I suppose this book could fit into the recent "romantasy" craze (except it's more science fiction, albeit with a strong mythical Arthurian element). II suppose this book could fit into the recent "romantasy" craze (except it's more science fiction, albeit with a strong mythical Arthurian element). It has a bit of a young-adult feel, at least to me--the protagonists are nineteen and twenty, on either side of an apparently unbridgeable divide: noble and commoner, opponents in the fighting ring and enemies in their stratified society, drawn to one another nevertheless. This romance is a slow burn, with no explicit sex scenes a la Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, and is all the more effective for that. Lastly, instead of dragons there are mecha, giant robots the characters use to fight each other. In the case of the titular Heavenbreaker, the robot our protagonist Synali von Hauteclare pilots, it is a little more than just a giant robot: it contains an alien creature from the past that turns the story upside down.
Having said all this, and with the fact that I really liked the book once the pieces started coming together and the plot picked up, the science is pretty wonky. You can't think about it too much. The setting is about 1400 years in the future, after a war with a Lovecraftian tentacled hivemind creature that humanity lost. Earth has been destroyed, and humanity's remnants live in giant space stations that have been flung across the galaxy by the enemy, err, somehow. (If the enemy is supposed to have psychic teleportation powers, why didn't they just fling the Station that Synali lives on into the gas giant Esther and let the planet's pressure crush their enemies out of existence, rather than letting it settle into an apparently stable orbit? This is just one question you can't ask, because then the plot begins to unravel.)
But while this history gradually becomes more important as the story progresses, it's not the major theme of the book: the class differences of the Station, and Synali's quest for revenge following the murder of her mother by her father's noble house, are. Synali is a tightly wound, tormented, traumatized character, who takes her fury and channels it into the Supernova Cup, the ten-year competition she is pushed into entering by the former crown prince, with the stipulation that if she wins, he will bring down the murderous House of Hauteclare and give Synali the rest she longs for. Of course, she then meets a fellow rider, Rax Istra-Velrayd, who makes her think that perhaps she doesn't want to die after she gets her revenge after all.
All this requires a lot of careful setup, with the result that the book doesn't really get going until about halfway through. I was able to stick with it because the characters, especially Synali, Rain the royal assassin, and Synali's opponent and cousin Mirelle are compelling enough to take the reader through the somewhat uneven opening chapters and the hand-waving science. The ending is also a bit of an abrupt cliffhanger, but the endspage promises the story will continue in the next book, Hellrunner.
The book is tightly written and paced, if you can get past the faulty science. I will be picking up the next book....more
This book straddles the divide between science fiction and fantasy: to me, it has strong SF underpinnings (the titular Book Eaters, according to theirThis book straddles the divide between science fiction and fantasy: to me, it has strong SF underpinnings (the titular Book Eaters, according to their own mythology, were genetically engineered to somewhat resemble humans and placed on Earth thousands of years ago to gather information by an alien Collector, who left and has never returned) but a fantasy/horror feel. (Especially since the Book Eaters are a weird zombie/vampire takeoff who consume literal books and magazines with their "book teeth," which enables them to instantaneously learn and store vast amounts of information. In perhaps the ultimate expression of "you are what you eat," when a book eater dies their blood turns to ink and their bodies decay into rotting rolls of paper.)
(This book also has a strong element of macabre humor.)
This is also a bit of a horror story as well, as the book eaters are divided into five authoritarian, patriarchal Families. Our protagonist, Devon Fairweather, is one of a dwindling number of female book eaters, and she is forced to marry and bear children for different people. The species as a whole is in decline, as there are very few "mother-brides" left and a book eater woman can only bear two children, rarely three, before they go into premature menopause. The book eaters realize they are headed for extinction and are attempting to repurpose human IVF technology for themselves, but in the meantime this (barbaric) breeding program is enforced by the families and a faction called "knights" that arrange the marriage and police book eater women. There is also a third kind of book eater, a "mind eater," who are born with long proboscis tongues that can be inserted into a victim's ear canal and suck out part of their brains (which is why this is something of a zombie story). Devon's second child, her son Cai, is a mind eater. The main storyline follows Devon and Cai and their attempts to escape from the Families and get Cai a supply of Redemption, the Family-manufactured drug that controls his cravings. Unfortunately the only Family making the drug, Ravenscar, has fractured due to a civil war and has fled to an undisclosed place that Devon has to find before Cai starves.
This is pretty detailed worldbuilding and a convoluted plot, but the heart of the story is love, motherhood and the monsters both can turn us into, as the book explores the depths of what a mother will do for her child. For Cai to survive, Devon has to hunt down humans and feed to him, and she picks those on the fringes of human society: the elderly, the homeless. When Cai feeds, he absorbs the minds of the humans he feeds on, and as a result he is a combination of many different people: is there anything of Cai left? Yet sometimes the vulnerable five-year-old who needs his mother peeks through.
As a matter of fact, as far as monsters go, pretty much every character in this story is a monster: the book eaters view themselves as a superior species and humans are pretty much the vermin under their feet, and the heads of the Families are even more entitled and arrogant than that. (As evidenced by the fact that they consign their women to what amounts to reproductive slavery. I've read a few of those kinds of stories, and for once I would like to see someone say, "Fuck you, if I don't have kids and the species dies out, so be it. If forced breeding is what it takes for us to survive, we don't deserve to.") That doesn't make them less compelling: the reader comes to empathize with Devon and Cai, even acknowledging the terrible things they do to survive and stay together. It takes a good writer to make us care about characters like that.
This story is pretty much wrapped up, but there is room for a sequel, as Devon also has a daughter, older than Cai, that she needs to rescue before the girl grows up and is forced into the cycle of marriage. I would read such a book myself, but all told this is a pretty harrowing, gruesome world. Still, the characters, as horrible as they can be, carry the story....more
I own all of this comic's volumes (like many people, I prefer to buy the paperback collections), but while I still like this series, I must admit it iI own all of this comic's volumes (like many people, I prefer to buy the paperback collections), but while I still like this series, I must admit it is getting more convoluted and harder to follow. This collection in particular tips a bit into batshit-crazy territory, as we spend nearly all of our time in a sort-of dreamscape and sort-of alternate world portal. Among other things, we find out (if I'm interpreting what I read correctly) that Maika Halfwolf, our protagonist and titular "monstress," is some sort of forbidden maybe-offspring of Zinn, the Lovecraftian monster/old god she carries around inside of her? (See, I told you it's getting more convoluted by the minute.) Maika also spends all of her time in this dreamscape as a disembodied head attached to one of Zinn's tentacles, while the ghost of her younger, more innocent and less ruthless and cynical self runs around trying to free the Maika-head, Ren, Kippa and Zinn.
Sana Takeda's art is as lush and gorgeous as usual, but I noticed an unfortunate trend in this volume that I've seen before: she tends to use the same face shapes and features both for the human characters and the nonhuman many-eyed monsters, and as a result it is sometimes really hard to distinguish between the characters. That is exacerbated in this book, and it makes for a more confusing story. Which is too bad, as this is a complex world and well-drawn characters. Unfortunately, this is not one of the better volumes in the series. Hopefully next time around that will change. ...more
This is the second novella in the Sworn Soldier series, following the adventures of Alex Easton, a retired soldier of the fictional country of GallaciThis is the second novella in the Sworn Soldier series, following the adventures of Alex Easton, a retired soldier of the fictional country of Gallacia in the late 19th century. The previous book, What Moves the Dead, was one of the best books I read a couple of years ago, a takeoff of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." This story features the return of Alex Easton, their traveling companion Angus and the fungal expert/Angus's girlfriend Eugenia Potter, and introduces some delightful new characters, including the grumpy Widow Botezatu and her grandson Bors.
This story is a little longer than the previous one, and veers more towards the supernatural instead of the previous story's SF bent. In this case, the monster is the "moroi," a ghost that comes in the night, sits on your chest, and sucks your breath. The moroi killed the caretaker of Alex's Gallacian lodgehouse, Codrin, and threatens Alex and their friends. Alex throws down against the moroi at the climax, in an extended dream sequence that also weaves in the primary theme of the story: Alex's PTSD (here called "soldier's heart") and how they deal with it.
This backstory of Alex's war experiences was mentioned in the first book, but really brought to the fore here. The characters and their relationships also are more of a driver in this book than the plot. Since we're visiting Alex's home country for the first time, the author provides plenty of vivid descriptions throughout:
Autumn was nearly spent, which meant that many of the trees had lost their leaves. You might think that would mean that the woods had opened up, but if you think that, you have likely never been to Gallacia. Serrated ranks of pine lined the road, with the bare branches of oaks thrusting out between them like arthritic fingers. The sky was the color of a lead slug and seemed barely higher than the trees themselves. Combined with the wagon ruts that left a ridge down the center of the road, I had the unpleasant feeling that I was riding straight down a giant throat.
Alex Easton's droll, relatable voice definitely carries the reader along in this book, along with a wry, matter-of-fact sense of humor that had me laughing out loud at several points:
it probably helped that Miss Potter did not demand English cooking and ate heartily of all the Widow's dishes, passing praise via Angus or myself. The quality of our food improved markedly. It hadn't been bad before, but it had been fairly monotonous. Now we only had paprika sausage for every third meal. (We stole that from the Hungarians, bask when we tried to fight them and they beat us sensless. This is how Gallacia acquired most of its cuisine. The Widow made excellent paprika sausage, but one's bowels do require a few hours to recover now and again.)
We find out a good deal more about Gallacia and its culture along the way. I don't think this book is quite as good, or as frightening, as What Moves the Dead (that book was enough to give anyone nightmares and look askance at mushrooms for a good long while). But the characters are appealing enough to make up for it....more
This book was difficult to read--but it is so, so good. It's the first time I've picked up a Tananarive Due novel, but it won't be the last.
This is tThis book was difficult to read--but it is so, so good. It's the first time I've picked up a Tananarive Due novel, but it won't be the last.
This is the story of Robert Stephens Jr., a twelve-year-old African American boy in the fictional Florida town of Gracetown in 1950, who defends his sister Gloria against a white boy making unwanted advances and as a result is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys, the titular Reformatory. The book goes into the horrors Robert suffers there and the background of the Reformatory is gradually revealed. There Robert sees the ghosts, or "haints," of boys who died thirty years ago as a result of a fire set by the sociopathic superintendent, Fenton Haddock. The horrors continue throughout the book: the dehumanization and persecution of African Americans in the Jim Crow South is accurately and fully depicted here, and the horrors inflicted on Robbie and the other boys by white people far outweigh the supernatural horrors.
There are two storylines in this book: Robbie's ordeal at the Reformatory, and the parallel efforts of his sister Gloria to get him out. Gloria and Robbie's mother died before the story starts, and their union-organizing father was falsely accused of the rape of a white woman and had to flee to Chicago. Gloria is left to try to rescue her brother on her own, but she is aided by many other people: her godmother Miz Lottie and Lottie's adopted sons; Marian Hamilton, a volunteer at the Reformatory who meets Robbie and his doomed friend, Redbone, while volunteering to teach the Negro band at the school; John Dorsey, the lawyer based on the author's own father, a Civil Rights-era lawyer, and others. All these characters are fully drawn, complex people. Even the "haint," Blue, who manipulates Robbie into freeing the ghosts of the boys who died thirty years ago and luring Haddock to his death, has depth and nuance despite his alien, undead way of thinking. The pacing is expert and the final chapters, tracing Robbie's escape, his pursuit by Haddock and the Reformatory's dogs, and his final confrontation with Haddock, are almost unbearable in their tension and suspense.
Apparently the Reformatory is based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys, where another Robert Stephens, the author's relative, was killed in the 1930's. Due has taken her family history and spun it into an at times incredibly hard to read but important novel. This book provides a stark lesson that as a country we haven't left Jim Crow as far behind us as we like to think. The scene where Gloria and Miz Lottie are pulled over by the sheriff, the questioning they have to endure and the suspicion immediately cast upon them by the white deputies for merely being black women driving a car, could be played out in any number of similar traffic stops today.
This is a horror novel, yes, but it is also a thoroughly American novel, to our shame. Hopefully by casting some light on these terrible things of our past (and present), the author can nudge America, and particularly the white population of America, to acknowledge a past that is still not past, a past we must come to terms with. We owe it to the memory of the real-life Robert Stephens to try....more
I generally like John Joseph Adams' editing work (he's also listed as an editor for this book, in tiny print under Jordan Peele's name), but this anthI generally like John Joseph Adams' editing work (he's also listed as an editor for this book, in tiny print under Jordan Peele's name), but this anthology is rather uneven. I understand that the intent was not only to present horror stories, but as the title says: Black horror stories, which may focus on a version of horror (i.e. the fallout of slavery and this country's ongoing racism and white supremacy) that is different than the usual. I have no quibble with that, and indeed, that is a major reason I wanted to read this. Unfortunately, many of the stories with these themes are just so-so. A couple of them are downright depressing, ending with death, destruction, and no hope. Which is to be expected in a horror anthology, but it doesn't make those particular stories any more pleasant to read.
However, there is one story--the very last one in the anthology--which is worth the price of admission all by itself. This is "Origin Story," by Tochi Onyebuchi. This story will hit you like a gut punch. It's written as a short play (and I would love to see it staged as such) with four speaking characters, White Boys #1-4, going through a whole litany of appalling white entitlement and the raw emotions accompanying it. It's scary and disgusting and so, so applicable to the USA, especially giving this country's growing racism and anti-semitism. This story will go on my list of the best stories of the year.
Otherwise, I think this anthology is worth reading just to get the perspectives of many of today's Black speculative fiction writers. But do not miss "Origin Story."...more
This medical horror/ghost story covers a period in British history (the Victorian era) that was frankly terrible. There was rampant misogyny, sexism, This medical horror/ghost story covers a period in British history (the Victorian era) that was frankly terrible. There was rampant misogyny, sexism, and medical experimentation, according to the foreward/afterward:
The Spirit Bares Its Teeth was inspired by Victorian England's sordid history of labeling certain people "ill" or "other" to justify cruelty against them. Threats of violence enforced strict social norms, often targeting women, queer and disabled people, and other marginalized folks.
While terrible things were done to all kinds of people deemed "unfit" by Victorian society, when it comes to medical experimentation, so much of that pain and hurt was inflicted on racial minorities in particular, and it would be incorrect not to acknowledge that.
This book has a content warning before you start, and it needs one. There is a lot of medical/surgical/supernatural gore in this story, so if you're sensitive to that kind of thing, it's better to skip this book. (This was also the case with the author's previous novel, Hell Followed With Us, but I found both books to be worth reading despite this.)
The protagonist here is Silas/Gloria Bell, the trans son of a family who is trying to marry him off against his will (as was done in those days). This alternate history postulates that sixty years previously, the Veil between the realm of the living and the dead thinned to the point where it could be seen and opened by certain people: men and women born with violet eyes. The Royal Speaker Society has taken control of these people and their powers, and women have been banned from doing spirit-work altogether (as soon as they were found to be superior at the job, a law was passed by Parliament to restrict it to men only). But violet-eyed daughters are highly prized by the Society for breeding further Speakers (yeah, Victorian England was just a nasty-ass place), and as our story opens, Silas is attending his brother's wedding and being informed by his parents that he will soon be engaged as well.
Silas/Gloria is autistic, and this seems to be an accurate and sensitive characterization. He has trouble interacting with people, but has a razor-sharp mind when it comes to solving problems and performing surgery (which he has been teaching himself, dissecting various deceased farm animals; he has also been aided and educated in medicine by his older brother George). (This is also where the content warnings come in, as Silas performs surgeries on various characters, including a Caesarian section/abortion on a young woman who has been raped.) He tries to run away to escape his fate, but is caught and sent to Braxton's Finishing School and Sanitorium, a horrorshow of a place for people like him deemed "Veil-sick" (actually, anybody rebelling against the suffocating societal norms and the Royal Speaker Society's rules). There he will be "cured" and trained to be an obedient wife.
The mystery and horror of the plot is what is happening at Braxton's to people like Silas. He meets the person his parents were trying to force him to marry, only to discover this person is trans like himself; her name is Daphne. They end up falling for each other. This relationship feels really sudden and a bit forced, which is the only nitpick I have about the book; but at the same time, I can understand Silas's surprise and elation and finding someone like him. There are also scenes of physical torture (strangling) at the hands of the Braxton Headmaster, who is trying to force Silas's masculinity out of him.
The last third of the book gets more into the horror/ghost story, but the real horror lies in the misogynist and repressive people around Silas. He and Daphne do manage to make their escape, however, and bring down the Braxton school and its terrible Headmaster. This is a harrowing story in spots, but it speaks to people learning to accept who they are and fighting for their right to exist as themselves. That is a universal theme, and unfortunately it is even more applicable to the world today....more
I've long been a fan of Alix E. Harrow, but this book elevates her to a whole new level. It is her unique twist on a Southern gothic haunted-house ghoI've long been a fan of Alix E. Harrow, but this book elevates her to a whole new level. It is her unique twist on a Southern gothic haunted-house ghost story. It is also, as is a running theme with her work, a treatise on the power of stories, with nested layers of stories within stories, emerging from generations in the past; and how we use our personal stories to make our own hell, which can spill out and affect everyone around us. It is about otherworldly monsters and human monsters, and how they each feed upon and arise from the other. Finally, it is about the families we find and the homes we make, and how to throw off our previous guilt and despair and live to fight another day, no matter how the world around us seeks to crush us.
And it's all wrapped up in some of the most beautiful, evocative prose you will ever have the pleasure of reading. One random example:
(describing the titular Starling House, p. 21)
The windows are filmy eyes above rotten sills. Empty nests sag from the eaves. The foundation is cracked and slanted, as if the entire thing is sliding into the open mouth of the earth. The stone walls are covered with the bare, twisting tendons of some creeping vine--honeysuckle, I figure, which is only ever a show tune away from gaining sentience and demanding to be fed. The only sign that anyone lives inside is the slow bleed of woodsmoke from a leaning chimney.
Towards the end of the book, as Opal describes how Eden has always rejected her (p. 281):
And I do know. I know what it is for your own people to turn their backs on you as easily as turning a page. I know all about cold shoulders and sideways looks, about being the only girl in sixth grade who didn't get a birthday invitation. I know the way people talk loud and slow to my brother, as if he might not speak English, the way they watch him in grocery stores even though everybody knows I'm the thief. Now I know about my mother, who was cast out for the ordinary sin of sex, and the far greater sin of refusing to be sorry about it.
Our first of two protagonists, narrating the first-person sections of the story (the other, Arthur Starling, has a third-person narrative) is Opal McCoy (although as she discovers, that isn't her real name), a white-trash daughter of the town of Eden, Kentucky. Opal's mother was killed in a car accident eleven years ago--she drove her red Corvette into the river with Opal aboard, and Opal does not remember how she got out. Ever since, she has been living on the fringe, lying, stealing and scheming to send her younger brother, Jasper, to a boarding school away from Eden. One night after work she walks home past Starling House, the hulking mansion on the edge of Eden that figures prominently in the town's history and myth. Long ago a mysterious young girl, Eleanor Starling, married into Eden's ruling coal family, the Gravelys, and all three brothers eventually died under mysterious circumstances. Eleanor built Starling House years later and wrote a children's book, The Underland, which tells a ghost story of demons in another world. And then she disappears, but the demons, called Beasts, are still there, coming out of Starling House on foggy nights. To contain them, the House draws Wardens to itself, and teaches them to fight. Arthur Starling, the other protagonist, is the current Warden, and he swears he will be the last.
That fateful night Opal is drawn to Starling House after dreaming about it for years, and even though Arthur comes to meet her at the gate and tells her to run, she returns. Arthur, burdened by years of guilt and loneliness, offers Opal the job of cleaning it, and since Opal needs more money to secure Jasper's tuition at the boarding school away from Eden, she accepts. Over the next several months she cleans Starling House from top to bottom, and slowly discovers its and Arthur's secrets. But since all of these characters' stories (and Starling House is definitely another character, sentient and quirky) interact with and feed upon one another, Opal has unwittingly been working for the man who let one of his Beasts slip past him one night....the same night Opal's mother died. Opal's and Arthur's slow-burn romance is cut short, and Arthur, driven by his guilt, will do anything to get Opal and her brother away from him and away from Eden, including granting the mineral rights to the property to the current generation of Gravelys, who want to reactivate the coal mines.
The climax ramps up to the ghostly demons being set free, and both Arthur and Opal descending into the Underland to stop them. There the final story of Eleanor Starling is revealed, along with the true origin of the Underland. Opal takes the Underland as her own and puts Eleanor to rest, and frees Arthur of his terrible obligation.
This is a wonderfully dense and layered story, and I think it would reward multiple readings. There are so many facets to the themes and plot, and the characters are real people, fallible and flawed and struggling. There are also several footnotes as the story goes along, and you realize that even though Opal is telling this story, someone else is writing it--and it isn't until the final pages that you find out who that is.
I think this book is fantastic. I've loved everything the author has written so far, but this is her best yet, and the best book I've read this year....more
Chuck Tingle (he's also on Bluesky, but I don't think non-invitees can see their threads yet) is the author of many self-published "Tinglers," which aChuck Tingle (he's also on Bluesky, but I don't think non-invitees can see their threads yet) is the author of many self-published "Tinglers," which are (mostly) gay erotica intertwined with social commentary. This is his first traditionally published book, and while it has a few problems common to new authors, it's certainly worth reading.
This is the story of Rose Darling, a young queer autistic woman raised in a Christian fundamentalist cult, the Kingdom of the Pine. Over the course of the story, she discovers she was sent to the titular Camp Damascus, where she was subject to "conversion therapy" to attempt to eradicate her love for Willow, another young woman in their small Montana town. Only thing is, this camp, as part of its "therapy," tethers LGBTQ people to literal demons to "cure" their same-sex attraction. (Which doesn't work, of course--Rose and Willow still love each other, even when Rose can't remember who Willow is.) The "demons" are just one of the interesting aspects of this story--they're not supernatural but rather beings from another dimension who are sometimes flesh and blood and who are vulnerable to fire. This plays into the climax when Rose, Willow and their friend Saul burn down Camp Damascus and free the surviving demons, who take an appropriate revenge on the church elders who have enslaved them to use in their bogus "therapy."
Chuck Tingle is also autistic, and Rose's characterization rings true: the rhythmic movements she makes with her fingers to calm herself down and focus, the notecards she prepares with conversation topics, the curious hyper-rational way her mind works. She undergoes a convincing character arc in this story, rediscovering her sexuality and her love for Willow and discarding the cult but not her faith. The broader themes of this book are love and acceptance and sticking to who you truly are, and laying bare the horrors of weaponized religion.
The book is fairly short (only 246 pages) and the pacing is a bit uneven. Also, the ending is abrupt. I wish the author had spent a little more time on that. Still, this is a promising debut, and I'm happy to see it seems to be finding its audience....more
I know "split personality" isn't really a thing for people, but such an appellation definitely applies to this book. It owes a heavy debt to Alien, ofI know "split personality" isn't really a thing for people, but such an appellation definitely applies to this book. It owes a heavy debt to Alien, of course; it could easily be described as "Xenomorphs aboard a generation ship." Said generation ship--or ships--there's an entire fleet returning from a failed colony on Proxima B, trying to limp their way back to Earth--is infected by native Proxima life, which could be described as Xenomorphs with crab claws and shells who like to snack on human organs. They can also hibernate for decades, and do just that, in the generation ships' food storage silos. When they finally awaken, they promptly start running amuck and killing people, until the brave first mate of the Calypso, Jacklyn Albright, manages to take them down.
Just writing it out like that makes it sound rather cliched and derivative, doesn't it? It really isn't. This is a novella, which is a perfect length for the story; stretch it out to a novel, and I don't think it would have worked. But the novella format provides just enough room to establish the characters and atmosphere--the Calypso and the other ships of the returning flotilla have many more problems than the aliens, at first: their ships are breaking down, the math of interstellar travel isn't working, Jacklyn doesn't think her ship and its six thousand inhabitants will survive the return trip to Earth, and there is growing unrest and rebellion onboard the Calypso. The ship has been subject to what is called "engagements," which is attacks from invisible outside enemies that breach the hull and shear off parts of the vessel, all of which is taking place before the Centauri, as the aliens come to be known, awaken and go on the prowl.
When this happens, the plot shifts into high gear, and the pacing becomes relentless. Jacklyn is as much of a badass as Ripley, and fights the Xeno-crabs to a standstill, finally putting on a suit, deliberately breaching the hull, and ejecting them into space. If the book had only ended there, even though we wouldn't have known if the flotilla made it back to Earth, the story would have been well served. But this, unfortunately, is where the split-personality part comes in. The other part of the plot, the part hinted at by the "engagements," as well as the strange android Watson who seems to have some link with whatever is causing them, comes to the fore after the elimination of the aliens...and proves to be a wholly unnecessary, mystical dea ex machina that damn near had me throwing the book against the wall. It also all but ruined the suspenseful rocket ride that had come before.
On one level, I get it. The author had pretty much written themself into a corner by making the situation so bleak to begin with (Jacklyn's last desperate order to get the ship away from the Centauri led to them draining all their power and becoming adrift). But for crying out loud, don't resort to some quasi-magical solution out of left field to rescue your characters. This made the ending deeply unsatisfying, at least for me. Which is a shame, as the most of the book showed a good grasp of atmosphere, pacing and character. This is the author's debut, so I can grant them some leeway, but this will have the unfortunate effect of me approaching any further books with more than a little skepticism....more
This author seems to be making a career out of sci-fi horror, and a successful one: this book, her second, is more assured than her first. The back coThis author seems to be making a career out of sci-fi horror, and a successful one: this book, her second, is more assured than her first. The back cover blurbs also compare this book to the classic sf/horror movie Alien, although that's not entirely accurate--there are no Xenomorphs to be found here. But there is a mystery and the slow reveal of alien possession, and the dawning horror of being taken over by a mysterious outside entity.
As in the author's first book, the protagonist Ophelia Bray is a troubled woman with a traumatic past of her own. She is the daughter of one of the richest families on Earth, and she is also the daughter of Field "Bloody" Bledsoe, who succumbed to ERS--Eckhart-Reiser syndrome--and killed twenty-nine people about twenty years before. Ophelia, then known as Lark Bledsoe, was present during the massacre and needless to say has been haunted by it ever since. She is now a psychologist studying the syndrome and trying to come up with ways to cure it, and as the book opens she is preparing to go into cold sleep for a three-month interstellar journey to join the Reclamation and Exploration team of the ship Resilience. They are on their way to an abandoned planet where an ancient alien city has been discovered, and Ophelia is taking new equipment provided by her employer, the Montrose corporation, to see if ERS can be prevented.
But the R & E team don't want Ophelia there, and she has a difficult time settling in with them on the planet. Then comes the slow reveal of things starting to go wrong, and the rising horror of the ruins infecting all the team members and taking them over. One of the most effective things about this is that the cause of the possession is not defined--is it the two black alien towers on the planet, some sort of sentient nanotechnology that killed the original inhabitants thousands of years ago, an alien organism that manifests itself as black sludge oozing out of noses and ears, or something else altogether? It doesn't really matter, because after all the pieces are set in place this becomes a tightly written struggle for survival, as the surviving team members race to get off-planet before they are completely taken over and no longer in control of their own bodies.
Along the way Ophelia undergoes a nice character arc: she is riddled with survivors' guilt and self-hatred for being the daughter of "Bloody" Bledsoe, and she has to learn to let that go and recognize she is neither responsible for the past sins of her father or the current sins of her mother's family. There is a hint of romance between Ophelia and Ethan Severin, the commander of the expedition, but for the most part the focus is firmly on the horror of the situation and the fight to survive. After reading the author's first book, I can see how she has improved as a writer: this effort is more mature, with better pacing, worldbuilding and characterization, and simply a better story. This book is well worth your time....more
The subgenre of fairy tale retellings/sequels is neither common nor easy to do. You have to be familiar with the previous stories and their various inThe subgenre of fairy tale retellings/sequels is neither common nor easy to do. You have to be familiar with the previous stories and their various incarnations throughout history, and whether the original tellings were bloodier than the current ones, which is often the case. Finally, the author has to know if (as is also often the case) the original stories have been Disney-fied beyond recognition.
All of which is to say that this novella, a sequel to The Little Mermaid, is a continuation of that story that is beautifully written--and definitely drawing from the older, darker, bloodier tradition--with prose keen enough to make just about any writer sigh with envy. Just picking a random page and paragraph from the book:
A lie if there ever was one. But even if I had a voice with which to correct my companion, I would have said nothing. I bite down on my smile instead, straightening, aware of how I must look: transparent hair, translucent skin, lips red as arteries. Iridescent eyes, stained-glass oceans, so large that they are nearly alien, their breadth magnified by thick, sweeping lashes. With every hour that passes, every morsel of flesh to worm down my throat, I become closer to what I was, what I am: an inhuman thing wrenched from the maw of the sea.
This gorgeous prose extends throughout the entire book, and is worth reading slowly just to savor. But this being the aftermath of a Little Mermaid tale that does not end at all happily for the prince (the original short story from which this apparently sprang is reprinted at the end of the book, and The Salt Grows Heavy begins immediately afterward), the mermaid and her companion, the equally nameless Plague Doctor from the original story, leave her husband's ravaged kingdom to have an adventure of their own. This is a coming-of-age story, of sorts; an adventure, of sorts; and a love story, of sorts. It is also extremely gory, with loving details of skin, blood, intestines, viscera and such, so if you have an aversion to that, you absolutely should not read this. The lovely writing and well-drawn characters were worth it to me. It also doesn't outstay its welcome: the novella length was just right for this tale. This is one of the best things I have read so far this year....more
This is kind of an odd book, a genre mashup of westerns, fantasy, and horror. I thought it started out promisingly, with a tight third person focus onThis is kind of an odd book, a genre mashup of westerns, fantasy, and horror. I thought it started out promisingly, with a tight third person focus on the protagonist: one Adelaide Henry, a Black woman who flees California after the mysterious deaths of her parents. Adelaide is trying to make it to Big Sandy, Montana, where she has applied to homestead 320 acres. (According to the author's afterword, this is a factual thing which was available in Montana in the time period of this book--1915--and open to Black people and single women.) The opening chapters establish the setting, the protagonist, and most importantly the mystery: Adelaide is carting an extremely heavy steamer trunk across the country with her, a trunk which must never be opened....or people will die.
All well and good, and the mystery is in fact the best thing about this book with its slow, creepy unfolding--until about halfway through when the trunk bursts open and we get a glimpse of what is inside. (The descriptions of the occupant are deliberately vague--I thought at first it was a vampire, but it turns out to be something entirely different at the end.) This complicates matters for Adelaide and sets up the final showdown between her, the monster, and the townspeople.
Unfortunately, after that the focus widens, and several other point of view characters are brought in. Some of them, frankly, I didn't care for too much. I wanted to go back to Adelaide. This made the middle of the story a bit of a muddle, until the rather bloody climax. I suppose the purpose of this was to show more of the townspeople and their entitlement and hubris, but if so, that idea wasn't very well executed. The ending was better, as Adelaide and the survivors settle into another town all their own and seem to be thriving.
So there was a lot to like about this book, but it wasn't tightly focused enough for this reader. It's certainly an interesting period of history, however, and it was worth exploring....more
This is the final book in the Outside trilogy, wrapping up a tale of quantum supercomputers ascended to Godhood to rule over humanity, and a group of This is the final book in the Outside trilogy, wrapping up a tale of quantum supercomputers ascended to Godhood to rule over humanity, and a group of revolutionaries on a breakaway planet who wish to overthrow them. Central to the narrative is Yasira Shien, who was on the autism spectrum and as a result of mindlinking with the extradimensional-Lovecraftian-cosmic horror realm of the Outside in the last book, has now developed into a "plural," bearing many personalities in one body. Yasira, with her plurality and the mind which now hosts Outside energy, turns out to be the one thing that can defeat the Gods, and her choice to sacrifice herself to save humanity is the central plot point and decision of the book.
"If it was anyone else that's what would happen," said Yasira. There was a burning clarity in that gaze, something that unnerved Tiv. "With me, she'll try. But we all know I'm not like the rest of you anymore. My soul is half-broken. No, I know you don't like words like 'broken,' Tiv, but that's what happened. I cracked into pieces and what fills me in between the pieces is Outside. I'm the closest thing we have to Outside itself walking the earth in human form. Even closer than Ev or the gone people. And the Gods can't see Outside. Do you understand? It doesn't function according to rules they can process. Say I die. Say Nemesis tries to eat me up. That means sooner or later She takes my soul into Hers, into the very center of what makes Her a sentient being. She takes Outside inside her. She won't be able to help it. And Outside will fucking rip her apart."
This entire scenario rests on the fact that in this future, scientists has been able to confirm the existence of souls, and said soul-energy is used to power the quantum supercomputers that turn themselves into Gods. At first, Nemesis and her sisters only take terminally ill volunteers, but as their power and hubris grows, they take over the planet and mandate that every human gives up their soul at the point of death. This allows them to set up the world of the trilogy, with Nemesis and the other supercomputers the tyrannical Gods who are ruling over humanity only for their own good, really.
This is a complex book, as it has to wrap up the many plot and character threads of the previous books in the trilogy. The many multiple POVs of the previous book carry over into this one, with is the one minor ding I have against it--I wish the author had focused more on Yasira and her lover Tiv. There's also a bit of metaphysical handwaving at the end, as Yasira ascends to a Godhood of her own to defeat Nemesis and the others, somehow ending up existing in the Outside. Your mileage may vary on that, but the author thankfully doesn't dwell on it too much. These minor nitpicks aside, this is a satisfying ending to a trilogy that is one of the most inventive and absorbing in the past few years. All three books are well worth your time....more
This is one weird book. The closest analogue to it I've read is Seanan McGuire's Parasitology trilogy, but that is a much more straightforward near-fuThis is one weird book. The closest analogue to it I've read is Seanan McGuire's Parasitology trilogy, but that is a much more straightforward near-future science fiction thriller. In this one, the worldbuilding is all over the place, and precious little of it is explained. I have the impression we're centuries, perhaps millenia, in the future, after a climate collapse and near-extinction, and humanity is just again beginning to pull itself out of the mud and rebuild a technological civilization. There is old, rusting and forgotten tech everywhere, and satellites falling from orbit are depicted in stories as "dog's noses" dropping from the sky. Or I think that's what happening, at least. Nearly everything about what worldbuilding exists is ambiguous, and the reader has to put their own interpretation on it.
What doesn't have to be interpreted is the central conflict. The first-person narrator, a nameless (at first) doctor from the Institute in the central city of Inultus, is riding a train north to investigate the death of its predecessor. Only, as we come to find out (and also why I used the pronoun "its") this physician is not a singular individual. It is a sapient parasite that has invaded and occupied the host bodies of all the remaining doctors in this post-apocalyptic society, and at least at the beginning of the book, it looks out through myriad eyes and speaks with multiple mouths. When the doctor autopsies its previous host, it pulls a wriggling black worm out of the dead host's eye socket, a competing parasite it names Pseudomycota...and the hunt begins.
Since this book has heavy gothic elements, the brooding and decaying chateau where this all takes place becomes a character of its own, and the inhabitants therein are a dysfunctional, horrifying "family" that comes apart at the seams as the story progresses. The baron who is running the place seems to be a cyborg (as do a couple of the other characters--in fact, the doctor brought with it some tubing to place in one character's artificial heart? but in this, as so many other elements, the worldbuilding is vague and frustrating), his son and heir Didier has a heavily pregnant wife who keeps miscarrying mutant babies in the attempt to produce a son, as her only surviving offspring are twin girls who seem to be attempting to become conjoined. Didier himself is revealed to be a thoroughly nasty person, as he is repeatedly raping his servant Emile because Emile looks like his lost love.
And that's just the horror inside the chateau. Outside, as the doctor goes looking for the source of Pseudomycota, the doctor and Emile descend into the depths of the "wheatrock" mine (a major plot point that is never fully explained; you can eat the stuff and also somehow use it to grow crops, and it's hinted that it might have an extraterrestial origin). They track it to the source and the full body of the creature is revealed, as it comes wriggling out of the dark with its goopy, many-segmented arms. (Cthulhu would be proud.) The doctor tries to reach out to its fellow hosts in Inultus, but at this point in the story the doctor is severed from its own parasitical overmind and is imprisoned in its host, all alone. For a while the doctor thinks help is coming from the Institute, but winter is settling in, such a winter as will bury the stone spire of the chateau in snow clear to the second-story balcony, and all the characters, including Pseudomycota, are trapped inside to fight it out.
If you like worldbuilding that makes sense, as I do, you won't find it here. But as I continued, it became clear that worldbuilding was not the author's primary concern. Once the doctor has become a singular person again, the story focuses on themes of identity, personality, and memory, and the person the doctor previously was begins to emerge, along with traces of her past. (Yes, this host is female, and at the end we learn her name: Simone.) Eventually, after discovering she has inadvertently infected everyone in the chateau and the surrounding town with the spores of Pseudomycota (including herself, but her Institute organism fought the invader to a standstill, localizing it in one eye, which is removed, and Emile is somehow immune to both parasites), Emile and Simone burn the chateau to the ground and escape. They catch one of the spring trains to ride south, back to Simone's community of origin.
There is a lot of body horror in this book--black ooze coming out of people's orifices, bodies being cut open and organs removed--so if that's something you can't handle, you'd best not start this. I considered stopping a couple of times because the worldbuilding is so vague and unsatisfactory, but the story, and especially Simone's rediscovery of herself, drew me on. (That, and the fact that Emile gets a most satisfying revenge on everybody who did him wrong.) It's not quite in the train-wreck category, but I definitely couldn't look away from it. It's an unsettling, disturbing read, and one of the more unique stories you'll come across....more
The blurbs on this book's covers tout it as a "haunted house ghost story in space" and liken it to the classic sci-fi/horror movie Alien. Both those aThe blurbs on this book's covers tout it as a "haunted house ghost story in space" and liken it to the classic sci-fi/horror movie Alien. Both those are true.....to an extent. The ultimate reveal of what is going on ends up not being either one, but for most of the way through, the spooky atmosphere, creeping sense of dread and rising tension definitely fits both categories.
What sets this book apart, I think, is the main character, Claire Kovalik. As the story starts, Claire and her four-person crew are in the midst of servicing the commweb, the network of beacons that boosts intrasystem communications. After two years of maintenance on the furthest-out commweb sector, Claire and her crew are coming to the end of their tour. But for Claire, it will be her final tour ever, as maintenance robots from her corporate employer, Verux, will now take over her position, and she will be confined to a desk-jockey job on Earth. It's a thought she can hardly stand, as she does not like being on a planet and around people. This is due to her complicated backstory: as a child, a plague ripped through the Mars hab where Claire and her mother were living and killed everyone except Claire. She had to spend a month alone with decaying bodies before she was rescued. This gave her severe PTSD and made her corporate employer distrust her, to the point where she had to fight to get any off-planet posting at all. She is frantic to remain in space, even to the point of considering suicide as the story opens rather than return to Earth.
But the crew of the LINA abruptly receives a distress call that Claire insists they check out, though a couple of the other crew members are against it. When they arrive at the signal's point of origin, they realize they have stumbled upon a fabulous find: the ship broadcasting the call is the luxury liner Aurora, which vanished with all hands and passengers twenty years before. Claire's crew wants to claim a finder's reward for the vessel, as the shares thereof, even split five ways, would make all of them independently wealthy. Claire agrees, and they park their small ship in the Aurora's cargo bay and board the seemingly lifeless ship, looking for something to bring back to prove that they have indeed found it.
The eerieness starts right away, as Claire sees the ghost of her dead mother in the cargo bay. As they work their way up to the bridge, they find signs that something terrible has happened here: the bottom cabins are barricaded shut, and there are various messages ("I see you," "Leave me alone") scrawled on the walls in what looks like blood. In a skin-crawling reveal about halfway through, the team discovers where the majority of the missing bodies ended up: floating in the ceiling of the ship's atrium, with signs of the passengers turning on and killing one another.
Meanwhile, Claire's crew is also starting to hear and see things that aren't there. This is nothing new for Claire: she has seen ghosts and visions ever since her childhood incident (and as we learn, even before; her mother took the job in the Mars hab because a five-year-old Claire kept saying she was seeing her dead father). The crew becomes increasingly unhinged, and in the last thing Claire remembers before apparently fleeing the ship in a lifepod, one of the crew tries to stop the voices in his head by piercing it with a plasma drill.
This is structured as a told tale for the first half of the book, with Claire recounting what happened to two investigators for the corporation in the Verux Peace and Rehabilitation Tower on Earth. She was brought there after being discovered in the lifepod by a ship seeking out why the LINA missed its scheduled rendezvous. The investigators are convinced Claire killed the other members of the crew, but they also want to use her to recover the Aurora. And so, over Claire's objections, a team is put together to return to the Aurora and bring it, or at least some of the bodies, home.
Things go even further to hell, of course. About two-thirds of the way through the book, we discover what is going on: what happened aboard the Aurora has neither a supernatural or an alien cause, but rather a technological one stemming from the eeeevvillll corporation. In fairness, this has been seeded throughout, with fair clues and red herrings. The last third of the book is a tense race against time for Claire and the final surviving member of her crew, Kane, to escape the Aurora before it is blown up to hide the evidence of the corporation's malfeasance. Claire and Kane manage to do so, and break the story wide open. At the end, Claire has enough money from her finder's fee to buy her own ship and start her own hauling business, and she invites Kane to join her.
Claire has a nice character arc throughout this book as she learns to stop isolating herself and to be vulnerable, to let go. Some readers might find the reveal of what's actually happening to be a bit disappointing. For my part, I was rather relieved to see there were no ghosts or alien monsters (even though there's at least a slight sideways glint towards the supernatural as Claire is still seeing ghosts of her new ship's crew at the end). Sometimes mundane things like greedy corporations are scary enough. But the first part of this book is dripping with atmosphere and rising dread, quite enough to merit the comparisons. The pacing is also very good. All in all, this is a satisfying story and worth the read....more
In the past few years, T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, has released some very good horror novellas. Her book from last year, What Moves the DeadIn the past few years, T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, has released some very good horror novellas. Her book from last year, What Moves the Dead, is a fantastic retelling of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," and you should read it right after you finish this. Apparently her work is selling well enough that according to the acknowledgments, her publisher is asking her for more books, which is nice work if you can get it.
But with books of the quality of this one, I'm not surprised. At 243 pages, this is a little longer than the previous novellas, which is still a pretty lean novel by modern standards. Nevertheless, the author makes good use of the extra page count, with the book's protagonist and voice immediately pulling you in:
There was a vulture on the mailbox of my grandmother's house.
As omens go, it doesn't get much more obvious than that. This was a black vulture, not a turkey vulture, but that's about as much as I could tell you. I have a biology degree, but it's in bugs, not birds. The only reason that I knew that much was because the identification key for vultures in North America is extremely straightforward. Does it have a black head? It's a black vulture. Does it have a red head? It's a turkey vulture. This works unless you're in the Southwest, where you have to add: Is it the size of a small fighter jet? It's a California condor.
This is Samantha Montgomery, an "archaeoentomologist" ("It's fine if you've never heard of me. I study insects in archaeological remains"--which is apparently a real job). She is another one of Kingfisher's patented relatable, practical characters, ordinary people who get thrown into extraordinary circumstances and find out what they're made of. As this is another gothic horror story--and more to the point, a Southern gothic horror story, which is its own peculiar beast--the author takes her time with the setting, characters and atmosphere, doling out the clues and foreshadowing and gradually raising the shivering sense of creeping dread. The vulture is important at the end, as is Sam's grandmother and her grandmother's house. And the roses. OMG, the roses. Those of you who don't like roses, and maybe those of you who do, might consider chopping all your bushes down after reading this.
Following the pattern of previous books, when everything has been set in place and one incident flips the switch of the plot in motion, it hits you like a battering ram. The last quarter of the book is full-on horror, with Sam, her mother, her mother's handyman, and the "old witch" down the street fighting for their lives. It's a breathless gasping roller-coaster ride that I could not put down (while glancing out my own windows to make sure my house had not fallen into a sinkhole). I will buy just about anything Kingfisher/Vernon writes, but this is one of her best....more
This is the third book in the Scholomance series, which is basically Harry Potter's Hogwarts turned inside out and into a horror story. In this one alThis is the third book in the Scholomance series, which is basically Harry Potter's Hogwarts turned inside out and into a horror story. In this one all the cards are laid on the table, all the hints and portents revealed, and we find out who and what Orion Lake is, how the wizard enclaves were founded, and exactly why the extradimensional Scholomance school to protect (however imperfectly) the wizard children was necessary.
It's a lot. But it's also the best book of the series. This is first and foremost due to the fact that the protagonist, Galadriel Higgins, is grown up, knows what she has to do, and will let nothing stop her from doing it. She first sets out to rescue Orion from the monster-filled school before it drops into the void (if you've read the second book, The Last Graduate--and you had better; this one won't make any sense without having read the previous books--you know it ended on a breathtaking and maddening cliffhanger, and this story picks up immediately after). This happens about halfway through, and we still have many more revelations to go. Galadriel, or El, is reunited with her father's family and finds out the secret of her great-grandmother's prophecy, which has hung over her head all her life. She sets out to unravel the wizards' way of making enclaves once she realizes the blood and lives of murdered children it has been built on, and the climax takes place in the broken shell of the Scholomance. El, as the only wizard who can kill the monstrous maw-mouths, has to go up against (of course) Orion Lake, who has some rather horrifying revelations of his own in this story. It's a tense, wonderfully written ending, and I could not put it down.
The themes running through this story include the power of community and found family, as at the end it takes a great many people--friends El has made and accepted into her life--to help her defeat Orion's inner maw-mouth while also sparing his life. Even afterwards, when she still has a lifetime's worth of work ahead of her to restructure the enclave system, there are many others who will come along to assist.
One note on the book's structure. The only knocks I had against the previous two books were the way they were written: many fat paragraphs mostly holding the protagonist's inner monologues. That is still true here to some extent, but in this book we have dialogue! And actual conversations! It made the story much easier to read.
This entire series could be summed up as "HP told from the viewpoint of a dark, angry and immensely powerful Hermione," but it goes to some unexpected places and winds everything up in a most satisfying manner. As far as I'm concerned, it's a keeper....more
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