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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

I grabbed this off this year’s Ignyte Award shortlist because the title was the right sort of almost-clever to put a dumb smile on my face, and my attention thus gained it seemed like it could be a wonderfully harrowing Gothic ghost story. A swing and a miss, as it turns out. I can see why this ended up with some award nominations – the setting is well-drawn and enchanting, the prose often quite delightful – this is a fairly one-note short story spread incredibly thin over three times as many pages as it really needs. It also deserves to be called ‘horror’ about as much as an episode of Caspar the Friendly Ghost.

Set in a fantastical alternate history of the Reconstruction-era United States, the story follows Phee – a daughter of New Charleston’s black upper class, the only child of a loving but distant workaholic father and an oppressively involved society woman mother. Having just about managed to weave through her most marriageable years without being entrapped in a suitable marriage to any eligible bachelors from similarly respectable families, the simmering tensions with her mother explode dramatically when a messenger arrives with news that her beloved aunt – the firmly estranged black sheep of the family – has died and needs a family member to handle the funeral arrangements. Phee openly defies her mother for possibly the first time in her life, taking a carriage to the strange and small town her aunt spent the last decade of her life building from nothing. Upon arrival she finds herself reckoning with the weight of the responsibilities she rashly took on, the eerie nature of her new surroundings, and soon enough the murky secret that led to her aunt’s exile to begin with.

To begin with a positive, I really loved the book’s setting – both the choice of it and how it was presented and evoked throughout the novel. The Reconstruction-era American South is an incredibly rich field for stories of basically whatever kind, and the small (but incredibly disproportionately influential, culturally speaking) black upper-middle and upper classes which persisted through the Redemption and Jim Crow eras are if anything an even more underused niche. Phee’s perspective then paints the world in incredibly evocative tones, and the descriptions of New Charleston’s streets, manors and ballrooms are very well done. Keeping so close to the perspective of someone who grew up in the world but has no great academic interest in its mechanics is also an excellent way to keep exposition to the barest minimum, and keep the world feeling vast and enchanted.

The book is told in close third person narration, but it is very close – Phee’s personality and perspective absolutely suffuse the narration from beginning of the story to end. Which could be absolutely insufferable, but in this case is the book’s strongest quality (and it isn’t especially close). The prose is a very clear pastiche of ‘19th century society writing’, baroque and mannerly to the point of occasional self-parody. Which lends itself incredibly well to elaborately poetic descriptions and turns of phrase and musings about Phee’s desires and sentiments. Stylistically, this is easily one of the best and most memorable novellas I’ve read all year.

The problem is then with substance. A few problems, actually, but more pressingly that there just isn’t much of it. This is a 160 page novella, and on finishing it I feel that at least 80 of them are spent on Phee repeating the same two or three emotional conflicts and screaming ‘this is my arc!’ in the privacy of her own mind while neither arriving at any new conclusions nor actually moving the story forward in any way. Something like three quarters of the plot occurs in the last 40 pages, and I’m quite certain that a sufficiently ruthless editor could have cut the book’s length by half without actually losing any important beats, if not getting it all the way down to short story length. The story would have been stronger for the discipline, and it would have made the beats that already feel underdeveloped or out of nowhere far more forgivable.

That aside, my most passionate and deeply felt issue with this book is – if I’m being honest with myself – a matter of tilting and windmills. This book is shelved and advertised as both horror and Southern Gothic and it’s just...not. Which is just a truly aggravatingly common issue with horror in general these days, but I really can’t even begin to tell what about this story is supposed to be Gothic. There are some gestures in that direction early on, to be sure – the meeting with the funeral directors and then preparing the lynched former slave for burial were both very striking scenes; the initial exploration of Phee’s aunt’s house more or less manages to hit the eerie and ominous notes it’s aiming for – but every answer given and step of progress made reveals them to be aberrations. The strange small town is a metastasized halfway house, where the indigent and desperate recover and prepare for better lives. The dead aunt is beloved by all who knew her, her nosy best friend entirely benevolent and not even a bit resentful for being left out of the funeral organization and the will. The eerily polite and timeless funeral director Phee falls for at first sight turns out to be both a savant and a saint, possibly literally the best man in the world for her. No matter how imposing the traditions to keep and obligations to live up to seem, all Phee needed to do is believe in herself and find the right help and everything goes perfectly. Even the buried scandal which led to the aunt’s exile turned out to be the result of her being framed – and the whole thing is drearily weak tea so far as dark secrets of genteel families go even once you include the fraud. The whole thing just feels positively bloodless, a painful waste of premise and setting alike.

But, stepping out of my own perspective and desires to try and meet the story on its own terms, this is trying to be a story about grief, guilt, and finding the courage to leave your parents behind and find your own way in the world (one almost wonders why it wasn’t written as YA, honestly). I’m admittedly just a very difficult audience for such straightforward coming-of-age narratives these days, and might be unfairly harsh here, but it’s hard to take the time spent dwelling upon the final part of that (and there’s so much of it) especially seriously when the book explicitly states that the only thing which has kept Phee close to home and under her mother’s dominion to that point was her own cowardice. The role conveniently being her aunt’s sole inheritor and now having a ready-made place in a wholly separate community might play in allowing for a clean and pleasant separation at the story’s end goes unremarked upon.

(It’s a very minor point – and a sign that I am far from any publisher’s assumed audience at this point, probably – but I was frankly far more interested in the community politics and feats of management, logistics and accounting involved in this sort of estate settling than in Phee going through the most obvious and oft-repeated character arc in all creation. The struggle between using all of her sudden inheritance to establish and sustain her own independence versus using it to continue all the good works and charity her aunt had dedicated her life to seems far more interesting to dwell upon than ‘is it good to be your own person instead of your mother’s wind-up doll?’, if nothing else.)

The book’s handling of grief and guilt is, at least, more affecting and better executed. The best comparison here is probably Mammoth at the Gates by Nghi Vo – both novellas are most interested in expressing the quiet, empty grief of sorting through a lost parental figure’s things, settling their affairs and coming to terms with the guilt of having grown distant from them. I was a bit cool on Mammoth as well, but between the two I think it accomplishes this far better – if only for having the focus and discipline to actually make the whole book about that. Maybe if Phee had had a bit more to actually feel guilty about, or if her rose-coloured and near mythologized picture of her aunt was actually contested and complicated through the story. As is, there’s just not much there to support the whole narrative around it.

A scattering, though not nearly as much as his sci fi (which, to be fair, there is a lot more of).

And y'know it's honestly rather charming to discover that the subgenre of 'random modern almost-always-Guy is transported back to a very specific historical moment and uses his knowledge of history/science/technology to revolutionize everything, jump start the industrial revolution and (most importantly) turn the author's incredibly obscure historical statlet blorbo and/or doomed nationalist golden age into the dominant global power with borders out of a Balkan irredentist's wildest dreams' - which I had previously thought of as a marginal subgenre of the already incredibly obscure genre of online alternate history stories - is actually a whole popular and commercially successful living tradition somewhere.

I have, for my sins, a whole shelf of books I paid exorbitant amounts for as part of one university class or another and then never read more than a chapter of (if that). After more than a decade, I found myself in need of a nonfiction work to read in June and guiltily lugging them along from apartment to apartment finally paid off! Despite being picked off that shelf entirely for being relatively short and about an area I’ve already been reading in, this was an interesting (if thoroughly academic and obviously dated) read. I mean, to me. I’ve yet to finish describing it to anyone IRL without their eyes glazing over.

The book is an exploration of the Socialist Realist novel, its tropes and internal logic, its influences and antecedents, and how it developed over time (and due to what causes). The result is quite dense – though blessedly conscientious in only using jargon after it defines it – and absolutely assumes its audience are at least passingly familiar with the genre and its historical context. If you’ve never heard of the term ‘production novel’ or of the first Five Year Plan before opening this, I fear you may have a rather rough time. That said, I last gave the subject serious thought a decade ago and only vaguely recognized most of the names quoted throughout it and I followed along without much effort, so you don’t need much more than the absolute basics to understand it.

The core thesis of the book is that Socialist Realism – most especially at its height during the High Stalinist period – produced such reliably terrible literature because it wasn’t really trying to create novels by the western understanding of the term. It was, rather, trying to create a mythology – a set of shared and universally understood symbols and narratives through which society could understand and (vitally) legitimize itself. The interchangeability of the genre’s ‘positive heroes’, the intensely formulaic plots and the near-total lack of psychological complexity or interiority for anyone all follow from this, as do the constant themes of heroism and sacrifice, the dichotomy of corrupt or obstructive local officials with a virtuous and far-sighted Centre, and the universal presence of paternal mentor figures who are either metaphorically (or in some cases literally) Stalin . The mythic nature of the genre also explains why it was in a sense agnostic to whether it was retelling actual events or pure fiction – it was commonplace for given works of it to be based on recent newsworthy events or biographies of noteworthy figures, but the best examples of the genre never let what was true get in the way of what was True.

While most works of Socialist Realism were, well, socialist, there was rarely anything distinctly Marxist about them. Rather than class struggle, economics or the stages of history, the central motor of the genre was the dialectic between (what Clark translates as) consciousness and spontaneity. The first here gesturing at a concept that includes self-discipline, modernity, enlightenment, vision and alignment with the needs of society; the latter including passion, impulsiveness, nature and the elements and almost everything random and chaotic. Every true work of Socialist Realism was in a sense a coming-of-age story, concerned above all with a more spontaneous positive hero’s journey into consciousness (generally exemplified through his completion of some impressive task on society’s behalf). Clark argues that this dichotomy has deep roots in Russian culture, both predating and having a broader appeal than anything about socialism in particular – one reason the tropes and symbols of the genre remained common even in avowedly dissident literature in the later 20th century.

Clark’s main focus here is Socialist Realism at its heroic peak in the ‘30s and ‘40s, where the fairly exact taxonomy (and fairly exacting plot structure) she lays out are most strongly represented. Which is in a sense a shame, because the effort spent on the period drifts well over the line of repetition and belabouring the point. The history of the development of the genre, its greatest influences and component parts, and the messy politics of defining and enforcing the boundaries of the genre were far more interesting, and did not receive quite the same focus (this is also true of the pages devoted to post-Stalin stagnation and decline of the genre, which is by some margin the weakest and most sloppily argued part of the book). Clark’s argument is, to dredge up some jargon that’s been rotting in my memory for years and years, basically Neotraditionalist; arguing for the fundamental continuity of the genre with preexisting Russian cultural traditions that had thrived before the revolution. Which includes radical and dissident fiction written by the Bolsheviks and their peers, but the more influential ancestors by far are the hagiographies and chronicles of saints and princes which thrived throughout the Tsarist era. Clark goes to somewhat tedious lengths to demonstrate how even the cliches and boilerplate physical description once used to identify great historical mystics and heroes under the old regime were echoed surprisingly faithfully in Socialist Realism – in general format even to a surprising degree down to the exact same phrases and adjectives. In what’s probably the most interesting argument in the whole book, she puts forward the idea that one of the reasons Socialist Realism became the hegemonic party line on how art ought to be created (though hardly the only one) is that the broader Russian intelligentsia needed to actually produce the stuff was much more willing (even enthusiastic) about engaging with parts of the form, compared with the levelling and relentlessly technological ‘cult of the machine’ the political elite tried to sponsor during the first Five Year Plan or the various (often far more aesthetically worthy, by conventional metrics, and sometimes significantly more politically doctrinaire and enthusiastic as well) tendencies which flourished in the ‘20s.

As mentioned, the parts of the book dedicated to the post-Stalin years are easily the weakest. Which is not hugely surprising, given that when the book was initially written in the ‘80s the transition into them was only barely far gone enough to really count as ‘history’. (The edition I read was still quite long in the tooth, but did contain a few obvious additions and expansions since the original draft - though nothing really transformative). Taken very generally, it’s interesting that Clark argues for a sort of state change in Soviet culture which aligns with what I’ve seen advanced in a few other places – that somewhere between the end of World War II and the overthrow of Khrushchev it ceased to be in any real sense revolutionary (Clark here argues for the post-war reconstruction as the turning point, though never in those words). Whatever else you can say about High Stalinism, it was a culture utterly convinced of its own world-historical mission and the heroic, epoch-defining achievements it was capable of – and of course even that was rigidly formalist and small-minded compared to much of what was going on in the ‘20s. The fiction of the ‘30s and ‘40s might have been bad, not to say repugnant, but it was idealistic, optimistic and sincere. After the war, it first mutated into a baroque, formalist mess in the Zhdanov era and then (as cultural controls and censorship became somewhat pro forma on non-political matters) became a husk various authors used to instead tell stories about middle-class professionals and managers struggling to live a truthful life in a cynical and corrupt society. Which is in its own way amusingly similar to the trajectory of literary fiction in the west as well.

This has been on my list for an eternity – since Graham Jones did some panels at a con I attended and talked it up as his about-to-be-released next work, actually – but I’ve only just worked my way down the list to it now. It’s of a piece with most of his other work that I’ve had a chance to read in terms of tone and general areas of interest, and like all of them is really excellent character-focused horror (the very rare case where it being obviously written by a complete nerd for the genre has actually worked out pretty well).

In 2012, a somewhat desperate adjunct professor in Communications Studies is informed that the journals of her ancestor – a Lutheran pastor in Montana, who vanished without a trace just over a century previously – had been discovered in the walls of his old parsonage. Seeing the chance to get a publishable book out of this and so salvage her long-since-stalled academic career, she dives headfirst into the project of transcribing and digitizing them. The vast majority of the book is those journal entries, which are themselves divided between the pastor’s actual diary during the weeks in 1912 when mysterious flayed corpses begin appearing outside of town and – the real meat of the story, really – the confessions of the strange Blackfeet man who begins attending his church and asking to share his credulity-straining story each Sunday. It’s genuinely much less confusing and easier to follow than it sounds.

So this is most obviously a vampire story – according to the acknowledgements it began as basically an exercise in figuring out how Graham Jones would do vampires, if he was going to. The result is very non-traditional – sunlight is painful but not dangerous and most of the other traditional weaknesses never come up at all and they can drink the blood of anything living in a pinch, with consequences – but hardly moreso than half the stories about them which aren’t outright Dracula pastiches end up being. While there’s certainly some time spent on the terror of being hunted and toyed with, this is more a story about the horror of being a vampire than of being attacked by one. Which it manages quite well – the most striking imagery in the whole book for me was the symmetry between the corpses drained of their blood and the skinned carcasses left behind by American buffalo hunters, both now spoiled and poison to anything else which make any slight use from the rest of the body. It’s also something a fun novelty for me to have a vampire who’s neither newly turned nor unfathomably ancient but just, like, an eighty year old who looks like he’s forty.

As said, this is most obviously a vampire story. But at its heart this is at least as much historical fiction about the American colonization of what’s now Montana, as told through the very particular perspectives of a tortured vampire and a gluttonous priest. Good Stab had the misfortune to receive a front row seat to most of the episodes of his people’s conquest and near-genocide, and the systematic destruction of all the material basis of their way of life, without ever being able to do more than lash out and bleed those responsible a bit as they destroy it. I’m hardly an expert here, but the historical settings feel extremely real, and full of little notes and anecdotes that add a lot to the texture of the story. Basically every single character is also just some degree of awful, in the way that early 20th century American settlers in small town Montana are reliably going to be.

The emotional core of the story is, then, less a vampiric horror story in most of the usual ways and more a dark supernatural revenge drama about colonialism and genocide, the protagonist of which just happens to have peculiar dietary restrictions and fangs. Good Stab truthfully suffers less from having to kill to sustain himself or being cursed by the sun than by the spiritual revulsion animals feel towards him, the forced rupture from any sort of participation in the life and culture of his people even as it’s destroyed before his eyes. Which is contrasted sharply with Arthur, who – for all that he’s an elderly eccentric and the butt of quite a few jokes – is a respected pillar of the community until the very end, even as he grows erratic and his mental state obviously deteriorates.

I’ve read (basically by accident) a surprising number of stories about hunger, famine and food recently, so that’s the angle of this that I found most striking. Arthur is the rare character – I can’t really think of any other well-done ones, off-hand – whose fatal flaw really is gluttony. His journal entries are full of loving descriptions of the meals and pastries various parishioners leave for him, and as a young man it was specifically the hunger of being on the march for so long and the dream of a nice pudding which enticed him to enable and cheer on the massacre of hundreds. The contrast to the various indigenous nations left starving as the buffalo were wiped out, or how Good Stab is now only able to eat at all through lethal predation, is never explicitly drawn but it’s clear nonetheless.

If the emotional core of the story is revenge drama – or, if you like, a horror story of the kind where a comfortable old man is damned by sins he thought safely forgotten – it really is excellent. Good Stab and Arthur’s cat-and-mouse game is great, the slowly worsening situation of the town around Arthur gives a real sense of dread, and both of them are excellent unreliable narrators with really distinct voices (and I really do enjoy the fact that Good Stab is clearly consciously playing up how Indian he sounds in his ‘confessions’). Graham Jones’ always does good character work and, while hardly his best, this is no exception.

The modern day (well, 2012-13) framing story that bookends the main narrative is weaker than it by a good margin, unfortunately. Etsy is introduced as a strong and #relatable character, but what we know of her didn’t really cohere with the moral courage and ability for decisive action she suddenly starts displaying in the book’s finale. Which is a shame, because said finale has some of the most viscerally horrific and disgusting imagery in the whole book (I mean this as a compliment) and a clear plot that does resolve the 1912 narrative in a satisfying way. Etsy just didn’t feel like the right person to actually do any of that? It’s purely a matter of taste – whether you like a more hopeful or upbeat ending to these things – but even given that I also think the stronger parting image would have been to end the book a scene or two before it was.