A Blog About Books and Reading
A Blog About Books and Reading
In his debut literary novel under his own name, Ruthnum provides a slippery, serpentine narrative that calls into question notions of identity and narrative stability.
Everett’s novel is about a Black intellectual who finds commercial success by writing a pandering, parodic work that gets taken at face value.
Neither of the houses in these two books is haunted in the traditional sense; the evil comes from the people and environs that surround them.
The risk in writing a domestic thriller with 9/11 as backdrop is that the geopolitical material comes off as a gimmick rather than an integral story element.
The book uses Grand Guignol techniques to literalize the process of tearing oneself open in the act of artistic creation.
The author returns to the slasher film saturated ground he has trod before to provide a loving homage that leans a bit too heavily on insider knowledge of the genre.
“A lot of it reminds me of just how much I have come through. And how much the people I know have come through. And what it was like to lose people.”
“I think I see life in very, very noir terms,” says the author, who considered quitting after finishing work on her latest novel.
“I didn’t have much of a relationship with masculinity growing up,” MacIntyre says. “I grew up among women.”