Soft Invasions

by James Reich

Los Angeles, 1942. Psychoanalyst Maxwell McKinney and his wife Joan await the return of their son after the sinking of the USS Yorktown. With sections of the city under camouflage and ordinances against “enemy aliens,” McKinney is troubled by his ambivalent feelings for his son and fears that California will be invaded by the Japanese. A chance encounter with a man who appears to be his double, a screenwriter named Sid Starr, allows McKinney to confront his guilt. Entwined with McKinney, Starr finds that his own identity is at stake, and between the two, McKinney’s wife and son fight against their own destruction.

Punctuating great American fears, James Reich targets the zones of recent history where worlds and anxieties collide, among them UFOs, the Battle of Midway, Hollywood, psychoanalysis and Japanese internment. Soft Invasions is an existential thriller about cowardice, cruelty and betrayal that invokes David Cronenberg's body-horror classics as well as the cold California glamor of Joan Didion, the ominous noir of Horace McCoy and the psychic angst of Norman Mailer.

This edition features an afterword by literary and media theorist Laurence A. Rickels.

150 pages, Paperback

Published December 5, 2017

About the author

James Reich is a novelist, essayist, and journalist. He is the author of The Moth for the Star (7.13 Books, September 2023), The Song My Enemies Sing, Soft Invasions, Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness (Anti-Oedipus Press), Bombshell, and I, Judas (Counterpoint/Soft Skull). His psychoanalytic monograph Wilhelm Reich versus The Flying Saucers is forthcoming from Punctum Books. He is also the author of The Holly King, a limited-edition collection of poetry.

James is a contributor to SPIN Magazine, and his nonfiction has been published by Salon, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, International Times, Sensitive Skin Magazine, The Weeklings, Entropy, The Nervous Breakdown, Fiction Advocate, and others. His account of innovations in British science fiction is published by Bloomsbury in its ‘Decades’ series, The 1960s. His work has also appeared in the editions of Deep Ends: The J.G. Ballard Anthology, Akashic Books’ ‘Noir’ series, and various anthologies of fiction and criticism.

James was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire in the West of England, and has been a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, since 2009. He was greatly influenced by early exposure to the poetry of Dylan Thomas, and by a small book on dadaism, and later by Andy Warhol, the Beats, science fiction, psychoanalysis, punk rock, and the films of Ken Russell and Nic Roeg. Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plath, J.G. Ballard, Anne Sexton, Paul Bowles, D.H. Lawrence, and Lars von Trier are also vital constellations in his work.

Reviews

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Reich’s Soft Invasions is a powerful fusion of noir, thriller, and historical fiction, sentence after sentence evincing great style and intelligence, its metaphors as refreshingly unusual as they are perfectly realized. Think Nathanael West, Graham Greene, and Joseph Conrad. With a pre- and post-Pearl Harbor bombing Los Angeles as its backdrop, Reich deftly explores peculiarly American anxieties and prejudices, while theorizing about identity, doppelgängers, mirrors, artificiality, consumerism, and militarism. So much darkness in this book, which is often countered by light, albeit light, and often sunlight, that blinds, that scorches. So much violence in this book, its unflinching depictions of war and empathetic rendering of a ritual disembowelment and subsequent arson particularly noteworthy. The novel’s jumping backward and forward in time is engagingly disruptive, its "momentum" further disrupted by nightmares, or are they hallucinations? Finally, its ending(s), which mirror(s) the novel’s various doublings, is nothing short of masterful. Highly recommended.

[Seb · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Reich's "Soft Invasions" is here to remind us what literature is all about: subversion and destruction of all possible comfort. A beautifully written Pasoniliesque novel(Early Pasolini, "Theoreme" comes immediately to mind) in its themes (Identity, sexual and otherwise), Pynchonesque in its panaroia and real-life historical references, Anne Quinesque in its gleeful destruction of narrative models, it is a writer's writer's book at its best.

[David Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly elegant, sinister, and powerful book, like a hyper-distilled lovechild of Gravity's Rainbow and Maps to the Stars.

[Franco Romero · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel moves in the most unexpected ways, constantly layered with rich (always mirroring) images. It should be read slowly, it should be digested and thought through. Each chapter is pleasantly short and this works to a great advantage— the reader has sufficient space to drink the psychology of what is being explored in Hollywood, in American fears, in Oedipal complexes and in the dark, too-often forgotten past of Japanese Internment. This is a novel that explores its concerns intricately and experiencing the way it does so is exhilarating.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Reich is a transgressive author at the peak of his powers, and his enviable prose is full of malice and complexity. His fourth novel stirs the entrails of wartime Los Angeles and this fortune-telling hints at our own future: the paranoia and anxiety drenching the nation like cold rain, the midnight deportations, the waiting internment camps. Reich uses a brilliant motif of doubling and doppelgängers throughout the book, but it is an unspoken mirroring—conjoining the past of 1941 and the present day—that resonates long after you finish the novel. Always a writer of ideas as well as masterful turn of phrase, Reich deploys his characters, such as the smoldering monster Joan Cravan, to full effect in his deeply Ballardian Greek tragedy. California’s history is nightmarish, and America’s future may be too, but Reich helps bolster our courage to keep our eyes open and clutch our spears.

[David Agranoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read my first James Reich novel earlier this year shortly after recording a bonus episode of The Dickheads podcast with him about Barry Malzberg’s Beyond Apollo, a book we both love. I was not super familiar with JR’s work before that point. His novel The Song My Enemies Sing quickly became one of my top reads of the year. This book had been on my radar since it came out as I always thought it sounded incredible.

The back of the book calls for it to be marketed as “Literary Fiction” and rightfully so. It is so much more than that in fact I would consider it to be alternate history, paranoid multi-verse science fiction with hints of horror in all the other super weird moments. Meta-old timey Hollywood mixes with counterfactual Japanese bombing air raids of California, UFO abductions and the battle of the Midway.

In 140 short pages of elegantly surreal prose James Reich gets wibbley wobbly with space-time and reality and creates a one of a kind reading experience. It is perfect for anyone looking for something that gets on the level of weird that PKD and Malzberg reached when they chained them selves to their typewriters in the 60’s and 70’s and pumped out dozens upon dozens of mindfucks wrapped in pulp covers.

Sure it is literary fiction but lets be clear PKD always was lit fiction long before the establishment pulled their head out of their asses and realized it was more than JUST sci-fi. This book is Science Fiction, Horror and psychedelic mind-fuckery strained through straight up beautiful prose. Hyperbole aside James Reich is great. The story has multiple characters and the narrative goes back and forth between times and realities. Readers who want everything to make easy sense, and have everything explained perfectly should keep looking for another book. I always trusted that Reich knew what he was doing.

We mostly follow Max McKinney, his wife Joan and his son George. But we also get to know Hollywood screenwriter Sid Starr. George is at war, Max is a psychoanalyst whose many patients are feeding drama to Sidd. Along the way reality comes down and the war comes home. Some of the chapters about the Japanese planes over Los Angeles were as haunting as anything I read this year. With perfectly executed sentences Reich reached almost mystical level of unreality that left this reader wonderfully stunned. I am sure there were elements and levels working in this novel that flew over my head but damn it was great. I would read this again for sure.

I loved this book. Sign me up for anything James Reich wants to gift to this reality.

[Scott Waldyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really love the idea of this book. It's a beautifully written, poetic exploration of the ways we ultimately torment ourselves in how we treat our "others" or doppelganger.

That's an oversimplification of the depth this book explores, but I'm trying to stay spoiler-free. The truth is, Soft Invasions echoes. Though it takes place in early 1940s USA, this is clearly a title that has a lot to say about USA now. Our fears. Our struggles. Our choice, as a nation, to treat "others" with the same malice we treated those in the 1940s.

My one complaint is that I felt the cataclysmic moment that is used to send our main characters into different directions felt too sudden. I wanted more.

Having said that, 'Soft Invasions' is still a must-read. It's a shining example of important and necessary literature. Literature with a capital L.

[Stephen Toman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reminds me a lot of High Rise by Ballard, though the plot is completely different. I said this was the missing link between Steve Erickson and Ballard - incidentally, I read Zeroville and High Rise back to back almost exactly two years ago.

[Matthew Binder · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is truly a first-rate novel. Soft Invasions provides a fantastically nuanced depiction of fear and paranoia, both rational and otherwise. It's a challenging read but well worth the effort.

[Adam Axler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark and desperate, Reich's characters and mood always draw you in. I started in reverse chronological order, but it is inevitable that I will read his entire catalog. Excellent.

[Wampus Reynolds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reich is a masterful author who crystallizes concepts and sensations out of a miasma of a surreal Los Angeles and its residents in the age it lives. The paranoia of 1942 America and of the Other are illuminated by a story of doppelgangers from different histories, an Oedipal dream (nightmare) in reaction to war, and a Hollywood filled with scandal. The prose made me laugh and hurt; the ending satisfied.