The Tavern at the End of History by Morris Collins

Reading a new novel nowadays can often feel like the experience of the idea of the thing more than the thing itself, but this is not that. The obsessions at work here are very different than Steve Erickson’s—whose work Collins seems to be a fan of, as I am myself—but there were parts of it that reminded me of the headlong tumble into fearless novels like Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock, and Arc d’X: characters that you kind of fall in love with, progressive formal and moral risk, intelligent prose, atrocity depicted in all its “horror and idiosyncrasy”, the big questions, and the heartbreaking details of life.