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For as much as I consider a book that markets itself as "humorous" to be a giant red flag, I do keep reading them for some reason or another. And while this one hit the mark more times than it missed, it doesn't take away from the fact that this is actually two separate plots from two different genres that were squeezed into a get-along shirt. If you like tonal whiplash, you'll love this one.

We bounce back and forth between Peyote (works in hell, first-person narration) and the four members of the Harrison family (upper-middle class spending the summer at their lake house, third-person narration), and chapters are short and digestible. There's never any confusion about who we're following at a given moment because the vibes between these two stories are so distinct from one another. Peyote's chapters feel like a surreal version of a corporate drama with schemes against coworkers and strong, cutthroat personalities eager to fuck each other over for a promotion. Whereas the Harrison chapters feel like your standard chick-lit domestic thriller with buried family secrets we don't talk about.

Which isn't to say that I can't enjoy something this daring and experimental, but I found myself disproportionately more interested in Peyote's journey than the other 50% of the book. Both plotlines do end up culminating at the same time and tie together, but the very very ending started jumbling up so many threads that I was getting confused.

I didn't love it, but I can't deny that it was ambitious for a debut novel.

This is one of the most bizarre nonfiction books I've ever read. It's like 25% history of 19th century stage magic, 25% applied kleptomania, and 50% "Using Roofies: For Dummies!"

It opens with a lengthy introduction about the early days of the C.I.A. and how the concept of fair play went right out the window in favor of ruthlessly using any possible advantage for information-gathering purposes. Apparently that included hiring Houdini and his contemporary ilk to teach agents how to do slight of hand tricks. After a recap of some of the more silly and out-there methods we tried (and failed) to kill Fidel Castro, the book pivots to the actual reprinting of an original classified manual from the 50's that was rediscovered in 2007.

From this point on, a lot of time is spent on multiple methods for slipping 1) pills, 2) powders, and 3) liquids into an unsuspecting mark's drink before we change gears and talk about how to use distraction and psychological tricks to swipe small objects right in front of someone's eyes. Which I guess would be handy skills for an aspiring spy. The part that interested me the most and what felt most like my understanding of spycraft - recognition signals and working as teams - was given the least amount of time, but at least it was addressed at all.

It's a very dated manual of its time (it's assumed that everyone smokes cigarettes, carries loose change, and that women don't leave the house without at least one handkerchief), but as a historical time capsule of what early espionage techniques looked like you could certainly do worse. Also there are tons of helpful sketches and diagrams, so maybe try getting your hands on a physical printing if you're interested.

Urban legends and hyper-local word-of-mouth stories have always interested me, and what are cryptids but a smaller niche of that already limited subculture? I had thought that I was well-versed in all the different kinds of critters that may or may not be roaming this country and going bump in the night, but apparently there are a lot more than I realized!

I did enjoy the premise of this book more than the execution however. There are interesting glimpses at why some towns embrace their local cryptids with annual festivals and statues, whereas others are embarrassed by supposed sightings from decades ago. I wish there was more exploration into the anthropological and cultural aspects of how unsubstantiated creatures can affect local communities, but chapters were too short and there was too much ground to cover to really allow for that kind of deeper analysis. Just when things were getting interesting, the chapter would end and we'd be launched into another anecdote starting with teenage boys riding around the backwood roads of their small town in the middle of the night (a surprising number of cryptid sightings begin this way).

This also felt like it was aimed towards maybe a slightly younger audience than I was expecting, so I'd recommend this for younger readers or just anyone looking for a broad but shallow understanding of Bigfoot, Mothman, the Jersey Devil, and the rest of the gang. Anything more substantial than that, maybe look elsewhere.

Always feels good when you luck out and read multiple good books back-to-back. The fifth book of a six-book series I was seriously debating bailing on was not what I was expecting to continue the streak, but a welcome surprise nonetheless!

This is a strange format because it's really a collection of self-contained standalone vignettes that when read in the printed order presents a more cohesive through-line. My understanding is that the author just kept knocking out these shorter snapshots until he had enough of them to slap them together and call it a book. There are recurring characters, but sometimes they're given reintroductions at the beginning of a chapter and previous events are recapped as if you're reading the current chapter in a vacuum. Can't recall ever reading another book in this style.

This franchise has had some serious highs and lows for me. The worldbuilding is a good balance of serious and whimsical and there's some really creative scenes that play out with high-tech inventions. The biggest thing that detracted from my enjoyment of the previous entries was the protagonist, who thankfully has finally (in-fiction) retired and does not appear at all in this book. Instead, it was basically all of the good parts I liked (the setting, the aliens, the politicking, combat scenes) without all of the bad parts I didn't (bad attempts at humor, Boomer-coded main character, undeserved ending).

There's no real resolution to the central conflict here and this absolutely is a filler piece of media, but I find that I don't mind because the individual mini-arcs were so entertaining on their own. And having come this far, I definitely think I'll give the final book a shot thanks to the refreshing momentum this one gave.