Sheldon Costa's THE GREAT WORK

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

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

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

OK, I'll settle down a bit. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward Ashton's MICKEY7

There's nothing like a good old-fashioned space colonization story. There's also nothing like a good old cloning story. And when you combine the two, you usually get a cracking good old-fashioned science fiction story. I mean, look what Duncan Jones did with it!

Pretty soon we're going to get to see what Bong-Joon Ho does with it, when he adapts this novel for the big screen. And I, for one, can't wait, because Edward Ashton's Mickey7 is perfect for him. 

Mickey Barnes has grown up in a fairly new human colony on a planet named Midgard, which is pretty habitable after a few generations of danger and effort following a well-established formula that isn't always successful, but is successful enough. More on that in a bit. For now we can just say that Midgard is well-established enough to have room in its society for the occasional fuckup of a person. Mickey Barnes is one of those. So nobody, not even his purported best friend, is surprised when Mickey winds up highly motivated to get the hell off Midgard and joins the next outward expansion of humanity as the one member of a spaceship crew that doesn't have to be the best of the best: the Expendable.

No, I don't know if the Expendable wears a red shirt. It would be fine if they did, although an Expenable isn't just someone who isn't all that important to the larger story arc but whose death can move an episode's plot along; an Expendable is literally the member of the crew, and later of the founding generation of the new colony, whose entire purpose is to die for the rest. Fatal debris strike in flight that'll expose the repairman to fatal doses of radiation in minutes? Send out the Expendable. Unknown if the soil/air/water of the newly settled planet has cooties that will kill a human? Feed it to the Expendable first. But why, then, does a colony ship only carry one Expendable and not many?

Because the one *is* many. Because the tech McGuffin that makes Mikey7 work is a combination of perfected cloning technology and brain scanning/duplication that means, as long as your Expendable has been regular in their "updates" they can die horribly and you can just print up another iteration of that Expendable out of your really fancy 3D printer and the new copy will have all of the prior one's memories right up until their most recent update and will carry on with whatever menial work you have for them until it's time to send them on another suicide mission. As long as you have enough raw materials to keep making new copies of the Expendable, that person is, at least from the perspective of the rest of the crew, functionally immortal with just a few inconvenient but also totally exploitable memory gaps here and there.

And no sneaky making more than one copy; that's strictly taboo after a rich guy once slowly took over an entire planet by making multiple copies of himself, overwhelming all of the other colonists one by one and feeding them back into the printer to make more copies of himself. He was poised to start taking over nearby planets when humanity as a whole came together to forcibly stop him in a disastrously permanent fashion. D'oh!

Which means yes, there are totally people with completely irrational prejudices against Expendables. Do you see why this is perfect Bong-Joon Ho material? I mean, he could have just put in an order for a story like this and wouldn't have gotten a more perfect source from which to make his next exciting, bloody, brutal and socially conscious film!

Meanwhile, it's a great read. Mickey is a perfectly relatable character, and Ashton does a perfect job of making us feel his dilemmas as the missteps of others put him in the very worst position an Expendable on a colony mission could be in: an accidental Multiple. And no, this is not a spoiler; it's in the promo copy for the book. Meanwhile, the new colony planet is even less hospitable than it looked through the telescopes back on Midgard -- and it already looked plenty inhospitable, which is why it's been named Niflheim. Brush up on your Norse mythology if you don't know why that's a hell of a name to give a planet (see what I did there?).

Hurry up with the movie!

Pauline Melville's THE VENTRILOQUIST'S TALE

The piece of chalk Wormoal held slid across the wet surface of the blackboard as he tried to write the words "Eclipse - A Rational Analysis of Myth." Water leaked from the ceiling directly above his head. Chofy watched the words disintigrate. Wormoal shook his head in annoyance. He tried again, and the chalk skidded off the board."

Colonizers and their beneficiaries (which I've decided definitely includes tourists and scholarly types) getting their comeuppance, or better yet, being ignored or swallowed up by the territories they've intended to conquer, are my favorite kind of colonizers if such a thing must exist. I enjoy watching would be conquistadors fail (see Werner Herzog's famous Aguirre the Wrath of God), I think the original Peter Weir version of The Mosquito Coast is even better than Paul Theroux's novel*, and I love, love, love, how Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale threatens to combine both of these sub-narratives of the Failed Colonizer right up until another, greater force swoops in and upsets everything.

The Ventriloquist's Tale does have me completely baffled in one respect though: the title. The first chapter of the novel is told in first person by a narrator we don't hear from directly again until the epilogue, and we are told that this narrator is a master of ventriloquism in that he/she can perfectly imitate the call or cry of every animal in the wilderness of Guyana and Brazil, and can make it sound like it's coming from anywhere, but (unless this person turns out to be one character whose birth comes near the novel's end but who would seem to have been killed off? Most likely? And hadn't exhibited this talent in the course of what little of the story concerns them in the text proper?) this seems to have exactly zero bearing on the story being told -- even if this titular ventriloquist/narrator does turn out to be the minor character there is an off chance that they are, what's the point of this establishing chapter? Anyway, moving on.

As I mentioned above, The Ventriloquist's Tale is the story of a handful of people who tried to make their mark on the challenging savannah/rain forest landscapes in the interior of Guyana (but has nothing to do with that other famous failed colonization of Guyana led by the Reverend Jim Jones, thank you very much), a Scottish adventurer who thought he'd come make his fortune in the late 19th/early 20th century, a Catholic Priest who thought he'd convert all the tribes of the Guyanese interior and win their souls for Jeebus, and, in the late 20th century, a researcher who has come to Guyana on the trail of a famous visitor to the region between the World Wars, one Evelyn Waugh, who commemorated his visit in a book, Ninety-Two Days: A Journey in Guyana and Brazil, 1932, which I haven't read, and a much better known short story, "The Man Who Liked Dickens", which I have. Of these, the scholar, Rosa Mendelson, seems more interested in the story than the travel book, and seems to have concluded (though without explicitly saying so) that the character in the story called McMaster was based on a real person, Alexander McKinnon, the aforementioned Scottish adventurer.

Before we meet any of these people, though, we are brought to visit the McKinnon family of the late 20th century, descendants of Alexander, a Scottish transplant to the region who, unsuccessful in business in Georgetown, turned to a rudimentary form of ranching in the countryside and "went native." Following the custom of the Wapsiana tribe in whose midst he settled, he married a pair of sisters and had a whole bunch of children with them around the turn of the 20th century. His children's lives, in particular his son Danny's and daughter Beatrice's Oops! re-enactment of a certain mythic archetype and the consequences that follow, form one of the novel's two main storylines, in which Waugh turns out to have played a laughably insignificant part.

Chief among the late 20th century family members we meet are Chofy, a grandson of Alexander's who is 20 years into a so-so marriage with a Wapsiana woman and has a son with the delightful name of Bla-Bla (!), and his aunt, Wifreda, sister of Beatrice and Danny and the only person left around who recalls anything of Waugh's visit, but doesn't want to talk about it because in her mind all memory of it -- which amounts to a schoolteacher giving the famous author a haircut -- is bound up with the family tragedy caushed by Beatrice and Danny's exploits, and with the doomed efforts of a Catholic Priest, Father Napier, to bring the Good News to the Guyanese, village by village, tribe by tribe. Eventually both Alexander McKinnon and Father Napier leave the region and return to Scotland, with Father Napier having made even less of an impression on the land or its peoples than McKinnon did (for after all, McKinnon, like McMaster in the story, fathered a great many of those people), to say nothing of Waugh, who apparently just got a haircut there. All three are like the chalk marks the anthropologist Wormoal fails to make on the blackboard in the scene I quoted above.

Waugh, though, at least had an effect on the outside world, which is what brings Rosa to Guyana in the late 20th century. Asking around Georgetown, where Chofy has come to work for a while and earn some money for his family back in the village, she learns of the McKinnons, reaches her conclusion about them, and manages to get an introduction to Chofy, who immediately falls in lust with her and becomes her very passionate lover. About which, look: I don't usually enjoy sex scenes, am kind of famously prudish about them, but these are some of the funniest sex scenes I've ever read because Chofy is 1. Very direct about his desires and 2. Very fond of narrating the goings-on. I couldn't not giggle.

Speaking of funny, author Pauline Melville, who was herself born in Guyana to an English mother and a Guyanese father, and her father had some "Amerindian" ancestry, so she could be telling us old family stories for all we'd know -- but she is also an actress. And if you're anything like me, you've seen her in a lot of weird and funny roles. Go look at her IMDB page. That's right; Vyvyan's Mum wrote this book. And wrote it well. I'll be looking for the rest of her stuff, which has won many a literary prize, eventually. If this is any example, it's easy to see why. The Ventriloquist's Tale, funny sex scenes and all, is a profound portait of culture clash, the difficulties of choosing between traditional and modern values, and the monkey wrench that sends all the pieces flying apart that is romantic/sexual love. I did not want it to be over. When's the next eclipse?

*I haven't seen the new TV series, because it's on a streaming service I don't get and my budget for those is 1. Allocated already and 2. Just fine the way it is. So I also won't be seeing Foundation any time soon, unless it gets released on physical media that I can check out from the library. Harumph.

Maria Jose Silveira's HER MOTHER'S MOTHER & HER DAUGHTERS (tr by Eric M.B. Becker)

All this is very sad, I know, but as I said in the beginning, I have no intention of glossing over the less savory aspects in this story.

So observes our narrator fairly early on in Her Mother's Mother & Her Daughters, an example of my favorite kind of historical fiction that both celebrates and decries the very complicated racial and sociopolitical make-up of the modern nation of Brazil as it, and its people, transform through over 500 years of history.

If you really enjoy big fat historical novels by the likes of Edward Rutherford and Ken Follett, the kind that tell the story of a place through multiple generations of the families that call it home, but you're tired of the exclusively European/North American settings, I may have found the perfect book for you!

Brazilian author Maria Jose Silveira explores her country's history through the lives of twenty generations of a single family, traced matrilineally. She begins with a young native woman, Inaia, in 1500 or so, right when Europeans are first starting to plunder South America, and continues all the way to the present as she sketches in the experiences of Inaia's descendants and those the various men of various races and nationalities who father those descendants. It's an incredibly cool way to tell the story of any place, but it really comes into its own when, as in, say, Sarum or Russka, the locale is one that has seen multiple invasions over centuries, diversifying the culture, the language, and the DNA -- all definitely the case in Brazil!

The accounts of each woman are brief but involving, with each character given just enough time to catch your sympathy, make you share her love for her daughter (usually), and break your heart as she fades into history. The quote I pulled to begin this entry, for instance, is from the story of Maria Cafuza*, the first seriously enslaved member of this family -- for while her mother and grandmother were both in conditions of semi-servitude, they chose their own baby daddies and enjoyed a degree of freedom that Maria, also the first of the family with an African daddy, can't even dream of; even her early childhood is cruel as she watches both of her parents die under torture at the hands of an infamous slave-catcher who believes in making a fatal example of would-be escapees. The description of Maria's parents' deaths drives home Silveira's point about Brazilian history having plenty of unsavory bits, and is fairly graphic so, content warning; translater Eric M.B. Becker didn't pull any punches, either.

Later generations see the establishment of cattle ranching as an economic powerhouse for Brazil, the first gasps of an independence movement, civil wars, the arrival of the Portuguese royal family after they run away from Napoleon, the design and building of a newly independent Brazil's national capital city of Brasilia, finally visit the Old World (especially France) and hit the ground running in the 20th century, with the most recent daughter of the family anticipating the birth of twins even as she struggles in that very Generation X way to figure out what to do with herself in a world that doesn't really know what to do with her, either. Things change, but also remain the same: the women of Inaia's line don't just witness history but actively participate in it, display qualities of courage and of selfishness, creativity and vanity, and always putting at least a little hope in the next generation. So while the book frequently made me wince at the violence and cruelty on display, it left me, too, with more than a little hope for the future, or at least curiosity about it -- though of course the novel ends before Bolsinaro rises to power. But hey, Brazil has seen all this shit before...

Exceptional stuff, this!

*Cafuza is a term used by Spanish and Portuguese colonizers to denote people of mixed indigenous and African ancestry. If nothing else, this novel is a great guidebook to the bewildering array of racial designations used in colonial South America. In Maria's case, when she's called a cafuza, people are ignoring the fact that she has a white grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great grandfather, but nobody in her world is very interested in the pedigrees of their slaves. 

B. Catling's THE ERSTWHILE

Where the first book in B. Catling's Vorrh series, The Vorrh, was a scattershot of interesting ideas, weird characters and language games, its sequel, The Erstwhile, is a bit more conventionally readable, while losing none of the prior's strangeness. All in all its a much more enjoyable read, but I'd kind of expected that.

I only took up the first book after reading a few tantalizing reviews of the second, which focused on the title character class. The Erstwhile are basically remnant angels, those who had failed to defend the Tree of Knowledge from Adam (Eve is never mentioned in this derivation from the book of Genesis) and were cast aside and forgotten after that little mishap. In the thousands (millions? Catling takes no stance on how old the Earth might be) of years since then, these angels have gone to ground -- literally in some cases -- and devolved into weirdly malformed monster shapes with moss and plant life growing on various bits even before they became completely quiescent.

Or so it seems until some of them start interacting with humans again, usually when they are accidentally discovered in and around The Vorrh by European colonists looking for resources to exploit there. When a few of these beings are dug up and shipped back to Germany, they come under scrutiny and care and start to seem human-like. And when one emerges mysteriously from the mud on the banks of the Thames in the 18th century and becomes the freaky muse of one William Blake (yes that William Blake, whose image of Nebuchadnezzar graces the cover of this novel and in this story is understood actually to be a portrait from life of one of the Erstwhile), and then spends a century so drifting among human society in London, that one becomes so human that he takes on the name of Nicholas Parsons and becomes a sort of trustee at Bedlam.

Meanwhile back in the Vorrh and the colony city of Essenwald, all of the characters who survived the previous novel are trying to live out their lives after those weird events, with varying degrees of success. Ghertrude Tulp is mysteriously pregnant but not sure by whom -- Ishmael? Some random guy on the same carnival night that Ishmael slept with Cyrena Lohr and by so doing cured her blindness? Ishmael and Cyrena are living together in her sumptuous house and getting tired of having sex with each other. And the city is in steep economic and social decline since the Limboia, the "mindless" slave labor force that kept the timber industry going in the last novel, have up and disappeared. Others have tried to take up the work, but unlike the Limboia, they can't handle the weird powers the forest exerts on puny human minds -- namely all but erasing them.

Soon Ishmael, the only man anyone knows who has traveled through the Vorrh without losing his memories and mind, is drafted into leading an expedition to go find the Limboia and it's all a bit like Werner Herzog's Herz aus Glas.

Already you can see that this novel has a lot more of a conventional focus and structure to it. The expedition provides one of its main narrative threads, twined with another in which a new character, Dr. Hector Schumann, is called upon to take up the mysteries posed by the Erstwhile brought to Europe. A third story, of a lonely old woman who rescues a mysterious baby from the abandoned home of The Vorrh's white savior figure and his black shaman mistress/wife, is woven in less well for all that there are structural parallels between it and the Schumann story in their final thirds. And the fate of Ghertrude's baby is, I guess part of all of this, too, but not really?

For this book is a textbook case of Middle Chapter Trouble. For all that it's a much more enjoyable read than its predecessor, it's even more frustrating, in that exactly none of the questions or problems it or the prior book poses gets resolved at all, leaving a lot for the final book, The Cloven, which just came out, to answer. But, to be honest, I have zero hope that anything will actually get resolved, because Catling isn't here to try for narrative coherence. He's all about the language.

And some of this is downright beautiful:

The stillness of the water became a secondary feature to the movement of the snow. It fell straight down into its own reflection on the mirrored Thames, the depths of the reflection rising up to meet it. Each flake fell from a black sky and fluttered up from the river's black bed to meet its twin and become one before disappearing.

I mean, god damn!

A lot of the time, though, Catling threatens to become downright annoying, especially when he gets precious with malapropisms -- which I have to assume is what he's doing because otherwise 1) He's kind of a doofus and 2) The editorial staff at Random Penguin all need remedial courses. I'm assuming its deliberate because I'd rather that were true. But there sure is a lot of "finally crafted jewelry" and whatnot in here.

But so maybe it's just sunk cost fallacy working and maybe it's still just good enough to make me want more -- I really can't decide -- but I'm looking forward to The Cloven. But I've got a lot of library books to get through before I go looking for it, because right now I'm Vorrhed out.

B. Catling's THE VORRH

Two covers for the first volume of B. Catling's trilogy seem to appear with equal frequency when a curious would-be reader starts poking around, the one at the left and the one I have reproduced further down. Both of them are maddeningly deceptive about what kind of book The Vorrh really is, for it is neither as coldly abstract as the black and white cover*, nor as lushly imaginative as the more colorful one.

Some have compared The Vorrh to the work of Mervyn Peake, whose famous Gormenghast trilogy I have started once or twice but not had the will to finish even while appreciating its uniqueness at least enough to see why this comparison is somewhat apt: Gormenghast, a "fantasy of manners" is both engaging and off-putting in its seeming plotlessness and the artificiality of its characters; The Vorrh is, perhaps, a fantasy of projections, slightly more plot-driven but also off-putting because it gives up its secrets so very, very reluctantly. And the artificiality of its characters, about which more in a bit.

The Vorrh of the title is an imaginary African forest, originally imagined by French surrealist Raymond Roussel for his Impressions of Africa, an outlandish romp through a wholly imagined version of the continent. Roussel becomes a character of sorts in Catling's book, a sketch of his story bookending the rest of the action, mostly just to remind us of how earlier generations with no actual experience of Africa romanticized it, but also to add another layer of weirdness to what is already a pretty weird tale.

For this book, The Vorrh is evoked rather than shown as an African forest of supernatural dread that just might conceal the original Garden of Eden at its heart -- and has a completely transplanted European town, moved stone by stone from one continent to another -- on its edges, thriving on an extractive economy based on timber from the forest (yes, children, this story is in part an answer to the question no one else has ever asked -- what if we started logging operations in Eden?) harvested by conveniently docile native slaves (their docility supernaturally compelled by the presence of... A pretty nasty thing I'm not going to spoil for you here though it's a perfect example of Catling's amazing ability to conjure up the truly grotesque) who are the only people who can come and go from the forest without losing their minds or memories (because they kind of don't have those to begin with? Maybe? At least according to the White Men who manage them? But maybe for reals? Maybe?). The Vorrh is also inhabited by creatures straight out of John Mandeville's fables of the kingdom of Prester John (for those non-Prester John fans out there, similar beings are visually depicted in Rene Laloux's crazy time travel cartoon Gandahar/Light Years) and by beings known as The Erstwhile, who are probably degenerated angels (?) and a sad, silent, grotesque and grey-skinned figure whose toenails have turned to horns or maybe hooves but whose human hands (the first human hands, we are told) look kind of normal and who might be Adam, as in Adam from the book of Genesis (?) Not even Roussel could come up with this stuff, is what I'm saying, but here he is, sharing some pages with them. Sort of.

Nor is Roussel the only historical figure to appear here, as a more fully developed narrative serving as a sort of mini-biography of photographic pioneer Edward Muybridge (with added steampunkish/fantastical elements and a fun interlude when he did some work for Sarah Winchester of Mystery House fame) is interwoven with accounts of Catling's own characters, which include Ishmael, a stunted cyclops of a boy raised by small bakelite robots until a pushy teenaged busybody, Gheertrude Tulp, invades the basement of the mysterious mansion given over to his care, accidentally destroys one of the robots and decides to finish raising him herself; Williams/Oneofthewilliams/The Bowman, Great War veteran and borderline white savior figure who resolves to explore the Vorrh after his shaman-lover dies and commands him to turn her into a sentient bow and two white arrows, which he fires ahead of himself to sort of (?) maybe (?) show him the way deeper into the forest(?); Cyrena, a blind woman who has her sight restored after spending a carnal carnival night with Ishmael, and many more, including a Scotsman who sort of accidentally finds out the secret of manipulating the local "hive-minded" tribesmen, another guy Tsungali,** who might be a member of that tribe but maybe it's a different tribe (the ambiguity is deliberate, as far as I can tell) who joins a host of other weird figures who have chosen to try to prevent The Bowman from crossing the Vorrh even if it means killing him, and...

Do you see?

So I can't even tell for sure if I liked The Vorrh, as such. It's overflowing with weird and neat ideas, and full of passages of stunning imagery (Catling is also an accomplished poet). None of the characters are remotely sympathetic*** but none of them are boring... And always there is the mystery. A sequel, The Erstwhile, is next on my to-be-read file, and a third book in the trilogy, The Cloven, is due out later this year. I'm tentatively on board for the rest of the set. We'll see how I feel after The Erstwhile. Which, judging from the title is going to be a bit more focused on the degenerated angels? Maybe?

Whatever. As long as the prose is still good.

*And I cannot account at all for the choice of such obvious eclipse imagery on this cover, either.

**Tsungali, who has spent most of his life as a colonial soldier and who carries a semi-sentient rifle, is my favorite character, chiefly for one scene quite early in The Vorrh, in which he visits England to serve as a living exhibit for his masters, and chances upon a display of artifacts in the British Museum that are not only the work of his own "True People" but are in fact things that his grandfather made and used, as his grandfather's ghost tells him. This is by far the most deeply felt and moving scene in the entire book, and so seems a bit out of place among the violence and willful misunderstanding and surrealism, but it made Tsungali stand out as, for me, the heart of the book.

***To be frank, all of them are awful, except Tsungali and MAYBE Ishmael, and even he is awfully creepy, even if we can understand why he's creepy. But this book is full of violence, rape, exploitation, manipulation, more violence, grotesquerie, class snobbery, yet more violence, and did I mention violence? I mean, the book starts with a guy dismembering his dead lover to make her spine into a weapon, so... yeah. Not a book to take up if you're looking for depictions of healthy relationships, honest conversations or demonstrations of the power of love and human kindness. While it's plenty critical of colonialism, it still lavishes a lot of loving detail on the mindsets that made colonialism possible and yes, this includes the female characters (which in addition only barely pass the Bechdel Test).