Alice Brière-Haquet's PHAILANA (Tr Emma Ramadan)

What if the Mothman (of prophecy fame) were a little girl named Manon, lost in Jack the Ripper's London? Being relentlessly pursued by a would-be mad scientist and protected by a weird old lady and a pack of Very Good Dogs?

I mean, shut up and take my money, amirite?

In Alice Brière-Haquet's Phalaina (Greek for "moth") the Goodest of the Good Dogs, Giulio, even becomes a point of view character, as he is an agent of the secret Mothman People (I know it's basically the Secret Commonwealth aka Faerie, but they hang out with moths, have very moth-like habits and glowing red eyes; they are the Mothman People) via his friendship, not only with Molly, the woman who becomes Manon's human protector after Manon escapes from a convent, but with a strange and gangly man with weird abilities who is seeking to reunite Manon with her people. Her people who live in a special harmony with nature and can communicate telepathically with each other and with all animals. Manon can't yet because she's still a larva, basically.

Giulio doesn't entirely steal the show, but he does emerge as Phalaina's most dynamic and dependable hero even when he's not the point of view character, so I think perhaps this novel should actually have been named for him, but then someone would have to explain the cover art (though I like how, in the American edition, the upper wings of the moth depicted look almost like dog's heads in profile and the lower wings, combined with the tree's trunk and a hollow at its base, form yet another dog's face! I wonder if that was intentional? The cover artist for the English language publisher, Levine Querido, is not listed on the copyright or title page, dammit!). 

Ah, but the Mothman People are not her only people; Manon had a human father, a famous and wealthy professor, Dr. Humphrey, who corresponded with Charles Darwin and started an important scientific foundation before dying in a mysterious carriage crash out in the boonies, which some sinister types know Manon was in but survived...

Among the sinister types are the hilariously Cruella DeVil-ish Harriet Humphrey, the dead professor's sister and sole heir -- unless proof surfaces that he had a child, say -- and her icky boyfriend, John, who was the Secretary of the good doctor's foundation and is helping Miss Humphrey to locate Manon, but maybe not in service to Miss Humphreys' or Manon's interests!

The resulting tale is a chase narrative reminiscent of, say, The Quincunx (but written for a middle grade audience) tinged with all of the coolest cryptid stories, Charles Paliser meets Coast to Coast AM minus the mRNA vaccine hysteria.

Translator Emma Ramadan kept this book's intended audience very much in mind and kept the prose clear and direct, though for some reason decided that the very modern (I think?) "heave" was a good usage to convey nausea and vomiting in a historical fantasy set in the 19th century, which usage tripped me up every time. I doubt the intended readership will even notice that, though; they'll just be having a good time while absorbing the book's very timely message about living in harmony with, versus dominating, nature. What a different world we might have now if that message had gained more traction back then. 

I hear Alice Brière-Haquet has written a few other books. Perhaps the next time I'm in the mood for some weird fantasy from the French, I'll grab one and spend some time with her again. She is delightful!

Yamen Manai's THE ARDENT SWARM (tr by Lara Vergnand)

Yamen Manai's lovely and tense The Ardent Swarm, the Tunisian author's first novel to be translated into English, has two villains,Vespa madarinia (what we in the US have dubbed Murder Hornets) and a rising political party that is mobilizing the countryside in favor of theocratic authoritarianism. But no, it's not set in the United States! Not everything is about us! For me, as for the novel's hero Sidi, it's all about the bees. 

Sidi is a beekeeper, a fixture in a village so small it doesn't even consider itself to be a village, in the fictional kingdom of Qafar, which is experimenting with democracy but is poised to reap that system's worst fruits as a demogogic fundamentalist "Party of God" is mounting a tremendous effort to convince the illiterate or barely literate citizens of the countryside to vote for them in exchange for gifts of food, clothing and blankets those citizens desperately need and, since they, like the rural poor in most places, don't really care who's in charge in the capital city, this strategy has every chance of working as our story starts.

But back to the bees and the beekeeper. Sidi is so devoted to the denizens of his hives that he refers to them as "his girls" and openly weeps when he finds that something has invaded one of them and brutally destroyed every last worker and drone, and even left the queen lying on her back, feebly kicking her wounded legs in the air before finally expiring. Reader, of course I cried. And immediately suspected, long before the other villain buzzed to the forefront of the novel's conflicts, that it was indeed the Giant Asian Hornet who had done the deed. But Sidi has never heard of such a thing; he's a simple man with profound knowledge and experience in one thing and one thing only, so this mysterious new threat not only to his livelihood but his entire existence is something he takes very seriously and approaches with a combination of deductive reasoning that would do Sherlock Holmes proud and a degree of physical courage that few of us could match.  He mounts a sleepless constant watch over his remaining hives -- he owes his beloved girls no less -- until he spots two of the thumb-length flying reconnaissance over his territory and marking the next hive for destruction with a reeking burst of pheromone attractants.

How did these monsters get here? Sidi's detective skills impress yet again as he discovers a surprising link between these invaders and the disturbing fundamentalists making weird promises to and demanding new levels of cultural and religious subservience from Sidi's friends and neighbors, who nonetheless come gladly to Sidi's aid when he decides that his plight calls for the kind of research he can't do with direct observation and experimentation and the kind of wise and careful, but slow, selective breeding that he has always employed to help his girls overcome previous threats -- fungal, bacterial, arachnoidal -- to their well-being, and this is where that title comes in.

An "Ardent Swarm" is the poetic name for a behavior that most of us who pay attention to things like murder hornets probably already know about, but was surprising new knowledge when Manai was writing this novel: bees who share the murder hornet's natural habitat have evolved a unique and devastatingly effective but costly defense: when one of these horrors lands on their doorstep, hundreds of worker bees pile on and around the invader's body and beat their wings and dance to generate kinetic energy, aka heat. The bees can tolerate higher temperatures than the hornets can, so the bees effectively cook their predator to death before it can do more damage. Of course, many workers get eviscerated by the hornet in the process of achieving the critical mass for an effective Ardent Swarm, but such is hive life. As long as the queen is safe!

The fact that this behavior strongly suggests itself as a metaphor for how Sidi's fellow visitors might respond to the threats posed by the Party of God and splinter groups that are more militant and less patient than the Party is delicately suggested but never explored outright; Manai is not writing a polemic or a guerilla warefare manual, he's writing a beautiful and tenderly observed novel about friendship, between man and bee, and between humans as well, as Sidi finds that his generosity over the years in sharing his knowledge and his honey has not gone unnoticed and will not go unrewarded. This is a strong contender for my best read of 2022.

I sure hope Manai and sound and unflashy translator Lara Vergnand bring more of his work to English language readers very soon. And now excuse me, I'm afraid I've gotten hooked on not one but two different versions of the casual mobile game of Ant Legion. Hymenoptera ahoy!

V. Castro's Queen of the Cicaidas/La Reina de las Chicharras

 I love finding out how other languages express animal sounds. Like the way in Arabic dogs say "Haw Haw" or Japanese cats say "Nyah" or pigs go "Grunz" in German. And then there are just foreign words for animals that are fun to say, and are often also versions of what sounds they make, like "Mao" for cat in Mandarin Chinese. And then there are words for insects, like the Icelandic "kakkalakki" for cockroach.

I have a new favorite one of these, and it is Chicharra, Spanish for cicaida. And, as it is frequently chanted in V. Castro's fantastically pulpy new horror novel, Queen of the Cicaidas/La Reina de las Chicharras, "Chicharrachicharracharracharra".

When I stumbled across this little gem of in the new books section of my local public library, I thought at first this might be a bilingual edition, since the title shows up on the cover in both English and Spanish, but alas, I was wrong. I was wrong about a couple of things with regards to this novel, but, you know, not alas. Because it's good.

The story starts out in the present day, when our heroine, Belinda, has to return to her old hometown of Alice, TX for a friend's wedding. Belinda has some kind of feelings about this, being herself divorced and becoming somewhat estranged from the teenaged son she's raising by herself, but she does her best to try to enjoy it... and then she discovers that the awesome wedding venue her friend has chosen is... a haunted farm!

But it's not just any old haunted farm. It's a farm where a brutal hate crime took place in the 1950s, against a lovely young undocumented farm hand named Milagros. But instead of a mere ghost of Milagros stalking the grounds and house, this farm is under the special attention of no less a figure than the Aztec goddess of the dead, Mictecacihuatl, and if you're getting Silvia Moreno-Garcia vibes, you're not alone. But V. Castro has other tricks up her sleeve than sending Belinda on a road trip with a scary skull-faced lady with a fancy headdress -- like turning Milagros into a brand new kind of monster*. The molted shells of immature cicaidas figured prominently in the torture-murder of Milagros, and so she is reborn into the undead Queen of the Cicaidas, whose legend immediately starts to grow and partakes a bit of, say, Bloody Mary but has other sights to show you as the story progresses.

This could easily have been a story of a plucky modern lady helping a nice hotel owner to purge his property of its supernatural miasma or something like that, which we've already read many times before, and it was kind of what I was expecting from the jacket copy. There are elements of this hoary old plot, sure, but there is much more, and I'm not just talking about how Belinda gets back in touch with her Mexican-American roots and especially with her Mexican side when she investigates Milagros' story and travels to the unfortunate migrant's original home to tell her family why her letters and money stopped coming so long ago. This is touching enough to make Queen of the Cicaidas stand out, but even this wasn't enough for V. Castro, who is maybe, like me, a bit of a fan of stuff like Ernest Hogan's magnificent High Aztech or something similar. I was absolutely deslighted by the unexpected turn this story took about 3/4 of the way through, when stuff happens that I'm afraid you'll have to read the novel to discover for yourself. Again, it's not a long read, but it's fun, though, prude alert: there's some graphic sex scenes near the end that I could have done without, but hey, Belinda is a lady with needs, I get it.

Speaking of, ahem, those kind of needs, I have to give this book kudos for excellent queer representation; Milagros had a girlfriend back in the day, so the farm owner's advances on her pretty person were extra unwelcome, and the modern day owner of the farm is a gay man with his poop in a group who is ready to start a family with the right partner. And no, it's not Belinda.

So, it's coming up on Halloween, you need a bit of spooky in your life that also takes on a couple of important social issues, and dishes up some godpunk and invented a whole new supernatural monster? Bow down to La Reina!

*Really, this monster/figure felt so organic to the setting that I went digging to see where she might have originated. As far as I can tell, she originated in the mind of one V. Castro, though I dunno, maybe it was inspired by the Navajo trickster god I learned about decades ago from James Hillman - variously spelled Bekotsidi or Begodchiddy, who sometimes turned into an insect in order to escape pursuit, other times, upon capture, let various insects swarm from his mouth and hair and whatnot. And dressed as a woman a lot. Great inspiration if that's where she got it, but if no, well, bravo to her for coming up with a genuinely new figure of pseudo-folklore. Who is cool AF, btw.

Also, apropos of nothing, here's maybe the person to cast if this ever gets adapted into a film. Her name is Shokotan, and for several years she made a sort of fashion statement using their discarded exoskeletons in celebration of cicada molting season in Japan. My kind of girl.

Laline Paull's THE BEES

To compare Laline Paull's entomological fantasy, The Bees,to Watership Down is an almost irresistible temptation, and probably made a pretty good elevator pitch for the book, but to do so, to simply say "bees instead of rabbits" is to sell both novels short. Yes, they're both magnificent novels that are much, much more than human stories acted out by animals, but that's pretty much where the similarities end.

The Bees concerns the life-span of one individual worker bee, Flora-717 (Flora is her "kin"; there are hundreds of Floras and she is but one. But...) within the larger life of a domesticated hive kept by a human beekeeper to pollinate his orchard (his sole "Visitation" to collect some honey is a terrifying scene I'd pit right up against the harrowing extermination scene from the animated film version of Watership Down, but it's somehow more horrifying because the reader knows the beekeeper believes he's a kindly husband to his hive, its benevolent father-god just collecting his tithe).

From her emergence from the cell in which she metamorphosed from a larva to an adult worker bee forward, Flora-717 (or just Flora; other members of her kin group are referred to as floras with a lower case "f" for clarity) is marked out as different. A member of the lowly sanitation caste, she is already considered ugly and brutish, but she's also huge for a worker bee, so huge that the "fertility police" almost kill her as deformed. Only the experimental kindness of a high-caste "Sage" (of royal kin) saves her, and sets her on her unique path.

Flora gets to be a nurse in the royal nurseries for a while, then goes back to janitoring, then gets the opportunity to join the elite corps of "foragers" -- the bees who fly out in search of new sources of nectar and pollen and come back to the hive to dance out not only directions but also detailed stories about how they found the food and what terrors they encountered -- crows, wasps, spiders, cell phone towers* -- on the way there.

All of this is presented with great attention to our current actual scientific understanding of bees and beehives, which lends a lot of plausibility (and earns a lot of willing suspension of disbelief) to Flora's story. At times, though, Paulli can't help herself. These bees "talk" in perfect English sentences and, furthermore, have a powerful form of telepathy that is kind of top-down in that higher caste bees seem to have greater ability than lower but also allows our heroine to download a whole load of knowledge from a dying forager bee at one point. One may snort at this, but let it go.

The prose is lovely, and so is the emotional journey of our Flora as she experiences both a sexless and sexual life of a kind, motherhood of a kind (only the Queen is supposed to breed, but as we've established, Flora is special -- and her origins, if not how she learns of them, plausibly explain her specialness) and life as a tiny part of a greater whole. I'm not at this stage 100% sure that I'm going to read this one over and over again as I have the rabbit book, but since I do happen to love insects rather a lot more than I do rabbits, well...

Anyway, as the best entomological fiction to hit the book world since Clark Thomas Carlton's Prophets of the Ghost Ants, this one is not to be missed!

*A whole thread that entertains all of the suggested and accepted factors that contributed to colony collapse disorder is present here. Paulli wisely favors none of the theories specifically, nor does she get didactic about it all; it's merely texture, background detail on what the life of bees must actually be like. Well, what it would actually be like if they "spoke" and all.

Laline Paull's THE BEES

To compare Laline Paull's entomological fantasy, The Bees,to Watership Down is an almost irresistible temptation, and probably made a pretty good elevator pitch for the book, but to do so, to simply say "bees instead of rabbits" is to sell both novels short. Yes, they're both magnificent novels that are much, much more than human stories acted out by animals, but that's pretty much where the similarities end.

The Bees concerns the life-span of one individual worker bee, Flora-717 (Flora is her "kin"; there are hundreds of Floras and she is but one. But...) within the larger life of a domesticated hive kept by a human beekeeper to pollinate his orchard (his sole "Visitation" to collect some honey is a terrifying scene I'd pit right up against the harrowing extermination scene from the animated film version of Watership Down, but it's somehow more horrifying because the reader knows the beekeeper believes he's a kindly husband to his hive, its benevolent father-god just collecting his tithe).

From her emergence from the cell in which she metamorphosed from a larva to an adult worker bee forward, Flora-717 (or just Flora; other members of her kin group are referred to as floras with a lower case "f" for clarity) is marked out as different. A member of the lowly sanitation caste, she is already considered ugly and brutish, but she's also huge for a worker bee, so huge that the "fertility police" almost kill her as deformed. Only the experimental kindness of a high-caste "Sage" (of royal kin) saves her, and sets her on her unique path.

Flora gets to be a nurse in the royal nurseries for a while, then goes back to janitoring, then gets the opportunity to join the elite corps of "foragers" -- the bees who fly out in search of new sources of nectar and pollen and come back to the hive to dance out not only directions but also detailed stories about how they found the food and what terrors they encountered -- crows, wasps, spiders, cell phone towers* -- on the way there.

All of this is presented with great attention to our current actual scientific understanding of bees and beehives, which lends a lot of plausibility (and earns a lot of willing suspension of disbelief) to Flora's story. At times, though, Paulli can't help herself. These bees "talk" in perfect English sentences and, furthermore, have a powerful form of telepathy that is kind of top-down in that higher caste bees seem to have greater ability than lower but also allows our heroine to download a whole load of knowledge from a dying forager bee at one point. One may snort at this, but let it go.

The prose is lovely, and so is the emotional journey of our Flora as she experiences both a sexless and sexual life of a kind, motherhood of a kind (only the Queen is supposed to breed, but as we've established, Flora is special -- and her origins, if not how she learns of them, plausibly explain her specialness) and life as a tiny part of a greater whole. I'm not at this stage 100% sure that I'm going to read this one over and over again as I have the rabbit book, but since I do happen to love insects rather a lot more than I do rabbits, well...

Anyway, as the best entomological fiction to hit the book world since Clark Thomas Carlton's Prophets of the Ghost Ants, this one is not to be missed!

*A whole thread that entertains all of the suggested and accepted factors that contributed to colony collapse disorder is present here. Paulli wisely favors none of the theories specifically, nor does she get didactic about it all; it's merely texture, background detail on what the life of bees must actually be like. Well, what it would actually be like if they "spoke" and all.

John Fowles' THE COLLECTOR

People who know me and my love for insects might be a bit surprised to learn that I really don't approve of, and don't understand, the mania for collecting them. I had to for an assignment once in college -- for a whole semester, I was out there with a killing jar and a set of pins and all the other accoutrements. I was going to be graded on my collection, on its variety and the quality of its specimens and all the rest. As excuses for being outdoors when everybody else was (supposed to be) studying in the library or whatever, it was all right.

But I would have rather been given a quality camera and a notebook to scribble down observations about how the insects behaved while they were, you know, still alive.

The male protagonist, Frederick "Call me Ferdinand" Clegg, in John Fowles' astonishingly creepy The Collector feels differently about things. To see a rare or unusual butterfly -- he only collects butterflies, though he thinks of going into moths -- is to want it dead and pinned in a box. And since he's a very socially maladjusted man, as certainly all insect fanciers are*, he takes the same attitude towards certain specimens of other species as well. Such as lovely (human) art student Miranda, whom he encounters in one of those unfortunately magical moments in which a young man is prone to mistake an anima projection for true love, right around the time he also happens to win the football pool at work, meaning he has stumbled into the mid-century equivalent of Eff You Money.

To his credit (I guess) he decides that this specimen is better enjoyed alive, the better to someday live out his fantasy that she is going to, I guess, succumb to Stockholm Syndrome** and fall in love with him and marry him and have his babies. So he takes most of his pool winnings and buys and furnishes a human-sized terrarium for her, in the cellar of a secluded country cottage. As one does.

The fascinating thing through these early chapters is watching our man engage in some serious mental gymnastics: he's not really going to do this thing, but what if he did? He pretends to himself that he's treating it all as an elaborate thought experiment and is thus astonished, in a way that we readers are not, to find himself actually doing the things he's thought of. Buying the house. Fixing up the cellar. Stalking the girl. Carrying a cloth soaked in chloroform in his coat pocket.

This would all be very interesting reading right there -- watching a still-pretty-ordinary-despite-his-peculiarities-guy fighting this impulse he's had. But Fowles takes us from thought to deed, and just as we're thoroughly squicked out and sick of this character, Fowles seems to agree and flips the perspective; the second half of the novel is told from the perspective of Miranda, the collected, the victim.

And that's the other fascinating thing in this book, because we learn, long before Miranda becomes the author of chapters of The Collector, that while Clegg may think he's captured a pretty, helpless butterfly, he's really captured something much more powerful. Some kind of bee, maybe; Miranda has a sting. Miranda is smart and self-possessed and has a highly developed emotional intelligence that leaves Clegg floundering from their first face-to-face onwards. Not one scene between them goes according to Clegg's script; its only his extraordinary grip on his delusion, or his delusion's grip on him, that defends him from her deft emotional manipulations.

Unfortunately, that's all either of these characters turn out to be: fascinating, Clegg in his maladjusted inability to resist his icky and absurd impulses, Miranda in her repulsive fixation on class and on her idea of herself as one of the few rare and talented special ones who must battle against the ugly ordinary people. She's a mid-century epitome of the know-it-all feel-it-all fix-it-all College Girl Who Is So Much Better Than You. Though her fate is horrifying, the reader (at least this reader, who may have personality problems of her very own, oh yes) winds up kind of relishing watching her endure it, a little bit.

Which means that Fowles is a genius at eliciting reader complicity in the horrors he is depicting. This one goes on the strongly-disliked-but-undeniably-admired shelf next to Robert Silverberg's Book of Skulls. It wasn't quite the hate read that Book of Skulls was, but it certainly was not a pleasure read, either.

But it sure is remarkable.

*Sideshow Bob Grumble.

**Though that phenomenon and its terminology were not described until ten years after The Collector was first published.