Three Great Books #32

Including one of the scariest thrillers I've read in a long time.

Shark Heart: A Love Story, by Emily Habeck

While reading this book, I texted my husband the following: “I just cried on the subway because a woman’s husband turned into a great white shark.” In Habeck’s version of the present-day U.S., people can occasionally and unfortunately express mutations that cause them to morph into certain animals over a period of months or years. Wren and her doomed husband, Lewis, are newlyweds when he’s diagnosed with the Carcharodon carcharias mutation. For a while he continues to teach high-school drama and to try to write plays, but the inevitable physical changes and new animal instincts soon make normal life difficult, then impossible. We see the couple navigate the time they have left together, flash back to see Wren’s family history of trauma and how she processes it all, and then jump to see what Lewis gets up to once he fully becomes an apex predator. (Or, almost apex. Some advice on orcas from a fellow human-turned-shark: “When it comes to whales, know your place, Lewis. It’s never worth it in the end.”) This is a lyrical read, with only a few sentences on some pages, and some chapters formatted as scenes from a play. It gave me all the feels.

Nightwatching, by Tracy Sierra

If you’re less of a scaredy-cat than me, you’ll blaze through this thriller in two or three sittings. I’m easily freaked out, so I had to put it down — often. Then again, what did I expect from a book that begins, “There was someone in the house”? The unnamed narrator, a single mother, is living with her two young kids in her ramshackle old New England home. It’s night, there’s a blizzard raging outside, and there are no close neighbors. And when she catches a glimpse of the intruder, she can tell that he is not a friend: “His presence had the distinctly familiar rancidness of something wrong and rotten she’d tasted before but couldn’t quite place.” She manages to grab her sleeping kids, keep them quiet, and hide in a secret room in the walls of the house while the intruder searches for them. This (insanely tense) main narrative is broken up by flashbacks that explain the absence of the narrator’s husband, and highlight her history of being gaslit and second-guessed by various men. I was able to stop reading through my fingers when the narrator starts channeling her pent-up rage to save herself and her family, and I loved the very satisfying ending.

The Trees, by Percival Everett

Everett is having a well-deserved moment, with heaps of praise for his latest novel, “James,” and the successful recent adaptation of a previous book into the movie “American Fiction.” This novel, published a few years ago, is set up like a police procedural. Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation are sent to a small town to investigate some very weird, very grisly murders. Local white men are being mutilated and killed and next to them is the battered body of the same young Black man, who inexplicably goes missing before reappearing at the next crime scene. The setting is, not coincidentally, the town of Money, Mississippi, where young Emmett Till was accused of flirting with a white woman in 1955 before being brutally murdered. And the victims, not coincidentally, are related to the perpetrators of that murder. Similar killings happen all over the country, the F.B.I. is called in, and no one can figure out whether this is a really unusual crime spree or a supernatural event. The dialogue, character names, and the descriptions of the unrepentantly racist townsfolk are laugh-out-loud hilarious, which is not something I expected to say about a novel centered on the American history of lynching. Everett has written a satire with a deeply serious moments, including a haunting ending that gave me goosebumps.