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Books I Bought This Week
This week I have demonstrated very poor self control and bought too many books. I wish this was all of them but it is not. I have succeeded at "shelf control" this week however, as I removed the desk from my bedroom and replaced it with bookshelves. Renting in a houseshare means my one room is on its way to becoming a Tetris-fuelled nightmare of Kallax cubes.
In what may well be the most seamless segue I'll ever write, A Very Nice Box is about Ava, a storage box designer at STÄDA, a New York furniture company. Ava becomes involved with her boss, but something sinister is afoot as Mat "isn’t who he claims to be, and the romance takes a sharp turn." I was intrigued by A Very Nice Box on the title alone, plus the fact it's co-written by writing partners Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman. I'm all for novels set in Ikea-style stores; Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix was a wild ride.
"A cleverly voiced psychological thriller".. Paul Tremblay is spoken of highly and recommended alongside Grady Hendrix and Riley Sager, so I thought I'd give it a go. It begins in 1988 with an awkward kid who starts The Pallbearers’ Club, "dedicated to mourning the homeless and lonely – the people with no one else to bury them". Fast forward to now, this kid is now an adult writing his memoir and trying to make sense of it all. Opening the book I was surprised to find annotations and notes in the margins! So this is going to be a book within a book experience, taking inspiration from S by J J Abrams maybe?
I started this on my lunchbreak and was struck by how much it reminded me of Feed by M T Anderson. Both have created a science fiction world that seems depressingly on the horizon; in Feed there are USB ports in the back of people's heads, in Moxyland there are overcoats made of screens that show graphic imagery and artificially engineered police dogs. Both groups of young adults seem completely desensitised to bombardment of images and the vulgarity of the world around them.
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