I get a lot of free books, by asking for them and by occasionally being asked to read them. It’s interesting to see what other people are doing these days! I’m inevitably critical, as these people are working at the same time as me. One day (maybe in the next two years?) I’ll put out this book of stories that will surely disgust and alienate some if not many of my peers. Anyway let’s get to opinions.
Danielle Chelosky’s Pregaming Grief (Short Flight/Long Drive, 2024)
Chelosky pops up all over the place on the literary internet—an editor at both Hobart (sf/ld is Hobart Press) and Amphetamine Sulfate, two edgy (albeit newly so in the case of Hobart) presses, she still somehow transcends the truly dark transgressive vibes. She’s a writer that seems very preoccupied with love, desire, and sex. These are all easily transgressed topics, yet her art’s chaos feels soft, diaristic, vaguely in search of resolution rather than pure wallowing.
A large thematic component of Pregaming Grief is Alt People being high and drunk. Hardly at the gig though. Underage alcoholism and the accompanying sexcapades with all their negative and positive implications are at the fore. There’s a preoccupation with doomed love and the sexual orbit of it—The boy that got away and can now never do right but still gets some pussy whenever he hits the narrator up, the boy from a friend group that gets a drunken stab at it and deals with an accompanying awkward regret (from one or both parties) after the fact, and the much older dating app guy with his emotional manipulations of the narrator for months. There’s a normalization of age gap situationships with the undercurrent of how fucked dynamics can be because of them. Split-ups and compartmentalizings for the sake of inevitable instant gratification reunions. But these makeups aren’t really instant. They’re sad and increasingly torturous for the narrator.
This book is deeply relatable to my life ages 17-21 minus NYC. I was more on psychedelics and weird dissociatives than booze, but it still resonates, and I like it a lot for that. Interestingly, the book spends a decent amount of time in New York without being annoying about it. This is likely because a lot of these sequences are focused in bedrooms.
A repetitive issue with the book is many scenes feeling passive, not well-detailed or explored enough. This could be explained away as due to repeated drunken blackouts, or the narrative priorities being more centered in discursive, emotional reflections. The influence of Annie Ernaux is obvious. She’s quoted for one of the epigrams that open the book. Pregaming Grief could be a cult novel for future young people experiencing the things detailed, but it could also end up stuck in the catacombs of indie publishing, populated with weird predatory older male readers, much like the guy that takes the most advantage in the book.
Paolo Iacovelli’s The King of Video Poker (Clash Books, 2024)
I got this one impulsively when Clash was asking online if people were interested in ARCs. This was in November(?) 2023. That being said, Video Poker was the last thing I read last year, finishing it maybe New Year’s Eve. I enjoyed it, sat with it for a bit, then pitched a review to Heavy Feather Review before realizing this novel wasn’t coming out until July 2024. Why am I reading it this far out from a release date? I coordinated for the future with the magazine, never followed up. I don’t know, something feels so. Ad Campaign about this novel. Even though I hardly see it mentioned. I guess I’m wondering what Clash is going for at this point, as the aesthetics of what they publish are all over the place. Early on they had some very interesting books: Darryl, What Are You, Proximity, The Logos, Gag Reflex, etc. Now we’re a few years down the road, and it’s hard to tell what’s going on. Horror and Literary, I get it, but. It feels. Too scattered. The quirky genre books do a disservice to the writerly works. The only presses (maybe?) doing a good job of balancing this is Apocalypse Party, 11:11, Amfsulf (sometimes). You get tired of name dropping these imprints.
Let me give Iacovelli’s novel an assessment. It’s super readable, plotted very well, meticulously even. The tone builds a gradual tension that takes surprising, engrossing, cinematic turns. It's a page-turner, very readable. I’d recommend this novel to any friend, reader or non-reader that likes edgy media. A beach read Tarantino.
Despite this, I have to say, the prose itself is deeply pedestrian. We dwell in a banality of Capital Letter branded products in overt reverence of the American Psycho formula. That’s what we get here. A success of the formulaic. A large plunge into inevitability. The outline is carrying, not the voice.
We’re eventually led to a shocking fictionalization of one of our countless 21st century American tragedies, which I thought was great. But there doesn’t feel there’s much of a subtext or underlying point to be made. It’s like a pulp novel, an exploitation film. These are two genres I enjoy a lot, at least the older iterations of them. I guess we are probably less critical of the past than our contemporaries when it comes to a question of entertainment vs. literary and/or cinematic art. I think if Paolo kept at producing books like this, it’d be a great body of work to reflect on one day. In the meantime, he should read some Manchette or Jim Thompson.