2020—the longest year that has ever been—is almost at an end, and that means it’s time for us to break out the calculators and tabulate the best reviewed books of past twelve months.
Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2020, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir & Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Graphic Literature; Poetry, Mystery & Crime; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.
Today’s installment: Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror.
1. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
(Bloomsbury)
26 Rave • 6 Positive
Read an excerpt from Piranesi here
“We believers have waited a long time for a second novel from Clarke, and so it’s especially exciting to see that none of her enchantment has worn off—it’s evolved. Reading her lithe new book, Piranesi, feels like finding a copy of Steven Millhauser’s Martin Dressler in the back of C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe … The hypnotic quality of Piranesi stems largely from how majestically Clarke conjures up this surreal House … an unusually fragile mystery—as delicate as the slender fingers and wispy petals on the marble statues that fill the House. Clarke’s power certainly extends beyond mere suspense, but her story relies on the steady accretion of apprehension that finally gives way to a base-shifting revelation. Until you read the book yourself, keep your wand drawn to ward off the summaries of enthusiastic fans and clumsy reviewers. I promise to tread carefully here … Perhaps Clarke’s cleverest move in this infinitely clever novel is the way she critiques our obliterating efforts to extract deeper meaning and greater value from everything in our world … This is the abiding magic of Clarke’s novel: We’re as likely to pity Piranesi for his cheerful acceptance of imprisonment as we are to envy him for his ready appreciation of the world as he finds it. Clarke conceived of this story long before the coronavirus pandemic, but tragedy has made Piranesi resonate with a planet in quarantine. To abide in these pages is to find oneself happily detained in awe.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
2. The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
(Orbit)
16 Rave • 7 Positive
Read an excerpt from The City We Became here
“… a reclaiming of the New York that Lovecraft vilified. In perhaps the greatest fuck-you to the man behind the Cthulhu mythos that has had such widespread influence on speculative fiction, Jemisin gives voice and human-ness to the objects of Lovecraft’s hatred … one of the most stunning features of this book is its positioning of capital waging war against the human beings of a place as a sort of Cthulhu … Nobody-makes-fun-of-my-family-but-me energy thrums through the novel … readers are shown a New York beyond the tunnels and bridges and roads named after men who no longer exist. [Jemisin] shows a New York, not of unmade communities, but of remade ones, the scar tissue stronger than unbroken skin.”
–Tochi Onyebuchi (Tor.com)
3. The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
(Gallery/Saga)
12 Rave • 9 Positive
Listen to an interview with Stephen Graham Jones here
“I’m always giddy when I start a new Stephen Graham Jones novel. Yes, I said giddy. Everything about the worlds, circumstances, characters, and atmospheres he creates appeals to me … In The Only Good Indians, Jones does that and more, and the more is quite special … The Only Good Indians is a disturbing horror novel about revenge and sorrow that houses a narrative about identity and the price of breaking away from tradition at its core. And that identity, Native American, isn’t monolithic here … the horror is unlike anything you’ve read before. It goes from disturbing flashes of thing that may or may not be there to in-your-face explosions of gore and violence tinged with supernatural elements. Jones has a talent for creating unsettling atmospheres and images, but he also enjoys explicit violence … Besides the creeping horror and gory poetry, The Only Good Indians does a lot in terms of illuminating Native American life from the inside, offering insights into how old traditions and modern living collide in contemporary life … Jones is one of the best writers working today regardless of genre, and this gritty, heartbreaking novel might just be his best yet.”
–Gabino Iglesias (NPR)
4. The Resisters by Gish Jen
(Knopf)
9 Rave • 8 Positive • 3 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Resisters here
“Gish Jen’s fifth novel imagines a dystopia so chillingly plausible … [a] gripping tale of a family confronting the digitally empowered authoritarian state … Jen doesn’t over-explain individual elements of her richly textured dystopia; she assumes we can deduce the meanings of her bitingly witty neologisms … Over the course of three decades, Jen’s social and psychological observations have only sharpened, while her marvelous humor has darkened … amusing but vaguely menacing, frequently with a sting to follow … Jen’s closing pages invite optimism about the prospects for change[.]”
–Wendy Smith (The Boston Globe)
5. Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
(Tor)
12 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“.. a gleeful, genre-bending romp, sliding effortlessly between different modes of horror … relentlessly funny without ever dropping its core seriousness. Muir has once again distilled several variations on ‘frenemy’ to fuel a compelling cast, and the novel’s pacing is amazingly controlled given how chaotic the story is—like a building deliberately falling down … an intricate and deceptive piece of work, refusing a straightforward approach to its outlandish story … Muir uses this ambitious, convoluted structure, not as an end in itself, but as a sneaky way to build on the fantastic premises of her debut … Delight is a key virtue of the novel—despite its effective horror, its grim world and gory action, Harrow is a fun, even joyful read … an astonishing depth of feeling and a perfectly-constructed puzzle box of a plot.”
–Jake Casella (The Chicago Review of Books)
6. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab
(Tor Books)
11 Rave • 5 Positive
“… it’s rare to encounter a character as stunningly, fiercely written as Addie as she grows and changes over a span of 300 years. She is a high wire act of a character in a high wire act of a story, neither of which—despite the devil’s best efforts—I am likely to forget … I am pleased to say that much of what has made Schwab’s previous work so successful can also be found in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue … the scope of Addie is unlike anything Schwab has written before—epic yet intimate, sweeping but not sprawling … Because Addie covers so much ground, it can be disappointing when stories are hinted at but never manifest … But though Addie’s world may be vast, it is depicted with careful attention to detail, like the changes in her vocabulary that subtly signal time’s passage … has a lot to say about how connection and love are always possible even in the face of isolation, how we inevitably leave our mark in the world and on the people who cross our paths, even in the unlikeliest or most fleeting of circumstances. It is easy to feel that in the absence of traditional, tangible moments of connection, no such connection could exist, no mark can be made. And yet, as an acquaintance advises Addie, ‘there are many ways to matter.’ If Addie shows anything, it’s that the impact of our actions and interactions can be vaster and longer-lasting than we can predict. Much like the seven freckles that sprinkle Addie’s face, we create our own constellations, and as we live through these darkened days, I feel brighter for having added Addie to mine.”
–Megan Kallstrom (Slate)
7. Sleep Donation by Karen Russell
(Vintage)
10 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read some rapid-fire book recs from Karen Russell here
“In this novel, Ms. Russell creates a new illness. She describes its hold over a futuristic America with Twilight Zone-like inventiveness and the energy and brio of a natural fantasist with a proclivity for blending the real and surreal, the psychological and the sci-fi … she immerses the reader in a world that is both recognizably familiar and nightmarishly dystopian. The novella becomes, at once, a kind of meditation upon the transmission of stories and dreams (something that books, paper or digital, do with magical ease), and an allegory about our overstimulated, sleep-deprived society and the sometimes self-serving sanctimony of NGOs and manic do-gooders, reluctant ever to let a crisis go to waste … Preposterous as some aspects of her story may sound, Ms. Russell writes with such assurance and speed that she puts the reader under a spell for the duration of her story. She creates a fully imagined world with its own rituals and rules, and deftly satirizes the media and governmental responses to the plague of sleeplessness … Ms. Russell’s account of sleepless patients and stolen sleep may not possess the fierce originality of her 2011 novel, Swamplandia!, or the cumulative power of her story collections…but it’s another testament to her fertile powers of invention.”
–Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times)
8. Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots
(William Morrow)
11 Rave • 2 Positive
“It is a clever, witty, vigorous, and well-crafted adventure in this mode of superhero revisionism, by turns hilarious and tragic, alternately rudely juvenile or sophisticated. It has some refreshing twists … Walschots’s accomplishments in this novel are several and impressive. First comes Anna’s character and voice. As narrator, she is onscreen every moment, but never becomes predictable or boring … The dialogue always has a 21st-century snarky hipness to it, conferring a sense of black humor to all the actions. This is of course fully in line with the traditional comic book quipping and banter.”
–Paul Di Filippo (Locus)
9. If It Bleeds by Stephen King
(Scribner)
6 Rave • 10 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Nobody does novellas like Stephen King … a quartet of stories that are a little too long to be labelled short, all of which are packed with that uniquely King combination of fear and empathy … One of the joys of King’s novella collections is the reminder that he, perhaps more than any of his bestselling peers, has a tremendous gift for giving stories exactly the amount of space they need to be properly told. Sometimes, that results in 700-plus page epics. Other times, just 70. Whatever it takes to get the story from his head to the page—that’s what King gives you. It’s remarkable really, that an author can create stories that cause a reader to shiver, to smile and to shed a tear in the space of a few pages—but really, should anything Stephen King does surprise us anymore? … practically pulses with the humanistic empathy that marks the best of King’s work. It’s an outstanding quartet, featuring four tales that are wildly different from one another, yet undeniably bound together by the voice of our finest storyteller. There is much to fear in the worlds created by Stephen King, but even in the depth of his darkest shadows, a light of hope steadily glows. More exceptional work from the maestro … Keep ‘em coming, Mr. King.”
–Allen Adams (The Maine Edge)
10. Zed by Joanna Kavenna
(Doubleday)
7 Rave • 7 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an interview with Joanna Kavenna here
“… a novel that takes seriously the age-old problem of free will. Not only does Kavenna pause the narrative to describe the difference between free will and determinism, she also dives deep into the theoretical waters of quantum physics and entanglement … Kavenna’s position won’t convince a die-hard materialist who believes that free will is a farce, that biology dictates our actions, and that spontaneity is an illusion, but as someone who wrote his honours’ thesis (three decades ago) on this very topic, I geeked-out at Kavenna’s bold and modern re-framing of the problem … If that all seems a little too airy-fairy, fear not, with a deadpan sense of humour and an eye for the absurd, Kavenna eviscerates the tech-industry’s utopian (libertarian) dream that we can code our way to a better future … It’s easy for a satirical novel like Zed to treats its characters as caricatures rather than well-rounded people. And to an extent that’s the case with Guy Matthias, a Zuckerberg or Dorsey stripped of whatever conscience those two men still possess. However, the rest of the cast is fleshed out … a fascinating study on the question of free will, a castigating attack on the twisted utopian vision of Silicon Valley, and a cautionary tale of what will happen if we fail to regulate these corporate monoliths.”
–Ian Mond (Locus)
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Our System: RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points
