I read “The Apologists,” by Tade Thompson. Thompson’s novel Rosewater contains one of the scariest, most visceral scenes I have ever read, so I was eager for his new short story.

In the early scenes, we meet a mother and daughter who get bludgeoned to death. Detective Eve Stevens investigates the murders, and for a while I thought I was getting a murder mystery, but then came the bit with the spider, a hiccup of weirdness in an otherwise straightforward police procedural.

The weirdness gradually escalates, and by the time things really get cooking, the story is a whole lot more than just a whodunnit. The plot zigzags like a ball in a pinball machine, leaving you dizzy and wondering where you left your coat.

I enjoy Thompson’s prose, which is economical and at times elegant, and I liked his characters here, especially Eve, trying to do her job in exceptionally difficult circumstances. I was also quite fond of the tiger.

I read Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy, because the older I get, the shorter life seems and the less patience I have for the ordinary when I could have something sublime.

Let my start by saying I laughed at the necrophilia scenes. Perhaps I should finish by saying that too. That one sentence will tell you whether this book is right for you or not.

McCarthy is famous for the violence of his writing. Quite a few critics point to Blood Meridian as the most violent book. Not just the most violent McCarthy book, but the most violent book.

I disagree. Now it has been many years since I read Blood Meridian, but I do not recall that one featuring a serial killer rapist who attempts to make sweet love to a corpse but keeps getting thwarted in Loony-Tunes-esque ways—forbidden desecratory love, but make it slapstick.

Child of God does not resonate for me as much as No Country for Old Men (the finest crime novel I have ever read) or The Road (with the scariest horror scene I have ever read), but even a lesser McCarthy is a magnificent thing. He is a prose stylist nonpareil. At times his sentences are straightforward and terse, the noun did the verb to the object, marching the plot forward in staccato steps. Without warning his sentences turn wavy, different lengths, new cadences. He describes the mundane throwaway details like a monk illuminating the serifs in his scroll.  

I did not read a print version, but when I checked the Wikipedia page, I found the passage that made me stop in my tracks and rewind the audio as I walked the dog the other day:

“He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?”

One final but crucial note: If you enjoy audiobooks, do not miss the Tom Stechschulte narration. He is one of my top five favorite narrators. Child of God is set in eastern Tennessee and he gets the accents right.

When I started as a public librarian, I checked out a few annual “Best of” anthologies to get a sense for different genres: sports writing, science writing, crime fiction, short stories in general. I recently found The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 (Hugh Howey and John Joseph Adams, eds.) on sale, so I gave the ensemble-cast audiobook a listen.

Disappointingly, the stories were of varying quality. I expect better in an anthology with the word Best in the title. Or let me be more accurate: the stories were all good, speaking on a plot level, but the prose was not always up to snuff.

The phrase “achingly beautiful” should not appear in your short story, because that phrase is hackneyed. If I’m editing, I’ll let that slide in book-length manuscripts for some authors, because prose craft is not everyone’s forte. I will not let that slide in a short story, because you’ve only got three thousand words, give or take, and each one needs to count.

I absolutely, positively would not let “achingly beautiful” appear twice in the same fucking story. Which it did in one of the stories in the anthology.

My favorite fantasy short story was “John Hollowback and the Witch,” because I am a sucker for good witchy stories. Amal El-Mohtar has been on my TBR for years. I’m going to seek out her longer fiction on the strength of this story. My favorite science fiction short story was “Calypso’s Guest,” by Andrew Sean Greer. I love a familiar story thoughtfully retold.

And there was a short story I expected to dislike. I won’t name the writer, but I had bounced off his novels because his prose disappointed me, but he did a great job with the short story.