Pool Partyin’
I spent Thanksgiving week reading five great books at a pool in Mexico with my best friend’s family. Shiri, you might be thinking, you have a husband and children. And that’s true. They went to my in-laws house and had a great time. I went to Puerto Vallarta and also had a great time, guess what, moms have lives too. The rest of November was a little hit or miss for me; lots of great beginnings that flamed out in the middle or, worse yet, crashed and burned at the end, but fear not, there were a few greats amidst the chafe. Come along, Pond.
Whalefall by Daniel Kraus (MTV Books) (CW: terminal illness, suicidal ideation, suicide, claustrophobia, drowning)
A man who never quite lived up to his father’s expectations goes on a dive to retrieve said father’s body from the ocean only to witness, and be literally sucked into, the clash of two of the sea’s great titans: a giant squid and a sperm whale. As you can imagine, things only get worse as the whale, gravely injured, starts its final dive toward the ocean floor, an event called whalefall.
This is a book about a man who is most likely about to die and a man who desperately wants to live. A man who was conflicted about everything in his life including his relationship with the father whose body he’s come to retrieve and who embarked on a hazardous journey to prove something to himself but also to a dead man who won’t ever know what he’s done. About that strange co-dependency that comes with loving a parent so much you have to walk away from them to save yourself but never losing the desperate need for approval that’s as essential as your need for air. And about realizing, when you’re staring down the end of your own life, it was never coming.
So, yeah. Whalefall is about a guy and a squid and a whale . But it’s also about the massive weight of generational trauma dragging you down and down and down and realizing too late you missed your chance to escape. That loving too hard can be dangerous and stories, while important, are also nets that can ensnare you, , keep you prisoner to the never was. That if your dad’s whale gets into a fight with a squid, you don’t have to go to the bottom with him.
It’s a book about giving your self permission to to get puked up, spat out, and float.
Starling House (Tor Books) by Alix Harrow
I have never read anything by Alix Harrow I didn’t love but Starling House is, I think, my new favorite.
Here’s why: publishers, and even the majority of the public, live under the misconception that fairytales are for kids. And while, yes, they are morality tales about having to cut off your feet to get what you want if you’re mean to your sister and getting kissed by strange men if you take candy from witches, fairy tales also discuss the deep, dark fetid insides of humanity, the ones society papers over so very thinly in a veneer of rules and laws most people will break in a heart beat if they think they can get away with it.
Starling House is a fairy tale for adults. Is the magic in it dark? Absolutely it is. But the world we live in his dark and what good would the power of friendship or house wards or love be if they couldn’t make the darkness bleed? If they weren’t willing to go for the jugular or the entrails or the beating heart of the things that were trying to tear them apart? And in a time when even the barest coat of civility has been shattered and fallen away, when people think they have the right to hurt other humans because their skin is a different color or they practice a different religion or because they’re LGBTQIA+, well, maybe they need to be reminded darkness begets darkness and magic doesn’t forget.
This is a strange story. It’s tangled and complicated and sad. But it also glows. It’s also hopeful if you’re willing to find the beauty in it.
It’s well worth the effort.
Grownups deserve magic too.
Middle Distance: A Graphic Memoir (SelfMadeHero) by Mylo ChoY
How aware are you of your own body? I’m pretty aware of mine, but that’s because we don’t get along: I have a couple of chronic issues that means most days, something, somewhere, hurts. I didn’t realize that wasn’t normal until very recently, believe it or not, because my mother also has a couple of chronic illnesses; I figured everyone walked around with something hurting everyday, at least a little. Normal pain level zero not a myth? No shit. News to me in my 40s.
My eleven year old is also very aware of their body for an entirely different reason (they’re fine with me talking about this, btw): they’re non-binary trans masc but their gender assigned at birth was female. They choose how they want to cut their hair and what they want to wear but that doesn’t change the fact that there are certain physical traits determined by chromosomes we’re not going to make permanent changes to until they’re older which means they spend a good part of their life thinking about their body without being sure exactly how to connect with it.
The moment I was done with Mylo Choy’s Middle Distance, I handed it over to them. Because, sure, this is a graphic novel about running but it’s also a graphic novel about understanding how to connect with a body you’re not sure you understand and you’re not sure you belong in. It’s about loving a body that can win races and finish marathons and wondering how it can betray you by giving out and forcing rest on you and performing XX chromosome functions even after you’ve realized you’re not a woman . It’s about finding yourself inside that body and taking the time to respect the shell that contains you while easing it into the shape that best conveys that person to the outside world. It’s about finding yourself in and out and making the dream of being yourself a reality.
Thanks for that, Mylo. And the kiddo says thanks too.
Unordinary by UrU-Chan (Harper Alley)
I’m digging the trend of pulling Web-Toon “seasons” together into trad- or indie pub Ed volumes because, while I do read a few comics on the app and I do read a lot of books electronically, I’d much rather read comics, manga, and manhua in physical form because I am old and the print is small and yes, I know I can zoom in, but then I can’t see the whole page and I like to be able to see the whole page, get off my lawn. I really did try to switch over but after I read Bungo Stray Dogs: Beast on Kindle and realized I was missing out on some of the details of the art, I decided I was going to indulge myself because I said so, leave me alone.
Anyway. Unordinary is very fun, sort of My Hero Academia meets the first couple (ie: good) seasons of Heroes, if you remember that show, meets X-Men. What really got me hooked on this particular comic though, are the tiny details: a mysterious novel written by the protagonist, John’s, father that’s been banned for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, and John’s mysterious past which has led him to lie about some very key elements of his life before Wellston Private School.
No, I’m not going to tell you because the reveal is great and it’s the whole point of volume 1, you’ll just have to read it for yourself.
High teenage drama and angst, fun light read, do recommend.
The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu (Solaris)
When I first started The Death I Gave Him, I wasn’t sure if I was going to finish it. I’m real picky about my retelling in general and Shakespeare retelling in particular because there are a lot of them and a large percentage of that lot of them are bad. Hamlet, in particular, is a tricky bastard because there are so many ways to read the characters and people tend do go with crazy because it’s the easiest and also, I guess, the most compelling on the surface but, as someone who struggles with mental illness, it is also the most clichéd and the laziest unless you do it properly which involves a lot of research. The language and writing style in Death put me off at first, because it seemed to be taking that route with Hayden (Hamlet) and I wasn’t sure why.
About 25% in, however, I realized that Liu had done their due diligence. A lot of it, in fact; their portrayal of Hayden’s anxiety was so accurate and so nuanced, it was spinning my own up without my even realizing it. Once I did, I was able to pull the two apart and appreciate their skill and attention to detail for which I’m very glad because The Death I Gave Him really is an incredible book and Elsinore is not a free for all loony bin. Hayden’s very specific mental health struggle is considered, careful, and contained.
The modern setting, the locked room mystery (for the characters), the family dynamics, it is all chef’s kiss. But it’s Liu’s deep understanding of people and their motivations, weaknesses, foibles, and potential for deep, deep emotional damage that propels this story and damn, is it good.
Additional bonuses: Felicia (Ophelia) is the most competent character is the entire mess (honestly, I always sort of read her that way in the play, it’s the men who screw things up). She also gets the most character development. And she gets to write her own story - not a spoiler. You find out almost immediately she makes it through the night.
And: When your finish this book, you will have finally read convincing human-AI sex. Tag, every other spec/fix author is now in. I will no longer be accepting garbage bio-machine fucking.
Indian Burial Ground by Nick Medina (Berkley, 4/16/24)
So… I was trying to wait until the release date was closer on this one but y’all are just going to have to suffer because I couldn’t. If you haven’t read Medina’s first book, Sisters of the Lost Nation, maybe think about doing that while you’re waiting for Indian Burial Ground to come out because that one is also a fucking banger. There has been a lot of really excellent indigenous horror the past couple of years, and I mean absolutely outstanding, and Medina’s is some of the best of the best so if you’ve been sleeping on his stories, this is your wake up call.
The thing that really stands out to me about both Sisters and Burial Ground a sort of lean toward the gothic: is there something supernatural causing the chaos tearing apart families in these books or is it the malice of humans, generational trauma, alcoholism, and fear spiraling out and over and through people who have been trapped together, through the even more powerful malice and blatant disregard of others, ignored at best, undeniably targeted for genocide at intervals.
If Medina’s books make you uncomfortable, good. They should. They make me uncomfortable. And they made me do some additional research that made me even more uncomfortable. Why? As Americans, we tend to look outward, overseas to what our government is doing wrong. And that’s fine. That’s good. We should hold them responsible for interfering where they’re not wanted and sponsoring genocide. When we do look at the home front, we get caught up in taxes and food costs and gas prices. Also justifiable. But when was the last time you looked at the statistics on missing and murdered indigenous girls, women, and two-spirit individuals? On the rates at which they’re abused? On why law enforcement ignores it? I’ll give you a place to start and remember, these are only the incidents that are reported: https://www.bia.gov/service/mmu/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-people-crisis
https://stoprelationshipabuse.org/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-two-spirit-individuals/
Here are some more statistics: According to the John’s Hopkins School of Public Health Center for Indigenous Health, teen pregnancy over all has declined 67% since it’s peak in 1991 but as of 2019, 40% of Indigenous girls had babies while in their teens.
This is an important part of Indian Burial Ground. You’ll just have to trust me.
Babies taking care of babies leads to difficult circumstances for all the babies.
There are also vampires. Maybe. Possibly. Werebirds. Werecoyotes. Weresnakes. Strange compulsions. And murders. Also talking corpses.
The Dead Take the A Train by Richard Kadrey and Cassandra Khaw (Tor Nighfire)
Two of my favorite horror authors collaborating on a duology? No chance of me missing out on The Dead Take The A Train.
This absolute splatterfest of a novel is an absolutely delightful foray into the twisted, slimy, entrail-laden world of Julie and Sarah, a pair of ones who got away, thrown back together by circumstances, a couple of otherworldly monsters, an absolutely demonic (literally) lawyer, and an ex infested by something that wouldn’t even appear in Satan’s worst nightmares. There’s something honest in a book where anyone and everyone is out for themselves and maybe their tribe, where they will cut of their nose (or leg or… whatever) to spite their enemies, and Hell hath no fury like the Firm scorned unless it’s their chief of security scorned and then wow, is that takeover going to be bloody and filled with raw, rotten meat.
CWs? Pretty much all of them. If you’ve read both Kadrey and Khaw, I’d say A-Train skews Kadrey: like, it’s gross. Really, really gross. If it were a movie, it would be over the top to the point of being parody but my brain conjures far more realistic images because, as a former nurse, I’ve seen inside actual people. Take that as you will. There is, also, in case the last bit didn’t give it away, a metric buttload of violence and some of the demons like to crawl graphically inside people through various apertures. Take that as you will. If you remain unbothered by such things, however, A Train is fucking fantastic, pick it up.
A wide variety in November. We forge ahead into 2024 with a bunch of manga and manhua, some academic tomes, and a bunch of spec-fic novels. Excelsior!