Continuing the periodic book rec posts I've been making here:
Consider the work of H.P. Lovecraft. A lot of people fell in love with the structure and tone of it before it sank in that much, or all, at the horror Lovecraft saw in the world around him was actually just repulsion at entire classes of people. Imagine a project of reclaiming that structure and tone for stories about— or by— the people Lovecraft imagined as monsters.
(This book is actually the first of a trilogy; from the second book it pivots from unflinching bleakness and into the problem of community mutual aid and queer found community as a way of fighting back against bad situations, and that was just a little more hope than I'm able to feel right now. But that may well be what you're interested in so, if so I encourage pushing on._)
"Honorable mention" / Bonus post
Slough House (Mick Herron) (Series): So, I'm not so sure about including these. But I did read though a good six of these last year (as I write this I've got the seventh on hold with the library), and I very much enjoyed them, so here they are.
These are British Spy Novels, with the hook that they follow "Slough House", which the series posits as MI5's version of constructive dismissal. When British Intelligence wants to fire someone, but for political or legal reasons cannot, they instead reassign them to this rubber room division in a tiny, unmaintained office on the far side of the river, where they are given makework until they quit from boredom. Or until, hopped up on excess energy from being a highly trained professional with nothing to do (or, spurred by whatever Problem got them exiled to Slough House in the first place) they go out and get into trouble, usually resulting in the plot of the novel and much amusement to the reader.
Structural note: There's an odd thing where this is a series of novels, but there are short stories scattered between the novels which are, rather than being bundled with the novels, all collected standalone in their own book ("Standing By the Wall"), with no explanation given of how they fit chronologically with the rest of the series. If you continue past book 1 I do recommend grabbing a copy of Standing By the Wall and reading the stories in this chronological order.
Content warning: The Slough House books do contain a couple recurring characters who are (diagetically) cringey edgelords. These characters are not viewed positively by either the narrator or the other characters within the story— the story knows what they are— but they're there, and for some readers this may break the ability to enjoy or read the story.
Some "Literary Criticism" as long as I'm typing, this may be more interesting to someone who's read the Slough House books than someone who hasn't: The politics here are strange, and I find myself still trying to figure out what to think about them. I find it useful to compare John Le Carre, another author I've been reading a lot of the last couple years. (Have you read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold? No? Okay. Go read it. Trust me. Also, if you like Phillip Seymour Hoffman, watch "A Most Wanted Man", and if you like yaoi, watch "The Night Manager".) Herron has the human realism and Brechtian detachment of Le Carre at his best, but compared to Le Carre feels… I dunno, unmoored. Le Carre writes about Cold War spy agents who long for the black and white moral clarity of World War II; Herron writes about modern-world spy agents who long for the black and white moral clarity of the Cold War. But the difference is Le Carre himself always had a moral center, a sense of clear right and wrong that the authorial voice points you toward even if it's never explicitly spelled out; Herron lacks this entirely, he is as lost in moral ambiguity as his characters. (The one political position you can tease out of Herron from his writing is that he has a clear conviction the British Conservative party are a group of corrupt, morally bankrupt incompetents who are dragging Britain into a catastrophic and ever-darkening abyss; but that's kinda a gimmie, honestly.) Meanwhile, much of Le Carre's work feels like mirror-world journalism, grounded in real-world facts and practices even if he's fudging the jargon to please the censors, whereas Herron… well, he has Le Carre's skill for grounding fiction in detail, but I honestly cannot tell how many of these details are real and which ones are fabricated. Unclear if this is on Herron or on me, more likely me, but it means what moral heft these books have a tad of a fridge logic problem: if disaster again and again befalls due to the machinations of a particular spectacularly corrupt and feckless administrator who is completely fictional, does this actually teach us anything about the real world security state? Maybe he's got an inside line somewhere, or just reads British journalism much closer than I do, but it leaves me wondering. None of this is to say there's anything wrong with Herron's approach, exactly, and you can make counterpoints to anything I may have written above that reads like a criticism, but these are some of the reasons I'm finding myself chewing on these books a lot after finishing them.
