Society of America and Humanities North Dakota. He has been a featured storyteller on The Moth, and has taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Cape Town, the University of Maryland, the George Washington University, Murray State University, and the University of California – Berkeley. In 2009, he moved to Korea and reunited with his birth family after 30 years of separation.
He is the author of two novels: The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves (2017) and Reprieve (2021). He is currently the fiction editor of Hyphen Magazine.
At CrimeReads he tagged "six books that are widely classified as literary but could have easily made their way over to the horror shelf," including:
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh NguyenRead about another entry on the list.
Most people wouldn’t categorize this novel as horror, but really, any frank and brutal depiction of war can and should be categorized as such. What, exactly, is more horrific thanmass slaughter dictated and encouraged by idealogue politicians who publicly feign compassion while ordering more of their own youth to kill and be killed? In war, the monster isn’t a vampire or werewolf or disfigured clown, it’s not a singular knife-wielding shadow lurking outside in the woods—no, it’s more horrifying than that. In war, the monster is the invisible force of murderous dogma, the tenets of which always lead to evisceration of some sort. So yeah: This book is rollicking, smart, and often funny, but it’s also terrifying. Its explicit depictions of murder and torture, especially in its last third, have been seared into my brain, and those images have stayed with me for a very long time.
The Sympathizer is among Rebecca Starford's six top literary thrillers about espionage, spies, & double agents, Siobhan Adcock's six crime books that explore the experience of veterans, and Shelley Wood's five top epistolary novels.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
