The Last Child
John Hart
Minotaur Books, 2009
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-0312359324
384 pages; $24.95

The Last Child has been nominated for a Best Novel Edgar by the Mystery Writers of America, and for good reason, too. Hart has written an exceptional novel, his best yet – even better than Down River, which won the Best Novel Edgar in 2008, and The King of Lies, which was nominated for an Edgar as the Best First Novel by an American Author in 2007. Three books and three Edgar nominations; not bad for a former criminal defense attorney.

The Last Child is about Johnny Merrimon, whose twin sister Alyssa disappeared just about a year before the novel opens. That year has wreaked havoc on his family. His father left; his mother has turned to drugs, alcohol and an abusive boyfriend who despises Johnny; and they’ve lost their home. Johnny hasn’t exactly become a juvenile delinquent, but he skips school frequently – rather amazingly keeping his grades up despite his absences. He has better things to do than attend junior high: he wants to find his sister. Witnesses say she was grabbed by a man in a white van, and Johnny is certain that the man has been holding her captive for the entire year, that she is still alive, and he is determined to find and rescue her. This means he stalks the registered sex offenders who live in his town at terrible risk to himself.

Johnny cannot bring himself to accept the help offered by Detective Clyde Hunt, a police officer who has himself never stopped looking for Alyssa, either. And it has wreaked havoc on his family, too, causing his wife to leave him and his teenage son to fend for themselves. Hunt is mesmerized by Johnny’s beautiful mother, and the tragedy of the loss of her daughter haunts him. He studies the file obsessively, but never gets any closer to finding the girl. He’s forced to watch as Johnny gets involved in worse and worse scrapes and as Johnny’s mother destroys herself in penance for losing her daughter. Nothing seems to change.

But then the anniversary of the day on which Alyssa disappeared arrives, and the worst happens: another girl is abducted. Johnny is intent on saving this girl, and believes that when he finds her, he will find his sister. His search brings him to the wrong place at the wrong time – or perhaps, ultimately, it will be the right place? – and a dying man tells him that he knows where his sister is. The tension builds as Johnny goes after a hardened pedophile, and grows even more when an escaped convict is discovered to hold a clue that Johnny hopes will help him find his sister.

The Last Child is a proverbial page-turner, but it is much more than that. Hart draws his characters well, making no one too perfect to be true and no one too evil to be real. Johnny, while older than his years, is believably so because of his circumstances, and also remains a 13-year-old boy who constructs his own fantasies about how life should work. Clyde Hunt is no magical, all-seeing, all-knowing police officer with special forensic tricks up his sleeve, but a man who makes mistakes about people, both professionally and personally. And Johnny’s best friend, Jack, cannot help but make the reader sad and mad at the same time. The plot is complex and the denouement surprising. Altogether, The Last Child is an exceptionally good mystery.

My philosophy for “best” lists is rather different from most publications and blogs. I won’t be telling you what I consider the best books published in 2008; I don’t determine my reading that way. I browse in bookstores and libraries and page through book reviews and pick up whatever interests me, in whatever genre. Much of the time, I can’t resist the shiny and new, so I do read a lot of new releases, but much of the time something will happen that will lead me back to a book that’s been around for a while. So when I put together a list like this, it speaks only to what I read in 2008 that I liked best.

I read 74 books in 2008. Of those 74 books, 44 were speculative fiction, primarily fantasy, which rather pleases me; I had hoped to move away from mysteries and more toward SF, and I’m glad to see I accomplished that without really trying. I read 15 mysteries and a mere three works of nonfiction (I have always preferred fiction). The remainder were straight fiction – mundane fiction, if you will – a rather higher number than in previous years. Several of those works, like Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati and Stephen Millhauser’s Dangerous Laughter, probably could be classified to at least some extent as speculative fiction, but they weren’t marketed that way, so I won’t so characterize them.

I don’t limit my “best” lists to any particular magic number, and I tend to be generous with my praise. My primary fault as a critic is that my default setting while I am reading is enjoyment, and criticism only follows in retrospect. My reviews are few; I must cogitate about books for some time before I can form a considered opinion. I take being an audience seriously. I almost always finish a book I start, so that I’m truly giving it a fair chance.

So, with those ground rules, and in no particular order, I give you my favorite book read during 2008.

Bone Song and Dark Blood by John Meaney. These books were the most sheer fun I had reading in 2008. The pace is breakneck, the worldbuilding is crazed, the genre-blending is complete (horror, New Weird, romance, urban fantasy, gritty detective novel, you name it, you’ll find it here). There are zombies, wraiths, singing bones, necromancers, and all other manner of magical beasties under a perpetually purple sky. Crime and politics live side by side, as always, and nothing is as noir as a dead opera diva. By no means am I going to tell you that Meaney is a stylist; you won’t be rereading sentences for their elegant word choice. But damned if you won’t take away a few images, including a few that you might not want to have permanent residence in your brain. There’s a lot to be said for a pair of books that can simply take you out of yourself for a handful of hours and take you to a place where the worries all belong to someone else. For a good time, these are your best bet.

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. At the other end of the spectrum is a book that really makes you concentrate, but that rewards effort. Quicksilver is the first of a trilogy, The Baroque Cycle, set at the dawn of the Age of Reason, a time when so much was happening in science that it is hard for us, now, to realize that it was all mixed up with alchemy, slavery and politics even more convoluted than those we confront today. Stephenson’s writing is dense with allusion, anecdote and allegory, and requires close concentration. Several story lines meet and intertwine in the three “books” into which the volume is divided. The first tells of the Puritan Daniel Waterhouse, an acquaintance and colleague of nearly every scientist and alchemist of note of the time. The second is about Half-Cocked Jack, a London street urchin who becomes the King of the Vagabonds, and his adventures with Eliza, whom he rescues from a Turkish harem. All the plots mix together in the third book, which takes place during the 1680s in France, England and Amsterdam, a time of much political and scientific ferment. One wonders whether this is science fiction or fiction about science, but either way, I, at least, am encouraged to continue to the next massive volume in the series, The Confusion. I may wait, however, until my rotator cuff heals; these 1,000-page volumes are damned heavy.

The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford. Jeffrey Ford has long been one of my favorite short fiction writers, and this new collection confirms my opinion that he excels at the short form. I confess that I am not the fan of the title story that many are, but I very much enjoy “The Night Whiskey,” “The Dreaming Wind,” and “The Scribble Mind,” which I’d read before, and was delighted to come across new stories I’d previously missed. Most intriguing to me, though, were short pieces scattered throughout the book that might – it’s not clear, and one should never draw any conclusions about a fiction writer – but pieces that just might be autobiographical, and if not, are certainly linked pieces about an extended family. These include “A Few Things About Ants,” which really is nothing more, but nothing less, than the title suggests; “Present from the Past,” about the narrator’s mother, her spurt of creativity after she ceases drinking, her death, and its aftermath; and “The Fat One,” about how the narrator quits smoking. If these are portions of a memoir, I definitely want to read that book. If they are fiction, they are wonderful fiction, and I hope they become a novel. Whatever they are, combined with the three stories I mentioned, they are worth the price of the book in and of themselves.

Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin. This historical novel was inspired by a mere few lines in Virgil’s The Aeneid about the second wife of Aeneas, the young woman he married as part of a peace pact following the end of the Trojan War. It is told in the first person from the point of view of that young woman, Lavinia, who Virgil dismisses so completely – to his regret, for he, too, is a character in this novel. Lavinia is a strong, competent woman, true to her gods, her father, her husband and her son, as well as to her fate. She thinks and she sees, and she does not accept that may not affect events because of her gender; she acts, wholly within character and within the bounds of the strictures of her time. This is a lovely character study as well as a study of another time and place as only LeGuin could do it. And it inspired me to purchase Robert Fagles’s translation of The Aeneid, which I hope to read this year, though I confess I do find the prospect of 400 pages of blank verse rather daunting.

The Art of Murder by Jose Carlos Somoza. This novel, reviewed in full here, is much more than a mystery, and gave me much to think about. It still lingers in my mind. Somoza posits a new form of art: the human body, drugged into a sort of physical submission (no sweat, no thirst, no menstruation, no blinking) and willed into mental submission by the models (no motion, control over pain, control over boredom), painted and posed, living statuary – and then imagines everything that would go along with a world in which such artwork existed. It is beautifully done. I plan to read Zig Zag and The Athenian Murders by the same author in 2009, and look forward to them with relish.

Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic. This was my introduction to Zivkovic, who I knew was meant for me when I heard him compared to Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. Hidden Camera is the tale of a man who assumes that the strange events that are happening to him – according to invitation – are because he is the subject of a sort of candid camera show, and that everything will be explained to him in time. But the harmless pranks one normally views on such shows are not replicated here; instead things grow not just increasingly strange, but dangerous as well. Soon one must add Kafka to the list of authors of whom one is reminded, as things grow increasingly surreal. I’m going to be reading everything by Zivkovic I can get my hands on in 2009; I’ve already read 12 Collections & The Teashop, and I can already confidently predict it will be on next’s year’s best list. Steps Through the Mist lies at the ready.

The King of Lies by John Hart. John Hart’s Down River was nominated for an Edgar this past year, but I liked The King of Lies better. That might be a matter of my own mixed feelings about being a lawyer in recent years: Hart’s protagonist, Work Pickens, is a lawyer who is tired of being a lawyer. The action starts when Work’s father’s body is found, and the police think Work did it for the $15 million he stands to inherit. Work is afraid his sister did it, and goes through quite a few acrobatics to make sure that suspicion is directed toward himself rather than her while still maintaining his innocence. Unlike the usual book in which a simple conversation between brother and sister would clear the whole problem up, Work is here prevented from clearing the air by a believable complication, which is quite a feat. The plot builds momentum, the stakes growing progressively higher, until everything resolves in a satisfactorily explosive climax. As I said in my original review on February 29, Hart belongs on the same shelf with Turow.

Thunderer by Felix Gilman. Gilman's debut fantasy is set in the city of Ararat -- a name well-chosen for a place where gods are manifest. Not just a god, but many, many gods, gods evil and gods benign, gods appearing once in an eon and constantly present, gods changing the shape of the city and gods changing the shape of a life. The city itself is the real subject of the book, as I find to be the case with most New Weird fiction, a place of never-ending fascination. If this sounds like the book is a bit weak on plot, well, that’s correct, though we do follow a young priest named Arjun as he attempts to find his own god, who has fled from his rural congregation to the big city. But leave the plot to the second Gilman epic, Gears of the City, which will be appearing in this list next year (it is even better than Thunderer) and enjoy this debut for the world-building and the language. You will carry away images that will stay with you forever, no matter how much fantasy you read.

Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet by Gregory Frost. No, I don’t know why he made them into two books instead of one big one, either, but I do know that I enjoyed them both. These New Weird tales of a puppet mistress and her travels in the mysterious world of Shadowbridge have both plot and ambience going for them (though I stand by my theory that New Weird novels have their essence in place rather than plot). Frost creates complex, believable characters and puts them in complicated, magical situations that are unlike any I’ve read about elsewhere in fantasy. He is also a genuine wordsmith. The first sentence of the first novel will capture you: “The first time Leodora spoke to a god, she had climbed to the top of the bridge tower and she was masked.” How can you not keep reading?

The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine. A hawawati is a storyteller, and the grandfather of the narrator of Alameddine’s tale is of that honorable profession in Lebanon. This tale of several generations of a contemporary Lebanese family sprawls across the decades, through fortunes, throughout politics and wars, dissects sexuality – but mostly, it tells tales. The tales focus on romance and family, genies and magicians. They are tales of unexpected pregnancies and sudden marriages, and tales of primary-colored dwarves and mysterious underground caverns. The narrative slips between the real and the fantastic, and resonances sound between one and the other. If I had to identify a single “best” book of 2008, this would be it. It has not received nearly the attention it deserves. Go out, get it, read it. Read it especially if, like me, you don’t read much literature originating from the Middle East. It is so rich and beautiful that you really shouldn’t miss it.

The Liar's Club by Mary Karr. I don’t know what made me pick up this memoir one afternoon; I was sitting on the couch and it was right at eye level and I realized I hadn’t read a memoir in a while, and next thing I knew I was halfway through it. It pulled me right in, this story of a girl growing up in the poorest part of East Texas in a crazy family with an educated, intellectual, artistically-oriented mother and a completely blue-collar, beer-drinking, hard-working father. Every moment feels absolutely authentic. It is told with that open-eyed, taking-it-all-in-ness of childhood, when what one lives feels normal no matter how odd it may be in the retrospect of adulthood. The Liar’s Club is a small masterpiece.

The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick. While I can’t say I loved every story in this collection of Swanwick’s recent short stories (I’m not a fan of his Darger and Surplus stories; the sort of humor that appeals to fans of Bernie Wooster et al. is lost on me), this collection had enough gems to make it onto my “best” list. I was particularly taken by “The Bordello in Faerie,” a surprisingly brutal story that approaches male sexuality in a way I’ve never read before. “Urdumheim” is a sort of odd religious fable about the beginning of the world, the importance of language and the invention of death that is sad and wonderful. “Triceratops Summer” is a wonderful bit of nostalgia that I never tire of rereading. This has whetted my appetite for The Best of Michael Swanwick, which has recently come out from Subterranean Press in a beautiful edition; hope to get my hands on that one soon.

The Crime Writer by Gregg Hurwitz. There’s an interesting gimmick to this mystery: the protagonist is a mystery writer who has been tried and found not guilty of the murder of his ex-fiancée. But he has no memory at all of the night of the murder, and fears that perhaps he really did commit the crime, after all, and is resolved to discover the truth for himself. The only way he can figure to go about this is to write it up as if it were one of his mysteries, and to research it as if he were researching a novel. The gimmick works, and the book is suspenseful and gripping.

Dangerous Laughter by Stephen Millhauser. I find it strange that Stephen Millhauser is not considered a fantasist rather than a mainstream storyteller. He writes stories about fashion in which dresses become as large as houses, for heaven’s sake, stories in which miniaturists create landscapes so small that they are literally invisible. Why are we not reading these stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction? I hope his audience is the larger for it, because these stories are exquisite. The title story alone is worth the price of the collection: a tale of a teenage obsession with laughter as an end in and of itself, laughter without cause, laughter that is, in fact, dangerous. As I , we are living in a golden age of short fiction of the fantastic, and Stephen Millhauser is additional proof of that.

The Imago Sequence by Laird Barron, a book full of Lovecraftian horror that comes as close to the effects of the master as I’ve ever read without being derivative – and, in fact, with far better writing than Lovecraft ever dreamed of.

The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: and Other Stories by John Kessel, a collection of short fiction by one who writes too little of it. Reviewed in greater detail here.

Poe's Children, edited by Peter Straub, a reprint collection of excellent short stories celebrating “the new horror.” Straub calls these writers “breathtaking[ly] ‘literary’ … who in this newly liberated atmosphere have no problem embracing their inner Poe,” and notes that their work “erases boundaries and blurs distinctions.” The “new horror” thus celebrates an end to ghettoes between types of literatures, and allows us to enjoy whatever is written by whomever, without the need for black and red mass market covers dripping with blood. The collection succeeds in giving us excellent stories that could as easily appear in The New Yorker as in Weird Tales.

The Epicure's Lament by Kate Christensen, the story of a man who believes he no longer has a reason to live, and who writes a book-length suicide note explaining why and recording every detail of his last few days on earth. It’s actually much funnier than that sounds, oddly enough, and can’t be called poignant or depressing; the fellow is actually sort of pathetic, but in an interesting way. If you liked Christensen’s The Great Man (I loved it), you’ll enjoy this book, too.

And so: onward. Two thousand and nine promises much reading glory. May your to-be-read pile always teeter with abundance but never fall on you!

Leap Day! What an odd little thing this extra day is -- like an extra New Year's Day, in a way, a second day of the year in which to take stock and see what's what. How are those New Year's resolutions coming? Mine are in poor shape, but I can always renew them now, because it's still early enough. Those six classics I've never read that I was going to read this year? There's still time. The exercise I promised to undertake? Better late than never.

Best of all, those book reviews I was going to write? I can make them up, right here, right now. So far, 2008 has been a terrific reading year, so prepare yourself for some "must read" recommendations.

The Dog Said Bow-Wow
Michael Swanwick
Tachyon Publications, 2007
U.S. trade paper, first edition
ISBN 189239152X
256 pages, $14.95

This excellent collection of recent Swanwick short stories is one of those rare single-author collections you can read straight through. Swanwick doesn't repeat himself; each story is unique and uniquely exciting. I'm a particular fan of "Urdumheim," a story about the beginning of language and the invasion of evil into the world, a mythology of a world something like ours but not exactly. "Triceratops Summer" is a lovely, gentle story that is as different as it can possibly be from the story of the tawdry and brutal "Bordello in Faerie." I was not personally fond of the Darger and Surplus stories, three tales from a far future universe following two conmen -- well, one conman and one condog, to be precise -- but those who enjoy purer adventure tales in strange settings are likely to enjoy these. The collection as a whole has something for everyone, and is one of the best of 2007.

Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One
Kathleen Duey
Atheneum, 2007
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 0689840934
368 pages, $17.99

The first of a projected young adult trilogy, Skin Hunger suffers from not being in the least self-contained; it simply stops. I found that annoying because I was so very much enjoying the story and wanted more right then and there. In fact, I was enjoying both stories, because this book is divided into two, with alternating chapters taking place in different time periods 200 years apart. In the first, magic is the work of charlatans -- yet real magic is pursued by one very ambitious, harsh, determined young man and his friend -- or is the friend his slave? Both are assisted by the viewpoint character, a young woman named Sadima, who has true magic in her and is in love with the friend. In the second story, magic is highly revered and very important, a demanding career for second sons of noblemen who do not care if their sons die in pursuit of it. The viewpoint character is one of the students, Hahp, who never sought out magic and hates his father for putting him in this dank cavern with these demanding, even torturous, studies. The novel is very dark and sad, with characters unable to help one another and, in the latter time, even strictly forbidden to do so. Skin Hunger was a finalist for the National Book Award in Young People's Literature, and deserved the recognition. But I do hope the next volume appears soon, because the book truly does suffer for being merely one-third of a full story. While most trilogies make some effort at bringing some sort of closure to any single volume, this one does not, and the reader is really left hanging. While it's a compliment to the author to say I want more, it's also really irritating to the reader to be left adrift for a year or more.

The Crime Writer
Gregg Hurwitz
Viking, 2007
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 0670063215
325 pages, $24.95

Metafiction has always intrigued me, from John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman to Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and even including Stephen King's The Dark Half. I have a good-sized collection of fiction about writing and writers, and it's growing. You wouldn't think that the subject of a person sitting at a computer keyboard and pounding out prose could be fascinating, but many writers have made it so. Hurwitz has gone a step further and turned it into a thriller, writing about how a writer writes a thriller, this time with the author as the suspect in a murder about which he is simultaneously writing. It's a good trick, and he makes it work, right down to the portions of the manuscript edited by his agent. The mystery itself is complex and fair and taut, difficult to unravel unless you're paying very close attention -- though the clues are all there. I'll be looking for more Hurwitz after reading this one; this guy's got the stuff.

The Imago Sequence
Laird Barron
Night Shade Books, 2007
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 1597800880
239 pages, $24.95

If you like H.P. Lovecraft, this is the book for you. Only it's better than Lovecraft: better written, better imagined, scarier. I can't get the title story of this horror collection out of my head, and believe me, I want to. Its images, its circularity, the doggedness of the viewpoint character even when he's scared practically to death, his bravado in the face of things he doesn't understand, his refusal to give in even when he knows hope is gone -- they're all there in my head, but mostly it's the images that I want to get rid of. And I don't want the images from "Hallucigenia" wandering around in my brain, vivid as they are from Barron's prose, which leans toward the purple but only in a good way -- prose so bright and dark that it's as if it's lit with a black light. "Procession of the Black Sloth" does for Hong Kong much of what Dan Simmons did for Calcutta in Song of Kali, making me scratch that city off the list of places I need to visit before I die. In fact, why the hell did I read this book? In order to get my pants scared off, that's why. Barron did to me what no one's been able to do in a long, long time: genuinely frighten me. And all without once bringing up my gorge, either, because this isn't graphic in that way. Barron plays with your head, making everything happen there. And if your brain is anything like mine, there are some dark, dark places that he's going to make you visit, whether you want to or not. Read it only with all the lights on and someone you're sure loves you in the house with you.

The King of Lies
John Hart
St. Martin's Minotaur, 2006
U.S. mass market paperback, reprint
ISBN 0312363753
400 pages, $6.99

John Hart is a relatively new writer on the thriller scene; his latest novel, Down River, has been nominated for an Edgar this year, and deservedly so. I think I liked The King of Lies even better, though; perhaps it's because I sympathize so with the protagonist, a lawyer who doesn't want to be a lawyer anymore. Jackson Workman Pickens, known to all as "Work," has always done what his forceful father, Ezra, told him to do. But Ezra disappeared eighteen months ago, on the night Work's mother died. Now his body has been found with two bullets in it, and the police think that Work did it for the $15 million he stands to inherit. Work is afraid his sister did it, and is concerned above all with protecting her from going to prison; unlike the usual book in which a simple conversation would clear the whole problem up, Work is here prevented from clearing the air with his sister by her significant other, who is also a suspect. Complication piles on complication, the stakes growing progressively higher, until everything resolves in a satisfactorily explosive climax. Hart belongs on the same shelf with Turow.