MAGNETIZED :: Carlos Busqued

A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness and is republished here with permission.

Questions about why serial killers do what they do evoke answers as varied as the new mysteries they generate. Carlos Busqued, Argentine radio producer, engineer and professor at the University of Córdoba, had the opportunity to spend more than 90 hours with imprisoned serial murderer Ricardo Melogno. In Magnetized, Busqued compiles the transcripts of their conversations along with details of the crimes and Melogno's troubling history.

Busqued recorded interviews with Melogno in 2014 and 2015, relating to "a series of brief, strange, and almost restrained murders" in Buenos Aires in 1982. During a one-week period, the bodies of four taxi drivers were found slumped in their seats with .22 caliber bullet holes in the temple. The only items taken were vehicle registrations and victim IDs. The police were stumped. A week later, Melogno's brother turned him in.

Melogno, then 22, was an enigma. Described as unimpressive, "a regular, skinny kid," he expressed no motive or rationale for killing and felt nothing afterward. His affect resulted in a complete lack of consensus on his psychiatric status. The Federal Capital declared him unfit for trial due to insanity; the Province of Buenos Aires tried him and sentenced him to life in prison.

In his own words, Melogno describes his violent upbringing and his mother's use of religion as a weapon. Busqued, nominated for the Premio Herralde for his debut novel, Under This Terrible Sun, provides a chilling glimpse into the psyche of a killer wrapped in a meek facade.

STREET SENSE:  Those curious about what goes on in the mind of a (one particular) psychopath will find these interviews riveting.

COVER NERD SAYS:  The color (used to hate orange, now I am attracted to it, go figure) and striations attracted me here, as did the subtitle. The title and imagery didn't become clear until reading, but other than wishing the title fit a bit better, I took no issue with those factors. A serial killer and a speeding car were sufficient to intrigue me.

THE 6:41 TO PARIS :: Jean-Philippe Blondel

"No one ever warned us that life would be long."

Imagine being trapped on a train with the worst nightmare from your past.

I wish I could remember where and from whom I heard about Jean-Philippe Blondel's The 6:41 to Paris, because that individual deserves all the credit for me reading it and passing along the joy. The blurb was very brief, but it (along with the page count of 146) was intriguing enough that I immediately requested the book from my library. I was not disappointed, this is a stellar work. If you were the one who wrote about it, please step up and take your kudos and my thanks.

The premise is simple, the execution sublime. Cecile is a successful business owner, on her way home from a stressful weekend with her parents ("There comes an age where you find yourself trapped between indifferent children and recalcitrant parents. That's all there is to it. I'm forty-seven years old. I'm right in the middle of it.").

The seat next to hers is the only one left on the train (there's a wonderfully spot-on passage about the pro and con psychology of this situation), and to Cecile's horror it is taken by Philippe Luduc. Horror because Philippe and Celeste have a past: four months of dating some 27 years ago that to describe as 'ended poorly' would be a severe understatement.

As the train gets under way, so does the suspense and tension. Cecile and Philippe pretend not to know each other, and the alternating visits with their internal monologues and emotions during the ride are nothing short of fascinating and excruciating. We visit their pasts and their presents, the emotion of both and the impact their brief, long-ago relationship had on each of them and who they became.

I'm guessing we've all had those moments, an experience, however brief, that scarred us and set us off on a different path, maybe impacting us well into the future and perhaps even in the present. I know I have. It was nothing like what happened between Cecile and Philippe, but it was enough that I felt a kindred understanding of this work. I wondered what I would do if I was confronted with Cecile's situation. I think I know, but that didn't make reading this masterpiece of emotion, psychology, and sociology any less taut or vivid.

Author Kati Marton put it perfectly when she said of this book (which she called "A taut, suspenseful psychological journey from which there is no escape"): "The 6:41 to Paris shatters any illusions that acts of cruelty committed in our youth are of little consequence later in life."

Despite its length, I could quote from this exceptional book ad nauseam (and I'm stalling because I know I have to try and pick just one below). Translated from French, I doubt it has lost anything in the language swap, but it makes me want to learn French just to read it in the author's native tongue.

STREET SENSE:  This brilliant little book will definitely be on my list of best reads for the year. Despite my fear that there was no way to bring it to a successful or satisfying conclusion, Blondel did so while at the same time leaving me knowing there was more and yearning for it. Genius.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  She hasn't reacted, either. She doesn't remember me. So much the better, in the end. I have to keep one thing in mind: most people have a 'delete' key which they will press at a given time, when their brain is about to overflow after all the misunderstandings and betrayals, all the hurt and disgrace - and when that happens, entire chunks of your existence disappear along with face, names, addresses, colors, everything goes out the window into the sewers of the unconscious.

Bonus passage!

The ant.
Do you know I still think about that, a lot?
You never imagine that certain phrases can stick, buried in your skin like splinters, and that at certain moments in life they come back and wreck everything.
My grandfather had fought at Verdun. He was very young. A shell exploded a few yards away from him. He had shrapnel in his legs all his life, and from time to time, with the changing seasons, a shell fragment would say, Give him my kind regards.
Those two words were my shell fragments.

COVER NERD SAYS:  This was a rare occasions where I knew I wanted to read this book before I had any clue what the cover looked like. I'm not sure if this one would have attracted me on its own or not. It does evoke some mystery, as it gives up little in the way of content. Those faces intrigue me. I'm not a huge fan of the color palette, but for some reason the cover still speaks to me. That may simply be hindsight love, but I'm ok with that.

PRETTY BABY :: Mary Kubica

"The first time I see her, she is standing at the Fullerton Station, on the train platform, clutching an infant in her arms."

I found Mary Kubica's The Good Girl to be a pretty stellar debut last year (you can read my thoughts here), so it was with great anticipation I dove into her sophomore offering, Pretty Baby. Just as with The Good Girl, I was sucked in immediately by Kubica's writing style and structure. I'll be interested to see if she continues to write in the same format, for despite some minor issues with both works, Kubica is quickly becoming an author I can count on for a compelling and worthwhile read.

Heidi and Chris Wood live in Chicago with their twelve-year-old daughter Zoe. Polar opposites, they are having trouble connecting. Chris, driven by the almighty dollar, works long hours and is rarely home. More troubling is the new "femme fatale" co-worker Heidi is convinced has eyes for him.

Chris isn't blind, he sees Cassidy Knudsen, how different she is from his wife. After fourteen years of marriage, Chris feels Heidi, a bleeding heart who works at a literacy non-profit, has more concern for the well-being of stray cats and her refugee students than for him. His thoughts about a photo of their wedding day tacked to the bulletin board in his office speak volumes:

But there was something telling about that photograph, I thought; our protective glass frame shattered and now here we were, punctured with microscopic holes that might one day tear. Those holes all had names: mortgage, adolescent child, lack of communication, retirement savings, cancer. 

One cold, rainy day, Heidi sees a young girl on the train platform, holding a baby and standing by a battered suitcase, soaked by the rain and obviously malnourished. The girl and the baby fill Heidi's thoughts from that moment on, feeding directly into her need to make everything right. She wonders about their story, how she can help them, ashamed she didn't take action.

When Heidi crosses paths with the girl again, she is bound and determined to help, and soon enough Willow Greer and baby Ruby are staying in the Wood condo, much to the consternation of Chris and Zoe. Who is this girl? A simple runaway? A killer or con on the run? As Chris asks Heidi, "How much can you really know about another person?"

Mysterious and secretive Willow and baby Ruby settle into the house, and with no end to their stay in sight, the stress begins to crack the already fragile family veneer. Chris and Zoe want nothing to do with Willow, want her gone. Heidi, meanwhile, is drawn deeper and deeper into Willow and Ruby's lives, using them to fill a void from her past, and the dynamic threatens catastrophic consequences. It's apparent early on that things go wrong, and the twisty ride to the truth is well worth taking.

Pretty Baby is written from three alternating chapter perspectives: those of Heidi, Chris, and Willow. What I love most about Kubica's style is how she spins the story through each character's perspective and keeps the reader guessing about actual motives, intentions, facts, and past history. You think you know what's going on, who these characters are, only to have that perspective is turned on its ear. It keeps the narrative quite compelling and doubles as a lesson in not judging characters, good or bad, too quickly.

Although a number of the plot devices in both of Kubica's books have been seen many times before, for some reason they don't feel impossibly gimmicky in her hands. Perhaps because she builds credibility with nifty nooks and crannies in her character and story development and also throws in great, authentic twists, I forgive the arcs that toe the cliche line. I'll take strong character study and evolution over a few unique plot points any day.

STREET SENSE: Fans of psychological thrillers and multiple character narration will be well-served by Pretty Baby. Other than a few short side-trips, Kubica keeps the pace steady and her characters engrossing, spinning the story around the various perspectives to a satisfactory, if less than explosive, conclusion. Pick up Pretty Baby, The Good Girl, or both, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  "Whipped cream?" the woman asks, and Willow looks to me for approval. Funny, I think, how in that split second she becomes a child, just at the very mention of whipped cream. She strikes me as an optical illusion, like the famous Rubin's vase: depending on how one looks at it, one of two scenes appear, two profiles, placed face-to-face, or the vase which lies perched between them. They flip-flop before your eyes. Profiles, vase. Profiles, vase. Strong, independent young woman with a baby; helpless young girl with an affinity for hot chocolate and whipped cream.

COVER NERD SAYS: For some reason, I find Kubica's cover art more attractive once I've finished the book. It's almost as if the story informs the images. I would not likely have been drawn to this cover if I didn't know the book was written by Mary Kubica. I can't deny they are beautiful covers, just not up my normal alley.

THE TRUTH AND OTHER LIES :: Sascha Arango

Although you might not know at first blush, Henry Hayden is a bit of an ass. To the outside world he's a dashing, bestselling author who has millions but lives fairly modestly other than his beloved Maserati. In reality, Henry is a masterful sociopath, his life and image all a carefully constructed facade.

As Sascha Arango's The Truth and Other Lies opens, Henry finds himself in a bit of a bind. His mistress, Betty, is pregnant with his child. Not only does Henry not really want children, there's that niggling problem of his wife, Martha. Complicating matters, and oh, do they get complicated, is the fact that Betty is the editor-in-chief of Henry's publisher, Moreany Publishing House (which his books helped save from bankruptcy). And she wants to keep the baby.

Stuck in an untenable situation, Henry has to take action. But his plan goes quite awry and sets off a chain of events that threatens to flatten his house of cards. Blowing more wind at Henry's tenuous paper abode is Gisbert Fasch, who smells something rotten in Denmark and is bound and determined to figure out what.

You see, Henry has been an ass for a long time, including the time he spent at the Saint Renata orphanage as a youngster. Henry turned the place into the "Saint Renata Gulag," and it was a "red-letter day" for all when he disappeared. None perhaps happier than Gilbert Fasch, who also lived at Saint Renata and was tormented by Henry.

Fasch remembered meeting Henry over thirty years ago in the catholic orphanage of Saint Renata. Henry  had been about eleven years old at the time and not a nice boy. It's quite possible that the career of every psychopath begins with a tragic event, but often that event is birth itself. Evil is born innocently. It grows up, seeks shape and form, and begins its work playfully. At that time Henry already had a pretty long history of children's homes behind him; he'd been kicked out of all of them or he'd ran away. But he never breathed a word on the subject. It was as if each day that passed were left behind him like a frozen stone.

Gilbert's dream of being a writer were crushed when self-publishing bankrupted him. He's teaching German as a second language when he learns of Henry's writing success in a literary supplement and figures it must be a mistake. How could Henry have written bestsellers? And why does Henry have no known history, literary or personal, between Saint Renata and his blockbuster first novel?

As Gilbert and the police keep pressing and Henry begins to lose control over various elements of his life, the only mystery is whether the pack of lies will come unraveled faster than even an old pro like Henry can knit.

I had to mull my thoughts about Truth for a bit when I was finished. On the plus side, it felt a bit like a 50s black and white noir film, and elicited images of Patricia Highsmith's Tom (Talented Mr.) Ripley. I loved those visions and that edgy feeling I had while reading. Henry isn't "likable," but I prefer my characters flawed (and often even sociopathic). I'm a sucker for a psychopath story, particularly when the psychopath has some back story and isn't just conveniently labeled as such.

I found many of the characters interesting, including the supporting cast of Gilbert Fasch, Claus Moreany, head of the publishing house, Honor Eisendraht, his long-time, secretly-in-love-with-Claus assistant, and Obradin, Henry's fishmonger friend. Truth can also be quite funny, sometimes almost farcical: Henry hunting a vicious, attic-dwelling, demon marten with a spear gun, and a crime committed with a sex doll.

Despite a bit of awkwardness which might have something to do with the book being a translation, I found many passages dart-worthy. To wit:

What tormented Henry far more than uncertainty was the thought of certainty. Knowing what lay in store for him was tantamount to the pendulum over the pit. What was there left to hope for except remorse, death, and decay? In keeping with this entirely clear-eyed outlook, Henry defined his life as a cumulative process, to be judged by historians only after his death. And happy is he who leaves nothing behind; he need fear no judgment.

Afternoon, four o'clock. The best time of the day, when it's too late to catch up on whatever you've failed to do, when the light is softer and the ice cubes glint in your glass. You treat yourself to a long drink instead of an afternoon nap, forget your vices, write imaginary letters and escort yourself out of this squandered, pointlessly spent day. 

Then there's the other hand. I enjoyed the change in feel between the absurd and the vile, but I can see how others might take issue with the wide swings in tone that aren't always seamless. Because I also liked Henry's musings on evil and good (i.e., people aren't generally good; sporadic acts of goodness are just "mere interruptions to human wickedness."), the change in pace didn't distract me, but some may find it uneven.

I didn't find the book to be mysterious at all, so if it's a whodunit? you want this likely isn't your bag. I would like to have had a better sense of Henry and Martha's marriage and Martha herself. There are some plot devices we've seen before, but because I was sucked into the story, it didn't matter. My overall feel for the book was positive, even up to the end, which could be the source of much discussion and frustration.

Overall The Truth and Other Lies was a positive reading experience. Henry's life is obviously built on lies, and it's apparent he's the bad actor, but his belief in the need for at least some truth ("indispensable, like the olive in the martini") makes for some interesting (and violent) shenanigans. It was a worthwhile trip to see which side, good or evil, would prevail in the end.

STREET SENSE:  I recommend The Truth and Other Lies to readers who like a psychopath/sociopath story, don't need every plot point tied up in a bow, and don't mind some elements that may seem a bit of a strange fit. If you can go with it, you might like it despite a bit of frustration.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE: There is no silence like another person's absence. Drained of anything familiar, it is a silence that is hostile and reproachful. The shadowy figures of memory surface noiselessly and begin their picture show. Hallucinations mingle with reality; voices call us, and the past returns.

COVER NERD SAYS: I think this cover is fantastic, it made me curious about the book at first glance. The image takes on more meaning as you read the book, but even without that I loved the obvious symbolism of breaking through the surface and seeing what lies beneath. This cover is high on my list of the best put out in 2015.

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN :: Paula Hawkins

The Girl On The Train is a fast-paced psychological thriller that admittedly kept me reading compulsively while at the same time distracting me with its too-similar and unlikable character profiles. Rachel is a 30-something alcoholic divorcee, prone to blackouts and an overactive imagination. In a tailspin after being unable to conceive a child with then-husband Tom, Rachel ultimately loses her marriage and her beloved home to Tom’s mistress Anna, with whom he now has a baby. Unable to let go, Rachel continues to harass Tom and Anna with phone calls and the occasional trespass.

Rachel also lost her job following an alcohol-fueled blowout at a client lunch, but is too embarrassed to tell anyone. In order to keep up the ruse, she continues to take the commuter train into London and back to her flat every day. But Rachel has other reasons for her train-riding ways. The train runs behind a row of houses, including her own prior home, and her depression and imagination draw her to a couple living a few doors down from Tom and Anna. She becomes obsessed with “Jess” and “Jason” (in reality Megan and Scott) observing them and painting them with the glorious, loving life she believes she had, and still should have, with Tom:

I don’t know their names, either, so I had to name them myself…They’re a match, they’re a set. They’re happy, I can tell. They’re what I used to be, they’re Tom and me five years ago. They’re what I lost, they’re everything I want to be. 

During her “commute” on the train one day, Rachel sees something shocking and unexpected at Megan and Scott’s. When Megan goes missing on a night Rachel is blundering around her old neighborhood in a blackout state, Rachel feels compelled to find out what happened, which requires her to piece together her fractured and often non-existent memory.

The somewhat Hitchcockian premise of Girl is a great one, and the story proceeds like an express train down a greased track. Told mostly from Rachel’s perspective, with intermittent sections from Megan’s and Anna’s point of view, the reader is left with an admittedly unreliable narrator, trying to piece together events along with Rachel. The “facts” are teased out slowly despite the fast pace of the book, which only increased the tension and need to keep turning pages.

Where Girl failed for me was in the character portrayals. I can’t go into too much detail without spoiling plot. Indeed I think some of the character issues I had stemmed from the author’s attempts to keep the reader guessing. The more similar and unlikable all the characters are, the more difficult it might be to suss out the true baddest of the bad. Unlikable characters I can deal with, so long as they don’t feel homogenous (i.e., women/men all drawn with strikingly similar character traits) and their actions don’t start to stretch credibility. Here, both of those occurred, and it took me out of the story a bit.

I was uneasy spending this much time in the head of a raging alcoholic, the author did a great job putting the reader inside that damaged mindset while keeping the story compelling. No easy task. If you read crime fiction you get used to characters making poor decision after poor decision, but at a certain point Rachel began to wear thin. Which I also must admit may stem from my life experiences with alcoholics, maybe it just hit too close to home. Overall, I thought the author did a great job telling the story through a very troubled mind.

STREET SENSE: A gripping psychological thriller that I couldn't put down, despite my feeling the character issues mucked up the works a bit.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE: I was trespassing. That’s what it felt like this morning, because it’s their territory now, it’s Tom and Anna’s and Scott and Megan’s. I’m the outsider, I don’t belong there, and yet everything is so familiar to me…It feels like coming home—not just to any home, but a childhood home, a place left behind a lifetime ago; it’s the familiarity of walking up stairs and knowing exactly which one is going to creak.

COVER NERD SAYS: Girl has great packaging. Both the image and the font portray movement, which for me mirrored the book literally and figuratively. The somewhat blurred visual reflects both the actual view from a fast-moving train as well as the perhaps hopelessly muddled view of the events from inside Rachel’s head. Well done.

THE GOOD GIRL :: Mary Kubica

Twenty-four-year-old Mia Dennett is a free spirit, the black sheep of her blue blood family. Daughter of a powerful judge and a socialite, her only sibling a doppelganger of her father, she wants nothing more than to maintain distance from her family and continue her work as an art teacher at an alternative high school. But when Mia is abducted by a man she meets in a bar and later returns home from captivity, she and her family are forced to deal with the pre- and post-abduction fallout as the reader is taken through the mystery of Mia’s disappearance and the repercussions that shake her family.

Mary Kubica’s The Good Girl is written in a terrific format which serves to ratchet the suspense to levels that truly kept me hooked from the get-go. The story is told in “Before” and “After” timelines as well as from four alternating chapter perspectives: Mia, her mother Eve, her abductor Colin, and Gabe Hoffman, the detective assigned to Mia’s case. The culminating event to which the “Before” and “After” are pinned is the recovery of Mia from her abductor, an event she can’t remember, along with her name (she now calls herself “Chloe”).

Mia seems to be a different person with different mannerisms and traits. Even as her mother struggles to understand Mia and help her through her PTSD memory-loss, she realizes she perhaps never really knew her daughter at all:

My eyes stray to a family photograph we had done years ago: James, Grace, Mia and Me. Everyone else looks as if they were forced to be there, with artificial smiles plastered to furrowed brows and rolling eyes. Even me. But Mia simply looks happy. Why? I wonder. We never gave her a reason to be happy. 

While the style might sound confusing, it’s in good hands with author Kubica, and I was never lost as to where I was in the story or which character I was listening to. The perspective switches, paired with short-ish chapters, made the book all the more compelling, a “just one more chapter” type of read. A psychological thriller of the first order, The Good Girl asks all kinds of great questions, then lets the answers play out over the two timelines and through the multiple narrators:

Why did Colin abduct Mia, only to take her to a remote cabin in Minnesota rather than turn her over to his cohorts as planned? What was the purpose of the abduction in the first place? Why is Mia’s mother so removed from her daughter, when it’s obvious she regrets the distance between them? Is Mia’s father always such an asshole, or just when it comes to Mia and the effort it might take to get her back and deal with her issues? Is her family really that bad or is Mia the one who’s a bit off? What really happens when abductor and abductee are holed up in a cabin in the frigid Minnesota wilderness?

The strength of The Good Girl is in the format and the character profiles, each well-drawn in its own right. I enjoyed getting into the minds of four different characters, who all had a different purpose, in and to the story. They also each had different pasts and motivations coloring their actions, some quite surprising. Eve’s and Colin’s chapters in particular were written with such emotion the pain emanating from the words was almost palpable. I may not have liked each character, but I liked reading about them, which is the important part, and Gabe Hoffman is one of my favorite characters of 2014.

Where the book lost me a bit was with the ultimate unveiling of how Mia was recovered and what was behind the abduction, which felt a bit formulaic. That being said, the let-down wasn’t enough to detract much from my enjoyment of the telling of how we came to the end. I’d still highly recommend it if you like a good, page-turny psych thriller.

STREET SENSE: Despite a bit of a let-down from the ultimate reveal (for me), I thought this book was really well done and recommend it for those who like a fast-paced mystery with a psychological bent.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE: I’ve been following her for the last few days. I know where she buys her groceries, where she has her dry cleaning done, where she works. I’ve never spoken to her. I wouldn’t recognize the sound of her voice. I don’t know the color of her eyes or what they look like when she’s scared. But I will.

COVER NERD SAYS: I’d heard good things about The Good Girl, but wasn’t taken in the by cover. For some reason, the photo read to me as a much younger girl, not a young woman, and it just didn’t leap out at me. Now that I’ve read it, and can better see the young woman of the photo,I appreciate the cover a bit more for its subtlety.

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES :: Caitlin Doughty

Like most of us, author Caitlin Doughty was shielded from death as a child, right down to the dead goldfish switched out for a live lookalike before she noticed anything amiss. But at the age of 8, Doughty witnessed the horrific death of a little girl, after which she understandably became a bit obsessed with the subject. Years later, somewhat aimless, Doughty took a job as crematory operator at a local funeral home, Westwind Cremation and Burial. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: & Other Lessons from the Crematory is Doughty's account of that job and its impact on her thoughts and beliefs on death and dying, on both a personal and global level.

Smoke is a fascinating account of the inner workings of a crematory, as well as an eye-opening look at how death in America has been commercialized and removed from tradition. Although Doughty's main job was to run the cremation machines ("retorts"), she also assisted her co-workers in body pickups and burial/cremation preparations, including makeup and embalming. Presented in a straight-forward manner infused with Doughty's sly humor and vibrant personality, the book is far from morbid or gross (there was only one short cringe-worthy scene; bet you'll know it when you read it).

Smoke is full of fascinating and educational stories on Doughty's daily responsibilities that alone make this book worth the price of admission. But Doughty has a much broader purpose in mind. Whether she's shaving her first corpse or loading a body in a retort ("Each machine had a metal door that slid up and down, the chomping mouths of an industrial children's fable"), Doughty wants us to find a comfort level with the subject matter, aware of just how far removed we've become from a healthy relationship with death and dead bodies:

Every culture has death values. Those values are transmitted in the form of stories and myths, told to children starting before they are old enough to form memories. The beliefs children grow up with give them a framework to make sense of and take control of their lives...[T]here is something deeply unsettling -- or deeply thrilling, depending on how you view it -- about what is happening to our death values. There has never been a time in the history of the world when a culture has broken so completely with traditional methods of body disposition and beliefs surrounding mortality.

Doughty explains how these breaks were often necessitated by circumstance. During the Civil War, for example, the sheer volume of bodies, combined with insufficient time and transportation, increased the need for embalming. But death rituals have also historically been driven by religious beliefs. As society becomes increasingly secular and commercialized, we worsen our relationship with death, hiding from it at every turn. Of course, this is all to the delight of plastic surgeons, rest homes, hospitals, and funeral practitioners, each of which plays a part in separating us from the death process and, perhaps, self-awareness and closure.

Left to their own devices, human bodies rot, decompose, come apart, and sink gloriously back into the earth from whence they came. Using embalming and heavy protective caskets to stop this process is a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable, and demonstrates our clear terror of decomposition. The death industry markets caskets and embalming under the rubric of helping bodies look "natural," but our current death customs are as natural as training majestic creatures like bears and elephants to dance in cute little outfits, or erecting replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Venetian canals in the middle of the harsh American desert.

Doughty ultimately left Westwind to attend mortuary school in order to get an inside look at how our death practitioners are being trained. She has since worked towards bringing more traditional rituals and natural deaths back into focus. She believes we are missing "rituals of true significance, rituals involving the body, the family, emotions." Rituals that can't be replaced with buying power and that provide the gift of facing our own mortality and finding closure and perhaps some comfort. You can read more about Doughty's mission at her website, Order of the Good Death, where she and other funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists "explore ways to prepare a death phobic culture for their inevitable mortality."

As a side note, the MAR was lucky enough to be selected to contribute to Pop Culture Nerd's Nerdy Special List, 2014 Favorites Edition (which you can find here), and Smoke was my contribution to that list. There are great picks from all the contributing bloggers, go check it out. And give PCN's blog a follow, she always has great reviews and information on books, movies, and other pop culture goodness (the fashion editions during awards season are not to be missed).

Final thoughts on Smoke:

STREET SENSE: Whip-smart, wickedly funny, and a natural storyteller, Doughty turns what could be a dry and morbid tale into a fascinating and enlightening must-read.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves. It is the only event in her life more awkward than her first kiss or the loss of her virginity. The hands of time will never move quite so slowly as when you are standing over the dead body of an elderly man with a pink razor in your hand.

COVER NERD SAYS: I really like this cover.  Neat and clean, it's nothing fancy, but gets the point across. While the coloring, bordering, and main title text can be interpreted as quite formal (perhaps even funereal?), the artwork and set-off of the subtitle text dial the formal back and bring in a little, dare I say, warmth.

WOLF IN WHITE VAN :: John Darnielle

I finished Wolf In White Van several weeks ago, and although I've been ruminating on it since, I'm still not certain I can adequately review it. Which, in this instance, is a testament to the unique and compelling nature of the work, one of my favorites of the year. Written by musician John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats (whose music I have never heard but will now seek out), the book certainly has a lyrical quality and, like a song, the meaning to be mined from it is to some extent left to the reader.

At the outset, we know protagonist Sean Phillips experienced a traumatic and disfiguring incident as a young man. The opening lines give some of this away:

My father used to carry me down the hall to my room after I came home from the hospital. By then I could walk if I had to, but the risk of falling down was too great, so he carried me like a child. 

What we don't know, and what slowly unravel through the course of the story, are the what and the why. And while the incident is at the core of both who Sean is and what the book is about, there are no neat answers. In this way, the book felt profoundly in tune with real life and the psychology of human behavior.

While lying in the hospital and through his long recuperation, Sean keeps his mind busy inventing a post-apocalyptic role-playing game called Trace Italian. Once able, he turns his idea into a reality, starting a small business running the game through the mail. For a fee, subscribers receive information regarding their next available moves in response to their letters to Sean revealing what they did with his last set of clues. Through this ongoing correspondence, Sean is connected to the players, even if remotely and based on made-up roles.

Trace Italian is a fantasy game, but two participants have taken the game "live," to disastrous ends. At the start of Wolf, Sean is facing an inquest over his potential responsibility for the acts taken by the two young players. The story weaves deftly between the past and present, doling out its own set of clues to the reader as to how Sean has come to sit where he's sitting, literally and metaphorically.

Told in reverse-chronology stream-of-consciousness style as Sean's past is weaved into his present, Wolf is challenging, gripping, and often raw, as Sean has been living a fairly solitary and often surreal existence since he was disfigured more than twenty years prior. But I also found it full of grace, as Sean has transformed and crafted a life in his solitude, one that is perhaps defined by more ties and meaning than it was pre-incident, even though shot-through with guilt and isolation:

I always wonder if people are afraid of me because they think I'll do something: press my face up against them or start making funny noises. I am always a little tempted to satisfy their fears. But I never do it; it would feel wrong; it would be wrong. I don't need to make myself feel better by frightening people or making them squirm. When I was a child, I dreamed of powers like these, but I no longer have those dreams. I am free. 

I think this book will have many different meanings and messages to different people. I could talk about and explore it ad nauseam, but I hesitate to delve too deeply and risk giving too much away. The joy is truly in the journey. One of the wonderful characteristics of Darnielle's story-telling is how he holds the mysteries and slowly lets them trickle forth. The incident hovers over every passage and I suffered the tension of wanting to know, wanting the answers. Darnielle's prose, past and present, masterfully holds that tension, circling around the incident like water to a drain, slowly drawing the reader closer to the defining moment that may, ultimately, be undefinable.

STREET SENSE: I can't do justice to Darnielle's masterful and unique writing, it has to be experienced.  I can't recommend Wolf enough if you enjoy lyrical writing that pushes the boundaries, forces you to think and reflect, and may raise as many or more questions than it ultimately answers.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE: I closed my eyes and I concentrated. Dad was getting ready to tell me about the funeral plans, I knew. I could make it easier for him if I tried hard enough. It isn't really much of a mystery, this occasional need I have to comfort my father. I did something terrible to his son once.

COVER NERD SAYS: This cover intrigued me more than anything. It reminded me of the mazes I used to do in Highlights magazine as a kid. I was also attracted by the color, which was anything but dark. I can't really tell you why, I just knew I had to try the maze, I wanted to know what that weird title meant. And the maze was so good I'm still mentally wandering around in it.

WHEELMEN :: Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O'Connell

Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour de France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever, is a journalistic account of the rise and eventual fall of American cycling, which begins with an apt quote from Abraham Lincoln:

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

The abuse of power theme pours out on almost every page of this painstakingly-researched, comprehensive look at how cycling grew in popularity in America, first via Greg Lemond in the late 1980s, then the juggernaut that was Lance Armstrong, all the way through the fall of Armstrong and the American cycling program in 2013 and 2014. 

Certainly the book highlights Armstrong, as he became the face not only of American cycling but the American cancer movement, beginning in the 1990s and continuing through 2013. But despite Armstrong's major role in the downfall of the sport, Wheelmen provides a fair and well-balanced portrayal of all the players in the scandal: cyclists (American and foreign alike), team doctors, owners, sponsors, et al. It feels like a quest for the truth, not a vehicle to lambaste Armstrong, which it rightfully could have been based on the facts presented. 

Arrogant, selfish, and some say pathological, Armstrong took whatever means necessary to get himself to the top of the sport and stay there. Which he did, winning multiple Tour de France victories despite a cancer diagnosis, treatment and recovery, and investigations from all fronts. 

Never a good teammate (nor, apparently, a very nice person), Armstrong bullied and demeaned fellow cyclists, pouted or refused when asked to take a supporting role for the good of the team, paid to have doping results hidden, and took part in a successful bribery scheme to ensure a victory. Once his dominance on the team and at the Tour took hold, he demanded his teammates take part in doping or be dropped from the squad, and left behind anyone who dared oppose him, on the course or in life. 

Always the subject of scrutiny due to the scope of his success, investigations into Armstrong's alleged doping came to a head after he left the sport, when prior teammate Floyd Landis tested positive and was stripped of his Tour victory. Landis and others eventually cooperated with the governing bodies, leading to Armstrong's ultimate downfall. He did not go quietly, however, once again asserting his dominance by threatening and discrediting witnesses and attempting bribery to cover up his history. 

The account is fascinating not only on the factual front, but from a psychological perspective as well; both the psychology of Armstrong and the psychology of a culture that fed and supported his power. Could Armstrong have been the champion cyclist he became without the villainous character traits that cost him so much? At some point did he actually believe his own schtick? Despite the numerous investigations and facts uncovered along the way, Armstrong staunchly denied using any PEDs until the bitter end, facing a lifetime ban from all sanctioned competitions (including triathlons, which he had taken up post-cycling). 

Equally as fascinating is the psychology of a society that assigns such value to the athletic heroes it places on very lofty pedestals. It is a need so strong much of the American public was willing, for a very long time, to overlook what had really become fairly obvious. Does celebrity culture spring from a desire and need to believe in the ideals of the American dream? Is it a dream of power and celebrity we celebrate vicariously? Those questions are a book unto themselves. But what is an equally enthralling question is how and why we are so quick to turn on our heroes when they prove to be less than perfect, as Armstrong certainly is. 

Granted, Armstrong's character flaws run deep, but query whether they would have lead him down the path he took if not for the adulation, money, and attention he reaped as a result. To some extent, Armstrong is a product of our own celebrity-worshipping culture and the "money-mad" world of sports. As the authors conclude: "We are willing to ignore and justify the wrongdoings of the rich and powerful." It's difficult to point a finger at Lance without admitting we might deserve a little bit of that finger ourselves. 

Street Sense: I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in sports, cycling, celebrity mythology, narcissism, and/or psychology as it relates to sports and to society at large. A knowledge or love of the sport of cycling is not required to enjoy what is a well-written, fascinating ride (see what I did there?). I listened to the audiobook version and the narration was fantastic.

A Favorite Passage: I can't help but go back to the beginning of this piece and use Abraham Lincoln's quote for this section. It really is the crux of the whole shebang. 

Cover Nerd Says:  I love this cover.  It's no coincidence that yellow is the only color surrounding that fantastic image.  And the photo itself, stark in black and white, is not a glorious image of Lance on a bike, but a gritty and bloody closeup of the man alone.