Books Read in 2023 # 222-223 - Shit Happens, I guess

222.The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers - I wanted to read this one because I saw my friend Billy (aka Poppy Z. Brite) talking about it on Facebook and he really loved it. It does have some great stuff going on and it is a first novel by a twenty something writer so there are some things to love and some things to be forgiven. Also for a 1950s book that takes place in the South written by a white woman it's refreshingly not racist, and in fact is anti-racist (according to Wikipedia, Richard Wright praised it for being the first book by a white writer that actually cared about the humanity of the black characters). That's an amazing bonus after I tried reading the complete stories of Flannery O'Connor and spent most of it going "does she mean to be this racist? This seems very racist" until I just finally realized "Nope, the bitch is racist as fuck."

It's interesting to see a Southern town from the perspective of the outsiders - a drunk radical wannabe union organizer, a ten year old girl, a deaf mute man who is probably gay, a black doctor and the owner of an all night diner who just stays open 24 hours because he likes it that way.

As far as the plot goes, well there's not much of a plot. There are a lot of side plots and subplots but the characters all get relatively equal time. So the ten year old girl watches her brother shoot another girl in the head (the girl lives) and by the end has to quit her job. The drunk keeps wanting to make everything better. The doctor thinks that he should be definitely more active but he's also afraid to get lynched, so when his daughter's friend loses his feet in prison because of solitary confinement in a freezer he has mixed feelings. The late night diner guy is the only one who doesn't get much of a story arc. His wife dies around page 50 and he mostly remains off camera especially when the deaf mute stops coming.

The deaf mute is the only one who gets much of an arc with his "friend" (maybe lover) who is an alcoholic. When his lover ends up in a hospital/nursing home, he is alone and ends up in a rooming house and everyone talks to him because he's not contradicting them. But he has a life and perspective of his own that no one really sees or even cares about.

223.Anno Dracula 1895: Seven Days in Mayhem by Kim Newman & Paul McCaffery - So here's an Anno Dracula adjacent book. I did love Anno Dracula but I read another book in the same universe (a novella in a bad collection of novellas) with Orson Welles trying to make a movie with vampires and it was garbage.

This one is a bit confused. There are many plots and subplots and the thing directly references The Man Who Was Thursday with everyone in the secret organization being a spy. There's a funny moment later in the book when one of the secret agents shows his badge and says he's a secret agent for the government to investigate subversives and the cop goes "bad luck for you, I'm a subversive who infiltrated the cops" and shoots him.

The plot is almost as confused as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter but this is a mystery with too many plot threads and eventually it's about fighting a vampire lady named light and I guess Dracula is still in charge. I thought they killed Dracula in Anno Dracula - or at least deposed him - maybe they killed Queen Victoria.

Books Read in 2023 # 224-226 - Psycho Manga

224.Betwixt edited by Junji Ito - Ok, this is the second disappointing Junji Ito manga in a row but in this case, it's not his fault. I just didn't know this was an anthology that he edited. So he edited it and half the stories are originally in Japanese and half are originally in English so you read it Japanese right to left and then English right to left (or vice versa). Some of these are good. Some are forgettable.

I liked the one about "don't open the window" because it's supposedly a dead woman coming at you. But then the one character looks and says "it's not a woman, it's something else" and it doesn't want to get close for revenge. It wants a better look at the people opening up the window. Also there's a story about a body under the ice for ice fishing with the one character going "no, let's go, that's me" and the body under the ice takes his place. So those were good. But just not Junji Ito levels (and these are new writers so they might be great later on but these are early works)

225.Fire Punch 7 by Tatsuki Fujimoto - And now we get the revenge plot more with Agni trying to live a normal life. Then the people come back and want to revive him. He's even dealing with the cults that started around him when he was on fire and burning things up. There's a lot of "kill Fire Punch" with the thought that maybe if he decides never to be fire punch again. The ending is ambiguous, but this is the penultimate chapter so it all leads into the conclusion.

226.Spirit & Cat Ears by Miyuki Nakayama - This is just as confused as the previous one. There's a whole story about possession and family sins. But there's also a cheesy poster of the characters in bikinis to start the thing. I don't really follow the story. It's fine but I'm not reading anymore.