Thoughts on books I read in 2019

I wrote one of these year-end wrap-up posts in 2015. That was a huge reading year, volume-wise. I bet I read 40 novels. And I had an awkward conversation with James Ellroy, too.

This year, I only rated 19 books on Goodreads. And two of them - Mary Monster and Camille - were my own. (Spoiler alert, I gave them five stars.)

Point being, when I talk about the books I read in 2019, I'm talking about a pretty short list. However, two of the novels on that list are Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest. So I bet I read as many words as ever. They just added up to fewer books.

I think about this all the time. Life is so finite. Is it better to use two months finishing eight clever crime thrillers or reading one literary masterpiece that (as readers of either of the two aforementioned novels will tell you) doesn't finish at all, in the conventional sense of the term?

Reading Gravity's Rainbow was a bit like going for a long run. I'm glad I did it, but I'm also glad it's over. I can now say I've read Pynchon's most difficult novel in all its disturbing glory. The highs were so high, but the lows, man... There is some sick stuff in there.

There's some sickness in Infinite Jest, too. It's a whole book about sickness, in fact. About our modern sickness: our obsessive need to be distracted. Some satisfy it through alcoholism. Others through seduction. And others through devotion to a cause, a sport or an entertainment. But all this sickness is surrounded by so much love, humor, and Wallace's empathy for all these broken people. Infinite Jest is maybe the only book I've ever read that made me want to be a better human.

I also read some Big Important American Novels like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Some genre thrillers like Head Full of Ghosts. Some European satire like Submission. And some modern stylists like Jonathan Lethem, who wrote the single most devastating sentence I've ever read, "We only feel we're floating because we're forever falling." I stared into my drink for a good 10 minutes after I read those words.

Perhaps the non-Infinite Jest book I remember best is The Elementals by Michael McDowell. In The Elementals, the heat is a character, the same way the cold was a character in Hold the Dark. In both books, the weather is an ever-present metaphor for meaninglessness and memory, for all the things you can't ever, ever escape. McDowell's Alabama coast is the loneliest, wettest, hottest place in the world. The heat weighs you down. The heat slows you down. In the end, the heat decides if you live or die.

Maybe I just have a thing for the weather.

Indie Reader reviews Mary Monster

This is one of those reviews where you get the feeling that if people'd just read it, surely they'd give your work a shot.

Writing a horror novel that plays off a seminal classic of the genre is a huge risk, but Matt Ingwalson does more than a credible job of pulling the feat off in MARY MONSTER. Rather than focus on her most famous literary work, Ingwalson instead brings Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley forward as both monster and creator... An interesting premise and a well-done presentation wrapped in a horror novel, MARY MONSTER is an engaging, fun and thoughtful critique of the creative process and relationship between artists and inspiration.

If that's enough to grab your attention, here's the link.

One reader's lyric is another reader's labor

Kirkus's review of Mary Monster isn't always positive, but it's fair. And anytime anyone compares me to Thomas Pynchon, I'll take it.

In this ambitious novel, Ingwalson’s (The Baby Monitor, 2017, etc.) prose slips in and out of Otis’ Mancunian dialect, flecked with rich allusions to rock, literature, and various Colorado locales. Otis’ voice is noirish in a way that will strike some readers as lyric and others as a bit labored... This is an elegant mystery in the mode of Thomas Pynchon or Jonathan Lethem, invested more in the journey than the outcome.

As an example of "labored" prose, the reviewer offers this, from my novel's third chapter:

For a few seconds I stared back, my eyes gone black as cats as I surveyed the silk of her neck. This one’s world had been night for far too long. She’d never seen a beach, she’d never cared for light. A streetlamp kicked on and it made her flesh milk-flesh.

Which is fine. If you don't like that, I'd urge you not to buy this book. Because the whole thing is like that. I swung for the fences on this one. I regret nothing.

I am publishing my unpublishable novel

Tomorrow is the drop date for Mary Monster. You can pre-order it right now, if you're so inclined.

I blogged before that my novel might be an unmarketable mashup of noir mystery, gothic lit, rock fetishism and supernatural suspense. Sure enough, I spent six months trying to find an agent. I got a few bites. A couple even sent me personal letters complimenting my voice. But in the end, no one was willing to rep it.

I'm not willing to let Mary Monster die on my hard drive. So I'm self-publishing it.

In a way, I think that's how it should've been all along. This is a personal book. A passion project. A book I wrote for me.

I've written an unpublishable mashup of a novel

Between January 3, 2013 and February 8, 2017, I put out eight novellas. That's a clip of a new book every six months. What's been the hold-up since?

The good news is I'm on my third draft of a novel. The bad news? I'm fairly sure it's unpublishable.

Mary Monster isn't going to be easy to sell. It's a mashup of urban surrealism and gothic horror. Dance Dance Dance meets Penny Dreadful. My first-person protagonist narrates the story in an awkward combination of 1976 Manchester and 2002 Manhattan slang. He drops dozens of indie music references, some explained and some that'll only make sense to the sort of person who obsesses over The Smiths. Meanwhile, the titular Mary speaks in wholly imagined accents, double entendres and literary allusions.

I tried to embrace all this artifice. In fact, I ran at it. In places I rewrote things to feel purposefully self-conscious, so readers have to slow down and make choices about what to Google and what to let go.

How do I explain this work in a query letter? And even if I could, who'd want it? Fantasy publishers will find my style obtrusive. While literary agents are going to be turned off by all the zombies.

But I can't self-publish, either. The type of people who download self-published fiction are looking for error-free genre fun. That means the first wave of consumer reviews would be terrible. Some jerk would claim my book was filled with typos. Another would drop the where-was-the-editor bomb. And snap, Amazon's algorithm would bury Mary Monster before it got a chance to find a niche.

To publish this book, I either need to find a publisher who believes in it. Or an audience ready to champion it. And I'm not sure either exists.