(As always, I’ll point out that my year’s best is based on the year I discovered the work, not when it was produced or published.)
For some reason, I’ve been on a Gothic kick this year. All four of my fiction picks seem to have an atmosphere of psychological and supernatural mystery, often focused by crumbling places of extreme emotional duress. I’ll leave it to posterity to link that fetish to my experiences in this less-than-wonderful year.
- Shriek: An Afterword, by Jeff VanderMeer, combines my love of found-artifact narratives with a great story of obsessive people pursuing weird mystery. As Duncan Shriek investigates the mushroom people living beneath the city of Ambergris, he seems to go native–arriving at odd times with wisps of moss or patches of mold clinging to his body as he discovers their terrifying intentions. Fun as this conspiracy is, I find the novel’s central theme of intellectual persistence and integrity to be all the more moving. This is a book about people refusing to accept all the accepted metaphors of popular taste and received wisdom, paying a price for their freedom of intellect. Duncan and Janice Shriek are heroic in ways you don’t expect.
- Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane, relies on a trick ending, true…but what a fun one. A mystery set in a remote mental hospital involving a missing patient, a troubled federal marshall, and a peculiar conspiracy? Sold! I don’t doubt that the upcoming movie will do some justice to the book, but you might want to read it beforehand, just in case.
- The Ghost Writer, by John Harwood, is an excellent semi-modern Gothic novel: an Australian boy corresponds with a girl in his mother’s home village back in England and slowly discovers his family’s secrets. One of those secrets is that a relative wrote gorgeous Victorian ghost stories, and we’re treated to excerpts of these in the book. Of course, they turn out to be terrifyingly germane to current events. The book has a dreamy quality to it, one perfect for a languid read by a fire on a rainy day. You’ll have to judge the ending for yourself; it isn’t hard to argue that it is the weakest element of an otherwise extraordinary book. But the atmosphere and mystery are worth the price of admission.
- The Red Tree, by Caitlin R. Kiernan, is another enjoyable fire-side read: it’s the story of a collision between inexplicable cosmic mystery and the artistic impulse, a critique and celebration of art’s mythologizing power–simultaneously reductionary and expansive. We make our world with words, and most of them aren’t up to the task. It’s a wonderful, contemplative work.
Hell, even my non-fiction picks seem intwined with the Gothic, too.
- White Heat, a biography of Emily Dickinson by Brenda Wineapple, challenges us all to ask whether our Verse is alive as Emily did. It tells the tale of her interaction with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a man who chose to interact with the world and dilute his passions among the concerns of the day. There’s no saying which is truly better; Emily paid a heavy price for her artistic integrity. But there’s a reason that she’s Emily Fucking Dickinson (as we call her in our house, as in “Imagine sitting in a parlor one day waiting for Emily Fucking Dickinson!”), and there’s a reason he’s just Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The lesson? If people aren’t worried that you’ve gone insane, you’re not devoted sufficiently to your art.
- Gracefully Insane, by Alex Beam, delivers a fascinating history of McLean Hospital, a place where the inconveniently weird relatives of prominent New England families could be sent to spend their days in seemly rehabilitation. Mostly they read and painted and screamed just a little in their private rooms, some of them even with personal servants, as they quietly tottered toward the grave. It wasn’t a bad deal: McLean treated its prominent patients with a courtesy you can’t get from any modern hospital, and you can’t argue with a daily regimen of reading, eating, and water immersion therapy. I’d pass on the lobotomies and electro-convulsive therapy, thank you, but they didn’t do much of that. Of course, deregulation and drugs completely ruin everything by the end.
- Booklife, by Jeff VanderMeer, explains all those things that professional writers too often have to learn by chance: the proper managment of one’s creative, emotional, financial, and professional resources. The first step, of course, is to write with the full power of your imagination, holding nothing back. This book covers what happens after that, how to get your work the attention it deserves.
On my short fiction patrol, I found some standouts this year, too:
- Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “G-Men” hypothesizes a murder of J. Edgar Hoover and his “assistant,” focusing on the investigation and aftermath of the death of America’s busybody–and the disposition of all his secrets.
- Michael F. Flynn’s “Where the Winds Are All Asleep” from Analog evoked a sense of terror and awe I haven’t much encountered lately in harder science fiction. This story discusses the possibility of additional instances of abiogenesis and shows an amazing example.