Allison Hammond > Recent Status Updates

It’s been a slog.

Wonderfully imagined. At times, deeply creepy. The boys are not scared enough for their taste, but I'm enthralled.

This is marvelously written and genuinely spooky. One of our boys is entranced by it.

“I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it’s a feeling you keep having, even after that’s no place anymore.”

I’ve traded bleak and alone in the future for bleak and alone in the past. What is my subconscious doing to me?!

My emotional health can’t really handle this book, but it’s so exquisite I can’t put it down.

I’ve focused my second reading of this book on structure. Here, in the lead-up to the climax, Gaiman is doing a couple interesting things. First, he’s turned an early antagonist into another protagonist. Second, he’s quickening the transitions between the split storylines to draw out the tension in both and to quicken the pace of the narrative. Super clever tricks.

The depiction of Fat Charlie’s hangover here rivals, in truth and skill of deployment, Tom Wolfe’s version from Bonfire of the Vanities. Both are flawless. This one, Gaiman’s, is also funny.

I get a little jolt of panic whenever I realize that I did something or read something first during the pandemic. First reading of this book began April 2021, and that Allison was so stressed and exhausted.

Kept wondering when, exactly, I dropped this book in fifth grade—was it the centaur-Pegasus planet? No. It was here, at the intersection of narrative and geometry. I can still feel my fifth-grade conviction that math ruins everything.

Forgot I was reading this. Sigh. What’s the emoji for detemined and resigned?

“For so long, my mother’s absence had been—I was sure—the source of some of the biggest, ugliest parts of me.”

As midpoints go, this one is marvelous.

“I had expected a tightening as I grew older; I would like what I liked and that was the essence of who I was. But my personality gets easily seeped now with new details. I read something new, I watch something new, I eat something new and the world feels again like a place I want to stay.”

This book is not at all what I expected it to be.

So I’m still a little disoriented in terms of what kind of reality this is, but the descriptions of cursed art objects is exactly my jam.

Feeling petty, so I’m going to declare that I hate “Darlington” as a moniker. If we’re going to continue using it, I insist that Alex be known as Astern (pronounced ass-turn).

“But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving—and even sacrificing themselves for—a system many of them rarely question.”

Just when I thought the excitement was over, he pulled an admiral out of his hat.

Just set out on a three-week trip, and this book did not make the packing list, so….

I’m just not that into this book.

Literally reading a novel about a house that walks around on giant chicken legs, and just said to myself “that doesn’t seem believable”—not because of the house but because a character took more than passing notice of a news story about a mass shooting. America is a dream being dreamt by a madman.

“Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not….”

These paragraphs on school, education, compliance are heartbreaking. I can tell I’m going to have to stop quoting or I’ll transcribe this whole book.

“I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.”

“For the dead are always close by in a life like Mahoney’s. The dead are drawn to the confused and the unwritten, the damaged and the fractured, to those with big cracks and gaps in their tales, which the dead just yearn to fill.”

Kidd introduces the dead not just to introduce them but as characterization for Mahoney. That’s so deft.

Again. And slower.

“People are born to live and stay and die here. They don’t want to go. Why would they when all the roads that lead to Mulderrig are downhill so that leaving is uphill all the way?”

I come from a town like that.