I have another book review up in the Wall Street Journal! This time I’m reviewing Dan Chaon’s circus-freak literary horror One Of Us. It’s very enjoyable and I ultimately wrote a positive review, although I had a few nits to pick. (I’m a big fan of Chaon, especially his 2017 novel Ill Will, so when I heard this book was coming out, I put in a specific request at the WSJ to review this one.)

In other news, I’m in the middle of my usual fall round of school visits, talking about the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival and my young-adult fantasy The Order of Odd-Fish. As part of my presentation, I usually show off Odd-Fish fan art that I’ve received over the years (I’ve collected it all here) and that sometimes inspires young artists to make their own fan art for the book . . .

And I just received two great pieces of fan art from Lennon M. of Decatur Classical School in Chicago! (It’s the school that both my daughters went to in Chicago, but I mercifully refrained from doing any presentations there until they graduated.) The art on the left is of the foppish cockroach Sefino getting humiliated by the centipede gossip columnist Mr. Chatterbox, and on the right is the wannabe villain Ken Kiang telling Hoagland Shanks about The Pie of Innocence Slain:

I love the supercilious look in Chatterbox’s eye and the way Lennon indicates the centipede’s disdain at Sefino’s mustard-blotched ascot through the speech bubble—and Sefino looks hilariously mortified, too! Likewise, the picture with Ken Kiang clearly relishing regaling Hoagland Shanks with dire visions such as a dead cat, a scythe, a skull, and so on, while Shanks contentedly eats his pie and claims it tastes like peaches is inspired. In both pictures, the looks on everyone’s faces and their body language are so expressive and communicate the vibe of the scenes so well. Top notch work, Lennon!

I also have some super exciting publishing news of my own coming up. Stay tuned!

I lived in Japan twice. The first time was a yearlong stay from 1997-1998 in Tokyo, teaching conversational English. The second time was when Heather and I lived in Nara Prefecture for two years, from 2004-2006, on the JET Programme. This summer we returned to our old stomping grounds for two weeks, with Lucy and Ingrid in tow!

Above is me posing in front of the “saru-ishi” (monkey stone) near the ruins of Takatori castle, which is near where we used to live. Have I changed much? I’m certainly much sweatier in the second picture . . .

Instead of zipping all over Japan for our two-week trip, we settled in to a traditional-feeling house (tatami mats! shoji screens!) in Kashihara City, which is where we used to live, and is within striking distance of Kyoto, Nara City, Yoshino, Asuka, and other great places in Nara . . . and many of our friends are still around, and we got to hang out with them and catch up with them! Lucy and Ingrid even did a presentation at an elementary school.

I kept my family and friends abreast of our Japanese adventures through short videos I shared out on Instagram and Facebook. Here they are below!

The first video is something I put together after our first full day. It’s our visit to Nara City, with its famous deer who come right up to you and you can feed (and they sometimes fight each other!), and the huge and gorgeous temple Todaiji with its giant Buddha and various other temples and shrines such as Nigatsudou and Kasuga Taisha, finished off with a splendid bowl of ramen at Susuru Susuran. It was way too hot, though—as it was almost every other day of the trip!

In this next video, we go up Yoshino mountain to visit the off-the-beaten-path Kimpusen-ji temple (home of the ascetic wilderness Buddhism sect of Shugendo) and the nearby Shinto shrine Yoshinomizu, followed by delicious noodles overlooking the valley. We show the house we’re staying at in Kashihara City, and visit a nearby bamboo grove with the mysterious carved megalith of unknown origin “Masada Iwafune”!

In this third video, we explore the mountain vermilion gate maze of Fushimi Inari, hang out with Japanese friends old and new, and hike up to a mountaintop castle ruin (and the statues and temples beyond).

And finally, our friend Fumie takes us to a matsuri and to her house for dinner, we explore Asuka by bicycle (and go in an old tomb!), we tour temples and shrines in Kyoto, Murou, and Kashihara, and have parties with friends old and new!

It was so wonderful to see old friends and visit our old haunts. I will return to Japan again someday!

I occasionally review books for the Wall Street Journal, and I’ve been doing more of it lately. In this weekend’s edition, I review Jayson Greene’s new AI-themed novel UnWorld, a satisfyingly weird and emotionally resonant novel about AI. I write “This is less I, Robot and more Ordinary People . . . humane and refreshingly idiosyncratic.” You can read the review above, or online here.

. . . And I also had an article in last week’s issue, too! They have a regular “Five Best” column in which a writer chooses five books that exemplify some theme or idea of their choice. For me, I chose five books that aren’t technically horror novels, but for me are actually more horrifying than many horror novels. Behold my “Five Best Tales of Unexpected Terror” (online version here).

(I gotta say, that classic WSJ-style hedcut portrait of me has a peculiar horror of its own. Uncanny valley vibes.)

Again, you can read my official article online, but here are some additional musings of a more personal nature about each of these books. They weren’t appropriate for the short form of the article, but that’s what blogs are for, right?

The first book I chose was Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wind in The Door, the even stranger sequel to her deeply strange 1962 Newbery winner A Wrinkle in Time. This shaggy 1970s mix of witchiness, religiosity, and sci-fi was first truly unsettling book I read. The demonic “Echthroi” are “X-ing” all of creation into void, whether tearing holes in starscapes or giving teenaged Meg Murry’s beloved little brother Charles Wallace a mysterious disease in his mitochondria. This sends Meg and her new allies into Charles Wallace’s body—not in a miniaturized vessel a la Fantastic Voyage, but by a mystic journey that collapses size differences between human cells and galaxies. Recounting these trippy scenes, you risk sounding like Bill Hader’s SNL character Stefon (“New York’s hottest nightclub ‘Charles Wallace’s mitochondrion’ has it all: A murky underwater world of mouse-shrimp critters, mystical hymn-singing trees, and cloned school principals whirling in demonic circles”). Trippy and disquieting, you wonder how L’Engle got away with all this stuff in a kids’ book.

I also chose Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, which is gorgeously written but deeply perverse. I gave it to my sister Kara for her birthday, and after she read it, she threw it in the trash and told me “I don’t want something this evil in my house.” The editor cut out my mention of the scene where a gang of nihilistic boys get naked together to kill stray cats and ritualistically remove their organs (you know, boy stuff). Maybe that’s for the best.

The third book I chose was C.S. Lewis’ The Dark Tower, which is not the 4000-page Stephen King series of the same name, but rather an unfinished novel discovered after Lewis’ death. There’s a vibe of sexual darkness and grotesque body horror that you wouldn’t expect from the hearty author of the Narnia books—some parts feel like stumbling upon a beloved uncle’s freaky browser history. It’s also been claimed that the manuscript is a forgery, which adds to its illicit vibe.

The fourth book is My Idea of Fun by Will Self, which I picked up on a whim at a used bookstore in Tokyo in the nineties. I was stunned at how ickily compelling it was. Every few years, I reread it—always with enjoyment at first, and baffled nausea by the end. I didn’t have space in the WSJ review to explain how the book gets more exasperating as it goes on, with digressions into a hallucinatory Land Of Children’s Jokes, the launch of an incoherent “edible financial product,” and the ramblings of a therapy session of junkies. Like the journey from adolescence to adulthood that it traces, it starts focused and riveting, and dissolves into something frustrating, chaotic, and morally fraught as you realize the story isn’t what you signed up for.

The last book is House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Somehow both addictive and a slog, a page-turner that does everything possible to not be, it gets under your skin and just might obsess you. It’s a haunted house story, but manifested in a maddeningly complicated way, presented as a story-within-a-story-within-a-story based on a lost manuscript complete with appendices, metafictional commentary, footnotes spawning more footnotes, and typographical stunts—complications that imitate the convoluted structure of the cursed house itself. It’s a dizzying and exhausting experience. At the beginning of the book, the narrator promises that after reading it, “a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years . . . Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were.”

Actually, that’s the inevitable fate for every one of us. And what’s scarier than that?