#46: Silver Screen Fiend by Patton Oswalt

Patton Oswalt's first book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland revealed him as an Earth-2 version of myself, growing up on Dungeons and Dragons and sci-fi movies; his latest collection of essays, Silver Screen Fiend, only cements his status as a lost brother.

In this, Oswalt talks about the transformative power the New Beverly Cinema had on him as he struggled as a standup comedian, writer, and actor.  The New Beverly showed classic and cult double features, and Oswalt became obsessed with the venue and movies in general.

Most interestingly, Oswalt talks about the idea of a "Night Cafe"--a room you go into (real or figurative), and come out forever changed.  How these "Night Cafes" steered his career in various ways was fascinating, to me.

I listened to this on audiobook, read by the author, and that may be the best way to enjoy Oswalt's musings.  This copy was on loan from the Morrisson-Reeves Public Library in Richmond, Indiana.

Recommended for fans of nerd culture of all stripes.

#45: Atlantic Hotel by João Gilberto Noll

An unnamed narrator, mistaken for someone else, goes on a perilous journey and brushes up against death and sex in Atlantic Hotel by Brazilian author João Gilberto Noll.

Noll's slender novel is a lot of things at once; a surreal odyssey, a religious analogy, a hardboiled noir, a psychedelic parable.  The back-cover description makes it sound like more of a noir, but its hallucinogenic imagery, and cryptic finale, make it anything--and everything--but.

Recommended for those readers who enjoy literary fiction and/or international fiction, but are prepared for sex and violence.

I purchased this with an Amazon gift card and read it quickly.

#44: The Whites by Harry Brandt

A gang of rule-bending New York cops who once called themselves "The Wild Geese" are aging, retiring, and mellowing; but their past comes back to haunt them in The Whites by Richard Price, using the pseudonym Harry Brandt.

The Whites of the title are the "white whales" that the cops each carry in their memories, criminals they tried to prosecute for terrible crimes that somehow slipped through the system.  When the "Whites" start dying off, the one remaining member of The Wild Geese, coasting out on the graveyard shift, tries to figure it all out, even while another troubled cop zeroes in on his family.

Richard Price has written some great literate, tough-minded urban fiction, such as The Wanderers and Clockers, and apparently decided to set out and write a straight genre novel--but it reads so much like vintage Price that his secret was uncovered quicker than J.K. Rowling's "Robert Galbraith."  There are vivid characters spouting colorful dialogue, lots of kinetic action, and a murky finale.

Recommended.  I listened to a very good audiobook reading, on loan from the Morrisson-Reeves Public Library in Richmond Indiana, read by Ari Fliakos.

#43: The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge

A writer decides to explore the long-ago relationship between H.P. Lovecraft and a gay teenage fan; when he goes missing, his therapist wife reluctantly takes up the search in Paul La Farge's The Night Ocean.

This interlude in Lovecraft's life is real, as is this young man growing up to be one of William S. Burrough's professors in Mexico City, in the "truth is stranger than fiction" category.  How La Farge blends truth and fiction is a compelling, decades-spanning riff on science fiction, fandom, relationships, and more, peppered with lots of real-life people and well-drawn fictional ones.

La Farge creates stories within stories, peeling back the onion on truth, lies, and speculation, an interesting metafiction that would appeal to fans of literary and genre fiction.  Recommended.

I checked this out from the Morrisson-Reeves Public Library in Richmond, Indiana.

#42: Two Graves for a Gunman by Barry Cord

A young cowhand is challenged by the outlaw Texas Jack to a showdown; when the less experienced cowhand surprisingly kills the outlaw, he sets out to find out more about the man he killed in Barry Cord's Two Graves for a Gunman.

The two graves of the title come into play when the cowhand finds out Texas Jack might have been a Civil War hero, and already has a memorial in a small town nearby.  Many secrets, that the townspeople would prefer to have stayed buried, begin to come to the surface.

Barry Cord was in reality the highly prolific author Peter Germano, who wrote mostly westerns for paperback and television. This oater is tight and compact enough to be pretty much television-sized, and was a quick read.

Two Graves for a Gunman is half of an Ace Double with another Barry Cord novel, The Deadly Amigos, on the flip side.  I nabbed this at the Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention in Chicago, and enjoyed it enough to start reading the other side.

#41: Glaxo by Hernan Ronsino

In a remote Argentinian town, at an intersection where a barbershop, a bar, a movie theater and a giant factory all squat alongside a train track getting dismantled, murder, betrayal, and revenge play out over several decades in Hernan Ronsino's Glaxo.

Glaxo is a slender, tightly-wound noir whose puzzle is intricately assembled through multiple narrators jumping back and forth in time.  Everything is packed in there from a femme fatale to a framed innocent to a stool pigeon to a corrupt official who orchestrates it all in the end. 

The denouement is especially satisfying, and caused me to thumb back through the book to see the tumblers fall.

This is Ronsino's first novel translated into English, and is as sure-handed and hard-boiled a noir as I have read.  Recommended for fans seeking new voices.

I checked this out from the Morrisson-Reeves Public Library in Richmond, Indiana and read it quickly.

#40: Camanchaca by Diego Zuniga

A young, disenfranchised Chilean man tries to work through some deep-rooted family dysfunction in Diego Zuniga's Camanchaca.

The young man travels over the summer with his absent father, and his father's new wife and son, while keeping a too-close tether to his mother back home and dealing with a reproachful grandfather.

Zuniga's novel is slender--most of the chapters are a single page, or even a paragraph--and full of tiny sketches, many of them mournful, some uncomfortable, and some mysterious (including the unexplained fate of a missing uncle).

Finely-wrought prose in an interesting debut.  For fans of literate character sketches, and complicated answers to hard questions.

I checked this out from the Morrisson-Reeves Library in Richmond, Indiana and read it quickly.

#39: The Green Eagle Score by Richard Stark

Legendary thief Parker is brought in on a payroll heist that, surprisingly, takes place on an Air Force base in Richard Stark's The Green Eagle Score.

Donald Westlake wrote quite a few Parker novels as Richard Stark, mostly hard-boiled caper novels, a lot of which became movies, comics, spinoff novels, homages, and so on.  I have read and enjoyed a number of them over the years, which I started looking for after getting to meet the gracious Westlake once.

I found this novel, from the late 60s, as an audiobook at the New Castle-Henry County Public Library in New Castle, Indiana, so I gave it a listen.  It's a very tidy little heist story with an interesting setting, and naturally has the requisite double and triple crosses (many centered around an unscrupulous psychotherapist). 

Genre readers who have yet to discover Donald Westlake, or The Green Eagle Score in particular, will find much to enjoy.