First Scare: Dracula (1979)

The one that was color-graded with extreme prejudice

With this being the fourth Dracula adaptation I watch for this series, I start to wonder: is it humanly possible to tell a Dracula story where women actually make choices of their own? Even in this unabashedly horny version, directed by John Badham, Lucy's vehement wish to spent eternity with the Count can be attributed to magical coercion. It's as if there were no such thing as freely desiring your predator; with Dracula there must always be a pinch of deception thrown in the mix, a hidden hand pushing the will that believes itself free. Where human seduction depends on mutual offering and suggesting, vampiric seduction is all about control. The trick is to hide that control under a charming façade, to convince you that your surrender was your own idea. The vampire is one of those predator species that prefer a docile prey. Like an anglerfish, but hot.

The trope of the vampire as a sexual threat has been present since the very earliest vampire fiction: both Polidori's The Vampyre and Le Fanu's Carmilla revolve around serial seducers of unsuspecting maidens. It became a perennial trait in fiction even until the early years of the 21st century to handle the topic of desire with a certain deliberate ambiguity where vampires were involved. Those stories look very different now through the lens of our contemporary notion of consent: for us, upholders of bodily autonomy and personal agency, any degree of coercion is unacceptable, no matter how sugarcoated. And it's a sign of the progress we've made that the authors of classic vampire tales would have found our perspective odd, maybe too reductive. So if you're going to dive into the literary tradition of sexy vampires, you need to keep in mind two conflicting stances: that of today, according to which anything less than free consent is inarguably assault; and that of the authors, whose understanding of seduction was most likely less egalitarian.

Badham casts a handsome Dracula, removing part of the character's mystique. While it makes the movie's romantic storyline more digestible to the audience, I find that it alters the character too much. Dracula is supposed to be a master manipulator; a key component of his scare factor is that, even if he presented himself in public like the stinking, rotten corpse he actually is, his victims would still be incapable of resisting his embrace. Dracula pulls the strings of human desire in the service of his own desire, which is what makes Nosferatu so effective. If Dracula is good-looking, it doesn't strike us as horrifying that someone would desire him—even if he's using his mind control powers. With the air of effortless charm that Frank Langella gives to this character, it's entirely believable that someone would want to be possessed by him—even if he's not using his mind control powers.

Here your mileage may vary. For a segment of the audience, the fact that he's already attractive before he starts controlling you will make him feel more dangerous. In my case, I'm fascinated by the idea of an inhuman monstrosity that can nonetheless reach into your most intimate feelings and twist them against you. And here we need to invoke cultural attitudes around lookism. By making Dracula handsome, this movie joins the long tradition of folk tales that question the idea of a link between external and internal beauty. Think of the Greek siren, or the medieval succubus, or the Japanese jorōgumo: extremely beautiful, equally evil.

For this version of Dracula, the reshuffling of characters goes like this: Jonathan is engaged to Lucy, who is the daughter of Dr. Seward. There's no Arthur, no brides of Dracula, no earlier visit by Renfield, and no ruse from Dracula: he readily admits that he's visiting England as a consumer. Of more consequence is the rewrite that turns Mina into Dr. Van Helsing's daughter. This time, he isn't an established vampire hunter; he learns about vampires along with the audience. This change allows for a scenario I like to see: Dracula infiltrating human society. Langella plays the Count as a worldly hedonist who enraptures people with his vast talent for conversation. Instead of keeping to the formalities of high society, like Lugosi's Count, Langella's is almost scandalous in how openly he seeks and enjoys female attention.

Thick volumes could be written on the Freudian symbolism of the vampire as a dual object of the erotic impulse and the death impulse, on the alarmingly easy way our basic desires can be warped toward our own destruction. Badham's Dracula aims to present a believable scenario of such distorted passions. Much like desire itself, your response to this piece of art will be uniquely yours. Maybe you'll fall under the spell. Maybe you'll remain unmoved. Taste is a mystery, like life and death.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: Dracula (1974)

The one with the excess of close-ups and the perpetually constipated grimace

Ideally, Jack Palance should have been a great choice for the role of Count Dracula. His suitability for the role was so widely acknowledged that Marvel Comics used his likeness for the series Tomb of Dracula years before Dan Curtis cast him in the role. This was the same Dan Curtis who created the TV series Dark Shadows. Add Richard I Am Legend Matheson writing the script, and this movie had the right pedigree to be spectacular. Unfortunately, someone must have given Palance the wrong acting instructions, because from the start to the end of the movie, he only knows how to make one face: that of the unlucky vampire who forgot to add some fiber to his all-blood diet, and is now in urgent need of a laxative.

It's not like Palance is wasted on the role. When he speaks, you believe that he's the right actor. He says his lines in an unnervingly calm, low voice, in the tone of an immortal who has seen everything and can no longer be surprised. His acting choices resemble those of Bela Lugosi in his manner of staring, standing, and carrying himself. However, where Lugosi could own a scene by raising an eyebrow, Palance invariably contorts every muscle on his face, as if the director were pressuring him to choose which emotion to show.

The director himself is no help on this matter, with his strange habit of resorting to a zoom-in to mark every emotional beat. He does make effective use of low angles and the occasional Dutch angle to underline a character's interaction with the realm of the occult, but his overreliance on close-ups becomes a form of self-sabotage against the serious tone he's clearly going for. Matheson's script keeps a tight rein on the pacing of events, an essential skill to have when the audience already knows the plot by heart, and the directing style falls short of what this script deserves.

This time, the reshuffling of characters is less drastic than in previous adaptations, but there's one key detail to pay attention to: the addition of the subplot about the Count's long-dead wife whose likeness he randomly encounters in the present. Coppola would use the same subplot in his 1992 version. This is another way of solving the eternal question about the Count's reason for moving to England: in this case, it's because he's a hopeless romantic. From his dialogues (and bizarrely melodramatic flashbacks) it can be inferred that he'd be happy to remain in his castle if it weren't for the armies that have continuously come to pillage his land and/or murder his wife. If you will just let him keep his wife, he won't have to come to kill you. This version of the Count is no less a seducer than previous ones, but here the story emphasizes his sexual needs instead of Lucy's or Mina's. In fact, the female characters in this version perform the function of hypnotizable MacGuffins rather than people. They're there for the Count to pursue and for Arthur and Van Helsing to chivalrously defend.

It's funny how the space left open by removing Jonathan Harker from the action in London raises Arthur Holmwood to an almost protagonistic position, yet the script keeps him restricted to serving as an appendix of Dr. Van Helsing. They do everything together, go everywhere together, investigate each clue together—you could remove Arthur from this movie and the only change you'd notice would be that Van Helsing would have to recite his infodumps to himself. Even Mina is almost an afterthought: her close friendship with Lucy is more told than shown, and what little autonomy she has in the plot is gone once she's fed Dracula's blood.

Changing Count Dracula from a predator to a heartbroken widower isn't enough to arouse sympathy for this character. There are still good reasons why the common folk who live near his castle shudder at his name. And on a more pragmatic level, the rough, hyperangular features of Jack Palance's face are a bad fit for a romantic lead. But the movie wants to present the Count as a suffering, tragic man who has endured loneliness for too long and just hopes for a second chance at happiness. Again, this is the same angle Coppola would try some years later, but Coppola succeeds at it because his Dracula is legible to us, because his flashback actually does the job of explaining the part of the story we need to understand instead of giving us mere hints as in this movie.

Dracula's manner of death in this version is overacted as all hell. Once the curtains are ripped open to let the sunlight in, the Count staggers and pauses multiple times to make sure you see him pose in pain from all sides. Then he helpfully gets himself in position for Van Helsing to impale him, a process that takes way more camera cuts than it needs. Overall, this movie is not without enjoyable moments, if your idea of enjoyment allows for frequent, abrupt shifts in PoV and a plot structured like a game of cat and mouse.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: Dracula (1958)

The one sadly afflicted with pink eye

A few years ago, I did the experiment of watching all three film versions of Carrie on one day. It taught me a lot about the minutiae of adaptational choices: what effect it has if a certain dialogue scene is moved to a different moment in the story, what actions need to be condensed if a location is removed, how far an emotional setup needs to be from its eventual payoff. (My verdict is that 2013 has the best Margaret, 1976 has the best Carrie, and 2002 has the best prom massacre.) Watching various adaptations of Dracula is turning out to be a similar learning experience, with Terence Fisher's 1958 film a fascinating example of how drastically you can strip down a story while keeping its core intact.

If I was surprised by how much the 1931 film shuffled around the novel's characters, this version goes even further: Renfield and the sanatorium are entirely removed, as is Dracula's journey by ship, while Dr. Seward is reduced to a very minor role. Arthur is now Lucy's brother instead of suitor, and he's married to Mina. The bulk of the action is moved from England to Germany so that trips to and from Transylvania are less impractical. The most consequential change is that Jonathan Harker doesn't visit Castle Dracula as an innocent clerk bringing paperwork, but as a sort of secret agent already tasked with killing the vampire. This means that it's not the Count who lures Jonathan to his land, but Jonathan who takes the initiative to seek the Count. It also means that the Count's evil nature is known all along, so he doesn't get to mingle with human society.

Removing the Count's pretense of being a normal human massively reduces the contact he can have with the rest of the cast, which forces the director to make the most of his very few on-screen appearances. The tradeoff works: this is one of those monster movies where we get to see the monster very rarely, but each time we do, it lands with full impact.

The changes to the whole Jonathan/Mina/Lucy axis help provide a practical solution to the biggest loose thread in the novel: why did Count Dracula want to leave Transylvania in the first place? In this interpretation, Jonathan sneaks into the castle crypt in the first act and kills the Count's bride, who may or may not be desperate to be rid of the vampiric curse. This event gives the Count a clear motivation: you take my bride, I take yours. And that's why he goes after Lucy, who in this version is Jonathan's fiancée.

Jonathan doesn't make it past the first act alive (for which I was thankful, what with actor John Van Eyssen being rather mediocre in the role), so the film promptly shifts to introducing Dr. Van Helsing, who ends up being the true protagonist. As Van Helsing, Peter Cushing does a stellar job. He's helped by the script, which cleverly remolds the novel's crusader/pest exterminator into a detective-esque figure. He's apparently been on Dracula's trail for a while, and he frames his mission in terms of protecting the world from what could become a plague of vampirism.

However, precisely because the story has been stripped down to the basics, this whole talk of a threat to the world sounds incongruous. The action is confined to about half a dozen sets, beyond which the rest of society might as well not exist. Van Helsing does visit a customs officer and an undertaker in the course of his investigation, but those spaces just play their part and are quickly done with. If not for the dialogues, we wouldn't even know that Arthur and Mina are living in Germany instead of England. And the Count doesn't help sell his menace factor either; he's more interested in replacing his dead bride than in going on a biting rampage. The main conflict in this film is a strictly private affair, but the dialogues insist that Dracula sits at the head of a "reign of terror" that must be defeated yet is nowhere to be seen.

So instead of the usual dynamic in a Dracula story of the foreign Other quietly invading the civilized metropolis, here we have the civilized heroes going out into the land of the foreign Other to stamp down the threat it represents. Not a very subtle sentiment for a film produced while the Cold War was getting started (it doesn't escape the viewer that the undertaker's shop where the Count first goes to hide has the last name Marx, of all things).

This version of the vampire doesn't bother with theatrics. No beastly transformation, no fog cloud, no magical stares. His power is raw, brutal hunger (and his female victims welcome his assault with equal hunger). When he finally meets Van Helsing, he doesn't try to control his mind, as in the 1931 movie; here he goes straight for the jugular, and is only thwarted because he lets himself grow overconfident.

For a limited special effects budget, Dracula's death in this movie is impressive. Instead of erupting in flames when exposed to the sun, he simply crumbles down into a pile of ashes. It's very simple, very repulsive, and very effective. Unfortunately, the Technicolor process left many scenes more illuminated than they're implied to be, which makes it look like Dracula is walking outdoors under more sunlight than he should, so the dramatic shock of having the sun hit his face at the end is somewhat less effective. Still, this is a enjoyable watch. It's like going to the doctor's office for a needle jab: just the briefest glimpse of blood, and it's over before you feel any pain.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: Dracula (1931)

The one with the intense stares

Tod Browning's Dracula is derived from a 1924 stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel, and it shows. It keeps several of the hallmarks of a traditional theater script: lengthy infodumps via dialogue; time jumps that relegate some plot developments (especially the violent ones) to the implicit space between scenes; extended, continuous use of the same set for several consecutive conversations; and a marked preference for telling over showing. I understand that Western theater has a long tradition of keeping the violence offstage; what I cannot understand is how, when you translate the stage play into a movie, you produce what eventually becomes the most memorable, most revered, most iconic interpretation of The vampire without showing me one single instance of biting.

It goes without saying that Bela Lugosi carries this movie on his shoulders. Despite the excessive wordiness of the script, the obviously fake bat puppets, the lack of a music soundtrack, and the scattered, ill-advised attempts at humor, it only takes one look at the titular vampire's intense gaze to fall under his spell. When he's not engaged in the social pantomime of small talk, in a strenuous but futile effort to pass as a hot-blooded, cheerful human, his presence fills the screen with an unblinking, commanding aura of evil. Wikipedia tells me that almost a dozen actors were considered for the role, but now that I've seen the movie, the possibility of giving the Count any other face strikes me as inconceivable.

Fancy clothes and impeccable haircut aside, this version of the vampire is still very close to Nosferatu, an almost irrational monster guided by the hunting instinct, without the sentimental appeal that later reinventions would add to the archetype to create a more relatable figure, desperate to find love but cursed to see people only as food. When his character is free from the need to pretend to be a normal human, Lugosi puts on the face of a predator, giving his victims not the natural recognition of a fellow person but the hungry stare of a beast preparing to jump. He delivers a terrific performance, which anticipates later occurrences of the single-minded, uncaring killer that can be found in Alien or The Terminator.

The liberties taken with the source material are a double-edged sword. For one part, the early scenes about a real estate lawyer visiting the Count's castle are given to Renfield instead of Jonathan Harker, a change that strengthens the causal cohesion between the first and second acts. Also, Dr. Seward, who is in charge of the hospital where Renfield ends up locked in, is rewritten to be Mina's father instead of Lucy's suitor, which gives the Count a convenient reason to get close to Mina. The downside is that the role of Jonathan Harker is greatly diminished, Mina is reduced to sexy lamp status, and Lucy's death and subsequent undeath lose the weight they should have in the plot. There isn't even a scene to purify Lucy's corpse; she's simply forgotten halfway through the movie.

From our position in this century, accustomed to hundreds of variations on the vampire mythos, it would seem easy to forgive such misfires; there's always another version out there with its own aesthetic, its own vision, its own reinterpretation of the story. But in 1931, Dracula was yet to enter the public domain. The choices made by Universal Pictures did more than express artistic freedom: they set canon. There's an entire period in the history of horror during which Universal's Dracula was the only authorized Count on screen. Just like the present generation only knows Ian McKellen's version of Gandalf, and will forever think of Gandalf in that image, there was a generation whose idea of the Count was shaped by Bela Lugosi's acting style. It's the kind of first-mover advantage that forces every subsequent moviemaker to make their art as a response to it.

The irony is that Nosferatu came first, however illegally, which makes Universal's Dracula, for all its intentions of defining the character on its own terms, a response. Whereas Orlok is a cadaveric nightmare heralded by pestilence, Lugosi's Count comes across as a dusty relic of the Ancien Régime, a ruler over the human heart who repays obedience with madness. Both are corrupted, bloodthirsty abominations, but Lugosi's version knows the tricks of a stage magician, most notably the dramatic effect of a well-timed fog machine. Moreover, Nosferatu is silent, while Dracula lets Lugosi make full use of his heavy Hungarian accent to leverage the audience's learned Orientalism. Orlok feels like the fearsome Other because he's a walking corpse; Lugosi's Count feels like the fearsome Other because he's a foreigner with weird tastes.

My notion of the vampire was shaped by the film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire and Coppola's reinvention of Bram Stoker's material (plus smatterings of The Munsters Today, Forever Knight, Count Duckula, Drak Pack, and Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School). Somehow I never came into relevant contact with Dark Shadows, Salem's Lot, Hellsing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Castlevania, True Blood, or The Vampire Diaries. I did meet Blade, Underground, Vampire: The Masquerade, and Twilight, although at an age too late for them to influence my personal mythology. (Namely: if you ask me to think of vampires, the thing about sunlight that hurts them is not the UV light, they are not at war with werewolves, they have no connection with Biblical characters, and they Do. Not. Sparkle.) I don't view vampires as tragic figures or forbidden seducers; I view them as the perfect symbol for the parasitic nature of aristocracy.

Alas, I am a child of my time. This version of Dracula didn't particularly frighten me. Some of the scenes where the Count uses his mind control powers straddle the very thin line between the sublime and the ridiculous, and the uneven editing kills all sense of dramatic momentum in the last third. Worst of all, in consonance with the theatrical conventions of its time, but absurdly for a big classic of horror, we're not allowed to see the Count die. I feel sorry for the masterful lead actor who was dragged into this less than expertly made movie.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: Tanglewood by Knicky L. Abbott

A smoothly, deliciously prosey story that deftly captures the interior life of its characters, taking no prisoners with its confrontation of a bigotry that hurts its believer even as she harms those around her.

Barbados in the 1840s. A rich estate. A black man working as a groundskeeper. A cursed woman hiding in the nearby wilderness. The loathing she holds in her heart, for herself and for the world that put her in this situation. The lingering threads of the choices that left her cursed in the first place. This is Tanglewood's story. At its heart, though, this is a story of white resentment against their black neighbours, and the horrible alchemy of oppression that makes success a zero-sum game, turning their own hardship into fuel for a bigotry that cannot be reasoned with.

The story follows Aoife, born to a white Irish indentured family, cursed, living alone in the wilderness, trapped in her own misery and her own thoughts, forever looping back and back on her suffering. We are deeply embedded within her POV, within her way of thinking, and this, Abbott has managed to capture beautifully. It is a novella with a crystalline sharpness in its lens of human despair - the interiority of the characters, and Aoife particularly, comes across so emotively on every page. But what Abbott does best is in her abstraction of that. She is so good at turning incredibly vivid and visceral introspection into metaphorical language, giving a potent and immediately graspable insight into the mind of a character. She makes the intangible, illegible insides of someone else's mind comprehensible, while maintaining their individuality, their voice. For example:

It was as if the forest of my humanity had been slashed and burnt, so that the fields of my penitence could be cultivated.

and

Like the earth around my childhood home, the soil of me was poor, not good for growing much else but coarse grass and hard lessons.

Aoife's despair, her misery, is so well crafted on the page, the sentence-level, word-by-word care is evident in every sentence. But that is not her only angle, and nor is she the only character. Because this is also a story of a growing infatuation, and again, this is where Abbott's prose shines - again bringing that deftness of craft across in really giving us the emotional sense, the heady rush of a growing emotional connection to someone, that feeling of falling head over heels, that obsession as Aoife experiences it.

Because we also follow John Jack, the groundskeeper at Tanglewood Manor, a black man, born a slave but now living free and working for pay, who finds himself travelling to the gully where Aoife lives, returning again and again, becoming entranced, despite the strangeness of her curse and herself, despite not knowing what and who led her to be here, as she is. We see this place and its beauty through his eyes too, and while what they see is nearly the same, it is the way they see it, the way their minds process and feel, and our insight into it that colours the story, and slowly draws us in to the crux of the matter, casting back into the years to Aoife's cursing... while also being heavily grounded in the now, and their growing feelings for each other.

Despite the page time for it being incredibly short, Tanglewood has some incredibly well-written... I don't know what to call it. It's not smut. Is it romance? Not really. It's certainly not erotica. Let's just say... intimacy. Whatever it is, in the same way as she has written the rest of the story, Abbott fully embeds us into the emotional perspectives of her characters as they grow closer, and finally come to the... ahem... climax of their affections. And by narrating it through the lens of that emotion, again with that evocative, abstracting prose, just a few lines of sexual encounter are rendered breathless and gut-wrenchingly real, and somehow far more charged than any amount of physical mechanics would have been in the same page space. And it's precisely because she puts us in those characters' headspace, lets us feel their wanting, and words it in such a way that it clicks into a familiar alignment if we are someone who has ever wanted in that way. It's absolutely deliciously done.

But, despite the good, there is also the bad. And it wouldn't be a gothic story without a great deal of the bad, even if we weren't dealing with curses. The latter half of the book, once we've met and become grounded in these two characters is where we really start to dig into the truth of what happened to Aoife, and where the themes that have been seeded throughout the early part begin to bloom. And it is here that we really see the benefit of that embedding into character headspace and that emotional resonance - because Abbott is really digging into the racism of the white working class, how their own oppression becomes a nearly unstoppable fuel in the fire of anti-blackness. We have seen the life that the white Irish in this place live, through Aoife's memories. We know their lot is hard. We sympathise with them. There is no part of the story that does not acknowledge that hardship. But while doing so, it bluntly lays out how they in turn hate and harm the black people around them as if it is the natural result of their predicament, and how insidious, how unshiftable and how self-justifying that perspective is.

By the time we reach the critical moments, where all the themes are confronted and the resolution plays out, the writing is very much on the wall. It is not an unsubtle story, but it is a blunt one. That's a hard needle to thread, but Abbott does it incredibly well, delivering an ending that, once read, feels like the only natural outcome to the story, a terrible, gothic inevitability, even if you maybe thought earlier things might lead elsewhere. What needs to be confronted is confronted, with nuance and thoughtfulness, but without sparing the sharpness it needs. The reader must sit with it, and see things for what they are, in this 1840s world of wealth, privilege and oppression, of narrow worldviews and bitter consequences for those in positions unable to fight back, and the nastiness of where the lens of blame turns, when it cannot confront its true architect. 

This is a very slim novella - only 95 pages - but it packs a huge quantity in, without ever feeling like it skimps or rushes. It leads us emotions first through a complex tangle of love and betrayal and oppression and bigotry, and delivers the ending that story absolutely needed to hit home the conclusion the whole narrative has been building too. It is a sad, inevitable, truly gothic story, and it is incredibly well done.

--

The Math

Highlights: beautiful prose, amazing immersion in character perspectives and emotions, precision wielding of both bluntness and subtlety

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Abbott, Knicky L., Tanglewood, [Luna, 2024]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Microreview: The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach, by Jas Treadwell

A masterclass in rendering magic from the mundane, with the help of lively typography and footnotes

 

Cover design and illustration by Natalie Chen

This book is one of the most entertaining tales I have read in a very, very long time—and made so solely by the narrative voice. I know it’s traditional in reviews to begin with a quick description of plot or premise, but I also like to start with the things a book does best, and in this book, that is the narrative voice. And when I say ‘narrative voice’, I don’t mean the breezy, sarcastic, quippy cynicsm that so often passes for any ‘narrative voice’ that manages to evince more personality than a default prose.¹ No, our narrator here is an educated, prickly, effusive fellow, who cannot write a sentence without using both italics and CAPITALS to emphasize his point, which he makes in long, involved, verbose profusions of loquacity that surely, in a less confident pen, would pall; but in a storyteller with as much to say as the necromantic historian (as our narrator terms himself, for he holds the power in his words to RAISE THE DEAD) serves to hold the reader’s attention in a sort of dizzied fascination; for whomst amongst ust can resist such a waterfall of vocabulary?

He holds strong opinions about literature, history, grammar. He flatters his reader in the main text, and picks fights in the footnotes.² He is repeatedly fascinated by the modern technology of chapter breaks, and their magical capacity to jump over time and space: ‘We thumb our nose at those unities proclaimed by old Aristotle,’ he explains, ‘for any law of art held in disdain by the GENIUS OF SHAKESPEAR, compels no obedience of ours’ (pg. 35). He makes extreme use of footnotes to hold forth his views on the cruelty of Job’s God, or the social currents among books; to explain a literary allusion that he fears his reader might have missed (‘… the fire which burns hottest, is soonest exhausted, and now no body remembers Werter and his sorrows. – Hence our foot-note. – You understand, reader, we ornament our pages thus, for your sake, not our own’ (pg 223).) He serves notice that a particular element of the story is going to prove important, and then when, later, its importance emerges, to remind his reader that such an eventuality was indeed foreshadowed back on pg. 159.

But, you may be asking yourself, what is this story, which contains such foreshadowing, such allusive richness, such bold disregard for Aristotelian unity?

Well, we have our titular Mr Thomas Peach: educated, gentlemanly, and moderate in his tastes; master of a small household, consisting of himself, his ailing wife, a housekeeper, a stableboy, and a housemaid. In every respect he has built a life for himself that is above reproach, attracts no notice, and fits harmlessly into the retiring country life of rural 18th century Somersetshire. Such seclusion is vitally necessary for the comfort of his poor wife, who can bear no disturbance, no noise, no visitors, no conversation with any but himself. So very retiring and secluded is his poor wife, that many wonder whether she exists at all, or is there some deeper mystery at hand? (Yes, there is some deeper mystery at hand, but it’s not all that mysterious. You’ll figure it out, I’m sure, within a few chapters, even without the narrator’s rhetorical winks, nudges, and elbows to your ribs.)

But, for all that Mr Peach is our purported hero, the real thrust of the story is carried by an entirely separate set of characters, whose dramas he interacts with more as witness than as participant. Chief among them is Miss Clarissa Riddle, an orphan, who has been raised by a wealthy gentleman, ‘in imitation of the most exquisite pattern of feminine virtue which history, philosophy, or literature affords’ (pg 53). In this case, that pattern is the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (hence Miss Riddle’s name), and if you have ever read much 18th century fiction blathering on about female virtue, you’ll not be surprised to learn that Miss Riddle begins to resent her treatment. Violently.

Various eventualities eventuate: Accusations of madness; a rather unfortunate hysteria about marauding ‘gypsies’; secret societies and subterfuge; disinheritance; assassins; schemes and plots for the acquisition of money; unwanted marriages; murder; arson; surprisingly skillful blank verse—actually, this all sounds rather lively as I list these plot elements here. But they’re also all rather mundane, which, given the rhetorical nudges and hints and suggestions and eventual revelation that—I promise you, this is not a spoiler---our Mr Peach is a sorcerer, seems unsatisfying.

Indeed, the most striking part of the book, is that there is an entirely mundane explanation for just about every event that occurs. Our faithful narrator attempts to dissuade us from such a mindset. ‘Reader,’ he says, in response to a skepticism he attributes to us, ‘We beg you, be neither intemperate, nor hasty in your judgement. Remain patient—as we have urged you—And, observe’ (pg. 186). Yet, faithful and patient as I was, I could not help but observe that the only events that seem unassailably supernatural occur solely in the presence of Mr Peach. And, as a friend tells him, these may well be the imaginings of a grieving mind. The other occurances, as occult as they may seem in our narrator’s eyes, can be interpreted equally well as the rather hotheaded, passionate imaginings of some hotheaded, passionate people. It is perhaps not an accident that young Jem, the stable boy, in falling victim to the romantic charms of Goethe, illustrates how easy it is to import the fanciful imaginings of one’s fiction into the mundanity of one’s life.

I wonder whether that is, at its heart, what Jas Treadwell is doing with this book. Was it magic? Was it mundane? Does it matter? Our opinionated, prolix, and larger-than-life narrator repeatedly presents himself as a sorcerer of sorts—a necromantic historian, you may recall. Whatever magic Thomas Peach is capable of working, or imagining himself to be working, it is no less enchanting than the magic of skillful storytelling, however mundane the story may be.

---

1 I mean no offense to any breezy, sarcastic, quippy cynicism. I enjoy that too. But it is rather common, you must admit.^↩
2 Regarding whether a river can flow ‘above’ a town: ‘My learned sir, if you have stood on the bank of some gentle stream, and observed the effortless and unhurried windings of its passage between yourself and those far-off hills, whence it descends; and have never felt the water’ss seduction, which seems irresistibly to lead you towards those sylvan heights!—then, sir, your soul is no better than a dry and shrivelled nut, and we leave you to the satisfactions of your quibbles and cavils. – You shall die, sir, and come to dust, as we shall; but we think our existence will have been worth the living. – Good day, sir’ (pgs 411-412).^↩

—

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 9/10 very high quality/standout in its category

• Narrative voice bulging with personality and opinion
  

• Murder, arson, alarums and excursions and REVENGE
  

• Lively typography
  

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

References:  

Treadwell, Jas. The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach [Hodder and Stoughton, 2021].

 

Microreview: Mordew, by Alex Pheby

A dense, richly Gothic tale full of vibes and inventiveness, but short on characterization

Cover illustration by James Nunn

Ahh, Gormenghast—such an odd duck of a book! So Gothic, so moody, so atmospheric! I’d been intrigued by its title and the pen-and-ink cover illustration for years before I finally picked it up, and I was so profoundly struck by how disagreeable it was, that--

Oh, sorry, wrong book.

Ahh, Mordew—such an odd duck of a book! So Gothic, so moody, so atmospheric! I’d been intrigued by its title and the pen-and-ink cover illustration for years before I finally picked it up, and I was so profoundly struck by how similar to Gormenghast it was—in vibes, if not in plot--that I’m still not entirely sure what I think of it.

The plot revolves around a boy named Nathan, who lives in the slums of the city of Mordew. Nathan is possessed of a particular ability called the Itch—a form of magic—that would enable him to support his sex worker mother and father dying of a lungworm infection if his parents had not forbidden him to use the Itch, no matter how dire the need. So Nathan instead offers himself to the Fetch, a type of messenger who collects boys from the slums and brings them to the house of the Master of Mordew. The Master is the undisputed magical ruler of the city, pays for boys in coin that would otherwise be entirely out of the reach of their impoverished families. In the Fetch’s carriage, Nathan runs in with Gam and Prissy, who induct him into their little band of street urchins, planning and conducting petty—and quite unpetty—crime from an underground lair. Above them, the Master conducts an undending war with his counterpart in a neighboring city, Malarkoi, and as the book unfolds Nathan becomes the center of multiple manipulative plans, as people high and low throughout the city struggle to control his power.

From the very beginning, this book leans hard into constructing a quite brilliant setting. slums are filled with a substance called Living Mud, which spontaneously creates gruesome creatures which can take a variety of shapes—wormy things, jointed eels, a conglomerations of infant limbs. If these creatures do not collapse back into mud they can be caught and sold for leather, or food, or other sources of income. Above the slums, the city of Mordew rises to a peak, with a Merchant City underneath the more aristocratic domains, all culminating in the Master’s House, which can only be reached by an enchanted glass road. The Master’s house is a city unto itself, with laundries, dungeons, experimental laboratories, forbidden wings, and hidden gardens. (Shades of Gormenghast again start to flutter at this arrangement, with the impoverished slumdwellers living beneath a mighty house that rules their lives and is a world unto itself.)

The magic of the setting is everywhere. Quite a lot of the characters in this book have abnormal origins, being birthed from Living Mud, or constructed from creatures who, if they were once naturally born, are most certainly not anymore. A talking dog, Anaxinamander, offers a very entertaining new perspective on the world in the scenes told from his point of view. The Master’s lackeys, known as gill-men, lack eyes and noses and all facial features, breathing through gills in their necks. The Master’s principle factotum, Bellows, lacks eyes, perceiving the world instead through his overgrown nose and the olfactory signals it picks up. 

(This last is presented to rather disagreeable effect sometimes. I cannot let it pass unnoted that the Master refuses to allow girls or women in his domain, and Bellows enforces this rule by repeatedly remarking how unpleasant it is to detect the scent of oestrus. Quite late in the book we learn that there may be a reason for this that is more intentional than just generalized in-world misogyny, but it is not really made perfectly clear until the glossary (pg 527—more on the glossary in a moment). And, in truth, I’m not willing to grant that the reasoning actually solves the problem. There was nothing inherent in the eventual explanation that could not equally well have been accomplished by ‘the scent of red hair is icky’ or ‘the scent of blue eyes is icky’ or ‘the scent of this particular inherited bloodline trait is icky’. Why, then, Pheby, did you feel the need to re-use ‘women are icky’ specifically for this plot point? It is so, so tiresome to run face first into this particular bit of social world-building, over and over and over again, in worlds where there is no need to import it. I promise, Pheby, if the readers are willing to accept Living Mud, they’ll be able to swallow a world in which women don’t smell gross.)

So elaborate and arcane is the setting that it cannot be fully conveyed in all its complexity within the pages of the book, and so the main text is followed by a 100-page glossary, which is its own exercise in literary craft and wit. Alongside reminders of who various characters are, or entertaining definitions of such esoterica as ‘bacon’ and ‘cat’, we also get fuller explanations of elements from the text itself—e.g., the nature of the gill-men or how Living Mud works. On top of that, we also get incredibly dense meditations on the theology and ontogeny of the world, the nature of magic and life and materiality, the warp and the weft that govern the fabric of reality across multiple realms of existence, life and death, God and godlings and demons and magic. We also get explanations of the history of this world, historical crusades and alliances against cities like Mordew and Malarkoi—those ruled by a Master or Mistress whose power originates from a source antithetical the organizers of repeated Atheistic Crusades. It’s as if Pheby could not find a way to work in all the worldbuilding he’d carried out into the text itself, and so needed to add the glossary to show that the world was not constructed just for vibes (no matter how exquisitely vibey it was), but in fact followed a deeper structure that was internally coherent.

The problem, as I see it, is that this internally coherent world-building, while brilliant, was developed to the extent that the actual characterization of the people within the world was quite thin, and their motivations and purposes seem desultory and arbitrary. Although a great deal of the narrative text encourages us to feel sympathy for the plight of the slum-dwellers and the way they are mistreated by the wealthy of the city, the author himself doesn’t seem to put his values into actions. The body count of innocent bystanders is astonishingly high, and at least one on-page genocide is set aside and quickly forgotten. 

At the individual level, too, this thinness is evident. The characters feel almost Dickensian in their grotesquery, characterized primarily by what makes them odd and unnatural, and lacking the full-fledged personalities that make characters feel like people, rather than objects to be beheld. And Nathan himself has no personality at all that I can see, not even a grotesque one. His actions in the second half of the book don’t really seem to spring from any plausible source besides a general sense of being ill-done-by—and even then, the targets of his behavior don’t line up with the people who have done ill by him. His mother is the center of a certain revelation toward the end of the book that is presented as if it is earth-shattering, but she lacks sufficient personality or even time on page to make me care much about her or what this revelation means. Even the talking dog, Anaxinamander, struggles to find a place in the plot. He is quite wonderful (characteristic line: ‘I have been charged, in the satisfaction of an obligation, with taking our life. To facilitate this please bare your throat so that I might the more easily tear it out.’). But I don’t understand his purpose in the broader story.

Perhaps these wandering, unanchored bits of plot and character will find purchase in the second book, Malarkoi. But for all the wit of the narrative voice and the richness and depth of the world-building, I don’t feel like I want to spend any more time with this story. The unfeeling callousness towards the people who have been constructed to act out the events of this book means that I do not trust Pheby to take care of me, the reader. He will be clever. He will be brilliant. But he will not be kind.

--

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6, enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

• Gothic, atmospheric vibes

• (Excessively?) detailed and rich world-building

• Grotesqueries as characters, with a lack of kindness or sympathy in their portrayal

• Unfortunately unnecessary misogyny

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative

Reference: Mordew, Alex Pheby, [Galley Beggar Press, 2020].

Microreview [book]: Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

A story of trauma, transformation and healing with a protagonist whose journey is impossible not to root for

Content Warning: Mentions of child marriage and offsceen CSA, body horror

Having brought us a generation ship space opera with US chattel slavery race dynamics, and a story of first contact and alien society with the Black merfolk of Drexciya, I went into Rivers Solomon's third book with expectations of something similarly genre bending and thoughtful, but otherwise with little expectation of whether Sorrowland, with its intriguing, gothic set-up, would twist towards science fiction, fantasy, realism or some other direction entirely. It's a mild spoiler to answer that question in full, but what I can confirm that Sorrowland is full of magic in its most basic sense: events and locations that seem mundane on their surface but are transfused with mythical qualities. At the centre of it is Vern, Sorrowland's protagonist and one of the most engaging, interesting protagonists I've ever spent a book with. From the first few pages of Vern's narration, I was hooked on her character's voice, and in following her journey through its heartbreak and discovery I was desperate for things to work out in some for her.

Sorrowland opens with Vern as a pregnant teenage girl escaping an unknown "fiend" in the forest near Cainland, the commune compound where she grew up. Vern's first act is to give birth in the midst of making her escape, taking her twins Howling and Feral - both referred to with he/him pronouns, though their gender is left ambiguous - to live in the safety of the woods. Vern is able to survive almost exclusively on what the forest provides, her inexplicable survival skills providing the first hint both of extraordinary abilities and her strength of character - but the Fiend continues to pursue her and make its presence known, and eventually it becomes clear that at least some of what Vern needs is outside of the forest. So she leaves, first temporarily, finding comfort with a woman called Ollie; and later, while seeking her closest friend from the compound who left under mysterious circumstances, with a more permanent support network. By the point of her departure, our suspicions that Vern carries supernatural abilities of some form have been confirmed, and Vern herself is grappling with a transformation that she can't fully understand, but which is clearly linked to her former life in Cainland.

As a cult survivor, Vern's experiences in Cainland permeate every facet of Sorrowland's story, from the overt - her past, and the circumstances in which she ran away, are explored throughout the book's first section - to the way she expresses her political and cultural beliefs, to the contrast between Vern's upbringing and the start in life she gives her own children. Cainland is a Black commune built to offer its residents an alternative to white supremacist society, but by Vern's time this mission has been corrupted by authoritarian religious patriarchy which forcibly cuts its members off from outside communication and preaches hate against queer folk while enabling child marriage for its leaders. As an albino intersex girl with an exclusive attraction to women, and strong opinions about the world around her, Vern finds it impossible to mould herself to the expectations of the compound, and its no accident that Howling and Feral are brought up in an environment where curiosity is encouraged and only curbed when it would bring immediate danger. This being Rivers Solomon, of course, Cainland doesn't exist in a political vacuum, and as Vern's personal transformation is explored, the factors that made that compound what it was also come into play.

Running in parallel the physical repercussions of Vern upbringing is her emotional journey, one which involves grappling with the trauma of Cainland and learning to live with (and embrace!) the parts of her which it tried to suppress. A large part of that is Vern's sexuality, and Sorrowland has some great (consensual) queer sex, including a poly encounter towards the end of the book which would be a spoiler to begin to describe but made me go "ohhh???" in a very intrigued and thoughtful way. (Maybe also some other emotions). Finding accommodation for her disability (Vern has nystigmatus due to her albinism, which reduces her vision and stops her being able to read) and gaining access not just to books but to people who support her intellectual curiosity and interests is also a significant - and heartwarming - part of her healing towards the second half of the book. But Vern's greatest emotional challenge, and the part that propels the book to its eventual, unexpected climax is reckoning with the way the cult has negatively affected her relationships. Vern's feelings towards her mother, who took her to live in Cainland in the first place and allowed her to become a child bride; her childhood friend Lucy, who left her abruptly with only an address in a book she couldn't read to track her down; her allies outside the compound, especially Native woman Bridget and her niece Gogo who offer Vern and her children an eventual home; and of course Vern's precociously smart, curious, thoughtful children: all these relationships are complicated and nuanced and come together in a messy but optimistic vision of healing, however imperfectly, from trauma. While its ending was more high-stakes than I anticipated, the work Sorrowland puts into its emotional journey had the biggest payoff for me, and I particularly enjoyed the portrayal of Howling and Feral as their own well-rounded human beings even at a young age, with relationships with adults which go beyond a one-way system of care.

Sorrowland covers so much ground, and a lot of it is best experienced without knowing what's to come, making it a difficult book to really sum up in a review. This is a work of thoughtful, passionate brilliance from a writer at the top of faer game, and trying to capture that in a 1,000 word one-sitting review is like trying to describe the ocean to someone who has never experienced water. This isn't an easy book - if you're familiar with Solomon's previous books, you won't be expecting that anyway - but if you have the time to devote to it, Sorrowland's journey is a powerful one and ultimately something that left me with a great deal of hope for its characters. And I simply cannot rate Vern highly enough, in all her prickly, passionate, confused glory - her journey is one that will stay with me long after I put Sorrowland down.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: Packs so many layers of nuance in depicting Vern's struggles and the forces she is up against

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

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: Solomon, Rivers. Sorrowland [MCD Books (US)/Merky Books (UK)]

Interview: Kathleen Jennings, author of Flyaway

Kathleen Jennings' Australian gothic mystery novella Flyaway will hit bookstore shelves at the end of July.   The uncanny story takes place in a small town that is full of secrets.  A quiet young woman, Bettina, gets a letter from her vanished brother, starting her down a path of fuzzy memories, the blurred line between urban legend and folklore, magical weeds, people who talk (maybe) in riddles, nested stories, ambiguity and of course, family secrets. And somehow, Jennings manages to cram all of that into a novella!  If you are looking for a fast read that packs an eerie punch,  this could be your book of the summer.

To add to the magic, Jennings designed the gorgeous cover art of Flyaway, and she sketched her way through her story telling process. This is a woman who truly thinks in images, and I am in awe.  To better understand what I'm talking about, allow me to point you in the direction of this article Jennings' wrote at Tor.com where she touches on story telling through images, sketchbooks, and how the cover art of Flyaway came to be.  There is so much art-thought behind Flyaway, that at times I have to talk about the novella as a piece of fiction, and at other times I have to talk about it as a piece of art that is separate from a plotline.

Jennings' short fiction and artwork has won so many award and been featured in so many places that to be honest I don't know where to start.  Her cover art and illustration has garnered her three World Fantasy Award nominations, and multiple Ditmar awards (she even designed a Ditmar!). Her illustration clients include Subterannean Press, Tor.com, Small Beer Press, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, among many others.  Her short fiction has appeared in/is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Eleven Eleven Journal, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, multiple Year's Best collections, and multiple anthologies.


You can learn more about Jennings' writing and artwork at her websites, Tanaudel.wordpress.com and KathleenJennings.com and by following her on twitter, @tanaudel.

Let's get to the interview!

NOAF: Your new novella Flyaway is an Australian gothic family mystery, which you wrote while getting your Masters in Philosophy. What do Gothic style family mysteries have to do with Philosophy? How did this novella come about?

K.J.: An MPhil (Master of Philosophy) is a research higher degree - basically a half-size (Doctor of Philosophy). They can be in any field, and mine was in Communication and Arts (Creative Writing). Sometimes they're purely academic research, but mine was practice-led. That means I wrote a book to figure out a question, as well as writing a big research paper about it. I did an MPhil because I knew it was the right size for my research question, and because I didn't think Flyaway needed to be a long book. (I've got a new, bigger question now, so I've started a PhD this year).

The question I had for the MPhil was: how do writers of beautiful Australian Gothic stories manage to make them beautiful and Gothic. A lot of Australian Gothic tradition is very hot and ugly and violent (for good reasons), but there are some gentle, gorgeous books which still use a sense of sublime to create that very Gothic terror. I wanted to do that.

I grew up on a cattle property in western Queensland, reading fairy tales, and for me it was very beautiful. I didn’t recognise the landscape in a lot of Australian stories - but it was the only landscape I knew for the fairy tales. But it was also frightening sometimes, and the older I got the more I found out about the real terrible history, and also had the chance to see places where those fairy tales came from, and how differently they fit into (say) the Black Forest, or Dartmoor, or Iceland. I wanted to tell a story that acknowledged the history of Australia, while still loving the physical place, and looking at how the stories I grew up with don’t always fit Australia. And I wanted to illustrate it!

NOAF:  Who are some of your favorite Gothic writers? Why is Gothic literature, and Australian Gothic Literature, such a fun genre to read and write?

K.J.:  I'm a fan of the classics, like Jane Eyre, of course, and I love M. R. James' Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. In Australian Gothic literature, the books I looked at for my MPhil included Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock, which I adore (it's a little, lovely book), and Rosalie Ham's gorgeously textured The Dressmaker, and quite a few of the illustrated stories in Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia. There are so many good books (and shows) that it's easy to give too many examples — but I’'ve recently discovered Kim Scott's Taboo, which is dangerous and fascinating and touches on a lot of themes common to Gothic literature.

NOAF:  When Bettina learns her brothers might still be alive, what are her emotions like? How does she react? Is she open about how she feels, or does she tend to keep her emotions to herself?

K.J.:  Bettina's emotions are tricky things, and I had to work on them when editing Flyaway. To start with, I like characters who are emotionally buttoned down, which meant in the early drafts I just left out emotion! Then I had to carefully add it back in. But on top of this, Bettina isn't just buttoned down. There are layers to what she's able to feel at any point in time, and reasons she can't be open even to herself, especially when she first learns about her brothers. At that point, she feels a mild puzzlement at finding something that doesn't make sense in her careful life - a loose thread that she pulls . . .

NOAF:  You put a lot of hints into your prose, using very specific words to mean specific, or multiple things. What was your writing process like, to make the prose do what you needed it to accomplish?

K.J.:  Thank you! I so much enjoy foreshadowing and layers, clues that make sense on rereading, allusions to paintings and poems - I like finding them as a reader, or recognising them lately when I found the image they referred to, and it's an awful lot of fun putting them in as a writer. The process is fairly simple.

First, generally, I read a lot, and have a habit of finding unlikely connections between things: links, theories, puns, echoes, etc.

Second, when I wrote the first draft I just put all the words in - especially all the adjectives! -th at seemed appropriate: there were heavy-handed jokes and unnecessarily long strings of descriptions.

Third, having all of those in there helped as I got near the end of the draft: there were traps I set in early chapters that I could spring in later ones, hints and echoes that suggested ways to end bits of the plot.

Fourth, when I edited, I strengthened those connections - and also cut out all the adjectives that weren't the right one.

NOAF:  So, what does happen to all those bits and pieces that you decided weren't ultimately needed?

K.J.: I don’t think they ever entirely go away. Some adapt, some become cryptids, some stick around causing untold trouble, muddying waterholes . . .

NOAF: What are some of your favourite fairy tales?

K.J.:  I’m fond of "Little Red Riding Hood", for all its variations and possibilities, and how useful the girl-in-a-wood is as a starting point for telling new tales, and because of what Dickens did with it as a frame for other fairy-tale allusions in Our Mutual Friend. "The Seven Ravens" is another I come back to a lot when I'm writing, as is "Beauty and the Beast", and the ballad "Tam Lin": all three about transformation and dogged - even defiant - loyalty. But I love the imagery and logic of fairy tales generally, like bowls of gems.

NOAF: You are a writer and an artist. When inspiration strikes, how do you know if the idea is best executed as a piece of fiction, or as a piece of artwork?

K.J.:  Sometimes I will have an idea and know it's a story or a drawing - they have different lengths and content. But other times I will be scribbling and a mood, movement, or aesthetic will emerge. Then I either play around with it until a phrase or thumbnail sketch "clicks" and I know I want to do it in a particular way. At other times, I won't have a direction for an idea. Then I'll often pick a type of story or art I feel like playing with but didn't have an idea for, and I'll try to shoehorn the idea into it. At that point, the format starts to shape the inspiration to fit it.

NOAF: You have an amazing essay on Tor.com where you discuss how creating Flyaway changed your opinions on decorative illustration. How do you think this could change your artwork, going forward?

K.J.: Thanks again! I hope it will teach me to be more definite about how I want a book-as-object to look. I tend to be cautious and responsive, because I like working around other people's ideas and requirements: it’s an enjoyable challenge, and helps a lot with decision-making! For Flyaway, I had the chance to illustrate a project purely to please myself - and to follow the illustrations into new places in search of that final style. So I hope it will make me take charge of some future projects for other people, too, and create a sort of grand aesthetic overlay for those stories. But at the same time I was working on ornaments for some books by Holly Black, and having a marvelous time inventing little illustrative dividers and chapter headers - it was very like writing all those little links and clues and ambiguities into Flyaway - so I will pursue more of that illustrative-decorative work, too.

NOAF: Thank you so much! 

POSTED BY: Andrea Johnson lives in Michigan with her husband and too many books. She can be found on twitter, @redhead5318 , where she posts about books, food, and assorted nerdery.

Microreview [Book]: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

The Queer NecRomantic Murder Mystery You've Been Missing All your Life

Cover art by Tommy Arnold

To say that Gideon the Ninth, the debut novel from Tamsyn Muir, has been the subject of some hype is like saying the Pacific Ocean is a bit wet. The hype about this skeleton-based queer adventure has been slowly taking over my Twitter feed since the end of last year, and its regularly felt like the universe was divided into those "lucky" few who had already read it (and were therefore falling over themselves to talk to the rest of us about skeletons) and everyone else waiting for the release to roll around. At last, dear readers, I have graduated into the ranks of the skeleton analysts.

Was it worth it? Oh, very yes.

Gideon is an orphan raised in indenture to the Ninth House, a crumbling ruined cult living on a nigh-uninhabitable planet, now facing total extinction. Ignored by most and openly tormented by the only other girl her age, Reverend Daughter Harrowhark, Gideon has been plotting her escape for years and on her eighteenth birthday, now finally has her chance to make her way off planet and into a marginally better life. On the verge of making good on her escape, Harrow outwits her at the last minute, only to instead offer to take her as a "cavalier", a sworn bodyguard to the House's necromancer, on a very different sort of quest. The First House - that of the Emperor - has offered a challenge, enabling a representative from one of the houses to ascend to the Emperor's services if they can successfully complete a task on the deserted First House planet. Left without a choice (and clearly intrigued and also maybe a bit into Harrow) Gideon takes on the challenge, taking a crash course in what it takes to be a cavalier before setting off to a crumbling house for an uncertain contest with the other seven houses. And then, of course, the murders begin.

In its worldbuilding, Gideon the Ninth takes a particular kind of claustrophobic gothic sensibility - one that's embodied in speculative work like Gormenghast and Under the Pendulum Sun - and applies it on an interplanetary scale whose mechanics are vague but also irrelevant. There's an empire, which we don't get a whole lot of information on, but whose leadership appears to be at the least chronically absent from the house structure its created. These houses specialise in upholding different aspects of the empire, ranging from practical services like "being soldiers" or "managing the library" to more nebulous professions like "being likeable", "thinking you're good at diplomacy but you're not, actually", "dying of attractive forms of consumption" and, of course, "skeletons". There's definitely an evolution to be drawn here from the districts of the Hunger Games or factions of the Divergent trilogy (and before those, the Hogwarts Houses) to this distinctly non-YA portrayal of a dysfunctional and yet internally meaningful classification system; in practical terms, the houses allow Muir to introduce a lot of characters and give them motivations in a relatively short space of time, and to allow the representatives of the Ninth House their own pre-existing prejudices and conflicts with those houses, while still maintaining them as outsiders to civilised company. Almost all of the supporting characters grow beyond the stereotypes of their house depiction (the main exception is the soldiers of the Second House, but they play their role and further nuance is not really missed), creating a highly satisfying political-necromantic soap opera which gets more desperate as the body count starts to build.

At the centre of it all are Gideon and Harrow, and their deeply dysfunctional relationship, all told through Gideon's lens. Muir may have written Gideon the Ninth in third person but it's most definitely Gideon's voice, and the portrayal of someone who has spent so long putting up with overblown spooky bullshit that she has no more fucks or reverence to give is utterly hilarious. Though Gideon makes no explicit cultural references to anything but her dirty magazines (and those play less of a role in the narrative than you'd think), her voice is imbued with what in other mediums would be referred to as "easter eggs": occasional memetic pop culture references to things like Mean Girls, which don't detract from the text if you don't read them as such but add to the idiosyncratic irreverence if you do. Because the atmosphere is so well defined beyond Gideon's perception, it makes for some highly amusing moments where Gideon's internal descriptions contrast with what's objectively going on: for example, her enforced vow of silence in early chapters allows her to come across as a creepy, mysterious hooded-and-painted skull figure to the rest of the group, even as she's walking around being internally rude, judgemental, and bored. The fact that the atmosphere isn't really dented by Gideon's irreverence is testament to Muir's skill in balancing the tone of what could have been a very uneven book. Instead, it all meshes together to create something that feels unique and fresh with a wonderful character voice, and a strain of heartbreak that really creeps up on you under all the hardened sword-wielding snark.

Another point of skill is the way that Gideon and Harrow's enemies to "it's complicated" relationship unfolds (complete with multiple complications including the aforementioned attractive consumptive necromancer), completely against the intention of either character, against a backdrop of general queerness despite their being very little in the way of explicit romance. Although I found it mildly frustrating that the few more "established" couples seem to be heterosexual, the way queerness is incorporated normalises it in a way which then enables Gideon and Harrow to be utterly obtuse about each other without it coming across as "baiting" or textually ambiguous that they could jump each other's bones (I promise that's the only skeleton pun that's going to make it in here) (but only because I'm kind of tired and don't expect any more low-hanging fruit). It's an important balance to strike particularly in a book like this where the trajectory is not towards an uncomplicated happy ending for the disastrous duo, because if lesbians are going to end the story unhappy and/or out-of-action, I need an author to have earned my trust along the way. However, this is a point where individual mileages may vary, and if you're a reader steer clear of "bury your gays" in the broadest sense then it may be worth seeking out a more spoiler-heavy review to work out if Gideon the Ninth is a book you want to invest in.

For me, therefore, this book has certainly earned its pre-release buzz, and I expect the community excitement is only going to increase as more people get to experience the world and characters Muir has created here (there was already a Gideon cosplay wandering around Worldcon one day, which I was pretty excited to see even before getting to read the book). In a strong year, Gideon the Ninth has effortlessly risen to near the top of my 2019 reads, and while its combination of gothic-grimdark worldbuilding sensibilities and post-Potter Millennial teen snark isn't going to work for everyone, it certainly does capture a genre zeitgeist which I was thoroughly delighted by. Best of all, there's just so much more of this bizarre world to see, and it sounds like we won't be waiting long before the next adventures of our skeleton faves in Harrow the Ninth.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonus: +1 Double Bones with Doctor Skelebone; +1 I could probably write a second review on all the other necromancers and cavaliers and my feelings about them (except the Second House)

Penalties: -1 Worldbuilding is a bit light on everything that doesn't play into the "Double Bones with Doctor Skelebone" aesthetic

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

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: Muir, Tamsyn Gideon the Ninth (Tor.com Publishing, 2019)

Microreview [book]: The Atrocities by Jeremy C. Shipp

Not Quite a Nightmare

Isabella has been summoned to the house (manor?) of a couple in need of an in-home tutor. The approach takes her through a maze filled with horrifying statues, but she soon learns that this family has more nightmarish secrets hidden within the estate.

A brief novel, The Atrocities impresses with its atmospheric setting. This is a Gothic style horror novel from beginning to end. It starts in a bad place, and only gets worse. Shipp deftly blends the real world with the nightmare to the point where it's sometimes difficult to tell when the fiction has gone into its own unreality. The central mystery doesn't exactly grab, but it does tug you along to the end.

Unfortunately, the end is where it kind of falls down as it has a sudden and simple end. Its simplicity left me feeling unfulfilled as the rest of story had been rather well woven. It's the kind of ending that could've happened in the first 10 pages and totally discounts the experience. It's not a total deal breaker, but it does badly affect how I felt about the whole novel and makes a recommendation much harder.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 100 pages of grotesquery!

Penalties: -3 wow, it ended like that?

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10 (problematic, but has redeeming qualities)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Shipp, Jeremy C. The Atrocities [Tor, 2018]