New year, new reading goals! In December I had my worst reading month ever... (well, in recent ever, anyway, lol). In January, I blew that embarassing low book count out of the water. I managed to finish 11 books! Granted 4 of them were audio books, but still!!
Let's see what I read, shall we?
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez
Good lord, the next time I decide to pick up a book this long, do me a favor and stop me. Just knock the damn thing out of my hand, or deny my netgalley or edelweiss request ok?!
It wasn't a bad book by any means, it was just toooo damn loooong. I'm postive we could've achieved the same outcome in oh, say, 300 less pages?
In a nutshell, a boy is born to a father who has a magnificantly terrible ability to communicate with an evil darkness and has inherited his powers. His father is sickly, dying a slow death, and is endlessly abused and forced to perform Rites and Ceremonials at the hands of his adopted family, who want to harness this darkness for their own dark, demented means. His father knows nothing will stop them from coming after his son once he's dead so he protects him, marks him so that his family will never be able to find him and force him to suffer the same destiny.
All of this is basically covered in the first section of the book. During the remaining 75% of the novel, we are frustratingly bounced around at a snails pace across a multitude of time periods and by a handful of connected narrators who continue to shed their particular light on what we already knew, the whole time wondering where we are being led and if we are ever really going to get there. And we do, readers, we do. But man, if there was short cut to get there, I would have gladly taken it!
Also, to be fair, this was a big buzz book in 2022, and by now I should know that me and big buzz books don't usually get along so well. So I'm not surprised to find myself underwhelmed.
Here's looking forward to seeing what 2023 has in store for me!!
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
I picked this up based on the recommendation of a couple of bookish friends and I'm glad I did. The prose was *chef's kiss*.
Labeled a feminist dystopia, The Water Cure is told from the perspective of three sisters who have been raised in an isolated homestead because the mainland, and possibly the entire world, has become unsafe - the air poison, the meat toxic, the men dangerous and violent, especially towards women.
We learn through the sisters collective memories that there was a time when their home, which is basically an abandoned grand hotel, used to be a refuge for "damaged" women who were hurt and suffering. Their parents used primative and strange therapies to cure them and send them back out into the world. Once the women stopped coming, their parents began using the therapies and other odd purification rituals on the girls, preparing them for the inevitability of men arriving on their shores. And yes, men do arrive. And hoo boy do things get interesting when they do!
It reminded me less of Handmaid's Tale (which it has been heavily compared to) and felt more similar to California by Eden Lepucki, except, here, they don't leave the safety of their home to face the changed world. Instead, they must face the fact that their home may no longer be safe...
A bit of a slow burn to start, and somewhat overly predictable, but a fully engaging and enjoyable read. Highly recommended for readers who like dystopian and apocalyptic stories in which the characters are fully isolated and have limited knowledge of or contact with the "outside" world.
Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
This companion book to The Passenger smacks of McCarthy's play The Sunset Unlimited.
The story is pure dialogue: two characters, Alecia and her doctor, explore why she has checked herself into the mental facility again. And that's all I'll say because oooohhhhhh.... having now listened to Stella Maris, I think my feelings about The Passenger may have changed and I may (maaaaayyyy) go back and give that one a re-listen now that I think I know what I know. You know?
No One Will Come Back For Us by Premee Mohamed
Cosmic horror only right here in our backyard. Steeped in speculative fiction and dripping with dark shadows, this collection of stories is infested with strange monsters and old gods who seek our attention, our planet, and our very lives.
A few of the standout stories for me were:
- "Below the Kirk, Below the Hill", about a dead girl who washes up on shore and the lighthouse keeper who looks after her
- "The Evaluator" about a guy who is sent out to determine whether or not a young girl has been posessed, and finds himself face to face with something wicked
- "The Honeymakers", about a group of girls and their strange relationship with bees
- "For Each of These Miseries", about what happens when a submarine comes into contact with a long undisturbed underwater entity
- And the title story "No One Will Come Back For Us", which ushers in a strange and otherworldly pandemic unlike anything we've ever seen before
Another notch in Undertow Publication's belt!
Unwieldy Creatures by Addie Tsai
This is a book that's been on my radar for quite a while. I had been keeping my eye out for it in the bookstores but none ever seemed to carry it so I was thrilled when a copy arrived in the mail last week c/o the author!
Unwieldy Creatures is a queer, gender-swapped retelling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In it, we meet Plum, a queer biracial Chinese Embryology intern, who is sharing the terrifying story of her time with Z, AKA Doctor Frank, a queer biracial scientist dead set on creating the "perfect" child without the use of egg or sperm.
It's an origin story as well as a cautionary tale. Z, we learn, allows her obsession with creating life sans men to taint her relationship with the woman she loves most, Hana. She will stop at nothing, is willing to risk everything, but there are complications and when her first experiment fails to meet her expectations, she not only loses the love of her life, she also heartlessly abandons the hideous child in the woods.
But our past never stays buried for long and years later, Z is confronted by the monstrosity, who demands something of her. Z is rattled by this and turns to Plum, divulging the full and horrific history, asking for their assistance with this newest project.
Addie pulls the classic into contemporary times with ease, introducing IVF and queer lifestyles, our culture's obsession with beauty and the perfect body, and the ways in which parental abuse and childhood trauma shape us and haunt us in our adulthood. An interesting spin on a story in which the created continues to compel our sympathy while the creator effortlessly earns our wrath.
Road of Bones by Christopher Golden
Caught this as an audiobook deal on Chirp and thought it sounded too intriguing to pass up.
Teig and Prentiss head out to Siberia to record a documentary of "Life and Death on the Road of Bones", a highway that gets its name because it was built over the dead bodies of thousands of Gulag prisoners. They're hoping this will be their big break, but instead end up finding themselves broken in ways they could not have ever predicted.
They hook up with a local tour guide Kaskil and end up running across a woman named Nari who is stuck out in the snow with a broken down car. The twosome have now uncomfortably become four. Kaskil convinces them to swing over to his hometown before they hit the road for real, but quickly realizes something is not right. The town is empty - front and back doors left wide open, food still on the tables, footprints leading straight into the woods - except for one little girl who appears to be in a catatonic state of shock. As they continue to explore the area in an attempt to understand where everyone's gone, they are attacked by a pack of wolves and end up running for their lives.
The wolves behave strangely, seeming to track them relentlessly wherever they go, and our little group soon picks up on the presence of other... things... out there in the woods as well. And that's when the situation becomes one of sheer surivial. Can they outrun the terror that is chasing them or will they succumb to the subzero temperatures first? What exactly IS chasing them and why don't their bullets seem to stop them?
A fast paced, high energy supernatural story that works very well as an audiobook.
Last of the Better Days Ahead by Charlie Parr
"This isn't an autobiography. I made all these stories up, if you can even call them stories - they are more like fragments of unfinished songs. Or daydreams, maybe. I've always wanted to see what would happen if I didn't carve away all the non-song bits., but instead went on to finish my thought without regard for how my guitar would interact with the words."
I hadn't heard of Charlie Parr or his music prior to his publisher putting this book on my radar. Strangely, in the collection's prologue, Charlie warns readers away from listening to the album of the same name, even though these are meant to be companion pieces, as he admits he hasn't listened to the record in quite a while.
Of course, as I waited for the book to arrive, I did a quick youtube search and gave some of them a listen. I find him to be similar in many ways to Will Johnson, and oh god don't kill me, David Duchovny. There's this deep, raspy, salt-of-the-earth feel to their music, which also shows up beautifully on the page when they put pen to paper.
In this collection we meet a variety of characters, many of them blue collar workers doing what they can to scrape by, in these gorgeously depicted blink-and-you'll-miss-it moments of their lives. I picture them in clothes with the knees and elbows worn thin, with dirt streaked cheeks and cracked fingernails, wind tussled hair and smile lines a mile deep. I imagine they smell of grass and motor oil and cigarettes and pine soap. And I am expecting them to become my friends.
Each story sings - some quietly, some more loudly. A truly lovely collection, not a bad one in the bunch.
Bad Cree by Jessica Johns
Oooooh. I kept seeing this one pop up in my feed here and there and finally decided to take the plunge. I listened on audio and it was really just so good. I don't think the description of the book does it justice, honestly.
It's a story about loss and grief and the horrors that escape our dreams and infiltrate our reality, only it's sooo much more than that too.
MacKenzie, a Cree woman, has recently lost both her grandmother Kokum and her sister Sabrina. As they approach the one year anniversary of her sister's death, she starts to dream about her, only the dreams are more like nightmares. And she's beginning to bring bits of those dreams back with her when she wakes. Afraid she might be losing her grip on reality, MacKenzie starts to reconnect with her estranged family and learns that they, too, have similar 'gifts' of visions and dream premonitions. Armed with this knowledge, she and her remaining sister Tracey, along with their cousin Kassidy, set out to understand what Sabrina is trying to tell her, and uncover a force much darker than they could have ever anticipated.
Steeped in Indigenous forklore and magik, and strong family dynamics, the atomspheric Bad Cree is more horror adjacent than actual horror, and I think it's best when you go in knowing as little as possible, like I did. It exceeded my expectations because quite frankly, I wasn't sure what I was expecting. And it really blew me away. If you're seeking more stellar debut and Indigenous fiction, Jessica Johns is where it's at!
Pinata by Leopoldo Gout
Slow burn horror novels are such an interesting thing. Initially I'm all like c'mon already, get to the good stuff because I know it's in here... but then once the good stuff finally gets going I'm all like whoaaaaa there, slow down, why are you in such a rush all of a sudden?!
Also, mothers, how well do you know your daughters?
In Pinata, we find ourselves following Carmen Sanchez and her daughters Izel and Luna as they travel to Mexico so that Carmen can keep an eye on the renovation that's taking place on the site of an old Abbey. Carmen's excited to introduce her kids to some of thier cultural history, but things take a weird turn when some scaffolding comes loose and exposes a hidden alcove containing some ancient clay pots and other detritus. During the commotion Luna, ever the curious girl, sneaks one of the strange pots out of the room and manages to smuggle it back to their home in New York, unbeknownst to Carmen, when word of the accident at the abbey gets back to her boss.
Little by little, Luna begins to withdraw inside herself and strange things start to happen at a water's boil sort of pace. Small things that Carmen and Izel could easily brush aside without much second thought, like the sounds of Luna speaking to someone in her room when no one else is in there with her and the creepy drawings she's been sketching, soon become more worrisome until eventually there's too much to ignore, like waking up to a dog sized cricket at the foot of your bed, and uhm hello, NOW you realize that a very pissed off ancient entity is attempting to use your child's body as a gateway for the apocalypse? Really?!
While there were some head-shaking, eye-rolling, shoulder-shrugging moments of really bad parenting, it was quite a unique and wild ride. I see it being compared to both The Exorcist and A Headful of Ghosts and that's actually a pretty good way to describe this book. I was highly anticipating this one and it didn't let me down.
Patterns of Orbit by Chloe N Clark
I picked up this collection today and had not expected to tear through it so darn quickly!
In Patterns of Orbit, Chloe deftly navigates the harsh realities of outer space, the horrors buried deep within the ocean, and literally everything in between. Her stories are relentless in the best way. She accomplishes in a few pages what others can't pull off in a hundred.
Steeped in love and loss, comforts and fears, science fiction and horror, these stories will unsettle you. They will gut you. They will crawl under your skin and haunt you. If you don't start looking at forests, bodies of water, and the stars differently after this... do I even know you?
How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix
This was my first Grady Hendrix novel, though I #ownbutnotyetread a few others, and I think I'm glad I started with this one. Based on the reviews I've read, I see people calling it "campy", others considering it a possession story vs a haunting. Well, you know what I say? I say it was a whole lot of fun! And I'm ready for more.
I listened to it on audio and really loved how it played out in that format. The narration was wonderful, the characters didn't take themselves too seriously, and even though I totally saw what was coming from a mile away, it didn't take away from the experience AT ALL.
And oh, btw, did you know I absolutely hate hate HATE dolls, puppets, ventriloquist dummies, and marionettes? They creep me out so bad. When I was a kid, for some strange reason I really wanted a Groucho Marx dummy for Christmas and once I got it, I was sooo terrified of it that I stripped all his clothes off and locked him in the coat closet so he couldn't get me at night. Seriously, google it. You'll see why. And I always made sure I fairly rotated all of my stuffed animals and dolls in bed with me each night so they didn't get jealous of each other or get mad at me. So uhm, YEAAAAH this book was also one massive fucking trigger for me too! And I STILL loved it!
Kakaweewee!!!!
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