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An apophany is defined as a moment where someone sees a connection that doesn’t literally exist. This is a column about those connections. You can support the author directly at patreon.com/christophersloce. 

Before we get started, I’d like to just take a very brief moment and let you know I’m currently trying to make up some hours from work that didn’t get paid due to some miscommunication, so I’ve been crowdfunding the difference. I was under the impression I’d be paid for about 28 hours and instead I was paid for 16. So far, people have been gracious and sent some money through, and I’m thankful for them. Because my Patreon is getting revamped in the New Year (including me trying to figure out how realistically I can do the Wu-Tang Clan retrospectives the exact way I want them), the best thing to do if you’ve enjoyed my writing this year and want to support me in a specifically stressful juncture, my PayPal is here.

Following lists are in no particular order. I wrote blurbs for the songs, and they were all terrible, which fits for this year. Instead I wrote some big long paragraph with brief explanations.  The book reviews went better. Here we go.

TOOKS

I’ll go ahead and get it out of the way: four of these books have SFUltra episodes attached to them, but only two readings were directly inspired by the show, and I’ve owned Crash for ages. Figured I’d at least acknowledge, yeah, I was kind of reading along with a podcast. With that being said, I’ve spent most of the year enveloped in a Moby Dick/100 Years of Solitude reread. Neither book make it on this list as they would have in their respective years, though I’m coming to grips with the fact Moby Dick may not be my favorite novel any longer because I don’t feel like I understand enough of it, which is different than hating it. 

Nevertheless, 

Motorman- David Ohle

The crown jewel of books I discovered via SFUltra. Motorman is an ingenious blend of noir, Krazy Kat, and wigged out sinister psych. Following hapless everyman Moldenke as has he tries to escape to the country when the shadowy, mysterious boss of his town Buntz turns out his lights after killing one of his cronies, the book entirely terraforms a post apocalyptic Americana out of a seasick, removed ton. The noir protagonist’s past usually relies on understandable betrayals by a lover or former colleague; here we have sheephearts and false wars and chewing a psychoactive substance called a stonepick. Throughout, Moldenke is chased by the sinister Jellyheads, a sort of false human whose heads are full of, well, jelly. This could all be very wacky (and it is), but Ohle’s great decision is to keep the prose pared down to skeletal, just so descriptions of Moldenke’s bizarre, dystopian world adds a real menace and stakes to Moldenke’s story. According to legend, Motorman was basically bootlegged via photocopies because the original run was insultingly small. True or not, the best thing about the book is that sounds like a plausible origin. 

Minor Detail- Adania Shibli 

I’ve got a bone to pick with J.M. Coetzee. He sells the back half of this novel as a story about neurodivergence. The first half of the novel tells the story of an Israeli unit capturing a woman, assaulting her, and then shooting her in the desert just after the Nakba. The second half of the novel focuses on a Palestinian woman who reads about in newspaper archives and realizes the murder took place on her birthday. In some ways, Minor Detail takes the form of a mystery novel where we know how the crime was committed, and now only have interest in seeing the criminal caught by our obsessive detective. Except I would argue that there’s nothing really that divergent about the second half’s narrator: her anxiety and counting for constant details isn’t neurodivergence when the political structures of Zionism force her every being to be surveilled. In some ways, Minor Detail works best as an answer to Camus’s The Stranger, one where the existential question of being an Algerian on the beach is of tantamount to the murder.

Train Dreams– Denis Johnson

Confession: I threw this on the list and argued if it deserved the placing or if I was just letting my own weird Americana interests dictate my end of year list. I had read about the first fifty pages and was like “Yeah, it’s a little book with Big Ideas about American life, that includes the long march of history and how it changes.” I was 100% wrong. There’s a conversation in the middle of this novel that causes it to open up into something suffused with a powerful mystery. You could not guess the last 50 pages if I paid you to guess them, especially how it ends. That’s scuttlebutt, though. I think this is Johnson’s best work; Jesus’s Son’s final six or so stories get too predictable compared to the opening run of classics. The technique Johnson uses to such effect in stories like “Out On Bail” and “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” to give the view of one man’s entire life in a rapidly industrializing America by allowing the implication of events throughout time to reverberate even before they happen. What order do the events in a book happen in? Whatever order they tell you in. Sort of. 

Crash– JG Ballard

Not an original observation by any means but if you’ve ever seen a TikTok that’s charged with an undercurrent of erotic energy despite it being ostensibly a TikTok scammer eating dog food, you know everything is somebody’s fetish now. Crash, then, had our number about 50 years earlier. Here, it’s no accident these English suburbanites find the erotic in car crashes they survive, something that breaks up the mundanity of cheating on each other and telling each other about it. Only a car, something we load personal significance (including the erotic) into despite the fact it’s mostly a waste of time and money, can contain the average perversion of a commuter. Difficult read, thought I was going to puke. That’s the power of fiction, baby!

Mumbo Jumbo– Ishmael Reed 

A secret history of the 20th Century. One of the rare laugh out loud great books, manages to situate itself in a classic noir mold while also exploding its idea of what constitutes crime. Here, it’s European ideas forced into a space of cultural supremacy. Reed and his characters are not interested in the sort of easy cultural exchange that typifies corporate diversity efforts. He doesn’t need to. White people are the ones who found jazz and then created Kenny G. 

Love Hotel- Jane Unrue

Because I was mostly in the weeds on a series of door-stoppers, I read small experimental novels on the side. Of these, Love Hotel struck me the most. An experimental novel where a woman is hired to solve a very vague mystery at the behest of a predatory couple, I found myself thinking of Bi Gan, David Lynch, Hotel Montreal and Skinamarink, more than novelistic forms (this is a sign of my own weaknesses). The novel breaks up sentences by line, like reading a poem. The effect is a daring imagining of the “woman in trouble” story. I don’t know what trouble she was in, but the novel’s ability to ratchet up intensity by withholding key details made this one of the most doom-laden reads of my year. 

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid- Michael Ondaatje

Truth be told: I don’t totally get this book, which uses the view point of Billy the Kid as a poetic valence to talk about myth, but i’ve never read anything like it. Very high up on my re-read list, if only because I’m not sure I liked it because “smart poem-novel about westerns” hits a bunch of my inner pinball bumpers or because it’s really doing something. I have my suspicions it’s the second. 

Fever Dream– Samanta Schweblin 

I decided I’d rather not rank these, because I didn’t see the point in pitting novels against nonfiction works (and because the one non-fiction book I read is the clear best book I’ve read this year), but if I had, Fever Dream was the best novel I read all year. The story of a ritual to swapping the bodies of two children after a tragic accident involving drinking from a polluted river, Fever Dream approaches this through a fevered dialogue between a woman and a ghostly boy. What makes Fever Dream the best novel I read this year is the way environmental degradation treated as the creation of a great, cosmic wrongness, more terrifying than any sea Cthulhu monster. We accept pollution as a given. Fever Dream makes pollution terrifying, extracting a “green” read of “The Colour Out of Space” and dumping it into modern territory. 

By Night in Chile– Roberto Bolano

One paragraph. One smart priest. A lot of self-flagellating and kidding yourself about why you supported Pinochet. Deathly apparitions of Trot punk Bolano talking shit to you as you die. The great reveal was a fact I was familiar with from reading A Last Supper of Queer Apostles, and it was no less horrifying when you learn about it historically as it is revealed late in this novel. A novel that is a complete rejoinder to our current cycle of psuedo-reactionary novelists declaring allegiance to the iceberg instead of the ship. 

Ice- Anna Kavan

Two evil men try to possess a woman during a new Ice Age that threatens the extinction of humanity. Each of them seem to regard the apocalypse as something that bolsters their overall quest, which is to control “the glass girl”. There is no good reason. There is only heinous, erotic self interest. At the end of the world people will make decisions that honor the annihilation instead of humanity. Ice reminds us that some people, faced with their own destruction, will still honor the ways they acted beforehand than trying to redeem what is left. 

Black Reconstruction- W.E.B. DuBois

There’s a pretty common acceptance, especially in the former states of the confederacy, that Reconstruction was a failure because it attempted to put Northern government on Southern states. If all men are truly brothers, then the Yankee brothers have to understand the Johnny Reb brothers and understand there are some things we will never agree on. Even if someone agrees the Confederacy was evil, people can’t let go of Reconstruction as a failure. DuBois work actually points to Reconstruction as the single most revolutionary moment in American history, where men refused to work for masters who mistreated them and sold away their families for profit, and instead took the long and painful path towards citizenship by selling their labor and fighting ability to the Union. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” declares “as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free”; this song, written by the wife of one of John Brown’s secret financiers to the tune of the rowdier “John Brown’s Body”, is the definitive document of revolutionary citizenship, one that applied to all Union soldiers, black or white,  whether they realized it or not. This mission was not a failure; in many ways Reconstruction was the first taste of stability and democracy in the former Confederacy.

The history that DuBois also recovers answers a pertinent question: why don’t we have a labor party? His answer is simple: after the war, by appealing to the purported failure of Reconstruction governments, it was much easier to create the conditions for a divided working class, and where that failed, there were always “Redeemers” ready to wage low-scale war against Reconstruction. America’s hopes for a party of labor died because the artificial division of black and white workers, and that was a division created by Northern capitalists abandoning the goals of Reconstruction when convenient, because Jim Crow was nothing if not convenient for the rapidly imperializing capitalists of the post-war.

So, DuBois’s book is not just about Reconstruction alone, as some distant period. It is about how modern America was created out of those 8 years, and in that, it is about how we, at some point, will have to reconstruct this nation to make it anything worth serving its populace. So much of engaging with modern politics is how it makes you feel, and the last three have been as dark as anything Donald Trump did from 2016 to 2020. For what it’s worth, though: performative online despair doesn’t do anything. The best book I read this year reminded me the reason there is still hope is because people have been hoping for the same thing since that war ended. There’s still time. 

BUNES

I’ve been interested in Skrilla’s music way before “6-7” was a (supposedly) demonic force feeding on the brains of children, but didn’t make time until the end of the year to check him out. I prefer “Rich Sinners” with a never better Lil Yachty. Other late additions include Chat Pile/Hayden Pedigo’s crushing “The Matador”. Past that, we finally had a chart dominator in the Elucid/woods field because Cameron Winter was on one all year. I rarely give credit to indie musicians du jour, but the vision of a zoomer rock formalist who has all the training and is just figuring out what they want to say reminds me of a short guy from Compton, if you want to make the most Fantano core sentence I’ll ever write. “$0″ turns Warren Zevonian piano balladry into an explosion of ineffable emotion. Meanwhile, the title song off Getting Killed manages to take the good parts of the Black Crowes (riffing and intricate, finger picked guitar parts) and meld them to a spooky outro fit for a Songs: Ohia record. What ties all the possible pretension together is Cameron Winter can sing his fucking ass off even if you don’t like his voice. woods is always a shoe-in for these, I don’t think it’s too much to call him the best writer alive. “star87“‘s first verse is woods at his sharpest. “Calypso Gene” pairs him with Elucid and The Alchemist for The Alchemist’s best work of the year. Like all good Armand Hammer songs, it’s about more than one thing, because everything is about multiple thing. Sometimes a river is a border, and the border is a river. Sometimes, a song needs to only be about one thing. “PROLLY WOULDNT BE HERE IF WE WOULDA BEEN KILLED THAT N****A KING BACH” by $ilkmoney is about how conveniently black performers fall back on community when they get caught wrong. The pressure from a dominantly white music world is a recurring theme in $ilk’s music. So is him rapping his fucking ass off. If most rap fans are willing to say it’s a given Kendrick Lamar is the best rapper alive, I think they should spend time with $ilk and wonder how attached they are to that take. “Lost Youth” by Fielded is a breakthrough song for the backwoodz affiliated chantreuse; Demisexual Lovelace should have been bigger, which is fine because I’m positive Fielded is going to wind up huge at some point. It’s the anthem they needed to write for themselves. Speaking of: Earl Sweatshirt’s “Tourmaline“, the single sweetest song he’s ever written, mostly drops the neck-snapping lyricism for a tender neo-soul ballad. I was stuck between this and another song for him, but he would have never made a song like “Tourmaline” without some domestic bless. Are Wren and I walking up the aisle to it? It’s not out of the question. We definitely aren’t using my final two songs. “Can’t Get Right” should have been an introduction for Lefty Gunplay after the “tv off” placement, but the album flopped. Fuck that. Throw on some dickies, have a barbecue, and listen to those big LA horns. Everybody should be going “Why they call me Lefty? Because I can’t get right.” That may make an appearance at the reception. Finally, we come to “So Be It”. I’ve spent most of my year thrashing around in deep betrayal because I thought the beats on Let God Sort ‘Em Out were Grammy this-is-an-important-rap-album chaff. It’s because “So Be It” is the one song they’ve released out of this run that feels like old Clipse while giving you an idea of what a solo success Pusha T/recharged Malice could do in their advanced age. Pusha’s best work is defined by world-historical disdain for his opps, even if they’re not explicitly named. This song might be the only worthwhile thing Travis Scott has ever been involved in, and he was just the subject.

See you in the big 2026.