August Reading Highlights
A check-in from the depths of hiatus feat. vampires, capitalism, and the haunting of the campus novel
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Contrary to popular belief, I haven’t disappeared into thin air. It is, as my roommate says, The Year of the Big Return, and I am planning to return. But Taylor Swift was right the last time she was brave enough to try something new: August did slip away. I moved back to New York, bought a plant, learned how to assemble furniture and live in a place without dining halls, closed my storage unit rental, memorized four and a half new subway lines, revived a plant from the brink, and forgot to edit my scheduled posts. A bildungsroman.
On a logistical note: I’m officially starting my grad program next week, which means my posts will likely get less frequent than they were over summer (albeit, so that my writerly output can grow more frequent overall). I’m giving myself most of September to remain on hiatus—albeit, with some occasional check-ins—while I get adjusted, but I plan to be back to at least twice-monthly posting by October (it’s not a One Direction situation if you say “hiatus” in good faith to begin with). Besides, I have big plans for literary Halloweentime.
Until then, a look back at August.
The Secret Place by Tana French (Penguin, 2014)
At an all-girls boarding school in Dublin, a 16-year-old boy is found murdered with no possible explanation. A year later, the case is all but cold when an anonymous note appears in the school’s halls, claiming to know what happened that night. Shifting perspectives between a cynical investigator and the four teenage students at the center of the case, Tana French’s fifth entry into the Dublin Murder Squad saga is part police procedural, part meditative campus novel, part pseudo-supernatural, cult-adjacent teenage murder mystery. Somehow, it managed to simultaneously remedy the areas where I’d been most disappointed by Dizz Tate’s Brutes and by the same token fell short when trying to deliver the sorts of moments that hooked me on Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You.
Like the girls of Brutes, The Secret Place’s girls—an equally tight-knit group of four boarding school roommates—narrate their chapters in unison, thoughts flowing seamlessly from one friend’s perspective into another. They seem to exist that way, too, until buried knowledge about the cold case threatens to tear through their bond. But Brutes reveled in the hyper-intimacy and viscerality of teenage girlhood to no particular end. Instead, The Secret Place is careful with its brutality, employing it with a measured scarcity that only increases the stakes. The girls are united—at a cost.
The Secret Place does also feel, in many ways, like a predecessor to I Have Some Questions For You, a time-and-perspective-hopping campus mystery in which those adjacent to a cold case look back to wonder how—and why—they possibly could have gotten it so wrong the first time around. Something in the campus novel—perhaps just its inherent nostalgia—seems to lend itself to haunting, a murder-induced arrested development. Here, rather than a former student haunted by the murder of a friend, we’re guided by the investigator himself, a detective hoping to make a name for himself by reopening the case a year later. We also hear from the girls themselves, serving a similar role to the imagined suspects in Makkai’s interludes, letting us feel the murder long before we understand it.
But what made I Have Some Questions For You, at least in part, were Makkai’s pauses, the breathtaking moments where she meditates on the impossibility of justice in a case that, as her narrator says early on, “we all, collectively, each bearing only the weight of a feather, got wrong.”French—though her prose hardly matches Makkai’s—attempts something similar here with more abstract, sometimes philosophical asides woven into the trance-like chapters narrated by the girls. But those musings eventually seep their way into the more straightforward procedural plot, where they begin to feel like a disorientingly flowery distraction. At just over 450 pages, The Secret Place hardly needed one.
Read if you liked: I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai (Viking, 2023), with the above disclaimers in consideration
Gunk Baby by Jamie Marina Lau (Hachette, 2021)
After many, many attempts, I finally found my way back to Jamie Marina Lau’s Gunk Baby, an alienated young woman novel that manages to evade nearly all of the genre’s beloved cliches—and perhaps refuses to be defined at all. In Gunk Baby, Leen is 24 and living off her roommate’s lottery winnings when she decides to become an entrepreneur, opening a Chinese ear-cleaning business inside a suburban Australian mall. Soon, however, the mall is overrun by a series of increasingly violent practical jokes against its store managers, and Leen is forced to confront the messy realities of her business, the mall’s hierarchy, and her role in the growing unrest.
Lau is captivating in her second full-length novel, writing with a sort of ruthless remove that, while it admittedly causes the novel to drag in some areas, gives the author her uniqueness. It also makes Leen’s coming of age—her discovery of what true adulthood means in a capitalist existence—all the more brutal. A sometimes funny, sometimes harrowing take on otherness and suburban isolation, Gunk Baby is nothing if not original.
Read if you liked: Big Swiss by Jen Beagin (Simon & Schuster, 2022), or Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang (Dutton, 2023)
Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, translated by Heather Cleary (Dutton, 2024)
What if Dracula had been narrated by the monster? What if John William Polidori’s titular vampyre had chosen another destination for his reign of terror? What if Warner Bros had taken Anne Rice’s pitch to adapt Interview with the Vampire with Cher and Anjelica Huston in the central roles?
From the depths of this alternate universe’s vampiric canon emerges Thirst, Marina Yuszczuk’s first novel published in the US. In Thirst, a vampire descends on 19th-century Buenos Aires after centuries of suffering in Europe and spends years in hiding, watching the city take shape and hunting under the cover of plague and unrest—until a chance encounter with a young mortal woman changes the course of her story forever. Generation-spanning without ever dragging and archetypal without ever feeling clichéd, Thirst manages to feel like an epic without even brushing the 250-page mark. It doesn’t need to—its brief presence is striking enough.
Thirst isn’t flawless—for one, Cleary’s version of the prose sometimes feels awkwardly sparse. But on an energetic level, Thirst captures Stoker’s spirit in a way few have since he lifted that spirit from Carmilla over a century ago. In a moment where authors like Mariana Enriquez and Carmen Maria Machado have brought the Latina feminist Gothic to contemporary ascendence, Thirstenters the canon and immediately pushes it forward.
Read if you liked: Carmen Maria Machado’s 2019 edition of Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Lanternfish Press, 2019), or Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez (Hogarth, 2023)
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Collage by the author.