It hasn’t been a great week.

Since we are now in the 52nd week since the nation began the deliberate descent into the odd conflation of Oligarchy and White Christian Nationalism, I really hadn’t expected much in the way of unfettered joy this week, but Halloween brought a momentary release from the drear and doom, a lovely escape into fantasy with my trick and treating granddaughter and, I assume, a candy corn fueled sugar high.

Now, settling back into more of the same dreary assault on fact, human aspiration, and science, I turn to the most immediate challenges arriving in the coming week – my book club assignments.

I belong to two book clubs, one a legacy of magical friendships in Oregon and the second an attempt to find connection and purpose in our new home in Connecticut. The first, begun on the banks of a duckpond in Ashland, Oregon, is idiosyncratic, reader’s choice, a wild Willy Wonka ride careening from mainstream popular literature. Colm Toibin’s Long Island, to Alvaro Enrique’s You Dreamed of Empires. We meet virtually and, now that some of us have left the duckpond, spend much of the meeting catching up. The second, the Simsbury Mystery Book Club, has been directed by the same reader/author for more than a decade. She shares my taste in mysteries (especially a fondness for the snappy banter in David Handler’s “Hoagy and Lulu” mysteries), but organizes the season’s slate by topic. Last year, we read five “Mysteries Without Murder”, clever and fun.

This month (this week!) I will be responding to a book I really don’t like in both book discussions. The Duckpond book belongs in the “dark and disturbing, not actually factual, but close enough to wring despair from the most exhausted conscience” category. I’ll finish it by Friday and carry it with me until worms turn and justice descends for all.  I’m no fan of the assigned mystery either, but it has been mildly energizing to find that the book offered this month is clunky enough and distasteful enough to nudge me into sitting down to work on a book I started to write months ago. 

For years I’ve said (and mostly felt) that I write for my own pleasure. Do I wish my novels had found grateful readers? Of course I do, but I’ve been ok knowing that they’re not bad and that I actually managed to finish the various challenges I set myself. Then, I walk into a book store and see piles of unremarkable new novels, each enthusiastically endorsed by packs of authors whose unremarkable old novels ostensibly sold well enough to assure the credibility of each labored blurb. I have been approached by aspiring authors and have coughed up a few bland blurbs that may have appeared as books found their way into print, but I’m a ruthless reader, and the few reviews I’ve written have been far from insistent. I’ll give a book twenty pages, then pitch back in the library bin if it lacks grace, or style, or purpose, or voice, or humor, or insight, or information. I bring home eight to ten books a week and return all but one or two. Hope springs eternal; I’ll hit a dry spell, then find someone like Kevin Wilson (Nothing to See Here), or Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry), and the tank is suddenly full again and the motor’s starts to hum. To be fair to the Duckpond, You Dreamed of Empires, a book that asks a lot of the reader, is also a book I’ll recommend to anyone who enjoys a challenge.

So, I’m not without appreciation for writers other than myself, but still …

I’ve been reading the chapters I knocked out a few months ago, hope nibbling at the self-protective defenses of the mind, when I start to receive a series of emails, ostensibly from folks who have found my books interesting. Several appear to be from folks who direct enormous on-line book clubs, clubs that consider and celebrate the most significant new writers in America. Their very complimentary letters suggest that they know my work, adore my work, and want to bring it to a wider audience. Would I be willing to address the club as they finish their appreciation of my wit and wisdom? Yesterday brought an even more enticing appreciation of a collection of essays, published as Side Effects May Include Astral Sex, a title giving a nod to a piece published in The Impractical Cogitator when the first Trump White House endorsed medical hooey and snake oil as the pandemic began.

I received an email with the title – “Goodreads is missing one very sarcastic voice – Yours!” 

The body of the message was equally insightful:

“Ever notice how mediocrity somehow gets front-row seats on Goodreads Listopia while the truly intelligent, satirical, and culturally aware books like Side Effects May Include Astral Sex are left standing in the hallway, arms crossed, waiting to be noticed? …

Let’s fix that injustice…

Side Effects May Include Astral Sex deserves to be seen, discussed, and admired ,not left floating in digital limbo. Let’s give it the stage presence it deserves.”

Having been floating without complaint in digital limbo, arms crossed, for more than a decade, I was intrigued, and, yes, moved, by the message’s sincerity and kind interest in my work.

But then … 

It’s probably a scam.

I suspect that I’m meant to leap into frenzied activity, energized by my champion’s conviction that she can bring me to an admiring public, sending a gushing response which allows the purported fan to access some portal necessary to my financial ruin.So, no, I have not and will not respond, however enthusiastically I agree with the writer’s estimation of that collection. I will turn back to the unfinished novel, remembering that I did enjoy creating the world in which the action takes place. I’ve got bodies piling up in the book tentatively entitled Murder in the Round, an account of a season gone horribly wrong in a Shakespeare Festival somewhat similar to my beloved and absolutely murder-free festival in Ashland, Oregon. I just have to figure out how to plant some false leads and a few more stiffs.

I’m relatively new in town, still disconnected, unconnected, at loose ends, so I decided to join one of our excellent library’s book clubs. The Adult Book Club turned out to be a book club for adults instead of a …you know, so I hopped into the Mystery Book Club, an enterprise in its 23rd year, moderated for all 23 years by an author of some pretty engaging mysteries. My fans (?) know that I’ve written three novels which could be considered  mysteries, if “mystery” means at least one of the characters gets bumped off. 

Some impatient readers have noted that I lose interest in plot somewhere around page 12, leaving those who fancy a well crafted whodunnit in the lurch, so I appreciate writers who can devise interesting schemes and characters whose foibles make the reader (me) want to slog through 300 pages of set up, execution, and red herrings. It happened that I grew up with bookshelves pretty much exclusively dedicated to murder, some from what’s known as “The Golden Age of Mysteries”, elegant mysteries written by Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Ngaio MarshMary Roberts Rhinehart, Margery Allingham, and some later, slightly less formal but conventional mystery authors including JohnDickson Carr (locked room mysteries in particular), Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, and Erle Stanley Gardner.

Apparently things got tough after WWII as the next wave to hit the family bookshelves was a bit darker, exactly what I needed as I ached my way through the miasma of adolescence. With my own school boy fondness for grotesquerie in mind, I offered an elective, in my last few years as a teacher in a wonderful independent school that allowed independent curricula –

 “Tough Guys, Tough Towns”, kicking off with Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me), then easing into Charles Willeford (Pick Up), Ross McDonald (The Galton Case), Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye), Mickey Spillane (I, the Jury), Lee Child (The Killing Floor), Richard Stark/pen name of Donald Westlake (Slayground), and Elmore Leonard (Maximum Bob).

Now comfortably settled into what I like to call the “Where did I leave my glasses” years, I’ve floundered a bit, but found a new home in Three Pines, the idyllic village in Quebec, mostly the setting for the Armand Gamache mysteries written by Louise Penny. I find comfort in realizing that these are humane, complex, compelling novels, driven by character (and food), but not wickedly complex murders.

They give me hope.

In any case, I’m starting the second novel to be “discussed” by the Mystery Club, a “Hap and Leonard Novel”, Honky Tonk Samurai, by Joe Lansdale, and realizing that I may have overestimated the pleasure to be had in sitting with thirty people who have all read the same case, met the same actors, and seen the same denouement. Not much to say (or hear) unless the novel has the complexity of human experience such as Penny provides in the very human exchanges inThree Pines. 

In an earlier life freelancing for a funky film magazine, “The Velvet Light Trap”, then published by the University of Wisconsin, now hosted by the University of Texas, I wrote a semi-scathing review of Magic, a film starring Anthony Hopkins, featuring Ann-Margaret, in which a vile ventriloquist’s dummy carries out unspeakable acts of creepiness. See, the thing about ventriloquism is that we enjoy the trick of a performer throwing his voice. It’s a trick that works because we know that there’s no other voice available other than the performer’s. Film pretty much allows a thousand voices to land anywhere the script demands. Trees talk in the Wizard of Oz; I wasn’t impressed by the trees, and I wasn’t impressed with Fats, the filth spewing dummy in Magic. 

(Should any reader care to be terrified by a similar wooden villain, dig up Dead of Night, a British anthology film in which Alberto Calvancanti directs a final segment which provides actual surprise and delicious frisson.) 

We have three more books lined up, none of which I’ve read before. I may love one and find a new author to follow. I may not. My hope, in any case, is that someone says something that allows me to consider the possibility of making a book friend.

I’ve written elsewhere about book friends and the peculiar ease with which one can find a cordial mind in sharing titles of books we admire. Maybe someone will say something like, “This one was ok, but have you read A Fatal Grace? 52 Pickup? The Jugger? The Snow Man? 

You had me at A Fatal Grace.