Book Review (Canon): Welcome to Night Vale

Welcome to Night Vale

Written by Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink in 2015

The Raccoon: In a small town where the dog park is only open to mysterious hooded figures, the highway is filled with ghost cars and government surveillance vans, and angels--that the City Council insists do not exist--help with household chores, perpetual teenager Jackie Fierro and PTA mom Diane Crayton still manage to find their lives turned upside down after they each receive a cryptic slip of paper.  Welcome to Night Vale, based on the podcast of the same name, uses wild surrealism to address the human insecurities and issues that even the best dramas tend to gloss over.

UNMASKED: Welcome to Night Vale the podcast deserves a 19/20.  Cranor and Fink’s writing, brought to life by voice actor Cecil Baldwin, is hauntingly sublime; the listener is drawn into the unique world of Night Vale and left at the end of every episode with a feeling akin to anatidaephobia.  Cecil’s narration capitalizes on fear of the unknown.  In the same way that the clawing and growling behind the door in a movie are scarier than the monster itself, the podcast’s lack of explanation as to why librarians need to be avoided at all costs and how a boy transitions from Eagle Scout to Blood Pact Scout ensure that the concepts remain lodged in the back of one’s mind and under the kitchen sink.

Writers typically use novels when they wish to illustrate detailed scenes and capture the nuances of dialogue. Unfortunately, these features are a terrible match for Welcome to Night Vale.  Although the plot is suspenseful and varied, and the characters are profoundly relatable, the novel simply casts too much light on a world intricately designed to be vague and shadowed.  Is it still Night Vale without the night or the veil?

Strengths:

• A chapter describing Diane’s relationship with her shape-shifting son perfectly captures the challenges of raising any teenage son. A clever quirk of Welcome to Night Vale is that it sidesteps forced metaphors by making the exaggerated and surreal a natural part of the setting.
• The novel’s ridiculous notion of research and the scientific method (“None of the scientists noticed her. They were all writing busily on clipboards and wearing lab coats. This is called ‘doing an experiment.’”), along with a few other other multi-page tangents, actually made me laugh out loud.
• The faceless old woman that lives in Diane’s house is the only character I have ever encountered who successfully adds to a story despite objectively having no relevance to the plot.

Weaknesses:

• While the novel can still be appreciated independently, almost every character and place originated in the podcast, and the novel is much better understood with that background.
• The fact that everything in Night Vale falls in a spectrum from off-putting to unspeakably horrifying ironically leads to a lack of stakes in the novel.  After all, if the characters have survived for this long, why would yet another supernatural event be cause for alarm?

Rating: 16/…

The number between 19 and 21 no longer exists.  The City Council apologizes for the inconvenience but hopes that this decision will foster greater appreciation for all 154 other numbers.

Ideal Setting: Read this whenever you begin to wonder how the universe can be so ordered and mathematical.

Book Review (Rucksack): Frankenstein

Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus

Written by Mary Shelley in 1818

The Raccoon: Let me just make this clear: the original Frankenstein story contains neither a hunchbacked lab assistant named Igor, nor a pitchfork-armed mob marching toward a tower.  To be unnecessarily fastidious, Frankenstein is actually the story of Robert Walton, an optimistic gentleman leading an expedition to the North Pole, who, when his ship becomes surrounded by ice, happens to encounter an exhausted Victor Frankenstein.

UNMASKED: For a story that inspired fifty-three movies and shaped hundreds of other pieces, the original Frankenstein is surprisingly humble.  The few moments in which Shelley tries to invoke horror all fall flat, and the Romantic era novel has little regard for action.  Instead, Frankenstein stands openly as a moral and philosophical debate, asking the reader to confront the humanity and cruelty that exist in both man and monster.

The reason that Frankenstein has been twisted and exaggerated with each new adaptation is that the novel cannot help but drag at times.  The reader witnesses the entire lives of both Victor Frankenstein and his creation in intimate detail; this leads to heavy sections of “downtime” in which Victor suffers from a constant cocktail of fear, guilt, and anger.  By the end of the novel, my connection with the protagonists was so deep that I felt as if I knew them personally, something very few authors can achieve.  On the other hand, the continuous emotional outbursts and monologues... got, like, really repetitive and annoying after a while.

Frankenstein has earned its place among the literary classics; its unique structure of layered flashbacks and constant sense of inevitability, as well as its exploration of timeless questions, qualify the novel as essential reading for any human being.  Unfortunately, while Frankenstein may keep you in your seat, you will not be on the edge of it.

Strengths:

• Every secondary character has a unique influence on Victor’s mindset and actions.  This both fleshes out the world of the novel and makes the characters and story more realistic.
• Watching other characters’ disgust towards the monster creates a much more powerful, grotesque image of him for the reader than any movie effects ever will.

Weaknesses:

• Granted, psychotherapy did not exist in Shelley’s time, but it became increasingly difficult to watch Victor torture himself, never able to move on and rekindle his passion for learning and exploration.
• The three female characters in the novel have identical one-dimensional personalities.

Rating: 17/20 brides

Ideal Setting: Read this the next time someone accuses you of being uncaring or unwilling to put your best effort into a project.  Passion leads to lifelong agony.

Book Review (Canon): The Humans

The Humans

Written by Matt Haig in 2013

The Raccoon: After Professor Andrew Martin solves the Riemann Hypothesis, he is immediately killed by aliens, who send one of their own to Earth to ensure that no evidence of his research survives.  However, once the alien narrator settles into impersonating Martin and living among the strange humans, he finds himself unwilling to complete his mission.

UNMASKED: Perhaps the reader would more easily comprehend the novel (and this review) if the narrator of The Humans had a name.  We know only that he, like all beings from his home planet, is immortal, the product of an advanced civilization where “minds, bodies, technologies all come together in a quite beautiful convergence.”  The highlight of his life is a speech he delivered at the Museum of Quadratic Equations, a detail which effectively summarizes the entire culture and philosophy of the planet Vonnadoria.

After this shocking, witty opening, The Humans is quite predictable.  The novel follows a progression as old as time:

1. An alien comes to Earth planning to harm our society and/or specific people due to his belief that doing so is the right action to take on a much wider scale.
2. A series of humorous mishaps occurs as the alien tries to pass as human.
3. Through art, laughing and crying, and finally love, the alien realizes that humanity is not as evil as he originally thought.
4. A happy compromise is reached between the alien’s original goals and his desire to protect the very people he was sent to hurt.  Ideally, the resolution follows an exciting battle of both ideology and physical survival as the alien, now a changed man, must face another member of his species.

For this reason, you are not missing out if you decide not to read The Humans.

Nevertheless, Haig’s short novel is an effective fun-sized package for anyone looking for a heartwarming story about love, humanity, and peanut butter.

Strengths:

• Andrew Martin’s arrogant personality and negative history provide a much more interesting setup and lead to more ironic, entertaining conversations than if the narrator’s disguise was morally upright.
• The narrator’s relationship and conversations with the family dog make The Humans the best dog book I have ever read.
• The ending is surprisingly realistic and satisfying.

Weaknesses:

• At a few points in the story, the narrator fails to such a great extent to pass as human that no sane person would ignore it.

Rating: 17/20 /23/29/31/37/41/43/47/53

Ideal Setting: Read this before announcing your next major discovery or invention, just in case it might give a hyper-advanced species a reason to murder you and your family.

Book Review (Rucksack): Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death

Written by Kurt Vonnegut in 1969

The Raccoon: Kurt Vonnegut’s absurdist anti-war book relays the horrors of the Second World War, specifically the bombing of Dresden, through the experiences of Billy Pilgrim, a traumatized soldier and chronic time-traveler.

UNMASKED: Vonnegut, who appears in his own work to provide a frame narrative that discusses how difficult the novel was to write, admits near its end that “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.  One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”  While this is a profound sentiment, and the author hammers in the lesson quite well, it makes for a slow and unrelatable story.

The structure of Slaughterhouse-Five reflects Billy’s emotional state: unstable.  The plot jumps around in time, and the only unifying factor of the disjointed scenes is the main character’s abduction by four-dimensional aliens, who convince him that time is irrelevant, à la Arrival or Interstellar.  The reader is led to believe that this sci-fi element is a symptom of Billy’s PTSD; however, its absurdity detracts from the story’s serious message.

By the end of the novel, Vonnegut has delivered his picture of war as hopeless and absurd, but this theme is the only thread that holds a messy book together.

Strengths:

• Slaughterhouse-Five is chock-full of memorable images, and a few of its humorous scenes make for lasting jokes and references.
• The narrator is irreverent towards death and tragedy, expertly echoing Vonnegut’s lesson through a uniquely painful lens.

Weaknesses:

• Billy’s experience living in an alien zoo adds absolutely nothing to the story, and the Tralfamadorians as a whole are annoying to the reader.

Rating: 11/20 prisoners

Ideal Setting: Read this when you begin to worry that your life is out of your control.  It is.

Book Review (Canon): House of Leaves

House of Leaves

Written by Mark Z. Danielewski in 2000

The Raccoon: Blurring the lines between reality and multiple layers of fiction, Danielewski’s occult cult masterpiece chronicles the story of a family slowly torn apart after they move to a suburban house that is bigger on the inside than on the outside.

UNMASKED: House of Leaves contains four layers of story.  At the center, Will Navidson and his family struggle against their impossibly-structured, possibly living home.  All the while, Navidson films this journey, and his wife later assembles the footage into the documentary The Navidson Record.  Zooming out, the bulk of House of Leaves is an in-depth essay and commentary on The Navidson Record, whose author, Zampanò, describes its contents as well as the debate surrounding its authenticity, reception, and themes.  Even further removed, narrator Johnny Truant explains how he came into possession of Zampanò’s work, and how his attempts to decipher it have led him to be tormented by anxiety and paranoia.  Finally, unnamed editors fill in gaps left by Johnny, and they include a series of letters written by his mother, in hopes of rendering the story more understandable to the reader.

So begins the confusion.  Johnny reveals early on that The Navidson Record does not exist.  

This stark fact leads him, and us, to question why and how Zampanò spent so much time analyzing it; after all, the author went so far as to cite other nonexistent commentary in his work and compile a series of exhibits regarding the Navidsons.  Of course, when Johnny tells us that he reached out to celebrities such as Stephen King to verify that their quotes in Zampanò’s essay were falsified and they have never heard of Will Navidson nor Zampanò, we must remind ourselves that the narrator too is fictional; the real Stephen King has no more knowledge of nor contact with Johnny Truant than he does with the other two men.  Furthermore, toward the end of the novel, Johnny learns from his own fanbase that he has already published the book; the version we hold has been updated by Johnny after travels to Virginia in hopes of locating any evidence of the Navidsons’ house.  In truth, the first edition of House of Leaves already had all of Johnny’s story; again, the narrator’s life only exists to the extent that Danielewski wrote about it.

And yes, I did feel that two large paragraphs were necessary to provide a basic description of House of Leaves.  The book is the closest thing to Daedalus’ legendary labyrinth anyone has created since the German Enigma Code.  Like the house in the story, House of Leaves cannot be contained within its own binding; online forums are still trying to unearth all of its secrets, and the actual act of reading this beast involves mentally organizing footnotes within footnotes and philosophical treatises dividing the two simultaneous plots, as well as occasionally rotating the pages, using mirrors, or deciphering codes to be able read the words.

While reaching the last page of House of Leaves is incredibly rewarding, and I encourage every passionate reader to undertake the adventure, I must honestly warn you that, once you have allowed such a complicated, atypical work to take root in your mind, leaving it behind is not as simple as closing the back cover.

• The actual

Strengths1

• The random inclusion of several dozen layout of the book “Pelican Poems”
• Many of the book’s questions invokesare still unanswered by the end, although all of the storylines and character arcs find resolutions. the feeling of being lost
• Although calling House of Leaves a horror story is greatly exaggerating, the Navidsons’ house in a is uniquely uncanny and frightening.

m a z e.

Rating: 18/20 minutes

Ideal Setting: Read this whenever you begin to feel bored with how comfortable you are in your world.

1Weaknesses

Book Review (Rucksack): One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Written by Gabriel García Márquez in 1967

The Raccoon: One Hundred Years of Solitude aims to recount the entire course of human history and the harmful patterns of society.  On the surface, the novel traces six generations of the headstrong Buendía family, who live in the fictional town of Macondo.

UNMASKED: Márquez clearly poured his soul into writing One Hundred Years of Solitude; the novel echoes traumatic experiences from the author’s life and from Latin American history.  The raw mix of satire, inevitability, and nostalgia embedded in the text has elevated the book to mythical status.  Ultimately, the book lives up to its promise of being the next segment of the Bible.

Of course, like the Bible, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a cumbersome, difficult read.  Márquez displays a talent for magical realism, combining various mythologies with a patchwork of historical events and locations to prevent the reader from categorizing the story as fantastical or based on truth.  Consequently, the only way to comprehend the novel is to continuously remind oneself to let go; asking questions or expecting clear climaxes and transitions are as fruitless as keeping track of the lineage in the First Testament.  One Hundred Years of Solitude needs to throw the reader off to communicate its deeper story.  As stated in the even more convoluted, cult-favorite book, House of Leaves, “what's real or isn't real doesn't matter here. The consequences are the same.”

That deeper story tells of a people ravaged by both corrupt foreign influence and their own destructive passions, who preach change yet constantly regress in their development.  With every character representing a different example of what not to do, Márquez ultimately wants to force the reader to confront the fact that the only way out of society’s (or personal) cycles is to acknowledge the pitfalls of our old behaviors and begin completely anew.

Strengths:

• The quality is not degraded by reading the book in English instead of Spanish; Márquez even admitted to enjoying the English translation more than the original version.  Both authors display an impressive command over language, evoking vivid images with almost every sculpted sentence.
• The narrator’s blunt, objective tone highlights the novel’s tragic events.  Mirroring the way imperialist characters are quick to ignore or erase any hint of their own wrongdoing, the narrator brushes past massacres the moment after they take root in the reader’s mind, rendering us solitary in our suffering.

Weaknesses:

• The repetitive names accompanied by repetitive personality traits and actions push just past the line, rendering the stylistic choice more of a confusing inconvenience than a thematic message.
• For a story with such a wide scope, a disproportionate amount of beautiful language is spent on sex scenes and José Arcadio’s genitals.
• The element of magical realism decays as the book goes on.  While fantastical ideas still drive powerful moments in the story, the feeling of wonder that the reader experiences in the first pages of the novel is never truly recovered.

Rating: 17/20 gold fishes

Ideal Setting: You have already read the story, are currently reading the story, and will forever read the story.  Naming an exact time and place is unnecessary, because it has already come.

Book Review (Canon): After the Dam

After the Dam

Written by Amy Hassinger in 2016

The Raccoon: Rachel Clayborne is still adjusting to her new role as a mother when her father sends her to the Farm, her family’s Wisconsin home, on a mission: find out her grandmother’s intentions for the property after she dies.  Rachel soon finds herself torn between a moral obligation, restoring the land to the Ojibwe tribe that her family stole it from, and her own feelings, a love and nostalgia for her childhood retreat.  This conflict is only exacerbated when Rachel begins to reconnect with her Ojibwe ex-boyfriend and realizes that she has deeper reasons for needing to hold onto the Farm.

UNMASKED: While all authors pride themselves on understanding the human condition, Hassinger is the only writer I have encountered that has managed to completely render the soul of her protagonist, allowing the reader to understand and connect with Rachel more than we do with most real people.  To top it off, Hassinger pulls this off for all five of her main characters, distinctly showing their personalities and then placing them with and against each other so effectively that every scene grips the reader’s heart.  After the Dam ought to wear the label of character-driven story as a badge of honor.

Hassinger also masterfully wields her setting as a tool for storytelling.  The tension in the novel swells simultaneously with aggressive weather that endangers the eponymous Old Bend Dam, and several other setting hooks are used to force characters together or prevent them from communicating at crucial times.  Additionally, the second of five “books” within After the Dam travels back eight years, highlighting Rachel’s budding relationship with her husband and her early environmental career.  While much of the characters’ history is effectively explained through shorter flashbacks, Hassinger’s choice to immerse the reader in a younger Rachel allows him/her to witness Rachel’s success in bringing down another dam; her actions provide a sharp contrast to the apparent immortality of the Old Bend Dam and to the frazzled impulsiveness of the current Rachel.

After the Dam brings the reader into an intense, compelling world, increasing the stakes with each scene and ultimately delivering an unforgiving, unforgettable story.

Strengths:

• All of the characters are well-developed, and it is easy to see any one of them as the protagonist.
• The author acknowledges the awkwardness and hesitation involved in love.
• Rachel’s daughter is simply a baby, as opposed to the many infant characters in other works that are somehow able to communicate important lessons and warnings to the adult characters.

Weaknesses:

• A large piece of the conflict remains unresolved by the end of the novel, with Hassinger choosing to leave the resolution open to several possible outcomes.

Rating: 19/20 buried homes

Ideal Setting: Read this before you collapse under the weight of repressed feelings and unresolved arguments.  Otherwise the dam representing your relationship may flood.