Michael Weingrad's EUGENE NADELMAN: A TALE OF THE 1980s IN VERSE

There ought to be so many books like this, 

As writ in verse, in meter and in rhyme, 

Yet telling modern tales, or modern-ish --

This one's nostalgic for a place and time, 

For Philly in the early Reagan years. 

Which years are now as far behind us as

Was World War II and all its hopes and fears

From its young hero's life and times. Such has

Been 'mongst my thoughts while reading this, a tale

Of 1981 and thereabouts.

Our Wonder Years are come at last. Avail

Yourself of Eugene Nadelman -- no doubts! --

As soon as e'er you can, for to enjoy

This charming story of this charming boy.

To Pushkin and to Petrarch Weingrad pays

His tribute here, while I obey the form

Of Shakespeare. I am well set in my ways

As readers of this blog well know -- with warm

Regard do I invite you, please to click

The link that's to the right, if you have yet

To buy my own experiment in slick

And sonnetized narrations. He has set

The tale of Onegin in junior high,

At summer camp, bars mitzvah, and, the most

Important, in a basement dungeon I

Could only envy, where, with his host

Eugene fights monsters, swings his weapon and

Loots wizards' towers scattered through the land. 

For yes, some action only here unfolds

Before the teenaged eyes of teenaged minds

In D&D! But lo!  This here game holds

Unguessed-at dangers, as our hero finds

When Abigail, his lady-love, comes down

To watch a bit, and has a girl's effect

On boyish hearts, which ever seek renown

Before a girl's attention. What will wreck?

A budding love affair? A friendly game?

Companionship from childhood? You must read

The book to learn the nature of the shame

And of the glories waiting for Eugene

In this short work. The little time you'll spend

In doing so rewards well in the end. 

Kylie Lee Baker's BAT EATER AND OTHER NAMES FOR CORA ZENG (Narr by Natalie Naudus)

There's something peaceful about your worst fear coming true.

Kylie Lee Baker would have been fun to have as a lab partner in high school biology, I decided about halfway through her creepy horror/crime hybrid Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng. She relishes the particular and intimate, yes, the gory, details of the insides of organisms, revels in the sensory details of textures felt and observed, how smells penetrate not only the nostrils and sinuses but also the back of the throat, if the substance giving them off is thick enough; the contrast of vividly colored internal organs and tissues to dulled and more uniform integuments and surroundings. 

So of course her heroine here is a specialty cleaner -- of murder crime scenes. And as we already know from comics and TV, that makes for an interesting enough character and milieu right there, but Baker has bigger and better ideas than the low hanging ones. 

Because, for starters, Bat Eater takes place in Manhattan at the height of the very first wave of COVID-19, when everybody who had the luxury was sheltering in place and hoarding toilet paper and being, perhaps selfishly?, grateful not to be among the corpses stacking up in hospital morgues, then meat lockers, then refrigerated trucks parked wherever they'd fit on the island -- and our heroine, Cora Zeng, is Asian. Specifically American-Born Chinese.

Oh, and just for extra fun, all of this kicks off just in time for the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, when the gates of hell open up and let the spirits of the dead roam the earth again, demanding attention and sustenance from their loved ones. Ignore them at your peril; they might take a bite out of your coffee table. Or out of you. Best to give them what they actually want, maybe?

I mean, if you believe that stuff.

And if you accept your Chinese aunt's insistence that you acquire symbolic objects made of joss paper and burn them as appeasement offerings to your dead, rather than your white and Catholic aunt's snobbish attitude that Hungry Ghosts and joss papers are just icky Asian superstitions and you should really just pray and confess and enact ritual cannibalism instead. 

Cora, you see, is half-white. But her older sister, Delilah, is fully Chinese. And, as Delilah observes of their situation in a poignant flashback to when they suddenly came into each other's lives after some familial drama finally brought them together, how they might feel about it won't charge the fact that they're family. So they might as well be more grown-up about it than their parents seem to have been, and stick together. 

Until suddenly, Delilah announces right before shocking tragedy strikes, that this whole pandemic thing has Delilah thinking about breaking up the team and heading back to China without her mei-mei, who isn't fluent in Mandarin or the local dialect their father's family speaks, and anyway Cora has nice white relatives she can maybe rely on like she does their father to send her a check from China each month to help cover NYC living expenses that are beyond his girls and their useless liberal arts degrees...

I still have a mostly negative attitude about Pandemic Literature. Too many people, I knew at the time and still maintain, decided that lockdown was the perfect time for them to finally sit down and write that novel they always knew they had in them, which, that's fine; we've been dealing with tidal waves of NaNoWriMo projects for years now and some of them have even been good, so this alone is no reason to dismiss a book, but too many of them have been about COVID-19 and the writer's personal experience of lockdown and toilet paper shortages and fear and germiphobia and putting their groceries under a UV light before putting them away (if privileged enough to have the money to spend on such a gadget) and all the rest of the, yes, mostly pretty common experience that most of the planet seems to have shared unless they were deemed Essential Workers and had to keep going to work at risk of their lives either as healthcare or grocery stockers or ambulance drivers... and didn't get to stay home and write that novel they've always known they had in them. I mean, there's only so many of those stories that I, personally, have patience for, and that number is pretty close to zero. Unless...

Unless someone has a different experience of this to share with me. Which the protagonist/narrator of Bat Eater most certainly does, for not only is she facing a new excuse for racism evoked by the title; as the Leader of the Free World and all of his minions declared while pushing the infamous "lab leak" hypothesis even as they also blamed it all on a wet market in Wuhan, China, lots of people at least claimed to believe that COVID-19 was all China's fault, and by extension the fault of every person they might encounter who even looks vaguely Chinese, even if they're third or fourth generation Americans with dim origins in completely different Asian countries than the one where Wuhan is, even if they don't speak any language but English, even if they're actually Native American but just kind of vaguely look Asian. Against whom it is now perfectly okay to discriminate and even enact hate crimes to punish the "bat eaters" for the disease and its impact on everybody's sudden inability to get a haircut.

I mean sure, racism is racism, but it has to have been extra bizarre and extra scary to suddenly get called "Bat Eater" before being spit on (which, get ready for all the bodily fluids in this story; it's not confined to the blood that Cora and her colleagues have to clean up in the crime scene du jour) or shoved or assaulted or -- here we go! -- murdered.

...maybe she wants this monster to have teeth, wants it to be some intangible, hungry darkness that can swallow all her rage like a black hole. She doesn’t want him to have a name, a job, a wife that he holds with the same hands he uses to gut Asian girls like fish. The thought sickens her, the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness. Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not. And she doesn’t care about his redeeming traits but she knows that other people will, that the newspapers will highlight his accomplishments, that the courts will talk about him being a good father or diligent worker or a thousand other things he did that matter infinitely less than what he took from Cora.

It would seem that there's a serial killer at work in Chinatown, targeting young, single Asian women who live alone. The killer bursts into their homes at night, brutally and spectacularly murders them in a variety of different ways, and then shoves a bat down their throats or otherwise inside their bodies, to make sure everybody Gets the Message. But so far, only Cora and her two colleagues, happy go lucky and kind of doofy Harvey (nephew of the Chinatown dry cleaning mogul who pivoted his business to crime scene clean-up when the pandemic meant nobody needed their work clothes professionally cleaned anymore) and sharply observant, intelligent and no nonsense Yi-Fei* (who is every bit as at-risk as Cora herself, being an actual immigrant from China who still has a bit of an accent), the found family Cora comes to rely on when her actual family seems to have let her down, seem to understand what's really going on. At least until they get the call to come clean the crime scene where a Chinese-American member of New York's finest has gotten the bat treatment. He would seem to have noticed as well. And to have paid dearly for noticing.

Cora Zeng does not get angry because anger always melts through her fingers until it is a pool of anguish under her feet. There is not enough oxygen inside Cora to keep anger burning. No matter how hard she tries, she can only wield her sharpest thoughts against her own flesh. She knows, on some level, that most of the problems in her life are her own fault in one way or another. Anger is just one of those thoughts that can never quite sink its teeth into her—she is not solid enough, and its jaws close around nothing at all.

Anyway, the relationship that develops between Cora and her co-workers -- a relationship she is in sore need of, as the above suggests -- is the best part of the story, for me. Both Harvey and Yi-Fei get to be fully developed characters who have important things to contribute to Cora's efforts to get anyone in authority to give a damn that young Asian women are being, not just verbally or physically attacked but murdered, to maybe track down the bad guy who ruined Cora's own personal life, and to deal with the Hungry Ghost that seems to be stalking her, and not just out of hunger. Because yes, the ghost stuff is far from incidental to the setting of this story. We get lots and lots of ghost action, some of it hilariously gory, some of it genuinely creepy, much of it heartbreaking. Good thing Cora has friends.

One thing I really like about horror novels like Bat Eater is how well they maintain a sense of ambiguity for as long as possible. Is this a fully supernatural tale, in which all of the adversaries, even the disease, are eldritch horrors from beyond the veil? Is the disease "natural" but the serial killer and the ghosts supernatural? Is the disease real and the serial killer just some asshole, but the ghosts are real? Or is all of this going to turn out to be aspects of Cora's psychological trauma? Baker kept me wondering and speculating about this until almost the last hour.

And all of this, to further muddy the issues, is delivered to us with a purring, cooing tenderness by narrator Natalie Naudus, who sounds like a mother telling us a weirdly contemporary bedtime story and doesn't want us to get too scared, but still relishes the disgusting details, described with immaculate syllabic precision so we can't elide or ignore them. I smelled, heard, and felt every drop of various fluids, every garbage pile, every whiff of bad breath. I'm pretty sure I showered a few more times than I needed to. I defy you not to.

Don't snooze on this one if you're in the mood for a good scare.

*I might have misspelled her name because audio book.

Amanda Michalopoulou's WHY I KILLED MY BEST FRIEND (Tr Karen Emmerich)

We all have to show courage and faith in our ideals. We have to literally embody our emotions if we're going to act politically. New technologies have marginalized the body. There's nothing more dangerous than that. We here are going to fight with our bodies, because it's the only thing we have left.

No, that's not a quote from Renee Good, dead only a week as I type this, but it sure could be, couldn't it? It's from a Greek novel, originally written in 2003, translated and published in English (by good old Open Letter) in 2014. History doesn't only rhyme with itself. Sometimes it rhymes with literature, too.

As the title of Amanda Michalopoulou's tense and affecting novel of odiasamato (we'll get to that), Why I Killed My Best Friend, the course of true love, or at least friendship, never did run very smooth, and while this story concerns two very cosmopolitan Greek women who effortlessly shuttle from Nigeria to Greece to France and around again, it's a book that I, a shut-in living in the landlocked and isolated heart of North America, found a lot within that spoke to me, and not just because I'm basically the same age as protagonist Maria and her titular bestie, Anna.

I, too, grew up with a best friend (though I called another that at the time) for whom I had feelings as strongly hostile as admiring. More than one, actually; my original frienemy, whose mother looked after both my sister and I after school during our elementary years ,moved away just before middle school, leaving me to drift into an almost identically toxic relationship before sixth grade was even halfway over. There's a reason I gnash my teeth at Margaret Atwood's doormat protagonists, who never quite manage to rebel against their more charismatic and domineering friends, only escaping at best, usually only to be re-ensnared later in life when the toxicity has only increased. I'm in this image and I don't like it. 

Such a fate looms ever larger for Maria, whose entanglement with the exquisite Anna begins soon after she is taken away from her childhood home in Nigeria (where her exiled Greek expat parents lived comfortably expat lives doing something bourgeois for a living) back to her family's native Athens. At first Maria feels unwelcome and singled out for misery: her classmates hate her. But then a newer new girl joins the class, also the child of returned exiles, but their return is from glamorous, sophisticated Paris, rather than primitive and mysterious Africa. Still, the girls' shared status as outcasts gives them a reason to bond, at least after they clear up a slight misunderstanding about whether or not Maria's parents were nasty, racist,  colonial oppressors. They weren't (or, at least, not exactly); friendship saved. 

Though this is far from the only misunderstanding that will threaten this pairing over the decades. 

For these two girls' families were not expats on a whim, like their American counterparts would be; their parents are leftists who fled into exile in the 70s rather than suffer, or even be killed, under the rule of the Greek Junta aka the Regime of the Colonels.* Anna's father is a famous philosopher, and her mother a ballet dancer, for instance. Maria's parents' leftist bona fides are a little less apparent -- her dad works for an oil company and her mom is kind of a socialite -- but at least they were very kind to their black live-in help, especially Maria's nanny, Gwendolyn, whom in true colonial fashion Maria thought was her actual mother for a while there.

I bring up all this political background because it's actually to the fore in this novel; indeed, it could be debated whether WIKMBF is a coming-of-age story with political characteristics, or a political story with coming-of-age characteristics. Anna has absolutely been raised on leftist politics and doesn't know how not to bring them up in every conversation, even as an angelic looking little nine-year-old new girl who is absolutely ready to judge her desk-mate as just another superficial right wing pigeon from outer space (IYKYK), while Maria is decidedly less so but willing to be influenced, falling under the spell of glamorous Antigone, Anna's mother, and very disappointed when her own mother won't join the consciousness-raising group Antigone is trying to put together before she and her daughter have even finished moving into their pretty house.

So of course the girls are soon competing with each other over who's the most doctrinaire leftist, who has the best ideas for incorporating good politics into their childish art projects at school, who's going to do greater and more important things when they grow up, and whose mother loves whom more. And yes, eventually the girls' fathers become part of the story, but never a very big part; just enough for us to see that Anna's future husband will be a carbon copy of dear old dad, and for us to see just how much Maria's mother has diminished herself to keep Maria's father happy, giving Maria a negative model of femininity to measure herself against as she goes on to live the life of a bohemian art student and political activist, i.e. neither a wife nor a mother.

And of course they spend some time in young adulthood accusing each other of insincerity, of doubting each other's commitment and effectiveness, while still joyfully reuniting and professing eternal love and best friendship... and Maria watching the prettier and more confident Anna steal pretty much every man Maria has ever had a crush on (and one or two of the women). Friendships as close as this only lack these aspects when there is neither a political nor sexual dimension to the friends' lives, like pretty much no friendship ever.

Someday, if I manage to figure out the why and the how, I'll write a novel. I'll tell the whole story, all that we lived through, from my point of view. I'll let Anna have the title, though: Why I Killed My Best Friend.  If you don't feel like reading it, the cover will be enough, you can skip the story: one friend kills another, big deal, human beings are killing one another every day all over the world. Sometimes, to give a logical structure to these conflicts, they fight body to body, hand to hand with the police. Or they fall down the stairs in a metro station without ever having been pushed. They'll even fight themselves, if there's no other worthy opponent around.

"Odiosamato" is the word Maria uses to name her relationship with Anna. I'm no scholar of Greek, ancient or modern, but I think our modern English slang "frienemy" works well enough for it, though I'm pretty sure the Greek, combining "love" and "hate" rather than the somewhat more tepid "friend" and "enemy",  deserves to remain in the translated text as it does. As we learn in a translator's note at the end, Karen Emmerich was able to work fairly closely with Michalopoulou on the translation, and Michalopoulou took this opportunity to revise the original a bit. As Emmerich observes, "Careful readers familiar with the Greek may notice some larger-scale changes than translator's usually allow themselves; these were all made with Amanda's consent and involvement." I'm not one of those readers familiar with the Greek, but their keeping of "odiosamato" signals very strongly to me how carefully this work was prepared. As a certain gigantic publisher odiously prepares to end its relationship with translators in favor of letting large language models do it instead, I want here to take a stand against it and in gratitude to the work that only human beings can do with the care and skill and sensitivity required. 

But so, the question you're probably asking in your head as I blather about this book is, does Maria actually kill her best friend? But you know me by now; I'm going to tell you to read the damned book. It's an international hit for a reason (and not just for its hints of good praxis, my favorite of which is bringing rainsticks to protests, "which in a pinch can serve as batons to fight the police"), and it's not just for the unflinching honesty with which it portrays female friendship at its most troublesome. 

I'm pinching myself for letting this book languish in my ebook library for as long as it did; had I gotten it in a physical edition its various lurid and eye-catching covers would have made it stand out on my shelf, I think. But better late than never, and sometimes, best of all is right now.

*A situation I only just learned of through reading this book. I swear I didn't choose to read this in January 2026 because its background dictatorship reminds me of anything chilly going on right now. Regardless of what the conspirituality types keep insisting, there is such a thing as coincidence. I just wanted to read more contemporary Greek literature, and did my usual trick of going bananas when Open Letter had one of its sales. Which, if you're reading this right when I've posted it, they've got one going on right now. Go bananas! Or baklavas, if you prefer. 

Karen Tidbeck's AMATKA (Tr Karen Tidbeck)

Do you like the art style known as Socialist Realism, but wish that maybe it was a little less realistic? Alternatively, do you like fantasy, but wish it could sometimes be a little more socialist?

Do you believe in the magic of language?

Boy have I got a book for you!

Karen Tidbeck's Amatka might be a portal fantasy of sorts, but it's hard to say, just as it's hard to say a lot of things about the world in which the title town sits, to which its inhabitants came generations ago as colonists of a sort, from what sounds like it might have been our ordinary everyday world, but could also have been the dystopian hellscape our best writers still feel coming despite how smugly we once regarded books like The Sheep Look Up as "self-denying prophecies.*" But I don't think they came in a spaceship, or in any kind of craft at all. 

I ginned up as many theories about what was really going on in Tidbeck's strange world as there are pages in this short novel, and I trashed nearly all of them, resurrected some of them, trashed them again, chanted nonsense words over them to see what they would do (but only if no one was about to hear me blaspheming/threatening the very stability of reality by so speaking), babbled to my book bestie (the mad book snob formerly but sometimes still known as Popqueenie), who originally turned me on to this book, that I had suspicions that there was some weird kind of "slavery with extra steps" kind of nightmare scenario at work here... cheered that the rather hapless heroine was finally taking on some agency and acting on her suspicions, only to grind my teeth to see her chicken out or dampen it down for the sake of her budding relationship with her love interest... you know. All the things great fiction makes us do in our heads while in reality we're sitting in a comfy chair with a cup of tea and one or more mammals using us as furniture and a book or some other kind of reading device spread open before us...

Anyway, let's talk about that heroine, whose name is Vanja and who isn't super thrilled with her job, but it could be worse -- and suddenly it's giving her the opportunity to travel and see more of her strange world. We meet her busily reminding all of her possessions of what they are by softly naming them off, one by one, working overtime to make sure that none of her words become rote; she learned long ago when assigned to do this with her childhood classroom's supply of pencils that saying "pencil" over and over again gets, first really dull, then kind of meditative, and then maybe nonsensical until you might as well, instead of saying "pencil pencil pencil" start saying "pencilpencilpencil" until you're kind of half-consciously saying "cilpen cilpen cil--" and oops, suddenly all of those pencils start losing their form and essential nature and then collapse into... something else... and everybody around you starts losing their minds with worry and panic and yelling at you for your carelessness and calling in the Cleaners to stop a chain reaction of form-losing from happening and taking everything in the colony, or at least in the classroom, with it.

You know. How everybody rides a slow, somewhat ill-maintained train from one town to another on an ordinary day.

Some reviewers of this book have complained quite a lot about Vanja, whose advent on the cold, chilly and mysteriously depopulated Amatka settlement touches off a whole series of calamities, being a badly written or unbelievable character. It would not surprise me at all that none of those reviewers have grown up in a truly small town, a really rural and underpopulated one by most of the 21st century's standards, and don't know just how different life is in such places from even the cities most consider to be small towns in this day and age. In a truly small town (as long-time readers of this blog know, I grew up in southern Wyoming, in a town with fewer than 1600 people, over 20 empty miles (as in no rest stops, no convenience stores, no gas stations, just big sprawling cattle ranches populated by cattle and haystacks and maybe one guy on a 4-wheeler or, yes, horse) from the nearest town, which boasted a population of maybe 300. We didn't have professional firefighters; we had volunteers, people from the community who had other full-time jobs and families and responsibilities who nonetheless also took on the role of responding to structure fires, wild land fires and many other dangerous accidents that professional firefighters in larger cities probably would never dream of being expected to deal with (a large proportion of these volunteers were also our emergency medical responders, paid a token amount and subject to brutal on-call schedules 24/7/365). Newcomers to our area were always kind of shocked and disbelieving about this at first, charmed by it for a while, and then sooner or later often pretty resentful when they realized that there weren't a lot of resources to go around and it's really better for everybody if they learn to manage some small issues themselves and take prevention very, very seriously.

And some of them never get it. Sigh.

Anyway, I bring this up because, for whatever mysterious reason that it's great fun to theorize about (myself I came up with a truly horrifying interpretation that still haunts me as a possible - Tidbeck has given us a truly awesome -- in the old-fashioned sense of that word -- thought experiment of an allegory of a horror scenario in the pages of this novel) because in Amatka and the larger world in which it's situated, reality itself is what everybody is responsible for maintaining, very deliberately, very consciously, every day. Because with the exception of the original stuffs -- paper, fabric, metal, wood, food organisms (I think?) -- that the original settlers brought with them to this weird and alien world, all matter is profoundly protean and malleable and uniquely responsive to human language to a rather shocking degree. Imagine if you'd forgotten to remind your clothing that it is clothing for a few days and it suddenly just dissolved into weird and possibly hazardous goo while you were wearing it at work! What if you hadn't declared that your bed was a bed for a few days, clearly and distinctly and unambiguously (and, importantly, without using metaphors -- no calling it "my sleepy sack" or "slumberland'; you have to address it, as it were, in the second person, and call it a bed), and forgetfully went to sleep in it one night, only to have it turn to slop in the night?

So, okay, life is hard, and a lot of your conscious thought (which is not an inexhaustible supply; ask any chronically ill person you know about what happens when they've spent too much of their energy in a day "playing through the pain" and then suddenly have to do some real cognitive labor like reading a page in a foreign language or updating a home budget spreadsheet or remembering to call the appliance repairman because the stove is more broken than you and YouTube can figure out how to fix which is maybe how you spent too much of that energy in the first place. You get me?) has to go into just maintaining the physical integrity of your clothes and tools and furniture and transportation and even, say, the documents that your company-or-co-operative keeps its records on. But that's true everywhere in this world, right?

Ah, but the more people there are on the ground to maintain stuff, the easier the work of maintenance is, right? For this reason, for example, nobody in Amatka lives alone. One tired person could never maintain the furniture, the kitchen equipment, the household chattels like curtains and blankets and bath towels and the walls and floor and ceiling and plumbing and heating ducts. By the time you'd got all that done you'd be overdue to start all over again.

And there's a whole town to maintain here. With factories and offices and city administration and water and sewer plants and greenhouses to grow the food in and... get me?

But so, Vanja is from a much bigger settlement, where there are lots more people to pay attention and name things and keep everything going at the basic level, and thus there can also be people who specialize in weird and kind of pointless Golgafrincham B Ark things like marketing, which is what Vanja does for a company who is maybe going to expand its service area if she can find a way to persuade residents of other settlements, such as Amatka, to buy their products instead of relying on their own homegrown soap and detergent and medicines and band-aids. She's grown up with only a little bit being asked of her by her community, and now she's come to an area that is unaccustomed to visitors overall but still expects them to do their part while they're there and...

And, oh, by the way; the ruling powers of this society have deemed it not that important to educate much of the populace about the actual nature of reality. So lots of people like Vanja have grown up with the habit of naming things -- it's drilled into them from earliest days and everybody probably has an incident like hers with the schoolroom pencils haunting their memories -- but seem to think it's a weird cultural thing and maybe out of date and really kind of fascist if you think about it because there's so much control over your behavior and how you use language and what about things like poetry, man?

So no, Vanja is not a poorly written or unbelievable character. She is a totally convincing and terrifyingly plausible product of her admittedly weird and kind of allegorical but compelling and mysterious environment. I know I've gone off about this at tedious length, but it's really important that you understand this going into the book because -- look, I wouldn't go to all of this effort, to any effort at all, really,** if I didn't think Amatka was something special. And if the reviewers bitching about it having top tier ideas but being a shitty novel didn't really piss me off. Heh.

Anyway, Vanja has come to Amatka to do her market research and of course is immediately put off by the impossibility of her task. And the shoddiness of her accommodations for her stay: she is assigned to an ordinary workers' house, which she will share with several strangers, including an old lady who needs extra care and help with maintaining her stuff because she's old and deteriorating but Amatka society still at least theoretically values her enough to keep her alive even though she can't work anymore; a greenhouse worker, Ivan, and Vanja's hostess and eventual love interest, Nina. And, on the odd weekend, Ivan and Nina's two daughters, who visit now and then to maintain basic ties with their parents but since their parents' work (everybody's work) is too important to also have to spend the mental and physical energy raising their kids and maintaining their stuff, kids in Amatka live and are educated communally, by teachers who live communally with them and thus aren't expecting to maintain individual households and chattels and whatnot. 

Make no mistake: if nothing else, Tidbeck has created perhaps the perfect scenario in which socialism is the only way for humans to exist. Feel about that however you like; you can't deny that this is interesting.

So, anyway, here comes Vanja, ready to convince the good people of Amatka that the hygiene products they've been using are inferior to what can be gotten from elsewhere (and never mind that in order to get them from Vanja's city to Amatka, someone would probably have to ride on the train with the shipment to keep telling everything what it is so it doesn't collapse into goo on the way, and of course someone has to maintain the train itself for the shipment, and goodness me, what would happen if something went wrong en route and suddenly there were no hygiene products to be had in Amatka because market forces had driven the local stuff out of production in favor of the fancier stuff from abroad? This is just my personal speculation; these arguments don't exactly come up in the novel, but it's part of the array of forces lined up against Vanja's mission before she even arrives, and she's primed to resent it before she even meets anybody), and not really prepared to pull her weight within the town while she's there; some of her own personal belongings denature themselves on her very first night, throwing the whole neighborhood into panic and forcing other town citizens out of their beds to come and contain the problem she created through her carelessness. You can see where this has the potential to go. Several wheres, several ways.

And then, Vanja falls in love with Nina, who seems to kind of return her feelings. And Vanja, from a big impersonal city that is full of people who, while not as individuals quite so slavishly bound to the round of mentally and verbally maintaining everything around them as Amatkans, still have to devote a fair amount of mental energy to keeping everything together and so don't have as much to spare for emotional attachments as we do in our ordinary world where the kitchen table remains a kitchen table forever unless it's smashed or burned, so, again, I argue that it's entirely plausible that "kind of" returning Vanja's feelings is enough to make Vanja, whose life back home was pretty dull even for a functionary like her, to decide she'll chuck it all and stay in Amatka with Nina. Who, for her part, seems glad to have another set of hands and brain cells to keep it all going, even if she's not, like, writing love songs and greeting Vanja with flowers at the end of the day.

But Vanja is still the city girl, and while she knows intellectually that she's got to step up and change her ways, still has that core of skepticism and resentment that won't go away no matter how much daily evidence she has that telling her file folders that they are file folders matters and has some outdated but very human ideas about freedom and expression and literally counter-productive things like that, and is nosy enough, as she starts imperfectly adjusting to her new life, to start connecting with other locals who might have some of the same notions, and to notice that some things like books of poetry in the town library that the authorities keep redacting and then suppressing, point to the possibility of another way of living if only, if only...!

So, look, this is an incredible book. Incredible science fiction, incredible social fiction, incredible weird fiction, just incredible. It's one of the best novels I read last year (look, it takes a while to generate these screeds of mine) and one I think that everybody should have a look at, and not just for its ideas.

Anybody who tells you it's a great novel trapped in a shitty one is just plain wrong. And if I don't tell you that, market forces might stop us from seeing what else Tidbeck has under their sleeve. And I very much want to find out what that is.

Karen Tidbeck. Author. Novel. Weird Fiction. Book. Treasure.

*But apparently at least 1/3 of the active voters in the United States in 2024 were regarding as a statement of goals, if not an instruction manual.

**If you haven't noticed, I don't review books that I don't at least like. I read a lot more books than I write about on here, and I am a ruthless did-not-finisher these days; my lifespan is in its second "half" (if you can say that about its uncertain length especially in this horrible century) and there are still so many books I want to read yet, so if I'm not feeling it on one, I move on. So if you see a book on this blog, it's because I think it's good enough or interesting enough or important enough to hurt myself to tell you about. Amatka is all of the above.

Sheldon Costa's THE GREAT WORK

He wandered over to a stump and sat down to watch the river flow over the side of the cliff. It fell a good thirty or forty feet, carving a glossy chute down the stone face and into the overgrown valley below, where it erupted into a cloud of white mist that settled slowly over the surrounding vegetation, dappling the ferns with a thousand glinting gemstones. Somehow, the moisture reached Gentle’s face, and no matter how fervently he wiped the droplets from his cheeks, they kept on falling.

Terrific nature writing, first rate depictions of both platonic and another kind of close male friendships, powerful ecological messaging, female characters with agency, and redneck alchemists, y'all! I started 2026 with a hell of a read. 

Sheldon Costa's debut novel, The Great Work, is purt'near everything I've ever wanted out of a Weird Western. It's got all the elements I mentioned above and more, and it tells a tight and coherent story to boot. It's even got some excellent, over-the-top villains.* And, I mean, just look at this cover art! Maryann Held is the mad genius behind this magnificence, and Quirk Books should keep her on a hell of a retainer based on this image. 

OK, I'll settle down a bit. 

Our heroes are a precocious pre-teen boy, Kitt, and his lost soul of an uncle, Gentle, who's only kept life and soul together in the pre-statehood foothills of what will become Washington State through the help and friendship of a frontier alchemist, Liam, hard at work to create the phliosophick stone, the titular Great Work, out in the as-yet unspoiled wilderness of the western United States ca. 1890 or so.  Only as our story starts the settlement of which they're kind of a part is suddenly all ahoo over reports of a cryptid, the giant, ghost-white salamander Maryann Held depicted on the book cover, which haunts their daily visits to the river and their nightly dreams -- and Liam has gotten himself killed trying to hint down the monster, in the belief that the Prima Materia he still lacks for his formula will be found in the salamander's blood.

Gentle, a drunken ne'er-do-well on the run from his powerful family back in Ohio when Liam saved his life years ago, now has to tough it out without his friend, face his grief and find a way to go on living - but some men would rather try to raise their bestie from the dead than go to therapy, yannow.

Enter Kitt, who, it turns out, is on the run from the same family as Gentle, being Gentle's young nephew, who was no more inclined to put up with Gentle's older brother's abuse than Gentle himself was a generation ago, and has high-tailed it out to try his luck with his black sheep of an uncle. Before we know it, the pair have set out from the late, lamented Liam's laboratory, with Liam's embalmed corpse strapped to the back of a scene-stealing old mule named Abe (it should surprise no one that Abe is the best character. I would die for Abe) and gone off in quest of the salamander once and for all. 

Alas, this weird party is only a step or two ahead of the mighty and implacable forces of civilization, in the person of The Reverend Judge Crane and a few lesser mortals, already hard at work logging and mining and damming and settling everything they can see, and to hell with the already mostly exterminated indigenous peoples, and the odd settler types with a less extractive outlook on the landscape, who stand in its way. 

Further complicating matters are a secret village of frontier anarchist free-love types AND a roving band of Civil War veterans and other freebooter types who have formed a weird cult around the salamander and its prophet that's straight out of "The Call of Cthulhu," minus the swamp.

With this much plot it's hard to believe there's good character work in here, too, but there is. It's not entirely evenly distributed; the various adversarial figures are a bit cartoonish, but most of the bystanders and secondary heroes are given a chance to manifest as real a set of people as Kitt and Gentle and Abe** do.

But what really makes The Great Work, uhh, work, is the inherent tension supplied by the questions that pulls the reader through it: just how much disbelief are we supposed to suspend, here? Does alchemy actually work in this alternate Cascadia? Or is Christianity "right?" Is the salamander an actual living creature or just an egregore, a shared delusion employed to explain the many things these settlers still don't understand about the land they think they've conquered? Whose promises and prophecies, if any, will be fulfilled? Are these beliefs all just competing delusions, or are some of them "real?" Or all of them?

I'm not going to tell you whether or not any of these questions get explicitly answered, anymore than I'm going to tell you if Abe makes it out alive. There's a website for that. Though this book is still pretty new, especially for something Your Humble Blogger has read. But what I will tell you is that I feel like Costa is going to be an author to watch, that has me curious about what he's going to do next, and that I'm grateful indeed to the Discord friend of mine who casually mentioned this book in our year-end ravings about what we thought the best books of 2025 were. It pays to have friends with taste!

*Here's our first sight of one of them. Tell me this guy, who is also seven feet tall with a thorough-going gentleman's education, wouldn't stop you in your tracks, if not make you want to run the other way. Or compliment his fashion sense?:

The hunter turned to look at them more closely. Gentle had a clearer view of the rest of his strange outfit, now. His coat and chaps, stitched together out of tanned hides, hung over his body in rigid plates, like the carapace of a giant beetle. On his feet he wore a pair of high-ankle cattleman boots made of alligator skin. The hunter had kept the alligators’ snouts and fangs intact, so that each foot ended in a snarling reptilian sneer.

**Don't you even try to tell me a mule can't be people. He's the Bill the Pony of the Weird Western genre. IYKYK.

The space was not large enough for the mule to fit inside, and after some cajoling Gentle was able to maneuver around the animal and squeeze into the crack. He turned back, grabbed Abe’s head in his hands, and pressed their foreheads together. “Go,” he whispered. “Please go. I’ll find Kitt. I promise.” The mule, as if embarrassed by this display, yanked his head away and snorted a wet blast of air into Gentle’s face. “Fine,” Gentle said. “Wait for us here, you stubborn bastard.”

Jenny Hval's GIRLS AGAINST GOD (Tr Marjam Idriss; Narr Gabrielle Baker)

No one asks me why I hate, no one uses that word, they call me grumpy, not even angry, but grumpy, six letters, something inconsequential and self-inflicted, something powerless, insignificant, something small in a small person, not something that's about society, or about them, just something that means i'm ruining things for myself, something that's in the way of my potential as an object.

The unnamed narrator of Girls Against God, Norwegian Renaissance woman Jenny Hval's second novel to be translated into English, first takes us back to 1992, when she is a chronological latecomer to the heyday of the Norwegian black metal music scene. She invites us to look with, not compassion but comprehension, at her younger self standing apart in the back of the crowd at a show, dressed in black with dyed black hair, looking on from the vantage of "The gloomiest child queen."

We don't get to spend much time in this teenagers' court, though (yes, I mean to use the plural possessive here. You think there's only one child queen at this show? There are plenty. We're just called to observe the gloomiest one. And yes, I'm being extra fussy about language and usage here. As my queen demands), before we follow our heroine into high achieving yet frustrated adulthood, with a magisterial will, a titanic ambition, a talent to match, a haughty disdain for us lesser beings, and, yes, a hate, which she still feels powerless to enact and express, still trapped in a small and frail-looking and easily sexualized body.

But underestimate this fragile looking young woman at your peril. Her advanced degrees are in the 20th and 21st century art of film and video, but her soul and her desire and her power come from friendship and sisterhood and other older and deeper and wilder arts -- and maybe even the craft usually denigrated with a prefix of "witch-."

But instead of a coven, burning candles and calling down the moon and making stinky tisanes (though there's a fair amount of all of that, too), she forms a band with two friends, Venka and Terese, and here's the part where I link to any of Jenny Hval's stunning music videos for her unique and haunting and powerful songs and song-like compositions. Except I can't choose. Partly because I'm a neophyte (if a 55-year-old woman in her twelfth goddamned year of perimenopause can still be called a neophyte in any way) in terms of Jenny Hval's art. It's all hitting me at once. I'd only barely heard of her as a name from an episode in the back catalog of one of my favorite podcasts -- and those folks generally like way heavier music than I do so I hadn't gotten around to that one yet when I saw it was about a musician who, at the time, had written her first novel*. I'll get to it one of these days maybe, I said. But so my point is, you can probably pick a place to start with Hval's other art as well as or better than I can. Go. Explore. But not yet. Because I want to talk about this amazing fucking book about a goddamned metal music witch coven and their adventures with the poor, exploited, overexposed young girl depicted in Edvard Munch's Puberty -- and, via the expressionist surrealist whateverist magic of fictional time travel, the Scream painter himself.

But so, think for a moment what it must have been like to grow up as a tiny blonde girl in 1990s Norway (specifically southern Norway, a distinction that is lost on me but that I feel after reading this book like it might not be utterly dissimilar to the United States' own South vis-a-vis the rest of Norway, in a way?), surrounded, as our Hval stand-in complains bitterly (and narrator Gabrielle Baker lets us feel every vibration of the eyerolls that accompany Hval's speeches from her character's gloomiest child queen's perspective, as well as the adult's slowly growing anger, chilling patience, and diabolical creativity as she unleashes the art of her spells, or the spells of her art, on the dominant and still very narrowly Christian culture that keeps trying to trap her and her bandmate-sisters within its narrow limits on femininity) the same pious yet aggressive, destructive and vicious attitudes that the young males among her contemporaries attacked with unreadable band logos, corpse paint, body odor, sick guitar riffs and, oh yeah, church burnings.

All that looks like childish tantrum-throwing to her. She wants to do something that matters, not to the teen boys screaming from her mix tapes of yesteryear or the prison inmates they became, nor to the greater culture that made the boys and the girls feel so trapped, but to herself and her girls. Who hate God.

"For a brief moment, the Norns have surfaced," she says, as her band and their fans turn the decaying former site of the Munch Museum in Oslo into their own installation, replete with water damage, faded spots on the wall in place of faded paintings, blood-red graffiti and badly 3D-printed plastic babies. Or at least parts of them. Does that sound a bit lame? Well, it's just the sound check.

Women’s work becomes a crucial problem within capitalism because reproduction is seen as nonwork. Reproduction as mystery isn’t new, but in capitalist rhetoric the mystery surrounding reproduction is redefined in economic terms, so that childbearing becomes not necessary but personal, a private rather than public concern, something that ‘belongs behind closed doors’, not labour performed but a ‘natural resource’ (making women generally ‘natural resources,’ too).

GaG is also a bit of a cyberpunk story, and not just because the band-coven could very easily have accomplished one of their highly effective rituals with a Flipper Zero. Though they totally could have. Except Flipper Zeros weren't really a thing yet when this novel was written. So, more than a bit cyberpunk, as the band members fuse deep web searches with chaos-magical something-or-others and joke about just using "witch ritual" as a search term and hitting "I feel lucky" and imagine "information streaming through the arteries" of their wrists. Pretending to use something like the internet back when computers were still exotic but unconnected was, our heroine realizes, her first ritual, an exercise in sending forth her will through "the cosmic internet.

I'm tempted to go on quoting from this novel, to go on enjoying the sometimes sweeping, sometimes transfixing, power of Hval's and translator Marjam Idriss' language, which so often sounds more like a Jimi Hendrix lyric than a narrative, as you've perhaps already noticed. Jimi was pretty in touch with his feminine side, I think. 

But so, that's one of the miracles of this book: even while the intense and implacable longing for feminine power and agency engulfs the text completely, it's never at the expense of men or boys. Even the humorless, pretentious black metal boys of yesteryear, and their more conventionally loutish counterparts who drive big junky cars through quiet Norwegian villages at top speed and volume, just to be disruptive, earn Hval's admiration, never her scorn. Even Edvard Munch, he of the Puberty painting that the band-members work passionately to separate from its subject so she can be free, gets off pretty lightly, to say nothing of the anonymous creator of a certain infamous and pornographic Japanese woodcut you'll have to read the book to find and identify. Hval engages in a fair amount of trenchant but never weaponized art criticism in these pages, too, but always with a positive goal even as she emphasizes that her greatest power is her hatred. But what she hates is never an individual or even a category of people. She hates forces, especially those that threaten her cherished values of freedom, agency, strength, expression -- these are none of them zero sum games, is the takeaway from this novel. And fuck anybody who insists otherwise.

Unless you're playing the aforementioned games against God.

The gloomiest child queen is my queen, too. She's a pretty good one. I stan.

*Girls Against God is, I think, Hval's third, though only her second to be translated into English? Or something like that? According to Wikipedia the other day? Which, do we still trust Wikipedia? My instinct says yes, but consider the demographic I copped to above.

Jazmina Barrera's THE QUEEN OF SWORDS (Tr Christina Mac Sweeney)

The Queen of Swords, Jazmina Barrera's fascinating and unusual study of Mexican literary icon Elena Garro, might get shelved among the literary biographies in the rare and special kind of bookstore that will even bother to stock such a thing, as a rule, but The Queen of Swords is about as much a biography as Orson Welles' incredible F for Fake is a documentary. Which is to say both "kind of" and "not at all.*"

Furthermore, in arguing for the "kind of" side I would have to invoke the parallel or tandem biography, like Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws, which simultaneously studies Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, while also giving considerable time to each Mary's equally-if-not-more famous husbands. Elena Garro's daughter is nowhere near as big a presence in QoS as Elena herself, but the child's father, Elena's famous husband Octavio Paz, takes up the space that Helenita doesn't, while Barrera's surprisingly entertaining experiences of researching and writing the book also shares the space, kind of the way some of Orson Welles' hijinks round out F for Fake. 

Moreover, both projects are complete delights, marred only by their (by modern standards) brevity -- though by saying they're "marred" implies that this is a flaw when it only really highlights the fact that they left me wanting much, much more.**

But there's no equivalent, in QoS, to the famous Chartes sequence in FfF. Barrera's work is much too intimate and personal to yield a big meditation on art and history and architecture. And Garro's life was a lot more harrowing than Welles'; several times she and her daughter were fleeing entire countries ahead of assassins, possibly vindictive ex-lovers, political authorities and penury. And Barrera has only the medium of text to convey all of this. But what text she has!

What we conserve of the dead is, above all, images and words: in that they are similar to books. We might even make the mistake of confusing the two, but no life fits in a single book. It would need several trunks, whole libraries, university and press archives to hold the vast, elusive life of Elena Garro, and what I write here doesn't aspire to that. It doesn't pretend to have the last word on anything or anybody. This isn't a biography, it's scarcely a notebook. It is a collection of stories, ideas, facts, and cats.

Garro was a woman who deeply loved the idea, if not the fact, of divinatory arts like the I Ching and the Tarot -- hence the incredible cover Two Lines Press generated for the English language edition of QoS, which takes the same iconic photo of Garro that graces the original and abstracts it into a version of a card of the Minor Arcana. Amusingly, the text itself is divided into very short chapters, some only a sentence or two long, each with a pithy title that could almost be the name of one of the Major Arcana, like "THE CRIME OF FANTASY" or "PERFUME," such that I had a working theory while reading the book that there was one chapter for each card in the Tarot. Alas, when I actually sat down to count the chapter-ettes, I got far more than the expected 78. It was still a fun theory, and while I have zero evidence that this idea was ever part of Barrera's plan for QoS, I respect that if it was, such a gimmick was not allowed to govern the presentation. Barrera's short, specific chapters (which, further arguing against the idea that this is in any way a biography, are not remotely chronological; they are firmly grouped by ideas according to a scheme that I couldn't really parse out but didn't really try because the text is far more interesting than the structure), which quote liberally from Garro's own works and those of her contemporaries, also present the reader with a pleasing run of meta-knowledge in the form of marginalia clearly identifying the precise source for its quotations, a technique I find that I much prefer to footnotes or endnotes and one that I wouldn't mind seeing catch on with other writers who are bridging the gulf between the scholarly work of formal criticism and the popular biographical one.

I've dreamed of Elena Garro a number of times and almost all those dreams have left me with brief, inconclusive pictures: a blurred image of Elena standing up, wearing a coffeee-colored, tailored suit; Elena Garro and Bioy Casares laughing at something awful, with Octavio Paz looking worried. I once dreamed that Elena entered a worm spiral of time and space that carried her from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Another night, I dreamed that Elena and Helenita were Lorelai and Rory from the television series Gilmore Girls.

Elena Garro is a brand new discovery for me. I had of course heard of her husband, who won the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature, but, to be honest, Latin American, and especially Mexican, literature is still a bit of a blind spot for me. I have read more fiction translated from various dialects of Arabic than I have from Spanish, more from the Austrian Hapsburg empire than from Spain's. Ernest Hogan, Alejandro Morales, Rudy Ch. Garcia, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (does she count since she's actually a Canadian citizen?)... so I've read some weird fiction from Mexico, sure, but not any literary or mainstream stuff... and then I find that Elena Garro is at least as responsible as more familiar-to-me creators like Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the development of Magical Realism, especially in its stricter definition in which the source for the magical is Indigenous folk legend and belief***. But so anyway, I came into QoS as cold as cold could be, and leave it now determined to make up for lost time with Elena Garro. How fortunate, therefore, that my brand shiny new subscription/membership to the Center for the Art of Translation and Two Lines Press brought me, not only QoS, but also The Week of Colors, a collection of Garro's short fiction originally published in 1964 and newly translated into English by Megan McDowell. It's like these people want to make it easy for me to fall in love, or something.

I will probably never love Garro as much as Jazmina Barrera does, though. As she shares in the course of the book, QoS started out as an essay for a journal, but as Barrera, whose own great-grandparents were friends of Garro and Paz, got access to loads of archival material and re-read Garro's works for the umpteenth time, her love became all consuming until the project swallowed up all of her time and effort and became this wonderful book. I'm grateful for this love and for the fact that it is still possible, at least for a very few of us, for people with a passion to pursue it fully and come out with something this terrific to show for it. Let's hear it for adventurous editors, curious scholars, and prolific playwrights/poets/novelists. This world would sure suck without them.

*And if I had to compare it to anything besides FfF, it would have to be to something like Michel Houellebecq's "literary mash note" H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, though QoS has an entirely different tone.

**And just as FfF led me down multiple rabbit holes of wrong and crazy awesome about Elmyr de Heury and Clifford Irving and Howard Hughes, well, let's just say that I'm already falling past the levitating rocking chairs and apothecary shelves and bookcases on my way down to exploring Elena Garro's (and friends') literary wonderland, starting with a newly released translation of Garro's The Week of Colors published in tandem with QoS, just to make sure I did so.

***And in these pages I learned that one of the many reasons why authority figures of various kinds did not appreciate the treasure they had in Elena Garro was her consistent and lifelong support of Indigenous rights (and, of course, her very vocal and active support of revolutionaries in general), entitling Garro to even more of my admiration than her literary output already demands.