Book Reviews: The Night Wanderer, Taylor; Riddance, Jackson; Tokyo Ghoul, Ishida

[juushika]

Title: The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel
Author: Drew Hayden Taylor
Published: Annick Press, 2007
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 220
Total Page Count: 343,415
Text Number: 1237
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A Native teen's turbulent social and home life is further complicated by a new houseguest who's returning to the reservation after many—many—many years away. The teenage angst offers valuable insight into reservation life but is unfortunately cliché and has a too-easy resolution. The visitor is a vampire, and the concept of a Native vampire has great potential, engaging the Otherness of the vampire while critiquing its aristocratic/therefore white connotations, and the exceptionally long view of reservation life dovetails with themes in the other plotline. But the vampire is ultimately nonthreatening, which decreases the stakes to nothing. And this feels indicative of the work entire: distinctive premise, good potential, but the execution is toothless and too easy, thus the work is forgettable.


Title: Riddance: Or the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children
Author: Shelley Jackson
Published: Black Balloon Publishing, 2018
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 505
Total Page Count: 343,920
Text Number: 1238
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Sybil Joines Vocational School teaches children with stutters to speak for the dead. Spiritualism, stutters, found documents, hidden pasts, and a mouth/necronautical aesthetic which is creative and frequently gross—there's a lot going on here, and it makes for a hot mess of a book. It's unnecessarily long, and while some elements combine well, primarily the two pseudo-simultaneous narratives converging in the climax, I wish others were pared down. The school ephemera grows particularly weird—it's a distinct aesthetic! and in dedication to that aesthetic, one of the more successful "found document" multimedia books I've read. But it's also a bizarre aesthetic, gross and farcical, and it overwhelms the weird elements which are more evocative, like the unusual landscapes of the dead, where self-narrative creates reality; like the language of "hearing-mouth," the dead-speakers folding into their own mouths, the recursive potential of the living speaking the dead speaking the dead speaking....

At its best, this is like nothing I've read, utterly unique in imagery, a tactile take on spiritualism and a critical look at how the empowerment of spiritualism failed to apply to children and people of color, more interested in the living's relationship with death/language/narrative than in plot. At its worst, this is like nothing I've read because it's a crowded mess, overreaching for the sake of novelty, a sort of gritty, satirical approach to kitsch. I suspect my response to the balance of these elements is negatively impacted by my lack of humor. I'm ambivalent—but glad to have read it—but I wouldn't recommend it, not really.


Title: Tokyo Ghoul
Author: Sui Ishida
Translator: Joe Yamazaki
Published: VIZMedia, 2015-2017 (2011-2014)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 2905 (224+208+192+192+200+200+200+216+200+216+216+200+216+224)
Total Page Count: 346,825
Text Number: 1239-1252
Read Because: personal enjoyment, paperbacks borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: A college student's life is radically altered when he receives transplanted organs from a man-eating ghoul. Ghouls take vampire tropes, make them even messier, and remove any pretense of ethics—so this is highly relevant to my interests. When it works, it's delightfully grotesque and unsettlingly intimate. But the style is so anime, and the overdesigned characters and exaggerated reactions share the heightened tone of the ghoul elements. Imagine the narrative this might be if the protagonist's revulsion towards human food didn't have the same tonal register as his prolonged supernatural torture—if the violence stood out, if the unsettling moments weren't drowned out. Sometimes it lands better, but rarely without caveat (see: volume 7 is honestly great, but the subsequent shift to much less interesting characters is a let-down; the bitter tone of the ending is brave, but the plotting sucks). I like this, but like it by cherry-picking and extrapolating those best bits that the work itself doesn't have time to differentiate before introducing a new character design. I don't like it enough to read the sequel.