Reading Wednesday
Nov. 13th, 2019 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhBloodlust & Bonnets by Emily McGovern. A graphic novel about vampires, Regency London, the importance of having pockets in your ballgowns, talking yet extremely incompetent castles, and giant psychic French eagles named Napoleon, all by the creator of My Life as a Background Slytherin. Lucy is a young lady so bored by the restrictions of Regency society that she goes on a murderous rampage during a polite stroll in the countryside. This brings her to the attention of a) the scandalous, glamorous Lady Travesty, who wants Lucy to join her "secret ancient immortal vampire cult", and b) Lord Byron ("you know, from books"), who thinks Lucy slaughtered all those pretentious gentlemen because she knew they were vampires, and who now wants the two of them to join up as non-exclusive paramours/vampire-hunting teammates. Before too long, they're joined by a third ally, Sham, a genderqueer bounty hunter who is way more efficient and dedicated to the vampire-hunting mission than anyone else (especially since Lucy is still half-convinced that joining a secret ancient immortal vampire cult sounds like a lot of fun, and that cackling and swanning about is a better lifestyle than dealing with feelings and trying to form real relationships). Lucy soon falls in love with Sham, who remains oblivious:
Eventually the plot becomes so complicated and full of shocking betrayals (tm) that no one seems to know what side anyone is on, what to do next, or even what their original goal was. Which is fine, because Bloodlust & Bonnets isn't really that interested in having a coherent, suspense-filled plot so much as it wants to make lots of puns, have pointless but fascinating side-characters, mock anything associated with Regency romance or vampires, and portray Byron as a shallow narcissist obsessed with his nemesis, Sir Walter Scott, and prone to sulking in bed whenever things don't go his way (which... fair enough).
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I've seen several people compare it to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and I think that's an excellent analogy. If you find that sort of silly, random humor annoying, Bloodlust & Bonnets is not the book for you. On the other hand, I enjoyed it a great deal. My one complaint is that it dragged a bit in the middle, and yet the ending is an obvious set up for a potential sequel that immediately made me want to read more.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Grip of It by Jac Jemc. A very unusual haunted house novel. Julie and James are a young married couple whose relationship (and savings accounts) have recently been strained by James's gambling addiction. They buy a house in a small town, leave their old life in the city, get new jobs, and prepare to entirely start over. Except, of course, that things begin to go wrong. There are hidden rooms and crawlspaces in their new house; their elderly neighbor is always staring at them through the kitchen window; Julie begins to find bruises all over her body; weird drawings and writings appear on the walls of the house; they both hear the sounds of breathing and humming, as well as glimpsing shadowy figures; the trees in the backyard are constantly creeping closer to the house; rumors about their house's history circulate in the small town; unseen children climb trees in a nearby forest, their shrieking almost indistinguishable from birds; the water in the pipes comes out as clogs of mold and algae; and that's just the start.
All of this probably sounds like the standard haunted house tropes, but The Grip of It is entirely original. For one thing, it's never clear how much of the "haunting" is actually happening and how much is the distorted perception of our narrators. At some points it seems clear that one of them is creating all of the mysterious activity to trick the other one; at other points, that explanation is explicitly impossible. Sometimes outsiders witness the strange occurances; at other times outsiders directly contradict Julie and James's understanding. Despite the quite over-the-top horror happening around them, both James and Julie seem unmotivated to abandon the house, and in fact they gradually miss more and more work until they never leave at all, just spending days obsessed with finding an explanation. The narration switches from present-tense first-person Julie to present-tense first-person James with no warning or other stylistic indication that we've changed characters, which gives the very text a disorientating feel that nicely matches the plot.
The writing style is the most distinctive element of The Grip of It; it's extremely literary, with all the ambiguity, claustrophobic navel-gazing, and bleak pessimism that implies. Except that this time I mean that as a compliment. The Grip of It and its prose just really, really work. We're never given an answer to if any of the haunting is actually happening and, if it is, how. You're left with the evocative experience of a paired descent into madness without any signpost of reality to pull yourself back out.
Highly recommend for your Halloween reading, even if it's a bit too late for that this year.
Eventually the plot becomes so complicated and full of shocking betrayals (tm) that no one seems to know what side anyone is on, what to do next, or even what their original goal was. Which is fine, because Bloodlust & Bonnets isn't really that interested in having a coherent, suspense-filled plot so much as it wants to make lots of puns, have pointless but fascinating side-characters, mock anything associated with Regency romance or vampires, and portray Byron as a shallow narcissist obsessed with his nemesis, Sir Walter Scott, and prone to sulking in bed whenever things don't go his way (which... fair enough).
*
*
I've seen several people compare it to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and I think that's an excellent analogy. If you find that sort of silly, random humor annoying, Bloodlust & Bonnets is not the book for you. On the other hand, I enjoyed it a great deal. My one complaint is that it dragged a bit in the middle, and yet the ending is an obvious set up for a potential sequel that immediately made me want to read more.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Grip of It by Jac Jemc. A very unusual haunted house novel. Julie and James are a young married couple whose relationship (and savings accounts) have recently been strained by James's gambling addiction. They buy a house in a small town, leave their old life in the city, get new jobs, and prepare to entirely start over. Except, of course, that things begin to go wrong. There are hidden rooms and crawlspaces in their new house; their elderly neighbor is always staring at them through the kitchen window; Julie begins to find bruises all over her body; weird drawings and writings appear on the walls of the house; they both hear the sounds of breathing and humming, as well as glimpsing shadowy figures; the trees in the backyard are constantly creeping closer to the house; rumors about their house's history circulate in the small town; unseen children climb trees in a nearby forest, their shrieking almost indistinguishable from birds; the water in the pipes comes out as clogs of mold and algae; and that's just the start.
All of this probably sounds like the standard haunted house tropes, but The Grip of It is entirely original. For one thing, it's never clear how much of the "haunting" is actually happening and how much is the distorted perception of our narrators. At some points it seems clear that one of them is creating all of the mysterious activity to trick the other one; at other points, that explanation is explicitly impossible. Sometimes outsiders witness the strange occurances; at other times outsiders directly contradict Julie and James's understanding. Despite the quite over-the-top horror happening around them, both James and Julie seem unmotivated to abandon the house, and in fact they gradually miss more and more work until they never leave at all, just spending days obsessed with finding an explanation. The narration switches from present-tense first-person Julie to present-tense first-person James with no warning or other stylistic indication that we've changed characters, which gives the very text a disorientating feel that nicely matches the plot.
The writing style is the most distinctive element of The Grip of It; it's extremely literary, with all the ambiguity, claustrophobic navel-gazing, and bleak pessimism that implies. Except that this time I mean that as a compliment. The Grip of It and its prose just really, really work. We're never given an answer to if any of the haunting is actually happening and, if it is, how. You're left with the evocative experience of a paired descent into madness without any signpost of reality to pull yourself back out.
Highly recommend for your Halloween reading, even if it's a bit too late for that this year.
