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."

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!

Greg Kisbaugh's BONE WELDER

Do you love Mary Shelley's Frankenstein a whole lot? Like enough to be one of those pedants who can't remind people fast enough that Frankenstein is the scientist's name, not the monster's? Do you also love Chicago a whole lot? Do you wish these two things could be brought together into a heartbreaking further chronicle of the most misunderstood?

Then Greg Kisbaugh is definitely your huckleberry.

The main conceit of Bone Welder is that Frankenstein's Monster was real, that Ms. Shelley got most of his story right but that she got the ending really wrong. The Monster didn't kill anybody, grew to become a noble and cultivated soul, but botched his reunion with his creator on the scientist's wedding night so badly that he had no choice but to head north and build what amounts to his own Fortress of Solitude.

That is until our man Jonas comes along. Ah, Jonas, long a widower, recently deprived also of his daughter, duped by a mad scientist into believing he can at least get the daughter back, but did I not emphasize the mad enough? Anyway, this scientist (no, not our monster's creator, but someone with an intimate connection to that tragic figure nonetheless) turns out to have duped a lot of people before Jonas, producing a huge population of botched re-animations that shamble about the darker, seedier bits of downtown Chicago, immortal imbeciles who have merged with the city's homeless population, and who now count (or would if they still could count) Jonas' beloved daughter among their number...

Yes, the soundtrack music for this novel would be heavy on the weeping, wailing melodrama of the violin.  But this is not a bad thing.

Anyway, said modern day mad scientist, one Lucius Angel, has convinced Jonas that Frankenstein's Monster (who now calls himself Victor) is the only person who can help de-zombify Jonas' daughter. So off our hapless Jonas goes to track down a legend.

Soon Jonas and Victor are skulking around Chicago, trying to put a stop on Angel's operation, but of course this proves insanely difficult. For Angel is as old and immortal as Victor, but has spent his centuries more profitably, building himself an empire with seemingly limitless resources. All Victor and Jonas have to draw on is, you guessed it, an army of Angel's mistakes.

Yes, this is all exactly as awesome as it sounds.

But wait, there's more. For it turns out Angel's efforts don't always result in mindless failures. Unbeknownst to him, two of the mistakes he's loosed on Chicago are lucid. One, Cooper Shaye, is working to ease the suffering of his fellow undead. As for the other, well, he's the one the book is (at least superficially) named for: Raymond Grimes, sound (sort of) of mind but decrepit in body, a disgraced surgeon in life, Angel's Bone Welder henchman in death. The scenes featuring these two secondary characters almost steal the show, with Shaye's heroic pathos nicely countering Grimes' chilling amorality. I'd read an entire novel about either one.

But if course, this is a book about Victor, and an elegant reimagining of his story and extension of its themes. Man, do I wish I, Frankenstein had used this storyline instead of the hot mess it had. I just needed to put that out there. Hollywood missed its chance, big time. When I am queen, etc.

I do wish, though, that the ending had been tighter. I can well understand the impulse to want to preserve the possibility of sequels in this publishing climate, but this book felt all the way through like a strong stand-alone. Good as this was -- and it's very good indeed -- I don't really want to read further adventures of Victor & Jonas. But maybe that's just me.