Author Archives: VN Alexander

Drift by Craig Rodgers wins Dactyl Award

Posted on by

Nominated by Charlies Holdefer with this excellent review, Rodgers’ novel, Drift delivers what the title promises. The hero of the story is a traveling Bible salesman who is unclear about the purpose of life and slides, with the lubricant of drink and cards, into the abyss.

The novel is written in the style of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, if McCarthy were to write a Coen Brothers screenplay, with maximal scenic description and elaborate stage direction guiding the actor’s motivation and thoughts.

“Vast signs stretch over streets to form crude tunnels in whose shaded interiors trespass mortal wanderers. One sign stands beside and not over the expanse of street, a mammoth billboard seemingly related to none of its squalid surroundings and decorated by its single cryptic word. JESUS. Vultures line telephone poles, one after another looking down on the world and somewhere nearby something is dead.”

The close third person narration knows more than the character who studies a woman he is about to seduce,

“Two hours of white knuckles among the dizzying fray of impromptu midday traffic leads to this place and this moment, untold variables aligning to allow now to transpire. He watches the secretary in the glow of her monitor. She reads things she’s read once, twice already, lips moving with the words so that for fractions of a thought there appears a glimpse into that mouth, that dark place where those whispered words are born. He sees in her the ephemeral trace of all loves that a ghost of memory touches, the pang of the past that means something underneath the skin. He sees hot summers and movie theaters and grass more green than grass could possibly be and he loses himself for just a second and no more in the velvet fall of that memory’s hold.”

If religion were the only thing that gave life purpose, it’d be easy to drop into nihilism, but in Rodgers’ prose there is a Wallace Stevens-like intoning that turns his art into a philosophy, upon hearing a

…banshee howl that scrapes away the lucid layers of the mind. The infant imagination underneath understands this subhuman sound not at all but accepts it with the immediacy of the truly unbiased.

Those quotes speak for themselves. Congratulations to Craig Rodgers, thanks to Charles Holdefer, and my apologies to Dactyl Review readers for the four-month delay in deciding this award. There were many excellent books to consider and I am a very slow reader.

VN Alexander

Audition by Katie Kitamura

Posted on by

I found this novel because I’ve become interested in the “weird girl” sub-genre of literary fiction and Audition by Katie Kitamura was suggested by Forbes as one of the best of 2025. Weird girl lit usually features a young woman who “embraces her alienation from the world.”  

Having been thus set up in my expectations, I was disappointed to find that the female (unnamed) narrator of Audition is not weird.  But like so many New York actresses, she is neurotic. Her life, husband, son, friends and New York apartment all fit very neatly within the stereotype of a female in theater. Her struggles are the garden-variety domestic and work-related kind. She is worried about turning fifty; she and her husband have grown apart; their adult son moves back into their small apartment.  What is unusual (but not weirdly cool) about the narrator is the way she narrates, in excruciating detail, all the intentions and unexpressed feelings of other people.  She suspiciously reads the minds of her husband and son, even a passing waiter or strangers sitting at an opposite table. Here is the opening scene:

The host asked if I had a reservation. I said that I was meeting someone and indicated the young man seated at the back of the restaurant. Xavier. It occurred to me that the host must have been the person to seat him at the inhospitable table, and I saw a flicker of surprise cross his features as I pointed. He looked quickly from my face to my coat to my jewelry. It was my age, above all. That was the thing that confounded him. He gave a tight smile and asked me to please follow him. 

Kitamura writes in the close first-person.  If I were her editor, I would have found myself asking, Have you considered using the omniscient point-of-view?  

Continue reading →

The Dactyl annual award returns

Posted on by

The last “annual” award was given in late 2019. The lockdown and rollout were unsettling for everyone. I felt it keenly. After that, I was tapped to work full time as an editor for a political/health related publication. I was distracted. That’s not much of an excuse, but it’s the only one I’ve got.

I will be considering all the books that were nominated in the interim. I thank all the reviewers who kept the reviews coming while I slacked.

[Update Jan 30th: I am still reading through nominees. The decision has been delayed due to the fact that some of the books, from very small presses, were hard to get and one coming from overseas was lost in transit. I anticipate a decision mid February.]

For more information about the award see this page.

If you would like to donate, please follow this link.

Best,

V. N. Alexander, editor

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Posted on by

Like a hermaphrodite, Middlesex (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Jeffrey Eugenides is composed of two parts that are not usually joined together.

The first half of this 529-page novel is a memoir of an average Greek-American family living in Detroit. I was expecting a story about a person with genetic mutation that deeply affects his identity and sex life, but what is presented in that first half of the novel is a nostalgic tale of a Greek couple fleeing the Greek-Turkish war in 1922, settling down, in what was then becoming the Motor City,  having children, running into financial problems, and surviving a race riot.

None of this had much to do the immigrant couple’s grandson (née granddaughter, apparently). That novel didn’t start until the chapter called “Middlesex” on page 253 where an amazing coming-of-age story finally begins to unfold. Cal/Calliope was born with undeveloped genitals and was mistaken for a girl until puberty started to try to catch his body up at fourteen. Continue reading →

The Book of Sasquatch by Louis Conte

Posted on by

Part allegory, part action novel, The Book of Sasquatch (City Bear Press, 230 pages) by Louis Conte views humanity through the eyes of a misunderstood monster.

Flirting with magical realism, this novel gives Big Foot highly-evolved capacities for sight and hearing, allowing him to perceive what humans cannot, while remaining unseen. He mostly surveils human activity through windows and from the trees above. The humanoid can also communicate telepathically with others of his tribe; he can cover ground almost as rapidly as the crow flies, all of which skills make him a near-omniscient narrator, who relates the activities of the townspeople of Deception Falls, as they deal with the consequences of modern development and changes in local demographics.

We can say Sasquatch is a monster insofar as he is prone to let loose his righteous rage against those who harm the powerless. He is a figure of retribution. He is the spirit of the pristine forests of North America. The Big Foot tribe is aligned with Native Americans. Their ancestors took revenge against early settlers who brutally killed their friends and they have walked “in the shadows,” cursed ever since, and banished like Cain. Continue reading →

A Book with No Author by Brent Robison

Posted on by

If the code, “Brent Robison,” were to undergo a random mutation—which in the writing world we call a typo—more likely than not, that “n” in the first name would jump, as even genes sometimes do, to the last name, where, as “Robinson,” it would create a more stable configuration.  And, of course the now isolated and wobbly “t” in “Bret” would likely undergo reduplication—as giraffe vertebrae have done—leaving us with the better reinforced product “Brett Robinson.”

Such are the circumstances that may lead a man to fancy he has a similarly-named double. If he is a writer of excellent literary fiction, he will take that fancy far. If he also moonlights in some other profession, say, as a photographer or videographer, the twinning can take on multiple dimensions. Continue reading →

Zone 23 by C. J. Hopkins

Posted on by

In his novel Zone 23 (SS&C Press, 483 pages) expat playwright C.J. Hopkins depicts a society, much like ours at its worse — some six or seven hundred years in the future — when any departures from prescribed ways of thinking are pathologized. Being melancholy, pondering larger philosophical questions, or contemplating the lack of fairness of the system can earn one a diagnosis of mental illness. Virtually everyone is on medication. Those who can’t be controlled by medication are deemed “Anti-Social Persons” and are removed from the society of “Normals” and relegated to various zones of abandoned and bombed-out cities, where they are eventually blown to bits by gamer-controlled drones.

Human reproduction is the central theme. That, too, has been pathologized. Continue reading →

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

Posted on by

Machines Like Me (Nan A. Talese, 352 pages) by Ian McEwan is set in the possible world of the 1980s if Alan Turing had not died in 1954, Kennedy had not been shot in Dallas, and Britain had not won the war in the Falklands. In the story, Open Source information has allowed technological progress to sprint ahead, and the automatization of work is leading, first to high unemployment and then, presumably, to the creation of a universally idle population supported by the labor of machines. The hero, Charlie Friend, has recently purchased a life-like robot named Adam and he and his new love interest Miranda Blacke will together train and condition Adam to develop a personality and consciousness. Continue reading →

Hiking Underground by Amy Smiley

Posted on by

In Hiking Underground (Atmosphere Press, 203 pages), three urban naturalists explore the relationship between art and reality in episodic reveries about nature. Although the narratives ostensibly take place mostly in parks in Manhattan and Maine, the real action is in the minds of the characters as they explore the great outdoors and grow as artists and as individuals.

It worked, thematically, for me to think of the three main characters, Adam, Alice and Emma, as the same person at different stages of development. In the story, Adam is Emma’s six-year-old son; Alice is Emma’s student and Adam’s babysitter; Emma is a professional artist and a teacher. The book is divided into sections dedicated to each one of them in turn, although the focal point does visit different perspectives within each section. Adam’s sections are a portrait of the artist as a young child; Alice’s are of the artist as a student, whose emotional memories need resurrecting; Emma’s are of the consummate artist who is satisfied with her creations and begins the body of work that unites her past with her future. Continue reading →

2021 Dactyl Foundation Award goes to Petri Harbouri

Posted on by

In his review of Petri Harbouri’s novel, The Brothers Carburi, U. R. Bowie, writes:

What do I like best about this book? I like a lot of things about it, but I like best the way the author loves words. Here is a description of what [Giovanni Battista Carburi], or any good physician, should be doing: “wrestling with obdurate diseases and overpowering them with an armamentarium—a good word, this—of powerful medicines.” The author loves words. Is there a better reason for writing creative literary fiction than a love for words? No. There is no better reason.

Apologies for the delay in announcing the award. It took a while to make contact with the author!

Petri Harbouri’s latest novel is Our Lady of the Serpents from Recital Publishing.