Book Review: The Dragon Has Some Complaints, by John Wiswell

A multi-headed allegory that rewards multiple readings

It’s tricky to attempt to pin down in a few paragraphs all the things that The Dragon Has Some Complaints is trying to say, because it operates on several layers of meaning at the same time. Its tale of a grumpy, battle-weary dragon who infiltrates a city of dragon riders to get free food while he quietly plots his revenge on humans is both hilarious and heart-wrenching, and the points it has to make about pain, kindness, hubris, cruelty, loyalty and resilience get richer the more one reflects on them.

The first and most obvious level of analysis has to do with disability and chronic pain. When we meet the protagonist, the fierce dragon Garrodigh, he’s badly injured and traumatized. In one of the frequent and interminable wars between human kingdoms, a cannon shot knocked him down from the sky, leaving him with the bones of one leg shattered, his wings torn to shreds, his four heads reduced to three, and his memory partially erased. Other dragons shun him because of an alleged closeness to humans he can’t remember. He can barely hunt his food, much less defend himself. If hunger doesn’t kill him soon, a stray cannon ball will. By the time the book starts, he already has nothing to lose.

Author John Wiswell has spoken openly and at length about his own experience with disability and chronic pain, and he uses that personal perspective to great effect in the book. Because the nature of dragonkind is all explosive fire and brimstone, Wiswell employs the imagery of water and ice whenever he needs to refer to things that harm dragons. The pain in Garrodigh’s broken bones is described as a freezing sensation, like being stabbed with needles of ice. To a dragon’s mind, the nearness of death feels cold. And in a fascinating bit of worldbuilding, dragons in this universe can’t swim. A dragon’s fire can’t survive immersion in water.

The reader will find such allusions repeatedly, because once Garrodigh sneaks his way into a dragon-friendly human city, the book takes its time to very gradually depict his recovery. These humans have an entire arsenal of techniques to rehabilitate injured dragons, but even after he has laboriously regained his full mobility, an echo of the pain still lingers. There’s no perfect cure, and a body that has taken that kind of beating will never not carry its old wounds. For a book that has dragons, this is a strikingly realistic representation of physical therapy in both its benefits and its limitations.

How the narration treats Garrodigh’s inner life is another point of interest. This dragon has three remaining heads, but the book is told exclusively from the perspective of Centerhead, who seems more in touch with reality than the perpetually hungry Bottomhead, who has no interest in complicated ideas and prefers to follow more animalistic urges, and the delusional Upperhead, who is horrified at dragon behavior and is convinced that he’s a human trapped in a bad dream. The constant disagreements between Garrodigh’s heads, with Centerhead almost always taking the role of the mediating and decision-making personality, can be read as a creative reinterpretation of the Freudian trinity of Id/Ego/Superego, with the missing four head serving as Garrodigh’s life-defining trauma, the symbolic castration in reference to which everything else is framed.

(Another possible reading of Garrodigh’s heads would view them as representing the fractured self that emerges in cases of dissociative disorders, with Bottomhead’s and Upperhead’s maladaptive coping mechanisms, as well as their selective amnesia, having developed to protect the primary identity from its life-defining trauma.)

(YET another possible reading of Garrodigh’s personality would use a Lacanian lens. The primordial Lack of the fourth head is what drives Garrodigh’s every goal and choice, and his inner conflict isn’t resolved until a later chapter where he crosses an ocean, facing the thing that can kill him. Here I should be careful not to spoil too much, but the turning point in this part of his journey is that he recovers a lost Archetypal Mother at the same time as he helps humans recover a lost Archetypal Father, an encounter that reconciles Garrodigh with both the order of nature and the order of society.)

Interestingly, with all the details the book provides on Garrodigh’s mind, it never mentions how dragons experience (or not) desire. This omission stands out because the narration goes out of its way to make a recurring joke about Centerhead’s bafflement at human sexual habits, and these moments showcase how humans can look outright alien when viewed at a distance. The human Rania, Garrodigh’s self-appointed rider, caretaker and confidant, has a head-spinningly convoluted love life that the reader only gets to see as filtered through the dragon’s inevitably inaccurate perception.

On the human side, things are no less complicated. Rania is an immigrant in the dragon rider city, a native of another kingdom with which her new home is at war. Some of her superiors expect her to simply fulfill her duty and fight, but others mistrust her by default and question the truthfulness of her sworn loyalty. These questions about belonging and acceptance mirror Garrodigh’s own dilemma regarding his place among humans: he hates them and wants to eat them all, but he’s unexpectedly met a human community where dragons are valued and cared for. Neither Rania nor Garrodigh see any reason to expect they’ll end up being loved, and finding exactly that will be the final test of their respective characters.

The Dragon Has Some Complaints continues Wiswell’s literary exploration of what we mean by the category “monster” and what we do to beings that label is applied to. Sometimes prejudice makes us eschew any attempt at communication, and sometimes we wish nothing more than to open up to each other, but never learned what to do if such connection succeeds. If you’ve ever felt it’s dangerous to open your mouth, imagine having three.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Wiswell, John. The Dragon Has Some Complaints [DAW, 2026].

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

Book Microreview: The Nightland Express by J. M. Lee

A journey across the dividing lines of American society

In the antebellum Wild West, two teenagers eager for an excuse to run away take a job as horse-riding couriers. This job isn’t like delivering the regular mail: riders are sworn to an extreme level of secrecy, the route is haunted with hungry, spectral apparitions, and the horses never seem to grow tired even after covering a week’s journey in a matter of hours. Operating in parallel with the Overland service, the Nightland one uses its own, secluded stations, hidden at the edge of visible reality. As it turns out, there’s a whole other world alongside this one, and the creatures that inhabit it don’t like the rapacious westward expansion of settler civilization.

Not unlike the huge political rift that will lead to the US Civil War, and which lingers like a shadow over the entire plot, there’s a deeper rift forming between humanity and nature, and both forms of opposition emerge from the same rotten desire to possess, to snatch and claim and draw property lines around that which should have been free. Our two protagonists will find themselves in the middle of an ideological dispute that might break the world.

Fittingly, these protagonists have experience walking between two lives. Ben is a former slave who can pass for white, while Jesse was assigned female and wears male clothes. An important part of their inner development will involve learning to empathize with each other’s struggles despite them not being neatly comparable. There’s a recurring theme of mutual incomprehension taking the form of a cosmic wound, of the land itself suffering under the artificial divisions that humans are so accustomed to carving between one another.

The Nightland Express pays special attention to this theme of otherness and the ways in which the dominant settler culture fails to engage with the perspectives, the concerns, or even the basic fact of the existence of the inhabitants of the lands it seeks to take. When our protagonists ride through the hidden regions of the Nightland, the description highlights the effect of unfamiliarity: the same landscapes appear forbiddingly terrifying at first sight, yet endowed with a unique beauty in later encounters. The book’s prose conveys both sensations with a striking expressive strength.

There’s a fascinating idea implied by the antagonist’s secret plan to protect the spiritual realm from the depredations of settler culture. Without spoiling too much, the book seems to be making the point that, before Western civilization embarked on its invasion of other regions of the world and started suppressing their various spiritual traditions, it inflicted that violence on itself first. According to this idea, the reason why the West seems less connected to its own spirituality is that it first committed colonial epistemicide against itself. So the question at the core of the book’s plot is whether colonized lands can avoid becoming similarly alienated from themselves.

The events of the ending don’t cascade into the large-scale restoration of relations that one might hope for, mainly because the timeline has to roll into our known history (and there’s that pesky Confederacy that needs to be destroyed), but the last we see of our protagonists has them set on a trajectory of healing. The broken order created by colonization will take a long time to repair, but the repairing is happening, both in the visible and the invisible realms.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Lee, J. M. The Nightland Express [Erewhon, 2022].

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

Book Review: The Palace of Eros, by Caro de Robertis

On making Mount Olympus' foundations shake

I first discovered the work of Caro de Robertis (they/them) with their novel The Gods of Tango, which follows an immigrant from Italy’s new life in Buenos Aires in the early twentieth century, embracing that quintessential Argentinean dance and music, and transitioning gender in the process; I was interested because I am an amateur ballroom dancer and can dance the American bastardization of Tango reasonably well, but know vanishingly little of the original. Since then, I have read some of their other books, including Cantoras, a spellbinding, heartbreaking saga of lesbian life under the dictatorship in Uruguay, and The President and the Frog, an odd little novel that dips into the supernatural. But in their most recent novel they take the speculative plunge: The Palace of Eros could be considered another entry in the recent subgenre of feminist retellings of ancient myth (as my esteemed colleague on this blog Roseanna Pendlebury has deftly discussed the failings of said subgenre).

Unlike Pendlebury, I will admit to you that I am not the ideal audience for this novel, and in all likelihood not the ideal audience for de Robertis’ oeuvre in general. I am heterosexual, cisgender, and male, ethnically mixed between a smorgasbord of western Europe on the one hand and the Philippines on the other. I am autistic, with no romantic relationships in my life thus far. I have no cultural link with Latin America, but I speak Spanish reasonably well if not fluently. Nor am I particularly fluent in classical mythology. A more narrow-minded person may ask why I would read this book to begin with. I would first retort with the well-trod benefits of reading widely, of learning other perspectives, of opening your mind. I would then provide this quote from Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth:

“Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trading-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without even lowering their voices. This indifference strikes home: their fathers, shadowy creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls; you it was who allowed them glimpses of light, to you only did they dare speak, and you did not bother to reply to such zombies. Their sons ignore you; a fire warms them and sheds light around them, and you have not lit it. Now, at a respectful distance, it is you who will feel furtive, nightbound and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies.”

The novel is a queer reinterpretation of the story of Psyche and Eros. In this novel, the former is the youngest of three daughters of a farmer. She is said to be the most beautiful, and her father is intent on using that fact to marry her off to a man that could benefit him. She and her sisters are made to sit quietly in their living room as her father socializes with the men of her town. Later, she is displayed as a sculpture would be at an auction, gawked at, leered at, but never actually engaged with in any substantive form. She is objectified in the sense that she is reduced to the status of an object to be traded away, as something to be hopefully received by the suitors, and to be traded away for benefit by her father.

It is at this juncture that Aphrodite, goddess of love, takes note, and is disgusted that men find Psyche more beautiful than her. She sends her child, Eros, to make her fall in love with a monster. Note how I said ‘child,’ and not ‘son,’ as Eros is traditionally male in mythology. Here, Eros presents femme in most contexts but can shapeshift across the gender binary (including sex organs). Though a character whose gender expression is quite fluid, Eros is referred to with she/her pronouns throughout the novel, and that is what I will use here. She is an embodiment of sexual desire, as in classical mythology, but a more expansive, more liberatory, queerer form; she loves both men and women (expressing confusion when contemplating why her mother has only ever had sex with men). More piercingly, she asks why her crossing of the gender binary is so rankling to the other gods, as they change species with regularity. If a man can become a god, and a god can become a swan, surely a man can become a woman, and a woman become a man, so the logic goes, and it is a hard logic to argue with.

Much as in the original myths, Eros arranges to whisk Psyche away to a pleasant valley with an opulent palace filled with luxuries. There are sumptuous meals that are refilled every day, and supplies for art, and baths, and a very big bed. Every night, when Psyche goes to sleep, she is joined in the dark by a person she at first calls, for lack of a better term, her ‘husband,’ who makes her swear to never bring light into the room, leaving ‘him’ anonymous, and to never ask who ‘he’ is. The ‘husband’ is of course Eros, hiding her transgressions against the Olympian patriarchal order by roof and by anonymity. The two will only meet in the marriage bed, in pitch black. This raises two significant themes in the book.

Firstly: if the word ‘Eros’ appearing in the title wasn’t enough to clue you in, there is a lot of sex in this book. The lovemaking sessions between Eros and Psyche are emotionally tense and psychologically deep. Consider that Psyche’s sole exposure to any form of human sexuality beyond rumors of the mechanics involved in heterosexual intercourse is to be leered at as essentially a trophy, to later become the second-class partner in an unequal arrangement as she is ripped away from everything and everyone she loves (her sisters and her mother in particular) to be part of a man’s status game (there is very much a dynamic of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ evident in the way the menfolk of her town behave). It is here that she gets to experience sex as a joyful thing, as something that she can take pleasure in. Eros clearly cares for her needs, and knows how to keep things exciting (the ability to change between male and female forms is used to great effect here). This is a very strongly embodied liberation: liberation not as an abstract concept, but as a thing that exists physically, on the skin and in the nervous system. At first, this appears to be eroticism without the shackles of patriarchy, without the weight of societal expectations, without the status-jockeying and the need to marry a man simply to have basic human needs met. At first.

If all of the above raises some thorny issues of consent in your mind, you have struck on the second theme I was mentioning. Eros has effectively kidnapped Psyche and, without explanation, given her everything she could ever want. Eros resolutely refuses to give any actual identifying information about herself to Psyche, and has made it clear that this cornucopia of gifts will only continue if Psyche agrees to her demands. At first, Psyche is happy to accede due to the novelty of the whole thing, but as time goes on she begins to grow bored with not having any company, and insulted by a lack of explanation. Psyche eventually begins to probe the boundaries of what Eros has allowed and finds answers, to Eros’ great displeasure.

This is the sort of thing that, if left unexamined, would be disturbing, but de Robertis is brave enough to tackle this issue head on. Eros has designed this arrangement to accomplish a number of things: to rescue Psyche from Aphrodite’s wrath, to explore the erotic opportunities of freely transcending the gender binary, and to hide this threat to the Olympian patriarchal order from the eyes of Zeus. Eros is herself deeply traumatized from the way her gender non-conformity has been persecuted, and empathizes deeply with Psyche. But as those with relative privilege so often do to those with less privilege, Eros treats Psyche not as an equal, but as a charity case, to be manipulated and prodded in the service of the former’s sense of self-preservation. In this arrangement, what little agency Psyche has is at Eros’ allowance (and there is some agency; Psyche is thrilled by the ability to engage in artistic expression in the palace, as she takes up painting with gusto). She is not treated as deserving the dignity of a clear answer to what’s going on, the dignity of real consent. What becomes so crushingly clear is that, in her attempt to escape patriarchal norms, she has recreated them in this palace, in this valley, allegedly away from it all. The great tragedy of the bulk of the book is seeing this logic play out; Eros and Psyche both are getting a crash-course education in breaking patriarchal norms, but, as Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood,’” and that in face of education that is not liberatory, the oppressed will only seek to become the oppressor.

It is at this point I am going to spoil the ending because it is too rich in thematic content to leave unremarked upon. Those interested in the story should exercise caution.

Psyche ultimately storms out of the palace and tries to find her way home. Eros, distraught, is found out by the other Olympians and is now in deep trouble with them for breaking their rigid gender norms. More gods get involved, some of whom are on Psyche’s side, and eventually Psyche and Eros come to see each other again, Psyche having reclaimed a sense of dignity and Eros having reckoned fully with the implications of what she had done to Psyche. Eros asks Psyche if she wants to stay in the relationship, and after thinking about it, she says yes. Eros says she will find a way to marry Psyche, and turn her into a demigoddess. One way or another, she says, the Olympians will accept her, and this arrangement. The novel ends not long after.

This is an ending that feels narratively satisfying, but has implications that some may object to. One objection I consider is that this is an abuse victim choosing her abuser, and I was more than a little worried at first. But, thinking about it more thoroughly, I came around to the ending. The novel has made clear the nature of why Eros did what she did, not out of malice, but out of a limited imagination. I can see how Psyche herself could have come to that conclusion in regards to Eros, her mind being opened by her positive experiences within the palace - experiences which would lead her, later, to seeing the issues of the palace arrangement itself. She comes to understand how Eros came from a situation not unlike her own. She understands, then, how Eros came to act the way she did, and she can forgive. That’s what makes the most sense to me, anyway.

This ending, again, is narratively satisfying, but thinking about it more, I find that it has a lot of potentialities that are simply left alone. The idea of the Olympian gods having to recognize a same-sex marriage and a god/dess who jumps across the gender binary at will implies a titanic (no pun intended, but appreciated) shift in the cosmology of this version of Greece, and will doubtlessly resonate in the mortal realm. As an SFF reader and writer, and especially as an alternate history aficionado, I find that this is where de Robertis is most obviously a writer of literary fiction. I quote from a piece in Strange Horizons by Ada Palmer, which is my framework for this particular issue:

 “But one nearly-universal characteristic of contemporary mainstream literary fiction (as nearly-universal as technology is in SF or magic in fantasy) is a focus on a powerless character making an internal journey to come to terms with the world. It may be a journey of finding joy or finding despair, but the world is the challenge, and whether it's static or changing is despite the characters, not because of them. Lit fic thus does not teach any models of how the world changes or how history works, other than the powerlessness model of the individual being ground along by progress, like Charlie Chaplin trapped in the gears of Modern Times. In fact, when literary authors want to talk about characters changing the world, they reach for the tools of SFF or historical fiction, as in Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s Shikasta, Spufford’s Golden Hill, Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers, and Mantel’s Wolf Hall—all of these authors established themselves first as mainstream authors but used genre tools when they wanted to address the genre question of how the world changes.”

The story of Psyche and Eros as presented by de Robertis matches this conception of literary fiction, albeit in a slanted form. Psyche, clearly, has no way of changing the brutal patriarchal order she had the misfortune of being born in. Eros, though, is a bit trickier - she has divine power, but she is presented for most of the novel as being incapable of changing the gendered order of Olympus. This is why this ending was a bit unsatisfying as a work of speculative fiction, whereas for a literary novel it is just fine. The part of me that loves SFF that depicts societies undergoing great change, whether sprawling (like Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 - a book that was pivotal in my political development - or The Ministry for the Future, what Henry Farrell called the ‘apocalyptic systems thriller’) or smaller-scale, localized books like Sim Kern’s The Free People’s Village, found this to be a very abrupt sense of what the narrative’s sense of possibility - we’ve spent almost three hundred pages in a situation where the world must be endured, not changed, but now we have a way to potentially change it! That left me wanting more. Looking at this novel from an SFF perspective, Eros and Psyche are two characters who exemplify very well K. S. Villoso’s point about how worldbuilding and good characterization reinforce each other when writing speculative literature. De Robertis saw fit to let setting mold character, but not character to mold setting. I know literary authors aren’t usually in the habit of writing sequels in the way that SFF writers are, but I really, really wanted a sequel to this book where Eros and Psyche rip the ideological floorboards out from under Olympus and from classical Greece at large, and see what new world emerges.

I finished this book empathizing with Psyche’s desire for dignity, for personhood, as an autistic person of color aware that his government is targeting people like him. I do so, though, with the understanding that as a cisgender heterosexual man I am very much not the target audience, and that there are nuances to this story, and the way it is told, that I have simply missed. My privilege doubtlessly blinds me to things here. I wondered for a while if I were the right person to review this book, being so far removed from the people it’s really about. I can say that it is an engaging, intelligent novel that I enjoyed a lot. I came to the conclusion that I, as someone with the privilege of having a platform like Nerds of a Feather, should use it to amplify good books that wouldn’t get coverage elsewhere in the SFF ecosystem. Ultimately, I believe that if this review brings this book to someone who will benefit from it on a level much deeper than I would, it is worth it.

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Reference: de Robertis, Caro. The Palace of Eros [Primero Sueño Press, 2024]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy

Book Review: Lessons in Magic and Disaster

A Russian nested doll of stories, characters and relationships, and yes, magic

Jamie is a grad student in Massachusetts, working as best she can to teach classes and make her way in the world. She’s also a witch, has been for years, and has gotten more and more interested in the uses of magic. But it is her relationship with her mother, and the story of two women in the 18th century, and a book, and the story within that book, that truly drive and reinforce the narrative.

This is the story of Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders.

On the level of basic plot description, the novel is a relatively straightforward affair about Jamie’s relationship with her mother, and about uncovering what happened to her other mother, Mae. This proceeds as Jamie struggles with her relationship with her mother, with her spouse, Ro, and with the nature and uses of magic. Oh, and there is also drama and issues with her graduate studies and classes in the modern day.

Anyone with a parental relationship as an adult will find a lot here to think on and absorb. There is a real dividing line from when you stop being a child and start being an adult with an adult parent; and what life is like on that other side can be uncomfortable, especially if relations have had a break for a time. This novel explores the implications of that sort of relationship intimately and with feeling.

The narrative is far more than the sum of its parts. It is a rich dive deep down in levels and layers that wind up influencing and talking to each other, and to the reader. The novel works on those interlocking layers. At the very top, this is a story about a mother and a daughter and how they try to reconnect, with the daughter teaching magic to her mother, and the use of that magic having all sorts of spinning consequences. This impacts severely the relationship. And since this is a Charlie Jane Anders book, nearly all of the sympathetic characters are queer.

Jamie’s graduate studies center on the author Sarah Fielding, a real-life author, and sister of the more famous author Henry Fielding. The story of 18th-century women like Sarah is part of this novel. Anders devises a fictional novel of hers called Emily, making the text (and Jamie) focus on that book and speculate on the relationship between Emily and one Charlotte Clarke. Charlotte is a fascinating real-life character who transgressed gender roles in complicated ways, was often known as Charles Brown, and dressed in men’s clothes. In real life we don’t know how much Charlotte and Sarah knew each other. In this novel, bits of a speculated relationship between the two is a “level” of the story underneath the main ones.

The novel is like that: levels upon levels, echoing and reflecting on each other, like a layer cake. From the top:

• Main day story of Jamie, Ro (her partner) and Serena (her mother). Plus magic.
• The story of Serena and her partner Mae (Jamie’s parents). It’s a tragedy in many ways. I was moved to tears at points.
• The story of Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Clarke. Anders takes what we know and, thanks to it being part of Jamie’s thesis, has her speculate on the relationship.
• The fictional novel Emily by Fielding (which we get excerpts and commentary on, since this is Jamie’s thesis).
• Finally, inside Emily there is a layer further down: a fantasy story, the Tale of the Princess and the Strolling Player, that definitely has connections at least up to Fielding and Clarke’s story, and, I think, all the way to Jamie and Ro’s as well.

Although there is no actual time travel involved in this book, what comes to mind when reading it is Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates, which focuses on the early 19th century, and the work of an imaginary Romantic poet’s work and its importance to the narrative. With all these layers influencing each other, I am also reminded of the Dialogues of Achilles and the Tortoise in Hofstadter’s Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

So the novel is extremely geeky in a literary sense. It’s a fascinating high wire act from Anders. It’s also a very science-fictional geeky book. For all of the focus on an 18th-century author, the novel lives in a modern context and has plenty of references and genre awareness—not to the degree of, say, a Jo Walton novel, but enough for someone new to genre works or movies to find it just very slightly off-putting. That said, this IS the novel to give your queer or queer-friendly friend who has never read science fiction or fantasy before but wants to try it out.

That subject has been in the water in recent months. Here, in Lessons in Magic and Disaster, there are no spell-slinging wizards; the magic is subtle. While people might reach for Kelly Link here, what this novel made me think of (besides earlier works by Anders and the aforementioned Tim Powers), is Megan Lindholm (a.k.a. Robin Hobb)’s Wizard of the Pigeons, where magic is also very subtle and hard to notice.¹ The threat in that novel is mystical, whereas the challenges Jamie and her family and friends face are all too real and present.

The theory of magic, such as it is for Jamie and her family and friends, is one of discovery and of liminal places. There is a numinous, mysterious and only-vaguely-understood nature of magic that is very much against codified rules. Jamie, who has been practicing this magic for some time before the book, has theories about it that don’t always seem to align with the actual results. Serena, to whom she teaches magic, has her own ideas on what it’s good for. When Serena and Jamie find other practitioners, the bounds and sphere of actual theory, craft and knowledge expand further. At no point is there a Sandersonian ruleset defined. Magic is, in the end, mysterious. And it’s not the entire focus of the book, as witness the book’s Kelly-Link-like title.

The voice in the writing of Lessons in Magic and Disaster is contemporary and open. In this year of 2026, Jamie’s voice resonates as someone you might know, or at least be neighbors with. Her concerns and problems, aside from the issues of magic, and of the 18th-century material mentioned before, are of this moment too: the rising intolerance against queer people, and the difficulties of relationships with a spouse and a mother. It’s not a comfortable read, given what Jamie and those around her go through, but Anders makes the experience easy for us to immerse in, and find sympathy in both Jamie and her mother despite their differences. There are no easy answers at the end. That in itself is a form of magic.

There is a point in the novel where Jamie finds a thesis statement (or thinks she has) for her study of Fielding. It’s really an echo for the thesis statement for Anders’ s novel as well, and so, atypically, I am going to quote it verbatim:

So now Jamie is thinking of Emily as a story about nature, change, and chasing your own heart’s desire in spite of everyone else’s expectations. Emily is a book about the games we play along the cliff edge. About nature encroaching in the places that people have left behind to move to towns at the very start of industrial capitalism, and the changes that people can make in those places. It’s about the trade-offs between security and self-determination, and Emily’s struggle to have both.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster is a queer, immersive character study that sometimes uncomfortably (in a good way) speaks to fractured relationships, both familial and otherwise, and the costs of both action and inaction in dealing with challenges. Plus magic.

Highlights:

• Character-focused, immersive story
• Russian-doll narrative, layered story reinforcing and exploring theme
• Possibly a very good fit for a first SFF novel for queer-friendly readers

Reference: Anders, Charlie Jane. Lessons in Magic and Disaster [Tor Books, 2025].

¹ I’ve thrown a number of books and references at you, the reader, in this review, but the book is like that, too. There are both a Historical Note and a strongly felt Afterword where Anders reveals her thought process, ideas, and a reading list. And a music list, because she’s like that.

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

Book Review: City of Others by Jared Poon

Magic and bureaucracy in a supernatural Singapore

It seems like I enjoy a subgenre of urban fantasy that I am starting to think of as “books that involve the bureaucratization of magic,” where main characters working for government agencies try to tame the magical world with procedures, paperwork, and protocols. Examples might include Charlie Stross’s The Laundry Files, parts of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, and now, it seems, Jared Poon’s new DEUS series beginning with City of Others.

Our narrator is Ben, who works in middle management at DEUS, the Division for Engagement of Unusual Stakeholders, part of the Ministry of Community, that oversees the “Others”: people with magic or connections to the supernatural.

The book is set in a Singapore where magic is everywhere, but most people don’t notice it due to what the ministry refers to as “Deviant Occurrences Blind Eye Syndrome” (DOBES). But most of the Others just all it the “DKP effect,” for “Don’t kaypoh” (kaypoh is Singaporean slang for ‘busybody’).

Ben’s team of government bureaucrats works to help Others fit into the overall fabric of Singaporean society. The team features a psychic, a spell-slinging bomoh (Malay shaman), a half-jinn intern, and Ben, who is a “Gardener” with access to a large well of internal magic. The team is eventually joined by a ghost cat who can rescue objects from the immediate past, as well as by Ben’s boyfriend, Adam.

Ben and his team face a dual threat: first, a world-ending attack from an endlessly ravenous shoal of creatures swimming in from a parallel but connected dimension; second, the possibility that their boss, Rebecca, may catch them performing an exorcism without a risk management plan and filing for official clearances.

There's just something I find charming about the juxtaposition of civil servants and bureaucracy with snake gods and other supernatural magic. For example, at one point, when Ben is trying to figure out what's going wrong in a residential neighbourhood, he tells himself, "OAR—Observe. Analyze. Respond. That was the DEUS framework for field observations around deviant phenomena. There was even a very nice set of slides, featuring clip-art people rowing a kayak together, that showed how the OAR framework could help us navigate complex situations.” As he considers what he can remember from the slides, he ends up submerged and frozen in a parallel universe for a few moments.

The OAR framework helps Ben navigate the situation, but his reference to it (and other government protocols) makes the magic seem possible to tame, which perhaps helps the reader feel like it could be real. Rather than forcing the reader into a magical realm, it brings the magic into our mundane realm with its informational PowerPoints and mnemonics to remember protocols.

Further, just as even mundane employees sometimes face top-down policies that make their lives difficult, Ben must deal with the DEUS’s past policies, which focused more on controlling and policing the Others rather than helping them. In the past, DEUS even violently shut down locations where Others gathered, calling them “unhygienic” and “lawless." Due to this legacy, many powerful Others do not trust DEUS, and Ben must work to prove that the agency has changed.

The book is peppered with pop culture references, with a light and humorous tone.  For example, Ben quotes both Aladdin and Star Wars at his boyfriend and, at one point, in the midst of the battle against the shoal, his team needs to stop everything to participate in the Ministry of Community Sports Day to demonstrate their team spirit for their boss. But the book also has a deeper core, where characters cope with past grief and mistakes while learning to grow and work together. Ben begins the book unable to ask for help and feeling emotionally estranged from his father. By the end, he comes to better understand how his father shows care, and also learns to ask for help when he needs it.

I enjoyed that this book was set in Singapore. We get to hear about different forms of magical beings based in Asian folklore, such as the manananggal, a mythical creature from Filipino folklore, and Semar, a Javanese demigod. Poon also integrates aspects of Singaporean history into the book, such as in the fact that the category of “Other” for magical creatures comes from a post-colonial era racial classification that the Singaporean government used as an administrative tool. People were asked to self-identify as “Chinese, Malay, Indian, or Other.” This puts all the magic users together with racialized others: “We, of course, were in the last category, which included jiangshi [undead corpse creatures from Chinese folklore], diviners, and elves right alongside Eurasians, Filipinos, Arabs—all the ones who had to tick a special box and fill something in when they entered the National Service.”

City of Others is clearly the first in a series where we spend a lot of the book meeting new characters and being introduced to the larger context of magical Singapore. The city has several powerful factions of Others that vie for influence, and there’s even a shadowy private organization trying to build technology with magic taken from Others. Because we’re being introduced to so many new characters and settings, the narrative can feel a bit like it’s dragging at times. But it was an amusing first book, and I’ll be curious about how Poon continues to build out this world.

Highlights:

• Fun, magical Singapore
• Bureaucratization of magic
• Queer characters
• Ghost cat

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10. Definitely enjoyable, but you’ll notice that it’s setting up for a longer series.

Reference: Poon, Jared. City of Others [Orbit, 2026].

POSTED BY: Christine D. Baker, historian and lover of SFF and mysteries. You can find her also writing reviews at Ancillary Review of Books or podcasting about classic scifi/fantasy at Hugo History. Come chat books with her on Bluesky @klaxoncomms.com.

Book Review: Fate's Bane by C. L. Clark

 A forbidden romance and an exploration of the complexities of duty.

Specificity is not always a virtue. Fantasy readers often disdain the generic medieval fantasy setting - and with good reason, given how overdone it is - but that doesn't mean that sometimes, a light hand on the worldbuilding tiller can be just as effective, or even more, than one that digs into granular details. Fate's Bane, the new novella from C. L. Clark, is a great example of exactly that.

The story follows two young women, one, Agnir, a hostage taken to ensure her father's good behaviour (read: not making war on the hostage-taker) and the other, Hadhnri, the daughter of the clan she's been taken into. Unsurprisingly, they fall in love. But Agnir is never truly one of Clan Aradoc, and Hadhnri cannot seem to see that her father will never let them be, and that Agnir is never so sure and comfortable of her place among them as she is in Hadhnri's affections. Clan Aradoc, and particularly their leader, expect of her the duty and loyalty of one born to them, but don't afford her the trust that would naturally go alongside it, denying her the weapon she yearns for as she goes into adulthood.

But in that imperfect childhood, the two girls-then-women find a magic that allows them to create, to influence the world beyond the realms of the mundane, the use of which brings them as close as their burgeoning feelings, until Agnir shies away from the risks that Hadhnri wants to take.

And so in the early part of the story, this tension is built up - two parts of the relationship with very different positions in the world, and thus very different outlooks, and very different ways of measuring risk and cost/benefit. Sitting within Agnir's perspective, it is easy to see all the dangers and problems that afflict her life that Hadhnri misses, blithe in her own security. And so, when Agnir's own clan steals her back, the reader sees easily how conflicted she is. On the one hand, she has all of her childhood experiences, the affection of Hadhnri and her brother Gunni, the food and shelter and care given, but on the other, the knowledge of how that situation came to be, and the ties that predate it all, to Clan Fein, her blood siblings and her father. To them she owes the loyalty of family, even if, after years of being raised elsewhere, they are nearly strangers to her. Clark makes clear - without belabouring the point, but in showing us in little snippets of life in these two clans - how clearly those blood ties and their sense of honour and duty matter to those in this world, these Fens. Agnir's divided self is set up and grounded just enough for it to feel a part of this setting, so that the story can then shift on to studying the (necessary, tragic) outcomes of that division of loves.

And that light touch embedding of the sense of this world's mores truly is one of the virtues of the book. It's a novella, and so such setting and groundwork as it does needs to be conveyed quickly, so the fact that Clark more evokes than explains stands it in good stead. I infer from words like "fens" and "seax" where and when in the world this is meant to be implying. Reference to the baneswood, and its stories, make clear the pagan nature of this culture, and so when outside forces come in wearing robes of a certain shape and worshipping a different god, it's easy to nod along and think "ah yes, the coming of Christianity to the British isles" and know roughly when and whereabouts this draws its inspiration from. It doesn't need more than roughly, because it is also very clearly a fantasy world - there are little shifts in culture, along with the clear magic, that take us a step outside of the bounds of reality. What Clark gives us instead of specificity, though, is coherence. We may not get a thorough explanatory guide to this place, but every single little detail we do get - the love locks courting couples share, the training grounds, the material culture, the clans and their quarrels - feeds into that sense of time and place, and helps to make it feel whole. It's a delicate line to walk, but one I think Clark has done phenomenally, in this instance.

Some of that is, of course, that the slightly abstracted historical period being evoked isn't the traditional-unspecified-north-west-European medieval. It's not taverns and wenches and kings and castles, and so gets points for rarity. But the skill Clark uses in sketching a sense of place in these clean lines with little moments of clarity is critical too. They know exactly when to give the reader a touch of something real, to ground the more nebulous whole and give it the semblance of greater depth.

It helps too, that the shape of the story owes a little to older traditions of "romance" as well as to modern, and that genre-shape helps guide how the story is read and make it feel of a piece with its setting. There are echoes of modern tropes, don't get me wrong. I recognise these lesbians from plenty of fiction. But there's also plenty of moments that draw on older myths and stories too. Which is to say that... happily ever after may not be the thing to be seeking here.

And, having read The Unbroken, I am not exactly surprised. Thematically, they're treading very similar ground here again, exploring how a person can have their loyalties owed in different ways to very competing people and powers. Both books examine the way that the deeper tie of family can be suborned and complicated by other forces, and that a person can quite blamelessly find themselves torn in two by the loves and duties they owe to the two different parts of themself. It's a very compelling theme, and one I think bears up under this repeated scrutiny. Interestingly, the story I found myself most reaching to for comparison however was one of the other yellow lesbian books of the same cohort - She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. There's a lot of thematic overlap between the two, don't get me wrong, but the particular love between someone raised by an enemy, and the child of the enemy, echoes really well between the eunuch Ouyang and Fate's Bane's Agnir. Both feel compelled to act against their personal desires in service of a duty greater than themself, and are pulled into a vengeance that can do nothing but hurt them. And both are extremely compelling for it. Agnir gets much less page time to get to a place of complexity than Ouyang does, but Clark does an excellent job of skimming where skimming needs to happen and lingering over personal moments to give us the shape of her personal feelings and dilemmas.

Again overlapping with Ouyang's story, as well as The Unbroken, Clark is clearly interested in thinking about power and powerlessness, agency and how that can be suborned or denied. Agnir is a symbol more than a person for much of the book - a token of her father's good behaviour and then, later, a symbol of the crimes of Clan Aradoc to her own people and those whose support her father seeks. Even to her beloved, sometimes, she becomes as much a token of rebellion against her family and their expectations as a real person with loyalties of her own. As with Ouyang and Esen, Agnir cannot seem to quite make Hadhnri see that she has ties outside of the ones that bind her to Clan Aradoc, and that what they have done to her has plenty of marks in the "bad" side of the ledger to balance out such good as there may be.

Much of this tension is built early and clearly, leaving an amount of the story's direction quite obvious to the reader. This is not a criticism - rather than the twists of an adventure novel, this again invokes older-style doomed romances, with the car-crash experience of watching two people bound by circumstances walk into a doom they cannot escape. Of such things is the entire tragic genre built, and for good reason.

It is not, however, a perfect book. I have two points to highlight that don't quite fit the otherwise excellent storytelling. The first is much more minor (though doesn't sound it), and that's the place of magic within the story. Despite the unexplained magic being the force that binds the characters to that tragic fate, its infrequent appearances within the story undercut its dramatic weight. Unlike so many of the other parts, here Clark's light hand doesn't quite do justice to the role that magic needs to play in the story, and leaves it feeling remarkably tacked on for what is, in essence, the motive force of the entire plot. And yet... I mostly couldn't bring myself to mind all that much. The character work is sufficiently compelling that it was easy to handwave in my head the course they were heading onto, rather than need it all spelled out. It's not missing, either, just a little thin, perhaps a casualty of the rather short length of the story and the greater focus (which has worked excellently) on character development. Given that it's a story that rides heavily on the strength of one character's own internal dilemma, this feels like a sacrifice that can be accepted, on the whole.

The second is more significant, but also one about which I've not quite made up my mind. For the majority of the book, the story follows a fairly linear standard structure. There are a few brief deviations into the mythic, but they are short and fairly closed off, and do not seem to say much to the shape of the story itself, rather instead to feed into the texture of it. But the ending takes something of a structural turn from all that. Clark opens up something of a wider possibility space for the shape the ending might take, and I cannot quite decide if this is a stroke of genius - leaning into the doom that has been shadowing the story the whole way to remind the reader that some stories cannot have a cleanly good ending - or a step away from that doom that undercuts some of its heft. Whichever way I find myself leaning, however, I cannot deny that the choice is an interesting one, and is one of the things that I suspect I will remember most clearly about the story when I look back to it in future. And I would rather that, I think, even if I come to a resolution that the ending does not work for me, I appreciate that it's such a distinctive stylistic and structural choice. I would always rather read a book that takes a punt than something more staid.

And I certainly couldn't call Fate's Bane that. In light sketches and deft moments of personal intimacy and turmoil, Clark has drawn out a story that manages to feel mythic and tragic, as well as with the more personal level of character work that is the best of what I like in modern story telling. It's an extremely competent novella, and one with a strong thematic core that helps give some of the lighter parts a greater narrative gravity and make it feel more than the sum of its parts. Alongside a prose voice that is distinctive while unobtrusive, and which feeds very neatly into the coherent atmosphere of this fantasy-but-slightly-historical world, the compelling chemistry and tragedy of the romance at the story's heart make this a novella well worth reading.

--

The Math

Highlights: Interesting setting with cohesive atmosphere, compelling main characters, interesting tension between duty and romance

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: C. L. Clark, Fate's Bane [Tordotcom, 2025].

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

Book Review: The Raven Key by Harper L. Carnes

Can you hope for love if your heart is filled with shadows?

Seth is a troubled high school student. His first boyfriend dumped him without saying why, and his second turned out to be a violent abuser. Maybe his newest crush, a mysterious college student with a melancholic air, will be Mr. Right? The only problem is that his crush is an adult, and Seth won't be for some months, so the legal implications of pursuing that relationship leave everyone looking bad. Choosing lust over good sense, Seth lies about his age, betting that soon enough it won't matter anyway. Spoiler: it does turn out to matter, with heartbreaking results.

But his age isn't the worst secret Seth is keeping. There's a darkness inside him, an ancient power that has remained dormant all his life. The threat he carries moved his mother to try to kill him as a child, and he's been dealing with that trauma ever since. Even with her locked away in a mental hospital, he hasn't gotten rid of the constant nightmares. Of course, he has never believed her desperate claims that he's too dangerous for this world, that the thing that lurks within him must be eliminated. He tells himself she's just hopelessly deluded. She has to be.

Still, strange events seem to follow Seth everywhere. His touch starts giving people small electric shocks. A wolf crosses his path, looking at him like it knows him from somewhere. And no matter where he goes, a flock of ravens is never far behind, watching out for anyone who dares to threaten him. He takes refuge in his new relationship to try to forget about all the weirdness, but his Tall, Dark, Handsome obviously knows more of occult matters than he's letting on, and the way his eyes gleam sometimes hints of something beyond this realm...

The Raven Key is a slow-burn romantasy that takes its sweet time to really get going, but the extended buildup is no less enjoyable than the action. For most of the first half of the book, we follow Seth taking the risk to fall in love again after some awful past attempts, and the hidden encounters with his crush are narrated with the sweetness of youthful yearning. One almost forgets this was supposed to be a fantasy story, with how much space is given to developing this growing relationship, but the author knows how to make the mundane feel compelling and meaningful. Seth just wants to be happy, despite the indelible way his mother hurt him, despite his self-doubts, despite the legally questionable choices he knows he's making. And by the story's midpoint, it almost looks like he's succeded.

But the weirdness only gets worse from there, snowballing into an unstoppable train of awful consequence after awful consequence that starts when his boyfriend finds out about his age. That part is painful enough, but at the same time the presence that lives inside Seth gains more power and starts manifesting its intentions in horrific ways, seizing more and more control over him. He needs to find where this curse came from, even if it means talking to his mother after all these years, because if he doesn't stop what's happening to him, he will lose himself completely, and the whole world will suffer.

The escalating revelations that come during the second half of the book do a good job of rewarding the reader for waiting all through the first half. The truth behind Seth's curse points to a layer of mystical phenomena underlying our reality, giving the reader the right amount of detail to satisfy this book's longstanding mysteries but leaving ample space for further secrets to be explored. The ending, however, comes too abruptly, a cliffhanger at the wrong time that makes the built-up momentum crash against the last page. It's one thing to write your book as the first in a series and leave some events unfinished; it's another to take your climactic scene and rip it with a machete. The misjudged execution of this ending is the only reason I don't give the book a higher score.

The Raven Key is written with impressively polished prose for a debut, and the thorny legal question at the center of its plot is handled with the proper care and nuance. It's clearly conceived as introducing a whole series, and the reader must be prepared for a less than conclusive ending to this first entry. Setting aside that last bit, it's a captivating story with a solidly delineated protagonist and judicious doses of worldbuilding. Recommended with minor reservations.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Reference: Carnes, Harper L. The Raven Key [self-published, 2023].

Film Review: The Parenting

Hell is other people... 's expectations.

You know how conservatives keep saying that queer people are possessed by demons? Well, the new HBO Max horror/comedy/romance film The Parenting turns the tables and argues that the actual demon is intolerance. Picture this scenario: you're nervously introducing your boyfriend to your family, hoping that they'll like each other, and all of a sudden, the loving father you've known all you life turns out to harbor a hateful spirit inside of him, one that spews homophobic slurs and even attacks your boyfriend physically. In our supposedly modern times, that's a nightmare queer people still dread. That's why a jocular title like The Parenting is quite clever: although the format of the story is that of spending a vacation weekend at a remote haunted house, this is really a movie about being terrified of your own parents. While it draws copiously from the usual tropes of the haunted house genre, as well as the meet-the-parents genre, the movie wouldn't work without the queerness element at the center of it. This is a specifically queer fear that can only be faced and overcome through queer means.

The movie starts with a prologue in the 80s, on the night the series M.A.S.H. broadcast its final episode. That's an important signpost: although it was set in the Korean War, M.A.S.H. was widely perceived as an allegory for the Vietnam War and for the heated sentiments it sparked among Americans. The end of M.A.S.H. coincides with the end of an era of countercultural experimentation and the rise, in its stead, of the conservative nightmare that still haunts the American consciousness. And in that prologue, the manifestation of that nightmare is juvenile disobedience, which of course was tied to the Satanic Panic and the cultural anxieties about the fate of the nuclear family. In a deceptively simple scene, we see a mother struggle to get her kids to come to the dinner table, only to be dragged to the underworld by something sinister. It takes the son too, and lastly, the daughter, who until that moment had been locked in her room with as-of-yet unspecified female company. It's a very subtle hint, but yes, this character is definitely queer. A possible reading, given the events that will follow, is that this specific demon is one that consumes families where someone is queer, which is why it's significant that this prologue happens in the 80s. (We learn later that said female company is the quintessential incarnation of everything Reaganites were scared of: a sexually unafraid teenager with a goth-ish/punk-ish aesthetic and pagan leanings. It's this archetypal bogeyman that brings the demon into the house, which strikes me as a fitting encapsulation of the way the conservative mind blames the culturally deviant for the hatred thrown at them.)

Fast forward to the 21st century, and we meet our actual protagonists: two young gay men, very cute, very much in love, and very nervous about the special weekend vacation they've organized for their respective families to meet for the first time. As it happens, the house they've rented is the same one from the prologue. And sure enough, after night falls, things start making strange noises. So far, so normal for a haunted house movie. Except this is too similar to the sound of, as a character puts it, "interplay." Each couple believes the other couple is doing it, and the movie extends this joke for as long as it will give. Here we get our first impression of the precise nature of this form of queer fear: telling your parents about your significant other implies making your parents aware that you are a sexual being. This is true of any pairing of orientations, but parents of straight children have the privilege of not having to imagine other forms of "interplay."

This fear reoccurs later, when one of the couple's parents, already possessed by the demon, starts throwing around the kind of hurtful remarks that people with little imagination use against queer people. And bring up the problem of having little imagination because, truly, it seems to break queerphobes's brains to think about a gay couple having a sex life. In a curious reversal, other scenes in the movie push the two young gay men to think of their parents as sexual beings, in awkward reenactments of the Freudian Urszene where children happen upon their parents' naked bodies. In themselves, these scenes are well executed jokes. But in the context of the implicit sexual humiliation that the demon inflicts on our protagonists, the choice to cast the same gaze back at the parents exposes the absurdity of the intended attack.

So how do you defeat this demon? To complete this analysis of the movie's themes, I'm going to have to spoil the ending. One of our protagonists, saddened by his father's deteriorated state, decides to invite the demon into himself and then ask his boyfriend to kill him. Let's untangle what this choice means. As I said above, the actual demon is intolerance. Inviting the demon into yourself for the purpose of taking it down with you is the movie's way of representing a case of internalized queerphobia leading to suicide. Now let's take the metaphorical eyeglasses off for a moment, because this is the core message of the movie. In the nightmare scenario where you take your boyfriend to meet your parents and they react violently, internalized queerphobia leading to suicide is one of the possible outcomes. It has happened and keeps happening in real life. Fortunately, in the movie this plan does not succeed. As our protagonists discover, the true way to destroy this demon (of intolerance) is to starve it of a human host to invade.

You shouldn't expect any new tricks from this movie, either comedy- or horror-wise. But it works. The performances are enjoyable, the leading couple has a sweet chemistry, and the dialogues ring true to the everyday dynamics of a queer family. Only a content warning is warranted for dogs that die of slapstick shenanigans during the movie. Otherwise, you'll spend a fun time laughing and/or screaming at The Parenting.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Microreview: Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend

After surviving the worst of breakups, can you ever feel human again?

The usual list of vampire superpowers happens to match pretty well with the traits of abusive partners: they manipulate your mind, drain your lifeforce, change forms between a breathtaking charmer and a furious beast, leave you empty on the inside, and lack any reflection. They're practical devices for a writer who wants to explore the ways in which the dynamics of desire and surrender can end in disaster.

The Nebula short film Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend, written by actress and philosopher Abigail Thorn, centers on a catch-up meeting over dinner between old friends: Fay, who chose to walk away from the tumultuous elite lifestyle involved in dating the literal Dracula and being part of his multinational fashion business; and Belladonna, the new girlfriend who takes a perverse pleasure in rubbing her status in Fay's face.

Except Fay can't be shamed by Belladonna's boasting. What's really happening is that Belladonna is desperate to confirm that Fay wants what she has. But Fay is past that, no longer under Dracula's spell, and hoping to shake Belladonna out of the harmful delusion she's willingly jumped into.

The tagline for Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend is "Bit people bite people," a recognizable allusion to the common refrain in trauma therapy circles, that describes the pattern by which cycles of abuse can perpetuate themselves. Here the effects of the vampiric bite are a metaphor for the lingering hurt that a victim can carry inside and sometimes inflict on others. During the dinner, Belladonna narrates with glee her adventures drinking the blood of unsuspecting strangers. Fay responds by mentioning that she's now in a healthy relationship built on respect, which Belladonna finds horrifyingly boring.

The emotional tone of the conversation is helpfully highlighted by changes in the illumination of the scene. Since this is a conversation between vampires, it's not beyond belief that the turbulent passions deployed in their clash of viewpoints would color the air around them. However, even for a film as brief as this, multiple repetitions of the same trick of lights can get tiresome.

Where the true brilliancy of the film lies isn't in its direction, but in its razor-sharp script. Thorn uses the trappings of vampire romance to comment on the many predations we bring upon each other: if we're sufficiently poisoned by inhumanity, we can drain our fellow humans of their time, or their money, or their devotion, or their labor, or their dignity. It took a massive effort for Fay to start healing from what Dracula did to her, and it's going to be at least as difficult to make Belladonna start to see the truth of her situation.

In fact, this dinner occurs at a delicate moment in Fay's new relationship, when she's just on the verge of reproducing Dracula's behavior. While Belladonna needs what Fay has to say about knowing when to escape from a toxic partner, Fay also needs to hear herself say it before she becomes what she struggled so hard to leave behind.

There's a conversation near the end, which on a superficial level may seem unrelated to the story, but which actually summarizes its theme. Fay explains her newly acquired smoking habit by enumerating the important moments in her day that are connected to each cigarette. When put like that, it has nothing to do with Dracula. But what the script is doing here is to repackage the strangeness of a supernatural premise and translate it into terms that human viewers can relate to. Cigarettes will eventually kill you, but they feel so good right now. Just like a lover that you know isn't good for you, that you know will break you into pieces, but for whose momentary delights you keep shutting down the part of your mind that screams warnings at you.

Dracula himself doesn't even make an appearance, but his dark shadow dominates the entire plot. It's amazing how a film made of just half an hour of dialogue can contain so much meaning, so much raw intensity. This short is a slap in the face by a well-meaning friend. It's a much-needed dose of tough love. It's a blunt reminder that we can turn into our own worst enemies when we get addicted to lying to ourselves.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Book Review: Queen B by Juno Dawson

Returning to the world of HMRC for a Tudor throwback with a witchy, lesbian twist

Anne Boleyn, historically accused of witchcraft—what if she really was a witch? I mean, you're not getting points for the originality of the premise, but I can't say I'm not interested. The eponymous Queen B exists in the background of the existing two HMRC novels as the progenitor of what grows into a national, official coven, and this novella purports to give us the beginnings of it all.

And it does well... kinda?

We are not following Anne for this story. Instead, we begin with the perspective of one of her ladies-in-waiting, her closest companions, her coven, watching as the swordsman takes her head. The narrative then jumps backwards and forwards in time between the year of her death and the time, a few years earlier, when she prepared to ascend the throne, and her brief time on it, all from the perspective of Grace Fairfax, transplanted Yorkshire girl, lesbian and witch. Because we couldn't stray too far from the métier of the original two novels, after all. Grace has the proximity to give us an intimate view into Anne's life and goals, trying to get a witch onto the throne of England to make life better for all her sisters in the process, as well as an emotionally invested view into the aftermath of her death—what this means both for the witches of England and for those who were closest to Anne herself. This ultimately leads to some events that in some ways prefigure the world we come to know in Dawson's novels.

But don't go in expecting a story about the creation of an official bureau of magic. This isn't that. This is, instead, a much messier, more personal story about love and people, and wanting and betrayal. It's about the risks people take, the lies they tell themselves, and the things that matter enough to them that they will make terrible choices to get them. Also, lesbian witches. Plenty of that.

As it happens, that's exactly the sort of story I like, so I was very happy reading this. Grace is a great narrative viewpoint character, occupying a half-in/half-out position with the royal household, thus giving us a way to evaluate the events of the story with a slightly more objective eye while still being invested in them. And by god is she invested. We get a good bit of rage, as well as some more complex emotional moments from her, and if nothing else, the woman doesn't go by halves, which is great fun to read.

But despite not being the protagonist or a viewpoint, it's the characterisation of Anne herself, occupying the edges of the narrative, that is the most striking. Obviously Anne Boleyn is a much covered fiction staple—her position in English history, her relationship with Henry and his break from the Catholic church, her ultimate end, all serve to make her a fascinating, shifting character onto whom a number of takes can be projected to suit the narrative need. Temptress, victim, political machinatrix, religious reformer, pawn—all available angles to take, all options explored in fiction already. But Dawson chooses simply to make her... messy. Which I'm absolutely sure has been done before as well, but it's the first time I'm reading it and I rather like it.

Dawson's Boleyn is compelling, charismatic and political, yes, but she's also someone whose motivations and ambitions are a little opaque, even to her. Possibly (probably?) she is lying to herself. The options are left open to interpretation by the reader, but what we are definitively given is a person, someone who exists as more than one thing to more than one of the people around her, and does not do it flawlessly. Someone whose perfection is only in the eye of the ones who love her more than they see her, for a time. We also see her exclusively through the people around her, and her own legacy-making—half of the story exists once she has already gone away, and some of it through what she has left behind, the words spoken to friends and lovers, letters hidden, gifts bequeathed. For a story not told from Anne's perspective, it does an awful lot of interesting centring of her, her interests, her propagandising and her failings.

Particularly interesting is that it does all of that, all of that focus on Anne, her wants and her machinations, while at the same time almost entirely sidelining Henry as both a character and a narrative force. He exists off to one side, reported on, creating change, but rarely spoken of directly or the focus of discussion. And even for the stories that centre Anne elsewhere, this is incredibly rare—as with all of the wives of Henry VIII, her entire narrative is conveyed to us now through the lens of her relationship with the king.

I have mixed feelings about this, as a choice? On the one hand, I deeply appreciate the narrative detaching the story of a really quite famous and interesting woman from the male framing and focus she receives in almost all tellings. More stories of people who get to exist outside of their status as wives, mothers, siblings and daughters of the powerful men of history, please. But at the same time, the story is deeply interested in a lot of things that were going on because of Henry. Anne's death is extremely central, as is the impending coronation and installation of Jane Seymour as her successor. For the women who are telling this story, Henry is an important motive force in their lives. He is the architect of the seismic changes in the world they live in, and will be again. To ignore his presence in the story renders its telling a little strange. We see the ripples in the pond, but never the stone that made them, and I wonder if the story would be less effective if it did not rest on the assumption of knowledge on the part of the reader—is this story less well told for someone not familiar with this bit of British history?

Then again, for all that those dramatic ripples shape the story, they are not the substance of it, and perhaps it truly does not matter—maybe the knowledge of things works against me, distracting me from what is on the page and back to the conventional narrative? Who knows.

In any case, this is a story that lives in the empty spaces, the rooms of women in a court of men, the relationships between women in a world whose documentary evidence largely ignores them, and aside from any concerns about narrative framing, that is wonderful. The moments that focus on the relationship —romantic, in case that wasn't already abundantly obvious from the blurb— between Grace and Anne are few, but nonetheless moving. Dawson has a knack of capturing moments, little frames of view that work as vignettes, as if we're seeing fond or closely guarded memories, sectioned off from the world around them. In those moments, we can clearly see the foundations of Anne and Grace's affections, as well as the faultlines, and they give us a great deal more insight into both characters as much through implication as by actually showing.

What is likewise wonderful is how clearly Dawson acknowledges the limits of the perspective she's chosen. Grace, our narrator, is a noblewoman and member of the court, in the inner circle of the queen, but also someone whose beginning was... if not humble, then rather more middle class than many of her now-peers. She has enough of an eye for social disparity that, when faced with people of much poorer origins and lives through the course of the story, she gives us someone whose sympathy and understanding seems plausible. She's not one of them, but she's those few steps closer, able to exist in the space between, and mediate. And this has allowed Dawson, though briefly, to do some very necessary acknowledgment that, while the problems the witches the story follows are serious and significant, impacting them all deeply and emotionally, at the same time they are living charmed, gilded existences, and their oppression as women and witches exists on a spectrum that continues well past them. This is a story about a Tudor royal court with commoners in it fully willing to speak up for themselves, to name the hypocrisy of the wealthy, noble women and look it straight in the eye.

But it is a novella, so the space for such things is brief. Good, well managed, pleasingly blunt, but brief.

Likewise, Dawson does not go into great depth, but there are glimmers of a very well handled approach to religious belief and witch-hunting in a story that could very easily have leaned into an easy good guy/bad guy approach. We see witch-hunting and the religious fervour underlying it used both cynically and entirely in earnest, by different groups of people with different aims, and understand that for every person using it as an excuse to squash such female power as could survive in the world of 16th-century England, there is another who truly believes that his actions follow the will and mandate of god himself.

Warlocks, too, get an interesting complexity. We have met them in the series' novels previously—typically less powerful than their female counterparts, sometimes resentful of this difference, but fundamentally under the same umbrella of magical ability, if separate in hierarchy. Here we see them before that union, men existing in an explicitly and intensely patriarchal system, using their social superiority in opposition to the witches' magical one. And then again this is unbalanced by class hierarchy—a noble woman witch and a common man warlock exist in extremely interesting dynamics of shifting power in different contexts, and it's a space Dawson is very happy to play in. This is possibly my major criticism of the story; I wanted to see more of this. The narrative is at its best when it plays with the messy social and power systems it has created, but we simply do not spend the time with them to truly explore what they mean to the people living under them. It makes sense: the novella is a novella because the linear story, the set of actions it follows are fairly simple and brief. Extending it would risk wallowing and soggy pacing. But there is so much in what Dawson has created that is fascinating and unusual that I nonetheless wish there had been more story to tell, just to give us the time to spend here.

But it's not, alas, the book we are given. What we do get —an emotionally engaging, historically interesting little snippet into the history of the world of the HMRC books— is still extremely enjoyable. It's a book that's easy to consume in a single sitting, a narrator it's easy to sympathise with, understand and root for, even as she makes decisions the reader may not agree with, and a little insight into how the world of HMRC came to be. If we imagine them as an alternative history, this is in many ways simply a story of the branching-off point, the slight difference that leads to the dramatically different present.

And that's neat. Is it a great deal more than neat? Of that I'm less sure. But if you go in with your expectations set, knowing it's a window into a short period of time, an implication of what's to come after, rather than a thorough explanation, it is very easy to have a great time with it and see some interesting storytelling choices while doing so.

The Math

Highlights: Genuinely interesting choices in depicting Anne Boleyn; brief glimmers of some cool intersectionality; fun backstory and worldbuilding to the existing books

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Dawson, Juno. Queen B [HarperVia, 2024].

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

Review: All the Hidden Paths by Foz Meadows

Treading similar political and emotional ground to the first story, and defying narrative conventions to remind us that people are fundamentally people, and that change is an incremental thing.

The sequel to A Strange and Stubborn Endurance, where nobleman Vel is sent to marry across the border, but on the eve of the move is discovered in flagrante with his - male - lover, and so goes to marry the brother of the intended betrothed (and political shenanigans ensue), All the Hidden Paths sees the same protagonists (and a bonus third) head deeper into Tithena, and its politics, as they are called to the capital. There, they must discover who's been trying to attack them and why, as well as hope their fledgling relationship can stand up to these new stresses, as well as the lingering hurts of the first book.

I've seen a number of reviews discuss this book, and highlight specifically what they consider a flaw - that the story "artificially" recreates some of the parameters of the first book so we can essentially redo the same plot and the same character dynamics over again, rather than have to take things in a new direction. However, I disagree.

At the end of the first book, our protagonists are married and have feelings for each other, but have known each other only a handful of weeks. There is camaraderie, lust, fellowship and romance, yes... but there's not a longstanding relationship and trust and reliance. They care for each other, they want each other and they want to work together for the good of their marriage and their situation. But they don't know each other, not fully. And this is much of the crux of the second book, and of the issues many reviews I've seen have had with it. Because this lack of knowledge that Foz Meadows takes such pains to remind us of, leads them to doubt. Not the good intentions of their husband, no, but the strength of their still-new relationship. Of course they have doubts! One of the two protagonists, Vel, is brilliantly portrayed in the first book as having pretty severe anxiety. Of course he's worried his husband is going to find him annoying, or care about other things ahead of him. Of course he's worried that his lack of grasp of the politics of the country he's only just moved to is going to hinder them. It's who we've consistently been told he is, and honestly, they're perfectly reasonable doubts to have in the circumstances. Yes, they leave us with a reiteration of the dynamic of "oh god am I annoying Cae? He's going to get sick of my bullshit isn't he?". But to me, this is a strength. Just because they won in the end of the first story and are married and fancy the heck out of each other doesn't magically solve trauma and anxiety and self-esteem issues and the longstanding habits of existing in a culture where gayness is extremely taboo and so any relationships are fleeting and secret and dangerous and desperately fragile things. One hot guy from a culture that's a bit more open is not a panacaea, nor should it be, and it is, in my opinion, a great strength of the book that Meadows has not caved to the narrative inertia to make it so.

The other great part of this is giving us a new character from Vel's home country, and another gay, aristocratic man at that. In Asrien, we have someone whom we might assume, from his identical context, would approach things in a similar way to Vel - would have the same fasciation with Tithenai culture, the same disdain for their shared Ralian mores and homeland. But he doesn't. Despite all that his country does and thinks about people like him, Asrien cares about it. He prefers the food. He disparages Tithena and its way of doing things in moments he thinks he can do so. He hates what it has done to him, but doesn't hate it, and has not quite left it behind, in sharp contrast to Vel's wholehearted embrace of his new home.

Because we have Vel and a Tithenai man as our primary viewpoint characters, this attitude isn't taken well, but when you fit it into the broader context of the story, and of Asrien's behaviour and backstory, it's really well done, and a source of great sympathy for his character from the reader. Much like his approach to trauma and anxiety, Meadows has done a really great job of giving us the multifaceted nuance and complexity of how someone oppressed by their culture can feel all sorts of ways about it, no matter how inconsistent or illogical they may seem to someone on the outside. He gets that feelings are feelings and people are people, and consistently shows us that in all its variety.

With these two points, there's a lot of strength to the book to compare to the first - people, personalities and interpersonal relationships are always beautifully crafted and nuanced. Beyond that, Meadows has a fantastic way with descriptions, especially of food (I have some intensely clear ideas of what Tithenai food is like and I want to eat all of it) and of fashion. We always know what Vel, Asrien and Cae are wearing, its colour and texture and cut and not only does it make the novel deeply visual, but it adds to the characterisation. Vel particularly clearly thinks about fashion, and when we have his viewpoint telling us about it, it shows us more of him, more of how he looks at the world around him and presents himself in it, and more of how the culture of the world presents itself. It's unusual for a story to have such a neat grasp of fashion as social language, and there's a really great moment - only a snippet really - where Vel wonders what to wear to a foreign court he's never been to, how he makes the impression they need to make, and in that tiny bit of discussion we get a whole swathe of... not even context, but just the acknowledgement that the context exists, even if our characters don't even know it themselves. And I love it. I love subtle, thoughtful worldbuilding like this, and it's been an absolute strength in both books.

And, building on that in something not quite so present in the first - in All the Hidden Paths we do get some critique of Tithena, that felt, by that point, much needed. Cae loves his country and Vel has thrown himself into his adopted homeland in exile (understandably), and so in both of their views, it's been very easy to see it as a perfect, equalitarian utopia. But nothing is ever so perfect, and people are always people, and in showing us the internal politics of the court of the capital, Meadows has done some great work undercutting that perfection without completely bursting the bubble. We still understand why Vel likes it, why Cae cares about his home, but we begin to see the odd crack appearing, and revealing it to be just as realistic-feeling a country as the far more flawed Ralia.

Alas, not everything can be perfect though. While the world-building and culture-crafting is impeccable, the politics leave something to be desired. There's a lot going on in the last third of the book - and a lot of players we've never met before - and there's simply not enough time to get to know everyone and everything necessary to feel emotionally connected to it all. The shenanigans make sense on a logical level, the solution is comprehensible, but they don't have the gutpunch that the ending of the first book did, simply because we've not had enough time getting to know all the players to really care about them, outside of our viewpoints characters.

Some of this is simply a pacing issue - a huge early chunk of the book is spent on the road with not a great deal happening (beyond some perfectly decent character work for Vel and Cae and some dangerous occurrences), and so when we flip to court politics, there's a big tone shift and pace shift, and there's just not enough book to accommodate everything we need at the speed we might need it. But beyond that, the court politics is just much less close to our main characters - geographically and emotionally. It's not their home town, their family, their closest people anymore, and we feel that as the reader in how the characters approach the problems... and we feel the lack. We're just not invested in the same way. There's a lot of potential in what's there, but without the feeling to go with it, it just rings a little hollow by the ending. If we could have just spent a little bit longer, and known the people involved a little bit better, it could have been really wonderful.

There are also a few small but niggling unresolved threads throughout, things that were hinted at and then never picked up on. A character is remarked upon as strange several times, another character tells us that if we don't know they're not going to say it aloud... and then... nothing. Don't leave us hanging like this Foz! Another character is looked for, has their absence noted, is sought for by some, but never turns up and their absence again feels just a little odd. Is there going to be a sequel? Are these things we'll learn more about then? I don't know! I don't mind hints that stretch across books, but they have to feel like things that might get resolved, rather than just forgotten threads never quite tied off, and at the moment, all the ones I noticed felt like the latter.

That said, while there are flaws, they don't ultimately get in the way of what is, at its core, a story very truly about people in the best way possible. It's not quite as impactful or as bittersweet as A Strange and Stubborn Endurance but nonetheless All the Hidden Paths is also a story about healing and personal change in the wake of both acute tragedy and the long term harms of a stifling, oppressive culture. Its strength lies in how authentically Meadows portrays this, and how humanly - it's so easy to feel deeply for both protagonists, and even more so than its predecessor for Cae, who now has his own hurts from the events of that story. If you loved the characters in the first book and want to see them continue to struggle and grow together, the sequel is fulfilling and worthwhile, and I harbour a hope that there will be a third book to tie off all the loose ends, and give a fully satisfying series the close it deserves.

--

The Math

Highlights: authentic approach to mental health and personal growth, two main characters who are both absolute numpties in the best possible way, some really beautifully described fantasy fashion

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: Foz Meadows, All the Hidden Paths [Tor, 2023]

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