I have not had the brain to write full-length essays or reviews but I have been reading a lot this year, so I thought I’d try writing about books briefly (and therefore, one hopes, posting a little more frequently.)

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I didn’t expect Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds to turn into a parallel worlds soap opera when I started it, but I suppose that is the nature of parallel worlds: evil twins and doppelgangers for everyone! I enjoyed this. The multiverse felt vast, but the individual worlds feel small and claustrophobically contained. The damaged narrator oblivious to being loved is a trope I’m fond of, and there are, conveniently, just enough moving parts between all available worlds for a neat resolution.

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones is, of course, great. An SGJ binge this year has recalibrated my hitherto meh feelings on the slasher as a genre and made me want to go back and fill in the vast gaps in my viewing of the canon (I’ve seen, like, some Friday the 13ths and an Elm Street or two …? Nobody tell SGJ.) This one does feel like familiar ground, in that it’s basically The Last Final Girl as seen through Demon Theory, but without that screenplay-ish narrative device, which probably makes it more accessible to people who are not big nerds (I loved the screenplayish thing obv.) But Chainsaw also feels more polished and much more accessible to the slasher newbie, since the narrator’s homework assignments are a neat way of filling in the lore for those of us who have not done our own homework.

Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail is brief, lovely, and devastating. As you might expect, it’s incredibly good at the details, and the shift in style between the two halves works wonderfully: the first half is the crime of the past, recounted in an almost fable-like fashion, and the second half is about the crime that is the present, which its nervous, boundary-crossing narrator manages to almost make sound normal for a while, so much so that the ending doesn’t feel predictable (in the sense of dull), even though it is (in the sense of inevitable and narratively necessary.) It’s not surprising, but it is painful, and perhaps even sudden, which ought to have been impossible.