Best Reads of 2014: Part One

Here at Read Me Deadly, we're conflicted about doing a roundup of the year's best books. It isn't easy looking back and whittling it down, is it, Georgette? Deciding what is "best" is subjective and changeable from one hour to the next. Yesterday, I decided to make it a little easier for myself by focusing only on fiction published in 2014 and not ranking my picks. By evening, my erasures had created holes in the list. No NFL coach has agonized more over substitutions, but at least I didn't have a playoffs berth at stake!

After we've posted our favorites this week, we'll discuss them as a group next week. I have no doubt I'll be ready to amend my picks then. But for now, here's the 2014 fiction I enjoyed most this year.

"By the end of his second month at Hitode Station, Rob Freeman had already come up with 85 ways to murder Henri Kerlerec." How's that opening sentence for a hook? Game designer James L. Cambias's A Darkling Sea (Tor, January 2014) is fun sci-fi set on the frozen moon of Ilmatar. Far below the ice-covered surface live blind, lobster-like Ilmatarans. Hitode is manned by a group of human scientists who are bound by an agreement between Earthlings and their first extraterrestrial contacts, the Sholen. The six-legged Sholen, far more technologically advanced than humans, demand Hitode scientists in no way make contact or interfere with Ilmatarans.

The scientists' investigation of the Ilmatarans is stymied so Henri, a media-darling Hitode archaeologist, insists on starring in a clandestine research mission to be filmed by nature photographer Rob. The old TV series Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom never featured anything approaching Rob's filmed disaster. The Ilmatarans, who have their own scientific curiosity, naively capture and dissect Henri. This brings the Sholen to Ilmatar and three species' politics and cultures collide.

I read A Darkling Sea after spotting it on Publishers Weekly's list of best 2014 sci-fi. I love books in which humans interact with extraterrestrials and Cambias has created species with both striking differences and interesting similarities. The author is excellent in his use and description of technology, but his book is more than a geeky vision of future tech. It's a comic coming-of-age story and an examination of identity, culture, imperialism and colonialism. I'm glad it's the first book of a series because I look forward to returning to Cambias's strange world.

We don't have to leave Earth or even the United States to find the mysterious Area X. It's a pristine wilderness created by unknown forces, constrained by invisible borders and investigated by a shadowy governmental agency in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy. Annihilation (see the review here), Authority and Acceptance were all published by FSG Originals/Macmillan in 2014. (In November, FSG Originals published Area X, a hardcover edition that contains the complete trilogy.) These beautifully written books combine elements of sci fi, fantasy, dystopian fiction, and horror. Some spooky scenes and unsettling imagery appear. VanderMeer does a great job with themes of authority and identity (specifically, what makes us human). The books must be read in order.

Toby Clements' Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims is historical fiction that runs riot through the War of the Roses. Kingmaker, first in a new series, was published in February 2014 by Century, a Random House UK affiliate, and arrived at our house after its original purchase in London by a friend.

It begins with events in 1460 that lead Sister Katherine and Brother Thomas to be evicted from their religious orders. As they flee, they are caught up in the English civil war fought by the royal houses of Lancaster and York. Real-life figures such as the future Yorkist monarch, Edward, Earl of March, and his adviser, the Earl of Warwick, appear, but it's Clements' ordinary men and women like Katherine and Thomas who give this book a vivid authenticity. It's cinematic and very appealing.

Have you watched the HBO TV series True Detective? The 2014 season consists of an eight-part crime drama set in the coastal plains of southern Louisiana. I was repulsed by the serial killer's staged tableaux at the series' center, but riveted by the performances of Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. I felt much the same way when I read Lauren Beukes's Broken Monsters (Mulholland, September 2014), a thriller/horror genre-bender laced with comedy.

A serial killer's first "artistic" tableau, staged in an abandoned warehouse in the decaying city of Detroit, is half-boy, half-deer. And that's just for starters. The multi-threaded story is told from several points of view, including investigating detective, Gabriella Versado, her teenage daughter, an itinerant artist, a journalist and the killer. Blood and gore don't spill from the pages but the book is as twisting and weird as you'd expect from South African writer Beukes, who also wrote 2013's The Shining Girls, featuring a time-traveling serial killer. I read Broken Monsters on a night I was the only one awake and experienced what true dread feels like.

I had fun reading David Shafer's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Mulholland, August 2014). It features an international media/industrial cabal called the Committee, natch, that wants to create a "New Alexandria" in which all information is privatized so they can take over the world. Playing David to the Committee's Goliath is the underground online group Dear Diary. Joining the fray is a trio in their 30s: Leo Crane, who uses his trust funds to abuse drugs and get paranoid in Portland, Oregon; his former school buddy, Mark Deveraux, a cynical self-help guru living lavishly in Brooklyn; and the good woman who brings the friends back together, Leila Majnoun, an increasingly fed-up worker for a global nonprofit agency.

Of course, Shafer isn't the only one to write about an unscrupulous Big Data conspiracy. Last year, there were Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge and Dave Eggers' The Circle, but this topic is important (NSA, anyone?) and this book is different. Shafer has an original voice that's darkly comic, paranoid and compassionate (if you can imagine that) and his characters are fully developed. I guess the best way to describe this is a cyber-techno thriller driven by its sympathetic characters rather than adrenalin.

I read Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad books for her stylish writing, characterization, meticulous plotting and Irish setting. The murder investigation in The Secret Place (Viking Adult, September 2014) begins when 16-year-old Holly, daughter of Det. Frank Mackey, gives a photo to Det. Stephen Moran, who's working cold cases. In the photo is Chris Harper, a rich and popular boy who was found dead a year ago on the grounds of Holly's school, St. Kilda's. Written across the photo is the sentence, "I know who killed him." The photo was posted on a St. Kilda's bulletin board called "the Secret Place." Stephen, who is ambitious to become a member of the Murder Squad, joins the Squad's tough Det. Antoinette Conway to investigate the now-hot case at the exclusive girls' school.

This fifth series book differs from the previous books, which are told from the lead detective's point of view. In The Secret Place, Tana French toys with the time frame and varies the point of view. One story line follows the course of the investigation by Stephen and Antoinette, while the other follows two competing groups of four St. Kilda's girls in the year leading up to Chris's murder and its aftermath. If you find teenage girls unbearable, you probably won't like this book. I enjoyed seeing French's police again and the book's focus on relationships.

What would the reading year be like without TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it)? My favorite 2014 dystopian novel is Station Eleven (Knopf, September 2014), by Emily St. John Mandel. The story centers around three characters: Hollywood star Arthur Leander, who dies onstage during King Lear in the book's opening pages; Jeevan Chaudhary, the good Samaritan who tries to save him; and a child actress, Kirsten Raymonde. Later that night, the Georgia flu begins wiping out most of the world's population. Years later, Kirsten is a member of a troupe of Shakespearean actors traveling through the Great Lakes area, which looks like something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. They are on their way to a cultural center, and a group of stranded survivors, at a former airport.

Mandel travels back and forth in time, weaving together the stories of these three people and their associates and adding intrigue in the form of a sinister figure, the Prophet. The strength of Mandel's writing and the journey of her survivors brought to my mind the nameless narrator's walking tour of Suffolk in W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. Mandel's artists and musicians believe that simply surviving isn't enough. Station Eleven made me think about the world's beauty and its future.

Rabih Alameddine's An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press, February 2014) is a portrait of Aalyia Sohbi, a 72-year-old divorced and godless woman whose family considers her worse than an unnecessary appendage. She's an obstacle because they lust after her apartment. Aalyia loves her city, Beirut, and she loves her books. After her divorce, she began working at a bookstore, where she was paid so poorly she stole books from time to time to make up for it. For more than three decades, Aaliya has begun the New Year by translating one of these books into Arabic. When she's finished, she simply puts it away. The quiet Aaliya needs for these translations is threatened by the war and her family.

Aalyia's thoughts about various books and writers are a treat to read. For example, here's Aalyia on Spanish writer Javier Marías, author of The Infatuations:

In one of his essays, (Javier) Marías suggest that his work deals as much with what didn't happen as with what happened. In other words, most of us believe we are who we are because of the decisions we've made, because of events that shaped us, because of the choices of those around us. We rarely consider that we're also formed by the decisions we didn't make, by events that could have happened but didn't, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.

How can a person read this book and not fall in love with Aalyia? I have Alameddine's The Hakawati, "an Arabian Nights for this century," on my 2015 reading list.

Earlier, I told you about the interspecies culture clash found in James L. Cambias's A Darkling Sea. In Okey Ndibe's Foreign Gods Inc. (Soho, January 2014), the culture clash is experienced by a Nigerian who immigrates to America. Ikechukwu "Ike" Uzondu drives a New York City cab despite his economics degree from Amherst. After his green-card marriage ends, Ike is overwhelmed by debt. His plan to deal with it involves stealing the statue of the god Ngene in his native Nigerian village and selling it to Foreign Gods, Inc., a New York gallery specializing in religious artifacts from Asia and Africa. Needless to say, his trip to Nigeria and the scheme don't go as planned.

Ike's life is fragmented as he straddles two countries. He doesn't feel completely at home in either of them. Foreign Gods Inc. has elements of a satire but it's a poignant portrait of a man who immigrated to America and got lost trying to find the American dream.

In Euphoria (Atlantic Monthly Press, June 2014), Lily King re-imagines the 1933 presence in New Guinea of a trio of young anthropologists: Margaret Mead, her then-second husband, Reo Fortune, and her future-third husband, Gregory Bateson. Her fictionalized anthropologists are Nell Stone, an American; Schuyler "Fen" Fenwick, an Australian; and Andrew Bankson, an Englishman.

We learn Bankson has been alone in New Guinea, studying the Kiona river tribe, for several years. He's lonely and depressed when his narration begins, "Three days earlier, I'd gone to the river to drown myself." He's saved from another attempt by his chance meeting with plucky Nell and her tightly-wound husband, Fen. Nell and Fen are ready to leave New Guinea unless they can come up with a suitable tribe to study. Bankson, already smitten with Nell, hastens to locate a tribe, the Tam, along the Sepik River, an hour boat's ride away. The trio's involvement with their work and the love triangle's growing passion are revealed through Bankson's narration and Nell's writing. (One smokin' scene involves the three poring over an unedited copy of Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture!)

King's prose manages to be taut and lush, restrained and sensual––all at the same time. She keeps her focus on the three anthropologists during this moving story but our glimpses of the New Guineans are fascinating. I'd particularly suggest this book to readers who liked Ann Patchett's State of Wonder, Hanya Yanigahara's The People in the Trees or Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork.

There you have it, my for-now favorite 2014 fiction. We'll have more favorites this week.

Let's Do the Time Warp Again

Doing the Time Warp in The Rocky Horror Picture Show

To do a mind flip and a time slip, you don't need to be a left-and-right jumping, pelvic-thrusting Transylvanian in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. You can stay in your comfy chair and pick up one of the unusual books below. None of them are for everybody. They zig-zag between past and present in an examination of identity and perception or betrayal and redemption.

For someone who wonders if a house can haunt people as well as be haunted by them: The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai (Viking, July 2014). Marxist academician Zee Devohr, of the wealthy "Devohrcing Devohrs," moves into the carriage house of her mother's family estate, Laurelfield, with her husband Doug, a struggling grad student who needs peace and quiet while writing his dissertation on poet Edwin Parfitt. He can't seem to get his ideas onto paper and then is further distracted when another couple also moves into the carriage house. Doug's thoughts turn larcenous when he discovers Laurelfield was once an artists' colony and that files pertaining to his dissertation may be in Laurelfield's locked attic.

This is one of those books you read as if you're opening a Russian nesting doll. It's full of twists and surprises, some of them so small or unexpected that an inattentive reader won't catch them all. When you register one, it feels as if you're in on a little joke between you and the writer that excludes some of the characters. How often do you have a chance to experience this when you read? The many characters are introduced and wander through chapters titled 1999, 1955, 1929 and 1900. After reading this clever book, you'll change the way you think about interpreting history, look at unidentifiable people in old photos and view objects that have been in your family for generations.

If you like putting together those gazillion-piece jigsaw puzzles of a herd of zebras or enjoy the process of not knowing what the hell is going on and getting clued in, bit by frustrating bit: Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy (FSG Originals, 2014). The Southern Reach is a secretive governmental agency that sends expeditions into the mysterious Area X, a pristine wilderness in Florida, maybe, created by something strange and contained by unusual borders. Annihilation (see review here) involves the all-women twelfth expedition: a biologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist and a psychologist. Authority details the attempts of Control, the Southern Reach's interim director, to take charge of his agency. Acceptance concludes this trilogy's look at human identity with a visit to Area X by Control and someone connected with the twelfth expedition.

These three books must be read in order and even then your imagination will have its hands full. When I read Acceptance, I wondered if I'd unknowingly taken something that was affecting my mental processing. Fun. These books are fascinating sci-fi/detective sleuthing/dystopian fiction for the right reader.

Like your British espionage to be more than a frantic boiling of nifty gadgets, cold-blooded spies and hot babes? Try Gerald Seymour's 464-page The Dealer and the Dead (Thomas Dunne, February 2014). In 1991, some men and boys in the Croatian village of Vukovar wait for an arms dealer's promised shipment. It never arrives and they are slaughtered by the Serbs. Almost two decades later, a Vukovar farmer's field is cleared of land mines. An unearthed body reveals the arms dealer's identity: Harvey Gillot, a wealthy Englishman famous for the reliability of his word. The surviving Croatian villagers have long memories and are now bent on revenge.

Seymour outdoes himself this time with his many, and I mean many, characters, few of whom approach likability. If you appreciate a slow-burning, multi-threaded story that ultimately kicks into high gear, give this book about redemption and the shadowy world of arms dealing a shot. Or, pick up Seymour's 2013 book, A Deniable Death (reviewed here).

And now, I'll do the time warp and pick up Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2014). It slips time in its story about two friends, one of whom betrays the other. I'm enjoying Rahman's exploration of how well we can know the world and ourselves.

Review of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation

No, this isn't my husband, our dog and me.

My rating scale for books is based on the lengths to which I'll go in order to avoid putting the book down. The other night I was reading Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 4, 2014) when the dog needed to go out. My husband took him out after negotiating a steep price because I rate Annihilation very high.

You can see why I was riveted from the very first paragraph:

The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. All of this part of the country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate. Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors’ equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat.

Before I talk about VanderMeer's skillful manipulation of the threat, let me tell you about the expedition, the twelfth sent by the Southern Reach, a clandestine government agency. The mission is simple: to continue the government’s investigation into the mysteries of Area X. While Area X is mysterious, so are the motives behind the Southern Reach's treatment of the expedition sent to explore it. Expedition members are not only forbidden to take cell phones and computers, they don't even have watches or compasses. On their belts hangs an odd measuring device that will glow red to indicate they have 30 minutes to find "a safe place," although they are not told what the device measures. They also carry guns and journals they're to write in without sharing entries with each other.

Members of previous expeditions did not fare well and it's not clear why. Area X exerts a strange influence over people who enter, and they kill themselves or each other or return, like the eleventh expedition, husks of themselves. The current team consists of four unnamed women: the psychologist, the surveyor, the anthropologist and the biologist, who narrates. The psychologist is the team leader. She puts her team under hypnosis to keep their minds from tricking them as they cross the border, which is invisible to the naked eye. If the psychologist becomes incapacitated, the others are to return to the entry point and wait for an "extraction" whose methodology they don't know.

winter in Area X

Everyone on the team assumes the enigmatic psychologist knows more than the others. From very early on, we see that the biologist narrator isn't divulging everything she knows to the group. She tells us she's not sure what they've been told is the truth. We're unsure how credible and objective a witness she is, although it's impossible not to root for her. It's strange that she insists on calling the uncharted structure that disappears into the ground (mentioned in the first paragraph) a tower, while the others say that of course it's a tunnel. Whatever it is, it's a masterpiece at unnerving the reader.

As unsettling events in Area X mount and take their toll, the biologist becomes even more determined to understand what's going on. I rode a roller coaster of dread and paranoia as she continues her investigations and attempts to account for strange, surrealistic animal behavior and to reconcile physical evidence with what she thinks she knows. As she becomes aware that everything is not what it seems and Area X may not be her only source of danger, she begins interrupting the action to recount her childhood, marriage and career as "the queen of tide pools." These suspensions in the plot serve to heighten tension when action is resumed, but her portrait is as fascinating as her heart-stopping Area X exploration. An only child, she became an expert in the uses of solitude and an observer who melts into her surroundings. Her nature is critical to VanderMeer's brilliant plot.

I was engrossed watching the biologist, whose work is her life, tackle the secrets of the intriguing and dangerous Area X. While we learn her secrets, she discovers truths about herself. This uncommon book, with its strange images and courageous heroine, is so suspenseful in so many different ways, I confess I sneaked peeks ahead. What can I say? I was under the spell of Area X.

Luckily, I don't need to wait long to continue VanderMeer's thriller mash-up of horror, sci fi, and fantasy examining reality and perception. Authority, second in the Southern Reach Trilogy, will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 6, 2014. The third book, Acceptance, will be out on September 2, 2014.

Map of Area X by Jeremy Zerfoss

Note: Images are from Jeff VanderMeer's page on weirdfictionreview.com.