Microreview [Book]: Grave Importance by Vivian Shaw

Grave Importance closes Greta's adventures but leaves its main character uncomfortably sidelined in a world of powerful supernatural men

Cover design by Will Staehle and Lisa Marie Pompilio

Grave Importance closes out the Greta Helsing series of medically-focused urban fantasy, starring Greta, doctor to the various undead and supernatural residents of London and occasional haver of dramatic, mysterious adventures. Having read the previous two books in this series, I went on to this ending with a sense of mild uncertainty - I'd said on my reading of the previous book, after all, that the frustrations of a heavily male cast were starting to get to me despite the fun, and that I shouldn't read the next book without first investigating if it was to be all about the men around Greta. Well, I didn't do that, and any results from not following my own advice are therefore entirely my own fault.

This time, Greta is off to Oasis Natrun, an exclusive medical centre and spa that caters to mummies - no, not women parents of young or precociously posh children, the ancient Egyptian type with bandages and decaying limbs and internal organs that have been removed and placed in jars. Greta has been asked to step in for several months to Oasis Natrun, and jumps at the chance to drop her regular GP practice and check out the fancy technology that this fabulously wealthy clinic has on offer (incidentally, one thing that's entirely missing from this series? Discussion of how Greta's services are paid for, and the wider conversation around the right to healthcare and the role of public funds in ensuring it is on offer.) Of course, this being Greta, we know that the trip is unlikely to go quite as smoothly as intended, and sure enough it turns out there's some rather odd medical mysteries at the clinic, which appear to be supernatural in origin. Compounding her problems, Greta's longtime vampire buddy Ruthven has just had to return early from a holiday with his new boyfriend Grisaille (returning from the previous book) when a migraine turns into something significantly more sinister. It turns out, of course, that everything is linked and what follows is a journey through increasingly escalating circumstances - and when I say escalating, I mean "dig out the Led Zeppelin 'cause we're on an actual stairway to heaven and also everything is literally on fire now, no, imagine more fire than that, no, more than that, OK now double what you were thinking about, yes, that much fire".

Vivian Shaw has a ton of experience as a fanfiction writer, and some of that particular fanfic writing style and sensibility is in evidence here. The most obvious is the tone the novel takes to humanise characters, with multiple points of view, human and otherwise, all narrating in the same mildly anxious, matter-of-fact tone. Although it means that everyone's internal thoughts, from ancient vampires to human doctors to utterly alien angels from the next dimension over, start to sound the same, that's definitely supposed to be a feature rather than a bug in a series that's all about how monsters are actually just people. I have to say, not all of the quirks work perfectly for me all the time: it's specifically notable that Shaw makes copious use italics for emphasis, to the point where there's generally quite a lot of special words on every page. This makes for quite a distinctive style of writing that feels much closer to "online dialect" than most other books of this type, and while it does get distracting if you pay too much attention to it, it's also an interesting way of making a novel that's full of some pretty old characters and concepts feel very much like a contemporary read.

Where I struggled once again, however, was in how little Greta's medical expertise seems to actually come to bear on the plot, or allow her to be the centre of her own adventure rather than just a human along for the ride. Although Grave Importance starts off as a medical mystery, with some interesting scenes around Mummy medicine specifically, once its established that the illness plaguing Oasis Natrun isn't strictly medical in origin, Greta steps aside to let other characters solve the problem. Similarly, she ends up being helpless in the face of Ruthven's sickness, and has to call in a male colleague (a fun reference, at least) who immediately fixes the problem without any of her inputs. Greta therefore spends huge amounts of this novel worrying about all the things going wrong with the various areas of her life in which she feels responsibility - to the job she's taken on, to her patients, and to her friends - all while the narrative gives her absolutely no tools to actually engage with those issues. It only gets worse as the story moves into its endgame and Greta and indeed all the characters we've been mainly following in the plot to this point end up sidelined in the face of overwhelming events, with others taking the fore instead (and an ultimate resolution that depends just on the actions of two intriguing but very minor characters to that point). It all ends up feeling a bit futile - why is Greta's name on the front cover if she's not the character who is going to solve any but the most routine problems?

And, of course, I have nobody to blame but myself for this, but I said I wouldn't read Grave Importance unless I discovered it wasn't all about the men, and then I decided to go for it anyway, and of course this book was once again all about the men. Sure, Greta's female surgery staff are back, but their screentime and impact is minimal compared to all the dudes she spends her time fussing over: from the supporting cast who get the most agency, to the external expertise she brings in to solve her escalating problems, to the patients she spends more than a few seconds worrying over. There's also a woman who serves as a secondary villain and whose arc is... interesting... and a nurse at the Oasis Natrun who Greta likes. Even the political representation suffers: The management of hell, which in Grave Importance appears as a city state destination much like any other, which the characters go out of their way to note isn't that bad, actually? Of course they're all blokes - because changing the very concept of Hell into a kind of misunderstood slightly-warmer Singapore makes sense, but having Greta deal with powerful women in positions of leadership would clearly be a change too far for the mythology.

I appreciate that this may come across as me getting too nitpicky about a series that's ultimately designed as fluffy escapism - but for me? That lack of female representation, and the lack of agency for the main character, is the stuff that really matters, because it's what prevents the Greta Helsing trilogy from being genuinely enjoyable comfort reading for me. There's certainly just as much value in books full of positive, sometimes queer relationships between men, but creating one at the expense of any empowerment, action or even anything particularly interesting about the female main character who is supposedly at the heart of it all is a choice that feels, at the very least, kind of disingenuous, and while I ought to have known what I was getting myself given my reaction to the previous book, I find myself disappointed all over again by a series that seems to be doing something very different to what I hoped to get from it.

The Math

Baseline Score: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 Unusual but fun writing style that takes some of the best conventions of fanfiction writing.

Penalties: -1 There's an ancient spotlight-stealing man wherever you look; -1 Honestly, I hate the spotlight-stealing men so much that I'm counting them as a second penalty...

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10

POSTED BY: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, 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.

Reference: Shaw, Vivian. Grave Importance (Orbit, 2019)

Microreview [Book]: Dreadful Company by Vivian Shaw

Dreadful Company builds on the strengths of the first volume in the series, delivering another solid urban fantasy adventure.

Dreadful Company is the second novel from Vivian Shaw in the Dr Greta Helsing series, following last year's Strange Practice. Readers who follow a fair bit of fanfiction may have already come across Shaw's works in the Homestuck, the MCU and Star Wars fandoms as coldhope. This background puts Shaw in a strong position to bring some of the most interesting aspects of transformative fiction to this original series, which takes such venerable members of the vampire canon as Lord Ruthven and Varney the Vampyre, and effectively sets them in a modern AU, showcasing them in a new environment without needing to focus on their process of adaptation. As her surname indicates, Greta is a descendent of Abraham Van Helsing -- though the family dropped the "Van" a while back -- and she's inherited the family business, but it's not the one you'd think: instead, she runs a medical practice dealing with the problems of London's supernatural denizens. Greta has built a strong community with the undead of London, and most of the undead cast have happily established their niche in 21st century London, and are strongly invested in protecting it against those who threaten it in any way.

Dreadful Company picks up the narrative some time after the end of Strange Practice, with Greta and Ruthven on a visit to Paris as Greta prepares to present a paper at a supernatural medical conference. Before they get there, however, there's time to visit the opera and get in their contractually required Phantom references. To Greta's surprise, while there's no ghostly apparition in Box 5, there is a creepy vampire in need of a haircut staring at her from another of the theatre's boxes. Said vampire quickly makes his terrible aesthetic and coven management skills - and his vendetta against Ruthven - into Greta's problem by abducting her to his lair in the conveniently atmospheric catacombs of Paris, where she comes into contact with the rest of his terribly-dressed coven and the mess they have made of 1) the city, 2) themselves and 3) the fabric of reality.

The coven, their politics, and the weird pet-creatures one of them keeps summoning through a rift in reality, are the highlight of Dreadful Company, which is for the most part a pretty claustrophobic narrative. Corvin, the coven leader, hits just the right blend of absurd and dangerous. His obsession with image, and with a particular type of stereotyped "vampiriness", gives Shaw lots of material to poke fun at particular aspects of the vampire myth, but at the same time the narrative is very clear that this isn't what makes him villainous: rather, its one symptom of his toxic fixation on power and control. Corvin's weary second-in-command, Grisaille, perhaps gets a more sympathetic ride in the book than I'd like, but he makes an interesting foil to Corvin's excesses. Greta's predicament, and the wider happenings in Paris, also pull in some other members of the supernatural community, including werewolf Alceste St. Germain, and "remedial psychopomps" Dammerung and Brightside, whose job is to seek ghosts who missed their trip to the afterlife the first time around. On our heroes' side, there's a practical, cooperative air to the inevitable rescue mission that reflects the attitude of Greta herself - she is a medical doctor, after all - and, again, contrasts wonderfully with the behaviour of the coven. Like Seanan McGuire's Incryptid series, Dreadful Company is a book where monsters are just people, and one of the underlying messages here is that healthy personal identities shouldn't be constructed from mystery and ego, even if you are an ageless vampire.

Unfortunately, I found Dreadful Company to be a book where my opinions on the aspects that fell short are unusually strong, despite how much I appreciated it overall. Some of those annoyances are pretty specific - for example, my initial excitement at learning Hell has a Monitoring and Evaluation department (my job! in a book!) didn't survive the descriptions of what that bureaucracy looked like in Shaw's world. I'm also tired of authors taking side swipes at "sparkly vampires": Twilight's vampire physiology was never an accepted feature of the genre, and that means its not a trope that needs deconstructing; rather, it's an innovation of a single problematic-but-successful female author whose work is now open to unquestioning mockery. It frustrates me that modern YA vampire tropes aren't given nearly the same care and critical attention in Dreadful Company as Victorian ones seem to be, and that comes across as a significant oversight in a series that is so focused on what vampire mythology looks like in a 21st century world.

I was also disappointed that, like Strange Practice, Dreadful Company is a highly male-dominated novel outside of Greta herself. In the previous book, several women appear briefly in the background as fascinating characters that the narrative is completely uninterested in, particularly Greta's colleagues at her surgery. Dreadful Company moves us to Paris, thwarting any chances of seeing those women again for now, and instead gives us two women in Corbin's vampire coven: Lilith, Corbin's partner, who is introduced to us via a male POV character as highly strung, stupid, shallow and irrational, and is given very little opportunity to prove us wrong before the narrative overtakes her (she's also the aforementioned pet-summoner); and Emily, the youngest vampire, who is also portrayed as out-of-control and useless although, thankfully, given more space to grow. It's also hard to miss the fact that Greta spends over half of this book trapped with Corbin and awaiting rescue - although she's far from passive through this process, or the eventual escape. I know I have high and specific standards when it comes to representation of women in my reading, and there's space for books that focus on interesting male characters, but the Greta Hellsing series has been particularly disappointing in that it feels like it shouldn't be falling short on this front to the extent that it has so far.

With that said, I'm aware that I'm passionate about the things I disliked in Dreadful Company precisely because I am so invested in the ways the series is going right. I like Greta, even if she could do with diversifying her adventuring companions occasionally, and the underlying themes of this series are strongly in line with what I want to read in the limited space I have for urban fantasy in my wider SFF diet. I'll be continuing to keep an eye on this series as it comes out, although I will likely be scanning initial reviews and previews of Book 3 quite hard for evidence of more not-men in the narrative driving seat beyond Greta herself. Still, if you want down-to-earth, self aware urban fantasy with an excellent critical eye for horror tropes and transformative, character driven fiction, this is definitely a series to look out for.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 Surprisingly adorable hair monsters!

Penalties: -1 Twilight alone has not made a generation of young women believe vampires sparkle by default; -1 Please can we have some powerful but matter-of-fact ageless supernaturals who aren't dudes in Volume 3?

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, "A mostly enjoyable experience."

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.

Reference: Shaw, Vivian. Dreadful Company [Orbit, 2018]

Microreview [book]: Strange Practice, by Vivian Shaw

If you love horror, monsters, science, mystery, you will enjoy this book.

I will let you know right now, I loved this book. This book made me laugh, cry, and generally fall in love with all the characters (well, minus the super bads).

Dr. Greta Helsing, a descendant of the famous Professor Abraham Van Helsing, is living in modern day London following in her father's footsteps. After medical school, Greta joined her father's practice, taking over after his passing. However, this isn't just any medical practice, Greta treats all manner of the otherworldly, from vampires and vampyres to mummies and ghouls. A firm believer that all persons, including the undead, should receive respect and properly medical care.

When a vicious attack on a vampyre friend of one of Greta's patients appears connected to the serial murders occurring in London, Greta, and her friends end up squarely in the sights of an evil unlike anything they've seen.

Without a doubt, the best thing about this book are the characters. Shaw beautifully blends Greta's analytical mind and intelligence with deeply connected friendships and compassion. Lord Edmund Ruthven, he prefers you abstain from using Lord, is the best host, a considerate friend, willing to help tend a baby ghoul, a vampire you can depend on no matter what the situation, and a dear friend to Greta. (And yes, there is a difference between vampires and vampyres, a detail I adore.)

Shaw clearly did her research when it comes to undead history and tales. There are so many references fans of horror will truly love and respect. It adds a richness to the text and an authority to the voice behind each character. Many times urban lore surrounding a certain undead will be openly addressed during conversations yet never felt forced into the narrative. Weaving such history into the story itself allows Shaw to make her Helsing tale wholly her own.

The attacks and murders lead into a pretty straight forward mystery where Greta and her companions start unraveling clues Scotland Yard is not privvy to since the undead are a bit harder to kill and become a witness to the crime versus victim. Greta is driven to solve the murders in order to protect those closest to her. The undead can't afford a lot of police and investigations poking around. She fears the worst from abductions for experimental probing to the pitch fork brigades. Protecting her patients and friends is of the utmost importance to her, and it is a credit to Shaw's skill that I was right there alongside Greta wanting to protect everyone.

It takes a bit to make me cry at a book, Black Beauty and Where the Red Fern Grows managed it and now I can add this one to the list as well. It wasn't because of a tragic thing (to avoid spoilers that is all I will say) it was because there is a moment when Greta is so upset she is a slobbering, sobbing mess and I was so invested in these characters I found myself tearing up and having to blow my nose, once again, right alongside Greta. It is that kind of character-building that will carry this series for as long as Shaw wishes to write it. As soon as I finished the book I went looking to see if I could at least pre-order the next in the series, sadly it isn't listed yet.

Every time I think I am firmly in the the "I prefer standalones always and forever" a book like this will come along and sweep me away selling me on the idea of series and spending more time with characters.

If you love horror, monsters, science, mystery, you will enjoy this book. If you are like me, you will keep checking Orbit's listings to see when the second is on the horizon and available for pre-order.


The Math: 
Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for truly wonderful characters

Penalties: Not a one.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 - A seriously great cast I look forward to following for many, many books!

Our scoring system explained.


Reference: Shaw, Vivian. Strange Practice [Orbit, 2017]


POSTED BY: Shana DuBois--extreme bibliophile and seeker of raindrops.