6 Books with Nicole Kornher-Stace

 Nicole Kornher-Stace lives in New Paltz, NY, with her family. Her books include ARCHIVIST WASP (Small Beer Press/Big Mouth House, 2015) and LATCHKEY (Mythic Delirium, 2018), which are about a far-future postapocalyptic ghosthunter, the ghost of a near-future supersoldier, and their adventures in the underworld. She has two more books due out in 2021: FIREBREAK, forthcoming from Saga, and JILLIAN VS. PARASITE PLANET, forthcoming from Tachyon.

You can find her on Twitter @wirewalking, where she is probably semicoherently yelling about board games, video games, hiking, fictional representation of strong platonic relationships, good books she’s read recently, or her cat.

Today she tells us about her Six Books:

1. What book are you currently reading? 

I'm nearly through an advance copy of Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw (forthcoming in October 2021), and I recommend it highly! It subverts a bunch of horror tropes in really delicious ways, and the prose is muscular without being overwrought in a way that reminds me of nothing so much as Tanith Lee. I've also just finished reading Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger, and it is delightful. It has an asexual protagonist whose best friend is her dog. Who is also a ghost. It's extremely wholesome and was just a really nice palate cleanser from ::gestures at 2020-2021:: and everyone should absolutely pick it up.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Apart from Nothing But Blackened Teeth, which I mentioned above, and Khaw's other forthcoming novel The All-Consuming World, I'm super excited about Rise of the Red Hand by Olivia Chadha!! It'll be out by the time this goes to print, and I just know that Future Me is going to love it. 2021 is going to be a great year for diverse, inclusive cyberpunk, and I'm very, very excited.

 

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to read again? 

I actually just went back and reread my old copy of The Boxcar Children for an entirely ridiculous side project I'm working on in my Patreon, but, as for stuff I originally read when I was older than 5 or so--since realizing that Nothing But Blackened Teeth was reminding me of Tanith Lee, I've wanted to go back and read some of my favorites by her. I first discovered her work in the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, (I remain very glad that when my dad found some of these books at a used bookstore and handed them to twelve-year-old me, he never flipped through them beforehand because there's so much stuff in there that my parents would have deemed age-inappropriate, but I'm not sure if I'd ever have gotten into writing SFF without them. 

So this is an anecdotal aside about not censoring your kids' reading, I guess.) and it blew my whole mind. I spent much of my teens hunting down as much Tanith Lee and Angela Carter as I could get my greedy mitts on, thanks to those anthologies, and they were absolutely formative for my writing, as you can very much tell if you can find any of my older stuff from pre-2010 or so!

At some point I got rid of a lot of my Tanith Lee collection--I move a lot, and books are heavy, and I'm not generally a big rereader these days, as I live about a block from a library, and there are way more books out there than I have time to read--but I kept some of the ones that were the biggest influence on me, The Secret Books of Paradys probably the most influential among those. I haven't read them since I was probably 18 or so, and they've been sitting on my shelf judging my life choices ever since.

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about – either positively or negatively?

This one's tricky! I'm not a big rereader or a big DNFer, so 99.9% of books I read get read once, for better or worse, and my opinion of them doesn't really change much afterward.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

Even though my writing style has changed a lot from when I was a teenager, I still have to give lots of credit to Tanith Lee. Not even any one specific book as much as her body of work itself. I write (and read) as much for the prose as for worldbuilding, character, plot, etc., and her work is where I imprinted on a number of things I still seek out in others' writing and have adopted into my own. For instance: she was a master of word choice. Plenty of people can choose their words precisely, but she could weaponize hers in a way that did all kinds of heavy lifting in lieu of paragraphs of description and exposition. She could keep a reader perpetually slightly off-balance one unexpected turn of phrase at a time. She could make the atmosphere of a story feel like a weight that just pushes you down and sits on you, and she could do it in extremely little space. I wish I'd read any of her stuff recently, so I had specific examples to bring to mind. But if you're into muscular language, prose with real texture, and dreamlike imagery, and you haven't read her yet, oh my god are you in for a treat.

 6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome? 

Hilariously, after having books out in 2015 and 2018 and nothing out in the years between or since, I have two books coming out this summer! Firebreak (May 4, Simon & Schuster/Gallery/Saga) has gotten compared a lot so far to Ready Player One, and it's similar in that it's about a VR gamer in the future, but, honestly, the similarity ends there. It's about Mal, the equivalent of a Twitch streamer in the year 2134, who lives with eight other people in a hotel repurposed as housing for people displaced by corporate civil war. The book is, essentially, the story of her radicalization from obedient consumer-citizen to anti-corporate activist. It's got ownvoices asexual/aromantic representation, strong friendships, lots of action scenes, and a whole bunch of stick-it-to-the-man energy. 

Then, in July, I have my middle-grade debut, Jillian vs. Parasite Planet, forthcoming from Tachyon, which is a space survival story that pits an eleven-year-old girl with anxiety and a snarky, cartoon-addicted, shapeshifting, intelligent nanobot array against an alien planet full of creepy mind-control parasites. I'm chronically terrible at talking up my own books, but I had a ton of fun writing both of these, and I very much hope they find their readers.

Thanks, Nicole!

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POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Microreview [Book]: Latchkey by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Latchkey takes the genre-bending mythology of Archivist Wasp and grounds it in a bigger, busier world, creating a different but worthy reading experience.

First, a confession: I was never on the Archivist Wasp bandwagon when it first came out. While it was on my radar, it never quite bubbled up to the top of the list, and by last year it was just another title to sigh over when browsing the Small Beer Press catalogue. Maybe someday, I thought, once I've read all the other books, I can read that one... Anyway, it turns out the fastest way to push a book up your to-be-read pile is to win an ARC of its sequel, and thanks to the generosity of Mythic Delirium, Latchkey's publisher, I ended up doing just that. While I'll focus the rest of this review on talking about the book whose title is at the top of the page, let me just quickly note two things. First, my response to Archivist Wasp is that it's an objectively very accomplished and unusual book that was enjoyable but didn't quite hit me in the way it seems to have done for others. (It also needs noting that this is a rare female-led YA without any romance plot). Second, it's going to be hard for me to review Latchkey without comparing it to its predecessor, which means there will be mild spoilers for Archivist Wasp itself. If you haven't had the pleasure of the first volume yet, I recommend you do so before reading on.

Latchkey opens several years after the events of Archivist Wasp, in a post-apocalyptic world where the ghosts of the dead are a constant presence. Isabel, formerly known as Wasp, used to be the Archivist - a young woman chosen through ritual combat to be the ghost hunter for a religious sect dedicated to an entity named Catchkeep. Following her adventures in the Underworld with a nameless ghost, learning about a pre-apocalyptic child soldier project called "Latchkey", Isabel has overthrown the abusive systems governing her own life and that of the girls around her (who, side note, were all being trained up to murder her in ritual combat themselves), and built a tentative relationship with the neighbouring town of Sweetwater. But her upbringing and experiences in the underworld have left Isabel with serious trauma, and its hard for her to connect with communities of people who had previously seen her as a rival or a weapon. In Latchkey, an existential threat to the village collides with the (literal) return of ghosts from Isabel's past, as it becomes clear that the route to saving her people's future, and to helping undo some of the harm inflicted on the ghosts of the Latchkey Project, are inextricably linked and in Isabel's hands.

Despite being a continuation of the story told in Archivist Wasp, with many of the same characters and a similar tone, Latchkey ends up hitting quite different notes to its predecessor. Where the first book was a slim, focused narrative with strong notes of a mythological journey - Wasp is literally travelling through the underworld, after all - Latchkey feels in some ways like a more straightforward blend of mystery and action. That's not intended to be a criticism, as the space the book opens up is put to great use showing us how Isabel's world has changed and expanded since her journey with the ghost, bringing a strong sense of wider community and more in-depth worldbuilding to the series. One basic but obvious thing is the different use of names: in Archivist Wasp, almost nobody has a name except for Catherine Foster, the ghost Wasp and her companion are tracking down; Wasp herself only reveals her true name under serious pressure, as part of a pivotal scene for her character. In contrast, Latchkey has a "normal" level of background names for all the people in Isabel's orbit, which immediately throws the questions of identity in Archivist Wasp into much sharper focus by contrast. As Isabel uncovers information about more of the Latchkey children, their names obviously become an integral part of the process of reclaiming their identities, and it makes the lack of name for "the ghost" (i.e. the original spirit who took Isabel to the underworld, who is himself a product of the Latchkey project) even more poignant.

The stronger plot thread for Isabel's "present" also means that Latchkey is a much busier book than Archivist Wasp. Most of the time, this is handled well, although I felt some of the balls got dropped on occasion. For example, a lot is made about evacuation of Sweetwater's non-fighting population into the subterranean tunnels, which ultimately only seems to serve as a vehicle for getting Our Heroes underground for an adventure despite lots of signalling about the kids not having enough supplies or responsible adults which ultimately comes to nothing. Also, the last 15% of the book feels like it's transparently heading for a cliffhanger ending, which is frustrating: if these scenes are setting up your next book, dear author, is it possible to put them in that book so I will actually have the right, fresh emotional reaction to them by the time that books comes out? I can see the logic behind subverting expectations and ending Latchkey with some quieter scenes completing the arc about reclaiming identity, rather than the more traditionally climactic battle, but because there's so obviously too much to do to wrap it up in the remaining pages, the execution didn't work for me.

In the end, I'm left personally very happy with where Latchkey took the story, but with some questions about execution and a sense that for some, the tonal direction this sequel takes might undermine the unique, detached feeling of the first volume. Archivist Wasp was so self-contained that this doesn't feel like a necessary continuation, but it's certainly one that makes the most of its foundations and delivers a strong, intriguing new facet to Isabel's world. I'm still not sure this is a series I'm ever going to love, but it's one that continues to interest me, and Kornher-Stace is doing a lot of very thoughtful, interesting things with Isabel's story that are sure to appeal to those who enjoy well-crafted genre-bending YA.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 Caused me to write a review where "gosh, most of the characters have names" seems like an insightful comment.

Penalties: -1 Could fall flat for long-time fans depending on what you liked about the original.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 "an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws"

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

References: Kornher-Stace, Nicole. Archivist Wasp [Big Mouth Press, 2015]
                    Kornher-Stace, Nicole. Latchkey [Mythic Delirium, 2018]