If The Book of Speculation were a body part, it would be the back of the knee, a dark place you don’t try to pretty up, the spot that makes you bend. It lets the flashier parts of you do their thing. It’s got a male librarian, a working stiff—a real back-of-the-knee kind of guy—a body part someone admires but never mentions. This book is about resilience. The back of the knee doesn’t wrinkle.
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In a bright sterile room, released from your mother’s sliced belly, your skull perfectly round, you are wrapped in a pink blanket and cooed at, she’s perfect, she’s beautiful, she’s cute as a button. As you evolve from infant to toddler, you’re told you’re adorable. People pick you up and pinch your cheeks and stroke your plump arms and kiss you all over your body. In childhood, your teeth fall out.
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If The Book of Laney were a snowstorm, it would be a snowstorm that burns bright and hot until it melts away and builds itself up again and again until all you see is snow melting and burning and freezing.
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I live with a vampire named Xiaomei, and it is dull beyond belief. It is so dull that we lived together for nearly a year before I even realized she was a vampire.
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Freshman year I lived in a dorm on Fifth Avenue. It was the same year many students flung themselves to their deaths from upper floors of the NYU library. Plexiglass barriers were installed after the third suicide.
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Norman Lock’s novel American Meteor is comprised of the first-person deathbed account of Stephen Moran, whose invented life spans the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries, and includes encounters with many of the great men of the era. He narrates the loss of his eye while fighting for the Union in the Civil war; his subsequent role escorting Abraham Lincoln’s corpse aboard a funeral train, cross-country; a career working for the railroad baron Thomas Durant; a career as a photographer; and encounters with George Custer, Crazy Horse, and Walt Whitman
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In the morning, Karen found the note on the hallway floor outside the apartment. She had been gone only an hour. There was nothing around her, save for the snow tracked inside by her boots.
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Our neighbors piled into our car, a Plymouth with fins and a bad gold paint job. I didn’t like their looks, guys with tousled pirate hair, dirty shirts missing buttons, faces pounded flat, no doubt in prison. They appeared uncouth, even frightening, but turned out to be quite charming. My husband and I drove them around the city, whatever city it was, seeing the sights, whatever sights they were, then dropped them in front of the Y because we were on our way to a ballgame. When we returned, they greeted us with cheers.
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It’s night, and I’m cold as fuck. The man driving the boat hasn’t spoken the entire trip. He has a broad back and a fat neck, and he likes to drive fast. Dr. Snow introduced him as Pål from Norway. He’s blasting heavy metal on a cassette player that rattles around as the boat skims the waves. There are times when the boat feels airborne. Cold spray crashes all around us. Pål drives with one hand on the polished wood wheel and keeps the other in the back pocket of his jeans, thumb out. The song is all noise. I think it might be the Scorpions. It sounds before my time.
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