Book Microreview: Open Sorcery by Rob Sheely

The concept is fantastical, but the execution does not compute

In Open Sorcery we’re introduced to a world where history proceeded exactly as in ours until the early 20th century, when it was discovered that engraving microscopic symbols on gemstones could work magic. The catch is that arranging those symbols in a useful sequence follows extremely complex rules of grammar, so by the 1920s an entire industry of prestidigital composition has emerged, which ends up looking pretty much like the real world’s software industry. In this setting, magic needs programming languages, and painstaking debugging, and antivirus wards, and user-friendly interfaces, and periodic system updates, and intellectual property laws, and the heroic abnegation of help desks. Spellbooks serve the same function as personal computers, and sticking gemstones on a book’s spine works like inserting a flash drive to load its contents. Of course, the formatting in the gemstone needs to be compatible with the spellbook’s operating system. If you want a net connection, you need to attach a gold thread from your spellbook to a ley line, unless your spellbook happens to be wireless-capable. And if your spells somehow fail to load, the universally recommended first step is to turn your spellbook off and back on.

Open Sorcery is a frustrating read. Half of the time, it feels like it’s building up to a clever satire of the small everyday annoyances of modern life, but the other half of the time, it feels like the story is a pretext for the author to settle very specific grievances with the software industry with the names changed: marketing executives who overpromise, clients who don’t understand what they’re asking of programmers, middle managers who make their insecurities everybody else’s problem, a workplace culture that has normalized casual abuse and ritual hazing, abusive monopolies, mealy-mouthed PR fixers, invasive advertising, and all the other usual charms that come from the intersection of a creative profession with corporate bean-counting. Paradoxically, the novel’s description of how magic has integrated itself into people’s daily routine resembles real life’s digital oversaturation in such detail that its world ends up feeling just like ours, and the sense of fantasy gets lost in the process. Mentally replace every “spell weaver” with “graphic interface designer,” “wrist amulet” with “smartphone,” “bubble of isolation” with “firewall,” “rhyming verse” with “line of code,” or “binding” with “compiling,” and you’ll get an idea of how the world’s logic works.

The novel shows it was written with genuine enthusiasm, because its gimmick is undeniably original and funny, but the author is more acquainted with the minutiae of software programming than with the current trends in the fantasy genre. In the software studio magic house where most of the action happens, the appallingly toxic mistreatment of an unpaid intern is treated like a venerable tradition of every programmer’s career, and his senior colleagues seem to have never heard of worker solidarity. At one point we learn that enchanted gemstones can be directly plugged to the human body as a nasty form of substance abuse, and the plot has zero compassion for the addicted. The female characters have no personality (the only exceptions are Seductress, Caretaker and Nag), and one main character’s tragic backstory amounts to Fridged Wife. And the villain’s plan, which is basically your classic cyberpunk rebellion against the big tech monopolies, is flatly dismissed as extremist without further discussion. Overall this is a heavily conservative story, where the heroes are eager to preserve a status quo that couldn’t be more obviously broken. This is a version of the 1920s with the life-changing technological wonders of the 2020s but somehow the same social attitudes of the 1920s. It’s a pity, because I’m a big fan of magic systems with rules, but this is a case where the author gave too much thought to the concept and not enough to creating a world that feels alive, or characters worth rooting for, or a story with awareness of its own themes and a stance to take on them.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

Reference: Sheely, Rob. Open Sorcery [Ferret Godmother Press, 2022].

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

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.

TV Review: Talamasca

The world’s most clueless spy, working for the world’s most ineffective spy agency… what could go wrong?

Our guy has a problem: his name is Guy. This show’s lack of imagination only gets worse from there.

Guy has another problem: he can hear other people’s thoughts, but the universe conspires to put him in the presence of either so many people that telepathy is too painful to use, or one person who is specially trained or magically gifted to resist it, so he’s that supremely irritating type of protagonist who has an awesome superpower that is of no use ever.

As it turns out, Guy’s life has been watched and orchestrated by the secret order of the Talamasca, who recruit people like him to keep tabs on the hidden supernatural world. The theory is that collecting data on vampires, witches, ghosts and demons (the series is set in the same universe as Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches) will help normal humans keep a reasonably peaceful life alongside so many warring superhuman factions. The reality is that the magical police is incapable of keeping its own house in order and its hierarchy is a tangled mess of betrayal and backstabbing enabled by jaw-dropping incompetence.

Welcome to the worst spy agency I’ve seen since Get Smart.

Our guy Guy is played by a too distracting Nicholas Denton, who, in fairness, isn’t to blame for looking so much like the spitting image of Eddie Redmayne that one forgets to listen to what he’s saying—not that he has much to comment on, what with the absurd level of secrecy his boss likes to maintain. Said boss, who goes by Helen, is a veteran spy and a master of the art of posing dramatically and giving a knowing smile as a substitute for having anything useful to say.

Helen has been the one in charge of steering Guy’s life from behind the scenes, preparing him for the right time to recruit his psychic talents in the neverending mission of keeping humankind safe. Nevermind that she never does anything to earn Guy’s trust; every one of his questions gets slammed down with the promise that all will be revealed in due time, which I guess is intended to be in the middle of season 4.

Because there’s apparently an urgent crisis going on, Helen gives Guy a crash course in spycraft (inexplicably, the course doesn’t include a lesson on “Don’t Read Your Spy Textbook in Public Transportation”), and sends him on his own across the pond to listen to the thoughts of a powerful vampire who has infiltrated the British branch of the Talamasca. On his first day in London, Guy fails at basic spying and hooks up with the first woman who makes eyes at him. One has to wonder why the spy textbook didn’t cover this kind of scenario.

Guy is supposed to be provided with a mentor/handler, who is alarmingly absent during most of the mission, and when it’s finally time to go looking for the big bad vampire, Helen refuses to make any plan. She basically tells him, “You’re smarter than any plan I could give you. You’ll think of something.” With this dismal neglect from his superiors, it’s no wonder that he turns against the Talamasca at the first opportunity.

Even before that, he seems to devote more effort to spying on his boss than on the vampire. He has valid reasons to resent the ways the Talamasca has meddled in his life since childhood, and when he discovers that his mother was also some form of spy, and that she and the agency parted ways in bad terms, any hope of retaining his loyalty is lost. But the side he chooses instead cares even less for his personal gripes, his lack of experience, or his continued existence. At times I wondered whether this series was supposed to be a comedy, because Guy speedruns through one disastrously bad choice after another, somehow making it way past the point where he should have already been dismembered by vampires several times.

The show’s aim appears pointed at feeling mysterious rather than narrating a mystery. We’re told that the magic police has vast resources, but when they task a complete noob with undoing a vampire conspiracy, they don’t equip him with as much as a cove of garlic. We’re told that the world has vampires, witches, ghosts and demons, but we only ever see vampires, and in the rare scenes that feature a witch coven, they don’t do anything particularly witchy, so they may as well be a hippie commune. We’re told that the order is ancient and has tentacles everywhere, but across the season we meet at most the same half dozen top operatives, which gives the impression that we’re watching a school play with zero budget.

As for the mystery of the season, it’s admittedly a clever one, but getting there is an ordeal, even with just six episodes. Someone has destroyed the centuries-old archives of the Dutch branch of the Talamasca, which should severely cripple the order’s ability to keep tabs on the supernatural world, but we don’t see any serious consequence. Out of earshot of her colleagues, Helen has been searching for something called The 752, which sounds like the name of a chemical weapon, or a model of missile, or a limited edition comic book. Whatever it is, it has immense power, so it must not fall into the wrong yadda yadda, or else the world will yadda yadda. And it just so happens that the person closest to finding it is the same vampire our guy Guy has to follow. Neat!

Oh, have I already mentioned that the season’s two-part premiere has not one but two fridged women? You know, for extra drama.

I haven’t watched the TV adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, but the praise I’ve heard about it has been consistently enthusiastic. This spinoff, on top of being mediocre on its own merits, does a shameful disservice to a beloved story.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

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].

Book Review: No Sympathy by Eóin Dooley

On using magic to slip away

Theo is a man who is almost invisible. He is couch-surfing with people he vaguely considers his friends in Berlin after leaving secondary school in disgrace in England. He does everything in his power to avoid calling himself ‘homeless,’ although after a certain point there is no other way to put it. He is rambling through the streets of Berlin in the middle of the night, looking for a place to sleep, when he stumbles through a hole in reality and winds up in Shenzhen, in China’s Guangdong province not far from Hong Kong. Deeply confused, he meets a man named Gabriel who tells him that he is attuned to magic, and he is attuned because he is invisible to the world, someone who is so easily forgettable. Such is the opening volley of Eóin Dooley’s novella No Sympathy, published in 2024 by Android Press.

So much of the reason why this book works is because of Theo, its main character. This is a man who is aimless, with no ties to anything, no roots anywhere. He is a man who was not able to ‘make it’ in that striving middle class sense due to an inability to truly fit in a late-stage-capitalist education system, and as such becomes invisible to ‘polite’ society. Dooley never states this, but I suspect that Theo might be best read as being neurodivergent, autistic perhaps, as he always holds the rest of the world at arm’s length. I wonder if something more traumatic is lurking in his background. It is his rootlessness that makes him really able to find a use for magic; those of us in steady jobs and with families, given the opportunity to use magic, may hesitate as it may disrupt the delicate balance that stability requires under late stage capitalism. Theo, a man with nothing that is truly his and as such has nothing left to lose, can go all the way with it.

Magic here is heavily associative; the main thing you can do in this particular universe is to teleport between two locations that are similar on some level. It is remarked by Gabriel that, unlike most depictions of magic in contemporary settings, modernity has actually been a boon for magic. The easiest way to use this power of teleportation is to jump between restrooms, or between different outlets of the same fast food joints, which happen to be in different countries. I’ve never seen magic used in a modern setting like this before and I approve.

But this comes at a cost to the user, specifically in the requirement that the wielder be unmemorable. It means you cannot really have friends. It means that you can’t have community. It condemns you to nomadism. It prevents you from ever being able to make a truly systemic change in the world. It means you cannot indulge in local cuisine, as that makes a place less interchangeable with other places, so you cannot teleport nearly as well between that place and elsewhere. Theo ends up, for a time, in a group of magicians who teleport around the world doing small acts of charity and mercy, and eventually snaps at how much this particular way of living alienates him from anything that makes life really worth living at all.

No Sympathy is a book that poses a powerful question but never really answers it - but I’m not convinced that an answer was necessary for the book to work. Indeed, the book works best as a character study of Theo, the consummate drifter. He knows he has no roots, but being in that position makes him all too cognizant of what it means to have none at all. Beyond that, there isn’t an obvious thematic throughline, an obvious stance on alienation that the book is taking, where this nomadic existence is shown with both great benefits and great costs to the nomad. Indeed, this group Theo falls in with makes it almost a monastic enterprise.

Theo asks them if they could use their powers to throw wrenches into the gears of capitalism, to do what they can to bring evil men to justice and thereby prying loose the injustice of the world. The response they give him is something Theo finds to be sanctimonious and without any commitment to the broader well-being of humanity, the magical equivalent of white American church groups that go to Africa and build poorly-constructed houses or water pumps or what have you and do it primarily for the vacation and for the Instagram photos with smiling African children in their arms. His charge is that they have used their powers to become dilettantes, which really is not all that different from those who use magic for selfish reasons.

When not reading I am a swing dancer in my spare time, and as such I have familiarity with a good deal of midcentury American popular music. This book reminds me a good deal of one particular song from the fifties that is occasionally played at swing dances: The Wanderer, written by Ernie Maresca and sung by Dion DiMucci in 1961. It’s a song that, at first, appears to be an ode to an adolescent heterosexual male fantasy of arriving in a town, bedding the local women, and going off to the next town to repeat. But, as Dion has said and Bruce Springsteen has pointed out, the key to the song is in these lines:

Well, I roam from town to town,

I got a life without a care.

And I`m as happy as a clown,

I`m with my two fists of iron but I`m going nowhere.

This is a song about loneliness, about listlessness, about rootlessness. Theo is Dion’s wanderer, but so poor that he doesn’t even have the benefit of mindless hedonism. Both Theo and the Wanderer have discovered the truth of Ubuntu, the philosophy from Southern Africa, of how a person is a person through other people. We are social animals, and as much as we may fantasize of throwing it all away, it can never truly be done without wrecking us. We may try to fill that gap with pleasure or mindless distraction or, in our world, reactionary politics, but it never works. We are all bound together.

--

Reference: Dooley, Eóin. No Sympathy [Android Press, 2024]

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

TV Review: A.A.R.O.

Come for the Paranormal Mystery of the Week, stay for the animist theodicy

To the Western viewer, likely acquainted with The X Files, Fringe, Supernatural and Evil, a show like A.A.R.O. may at first feel like another iteration of the "whodunit, but make it spooky" genre. And the limited series that's been released on Netflix goes for that vibe in its initial episodes: this is a world where people can vanish into thin air, leaving just their empty clothes and bucketfuls of blood; where breaking the shrine of a fox spirit causes a wave of mass faintings; where pieces of an airplane that's been missing for years suddenly fall to the ground out of nowhere; where a shadowy terrorist faction can't succeed at planting bombs across Tokyo because a clairvoyant keeps frustrating their plans.

So far, so standard. But as we gradually get to meet the protagonists, a jaded misanthrope who can cite the classics of Japanese mythology from memory and a wide-eyed newbie with a keen nose for asking the right questions, we discover that the plot lurking under the surface is far more alarming than the occasional unexplained anomaly. It's not just that the monsters and curses from Japanese folklore happen to be real; it's that someone has declared war on the entire spiritual realm and has been extending tentacles at every level of Japanese society. This is a world where someone has been buying mummified mermaids to harvest their flesh; where someone has been running experiments with a spell that causes unending hunger; where someone has created a sound frequency that induces suicide; where someone is scheming to put heaven and hell under new management. What begins as a series of seemingly unconnected cases for a clandestine government agency to investigate turns out to lead to a potentially world-ending conspiracy whose best chance of succeeding is the fact that humans are the worst.

That's a fortunate thing for the viewer's enjoyment, because on the purely police investigation side of the story, A.A.R.O. just isn't very well written. The quiet pleasures of meticulously following the clues and formulating logical deductions are eschewed for impossibly lucky guesses, unprompted confessions, frequent instances of literal deus ex machina, and a tsunami of melodrama that would make Candy Candy blush. Also, the plot plays an increasingly ludicrous game of "guess who's possessing whom" that abuses the bait-and-switch trick with regard to the true identity of the villain four times, including one time it does reveal the actual villain, but still tries to pretend there's a further bigger villain behind. No, this detective/mystery show doesn't stand out because of its detectives or its mysteries. It stands out because of the ideological conflict it dramatizes on the nature of evil and the redeemability of humankind in an era when we've become almost godlike with technology we're too immature for.

It's worth highlighting once more the non-Western nature of this story, because the dynamic between mortals and the supernatural is very unlike what we're used to seeing in Western fantasy. Over here, we're still under the Miltonian spell, conceiving of spiritual power as flowing in a vertical direction, which makes humans either the helpless playthings of omnipotent overlords or the blasphemous rebels who seek to punish heaven for being too harsh on this world. But in the animist mindset, spiritual power flows horizontally, because humans are no less capable than the gods of influencing events in heaven, and if anyone seeks to punish heaven, it's for being too permissive with this world. With enough discipline and study, a determined human may turn into a worthy adversary for the gods.

A.A.R.O. thus twists the formula of the paranormal procedural: this time Earth isn't a means for spiritual factions to play out their eternal battles in; it's an end in itself, where all the spirits are responsible for protecting humans, even as humans grow more and more self-conceited, cruel and treacherous. Instead of fighting demonic incarnations of evil on behalf of humans, the protagonists of A.A.R.O. fight the demonic extremes that human hubris can reach. Instead of treating the gods the way, say, the Greek epics do, as capricious tyrants to fear or to pacify, in A.A.R.O. the gods are long-suffering, overworked benefactors who can only do so much in the face of human self-destructiveness. Whereas a story like God of War treats the quest to dethrone the gods as heroic liberation, A.A.R.O. treats the quest to dethrone the gods as a sad consequence of ignorance.

A case could be made that treating the Shintō gods as the preferrable status quo gives the show a conservative bent, and it would be hard to argue against that interpretation. The story clearly leans toward blaming human hubris for the problems in the world. However, it knows to avoid the extremes of anti-humanism and binary morality. The two protagonists constantly argue for opposite sides about the worth of humans, and a key reason why the good guys (somewhat) win in the end is because a god chose to trust a human. One villain is so strongly convinced that their cause is just that they can fool another character whose superpower is to cast detect evil. Moreover, a spell that reduces a god to human status isn't treated as a profanation every time. A former god reflects on this turn of events with admirable equanimity: yes, dying as a human is horrible, but living as a human can be full of wonders.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: Coyote Run by Lilith Saintcrow

A near-future quasi-urban fantasy where the titular Coyote takes on fascists in a nearby state

Sometimes, you just need to punch fascists. That’s not quite what Coyote’s job is, but you might call it a happy side benefit. In a near-future broken and remixed North America, Coyote lives in Federal Mexico. Among other odd jobs she does to make a living (including some light thievery), she works to get people and things across the border into, or out of, the breakaway state next door: Neo-Texas, a.k.a. Lindyland. It’s not the most pleasant of neighbors; it’s in fact a straight up fascist state, complete with a blond-haired blue-eyed army of clones. But when Marge, a top flight mechanic, hires Coyote to get across the border and rescue her sister, she realizes that all paths are leading back to Distarritz, a prison facility especially designed for people like Marge’s sister... and for Coyote. For, you see, Coyote isn’t just an ordinary smuggler and border crosser. She is, in fact, a shapeshifter... and once was a prisoner in Distarritz herself.

The story of Coyote and Marge is the story of Coyote Run by Lilith Saintcrow.

Coyote, our protagonist and point of view character, is tough as nails, living close to the border between Federated Mexico and Lindyland. This near-future North America is broken in many ways, but Coyote is holding on by her nails. In the wake of civil wars, plagues, and the emergence (or possibly re-emergence) of real-life shapeshifters into the world, Coyote is, in fact, a shifter of her namesake. She’s a survivor, a scavenger, and mostly a loner. The author has a lot of fun exploring the consequences and nature of shapeshifting in her main character, as well as giving us looks at other shifters in the course of the novel. Coyote does not have a comfortable life, but she’s doing okay. Certainly better than she would over in Lindyland. Shifters like her don’t have it easy anywhere.

Or shifters such as Marge. Saintcrow has another lot of fun with her second protagonist, giving her to us on a plate for us to figure out things about the world, and giving us a puzzle to work on as we follow Coyote’s story. Marge is by nature a character whom the reader can warm to immediately, and over time, the loner and grumpy Coyote can warm up to as well. One could even say that the character arc of this novel is Coyote learning that she doesn’t have to oppose fascists and bedevil Lindyland all on her own.

As opposed to Coyote being a tough loner who punches fascists, Marge is a tinkerer, a builder, a creator. She may not get her hands as dirty as Coyote in fighting fascists directly, but she definitely wants to hurt the fash any way she can. We get an excellent bit of characterization that really establishes her character when, as part of her upfront payment to Coyote for the job of rescuing her sister, she lovingly fixes and repairs to operational status Coyote’s illegally obtained military robot, DONQ-E42 (better known as Chicken).

Saintcrow also gives us a number of interesting secondary characters, ranging from other prisoners at Distarritz that Coyote encounters on her mission to free Marge’s sister, to a pack of werewolves, and of course the Lindyland antagonists. While the fascists are there in the end to be punched, they are detailed and described well enough so that one can visualize, and cheer, when Coyote does what she does best. This is an excellently inhabited and populated world, helping set the table for the setting.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about the worldbuilding, shall we? This is a relatively tight and localized story, taking place in a border town, the badlands across the border and the ferociously evil prisoner camp. But we get dollops of information leavened in, as much as Coyote knows, anyway, about why and how shapeshifters are back or just emerged, as well as the geopolitical situation. It’s a lean and mean worldbuilding—I have no idea what happened in this novel to what was the east half of the United States; it never comes up. We have Lindyland, the Federated Mexico, and mentions of things like Cascadia and Transcanada. On a more grounded level, we have all sorts of speculative worldbuilding on technology in this endless civil war, but it all feels grounded as an extension of the present. This might not be twenty minutes into the future, but it certainly could be two hours.

And I did mention punching fascists? This is a novel that unapologetically puts its politics on its shirt sleeve, and then puts that politics into practice. There appears, having read a bunch of her novels, to be a couple of “gears” to the various kinds of writing Saintcrow has done. You can get the patient slow burn of works such as A Flame in the North, which build like a thunderhead toward their conclusion, with occasional lightning strikes along the way. And then there are her novels which launch hard so the reader simply has to try and hold on.

In Coyote Run, Saintcrow has elected the latter approach. The result is a balls to the wall, pedal beyond the metal and into the next level story that grabs from the word go and does not let up till the finale. The action moves quickly and briskly, only pausing when it needs to for our characters, and the reader, to catch their breath. This is a novel designed for page-turning, fast-paced entertaining reading. This is the kind of book you read on your lunch break and curse when your lunch timer goes off and you have to clock back to your job, because you are having too much damned fun reading it.

And that is where the book lands for me. This is an intensely fun, kinetic, potent read where fascists are there to be opposed and punched. Or sometimes run over. Or shot. You get the picture. Is it a crazy and dangerous plan that Coyote has, with danger and high stakes? You bet. Are you cheering for Coyote and Marge the whole way? Absolutely yes. As an early book out of the gate for Kevin Hearne’s Horned Lark Press, Lilith Saintcrow’s Coyote Run starts off with a crowd-pleasing bang. Come for the punching fascists, stay for the strong characterization, rich worldbuilding and intense action beats.

Highlights:

• Punching fascists for fun and profit.
• Excellent pair of main characters
• Fun and kinetic writing keep the pages turning.

Reference: Saintcrow, Lilith. Coyote Run [Horned Lark Press, 2025].

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

Film Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Not so much beating an undead horse, more like apathetically poking it with a stick

In case the term "revival" wasn't suggestive enough, the ongoing sequelitis in the moviemaking world has many times been compared to unabashed necromancy. Although sequels to 1988's Beetlejuice were attempted a number of times, the capricious stars that preside over Hollywood refused to align until this century. The result is undeniably funny, but at the lowest-effort level. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice recycles many of the original's jokes and even copies its method of defeating the villain, and the new material it introduces is so underutilized that one wonders what's the point of having it in the movie.

When we first met the titular trickster ghost, he was a fearsome presence, menacing and treacherous. His day job was to terrorize the living, and his driving motivation was to escape the afterlife and enter our world permanently. In the sequel, his menace factor has been disappointingly defanged. No longer an irreverent troublemaker, he's now a businessman on friendly terms with the ghost police. In other words, he's become exactly the type of comfortable bourgeois that the first movie delighted in mocking. And the script gives him a decades-long obsession with the girl he tried to marry, which is a grave misunderstanding of his character. His attempted marriage to a human girl was merely a means to an end. This movie not only says that he still wants to marry her, but makes it his central goal, a plot point that ends up being key to him becoming exactly what he should never be: the hero who saves the day.

(The script pretends that the actual hero is Jenna Ortega's character, but it's Beetlejuice who fixes the big problem the movie centers on, although he does it very quickly and with little emotional impact, while Ortega's character gets a grand, dramatic, climactic moment for an action of negligible consequence, right before she gets a small, undramatic moment for a much more important one. I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum: the first action is to incur near-lethal danger to save Beetlejuice from a punishment he probably deserves, and the second action is to quote a legal technicality to save her mother from eternal agony. This movie is very confused about which stakes we should care about.)

Instead of the sharp-witted, opinionated girl we all had a crush on in the first Beetlejuice, adult Lydia Deetz is an anxious mess with a selective color-blindness to red flags. Her character comes off as so passive, so fragile, so easy to manipulate and so scared of everything that at times I wondered whether Winona Ryder had gotten confused and thought she was playing Joyce Byers from Stranger Things.

Speaking of badly written female characters, Monica Bellucci got a terrible deal out of this movie. She's given a fascinating backstory, impressive makeup, scary superpowers, several scenes of escalating setup, and then she's dispatched without a thought. She may as well not have been in the movie. The same confusing choice is made with Willem Dafoe's character, who, given the events of the plot, would be expected to play a pivotal part, but he's reduced to a recurring joke that gets tiresome the first time and ultimately has no effect on the story. These two characters are very good concepts that would have been better used in a different movie. Here, they just occupy space.

And then we get to Jenna Ortega's character, whose arc reveals the scriptwriters's biggest mistake: they treat Lydia's antipathy toward her shallow, greedy stepmother as a phase she had to outgrow, so they write Lydia's daughter as having the same relationship with her. This gives the movie a conservative vibe: parents are always right, kids had better listen, and rebelliousness is foolish. All of young Lydia's edginess has been meticulously sandpapered.

This is a pity, because the relationship between Lydia and her daughter is the emotional pillar that sustains the whole movie. At its core, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is about a mother and a daughter who desperately wish to connect but don't know how, and finally get the push they need when they're each targeted by social predators. In a better version of this movie, the characters played by Bellucci (a spiritual parasite with a long trail of victims) and Dafoe (a poser in a role he can't play convincingly) should have provided thematic resonance to the dangers that Lydia and her daughter face in the human world, but, as I said above, they're barely there.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice makes up for all its faults with genuinely funny absurdity. But one misses the acerbic critique of its predecessor (Beetlejuice shares with Ghostbusters the brilliant premise of a group of jaded New Yorkers whose first impulse upon discovering that the paranormal is real is to monetize it). Michael Keaton's character is reduced to a family-friendly echo of his former, funnier self. But the worst choice in this movie is to add to the postmortem hellscape of eternal bureaucracy a next realm of blissful rest. I'm reminded of the 1975 season of Tom & Jerry, where the mortal enemies were rewritten as adventuring partners. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice waters down precisely the parts that were interesting about the original. There's a bit of unintentional irony in the fact that this movie contains a line that makes fun of Disney, even though it follows the same Disney modus operandi of sanitizing a scary world to render it inoffensive. Like its titular character, this movie is exactly the thing it pretends to criticize.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Film Review: Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person

We can sometimes feel broken, until we meet someone whose broken pieces fit ours perfectly

I promise you, a very brief tangent about Doctor Who is relevant here.

Last week, Doctor Who aired the episode "Rogue," where the Doctor meets a charming bounty hunter at a posh gala ball. As part of the plan they devise to lure out the Monster of the Week, the two men dance in public view of the easily scandalizable guests. Commenting on this scene in her video review of this episode, Jessie Earl praised the scriptwriters' choice to have queer characters take control of the dynamic of marginalization and weaponize it in their own favor. Coming up with a way to turn an element of your oppression into a tool you can wield against your oppressors is greatly empowering.

I was reminded of that interpretation while watching the Canadian dark comedy film Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person.

Our protagonist is Sasha, a vampire girl who cannot hunt for victims because she's unusually empathetic for her kind. She absolutely needs human blood to survive, but watching her fellow vampires kill for their meals has always been too shocking to imitate. The way of life that defines her family feels cruel to her, and for her entire life she's depended on her parents' supply of human blood. However, when her parents decide that she's old enough to feed herself, she faces a serious dilemma: how can she avoid starvation when she can't bring herself to kill anyone?

This premise is very interesting at the literal level, but it's even more so when one reads the emotional currents that course underneath. Sasha's family situation is heavily coded with the signifiers of transgenerational abuse. Remove the vampire trappings of the movie, and what remains plain in sight is that matter-of-fact cruelty has been normalized at her home, and her parents actively pressure her to reproduce the same cruelty. Her principled refusal to comply and her determination to find a way to live without more violence resemble the inner process survivors of emotional abuse undergo when they decide to break the cycle.

Her yearning to define herself in her own terms finds its outlet when she meets Paul, a depressed teenager whose experience with intense bullying has driven him to suicidal intent. Again, at the literal level, there's plenty of morbid humor to extract from the absurd encounter of an obligate predator and an all too willing victim. But in terms of emotional content, what's going on here is the forging of a mutually supportive bond between two abuse survivors who discover that their respective weaknesses can make each other stronger. To refer back to Jessie Earl's video, the specific ways they've been mistreated happen to equip them to be each other's best support.

In trauma recovery it's common to hear the refrain "Hurt people hurt people." But hurt people can also empathize with the hurt that others have gone through. To be clear, the movie's plot is not aspirational. No abused person should have to rely on the coping strategies that emerge from living in permanent crisis mode. But it's a positive change when they find that they can. The close friendship that forms between Sasha and Paul is an extremely anomalous solution to extremely anomalous circumstances. He gives her a way she can satisfy her needs without becoming a monster like her parents, and she gives him a way to find purpose outside of the harmful environment he's been so far limited to.

Spoiler alert: Paul's journey doesn't result in suicide. At the end of every "I don't want to live" is an asterisk that points to the footnote "… like this." The director-writer duo of Ariane Louis-Seize and Christine Doyon evidently understand this point. It takes a very delicate touch to make a story about suicidal depression that manages to be funny without being insensitive, frank without being sensationalist, uplifting without being naïve. It can sound outlandish to call a movie about centenarian bloodsuckers realistic and relatable, but these characters' struggles reflect many real problems that occur in toxic families and negligent schools.

The ingredient that helps this recipe achieve the right flavor is the impressive casting for the two lead roles. Sara Montpetit as teen vampire Sasha conveys a rugged vulnerability that underscores her character's desperate need for acceptance while maintaining an anxiously practiced distance from the ever-present threat that she poses to every human being she meets. Félix-Antoine Bénard as high schooler and part-time worker Paul is the sweetest incarnation of self-destructive self-defense. His daily life is a continuous string of "What did I ever do to you?" that he deals with by preferring to do nothing to anyone. He's a sort of mirror to Sasha: the two of them are loath to harm those around them, but while the supposedly well-meaning but ultimately unreliable adults in Sasha's life fear that she won't cause harm, the supposedly well-meaning but ultimately unreliable adults in Paul's life fear that he will.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person makes a potent argument for rejecting inherited patterns of abuse. Behind the acerbic comedy of a family of people-eating fiends, you'll find a compelling demonstration that the way you've been taught to relate to others doesn't have to be the way you stay stuck in. It doesn't matter how lowly you may think of yourself; even a bored, long-lived, unnatural monstrosity can learn new tricks.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: We Are the Crisis, by Cadwell Turnbull

Cadwell Turnbull returns with book two of The Convergence Saga, balancing social critique with entertainment

Note: This review will contain spoilers for book one, No Gods, No Monsters, which Adri reviewed here.

I’d been anxiously waiting to read We Are the Crisis as No Gods, No Monsters was one of my favorite recent reads and a book I recommend to just about everyone. I enjoy urban fantasy, and The Convergence Saga has been a great blend of urban fantasy fun with social critique. Plus the series directly references one of my favorite books of all time, The Dispossessed by Le Guin. Book two, We Are the Crisis, doesn’t disappoint as a sequel. It maintains the same energy and devotion to examining characters while continuing to raise the stakes for the multiverse.

We Are the Crisis starts in 2026, two years after what is called the Boston Massacre—the pro-monster protest that turned violent due to magicked mass shooters. At the end of book one, Ridley, Laina, and Rebecca had agreed to become a pack, and book two starts with Ridley full embracing his “wolf.” Not only are they all werewolves, but they are prepared to fight and have practiced how to protect themselves. The first forty pages open with a tense sequence of the pack being followed and having to fight off a vampire that perfectly plays into the camp of urban fantasy. The fight scene demonstrates how powerful they have become with their wolves and how they have learned to work together. Considering Ridley’s trauma around monster rights at the end of book one, this scene demonstrates how his character has changed and how the wolf has made him a more powerful protecting presence.

The pack is searching for the other wolves that started disappearing after monsters initially revealed themselves. In book one, Rebecca’s pack had shown themselves shifting on the freeway but then slowly shrank to just her and Sarah, until Sarah died at the protest. Now, with her new pack, the three of them search for the lost wolves, who seem to have just… vanished. After the vampire attack, Ridley finally reaches out to Melku for more information, and Melku explains that the secret monster societies are in conflict, which is only aggravated by a monster hate group called the Black Hand, which has an upcoming rally in Boston.

Like the first book, We Are the Crisis follows multiple characters via the disembodied narrator, Cal. Cal’s powers allow him to visit different universes in the multiverse, and throughout the book, Cal learns more about his powers and what he can and can’t do with them. In Cal’s world, there seem to be no “monsters” per se, but things bleed from other universes, such as the god Asha, who visits Cal and his niece Gina in the form of a cat, even when Cal and Gina leave the U.S. Virgin Islands to visit the States for Gina to look at colleges. While Cal struggles with reconnecting with his family and bringing Gina into their lives, the multiverse becomes more dangerous, even for his incorporeal form.

One of my favorite characters, the young Dragon, intersects with a new character in the book, Tez, the Wanderer, a monster who runs a co-op that provides mutual aid for humans and monsters. In book one, co-ops and networks were a theme and part of the characters’ passions, but in book two, those co-ops become a deeper part of the plot as there is a rise in cooperatives at the same time as the monsters reveal themselves. Both humans and monsters work at Tez’s cooperative, but the Black Hand’s violence is directed indiscriminately, and the co-op’s human members suffer as much as the nonhuman. Dragon gets to know Tez because he volunteers at the co-op and the members help him find safe places to stay. A few years older, Dragon is starting to learn how the world works and how hard it is to protect the people he cares about.

As in our world, when revolutionary work is being done and people are uniting, there are always government agents and propaganda trying to stop it. The struggles that the monsters and activists face mirror what revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers have struggled against (and in the acknowledgements, Turnbull mentions how his research on the Black Panthers influenced the book). As in book one, the social critique of the novel about civil rights but also revolutionary organizing is carefully woven into the story. The character of Tez and his mutual aid practices are one area, but also the return character of Sondra, who has stepped away from politics on the U.S. Virgin Islands to start a nonprofit called Solidarity Commonwealth VI, which helps small businesses become worker-owned. Her partner, Matthew, is a senator, and over the course of their relationship, they have in-depth discussions about power, statehood, and revolutionary thinking.

Much like book one, this book focuses on the characters and their developing identities and ideas, which allows for these discussions to feel like part of the story rather than infodumping leftist concepts. One of my favorite parts of book one was the intimacy of the character portraits as Cal observes them in the different worlds. Tez continued this pattern, as did a deep dive into a real occult figure, Marjorie Cameron, whose paintings are referenced in book one. Due to the character focus, Turnbull can deftly weave in the social critiques because they spring from the characters’ lived experiences. I was particularly excited with how the co-ops move from more of a background theme to something central in book two, and I hope this trend continues in the third book.

Turnbull’s Convergence Saga delivers compelling characters, unique structure, and literary lines. On top of that, the way he plays with the urban fantasy genre is a great combination of entertainment and more literary fantasy. On top of that, these books aren’t merely entertainment but also contain social commentary in a manner that doesn’t detract from the plot. I can’t wait to see what Turnbull does with book three!

Reference: Turnbull, Cadwell. We Are the Crisis [Blackstone Publishing, 2023].

POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change.

Review: For Love of Magic by Simon Green

A myth about understanding why we love myths—a metamyth, if you will

Fantasy is a genre built on myth. That is what J. R. R. Tolkien was quite explicitly doing with The Lord of the Rings, and in traditional Western fantasy the myths of Western Europe are reinterpreted in any number of ways. In non-Western fantastic literature, the same is done to the mythologies of a variety of other cultures. Here, that concern is made more explicit than most fantasy, of any tradition, in Simon Green’s novella For Love of Magic.

For Love of Magic starts off with what appears to be a fairly standard urban fantasy setup: a magical painting has begun to cause problems in a museum in London, and His Majesty’s government calls in the freelance magic hunter to solve the problem. This opening scene alone is inventive, if not the most original, by virtue of it involving our esteemed magic hunter literally walking into the painting and forcing what’s on the other end into a shape that is more amenable to the non-magical world.

But that is only the opening salvo of a barrage of interesting magical set-pieces. Our protagonist is rapidly sucked into a war that has lasted for eons, between those who want to see magic gone and those who want a better coexistence between the magical and the mundane. This war has suddenly escalated: the opponents of magic have now found a way to travel through time, trying to erase that which made magic meaningful—to erase myth, to erase heroism and whimsy. Our protagonists simply cannot allow that.

It is here that For Love of Magic begins to really shine, as it sets out to interrogate the meaning of myth. That is why you find yourself sent back in time to Roman Britain, where you meet Boudica, as well as King Arthur and Robin Hood, among other figures of British mythology, not quite as you remember them, because time has done a number on how we perceive them. These were men and women, all too human, as Green stresses, who have become something else as time marched inexorably on, becoming the heroes, myths, and legends of British culture, and those of its former colonies.

Green is willing to show heroism become a burden, not so much literally as metaphorically through the incursions of the time travelers. These are people who have become special in a time when their Lord-knows-how-many generations of their descendants have passed on, with their own long lines of descendants likewise. They have become pawns in a war far more literal than what we call ‘culture wars,’ a conflict that truly deserves that title over the role of magic in human society. They are burdened with the vicious arguments of their progeny, but unlike the cold and silent statues of our day, be they in Bristol or Charlottesville, these heroes get to speak back and fight back.

The action in this slim little volume is well depicted, never bogged down in the minutiae that can tank a good action sequence. Green’s writing is brisk when it needs to be in these dynamic scenes, and tender when it needs to be among some of the character moments, be they concerned with romance or with the gravity of the situation. It is a style, indeed a combination, that feels properly heroic, with the gravitas that such a story naturally needs. Green never lets the story feel puny.

If anything, I’m disappointed this book wasn’t longer. There are many more British legends he could have gone with. The last one he depicts, while written by a British author (although not within Britain), struck me as a very odd choice for this sort of book, and some of the setting of that story is brought to Britain in a way that feels odd. Indeed, it’s a format that could have made for a much longer book, and part of me really wants to read that book (I can think of at least one British literary legend in the public domain that wasn’t in it, and frankly I was surprised that this figure was omitted). I don’t know whether Green is planning any sequels, but he really should be, for there are so many directions this story could go. There are other British myths, but also myths of other countries (his Wikipedia page mentions he studied American literature in university, in addition to British literature). Indeed, I daresay this novel could set up a whole shared universe like that of the late Eric Flint’s 1632 series.

For Love of Magic is a book that is not particularly original in a number of elements, but makes up for all of that in its bold use of intertextuality and its investment in understanding why its audience reads stories like this. It is fantasy that doesn’t just crib from mythology, but engages with and even probes these stories for why they became myths. It is a fantasy that is in many ways more self-aware than its contemporaries, and is all the better for it. Now only if Green could write another one…

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Reference: Green, Simon. For Love of Magic [Baen, 2023].

Review: The Diviners Quartet by Libba Bray

A lively, flapperish adventure through 1920s America in all its diversity, plus ghosts

There’s something terribly satisfying about finding a long, engaging series. Not silly-long, like Wheel of Time, but long enough that things can get really gnarly. Kate Elliott knows what I’m talking about, as does Robin Hobb. On these very pages I’ve praised Chris Wooding’s Tales of the Ketty Jay, and now I’m pleased to be back again to tell you about Libba Bray’s Diviners quartet.

Do you like flappers? Do you like ghosts? Do you like thoughtful meditations on 1920s America, balancing gracefully on the knife edge between admiration for the optimistic spirit of a young nation and clear-sighted acknowledgment of the dark past on which that nation was founded, and continues to perpetuate as it looks towards the future? Sure you do, or else you wouldn't have got past the tagline at the top!

This quartet opens with 17-year-old girl, Evie O’Neill, a good Christian white girl raised in the heartland of Zenith, Ohio—the only surviving child of a respectable family who never really got over the death of their golden boy in World War I. Evie has a knack—a party trick, really—by which she can read objects, and uncover secrets from them. When she uncovers an awkward secret at a party, her family ships her off to live with her uncle, who runs a museum of the occult in New York. The plan is to keep her tucked out of sight just until things blow over in Zenith, but Evie, a party girl through and through, is thrilled at this opportunity to live a glamorous big-city life. In short order she is having a grand old time, cultivating friendships with philosophy-reading museum assistants, muckraking reporters, Harlem poets, showgirls, street thieves and union agitators alike. When the cops come to her uncle’s museum to consult with him on an occult-flavoured murder, she even manages to get herself invited to come along to the scene of the murder, and just like that our flapperish ghostly whodunnit is off to the races in Book 1, The Diviners.

The second book, Lair of Dreams, also opens with mysterious deaths, but in this case they are not obviously murders, but instead are related to a mysterious sleeping sickness. People go to sleep, and are enticed by some entity to dream something that starts out sweetly and turns into horrors. They do not wake up.

Although both The Diviners and Lair of Dreams tell self-contained stories, they are united by two threads: one occult and one mundane. The first is a repeated image a man in a stovepipe hat, lurking in the background of these deadly occurrences, who seems to be connected with the release of these supernatural horrors upon the mundane world. Yet the mundane world is itself up to no good, because a government agency, Project Buffalo, seems to be also involved in everything: from the death of Evie’s brother during the war, to mysterious disappearances in immigrant communities; to, oddly, other knacks that her friends turn out to possess. Some have the ability to walk in dreams, or to turn unnoticeable, or to heal, to see the future. These knacks are what define the titual Diviners of this series, in fact—so actually the occult and the mundane are intertwined in sinister ways. These twisty interweavings define the structure of the last two books of the series—Before the Devil Breaks You and The King of Crows.

What makes this series work so well is the way Bray never loses track of the larger plot structure even as each book-sized story plays out. Thus, we get hints of Project Buffalo and the man in the stovepipe hat from the very beginning, and we meet side characters that in the early stages seem to have no other role in the main storyline than to round out a rather sprawling dramatis personnae.  In some cases those appearances are only the briefest flash on the page before they come into their own in later books. For example, Ling Chan, a half-Irish half-Chinese girl who can walk in dreams, appears only momentarily in The Diviners, but becomes a central character in Lair of Dreams, where the mystery of the sleeping sickness makes dream-walking a valuable skill. Bill Johnson appears only as a blind beggar with a gambling problem at the start, but his character arc in later books is rich and important.

In other cases, the characters are fully introduced in The Diviners, but their contributions to the first book’s plot are secondary. In this way, we meet Memphis Campbell, a black poet in Harlem, and his little brother Isaiah. Theta Knight is a dancer with the Zigfield follies, living with her dearest friend Henry DuBois in the same building as Evie and her uncle. Downstairs from them is Mabel Rose, the daughter of a society lady and a Jewish progressive agitator. (I suppose I should mention  Jericho Jones, the mightily forgettable Jericho Jones, who is so dull that Bray literally drops him in a hole in the ground for the climax of The Diviners to get him out of the way. He’s very strong and broody and is kind of a cyborg.) All of their stories have a chance to shine because this series uses its ensemble cast so effectively across the entire stretch of narrative. Nothing feels rushed. Everyone gets their moment in the sun, even if that moment doesn’t come until Book 4.

In addition to the long-form pacing, this series excels at characterization and effortless diversity. We’ve got white people, Black people (both big-city northern and rural southern), Chinese immigrants (both newly arrived and nth-generation), Russian immigrants, native Americans, Irish, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, gay, straight, lesbian, ace. You name it, it’s there, unforced and natural because America in the 1920s was a diverse place, no matter what conservative critics might try to claim in their evocations of artificial nostalgia. And beyond diversity of people, we have a dizzying diversity of settings too, again taking advantage of every flavour of 1920s America. Not just the wealthy white flappers in New York, but the Harlem Renaissance, Chinatown, queer nightlife, glitzy showgirls, eugenics movements, Vaudeville. Outside New York, too, we have Midwestern small towns, the Deep South, hell, we even get a travelling jazz band and a circus. There are acrobats! Lions!

This book is a cornucopia of peoples and places and cultures and attitudes, richly researched, skillfully plotted and paced, sensitively told, and full of wit and humor and a joyful revelry of 1920s slang. Sure, at times the prose can get a bit purple; at times the sweeping meditations on ~*America!*~ can be a bit overblown; and as I’ve mentioned before Jericho Jones is a bit of a snore. But I can’t hold that against these books. They have so much to offer, and work so well, on so many levels, that the occasional clunker is a mere drop in an ocean of otherwise chewy, deep, captivating period fantasy.

(Oh, and I can’t end without mentioning that January LaVoy does a fabulous job on the audiobook narration.)

--

Highlights

• Flappers and ghosts • Thoughtful meditations on the cultural foundations of America, both good and bad
• Balanced ensemble cast • A slightly purplish tinge in some meditative bits

Nerd coefficient: 8, well worth your time and attention

References

Bray, Libba. The Diviners. [Little, Brown, and Company, 2012]
Bray, Libba. Lair of Dreams. [Little, Brown, and Company, 2015]
Bray, Libba. Before the Devil Breaks you. [Atom, 2017]
Bray, Libba. The King of Crows. [Atom, 2020] 

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

Review: March's End by Daniel Polansky

Taking some of the basic the tropes of epic and portal fantasies and intensifying them via the lens of a family drama. 

You may think you have heard this story before. Young scions of a ruling family in a fantasy kingdom have to come to terms with being the next generation and having to fill their parents' and ancestors' shoes, especially as a power capable of undoing the world comes calling. Plenty of extruded fantasy product has this sort of dynamic, in epic fantasy novels, trilogies, and series that are not yet complete.  If you are a seasoned reader of epic fantasy, you know all the beats, the shape of this story.

Except, you haven't heard this particular story before. The Harrow family is well off in our world, our own Earth, but every evening, once they find themselves of age, they can find themselves in a secondary fantasy world of fantastic landscapes and even more fantastical anthropomorphic intelligent creatures. The Harrow family, rulers of this world, are, in fact, the only humans in the March. But when time has moved on and the younger March family members are faced with the possibility that the March's time has come, one way or another.

This is the story of Daniel Polansky's March's End.

A mix of urban and epic fantasy, mixing a secondary fantasy world with our own world, and having people with agency in both, is not sui generis to Polansky here. Eric Nylund's Pawn's Dream took a similar conceit, with the protagonist falling asleep in our world and waking up in a secondary fantasy world, and then back again when he fell asleep there, night after night, day after day. Violette Malan's Shadowlands novels have a Professor of History in a Canadian university who finds out he is really a Prince of Faerie, and Faerie definitely needs him back. The feel at the beginning of the series is urban fantasy, with magic intruding into our world, and ending with epic fantasy with the action mainly in faerie. Edward Lazellari works on a similar method, where a NYC police officer in Awakenings finds out he is a knight of a secondary world fantasy realm. By the third book in the series, Blood of Ten Kings, the story has gone completely from urban to secondary world epic fantasy. 

Polansky's method and style and ethos subverts and plays with all of this throughout the book. He starts it off with a couple of the Harrow children, as young children, discovering their family's secondary world secret for themselves for the first time. But he subverts what might be a straightforward coming of age by having time frames both set early on in the kids' lives, and then 20 some odd years later, in our present. Mary Ann, Will and Constance are very different than their young selves, and old conflicts between the three of them and their mother, Sophia, have driven strong wedges into the family. A lot of the present day narrative does not take place at all in the March and instead focuses on the family conflicts and drama between the three of them, as the seams of what is going wrong with the March, and has been going wrong for quite some time, come to light.  

Thus, Polansky relies on their younger selves to show the March and the rot and decay underneath the Harrows and their rule subtly and carefully even as he shows and then undercuts the secondary world fantasy narrative. And this then is the grist for the mill of the present day conflict that the Harrows primarily face in our world. The Harrows bicker, come into conflict, and finally must not only face themselves and each other, but face the problems they themselves have helped to create. The novel shows us the consequences of rule, and often gives us a stark exploration of what a secondary fantasy world is like, and not just for the ruling class, either. 

Thus, overall, the book does feel like a deconstruction of secondary world fantasies, in particular, as well as portal fantasies and urban fantasies. Polansky's deep focus is always on the characters, especially in the present, and it is their fates, nature, destinies and problems. Just why the March is falling apart, who is ultimately responsible and what can be done--sure, Polansky does give us some big action sequences, but in some ways, even the big set piece one we get, is a sideshow to his development and study of these characters. Just what would ruling a secondary world fantasy kingdom by night do to a family over generations, over time? What does having that secondary world do to a person or a group of people who can share that experience? How can you make connections and bonds to people who can't appreciate, quite literally, what you do in that other world?  This is also territory that Seanan McGuire has been exploring in her series of Wayward Children novellas.  

This is definitely, in the end, not a Fantasy 101 book by any means. This is a reconsideration, reformulation and distillation of several types of fantasy and looking to see how they actually work with characters out of mimetic fiction who have, by birth, not by choice, have the connections to a magical world as their legacy, birthright, and even curse. Polansky doesn't explain some key bits about how the Harrows' world of the March vis a vis our own actually works and doesn't work, and there are some beats in the story that happen and are remarked on, but again, are not explained and explicated.  I think that's part of Polansky's point, his design for this novel. He challenges readers to think about these subgenres but doesn't spoonfeed any answers, but rather poses the Problem of Secondary World Fantasy (capitalization intended) through the lens of the Harrows and their lives. 

Thus, I don't think this book is for everyone. For all of the fantastic that Polansky shows us in the March, and it is vivid and amazingly well shown when he focuses on that, this is not a novel about escapism. No, I am wrong in that. It is a novel entirely about escapism and the perils of escapism and not facing up to the consequences and problems of the escapism that is, at the bottom, what the March *is*.  It's a strongly written book, a book that often cuts very to the bone, especially for a fantasy reader. It's not a comfortable book (but that seems to be a Polansky speciality, in my reading of his work).  Reader beware, but also, reader discover.

--

Highlights:

• A strong family dynamic central core
• Interesting if uncomfortable discussions of genre and what it is for.
• A challenging and rewarding read on an emotional and textual level.

Reference: Polansky, Daniel, March's End, [Angry Robot, 2023]

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

[Microreview]: Island of Time by Davis Bunn

Urban fantasy on the shores of Lake Geneva

Urban fantasy so often confines itself to very sleek, modern American cities that clash aesthetically with traditional urban fantasy; that disconnect drives the interest, I feel. You also get London a good fair bit, but other European cities don’t get as many stories like this. I suspect, although I can’t confirm in any way, that Americans, at least, see old European cities as being too close to the fantasy they love to elicit the sense of wonder (as odd as that sounds, we Americans find cobblestone streets exotic, and I was once stunned by a restaurant owner in Britain saying the building he owned was ‘only’ two hundred years old). Today, we’re discussing an urban fantasy novel set in a European city—I can only remember a few works of genre fiction even being set in the country!

That country is Switzerland, that city is Geneva, and that book is Island of Time by Davis Bunn. This is the first I have read by him; I found this book, as I have so many books that I have loved, just browsing the stacks at the library in my neighborhood (and I am infinitely blessed to have that library within walking distance, no matter how many times it gets used as a political football during county budget negotiations). It is a slim volume, just under two hundred pages, and I blasted through it.

Bunn has chosen a unique sort of agency around which his work revolves. His protagonists are mostly law enforcement officers, as is common in this sort of fiction, but they work for INTERPOL, who has an office dealing with magic in Geneva. It’s not something I’ve seen in much fiction, period, and it pleasantly surprised me (although I admit a slight annoyance that he forgets that the INTERPOL headquarters is in Lyon, not Brussels—the liaison office to the European Union is in Brussels, analogous to the office in New York that liaises with the United Nations, but the worldwide headquarters is in Lyon—something all the more frustrating, albeit still mildly so, because Lyon works geographically for some key events in the plot! I’m a pedant, I know).

The plot begins with what appears to be a murder in a mansion overlooking the city of Geneva, but it is rapidly found to be something both involving the occult and definitively within the remit of INTERPOL. This involves the talents of multiple INTERPOL officers, as well as a suspicious man with no eyes and with a vast arcane knowledge and connections to the underground world of magic. This is made more complicated by the fact that Switzerland has banned the use of magic for its entire existence as a sovereign nation.

The international politics in this book is interesting, as it is such a clear way of showing off the world while never feeling shoehorned into the plot; people are shunted back and forth between different INTERPOL offices because of mundane organizational disputes. Different jurisdictions have different rules about magic, and different agencies have different legal and technical abilities to deal with magic (I wonder if Bunn has had any dealings with this sort of thing; he has worked in finance, which has myriad permutations of law, as the infamous Swiss banks can attest to). This complexity increases with the magical underground, with seven different Institutes, as Bunn calls them, governing magic users (akin more to secret fraternities than anything else). It is here where the worldbuilding starts to muddle a bit: you get the impression that a degree of magical knowledge is accessible to the general public, but the bounds of that are never quite made clear.

The actual magic is filled with pyrotechnics and some interesting and delightfully weird concepts. The central mystery of the novel is something that has been done before, but here it's done in a convincing and clever way, resembling ever so slightly Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. The rest of the magic, though, does feel somewhat underdeveloped, and there’s a role that precognition plays in the story that feels a little too convenient at times, perhaps used when a mundane way of figuring out a problem would be more narratively compelling. Even so, Bunn succeeds in wowing you, with a few moments that are stunning by virtue of how well the scenes are constructed.

The INTERPOL office in Geneva, if this book is to be any indication, is filled with troubled, indeed broken, people. The main character lost his wife in an accident, another is an immigrant who feels somewhat lost, and another has run the gamut of magical experience before turning coat to the authorities. Different characters come from different organizations, and the friction comes to the fore here; the best bits are the mundane Swiss police having to deal with something their government has formally banned. They are thrust into a world of memos written only for a few top brass, never put in the regular archives; and it is all under lock and key. Part of me thinks that having the dead wife of the male main character is a tad cliché and has some unfortunate implications, but it is used well, and fits the broader constellation of the story in a way that is more justified than in most similar stories. Likewise, I had some reservations about the use of sexual assault in the backstory of a female protagonist, but again, it has enough connections to the broader story that it works better than most; both of these issues feel justified, rational, not shoed in for added tension. Not everyone will like it, I feel, but I could accept them.

Island of Time is a successful, brief urban fantasy novel that largely succeeds at what it wants to do. It reminded me of Alex Shvartsman’s Conradverse series, and in the most complimentary way. It’s good fun, pure and simple, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in urban fantasy.

Highlights: the weird magic

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: Bunn, Davis. Island of Time [Severn House, 2022].

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