Books of 2019, #1–2
[This is simply a chronicling of the books I read in 2019. I’m hoping I do better at keeping up with this, and writing a bit on each novel or comic or whatever, throughout the year.]
#1 — THE FADE OUT
Rereading this years later solidified how much I think it’s a Hollywood neo-noir masterpiece; the kind of perfect story about a writer, a dead girl, and a studio system and a government that could take anyone and everyone down, that I’m frankly shocked hasn’t been adapted into a miniseries yet. Like any other Edward Brubaker/Sean Phillips story, it’s a bleak one, but that doesn’t make it any less great.
If anything has soured in the years since it came out, it’s seeing Devin Faraci’s essays in the back of a number of issues. They’re rather bare bones attempts at looking into Hollywood scandals and histories that, apart from being written by a dude with a history of sexual assault, aren’t actually worth reading. Just pop on Karina Longworth’s podcast instead and get a genuinely worthwhile history lesson.
#2 — THE SLUTS
I have to thank Caden Mark Gardner & Frank Jaffe for this recommendation(the former explicitly for this book and the latter for introducing me to Dennis Cooper overall) because I really haven’t sat down to swallow a novel in one afternoon in a very long time.
THE SLUTS is a fascinating, seedy, erotic thriller told almost entirely digitally through unreliable narrators. It’s as shameless about its layers of fabrication as it can be and all the better for it. In an ideal world, I’d love to see this adapted into a wildly long film that played more like a visual novel, told through forums, faxes, emails, audio recordings, and scanned images. Or, maybe the real appeal is that there are no faces attached to this. Everything is in your mind.
There’s something engrossing about reading a book about these extreme fetishists and these con-artists — a sort of torture porn adjacent tale that forces the reader to imagine every hole eating, every bone-crushing beating, every near death experience — never knowing if it’s real or not.
In a way, it’s exactly like porn in the way it describes these scenes playing out. Cooper is determined to arouse the reader intellectually more so than sexually, quite literally having characters refer to the proceedings as too morose and grim to be exciting or intriguing anymore. But fuck, it’s so appealing, enough to make the reader into just as much of a moth as the participants within the forums, all drawn to the legend of Brad and Brian.
