“Postmortem: What Survives the John Wayne Gacy Murders"

By Courtney Lund O’Neil

ISBN No. 978-0-80654-299-7

www.penguinrandomnouse.com

Who doesn't love a road trip? Exotic locales. Fast food. Interesting people. A chance to lose or find yourself.

Courtney Lund O'Neil and her mother, Kim Byers, start their road trip with Simple Minds' "Don't You Forget About Me" playing in the cassette deck. Yes, cassette deck because this road trip takes mother and daughter all the way back to the late 1970s. For Byers the song is nostalgic for an era when kids were sent out to play and told to come home when the streetlights come on and if they didn't... well, the police would convince you they'd run away. For O'Neil the song is more complicated. Neither, we learn, has been able to escape the loss of a childhood friend of Byers' or the serial killer who took it. 

The book - and the road trip - goes from Des Plains, Illinois in 1978 (where Byers grew up and the murder took place) to present day. Childhood friends (now in their 60s), parents, prosecutors, a teenager's diary, and even a mailman try to explain, make sense of, and come to peace with the unfathomable. The book has an impressive pedigree: O'Neil's mother was a coworker and friend of Robert Piest and saw a contractor named John Wayne Gacy talking to Robert around 5PM on December 11, 1978. Robert disappeared and Byers connected Robert to Gacy. Gacy told the police he'd never talked to Robert. A search of Gacy's home found Robert's parka and the small receipt Byers had slipped into one of its pockets. They also found the bodies of 29 young men under the floorboards. Byers was a star witness at Gacy's trial where he was found guilty, sat on death row for 14 years, and was eventually executed in 1994.

Mother and daughter go back to the school Byers and Rob attended (and where the movie "The Breakfast Club" was filmed), to where the pharmacy stood, the site of the murder(s), and the river where Robert's body was dumped (and lay frozen until the Spring thaw, where it was finally found, "bloated...gummy," O'Neil writes). Along the way there's enough gore in the autopsy reports to keep even the morbidly curious up at night and some revelations I had to read twice - but O'Neil never loses the humanity of everyone involved. Byers went on to have children and a career in medicine but Robert's childhood best friend, who keeps a picture of him and Rob on his phone, was too worried about losing a child to have one of his own. Most everyone in this book is still haunted by the wide-awake-2AM questions that O'Neil asks in her final chapter: was there anything anyone could have done to stop Robert from going with Gacy? How many other boys would have been killed if Robert hadn't gone with him? What Gacy didn't anticipate, this book says, is now that Gacy's gone his legacy will be written by his victims and their families. 

Popular culture still celebrates the sexy, brilliant and/or misunderstood serial killer (even C. Thomas Howell - yes! Pony boy! - played one!) even though their stories are all the same (childhood trauma, mental disorders). After reading "Postmortem", though, the most fascinating character, the real "get" of an acting role, is Elizabeth Piest, the mother of Gacy's last victim; the woman who stood there as her youngest son said he'd be back in a few minutes and then never saw him alive again. She was the mother of the child who brought down a monster and for that she carried a biblical weight of grief, remorse, and stoicism to her grave. She had a life worthy of being played by Meryl Streep. Hollywood, are you listening? 

"Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

This movie is about a lot of things but not enough about the right ones to be truly interesting. It's 1969 in Los Angeles and a TV actor and his stuntman friend keep running into the Manson family. Academics and film nerds will appreciate the period production values (clothes, music, cars) and read too much into the director's usual kink for women's feet, dialogue that goes nowhere, and scenes that go on waaay too long. When the material is this thin and the running time this long (2.5 hrs+) your mind has time to wander and wonder why there isn't more of something, anything. Or worse: anything interesting.
The best scene in the whole movie has a few Manson girls just watching TV. It covers the 60s in a second: the laziness, the last innocent hippie summer, the clutter of a living room before everything went digital and ergonomic. But the movie is best summed up by a scene of the same girls scrounging through a dumpster for food. Somewhere in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" is that awesome two minute trailer spread over a very dull, confused and very, very long movie. 

"Hustlers"

Directed by Lorene Scafaria

Jennifer Lopez isn't a character actor but she keeps playing the same character in her movies: a beautiful, proud, hardworking, single Mom kept in her place by The Man. This time Lopez isn't a maid or wedding planner but the impossibly hot leader of a pack of plucky strippers scheming to even things up with their rich customers. Problem is the movie's trailer doesn't have just the best parts of the movie in it, it's also got the all of energy the movie needs. The actual movie feels long, drawn-out, cheap and icky, kinda like a bad lapdance. 
Lopez hasn't gotten any better as an actor over the years but she's starting to look a lot like Eva Mendes, who's a slightly better actor. She's still in good enough shape to manage some ridiculous fetish scenes (rolling around in money, teaching her shy coworker how to pole dance). She's still defensive about her image, defying the W.C. Fields rule of never acting with children. She probably signed on for a gritty script and then slowly softened it, thinking her characters need The Child, The Fat Friend, The Help that Jen's maid/wedding planner/stripper is kind to. They help soften and simplify an image that should be getting harder (and more interesting) with age. 

"Fifteen Dogs"

By Andre Alexis
ISBN No. 978-1-55245-305-6
www.chbooks.com

How's this for a pitch? Two gods give 15 dogs staying overnight in a veterinary clinic "human consciousness" to see if they'll be as happy or miserable as their owners.
With its clever ground rules for a parallel reality of thinking, talking dogs (reminiscent of the rules of the afterlife in "The Lovely Bones") and the conundrum of mastery over "lesser" creatures (reminiscent of "A.I. Artificial Intelligence"), "Fifteen Dogs" is the latest in a very long line of stories about what happens when dogs whisper back.
The 1975 cult film "A Boy and his Dog" starred Don Johnson as a slacker Mad Max wandering through a dystopian desert with his talking dog. The 1989 movie "Baxter" was narrated by a French-speaking bull terrier. In the excellent book "The Dogs of Babel", a distraught husband tries to find out why his wife died in a freak accident by getting the only witness - a dog - to talk.
Like all of those aforementioned titles "Fifteen Dogs" is a compelling crossbreed of everything from the deepest philosophy about what constitutes a happy life to the most basic emotions around the death of a pet.
When the writing's good it's really good. A blind dog sleeping outside was "easily seen by all the creatures that walked, flew or crept past him on their way through the gardens." And when the writing's not so good (as it is in the first 44 pages) it's almost Disney-ish in its apostrophe-free depiction of plucky canine teamwork. Even worse, the gods make their bet over a few brewskis in a Toronto bar. (I know Toronto sees itself as the cultural and business centre of Canada, but now it's the mythological and philosophical centre of the whole universe??)
Yet "Fifteen Dogs" is still a very clever and rewarding read. At only 171 pages, the spareness of the writing (considering the complexities of the plot) is a miracle of sorts. When a storyteller is this assured and confident he encourages us to trust him as well. Besides, it's nice to think that our lives are determined as much by choice and circumstance as they are by imperfect gods of fate making it all up between games of Foosball.
"The first [god] spins the thread of a life," Alexis explains. "The second draws out the length of thread each being will have. The third cuts the thread and ends that being's time on earth." Whew... And when the gods toy with the fates of the dogs and their owners ("Atrapos cut two of the three lives that were wound together, then added years to the one that was left by way of balance.") make sure you have some tissues nearby. 

"Song for a Summer Night"

By Robert Heidbreder & Qin Leng
ISBN No. 978-1-55498-493-0
www.groundwood.com

"Day's left the stage. Night's in the wings. The summer air sings what a summer night brings." In an age of books like "Go the F*** to Sleep" suggesting that already sleep-deprived parents let their children stay up waaaay past their curfews must be fighting words. But they are such lovely words. Those opening lines from this charming, beautifully illustrated lullaby of a book announce a contrarian kind of bedtime story about the promise, not of a new morning, but of the start of a day's end. When the children in this story break curfew to party with the cute creatures of the night (shy skunks, sparkling fireflies) they're appreciating the magic of a moonlit summer night many decades before they'll go gently into another, more sombre, good night. It's touching stuff.

"The World Without Us"

By Robin Stevenson
ISBN No. 978-1-4598-0680-1
www.orcabook.com

It takes a certain kind of courage to publish a youth novel about suicide when even the mainstream media is still trying to figure out how to report on it without nudging depressed millennials in that direction. It takes even more courage (balls? gall?) to give your book the same title as another one about what the world would look if the virus of humanity were suddenly gone for good. Stevenson's book is all those things (ballsy, galling, torn from the headlines) - just not to everyone at the same time. Yes, the titling of an end chapter "The Point of it All" suggests a certain resolution to a tragic phenomenon. It isn't. Instead, its characters are the human beings behind the headlines. They never feel like stock characters or ciphers and their motivations - ultimately - are always about doing the right thing and making the world a better place for themselves and their loved ones, now and long after they're gone. That's a heady ambition in contemporary adult fiction. That Stevenson achieves it in youth fiction is a miracle. It's a smart, daring read. 

"Unnatural Selections"

by Wallace Edwards
ISBN No. 978-1-4598-0555-2
www.orcabook.com

We're warned right upfront: "Readers of this book, behold! Beasts from an imagined age." Those beasts come from the imagination of Professor I.B. Doodling, a "traveling artist who visits schoolchildren and takes their suggestions...to create fantastical hybrid animals." The results are elegant illustrations and nonsensical poems about everything from the "Whalephant" ("Everyone who gets to see him, secretly would like to be him") to the "Leofroat" (a mashup of leopard, frog and goat).
The book encourages children to spot and identify the different animals in the pictures, but it's also an unwitting introduction to the environmental ills of our rapidly (de?)evolving planet. Being "a fantastical collection of unnatural selections!" also means the book might be an empowering or emasculating read for children with emerging gender issues. Whew... Thats a LOT of forehead crunching for a children's book. This isn't a bad thing if it gets parents and children talking about stuff like "natural" selection, the implications of GMO agriculture or - considering how fast kids grow up these days - the unnatural selections in books like Margaret Atwood's dystopian "Oryx and Crake" trilogy, where glowing rabbits - a failed experiment in bioluminescence - run freely in the countryside.