Carrie - Stephen King

Being on the road a lot this summer means I'm biased towards straightforward books. Stephen King is a good bet, as is Thomas Harris, as would be Richard Price. Something I can read in the back of the van in tiny bits and pieces without losing the thread through gas station stops, meals, blown tires, etc.

Carrie - what a way to step onto the scene. Apparently he got a $2,500 advance on it from Doubleday. Then another company bought the paperback rights, for which King got $200,000.

It's an epistolary book, but that form drops into the background pretty quickly. There's a few clunky sections, where different witnesses testify at length about what they were eating when they heard the explosion, or why they were at the gas station that evening, or whether or not they'd brushed their teeth that morning. Overall, though, the action is brisk and the tension builds quickly.

I'm never crazy about books trying to hook you with flash-forwards to the climax, because it's easy to overplay that hand. The rest of the book can seem dull by comparison, or worse, the height of the action can be overexposed and lose its impact. Carrie teeters on the edge of stealing its own thunder, though there are certainly some fireworks left to go off by the end.

(Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin was the most impressive piecing together of a climax that I can remember reading. The details dropped through the entire book did nothing to undermine the horror of the final reveal.)

Red Dragon - Thomas Harris

Thomas Harris writes grisly murder thrillers with as much deftness and depth as any grisly murder thrillers I've read (not a few). It's another book with Will Graham and Jack Crawford and Hannibal Lecter, but it's not "The Newest WILL GRAHAM Mystery" or "A serial killer is stalking whole families... and crack FBI agent JACK CRAWFORD is on the case."

Harris is not churning these things out. Red Dragon is his first book with these guys, and he didn't write another thing until Silence of the Lambs seven years later. He puts in the time to make these characters more complicated than good guy and bad guy, and they have to deal with their own internal struggles just as much as they have to hunt each other down.

Having read Silence, watched three Hannibal movies, and sat through two seasons of the Hannibal TV show, it struck me how complicated a backstory Harris had already established by this first book. Hannibal Lecter is a minor character, already locked up. Will Graham's already quit the FBI, and Jack Crawford... is unchanging for all time, it seems like.

It's a great series to make a prequel TV show from, because there is so much unsaid about the past. Red Dragon does no more than drop hints at what the Hannibal Lecter story is, and it seems little wonder that Harris wrote more about him. (Or did the publisher push for it? Maybe he tested well...)

Overall, a heavier read than your average airport book, without sacrificing the satisfaction of a good detective story. Plenty of desperately sifting through the evidence as the clock ticks down, plenty putting the clues together as the killer strikes again. If that's your thing.

A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon

Think Modern Family and you'll understand the structure of this book. Family turmoil in the run up to a wedding that springs from three discrete sources: mom and dad, retirees and struggling with it; daughter, her child, and her new fiance, polar opposites and struggling with it; gay son, newly single and struggling with it.

The book and the show also seem to share the opinion that everyone's crazy, and it's through accepting and loving one another's craziness that relationships and families hold together. In Modern Family, the crazy can only run so deep. No fallout can last longer than twenty-two minutes. A Spot of Bother has no such limitations, and doesn't hold back from disaster.

As the narrative jumps from person to person, each bout of insanity seems to have an uncomplicated internal logic. Haddon writes his characters through their mental breakdowns like a tour bus operator pointing out the landmarks. It's all very British and matter-of-fact.

It's a very funny book. The characters are often uncomfortably human, and often painfully lacking in self-awareness. I cringe and laugh to see myself in the pages, and I won't say where. You won't want to either.

Desperation - Stephen King

Full disclosure: I am a big Stephen King fan. He likes his American Heroes, his Average Joes, his Good versus Evil simplicity. He runs these characters through the meat grinders of his stories with clean prose and gruesome imagination. Ordinary, everyday life in Kingland is always moments from mutilation and chaos.

Desperation opens clean and strong. The simplest situations can be the most unnerving, more so than a ragtag bunch straggling through an apocalypse. Two people pulled over by a gigantic cop on a desert highway - a setup loaded with potential.

There are a few nods to the Dark Tower series, which is in many ways the hub of King's oeuvre. It's rewarding to find those connections, and he never overplays his hand. In some ways, he couldn't overplay it even if he tried - by 1996, he had only published the first three of seven Dark Tower books. By his own admission, he didn't know where the story would end up, and he hadn't fully fleshed out the pillars that held up his multiverse.

While the Evil in Desperation is unexplained in its origins, the Good is directly attributed to God. King's Good usually comes down to Innocence, or America, or Love in the end, and his poor protagonists take a beating but pull themselves through. Not so this time around - prayers are answered, God speaks, hands are guided, the whole nine yards.

King's not afraid of putting God into his stories. His priests aren't always evil, his churches are often sanctuaries. (I'm sure he sells well in the Bible Belt.) Despite the obvious relish he takes in mangling the human body, some things are actually untarnished. In Stephen King's world, a hero can be unironically pure.