Lee Hunts

It was inevitable that I would write something on the topic of politics and fiction. I hate the way it is talked about, because people are often so shallow in how they approach the topic. We are regularly treated to gems like, "Art shouldn't be political," and equally shiny gems like "All art is political." Invariably, I find the discussions to be particularly annoying and, at the heart of all of them, there is a rather obvious problem. They do not define what it means to be political. How else do you think people could be making such ridiculously contrasting statements? They have different understandings of what it means to be political. In this post, I want to unpack multiple senses of what it means for art to be political, and draw out the implications. What is Politics? I subscribe to a particular form of power politics, so my understanding of politics places power at the center. Politics is the set of activities individuals, groups, and institutions engage ...

I just finished reading House of Leaves, by Zampanò and Johnny Truant. This is a literary horror novel, and a postmodern novel that I bought probably over a decade ago, after watching a video about it. But I was quickly intimidated by it, and it remained on my shelf for that length of time. But finally, finally after deciding to put my foot down this year and read all the heavy books that need to be read, I finished this beast of a book after a month or two of reading. I didn't count the time, but it was a chore and I know that this is a good ballpark estimate. Borrowing the basic concept from a comment by Vince Gilligan, I did not enjoy reading this book, but I enjoy having read it. Let's explore what that means. No Spoilers Summary The inside cover description of the book starts with the following: "Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Inte...

I There was a book that was essentially purged from all the markets in society around 2017 in America. If you are familiar with recent history, this is around the time of the rise of the Alt-Right and the Charlottesville protests and riots. The book is known as The Turner Diaries. It was easily available leading up to those moments. You could actually find a copy of the official audiobook for free on youtube. It disappeared shortly afterward. The content makes clear why. The book opens with a far-left government taking control of America. They claim that because laws against murder and rape have a disparate impact against black people, they are racist—and so they abolish them. As a result, crime runs rampant; the book operates on the added assumption that black people are inherently violent in everything they do. This triggers a white nationalist revolution, where the white population seeks liberation, not just from black people, but also from the government, and of course, from the Je...

I just finished reading Norylska Groans, by Michael R. Fletcher and Clayton W. Snyder. This is a grimdark fantasy novel set in a Russian inspired industrial setting. The reader follows two characters as they struggle to survive in a system that seems to conspire to crush them without any regard for their personal circumstances. Paired with this is a unique magic system that involves manipulating memories and personality traits. Given my own interest in themes of identity, this definitely caught my interest. No Spoilers Setting The setting of this book is one of the stronger elements of the story. I am not only referring to the concepts behind it that I mentioned above, but the execution of said concepts. The descriptions are vivid and oppressive, mixing winter and industrialism to create a horrifying backdrop for the story. There was one quote about the mixture of black ash and white snow turning everything grey, comparing that to moral complexity, which I thought was quite apt. Anothe...

I finally finished reading We Need To Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver. It took me about two months of scattered reading to get through the first quarter of the book, and then I finally got the audiobook and burned through the rest in the course of three days. I've definitely found that syntax can really mess with my ability to read prose, given my predilection to analyze and pick things apart. The sentence structure in this novel was so difficult that it was a chore to read, even if the story were engaging. This story is about a mother coming to terms with the fact that her son committed a mass shooting. She never loved her son, Kevin, and so she decides to send a series of messages to her estranged husband in order to sort out her place in the events, even considering the possibility that she might have played a role. Overall (No Spoilers) I did not plan on writing a review to this book because I was not entirely sure what I wanted to write about. Paradoxically, this is the ki...

I just finished reading the Death Note Manga by Tsugumi Ohba, which is almost a decade after watching the anime several times through, so I was actually quite familiar with the story going in. This was one of those life changing stories that shattered my understanding of storytelling, so I wanted to go back and revisit the story to see if the merit still held up after writing my own books, and reading countless others since. What we have in this story is a game of cat and mouse. It starts when a high school student finds a Death Note that allows him to kill people when he writes their name down inside, while thinking of their face. He starts killing people in the name of justice in order to create a new world where only kind and good people live. L, the world's greatest detective, recognizes this pattern of deaths and understands that someone is behind this. What follows is the investigation, as the two track each other down in an attempt to capture the other. Scheming I was partic...