Today at TCJ, we've got Austin Price on Nathan Gelgud's House in the Jungle. He did not care for it.
Yet to give it a pass would be worse, because endorsing Gelgud and his hypothetical future imitators’ experiments would be to sabotage the exact kind of oddities I’d sooner trumpet. While it is, yes, a welcome slice of strangeness that Gelgud trots out in A Home in the Jungle, it’s insubstantial. This is a book that announces its ambition on every page but musters none of the profundity or mystery it positions itself worthy of, a civics lesson on the importance of political engagement masquerading as a slice of Lynchian weirdness which yields only easy answers without ever honestly engaging the uneasy wondrous that frustrates explanation in favor of deeper pleasures.
Over at Popula, Trevor Alixopoulous deliver his take on disaster preppers, along with some autobiographical details for some spice. And you know what they say about he who controls the spice.
Over at PEN America, Whit Taylor's most recent editorial comics call was to Katie Fricas, and it was an excellent choice.
Over at Facebook, Charles Vess posted the endpapers art for his Spider-Man graphic novel from 1990. Pretty unreal.
