Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

This will be brief, because I can convey the feel of this tense, dark, gritty novel in very few words:

Smoke. Gin. Bullets. More gin. Bogart, not literally, but you won't be able to not see the nameless narrator as Humphrey. And this quote:

"I haven't laughed so hard over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother."

If you think we live in a jaded, brutal age, try this Depression era novel. If you think we live in a violent age, try this novel. If you think we live in an overly drugged age, read this novel.

In short, read this novel. I look forward to the other four (including, most notably, the Maltese Falcon) in this volume.

Johanna Sinisalo, Troll: A Love Story

Johanna Sinisalo's Troll: A Love Story is a strange, dark, stunningly beautiful novel about the boundaries of humanity. The premise is that trolls, longstanding elements of Scandinavian myth, have at last been documented by science. This process (which has happened with a great many creatures like the giant squid and the rhinoceros, both of which were once considered mythical) transforms them from "monsters" to "animals," as they are shifted from books of mythology to books of biology.

They remain, though, highly elusive, rarely captured or even observed. Still, as has been happening win many large predators from wildcats to bears to wolves, habitat destruction and global climate change has shortened their periods of hibernation and pushed them closer to human settlements.

The plot begins with advertising designer Mikael (aka "Angel") stumbling home, partly drunk, to find some local teenage thugs beating someone beside his building. He yells and threatens to call the cops, and when they scatter, he finds that they have been attacking a young troll, roughly human-shaped, though tailed, jet-black and feline in its litheness but clearly in terrible shape. Against all good sense, he scoops up the wild "animal" and brings it into his apartment:

It's very weak. When I lower it onto the bed it doesn't struggle at all, just contemplates me with its reddish-orange feline eyes with vertical pupils. The ridge of its nose protrudes rather more than a cat's, and its nostrils are large and expressive. The mouth is in no way like the split muzzle of a cat or a dog: it's a narrow, horizontal slit. The whole face is so human-looking ... It's easy to understand why these black creatures have always been regarded as some sort of forest people who live in caves and holes, chance mutations of nature, parodies of mankind.

Each short chapters is told from the point of view of one of a handful of characters (Angel, his ex-lover "Dr. Spiderman," his frightfully oppressed mail-order-bride neighbor Palomita, and so on). These are interspersed with passages from other books and journals, real and fictional, that give background on the troll mythology and biology, ranging from Aki Bärman's The Beast in Man: An Enquiry Concerning the Kinship Between Man and Wild Animal in Myth and Fantasy (1986) to Väino Linna's The Unknown Soldier (1954).

Angel becomes increasingly fascinated, captivated, obsessed with the troll, and this relationship begins to eclipse all of his human relationships, professional and personal. The novel is driven by the interior concerns of several characters, external pressures on and between them, and the ticking time-bomb of the razor-clawed, sharp-toothed wild animal in Angel's bedroom.

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

As a teenager, I read hundreds of sci-fi and fantasy novels (not all of them masterpieces, I realize in retrospect). All fantasy novels essentially owe a debt to J.R.R. Tolkien's pioneering masterpieces The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; so too, much of science fiction owesa debt to Ray Bradbury and his short stories and novels, including The Martian Chronicles, but also the harrowing and wonderful Something Wicked This Way Comes and, perhaps most famously, Fahrenheit 451.

What these works all share in common is, perhaps, the hallmark of the genre -- a penchant for looking at humanity as if from the outside, an estrangement in time or place or species that allows us to see ourselves anew.

The Martian Chronicles was originally published as a series of short stories in a number of publications, and does not have the scope or cohesion of this proper novels. Still, a series of themes run throughout them. The narratives are set in a future which seems, now, rather like our own past, as if the 1940s (when it MC was written) were pushed into the future, without the intervening years having occurred. It is a quaint future, for all of its sudden violence, which highlights how, no matter what we predict about the future, we are always, in essence, wrong.

Hilary Mantel, The Giant, O'Brien

This novel of the famous Irish giant Charles Byrne was recommended to me over a pint in a pub in London by an Irish friend, so of course I was compelled to seek it out. The real Charles Byrne died a young man in 1783, after attaining the prodigious height of 7 feet, 7 inches. Hilary Mantel puts flesh on his bones which, somewhat chillingly, remain on view in the Hunterian Museum in London:

Mantel's fictionalized Byrne, re-christened Charles O'Brien by his dubious promoter, is a storyteller in the ancient Irish tradition, and the mythical tales he delicately weaves for his admiring (and ultimately traitorous) form a stark contrast to the bleak life of the giant who tells them. He speaks of gold-trimmed chariots led by teams of white horses, but plods his way on foot. He speaks of castles hug with Flemish tapestries and furnished in ornate antiques, but lives in squalor. We read:

The poet has his memorial in repetition, and the statesman in stone and bronze. The scholar's hand lies always on his book and ... the rebel has his ballad and his cross ... But for the poor man and the giant there is the scrubbed wooden slab and the slop bucket, there is the cauldron and the boiling pot, and the dunghill for his lights; so he is a stench in the nose for a day and a week, so his is a no-name, so he is oblivion. Stories cannot save him. When human memory has run out, there is the memory of animals; behind that, the memory of the plants, and behind that the memory of the rocks. But the wind and the sea wear the rock away; and the cell-line runs to its limit where meaning falls away from it, and it loses knowledge of its own nature.

The novel begins perhaps slowly, it winds perhaps more than is necessary, but it finishes with withering power. Modern science can tell us why Charles grew so tall, but it must remain mute on what it would be like to live as a giant. For this, we need a novelist.