7 Books We Can’t Stop Thinking About This Month
As spooky season comes to a close and we barrel darkly toward this weekend’s daylight saving switch, members of the VF staff share the recent reads we can’t get out of our heads. (Following Halloween parties, perhaps you too are in a Kylie Minogue state of mind—maybe you even donned a literary-zeitgeist costume in which to dance.) Load up on books before Sunday comes; you’ll get an extra hour to enjoy them.
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‘Terrace Story’ by Hilary Leichter
Most of the time, I don’t believe in spoilers. My feeling is that great narratives can’t be ruined even if you know how they’re going to end. (I saw the final scene of The Sopranos on YouTube years before watching the series and when I got there it still punched me in the gut.) I believe that this theory holds up in Hilary Leichter’s bountiful Rubik’s cube of a novel, and so we’re going to have one minor spoiler here about a reveal that occurs 49 pages in. You’ve been warned! The book is told in four parts, the first following a couple named Edward and Annie who, while entertaining Annie’s work friend, Stephanie, find that their tiny apartment has an impossible, luxurious terrace that only exists when Stephanie’s around; this section ends in a ruinous betrayal. The next section picks up with a story of a marriage in tumult: George and Lydia, who are eventually revealed to be parents to Annie, who shows up, as a child. (That’s the spoiler.) That section, along with the third and fourth, introduces fairy tales, magical powers possessed by a misunderstood young woman, space travel, and tears in the multiverse—the novel continuously shifts the reader’s prior expectations and understandings without ever feeling like a gotcha. And here’s where I abandon my stance on spoilers, because a revelation about the identity of two characters in the final section is so beautiful, so devastating, that I would hate to deprive anyone of the experience I had reading it. After spending the whole book reveling in Leichter’s precise language and extraordinary powers of control over the intricate narrative. it reduced me to pure emotion, tears running down my cheeks. (2023, Ecco) —Keziah Weir, Senior Editor
‘The Fraud’ by Zadie Smith
I can’t ever listen to a book on tape without reading it on paper, first; I’m too prone to momentary distractions that make me quite literally lose the plot. But listening to a great audio recording of a novel I’ve recently read and loved is comforting and entertaining, and when it’s read by the author—as is the case with Zadie Smith’s The Fraud—there’s an added dimension of receiving the sentences’ emphases and pauses directly from the person who wrote them. The Fraud takes this to new heights: there are various accents, there are songs. Smith, who recently described herself as “a ham” to David Remnick in a New Yorker Radio Hour interview, studied with a voice teacher and goes delightfully full bore in narrating her novel about a scammy 19th century debt-evader claiming to be a missing English aristocrat entitled to a fortune; the formerly enslaved man insisting that he is who he says he is; and one household—a Scottish housekeeper, her novelist cousin, and his illiterate maid-turned-wife—captivated by the case. Come for the witty resonances with contemporary Trumpdom, stay for Smith’s interrogation of fiction writing writ large. (Penguin Press, 2023) —KW
‘Poser’ by Claire Dederer
I loved Poser by Claire Dederer, whose piece "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?" is, I think, one of the best pieces of writing to come out of the MeToo era. Poser is a memoir about yoga, but also a lot of other things, like what it was like to be a mom in North Seattle in the early 2000s and a kid in the '70s. The book is funny and incisive and beautifully written. Reading Dederer sort of felt like chatting with a very honest friend. I don't think you have to do yoga to appreciate this book, but there's a bit of a plus if you do, because hearing the wise words of some of Dederer's teachers is sort of like auditing a really great class. I've been thinking about some of what I read on the mat. (FSG, 2010) —Charlotte Klein, Media Reporter
‘Raven Smith’s Men’ by Raven Smith
The personal essay isn't dead, but it's certainly no longer in its viral xoJane golden age. So where did it go? I'd argue that all that click-optimized intellectualized confessionalism has since infiltrated the groundwater of every tweet, Instagram Story, and TikTok that beckons from our phone. We're all posting through it in real time now. But it makes me miss the original wide-eyed divulgence of a good personal essay, how finding a good one online was like uncovering a gem in the potato bin. Raven Smith's Men reminds me of that thrill.
The memoir explores all the usual suspects—coming of age, dating, partying, generally experiencing any life lived with an "emotional intelligence that felt like a curse"—and makes a compelling case for the inimitable magic of the form. This is largely owed to Smith's earnest, knowing prose, which manages to situate his storytelling as both exactingly à la mode and universal: "His pupils were black side plates at Nobu;" "The buttery calfskin jacket of drink closing around my chest." In an era where your friendly neighborhood confessional TikTokkers are locked in an arms race to decode "situationships," "delulu girls," and other nonsensical neologisms, Men is a reminder of what a real wordsmith can do. (Fourth Estate, 2022) —Delia Cai, Senior Correspondent, Vanities
‘Fruit Punch’ by Kendra Allen
Fruit Punch is a meditation on self-preservation, and Kendra Allen excels at toeing the line between devastation and beauty. In this refreshing memoir, Allen explores personal trauma: an overly sexualized childhood, racism in her home state of Texas, growing up and being forced to deal with things for which you don’t yet have the tools. Yet through her writing, she distances herself from the violence and turmoil of her childhood—naivete by intention. With its sharp and honest writing, this book requires a second or third reading. (Ecco, 2023) —Kathleen Creedon, Associate Web Producer
‘Becoming the Boogeyman’ by Richard Chizmar
The most chilling campfire tales always start with some variation on "This really happened ..." with bonus scare-points if you can add: "and not far from here." As the longtime impresario of Cemetery Dance magazine, Richard Chizmar knows his way around a frightening story and he combines those two elements to powerful effect in his 2021 book Chasing the Boogeyman and its new sequel Becoming the Boogeyman. Both are deeply unsettling narratives that leave the reader questioning reality even as the more logical parts of the brain insist: It can't be ...
Set in the author's actual hometown of Edgewood, Maryland, the first book chronicles the impact of a local serial killer during the late '80s, when Chizmar was a young man just beginning to set off on his own, and he sets the stage by first immersing you in the nostalgia of days gone by before piercing that idyllic setting with news clippings and police accounts of the murders that shook his community and eventually became his own obsession. It's a true crime book, but ... without the 'true" part. Chizmar is upfront about it being a work of fiction, but after that initial disclaimer, he plays it so straight as memoir that you get transfixed by the spell.
The sequel, Becoming the Boogeyman, is about the storyteller getting caught in that spiral, as well. Now in the present day, with his book about the killings and their unusual perpetrator finished and published, it explores the psychological aftereffects of so deeply immersing oneself in incidents of violence, cruelty and evil that you get lost in the shadows. The late Michelle McNamara's killer-hunting book I'll Be Gone in the Dark is a clear influence, along with Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and other novelists who clearly see the beauty in the world around them, but become fixated on the darkness encroaching on the edges. Chizmar blends reality and fantasy in a way that can only be described as intoxicating: heightening your emotions, blunting your skepticism, and luring you into trouble. (Gallery Books, 2023) —Anthony Breznican, Hollywood Correspondent
‘Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer’ by Bettina Stangeth
This summer, I read Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus, the source material for Oppenheimer, and it left me a little desperate to keep thinking about the outsize effect a few people had on the course of World War II. Bettina Stagneth’s 2014 look at the life of Adolf Eichmann wasn’t an obvious choice to join the “To Read” pile on my bedside table, but its focus on the Nazi official’s political role in the 1930s and his life in hiding after 1945 made it a fascinating inverse to American Prometheus’s look at the interplay between optimism, ignorance, and remorse. Challenging Hannah Arendt’s description of Eichmann as an anonymous functionary embodying the “banality of evil,” Stagneth paints a chilling picture of a man who was notorious for his cruelty before the war started and casually remorseless for years afterward. (Vintage, 2015) —Erin Vanderhoof, Staff Writer
