Books: We Are All Completely Fine By Daryl Gregory (2014)

 

"Harrison is the Monster Detective, a storybook hero. Now he’s in his mid-thirties and spends most of his time not sleeping. Stan became a minor celebrity after being partially eaten by cannibals. Barbara is haunted by the messages carved upon her bones. Greta may or may not be a mass-murdering arsonist. And for some reason, Martin never takes off his sunglasses. Unsurprisingly, no one believes their horrific tales until they are sought out by psychotherapist Dr. Jan Sayer. What happens when these likely-insane outcasts join a support group? Together they must discover which monsters they face are within and which are lurking in plain sight."

As I mentioned in my Harrison Squared review, I discovered while reading it, author Daryl Gregory had written We Are All Completely Fine novelette released a year before H2. Set some twenty years after the YA title, this short novel only hints at Harrison’s previous life as some sort of monster hunter. He recollects some stuff to the group in this tale –but some are bit different here than in Harrison Squared- and that his “adventures” inspired a series of YA horror novels called Jamison Squared.

This is a much more complicated story than H2, darker, more violent and gory. While it’s clear that Gregory will continue with at least two more adventures featuring the young Harrison, this novelette is either an open-ended epilogue or, once finished telling Harrison’s younger days, the beginning of something different.

I’m unsure if Gregory intended this to be a short story from the get go, a first attempt to see if a full length novel could support his idea –and maybe take on Stephen King is some subtle way, ala a interconnected universe- or Harrison Harrison’s voice took over his thoughts and so he needed to address that story first before moving on. I mean, there are a lot of good ideas here, some half-baked, some nicely fleshed out, but we’ll see if he intends to follow through.

Still, as I read Daryl Gregory, the more I love his work, his style, his attempt to blend horror and humor.

Books: A Likely Story By Donald E. Westlake (1984)

 

"Supporting one and a half families is not the ideal situation for a man who makes his living as a writer --unless he comes up with a book so certain to be a bestseller that he doesn't have to worry about money ever again. (Or maybe Mary will find a fella of her own who can start contributing to the support). So Tom's surefire bestseller, The Christmas Book is begun, and Tom's troubles begin. His editor quits, Ginger doesn't want to get married, Mary won't give him a divorce, his new editor announces she's pregnant (and quits), the woman in an iron lung enters his life, and a third editor begins work on the book. Then things really get complicated."

A Likely Story is not a Donald E. Westlake crime novel, more of a skewering of the publishing industry. Tom is a freelance writer who is in need of easy money and believes a book about Christmas will sell itself. Who hates Christmas? But the road to the holidays is not as simple as it seems, as Tom is forced through several editors (according to David Bratman, who runs the site: Donald E. Westlake: an annotated bibliography, one of them “is based on the unsatisfactory editor Westlake had for the first edition of Kahawa”). So our narrator must constantly juggle this problem with issues of a personal nature, mainly his ex-wife who wants him back, a jealous girlfriend and a mistress, who happens to one of the after mentioned editors.

Not surprisingly, this is a very meta-novel, as Westlake takes the publishing industry to task --“Publishing is the only industry of where most of the employees spend most of their time stating with great self-assurance that they don’t know how to do their jobs.”

“I don’t know how to sell this, they complain, frowning as though it’s your fault. I don’t know how to package this. I don’t know what the market is for this book. I don’t know how we’re going to draw attention to this. In most other occupations, people try to hide their incompetence; only in publishing is it flaunted as though it were the chief qualification for the job.”

It also pairs well with Westlake’s take on the murder mystery genre in A Travesty, the novelette length tale that appeared in Double Feature book I read last month, if only because Westlake is great at these genre conventions. It’s a fun book, told in diary form, it’s also a light bedroom farce the studios used to put out in the late 1960s, early 70s. It’s certainly flawed in some respects, but it still had some laugh out loud moments.

Books: Harrison Squared By Daryl Gregory (2015)

 

"Harrison Harrison—H2 to his mom—is a lonely teenager who’s been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished.  One of the “sensitives” who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison and his mother have just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him: Dunnsmouth, a Lovecraftian town perched on rocks above the Atlantic, where strange things go on by night, monsters lurk under the waves, and creepy teachers run the local high school. On Harrison’s first day at school, his mother, a marine biologist, disappears at sea. Harrison must attempt to solve the mystery of her accident, which puts him in conflict with a strange church, a knife-wielding killer, and the Dwellers, fish-human hybrids that live in the bay. It will take all his resources—and an unusual host of allies—to defeat the danger and find his mother."

 

Harrison Squared is fun little tale from author Daryl Gregory, who is able to vacillate easily between adult horror/supernatural (and offbeat family dynamics in Spoonbenders) tales rooted in early horror writers, to this YA title that carries some of the same themes, but presented in a less frightening way. Still, it’s basically Lovecraft’s Cthulhu meets a modern-day Scooby gang. Harrison is deft sixteen year-old, who must deal with the town of Dunnsworth, its often creepy adults (and sometime creepy kids), and the kidnapping of his mother.

 

Gregory has an affinity for witty dialogue and it shines here, as he creates some wonderfully fun characters (I enjoyed Aunt Selena a lot). And while this book (which does hint at further adventures to come) is not that original –I mean, clearly Daryl Gregory took all his teenage passions and dumped them into this book- he is able to keep the balance between horror, humor and things we’ve seen before going through to the end.

 

I also discovered after finishing this book that Harrison was featured in a previous short novel (or novella, I guess) released a year before Harrison Squared. We Are All Completely Fine is about physiologist Dr. Jan Sayer, who gathers survivors of supernatural violence. One of those people it turns out to be Harrison, who is in his mid-thirties and spends most of his time popping pills and not sleeping. He apparently was, at one time, a monster hunter.

 

I’ll need to track this one down to see how much backstory is revealed about Harrison. While it shouldn’t bother me, knowing that Harrison is alive twenty-years after this book, it means that if Daryl Gregory continues from this book, any danger he puts Harrison in is lessened by the fact he is alive at 35.

Books: The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz (2019)

 

“You shouldn’t be here. It’s too late . . . “

"These, heard over the phone, were the last recorded words of successful celebrity-divorce lawyer Richard Pryce, found bludgeoned to death in his bachelor pad with a bottle of wine—a 1982 Chateau Lafite worth £3,000, to be precise. Odd, considering he didn’t drink. Why this bottle? And why those words? And why was a three-digit number painted on the wall by the killer? And, most importantly, which of the man’s many, many enemies did the deed? Baffled, the police are forced to bring in Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, the author Anthony, who’s really getting rather good at this murder investigation business. But as Hawthorne takes on the case with characteristic relish, it becomes clear that he, too, has secrets to hide. As our reluctant narrator becomes ever more embroiled in the case, he realizes that these secrets must be exposed—even at the risk of death."

While a fairly well paced whodunit, I’m still sort of put-off by author Anthony Horowitz putting himself as a character in his own book. As I wrote about in the first book in this series, The Word is Murder, I find it a distracting element. Again, he puts himself in a position of looking like an idiot.

As all books in this genre, The Sentence is Death has many twists and turns, a few red herrings, and everyone with a motive for murder. Daniel Hawthorne, the ex-cop that Horowitz’s hyper-reality version of himself tags along with, remains somewhat of an unlikable character. His sexism, his homophobia appears to be justified and accepted, if only because he’s “brilliant” detective. He, and fellow cops Cara Grunshaw and DC Mills, are awful people, but not in a creative, realistic way; they’re awful because the story requires them to be terrible human beings (I mean, why are Mills and Grunshaw so hostile –there’s never a reason given). We also get a few drips and drabs of Hawthorne’s personal life, but in the end, they don’t add up to anything. I know the British writers have a tendency to put unlikable hero’s front and center because it makes them flawed individuals, but it also has a tendency to make them look like two-dimensional cartoon characters if not done right. And at times all three detectives come off as jerks, with –again- no reason given for their personal flaws. So they grate on ones nerves –which a reader should not be put through.

While Horowitz’s creates a large puzzle here, a lot of felt unnecessary and seemed designed to make the book longer than it should. It makes me wonder if I’ll read a third book in this series, but who knows?