"I know what to think. I know what to do and I know what to think." Elliott Gould as Phillip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye."

To read this weekend:



St. Clair McKelway's "Annals of Crime and Rascality"

Geoffrey Household, a new book I found at a mystery bookshop called Whodunit

A bunch of NYTimes Magazines that I saved up, now that I only have time to read the Style section.



In every other house on our block, it's Thanksgiving. I hear someone next door moving heavy stuff and it might be a turkey roaster pan. Of course, it's almost too late to start one, isn't it? Thanksgiving is a day I feel a bit sorry for myself because our little household has no gravitational pull on the holidays. No one really takes seriously the idea of hauling kids and minivans down to see us. We go to them. We also like to travel, so everything adds up to us going away and calling the lovely Angie to come feed the cat. This weekend we'll decide where to take a trip next year. That $200 Expedia coupon offer is burning a hole in my pocket. We could buy tickets to visit another relative but I really want to go back to Europe. N has floated the idea of Jamaica. I wonder who he thinks he's married to. Neither of us tan. I want to go back to Turin, for some reason (the witchy attraction), or to Barcelona. When I have to think of a place I haven't been yet, I draw a blank. I mean, I can name places. But should I take a chance on finding a new place (Prague) depressing when I know I love Paris?

This weekend is all about freelance work that I was too chicken to turn down. It's been tough to turn down project after project for this one company and I got the feeling that the next thing I turned down would cause questions to be asked such as whether I was really a real person or just an auto-reply. If I had still been freelancing full-time, I would be getting ready for NaNoWriMo, which I'd thought about doing with my mom. We'd actually been thinking of doing it in August, a better month for us. But I had a job in August. Instead as November rolls up I am reading a catalog of other people's novels and wishing that my clever friends would write novels for me to read.



Part of the freelancing this weekend has involved going back through the list of all the books I've read professionally this year, from January to when I stopped picking up freelance work. One story has stuck in my mind, and I just re-read it just now for fun. It's called "For Those Who Ride the Dog," by Nikki Barranger, from the anthology "Stories From the Blue Moon Cafe III." It's the first story in the anthology (after a poem) and it might be the best thing I read all year. The hard part is that even as I read it I can understand why other people whom I like and respect would not like it. The other things I read and liked a lot were three books by Will Christopher Baer, which unfortunately I read on page proof so have not got a copy on my hard drive to re-read. These books are very sick but have some lovely writing. They're the kind of books that you almost can't recommend to anyone you know if you live outside certain West Coast subcultures. Like, anyone who gets the V. Vale newsletter would be down with these and get them 100% without having to actually subscribe to the lifestyles portrayed therein. I get the newsletter and am down. But can't imagine anyone in my East Coast life being even slightly so.

I am reading a book about stairs. Maybe the most interesting thing about it is that the architect who wrote it is mainly noted for being an expert witness in injury lawsuits involving stairs. I think there are a few logical slipups and some assumptions about architectural intent that seem specious to me. But the book is also missing a few pages, which were neatly removed so that I didn't even notice before I bought it. One page that is missing has an illustration of an industrial staircase that has alternating left and right treads, so you have to start with the same foot every time. I kind of want to see how that works, sort of like the alternating pegs on a telephone pole. I'm not sure if it would be an improvement on our spiral stairs but it might be. After hearing our guests go up and down them last weekend with some difficulty, it is on my mind.

It makes me sad

When books are bad

Confidential to the novelist: Your main character is obviously you. I can tell because the character is not interesting though his or her every thought is described in detail. He or she fascinates you but no one else.

Writing magazine headlines is about the hardest thing there is to do. It is very emotional for everyone involved. Ideally there is a hed that fits perfectly, that ties together the photo, the story idea, and the mood of the magazine. The greatest headline ever written was in Wired: "Nobody Fucks With the DMV." Anyone who read that hed knew what the story was going to be about, and what the magazine felt about the story. (This was earlier in the 1990s, before people said the F word so much.) A bad hed for that story would have been, like:

The DMV Goes

HIGH TECH

This is the kind of hed that floats around, though. It's adequate but obviously careless. It's easy for people to agree on. It would be easy to design around, using the latest "digital" font. Someone would imagine writing the headline on the touchscreen of an electronic ticketing pad like cops use. What a fun idea, someone else would say.

The key thing with headline writing is that you're shooting for the a-ha hed that makes everyone *in the meeting* look up and say, "Yeah!" but that has never happened in the history of magazines. No three people in a hed meeting have ever agreed on a headline except in order to move on.

Just read a bunch of Theodore Sturgeon for some reason. I always think I'm going to like reading old science fiction and then I start reading it and it's all messagey. Probably in 1965 it was so shockingly new and still the realm of fantasy to talk about, to mention a few themes, impotence and homosexuality that the story didn't need to be very awesome. I remember a similar thing in a mystery I was reading that was written in 1990, let's say, and in which the big shockeroo had to do with AIDS. Or how emotional it was to see Wings of Desire while the Berlin Wall was still up, and how I haven't seen it since out of fear that I won't feel the same way, since the wall is down and the heartbreak at the center of the story has been more or less solved. I think these books and movies are genuine artistic responses to current conditions, but I don't know how well they will work in future conditions. Imagine what will happen to literature when we cure death. Probably the same thing that happened to the kidnap drama when we invented cell phones. Though maybe the problem is that these problems are in the recent past. Once they're fifty years old we'll be able to see them more clearly, rather than just be annoyed by people who still think they are problems, the way we're annoyed by someone who doesn't have a cell phone and starts freaking out when they can't get in touch with you. Get a damn cell phone, you say to Harrison Ford in Frantic; you don't say it to the cast of, let's say, Suddenly.



In a similar vein, I played My Bloody Valentine for an 18-year-old this week and she was not as blown away by it as I hoped. I think it must sound like just whatever's going on now to her, or like a paler version of now. On the other hand, I played her some Butthole Surfers and she about busted a gut. I remember one friend who was so highly strung during the teenage years that we worried about playing the Butthole Surfers around him. Turns out my cousin is the same way. I think I'll give her one month at college without this record, so she can meet some people, then send it to her.

In "Under the Net" there's a great idea, that there are places to live that are in the swing of things and there are places that are not. Philadelphia is not very much in the swing. You don't move here in order to plug in and be part of what's going on in the larger world, the way you would move to New York. You move to NY as much for the feeling of being switched on as you do for any actual job or opportunity. What's prompting these thoughts is a woman from the office who's moving to Boston, which just seems so much more alive and cogent as a city than Philadelphia does, though the two are similar in some ways. Boston is her fantasy city. I'm not sure if Philly is anybody's fantasy city, besides M. Night Shyamalan.

Just finished two novels in bound ms that I'm FedExing back to the publisher this afternoon. They're very good and had a million post-spell-check typos. "Suck" for "such" or "sec" for "sex," and a million times, "on" for "one." As usual I wonder where the edits -- and the books -- are going to go after I read them. I know that sometimes the work I do on these mss, when I work in pen on paper, is input by someone who may or may not be text-oriented, who may not know editing symbols. I have a few questions about the author's intent -- is this a typo or an unorthodox but correct word choice? These queries may not be made to the author, because time is tight; someone may just make a call, right or wrong, and let it fly. I also know that my corrections, when entered by someone else into the page layout, will cause other mistakes to appear, no matter how careful they are. It's just the law of editing and publishing. I can't think of another field in which so many people work solely to rid some product of errors, and never succeed. It's almost reassuring to me that this was a super-rush job, though it sucks for the author, whose works got such lickety-split treatment. One thing I learned early on is that second editions, as rarely as they're published, even more rarely get their typos corrected.



I really want these books to look good. I think they're very special. The tragedy of them is that they could be easily typecast as genre books, but the quality of the writing is so far above the kind of writing you usually see in genre books. I find them more human and thoughtful than James Ellroy, up to now my benchmark for modern, noirish mystery. They don't go for the cheap rush. But they're also not the inwardly chuckling self-reflexive kind of writing you see in upscale mysteries (often packaged around Italian themes). I think they're right for this publishing house, even though the house doesn't do genre books. The writing is so generous and beautifully paced. (Something else that will make them a tough sell; reviewers don't usually get a chance to sink into the pace of a book, or to try to quantify what makes a book alive as opposed to what makes a book "correct.") There are a few characters that I really see; others that I think are intentionally opaque and impossible to know. The mark of a good book, I guess, is the word "intentionally." I think this writer really worked on these books and made every choice consciously. I was psyched to read them and felt different afterwards, not tired but more alive.

I'm excited to read a new and quality book manuscript tonight because I spent my day marking up manuscripts that needed focusing on shed design, as opposed to general information about sheds, or on how the garage is the new front door of the home. The garage, it's said, is the entrance to the new "beehive home," which has taken over from the "cocoon." People go in and out all day. They also give their delivery guy the code to their garage door opener so he can leave them packages without going in the house. I wish I had a garage so I could get my damn package from UPS. Second delivery notice today. I really don't know how I'm going to get this package. No one is home all day in my building anymore.

I like giving books to people. Sometimes I just know it's the right book and sometimes I'm being imposing and a showoff or know-it-all. But every so often you hit the bullseye and this week I did. I had these two books on Scandinavian design that had come into the bookstore; they were 1960s era, both still in their book jackets, and they were going to be completely jacked to pieces if they sat on the shelves. I say this to justify my buying them at the discounted rate. I was saving those books. So I took them home and read them, and they were gorgeous and everything, and I stood them on the shelf in readiness for when my liking of Scandinavian design should blossom into an obsession. But it didn't, and I knew these books were important (I looked on Alibris and they were over $20, which is always a clue), so I thought, who do I know who wants these? And I thought of someone, and mailed them off, and got the best phone message back. Someone who really wanted these books now has them, without having asked for them. How about that? I think this is what librarians hope to do every day, and it accounts for why a lot of librarians you see are kind of angry, because what they really do every day is tell kids that their 30 minutes are up and it's time to let someone else use the computer. And ask for funding.

"Converted into Houses," by Charles Fracchia, is sort of what I pictured my house looking like. It was published in San Francisco in 1976 and it's full of that Northern California funk. Hanging ferns, bentwood chairs on old oriental carpets on concrete, Lucite tables. Giant rooms divided by rows of chipboard cubes, old California job cases (those multicompartmented type trays) on the wall, in general a lot of collecting of old type elements. Handmade light fixtures. It's what I like. But the new house is not going to lend itself to that look at all. California funk, as far as decorating goes, requires space, light, high ceilings. I think it also needs the clear light of California, which makes everything look intentional. Or maybe it needs to be in California, period, where it's understood that you are living the way you choose.



But what this means in the short term is that I'm purging the Cal-Scando-Japanese things from my little collection of crapola. I'm staring at the bookcase that's going to be the toughest thing to cut loose. It's 6.5 feet tall, teak-veneered, brassy fittings, boomerang-y feet, stamped "Made in Norway."



I will keep my giant turquoise ceramic lamp. This may be the only important thing I own. What makes it most important to me at the moment is that my little nephew walked into my apartment for the first time and said, "I like your lamp." He does not notice much around him, or he does not comment on what he notices. Anything he likes enough to mention, I like.

Ugh, I just read some kid's sophomore novel, and it's not very good, and I have to find a way to tell the kid, or the kid's editor. You know how writers use cop language when they're trying to sound grown up and authoritative? E.g., "Two months prior, I had relocated to San Diego." That's this book all over. Dull language propelling a dull plot. What a waste of everyone's time, and too late to rewrite.



I know that if I ever wrote a book, and it was as fun as this kid's first book was, I would slack my ass off on my second book, and maybe even use it as a platform for some of my sourest notions of how the world works, hoping that my Big Idea would drive the book so I wouldn't have to be super-careful on the language, especially since this would be the first book I ever wrote on deadline. I'd bang it out, get it in, and maybe get a bunch of help on it later like I did with my first book, though I won't. For this reason I am glad that I had an extremely fascinating social life when I was as young as this kid, and had really no notion of making myself into an artist or making statements to the world through anything but my clothing and music choices. Of course, I thought of myself as daring and political. The things I said and thought then, I believed. Now I know a lot of what I believed were transitional beliefs, things you have to think at some point in your life in order to be a well-rounded and tolerant person later on.

I read a couple things from my old life yesterday that are pissing me off. One is a short review of a book I helped someone work on that dings the book for exactly the reasons I dinged it over and over and it never would change. The writer just wasn't made that way. It's still a very interesting book. Oh well. The other is a story on urban "tribes" that I think is a little bit specious. It's in the latest issue of Readymade, and I probably should buy it anyway because the article is about weddings and I have to keep up on that now. Basically the story is about a couple who plan a hip wedding and their friends pitch in and help. This group is defined as a kind of "tribe." But I don't buy the argument that hip people who hang out with other hip people while it's fun to do so constitute a "tribe" as distinct from a "group of friends." I think tribalhood is only tested when there's an economic or duty component -- when group members are doing more than mutually amusing themselves. I dunno. I would see a group of moms who share babysitting as more of a tribe, because they're doing something of mutual benefit that involves a little hardship and tedium and not much payoff in amusement, except as each others' kids are amusing. They manage politics and call on one another to work for the good of the group. What else does a tribe involve that differentiates it from a clique or gang? A mix of ages and interests, maybe. Members who have important relationships outside the group. Like, I don't think "Friends" showed a tribe. It showed a group of close friends at a time in their lives when their social bonds naturally formed with others like them -- not with their parents anymore, not yet with a wife or husband or kids.



I am not putting down the idea of groups of friends. They're awesome.

One of my last freelance projects is proofing a catalog for an upscale retailer, cross-checking SKUs and dimensions. My shallowest first thought is that it blows my mind people can spend multiple thousands of dollars on a dining room set. But of course the people who do so usually have much better-looking dining rooms than I do and have people over more often. We have only ever hosted one person in our place who wasn't blood-related to us, aside from workmen and representatives of the management company. A couple guys came in to fix the windows one time (we hadn't complained, I don't care if I have to prop a window open with a board) and I was shambling behind them in my robe apologizing for the mound of crap in front of one window. "Don't worry," one of the men said, "we live like this."



But the deeper thought, the thought that makes this proofing work compelling in the least, and it's not that deep, is how important and wonderful catalogs are. I can picture two or three clothing catalogs, like the very first Tweeds catalog, or the Esprit catalogs from the early 1980s, that I wore out from reading and re-reading. They'd end up in the bathroom all curled up and I'd still read them when I was in there. Before that I remember the Lillian Vernon catalogs at Grandma's, the Horchow Collection and L.L. Bean, worlds of stuff described. That's the key, that there's an image and a description and you assemble the two. Not to quote Roland Barthes but his book "The Fashion System" talks about this, the idea that there is the "thing-pictured" and the "thing-described" and together they make this image that's more or less artificial when compared with actual things. As we found out when we got our first box from Tweeds and it was just...clothes. But these clothes maintained a totemic importance that caused me to keep one platter-collared blouse, barely worn, for five years. I always pictured the seaside scene with blowing skirt and straw hat that made me buy the platter-collared blouse.



Once I went to the museum with a friend and realized he did the same thing as me: reading the wall labels for longer than you look at the art.

Another eight-hour day. I had to "do the board" this morning. It's a whiteboard we set out in front that has quotes and info from this day in literary history. If I'd thought ahead one second I'd have done some real research the night before. As it was, I cribbed from a Literary Book of Days that listed:



Bertrand Russell's birth (1872?)

Mikhail Bakunin's birth (??)

Patrick Dennis' birth (1920?)

and the fact that on the day in 1593, an arrest was sworn out for Christopher Marlowe on a false charge of heresy.



The usual board guy makes this fantastically detailed board with illustrations. I was not up to that, but I think I used the space well, working with the graphic elements at my command. For instance, the fact about Christopher Marlowe was written on the shape of a scroll. I got all paranoid about my handwriting because I've always been impressed by the handwriting of people in record stores. Mine is a little lumpier but it does slant forward cheerfully.

Yesterday I worked an eight-hour day at the bookstore. I haven't worked an eight-hour day in at least a year -- it's always been, like, either 2 or 12 hours. I had to leave the building to make calls, which was also weird. The strangest thing was, at one point, I saw that I probably wasn't needed for a while, I thought, naturally, why not just leave? Which reminded me of how hard it was, a long time ago, to even conceive of doing that. My first job was hourly, and it was important to be there, lumbering around the stockroom or whatever, looking busy. You get in the habit of killing time. So when you're actually able to get out of the office, when you're being "measured by results" or whatever, you haven't got the will to take advantage of that and say, I'm done, I'm leaving. Obviously, you can't just walk out of a retail establishment, so I didn't. That was weird too. I took a break in the back room and I felt like I was taking off a Mickey Mouse head.



Some great customers came in late in the afternoon, a small family from Princeton. Out-of-towners find this bookstore and go hog-wild. They wanted suggestions and gave me some books they liked. At first they were doing a bunch of mystery writers I didn't know. Then the guy said, "And I liked 'Geek Love.'" Oh yeah! And then he liked "Confederacy of Dunces," and Redmond O'Hanlon. I hope I set him up with some books he'll like as much, though I can't remember now what they were besides Carl Hiassen. Everything was under $6 anyway. The gal wanted books by Latin American writers (Jorge Amado) and Indian writers. Neat people. The tough thing was finding books they'd like that we have on the shelves. Like, I really wanted to suggest:



"Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," Mario Vargas Llosa

"The Contortionist's Handbook," Craig Clevenger

"I Capture the Castle," Dodie Smith

"Rogue Male," Geoffrey Household

"His Master's Voice," Stanislaw Lem



My usual suspects, but it seemed like they would work. I should read more new books, honestly. For all I'm around them lately, anyway. Maybe when I start my real new job I will read even less!

Not many people have sat and read two anthologies of contemporary Southern short fiction in one weekend, but I just did. Fifteen minutes ago I was startled awake at my table by the sound of tapping. I thought someone was at my door but it was the neighbors hammering something into the party wall. I had been dreaming about rock-climbing around an enormous, round, polished-granite fountain. I remember thinking in my dream, why do I always dream about this fountain? though I know I never have before. But I fell asleep on top of the ms of the second of the two Southern short story collections. I fell asleep with violence; I remember my head actually bobbing. So far in these collections there's one story that blows me away. It's the lead story in the second collection, and I am crazy about it. I almost cried reading it. There's a lot of dog-killing in the South, in other news, and people have incest a lot.



At this point, if the short story doesn't end (a) in a tragic sexual misunderstanding (b) in an epiphany during fireworks or (c) at the grave of a dog, I find it fresh. Even the dumbest of books can leave you with one great image.



I don't like twist endings. It frustrates me when the Southern voice is so clearly a put-on that the characters can't resist saying "purportedly." I also hate the construction "adding that" after a quote: "I love her," he said, adding that she was the only woman for him. [Unless "he" here is Smoove B.] I also hate foreshadowing. One of the stories contains a phrase that goes like, "At last he'd done a purely good deed, something no one could take away from him." Cue the tragic sexual misunderstanding and you better believe this one ends at the grave of a dog. I also just hate stories that revolve around one semi-nonsensical act that the main character performs in the belief that the act will clear his mind or is foreordained for him to do. How did you, Mayron T. LaCutcheon, president of the Buck Ankle Federated Bank, get it into yer haid to try 'n catch that ol' panty thief?



There does seem to be a short-story industry that turns out these paint-by-numbers jobs. He's divorced. She's around. Tragic sexual misunderstanding. As he drives home in the rain he has an epiphany and ends up throwing a trash can through the window of a 7-Eleven. If this were a New York short story collection you could flip the sexes and replace the TSM with a comic sexual understanding and you might have "Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York."



You know what I would read is a Connecticut townie collection. Connecticut townies are the most fascinating people on the planet. I would also read any short story written by Boston Rob from Survivor.

On top of all this nonsense I am doing the most bizarre job I have ever done. My job is to go through this novel set (and already published) in Canada and remove all the traces of it being set in Canada.

Two interesting questions at the bookstore Tuesday. First, two women came in looking for romances with African American themes. We were out of Terry McMillan, and I spent the next fifteen minutes pulling likely-looking books off the fiction shelves and checking the cover art and author photo. If I never see another white woman again ... there should be more books than we have, that's for sure.



Then a man came in looking for a book by Cecil Brown; he got out a little notebook and read, slowly and carefully, "The Life and Loves of Mr. --" and I cut him off: "Oh, I read that book." I think he was relieved, and I know I didn't want to make him say the whole title. We didn't have a copy in either the new or old edition, and the guy said he couldn't find it anywhere. I know Robin's will help him out.

If you work at a magazine, you should read The Big Clock, by Kenneth Fearing. Or so I tell everyone.

Read: "The Art of Fine Baking," by Paula Peck
Why: I like to bake
A detailed guide to making cakes and pastry
Takeaway: I like to bake (see above) but I don't know if I have it in me to make anything in this book. These are the classic recipes for things you love from the bakery; each cake involves four or five complex steps for the cake itself, separating eggs and cooking sugar syrup to 238 degrees on a candy thermometer, and then you can make a buttercream frosting or glaze that involves another three steps and three pans. Making strudel or your own puff pastry would tie up your kitchen all day; it would be a fun project with my sisters but how annoyed would we be when people ate only small slices, or left half the plate uneaten? Reading this made me tense with all the tied-up expectations of making a cake that takes eight hours.

Read: "Lebek: A City of Northern Europe Through the Ages" by Xavier Hernandez and Jordi Ballonga; illustrated by Francesco Corni (1991)

Why: Wanted to buy something from used bookstore in Italian Market

A large black-and-white illustrated book in the style of Macauley's "Cathedral," it shows how a seaside port city develops from 1000 BC to the present.

Takeaway: Every time I open this book I get lost in it and get a crick in my neck. Fourteen enormous bird's-eye-view illustrations, in pen and ink, follow the city from the Bronze Age to the late 20th century. The city of Lebek starts as a farmers' campsite, builds a stockade, fights the Vikings, then builds a Gothic cathedral that rises in the middle of the little townhouses like a giant turbine. The whole city is like a machine that's being built from the inside -- it's neat to watch the city grow bit by bit and make itself into something that looks familiar. I got so invested in the growth of Lebek that when it got pounded in World War II, I was sad.

Read: "The Contortionist's Handbook," by Craig Clevenger (2001?)

Why: Paid to

It's the story of a man who creates a bunch of aliases so he doesn't get thrown in jail or the mental hospital

Takeaway: One day I was dropping something off at my friend the publisher's, and offered to input some proofing corrections on another manuscript while I was there. Twenty pages in, I noticed two things: one, the proofreader had missed a lot of errors, and two, the manuscript was *fantastic*. Just beautifully written. It had a clear, fresh way of putting things -- a way of seeing images in a flash that made the book feel like a good movie. It was clear to me that every word had been considered. Once I read the whole thing straight through, it got even better. I like most things my friend publishes, but this was another kind of liking -- I realized I liked this book as a book, not just as a product of my friend, of whom I am very proud.

Read: "My Pilgrim's Progress," by George W.S. Trow (1998)

Why: Enjoyed his book "Within the Context of No Context," and found this on the shelf.

It's a collection of essays on 20th century culture

Takeaway: This book was mainly dictated, not written, and it is kind of fun to read for that reason alone. The language is very precise but there's a looseness of expression that makes the words fly by.

While reading this book, though, see if you don't start thinking about your own smart friends, and how they might have deeper things to say. Trow's main theme is that the WASP context in which he grew up, as a kid born during World War II, is gone -- that our culture, which we used to create ourselves, has taken on its own life, and we're now separate from it. He's speaking as a representative of the culture-creating class of 1950; his main qualification for writing this book seems to be his family background and the books he can remember reading as he speaks into his tape recorder, feeling around for something specific to say about his vague sense that things have changed. It feels like a long phone call. There's one eye-glazing section where he reads the headlines of a 1950 New York Times directly onto the page. You know he thinks it's significant, but it just seems corny, casting around for something to hook an idea onto. In the end maybe that's why I wasn't as pleased with this book as I was with "Within the Context of No Context." The insights seem like chitchat (like, "To me, John O'Hara was the greatest chronicler of the 1920s"). It gave me an idea for a business, though, which would be to record everyone's thoughts on modern society and type them up for $25 a page.

Read: "I Was Dora Suarez," by Derek Raymond (1990)

Why: An article in the Boston Globe recommended it.

It's a mystery set in late-1980s London. Crabby detective, kicked off the force for striking fellow officer in previous book in series, is called back to solve disgusting double murder. He finds the journal of one of the victims and starts to get into her head, fueling his need to find the killer and revenge her death and the death of all victims.

Takeaway: There's something sort of depressing about a book that tells the reader to anticipate a shock, anticipate it, anticipate it, then here comes the shock, and here it is! Shocked? Because it's just never as shocking as what you're anticipating in your head. Same goes with expressions of sheer beauty, like when you know someone's going to heaven, and what is it going to look like? This book starts with one shocking scene that you aren't set up to anticipate, and it really is a knockout. But the rest of the book revolves around three separate questions whose answers are meant to shock you too (What happened to Dora? What's upstairs? What's that guy doing in there?), and they're built up to and built up to, and then -- you get the answer and then, okay, you know. It's informative but not satisfying.

There's also a lesson about not tying your book to current events. A couple plot points in here have worn out their ability to shock; one in particular has become the punchline of a joke. It's one of the books I wish I could re-edit.