Craig Brownlie is back with two more amazing reviews for us! Craig is a great friend and author and I really love his detailed reviews. He's been sharing them with us for a while now and it's always greatly appreciated.
Check out his thoughts below on DMV by Bentley Little and Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias.
Enjoy!
DMV by Bentley Little
Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias
Reviewed by Craig Brownlie
Consider the cheeseburger with the mold discovered only after you have passed five miles from the drive thru. It is neither fight nor flight, but it is hard not to think on your own mortality and that of the fast-food cook who chose to foist the green lump on your bubbling belly.
If you are reading this, then you have survived this long in a world that conspires to end you. We have all made it this far by alternately fighting and compromising. Some of us are more finely attuned to the give and take of survival. Occasionally, all of us notice.
In both their novels, Bentley Little and Gabino Iglesias ask, “What do you do to survive in a world that has always been insane?” The stories initiate with maddening events which highlight just how crazy the universe has always been. Our protagonists had previously adjusted to a specific level of madness. Up until the rise of the dark gods of the DMV and the U.S/Mexican borderlands, life carried on with a comprehensible degree of madness which our main characters would probably describe as the current unacceptable normal.
Right now, I’m questioning the wisdom of pouring some mezcal before sitting down to write this review. Not because I need fortification for dropping an opinion, but because it’s mezcal and I’m wondering if I have any other books in the house by Iglesias or Little. The hard truth with reviews is that it is difficult to pinpoint the exact reason the work falls into your brain and your heart hard enough to call out for a review.
Maybe it’s just me. Peeling the onion on a work of art can become heartbreaking. I was wrecked for so many movies in the 1980’s because I studied film and theater so intensely. I saw every choice made by every collaborator. It took a lot of friends and a lot of great artists to help me step back into the world of contented consumption.
But books… I love the way the sausage is made. And Little and Iglesias make wonders that taste of sage and cumin and garlic. They speak succinctly, chopping out the excess verbiage. They pull the plot along with tightly bound moments which linger in the memory. With a sip of a paragraph, they can make your heart burn, and your eyes open wide. Their characters do not overburden us with backstory while still sitting up on the page fully formed. They refuse to belabor a metaphor until it tastes like mush… And they do not overuse the ellipsis.
To bear dissection and still flow like deep water is a gift to an author and a reader.
Still, we know what we know. Skillful altering of the expected can rip the ground from beneath us. Both books thrive on what we think we know about environments that already feel fraught (though let’s be clear that renewing your driver’s license does not hold a patch on crossing the southern border of the United States).
In Coyote Songs, Iglesias entwines multiple stories of the Mexico/U.S. border, blending his stories through place and embodied emotion. Much like Sherwood Anderson or Thornton Wilder amped to eleven, Iglesias’s characters offer a multitude of perspectives to illuminate the reach of a seemingly discrete situation. This is fiction (in the tradition of those and many other great writers) peering into the dark heart of a man-made situation and not talking heads on a news program insisting immigration is complicated.
Little has published many books in a long career. Some of them put commonplace organizations in their crosshairs and twist insurance companies, tech start-ups, business consultants, etc., into horrific commentaries on the modern condition as experienced by middle class America. Little’s DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) is a monolith experiencing an acquisition and reorganization. In the process, the annoying bureaucracy flexes its muscles and becomes the worst sort of Big Brother with capital punishment and kidnaping on its corporate mind.
Reading Iglesias and Little in close proximity highlights the different effects achieved by heavily leavening horror with current experiences and issues. Both can churn the stomach and wrench tears and laughter, but those are the accomplishments of finely-honed craft. In the end, satire hits hard when it exaggerates a current situation that has not crossed into inarguable horror in real life. Franz Kafka long ago satirized the madness of the societies we had constructed. Even his brilliance would fail to elicit laughter at a world that trades in human flesh rather than proper documentation.
Old Franz would be flabbergasted to know we still read his work today though I’m of the belief that he’d be pleased. In his case, the social commentary plays with general angst. DMV and Coyote Songs launch from specifics. All three authors (Little, Iglesias, and Kafka) are alive to their times which has led to powerful art. Their mastery of their craft allows that art to continue to have relevance. That continued relevance is to our sustained shame.
Skip the nighttime coffee as you curl up with these highly recommended books
Bio for Craig Brownlie: Abbott and Costello starred in the movies which introduced Craig to monsters. By the time he saw Steve McQueen in The Blob, Craig could just about cope. This was in broad daylight on weekend afternoons in the safety of his parents’ home. Also, the television screen was really small. None of this stopped him from checking out all the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies from the library- think classic horror mixed with R.L. Stine. Look for his work in Space and Time Magazine, Demons and Death Drops, No More Resolutions, Lovecraftiana, and Unspeakable Horrors 3. He has three books out in his Little Books of Pain series: Hammer, Nail, Foot; Thick As A Brick; and A Book of Practical Monsters. These are in addition to the re-release of his middle-grade novel Comic Book Summer.
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