L. Andrew Cooper's 3 favorite reads in 2024

M. Ennenbach’s CUCKOO is a love story, a dark fantasy, a horror story, a book of poetry, a literary experiment, and… and, well, I could probably think of a few other ways to describe it, but my point is that you can’t pin it down, and its refusal to be typical while always being a pleasure to read makes it great. Experience with love and loss shatters the main character, who has a sometimes-debilitating mental illness, and since he is shattered, the book is shattered as well. It appears mostly in three types of sections, Before, Now, and After, but the timelines it explores aren’t as tidy as those divisions suggest. Going beyond the usual questions about what is “real” raised by an unreliable narrator, the main character’s perspective conjures multiple realities, some of which seem to encode others, and the reader gets lost along with “Cuckoo,” adrift in his passions. As the book dives into passages of prose poetry and even some poetry broken into more traditional form, emotion rules. Sense-making becomes more and more possible toward the book’s end, but it’s a book driven by feeling, with sense-making in the back seat and the reader on the passenger’s side, with no control but with total access to the thrills of the journey.

While I love GONE TO SEE THE RIVER MAN, which seems to be Kristopher Triana’s most popular work to date, THE OLD LADY puts Triana on a different level. It’s got the brutal violence that many of his fans will expect, but what really makes it such a great read are its immersive descriptions of an antagonistic setting and its masterful development of characters, good guys and bad guys, but especially the titular lady, Tracey, who doesn’t fit easily into good or bad molds but is likely to have you cheering for her anyway. I often found myself wishing I could handle natural terrain and survival tactics as well as she does. The lady has serious problems, but her relationship with her surroundings makes her unquestionably cool.

I don’t want to do any damage to the book in the eyes of fans who dislike such descriptions, but I wouldn’t hesitate to include THE OLD LADY in a survey of contemporary American literature, horror or otherwise. Yeah, it’s horror—scary and gruesome as hell. But without being preachy, it’s also deeply insightful about current cultural conditions and the more general human condition in ways that make me think it’s a book that, if given the right exposure, could last.

I wouldn't often--I would almost never--consider describing a book as "original" because I tend to think everything's been done, but the main point of MOTEL STYX, an exploration of a world where necrophilia is legal but regulated--is not something I've seen before, and authors von Eschen and Butcher handle their subject with frank rationality that endows it with fascination that balances its inherent repulsiveness. Don't get me wrong: the book is very, very nasty, definitely extreme horror that goes for gross-outs like you might expect. However, it delves with surprising insight into psychological states surrounding death and loss that both give rise to the taboo on necrophilia and some people's desire to break it. I found two characters, one alive and one dead, to have a quite endearing relationship once I came to understand them. The authors weave different aspects of the motel that fulfills necrophiles' fantasies around a compelling amateur-detective story about a man who comes to the motel looking for answers related to his wife's death, which gives the book unity and momentum that make it a page-turner. For the open minded and strong of stomach, it's a rewarding read.