The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern by Maurice Samuels. Nonfiction about the 1830s in France. After the Bourbons had been kicked off the throne for the second time, the duchesse de Berry, widowed mother of the theoretically legitimate king (who was only 11), attempted to lead a civil war in rural France to retake the crown. This obviously did not go so well, and after her defeat she went into hiding, only to be betrayed to the police by one of her followers named Simon Deutz. Deutz had been raised Jewish, and despite his recent conversion to Catholicism was best-known for being the son of France's Chief Rabbi. Unsurprisingly, his actions led to an upswell of antisemitism, and Samuels argues this moment was one of the key shifts from antisemitism's medieval form (blood libel, backwards religiously) to its modern form (global capitalists, pushing the New World Order).

Even if you don't exactly agree with the duchess's pro-monarchy politics, she's a fascinating figure: despite being frequently described as "not pretty" by other members of the nobility, with bad teeth and a wandering left eye, she became a fashion icon who set the most glamorous trends of Parisian style; only 4'7, she was an inspiring military leader and modeled herself after Joan of Arc; idealized as the perfect, devoted mother by her followers, she had an affair and bore a child out of wedlock, who shortly thereafter died, probably due at least partly to parental neglect.

Deutz seems like a bit of a terrible person, even ignoring all of the racist accusations of his detractors: unable to keep any job for long, constantly running up debts and taking advantage of anyone foolish enough to loan him money, given to violent outbursts and heavy drinking and self-aggrandizing. As the aftermath of the clash between him and the duchess played out in newspapers, books, caricatures, and politics, it's easy to see how she came to represent old-school values of honor, trust, courage, and loyalty, while he stood for the modern world of hard cash, putting yourself first, individualism, and immigration (having been born not only Jewish, but in a German village before moving to France as a toddler). Of course, it's the tragedy of the last two hundred years that these symbols accrued not only to Deutz himself, but to all Jewish people.

It's a very relevant piece of history, and one that I'd never heard of before. There's all sorts of interesting repercussions to other areas, from Les Miserables to Alexandre Dumas to the Dreyfus Affair, the more recent and more well-known outburst of French antisemitism. I was particularly interested in the history of French Judaism in the early 1800s, the way the community gained rights and lost them in the swinging pendulum of Revolution, Napoleon, and Restoration. The writing style is smooth and engaging, and Samuels does a very good job of drawing parallels from this singular event to its still-ongoing repercussions.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland by Gretel Ehrlich. A nonfictional account of an American's time in Greenland. I was never quite sure why exactly Ehrlich went to Greenland – early on, she alludes to a medical problem, something to do with her heart, but I'm not clear on how that would lead one to travel to Greenland, and there never is more of an explanation than that brief allusion.

Regardless, once there, Ehrlich sets out to better understand traditional Inuit (Eskimo? she uses the terms interchangeably, but that might have been more common in the 90s when she was there) life and beliefs, and to experience them for herself. Ehrlich structures her trips around those of previous travelers, particularly Knud Rasmussen, an explorer/anthropologist of the early 1900s, and Rockwell Kent, a painter who lived in Greenland in the 1930s. Mostly though, Ehrlich records her perceptions of months-long night, months-long day, dogsled trips, and icebergs. It's a book that's almost more poetry than it is memoir, travelogue, or history. Unfortunately, the quality of the poetry varies enormously. Sometimes it's lovely. Sometimes it's entirely nonsensical:
Now circling sun augered light down like an arrow of time, pushing us across the great expanse because there was nowhere else to go. Ice is time solidified.
Solid space stands for emotional grasping; an ephemeral cataract, making opaque what it is we long to see.
THAT DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING. YOU ARE JUST STRINGING RANDOM WORDS TOGETHER.

More than anything, Ehrlich needed a better editor. Both because someone should have urged her to cut the more ~abstract~ bits of poetry, and because she began to repeat herself frequently in the second half of the book: she tells the story of the ill-fated Greely expedition twice, chapters apart; she repeats the same descriptions of people (not in a poetic way, just in an "I forgot I already used this very distinctive phrase" way); the same conversations with the same people are retold, word for word.

I was also made uncomfortable by some of Ehrlich's relationships with local Greenlanders. It's never quite clear if she was compensating them in any way for taking her on weeks-long trips or allowing her to stay in their homes for months at a time. In particular, she has a relationship with a young girl that veers hard into White Savior territory; at one point, Ehrlich offers to take the girl with her to California so that she can attend a better school, despite the fact that would mean leaving her parents (and younger brother, who Ehrlich doesn't seem to care as much about) behind. Ehrlich's writing style treats all emotions and relationships so opaquely that I have no real sense of how the girl's family felt about her in return, or if she bothered to keep in contact with them when she wasn't in Greenland. It was all just weird and awkward.

I would have given this one star, except... well, it did really make me want to visit Greenland! So I suppose I have to give Ehrlich some credit for that.

I did a post like this last year, but thought a new year was a good time for an update. Though there's certainly a lot of overlap! So here are my Top Ten Favorite Podcasts of 2020 – or, at least, the podcasts I listened to the most often, which oddly doesn't always translate to 'favorite'.

10. The Dollop: Two male comedians tell one another weird stories from American history.
This podcast is probably the one I'm currently listening to that makes me laugh the hardest. The hosts are both straight white men and that can sometimes be a little too obvious in their blindspots, but they have a real talent for finding the most bizarre true stories and turning them into comedy gold. It's sort of like 'Drunk History' with less slurring.

9. Moby Dick Energy: A chapter-by-chapter breakdown of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. The female host has a different guest on for each episode/chapter, who have ranged from comedians to English professors.
I love the idea of this podcast – Moby Dick is so well-suited for this sort of deep-dive – but so far I'm not loving the execution. The show has struggled with what it wants to be – it's not going hard enough on the comedy to be funny, but it's also not going hard enough on the research to find worthwhile insights. By trying to do both it's just failing at both. But I haven't listened to many episodes yet, and I get the sense that it might find its balance soon, so I'm not giving up yet.

8. Ologies: A woman journalist/comedian interviews scientists from every -ology imaginable (gemology! paleontology! cosmetology! you get it).
I only discovered this podcast in December or else it would probably be much higher on this list. I worried that the interviews would be too much about the scientists' personal lives and not enough about their cool research, which is a problem I have with a lot of science journalism, but this show doesn't strike that note at all! It's really exactly the Cool-Things look at various sciences that I've always wanted.

7. Lore: A male host tells creepy true stories from history.
I honestly don't know why I'm still listening to this show, because every episode drives me crazy. The host is so gullible – recounting stories that are clearly nothing more than creepypasta (or sometimes the 18th century equivalent of creepypasta) as though they're plausible real accounts – or maybe he's not gullible and just doesn't care to do adequate research, which is equally annoying. His attempts to derive deep philosophical meaning out of stories about haunted puppets and werewolves are also ridiculous. I also generally don't like single-host shows; I much prefer the flow of conversation you get once there's multiple people involved (the main thing that has prevented me from starting my own podcast!).
And yet, I keep not unsubscribing. I can't explain why, but I find myself hitting play on this show more often than on ones where I don't outright hate the host. I can't explain it. Maybe hate-listening turns out to be pretty solid entertainment?

6. The Magnus Archives: A fictional series about an archivist who records the stories of random people's horrific supernatural encounters. Gradually he becomes more and more pulled into an adventure involving worm-monsters and a supernatural conspiracy that seems to have it out for him specifically.
So many people have recommended this podcast to me. So many! But sorry, guys, it's just not working for me. I prefer the Monster-of-the-Week episodes (though even those are never as scary as I want them to be) to the overarching narrative, and the more we get of the latter the more bored I become. I'm near the end of Season One, and I think I might drop it at that point – I've heard it becomes much more focused on the characters and plot in subsequent seasons, and that's exactly where I don't want it to go.

5. History is Gay: Two queer women cover queer history with a sense of humor.
I discovered this podcast while doing research for a class I was teaching on the history of same-sex marriage, and I have to give it to them: this is the best queer history podcast I've found, striking an excellent balance between general and specific knowledge. They cite their sources, and the Notes post that accompanies each episode is a great supply of art and other images.
All that said, I find the hosts incredibly annoying and their jokes dumb and cringeworthy. So why am I still listening? Well, I do learn something interesting or useful in each episode, so I feel obliged to continue. Still, I'll be glad when I run out of new episodes.

4. Apocalist Book Club: Two women read every post-apocalyptic novel ever written, in chronological order starting in 1805.
Most of the books the hosts review are bad, so very bad (they're only up to stuff in written in 1930 so far), but they do a wonderful job at providing context for the author and literary trends of the time, along with hilarious recaps of the plots themselves. My one complaint is that this show only updates once a month, so I can't listen to it as frequently as I wish I could.

3. The Baby-sitters Club Club: Two thirty-something male comedians review every book in Ann M. Martin's classic preteen-girl series, The Baby-Sitters Club.
The show is so much sweeter than that description might make you assume, and I adore these guys and their humor. They've finally run out of Baby-sitter related material to cover (after reviewing every spinoff imaginable, the Netflix series, the graphic novels, and the computer games), and I have no idea where they will go next, but I do hope they continue because I love this show.

2. Alternate Ending: Three friends discuss movies: one's a legit film critic working on his PhD, one dropped out of film school, and one's a 'casual viewer'.
Another slightly odd choice for 'favorite', since I'm not actually that big of a movie watcher and frequently haven't seen any of the movies they discuss. Nonetheless, I really love the banter between these three and am always excited whenever a new episode drops.

1. My Favorite Murder: Two women comedians discuss true crime.
After avoiding this hugely popular podcast until late 2019, I promptly was sucked into a massive binge. Considering that there's something like 470 episodes, I had plenty to listen to, and easily spent hours listening every day. I'm not really sure why? I don't dislike the humor or the hosts, but I'm also not that big of a fan of true crime. But something about MFM soothed my brain during all of the stress and bizarreness that was 2020. I've very nearly hit the end of my binge (there's only 12 new episodes left!), and I'm not sure I'll continue to feel the same way about it once I can no longer listen endlessly but have to wait for updates like everyone else. I suspect that might break whatever spell I've been under. Still, it's been a good thousand hours of listening.

What do you listen to? Recommend me new shows!

The Case of the Reincarnated Client - Tarquin Hall.The fifth book in the Vish Puri series, murder mysteries set in Delhi. This one, though set in 2016, mostly concerns a murder that took place in 1984 during the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Puri's own father was a police detective at the time, and investigated the death of Riya Kaur, suspecting that she was actually murdered by her husband, who used the riots to cover up his own crime. Unfortunately Puri's father was never able to prove anything, and the case haunted him until his death. Now Puri's mother ("Mummy-ji") believes she has found the proof – in the form of recovered memories from a woman who claims to be Kaur's reincarnation. Puri's skepticism about the supernatural runs up against the impossibly accurate information Kaur's supposed reincarnation is able to provide.

Meanwhile, the government of India releases a surprise announcement that all paper money must be exchanged at banks for new paper money within the next 48 hours, or else it will become worthless. It's part of a plan to reduce the black market, but Puri finds himself both with a buttload of cash to exchange and no time to do so, and clues to a suspected money launderer.

Despite the seriousness of both cases, the Vish Puri books are always funny, cozy, and full of lots of food porn – especially street food. They're light mysteries, overall; a subplot concerns a bride who wants to know why her groom is such a loud snorer, for example. I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as I've enjoyed the previous books, unfortunately, but it's still a fun series that does a wonderful job at capturing the feel of Delhi.

(Also, I read this book while on a trip to India earlier this year, and it finally cleared up my confusion at why everyone refused to take my old cash!)
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London by Sarah Wise. Nonfiction about a historical true crime case. The late 1700s and early 1800s saw the fantastical-sounding profession of "resurrection men": specialists in grave-robbery who stole fresh corpses to sell to doctors and medical schools, who needed them to practice surgery, study anatomy, and expand our knowledge of how the human body worked. The most famous of these Resurrection Men are probably Burke and Hare, who in Scotland in 1828 got tired of digging up bodies and decided to create their own instead. Eventually convicted of sixteen murders, Burke and Hare and their crimes became enormously famous.

Less well-known is that, a few years later, London had its own murderous Resurrection Men. In 1831, several of them shopped around the corpse of an dark-haired fourteen-year-old boy, until one of the prospective clients decided the body was just a little too fresh and detained the Resurrection Men until the police could be called. Ultimately the corpse was identified as that of an Italian beggar-child who had made money by displaying white mice – though, as Wise shows, there's an equal amount of evidence that he was just a regular English kid, and the popular identification of him as the "Italian Boy" probably has more to do with contemporary Londoners' romanticization of the attractively-exotic poor than anything else.

I love historical true crime because it's capable of being a fascinating window into a particular time and place, and Wise really delivers. She provides deep dives into topics like the rivalries between London's various medical schools, the functioning of the Smithfield Meat Market, the child trafficking between Italy and England for a constant flow of those "adorable" beggars, the inner workings of the Newgate Prison, and daily life in a poor suburb of 1830s London. If you're only looking for the details of a gorey crime, The Italian Boy is probably not the book for you. But if you, like me, are excited to learn the intricacies of the politics of police uniforms in 1820, than I highly recommend it.

The Italian Boy also had a lot more pictures than is typical for a nonfiction book, nearly one for every other page: maps, portraits, images from broadsheets, newspaper headlines, etchings of famous beggars, and more. It was a surprise, but a nice one.


The Fall of the Wild: Extinction, De-Extinction, and the Ethics of Conservation by Ben A. Minteer. A collection of six essays on the philosophical considerations involved in protecting wild species. I picked up this book because I'm hugely interested in de-extinction (the actual ongoing research to try and revive various extinct species through cloning and/or genetic engineering; the passenger pigeon is one currently closest to success, though the project on the woolly mammoth is probably more well-known), which Minteer is not a fan of. In general, I'd call Minteer a moderate for his views on conservation. Take the issue of zoos, for example. Several groups have called for their widespread closure, but Minteer doesn't go that far; instead, he points to the role of captive breeding in preventing the extinction of the California Condor or the Arabian Oryx, as well as the possibility of zoos inspiring visitors to become more involved in conservation. But he's not for massive deregulation or the too-close confinement of animals either.

Unsurprisingly, he's against de-extinction. His argument mostly centers on the idea that if humans know that we can 'fix' extinction, we won't try to prevent it as strongly. I don't find this convincing; it's not like de-extinction is easy, cheap, or simple, and I can't imagine extinction ever coming to seem unimportant, no matter how many technological fixes might exist.

But despite my disagreement on that issue, I very much enjoyed The Fall of the Wild. Minteer's writing is thoughtful, clear, and engaging, and he doesn't stick to theoretical philosophy, but tells multiple interesting stories. I particularly enjoyed his descriptions of Zootopia, a not-yet-built zoo in Denmark that will be an immense, wall-less, cage-less landscape where animals wander free and humans peek at them from hidden enclosures. The story of the relocation of 500 elephants from one nature preserve to another several hundred miles away, done via helicopter and trucks, was also fascinating. Minteer frequently refers to Aldo Leopold (an American conservationist from the early 1900s), whom he has modeled his thinking after. Leopold sounds incredible, and Minteer's summaries of his life and philosophy were a new area to me, but one I found very compelling.

Overall a very intelligent and readable book if you're at all interested in the topic.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

The Elementals by Michael McDowell. A horror novel set in 1970s rural Alabama. Family matriarch Marian Savage has died, and her relatives gather for a period that's half mourning and half summer vacation. They consist of her son Dauphin and his wife Leigh; her other son, single father Luker, and his 13-year-old NYC-raised daughter India; her best friend Big Barbara, who is also Leigh's mother; and long-time servant Odessa. They head to Beldame: three massive houses perched on a sandspit that arches right out into the Gulf of Mexico, so isolated that they can only be reached at low tide. But only two of the houses at Beldame are inhabited; the third has long been abandoned, left to slowly fill with the omnipresent sand.

The real star of The Elementals is its sense of place, and Beldame is a location to stick in your mind. It features the exact opposite of every horror cliche, and yet is still wonderfully terrifying. The inescapable, languid heat of a Deep South summer; the blinding white sunlight; the feel and sounds of a wooden house sucked dry of any moisture; and most of all, the constantly shifting, blowing, trickling sand. The characters are interestingly fucked-up, with the sort of complex family dynamics and long-held secrets (except for Odessa, who is one hell of a Magical Negro stereotype, so be prepared for that) that is required of a Southern Gothic novel, full of tensions that are revealed and become more relevant as the horrors mount up. And speaking of horrors, they're left fascinatingly unexplained – the elementals of the title live in the empty third house, but what they are and what they want and exactly what they did or did not do are all left as open questions. There's no resolution to them, no rules they obey or clear story tropes they follow, and that sense that they might disappear or they might follow you home and there's no way to know which really adds to the lingering creepiness of the novel.

Still, it's all about Beldame. God, there's a haunted house that deserves the renown of the Stanley Hotel and Hill House.


The Guest List by Lucy Foley. A thriller novel (whoops, picked it up because I thought it was horror, but it doesn't quite fit into that genre) set on a small island off Ireland in the modern day. Jules is the CEO of an extremely successful lifestyle website; Will is the star of a 'Man vs Wild'-esque reality show; together they are having a lavish wedding designed to be focus of many a Pinterest board. Unsurprisingly for the reader, the night of the wedding a massive storm hits the island, knocking out the electricity and cutting them off from the mainland. And then a dead body turns up.

The book immediately jumps back in time to a few day before the wedding, allowing us to slowly meet the many guests and employees, all of whom have conveniently linked Dark Secrets. Meanwhile, the clues build regarding A) who's dead, and B) who killed them. By the end, it's less a question of "who had a motive", and more "Jesus Christ, everyone on this island has a motive, it's just a matter of who got to [Dead Person] first".

This is a supremely silly book that should only be read while sitting on a beach half-drunk on something fruity. I read it two weeks ago and already most of the characters and details have slipped forever out of my memory, which tells you a lot about what to expect. The sheer overload of tragic backstories, unlikely coincidences, dumb motivations, and shocking twists means that it's hard to take any of it seriously. That said, if you're in the mood for a compulsively readable collection of cliches, you really could do worse than The Guest List. It's a lot of fun in its tropiness.


Experimental Film by Gemma Files. A horror novel set in modern-day Toronto. Lois is an ex-professor of Canadian film history and a local film critic, desperate to find some sort of work in her field. This search is complicated by her young son Clark, who has severe autism and needs more patience and attention than Lois is able to give him – at least in the opinion of Lois's mother. Then Lois stumbles across several film reels from the 1910s made by a woman named Iris; the movies are all variations on the same bit of Slavic folklore, a dangerous entity known as Lady Midday (who I totally thought had been made up by Files until googling just now, and I was going to congratulate her on a truly realistic-feeling bit of fake folklore, but never mind!). The production date of the films would make Iris the first Canadian female director, and Lois sees the chance for her career to skyrocket: her research on Iris could lead to a book, a documentary, traveling exhibits, and more. There's just the matter that Iris's connection to Lady Midday seems to have been more literal and supernatural than anyone can rationally accept, and that Iris's life parallels Lois's in eerie ways, including another autistic son.

Gemma Files is an author I've been meaning to check out for ages; I've pushed her off for no better reason than that I have a ton of authors fighting for the top of my TBR list. But I'm very glad I finally made it to her, because Experimental Film is a FANTASTIC book. It's absolutely, wonderfully creepy (definitely outright scarier than most of the books I read this Halloween – the only contender would be The Only Good Indians), though surprisingly I'd classify it as folk horror, not what I expected from a book themed around film. Nevertheless, that's what it is, and really really good folk horror at that. But in addition to being scary, Experimental Film is an incredibly well-done take on several different topics: motherhood and the expectations parents put on their children, the value of work (not in a Protestant-ethic-Capitalism way, just the joy of creating something meaningful and lasting), and the difficulties and bliss of finding someone who understands you. The writing is lovely and plays around storytelling structure – not excessively so, this isn't House of Leaves, but enough to be interesting – the characters are compelling, the horror is supremely horrific, and it's just a good book all around.

On an entirely random note, why are Yazidi beliefs so incredibly popular with horror writers? Nothing wrong with the Yazidi, of course, but they're quite a small ethnic group, and it's odd to see them appear everywhere from Lovecraft to Experimental Film, when there's nowhere near the same name recognition for, say, Mende or Sami beliefs. I suppose it's probably a case of once one person does it, everyone else follows, but it's still odd to me.


A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill. A novel set in modern-day small-town Texas, whose genre is extremely difficult to describe. The best I can come up with is "literary fiction about horror fiction". The plot is similarly difficult to describe, primarily because the narrator isn't even born until about a hundred pages in, but I will try: Noah's family has always had an intimate relationship with horror. His mother and father's courtship centered around horror movies, Lovecraft's stories, and haunted houses; when Noah was a child, their primary income was from a haunted house run by his family; he met his own future wife when she was an actor at one of those evangelical Hell Houses. On another level, Noah's family has dealt with less fictional horror: the death of his father at a young age from brain cancer; a sister's sudden disappearance, presumably kidnapped; another sister's deep depression and suicide attempts. And on yet another level, Noah has been regularly visited from a young age by a werewolf-like monster who only appears when Noah is alone, but who can fly and take Noah other worlds. This monster is real within the world of the book but is also a fairly unsubtle metaphor for inherited mental illnesses and family trauma, and it usually works better in that regard than as an actual character.

Horror fiction that is not-so-secretly a metaphor for real issues is a longstanding tradition within the genre, from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and "The Lottery" to more modern examples like Get Out and HBO's Lovecraft Country. Yet I don't feel like A Cosmology of Monsters fits in with those. It doesn't take the horror half of the equation seriously – there's no attempt to be scary or take the supernatural aspects as a real problem to be solved. It's more like Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation: a film that uses Japan as a setting to evoke a certain mood in the characters, but which is very much not *about* Japan. That's exactly A Cosmology of Monsters's relationship to horror.

Since it's not horror, that leaves only literary fiction: a deep dive into the personality and dysfunctions of one particular character and one particular family. Which is all very well for those who enjoy literary fiction, but unfortunately I tend to find it boring, and A Cosmology of Monsters was no exception. I mean, yes, it's well-written, it's insightful, it's a sharp portrayal of loss and depression and disconnections, and yet... I just wasn't engaged. Recommended if you're a fan of literary fiction, but not so much for the horror fans.


And I have now completed reviews of everything I read in October! \o/

Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg. A vampire novel set in modern-day small town North Carolina. Sophie and Natalie are lifelong best friends, both single mothers to infants, both doing nothing much with their lives: in their early twenties, working at Waffle House and living in a trailer park. Until one night they cross paths with a vampire named The Whistler and wake up dead. Natalie, the more steely-willed of the pair, figures out what's going on and immediately abandons both their babies to her own mother out of fear of what she might do to them, and forces Sophie to join her on an endless road trip that's more about losing themselves than going anywhere in particular. Meanwhile, The Whistler becomes increasingly obsessed with Natalie and how to shape her into the perfect eternal partner, which sets off problems with his previous eternal partner, a woman known only as Mother.

Here in the year of our lord 2020 it's more or less impossible to do anything new with vampires. Every possible permutation of the myth has already been done and redone. But having said all that, I really enjoyed the spin Motherless Child gives to the old story. It takes the route of emphasizing that vampires are dead – not sexy immortals, but cold corpses somehow still inhabited – and underlines it with gorgeous prose:

As she pushed out into the night, she realized she even knew what the whistling in her ears was. Not cicadas. Not power lines. Not the echo of the Whistler's breath in her ears. Just the sound the world makes rushing through a pipe or pooling in a cistern. Whipping through a dead place, with neither heartbeart nor blood rush to impede it.
***
"Does it still feel good to you? The guys, I mean."
Now Sophie looked startled, almost guilty. After a moment, she shrugged. "It feels warm."
"Yeah," Natalie said.
"Especially their mouths."
Which was exactly right. Mostly, these last few nights, Natalie found herself hovering around their lips, in the same way she'd once crouched beside the tiny space heater her mother used, on surprisingly frigid Charlotte winter nights, to heat the trailer. That, apparently, was what sex would be about from now on. The ghost of tingling. Mostly heat.
***
And in the meantime, through the agony and the haze of her own tears, she'd stare, like Sophie, at the way the world looked when it was lit. How could I possibly have forgotten so quickly? But she knew the answer to that. She hadn't forgotten, really. This sight – this impossible green, this radiant orange, the daily blossoming of the whole planet – couldn't be forgotten, because it couldn't be remembered. Could not be held in a human brain. That's what made it such a daily revelation. All her life, she'd been told that death was unimaginable, unknowable. When it truth, it was life that could never be imagined. Life was just too big.

There's blood and gory death and hypnosis and all the other things that go along with vampires as well, but it's Hirshberg's invocation of death that has stuck with me. And the ending. That ending! Goddamn. It's a cliche to talk about 'strong female characters', but the final choices of Natalie and especially her mother are some cold-ass, steel-spine strength to remember.


Remina by Junji Ito. (Sometimes also titled Hellstar Remina, but my copy just had Remina) A sci-fi horror manga set in Japan in the near future. An astrophysicist discovers a new planet, whose existence seems to prove the reality of wormholes to other dimensions. A pretty significant discovery! And one that wins the scientist both the Nobel Prize and naming rights to the new planet, which he calls after his teenage daughter, Remina. Remina herself is soon a media sensation, becoming a pop star and advertising celebrity. Of course, this is a horror story, so things begin to go wrong: the planet Remina turns and somehow heads towards Earth at nearly the speed of light, and other planets and stars in its path disappear. As Remina comes closer, it becomes clear that it's not quite a planet, given that it has a massive eye and tongue; that it's eating everything it passes; and that Earth is its target. People unsurprisingly panic, and a cult suddenly arises, playing on these new fears to put the blame on Remina and her father. The cult argues that the Oguros have somehow summoned the planet, and the only way to save humanity is to sacrifice them.



The middle and late section of the book get a bit repetitive as the same plot plays out over and over again: the cult finds Remina, attempts to kill and/or torture her, a man saves her, she escapes. The only change from one round to another is that Remina's clothing becomes ever more tattered and scanty. That said, there are some fantastically creepy images throughout: Remina tied to a cross as a massive eye opens in the sky behind her; a nuclear-blasted corpse, its skull grinning through heat-tightened skin; a body melting into goo when exposed to the toxic atmosphere on the planet Remina; the constant mob of screaming mouths and reaching hands, shouting "Kill Remina!" and "Remina the witch!".



Overall, it doesn't reach the heights of terror Ito is capable of in stories like 'The Enigma of Amigara Fault' or 'Uzumaki', but it's nicely scary little story about cosmic horrors and why the brutality of man is scarier than anything out of space.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

The White Road by Sarah Lotz. A horror novel set in modern-day England and Nepal. Simon is a mid-twenties slacker, working at a coffee shop and half-heartedly running a website of dumb videos – until he decides that the perfect click-bait would be footage of actual dead bodies. He chooses those of a group of young cavers who were trapped and died in a sudden flash flood; due to the difficulty of getting into this particular cave in the first place, the bodies have been left there since their tragic death a few years ago. Simon hires a stranger off the internet to serve as guide to this closed-to-the-public cave, and off they go.

Unsurprisingly, things go wrong. Simon comes out of the cave with a pretty serious case of PTSD, as well as hearing voices – the incarnation of darkness? the ghosts of the cavers? the memory of the guide? something else yet again? – as well as the footage he searched for. After it's uploaded, the site suddenly becomes profitable, and Simon's friend pushes him into climbing Mount Everest to film more dead bodies. In what is a more implausible turn of events than seeing ghosts, Simon manages to secure a place on climbing team despite extremely little experience on mountains, and is shortly thereafter making his way to the summit. Meanwhile, the book turns to the story of Juliet, who is racing to be the first woman to climb Everest without using oxygen tanks. She's been having some weird experiences up there alone on the ice; experiences that seem tied to what Simon witnessed in the cave. This tension is summed up by a T.S. Eliot quote which is repeated again and again throughout The White Road:
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
there is always another one walking beside you”
Nicknamed "the third man", this real concept (described by multiple climbers and other people in extreme life-or-death activities) stalks both Juliet and Simon, a confusing, mostly unseen presence whose intentions are ultimately left unclear: malignant or helpful?

Lotz is a writer who is extremely good at depicting an environment and making you feel like you're there. The cave and Mount Everest are both excellently vivid settings, and she wrings every drop of creepiness out of them. I also found the details of how mountaineering works to be fascinating; granted, I've never read much about Everest before, but I had no idea of quite how complicated and long the process of preparing to climb it is. So that's all well-done.

Now for the negatives: the cave portion is by far the scariest part of the book, and it only takes up the first quarter or so; everything after that is a gradual let-down of realizing that The White Road is just not going to reach those same heights. I think caves might be inherently scarier than mountains – after all, I can think of dozens of creepypastas and horror movies set in caves, and none on mountains.

The characters are a collection of interchangeable cardboard cutouts; none of them feels three-dimensional or real. To be fair, flat characters are a pretty common problem in horror, and not one I necessarily mind if the scares are there. The flatness is all the more emphasized in that Simon has a habit of nicknaming everyone he meets after various media references: "Depressed Harry Potter", "a low-rent version of Tom Cruise", "Tilda Swinton [...] not in looks exactly, but in presence", and so on.

The opening caving section is wonderfully terrifying, and the Mount Everest portions are interesting as a story of mountaineering, but overall The White Road is a fairly forgettable book. I enjoyed it, but I'd only recommend it if you've already read 'Ted the Caver' and watched 'The Descent' and are desperate for more.


The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. A horror novel set on a modern-day Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Years ago, four friends – boys in their early twenties – do something bad while out hunting for elk one winter. Not terribly bad, not anything worse than the dumb things a lot of us get up to in our late teens or early twenties, but these four are spectacularly unlucky in that one of their victims turns out to be something more than the usual elk. And now she's out for revenge.

Part One of the book focuses on Lewis, the only one of the friends to have left the reservation; he's seemingly the most successful, with a wife, stable job, and new house. This part of the The Only Good Indians is mostly psychological horror. Minor creepy occurrences begin to build, but the constantly lurking question is if they're actually happening, or if Lewis only thinks he's being haunted and is about to do some real bad things because of that misconception.

After an incredible climax halfway through, which makes it very, very clear that this haunting is real, The Only Good Indians switches genres to essentially become a slasher story, complete with a really excellent Final Girl. Though the mental games continue, and I love how most of the deaths are not done by the monster herself, but by how she's able to mainpulate one character against another. The worst horrors are the ones you commit yourself, after all. There are so many amazingly frightening images left behind by this story: a silhouette half-glimpsed through the blur of fan blades; an elk calf, kicking its way out of the womb; the removal of teeth; an old car falling off the cinderblocks it's propped on; ants on a boot. God, just – this book is so filmic, and so good, and so scary.

I had high expectations going in, and The Only Good Indians succeeded over and above them. The early buzz made me think would be literary fiction, perhaps more concerned with social justice than with monsters, and while it handles that aspect of the plot wonderfully, it's also a genuinely terrifying horror novel, one of the scariest I've read in a few years. Honestly, I loved this, and if you've been putting off reading it, stop that! It's Halloween season, and the perfect time to get yourself a copy of The Only Good Indians.

Note: several dogs die gruesomely, in ways that are graphically described. As do humans and other animals, but I know a lot of people are particularly sensitive to dog-death.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

Vienna by William S. Kirby. A murder mystery/retelling of the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons", set in modern-day Europe with a Holmes and Watson who are both women and also in an explicit relationship. This book was sold to me as "lesbian Sherlock Holmes", and to be fair, it succeeds on that front – which is probably all that matters to many of you.

Justine Am is a world-famous supermodel, currently doing a tour of the capitals of Europe for an art project in which various photographers shoot her posing with wooden mannequins from the 1700s. She's also an ex-med student, which I suppose makes her the Watson of this story. Vienna is an autistic savant (there's a little bit of jargon at one point about how autistic savants aren't really a thing, and she actually has some other rare condition, but she's clearly written to be an autistic savant despite that ass-cover), with a photographic memory for everything she's ever read, incredible math skills, and a tendency to be pulled into geometric patterns in a way that can lead to seizures. Which I suppose makes her the Sherlock? Someone has to be, at any rate. Vienna is also an orphan with a mysterious past connected to her extremely rich and powerful "uncle", a British lawyer and nobleman.

The book opens with Justine in Vienna's bed after a mildly dissatisfying one night stand. Matters grow more complicated when Justine's boyfriend is shortly thereafter murdered and Vienna becomes the first suspect. Despite being thrown together under these not-promising circumstances, they discover a real connection and fall in love. Meanwhile, the boyfriend's murder is only the first in a string of deaths which seem to be connected to Justine's photo shoots – someone is using her as an opportunity to get access to the mannequins. Figuring out who, and why, is the only way for Justine and Vienna to stay alive.

The relationship is well-written – I'm always a fan of characters who have sex first and take a while to catch feelings – but the mystery is complex and arcane to the point of silliness. It involves astronomy, anarchists, assassinations of the 1800s, alchemy, ancient Egypt, and is weirdly alliterative, I've just now realized. The solution also depends on believing that the royal families of Europe (including the Hapsburgs) are secretly still in charge of everything and have regular hidden meetings to maintain society. Which would have been outdated in 1904, the publication date of the original Holmes story, much less 2015.

That's not the only odd thing about Kirby's writing. Justine is constantly called out for behaving "like an American" or a "crass colonial" by other characters, while this is actually not a thing that comes up all that often in my experience of living in Europe. She herself makes strange allusions to this supposed deep contrast between American and European culture, such as when she worries that a joke about Romeo and Juliet in front of a British crowd will set off "a riot, but the laughter seemed good-natured rather than derisive. How had she gotten away with mocking the country's greatest hero?" Vienna's British accent also struck me as a bit stiff and unrealistic, but not being British, I'll leave the final call on that to the experts.

The weirdest plot twist of all is when Justine loses her modeling career because it comes out that she's dating another woman. It's not even the added complications of Vienna being visibly autistic or involved in the case about Justine's boyfriend's murder that supposedly drive the nail into the coffin, but simply her gender. 2015 is not that long ago; I find it extremely doubtful that anyone would lose multiple modeling contracts due to a lesbian relationship.

Kirby's writing is highly oblique, with dialogue that often jumps from topic to topic with no transitions and plot developments that never entirely spell themselves out. I usually admire this style of writing, with its do-it-yourself approach to the reader who's left to figure out meanings and connections for herself. But Kirby occasionally goes too far, producing scenes that are just baffling rather than ambiguous.

Overall, I mostly enjoyed Vienna, despite this review sounding like a litany of complaints. It's just that the things that bothered me were all so unusual that I couldn't resist describing them in details, even though they were minor.


Medea and Her Children by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, translated from Russian by Arch Tait. A novel focusing on Medea, a widowed and childless woman living alone in the Crimea, and her large and messy Greek-descended family, who arrive at her small village every summer for beaches, parties, and gossip. The style is lyrical and frequently shifts in time from the present moment (which seems to be around the 1970s, though I don't think it's ever explicitly stated) to various events in Medea's memory, stretching all the way back to her parents' lives at the dawn of the 20th century and covering every important moment in between. Despite brief references to the many major political upheavals this period covers (WWI, WII, the expulsion of the Crimean Tatars, the death of Stalin), the focus is very much on the family and its petty dramas: dead parents, marriages, divorces, affairs (SO MANY AFFAIRS), illegitimate children, children sent to live with siblings or grandparents or cousins, house renovations, careers desired and discarded, and so on. The best passages are those describing the landscape of Crimea, its mountains and steep paths and the scent of the ocean.

Medea and Her Children falls into a certain style of 'literary fiction' that just doesn't work for me. I never engaged emotionally with any of the characters, although the writing is certainly lovely. There's all sort of major tragedies in the narrative, but I don't feel them much when the style comes off as so distancing and almost deliberately disorienting, choosing not to reveal characters' motivations or histories. Ah, well. At least there are some gorgeous turns of phrase.

Hello everyone!

I aten't dead. Just extremely, extremely busy in these odd times. I hope you all are also well! And I hope that soon my life will calm down a bit and I can return to checking DW on the regular.

In the meantime, I have been doing a lot of reading, though alas, not so much with the typing up of my thoughts afterwards. Since I can't leave my house, I've been focusing on finally getting around to reading all the big tomes on my bookshelves, the ones that usually I put off because they're too big to fit into my purse. They, uh... mostly haven't been great. Further proof that I am far too easily seduced by a pretty cover. Anyway, here's two I did manage to write up!

Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney. A novel set in New York City in 1870s. Georg Geiermeier is a recently arrived immigrant, and his various adventures manage to hit upon every single remotely memorable thing happening in the city at the time: the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, P.T. Barnum's circus, the explosion of the Staten Island Ferry, working on the sewers, laying cobblestones on the streets, German immigrants, Irish immigrants, Black immigrants, female doctors, secret abortionists, new factories, old Brooklyn farms, street life ('Gangs of New York' style), a night in the Tombs, sex work, life in Five Points, the freezing solid of the East River, and on and on. Gaffney's determination to namecheck every element of her research ends up feeling somewhat ridiculous, and by the end I started to laugh whenever she brought in yet another historical event.

All of this pointless scene-setting provides the background for a fairly bland narrative: Georg falls in love with Beatrice, a member of the Whyos gang, which leads to a rivalry with Johnny, the leader of the gang who wants Beatrice for himself. Meanwhile, a sadistic arsonist/serial killer becomes convinced that Georg is to blame for his own incarceration, and is determined to get revenge. None of these characters are particularly interesting, and the plot never manages to do anything surprising. It's not improved by Gaffney's odd stylistic choices – occasionally butting in with an omniscient narrator to inform us of things like "but Georg wouldn't know that for another two years" or "none of them suspected that the problem was already solved". She doesn't do this often enough for it to become a consistent feature of the book, but it appears just often enough to give a further distancing effect to any emotion the reader might have been developing for the characters.

Overall it's cliched, it's frustrating, and it's mostly just boring. Is there anything exactly wrong with Metropolis? No, not really. Are there thousands of better historical novels out there better than this stale melodrama? Very much yes.


The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily by Nancy Goldstone. Nonfiction about Joanna I, who ruled Naples (her titles as ruler of Jerusalem and Sicily were more hopeful than accurate) in the 1300s, and who has been considered 'notorious' ever since due to rumors that she had her husband violently murdered. And possibly also for her role in inciting the Western Schism (that time when the Catholic church had two simultaneous popes, each of whom of course denounced the other as the antichrist).

Goldstone is here to redeem Joanna's reputation, instead showing her as a dedicated, competent, and successful ruler. And also not guilty of husband-murder since, as Goldstone says, if Joanna had wanted to get rid of her husband she likely would have had him subtly poisoned and not publicly attacked by goons to be beaten and hung. It's a fair goal, but unfortunately I came away from the book feeling like I just don't care if Joanna was good or bad. There's dozens of chapters about intricate Italian politics and backstabbing and alliances (and goddamn this is really a book that could have used a Character List; I had such a hard time trying to remember who was who), but none of it seemed to have many long-term consequences, nor was any of it interesting enough to read about for its own sake. A lot of the most fascinating bits in the book were relegated to the status of tangents, when I could have read much, much more about them: the Salerno medical school, which allowed female students and possibly teachers; repeated, devastating outbreaks of the plague; the free companies, roving bands of unemployed mercenaries who were a constant background threat in 1300s Italy; the family of a African formerly enslaved man who rose to become major political figures in Joanna's court.

I think Goldstone would have been better served by including a chapter or two focusing on Joanna's historical reception in the centuries since her life. She very briefly complains that Joanna didn't get an awesome tomb, unlike most members of her family, but that's not enough. The premise of the book is 'I am reclaiming this notorious historical figure for the side of good', but I think the average American has no name recognition of Joanna at all, pro or con. Goldstone needs to actually show us that Joanna was hated, not just tell it. That likely would also have helped with my ultimate not-caring, since part of my problem was that a great deal of the stuff Goldstone dwells on didn't seem to matter much to the grand scheme of history.

Eh, it's not a bad book. The topic is fine and the writing is fine. It's just that I prefer my interesting-facts/amount-of-text ratio to be much higher.

The Companion by Kim Taylor Blakemore. In 1855 rural New Hampshire, Lucy Blunt is a servant in a rich household that revolves around the beautiful, blind, capricious, and laudanum-addicted mistress, Eugenie. Lucy's attraction to Eugenie is quickly reciprocated, a circumstance that elevates Lucy from kitchen maid to formal companion – displacing Eugenie's previous companion, Rebecca – as their relationship becomes sexual. But Lucy has secrets she can't afford for either Eugenie or the jealous Rebecca to find out, even if she could be certain that Eugenie loves her rather than only using her as a temporary distraction. To complicate matters, the entire story is being told in flashbacks as Lucy sits in jail after being found guilty for murder – though who she murdered, and why, and under what circumstances, and even if she is actually guilty, are all questions left unanswered until the climax of the novel.

First things first: The Companion is extremely similar to The Confessions of Frannie Langton. We have a maid in love with her mistress, whose habit of consuming laudanum makes her emotions and actions unpredictable; the maid ends up accused of murder; the story is told in flashbacks, coaxed out by a lawyer or journalist as the maid waits in jail. Both use the plot to comment upon the sexism and classism of the mid-1800s, though The Confessions of Frannie Langton also has a lot to say about racism, while The Companion brings in the issue of abilism.

To contrast them, The Confessions of Frannie Langton makes excellent use of gothic horror tropes to serve new, anti-racist purposes, while The Companion is more straightforwardly historic-fiction in style. On the other hand, I thought that the characterizations were stronger in The Companion, particularly Lucy's fellow servants, such as the motherly but proud Cook. The emotional relationship between Lucy and Eugenie also worked much better for me than the one between Frannie and Marguerite. But both books are gorgeously written and handle their chosen social issues with care and insight.

It's hard to complain about too many thoughtful lesbian historical murder mysteries! It's the genre I've always wanted and never knew existed. Read these both!
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn by Hannah Holmes. Nonfiction about one suburban homeowner in Maine and her intense study of her own backyard. Holmes learns about not just the easily visible animals (the squirrels, the ravens, her adorable relationship with a chipmunk that she trains to eat out of her hand) but the unseen: insects, fungi, the roots of plants, the water runoff, the heat bubble created by her house, the soil, even the deep-down geology. Her style is very similar to Mary Roach's – an intelligent, curious, and humorous generalist who interviews experts to learn more, with a non-insignificant part of the book being her own mishaps, misunderstandings, and difficulties in finding the right experts. Holmes does end up advocating for her readers to adopt her approach (growing a freedom lawn – no grass, just native species however messy they might look, no fertilizer or pesticides), but overall it's a book of interesting facts, pleasantly delivered.

A note: Holmes, like most nature experts, dislikes invasive species. However, there's a short section where she goes way farther than most, including a quite graphic description of the death she wishes upon sparrows and starlings. Anyone who can't read about animal death might wish to skip the first few pages of Chapter Eleven.

1. A Series of Discoveries by genarti.
Sorcerer to the Crown, Rollo/Damerell, 5.7k, Teen.
The young man had listened to this with flatteringly evident interest. "Could it be -- and I beg your pardon, of course, if I am wrong -- but is your business, perhaps, to avoid your Aunt Georgiana?"
Absolutely wonderful backstory for Rollo and Damerell's relationship, with a style that sounds just like canon.

2. good boys do fine always by skazka.
Lord of the Flies, Jack/Ralph, 3.9k, Mature.
"All things considered, we were rather lucky, weren't we? Going off on a grand adventure instead of staying in place and getting bombed to ash. Getting to meet a load of other boys from different schools."
Dark, dark future-fic for Lord of the Flies. The world the boys returned to, the one they grow up in, turns out to be not all that much better than the island. This is gorgeous and horrifying all at once.

3. An Explorer of Delirium by Edonohana.
The Sandman, gen, 567 words, Teen.
“It’s a sundial,” he said. She could tell he liked explaining things. Words hovered over his head, glistening and swelling and then exploding with tiny popping sounds. They said, HE LIKES EXPLAINING THINGS. “It tells the time of day. Look, you can read it by the shadow.”
Pitch-perfect Delirium POV, with just the sort of ending she would go for.

4. Where There's a Whale There's a Way: or, How to Kiss a Harpooneer in Ten Leagues by Icarus_Isambard.
Moby Dick, Ishmael/Queequeg, 5.8k, Teen.
“Harness thine inner strengths, organize thine harried and confused thoughts of love for Queequeg into lines of beauteous verse. Remind him of the searing flames which burned at thy first meeting.” He leaned in, his face drawn and serious. “Then sing them to him, my hearty. Eviscerate the emotions from thy bowels and sing thy fucking heart out.”
Delightfully silly rom-com tropes collide with Melville's writing style. Plus: pop song parodies! This fic made me laugh harder than any other I've read from this year's Yuletide.

5. cacio e pepe by serephemeral.
Some Like it Hot, Jerry/Joe/Sugar/Osgood, 5.4k, Mature.
For all that Osgood is odd and oblivious and infuriating, he’s also romantic, sweetly protective, and a damned good kisser. And he wants her. Wants her on the days she’s Daphne; wants him the days he’s Jerry. Fiancée, fiancé; Osgood wants both, and Daphne’s beginning to realize just how much that means to her. To Jerry. To them.
Okay, yes, everyone has already recced this, but it really is the OT4 fic this movie has always deserved.