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.

Tim Powers' MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

Anglican Church," he muttered. "You nearly never go to church anyway -- your church is the moors, your priest is your dog, your God is -- I don't know what. The wind.

Anybody who's been reading this blog for more than ten minutes knows how much I freaking love Tim Powers. He was the first author I ever put on the Automatic Buy list, long before I realized I even had such a thing.

But because he was the first and was, for a long time, the only, I still collect him in hardcover. Which is a format which I read with increasing difficulty as the years go by.

So while I was running around screaming like a little kid on Christmas Eve waiting for Powers' latest, My Brother's Keeper, to come out, had pre-ordered it the moment that was possible, I'm only now, almost a year later, finished reading it.

I beg you, do not take that as any kind of commentary on its quality, anymore than you should take its dirt-common title or its cover blurb from, of all people, Orson Scott Card.*

Because My Brother's Keeper is Tim Powers' tensest and creepiest read since he invented his own micro-genre of literary historical weird fiction (which lesser mortals have failed to duplicate. Cough. Seth Grahame-Smith. Cough) with The Stress of Her Regard, to which he returns here, not with a sequel like the serviceable but not exceptional Hide Me Among the Graves, but a true spiritual successor, pitting the Brönte sisters, their hapless brother and their Yorkshire parson father against a family of sort-of werewolves. I say "sort of" because these are werewolves in the way that the lamiae of Stress/Hide Me are vampires. This is still Tim Powers, an OG chaos magician of literature, the kind of guy who says "what if these classic monsters but both cooler and more sorrowful?"

And yes, of course there is a very Heathcliff-esque character striding the moors with Emily Brönte and her gigantic bull mastiff, Keeper (who is one of the best dog characters I've encountered in recent years and within recent years I read Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City trilogy. Keeper ranks up there with Wood!), but he is not an inspiration for Heathcliff; the Emily of My Brother's Keeper already has a completed manuscript of Wuthering Heights in her writing case, has indeed been tempted by her brother, Branwell, to meet the wonderfully sinister and perfectly named villain, Mrs. Flensing, by suggestions that Mrs. Flensing has publishing connections in London. 

No, Powers just lets Alcuin Curzon, the "one-eyed Catholic" whom Emily and Keeper rescue one day, serve as a sort of unremarked-upon slant-rhyme to Heathcliff, the better to enlarge the imaginative power of she whom Emily Dickinson named "Gigantic Emily Brönte" by his presence, instead of diminishing her by creating a lame figure for her creation to be based on.

I like it.

Honestly, I haven't been this excited by a Tim Powers novel since the very first time I read Last Call. Do not snooze on this one, or I'll let Mrs. Flensing get you.

*Just, remember that we liked Card once, and he wrote some good books before he started milking his IP dry.

Miha Mazzini's THE COLLECTOR OF NAMES (Tr Maja Visenjak-Limon)

After what I saw in the cellar I often thought about God. For some time, that was all I thought about. This is how it is, I think. The only time we’re in contact with him is when we sleep. And dreams are our defences, our earthiness, trying to lead us away from Him. If we fight them and break through them we come into contact with Him. That’s what we call a nightmare. The more horrible the nightmare, the closer to Him we are. And that’s why in our everyday life it doesn’t matter whether you believe in God or not: but when your life starts becoming a nightmare that belief is the only thing that can save you. There are no decisions when you’re in contact with God. There’s no free will. And that’s what makes the nightmare so horrible. Things happen to you. Horror is the prayer of our time.

What could be more idyllic than a few months' stay on a relatively unpopulated and undiscovered Mediterranean island in the summer between your school years and the start of your adult life? Plenty if you're a teenaged character in Miha Mazzini's cosmic chiller, The Collector of Names, which explores the experiences of a passel of teen boys who've been given the keys to a newly-acquired but still pretty much abandoned villa on one end of the island, and a girl who's come to have her first taste of independence while staying with her great uncle on the other end, where a quaint village braces for the influx of tourists that are about to start pouring in now that a campsite has been established in the island's interior and word has gotten out about it.

Ana's great uncle, Aco, grew up on the island and was the first to encounter its weird and terrifying secret, which manifested in his childhood only as a weird green glow coming from the cellar of the villa when it was newly built and the home of a diplomat's subcontinental Indian widow. Aco took a dare to go check it out as part of his initiation into a gang of older boys who were themselves too afraid of, in particular, the hue of green that shined out of the basement window. He emerged from his encounter with his hair turned completely white, but we don't get to find out what he saw until much later. 

Cut to decades later when Ana has come to visit, and four teenaged boys re-open the villa with the weird secret in its cellar: Max, the son of the villa's new owner and a self-imagined lady-killer and the first to strike up a conversation with Ana on the ferry to the island; strong and fit Sano; less assured farm kid Alfonz; and poor, skinny, clumsy Raf, who is really only along because Max felt he owed Raf a good time after copying off his schoolwork for years and years. They've come for a little while to get good and drunk, having brought rucksacks full of homemade schnapps and cleaned out the entire beer and brandy stock of the village's only store-cum-bar, but since the villa has no refrigerator and the ocean tides on the nearby beach are too strong to use seawater as a cooler, the boys decide to use the spooky cellar to keep their drinks cold -- only to discover a weird crate full of a plastic-like substance that is warm to the touch, and a bunch of tiny stalagtites of what turn out to be some kind of amber, each one containing the letters spelling out somebody's name. All kinds of names, from the commonplace to the exotic and foreign. And there are a LOT.

By the time one of the boys has a direct encounter with the... entity in the cellar, it's too late. 

Some truly gruesome scenes ensue, and some truly touching ones as well. The monster from the cellar affects everyone differently with its simple tactics, but as its victims meet or approach their ends, their unique emotional wounds are reopened as we experience their madness from the inside. The Collector of Names could have just been an entertaining gore-fest, but Mazzini isn't interested in writing a literary slasher film; he wants us to feel what everybody's feeling rather than just pointing and laughing at their deaths.

Livening things up still further is Aco's childhood gang, all of whom grew up to serve in the same military unit, with Aco emerging as the leader with the moral authority he gained when his hair went prematurely white. They have maintained a certain military discipline together over the years, for all that it looks like, to the teenagers arriving on the island, they just sit together on a bench every day and codge (that's what a codger does, right? Codges? Anyway, these guys codge). In other words, under Aco's direction, they've been planning for the day when whatever is in that cellar emerges. Were their preparations effective? Only one way to find out, friends. It's a tight, short read. Go and get it!

Hiron Ennes' LEECH

A lot of books I read nowadays feel like video games in prose, and Hiron Ennes' debut novel, Leech is a perfect example of this. It starts with our narrator riding a train through a snowy landscape to a destination that feels very much like the end of the line at the end of the world, and I couldn't stop thinking of that great old classic point and click adventure that was Benoit Sokal's Syberia games.

The world our unnamed protagonist inhabits, though, is somewhat lacking in those games' clockwork charm (aesthetically it's closer cousin is Mark Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's City of Lost Children) though it is heavy on their air of decayed glamor as our protagonist enters a decrepit chateau in the extreme north to take up the post of resident physician amidst a family straight out of the best gothic fiction: a baron, on the brink of death for decades but kept alive by all sorts of gimcrack technology that allows him to, for instance, leave his colon upstairs in his tower bedroom when he joins his household for formal dinners (a memorable moment of maintenance has our protagonist holding "the congested metallic sponge that passes for his spleen" for instance); the baron's feckless and alcoholic son; the son's louche and perpetually pregnant wife; their twin daughters, all but literally joined at the head and possessed of strange paranormal abilities; the capable but mute houseboy who keeps it all running more or less smoothly...

But the chateau's denizens are nowhere near as weird as our multiform (and, for many reasons, delightfully unreliable) narrator, who is quite possibly the most unusual protagonist I've encountered in literature, in that they are a hive mind that parasitically occupies innumerable human bodies scattered throughout what's left of the world.* Calling themselves the Institute, this parasite has taken over the entire health care industry, such as it is in a post-apocalyptic hellscape in which the moon has cracked open and the land is mostly toxic and frozen and inhabited by all kinds of bizarre monsters.  

The instance of the Institute who is our narrator, therefore, is constantly** experiencing things their other selves are doing in warm research libraries and cold operating rooms and filthy tenements and down dangerous mine shafts while they sip water at the baron's miserable dinner table and get felt up under that table by the baron's daughter-in-law -- or, as happens quite soon in the narrative, dissect a corpse that used to be one of their selves only to find that what killed that body was another parasite!

Late in the novel, or narrator has questions and insights that really apply to us all:

I don't know if I'm even human, or if I'm only the synthesis of all my infections, if bits and pieces of Pseudomycota and The Institute and every other organism that has colonized me are still fighting in my blood, trying to conquer the territories of my muscles and consciousness. I don't know if I'm only an accumulation of organized cells that has deluded itself into thinking it's something more.

I'm reminded a little of one of my favorite books that I hate (as in it squicks me out every time I read it, but I keep re-reading it because it's so good), the late Greg Bear's Blood Music, in which the somatic cells of a researcher's body become individually sentient and self-aware after he injects himself with a research product in order to steal it. Bear didn't address all the other cells that occupy a human body like, say, gut bacteria, but if he had the result might be something like our narrator and their struggles to understand themselves as the novel's central drama evolves inside them. 

Even before the existential dilemmas kick in, Ennes slips in clues here and there, starting very early into the story, suggesting that our narrator's grasp on the situation and even on their own identity is not what it seems, and it's only the least of these that relies on well-known canards about how parasites can manipulate their hosts! There's so much more going on here. So much! And I haven't even talked really about Emile, the aforementioned mute houseboy who is the product of a few centuries of an isolated human population's evolution into what might be a whole new sub-species of gray-skinned human with an apparent resistance to both of the novel's weird invasive organisms! Or about the whole Montish culture from which he comes, with its tradition of shaggy dog stories which... kind of signpost that the reader is in for an ambiguous ending, as fits a tale told by an unreliable narrator...

I am certainly finishing my reading year on a high note, even if nothing else is going all that well. I'm going to try to finish a few more reads before we ring in 2023 (ugh) but if I don't, happy new year. Or something. Watch out for creepy black grassy things in jars.

*And of course, since our protagonist has multiple bodies -- multiple lives -- at their disposal, there is also a potential for respawning, making this story even more video game-like.

**Except when it's not; distance isn't entirely obviated by the Institute's nature. Much like radio signals can't penetrate very far underground and attenuate over vast distances, the Institute's ability to communicate with itself diminishes at inconvenient moments, too.

"I cannot quite understand these fables, not can I discern their use. I suspect they are born from the peculiar, suspect anxiety that there is something fundamentally fragile about humanness. The dead that perhaps, if one takes time to peel back the skin of another, they will find an imposter, a machine, or, stranger still, something like me."

Karl Ove Knausgaard's THE MORNING STAR (tr by Martin Aitken)

I haven't been able to stop giggling since I realized, about 2/3 of the way through Karl Ove Knausgaard's return to fiction writing, that the novel in question has a Tl;dr in the form of an Of Montreal song, but it totally, totally does.

   

I wish I could remember how I even heard of The Morning Star. The pathetic native app on my phone that Alphabet still seems to insist is a reasonable replacement for the much-missed Google Reader has sussed out that I can be induced to read a lot more literary websites than it previously thought so almost every day LitHub or something grabs me with some crazy niche listicle of "new historical fiction coming out this fall" or whatever, so I suspect it was one of those? Or was it somebody on Twitter? Anyway, I owe somebody some half-assed gratitude; half-assed not because the quality of this novel is such -- anything but -- but because it's gotten me sufficiently interested in its author that I might have to track down some of his other work, most of which is massively multi-volumed, Proust style, and some of which rejoices in the stomach churning title of My Struggle in its English language editions.

Good thing that I a) Use an ebook reader and but b) Never go anywhere anyway, so the likelihood that anyone but my family members who share my big river account will actually see me reading such a thing is small.

But anyway, The Morning Star, hilariously and surely intentionally paginated by the Arbitrary Antarctic Avian in its hardcover edition at 666 pages. I see what you did there.

The titular star appears in the sky above the area of Bergen, Norway one night in 2023, shining its weird light over the messy and mundane lives of several characters whose direct experiences we share and an odd assortment of other figurants, including an infamous black metal band, three of whose members turn up butchered in the nearby wilderness, possibly at the hand of the missing fourth, and other strange phenomena like home invading badgers and giant swarms of crabs emerging from the sea to cause traffic hazards on the highway, possibly just confused by the giant glowing meatball hanging in the sky but maybe also drawn by a sinister power inherent in the giant glowing meatball hanging in the sky.

What does it mean, the meatball? What even is it? Is it natural or supernatural? Is it going to be hanging in the sky forever or is it going to burn out in a few days? Our characters barely seem to care, but they've got a lot of bigger stuff going on. Some of it is mundane and painfully ordinary; some of it is bizarre and unexplainable.

I'm mostly going to focus on the mundane, so I don't get yelled at about spoilers. The bizarre and unexplainable stuff is what both of my readers would be most interested in, so I will leave that behind the spoiler wall.

Arne is spending a pleasantish summer with his wife and kids at their summer home -- pleasant-ish because, well, the wife seems to be on the verge of a psychotic breakdown and keeps talking in her sleep about how she would like to maybe have sex with their neighbor Egil.

Egil has been making a documentary film about the black metal band mentioned above (and how can we not think of Aaron Antes & Audrey Ewell's amazing Until the Light Takes Us, here?) and for that alone might be the coolest character in the book but he's also saddled, about halfway through the novel, with a surprise childcare gig when his ex-wife decides to take off on a trip with her new boyfriend and puts their ten-year-old son on a bus to (approximately) where Egil lives before she even tells Egil about it, thus forcing him to scramble to prepare and then to confront the fact that either the ex has really done a great job poisoning their son against him or his little boy is really a foul-mouthed little prick of a child.

Meanwhile, the girl Egil had a crush on in school, Kathrine, has grown up to become a priest, and is suddenly experiencing a troubled marriage after she delays her return from an annual conference because she just doesn't feel like seeing her husband yet (despite the fact they have two kids whom she misses), only to finally come home to accusations from him that she's having an affair.

Then there's Jostein, an arts reporter for the local newspaper who turns a sour interview with a promising young artist into a hostile one-night-stand while his wife, Turid is having her own problems we'll get to in a moment and his son is having his own Dark Night of the Soul (really, this novel is the most like a Bergman film in prose of any I've ever read, and I haven't even gotten to Egil's many intense existential and religious crises which make up at least 25% of the book yet, oy!). The next day, he gets the a tip-off  about to the scene of the crime where the members of the black metal band have been found horribly dismembered, and rushes there, ready to scoop the world. And remember, this is still the mundane stuff.

Meanwhile, Turid works in a mental institution where she has the usual employee issues with a bitchy boss and a dispiriting job until suddenly one of her most problematic patients waltzes right out of the facility and into the night. Meanwhile, she and Jostein have both gotten faintly worrying messages from their son Ole, but are each assuming that the other is having a more ordinary night and will deal with their boy.

Then there's Solveig, a young woman fresh out of high school and working a dead-end job in town, living in an attic apartment whose landlords, a nice family who occupy the rest of the house, are away on vacation BUT their crazy drug-addict of a son has shown up to terrorize whomever he finds there, even if he's never met 'em before, but of course disappears by the time the police appear.

And there are still more characters, each of whom gets at least one turn in the first-person spotlight, giving you their excuses for bad behavior, disappointment with other characters, misunderstandings of loved ones' meanings, and, every once in a while, reactions to the giant glowing meatball hanging in the sky.

And slowly, things get weird, but never quite as weird as a genre fiction reader might be expecting, for while some possibly supernatural things happen that occasionally might seem like modern takes on, say, the biblical plagues of Egypt or stuff out of Revelations, mostly they're pretty tame by weird fiction standards, because Knausgaard isn't interested in weird fiction; he's interested in god and the afterlife and what it means when we both believe in these things and yet also know they probably aren't true. I didn't bring up Bergman films for nothing, is what I'm saying. I mean, the last 50 or so pages of the book is just Egil's essay about the meaning of death. Though the essay contains maybe a clue or two about some of the dangling plot threads in other people's stories, I'm not sure.

It's all almost farcically, stereotypically Scandanavian. But we like that stuff, don't we? We do. And while ultimately this is kind of a frustrating read -- the plot-before-the-essay ends with someone telling a character who has awakened from a coma that all of the stuff he's worried about -- with what he's worried about being the entire plot of the novel, including so many unresolved questions like who killed the black metal band -- is no longer of concern to anyone compared to what happened in the two weeks he was comatose, and do we get to find out what happened in the two weeks he was comatose? Do we buggery. Perhaps we can go back and tease it out, Gene Wolfe Reader style, someday by re-examining the narrative of his coma experiences, but not right now; the book (the actual, physical book printed on dead trees, which means reading it was a physically painful experience that is the main reason I'm not interesting in going back and teasing out dangling plot threads Gene Wolfe Reader style) is due back to the library where others in my city are anxiously waiting to be frustrated the way I am right now.

Reviewers who have referred to this as a shaggy dog story are not wrong. BUT, it's a really good and interesting shaggy dog story, with lots of good character drama, scenery porn and quality speculations on natural philosophy (are the laws of nature actually immutable laws, or are they merely reflections of matter's habits of "thought"?), theology, eschatology and whether or not a guy can actually drive his recently-crashed-in-an-unreported-drunk-driving-accident car clear across Norway with one headlight and no blinker without getting stopped by the police. So while I'm kind of shaking my fist at Karl Ove Knausgaard, I'm also impressed enough to, as I indicated above, want to read more.

Just not on dead tree. Oh, my aching hands.

Caitlin Starling's THE DEATH OF JANE LAWRENCE

you tried to live a small life, jane shoringfield lawrence. you tried to have no regrets. you tried to control everything. and now you are here, filled with guilt. how many have died because of your actions? because you married a man who did not want to marry, because you made him care enough to lie to you, because you forced him to confront those lies?

That's a pretty intense bit of dialogue-or-monologue whatever the story it's in, but coming from the mouth of a unique monster in the middle of a gothic novel that seems at first like it's going to be so by-the-books a gothic novel that it needs to have a woman with great hair running away from a building on the cover, it's more intense still, and that's what The Death of Jane Lawrence is from the get-go: intense. 

The novel at first seems like a gothic take on my beloved Middlemarch, and in many ways it is as I'll discuss a bit below, but we quickly learn that it's actually set in another world, in which the Great Britain analogue fought a terrible war on its own soil against a Russia analogue, and many ordinary civilians who took on the job of helping the injured and the trapped when cities were attacked or fell, were killed by chemical weapons. So this argues for it being a post World War I story, but there are no internal combustion engines or electricity; indeed, only the poshest of houses has gas lighting, so the feel is of the 19th more than the 20th century. Also, a kind of magic actually works, maybe. We'll get to that.

Jane Lawrence is our heroine's married name, though she starts off the novel as a PTSD-riddled ward of her late parents' friends, newly adult and faced with a tight situation. Her guardians are moving back to the city where her parents died horribly in the war, which she doesn't want to do, but the income she has from her parents isn't quite enough to live on by herself, so she needs to find a way to supplement that somehow. She is a self-taught accountant of considerable skill, but the alternate England in which she lives isn't quite ready to countenance a single young lady supporting herself that way, yada yada, point is, girl needs to get herself married. But see that bit where she's a self-taught accountant? There's a bit more to it all than that; Jane doesn't really do people, she does numbers. Brilliantly and often, and often to the point of not noticing that she's been doing numbers for ten hours without a break and oh, somebody's been trying to talk to her for the last twenty minutes oops.

Enter Augustine, not exactly the Tertius Lydgate to her Rosamund Vincy, but he is a well-educated and idealistic doctor who could have had a brilliant career elsewhere but is practicing in their quaint little town and living in his family's seriously dilapidated estate, so he is very Lydgate-ish if Jane is no Rosamund*. Lydgate-ishly, too, Augustine is known to be less than a brilliant businessman for all that he's a great surgeon, and so seems perfect for Jane, who doesn't want a husband so much as she wants an employer who can't fire her. Augustine has no wish to get married, but she quickly out-logics him and shows him he's better off with than without her, and quickly the two quickly reach a very businesslike arrangement with some odd conditions: Jane is to live in town in living quarters above Augustine's office, while he goes home every night to the aforementioned estate. She's not to ask why, nor to explore, maybe she'll get to have a peek at the place once in a while someday but never at night, etc. In other words, Augustine Has Secrets.

Circumstances, of course, force them out of their perfectly planned arrangements almost immediately, starting with the fact that oops, they're attracted to each other, rather ferociously. And then, oops, a mix-up on their wedding day teams up with an epic thunderstorm to trap them both overnight on Augustine's dilapidated estate full of secrets, some of which Jane has personal encounters with. Oops, oops, oops!

Chief among these secrets are terrifying reflections in darkened windows and dusty mirrors (dilapidated is actually a kind word to describe the state of Augustine's stately home; it's a barely habitable dump) of a young woman with blood red eyes and terrifying aspect. But Augustine's aspect is not merely that of a man who lives in a haunted house, as Jane quickly discovers; as I said, in this world, it's possible that a kind of magic exists, though it's a far cry from the mediums-and-Ouija-boards the ghostly apparition sets us up to expect; this world's magic owes more to that of Diane Duane's Young Wizards series than to any ordinary fantasy novel. Which means that, yes, Jane's got "a mind for magic" more than most of the other practitioners we encounter in this story, which might all be fine and good except it's via this maybe-magic that the monsters I quoted at the beginning of this entry have found their way into Augustine's house and Jane's life.

The last third of the book is chiefly taken up with Jane's reluctant embrace of her abilities (for very good reasons) and the various emotional, moral and physical costs of her doing so, and this novel does not pull any punches in describing them. She nearly starves, has to confront every fear she's ever felt in vividly rendered detail, and has to do some pretty gross things. This is not a story for sissies, though the 19th century medicine angle should have scared them off already.

But if, say, Sarah Chorn is not cranking out her tear-jerking gutbusters fast enough for you, I'd say you could add some Caitlin Starling to your TBR pile to fill in the gaps between Sarah's books. And if Sarah is new to you and Caitlin is not, well, you know what to do. Go make with the clicky.

Just have some kleenex handy.

*For one thing, she gets roped into helping with a dramatic and bloody emergency case on her very first day at his office, which is only the second day of their acquaintance!

Stephen Graham Jones' MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW

 If we go fast enough, if we close our eyes tight enough, if we ball our fists tight enough and lean forward far enough, then we can still remember what it's like to not just be terrified, but to be so terrified that we start grinning, and finally laughing, and then whether we get away or not doesn't matter anymore, because whatever's after us can never touch our smile.

Is it weird to open a directionless essayish thing about a new novel by quoting from its afterword? It feels weird. But this paragraph from the afterword of Stephen Graham Jones' latest, My Heart is a Chainsaw, struck me as such a perfect encapsulation of our culture's love for horror stories and their cathartic power that I had to include it here.

I am not the target audience for My Heart is a Chainsaw. I'm not a huge slasher movie fan. I'll sit down and watch one every now and then, but just as its parent genre of horror isn't my favorite, the slasher subgenre is something of which I am certainly aware, and have hilarious memories of watching at slumber parties in the 1980s, but for me, slashers are more a thing for which I appreciate the appreciation of others rather than really seek out on those rare occasions these days when I can bring myself to sit down in front of a movie or TV screen.*

So, if Jennifer "Jade" Davis, the teenaged heroine of My Heart is a Chainsaw, were to meet me, she would probably get frustrated with me in minutes, but if she gave me a chance she would find me a more attentive audience than, say, her history teacher, Mr. Holmes, for her lectures on the subgenre. These are delightful, peppered with encyclopedic knowledge, a head for real world applications of the lessons learned, and her smarter-than-smartass delivery of these insights. Seriously, if you think you don't have time to read the whole book** you owe it to yourself to get your hands on a copy for an hour or two to just enjoy the "Slasher 101" essays Jade has submitted throughout her checkered high school career as extra credit work for Mr. Holmes. They appear between each chapter of the narrative proper, and are the sassiest things you'll read this season, if not this year, and could be packaged and marketed as a chapbook all their own to great success.

Jade has grown up in a tiny Idaho town with a colorful history all its own even before it gets discovered by a small consortium of millionaires-or-billionaires. Founded in the years leading up to Idaho's statehood (just a week before my bordering home state of Wyoming's in 1890) and relocated once after a dam was built to create a reservoir that was unofficially christened Indian Lake, Proofrock has legends of a dead preacher in the original drowned town, a drowned "lake witch" whose origin story still inhabits living memory, and a traditional July 4 party in which a giant inflatable movie screen is placed on the town's beach, the better to be viewed from rafts, inner tubes, paddle boats and anything else that floats, for a community-wide screening of, of course, Jaws.*** How could Jade, a semi-outcast unwanted by either parent and working as a janitor for a variety of county and municipal buildings (including her high school) to save up to get the hell out of town after she graduates, not grow up a horror fan?

It also, as of the area's discovery by the new rich settlers who call themselves "Founders" in true colonial bullshit fashion, the site of an exclusive new housing development on the other side of Indian Lake called Terra Nova, from which cigarette boats and yachts are deployed to bring the settlement's children to school in Proofrock and the grown-ups to patronize the tiny local business district when the fancy strikes them. It's not enough for them to buy up the best views and privacy and build themselves a special little enclave; they want to be loved for it, too, so they know they've got to spread cash around to buy the resentful locals' adoration.****

Among the newcomers is one Letha Mondragon, a paragon of 21st century femininity (self-rescuing princess edition) whom Jade immediately pegs as born to be a Final Girl almost before Jade realizes that they might just actually be living a slasher movie plot in real life. Only Letha is so very modern and so very much a paragon that she misinterprets Jade's attempts to prepare her for her coming role as cries for help from a sociologically challenged and domestically desperate peer and believes that it is Jade who needs her help, rather than that she needs Jade's. The relationship that develops between them is complex and fascinating even as circumstances ramp up and the situation becomes one in which there is very much not time for a complicated and fascinating relationship to develop as all around them Plot. Happens. Oh so very much Plot Happens. Plot Happens in ways that feel as inevitable as a formula slasher film but also, highlighting Stephen Graham Jones' incredible skill as a novelist, would bear at least two different and contradictory interpretations right up until the final chapter (which is, delightfully, called The Final Chapter, because all of the chapters are, I believe, named after classics of the slasher genre).

And I'm not going to say anything more about it because you're going to go get it and read it now, aren't you? And then come back here and talk to me about how ending a story with a scene straight out of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom made me legit ugly cry.

*Which is very, very rare these days. I did go to a theater to see the Denis Villeneuve Dune because of course I did, but almost didn't make it home afterwards because of the migraine the theater's way OTT sound system induced. As for TV, I'll watch the new Great British Baking Show every week purely as a sort of Friday night palliative, and I'm sort of half-assedly watching the World Series aka "what if both teams were villains" but otherwise these days, I don't have the patience for it. Time spent watching TV, even prestige TV that's aimed squarely at me and my interests, is time I could be spending reading. I'm getting old, y'all.

**If so, what is wrong with you? Who hurt you? Who is wasting your time for you? Life is too short.

***Which, Jade argues eloquently in one of her Slasher 101s, is actually a stealth entry in the slasher genre. If you want to read said eloquent and persuasive argument, you know what you've got to do.

****Which, boy oh boy, Stephen Graham Jones might have written this scenario just for me, because my family got priced out of my birthplace not long after I was born, and are watching the same thing happen at a slightly slower pace in the town to which we moved (both in Wyoming) right now. The former was actually a lost cause before I was born; we were only there for my dad's state job; the latter started getting eaten by Big Carpetbag Money before I was born as well, but the first development didn't quite kill off the host the way the second wave now is. For more on what Big Carpetbag Money can do to quaint little rural areas, I'll refer you to Justin Farrell's excellent analysis in Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West.

Stephen Graham Jones' THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS with a slight detour into other media about Native American pop culture

 My sister and I have almost caught up on the available episodes of FX's goddamned delightful new series, Reservation Dogs, which hits all kinds of right notes with me that aren't all just remembering how much I love Smoke Signals although of course I screamed in Episode Four when Gary Fucking Farmer showed up as an old time pot-smoking bar-fighting "uncle" to one of our teen protagonists and stole the show every bit as much as he did in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and, to a lesser degree, in Smoke Signals, so hell yes, I realized it was high time that I checked out Stephen Graham Jones, especially since every recommendation algorithm the internet throws at me (possibly, in 2021, already all the same algorithm? Or I'm even more predictable than I think I am, which is very, but maybe it's very very) has been showing me this book for going on a year now.

Deep breath.

Also, it's spooky season. And while once again I'm at least partly wanting to focus on Spooky in Translation like I did last year, it totally felt like it was finally time to check out The Only Good Indians, which already had my attention based on that title and cover alone. I've had close encounters with deer, elk and moose that have left me seriously thanking my lucky stars I didn't get stomped or gored or worse, so I was primed for a good old fashioned animal revenge tale but with Blackfeet -- but I got so much more.

The Only Good Indians -- the title, of course, refers to the terrible old adage that the only good Indian is a dead Indian but the book, if nothing else, is interested in showing us that like the rest of the human race, all Indians are complicated, flawed people, trying their best, sometimes doing their worst, often punished by circumstances disproportionate to their failings, and haunted by a history of living in a land their ancestors cherished long before European settlers showed up and started coining adages like this one and committing genocide.

Stephen Graham Jones is not interested in litigating that here -- or at least not much, but in depicting his characters' lives as they are both on and off a reservation, a certain degree of litigating that here can't help but happen -- so much as focusing on four friends who happen to be Blackfeet, Ricky, Lewis, Gabe and Cass, and their moral universes. As young and stupid men, the friends went on a frustrating late season elk hunt on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and after an unsuccessful morning make a desperate and dumb decision to go hunt on a parcel of land that is reserved for elderly Blackfeet only, breaking U.S. law and risking prosecution, but also breaking their own codes when they come across a herd and massacre a bunch, including a cow elk who turns out to be pregnant out of season and is suspiciously -- maybe even supernaturally -- hard to kill. As the men start field dressing their kills, it draws late, so late that darkness is falling, and there is at least one game warden out there on patrol who just might catch them, and so they make the horrifying decision to waste a whole lot of the meat. They're just going to take hindquarters and leave the rest to rot and scavengers. And then they start on the pregnant cow elk that was so hard to kill. Her calf is still alive, struggling in its amniotic sac. And Lewis makes a vow not to let any of this cow go to waste. Furthermore, as he promises after the game warden catches them in the act, he'll give all of her meat away to the elders who are the only ones who should have it anyway. Freezers don't fill themselves, especially when a hunter is maybe a bit too old to hunt.

But of course, once that meat is given away, Lewis can't really control what happens to it, can he? He can't stop it, from say, working its way down to the bottom of someone's freezer over the course of a few years until it's out of the freezer geezer's reach until the geezer dies and... But we don't know for sure something like that happened...

So these guys, as the actual story begins (almost exactly ten years later and with an absolutely bonkers scene in a North Dakota honky tonk parking lot), are carrying a heavy moral load, which alone would make for a fine story, but SGJ isn't interested in focusing on that. We're here for a horror story, folks, and there was indeed something supernatural about that pregnant cow elk. Supernatural and conscious and very, very patient. If Lewis' promise isn't kept 100%, Hell is coming with sharp hooves and big teeth and 500+ pounds of fury.

But might not look it.

We get to know these men and, to a degree, the women in their lives, very, very well as the supernatural force they unleashed begins stalking them. They are, in their different ways, trying (if not always succeeding; one is basically a dead-beat dad, after all) to be better men than they were; perhaps they have learned from their transgression. A different writer might focus on that and give us a story of redemption.

But not this one.

Stephen Graham Jones is an astonishing storyteller. The Only Good Indians is tightly plotted, superbly crafted, turns over like a fine engine on a lovingly restored antique motorcycle. The characters will capture and then break your hearts even before they start suffering their spectacularly gory and intricately executed comeuppances. The supernatural elk spirit avenging herself doesn't use her teeth or hooves or bulk unless she has to, because she also has human-level smarts and cunning. The traps she sets for them are worthy of a human Patricia Highsmith character (I invoke her because she is the absolute mistress of the animal revenge story) and display a level of insight into these characters weaknesses that we have discovered right along with her. As a horror villain, she is utterly unique (though the episode of Reservoir Dogs featuring Deer Woman shows us that she is a villain with roots in tribal culture and let me tell you, seeing that episode on the day that I finished reading this book was a trip!), compelling enough to feel both frightening and sympathetic.

A final note: I wouldn't be surprised at all if Stephen Graham Jones doesn't someday turn his hand to writing novels about sports. They'll be brilliant, if several passages in which various characters work out their stuff on makeshift basketball courts* are anything to go by. The slow-building climax to the story even heavily features maybe the most tension-riddled, high stakes game of one-on-one ever committed to the page. But even the basketball stuff is kind of heartbreaking, as a subplot with an eighth grade girl who is a basketball phenomenon shows us: at just 13 or 14 years old, she is already all too familiar with the kind of racism a powerful Native American sports team faces when they play other schools. I only know of this by anecdote, though: I grew up in Wyoming, which only has one reservation and one Native American high school, which dominates in basketball every year. One thing that was always cool was when they came to play in my home town, against my school, because it seemed like the entire Wind River reservation came to town to watch the game and support their teams. It was always the best attended game of the year, with an absolutely packed and boistrous gymnasium, a special night (and yes, they usually beat our asses). I'm pretty sure it's like that for most of their away games. I'd like to think it's not just because they turned out in tremendous numbers that they got what always seemed to me to be a pretty good welcome (but my perspective might be skewed because my dad and their bus driver, the extraordinary Gary Medicine Cloud, were good friends so these games were something we tended to look forward to in our family), but the young woman in this novel, Denorah, has had experiences that suggest it's otherwise elsewhere. I don't know if Blackfeet basketball mounts a small invasion of other towns when they travel for games or not, but is that part of the difference? I couldn't help wondering about this as I read.

I don't read sports fiction, am not even sure if that's a thing apart from in the movies, but if Stephen Graham Jones ever decides to write some, I'll for sure read it. And I'm pretty stoked to read his newest novel, which is, I'm told, horror fiction not centered on his heritage, too.

Basically, I'm a fan now. Wow!

*One of these is a dead ringer in prose for the court my dad built for my sister and I when we were kids. A friend of his with a concrete business had a client flake out on him and he had a mixer full of stuff going to waste, so my dad made some kind of a deal with him to pour it into some hasty forms he threw down, then he put up a basket and made a backboard for it out of plywood. The concrete was already too far set to really get it leveled out, and wasn't really meant for this purpose, so it was a bumpy and unpredictable surface upon which to learn to dribble, etc. And the backboard was much narrower than regulation. But damned if that didn't turn my little sister into a deadeye shooter, and a pretty good guard who was ready for surprises! I regret that I never got to see her play as a high school starter; we were only in high school together for one year, my senior year, and I was on the speech team, which has a season from November through March, with the kids on the road every weekend, so I didn't get to see her then, and I certainly didn't see any of the rest of her career once I was thousands of miles away at Bard. Le sigh.

Zhao Haohui's VALLEY OF TERROR (tr by Bonnie Huie), with a slight sidebar on StoryGraph

I spent a lot of time while reading Zhao Haohui's Valley of Terror feeling like I had been let down a bit by the people who'd recommended it to me last October, when I asked Twitter for a couple of "spooky reads in translation", but then I saw that something rather clever was going on.

I really couldn't tell, from chapter to chapter, whether I was reading a supernatural horror novel disguised as a Sherlock Holmesian* detective story, or a Sherlock Holmesian detective story disguised as a supernatural horror novel. Was there going to be a Scooby Doo "it was old man so-and-so with this bag of mundane tricks" ending or was it going to end in some kind of exorcism? 

The tension between these two possibilities was maintained almost until the last chapter! And this made up for what, for me, were still some pretty annoying flaws in the novel that I'll discuss a bit below. But overall, the effect earns Valley of Terror a WOW! from me.

But first, a bit about pace. I'm not usually a reader much concerned with pace, but as I've started migrating my book-tracking from the problematic and Tech Giant-owned GoodReads to The StoryGraph (so far not Tech Giant-owned, with a very different recommendation engine, and all the tasty bar and pie graphs a dork could ask for), I've been unable to avoid noticing it. Every time you mark a book as finished over there, you're asked to describe it in terms of moods ("challenging", "dark", "adventurous", "lighthearted" etc) and pace.

Now, this might be a whiplash effect from my previous read having been Marcel Proust's Swann's Way** but boy did Valley of Terror feel fast-paced. Zhao, at least as translated by Bonnie Huie, is all about the terse declarative sentence, the quick establishing description, and above all keeping the story moving. If you're looking for a brooding noir-ish crime read where the personal drama of the detective is half the story, this ain't it. We're dropped right into the action -- a plague of absolutely mind-shattering fear has descended upon a Chinese city, with at least two people dead before we've even finished meeting our detective, Chief Investigator Luo Fei (and learned how very respected he is; everybody, barring one character I'll talk about in a bit, is either very wise and learned with a shining reputation who commands awe and respect from everybody else, or is basically just a figurant there to express that awe and respect). One went tear-assing out of a college library late at night and ran six miles in 40 minutes, essentially running himself to death, dying with an appaling rictus of terror on his face; the other suddenly left a wedding where everybody else was having such a great time they didn't notice that he was scared out of his mind, so scared that he tried to hide his head and entire body in a toilet and drowned. Also with the rictus.

And really, I almost feel like I took longer than Haohui does in describing this set-up. Dude is snappy! As in lickety-split, our Sherlock Holmes-analogue, Luo, has picked up a Watson-analogue at the local university, renowned psychologist Dr. Zhou, who has a living patient on his hands with a problem very like what the corpses seem to have experienced. Except he doesn't speak Mandarin; he only speaks a minority language, Hamo. And they don't even know who he is! Every bit as resourceful as Holmes and Watson, but with greater resources, they turn to the internet to solve this dilemma, and again, almost before we know it, BOOM! A third team member appears in the form of fringe historian Yue Dongbei.

And here's where Valley of Terror first threatened to get tiresome, because there is a lot of cliched sparring between Respectable Scientist Zhou and Crackpot Yue, even though the Crackpot has actual insights into the case; he had hired the living patient to go into the Back of Beyond to investigate a paranormal legend for him!

Thankfully, though, here is also where things get really fascinating for the Western reader, because the paranormal legend involves a lot of very real Chinese history that this American, even though she took four years of Mandarin in college and has struggled mightily to preserve what fluency she attained by watching a lot of Mandarin-language TV and movies over the years, didn't know much about. 

Way back around the time that Charles I was making everybody angry in England, the Manchu were invading China, and their forces were duking it out with the Yongling emperor's over territory near the modern day nations of Myanmar and Laos, with the almost-defeated Yongling forces left to the charge of one very capable and resourceful leader, General Li Dingguo, after the emperor fled to Myanmar (Burma back then). Li led something between a guerilla campaign and a siege defense in a mountainous region for years, achieving feats of military brilliance and command of logistics, but coming to a tragic and lonely end.*** BUT! In Yue's version of this history it is commonly believed that Li's prowess and incredible feats of derring do were only possible because he could command actual demons! Demons which were devilishly hard to overcome, as was Li until finally he and his supernatural aid were trapped in a vial via his blood. The vial is now a terrible, sacred treasure that must be guarded, lest the terrible monster Li escape and reincarnate and seek revenge on Those Who Brought Him Low.

Centuries later, this vial was looted from the region, smuggled into our man Luo's home city, and was in the process of being sold by unscrupulous traders to a collector from Myanmar a few months before the first scared-to-deaths occurred. This shady transaction was interrupted by none other than Supercop Luo, who in the process had to fire his weapon and managed to break open the blood vial! Did something escape from that vial besides some really old but well-preserved blood? Something that, say, can elicit mind-shattering fear in any unlucky human it/they encounter? SPOOKY!

We're still not even like 1/8th of the way through the novel, here, by the way. Lightning pace! Next thing we know Luo, Zhou and Dongbei are off on an adventure to the village to which General Li retreated centuries ago, to find Li is worshipped by the rustic locals, all of whom are descended from his defeated troops, as a rain god. A local Big Man, Chief Bai, a descendant of General Li's lieutenants, keeps the cult alive through a Scooby Doo mechanism: when the locals pray for rain, they make offerings and perform a ceremony and, if the "rain god" is pleased, his statue "cries" tears supplied on the sly by one Chief Bai -- or rather, one of his assistants. Except just as our investigative trio turns up, that assistant turns up in a state of severe shock and the General Li statue is crying blood!

Does this sound like good, pulpy fun, or what? But wait, there's more! Like a remote village populated by a minority tribe, the Hamo (kind of maybe based on a real life tribal people of the region, the Miao, maybe?), speakers of the language Dr. Zhou's terrified babbling patient was babbling terrifiedly in and believers in a version of the legend of Li Dingguo in which he is a terrifying villain who could summon demons and inflict sanity-destroying terror on his foes. The local belief system is upheld by yet another chieftain type, descended from the mighty Hamo warrior who originally, legendarily, defeated Li and put his blood in the vial, and a beautiful priestess, formerly the keeper of this vial who is descended from the lovely woman who was integral to the original plot to bring Li to justice.

See? So pulpy! So fun!

Continued tiresome arguments between Dr. Zhou and Mr. Dongbei aside.

And the annoying tendency for Zhao to describe his characters' physcial appearance in moral terms; we don't really know what anybody looks like in terms we're used to in western fiction, but we are often told that someone has an "honest" or "forthright" face and this is only my second modern Chinese novel but is that really a convention of Chinese fiction, that there are facial physiognomies that automatically convey trustworthiness or the lack thereof? Because, yuck.

Oh, and Zhou is constantly having leaps of insight that we're meant to just run with like being able to tell from a faint and messy footprint in damp mud that a dude was six feet tall, which, yes, deduction is mighty, but we're not treated to any deductive reasoning here, the other characters just say something along the lines of oh yes, of course, you learned that in police training!

And like I said, for a lot of the time I spent reading this, I was pretty annoyed at all of this, until I noticed how well the Big Mystery, the tension I mentioned above, is kept suspended. And so no, I'm not going to tell you which it is, but I am going to tell you that if you like mysteries, want to explore a different setting (and by the way, Zhao is a pretty competent scenery pornographer; China's equivalent of a Tourism Bureau should be slipping him a little something something for making people want to come visit Hunnan; it sounds beautiful), or like their spooky mysteries laced with a lot of historical drama. I might check out more of Zhao's work one of these day.

*With this title, and a bit of dialogue early in the novel evoking yet another Holmes mystery, I can't help but thinking a bit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear, eh wot?

**Which, yes, I'm finally going to read all of In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past but no, I've decided I'm not going to inflict my thoughts about on this blog. Plenty of ink and pixels have been spilled on long dead Proust, most of it by people with smarter and more insightful things to say about it than I. Too long; didn't write: how did "Swann in Love" escape the 90s trend of adapting classic literature into a snappy teen movie? It's exactly a teen movie plot!

***I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on this but you know who really went down a rabbit hole on this? Zhao Haohui, who has a nifty afterword about it that basically tells the whole historical tale of General Li Dingguo and it's a pretty great story.

Doctor, Doctor: Mark Morris' FOREVER AUTUMN

Sweet Jeebus, there's a lot to like about Forever Autumn. A lot! Like, it would be a great seasonal read, a fun horror novel, all on its own, without its being a Doctor Who novel. But, sigh, it's not only a Doctor Who novel, it's a Tenth Doctor, Doctor Who novel.

Forever Autumn -- and see, I even love the title! -- blunders right into Lovecraft territory (albeit modern day Lovecraft territory, a smallish* New England town with a history of weird stuff, a mysterious black tree, etc.) and acts like it owns the place. Kids have the wild hair to dig at the roots of the mysterious black tree, which is so ancient there are Native American legends about how it got there, and dig up a mysterious, creepy, kind of "fleshy" book full of strange names and lettering. It emits a weird green glow, and soon the town is enveloped in creepy green mist. Then tall, thin, tree-like skellingtons are walking around town at night throwing the whammy on unsuspecting citizens. I mean, hell yes!

But then the Tenth Doctor, and his beautiful but boring-as-paint-drying companion, Martha Jones, show up, and start mugging for our attention. And here's the flaw. Novels and Big Finish have rehabilitated Doctors that I've not been too fond of for me, so I had at least some expectation that maybe this, my first Tenth Doctor novel, would maybe do the same. But no.

This book managed to make the Tenth Doctor worse! As portrayed by David Tennant -- who has been marvelous in everything else I've seen -- the Doctor is frenetic, twitchy, disconnected (if the Ninth Doctor is the PTSD Doctor, the Tenth is the ADHD Doctor. Unmedicated) and shouty. He's a distraction rather than a star or a protagonist.

As written, he's all of these things, but turned up to eleven (heh). Author Mark Morris must have been under special orders to emphasize all of these qualities, because in these pages the Doctor can't stand or sit still for even 30 seconds. Maybe because, without an actual actor with biology and whatnot to accommodate, there really are no limits to how spastic he can be? When he doesn't even have to take a breath?

I dunno.

What saved this book for me -- remember, to date I've only ever DNF'd one Doctor Who novel -- was the setting, and the incidental characters. The kids are kind of stock characters, but have personality enough to be enjoyable; the early victim of the novel's main monsters is compassionately portrayed (bonus that one of the kids knows better than to take him lightly as a figure of fun), and the novel's temporary companion, an elderly woman whose family has always had something a bit witchy about them, is a delight. Like I said, this would have been a fine, possibly Bradbury-ish read without the Doctor Who elements.

The climax is fun if kind of telegraphed from a long way off (*cough* Chekov's Evil Clown Costume *cough*), the monster-aliens, a delightfully weird riff on the Pumpkinhead, are cool and genuinely creepy and the book quite a good read. I would have absolutely adored it with pretty much any other Doctor/Companion team; as it is, I merely liked it a lot.

As for my Arbitrary & Mercurial rankings, they don't change a lot. I just get to add a few elements.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis

Mark Morris
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

Doctors:

Ninth
Twelfth
Sixth
Third
Eleventh
Second
War
Fourth
Eighth
Seventh
Fifth
First
Tenth

Companions:

Ace
Romana II
Jamie
Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara
Nyssa
Samantha

Martha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric

Rose
Peri
Ian
*Most of you would probably drop the "ish" but I'm from a town with a population under 1600 souls, and spend a lot of time in even smaller burgs, so this town, which is apparently populated enough to allow a year-round dedicated costume shop to not only survive but flourish, it's small-ish. In a true small town, you make your own costumes, or you buy them at the nearest big box store (well over 100 miles away) or luck into them at a second-hand joint if your town's business community manages to support such a thing.

Tim Powers' MEDUSA'S WEB

My love for Tim Powers knows no bounds, as my readers probably know very well. From my very first reading of his basically perfect The Anubis Gates when I was a teenager to my most recent umpteenth re-read of his definitely perfect Last Call, I'm pretty close to saying the man can write no wrong.*

With his latest novel-length work, Medusa's Web, I'm even closer to saying that. Because holy crap, this is his best work since Last Call, and I really, really, really love Last Call, y'all.

There are enough superficial similarities between this work and LC that a reader might at first start suspecting that the wells to which Powers likes best to go are finally starting to run dry -- the hero's name is even Scott, you guys (but the reader discovers midway that it's Scott for a very punny-but-plot-relevant reason) -- but quickly it becomes apparent that said similarities are superficial indeed. Powers is not done coming up with weird new ways to mix science and magic and human creativity, and this is one of his weirdest yet.

Medusa's Web, which also in its setting and cast of closely related characters has even more of the flavor of a gothic novel than Powers' stuff usually does, begins with an uncomfortable reunion of cousins, gathered back to the sprawling Holywood estate where they were all raised by a legendary actress/model/bodice-ripping novelist named Amity. Who recently died. By committing suicide. By going to the roof of her monstrous house and blowing herself up with a grenade. And oh, by the way, because her monstrous house and its grounds are sort-of-haunted in a very timey-wimey way, that particular explosion keeps repeating itself at odd intervals throughout the subsequent story as her son and three of his cousins try to sort out what to do now that the old girl is gone.

And that's not all. Because this is Tim Powers. So, no, there is no Time Machine whisking people to and fro, nor is the repetition of Amity's spectacular suicide just a ghost story. There is a really weird sort of magic at work here, magic triggered by very simple but weirdly potent line drawings that suck observers right out of their bodies, into an identity-less, sort-of-dimensionless space and then dump them into vignettes from the lives of other people who have looked at those drawings. And there are lots of those, generally, because this trip is pretty addictive. But that's not all, either.

Let's just say you're not just a passive observer of the vignettes you might witness. And that there's maybe some reciprocity. Which makes a kind of time travel possible. Kind of.

And there's yet more. Because this book takes place in Hollywood. Yes, the bulk of it in 2015, and yes, in kind of a romantic ruin of the past, but also in Old Hollywood. As in the silent movie era. And the great Rudolph Valentino is a character (kind of the way Bugsy Siegel was in LC, but he gets to do more). And there's a whole thread woven in about a classic silent pic, Salome**, which I'd not heard of before but now totally want to see.

And but so, GLAMOUR.

I think this is going to warrant a repeat read very soon, because, too, in some ways this reminded me a bit of a Gene Wolfe novel. Once you know its secrets, the meaning of some baffling early bits might just turn from baffling to brilliant.

Don't forget your bullseye specs, kids!

*I say "pretty close" only because I am not a huge fan of his sequel-that-tied-two-previously-unrelated-books-together-to-make-an-after-the-fact-trilogy, Earthquake Weather. It's not terrible, but it's not up to his usual mark, either, and reeks of something cooked up by his agent or publisher. Meh. But otherwise, yeah, he can write no wrong.

**Which is a silent adaptation of the great Oscar Wilde's famous play about Salome and John the Baptist and Herod. Yeah, that Salome. But it's also, because Powers is a genius, warped into being a key to the mystery of these weirdo spider drawings. Because Powers is a genius.

Paul Elard Cooley's THE BLACK: OUTBREAK

In The Black: A Deep Sea Tale, literary horror author (and good friend of Your Humble Blogger) Paul Elard Cooley sic'd an ancient and mysterious and unique monster on a too-enterprising crew of roughnecks and scientists on an offshore oil rig. In The Black: Arrival, Cooley began exploring the implications of this entity's arrival on the mainland as it wreaked havoc on the testing laboratory to where the first novel's crew sent samples of oil that happened to also contain that entity, which results as harrowing and disastrous as those on the rig.

In this third novel, The Black: Outbreak, Cooley now shows us what happens when the entity, mistakenly treated as a disease organism, becomes the problem of a nearby hospital, the Centers for Disease Control, and members of Houston PD's SWAT. This means the reader is being asked to invest in a whole mess of new characters, and Cooley as usual does a fine job of deftly sketching them in, so a few words conveys a whole lot of information about who we're following through his labyrinth of nasty doom. But we've learned, we have, that more than half of these people are basically just monster chow.

Confession time: I found this one a tough slog compared to the first two. The middle of the book is basically just a long round of set 'em up and knock 'em down, as character after character succumbs to the basically unstoppable Black even as an isolated hero in the CDC mobile command unit finds the entity's weakness. It got a bit repetitive, there for a while, but then the tension (will the (very few) survivors be able to implement the solution in time? Especially since The Black has knocked out all of the hospital's utilities, even unto the backups?) between plight and solution kicked in to regain the book's momentum.

The ending is basically satisfying, even (bizarrely, for a Cooley novel) hopeful, while still setting up another sequel. And this one should have some character continuity, which makes me happy because I've grown attached to a few of the characters in this one.

I'm sure I went regret that at ALL.

Justin Robinson's EVERYMAN

I mostly know of Justin Robinson as a cleverly goofy writer of fun stuff like his Mr. Blank books and City of Devils -- imaginative, occasionally silly romps that take an entertaining premise and run buck-wild with it.* I only vaguely knew that he wrote more traditional genre fiction, too, with a bent towards horror.

What I didn't know was that when he does so, if Everyman is anything to go by, he achieves even more impressive results.

Everyman goes on my virtual shelves alongside the works of Tony Burgess (Pontypool Changes Everything, The N-Body Problem), Ben Marcus (The Flame Alphabet) and Colson Whitehead (Zone One).** What do these have in common? They're ostensibly horror, but they transcend the genre in various amazing ways.

Superficially, Everyman is treading through Tim Powers territory, and I don't just say this because it so lovingly traces its way through the geography of Los Angeles. Its monsters (well, at least one of them) would be at home in a Powers novel, as would its depiction of the warm and happy but doomed marriage at the heart of its narrative, and it has chills similar to those that Powers occasionally offers, but Everyman has emotional beats and trappings that are entirely its own thing.

The book can be read as an extended ad absurdam metaphor for identity theft; its antagonist, Ian, can do so with frightening completeness, just by rooting out what thing among all of a person's possessions actually carries the most of his victim's emotional identification and stealing it. Possession of this possession allows him to mimic the person so completely that even those closest to the victim believe that Ian is the real person and their loved one is a bad and terrifying imposter -- even if both of them are in the room.

The victim is quickly expelled from his paradise, and finds that not only those who know him or her, but everyone, reacts to him or her with a deep lizard-brain level of hostility.

Such happens to our first protagonist, David, in the first act, and we spend a lot of time with him as his new unreality sinks in. He is suddenly friendless, homeless, loveless -- his own mother, his friends and neighbors, even, most importantly, his truly beloved wife, Sophie (who winds up the real hero of this novel in lots of poignant -- and kickass -- ways) threaten violence or law enforcement involvement at the very sight of him. This material is every bit as gut-wrenching as you might expect, but never strays into melodrama, remaining merely deeply effective, and eventually, quite Kafkaesque.***

And then things get bad.

Ian's power works in weird and grotesque ways, ways that Robinson spent a lot of time and effort reasoning out (again, in a very Tim Powers way that I can't applaud enough. Yes, it's supernatural/magical, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be internally logical!). Ian's victims don't just wind up lonely and homeless: there is a far sadder, weirder and grosser fate awaiting them. And their chosen objects. Yuck.

I am seriously impressed.

*And as a hilariously snarky lover of television and movies of questionable quality, which he loves (?) to share with us over at The Satellite Show.

**I suppose Doris Lessing belongs there, too, but I've only read The Fifth Child and don't want to read any more as a result.

***I mean, really, is anything more Kafkaesque than a well-constructed doppelganger story? To be truly Kafkaesque I suppose our heroes would have to have gotten tangled up in the justice system's red tape, but still.

James S.A. Corey's CALIBAN'S WAR

The first Expanse novel, Leviathan Wakes was a Belter punk detective story in space opera clothing, and entertaining as hell, entertaining enough for me to set aside the books I was intending to read next and plunge right into the sequel. So what's the sequel, Caliban's War?

Man, the sequel is pretty much a horror novel with a sprinkling of military fiction in space opera clothing, innit? In fact, on reflection, it reminded me more than a bit of two favorites: the earlier Alien films, and Paul Elard Cooley's horror/petroleum punk The Black novels and, of course, Scott Sigler's Infected series. In fact, imagine a possibly omnipotent, physics-defying combination of those three menaces and set it in a human-settled solar system and you've pretty much got the protomolecule that is the main background threat of the Expanse series thus far.

So while I enjoyed meeting up with (almost) all of the characters I'd come to enjoy in the last novel, and my introduction to three new ones, it was really the horror/suspense elements of the plot, and the characters' (largely post-traumatic) reactions to them, that really kept me advancing the pages of Caliban's War. Especially the reactions. This book so successfully evoked the PTSD experience (at least as experienced by Your Humble Blogger) that it actually gave me quite a bit of trouble mid-novel. I won't say I had a full-blown attack, but I was pretty much a mess for the middle third of the story. Part of me is very upset about this, because triggering someone's PTSD is not at all nice, but the rest of me admires the effectiveness this had in absolutely freaking riveting me to what I was reading.**

But so, your mileage may vary there. A lot of people have whined that this book isn't as good as its predecessor (and they're not totally wrong in that lots of it does rehash/recycle elements from LW, right down to the Find the Missing Girl plot), but I don't see it. I was able to put the first one down, sometimes for days. This one, this one I barely slept.

But I wasn't just scared, reading CW. I also just enjoyed. I really dig all the characters from the first novel that carried over into this one (though I sure do miss [REDACTED]), and the new ones introduced here are just as great.*** Everybody gets a very satisfying character arc (well, except maybe Naomi, who has diminished into a stock girlfriend character who only occasionally gets to do something kind of important behind the scenes with her magical technological skills. Fix that, Coreys!) and their adventures with the Caliban-esque**** (in that they are supernaturally powerful beings imperfectly subjected to human will, only to of course throw off their chains and raise hell) protomolecular monsters are amazing, of course.

There was something else, though, that really fascinated me in CW, and that's the depiction of how Ganymede functions, and how it falls apart. Here the two-headed Corey monster really went to town, fully and convincingly realizing a complete world, a total artificial ecosystem on which not only its immediate inhabitants depend but on which most of the Outer Planets and the Belt do, too, and then tearing it all down in excruciating detail. It's kind of like watching a giant domino display of doom going down. Yes, I realize I'm probably a big ol' jerk for enjoying this aspect as much as I did. But I'm sure I'm not alone.

Now excuse me. I have to start on the next one. Because of [REDACTED] showing up at the end and not being [REDACTED] but instead [REDACTED]. Dude!

*Which, Bob help me, I always want to type -- and say -- as Leviathan's Wake. I'm sure there's something Freudian there but I don't care. It's just something that simultaneously amuses and annoys me.

**Much as in a full-blown event, I knew perfectly well that nothing was actually happening at the time and I was perfectly safe in my comfortable home and so was everybody else I care about, but knowing intellectually that nothing is wrong is not enough to stop me feeling it in my gut and shaking and crying, or to let me tear myself away from the horror show in my head. Because who wants to stop and do EMDR while reading a freaking sci-fi novel?

***Though man, the TV show sure did improve on Avasarala (even as the TV writers had to create her story out of whole cloth for the show, because she's not in the parts of the books that the first TV season covered). Not just because Shohreh Aghdashloo is fantastic and lends the character considerable gravitas and grace, but because she had to do something to get her point across besides swearing. I have no particular problem with cursing usually, but book-Avasarala relies entirely too much on the harmless-looking little old lady shocking everybody with F-bombs to get her point across. Jeebus!

****Read your damned Shakespeare.