2012′s Overlooked Books

Judging Brian Evenson's books strictly by their titles is enough to give you a good idea of the kind of dark, thrilling experience you're in for when you read him — Contagion, Dark Property, Father of Lies and, of course, Altmann's Tongue, whose extreme violence led to Evenson's exit from Brigham Young University. But Evenson is no mere horror novelist; his cerebral, visceral thrillers have racked up praise from everyone from bestseller... Peter Straub to postmodern theorist Gilles Deleuze. But while Evenson has had a cult following for years, Immobility deserves a wider audience.

Here's the deal: A cataclysm known as the Kollaps has left the Earth all but destroyed, and it is into this reality that Josef Horkai awakes after having been in stasis for 30 years. He's promptly informed he'll soon die of an awful disease: "Eventually you'll be completely paralyzed, suffering from utter immobility." Josef has been awakened because only he can withstand the ubiquitous post-apocalyptic radiation that poisons anyone who is exposed for too long, and he is needed to perform a task that might save what remains of humanity, a ragged community known as the hive. In the process, he's given a difficult choice that puts the fate of the human race in the balance.

Though Immobility is, like so much of Evenson's work, a riveting horror story of bleak survival, it is so much more — the sharp prose and terse dialog probe deep questions about how we know things and what we believe. Josef comes across as a post-apocalyptic version of Camus's Meursault, a man struggling to remember who he is while dealing with a much more pernicious question: Is the human race worth saving? — Scott Esposito

A wisp of a novel, Office Girl was easy to miss when it arrived in summer, its intimacy and quirky charm quickly overshadowed by the year's fall blockbusters — liken it to the indie film that plays for a week and lives on through word-of-mouth hype. Joe Meno's story of a romance between two 20-somethings during a Chicago winter is best savored as a few hours' escape from the cold. It's February... 1999 when Odile, the titular girl and an art school dropout, meets Jack working in adjoining cubicles at their dreary third-shift gig answering phones. She gets her kicks biking around the city and vandalizing signs, while he's up for anything if it means she might fall in love with him. Written in short, angsty bursts — which are narrated with eye-rolling perfection by Julia Whelan — Meno's novel sets these two dreamers in dank cubicles and cozy walkups late at night and captures the optimism and nervous energy of the Y2K moment. — Kate Silver

Why didn't everyone I know rush me and demand that I read I Am an Executioner back in April when it came out? Were the sturdy, hilarious narratives too accessible for the experimentalists I sometimes run with? Was the formal playfulness too weird for my fellow fiction devotees? After all, in this debut collection, tigers, cinematographers, aliens and humans bray, mate, devour, love and write. Even so, Rajesh Parameswaran's fiercely imaginative plots... and hyper-precise prose add up to a must-read. Parameswaran tests the line between nature and culture — or between one culture and another — to ask, what happens when that dividing line shifts?

"Demons" tells the darkly humorous tale of an immigrant couple, using realist conventions to discuss the assimilationist potential of Thanksgiving turkey. In other stories, an elephant dips her tusk in ink to write a memoir and an Indian stationmaster pines over his peculiar clerk in a queer retelling of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." What unites these varied characters are the ever-present forces of love and death. As one extraplanetary being muses, pondering the fatal culmination of his mating ritual, "Life feeds other life. It is equal with the act of love." — Amanda Davidson

Marilynne Robinson's essay collection illuminates what matters to the author about philosophy, literary criticism, U.S. history, and religion. These may sound like heady matters and, indeed, this is not an audiobook for bopping around town doing errands. Read by Robinson herself (in exactly the voice devotees of Housekeeping and Gilead would expect her to have — considered, warm, a tinge of prairie) this is the audiobook to savor on a long solo... car trip, preferably through some wide open spaces, when you've got the time and headspace to contemplate the big questions.

When I Was a Child garnered critical praise upon its release, but I was one of many, I think, who were interested but ultimately turned off by the extent to which the book is informed by Robinson's Christianity. Wrongly so; it turns out that for Robinson, religious belief is not mere dogma. To her, it is an opening up of thought, rather than a circumscribing, and the essays in this volume provide ample evidence to support her belief that religion, like literature and like America itself, is about generosity, wonder, and possibility. — Sara Jaffe

I'll admit it, there are some formidable reasons James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge's Zoo does not belong on a list of unsung literary gems. For one, while legit reviewers of literature wouldn't touch this thing with a 10-foot quill, the book was a bestseller, read by — and I'm just guessing here — 100 million people, many of whom had just learned their flight was delayed. And as for its "gem" qualifications,... Zoo is a deadly serious adventure yarn about, basically, a full-on global war between animals and humans. Yeah, OK, the Man Booker Prize people probably needn't waste their time.

The thing is, lit nerds like myself — OMG, George Saunders just accepted my friend request! — have been shamed away from reading Patterson (and Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins, etc. etc.), but maybe that sort of snobbery is outdated. Surely we can switch our brains to energy-saver mode and just have fun with a book like Zoo, despite its clichés and inconsistencies and parts where the scientists don't seem to know much about science. Because it's wild and weird and unexpected. Because guilty pleasures are still pleasures. Freed from shame and pretense, we can all admit that a scene in which thousands of dogs take over Manhattan and have a giant, disgusting orgy is just plain awesome. Sometimes, that's what a gem looks like. Like a giant dog orgy. — Pat Rapa