The Reef

Juan Villoro

Tony is a washed-up rock star who thinks fondly of touring in Tokyo. Years of that life have left him with a partially severed finger (a firecracker), a limp (a car), and memory loss (a lot of drugs). Now he works at a Caribbean resort called the Pyramid, a place that exists “so you can leave your former life behind”—guests and employees included—running the sound system for the hotel’s aquarium. Oh, and here’s the wrinkle: the Pyramid specializes in “extreme tourism,” which means patrons can sign up for faux kidnappings and the “authentic” experience of life under threat of cartel violence “Fear is our greatest natural resource,” Tony says, set against a shrinking coastline.

Mexican author Juan Villoro is playfully cynical, and in The Reef, tourism makes for an easy window into geopolitical satire. “Every species has their own cure for despair,” Villoro writes. “Horses stampede through canyons, whales wash up on beaches. Human beings just pack their bags. In the future there won’t be any wars. There’ll be tourists—exhausted invaders.” Everyone at the Pyramid is wasting away beneath the sun.

The story picks up when the death of the resort’s scuba diving instructor is revealed to be a murder. But The Reef is a mystery as much as, say, Inherent Vice is one: clumsily plotted, but the plotting is really beside the point. Tony stumbles his way to the book’s conclusion, through a noir-tinged voyage that finds him moving through escalating absurdities of characters and scenarios. Tragedy in paradise turns out to be a metaphor for the greater world.

The Changeling

Victor LaValle

A lot of people have credited Jordan Peele for fusing the horror genre and racial consciousness in his movie Get Out, but Victor LaValle has been doing this in his novels for years. In The Changeling, LaValle upends the age-old changeling story. At the center of the book are Apollo and Emma, a young couple that falls in love, gets married, and has a kid. A few chapters later, Apollo finds himself tied up, unable to do anything as he hears the sound of his young son Brian being murdered by Emma, who disappears thereafter. Apollo sets out to find her for answers—a windy journey that takes him through horrors both figurative and literal.

LaValle's career has been inching toward the horror genre since his third book, the excellent Big Machine. He followed it with the underrated psych-ward haunting The Devil in Silver, and later, the H.P. Lovecraftian The Ballad of Black Tom. But unlike Black Tom, which at times could feel more like Lovecraft homage than brainy inversion, Changeling takes the less obvious route in its socially conscious horror. (It’s a bit more Rosemary’s Baby than Get Out.) Still, LaValle’s gift is a voice that sounds both fable-like and contemporary at once, a kind of timelessness that never feels at odds with the myriad references to modern technology (even if it at times it’s a tad overstuffed with a warning about posting too much information on Facebook). The Changeling is full of other specifics too, in particular a thorough traversing of New York’s boroughs. But more than anything—as a novel of the terrors of child-rearing, racism, the unknown—it is really goddamn scary.

The Answers

Catherine Lacey

The Answers starts with a 30-year-old woman named Mary, who is so desperate to soothe a number of physical pains that she’s willing to try something called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia. Wait, it gets weirder. To pay for her treatment, Mary finds a job with the Girlfriend Experiment, a pseudo-scientific, pseudo-performative test to see if every facet of a relationship can be perfected if they are singled out and specialized. That means the subject, famous actor Kurt Sky, has small harem of girlfriends: an Intellectual Girlfriend for conversation, a Maternal Girlfriend for nurturing, and an Anger Girlfriend for arguments. Mary gets the role of Emotional Girlfriend, which mostly involves listening to Kurt, and the occasional “I love you.” (Physical closeness will be handled by a separate Intimacy Team.)