Spooky Season Bonus Books

I’m back and I bring spooky season bonus books! Of course, if you’re anything like me, every season is spooky season so don’t feel like you have to cram these in by Tuesday morning or save them for next September/October; go ahead and creep your in-laws out on Christmas Eve or your fellow beach goers in July. 

Night of Demons and Saints by Meena Van Praag

Those of you who read Van Praag’s first Sisters Grimm novel know how gorgeous her prose is and how, even in moments of incredible fantasy, how real her characters; those of you haven’t should really get on it because both are very special gifts even those who read widely aren’t given very often. Van Praag has also developed the rare talent of balancing universal human experience and emotion with the fantastic in a way that both brings Everwhere to us and our own worlds and lives to the border of her fantasy realm. 

Though some of the details of her first book, The Sisters Grimm, have slipped from my mind (I read it just as the pandemic was starting, while on a trip to California, during which my return flight was ordered back to the gate after a tower shut down at Midway where staff tested positive) rediscovering Liyana, Goldie, and Scarlet was like seeing my own sisters (though I only have two) after a long absence. I don’t know if Van Praag has sisters herself but, if not, she’s certainly made a study of them, of the ways in which we love one another fiercely even when we’re furious, the ways in which we would do anything to protect one another even when we’re sure one of the others has made a terrible choice, the fact we’ll always come back together no matter what’s happened or what will. 

As to the story, well, that would be telling, but I appreciate how tight and taut Night of Demons and Saints, how it moves with each event clamoring for attention, how it carried me along like Everwhere’s river, never letting me rest until it had reached its magical sea. I find a lot of books 50-75 pages too long these days but not Night of Demons and Saints; this one was perfect. 

My only quibble is with the jacket copy, that has everything to do with the publisher and not the author or story (which probably seems strange to point out here, but honestly, people need to start calling it out). The copy identifies Van Praag as being from England and then her genre as “magical realism.” While yes, genre is a construct, “magical realism” should be reserved for books from Latin and South America. And Harper Voyager is a big enough publisher to know better. 

Kaiju No.8 Vol 4 by Matsumoto Naoya

With Vice-Captain Hoshina staring down death after defending the base and his team, Kafka does what he must to save one of his officers: he transforms and enters the fray, knowing that no matter what happens, the incident won’t end well for him. 

Taken into custody, despite his heroics, Kafka is restrained and facing execution when, suddenly… 

The Sundial by Shirley Jackson 

Biographers report, and Jackson says in her letters, that The Sundial is her favorite of her own books. It’s one of few I hadn’t read or listened to and I’m glad I remedied that because it is, truly, a masterpiece. The premise: a group of truly terrible people trapped in a house together in an attempt to avoid the apocalypse foretold in a questionable psychic vision by the family patriarch, long dead. 

Biting social commentary, hilarity, genuine terror, gothic is it/isn’t it supernatural happenings, and murder ensue. 

I suggest listening. The Audible reader is masterful. 

Will Do Magic for Small Change by Andrea Hairston

Have you ever read a book you have no idea how to describe but you think everyone should read?

This book. This book, right here. It’s incredible and huge and personal and it’s in this world and so much smaller than this one and so, so much bigger and if you tried to parse it in any formal way, you’d fail but that’s not what it’s for and it makes sense on this visceral level.

I could describe the plot but that would be doing it, and you a disservice. Just go. Library, bookstore. Whatever. Read it. 

The Heart by Marc Petitjean 

I’m doing research on Frida Kahlo for a writing project right now and, as I’ve learned to do when engaged in such re: a female-identifying artist, I’m trying to stick with books by female-identifying authors (though I would go non-binary for Frida as there are hints in her personal history that, where she alive today, she might have identified as non-binary), however, there isn’t much information about the time she spent in Paris and so, I made an exception. What I didn’t realize from the library blurb is that The Heart is written by the son of a man with whom Friday may had an affair during her trip (she is known to have spent time with him and his letters to her were in one of the rooms in Casa Azul that was opened in 2004; no one has found any return letters which is unusual. Frida usually kept up a correspondence with people she had relationships with). 

Petitejean definitely has opinions based on his father’s opinions. They are mostly bad takes and include commentary on Frida’s relationships with Jacqueline Lamba, Dora Marr, and Alice Rahon during the same trip. 

Petitejean also seems comfortable calling his father an “expert” on Mexican culture because he worked in the Museum of Ethnography for a few years: as a volunteer and in the Sub-Sharan Africa division. While senior may very well have studied Pre-Colombian culture, the details in the book made it sound as though his interest in Frida were a little… fetishy? Especially since his descriptions cultivate in accusing feminists of appropriating her. Let us discuss he’s the only author so far of the ones I’ve read to call her a narcissist and to use her incorrect birthdate (he calculates from 1910 which is well known to be the date she gave because it coincided with the start of the Mexican Revolution; He wrote the book just a few years ago and it was widely known in her lifetime), He also claims to be writing fact but also inserts fictional sex-scenes between Frida and his father which is… definitely a thing. 

I’m skeptical, especially since he also pooh-poohs Hayden Herrera’s biography, considered definitive by most Kahlo scholars since its publication in 1986.

Some good info that can be fact checked but otherwise… gah. 

This one is scary because, well… see above. 

Onward to November!!