Best book reviewer has read all year

If I told you that “A Questionable Shape” is the best book featuring the undead that I have read this year, you might have some questions of your own.

Am I offering up a backhanded compliment? Do I, as a rule, like books featuring the undead? And just how many of that sort of book have I read so far this year anyway?

So, in the interest of clarity, I'll instead tell you this: “A Questionable Shape” (Two Dollar Radio, 224 pages, $16.50) is the best book I have read this year. I suspect it will still hold top honors when the year comes to a close many months hence.

Bennett Sims, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, has penned a beautiful novel that is largely a philosophical investigation into the nature of undeadness - which, by extension, is an investigation into the nature of being alive.

Michael, the novel's narrator, owns an impressive vocabulary and is given to lengthy asides (rendered as footnotes). He muses for the reader while helping a friend search for the friend's undead father or while attempting to get his girlfriend to practice preparedness drills with him. Here is Michael considering the ways in which the hunt he is engaged in connects a father and son in ways neither ever would have expected:

“This, too - just the fact that he's here right now, in the antiques store's parking lot, whether he's spitting apple seeds onto its gravel or gristly beef - bespeaks a synonymy with his father. For it's clear that the crowning similarity, the point of pure identity where he and Mr. Mazoch converge, is this itinerary that Matt's acceded to. In shadowing Mr. Mazoch (in staking out his haunts), Matt follows literally in his father's footsteps … haunting another man's haunts.”

Now, I will readily acknowledge that many a reader will not be looking for this sort of discourse in a book featuring the undead. Such a reader may well be disappointed by the relative paucity of gore on display. Nevertheless, I maintain that “A Questionable Shape” is unquestionably a major accomplishment.

• What: Bennett Sims reads from “A Questionable Shape”
• When: 7 p.m. Wednesday
• Where: Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City
• Admission: Free