Christina McDonald

Christina McDonald is the USA Today and Amazon Charts bestselling author of What Lies In Darkness, The Stranger At Black Lake, These Still Black Waters, Do No Harm, Behind Every Lie, and The Night Olivia Fell, which has been optioned for television by a major Hollywood studio.

Her critically acclaimed novels have been featured on lists from Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Real Simple, and more. Her writing has been featured in The Sunday Times, Dublin, USAToday.com, and Expedia.

Originally from Seattle, WA, she has an MA in Journalism from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and she now lives in London, England with her husband, two sons, and their dog, Tango.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. McDonald's reply:

I read almost exclusively fiction, and tend to stick within the thriller genre, which is also what I write. As an author, I’m lucky to be given early reader copies of upcoming books in order to blurb if I enjoy them. One I’ve read lately that really stands out for me is Catch You Later by Jessica Strawser.

Catch You Later is about two best friends, Mikki and Lark, who have nothing but each other. Working night shift together at a highway travel stop, Mikki and Lark are going nowhere fast. Until a stranger stops by the travel stop and Mikki impulsively leaves with him, never to be seen again.

Hypnotic, elegant and beguiling, Catch You Later is a beautifully written story about the power of female friendships, about the ties that bind, and those that set you free. There’s a compelling mystery, emotional depth and tightly plotted twists, but where this book really shines is its characters. Mikki, who disappears, and Lark, left behind to pick up the pieces of her shattered life.

Catch You Later is smart and textured with a dark, atmospheric heart. It’s one of those books that I thought about long after finishing the final pages. I highly recommend reading when it comes out in October 2024!

Visit Christina McDonald's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Night Olivia Fell.

The Page 69 Test: These Still Black Waters.

Q&A with Christina McDonald.

--Marshal Zeringue

Molly MacRae

Molly MacRae spent twenty years in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Upper East Tennessee, where she managed The Book Place, an independent bookstore; may it rest in peace. Before the lure of books hooked her, she was curator of the history museum in Jonesborough, Tennessee’s oldest town.

MacRae lives with her family in Champaign, Illinois, where she recently retired from connecting children with books at the public library.

Her latest novel is Come Shell or High Water.

Recently I asked MacRae about what she was reading. Her reply:

Mortal Radiance, the second book in Kathryn Lasky’s Georgia O’Keeffe mystery series just came out. But I didn’t know about this historical mystery series, until I heard about Mortal Radiance, so I rushed right out to get book one, Light on Bone. It’s wonderful. Set in 1933 New Mexico, it’s told from O’Keeffe’s point of view. She’s living alone in a casita at Ghost Ranch and protective of her painting time and solitude. That solitude is first shattered when she comes across a murdered Franciscan friar, and then by an accumulation of other events, including the arrival of Charles Lindbergh and his wife at the ranch. As O’Keeffe collects facts and suppositions about the murder and other events, she begins to think about them the way she thinks about art—about seeing the unseen and about making visible the invisible. Lasky’s vivid writing make me feel as though I’m in O’Keeffe’s beloved New Mexican landscape and inside O’Keeffe’s fascinating mind.

I’m also making my way through the short stories in The Killing Rain; Left Coast Crime 2024 Anthology, edited by Jim Thomsen. The stories are all set in the Seattle area. They range from traditional to humorous to hardboiled. I’ve read nine of the fourteen stories, so far, and each is excellent.

In the early 80s I decided I wanted to make paper and started collecting cotton lint from our dryer. Life (and growing children) intervened. This summer (only forty years later) I’m going to try again. To help, I borrowed every book about papermaking the library has. Helen Hiebert’s Papermaking with Garden Plants & Common Weeds is my favorite. Hiebert gives clear definitions, instructions, recipes, and charts of papermaking plants. She suggests techniques and projects, and she offers encouragement. I’ll start with some of the easier methods to see if I can really do this. If I can, then I’ll work my way up to making paper from the mulberries and Rose of Sharon that grow like weeds in our backyard. Weeding through papermaking sounds like an efficient plan.

Visit Molly MacRae's website.

My Book, The Movie: Plaid and Plagiarism.

The Page 69 Test: Plaid and Plagiarism.

The Page 69 Test: Scones and Scoundrels.

My Book, The Movie: Scones and Scoundrels.

The Page 69 Test: Crewel and Unusual.

The Page 69 Test: Heather and Homicide.

Q&A with Molly MacRae.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peng Shepherd

Peng Shepherd was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, and has lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, New York, and Mexico City.

Her second novel, The Cartographers, became a national bestseller, was named a Best Book of 2022 by The Washington Post, and received a 2020 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her debut, The Book of M, won the 2019 Neukom Institute for Literary Arts Award for Debut Speculative Fiction, and was chosen as a best book of the year by Amazon, Elle, Refinery29, and The Verge, as well as a best book of the summer by the Today show and NPR’s On Point.

Shepherd's new novel is All This and More.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Shepherd's reply:

With novels, I’m always either early for or late to the party—half of my TBR pile is advanced copies of upcoming books that editors have sent me and the other half is treasures I’ve found while wandering bookstores or been recommended by friends over the years.

Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić (1988)

This is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. I love stories with unusual structures, and narratives that come together fragment by fragment like puzzles. Dictionary of the Khazars is an imaginary history of the Khazars, a semi-nomadic people from the seventh and ninth centuries, written in the form of three mini-encyclopedias which cross-reference and sometimes contradict each other. The effect is mysterious, fascinating, and eerily verisimilar.

Hum by Helen Phillips (forthcoming, Aug 2024)

Helen Phillips is a master of suspense, and Hum is no different. One moment, you think you’rereading a sharp satire of an exhausted mother trying to navigate the dystopian, tech and social media-addicted world we’re all living in right now, and the next, your heart is in your throat. After May loses her job to artificial intelligence and is desperate for money, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it can’t be recognized by surveillance. But when a tiny, innocent mistake suddenly spirals out of control, May’s best chance of proving that she’s a good mother and that her children belong with her lies in the very tech which can now no longer recognize her. It’s a harrowing glimpse into our possible future.

Visit Peng Shepherd's website.

Q&A with Peng Shepherd.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Lange

Richard Lange’s stories have appeared in The Sun, The Iowa Review, and Best American Mystery Stories, and as part of the Atlantic Monthly’s Fiction for Kindle series. "Apocrypha" was awarded the 2015 Short Story Dagger by Great Britain's Crime Writers' Association. He is the author of the collections Dead Boys and Sweet Nothing and the novels This Wicked World, Angel Baby, which won the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers, The Smack, and Rovers. He received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow.

Lange's latest novel is Joe Hustle.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Lange's reply:

I read a number of books at once, consigning each to a certain time of day. One in current rotation is The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann. Vollmann is my favorite living author and has been for years. I’m awestruck by his formal experimentation, his historical research, and the emotional wallop his books pack. That he has not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize is a straight up crime. The Dying Grass is the fifth book in his Seven Dreams series (only six have been published so far), which examines the history of confrontation between Native Americans and various colonizers. Don’t think James Michener though. Vollmann turns historical fiction on its head. These books are spells, hallucinations, and visions that take you places you’ve never been and teach you things you should have been taught in school. History has never been more real and surreal (and thus more accurate) than in these novels. The Dying Grass is set during the Nez Perce War of 1877, when the tribe finally had enough of being cheated and brutalized by the U.S. government and greedy settlers and struck back. It, like all of the books in the series, is a marvel, and you will come away changed by the experience of reading it.

Vollmann doesn’t only write history, though. My introduction to him came through Whores for Gloria, a weird, gritty, heartbreaking wallow among the drunks, hookers, and other lost souls inhabiting San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. It blew me away, made me a lifelong fan, and is a good entry point into the man’s oeuvre if you’re reluctant to commit right off the bat to 500 pages on the Norse exploration of the New World (The Ice Shirt).

Visit Richard Lange's website.

The Page 69 Test: This Wicked World.

The Page 69 Test: Angel Baby.

The Page 69 Test: The Smack.

The Page 69 Test: Rovers.

Q&A with Richard Lange.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's newest novel to be released (July 2024) is Evangeline, a courtroom drama about the murder trial of captain who is one of the few to survive the sinking of his ship.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July:

On July 5, l852, Frederick Douglass, who had been a slave until he escaped bondage when he was eighteen, gave a speech entitled, ‘What To The Slave Is The Fourth of July.’ He was brutally honest. “This fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand, illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthem, were inhuman mockery, and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?”

This, as it would seem, is completely consistent, added proof, if more proof were needed, that from the very beginning the American experiment was a hoax and a fraud. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, whatever else they may have done, had been slave owners and, when it came to that issue, as guilty as everyone else who believed that only white people were entitled to the blessings of liberty. Jefferson’s great work, the Declaration of Independence, was a white man’s call to a white man’s revolution; the Constitution, drawn under Washington’s watchful eye, was a white man’s declaration that a black man was only a fraction of a white man’s worth. America was not just racist, but the most racist nation on earth. More than any other day of the year, Douglass insisted, the Fourth of July reveals to the black slave, “the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” There is no “nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

This is what Frederick Douglass said in his speech about the Fourth of July as reported in the Library of America’s edition of the works of Frederick Douglass, or what we would believe he said if we did not know that the last third of what Douglass said had been cut. And we would know that only if we read the speech in some other, more honest, edition. The Library of America did not just cut a third of the speech, the editor did not so much as bother to mention that the speech had been abridged. By leaving out, i.e. by concealing, what Douglass went on to say, the reader is not allowed to know that this speech, one of the most remarkable speeches ever given by an American, recognized not just America’s failures, but America’s greatness. The reader would never know that Douglass insisted that the men who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence were great men, “great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable, and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen and patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”

What too many of us have forgotten, but what Douglass understood, is that the difference, what was then the glaring difference, between the principles of American freedom and the practices of American slavery had a greater, and a deeper, meaning than the hypocrisy of those who talked about the one and did nothing about the other. What Douglass understood was that it was precisely that difference that promised the end of slavery. Either the principle or the practice would eventually prevail. The Declaration, as both he and Lincoln understood, required that slavery had to end, and the Declaration, as he and Lincoln understood, was the basis for how the Constitution had to be interpreted. Moreover, Douglass insisted, the Constitution itself, which some abolitionists, and not just abolitionists, dismissed as marking the slave as only three-fifths of a human being, was a charter, not of slavery, but of freedom. The South had demanded that the Constitution be interpreted to give “the right to hold, and to hunt slaves,” but, “in the instrument, I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing.” And then Douglass adds, “if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopted, a slaveholding instrument, why neither slavery nor slaveholding, nor slave can be anywhere found in it.”

It is curious, and worth noting, that Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, two of the greatest masters of the English language America has produced had, neither of them, any of what today would be considered real education. Neither of them attended a university. Douglass never spent even a day in a classroom; he taught himself to read. Both of them read the Bible; both read Shakespeare, and both sought the deeper meaning in what they read. Lincoln read Proverbs 25:11, ‘For a word fitly spoken is like applets of gold in filigree of silver,’ and used it to explain the proper relation between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. They had an immense respect for one another. At a White House reception after Lincoln’s second inaugural, Douglass was the only one he asked what he thought about his speech. In l876, at the unveiling of a statue of Lincoln, the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington, D.C., Douglass gave an account of what Lincoln had done, an account that could take the place of almost everything written about slavery and the Civil War, a speech that manages to combine the two elements that instead of demonstrating ineradicable white racism, as too many of us believe, prove instead Lincoln’s greatness.

Douglass began by telling his mainly white audience, an audience that included the President of the United States, “You are the children of Abraham Lincoln; we are at best only his step-children, children by adoption, children by force of circumstance and necessity.” Lincoln was not, “in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.” But the debt owed Lincoln is beyond measure, “for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.”

Viewed from the perspective of an abolitionist, seen from the vantage point of a former slave, Lincoln seemed at times a doubtfully ally. In a single remarkable sentence Douglass details the reasons for this confusion: “When he tarried long on the mountain; when he strangely told us we were the cause of the war, when he more strangely told us to leave the land in which we were born; when he refused to employ our arms in defense of the Union; when, after accepting our services as colored soldiers, he refused to retaliate our murder and torture as colored prisoners; when he told us he would save the Union if he could with slavery; when he revoked the Proclamation of Emancipation of General Fremont; when he refused to remove the popular commander of the Army of the Potomac, in the days of inaction and defeat, who was more zealous in his efforts to protect slavery than to suppress rebellion; when we saw all this, and more, we were at times grieved, stunned and generally bewildered.”

And still, despite all that, Douglass insists, “Our faith in him was often taxed and strained to the uttermost, but it never failed.” Why? Why did the faith of four million slaves, and former slaves like Frederick Douglass, never fail? The answer is that, living through what they did, taking their knowledge and their understanding, not from books someone else had written, but why they saw with their own eyes, and felt with their own hearts, they knew far better than we can ever know who Lincoln was and what he had to deal with. Douglass, for all his concerns with the way things were done during the war, understood at the end of it why Lincoln had proceeded the way he had.

“His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful co-operation of his loyal fellow countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would inevitably driven from him a powerful class of American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent, but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

In his autobiography, a book that makes you both ashamed and proud to be an American, Frederick Douglass described Lincoln as a great man, a very great man, too great to ever be the prisoner, the slave, of small thoughts. At the conclusion of his speech at the Freedmen’s Monument, Douglass shows just how great Lincoln was, and how little greatness is at the time of its unfolding understood.

“Few great men have ever been the victims of fiercer denunciations that Abraham Lincoln during his administration….He was assailed by Abolitionists; he was assailed by slaveholders; he was assailed by men who were for peace at any price; he was assailed by men who were for a more vigorous prosecution of the war; he was assailed for not making the war an abolition war; and he was bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war.

“But now behold the change; the judgment of the present hour is, that taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite creation has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.”

There were two Americas when Frederick Douglass lived and wrote and spoke and struggled: not a white America and a black America, but a civilized America that believed in what the Declaration of Independence promised, and a backward, barbaric America that believed that one race, the white race had, in Jefferson’s vivid description, been born “booted and spurred” to ride roughshod over the other. There are still two Americas, one that believes in the principles of the Declaration and takes them as the standard by which to determine the changes that still have to be made, and one that insists that because the standard has not yet been met the standard - the Declaration - is itself a hoax and a fraud. Frederick Douglass, when he was a slave and when he was free, never doubted which America was the one worth fighting for. He understood, as Lincoln understood, that the last best hope for freedom was that the principles of the Declaration of Independence become the “civic religion” of the United States, a common belief that holds everything together.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.

Third Reading: All The King’s Men.

Third Reading: The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.

Third Reading: Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt.

Third Reading: Main Street.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II.

Third Reading: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Third Reading: Fiction's Failure.

Third Reading: Hermann Hesse's Demian.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Housewright

A past President of the Private Eye Writers of America, David Housewright won a prestigious Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America and three Minnesota Book Awards for his Rushmore McKenzie and Holland Taylor private eye novels as well as other tales of murder and mayhem in the Midwest.

His new novel is Man in the Water: A McKenzie Novel.

Recently I asked Housewright about what he was reading. His reply:

I tend not to read other writers’ books while I’m working on my own. Fortunately, I finished my next book about six weeks ago and sent it off to my publisher. I’ve been binging ever since. Two books stand out.

The first is Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane. I’ve always maintained that the best crime novels are always about more than the crime and whodunit; are always about more than who killed Mr. Body in the library with a candlestick (It was Miss Scarlet, by the way. It’s always Miss Scarlet). This book deals with race hatred, family, the criminality of power, personal salvation and so much more. It is thought-provoking as well as dark and suspenseful. A terrific book!

The second is Once in a Blue Moon Lodge by Lorna Landvik. Landvik might have the most authentic Minnesota voice of all the very many great writers from my home state. It is most decidedly not a crime novel, in case you’re wondering, and deals with love – love between parents and their children, between husbands and wives, between lovers, between people who are unrelated but considered family. It is also thought-provoking as well as warm and funny.

I recommend that read them back-to-back like I did.

Learn more about the book and author at David Housewright's website and Facebook page.

My Book, The Movie: The Last Kind Word.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Kind Word.

The Page 69 Test: Stealing the Countess.

The Page 69 Test: What the Dead Leave Behind.

The Page 69 Test: First, Kill the Lawyers.

The Page 69 Test: In a Hard Wind.

Q&A with David Housewright.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yoon Ha Lee

A Korean-American sf/f writer who received a B.A. in math from Cornell University and an M.A. in math education from Stanford University, Yoon Ha Lee finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for story ideas. Lee’s novel Ninefox Gambit won the Locus Award for best first novel, and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards; its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were also Hugo finalists. His middle grade space opera Dragon Pearl won the Mythopoeic Award for Children’s Literature and the Locus Award for best YA novel, and was a New York Times bestseller. Lee’s short fiction has appeared in publications such as Tor.com, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Audubon Magazine, as well as several year’s best anthologies.

Lee’s hobbies include composing music, art, and destroying the reader. He lives in Louisiana with his husband and an extremely lazy catten.

Lee's new novel is Moonstorm.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. His reply:

The last book I read was an ARC of James S. A. Corey’s The Mercy of Gods. I knew I was going to like this, as I enjoyed The Expanse, but I did not expect to be snarling carnivorously at everyone who came in between me and my reading experience! Besides, my catten is better at carnivorous snarling anyway. (Kidding. She is a giant round marshmallow.)

I’m betraying my age, but The Mercy of Gods is like the best parts of William Sleator’s supremely creepy psychology experiment children’s horror novel House of Stairs if you mashed it up with the far-flung alien empires in C. J. Cherryh books like Hunter of Worlds and The Faded Sun, and added heavy doses of microbiology, ineffable mystery, and body horror. We start with a planet settled by humans, but to which humans are not native; the humans themselves have no idea how they got there. On the eve of a triumph in microbiology research, that world becomes the latest conquest by aliens who rate other species as (a) useful (b) extinct.

This book absolutely grabbed me because the authors take the opening gambit of telling us, from the viewpoint of an alien, that the humans win in their rebellion. We already know the outcome. So the question then becomes not “Will the humans win?” but “How will they win, and will the price be worth it?” I see possible glimpses of the former, and am terrified already of the latter.

Beyond that, I am ride or die already for the two lead characters: Dafyd, who looks like a useless nepotism hire bench monkey except he’s a genius at interpersonal/soft skills except when it comes to his own love life; and Jessyn, a scientist whose struggles with anxiety and depression in some ways make her the best prepared to deal with hostile aliens.

In any case, I have already penciled “MOAR CARNIVOROUS SNARLING” into my planner for whenever the next book drops!

Visit Yoon Ha Lee's website.

The Page 69 Test: Revenant Gun.

My Book, The Movie: Ninefox Gambit.

Q&A with Yoon Ha Lee.

The Page 69 Test: Fox Snare.

My Book, The Movie: Moonstorm.

The Page 69 Test: Moonstorm.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's newest novel to be released (July 2024) is Evangeline, a courtroom drama about the murder trial of captain who is one of the few to survive the sinking of his ship.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Hermann Hesse's Demian:

Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse both won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Both were born in Germany, and both became citizens of other countries. There was something else these two remarkable writers had in common: their greatest works would not have been possible had Friedrich Nietzsche never lived.

In the introduction to Hesse’s novel, Demian, Thomas Mann wrote:

The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian…is unforgettable.” Unforgettable because, “With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth a grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpretation of their innermost life had risen from their own midst - whereas it was a man already forty-two years old who gave them what they sought.”

Hesse had written Demian over a few months in l917, the third year of the war. It was published just after the war, in l919, the same year he wrote an essay entitled “Zarathustra’s Return” in which he acknowledged “his enormous debt to and reverence for” Nietzsche. The debt could not have been greater. In Steppenwolf, Hesse’s most famous novel, Harry Haller turns his back on what the l9th Century has produced - the bourgeois, Nietzsche’s “last man,” - with as much disgust as Flaubert expressed in Madame Bovary. Through the French Revolution and the forces of industrialization, the world had been turned upside down. Money, comfort, work - everything looked down upon by the aristocracy - was now looked up to as man’s greatest achievements. The noble sense of a scale of rank and values had been replaced by the demand for equality and the right of everyone to their own, uninstructed, opinion. The sense of reverence for the customary, the established way - the morning prayer, as Nietzsche had put it - had been replaced by the morning paper - the daily report of whatever was new. Everyone had become an actor, showing others what they thought others wanted to see, and then, believing what others thought about them, thought that was who they were.

The bourgeois, according to Steppenwolf, which is the name Harry Haller has given himself, is incapable of giving himself entirely either to God or to the flesh. The “absolute is his abhorrence.” He will never follow one path or the other; he always seeks the safety of a middle ground. “He may be ready to serve God, but not by giving up the fleshpots.” The bourgeois is the very definition of mediocre: “a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has established majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for responsibility.”

The choice of the name Steppenwolf is not accidental. Haller has both a “tamed or sublimated nature” and the raw nature of a wolf, a savage creature for whom cruelty has no meaning. But, as Nietzsche taught, the self is not divided between these two natures, a rational and an irrational part as the ancients understood it, but a “hundred or a thousand selves.” In a not completely veiled allusion to what happened to Nietzsche, the madness that put him in an asylum, Steppenwolf writes that if someone of “unusual powers and unusually delicate perceptions sees that the ‘self is made up of a bundle of selves’” the majority “puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizophrenia and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons.”

Steppenwolf is not a novel in the usual sense. It does not attempt to trace the development of the various characters of a story through their relationships; it is a report of what Steppenwolf has written down, his reflections on the disordered times in which he has the misfortune to live. Reading Steppenwolf is like reading what an intelligent student might write about what he had learned from a teacher who had himself studied under the one of the most remarkable minds of the last two hundred years; it is like reading what someone with an unusual gift for literature might write about what he had learned from reading Friedrich Nietzsche.

Harry Haller - Steppenwolf - suffers from the loneliness of his knowledge, his understanding of the fatal deficiencies of what Europe has become: a “cemetery where Jesus Christ and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but the indecipherable names on mouldering stones…,” a civilization where the bourgeois are prevented by the very machinery that controls their time measured existence from “recognizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead.” This includes especially the scholar who “believes in the value of more knowledge and its acquisition, because he believes in progress and evolution.” Haller, the Steppenwolf, can see the future: the next war “will be a good deal more terrible than the last.”

Like Steppenwolf, Demian is a very short novel, barely a hundred fifty pages, but every page holds your attention. This, in part, is because you know in advance, as it were, the effect it had, that “electrifying influence” Thomas Mann writes about in his introduction. Everyone knows that Nietzsche, though he despised both German anti-semitism and German nationalism, had something to do with fascism as it took form in Europe. But for every person who read Nietzsche, hundreds, and more likely, thousands, read Hermann Hesse. Demian had an effect that no other novel had on young Europeans since Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, nearly a hundred years earlier. Werther led more than one young man to commit suicide out of his own feelings of love lost despair; Demian helped lead an entire generation to the Third Reich and the suicide of Europe.

The story of Demian is told by his young friend, Sinclair, who was drawn to him when Demian, new to the school Sinclair attends, gives him his own interpretation of the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. When Cain kills his brother, he is “awarded a special decoration for his cowardice, a mark that protects him and puts the fear of God into all the others, that’s quite odd, isn’t it?” What really happened, Demian explains, is that “a strong man killed a weaker one and all the weak became afraid of him. Cowards, afraid to fight, they say that God has put a mark on him and that this is the reason - not their cowardice - that they don’t do anything about it.”

The distinction between the strong and the weak, and the way the weak conceal their weakness and weaken the strong, are the central elements of the story, the explanation of everything that is wrong in Europe and the prescription of what needs to be done to make things right again. Everywhere, Demian insists, you see the “reign of the herd instinct, nowhere freedom and love.” It is what the 19th Century has done. “For a hundred years or more Europe has done nothing but study and build factories! They know exactly how many ounces of powder it takes to kill a man but they don’t know how to pray to God, they don’t even know how to be happy for a single contented hour.”

The herd instinct can be overcome, or, rather, there are some, always a few, who are different from the herd. “Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them; things are forbidden to them that every honorable man would do any day in the year and other things are allowed to them that are generally despised.” It is the struggle, the life and death struggle, that the individual has with himself. At one point, Demian insists that the only reality is the one that is contained within ourselves, and this is the reason why each man has one vocation - to find the way to himself, to discover his own destiny and “live it out wholly and resolutely within himself.”

Finding the way to our true self is not easy. “Every god and devil that ever existed…are within us, exist as latent possibilities, as wishes, as alternatives.” How to choose, how to know what is better, what is worse; how to decide this, or anything, if you are, like Sinclair, an unusual boy of eighteen who frequently considered himself a genius, and just as frequently, crazy? When he enrolls in the university, he lives in an old house near the town hall. On his table are a few volumes of Nietzsche, volumes with which he becomes intimately familiar: “I lived with him, sensed the loneliness of his soul, perceived the fate that had propelled him on inexorably; I suffered with him, and rejoiced that there had been one man who had followed his destiny so relentlessly.”

Believing in what Nietzsche had written, he believes Demian is right that, “The world, as it is now, wants to perish - and it will.” And when it does, the will of humanity, what Nature wants for man, what is written in the individual, as “it stood written in Nietzsche,” will “come to the fore again.” There is only one task for Demian and Sinclair and others like them: to represent an “island in the world,” to wear again the sign of Cain, to be “considered ‘odd’ by the world; yes, even crazy, and dangerous.” Humanity, for those who bind themselves and their opinion closer to the herd, is something complete that must be maintained, but for those who wear the sign humanity is a distant goal. And then, repeating Nietzsche’s prophecy that the Twentieth Century would be more warlike than any other time in human history, Demian says of the war he sees coming: “People will love it. Even now they can hardly wait for the killing to begin - their lives are that dull!” This is only the beginning. The new world has begun, and it will be “terrible for those clinging to the old.”

And, like nearly every prophecy Nietzsche made, the prophecy came true. The war came, and it was even more terrible than he, or Hermann Hesse, could have imagined. Leo Strauss, who lived through it, once remarked that those were fortunate who preferred the novels of Jane Austen to those of Thomas Mann. He could have said the same thing about the novels of Hermann Hesse.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.

Third Reading: All The King’s Men.

Third Reading: The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.

Third Reading: Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt.

Third Reading: Main Street.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II.

Third Reading: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Third Reading: Fiction's Failure.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kimberly S. Belle

Kimberly Belle's new novel, The Paris Widow, “continues the author’s winning streak” according to Publishers Weekly. Her previous novels include The Marriage Lie, a Goodreads Choice Awards semifinalist for Best Mystery & Thriller, and the co-authored #1 Audible Original, Young Rich Widows. Belle’s novels have been optioned for film and television and selected by LibraryReads and Amazon & Apple Books Editors as Best Books of the Month, and the International Thriller Writers as nominee for best book of the year. She divides her time between Atlanta and Amsterdam.

Recently I asked Belle about what she was reading. Her reply:

Gothictown, a 2025 release by Emily Carpenter, a story about a family who moves to Juliana, Georgia to start over after the pandemic and gets way (way!!) more than they bargained for. I’m a huge Carpenter fan, so when she offered me an early read, I happily accepted and am gobbling the story up. It’s creepy in the best possible way.

I’m also just starting Ruth Ware’s One Perfect Couple. Ruth is one of those authors I don’t care what the book is about; I just know I want to read it. She’s also an upcoming guest of the Killer Author Club, a bi-weekly author interview series I host along with fellow authors Heather Gudenkauf and Kaira Rouda (for schedule, see killerauthorclub.com). I’ll definitely be fangirling!

Visit Kimberly Belle's website.

The Page 69 Test: Dear Wife.

Q&A with Kimberly Belle.

The Page 69 Test: My Darling Husband.

The Page 69 Test: The Paris Widow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eva Gates

Eva Gates, also known as Vicki Delany, is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than forty-five books: clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy. She is currently writing four cozy mystery series: the Catskill Summer Resort mysteries for Penguin Random House, the Tea by the Sea mysteries for Kensington, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series for Crooked Lane Books, and the Lighthouse Library series (as Eva Gates) for Crooked Lane.

Delany is a past president of the Crime Writers of Canada and co-founder and organizer of the Women Killing It Crime Writing Festival. Her work has been nominated for the Derringer, the Bony Blithe, the Ontario Library Association Golden Oak, and the Arthur Ellis Awards. Delany is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

The latest Eva Gates Lighthouse Library mystery is The Stranger in the Library.

Recently I asked Delany about what she was reading. Her reply:

Summer is my best reading time. Nothing I love more than sitting in the sun by the pool with a good book. But, before the Great Canadian Summer gets into full swing, here’s what I’ve been reading lately.

The Hunter by Tana French. Easily one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. French is Irish and the book (follow up to The Seeker) is set in a small, rural patch of Irish countryside where the people are not exactly accepting of strangers, and definitely into following everyone else’s business. The plot is interesting, the atmosphere perfect, the characters well drawn and fascinating, but the best part, to me, is French’s skillful use of the Irish accent and idioms that cleverly give the English speaking reader a taste of the dialect without making it something you have to parse through to understand. When local words are used, they’re well placed in context so you understand without having to look them up. Highly, highly recommended.

The Lantern’s Dance by Laurie R. King. I’ve been reading this series about Mary Russell and her mentor/husband Sherlock Holmes since the publication of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice thirty years ago. The series sagged a bit in the middle, but I kept on reading because I love the characters so, and I’m glad I did as this latest is as good as ever. In particular, I love the Russell character, every bit Holmes’s equal in every way. The Russell and Holmes books have a prominent place in my own virtual bookstore, The Sherlock Holmes Bookshop and Emporium which I write under my own name of Vicki Delany.

All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay. I am not much for reading fantasy (with some exceptions) but for some reason I thought I’d give this one a try. I didn’t even finish. I was interested in the characters and their story but when it got all wound up in the intricate politics of the world, which became nothing more to me than a jumble of made up words and names, I decided not to continue.

Follow Eva Gates on Twitter and Facebook, and visit Vicki Delany's website.

The Page 69 Test: Death By Beach Read.

Writers Read: Eva Gates (June 2022).

The Page 69 Test: Death Knells and Wedding Bells.

Writers Read: Eva Gates (June 2023).

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's newest novel to be released (July 2024) is Evangeline, a courtroom drama about the murder trial of captain who is one of the few to survive the sinking of his ship.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Fiction's Failure:

In the middle of the last century, before everyone had a kindle, or some other small electronic device to keep them entertained, when millions of commuters rode the bus or the train sometimes more than an hour to work, the introduction of the paperback novel revolutionized the reading habits of Americans. Instead of expensive hardcover books, paperbacks, some of which cost less than a dollar, gave the seat-bound commuter four or five hundred pages of page turning fiction, an escape from the crowd around her and the thought of her dull, tedious, and often thankless job. The books were thick, the covers sometimes lurid, the prose, though nothing like as graphic as it is today, fast-moving and easy to understand. A number of writers made a great deal of money writing books like this, but no one was better at writing what the critics, with some justification, called trash, than Harold Robbins, about whom a better novel could be written than any novel he wrote himself.

Harold Robbins loved booze, loved women, and hated writing, hated it so much he had to be locked in a room before he would even start. It is true that it was not a bad room; it was, quite often, one of the most expensive rooms in one of the most expensive hotels in New York. But Plaza suite or jail cell, confinement, as they say, concentrates the mind. The difference was that what they did to Robbins in a New York hotel, no Georgia county sheriff would ever have been allowed to do. The hotel or, rather, Robbins’ friend and agent, who gave direction to the hotel staff, would not send in food. Not until, each day, Robbins had written the requisite number of typed pages.

Among his other contributions to American fiction, Robbins wrote The Carpetbaggers. Based loosely on the life of Howard Hughes, the book was an enormous best-seller when it came out in paperback. Robbins got richer still when Hollywood made a movie out of it, a movie in which the girl who was about to marry the Howard Hughes character, asked what she would like to see on her honeymoon, replied, “Ceilings.” The audience was properly shocked and could not wait to tell their friends. Like everything Robbins wrote, The Carpetbaggers followed the time tested formula of a powerful, ruthless, and yet somehow vulnerable man involved with two kinds of women: the kind you would like to take home to meet your mother, and the kind you would like to take to the Plaza Hotel, if she had not, at some point earlier in her life, been there, working, on her own.

Working all day, banging out his stories of sex and redemption, becoming more hungry with each page he finished, Robbins would pass under the door what he had done. His friend and agent would check to make sure Robbins had not cheated on his daily quota, and only then allow room service inside. Finally, after weeks of cold sober writing, the novel would be finished, and Robbins and his agent would again have all the money they needed. They did what any serious writer and literary agent would do: they got falling down drunk, and stayed that way, delirious with happiness in an alcoholic haze, a party that lasted as long as there was money to spend and women to help spend it. Then, broke again, Harold Robbins would plod back to his typewriter and his locked room at the Plaza Hotel and punch out another enormously successful novel. Every writer has his routine.

Graham Greene, who wrote much better fiction, including such one-time classics as The Power And The Glory and Our Man In Havana, had a peculiarity of his own. He wrote every morning the same, exact, number of words, five hundred, not one word less, not one word more. And it did not matter where that word was, the first, the last, or in the middle, of a sentence; five hundred words, he was done for the day. What was never quite clear was how long it took to get to that final five hundredth word. Was it two hours, an hour, less than that? Five hundred. The number, not the time, was all that counted. Anthony Trollope, like Greene a British writer, but one who lived and wrote in the twilight of the Victorian Era and whose Palliser Novels continue to be read, measured both words and time, and did it with an astonishing, mechanical, regularity.

Every morning at precisely five-thirty, Trollope would begin to write; every morning at precisely seven-thirty, he would put his pen aside and stack together the sheets of paper on which he had written, without exception, precisely two thousand words; words written in a way that would have brought cheer to the face of an army drill sergeant or a sadistic dance instructor. With his pocket watch open on his desk, Trollope, as meticulously as the perpetually repeated motion of the watch itself, would write every fifteen minutes exactly two hundred fifty words. If you read Trollope’s novels, and they are worth reading, stories that give a better sense of the lives of the British aristocracy than anything else written at the time, you begin to become aware that your eyes are moving with the same mind-numbing efficiency as the author’s hand, one line to the next, one paragraph, one page, one chapter, to the next, like the endless movement of a metronome.

There is an important difference between writers who think in terms of how much they can write, and writers who want to write what deserves to be read. And if it is a difference that has gone missing, all the better to remember great writers and the different way they worked. Flaubert wrote fewer novels, and far fewer pages, than Anthony Trollope, or the other two popular writers mentioned, but what Flaubert wrote will be with us as long as there are still serious readers. No one had to lock up Flaubert to get him to write, he did not count how many words he had written or keep a watch next to him to tell him how long it had taken to write them. He once spent three days in the struggle to find the one perfect word he needed. Another great writer, James Joyce, replying to someone who complained how difficult it was to read Finnegan’s Wake, said with cruel indifference that it had taken him sixteen years to write it and he did not care if it took that long to read it.

Friedrich Nietzsche understood what the emergence of a mass market meant for the future of literature: “When everyone learns to read, no one will know how to write.” This, to the modern, democratic, eye, seems to make no sense at all. What difference does it make if everyone, instead of only a small minority, knows how to read? As it turns out, all the difference in the world. When reading was limited to those who had the time to read and think about what they read, when, instead of a source of entertainment, a thoughtless diversion, a book was expected to say something, and say it in a way that was, in every sense of the word, memorable, an author who could not write well was considered no author at all.

The distinction between the kind of writing required to reach a mass audience and the kind that appealed to an educated reader with the time, and the ability, to reflect on what he read, is itself a pale imitation of a distinction drawn when reading and writing first became available to people who were neither the rulers, nor part of the priesthood, of an ancient city or nation. There was first the fear that writing would weaken, and perhaps eventually destroy, the ability to remember what we hear; the fear that, by writing everything down, the memory of what someone said would be lost. If Homer is raised as an objection, the Iliad and the Odyssey among the few great works that have been read for more than two dozen centuries, it needs to be remembered that Homer was not read in ancient Athens. His two long stories were recited in public by rhapsodes, men who committed Homer’s words to memory.

The other, more serious, objection was that it was dangerous to put in writing what could be used against you by those in power, whether the tyrant, always quick to murder, or the demos, always quick to condemn anyone out of step with the majority. The problem was how to write in a way that would reach those capable of understanding without raising the alarm among those who could make sure you could never write at all. The answer, beginning with Plato, was to write in a way that, appearing to agree with what everyone believed, or claimed to believe, suggested a deeper meaning, a secret teaching somehow hidden in plain sight. The first words of Plato’s Republic - “I went down to the Piraeus’ - would seem, on first impression, nothing more than a brief, straightforward description of where Socrates was going, until, later, you discover, or you remember, that the Piraeus, the port of Athens, was the heart of the Athenian democracy and the place where different ways of life were brought from different parts of the world. And then, remembering that, the careful reader might wonder what it means that Socrates goes down, i.e. looks down, on the Athenian regime.

The need to disguise the meaning of what one writes made writing a form of art. A story, any story, was not interesting unless it was written well. Among those who wrote for a popular audience, no one understood this better than Shakespeare. In Hamlet, he has Ophelia explain, “Now, this overdone, or come tardy-off, though it makes the unskillful laugh, cannot but makes the judicious grieve; the censure of which one must in your allowance overweigh a whole theatre of others.”

The question whether to make the unskillful laugh or the judicious grieve has now, in our time, been answered in a different way. The judicious reader has all but disappeared. There are still some left, but not enough to determine how a larger audience wants to spend its time. The real question, the question that will decide if literature, and therewith civilization, can be saved, is whether, in an age of mass produced entertainment, there will still be writers who believe what, among others, Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford believed, that writing about the human condition is the most serious thing a writer can do. The prospect seems doubtful.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.

Third Reading: All The King’s Men.

Third Reading: The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.

Third Reading: Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt.

Third Reading: Main Street.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II.

Third Reading: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

--Marshal Zeringue