Resident Lesbian Space Atrocities Fan Page

April

13 - The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling 14 - End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland by Haruki Murakami 15 - City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett 16 - East of West: The Apocalypse, Year One by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta

May

17 - Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle 18 - Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera 19 - The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine 20 - Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

June

21 - Cinder House by Freya Marske 22 - The Starlit Wood (ed. Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe) 23 - What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher 24 - Umineko WHEN THEY CRY Episode 1: Legend of the Golden Witch by Ryukishi07 and Kei Natsumi 25 - The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar 26 - Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky 27 - The Summer War by Naomi Novik

Starling House, though? That did something for me and I honestly can't even say why, and then I read The Everlasting and it was the best thing I read last year (and I read a lot lol). I do really hope you love it because I truly think it's Harrow's best work to date (and just one of the greatest things ever written, in my opinion, but I digress haha)

I read January long enough ago that I can't at all endorse my past love for it, but for whatever reason it really got to me at exactly the right time? Which is for the best, because after the two Fractured Fable books and a couple short stories I doubt I'd have given anything by her another chance otherwise.

The third of eight parts in the manga adaptation of the famous visual novel, which combined have a page count I think can literally be described as myriadic. This episode marks the point where I’m just giving up on making any sort of predictions about how the plot will develop. Partially because I was entirely taken in by the elaborate fake-out that took up half of it, and partially because Beatrice basically turns directly to the audience early on to helpfully inform you that things are only going to get weirder and more anime from here on out.

As seems to be the structure of the series, this episode once again follows the wealthy Ushiromiya family (and their servants) on a fateful weekend in 1986. Though this time they’re joined by a much larger cast of the witch Beatrice’s various magical slaves, familiars and occult peers, and the psychodrama between her and Battler is even more prominent relative to the ‘ground-level’ occult murder mystery than in episode 2. And, in a dramatic departure from the previous runs through this weekend, this time someone actually tries to solve the witch’s riddle before most of the island has been brutally murdered. Frankly the riddle itself turns out to be an anticlimax, solved in the space of a couple chapters without much incident or drama until the prize is literally right in front of them – but then, the riddle turns out to be much less important than the ‘prize’ for solving it. Namely, inheriting (as well as the gold and family name) Beatrice’s witchly title and powers. The central drama of the episode’s back half is the horror of a newborn witch (it turns out to be less ‘you become a witch’ and more ‘a witch emerges from your subconscious, doesn’t necessarily think much of you or whatever you may care about’) and Beatrice’s apparent redemption arc, as the contrast with a crueller and more capricious usurper seems to force her into self-reflection and even self-sacrifice.

I’ll freely admit I didn’t have enough faith in this series. I spent quite a lot of the episode getting increasingly annoyed and starting to check out entirely, sure that they were in the process of giving Beatrice the most abrupt and stereotypical redemption imaginable (complete with strong romantic overtones between her and Battler). I was dreading what a slog the rest of the series was going to be and what it would even look like from here on, honestly. Which meant the big twist in the final chapter absolutely got me, and entirely redeemed the whole exercise (though I’m grateful it didn’t get dragged out any longer than it already was). Sadly Beatrice suffers from fatal cartoon-supervillain-itis, and was unable to restrain her gloating and monologuing habits for the two more minutes it would have taken to actually win – and thus we have another 5 episodes that will not be entirely spent on Battler being subjected to an eternity of varied tortures.

(I honestly have no earthly idea how this keeps going for another five episodes, given that it feels like we’ve already gone through most of the mysteries and foreshadowing the first episode established and there hasn’t been that much laid out since. But I would never have predicted where this episode went in a thousand years either, so for now I’m just going to trust the process.)

The ground-level events on the island seem to be getting less and less focus with each passing episode, if only to make room for ever-more-elaborate occult intrigue in the same rough page count. Which is something of a shame, because one of the great strengths and appeals of this sort of time loop fiction to me is its ability to manage a sprawling cast and give different members of it their own opportunity to shine in different iterations of the same event. We’re only in this episode really getting some focus on Kyrie and Rudolf, who I’ve been curious about and interested in from the start, and I admit I’m a bit disappointed that my arbitrarily-chosen faves have so much competition for attention in their bit of time on centre-stage.

Speaking of that competition – I have since learned that Umineko is actually kind of famous for its incredibly over-the-top fight scenes, but it’s not something I was at all prepared for starting the series. This episode, having as it does an elaborate witches’ duel with floating towers and legendary summoned weapons taking up most of a chapter, marks the point where that action has started becoming actively tiresome. Maybe it’s just my dysfunctional eyes making parsing the incredibly busy fight panels more effort than it’s usually worth, but basically every fight in this is dragged out two or three times longer than it needs to be for the sake of pure spectacle, and the spectacle is just not nearly good enough to justify the effort.

I’m not quite so down on the inter-witch intrigue and scheming, especially since it is moving towards really mattering to the parts of the story worth caring about. But the story spends an immense amount of time holding forth about how various types of magic work, and seems entirely sanguine about contradicting itself here whenever doing so would be cooler-looking or more convenient in the moment. I’m not quite sure if effort spent trying to synthesize a coherent system out of what we’re shown would be rewarded later or just be a waste of my time.

To round out my complaining here, the shift to a different artist in episode 2 and then back to Kei for this really drove home that I just do not much like their style. Mostly just slightly grating or eye-roll inducing, but the combination with the already I assume intentionally strange character designs for the various non-Beatrice witches ends up being a bit uncanny valley and just distractingly dissonant with what I think we’re supposed to get about those witches as characters. Not to mention just kind of aesthetically ugly.

I hadn’t actually realized there was a new Singing Hills story released last year until I was looking through what my local library had of Vo’s backlog. Picked up because I’ve more-or-less enjoyed all the previous novellas in the series, and it’s not like this was a big time commitment (calling it a novella feels overly grandiose, this is a short story that outran its word-count by a bit). Modest length (and a few odd choices on how to spend it) aside, this was a wonderfully eerie little read, and easily one of my favourite instalments in the series so far.

As always, the story follows Cleric Chih, itinerant historian and chronicler of the Singing Hills Monastery, and their eidetic and avian companion Almost Brilliant as they travel vaguely sketched medieval-fantasy-China in pursuit of hidden truths and interesting fables. On this occasion, the two of them arrive in Baolin, a town famous for its legendarily delicious braised pork and also the cataclysmic famine which almost destroyed it some decades past. On arrival, Chih finds themselves the involuntary guest of the local magistrate and so almost accidentally begins investigating the awful secrets from the famine that he is so desperate to keep safely forgotten.

The Singing Hills series has ended up being a bit of a protean thing – I would guess because Vo seems committed to writing one a year and lets whatever happens to be inspiring her at the time guide what each new entry should be. Empress of Salt and Fortune was and probably will forever remain the best of them, being far more ambitious and carefully executed on basically every level (very possibly because it wasn’t written under the same constraints as all the sequels). The quality and subject matter of the five subsequent books have varied widely, but The Brides of High Hill and now Mouthful of Dust have both taken the series towards something close to outright horror – or, if not horror, then at least the sort of spooky and spine-tingling stories told around a campfire or huddled together after dark. I really couldn’t be happier about this – it fits well with the framing device, Vo writes it well, and as a matter of taste I just prefer it to the larger-than-life high fantasy soap opera of some of the previous entries.

As a matter of focus and aesthetics, I also just find a world where travelling monks are esteemed and respected because angry ghosts and murderous trickster spirits are very real dangers and everyone lives in fear of their home attracting a great demon of famine or plague far more compelling than one defined by feuding bands of supernaturally empowered martial artists. Not that there’s any necessary contradiction about the series including both (though the world certainly seems more haunted and enchanted now than in previous books), but just as a matter of what gets emphasized and focused on.

Famine is a really underused concept in western horror (and adjacent dark fantasy and similar), probably in part because the vast majority of both creators and presumed audience are generations removed from any direct exposure to it. Vo really captures the grinding, drawn-out, almost mundane horror of it and the increasingly strange (sometimes absurd, sometimes horrific, sometimes both) ways people attempt to adapt to it and cope as the shortages drag on and on and on. The plot justification for how it’s presented is somewhat blunt, but learning the trauma it inflicted upon the whole community mostly through incidental stories and little tangents was for me more effective than dwelling upon the spectacle of starved and devoured bodies would have been, for basically the same reason a good horror story shows off a clear view of its monster as little as it can possibly get away with.

I do have a few somewhat significant complaints with the story, general impression aside. For one, the thematic connection with the famous Baolin pork and with the importance of cuisine in general and communal eating of whatever kind in particular to culture and community is clear enough with a little thought, but in this I think the book could have stood to be either longer or shorter. As is, the subplot with the restaurant feels like an overgrown tangent without any really neat conclusion or elegant interweaving with the main plot. The climax of the ghost story/mystery being Chih realizing what’s happening and just running in the opposite direction as fast as they can until the screaming stops is funny, but the whole resolution does feel blunt and rushed. And I do miss the affection for Rashomon-style unreliable and contradictory narrators that the series seems to have basically now abandoned.

So with the caveat that he's written roughly ten thousand books and I defiantly haven't read all of them and am forgetting some of the ones I have:

Pass on the sprawling 10+ series (Shadows of the Apt and The Final Architecture). Both are competent, neither's really anything special for their subgenres and you have better things to do with your life.

I haven't read the latest, but the first two Children of Time sequels (Children of Ruin and Children of Memory) are both very good, but also basically entirely distinct beasts (conceit of rogue uplift programs evolving in alien biospheres aside) from the original. I still maintain they are the best execution of the whole Star Trek idealistic exploration space opera I've yet seen. Given how weird things had ended up at the end of Memory I've got no clue what book 4 will be about. Kern remains MVP though.

Shroud is probably the best stab at the general ideas about alien life and encountering The Alien that seem to preoccupy Tchaikovsky in most of the sci fi he writes. If you liked Children of Time's extended interludes detailing the spider's evolution, you will probably also like the same thing but for a truly alien biosphere and intelligent life. Requires a real appreciation for dramatic irony, mostly an exploration/quest narrative that everyone involved takes a long time to understand is a first contact scenario.

Speaking of dramatic irony, on the shorter side Elder Race is a delightful little novella where one point of view is the princess of a small kingdom menaced by strange demons beseeching the legendary wizard who aided her ancestor in founding it to come down from his town and help her, and the other is the transhuman final staybehind scientist in a mostly-mothballed observation mission getting woken by cryo and regretting giving contact codes when he intervened to stop a mass depopulation even several generations ago.