Intrigue: 5 books that summon us into strange, shivery wonder
#1: The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
What stands out: Jones gives us a slow burn revenge story here, braided together with a little horror and shape-shifting, a little resilience, and a little insistence on how community holds the line, including on the rez. Both odd and touching, this book definitely intrigues.
Read this when: You want something both different and deeply familiar.
#2: Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
What stands out: A tale of two off-kilter individuals with interlocking ideals, this novel about trying to float a glass church up a river is a striking look at how it feels to try to accomplish something different.
Read this when: You love big gestures.
#3: American Fire by Monica Hesse
What stands out: If you’ve ever been curious about crimes of passion, this book may be for you. Here Hesse tracks a southern arson case to its conclusion, documenting an entire, close-knit community as well as a weirdly fascinating love story in the process.
Read this when: You fall fast and hard for the stories about strange things people have actually done.
#4: A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters by Julian Barnes
What stands out: Termites, shipwreck paintings, the recurrent appearance of Noah’s ark…these short stories and musings orbit odd themes while making for a strangely compelling read that gently mocks our foibles while insisting on alternate perspectives.
Read this when: You want something…different.
#5: The Nature of Life and Death: Every Body Leaves a Trace by Patricia Wiltshire
What’s the ultimate intrigue? Dare I say death? Even if you don’t agree, you may appreciate this account of how plant clues contribute to forensic science. For a book about death, it’s surprisingly exuberant (and definitely intriguing)
You’d like to know more about how plants track you and help solve murders.
What’s the appeal of intrigue?
Like a curious cat, I’m often drawn to mysterious things, including some things better left alone. I find things I don’t understand compelling, and so there I go again, following some odd psychological bent through hundreds of pages.
A book gives us a relatively safe place to investigate intriguing things, fortunately. Some of us may indulge fantasies we’d prefer didn’t show up in real life, while others of us get to “try on” a different mindset or wonder at how it might feel to lead a completely different life. Given how there is only so much a single person can experience, books open up the world wonderfully, piling up a lovely kind of experiential density.
Give us a satisfying thrill and our hearts accelerate as the blood swerves through the curves of our veins like a Formula 1 car, our pupils dilate, our mouths fall slightly open–we are alive! We feel the soft pulsations of being a prey animal coupled with the salivating surge of being a predator. We feel the urge to chase something down, even if that something is only a question.
Overall, it might be more dangerous not to be intrigued. If your tiny spark of curiosity dies, where does that leave you? In the cold woods of numbness and incuriosity, I think. It is possible to sleepwalk through your days, and if you suspect that might be the case for you, you could let yourself be rescued by intrigue. You never know what you might find.
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
Here author Stephen Graham Jones gives us the literary equivalent of a forest path on a moonless night. We know we’re not supposed to go down there. But we do anyway, following the murky, magnetic logic of horror stories. ‘Huh-uh, no way man,’ we should tell him, but he sprinkles such sweet, stomach-turning breadcrumbs of unsettling folklore that off we go, hopping down his quease-inducing, subversive slow burn of a narrative.
Stephen, a persistent and long-lasting author who penned multiple books before he ever arrived at broad acclaim, likes to champion the charms of “genre” fiction, and I applaud him for it. Why stuff every book into a labeled box, anyway? Part of the intrigue of reading certain writers is witnessing how they ooze from those cardboard corsets or upend multiple boxes at once, mixing the contents for maximal effect.
Anyway. Stephen sets his revenge fable set near a Blackfoot tribal reservation and pits his characters against the consequences of being wasteful and wanton. To amp up the intrigue, a set of apparent hauntings begin. The killings triggered by the hauntings are unfortunately not imaginary.
You stop wanting to look. You can’t help peeking anyway. Stephen’s suspense is too slow and bloody for some, but I found it effective, and I appreciate how he weaves in threads from multiple other parts of Blackfoot life as well. It was easy as a reader to sink into the immersive world he creates, just as it was easy to keep turning the pages.
What stuck was the lack of ease. The narrative ranges beyond genre tropes, refusing to give readers the cheap satisfaction of clearly delineated “good” and “bad” characters. It’s possible, as the intrigue and suspense build, to find your reading loyalties begin to split and waver; it’s possible to find yourself wondering what you truly think.
Where’s the bibliotherapy?
Skilfull writing sets this horror apart from its dimestore counterparts. So does Stephen’s ability to lay bare his characters’ internal reasoning and motivations, generating the kind of empathy that makes it difficult to draw hard, heavy lines.
While empathy is often heralded within self-help literature as the antidote to hatefulness and terrorism, I doubt it’s that simple. The human heart is a labyrinth that seems set in concrete but can also pivot in seconds; the mind's beliefs and the body’s actions do not always align. Empathy cannot, I don’t think, get us all the way to understanding each other. What, however, can? Empathy can act like Venetian blinds, letting in at least fragments of illumination that can help us guess at what’s going on. That, often, is the best we can do.
Some of us (some of Stephen’s characters, even) fall outside the normal range of empathy, and struggle to imagine another person’s mindset accurately. This isn’t always an impediment, as even psychopaths can learn how to intuit what others might be going through via observation and by teaching themselves “formulas” about how other humans tend to feel and react. Psychopaths get rather good at this, in fact, but it’s a rote form of relating, kind of like memorizing human behavioral scripts instead of fully inhabiting them.
If you’d like to develop your own empathic skills, reading can certainly get you there. I would also challenge you, as the research suggests, to push yourself into real life situations that are unknown and challenging. Let intrigue guide you–you could, for example, start to seek out opportunities to have tough but sincere conversations with others who think very differently than you do. It’s not easy, and I don’t always enjoy it when I try, but it also feels a little like lifting weights: hard, a bit painful, yet somehow satisfying. If you encourage your sense of curiosity and gently muffle the parts of you that want to argue, prevail, or hold forth, you can soak in a better sense of someone else’s unique reasoning and way of being. This can be a uniquely rewarding experience (and often a far more persuasive way to win over someone’s thinking, since warm relational bonds can often succeed where “rationality” and “logic” fail).
A little more
The author’s site on Simon and Schuster
Esquire interviews Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen talks to The Rumpus about the honesty of horror
Netflix show Rez Ball, which drops later in 2024
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
I’m sure you, too, have met people so odd and so dedicated to being themselves, you can’t get them out of your head. You may not understand them (and, to be honest, they may even irritate or infuriate you), but there it is: they’re fascinating. Maybe you envy their ability to seemingly not care what others think. Maybe it’s their freedom you’re drawn to or their defiance in the face of social speed bumps and disapproval. It must feel amazing, you might think, to feel such assurance. How must it feel to be so singularly dedicated to the odd things you adore and the strange ways you are completely yourself?
In his debut, Peter Carey lets two such peculiar people meet. Drawn together by a mutual attraction for playing the odds, the two unite in Australia’s dry and sinuous landscape to attempt the patently ridiculous: to float a glass church down a river deep into the outback.
The premise works for me because it, like its protagonists, is so bent on being itself. It’s a silly story, really, but it’s compelling, too, stuffed with intriguing asides, with reflections of eccentricities, and with unlikely bends. I last read it years ago, and yet Oscar and Lucinda remain vivid in all their picaresque, quixotic determination. Oscar believes God is a gambler but also thinks he should throw his life in with God’s lot as a missionary, while Lucinda wrecks the men around her with her glass and gambling obsessions.
What could go wrong (or right)? You’ll have to read it, and please be warned: after you finish, you, too, may find yourself asking who you might be if you were a tiny bit more dead set on what really mattered to you.
Where’s the bibliotherapy?
Peter, I think, is asking whether it’s worth it to flaunt convention if and when you really believe in what you love. It can be tough to feel full-hearted these days with so many confusions and complications. As an aware person, you know life flings choices at you that teem with contradictions – there are few easy pathways, few “pure” endeavors.
You’re pretty sure that, whatever path you choose, you could end up really regretting it; you fear not letting yourself have full rein just as much as you fear living an untrammeled, possibly punished life. You’re supposed to “follow your heart,” but you know how that often works out. You’re supposed to “do the right thing,” but you know how many knots and asterisks there are, how many footnotes and gut-twists you don’t control. If virtue ethics cannot fully suffice and following your gut only threatens to gut you, what’s left? Your obsessions and what you do with them, I suppose.
What is obsessing you right now? Why? What is that obsession trying to tell you? I invite you to follow that sense of intrigue a little deeper into yourself to see if it’s trying to tell you something.
A little more
Check out “S-Town,” a podcast about murder and deeply strange characters
Read The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean if swampy uncertainties and floral obsessions are your thing
How do our personalities even form? Of course it’s complicated
American Fire by Monica Hesse
So. I don’t think I liked the characters Hesse portrays in this book. But, like eavesdropping in a diner, sometimes you can’t tear your ears or eyes away. I love life for its bizarre twists sometimes: sometimes whatever we imagine is going on turns out to be much tamer than the actual events. Sometimes real life really is beyond weird. I find that satisfying and comforting, because it hints I’ll never truly be able to predict what’s going on and that there’s always something out there that could surprise.
The gist of the book pivots around a mysterious set of fires that keep destroying area structures, mostly warehouses or abandoned places, but still. The fires keep igniting with a maddeningly regularity, as the threat seems to blaze higher, the whole country starts to become increasingly paranoid and ragged. Who’s the arsonist?
That, by far, is not the most interesting question. As Hesse follows each glowing clue, further mysteries crackle to life. Fire-setting takes on a new meaning, but I don’t think even a bonfire could illuminate all the tenebrous corners of the human heart. That remains the intriguing thing: that we can be urged into doing things we hadn’t previously imagined, for reasons we don’t completely trust, and that we go ahead and do them anyway. We’re weird!
Where’s the bibliotherapy?
What I get out of reading this is a deep reminder that I cannot fully know someone else’s heart, not even my own. While I think we’re often taught to view ourselves as an integral whole and while we seem fairly confident issuing proclamations about someone else’s proclivities–”Oh, he could never do that!”--we’re often wrong.
This wrong-ness is an interesting place. For better or worse, our character and actions appear more fluid than it’s convenient or reassuring to believe. We are more like chameleons than rocks–the people around us, the prevailing norms, and fleeting urges all may have more to do with the actions we actually take than do the principles we hold close. While some personality traits may tend to express themselves fairly consistently, we are also profoundly impacted by the unpredictable and the situational.
This doesn’t reassure, but it could help explain behavior that seems out of character or crimes that perplex even the perpetrator. At the root of it, sometimes we don’t know why we did something. We’re used to assembling narrative explanations–that’s a natural way, after all, to explain and characterize ourselves–but when narratives crumble or prove insufficient, we’re left with a sludge of inchoate longings, puzzling influences, and strange ambiguity.
As a reader, maybe this unknowability makes me a little more humble and a little less prone to demanding a satisfactory explanation for everything. Maybe it helps me sit longer and better with the fact that narratives are only interpretations, our best guesses arranged in a plausible way, but still invented. What do you think of unknowability?
A little more
Read I’ll Be Gone in the Night by Michelle McNamara (or watch the HBO show) for more about someone refusing to let go of the need for an explanation
Or watch The Staircase, an 8-episode TV show maddeningly dedicated to the limits of knowledge and psychology
Keeping in the vein of true-crime-inspired work, read “The Girl From Plainville” or watch Hulu’s version of it, for more on strange motivations and eerie persuasiveness
A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters by Julian Barnes
This could be a highly subjective opinion, but Julian Barnes continues to fascinate me because he…just writes about whatever he wants. Balloons, parrots, death–he seemingly tosses whatever he’s been mulling over onto the page and finds some way to make it stick. So I shouldn’t be surprised that he crafted this ode to Noah’s ark, shipwrecks, wood worms (of all things!)...but most of all, to the sawdust and flimsy tissues that nonetheless connect so many things.
That’s intriguing to me. Not to everyone, I know. But I remain fascinated by things we don’t immediately discern: the subtle details, the invisible links, the relationships that gradually emerge as you meditate on them. Time after time, this kind of fascination has paid off in terms of unexpected realizations that give me an entirely fresh perspective on how we depend on each other. It seems abstract at first, but dig down, and the connections become tangible and vital, even if they go relatively unnoticed.
Even the way Barnes constructs his book is intriguing. First obviously (what’s with that title?) and then more subtly as you begin to assemble the tangent-driven way Barnes thinks. He doesn’t feel compelled to tell you exactly what to think, or whether these pieces are short stories, essays, or notes; he won’t even really dig into why he’s lumped these various bits and bobs together, but relies on you to supply your own curiosity. It seems he’s all over the place, but then you begin to notice that his pathways take echoing themes and that he lays out breadcrumbs for you to string together. It’s a generous way of constructing a book because it leaves space for you to draw your own associations, which may differ from another reader’s. There’s a richness there, a felt ability to collaborate in co-creating narrative. Then there are some more wood worms.
Where’s the bibliotherapy?
When I read Barnes, his gentle humor and insightfulness seep through slowly, like sitting next to a good friend. So there’s a therapeutic effect to spending time with a supportive tone, I think. The right writer helps you feel more like yourself–I’m not sure exactly how, probably through at least partially reflecting the contours of your own thoughts and beliefs and partially through making it clear that you can bring thoughts and feelings that might not be perfectly aligned. You don’t have to care only for the author, don’t have to passively revolve his performance. You can fill in some of the blanks yourself.
One can also learn from the allusionary nature of Barne’s writing. Since he does not declare everything explicitly or detail his thoughts in the normal, didactic way, the reader assembles a meaning. This is how “real life” often functions–you see only flickers right under the surface or branches waving, but you don’t see the sea monsters or the wind. You guess at what is going on; you tune into hints. You harvest meaning from small details and assemble an overall picture without a guide or strong idea of what you are “supposed” to conclude. I think this is useful. Through tuning in more closely to these clues, both on the page and in real life, we can attend more closely to those we care most deeply about. You benefit from your own heightened ability to pay attention – sensations may be richer. You may be more deeply struck by what you’d previously been overlooking.
A little more
Julian’s website
Check out a woodworm
More about The Raft of the Medusa
Including an entire book about it, like Tom de Freston’s Wreck: The Art of Being Lost at Sea
The Nature of Life and Death: Every Body Leaves a Trace by Patricia Wiltshire
Did you know that pollen can help convict a killer? Or that plants can act as crime-scene witnesses?
Patricia Wiltshire certainly does, having founded her life’s work on figuring out crimes by using forensic botany. This memoir, a mix of case studies, life advice, memoir, and nature writing, won’t be for everyone, but it’s definitely for readers who might be intrigued by the esoteric way a plant husk could condemn or absolve you.
This is a book that keeps pulling me back in. Wiltshire has one of those wise tones that come from living a truly dedicated life – she chose an unconventional path, dug deep into it, and has a hard-won note of practicality to her tone. I respect her for living out her decisions, for getting close to both plants and death, for letting herself celebrate her own curiosity and drive, for permitting herself to be human and to hurt, and for putting in the truly difficult work of living a full and complex life.
QUOTE: Even as a little girl, no matter how much I read about the natural world, I always wanted to know more. There is always so much more to be had; it is still the same for me now. This is frustrating because you can never reach the summit. Nobody can. The climb is grindingly hard, and it continues forever.
Where’s the bibliotherapy?
Over time, Wiltshire has built up a lifetime of opinions and insights culled from hours spent in hedgerows or bent over a microscope. When she sees a landscape or a human, she’s seeing more than the rest of us usually do – she’s noticing plant traces, absorbing how plants are interacting, and tracking the subtle ways the landscapes we pass through mark us. This kind of noticing is specialized and attentive, both professional and personal. Reading her remarks, you might start to wonder if you could develop a specialized kind of seeing, too. What might you want to notice? What might you be overlooking as you go about your everyday labor?
Your body is your own for only a short time; the elements from which it is made are only borrowed from the outside world, and you must give them back eventually. The entity that you recognize as you is a collective of ecosystems that many different types of microorganisms call home. And although you might die—when your brain and circulatory systems have irrecoverably stopped working—the communities of bacteria and fungi, and even mites in your pores and worms in your gut (if you have any), will live on for some time.
Wiltshire also adopts a long-term view that I find both realistic and refreshing. She’s become incredibly pragmatic about death, finding wonder in the biological facts of it while also accepting the cyclical nature of mortality. Death, for her, isn’t so much to be feared as it is to be experienced as natural. I think more of us could benefit from contemplating our own ends. Rather than avoiding our mortality or automatically finding it creepy, gross, or terrifying, perhaps we could notice some wonder in it? Maybe we could reconcile ourselves to our ends by considering what other beginnings our bodies enable?
A little more
How Kew Gardens contributes to forensic botany
Wiltshire’s The Natural History of Crime
Patricia walks through solving a crime
Vox news discusses death contemplation with AI researcher and Buddhist meditator Dr. Nikki Mirghafori
And there you have it, book friends. I hope you’re feeling slightly more hopeful, slightly more intrigued. If you’d like, find out more about my bibliography site or book some bibliotherapy for yourself. Thank you for reading.