Beneath This Sea is Sea: The Books of 2017

I feel like no matter how long my fallow periods in the writing of this blog last, this one, my annual list of The Best Books What I Did Read, will always draw me back. I’ll spend most of one day at the end of every year writing it.

Anyway, if I ever don’t, it won’t be on a year such as this one, in which I almost doubled the number of books read in my previous best reading year, and almost tripled what I would guess my average to be. Because of this, while much of what’s to follow should be familiar to anyone who has read these lists of mine in the past – these books are not necessarily listed in an order of preference, until the last few, which I do consider the third, second, and first best books I read this year, etc. – you will find a whole new second thing here: the entire list of books I read in 2017. I include this entirely and only out of boastfulness; you’ll notice that I include no indication, outside of the main list of separated “best” books, what I thought of any of these, so other than saying to you “Lookit all these books I read,” what possible purpose could it serve? It should go without saying that not every book I liked can make the list of “best” books, so many of the uncommented-upon titles I liked very much, indeed. Others I hated down to my bones. I’ll let you guess which are which! And if you see a book on there that you count as one of your favorites, just assume that I despise it, and you, and all you represent.

All right, let’s get this fucking nonsense rolling! I’d like to be finished by dinner-time.

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King – For many years, after Cell, I was out of the habit of reading Stephen King, and this had been a habit I’d maintained as avidly as a smoker for many, many years. A few years back I decided to take it back up again on a limited basis, and it has provided me with limited, but real, enjoyment. This book, which I skipped even during my more passionate years due to my callow assumption that it would be dull, has by far been the most rewarding. The title character tells the entire story, the book written as though she were speaking to the cops who have arrested her for the murder of the old woman she worked for, and King finds greater success with this conceit than I expected. Dolores is a full person, her life and story equally so, with all the suspense and rural Gothic you could want from a book like this. That it’s sister novel is the nebulously, mysteriously, but unmistakably, and thematically, linked Gerald’s Game, also published in 1992, just makes the whole thing more powerful.

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally – This year was supposed to be my big Keneally year, but this, also the first book I read in 2017, is the only one I got to. Based on the true story of aborigine in 19^th century Australia who after years of being treated unjustly by white Australians, suddenly embarks on a rampage of violence. Harrowing and at times genuinely shocking, Keneally doesn’t make the mistake of glorifying what Blacksmith does. He’s simply saying, if one must simplify this complex novel, that that led to this.

Cops and Robbers by Donald E. Westlake – I wrote about it, briefly, here.

The Wardrobe Mistress by Patrick McGrath – One of several novels I read this year that actually came out in 2017, and one of several by writers I rank as favorites, McGrath’s unusual pseudo-ghost story about a woman dealing with the death of her actor husband, a few years after the end of World War II, and some alarming revelations that follow, may suffer from an ending that, while perfectly fine as far as what actually happens goes, feels so rushed that I wondered if McGrath’s manuscript was due later that afternoon. But that’s ultimately no big deal, because the rest of the novel is so sad, and so unnerving, and so full of little bits about the English theater at that time, the environment, and bombed out London. I think it’s McGrath’s best in years.

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill – The story of a marriage teetering on the point of collapse, told in a meticulously assembled series of incidents and digressions and thoughts on whatever subject happens to seem relevant to the protagonist, even if she’s  unable to articulate why all this makes sense together. I don’t think I could articulate why this all works together myself, but it does. It’s like being inside the head of a sane person: everybody’s head is a jumble, even when it all makes sense.

Othello by William Shakespeare – It’s good! Also, I think Othello being a Moor might actually be relevant.

Dearest by Peter Loughran – Sort of like The Collector by John Fowles, but less ponderous, and written in a way that evokes actual life as it’s lived by some. It’s all the more disturbing for it. Relegated to the genre bin and therefore “disposable.”

Go Tell It On the Mountain  by James Baldwin – One of three books written by James Baldwin I read this year (as with Keneally, it was supposed to be more), along with If Beale Street Could Talk and The Fire Next Time. This novel, Baldwin’s first, stands out for me in the way it tells the story of John Grimes, a young boy living in Harlem, by telling the story of his mother, his father, and his step-father, each of whom lives completely here, and each of whom lives to create this heartbreaking little kid. Some knowledge of Baldwin’s life will help tell part of the story that the censors wouldn’t allow Baldwin to tell in 1953, though certain dots are probably not that hard to connect anyway.

Dead Air by Matthew M. Bartlett – I wrote about it briefly here.

Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher – An epistolary novel comprised entirely of letters (and e-mails, etc.) of recommendation written by one crushed-by-life English professor would seem to promise nothing but repetition, but Schumacher’s novel, which won awards and everything, is one of the funniest I’ve read in years. That the bitterness of Jason Fitger, the central academic, is predictable, because there is a tradition of such novels in English literature, means nothing because his bitterness is so pointed and eloquently nasty. I think the ending takes a too-sharp turn into the realm of “emotional weight” and so forth, but that’s fine. It’s one of the most satisfying and entertaining novels I read this year.

Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai – Conspiracy, death, animal cruelty, vast emptiness, endless alcohol, loneliness. It’s sort of a comedy. Hungary as the end of the world.

Green River Killer by Jeff Jensen and Jonathan Case – A true crime comic book about Jensen’s father, the lead detective in the hunt for Gary Ridgway, and the decades of his life he gave to finding a monster. The climactic moment between Tom Jensen and Ridgway is more frightening than any cinematic serial killer you could name.

At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien’s famously askance, let’s say, look at the Irish spirit, as well as Irish myth and stories, is very odd, and very funny, but at the end it suddenly put me in mind of Wallace’s Infinite Jest, in the most unexpected way. A dark cloud persists when I think of it now.

Ill Will by Dan Chaon – The thriller of the year, as far as I’m concerned. Wrote about it here.

An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge – Speaking of post-war English theater, this novel, perhaps Bainbridge’s best-known outside of her masterpiece The Bottle Factory Outing, approaches that world with a touch more warmth than McGrath did in The Wardrobe Mistress. But just a touch. Once again, Bainbridge strikes a tone of skepticism regarding people and the way they go about things, and by the end that skepticism is proved to have been warranted. It’s good, and fun, until it’s not.

The King in the Golden Mask by Marcel Schwob – One of the key works of early French surrealism, Schwob’s 1892 collection of stories also shows how inherently linked that movement is with weird horror fiction. Not that that’s what Schwob was writing by another name, but he sure did write it sometimes, and helped mark a path. The title story seems clearly influenced by Poe, elsewhere there’s devil worship and horrible violence, and there is no story here that isn’t imbued with the terrible unease felt when nothing feels right, or when everything is certain to go wrong.

Poor George by Paula Fox – Fox’s first novel is about a miserably unhappy teacher who meets a troubled kid when that kid breaks into the teacher’s home. The teacher then, against his wife’s objections, hopes to take the kid under his wing. Less a comedy of errors than a full-on disaster, and less a satire than the state of things delivered with a sad, heavy sigh.

The Big Bounce by Elmore Leonard – Wrote about it briefly here.

Point Omega by Don DeLillo – One of four DeLillo novels I read this year, an easily my (unexpected) favorite. This very short novel is political in its inspiration, but the power of the story – about a scholar with government connections being interviewed in the desert by a documentary filmmaker, about the scholar’s daughter who visits, and what happens then – is in its ultimate inexplicability. What’s unsettling isn’t what’s immediate about it, but what’s timeless.

My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf – More true crime, more serial killers, more comic books. This approach to the subject is truly unusual, though: Backderf went to high school with Jeffrey Dahmer, and hung out with him, and saw the budding psychopath without realizing what he was seeing. This perspective allows for an element of the everyday that accounts of the lives of serial killers often lack – it’s all nightmare, all horror, either inflicted on the killer as a child, or inflicted by the killer as an adult on others. Which isn’t to suggest that My Friend Dahmer isn’t chilling, because it is. It’s just that for once we, who will hopefully never face something or someone like this in our lives, are forcefully reminded that these things happen in the same world we wake up to every morning.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer – The first of VanderMeer’s Souther Reach trilogy, this short novel is about an expedition of women (not irrelevant) scientists, both hard and social, sent to explore a section of America that has been transformed, mysteriously and lethally. What they discover there is frightening and mystifying, otherworldly but somehow, seemingly, rooted inside this very planet. Though I have enough faith in VanderMeer to expect the trilogy to end well (I’ve also read the second book, Authority, which I liked, though not as much), I think Annihilation could have stood alone, brilliantly.

Holidays from Hell by Reggie Oliver – This, Oliver’s most recent collection of stories, would be a great place to start for anyone new to his brand of classic, yet nevertheless unique, horror fiction. Oliver is able to take premises that, if you think long enough about them, seem unsupportable, as he does here in the title story, which is about mysterious visitors at a seaside inn (that’s all I’ll say) and infuse the proceedings with puns before casting a genuine pall over the reader. Which isn’t to say this is his only mode, but rather an example of what he can do. My favorite horror book of the year.

Voices in the Night by Steven Millhauser – Wrote about it here.

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion – Life in California as existential nightmare spiral. Which was my guess, anyway.

Quake by Rudolph Wurlitzer – Speaking of California, nightmares, spirals, and so on, Wurlitzer’s novel about a massive earthquake turning Los Angeles into a fast-evolving Apocalypse really is just one damn thing after another, told with a lack of affect that seems, well, telling.

The Eighth Dwarf by Ross Thomas – My first Thomas novel, and it’s a blast. It’s curious to me how this novel, about the kind of men who hunted Nazis immediately after the war ended, and what the rest of the world did about that (not that I think this is a work of reportage, mind you) comes in at under 300 pages, whereas a similar novel written today would easily crack 500. I’m also interested in the fact that the title character is literally a dwarf but there really aren’t many jokes about that fact, nor is he, to be honest, the main character. I’m also interested in books like this which characters the author chooses to kill off and which he spares. There is much here to be interested in and amused by.

An Artist of the Floating World  by Kazuo Ishiguro – Lots of post-war shit in my 2017 reading, apparently. This, Ishiguro’s second novel, and one of the last two of his books I needed to read (I have The Unconsoled on deck, finally, for 2018), is about a Japanese artist and illustrator who, in the years following his country’s defeat, has to reckon with – or choose not to reckon with – his place in the war effort. It’s a bracing, complicated, and damning novel.

The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns – Comyns takes the titular fairy tale and turns it into a story of class, love, friendship, and freak tragedy. Comyns was a genius, seemingly without effort.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass – “The Pedersen Kid,” Gass’s novella about violence, numbing cold, and a particularly grim sort of freedom, is as good as you’ve heard, and is without question the centerpiece of this 1968 collection. But everything his is exhilarating in its way – though Gass’s prose is often very dense, certain passages have a striking clarity, like this from “Icicles”, about a realtor’s crisis (look, I have to describe it somehow, and I ain’t got all day):  

So he’d hear Pearson preach the power of imagination: Fender! think what you’re selling! happiness is is our commodity! you want to dream for them – dream! But Fender remembered how a Baby Ruth wrapper had ruined a sale, it had gone through their dreams like a brick…

Everything is worthwhile, including the preface, which is long, and reads like a writer’s autobiography.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert – Yeah, it’s not bad. I’m not sure what I can add, other than to say it is, or should be, the model of moral fiction that neither condemns nor glorifies, and of fiction that creates an entire community of not just people but buildings, houses, trees. It has also instilled in me what I expect will be a lifelong distrust of apothecaries.

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis – A mad, romping smear of a kind of autobiographical something, soaked along the way with a bathtub-full of mortal dread. It’s a very odd book, in other words, and the comedy may not always lay easy upon it, but God is it absorbing.

Hell Hound by Ken Greenhall – Finally back in print, thanks to the good people at Valancourt Books, I’ve wanted to read this book for ages. It doesn’t disappoint. About a chillingly smart pit bull named Baxter that enters a suburban neighborhood and takes what it wants. Which is not all Hell Hound is. This novel is ultimately more disturbing, even sleazy, then I’d expected, but never dumb or pandering or cheap. It left me feeling very uncomfortable.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – Robinson may be the finest writer of prose currently alive in America. As all such proclamations are, this is arguable. But Gilead, about a minister named John Ames as he nears the end of his life and reflects on his faith, his family, his neighbors, war, the land, life, and death, written as a long message written by Ames to his young son, is more full of exquisite language and imagery than any other five contemporary novels you might choose to squish together into one volume and throw into the pit with it.

Last Look by Charles Burns – Another comic book (oh yeah, that’s another difference in the list this year: this one has some comics in it), and possibly my favorite one. In Black Holes, Burns used horror as both metaphor and as literal presence in the world of the story. With Last Look he doesn’t something different, and harder to pin down. Last Look may seem smaller than Black Holes, but like his magnum opus it is entirely impossible to shake months, and I suspect years, after putting it down.

The North Water by Ian McGuire – Wrote about it a little bit here. Suffice it to say, comparing it (in incident if not in language) to Cormac McCarthy at his most violent wouldn’t be inaccurate. Truly blood-drenched and horrifying. It’s a good book!

Nutshell by Ian McEwan – With this strange take Hamlet, McEwan has written his liveliest, most vivid prose in ages. In terms of tone and content, it’s like a throwback to his more genre-ish early work, but with the spark of a great writer who has found new life. Terrific fiction.

Indignation by Philip Roth – This novel, in addition to being a real honest to God novel, is an argument. A moral and political argument, more specifically, and, this being Philip Roth, it’s so mad it spits. The conclusion it ultimately comes to after considering the events of the novel is not the one I came to as a reader, and I feel confident that if we ever met, Philip Roth wouldn’t like me. But rarely, if ever, have I read the side of an argument I myself would have represented expressed as clearly and as intelligently and as eloquently by someone who rejects it utterly. Philip Roth is a great writer, and Indignation is a great novel.

Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson – When Johnson died unexpectedly earlier this year, this is the novel I immediately wanted to read. Johnson seemed able to write anything, and seemed to want to. This is his post-Apocalyptic novel, and is the most believable, authentic-seeming novel of this kind I’ve ever read. In Fiskadoro Johnson imagines a world that is far away from what we currently know, but understandable in its primitive struggles toward something familiar. It is as sad and as beautiful as anything Johnson ever wrote.

Some Came Running by James Jones – Wrote about it here. And while it may not be the best book I read in 2017, it is certainly the one I lived with the longest, and will continue to live with probably forever, and the one I know best. I know it like it’s alive inside my house. (Just don’t, you know, quiz me about it or anything.)

In the Money by William Carlos Williams – The second, after White Mule, in Williams’s trilogy of novels about the Stecher family and their rise (so far) to relative affluence. Set during the early 20^th century, In the Money is ostensibly about how the Stecher patriarch, Joe, launches his own printing business after snatching from his former employers a major contract to print money orders for the government (FDR has a cameo!). But as a novelist, Williams was primarily concerned, as in his famous poem “This is Just to Say”, with the things that make up someone’s day. Especially if that someone is a child. No writer I can think of has a better eye or ear for the way children are, what frustrates and frightens them. One chapter, all about the two young Stecher girls going to the park with their mother, includes a moment so heartbreaking that I don’t like to think about it. And though Joe Stecher’s climb towards success may be difficult, and his wife Gurlie’s attitude towards it all may seem uncomfortably mercenary, what I’ll remember most about In the Money, what matters most, is the chapter about the youngest Stecher, Flossie, and what it’s like, and why it’s so awful, for a baby to be alone in a dark bedroom.

The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes – Each of the three novels about Harlem cops Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones were absolutely berserk, and, not incidentally, completely wonderful. But nothing I read in 2017 made my jaw hang open like The Real Cool Killers, Himes’s second novel in the series. It begins with an insane knife attack in a night club, the consequences of which spill out into the street and lead to the plot’s central murder, and climaxes – that is, the beginning of the novel climaxes – with Gravedigger Jones fatally shooting a teenager because the kid...well anyway. If I told you, you might decide this is all just too ridiculous. But somehow it isn’t, and somehow Himes is able to maintain this pace, and somehow The Real Cool Killers becomes, by the end, deeply moving, deeply sad and world-weary, and weirdly open-hearted, given a lot of factors you’ll notice and think about and bring into the book when you read it. It’s the crime novel as novel of absurdity. It’s the novel of absurdity as a kind of mourning.

Okay, here's the full list. In reverse chronological order because it would be a pain in the ass to do it any other way.

141. Jizzle by John Wyndham

140. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass

139. Samedi the Deafness by Jesse Ball

138. Mayhem by Sarah Pinborough 

137. Authority by Jeff VanderMeer 

136. In the Money by William Carlos Williams 

135. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher

134. In the Middle of the Night by Robert Cormier 

133. Who is Rich? by Matthew Klam 

132. Matchbox Theater by Michael Frayn

131. Ratman's Notebooks by Stephen Gilbert

130. The Wardrobe Mistress by Patrick McGrath

129. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

128. The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns 

127. The Eighth Dwarf by Ross Thomas

126. Nothing by Henry Green

125. The Forensic Records Society by Magnus Mills

124. Nutshell by Ian McEwan

123. Smile by Roddy Doyle

122. An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

121. The Ballad of Typhoid Mary by J.F. Federspiel

120. The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf

119. Fear is the Rider by Kenneth Cook

118. Cops and Robbers by Donald E. Westlake

117. The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons

116. Othello by William Shakespeare

115. Experimental Film by Gemma Files

114. The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer

113. The Snowman by Jo Nesbo

112. The Tragedy of Brady Sims by Ernest J. Gaines

111. Three Tales by Gustave Flaubert

110. You're All Alone by Fritz Leiber

109. Play Things by Peter Prince

108. Dead Air by Matthew M. Bartlett

107. The Poor Mouth by Flann O'Brien

106. The North Water by Ian McGuire

105. The Big Bounce by Elmore Leonard

104. Voices in the Night by Steven Millhauser

103. Ill Will by Dan Chaon

102. Some Came Running by James Jones

101. Strange Monsters of the Recent Past by Howard Waldrop

100. Lunar Follies by Gilbert Sorrentino

099. Young Adolf by Beryl Bainbridge

098. Poor George by Paula Fox

097. Indignation by Philip Roth

096. You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann

095. Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson

094. Journey of the Dead by Loren D. Estleman

093. The Crazy Kill by Chester Himes

092. Conscience by John Skipp

091. The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales by Angela Slatter

090. Idaho Winter by Tony Burgess

089. An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge

088. The Changeling by Victor LaValle

087. The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty

086. Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman

085. In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware

084. Revenge by Yoko Ogawa

083. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

082. The King in the Golden Mask by Marcel Schwob

081. The Happy Man by Eric C. Higgs

080. The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille

079. The Lake by Yasunari Kawabata

078. Backflash by Donald E. Westlake

077. Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind by Michael Fessier

076. The Monster Club by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

075. The Silent Gondoliers by William Goldman

074. Pictures of Fidelman by Bernard Malamud

073. Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane

072. Kubrick by Michael Herr

071. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle

070. Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson

069. The Pistol by James Jones

068. So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

067. The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud

066. The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge

065. Players by Don DeLillo

064. Neonomicon by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows

063. Dusk and Other Stories by James Salter

062. Green River Killer by Jeff Jensen and Jonathan Case

061. A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr

060. Stranglehold by Jack Ketchum

059. The Fisherman by John Langan

058. My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf

057. Red Lights by Georges Simenon

056. Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

055. Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages by Manuel Puig

054. Devils' Spawn by Charles Birkin

053. Last Look by Charles Burns

052. The Dinner by Herman Koch

051. Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly by John Franklin Bardin

050. Junky by William S. Burroughs

049. A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

048. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin

047. Hell Hound by Ken Greenhall

046. Resurrection Man by Eoin McNamee

045. The Fates by Thomas Tessier

044. Where Furnaces Burn by Joel Lane

043. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

042. I Should Have Stayed Home by Horace McCoy

041. The Hero Pony by David Mamet

040. The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

039. Shadow of a Broken Man by George C. Chesbro 

038. Death Poems by Thomas Ligotti

037. The Sensitive One by C.H.B. Kitchin

036. Quake by Rudolph Wurlitzer

035. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

034. Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett

033. The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales by Mark Samuels

032. Dirty Tricks by Michael Dibdin

031. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

030. Project X by Jim Shepard

029. All the Little Animals by Walker Hamilton

028. The Patriot Game by George V. Higgins

027. Ray by Barry Hannah

026. Holidays from Hell by Reggie Oliver

025. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

024. White Mule by William Carlos Williams

023. Universal Harvester by John Darnielle

022. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

021. The Scarf by Robert Bloch

020. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

019. If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

018. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

017. The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes

016. A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes

015. The Secret of Ventriloquism by Jon Padgett

014. Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin

013. Swift to Chase by Laird Barron

012. Dearest by Peter Loughran

011. Street of No Return by David Goodis

010. I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas

009. Dog Eat Dog by Edward Bunker

008. Chess Story by Stefan Zweig

007. Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

006. The Body Artist by Don DeLillo

005. Point Omega by Don DeLillo

004. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

003. Hogg by Samuel R. Delany

002. Running Dog by Don DeLillo

001. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally