lightreads

The Fireborne Blade

3/5. Novella about the lady knight (gasp) who sets out to retrieve a mythical sword to reclaim her honor and reputation, also dragons are more terrifying even in death than in life.

A mix of high fantasy and horror, with a bit of a queer love story. This will be totally awesome for certain other people. The horror vibes, in particular, are on point, and there’s all sorts of interesting dragon lore that I’ve never seen done like this. But it’s not to my tastes or interests.

Content notes: Violence, hauntings, horrible ways to die by dragon

Piranesi

4/5. Passages from the journals of Piranesi – except he somehow knows that's not his name – who lives alone in an endless house of halls and statues where the sea sometimes rises from the bottom floor. Alone, that is, except for one Other.

This is not my sort of thing, but managed, through beauty and intricacy and tenderness, to really be my sort of thing. It has some trappings of a horror novel, but is often too busy being about birds to notice. It's also a gothic. And a mystery. It's about ideas draining out of the world, and memory draining out of a person, and the sea rising to fill the spaces left. And it's about living respectfully in an unwelcoming space, and making it welcoming thereby.

A lot of people have called this a pandemic book, as it is in large part about isolation. Others have pointed to Clarke's long chronic illness which keeps her often homebound. I find both these glosses reasonable but shallow as applied to a book this slim and layered and strange and upsetting and beautiful. These ideas – reading in isolation from the world, or writing in isolation from the world – are part of the whole, but only part. Only a few statues in many halls of strange and inexplicable pieces of art, to use the book's own landscape.

Content notes: Gaslighting, references to violence and murder.

Cuckoo Song

4/5. 1922. The thirteen-year-old daughter of wealthy parents wakes up after a near-drowning. With gaps in her memory; and a bottomless, terrifying hunger; and hair that turns into leaves overnight; and dolls that try to flee her; and a sister who calls her a "thing" and hates her guts.

I talk about what I'm reading a lot with my nearest and dearest. Seriously, my poor wife gets the disorganized and incoherent thought soup that I yank these reviews out of. You know, my sparklingly coherent and organized reviews. You know.

But anyway, I keep saying "Frances Hardinge" to people, and they keep saying "Who?" And that. I do not understand that.

So hear ye, hear ye.

Frances Hardinge. Frances motherfucking Hardinge.

She writes young adult…ish. Fantasy….ish. Her brain is a magical tree that bears strange fruit, and I want to eat every single one, even when I know there are teeth on the inside. And people do not know who she is, which is incomprehensible to me, because she's written more than a half dozen books by now, and they only get better.

As a first Hardinge, I recommend Fly By Night, which beings with our young lady protagonist starting a fire and gets more madcap and wonderful from there, or Gullstruck Island which is the best young adult about colonialism I have ever read. Both of those books will give you a sense for Hardinge's powers, the way she yanks stories off their tracks and drops them into new ones, and where she puts the bite (spoiler: everywhere), and how no one can stop her writing amazing young women relating complexly to each other.

This one is kinda advanced level Hardinge. The first quarter is a slow motion, claustrophobic interpersonal car accident, and it kind of fucked me up. And then the accident happens, and the book leaps right off the road, and we have sisters, and jazz, and spells to trap the dead, and magic by architecture, and a motorcycle with a sidecar, and a woman chased by perpetual winter, and other kinds of sisters. It's a wonderfully prickly, complicated book that made me brace, on every page, for pain. And then surprised me, at the end, with a drop of mercy. Not her most accomplished, on a technical level, but there is something . . . unrestrained about the horror at the center of this book that really got to me.

Frances Hardinge, you guys.

A Stir of Bones by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Thirteen-year-old Susan slips out from under the thumb of her abusive father through friends and communing with a haunted house. Slight, strange, more horror than fantasy. By which I mean that the supernatural elements feel as though they are . . . extensions? Reflections? Of-a-piece? . . . nearly inextricable from the story of internal psychological strife – the fear and depression and self-destruction. Rather than being moving elements for their own sake. Quibble with my definition, whatever, I'll just change it again in a few months anyway.

Put it this way -- a central character is the ghost of a boy who suicided many years ago, and they find his skeleton in a closet. It's that kind of book.

Two anti-climactic to really get me. I'm confused about why this, out of all of her catalog, is the only title I can find in audio. I'm not intrigued enough to put myself to the extra brain effort of text-to-speeching a novel of hers. (When you must absorb tens of thousands of words in artificial voices every day in professional settings, the desire to do it for leisure basically vanishes. Which is a shame given only a tiny fraction of a percent of the books in the world are in audio, but part of the problem is I'm usually too tired to care.)




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Dexter By Design by Jeff Lindsay


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
All right, that's more like it. Our favorite vigilante serial killer goes on his honeymoon to Paris, then comes home to a killer with an artistic bent. And we can all basically pretend that book 3 never happened.

Hilarious, as usual, but also disturbing in places, which is all for the best. And we see Dexter responding to some extremely unexpected circumstances in his own Dexterian way, and reflecting a bit on the Harry code and its implications as he trains his stepkids to be good little sociopaths. And there's just a teensy bit of philosophizing by Lindsay on the nature of the stories he's telling as pieces of violent art. At least to the extent possible with Dexter's peculiarly limiting narration. And then a bombshell at the end, which, well. Heh.

All in all exactly what I wanted – forward-moving, absurdly funny, keeping hold of what makes it good while changing things up in interesting ways. And most of all, not stupid.

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A collection from the author of Heart-Shaped Box. Some horror, as you would expect, but also just a lot of fiction with a touch of the supernatural.

Damn but that's a good book. I knew for sure during the opening story, "Best New Horror," in which our narrator is an anthology editor who gives us a one-page synopsis of a novella manuscript he receives, and the compressed summary made me forget where I was. Right on through the weird and metafictional "Pop Art" (bad! Pun! Alert!) and the amazing little vignette "Dead-Wood" and the totally inexplicable but fascinating "My Father's Mask." The closing novella, "Voluntary Committal," about a boy with childhood onset Schizophrenia (or possibly not) who can build things that he shouldn't, gathers up everything good about this book. It's tense, rich storytelling, the sort that makes you feel like you have to figure out how to breathe again when you put it down.

It's not all great. This is a book about fathers and sons, if you know what I mean, and there aren't many well-drawn female characters who aren't also victims. Interestingly, though, what this book does have is a fair share of disabled people – Asperger's, Schizophrenia, learning disabilities. And, wonder of wonders, the disability isn't an outer manifestation of evil.

But yeah. Damn.

Judas Coyne (born Justin Cowzynski) is an aging rock star with a lot of bad memories, a girlfriend thirty years younger than him, and a collection of macabre and disturbing memorabilia. And then he buys a dead man’s suit off an auction site, and the dead man’s ghost with it. And this ghost ain’t nobody’s Casper – he’s a scary mother-fucker with a background in psychological torture, hypnotism, and razor blades.

I don’t generally go rooting around in the horror genre, preferring to stick to recommendations. I mean, if I really want a dose of repulsive people doing horrifying things to each other, I read the newspaper. But I do keep taking recommendations, because when horror is done right, oh yeah will I take that ride. Being horrified and repulsed by a book is not something I enjoy; being horrified and repulsed because it is deeply compelling is the sort of psychological rollercoaster that you just can’t get any other way.

This book does it right. Oh does it ever. It comes down hard as a ton of bricks but with the precision of an expert marksman on some viscerally frightening buttons, and I say this as someone who’s pretty jaded on that front. More importantly for me, though, Jude is a selfish, sometimes violent man, still alive after a lot of hell and honestly miserable that it can make him happy. He’s one of those guys who knows exactly how bad he treats people, and cares a bit, and doesn’t stop. In the hands of a lesser writer he would have been just a cog in the horror machine, and I never would have finished this book. Instead, he is wonderfully complicated, sad, complicit in terrible things, utterly fascinating, ultimately sympathetic. It’s damn impressive character work.

Mostly, it’s that the stellar characters and fast, to-the-face swipes of the plot are backed up with a subtle thematic argument about identity and responsibility and complicity. The book spends three hundred pages telling us that you can’t change it, you can only bear witness, that we’re all just walking ghosts of the happier people we were once, before the world or just our parents got to us. And then it turns around and says, ‘oh yeah? Bearing witness is doing something, and even ghosts can save themselves.’

It’s a fantastic debut novel. Hill does let his stitches show a bit too much for my taste – he cast two threads in the very beginning which I instantly and correctly marked as the central knot of the end game, and I saw a few too many turns coming. But I mostly didn’t care. I want to read Hill’s next book, but more than that, I really want to read his fifth book, his eighth. Because those are going to be something else.

The sharp-eyed will be noting the thing I didn’t talk about here. I‘m really not someone who takes an author’s wishes about how he is to be perceived and reviewed as gospel, but in this case I respect Hill’s expressed wish, in both senses of the word. And contrary to every newspaper in the western world, I find it is not just possible to talk about this book without talking about the thing, but also preferable.