Writing Lessons From a Fellow Outlier: Dad’s Maybe Book by Tim O’Brien

Of all the books I read in 2019 (105 and counting, as of this writing), perhaps the one that surprised me the most was Dad’s Maybe Book by Tim O'Brien.

Don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t surprised by the quality of writing to be found in the pages of the man who gave us The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato; nor was I startled to find a memoir about fatherhood from the man who has so beautifully described the horrors of war because ten years ago I heard Tim read from an early draft of Dad’s Maybe Book (a sweetly hilarious scene involving his son peeing into a bathroom wastebasket); nor was I shocked to find this new memoir loaded with pathos and tenderness and sentimentality that occasionally walks up to the line of overdoing it, then spits in Treacle’s face, because any reader who makes it through The Things They Carried without weeping surely carries a stone in their chest in place of a heart.

No, what really struck me afresh in Dad’s Maybe Book was how Tim O’Brien reveals himself to be a first-class writing instructor, one at whose elbow I would gladly sit with pen and notebook at the ready. I nearly wore out the highlighting feature on my Kindle marking all the paragraphs dedicated to writing advice and then jotting them down in my ongoing Commonplace Book.

At first, this new book feels like a bit of a departure for the man who wrote, in The Things They Carried, of a soldier who ties a puppy to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezes the firing device. There are some of those gruesome echoes of war here, yes, but O’Brien leaves most of the grim stuff off the page and concentrates on the messages of love he wants to leave his two sons. Tim came to fatherhood late in life: he was 56 in 2003 when his first son, Timmy, was born; his second son, Tad, came two years later. And so, facing the ticking clock of mortality, he set out to write a book not for us but for his sons. Maybe it will be a book, maybe it won’t, he muses. His wife Meredith assures him, “You don’t have to commit to an actual book. Just a maybe book.”

And here’s our first lesson: write a book for your readers, not for publishing glory (or vainglory, as is often the case). Even if it’s just two readers—a little boy named Timmy and his brother Tad—speak directly to them from the page, not the faceless thousands who might grab your book from a display at a Hudson Booksellers in an airport terminal between flights. Write for your Tad, your Timmy, or perhaps your dead mother who needs to hear what you could never say while she was alive.

That’s Lesson Number One, class. Are you paying attention?

Here are many more nuggets of wisdom gleaned from Dad’s Maybe Book, randomly plucked from my Commonplace Book which I am sharing with you [insert your name here], my dear friend.

I write so slowly—how can I tell my kids all I want to tell them? Each of the scraps of paper on my desk seems to whisper, “Tell me, put me in, don’t forget me,” and yet this is only a maybe book, and I am only a maybe-writer, just as every writer was once a maybe-writer and just as every book was once a maybe book.


All of us, writers more than most, are left with the cruel and taunting illusion of memory. What we call memory is failed memory. What we call memory is forgetfulness. And if memory has failed—failed so colossally, failed so apocalyptically—how can we pretend to tell the truth? Is one small fraction of the truth the truth? Memory speaks, yes. But it stutters. It speaks in ellipses.


We lose our lives as we live them. Memory is a problem. Even more of a problem, much more, is that I am also at the mercy of my abilities as a writer, and at the mercy of recalcitrant, never-quite-right nouns and verbs. I am at the mercy of the bullying word “nonfiction,” which prohibits make-believe. I am at the mercy of my endurance, and at the mercy of the demagogic rhythm of a sentence, and at the mercy of a spectacular image just off the tip of my imagination.


Among the strange and bitter ironies that have visited me over these seven decades is the certainty that I will be remembered, if I am remembered at all, as a war writer, despite my hatred for war, despite my ineptitude at war, despite my abiding shame at having participated in war, and despite the fact that I am in no way a spokesman or a “voice” for the 2.6 million American military personnel who served in Vietnam from August 1964 to May 1975. In the eyes of many Vietnam veterans—probably a majority—I’m an outlier. I don’t fit in and never did. As far as I can tell, the bulk of those who fought in Vietnam are proud of their service. I am not. They generally believe their cause was just. I do not. Many profess nostalgia about their days in uniform. I do not. Many would do it all again. I would not.


To read as a writer is to read not only with attention to artistry. It is also to read with jealousy, with ambition, with disputation, with rivalry, with fellowship, with fear, with hostility, with celebration, with humility, with proprietorial vigilance, with embarrassment, with longing, with despair, with anger, with defensiveness, with pity, and with a wolf’s steady contemplation of its next meal.


The essential object of fiction is not to explain. Explanation narrows. Explanation fixes. Explanation dissolves mystery. Explanation imposes artificial, arrogant order on human contradictions between fact and fact. The essential object of fiction is to embrace and widen and deepen all that is unknown and unknowable—who we are, why we are—and to offer us late-night company as we lie awake pondering our universal journey down the birth canal, and out into the light, and then toward the grave. In a story, explanation is like joining a magician backstage. The mysterious becomes mechanical. The miracle becomes banal. Delight vanishes. Wonder vanishes. What was once surprising, even beautiful, devolves into tired causality. One might as well be washing dishes.


Bad and mediocre stories explain too much: how the wicked witch became so completely and irreparably wicked—abused as a child, no doubt. Bad and mediocre stories tidy up the world, sorting out the human messes of serendipity and tangled motive. Who among us truly understands the plot of his own life? Do you, Tad? Do you, Timmy? Do you truly understand your own swirling, half-formed, and contradictory motives? Who recalls more than a tiny fraction of his own life—last Tuesday, for example? And if we cannot recall our lives, how can we pretend to explain our lives? It is guesswork. Scantily informed guesswork at that.


To trust a story is to trust one’s own story, not someone else’s. To trust a story is to avoid the predictable, the familiar, the wholly logical, the already written, the movie you saw last week, the bestseller you read last month, and even that classic you nearly finished back in college. To trust a story is to trust your own imagination, not the imagination of some literary predecessor.


Do not impose symbols on your work. Let symbols grow in and from your work. If you write a sentence that contains a symbol merely to insert symbolism, hit the delete key and dip your computer in Clorox.

Front Porch Books: November 2019 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of new and forthcoming books—mainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)—I’ve received from publishers. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released. I should also mention that, in nearly every case, I haven’t had a chance to read these books, but they’re definitely going in the to-be-read pile.

Barn 8
by Deb Olin Unferth
(Graywolf Press)

Jacket Copy:  Two auditors for the U.S. egg industry go rogue and conceive a plot to steal a million chickens in the middle of the night—an entire egg farm’s worth of animals. Janey and Cleveland—a spirited former runaway and the officious head of audits—assemble a precarious, quarrelsome team and descend on the farm on a dark spring evening. A series of catastrophes ensues. Deb Olin Unferth’s wildly inventive novel is a heist story of a very unusual sort. Swirling with a rich array of voices, Barn 8 takes readers into the minds of these renegades: a farmer’s daughter, a former director of undercover investigations, hundreds of activists, a forest ranger who suddenly comes upon forty thousand hens, and a security guard who is left on an empty farm for years. There are glimpses twenty thousand years into the future to see what chickens might evolve into on our contaminated planet. We hear what hens think happens when they die. In the end the cracked hearts of these indelible characters, their earnest efforts to heal themselves, and their radical actions will lead them to ruin or revelation. Funny, whimsical, philosophical, and heartbreaking, Barn 8 ultimately asks: What constitutes meaningful action in a world so in need of change? Unferth comes at this question with striking ingenuity, razor-sharp wit, and ferocious passion. Barn 8 is a rare comic-political drama, a tour de force for our time.

Opening Lines:  A nest. Built of 14-gauge galvanized wire mesh, twenty-five thousand water nipples, a moss of dander and feed. Six miles of feed trough runs down rows, up columns. Staggered tiers rise ten feet high into the shape of the letter A, the universal symbol for mountain. Wooden rafters, plywood walkways. Darkness. Sudden light. Three hundred thousand prehistoric eyes blinking. The entire apparatus ticking and whirring and clanking like a doomsday machine. Above it the purr, coo, and song of a hundred and fifty thousand birds at dawn.

Blurbworthiness:  “Like Flannery O’Connor, Deb Olin Unferth does things entirely her own way, and that way is impossible to describe....This very funny and absurd novel is also as serious as the world.” (Zachary Lazar, author of Vengeance)

Why It’s In My Stack:  I’ve been meaning to read Unferth for a number of years, so I recently added her 2011 memoir Revolution to my to-be-read pile. A few days later, an advance copy of Barn 8 arrived in the mail and I thought to myself “Egg-cellent timing!” And lord lord lord, that cover! If I don’t read it soon, I fear that bird will peck my eyes out.

Creatures
by Crissy Van Meter
(Algonquin Books)

Jacket Copy:  On the eve of Evangeline’s wedding, a dead whale is trapped in the harbor of Winter Island, the groom may be lost at sea, and Evie’s mostly absent mother has shown up out of the blue. From there, in this mesmerizing, provocative debut, Evie remembers and reckons with her complicated upbringing in this lush, wild land off the coast of Southern California. Evie grew up with her well-meaning but negligent father, surviving on the money he made dealing the island’s world-famous strain of marijuana, Winter Wonderland. Although he raised her with a deep respect for the elements, the sea, and the creatures living within it, he also left her to parent herself. With wit, love, and bracing ashes of anger, Creatures probes the complexities of love and abandonment, guilt and forgiveness, betrayal and grief—and the ways in which our ability to love can be threatened if we are not brave enough to conquer the past. Lyrical, darkly funny, and ultimately cathartic, Creatures exerts a pull as strong as the tides.

Opening Lines:  There is a dead whale. It rolls idly in the warm shallows of this island, among cartoonish sea animals with tentacles, suction cups, and goopy eyes. There are squawking birds leaking nearly colorless shit, and we are concerned with an unbearable odor and the must-be sharks circling nearby.

Blurbworthiness:  “Creatures is the kind of beautiful book that makes you want to lick the salt from its pages. It’s so physically present you can feel the waves hit your body, smell the sea life, hear the roar of the ocean as your hair whips around your face in the breeze. Crissy Van Meter has written a book about the complexities of love and families, yes, but it’s also a careful look at intimacy through the lens of a person learning and relearning how to love the people who continually let us down. It’s inventive and surprising. The text is tactile; a punch to the heart. It’s one of the best novels I’ve read this year.”  (Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things)

Why It’s In My Stack:  I’m a sucker for bloated whales and lean prose.

Everywhere You Don’t Belong
by Gabriel Bump
(Algonquin Books)

Jacket Copy:  In this powerful, edgy, and funny debut novel about making right and wrong choices, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable and lovable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude is a young black man in search of a place where he can fit; born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights-era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change. After a riot consumes his neighborhood, Claude decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new life and identity. But as he discovers, there’s no escaping the people and places that made him.

Opening Lines:  “If there’s one thing wrong with people,” Paul always said. “It’s that no one remembers the shit that they should and everyone remembers the shit that doesn’t matter for shit.”
       I remember Euclid Avenue. I remember yelling outside our window, coming in from the street. Grandma put down her coffee. I remember Grandma holding my ankle, swinging my two-year-old self out the front door, flipping me right-side up, plopping me down next to the Hawaiian violets, plopping herself down next to me. I remember awe and disbelief.
       Dad was on the curb, wrestling another man. He had the man’s head, the man’s life and soul, between his thighs.
       Upstairs, above our heads, Mom screamed for the men to stop, to regain their senses, civilize themselves.
       “You’re friends!” Mom yelled. “You go to church!”
       “Say it again,” Dad told the man.
       “I’m sorry,” the man told Dad.
       “Sorry for what?” Dad asked the man.
       “Sorry for saying you look like Booker T. Washington,” the man told Dad.
       Dad unsqueezed the man. Chicago Cops came speeding down our street before Dad’s loafer could unhinge the man’s teeth.

Blurbworthiness:  “In Everywhere You Don’t Belong, Gabriel Bump completely, beautifully, and energetically illuminates the heretofore unrecognized lines connecting Ellison’s Invisible Man to Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. This is a startling, original, and hilarious book.”  (Adam Levin, author of The Instructions)

Why It’s In My Stack:  This novel has been getting a lot of buzz—which I started noticing after I got my advance copy, read those opening lines and couldn’t pull myself away from that image of one man’s shoe unhinging another man’s teeth. By that time, the novel already belonged to my TBR pile.

The Silent Treatment
by Abbie Greaves
(HarperCollins)

Jacket Copy:  By all appearances, Frank and Maggie share a happy, loving marriage. But for the past six months, they have not spoken. Not a sentence, not a single word. Maggie isn’t sure what, exactly, provoked Frank’s silence, though she has a few ideas. Day after day, they have eaten meals together and slept in the same bed in an increasingly uncomfortable silence that has become, for Maggie, deafening. Then Frank finds Maggie collapsed in the kitchen, unconscious, an empty package of sleeping pills on the table. Rushed to the hospital, she is placed in a medically induced coma while the doctors assess the damage. If she regains consciousness, Maggie may never be the same. Though he is overwhelmed at the thought of losing his wife, will Frank be able to find his voice once again—and explain his withdrawal—or is it too late?

Opening Lines:  From above, Maggie looks to have everything under control. She deposits the tablets onto the dinner plate with her usual fastidious care. If anything, she moves through the motions of breaking the coated capsules free from the foil with even greater precision than usual, tipping the blister slowly so as to enjoy the sharp clanging sound that announces each one hitting the ceramic. Anything to break the silence.

Blurbworthiness:  “Not so much a case of ‘he said/she said’ as ‘he didn’t say/she didn’t say,’ this moving debut unpicks the secret selves of Maggie and Frank to reveal the tragic miscommunications of their broken family. It’s a pleasure to read such a stylish and confident new voice—readers are going to love discovering Abbie Greaves.”  (Louise Candlish, author of Our House )

Why It’s In My Stack:  I have been married to the same wonderful woman for thirty-six years. We love each other to the ends of the earth and beyond, but I’ll be the first to admit there have been times when angry, hurt silences stretched between us, as vast and impossible to cross as a dry desert.

Dad’s Maybe Book
by Tim O’Brien
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Jacket Copy:  In 2003, already an older father, National Book Award–winning novelist Tim O’Brien resolved to give his young sons what he wished his own father had given to him—a few scraps of paper signed “Love, Dad.” Maybe a word of advice. Maybe a sentence or two about some long-ago Christmas Eve. Maybe some scattered glimpses of their rapidly aging father, a man they might never really know. For the next fifteen years, the author talked to his sons on paper, as if they were adults, imagining what they might want to hear from a father who was no longer among the living. O’Brien traverses the great variety of human experience and emotion, moving from soccer games to warfare to risqué lullabies, from alcoholism to magic shows to history lessons to bittersweet bedtime stories, but always returning to a father’s soul-saving love for his sons. The result is Dad’s Maybe Book, a funny, tender, wise, and enduring literary achievement that will squeeze the reader’s heart with joy and recognition.

Opening Lines: Dear Timmy,
       A little more than a year ago, on June 20, 2003, you dropped into the world, my son, my first and only child—a surprise, a gift, an eater of electrical cords, a fertilizer factory, a pain in the ass, and a thrill in the heart.
       Here’s the truth, Timmy. Boy, oh, boy, do I love you. And, boy, do I wish I could spend the next fifty or sixty years with my lips to your cheek, my eyes warming in yours.

Blurbworthiness:  “A bountiful treasury of fatherly advice, memoir, literary criticism, history, political commentary, and a dash of magic and miracles…There are smiles and tears awaiting the reader on every page of this often emotionally charged book, and enough wisdom in it about what it means to be a parent, and a decent human being, to fuel many hours of personal recollection and reflection.” (BookReporter)

Why It’s In My Stack:  If you have to ask this, then you don’t know the depths of my love for Tim O’Brien. And if, based solely on those sweet and tender opening lines, you think this is a departure from the author’s celebrated Vietnam stories, then you need to turn directly to Chapter 3 where two-month-old Timmy cries non-stop through the night, leading O’Brien and his wife to desperately pop Xanax while trying to soothe the inconsolable infant back to sleep with a dirty-lyric rendition of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” The scene is as harrowing, funny and as wisely-told as anything to come out of O’Brien’s Vietnam War. I started reading Dad’s Maybe Book late last night, when I myself was having trouble sleeping; I stayed awake, with pleasure. This might just be the best thing I read this year.

Barker House
by David Moloney
(Bloomsbury)

Jacket Copy:  David Moloney’s Barker House follows the story of nine unforgettable New Hampshire correctional officers over the course of one year on the job. While veteran guards get by on what they consider survival strategies—including sadistic power-mongering and obsessive voyeurism—two rookies, including the only female officer on her shift, develop their own tactics for facing “the system.” Tracking their subtly intertwined lives, Barker House reveals the precarious world of the jailers, coming to a head when the unexpected death of one in their ranks brings them together. Timely and universal, this masterfully crafted debut adds a new layer to discussions of America’s criminal justice system, and introduces a brilliant young literary talent.

Opening Lines:  I work alone on the Restricted Unit in the Barker County Correctional Facility in New Hampshire. It’s a semi-circular room, the curved wall lined with nine cells. Most of the day, the inmates press their faces to scuffed windows, silent. There are no bars. The architects went with rosewood steel doors. Rosewood: the color of merlot.
       On Tuesday and Saturday mornings I supervise inmates while they shave in their cells. We don’t leave them alone with razors.

Blurbworthiness:  “At a time when mass incarceration is increasingly a feature of American life, David Moloney’s Barker House is a great and important book. Without romanticizing, demonizing, or candy-coating the work of his corrections officers, this novel-in-stories offers an experienced insider’s view of their lives, in stainless-steely prose that easily matches the best of Raymond Carver and John Fante.” (Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens)

Why It’s In My Stack:  While excellent shows like Orange is the New Black have helped shatter the stereotypes of grim-faced, robotic turnkeys, an in-depth literary treatment of prison guards is a rarity. The fact that Moloney himself worked as a correctional officer for many years lends an air of authenticity to his stories.

Warhol
by Blake Gopnik
(Ecco)

Jacket Copy:  To this day, mention the name “Andy Warhol” to almost anyone and you’ll hear about his famous images of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. But though Pop Art became synonymous with Warhol’s name and dominated the public’s image of him, his life and work are infinitely more complex and multi-faceted than that. In Warhol, esteemed art critic Blake Gopnik takes on Andy Warhol in all his depth and dimensions. “The meanings of his art depend on the way he lived and who he was,” as Gopnik writes. “That’s why the details of his biography matter more than for almost any cultural figure,” from his working-class Pittsburgh upbringing as the child of immigrants to his early career in commercial art to his total immersion in the “performance” of being an artist, accompanied by global fame and stardom—and his attempted assassination. The extent and range of Warhol’s success, and his deliberate attempts to thwart his biographers, means that it hasn’t been easy to put together an accurate or complete image of him. But in this biography, unprecedented in its scope and detail as well as in its access to Warhol’s archives, Gopnik brings to life a figure who continues to fascinate because of his contradictions—he was known as sweet and caring to his loved ones but also a coldhearted manipulator; a deep-thinking avant-gardist but also a true lover of schlock and kitsch; a faithful churchgoer but also an eager sinner, skeptic, and cynic. Wide-ranging and immersive, Warhol gives us the most robust and intricate picture to date of a man and an artist who consistently defied easy categorization and whose life and work continue to profoundly affect our culture and society today.

Opening Lines:  Andy Warhol died, for the first time, at 4:51 P.M. on the third of June 1968. Or that was the grim verdict of the interns and residents in the emergency room of Columbus Hospital in New York. Some twenty minutes earlier, the artist had been shot by Valerie Solanas, a troubled hanger-on at his famous studio, the Factory, which had recently moved to a new spot on Union Square. During the half hour it took for the ambulance to arrive, Warhol slowly bled to death. By the time the patient was dropped at the hospital, a few blocks away, the young doctors in the E.R. couldn't find a pulse. There was no blood pressure to speak of. The patient's color was newsprint tinged with blue. By any normal measure, this thirty-nine-year old Caucasian, five foot eight, 145 pounds, was D.O.A.

Blurbworthiness:  “John Lennon and I once hid from Andy in a closet at the Sherry-Netherland hotel. I wish I’d known him better. This fantastic new biography makes me feel that I do. It really reveals the man—and the genius—under that silver wig.”  (Elton John, rock god and author of Me)

Why It’s In My Stack:  My familiarity with Andy Warhol stems from only three things: my reading of Edie by Jean Stein thirty-seven years ago, watching the motion picture I Shot Andy Warhol in 1996, and—yeah, yeah—the canvases of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. I want to learn more about the enigmatic man and Gopnik’s biography looks like a good place to start.

Attention Servicemember
by Ben Brody
(Red Hook Editions)

Jacket Copy:  Shortlisted for the Aperture-Paris Photo First Book Award, Attention Servicemember is Ben Brody’s searing elegy to the experience of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Brody was a soldier assigned to make visual propaganda during the Iraq War. After leaving the army, he traveled to Afghanistan as an independent civilian journalist. Returning to rural New England after 12 years at war, he found his home unrecognizable—even his own backyard radiated menace and threat. So he continued photographing the war as it exists in his own mind. Inspired by military field manuals, Attention Servicemember invites viewers through an evolving and often wickedly funny creative process—some pictures are intimate snapshots, some are slick jingoistic propaganda, others are meditative and subtle tableaus. Writing from an intensely personal perspective, he also offers an insiders’ view of the military, the media, and their contentious but symbiotic partnership. Anyone wondering how we wound up trusting serial liars and arguing about fake news should take a closer look at the cognitive disconnection in Baghdad and Kabul during the height of the wars. With a darkly engaging design treatment by Kummer & Herrman, Attention Servicemember is a powerful passport to that world.

Opening Lines:  In 2002, when Americans were expressing their newfound nationalistic fervor by supporting the invasion of Iraq, I resolved to photograph the brewing war. There was nothing for me to do in my hometown. The girl I’d been seeing had broken up with me again. We’d met at college, but I dropped out after a year to learn photography and sell cannabis to art students.
       I was 22 and thought the Iraq War would be a pivotal moment for my generation, as Vietnam was for my parents’ generation. I was skeptical, and assumed this war was as likely to achieve its objectives as Vietnam did. Almost all of my friends and family thought I was a fool for going. Because I had no money and had failed my only photojournalism class, I thought joining the Army as a combat photographer was the only way I could get to Iraq. I wanted to learn what my own country was all about, while also satisfying my naïve instincts about the steps a boy must take to become a self-determined adult. My Army recruiter didn’t believe the job of combat photographer existed. I told him I’d seen it in the catalog. Photographing the wars would be the next 15 years of my life.

Why It’s In My Stack:  Full disclosure: Ben Brody is a friend of mine. More than that, he is a fellow veteran with whom I had the pleasure of serving during the Iraq War. Ben and I deployed together with the 3rd Infantry Division in 2005 and I worked in the task-force headquarters public affairs office which oversaw Ben’s brigade public affairs shop. So, yes, I have a deep personal connection to this book. I have only skimmed the opening pages and while I’m very much looking forward to leafing through the rest of the photographs and textual interstices, I am also a little nervous about doing so because this reading experience will be like looking through a photo album of a particular time in my own life that I don’t often like to revisit, a reluctant trip down memory lane. This book is personal to me, as it will be for the soldiers Ben and I served with. But for everyone else, I urge you, in the strongest of terms, to buy this book for a look at the war you never saw from your living room. But be careful: these pages are bound to draw blood. Go here to see sample photos.

A Ghost of an Autumn

Here in western Montana, climate change robbed us of our Fall.

An early snowstorm on September 29 left us punched and reeling from an icy fist. In many parts of the region, snow levels were measured in feet, not inches. I woke to see my three cats staring out the living room picture window, stunned and purring nervously.

Instead of blazing with yellows and oranges, the leaves on the trees carpeting the hills around Butte curled up and died on the branches, turning a sickly dull brown overnight. They looked like pennies left too long in a miser’s pocket—a fitting sight for this mining city which built its wealth and reputation on the copper dredged from its soil, but a sore sight for eyes like mine which always look forward to the color-symphony of autumn. Fall has always been my favorite season. Not this year.

Thankfully, I have some good books at hand to distract me from the dead landscape outside my window.

My annual Halloween list this year consists primarily of three books: Ghost Stories, edited by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger; The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King; and Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. I’m still floating somewhere in the middle of each of them, but here are some of the highlights of my favorite spooky parts so far....

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

We all know the familiar opening line to Du Maurier’s 1938 Gothic novel, etched permanently in most of our minds by Alfred Hitchcock’s film. But there are chilling delights that creep up my spine the further I go in the book and read about how Maxim de Winter’s new wife (who remains unnamed throughout the novel) must contend with the memory and reputation of his first bride, Rebecca, who drowned after taking their boat out alone for an evening sail around the cliffs below Manderley. For instance, there is a scene when the “skull-faced” housekeeper Mrs. Danvers confronts the new Mrs. De Winter in Rebecca’s old bedroom and asks: “Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?” Apparently, Mrs. Danvers’ favorite hobby is keeping Rebecca alive by tormenting the second Mrs. De Winter. She proves that undying devotion to someone is not always a good thing.

Of course, having seen Hitchcock’s film countless times, I know how all this ends, but I’m enjoying my journey through Du Maurier’s novel which is so rich in imagery I often find myself reaching up to wipe away the ocean-dashed salt spray off my face. I’ve been listening to Rebecca on audiobook, narrated by actress Anna Massey sometime before she herself passed away in 2011. Massey expertly captures the, um, spirit of both Hitchcock’s movie and Du Maurier’s original words.

Stephen King has a way of turning ordinary, everyday objects into talismans of horror. Before reading The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, I never would have thought a cookie jar could be haunted. Or that an obituary could lead to a person’s death, rather than reporting it. Oh, and if you ever see a six-year-old boy with orange hair, green eyes, and a beanie, you should know bad things are about to happen: very, very bad things at the hands of a “Bad Little Kid” (one of the creepiest stories in these pages).

I’ve read some of these stories and novellas before—including Blockade Billy and Ur—but a return trip to King’s wicked prose did not disappoint.

As King himself says of the twenty-one tales (and a scatter of poems) gathered here, “The best of them have teeth.” Indeed they do, and they bite like vampires.

I busied myself to think of a story—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name.

Thus writes Mary Shelley in the introduction to Frankenstein and which is quoted in a footnote to Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense. This new anthology edited by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger is completely worthy of its name and might just be the favorite of this scary trio of books I’m currently reading. Morton and Klinger have assembled a blood-curdling array of stories here whose authors include Charles Dickens (this marks the fourth or fifth time I’ve read “The Signal Man” and I’m still freaked out by what happens at the mouth of that lonely railroad tunnel), Henry James, M. R. James, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sir Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allan Poe. If that sounds like a dusty, musty line-up to you, then you’d be wrong, dead wrong. Klinger and Morton expertly show how these ghost stories laid the foundation for the likes of Stephen King, Paul Tremblay, and Victor LaValle and serve as guideposts for any writer who wants to learn how to scare the hell out of readers.

Most of these tales also make us look at the genre of ghost stories in a fresh way (weird to say that about “dusty, musty” classics, eh?).

For instance, “Since I Died” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, first published in 1873, is narrated by a ghost who longs to reach out and touch her lesbian lover but can’t. It is as poignant as it is morbid (and surprisingly ahead of its time). Here’s a passage that is especially sad:

     I hold out my arms.
     You lift your head and look me in the eye.
     If a shudder crept across your figure; if your arms, laid out upon the table , leaped but once above your head; if you named my name; if you held your breath with terror, or sobbed aloud for love, or sprang, or cried—
     But you only lift your head and look me in the eye.
     If I dared step near, or nearer; if it were permitted that I should cross the current of your living breath; if it were willed that I should feel the leap of human blood within your veins; if I should touch your hands, your cheeks, your lips; if I dropped an arm as lightly as a snowflake round your shoulder—

Reading “Since I Died” made me think about my own afterlife to come and how horrible it would be if I couldn’t reach out to hug my wife with my light-as-snowflake arms. It’s enough to bring a cold, dead tear to my eye.

“The Last of Squire Ennismore” by Charlotte Riddell published in 1888 was another favorite story of mine and describes things that go bump in the night as well as anything I’ve seen or heard since I sat in a movie theater watching Poltergeist and Kubrick’s The Shining in the early 1980s. It opens with a fisherman recounting the strange goings-on in the titular squire’s house, which has now fallen into ruin:

There used to be awful noises, as if something was being pitched from the top of the great staircase down in to the hall; and then there would be a sound as if a hundred people were clinking glasses and talking all together at once. And then it seemed as if barrels were rolling in the cellars; and there would be screeches, and howls, and laughing, fit to make your blood run cold.

So there you have it: three ghostly reads for your Halloween list. They’re scary enough to freeze the sap in the trees around my house, even if a September snowstorm hadn’t gotten there first.

When My Father Fell in Love With Annie Dillard

In 1975, my father read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard and fell in love with both the book and its author. At the time, the Reverend Dan Abrams of the First Baptist Church in Jackson, Wyoming spent a goodly, Godly amount of time on the rivers and streams which braided through Jackson Hole like tangled silver necklaces. He could often be found in his non-pulpit hours standing on water-lapped banks, or thigh-deep in a tugging current, or atop great boulders in mid-stream where with his fly-rod raised like a sword and the determined, concentrated pinch of his face, he could be the model for a Civil War statue or, at the very least, the pudgy-but-dapper male model on page 54 of the L. L. Bean catalogue.

In the 1970s, my father spent so many restless hours outdoors that I wonder now if he wasn’t in daily pursuit of his own peaceful Tinker Creek where he could find temporary shelter from the emotional and soulful demands of the ministry. All I know is, when he read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, he closed the book with a sigh then sat down and wrote a love letter to its author. I was young then, but I can still remember the stir this caused in our house―not because of the word “love” (in my father’s line of work, love was the main commodity), but because he was corresponding with a famous person. Yes, once upon a time, writers were minor-league celebrities.

It was all in the guise of a proper book review which appeared in the weekly Jackson Hole News where, in fact, my father penned a weekly column called “Outdoors with Dan Abrams.” Over the course of nearly a decade, my father wrote about fishing, hiking, hunting, and conservation ethics. But mostly fishing. My father, the fisherman and, religiously-speaking, the “fisher of men,” was mad for piscatorial pursuits. In fact, if he’d been one of those original disciples on the beach who’d heard Jesus call to them, “Leave your nets and follow me!”, he might have been the last to drop his net and, with a final doleful look at the water, turn to go with the rest. I think it’s the simplicity of the water he loves: the languid glide over rocks, the rhythmic lap of waves, the determined, no-nonsense way a river cuts through a canyon of stone. He has always shared Annie Dillard’s “holy curiosity” for nature.

And so he reviewed her book.

And he sent her a tearsheet of the review.

And the author wrote back to the reviewer. And my father has rightly treasured that card with its quick-scrawled Thank You for years.

As I continue to make my way through James Mustich’s landmark 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, I have arrived at the D section, specifically “Di-”, and just around the corner from Dickens and next-door to Joan Didion, there is Annie Dillard. The inclusion of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, has stirred the memory of the time my father fell hard for Annie Dillard. Though I haven’t yet read Pilgrim (or, truth be told, any of Dillard’s other books―I am such a filial disappointment!), I remembered my father waxing rhapsodic about the book across a dozen dinnertimes. And so, the other day I asked my father if he still had a copy of that review. It arrived in my inbox less than an hour later. He, it seems, has not lost any of his ardor for this book....

I’ve never met Annie Dillard. Never laid eyes on her. But I think I’ve fallen in love with Annie Dillard (with my wife’s permission, of course).

You see, Annie wrote a book which she entitled Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It was published over a year ago, but I got around to reading it just last month.

I wish I had read it a year ago. In fact, I wish Annie had written it ten years ago and I had read it then. But I am grateful she did and that I stumbled across it.

At first glance Pilgrim appears to be a chronicle of a year’s hikes and observations of the plants, insects, birds and animals which inhabit the environs of Tinker Creek, an ordinary stream flowing near her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

But don’t let that fool you. Through the eyes of Annie Dillard, the ordinary becomes something special and the common things in nature give hints of the very essence of life and the universe itself.

She allows herself to become immersed in a sense of wonder at the intricacies and interrelationships of God’s creation. She thrills at each new insight of universal proportion as revealed through her windows opened toward the little world of Tinker Creek.

We walk and watch with Annie as she stalks muskrats, scares frogs, collects the eggs of a praying mantis, and sees a mosquito sinking its hypodermic stinger into the neck of a copperhead snake.

We sense her fascinated horror as she observes a giant water bug as it injects a frog with enzymes which dissolve the victim’s muscles, bones and organs. Then the heavy-bodied brown beetle sucks the frog dry of the resulting juices, leaving nothing but a formless skin floating in the film of the water.

Let me warn you, Annie’s imagination takes some strange leaps when you least expect it. She spends a night in a nearby meadow and somehow her thoughts wander to a phenomenon about eels described by Edwin Way Teale. [My father was also a big EWT fan; I have his books, too, but once again you should just go ahead and dip me headfirst in boiling oil because I haven’t read them.]

In one of his fascinating books, Teale tells how eels will sometimes crawl for a mile or more across dewy meadows to reach streams that will carry them to salt water. Annie’s stream of consciousness then flows along to consider the strange life cycle of eels. Not the ordinary stuff of thoughts to ponder as one whiles away the night on an inland meadow.

She has an insatiable thirst for kinky facts and quirks of nature. Annie sits under a sycamore tree near Tinker Creek and begins to contemplate the tremendous extent of life to be found in the top inch of soil on which her body rests.

There comes a consciousness of the fact that in the top inch of forest soil, scientists have found an average of 1,356 living creatures present in each square foot, including 865 mites, 265 springtails, 22 millipedes, 19 adult beetles and various numbers of 12 other forms. There could be upwards of two billion bacteria, and many millions of fungi, protozoa, and algae in a mere teaspoon of soil.

Such statistics tend to boggle the mind, but they keep Annie intensely aware of her surroundings and instills a refreshing sense of awe and wonder at finding herself in the presence of such variety and quantity of life.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek one receives new insights to the art of seeing, hints on stalking small wild creatures, and a treasure of interesting facts (ten percent of all the world’s species are parasitic insects).

Annie Dillard is a poet and it is a pleasure to read words strung together exquisitely as pearls on a delicate strand from Cartiers.

Her enthusiasm for life, her childlike sense of wonder and her aggressive curiosity seriously infect the reader. All of this has joined together in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to produce a hymn of joyous praise to the Creator and His world.

Do yourself a favor and read this book. It will go a long way in honing your sensitivity to the natural world about you and thus tuning up your capacity to enjoy the moment at hand wherever you are. Be careful, though. You, too, will probably fall in love with Annie Dillard.

After all, who can resist a girl who plays “King of the Meadow” with a field of grasshoppers and who delights in knowing there are two-hundred twenty-eight separate and distinct muscles in the head of an ordinary caterpillar.

[...There is something endearing about that “Shucks.” I like to think of the author sitting at her table, the burble and babble of Tinker Creek riding to her on the breeze, reading this fawning review that arrived out of the blue from a preacher-man in Wyoming, feeling the pink bloom across her cheeks, searching her roomy writer’s brain for just the right word and finally finding it in the simple, charming Shucks.]

*     *     *

Postscript: When I visited Annie Dillard’s website after posting this, I learned just how rare and special that handwritten note has turned out to be. The Annie Dillard of 1975, still standing fresh and unknowing at the doorstep of her approaching fame, could afford the time to write to small-town pastors; now, however, it’s another story (and justifiably so; I may one day steal/borrow these words for my own0:

Like many other writers, I can no longer read, let alone comment on, the many books and manuscripts people send me. I am going to stop even acknowledging them, to my sorrow and the sorrow of many good writers. I’m merely overwhelmed. I can’t help get others’ writing published, not because I’m holding out, but because I don’t know any agents who are taking on new writers or even who handle “literature.” I lay low. Nor can I write introductions or forwards or provide comments or text or reviews. It’s a matter of time, not of heart. If I answered one-twentieth of the mail, I could neither read nor write, let alone take care of family.

Scary as Sheet: Ghost Stories For My Halloween

I live in a house that has good potential to breed ghosts. Built in 1920, the Craftsman home on a quiet tree-lined street in Butte, Montana, is a jigsaw puzzle of dark corners, cobwebbed crawlspaces, drafty closets, an obsolete coal chute, and narrow, twisting staircases that send one’s mind reeling with vertigo. In the basement lurks a big-bellied, multi-armed and asbestos-lined furnace that, when it gleams with inner fire, looks like a mechanical beast out of Jules Verne. And one hears things. At night, the radiators tick like approaching high heels. The blowsy curtains shift from side to side, in a breezeless room. There are creaks, there are hums, there are papery whispers behind one’s back.

The house has seen its share of stories, passing through several different Butte families before us, including one owner, a well-known married ophthalmologist, who met a scandalous end when he was killed in a car accident, along with an 18-year-old female passenger. In an unofficial history left by previous owners, there’s a winking little addendum to the story: He was known for his wandering eye and partying ways.

Like I said, stories have attached themselves to this house. And I believe some characters from those stories still live here.

During one visit, my daughter tripped near the top of one of those spiral staircases, barely catching herself in time from falling. She swears she was nudged from behind. A distinct push against the middle of my back. She was alone in the house at the time.

Houses contain us, we live our lives in them, and it is not surprising that they might continue to shelter us after we die. We are attached to our homes, perhaps so much that we cannot leave, even though we are dead. A haunted house has an emptiness that is filled by the inappropriate or unnatural. A house can lose its soul, a house can go bad. Houses can be monuments to personality, we inflict our tastes upon them, but they can afflict us with their perversity in return. Ghosts can be like vermin–pests to be driven away or exterminated. We are anxious about our houses. Even the most conciliatory, helpful house can become supernaturally burdensome.

I don’t know if I’m supernaturally burdened in my house or if those noises in the other room are just noises, but I do know I suck a lot of pleasure out of that paragraph from Audrey Niffenegger’s introduction to her excellent collection, Ghostly, which is one of the books I’ve been reading this past month to get me in the mood for Halloween.

Ghostly begins with “The Black Cat.” It has been years–decades–since I read Edgar Alan Poe’s classic, and Niffenegger was smart to open her roster with this one because I felt those spinal chills all afresh as if for the first time when I read these words from the narrator (murderer and terrible pet owner) when he overconfidently bangs against his cellar wall as a show of bravado in front of the investigating policemen:

       “Gentlemen,” I said at last, as the party ascended the steps,” I delight to have allayed your suspicions. I wish you all health, and a little more courtesy. By the bye, gentlemen, this–this is a very well constructed house.” ( In the rabid desire to say something easily, I scarcely knew what I uttered are all.)–“I may say an excellently well constructed house. These walls–are you going, gentlemen?–these wall are solidly put together,” and here, through the mere frenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily, with a cane which I held in my hand, upon that very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom.
       But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs of the Arch-Fiend! No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, than I was answered by a voice from within the tombs!–by a cry, at first muffed and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman–a howl–a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the dammed in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.

The book only gets better from there. Shivery standouts include short stories by Edith Wharton, Oliver Onions (funny name, creepy story), A. M. Burrage, A. S. Byatt, and Neil Gaiman, whose “Click-Clack the Rattlebag” is an icy stab to the heart. I don’t want to spoil anything for the virgin reader, but these lines near the end really sent me over the edge:

He pushed open the door to the attic room. It was perfectly dark, now, but the opening door disturbed the air, and I heard things rattle gently, like dry bones in thin bags, in the slight wind. Click. Clack. Click. Clack. Like that.

Ghostly also briskly re-introduced me to Saki and his equally-brisk pleasures. “Laura” and “The Open Window” are both delights in narrative wordplay, trickery, and compression. Especially the latter. Saki gets the job done in the time it takes some writers (present company included) to merely warm up the pen.

Niffenegger closes Ghostly with Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” (updated here to “August 2026”). As she writes in her introductory note: “Perhaps this is not a ghost story at all, but I like to think it is. It is a story of the ghost of a house and the ghost of a civilization. It is a warning and a parable. Of all the stories in this book, it is the most possible.”

The story moves like a roving camera, in one take, through a day in the life (and death) of a house which has miraculously survived a nuclear attack. The house lived, but nothing else did:

       The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.
       Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.
       The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.
       The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.

A house also featured prominently in my TV watching in October. The Haunting of Hill House was only nominally, tangentially related to the novel by Shirley Jackson, and it took my wife and I a couple of episodes to really get into the Netflix series, but when we did, we were sucked in, as helpless as poor little Carol Anne splaying her fingers across the television screen in Poltergeist. There were plenty of legitimate jump scares that had me choking on my candy corn, but more than anything The Haunting of Hill House succeeded as–get this–a tender story about the bonds of family and how to deal with grief and guilt. The scares melt to schmaltz in the final episode as the denouement swerves like a car on an icy road toward a tree called This is Us, but even that isn’t enough to dampen the series’ well-earned sentiment of family first, even unto death.

I also appreciate how the Netflix series was kind enough to include a few patches of text lifted directly from Jackson’s famous opening/closing lines:

Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it has stood for eighty years and might stand eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

I concluded my Halloween reading jag with Dolly by Susan Hill. While I wouldn’t rate it as highly as I would her previously ghost story novella, The Man in the Picture, Dolly does have its moments. Hill creates a soupy, chilly atmosphere of an isolated house out on the fens in Britain. She writes: “Empty houses breed fantasies, bleak landscapes lend themselves to fearful imaginings.” There are some superb, evocative descriptions which all combine to create some tense scenes surrounding temperamental children, a too-large mansion, and an unappreciated gift, a doll. And don’t even get me started on the rustling of tissue paper.

Speaking of odd noises, I just heard something strange coming from the other room. I’m gonna go check it out and then I’ll be right back.

Quivering Pen: The Resurrection

Just like General MacArthur, a bad penny, and that ugly sweater you got from your Aunt Julie last Christmas, I have returned.

For a variety of reasons too complicated and personal to go into here, I let this blog lapse into a four-month silence. While I had plenty to occupy my time and engage my attention this past winter, I always felt the gentle yet insistent tug of The Quivering Pen: Come back to me. Put blood in my veins once again.

And so here I am. Here we are. For now, at least. I don’t know how rigorous or frequent my writing here at the blog will be going forward from this day (because, after all, I am starting work on a new book and I have my priorities in order), but I’ll try not to let so much time pass between posts again. I’ll soon be bringing back all the old regulars: My First Time, Friday Freebie, and Sunday Sentence, along with the occasional guest post and, if I can make the time for it, my own stream-of-consciousness musings about reading, writing and publishing.

(By the way, even though I’m posting this on the first day of April, this is no joke. The Quivering Pen is, indeed, back.)

One reason—which may seem small to you, but felt huge to me—why the blog jumped the tracks back in January was the Best of 2017 posts I’d planned to write, highlighting my favorite books and literary moments of the past year. I’d made notes all year long, but had never gotten around to actually stringing all those words into something coherent and interesting. I always meant to get it done, but I never carved out enough hours during the day to finish those blog posts. Time passed. More time passed. Too much time passed. And then it seemed silly to be posting a “Best of” feature halfway into the next year. And so The Quivering Pen drifted off into silence.

That in itself is silly, of course. Why should the calendar—and the fact that everyone else had posted their lists back in November and December—keep me from publicly expressing my love for certain books published in 2017? Who wrote the rule that no best-books lists should be posted after January? Probably the same jerk who once said it was gauche to wear white after Labor Day.

And so, without further ado and dithering (and with minimal commentary because I’m still fighting those irrational feelings of “don’t bother posting this if it isn’t a long and comprehensive review”), here are my various picks for the cream of 2017’s literary crop, starting with

THE BEST BOOKS OF 2017

Hourglass
by Dani Shapiro
This is my new gold standard for how memoirs should be written: tight, poetic, and deeply-felt. Shapiro charts the course of her 18-year marriage to “M.” in the space of 161 beautiful pages. Along the way, she covers a wide swath of territory, including thoughtful meditations on how external forces like luck (good and bad), family history, and those damned grains of sand in the hourglass can bend, but not always break, a relationship. On the surface, Hourglass may look like a small book, but open it up and it becomes a candle in a dark room whose light reaches all corners of the heart.

Lincoln in the Bardo
by George Saunders
In my personal reading history, Saunders’ unique novel about Abraham Lincoln’s grief over the loss of his son is as rare as an albino Tyrannosaurus Rex: I loved this book so much that I read it twice, once on audiobook and then in print. That never happens, mainly due to the constant flood of new books coming into my home. But Lincoln in the Bardo is so full of nuance that a second time through was just as rewarding. It is easily one of my favorites of the year, in any format.

Letters to a Young Writer
by Colum McCann
I can think of no better compliment for McCann’s book of advice to writers (and all creative artists) than to say the ink in my new highlighter pen ran dry halfway through reading. Open my copy and all you’ll see is canary-yellow lines shading brilliant bits of wisdom.

Imagine Wanting Only This
by Kristen Radtke
Can a book about urban decay move me to tears? If we’re talking about Radtke’s graphic memoir about ruined places like deserted cities in the American Midwest, an Icelandic town buried in volcanic ash, and islands in the Philippines, then the answer is a most emphatic “Yes!” Like the equally-brilliant Building Stories by Chris Ware and Here by Richard McGuire, Imagine Wanting Only This made me think long and hard about what we love, what we leave behind, and what ultimately crumbles back to dust and rust.

We Could’ve Been Happy Here
by Keith Lesmeister
This is a criminally-overlooked collection of short stories about contemporary Midwesterners that had me running out the door and grabbing everyone by the shoulders and shouting, “You have GOT to read this!”—on social media, rather than in real life, of course, because I am at heart a shy person. Consider your shoulders shaken, dear blog reader. You really must give this collection a try, not only because it was issued by a small press that, despite all good efforts, wasn’t large enough to make this book ping your literary radar, but also because Lesmeister writes beautiful lines like “The autumn sun felt like a quilt” and “I felt like a rusty nail getting hammered into the knot of a two-by-twelve, getting all bent up, going nowhere.”

Theft by Finding: Diaries: 1977-2002
by David Sedaris
I knew this diary would be funny. What I didn’t expect was how moving and thought-provoking it would be. And yes, the section previously covered in The Santaland Diaries is just as brilliant the second time around.

See What I Have Done
by Sarah Schmidt
The opening pages of Schmidt’s debut novel about Lizzie Borden are drenched in blood, but don’t let that deter you from this breath-taking historical thriller, a stunning book that makes us reconsider that 1892 crime in a new light. Schmidt tells the tale via a chorus of voices, each offering a slightly different perspective on what happened in that house, leading us to think long and hard about Lizzie’s so-called “forty whacks” with the axe. Did she or didn’t she do it? When the writing is this good, who cares?

Draw Your Weapons
by Sarah Sentilles
After my reading from Brave Deeds at Powell’s last summer, bookseller Kevin Sampsell came up to me and said, “Have you read this?” I took one look at the cover with its paintbrush morphing into bullets and said the same thing to the book that I did to my wife when we met thirty-four years ago: “Where have you been all my life?” I don’t say this lightly: Draw Your Weapons will completely change your outlook on art, war, and religion. Sentilles does an incredible job of blending the stories of two men: Howard, a conscientious objector during World War II, and Miles, a former prison guard at Abu Ghraib. Reading this felt like putting on a pair of prescription glasses after squinting at the blurry world my whole life. Thanks again for the recommendation, Kevin!

The Girl of the Lake
by Bill Roorbach
Let me just put this out there: I love Bill Roorbach, I love his sentences, and I really love this book of short stories. All nine stories in the collection are terrific, but my favorites are “The Fall” and “Harbinger Hall.” Dive in, readers!

The Shape of Ideas
by Grant Snider
I have loved Snider’s Incidental Comics series for years and so I greeted the news that the best of them would be collected into a hardbound book by tooting a horn, releasing a cloud of butterflies, and taking my menagerie of pet alligator, turtle, cheetah, and camel for a parade down Main Street. Oh wait, that was Snider’s alter ego doing those things in these pages. Still, that’s the kind of joy I always feel when encountering Snider’s offbeat imagination, so perfectly inked in panels that teem with inspiration. If I were the Secretary of Education, I would make Congress pass a law that said every graduating high school student should get a copy of The Shape of Ideas along with their diploma.

THE BEST FIRST LINES OF 2017

Phoebe never hated her husband more than when she visited him in prison.
       The Widow of Wall Street by Randy Susan Meyers


Despite protests from the Kirkwood Neighbors’ Organization and bad press in the local paper, they bulldozed the house where I lost my virginity.
       Flight Path by Hannah Palmer


I left Indiana and drove toward happiness.
       Should I Still Wish by John W. Evans


Killing, Balint discovered, was the easy part. Not killing required discipline and restraint.
       The Mask of Sanity by Jacob M. Appel


My mother had two placentas and I was living off both of them.
       Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash


After my mom hangs herself, I become Nancy Drew.
       The Art of Misdiagnosis by Gayle Brandeis


In a coffee shop on Dead Elm Street, Norma arranges chicken bones on her plate, making an arrow that points to her stomach, where the chicken now resides.
       The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt


Francis never expected the silverware would be his undoing.
       The World of Tomorrow by Brendan Mathews


The index finger is in my pocket feeling like a soft twig, or a bent piece of stale licorice in my warm palm.
       What’s Wrong With You Is What’s Wrong With Me by Christian Winn

THE BEST BOOK COVERS OF 2017

The Age of Perpetual Light by Josh Weil, design by Nick Misani

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, design by Rachel Willey

Exes by Max Winter, design by Strick&Williams

To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann, design by Oliver Munday

Heating & Cooling by Beth Ann Fennelly, design by Alex Merto

The Fall of Lisa Bellow by Susan Perabo, design by Alison Forner

The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler, design by Allison Saltzman

The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott, design by Alex Merto

Isadora by Amelia Gray, design by Na Kim

Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips, design by Jason Ramirez

Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash, design by Karl Engebretson, illustration by George Boorujy

Release by Patrick Ness, design by Erin Fitzsimmons

I’m Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking by Leyna Krow, design by Zach Dodson

See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt, design by “committee”