Steve Capone Jr.'s Blog: Author Blog

Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology by Ed Simon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is a beauty and a wonder. It's visual (duh), and it's historical (also duh), but that isn't giving it what's properly due. The visual elements here are stunning and selected to match the historical accounting of demons. The history takes center stage. If you're a cultural historian, or an amateur like me, you'll want to POSSESS this book (for real, no pun intended) as well as to read it. It's a big `ol doorstop of beauty and glossy perfection.



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Title: House of Bone and Rain (9780316427012)

Author: Gabino Iglesias

Publisher: Mullholland Books

Pub Date: August 6, 2024

Audiobook Narrators: Jean-Marc Berne, Daya Mendez

Steve’s Rating: 4.5 ⭐ out of 5 ⭐

The Devil Takes You Home, a self-described “barrio noir,” was unlike anything I’d read before. House of Bone and Rain is another barrio noir, and while it feels reminiscent of the vibe of The Devil…, it is surely its own story with its own characters, flow, and themes.

Summary: When Gabe and his friends swear revenge on those responsible for the drive-by murder of his friend Bimbo’s mother, they find themselves pulled into a level of street crime they’d never imagined entering before… and their shared trauma sends them on a criminal underworld adventure in pursuit of justice. The Old Gods, Guns, and Blood. These are the three core elements in their journey. This is a story about vengeance and what vengeance pays. That “all stories are ghost stories” is a sentiment Gabe says repeatedly in the book, and it’s worth considering while you read.

We get to know Gabe and his friends Xavier, Tavo, Paul, and Bimbo through their mutual commitments to one another and to their families. We ride alongside them making mistakes, trying to do the right thing for the right reason, and finding that violence is the only answer they can come up with in response to violence. At the same time, they’re haunted (literally and figuratively) by their past, and they’re always reacting at least in part to their own traumas, just as all people do.

House of Bone and Rain does a fantastic job of communicating the sense of trauma not just from acts of violence directly portrayed in the book but also of the more ephemeral impacts of colonialism and second-class citizenship that endures in post-colonial Puerto Rico. Another quote we might keep in mind while reading is Faulkner’s “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.”

I’m not usually one for supernatural elements. I say this knowing full well that some of my favorites in recent years have been The September House and The Militia House, stories with clearly spooky and fantastic elements. But truly, I don’t love ghost stories, don’t believe in gods, and am much more likely to award my highest reviews to stories with compelling psychological premises. But Gabino Iglesias’ second major book managed to pop into the overlapping zone of the venn diagram where “books with supernatural elements” and “steve’s favorite books of the year” circles overlap.

This one is worth your read, just as was Iglesias’ first. There’s no sophomore slump here. His first won the top Stoker Award, and I won’t be surprised to see this one nominated as well.

House of Bone and Rain is currently up for the Goodreads Choice awards in the Favorite Horror of 2024 category, and it’s worth a thought.

My book, Max in the Capital of Spies: A Max Fredericks Story, won a really neat recognition last weekend: the Gold Quill award in its category (Young Adult and Middle Grade Novels) at the 2024 Quills Conference here in Salt Lake City, Utah. The event is put on by the League of Utah Writers, and independent judges determined the recipients of the awards. I am so very tickled.

I wrote a bit more about this on my website, and I grabbed digital copies of the certificate and sticker for the website as well. Check em out!

Steve

Book: Bury Your Gays
Author: Chuck Tingle
Publisher: Tor Nightfire
Publication Date: July 9th 2024
Capone’s Rating: 5 of 5 ⭐s

No intentional spoilers, but reveals are implied—strong recommendation here that you skip this review and read Bury Your Gays immediately, without knowing anything about its plot.

Chuck Tingle’s Bury Your Gays is 12% guts, 13% jokes, and all heart. Wait—it’s 40% gay Scream plus 60% The X Files homage. And remember that film Enemy of the State? Throw that in the mix for good measure. In a thriller-horror novel following Camp Damascus, a chiller rendering the terrors of conversion-therapy camps as obvious as they are awful, Tingle’s again relates queer struggles that are almost intentionally ignored in the straight world (to everyone’s detriment). In this followup, Tingle writes of Misha, a Hollywood figure wrestling with his public identity as an ambiguously gay show writer. While the story’s internal conflict is about whether or not Misha feels safe to be out in every area of his life, its external conflict is driven by the trope of popular media writing off queer characters or having them die in a blaze of straight-person-saving glory. Specifically in this case, Misha is commanded by the powers that be (who turn out to be quite powerful indeed) to do just that: to kill off his gay characters in the final episode of a successful TV show he’s written. He doesn’t want to do this, of course. Enter: conflict. Misha’s also in the running for an Oscar for a short film, which adds to some of the tension of the story and plays out with an intensity that had my eyes bulging and my kids wondering what was so shocking. (Truly, I read a lot of horror, and I read a lot, period, and the second half of this book had me almost racing to finish and to find out what’ll happen to a cast of characters of which I’d grown so fond.) They watch me read some 120 books a year and have never seen this look on my face before today. I can’t wait to buy them a copy of this book. So the story plays out, and there are forces at work that put our hero’s very life at risk—along with that of everyone who knows him or happens to be standing near him at any given time.

Bury Your Gays is a tremendous success. Hilarious, gross, and heart-warming; this mostly straight reader connected emotionally to what friends have described as a common experience of a queer person being excluded, vilified, or used as a prop for someone else exorcizing their own potential queerness. Horror often helps us to express our fears and traumas in ways that are more accessible than sharing therapy sessions with the public, and Chuck Tingle connects me to his characters on a genuine emotional level. The joking-but-serious tone here works, contributing to my love for the story.

I’ve got one more thing to add to this review, and it’s going to seem like a reach, but please, follow Professor Capone for just another moment.

When Socrates tells Glaucon in The Republic that he’s going to describe a city where Justice reigns, he does so in the context of describing what Justice is. Glaucon, his interlocutor, had claimed that we’re essentially backed into a corner and have to accept justice because we’re too weak to take what we want and get away with it. Socrates doesn’t cotton to this way of thinking. In defending his own view of Justice, he has to say what it is, but that’s tough—and maybe boring. So he tells a story. Justice will be easier to see if writ large, he explains—described by way of a thought experiment. He goes on to describe what Philosophy 101 students know as The Republic, which is often taught (wrongly) as “Plato’s ideal city-state.” If you figured me for comparing Chuck Tingle to Plato or the character Socrates, you’d be right. In Bury Your Gays, as in Camp Damascus, Tingle makes apparent through exaggeration and metaphor the stuff that wouldn’t grab our attention as clearly without figurative language and in the mode of literature. What people might ignore or instinctively battle in a political debate may be understood more clearly on an emotional level through storytelling. “Love is real,” as Tingle says in his afterword (and every time he speaks or writes, I think), and the message comes through in Bury Your Gays, loud and clear. Five goddamned stars.

Book: Just Like Home

Author: Sarah Gailey

Publisher: Tor Books

ISBN: 9781250174727

Publication Date: July 19, 2022

Capone’s Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ of 5⭐

As always, no Spoilers.

I added Just Like Home to my reading list when I read about it in Sadie Hartmann’s 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered (2023, recent Bram Stoker Award Winner and a book you should peruse weekly) earlier this year. Hartmann remarked there that it’s best to go into this one cold, and that’s my recommendation as well. From the first sentence—beautifully hewn from all the possible words Gailey might have chosen—to the last, this novel demands to be read and reflected on. Simple haunted house story it is not.

I found myself returning to that first sentence several times as I tiptoed through Gailey’s dread-inducing story of Vera Crowder’s return to the house her father built—he of nefarious repute—to sort through the house as her mother—she estranged from Vera these many years—dies a slow death.

So as not to disappoint potential admirers and steer away those looking for a different kind of book, let’s set this book where it belongs. It is a horror novel. It is a slow-burn, character-driven work of literary horror that will not use any tricks it does not earn, will not pay out any promises it has not made in its development, and will not pander to an audience seeking a thrill ride. It is a much better horror novel for all of that.

Thanks in part to the sub-genre being the first category in the aforementioned 101 Books…, I’ve been on a haunted house novel kick lately, and this instantiation most reminds me of Carissa Orlando’s The September House in tone, minus the humor. If you enjoyed that one, you’ll find a similar feel with familiar turns in Gailey’s earlier story.

No spoilers, other than to ward you off if you’re looking for a fast-paced thriller—and to drag you in if you’re looking for an intricately plotted, sentence-level honed, character-driven story with supernatural elements offering a new spin on the haunted house yarn.

Before I checked out Debbie Berne’s online portfolio upon finishing an enthralling read-through of her book, I had no idea I’ve got at least one book she designed on my bookshelves. (I do: it’s Story Genius.) Berne has been designing books for two decades, and in The Design of Books, unsurprisingly, she reveals all it takes to build and design a book from the ground up.

In this monograph, the author opens with a brief history and description of the key elements of The Physical Book (Chapter One) and proceeds through explanations around Type (Chapter Two), Cover (Chapter Three), a book’s interior (Chapter Four), a dive into the challenges and intricacies of designing illustrated books (Chapter Five), a brief look at how ebooks differ from printed books (Chapter Six), and workflow (Chapter Eight), among other topics. This reader got the sense that, among these, the weakest chapter is most certainly that covering electronic books, though even Berne’s weakest work is going to be something no one ought to pass over lightly; in that chapter, as in the others, authors and publishers will find crucial distinctions—as in that which exists between the reflowable and fixed layout varieties (156). The most jam-packed and useful chapter was that covering the cover (no surprise there, I think).

Having recently self-published a book (Max in the Capital of Spies, March 2024), I dove into this book on design with some trepidation and with a wound-ready heart, hoping not to take anything too personally. Throughout, Berne counsels heeding the advice of the expert designer (for interior and exterior elements), and she warns the self-pubbing writer might fare poorly without hiring such an expert.

But the work isn’t all moralizing about what not to do without professional advice about what we ought to do: I learned a lot (aside: what type should I use for emphasis here?) about books and the design of books.

Given my foray not only into publishing my own book but starting my own press, I’m walking away from The Design of Books with more confidence in my background knowledge and ability to converse with designers about what I want in a way that I expect will be helpful and clear for folks used to having a certain kind of conversation—”This palette feels too quiet, can you make it pop more?” rather than “Boy, I hate that green, use purple instead” (190). And yes, I realized that I had missed the distinction between the half-title page and the title page in my own book’s front matter. When I revise for a second major printing, I’ll be changing this—and quite a lot else, I think—thanks to Berne’s advice. And when I dive into this process for my forthcoming traditionally published book, Jimmy vs. Communism, I know how to have useful conversations with the design team at Gibbs Smith press.

So I didn’t take it personally, and you shouldn’t either. Writers (self-publishing or traditionally published), read this book with care. I have a feeling I’ll be keeping it close at hand as I redesign Max… as well as design for Whisper House Press’s inaugural anthology and future projects. And if you’re a curious book nerd, this book is probably worth your time as well.

Title: The Design of Books: An Explainer for Authors, Editors, Agents, and Other Curious Readers

Author: Debbie Berne

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Release: Spring 2024

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I’m late to this party, but I’m glad I’m here.

Carissa Orlando’s The September House (2023) is (still) a new take on haunted house horror. Lately, I’ve read a slew of them (six haunted house books in the last two months). In this story, we meet Margaret, a mature woman with complex familial relationships—and accompanying psychic wounds—who herself meets a host of ghosts—all of whom boast grisly wounds of their own—living in her recently acquired Victorian mansion.

The inciting incident here isn’t the appearance of the ghosts or the disappearance of Margaret’s husband Hal, but rather the impending arrival of her daughter Katherine who will undoubtedly be totally freaked out by the blood drip drip dripping down the stairs and seeping from the walls.

The main plot questions in this story are driven by Katherine’s need to find her father and Margeret’s distinct lack thereof combined with the intensifying behaviors of the multifarious denizens (“pranksters,” per Margaret) of the Vale Home.

Most impressive, considering my growing familiarity with the sub-genre and my general awareness of the tropes we all know and love in the superordinate category of Horror: Orlando’s narrative subverted my expectations—in big ways—at least three different times. I twisted this way and that, contorting in anticipation yet wondering what was coming next, what was really happening, and what I was merely imagining. Orlando’s carefully plotted release of information led me down a path that looked much much one sort of way only to remove my colored glasses and show me that everything I’d been sensing wasn’t mistaken, but that my understanding of the world where these things occurred was badly mistaken. It’s hard to overstate how surprising and pleasing this experience has been. I am already wistful that I can never again read The September House for the first time; I treasure any book triggering that lament.

Title: The September House

Author: Carissa Orlando

Publisher: Berkeley

Release: September (of course) 2023

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

In Devils Kill Devils (forthcoming from Tor Nightfire, 2024), Stoker-nominated Johnny Compton’s sophomore effort to follow his stellar Spite House, a hidden community reminiscent of those in Cadwell Turnbull’s No Gods No Monsters meets the squabbles-turned-bloodbath vengeance battles from Cassandra Khaw’s Food of the Gods.

When wounded protagonist Sarita learns she really has been chosen, she’s faced with a question: When SHTF, just how much faith in herself does she have? Simultaneously, distraught mother-in-law Hannah blames Sarita for her woes; and Hannah, too, is more capable than your average, wary mother-in-law. From the moment Sarita weds Hannah’s son, the two are set on a path against one another, and we bear witness to the fallout. And these consequences are not the sort usually seen when mother-in-law stands against daughter-in-law. Sarita—meet Hannah. Cosmically horrific results ensue.

The premise of the story is uniquely of Compton’s voice, and its telling brings characters to the page in a manner both familiar and welcome. We root for the characters. We understand where they’re coming from. They’re—bursting out of their skin? Whoa, now. This is new.

Compton’s got moves. He weaves together the key points of view and spins a yarn that keeps us reading, telling us a new kind of vampire story—one that borrows from Eastern European lore as well as invents some tricks of its own. The result is admirable. As story development goes, the pacing is at times confounding, as scenes often run too long or too short compared to that befitting their importance, and at least one long backstory sequence could have been eliminated completely without any loss for readers understanding core characters. That said, this book is more than just readable. It’s quite good. And while it would be hard to measure up to Spite House, a book I still recommend on the regular, Compton here has swung big and turned out something never seen before. And that’s what worthwhile art is. We swing big, and we try to do something different. He’s succeeded on both counts.

Title: Devils Kill Devils

Author: Johnny Compton

3.5 of 5⭐s

Publisher: Tor Nightfire

Scheduled Release Date: 9/24/2024

Book: Incidents Around the House
Author: Josh Malerman
Publisher: Del Ray
ISBN: 9780593723128
Publication Date: Jun 25, 2024
Capone’s Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ of 5⭐

Summary (spoilers by implication possible but not explicitly given)

Wow. In two days of fierce reading and constantly wondering what was to happen to Malerman’s latest protagonist, I found myself feeling creeped out. This says a lot, if you consider that I read some sixty to eighty horror books per year and cannot recall the last time one of them actually frightened me. I don’t read for the frights or thrills—I read for the questions that horror literature explores. Because I was raised a philosopher, I read for the philosophical questions horror explores through its symbols and stand-ins, its exaggerations and moral outsiders.
Yet somehow, Malerman’s Incidents Around the House, a forthcoming novel that read like it was forty rather than nearly four-hundred pages long, managed both to ask complex questions about familial relationships and willful social ignorance of a family in chaos as well as to scare the hell out of me.
The plot is simple, but the premise is unique and reminiscent of the oddity found in Malerman’s earlier Pearl or Inspection, the down-home setting from Goblin and its environs brought back around for this tale of isolation. A family is haunted. The perspective is that of a child—an eight-year old. A [usually] closet-dwelling sometimes corporeal entity with a long, often upside-down face wants to be let “into [Bela’s] heart.” What letting the creature in would mean, exactly, isn’t clear. However, the sense the reader gets is that allowing the presence, AKA “Other Mommy,” into Bela’s heart would be at the least allowing a ghost to share in her soul, and in the worse case an expulsion of Bela into an unknown plane of existence for at minimum one lifetime. Pretty stinkin’ bad stuff, in other words.
Malerman sets up this premise and stakes. Then, instead of having everyone question the young protagonist’s sanity and tell the story of a girl who sees dead things no one else can see, asks, “What if everyone can see this thing? What then?” What if anyone can see it but no one cares enough to help outside of those trying to protect themselves and Bela from her haunting. I’ll spare the reader any other potential spoilers and offer the closing thought that Malerman’s entity, Other Mommy, will be something I think about for a not insignificant amount of time when next I go to bed and shut out my lights.

Book: Dear Hannah
Author: Zoje Stage Zoje Stage
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Estimated Publication Date: Aug 14, 2024
Capone’s Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ of 5⭐

Summary (beware, some potential spoilers, but nothing explicitly spoily): We meet Hannah in her mid-20s. She’s crafted a life for herself based on what she perceives to be the best possible circumstances for living the life she wants. Most importantly, that life is totally separate from contact with her parents. She writes to her brother regularly, and they exchange advice about everything from choices in artistic expression to how to murder an enemy. The main conflict here comes from a drastic shift in family roles, upsetting her perfect arrangement. How will she maintain control, given that most of the changes are totally out of her hands? Riding along with Hannah as she navigates a world full of humans she doesn’t get (relatable), I found myself rooting for her even when she was planning to do precisely the wrong thing because it seemed the best among terrible options… there’s much to be said for an author who can make a character’s insane choices seem perfectly reasonable.

This novel gets five stars because of the reality of its unreality: at no point during my time spent with the characters did I remember that I was reading a book. I was tickled, of course, that the book was set in Pittsburgh (Yay! Giant Eagle! Beacon Street! And the on-ramp toward Monroeville from Squirrel Hill is a no-go zone for me, too—I will add time to my drive and go through Swissvale or Regent Square to avoid it…). A head-spinner, this story makes me feel at home in an uncomfortable psyche. Although this book is probably promoted as a sequel to Stage’s 2018 Baby Teeth (the book that gave me what I’ve always wanted: a story about a little kid trying to kill their mother), I’m certain you can read Dear Hannah without any familiarity with the earlier title. I recommend both books; like Baby Teeth, Dear Hannah is sure to capture and hold its readers.