TV Microreview: The Boroughs

Stellar cast, creepy monsters, zero mysteries

It’s impossible to spoil The Boroughs. The new Netflix show is so uninterested in keeping its secrets that the first episode tells you all you need to know: a monstrous presence lurks in a retirement community whose young, cheerful owners look and dress like they’re stuck in the 1950s. Because the residents are already at an age when it would be completely normal for them to die, nobody suspects that they’re being preyed on, even though the owners give an obvious creepy vibe from the moment they show up. You can put the pieces together: a large mass of easy victims, plus a rich couple with suspiciously youthful beauty, equals you already know what’s happening here.

So why dress up this show as a mystery, when the script is so eager to reveal everything up front? It’s not particularly subtle with its references: its plot beats proceed as a dark mirror of E.T. (instead of a human befriending and protecting an alien with healing powers, this human decides to imprison and exploit it) blended with a dark mirror of Cocoon (instead of aliens giving vital energy to old people, they devour old people to extract vital energy) and an even darker mirror of Omelas (instead of everyone benefiting from one person’s suffering, we have one person benefiting from everyone’s suffering).

With so many recognizable story elements, the only thing that keeps The Boroughs interesting and watchable is its spectacular casting. You couldn’t have asked for better actors to play the senior heroes of this show: Alfred Molina is pitch-perfect as a grumpy grandpa thrown too soon into too many otherworldly shenanigans precisely when he needs space to properly grieve his late wife; Denis O’Hare brings a sweet mixture of worldliness and vulnerability to the role of a man whom life has never ceased to punish; and Geena Davis rescues her character from the dreadfully bland arc the writers gave her. But the absolute show-stealer is Alfre Woodard, whose deeply layered performance deserves a dozen shelves full of awards.

The show sometimes alludes to themes worth thinking about, although they could have been explored to a greater extent. We’re told that Molina’s character’s devastating grief opened his mind to be receptive to a key character’s unspoken pain, but this revelation is addressed in a hurry, without giving us time to consider what this says about the nature of empathy. Both the monsters and the people who use them to unnaturally maintain their youth are vulnerable to the light of old TV sets, but whether this is a commentary on, say, the power of media to “shed light” on corruption is left unclear. The only theme that seems properly handled has to do with the fact that the retirement community is built on the site of a former mining town that became rich very quickly and was deserted just as quickly, which symbolically links the villains’ theft of vital energy to an earlier instance of rapacious extractivism.

If you focus your attention on admiring the actors, you’ll survive the predictable derivativeness of The Boroughs. As could be expected from the much-touted involvement of the creators of Stranger Things as executive producers, The Boroughs is unashamed to proclaim its references as loudly as it can. That’s the only warning you need: at no point are you going to be surprised.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Double Feature: Weeping for Mother Earth

When nature can't speak for itself, is it our duty to carry its scars with us?

Let's forget for a moment the alarming detail that my progress through my TBR is still stuck in 2021 (I have a system, I swear). Without planning to, I recently read in succession two novellas that not only share the same theme, but the same publisher: Stelliform Press. A look at their website helps explain the coincidence, as Stelliform is specialized in climate fiction. But these two books in particular speak of a sadness that descends upon their characters and makes them suffer deeply for the forms of life that modern civilization has doomed.

In Octavia Cade's The Impossible Resurrection of Grief (previously reviewed on this blog), a new mental illness has emerged across the world. It's called simply Grief (always written with an almost audible uppercase initial), and it's a sort of super-ultra-hyper-mega-depression on steroids that is caused by awareness of our central role in causing environmental devastation. It's not just that we've killed countless precious species; it's that, more damningly, we were fully aware of it, knew how to stop, and didn't bother stopping. People afflicted with Grief are in a state of permanent mourning for the innocent creatures we've destroyed, to the exclusion of any care for humanity. So they abandon their daily lives and spend all their attention and effort in some form or another of obsessive artistry, which can become quite intricate, to channel their fury at the evil we've uncaringly caused. After a few months, Grief invariably results in suicide.

Meanwhile, Cynthia Zhang's After the Dragons shows us a world where all the dragons from all legends are real: they have evolved naturally on Earth, as another branch in the tree of life (despite the cover illustration, they seem to grow no bigger than dog size). As cool as they are, they don't fare too well. European dragons, being fire-breathers, were hunted to extinction long ago. And Chinese dragons occupy the niche of urban pests, like rats or pigeons. Some are bred for clandestine fights, some are kept in shelters waiting to be adopted as pets, some are butchered for use in traditional medicine, and some roam the streets subsisting on trash. Only their apparent resistance to air pollution draws enough interest in their preservation, because they could provide the cure for a new form of chronic respiratory disease that people acquire from living in big cities.

Cade's novella follows Ruby, a marine biologist whose friend Marjorie has contracted Grief because nothing was done to save the last coral reefs. In her new state, Marjorie calls herself the Sea Witch, and does nothing but compulsively cut out plastic bags into the shape of jellyfish. As it happens, jellyfish are Ruby's specialty, and they have managed to survive the warmer seas in the way coral couldn't. The implication is that the Sea Witch resents the jellyfish for moving into the places where coral used to live, and resents Ruby for being able to live in a dying world and not contract Grief. A seductive, poisonous argument is developed throughout the book: if human mistreament of nature is absurd, the only rational response is to succumb to the absurdity and throw oneself into the Grief. The magnitude of the evil is just too mind-boggling; aren't we complicit when we go on with our normal lives? Under this lens, to be untouched by Grief is a sign that one cares less than one should. However, in the book, Grief doesn't move people toward restorative action. Even those who apply their talents to reviving lost species intend to weaponize them to take revenge on humanity. This is the uncontrollable firehose of rage that ultimately leads those with Grief to the logical consequence: self-destruction.

In Zhang's novella, environmental damage is less obvious, but it lingers in the background of every space. Industrial pollution is slowly killing people at random, in the form of an irreversible rotting of the lungs that progresses over years. Our protagonist, Eli, is a medical student doing an exchange semester in China, where he researches the therapeutic applications of dragon physiology. He falls in love with Kai, who has all but dropped out of college after contracting the disease, and who now rescues stray dragons to give them what little first aid he can afford. Kai has cut off all contact with his friends and family, spending all his time in his one-man quest to save dragons, forgoing even his own treatment. But he knows that what he's doing makes close to no difference. He despairs for a world that grows warmer and dirtier and that has lost the due respect for such magnificent creatures. He barely has the energy to tend to the dragons that crowd his apartment, and scoffs at Eli's pleas to seek help for his condition. For Kai, his mission is too important for distractions. For Eli, such overexertion is merely a slower form of suicide. Where both agree is in the likely futility of individual effort in a civilization that has collectively decided to not care.

So we have these characters, Ruby and Eli, who care deeply for Marjorie and Kai, while the latter chastise the former for aiming their care in the wrong direction. They seem to be saying: Why do you worry so much about me, when the world is falling to pieces? Why aren't you instead doing what I'm doing? Why aren't you consumed by the insatiable empathy that this world deserves? What do I matter next to that? It would be easy to read these reactions as directed at the reader, as an indictment for our failure to do what must be done. And that interpretation has merit: it's true that Mother Earth needs emergency care right now. But these stories are aware of the paradox of individual action. I could tell you to stop wasting time reading this blog and go plant a tree, but we both know how little impact that will have. And yet, big, collaborative achievements are built from the synergy of individual actions. The malaise described in these two books is the simultaneous recognition that saving nature has always been in our hands, but if you look at a pair of hands, they're too weak and small to save anything. We made this mess, and it's up to us to fix it, but seriously, have you met humans?

So Marjorie fakes her suicide to force Ruby to reckon with what Marjorie considers her hipocrisy: Ruby may not mourn for the corals (and she got lucky that her jellyfish still live), but she'll do some mourning for Marjorie. After a while, as is normal for anyone, the mourning will end. And that, Marjorie thinks, is the problem: we grow accustomed to death too easily. What prevents us from reacting to the death of the world is that we already see death as a normal, everyday occurrence. It's inevitable, therefore we don't fight it, when it should spur us to action. When Marjorie shows up alive and confronts Ruby with these accusations, Ruby admits that her life was easier with Marjorie dead. When death happens, one is freed from the responsibility to prevent it. But the twisted logic of Grief doesn't stop at recrimination. It seeks to use the inexhaustible human talent for destruction and turn it back at its perpetrator.

Less consciously, Kai engages in a similar form of self-punishment, as if it could atone for all the other deaths. In his moral calculation, the deterioration of his body matters infinitely less than the dragons' crawl toward extinction. It doesn't change his priorities to hear that something in the biology of dragons could cure him. It barely registers to have Eli love him, because to Kai that's a waste of love. That's the peculiar cruelty of this form of sadness: it treats worth as an inherent quality instead of a human construct. The truth is that the universe couldn't care less if our biosphere were ruined forever; it's we who label it valuable. The type of self-denial that has taken hold of Kai makes him ignore the necessary logical implication that the work of healing nature only matters if we're around for it to matter to. Granted, humans are to blame for the ongoing destruction, but blame, too, is a human construct. Removing ourselves would only be a misguided pretense of heroism, and would provide no restoration. By itself, nature is just molecules bumping against molecules. For it to be beautiful, or important, or deserving of protection, we must assign those labels to it. Kai is right to care so much about endangered animals, but neglecting his own health doesn't help anyone. He fails to see himself as worthy of preservation, too. So he believes he's acting responsibly, even morally, in refusing Eli's love.

There is a tangible pain running underneath both novellas; a confession of guilt that recognizes that the purpose of reparation isn't to earn forgiveness; a clear-eyed acceptance of facts that doesn't entail resignation. The outraged cry that each hurls at the reader is more than justified; our complacent inaction is inarguably criminal. It's not a cliché that in killing the planet we're killing ourselves, and these stories explore what it would look like if we were deliberate about that equation. But the extent of the damage is so unfathomably immense that it short-circuits our moral intuitions: it's dangerously easy to want to punish all of humankind for the depredation committed by the big polluters. And there's a good argument to make for the shared responsibility of the entire human species. We, in aggregate, perpetuate our way of life by our small daily decisions. It's just too comfortable to go on this way, and that's a big part of the problem. You may have heard a similar position from political activists: it's dysfunctional to be well-adjusted to a dysfunctional world. The trick is how to stop the harm without causing more harm. When we target ourselves as the enemy, the thirst for revenge collapses into a black hole that nullifies every ethical standard.

Coordinating the big powers of the world to forget about profit for five minutes is, as recent history shows, not one bit easy. Of course, the authors of these two novellas don't have the answer either, which is why their stories end without reaching a complete resolution. What they do leave us with is a sobering assessment of the stakes of climate action at the personal level, which is the scale of analysis at which literature usually excels.

References
Cade, Octavia. The Impossible Resurrection of Grief [Stelliform Press, 2021].
Zhang, Cynthia. After the Dragons [Stelliform Press, 2021].

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

Film Review: Elio

Disney loves to write orphans, but doesn't seem to understand them

Recently orphaned Elio Solís has been adopted by his aunt Olga, who has a busy military job and had to give up a chance for career advancement in order to take care of him. She's struggling to adjust, but hasn't said one word that would imply she resents him. Still, he feels unwanted and unwelcome. This misunderstanding on his part sparks an entire allegorical journey in which he meets a distorted mirror version of himself (no, I don't mean the clone) and learns that he isn't as alone as he thought. The message is sweet and valuable, but the way it's expressed through the narrative is sometimes muddled, which is unfortunate in a movie that focuses so much on efforts to communicate.

What sets things in motion is Elio's visit to a space museum where he learns about the search for alien life. After reasoning that there's no one on Earth who loves him, he becomes obsessed with contacting aliens, hoping to be taken by them. Any viewer who grew up with terrible parents will recognize this fantasy of adoption, but it's hard to understand in Elio's case, because his aunt is in no way whatsoever mistreating him. It's Elio who convinced himself that his presence is bad for her life. He takes too long to figure out that her choice to pause her career plans is not something he inflicted on her but something she willingly did for his benefit.

All right, she does make one mistake: she signs him up for a summer camp that teaches military discipline, which ranks very, very low on the list of things you should do to a kid who already feels lonely and expects to be abandoned. He soon gets dragged into a fistfight with other kids, which the movie treats as a pivotal moment in the course of his life.

From this point on, the emotional trajectory of Elio is best understood by placing in parallel the plotlines of the human kid Elio and the alien kid Glordon. They don't even meet until well into the runtime, but Glordon's story is basically the heightened, hyper-dramatized version of Elio's. From Elio's perspective, Olga has dumped him in that military summer camp because she's had enough of him, and also because military life is all she knows. In Glordon's case, his father, Grigon, is an interstellar tyrant who expects him to one day wear the battle armor that is traditional in their species. The armor is full of a ridiculous variety of deadly devices, and it hides, constricts and pierces the creature's soft skin. It's meant to be worn permanently. What this prospect means, when translated back into Elio's life, is that he has before him the option to deal with his complicated feelings by squeezing them under a mask of toughness. But the kind of person who would make that choice, as the movie illustrates rather literally, is not Elio's/Glordon's authentic self. It would be a disturbingly people-pleasing version of him. Olga wants a polite, obedient child, as the warlord Grigon wants a ruthless conqueror, but that's not who Elio/Glordon is.

Where this beautiful allegory falls apart is in the manner of its resolution. Elio's injury from the fistfight at the summer camp shows Olga that she was wrong in trying to steer him into her steps; Glordon's almost-death shows Grigon that galactic conquest isn't worth losing his child. The problem here is that Elio is the one who needs to change his incorrect beliefs (the movie even literalizes this point by giving him an eyepatch during the entire second act to represent his limited perspective), but the allegorized version of his struggle has the parental figure be the one who learns a life lesson (notice how it's the battle armor which has eyes, in the manner of a reverse blindfold, while the actual alien body has none). The emotional resonance is pointed in the wrong direction. Grigon's neglectful, harsh style of parenting is not the proper translation of how Olga behaves toward Elio. A charitable reading would say that Grigon stands for Elio's distorted idea of Olga, but even in that case it would still be Elio who needs to learn and grow. This thematic misfire brings to mind the better execution of the same dynamic in The Lego Movie, where the villain and the father follow neatly parallel arcs.

Despite this confusion in the handling of its ideas, Elio is not without highlights. A thrilling scene in which Olga and Elio have to pilot a spaceship through floating debris reaches a triumphant peak when they get unexpected help from random strangers, which is a better thematic conclusion to Elio's yearning for a community where he fits. Maybe he won't join the diplomatic elite of the universe, but there's plenty of excitement to be found on Earth.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Book Review: A Mourning Coat by Alex Jeffers

Is it about fashion or is it about finding yourself once again, after a period of grief? Why not both?

What do we mean when we say "low stakes"? I always struggle with this as a descriptor, because, well... it's all relative, right? My instinct in how to describe A Mourning Coat is, at first, to reach for the term, because nothing world-shattering happens. There's no intergalactic war. The realm isn't saved by feats of derring-do. The entirety of scientific understanding is not overthrown by new discoveries. And yet... after a long period of illness, the protagonist's father has just died. A world has been shattered. How can we say that the death of a parent is low stakes, when the deaths of those closest to us are the highest stakes many of us will ever truly face?

Of A Mourning Coat, let us instead say that the stakes it handles are realistic ones, the problems it handles familiar. The scale is small, even if the emotional impact is not. And these are the stories I really want, when people talk about low stakes, or slice of life—I want the stories whose view is pulled in so tight that you are, however briefly, fully inhabiting a person's perspective on their problems. I want to think, feel and breathe them, be immersed in them, for the duration. I want to close the last page, exhale, and feel, fleetingly, ephemerally, a person changed by this inhabitation of a new perspective, in a way that comes so much more bittersweetly when there's nothing else to pull you away, no distraction of hurrying action and plot. I want poignancy and human connection in my slice of life. I got it here, in crisp perfection.

There used to be an atelier, until his father —his famous father the actor, much acclaimed and renowned— fell ill, succumbing to early dementia and increasingly in need of care. So Therre moved back into his childhood home, went through a messy breakup, and spent five years of his life watching his father decline and doing everything he could to support him. His father has now died, and Therre is alone in this empty house, full of the grief of memory, and without the daily structure of a life well lived to return to. He needs something to wear to the funeral, something appropriate to mourning, to honour the father he loved, who became the father he struggled to love, and their heritage and himself. And so he reaches back to the person he was, the creator of fashion and elaborate garments, to make himself a mourning coat, white on the outside as is proper, but lined with an embroidered, colourful wool his ailing father had loved to touch. He crafts himself a statement about who he is, was, loves and possibly hopes to be, and wears it, struggling, to a funeral. And somehow, the coat changes everything.

Well, for a given definition of "everything." It's that matter of scope again—we are so used to fantasy stories that encompass worlds, multiverses, galaxies, empires, so we begin to expect that vastness in all descriptions. But here, everything is simply Therre's world, Therre's life. As if a single life can be simple.

The scope of the story is the beginning of Therre's journey away from this grief, this life apart from the world and back into community. It is only the beginning, because it is a story that understands that grief is not easily surmounted, and that the problems between people —between, for instance, estranged siblings— are not solved overnight by grand gestures. It's a story of living through the seeds of change, with an ending of hope for what's to come, a beginning of the next step. So it is a story of transition, from one phase of life to another, encompassing the period of the shift and nothing more. Jeffers does what the best novellas do, and narrowed his scope into what can be meaningfully explored in the space he has—excise the need for the three-act structure, the need for intricate worldbuilding, the need for a wide-reaching explanation, and focus down into what matters for the story. Here it's immersion in a perspective, being able to see the world truly through Therre's eyes, particularly facilitated by the physical world —texture, especially, the feeling of cloth, and its colour and drape— and a distinctive, immediate internal monologue that gives shape to an individual you grasp immediately and love soon after.

If I had to focus on one thing the novella does well, it would be that: the tone. Therre is a delightful narrator to inhabit. He mixes awkward authenticity and self-doubt with a dry, self-effacing humour that makes me immediately want to listen to him more. There is a wryness to how he thinks to himself that I cannot help but smile at, like so:

The straightforward happenstance of a sex dream wasn't especially novel, and I had besides, simply as a health measure during five stressful years in my father's house, regularly exercised my hand and as necessary the sort of visual entertainment not spoken of in company.

or later, when spectacularly failing to take a compliment:

It's not especially memorable, I don't think. Just a prick. Most men have them. Some people who aren't men.

He talks around things in a way I find charming rather than contrived—it makes you think he's laughing at himself rather than putting on airs. This is someone who knows how he sounds, and wants the listener to be in on the joke with him.

Much of the writing is situated within Therre's internal monologue and perspective (aided by his occasionally interesting language choices—I was delighted to see the use of "cossie" for swimming costume, which I had always assumed was incredibly British, and fully made sense with his Scottish-seeming birth country) and so the whole story feels suffused with him as a personality—we feel, through his words, his sadness and confusion, how adrift he feels in the life that has lost the star around which he orbited for five years, but also the man he was and can be again, who charms and delights. It's never spelled out, never said, but it comes through nonetheless, especially when reflected off the people around him.

Because that's the other thing Jeffers has done well—created authentic-feeling fellowship between Therre and those in his life, however unusual the relationships. He has a sister, back in the homeland he and his father left behind, who has her own hurts over her place in her family, but with whom he begins to slowly reconnect, and develop a relationship as adults. He has an old acquaintance who may grow to be something more, who sees what he needs and tries to help him find it. But he also has Aìbi, the ex with whom he had a messy breakup once his father's needs began to take over his life, whom he once loved, who is now married, and with whom he shares these lines:

I swallowed. "I love you, Aìbi. I never deserved you."

"You didn't, but we loved each other for a while and had a good go at it, and now we love each other differently."

And they do. We watch a new relationship rise from the ashes of the old. Not a perfect one, not without faults and stumbles on both sides, but something Therre can grasp, a hand to help pull him free of where he is now. Jeffers understands how to portray people with a long history, the fellowship of people who really know each other, through the good and the bad, but are still here anyway, and even more than the flirting (which is delightful) and the complexity of family (tentative and brittle but so hopeful), it is this relationship that draws me in, simply because it's a rare one to see, and doubly so to see done so well.

I should, I suppose, also touch on how this fits into SFF—you'd be forgiven for taking what I've said so far as implication that it's social realism or something similar, after all. The story is set in another world from ours, one I would describe in the same vein as Guy Gavriel Kay's "quarter turn to the fantastical"—there are elements of the supernatural hinted at, and distinct differences from our world (even beyond the naming of places and things), but those elements are predominantly hinted at rather than shoved into your face, and even where they appear most prominently, they are never the full focus of the story. The how of them? Irrelevant. It's not a story about the fantastical, just one that employs it to get its point across, to play about with things and craft a space that makes a story —this story, and others— work.

When not relegated to the background, it comes across in its own little wry excerpts, for example this, from an in-world text about gender in fashion:

Binding up a man's swinging parts in trousers as those barbarous folks did went against nature, science, logic and common sense [...] whilst the drafty openness of skirts must be similarly unhealthful for a woman.

Which comes into our awareness briefly, serves its purposes for the plot and our understanding of the shape and texture of the world, and then flits off again, its work done. I often find stories with this kind of simple inversion clumsy —the way The Power handles its power imbalance springs to mind most prominently— but here, the fact we do not dwell on it serves it well. It's not the underpinning of the whole purpose of things; it's not a grand statement. It's just "oh, by the way," and then we move on, we don't overthink it, which is where so many fall down. But such statements don't need to stand up to intensive scrutiny if they don't overstay their welcome.

Likewise, we watch Therre develop a new interest in what he calls "counterfactual fiction" or "CFF"—the SFF of its own worlds. Jeffers holds up a brief but delightful mirror to the sort of shows I grew up loving —space opera with dramatic nonsense and excellent content mixed up in equal measure— and even in that short space, we see a familiar fondness shine through even across the difference of a made-up world. Not everything has to be an inversion, and that makes the bits that are changed matter all the more. Different... but also the same. It's also just quite fun watching him go from ignorant dismissal of the genre to genuine interest, via the medium of a hot actor playing a part well. I cannot call him wholly unrelatable in that, let us say.

But that is somewhat the extent of the fantastic in the story —a different world with different geography and history, different mores, different stories— for approximately 85% of the book. There are some points that stray further when critical to the plot, but for the rest of the time, it takes a back seat and lets us focus on Therre and his world, and the people around him, and it is that I am delighted by the most.

It's what sings out the most, too. It's a story about a person and his grief, and one told with gentleness, sympathy and deep humanity. It is about connection, about living, and about the tethers on your soul that you will never shift, but maybe learn to live around. It is beautiful, sad and desperately poignant, and I loved it.

The Math

Highlights: beautiful, personal tone of voice; wonderful descriptions of the physical (especially fabric); subtle understanding of grief and love

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

Reference: Jeffers, Alex. A Mourning Coat [Neon Hemlock, 2024].

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

Review: Age of Ash (Kithamar #1) and Blade of Dream (Kithamar #2), by Daniel Abraham

A structural experiment that doesn’t quite work out

Jacket design by Lauren Panepinto

; Jacket art by Daniel Dociu

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The perspective of a story’s narrative can have enormous consequences for how readers react to its events. This is why head-hopping and multi-POV structures are so effective. When done well, we can see the internal motivations of an action in one chapter, and then explore the external effects or perceptions of that same action in another. When done extremely well, it can overset a tale entirely, yanking out our foundational assumptions and collapsing our understanding of how things fit together into a pile of rubble, from which a new understanding can emerge.

This is what Abraham is aiming to do with the first two books of his Kithamar trilogy. The first, Age of Ash, was a solid introduction to the city of Kithamar, characterized primarily by its very sensitive exploration of how grief can cause people to do unhinged, ill-thought-out, usefully plot-advancing things. Alys, a street crook from the poorest district of Kithamar, learns that her brother has been killed carrying out some shady plot. Fuzzy-headed with grief and rage, and lacking the kind of social—or indeed physical—safety net that might support less impoverished and desparate people through such a terrible time, she sets herself to discover what her brother was up to, and why he got killed. Her only help comes from the well-meaning efforts of her friend Sammish, who is equally impoverished and desperate, and who helps Alys because she nurses a hopeless romantic flame in her bosom that, it’s clear, will never be returned.

Through a series of blundering, unwise, and entirely believable actions, Alys finds herself wrapped in the same threads that wound her brother to his death, threads that she willingly entangles herself in, because to understand what happened to her brother she must take on his role in the world. Yet these same entanglements, however well (or poorly) they tie her to her brother’s memory, alienate Sammish, who finds herself working against Alys's adopted goals, undertaking actions on her own initative, motivated by her own moral compass in a way that Alys is incapable of doing. As Alys becomes progressively more isolated, she undertakes progressively more reckless actions, and events build and develop in extremely satisfying ways. Alys's journey through her grief, and her emotional arc as she comes to terms with what her brother was, and what she is becoming, is executed beautifully and skillfully, in a way that I don’t think I’ve seen done in this way in all my years of devouring SFF as a genre.

Intercutting this character arc is a broad plot that is much more workmanlike: An evil entity has haunted Kithamar for generations, but it requires a certain maguffin to complete its plans. Mystical opponents work against it, a stranger comes to town, the ruling family gets up to unthinking hijinks that interfere with the evil influence’s plans, and Alys and Sammish are tangled up in the thick of it.

Age of Ash ends with a temporary—but by no means permanent—setback to the entity's schemes, leaving open multiple avenues for it to pursue its evil plans and advance the plot further. Yet the ending doesn’t feel like a cliffhanger, because Alys and Sammish’s contributions to the story are tied up quite beautifully, in ways that are true to their characters and their character arcs. I was contented to finish with their stories when I finished the book. The trilogy is not about them as characters; they simply inhabited the first book and helped nudge the events to the next stage.

 

This is why Blade of Dream, the second book in the series, simply did not work for me. Because in Blade of Dream, events do not proceed to the next stage. We go back to the beginning again. Structurally, it’s clear what it’s intended to do. It relates the same events from Age of Ash, taking place over the course of the year, starting with the death of one ruler, old Prince Ausai, and ascension of his heir, and ending with the death of the second ruler and the ascension of a third. But the same events of this turbulent year are now related from a different set of perspectives. Rather than viewing the titanic struggles for control of the city from the perspective of street rats Alys and Sammish, now we see it from the perspective of the wealthy, the royal.

The problem with this structural exercise, though, is that we don’t really learn anything new. The events of Age of Ash were not unclear or mysterious. They were pretty straightforward by the end. I knew what the maguffin did; who opposed it; why the various participants in the power struggle did the things they did. Seeing all of the same events from the other side didn’t shed any new light or overset any old understandings. The same characters appear and do the same things, and nothing changes the second time round. As just one example, in Age of Ash, Alys is ordered to kill a canoodling couple, and we see the event unfold from her perspective. In Blade of Dream, we see the same sequence from the perspective of the canoodlers. But nothing was gained by revisiting the event. The canoodling couple did not do anything unexpected or enlightening; they were not privately advancing the plot in any way before they were interrupted by assassins. They were canoodling. Then Alys arrived. And I already knew what was going to happen, so there was no drama or suspense about it. You shouldn’t be bored by assassination attempts in your books, and I was bored. That’s a bad sign.

Perhaps there are balls set in motion in Blade of Dream that I’m not seeing, because they’re still rolling quietly into position. It’s not impossible. Abraham is a very fine writer, with a wonderful grasp on setting and character and complex social and political machinations. Don’t forget that he’s one half of James S. A. Corey, author of The Expanse, which set a new bar for modern space opera. (Also don’t forget that he’s written two outstanding fantasy series before now—The Long Price Quartet and The Dagger and the Coin—which I cannot recommend highly enough.) Possibly Kithamar will explode into the brilliance of a structural long game when Book 3 rolls around. I certainly plan to read it. 

But the fact remains that Abraham wrote a rather dull, repetitive Book 2 while he heaved those balls into position. I sincerely hope that Book 3 makes my patience worth it. But if it begins with the same death of Old Prince Ausai, and I have to slog through that same year a third time over, I’ll be very annoyed.

--

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6/10: still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

Highlights:

• Beautiful emotional arcs (book 1)
• Very well-developed city-as-character
• Repetitive structural conceit
  

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:

Abraham, Daniel. Age of Ash. [Orbit 2022]

Abraham, Daniel. Blade of Dream. [Orbit 2023]
 

Review: Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo

A story about the remembrance of the dead, through a lens of the complicated legacies they leave behind.

Alyssa Winans' cover art continues to stun

CW: Death, grief

The stories Nghi Vo has told in the Singing Hills novellas have all had a conceit, a neat little framing device that shapes the story into something a little more than just a story. It's one of the best things about the series, and means I go into each new one excited not just to know what happens, but how it's told. In the first, it was framed around found objects, the second a story told by different tellers, the third had unconnected tales that turned out to be connected by the people in them. In Mammoths at the Gates, the fourth in the series, it's stories of a person told by the different people who knew them at their funeral, stories from those who loved them, who think of them fondly, their fellow clerics, their companion and their granddaughters, who knew them only as the best they were... and one that isn't quite so flattering, but no less true.

I read this book one week after my grandmother died.

Normally, I'm not so keen to put quite so much of myself into my reviews as this, but the resonance between the story and what has happened so recently in my own life was impossible to ignore. 

My grandmother was... a complicated woman. Rarely a nice one, though more often to people who didn't know her well. The legacy she left us, when she passed, was no less complex. Her will makes plain that she cared very much about lifting some of those who survived her above others, showing her favour and her disdain in equal parts. No matter how much one knows about this when the person is alive, it becomes harder to bear when you realise it's the last thing they leave in the world, the message they want to be seen after they've gone, their last word. As I say, complicated. But part of dealing with that complexity is the family that gathers at the passing, who tell their own stories about her. I haven't seen my aunt - who lives abroad - in years, but we sat in the emptiness of my grandmother's house, her and my mother and me, and naturally, what grew out of that emptiness was stories. Stories the others may not have known, or that saw a complex woman from another side than the one the listener had in their mind, or that revealed hurts she caused that the rest of us simply never knew about.

My mother asked me yesterday, did I want to speak at her funeral? I declined. I don't know how I'd even begin to frame that complexity into something appropriate for speaking publically.

Nghi Vo did. 

She begins the funeral with the expected stories, the ones that praised the deceased for the things most prized by the speaker. Patience, compassion, cunning, by turns. They reveal the different sides of the person, as person in the world and later as a cleric, to the surprise of those who only knew one part of them. But the greater surprise comes in the story that is not the best but the worst of their life. The listeners all had to then reframe their knowledge of the deceased, around the discovery that they weren't, as everyone had thought, always quite so wonderful.

That sort of story is so rare, in life and in books. We do not speak ill of the dead. We certainly do not speak ill of the fondly-remembered dead, or those who were good and bad in parts*. But as Vo shows, there is incredible power in remembering the truth of a person, the good and the bad together, an emotional impact that cannot be achieved by simply speaking the kind words, the ones that everyone expects to hear. It was an impact I did not realise I would appreciate quite so much, but I felt it all the way down to my bones as I read it. It hurt, and it helped, to have a story reminding me that we can have complex feelings for our dead, in a time when I needed just that. From a personal perspective, I might even say this is the best of the stories in the series, simply because it has hit me so intimately in my own unsettled emotions.

But even if I step outside this personal impact, it's a story whose themes are bittersweet and beautifully crafted. As well as those of death and mourning and the memories of a person left behind - themes made all the more poignant in a setting full of characters whose entire purpose is their perfect recall - it is also a story of how people change, how parting and returning may bring you back to a different person than the one you left behind. And that in discovering that, you realise you too are different from the person who left. All the Singing Hills books are deeply, inexorably rooted in people and their relationships, but Mammoths at the Gates doubly so. We follow Chih, our cleric protagonist, as they return to the Singing Hills Abbey after their travels, hoping to see again their neixin companion who returned before them, as well as their familiar fellow clerics and old tutors. But they find their best friend suddenly serious and grown up, their neixin now a mother of a fledgling, and much of the abbey gone to a nearby situation that requires their attention. Their home is almost empty, and they have to reckon with the changes against the backdrop of a very present threat - the eponymous mammoths at the gate - whose title drop within a few pages of the opening of the story I particularly appreciated.

But like all the other stories, it isn't really a story about Chih, no matter that we continue to learn about (and love) them through how they approach the stories of other people. And it is no different here - we learn about Chih through how they cope with the changes they bear witness to in their erstwhile best friend, and the stories they hear and react to during the funeral. They are the conduit through which we receive the stories, and like any good medium, they bring with them their own personality to the message. For only novellas, for stories that always spotlight other people, Nghi Vo has done an amazing job of giving us such an insight to the person on the fringes of all those stories, a wry, cheerful, thoughtful, ever so slightly rebellious but ultimately dedicated cleric, one who truly yearns to hear what people tell them, and believes in their duty to keep those stories safe, because the things that happen to the people in their world, even the little things, ultimately matter.

We likewise get those tantalising little glimpses into the world, and as in all the books, we continue to dwell particularly on food. In a book about homecoming and comfort, it feels all the more important to have that there, all the more true to life. Cleric Chih has always been quick to describe what they eat - or want to eat - in all the novellas, and so getting back to the green onion buns, the rice and mustard greens, the salted plums of their home, the things that comfort them against the world, makes you yearn for those foods too, even if you've never tried them yourself. Because they're not described in the way food sometimes is, as vivid sensory experiences, full of taste and smell and almost sensual aesthetics. Instead, food reverts to its emotional self - rice as a balm for the soul, a green onion bun or milk candies as nostalgia, a salted plum as a rare treat. We understand food, as we understand much of the story, through the lens of Chih's experience. Whether or not I would like salted plums, here, they are likeable, and that positioning in the story is, for the moment, more important than my own imaginings of what a salted plum might taste like.

If I were to be fanciful, I might say that all the Singing Hills books are a thesis on the importance of bias for the narrator in a story. Because they would not be what they are - which is wonderful - if they weren't constantly coloured by the perspective from which we see them. Whether it is Chih and their experiences, or the framing devices that shift from book to book, each of these stories is as much the medium as the message, the two woven so thoroughly together that extraction would make each meaningless except as part of the whole. And Mammoths at the Gates is no different in that.

But likewise, for me, it is also now inextricable from my own experiences, and my own bias. I cannot but view it through the lens of my own mourning, I cannot but find myself in the story, and be comforted. I declined to speak at my grandmother's funeral, and ultimately, so does Chih decline to speak at their mentor's. I find a form of fellowship in that; I feel seen. And it is a testament to how well the story is told that such resonance is so easy to grasp, and so poignant.

*On twitter, we quite frequently speak ill of the terrible dead, but twitter is its own little microcosm, and I don't want to use it as a pattern for society at large. God no.

--

The Math

Highlights: A continued dedication to great framing devices, emotional resonance so substantial you could make buns out of it, bittersweet friendship

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10

Reference: Nghi Vo, Mammoths at the Gates, [Tordotcom, 2023]

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

Microreview [Book]: Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune

Fans of The House in the Cerulean Sea are in for a treat that's both somewhat familiar in tone to what came before, but with more than enough deviations to feel fresh.

In Under the Whispering Door, the protagonist is dead almost from the novel's start. His body is buried, unable to scramble out of the ground. His life was not a life well lived. It was one of bitterness and heartless misdeeds. And now death has robbed his body of any opportunity for redemption. It's an image of hopelessness, of being tamped down by earthly forces out of your control without any recourse of getting out. But while his living body's journey is complete, he has a new one in ghostly form. That ghost, as it leaves his body, is a form of a second chance. Just because his life was a lost cause doesn't mean his death has to be, too.

Following Wallace's death, he is situated in a place where people with fantastical gifts, including Mei, a reaper, and Hugo, a ferryman, work to acclimate Wallace to his death with eventual plans of him transitioning to what lies beyond. His rehabilitation and preparation is done at a tea shop owned by Hugo. Warring with Wallace's protestations are feelings of affection beginning to form for those in the tea shop. Feelings that he never felt before, even when he was alive.

While the premise doesn't exactly break new ground in fantasy, the character interactions are where the novel is at its best. Whether its friendship between the protagonist and other the other ghosts he meets,  budding, believable romance that had its hooks in me until I was tensed and engaged, along with heartbreak and grief that is native to deathly situations--everything is handled with sincerity and emotional intelligence. The bits of wisdom might be parceled with a couple anodyne platitudes, but that adds to the cozy feeling that covers Under the Whispering Door like a warm blanket.

Don't go into the novel expecting rollicking, action-packed chapters. The roiling is more within the characters than pyrotechnic spectacles. The settings aren't varied, with most of the interactions confined to the tea shop--which sometimes have conversations extended to superfluity. But often it feels like a crucible for character growth with all the epiphanies, realizations, and disillusionments that comes with it. Just because the setting is relatively static doesn't mean that characters are taking steps of their own, even if they're metaphorical rather than literal.

Wallace might have been stuck in a rut in life, but in death the novel showcases him finding a pathway of ascending. In the year I'm writing this (2021), in which I am confined, often static, and sometimes pathless, Under the Whispering Door has come at a perfect time to offer a roadmap forward in literary form. Its pages might not be literal steps, but as the characters evolve internally, the novel's words made my heart warm and molded it into something sweeter, something that I think is more capable of approaching the world's clinical processes and rampant rage with more grace.

The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10

Bonuses: + 1 For having so much heart that even the grinchiest people will be moved. +1 For expertly vibrant banter.

Penalties: - 1 For a middle-third that is a little too slow and long.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Klune, T.J. Under the Whispering Door (Tor, 2021)

POSTED BY: Sean Dowie - Screenwriter, editor, lover of all books that make him nod his head and say, "Neat!”

The Novella Files: Crossroads by Laurel Hightower

Subject: Laurel Hightower. Crossroads [Off Limits Press, 2020]

Accolades: Ladies of Horror Fiction Nominee for Best Novella (2020)

Genre: Horror

Executive Summary: How far would you go to bring back someone you love?

When Chris's son dies in a tragic car crash, her world is devastated. The walls of grief close in on Chris's life until, one day, a small cut on her finger changes everything.

A drop of blood falls from Chris's hand onto her son's roadside memorial and, later that night, Chris thinks she sees his ghost outside her window. Only, is it really her son's ghost, or is it something else—something evil?

Soon Chris is playing a dangerous game with forces beyond her control in a bid to see her son, Trey, alive once again. (From Goodreads)

Assessment: In Crossroads, multiple characters have a sort of wounded opening in them. But it's not an empty void--it's filled with agonizing grief. Its grief for the death of a loved one and all the memories of them that paradoxically inspire both joy and mournful wistfulness. Sometimes its mourning what someone never had--it's grief of the realization that their fantasies will never come to be. Family forms connectors that when cut by death leave scars, but so can never having any connectors from the beginning.

Crossroads moves at a pace that favors character development over gory shocks. It mainly finds horror through Chris' interiority. The growing relationship between her and her neighbor Dan is a sweetness amid an ocean of tart. Her love for Trey is palpable. I found her blind devotion to undo her hurt both rational from her tortured perspective yet unwise from an objective reader's point of view. I wanted her to stop going down a road that intensified in horror and pain yet I still understood why she powered through.

When the gore does come, it's with purpose--every drop of blood is employed to support the themes and characterization. And every description of visually harrowing scenes is done with a skillful balance of sophistication and jarring unease. Sage observations are also offered aplenty. It's a horror story that feels suitably horrific, while edifying the reader along the way, making the grimy feeling that comes with it strangely rewarding.

The great characterization, observations, and thematic exploration are done in a way that offers new perspectives of grief. For those that have experienced the death of a loved one, the novella's themes should strike a chord if you're willing to go into the depths with it. For those without a close familial connection, Crossroad's exploration of love, loss, and isolation might be meaningful and relatable enough to ring true for them. It shows that a familial connection can be formed despite your current predicament. Sometimes you might have to leave the one you have and make a new one in which you'll find both love and heartbreak. Crossroads offers many instances of pain, but through it all you can at least feel the overpowering affection that literally bleeds out.

Score: 8/10

POSTED BY: Sean Dowie - Screenwriter, editor, lover of all books that make him nod his head and say, "Neat!”

Microreview [Book]: King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender

A story that expertly tackles a number of topical issues and adds a dash of magical realism to create something sublime.

In many ways, humanity is similar – made from the same fabric – yet the times have found ways to knot our fabric up into warring sects. Our nuances override the potential kinship of our shared fundamentals. Some cultures have been raised more so than others to perpetuate racism, homophobia and stoicism, setting up a sort of dam that blocks opportunities for acceptance or cathartic tears. King and the Dragonflies is centered around that fabric, and through a story of love and understanding, tries to unknot our shared cloth, and should make some readers a little more well-rounded than they were before opening the book. It’s marketed as middle grade, but like some of the most special works in the genre, has the potency and perceptiveness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with any novel.

King and the Dragonflies follows King, a boy whose older brother Khalid recently passed away. At Khalid’s funeral, King sees a dragonfly, and becomes convinced that his brother has taken the form of said insect. Meanwhile, Sandy, one of his best friends came out as gay to him, and he’s been ostracizing Sandy for fear of going down with him in homophobic humiliation. But there’s something more to the situation – both in terms of his brother’s involvement, and King’s personal feelings to the matter, which I will not spoil.

King is Black, which is vital to the story, as both racism against his people, as well as homophobia carried by a portion of the Black community is explored. The novel presses the paradox that the racism Black people experience and fight against is comparable to the level of hate and narrow-mindedness exhibited by homophobes, and yet Queer and anti-racist movements aren’t always interwoven. That contradictory dichotomy is heightened when Sandy, who is white, meets head-on with the traditionalist Black teachings of King’s family. And it’s heightened even more when Sandy’s family – including the father who is the sheriff of the town - has a besmirched reputation of being blatantly racist.

There’s so much emotional suppression in King and the Dragonflies, in which what characters say often oppose what they think. But the novel takes King and some of the supporting characters on a transformative journey, in which they become comfortable with what they keep hidden, until they no longer feel a need for suppression. If the novel starts out with a obstruction that blocks out translating thoughts into action, each page turned in the book moves the characters progress a little bit forward and gnaws on that obstruction, until a close approximation of liberty is granted.

For those who enter the book with the expectation of a lot of speculative fiction elements, you will be disappointed. The book is very loosely magical realism, with Khalid’s alleged transformation into a dragonfly being the most prominent fantastical element. The story later builds on the premise of time and space being fluid, and without spoiling anything, it ends up eclipsing the dragonfly as the most salient fantastical element and the greatest symbol of King’s grief and development.

The fabric of our world could be so smooth, in which prejudices are flattened out into indistinct fallacies. But instead, our world is a patchwork, with threads frayed off and inaccessible to others. Some patches are rough to the touch and seem to have no way of mending. But there are some pieces that are detached but capable of threading into more fabric. King and the Dragonflies speaks to readers, both of the middle grade and adult age, of how to weave into areas that you were ignorant of. Even if a dragonfly doesn’t grace you with its beauty and land on your fabric, you have comfort knowing that you’re attached to even greater things.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 For covering incredibly heavy topics with full-forced depth while being accessible to a middle grade readership.
+1 For insightful and incisive observations and emotional depth.

Negatives: -1 For an ending that ends a little too conveniently and quickly.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

POSTED BY: Sean Dowie - Screenwriter, stand-up comedian, lover of all books that make him nod his head and say, "Neat!

 Callender, Kacen. King and the Dragonflies [Scholastic Press, 2020]