limb dismemberment, whatever. The reader, in this weird way, wants to carry the author’s baggage — but that doesn’t mean the reader requires the same reiteration of story or genre.  You don’t read McCammon — or Lansdale, or someone like Cherie Priest — and expect the same old recycled pap every time. What you can expect is a quality of writing and a another visit with those elements the author holds dear.

The Providence Rider was just what the doctor ordered. We have an infant in the house so it’s hard to carve out as much time for reading — and when I do, I don’t necessarily want something heavy. This book did the trick. It’s lean, mean, and wild-eyed — a Caribbean adventure with buckled-swashes and pulp-soaked goodness. I had a blast reading it, and I suspect so will you.

If you haven’t read any in the Matthew Corbett series, I might recommend jumping right in with Queen of Bedlam — then go back and read Speaks the Nightbird after the others as kind of a “prequel.”

The Providence Rider drops in May.

You can pre-order direct from the fine feathered folks at Subterranean Press (click here).

Needless to say, looking forward to the next Matthew Corbett adventure.

“Bullsnot,” you proclaim. “Books are totally fun. You’re an asshole.”

Shh, no, you’re not understanding this literally — stories are fun, yes, but once you leave childhood the physical act of reading a book (whether it’s an ancient hardbound tome like they used to make way back in the 21st century or on one of them fancy Kindlemachines) becomes a fairly rote endeavor. Pick it up. Read left to right, top to bottom, get to the end, have a snack, go to bed.

I am here to report that the fun has once more been returned to the act of reading a book.

Remember CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE books? Of course you do. Unless you’re some kind of moon dweller, you probably had at least one. Or, if you were me, you had damn near all of them. Those books offered branching stories — “Want to kick down the door? Turn to pg 72. Feel like pouring the witches’ brew into the sewer grate? Turn to page 89.” Then you’d make your choice, turn to a page, and you’d be eaten by rats or stuck in quicksand or turned into a flying monkey.

It was easy to die in those books. Every turn, a new inventive death. Only a few ways out “alive.”

Well, those books are back.

Um. Sort of.

CHOOSE YOUR DOOM: ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE — penned by fellow penmonkeys DeAnna Knippling and Dante Savelli — is just like those early iterations except for the fact that the book has no happy endings. It has awesome endings. But none of them are particularly happy. The book even advertises this on the cover.

Each page, in addition to generally offering you a choice, also offers a sketch of the action on that page. The PDF version allows you to click links to get to the next choice, which feels keenly interactive.

Gist of the book is this: you’re a guy at a bar when the zombie apocalypse hits town. After a few pages of basic exposition, you’re thrown into a series of choices. What to do when the bartender Marty starts to turn into a zombie? What to do when survivors come to the door, when zombies come crashing through the window, when you see an ambulance outside full of medical supplies (and also an orgy of zombies)?

You will navigate the town and find your friends Bob and Bennie, your girlfriend Addie, and your father. You might visit the zoo. You might find yourself at Cheyenne Mountain. You might even become a zombie.

It’s a fun story, cleverly written, with doses of humor throughout. If I had any complaints, they’d be minor — it’d be nice to have some of the side characters get a little more “character juice” and become more fully realized (before you perhaps dispatch them or they dispatch you), and also, some of the sketches, while fun, didn’t always match up with the action as it was described.

Even still, it comes together as a quick, engaging, humorous read.

Chiggity-check it.

Doompress-dot-com.

So, fuck it. Here’s the review.

Jeff Vandermeer’s Finch.

First, let’s not get crazy. This is not going to be a well-organized or smartly conceived review. I just don’t have time to go through it that way. It’s a hard knock life, little babies. You’re gonna have to cope.

Second, I’ll do a quick summation, but don’t expect any spoilers or plot details. For me, personally, I find that reviews so often go to the plot details, as if they’re what really matters. That doesn’t matter to me. Everything else does, but how the plot unfolds? Not so much.

Third and finally, The Great And Mighty Hindmarch talks up Finch far more effectively than I will. Be advised. He wrote two posts on the novel: one here, one here.

The Gist

Our protagonist, Finch, is not a detective. It’s like a mantra to him: “I am not a detective. I am not a detective.”

And yet — hey, too fucking bad, the guy’s a detective. He’s forced to be by the brutish fungal masters that rule this fantastical city of Ambergris, and in the opening of the book Finch is working a case involving two Very Strange Bodies in a apartment, and these two bodies are so cryptic, so mysterious, that they serve as the springboard for an unholy unraveling of mystery and conspiracy. That one loose thread will pull the whole goddamn sweater apart for not just Finch, but the people he knows, the city he loves, and even those fungal masters (gray caps).

It’s classic noir. One thing leads to another, to another, to another — it’s an inverted pyramid, and the sharp pointy tip is pressing down on Finch’s back with all the weight of the world above him.

(A quote on the cover by Richard Morgan calls it “fungal noir,” which is so perfect a descriptor I wish he’d have stopped there — he goes on to call it “steampunk delirium,” which is so imperfect I wish he wouldn’t have included it. Oh, and one of my Writing Totems, Joe Lansdale, sells it on the back cover: “Heavy with shadows and dark as sin, detective, fantasy… I loved it. In fact, I’m a little jealous.”

High praise from one of my heroes.

Hey, Joe, I’m jealous, too. This book is a masters class on how to write a crime novel and a fantasy novel, together or separate.

Let’s get into what I adored about the book.

Fantasy Doesn’t Stiffen My Nips

I’ve noted it before: I don’t like fantasy for the most part. I think most of it falls back on convention. It jumps up and down in the Tolkien pool, splashing and squealing, so often ignoring what can be possible with fantasy. You look at the raw potential represented by the genre, and it’s infinite. Literally. “Fantasy can be about anything.” You have no boundaries. You are not fettered to any one notion or convention. And yet, so many authors take no such liberties and have no fun with it, and keep dragging their wheeled carts in the same muddy ruts left by those who had come before.

That is not Finch.

Vandermeer has his own thing going on here, and its deserving of mighty praise. He has created a world that feels familiar, but is dotted with landmarks that feel wholly alien and removed from anything we know and expect. The fungus alone has its own presence in this book, and the descriptions are moist, fetid, fractal, strange. No elves. No orcs. No dragons or fairies. It’s fungal guns. It’s memory bulbs. It’s spore cameras. It’s gray caps and Partials and — well, all that stuff you’ll have to discover for yourself.

It’s never inaccessible. Therein lies another problem with fantasy: for me, fantasy novels so often present a too-high barrier-to-entry. Lots of fantastic words and concepts ill-explained — clumsy attempts to “show, don’t tell” end up being neither, talking to me about weird concepts without context, and it stops me up. If I get ten pages into a book and I cannot tell you what’s happening, that book is down, gone, game over. I’m unforgiving with novels; perhaps not a good way to be, but it’s how I be, dangit. Finch presents alien concepts, but frames them in a context that feels real, with characters that seem authentic and interesting, and he doesn’t focus on the whiz-bang of the weirdness. He lets that be almost an afterthought — it matters, but it doesn’t matter as much as who Finch is, what he’s doing, how he’s feeling. It doesn’t flaunt the fantasy. And, when you finally get around to understanding things, it’s because he shows you how these things work. He doesn’t explain them. It’s like a painting, almost — you can run your hands across the textured canvas and make out details. Vandermeer is just pointing our gaze and our fingertips to different spots within the image.

Further, Vandermeer gets that it’s not about the fantasy. The fantasy doesn’t matter. The fantasy just frames it. It allows him to rearrange old story ideas and make them new. But it never dominates. It’s an old story, and I say that and mean that in the best way. It feels familiar, but uncertain.

It’s weird. I’d almost argue that “fantasy” is a fake genre after reading this book. If I were to look at a Stephen King book, or a Don DeLillo book, or a John McFetridge book, I’d never say, “This is in the Real World genre, because it takes place in Our World.” I’d say, “Oh, this one’s horror, this one’s contemporary America, this one’s crime.”

Fantasy isn’t a genre. It’s a setting. You can tell any kind of story in that setting, but too many authors seem over-focused on it being a genre, with the trappings of said genre.

Vandermeer clearly gives a middle finger to those conventions, because dangit if he isn’t telling a great piece of detective fiction in a fantasy setting. I’d love to see him take other genres and apply them to the setting of Ambergris — a city that feels alive to me, alive as any city I’ve been in. (One small failing of the book: no map of the city. I feel like I could’ve used it in the beginning, though as the book pushes forth you start getting a picture of the whole thing come together. Actually, I may have said it before, but Finch feels like a great example of a book that could have a whole transmedia experience packaged in and around it — an Ambergris “map app” could be the star of said package. But I’ll talk more about transmedia later in the week, I think.)

For the record, I’d compare this to China Mieville if you’re looking for a close comparison.

What Else?

What a ludicrously bold and ambiguous header!

I apologize; I’m really not doing this novel justice.

Let’s talk briefly about the other things I loved about this book.

The characters? Yes. Finch starts off a cipher — an appropriate thing given that the book is as much about deciphering the character of John Finch as it is unraveling the mystery of the two dead bodies. Finch is our vehicle into this story, and we feel every nagging question, every turn down uncertain alleys and hallways, every tortured moment (mentally and physically). It’s a rough road. Rougher when you see how other characters fare: Wyte, Ethan Bliss, Sintra, and so forth. Their notes feel elegant, spare, just enough, just right.

The description? As said, it drips. It comes alive not with overwrought prose, but once more with brief and almost-perfect language. Vandermeer has chosen his words carefully; many novels are sloppily written, and frankly, that often works just fine. He takes it to a whole other level. The ideas here are truly bizarre, but his forthright language that deviates only occasionally into the poetic makes such strangeness accessible.

The plot? The plot is fine, but like with any noir, it’s hard to get your hands around it. Rather, it is the story — the whole circle of encompassed events and characters and possibilities — that engages me. Our line through that circle, the plot, is one that is hard to see. With noir, I find I don’t come for the plot — noir seems to be about plot, but it’s not. It’s about how the characters move through the plot and what that means for them.

Anything I Didn’t Like?

The “no-map” thing got me early on, but eventually ceased to be an issue.

The book clearly ties to some other Ambergris tales, and for selfish reasons (I haven’t read those) I wish he would’ve left out those connections — but, then again, those connections are what bolster my ideas that this is the perfect transmedia novel. It has tie-outs. It has other stories that spin forth from its prose. Had it been easy to follow those trails, those threads, I wouldn’t have found it as troubling. Again, selfish.

A few characters could’ve used a little more meat to their bones — yes, yes, selfish. Selfish because I loved what I got, and wanted more. A single bite, not nearly enough.

But really, that’s about it.

Vandermeer’s novel is a gift, a revelation that Good Is Good. Doesn’t matter what genre it is — I don’t care much for fantasy, and here is a fantasy novel I adore. Anything can be good when given by a great and gracious hand. I look forward to reading more of Vandermeer’s work — I have to wonder, is Finch a major step-up for him, or has his work always been like this? I recall reading that his other work strikes a very different mood and isn’t like this one at all. That might be great, though I’ll note it could be disappointing: I love this book so much that it’ll be hard to read other work that doesn’t at least capture some of what I loved here. The curse of the creator: create something great, and everyone wants that again and again. Me, I just want more Finch.