ISSUE ELE VEN EXPLOITS FEBRUARY 2019 an UN WINNABLE publication

A Celebration of 2018’s BOOKS

ART & ARCANA • The PISCES • CRUDO • MISTER MIRACLE • SEVERANCE • BLACK HAMMER: AGE of DOOM Editor in Chief | Stu Horvath

EXPLOITS A Magazine Dedicated to the Reasons We Love Things

Managing Editor | Melissa King

Music Editor | Ed Coleman

Books Editor | Gavin Craig

Movies Editor | Amanda Hudgins

Television Editor | Sara Clemens

Games Editor | Alyse Stanley

Copyright © 2018 by Unwinnable LLC Unwinnable 820 Chestnut Street All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may Kearny, NJ 07032 not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher www.unwinnable.com except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For more information, email: Unwinnable LLC does not claim copyright of the [email protected] screenshots and promotional imagery herein. Copyright of all screenshots within this publication are owned by Subscribe | Store | Submissions their respective companies This machine kills fascists. OPENING STATEMENT by Gavin Craig

s per every year, at the end of 2018 Unwinnable reached out to its writers to compile a Aseries of lists of the best media released in the past twelve months. This year, however, for the first time (at least in this writer’s memory) that set of lists was intended to include one devoted to books. As you can tell, it didn’t quite work out that way. When Unwinnable writers were polled on their favorite books released in 2018, there was not a single book that appeared on multiple ballots. Not one. In terms of a compiled list, this was a disaster. In terms of a response to a vibrant and almost impossibly varied medium, it was a little inspiring. There are, you see, too many books, and even too many good books, not to mention too many genres and individual predilections for one small, underfunded publication to compile any sort of representative “best-of” list for books. It’s just too much. So we expanded a bit and, given that books are things that hang around, took a little bit of extra time, and now here we are, with an entire issue of Exploits devoted to our contingent, individual choices for our favorite books of 2018. (And our awareness that our favorite books read in 2018 were frequently books not published in 2018, but that’s another topic for another time.) We’ll return to our regular Exploits format and schedule in March, but until then, we hope you enjoy our little bit of excess, and that your year in reading ahead is as much an embarrassment of riches as ours has been. BOOKS

CRUDO – Everyone knows that the avant garde novelist Kathy Acker died of breast can- cer in 1997 in a Mexico alternative treatment center. What Olivia Laing’s novel Crudo pre- supposes is maybe she didn’t. It’s not quite fair to say that Crudo is a para- ble – like Acker’s work, Laing’s novel has little time for even the possibility of neat lessons – but there’s something about the ever-pres- ent unreality (a-reality? irreality?) in Acker, the irreconcilable, insistent absurdity of the everyday experience of those denied a place in the hierarchy of social propriety, the unclean, the unacceptable, the non-person, that speaks precisely to the right now. If one can wish that Acker had been granted the opportunity to grow old, to turn her eye on the compromises getting under her skin and staying there, it of entering the middle class and middle age was pretty much the only experience of per- and not be satisfied, one can also welcome the manence she had. Oh Kathy, nobody wanted reminder that our present nightmare reaches you. Oh Kathy, now they do.” back to the Reagan/Thatcher 80s, and the The difference between youth and middle Eisenhower/Nixon 50s, and not everyone was age is that the young are in a hurry to die and taken by the veneer plastered over the blood in middle age everyone else is waiting for you and plunder of the social project. to get on with it. We need you, Kathy, your If one is not angry, it is said, then one is attention and your rage. We need your indif- not paying attention, and Laing’s functioning ference to the possibility of reconciliation insight is that Acker’s peculiar gift was not with a world that seeks our annihilation. We her anger, but the quality of her attention. “It need them right this very second. was beginning to seem like the world might be about to end,” Laing’s Acker thinks to Other 2018 Books herself as conspiracy theories find their way My Year of Rest and Relaxation – Ottessa into book review pages and the President of Moshfegh the United States flirts (and that can be the Essayism – Brian Dillon only right word) with nuclear war with North The Incendiaries – R. O. Kwon Korea. Twitter is neither exactly unreliable Upstate – James Wood or unavoidable, it is rather a mad demigod The Immortalists– Chloe Benjamin humming beneath the noise of every occu- The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle – Stuart pied table and veranda. “Maybe you’re dying Turton and you don’t care anymore . . . The reason The Library Book – Susan Orlean she liked tattoos was that she liked something – Gavin Craig BOOKS

MISTER MIRACLE – The best DC Comics are the ones that are steeped not in continu- ity but more in a kind of modern mythology. Tom King and Mitch Gerads produce one of the best DC Comics I’ve ever read with Mis- ter Miracle. King and Gerards explore Jack Kirby’s Fourth World mythology through the eyes of super escape artist, Scott Free. The series begins with Scott Free, super escape artist, attempting suicide. His wife, Big Barda, finds him and saves him. As the series progresses, Scott and the reader question the reality he finds himself in. Is Scott alive? Is he dead? Does Darkseid have the dreaded Anti- Life Equation? Is all of this Darkseid psycho- logically torturing Mister Miracle? These are questions that persist throughout the series even as Scott continues to live his life as a hus- band, a famous performer and as a general in the war against Darkseid. Mister Miracle mixes Kirby’s high concept mythological New Gods and everyday life. reader question reality along with Scott. By One of my favorite issues is #6 where, after the series’ end, it’s unclear whether Scott is being sentenced to death by Orion (new alive, dead or under Darkseid’s thrall. Ulti- Highfather of the New Gods and firstborn mately, it doesn’t really matter. Whatever the son of the god of evil, Darkseid), Scott and reality is, Scott chooses love and life and that’s his wife, Big Barda, jump through numerous all any of us can really do. Hot damn, is this deathtraps, preemptively killing Orion’s exe- one of the greats! cutioners until they reach his throne room. Scott and Barda spend the whole issue talking Other 2018 Books about how they want to rearrange their condo Love & Rockets in Los Angeles. The comic ends with Barda Usagi Yojimbo: The Hidden telling Scott that she’s pregnant and then Scott X-Men Grand Design finds Orion – who is butchered in his own – Ian Gonzales throne room by Darkseid. The other thing I love about this comic is its construction. Damn near the whole comic is drawn in 9-panel grids! It allows the reader a larger view looking into this Scott and Barda’s world while some of the renderings make a BOOKS

BLACK HAMMER: AGE of DOOM – Black and Ormston go so far out of their way to Hammer: Age of Doom is among the most defamiliarize what I know. It’s certainly a brilliant superhero satire available to us. It’s rewarding position to see where the riffs cut references, visual and textual, are sharp, witty closest but it’s also fun to see how different and often funny when you realize the joke. It things can, the small and big rug pulls work has the vibes of an Alan Moore work in the amazingly when you can see the inspirations. way that it so deeply understands the thought- With each issue it’s become a livelier and fuller matrix beneath traditional comics’ stories and world, a world that begs questions and offers reinterprets it. It’s not just someone else’s (Jeff few answers. It’s brilliant in that strange way. Lemire and Dean Ormston’s) version of the But it’s also brilliant because of how deeply Justice League or Avengers. It’s a sad, slow, sad it is. Characters make difficult choices. affecting riff that is increasingly its own weird They live far below their comfort and struggle mythology. deeply with incredibly relatable problems. Even “Age of Doom” as a name is part of the Even the outlandish ones are rooted in riff. Just as big name comics are constantly something that resonates with my personal relaunching, rebranding, re-anything so too insecurities. in response does Black Hammer. Even as it Age of Doom continues the brilliant continues the same story it started with it goes strangeness of its earlier issues and doesn’t to new and weird places. hesitate to go further into the weird void that That weirdness is a big part of why it inhabits. it’s captured me. Even though I can see – David Shimomura familiarities with characters I know, Lemire BOOKS

The PISCES – Melissa Broder’s debut novel, The Pisces, contained some of my favor- ite tropes: sex with mythical creatures and women looking out to sea. These tropes are handled brilliantly, their trajectories unpre- dictable. Donut shop disasters, the angst of academic writing and a general disdain for humanity kept me frantically reading (and laughing out loud, inappropriately, in public) until the last page. As someone who spends most of her time happily juggling three to sev- en books, when I say I couldn’t put this novel down, I really mean it. While The Pisces treads the familiar path of a human falling in love with a mythical be- ing, rather than a sailor falling for a siren or a teenage girl falling for a hot vampire, in Brod- er’s mythos, an academic woman, Lucy, falls for a twink-like merman with above-the-tail self as being “committed to a sort of ‘pleasure genitals. More than anything else, Lucy’s acer- realism’ . . . sometimes, the U.T.I. in my own bic, witty, painfully funny voice hooked me. life has been more profound than the sexual It’s no surprise that Melissa Broder skill- experience, and a more lasting memory.” fully taps into the mental states of anxiety and This combination of “pleasure realism” depression; she’s well-known for her once- and content surrealism entwine perfectly in anonymous Twitter account, @SoSadToday, Lucy’s story. I’ve always been a fantasy stan, and in 2016 published an essay collection of but the kind of fantasy I prefer remains firmly the same name. Lucy’s searching, her sadness, grounded in recognizable emotional realities is certainly relatable to me, and based on both – which The Piscescarries out flawlessly. critics’ and readers’ responses to the novel, is clearly relatable to many. Other 2018 Books I was equally impressed by Broder’s will- Tonight I’m Someone Else – Chelsea Hodson ingness to dive into uncomfortable territory Dead Girls – Alice Bolin with the ease of intimate conversation. In one I Don’t Write About Race – June Gehringer scene, Lucy gets a U.T.I. because she doesn’t Social Creature – Tara Isabella Burton pee after sex. I couldn’t think of a single other The Mere Wife – Maria Dahvana Headley fictive work where a character gets a U.T.I. My Pet Serial Killer – Michael J. Seidlinger (there are surely others, but I’ve never read Destroy All Monsters – Jeff Jackson any). It’s a bold move, describing an all-too- Why We Dream – Alice Robb common reality for many women. When I in- Cheap Yellow – Shy Watson terviewed Broder in 2018, she described her- – Deirdre Coyle BOOKS

ART & ARCANA – In December of 1999, DVD players were suddenly affordable and it seemed as if everyone who got one for Christmas got a copy of The Matrix to go with it. For years, I’d go to someone’s house – it didn’t really matter who, or how many other DVDs a person owned – there it was, on the shelf next to the TV, in its weird cardboard clamshell. A similar thing happened this fall following the release of Art & Arcana, a massive visual history of Dungeons & Dragons by Michael Witwer, Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson and Sam Witwer. Granted, it isn’t quite as widespread at The Matrix, but just about everyone I know who has had even a passing interest in D&D seems to have wound up with a copy on their shelves. This makes sense; despite being a game of game’s popularity. It seems an impossible task imagination, D&D has always leaned heavily to accomplish in a thousand pages, yet Art & on art to bring its thrilling adventures to Arcana manages a scope both wide and deep life. It is easy to see how that art – designed in just 450 pages and 700 illustrations. to encourage players to say, “I want to do I can say, entirely without pique: Tis is a that,” or “I want to be that,” and to open their book I wish I had written. I am glad I didn’t, wallets in order to do so – might appeal to the though. I much prefer my time with the art D&D-curious more powerfully than D&D of Dungeons & Dragons be spent in leisure itself. Even more so when you consider the rather than labor. outsized influence D&D has had on the visual portrayal of fantasy over the last 45 years. Other 2018 Books There is a lot of ground to cover. D&D’s Blood Standard – Laird Barron art had many stylistic shifts over the decades Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales – Orrin Grey before its visual language began to fossilize The Outsider– Stephen King in recent years – a range as diverse as Erol – Stu Horvath Otus’ psychedlic drawings, Tony DiTerlizzi’s whimsical ones, Larry Elmore’s high-polish work, Russ Nicholson’s grue, Brom’s sleek BDSM-influenced paintings and more. Always more. And that’s not accounting for the pop culture flotsam of videogames and records and toys that rode the tide of the BOOKS

SEVERANCE – My first instinct is to start list- ing the things Severance is better than. Suffice it to say that Ling Ma’s debut novel does not fit comfortably into any of the categories that come to mind at first glance. It’s not quite a zombie apocalypse novel. Instead, it eschews the black-and-white rules of monster fiction and the action-packed tropes of the disaster genre. Its tone is often wistful. The fungal infection that empties New York City starts in the manufacturing plants in Shenzhen, China. It follows shipping routes, we assume. Candace Chen meets up with a band of survivors – other folks who’ve some- how avoided getting “fevered” – led by Bob, who promises to take them to a place outside Chicago he calls The Facility. The rituals and proper nouns of Bob’s crew are corny, but his team seems to believe it is productive to follow his instructions and keep combing through empty houses for food and brand name prod- ucts – Blu-rays and videogame consoles. clients the higher costs associated with work- We just got through the longest federal ing conditions. government shutdown in US history. Every These storylines are all explored at once. In week there’s a new, more ominous deadline between the growing tensions in Bob’s group for combating global climate change. It feels and Candace’s days watching New York empty worse and worse to just keep going to work. out, people find themselves falling back into How long will it take before the economic patterns of work. Candace’s many communi- infrastructure we’ve built begins to crumble? ties replace and fail to replace one another. Sev- Candace’s parents – who passed away by erance isn’t a horror novel, but it frightens with the time the novel begins – brought her to a macabre vision of work and family trapped in the US from China when she was very young. the patterns of capitalism and consumerism. After her college photography work fails to materialize into a career, she finds work in Other 2018 Books publishing and throws herself into the job, I Am a Season That Does Not Exist In the maybe hoping for a transfer from Bible pro- World - Kim Kyung Ju duction to join the Art Department and the There There - Tommy Orange “Art Girls” who work there. She’s often on the Frankenstein in Baghdad - Ahmed Saadawi phone, haggling down prices for books pro- Dept H - Matt Kindt duced in China, or trying in vain to explain to – Daniel Fries BOOKS

I’LL BE GONE in the DARK – Every book is sought to capture to subheadings that indi- the product of its author. Whether you believe cate a chapter was compiled posthumously in the concept of death of the author or not, from her notes, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark feels that much at least is something we know. like a phylactery for McNamara. Her atten- Books come from people. It’s an unavoidable tion to detail is exhaustive and precise, and fact in Michelle McNamara’s true crime book her loss adds just a touch more humanity to I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, where McNamara each personal detail she records. Accounts are seeps into every word not just of the stories told from the perspective of survivors, eyewit- of the Golden State Killer but also in her own nesses, cops and the folks left behind. McNa- relationships with her mother and daughter, mara is detailed but never so much with the and the unsolved-to-this-day murder that gore as she is with the people who define the inspired her to get into true crime in the first cases themselves. place. Even without McNamara’s untimely death, Because McNamara died before the book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark would have been an was finished, before the case was ultimately exceptional work of true crime. With it, we solved, there’s a note of that loss throughout. are given a testament to her talent and work. From the foreword by Gillian Flynn that is – Amanda Hudgins more about the author than the murderer she

IN EXTREMIS: The LIFE and DEATH of the that speaking truth to power takes. Colvin WAR CORRESPONDENT MARIE COLVIN – In was able to confront generals and despots this biography of the infamously eye-patched in ways that few other reporters could and reporter Marie Colvin, Lindsey Hilsum pushed her luck to the very end, when she does not flinch. She presents Colvin as the was killed by a ballistic strike ordered by high indefatigable investigator for the humanity government officials in Syria. This book is a in warzones and a victim of PTSD, the life of whirlwind account of a life burnt at both ends the party who only felt alive at parties and on that does Colvin a great service, as she did for battlefields, a natural reporter that suffered journalism and the actual people caught in from very human self-doubt and other mortal the blast zones of war. afflictions that remind us of the immense toll – LEVI RUBECK