The Lost Village by Camilla Sten, translated from Swedish by Alex Fleming. A horror novel set in modern-day Sweden. In 1959 an entire village of 900 people vanished – leaving behind no bodies, no footprints, and no trace of where they'd gone. The only clues were one newborn baby, abandoned in the local schoolhouse, and one corpse, that of a woman who'd apparently been stoned to death in the village square.

In 2019, a group of five young filmmakers arrive at the still-abandoned Silvertjärn to investigate the mystery and film a documentary, led by Alice, whose grandmother lost her parents and sisters when the village disappeared. The others are Tone (Alice's best friend, with her own secret connection to Silvertjärn), Emmy (Alice's ex-best friend and there is quite the backstory there), Max (who provided most of the funding and is interested in being more than friends with Alice), and Robert (Emmy's partner and kinda just there to provide another body). In appropriate horror tradition, Silvertjärn mysteriously renders cellphones unuseable and the only way in or out is a long, nearly overgrown dirt path. In other words, once the five arrive, there's no way of getting help from the outside. Weird stuff immediately begins to happen: muffled voices, half-seen glimpses of silhouettes, rotted buildings collapsing around them. Is it paranoia from being so isolated? One of the five fucking with the others? Ghosts of the vanished? The cause of the disappearance, come to claim more victims? Or something very human and non-paranormal, but using the empty buildings to stalk the five?

In between the chapters set in 2019, flashbacks from the POV of Alice's grandmother's family show Silvertjärn in 1959 in the months leading up to the disappearance and slowly revealing exactly what happened. There's a nicely creepy solution, and one that proved satisfyingly difficult to guess ahead of time.

First of all: the entire premise of this book is self-evidently silly. There is no way nearly a thousand people disappear from a Western country in the 1950s and said country doesn't flip its shit attempting to find those people, or that such an event could be half-forgotten and degrade into a generic interesting factoid and not be, like, the most famous event in history. I mean, people still can't shut up about the Roanoke Colony, and that was a) in the 1500s, b) only 100 people, and c) has a fairly obvious answer. But it doesn't really matter; plenty of horror has a silly premise and still manages to be perfectly effective! One you accept the whole 'lost village' thing, The Lost Village has some very creepy scares.

It is also incredibly femslashy. So much so, in fact, that I spent a significant portion of the book convinced that Alice and Tone were current partners and Alice and Emmy were ex's, and in neither case just in the friend sense. I mean, here's Alice describing the tension between her and Emmy:
“Alice, we need to talk,” she says, then sits down cross-legged on the cobblestones. She does it smoothly, in a single movement. She never used to be so agile. She used to be stiff and a little lazy, slow in the mornings and energized by night; used to yawn like a cat, wide-mouthed and red-tongued.
How many times have we eaten breakfast together? One hundred? One thousand? Her with hair wet post-shower, like now, me with yesterday’s makeup still clinging to my eyelashes. But this time my face is bare, and hers is closed.
SUPER PLATONIC, I ALWAYS THINK ABOUT MY FRIENDS' TONGUES.

Overall, The Lost Village is a good source of page-turning chills and thrills, but also the kind of book where you're likely to forget what happened as soon as you finish it. It's a popcorn movie in horror novel form, but hey – sometimes that's exactly what you want.

Note: there are two characters with mental illnesses (one with severe autism, one with a psychotic disorder), who suffer due to the prejudices of those around them. I thought it was handled better than you'd expect from a trashy genre novel, but one of them dies violently, and I respect anyone not wanting to read it for that reason.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand.A horror novel structured like an episode of VH1's 'Behind the Music'. I suppose you could call it an epistolary novel, if you stretch the term to cover not only letters and journals but also recorded interviews. Said interviews concern events that happened during the summer of 1972, when folk revival band Windhollow Faire rented a rural English manor hall to record their second album, immediately after which their lead singer mysteriously and permanently disappeared. Various people give their version of events, from the surviving members of the band to various girlfriends and ex's, the band's manager, a music journalist, and a local kid with dreams of starting a photography career. The interviews come from decades after the actual events (at an unspecified date but presumably sometime around 2015, when Wylding Hall was published), which gives much of mood of the book – it's drenched in nostalgia, a group of middle-aged people looking back to the moment when they were the most famous, the most successful, the hottest, the most *alive* they would ever be. This theme is laid out for the reader right on the first page:
And of course, everyone was so young. Julian was eighteen. So was Will. Ashton and Jon were, what? Nineteen, maybe twenty. Lesley had just turned seventeen. I was the elder statesman at all of twenty-three.
Ah, those were golden days. You’re going to say I’m tearing up here in front of the camera, aren’t you? I don’t give a fuck. They were golden boys and girls, that was a golden summer, and we had the Summer King.
And we all know what happens to the Summer King.

As you might guess from that reference, the strange things that begin to happen at Wylding Hall concern British folklore. (A lot of people seem to be describing Wylding Hall as a ghost story, but it's quite obviously folk horror.) The doomed Julian becomes obsessed with recording his own version of Thrice Toss These Oaken Ashes, his bedroom fills with Tudor-era books on magic and medieval jewel boxes, there's an ancient barrow on the hall's grounds, a local custom concerning the hunt of the wrens, time behaves strangely, rooms in the hall appear and disappear, and some people see a beautiful young woman whom no one else can recall. It all adds up to an ambiguous but creepy ending.

One problem for me was that, for the mood of Wylding Hall to work, you really need to believe in that image of "golden boys and girls", of a halcyon summer, as another character describes it. And it's obviously my own biases, but I just can't take a folk band seriously as the epitome of cool. I wasn't alive in 1971, so perhaps I'm underestimating the appeal, but, like, here's an example from when the band visits a local pub: "She dressed sharp, too—long skirts and dresses, lace-up boots and flowy scarves, all kinds of shiny bits and bobs. Hippie royalty, we were. [...] Her scarf was printed with peacock feathers, and she had on earrings made from peacock feathers". And this is very popular with a bunch of elderly regulars in a small town? Look, I sometimes dress like a Ren Faire reject myself and own peacock feather earrings in multiple colors, so I get the attraction, but I'm not under the illusion that I'm impressing anyone with my style choices. Every time a character tried to emphasize how Windhollow Faire was the height of rock-and-roll glory, I alternatively giggled or rolled my eyes. Which presumably did not help to build the atmosphere Hand was going for.

Still, I assume that most people will not have this problem, and Hand does do an excellent job of building a haunted, heavy sense of dread. A really lovely, skillful take on the horror genre, with some absolutely beautiful writing.



BREAKING NEWS: THERE IS A NEW BENJAMIN JANUARY BOOK IN THREE WEEKS! AND IT'S SET IN NYC! I AM SO EXCITED. House of the Patriarch by Barbara Hambly. I would link to somewhere better than Amazon, but it appears to be limited to ebook form until January.

I got a gift fic! And it's lovely and wonderful and perfect!

That is my home of love by Nary. Benjamin January, Teen, 1.2k. Hannibal's thoughts on the Ben/Rose/Hannibal relationship.

Go read it! NOW! :D

Cold Bayou by Barbara Hambly. The sixteenth book in the Benjamin January series.

I realize it's been a while since I posted about Ben January, so let me take a moment to give an overview of the series. They are some of my favorite books of all time, and I can't recommend them highly enough. Set in New Orleans in the 1830s, they focus on Benjamin January, a free black man trained as a surgeon and classical piano player. Despite the 1830s being pre-Civil War, at the time New Orleans boasted a large population of 'gens de couleur libres ', or free people of color. It was a category of (often but not always) mixed race people, often (but not always) descendants or family members of women who served as mistresses to white men. In Spanish and French colonies, mistresses and children were (often but not always - do y'all get the sense that it's hard to put lines around this kind of thing yet?) freed and given money or employment, whereas in British colonies the color line tended to stay stronger, and mistresses and children were (often but not...) kept in slavery. This resulted in a system where British colonies had two groups of people – black and white – but French and Spanish ones had three – black, white, and "colored" – where the middle group was seen as distinct but containing some qualities of both the others. In New Orleans itself, this became codified in the "placée" system; interracial marriage was illegal, and so women of color in long-term romantic/sexual relationships with white men were described as being "placed" with him.

Anyway, all of this is just background to fun, well-written murder mysteries. Benjamin January was born into slavery, but freed as a young child when his mother became a placee. As a result, he was raised in relative privilege – highly educated (he speaks something like seven languages, including Latin), interested in music theory and scientific advances and Shakespeare, sent to France for schooling in medicine – but has never gotten over the violence and terror of his childhood, particularly his fear of potentially losing anyone he cares about at any time – and indeed, after he was freed he never saw his father (who remained enslaved) again. Ben's in his 40s in the books, when he stands 6'3 with broad shoulders to match and is very dark-skinned; this means everyone who meets him automatically assumes he's a field slave rather than a free man, which doesn't exactly help him get over his fears. Ben is such a fantastic main character; he's smart and cynical but with a deeply good heart (he literally saved puppies as a kid!), he loves meeting people and talking to them, he's snarky and sweet and gentle and also frequently gets to have adventure scenes like punching a giant alligator in the middle of a hurricane. Since the series are mysteries, he's repeatedly called on to investigate unusual deaths. At first this is usually to prove his own innocence – or that of a relative or close friend – who's been accused of murder, but as the books go on he's often asked to help simply because he now has a reputation for it.

The books are remarkable not just for Ben himself, but for his community. My favorites of the other characters are Rose and Hannibal. Rose is a free woman of color, born into that status but who has suffered in her own way, as a woman who more interested in math and microscopes than fashion or flirting. She's determined to open a school for girls of color, despite several setbacks. She's gawky and wears glasses and Ben is head-over-heels in love with her. Hannibal is their best friend, the only white man in New Orleans who isn't insanely racist (though even he makes mistakes sometimes). He works as a musician with Ben, and is clearly from some sort of aristocratic background, but has chosen to change his name and spend his days homeless and addicted to alcohol. He's also dying from TB (well, "dying"; 16 books and counting and he's still around), which means he is the designated woobie of the series, frequently being poisoned or kidnapped so that Ben has someone to rescue.

Ben's family is also fundamental to the series, including his mother (a heartless, awful person, but a stone-cold survivor down to her bones), his sister Olympe (a Voodoo Queen, and voodoo is taken seriously as a religion in these books, not just oooh zombies), and his half-sister Dominique (also a placee, she comes off as flighty and gossip-obsessed, but she's clever and loyal to a fault). Another important character is Abishag Shaw, a white police lieutenant who is sympathetic to Ben's attempts to find real justice and often provides off-the-books assistance.

The series is everything you could ask for in terms of diversity. As is obvious above, most of the characters are black or mixed race, but there are also important Native Americans, Muslims (including Ben's first wife), Latin@s, Jewish people, and gay characters. Hambly also uses the setting to discuss issues of discrimination that fall along the lines of gender, colorism, religion, language, class, disability, nationality, and more. The historical detail of 1830s New Orleans has obviously been incredibly well-researched and is depicted in great detail. But it's also just so much fun! Ben, Rose, and Hannibal in particular are immense nerds who spend a lot of time joking around with one another, there's adventure, there's suspense, there's immense amounts of competence porn, there's hurt/comfort, there's everything you could want. But the series is especially good for Found Family; Ben's efforts to gather and protect a community around himself is the central arc of the series, and breaks my heart every time. I mean, when it's not giving me joy.

In summary: READ THEM PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

Anyway. Back to Cold Bayou.

The sixteenth book in the Benjamin January series, Cold Bayou begins with the engagement of Veryl St-Chinian – sixty-seven, eccentric, and hermit-like – to an eighteen-year-old illiterate Irish former prostitute. The St-Chinian family is, unsurprisingly, extremely upset by this, since everyone assumes Ellie, the bride, is a gold-digger. That would still be Veryl's choice, but due to vagaries of French colonial law, the family holdings are operated more like a shareholder-owned company than individual plantations. As one of the few still-living members of the oldest generation, Veryl holds a one-third vote over any matter relating to the family business, and as his wife – or widow – Ellie will hold an equal vote. Which means she could, theoretically, decide to sell off all the land and waltz away with the money – all the dozens of plantations, townhouses, business operations, and more owned by the St-Chinians – leaving hundreds of family members and their dependents destitute. Which, you know, it' hard to have much sympathy for a slave-owner losing his sugar plantation, but any such abrupt shift in ownership would put the slaves themselves in danger too.

Such is Ellie's ostracism from New Orleans high society that Veryl decides to hold the wedding on Cold Bayou, a small, remote plantation. Benjamin and Hannibal are hired to provide music for the ceremony; Chloe attends as Veryl's beloved niece, which means she brings Henri, which means he brings Dominique; Livia Levesque, Ben's mother, receives an invitation and would never refuse a chance to show off her social connections; Selwyn Singletary (previously appearing in Good Man Friday comes along as a Veryl's fellow old man who's more interested in Plato and calculus than business or family; and Rose is invited as perhaps the only person Veryl actually, simply, likes.

And so they all head off to isolation in Cold Bayou, where there's not enough guest rooms or food and everything immediately goes wrong. The priest doesn't show up on time, suitors of various young women make dramatic arrivals, spoiled young white men challenge one other to duels, Ellie's maid is having an affair with a fieldhand, the overseer is embezzling from the plantation, Ellie's uncle shows up to threaten anyone insulting his niece, and through it all the St-Chinians are doing everything they can to stop the wedding.

Matters escalate when Ellie's maid claims that Ellie holds the papers on a debt long-ago incurred by Simon Fourchet, Ben's former owner. If she's telling the truth, it means that Ben, his mother, his siblings, and all of their children are still legally enslaved. Ben tries to investigate this claim, but he doesn't get far before the maid is killed that night, presumably in a case of mistaken identity for Ellie herself. And as if things weren't bad enough, a storm causes the Mississippi to flood, trapping everyone on the plantation.

I absolutely loved this book. It has a really fun twist on the country-house genre (flooded sugar plantation is about as far as you can get from British country house, but they serve the same purpose!), and it was wonderful to see characters we hadn't gotten to spend time with in the most recent books, particularly Livia. She's so awful, but her scenes are some of my favorites.

I don't want to spoil the mystery, but the resolution is incredibly well-done. It speaks to how we can all be short-sighted, as readers and people; we – and Ben, at least at first - assume we know who's the main character in the story and who's only secondary, but the truth turns out to be very different.

I'm not sure I'd recommend this book as an introduction to the series, there's too many characters fans already know playing important parts. But if you're familiar with Ben January and co. already, you're sure to love this.

I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

It's Yuletide time! Hooray!

Hello and thank you for offering one of my fandoms! I'm looking forward to whatever you write, and if you want to completely ignore the rest of this letter, or pick and choose just a few things, that's totally fine. I've tried to write a shorter letter this year. If you want more information click here for previous years' letters. Anything I've asked for before I would still love to get.

AO3 name: Brigdh

Basics
– I love all ratings, from G to NC-17. A lot of the prompts I give below are focused on ships, but feel free to write me the characters as platonic friends instead if that's what you prefer. Gen and PWPs are both awesome!
– Feel free to include injury, illness, death, infidelity, racism, homophobia, classism, etc, as needed for your story. Or feel free to ignore such elements of the canons below! I'm good either way.
– A lot of my requested canons are historical fiction. I DO NOT require you to have done research to write them. Trust me, I won't care if you use a modern word or describe the wrong style of clothing. I'm not an expert either.
– For each of my requests, the characters are very much OR instead of AND. Want to write a story about Rose without Hannibal, Rosalee without Cato, etc? Go ahead! You could probably guess this from the prompts I give below, but I wanted to be clear about it.
– Weird stylistic writing choices, like second person POV, a series of linked drabbles, unreliable narrators, five times fic, etc, are all totally okay. I enjoy reading experiments!

DNWs
– amnesia
– de-aging
– mpreg (I do love A/B/O fic; if you want to write that, feel free to mention mpreg in the worldbuilding. Just please don't make it the main focus of the fic)
– Groundhog Day AUs
– 24/7 lifestyle BDSM

Yes, please!
– AUs, especially: modern AU, historical AU (as in, any historical period other than the one in canon), A/B/O, pirates, Wild West, cyberpunk, postapocalypse, circuses, canon-divergence
– found families, families of choice, and loyalty kink. I especially love it when there are reasons why it's difficult or unusual for the characters to have a relationship, but they defy expectations by being devoted to one another anyway.
– I LOVE one character risking their life/sacrificing themselves to protect another. "I thought you were dead!" is also an excellent trope
– casefic would be great, especially if you could combine it with slowburn get-together of one of my ships. I realize that’s a lot to ask of a writer. But just in case you want to write long casefic: I would love to receive it!
– hurt/comfort of all kinds, especially if the comfort leads to a deepening relationship. People getting ill, people getting beat up, people choosing to be tortured to protect someone else, people hiding injuries while trying to soldier on, people enduring long-term poor conditions (especially cold! I HATE being cold, and so I deeply identify with a character barely avoiding hypothermia), last minute rescues, confessions of feelings due to thinking you're about to die, caretaking, giving the hurt character a bath (especially hair washing!), and characters learning to be loved.
– iron woobies, always and forever
– established relationships are my jam. Show me how comfortable people have gotten with each other, how they know one another well enough to know all of their jokes and triggers and erogenous zones. And established doesn't have to mean problem-free! There's all sorts of troubles that tend to come up in relationships long after the first time. For example, I'd love a story about a fight and working through it.
– arranged marriages/marriages of convenience and fake dating are some of my favorite stories. I love all of it: the awkwardness, the enforced intimacy, the pining over 'my feelings are real but yours are pretend', the trust despite the difficulty, the teaming up to put on a good show for outside observers.
– slice-of-life, domesticity, missing scenes, and curtain-fic are all wonderful. I am totally fine with a very low-stakes story, as long as I get to see my favorite characters going about a normal day, enjoying themselves with one another, making jokes, etc.
- I adore all sorts of silly fanfic tropes, but here are some of my favorites: Genderswap (particularly of the "always-a-girl/boy" type rather than "woke up one morning" type), crossdressing, roadtrips, huddling for warmth, masquerades/disguises/undercover, trapped together (snowed in cabin, handcuffs, etc), friends-to-lovers and especially FWB to more, sex pollen, and platonic bed sharing.

Porn: I love everything from PWP to fade-to-black to gen. If you want specifics, I'll have a comment up under the Yuleporn post soon.

( Specific fandom requests: Benjamin January, Hadestown, Underground, The Ballad of Black Tom )

Title: Light As Air
Ratings/Warnings: NC-17 for explicit f/m sex, breathplay
Fandom: The Benjamin January mysteries by Barbara Hambly
Pairings: Rose/Hannibal
Notes: This is the reason I've been so busy lately – managing to get this story finished before the deadline. This is a treat I wrote for Nary for the Seeing Color exchange, though it's actually based on prompts from the Smut Swap exchange a few months ago. I started it then, but didn't manage to finish it in time, and luckily had a second chance to write it.


Summary: Rose conducts an experiment on Hannibal, which leads to unexpected places. (Set during Good Man Friday.)

7216 words. Also available on AO3.

( Light As Air )

Some things I've read recently that I enjoyed and want to pass on:

Small Kindnesses by ophelia_interrupted. Benjamin January, Hannibal/OFC, E, 1.6k. YES THERE IS A NEW BENJAMIN JANUARY FIC AND IT IS REALLY GOOD. :D Why has no one else read this? It's fantastic! EVERYONE CHECK THIS OUT AND SQUEE WITH ME BECAUSE I LOVE IT.

Singing the Lord's song in a strange land by Nary. Based on a song, but you can easily read it as original fic. M, 1.4k. An absolutely beautiful story about slavery and mermaids (or something darker!) and motherhood and just, this is so great. You should absolutely give it a chance.

Red Sky at Morning by thewalrus_said. A sequel to Shakespeare's 12th Night, written in script format. T, 14.5k. This is just excellent! I love the plot, I Iove the characterizations, and I love the romance. Really worth reading if you have any fondness for the original play at all.

Double Negative (Eliza/Jefferson, 4k) and its sequel, An Unconventional Relationship (Eliza/Jefferson/Hamilton, 10.7k), by holograms. Hamilton: a musical, E. This is not a pairing that would ever have occurred to me, but by God, this fic has converted me. It's so hot and well-characterized and sympathetic and funny and sad and did I mention hot? Because it is. Yes. Highly recommended.

What did you just finish?
Drinking Gourd by Barbara Hambly. In the 13th book of the Benjamin January mysteries, Benjamin's participation in the Underground Railroad takes a turn for the complicated. The plot starts when Benjamin is summoned to the small town of Vicksburg, Mississippi, where the local Railroad workers need a doctor who knows how to keep secrets. He brings along his friend Hannibal (a white man) for protection, and they soon find that there are many more secrets around than either anticipated.

This is a hard book to talk about without spoilers because of those very secrets. Many characters who seem trustworthy prove not to be, and first appearances count for very little. But without giving away specific plot details, I can say that the book deals with a paradox that's been around since at least Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale: "For though myself be a full vicious man / yet I can tell a moral tale". In this case, if the local Underground Railroad absolutely depends on one man, how much harm can that man do before it balances out the lives he's saving? Does it ever? Can good and evil even be balanced on the same scale like that? Benjamin is forced to ask himself how much evil he can tolerate to keep open this line of the Underground Railroad.

And he's not the only one facing hard decisions. Many people in this book are striving to justify the bad they do with acts of goodness, or let the appearance of goodness cloak their badness, or just trying to find the easiest path between two terrible fates. It's a book of incredibly complicated choices, and many of the decisions made could be betrayals or salvations; it all depends on your perspective.

Another theme is the position of women (and I kind of mourn the absence of Rose in this book, because I'd love to see her comments on it all. Though I suppose it's easy to guess what she would say). Black and white, upper class or prostitute, they're all trapped by the patriarchy and left with few options. Whether they sacrifice themselves or those with yet less power, there's little they can do to break free. Also – I can't think of a way to bring this up subtly – there is a lot of rape in this book (though none of it "on screen"), so if that's something you're sensitive to, be aware.

If there's anything I would critique, it's that the book is a little too busy, especially at the beginning, although it's hard to fault it for that because there's an enormous cast to be introduced, with all of their relationships and rivalries, not to mention a new setting to describe. The mystery hangs on a complicated tangle of 'who knew what when and where were they?', which necessitates the telling of yet more detailed information. Personally, I missed seeing the characters get a chance to simply breathe and spend time together, and I would have liked more space for their emotional reactions after some of the dramatic moments. But that lack (if it even is one; I'm sure some readers are bored with those sort of characterization details and prefer the action) makes room for a book that is much grander than much of the series, and which grapples with questions of a deeper and darker nature.

You could easily read this book without knowing anything about the rest of the series. It's a book that takes seriously the problems of ethical action in a flawed world, of the impossibility of escaping from any awful situation without doing some damage, and it gives a picture of American history which is complicated and layered and hugely engrossing. As dark as this book is, it was hard to stop reading. Highly recommended.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


Middle Passage by Charles R. Johnson. Well, this is a confusing book to describe. In 1830s New Orleans (yes, yes, one guess why I bought this book), Rutherford Calhoun is a highly educated ex-slave and current thief and general scoundrel. Seeking to escape his debts and avoid marrying his girlfriend, he stows away on a ship, only to discover that it's a slave-ship. He's remarkably nonchalant about this, at least until they reach Africa and load on their captives. After that things take a turn for the worse.

Despite the topic, it's not at all a depressing or grim book; it's a little bit humor, a little bit adventure, a little bit magical realism, and a whole lot of postmodern philosophy. Johnson was clearly hugely influenced by Moby Dick (we have the captain obsessed with pursuing a goal, the gentle first mate, the cabin boy who loses his voice and his mind) as well as The Mutiny on the Bounty (the friendship between the narrator and the one 'good' officer, harsh punishments leading to a mutiny) and probably a hundred other sea tales that I'm unaware of. The first person narration is insanely erudite, rhythmic, and wry, full of (presumably deliberate) anachronisms, and is a better inducement to read the book than the actual plot. Here he is describing the captain of the ship after the mutiny:

I saw half the ribs on his right side were broken, that he strained not only to deny a physical pain involuted and prismatic but deeper wounds as well. What were these? I could see that all he valued would perish from the indifference of Allmuseri [the slaves] who would no more appreciate the limits and premises of his life than he would theirs, whereby I mean his belief that one must conquer death through some great deed or original discovery, his need to soar above contingency, accident, and, yes, other pirates like John Silver and Captain Teach, his pseudo-genius – to judge it justly – which could invent gadgets but lacked genuine insight, which rained information down on you like buckshot, but in the disconnected manner of the autodidact, which showed all the surface sparks of brilliance – isolation, vanity, idealism – but was adrift from the laws and logic of the heart. All at once I found that I was still ensorcelled by a leader who lived by the principle of Never Explain and Never Apologize. But I pitied him too, for his incompleteness. I pitied him, as I pitied ourselves, for whether we liked it or not, he had changed a people simultaneously for the better and worse, made himself the silent prayer in all their projects to come. A cruel kind of connectedness, this. In a sense we all were ringed to the skipper in cruel wedlock. Centuries would pass whilst the Allmuseri lived through the consequences of what he had set in motion; he would be with them, I suspected, for eons, like an ex-lover, a despised husband, a rapist who, though destroyed by a mob, still comes to you nightly in your dreams: a creature hated yet nevertheless at the heart of all they thought or did.

I discovered after finishing this that Johnson has apparently written multiple books on Buddhism, which makes perfect sense. Themes of utter connectedness, of how action ripples inward and outward, of the interweaving of past and future into the now, and the way that nothing (whether person or thread or waterdrop) exists as an individual but only as part of the whole form the foundation of Middle Passage. I'm not even sure I 'get' everything here, but I liked reading it, and I'd recommend it.


What are you currently reading?
The Coral Strand by Ravinder Randhawa. Another book off NetGalley.

Here are some stories I've been enjoying recently, and that you should read as well:

Passage by bigsunglasses. The Goblin Emperor, gen, 14.8k.
Released from his role as Prince by the birth of a son to the Emperor and Empress, Idra is allowed to attend university. But he can't escape his past so easily, or perhaps at all, particularly not when he meets someone who walks under a similar shadow ...
Three years post-canon.
A really wonderful extrapolation of world-building and character. It's thoughtful and kind and full of excellent H/C.

you dared not look. a human voice, / you thought by inkandcayenne. True Detective (Season 1), Rust-focused gen, 28.8k.
At North Shore they called it repetition compulsion: the desire to throw himself into a ravine because at least he recognized the landscape. They warned him that he would do this again, and again, and again if he wasn’t careful. “It’s like you’re always bracing for a fight,” Laurie said once, “and if it doesn’t happen, you create one.” Sophia’s blood on the driveway, Marty’s blood in the parking lot, Psyche with her goddamn lamp, poking at a good thing until it’s scorched and screaming. There’s only one story, the oldest: “You climb a tree too high for you,” his pop said, as he passed Rust a bottle of whiskey and began to splint his arm, “you best be prepared to fall and get hurt.”
I haven't even watched True Detective, I just follow the gifs on tumblr. And occasionally read the fic. That said, this is a gorgeous, moving story, interweaving myth and poetry with the grit and violence of Rust's life, and an eventual sort of peace. I always love inkandcayenne's writing, and this is a great example of it.

Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter: Draft 2 (With Comments) by ryfkah. Shakespeare in Love, gen, 0.9k.
What has occurred to bring me to this pass?
For on my life, I cannot make it out.
[PERHAPS BECAUSE THE RELEVANT SCENES ARE MISSING FROM THIS PLAY, WILL]
And now for something totally different! A short, hilarious piece that I just loved.

Kill Not the Moth nor Butterfly by within_a_dream. Benjamin January mysteries, gen, 1.2k.
It is fall 1832, and New Orleans has long since fallen to hordes of the undead. Rose Vitrac has built herself a home in a wreck of a city, and after an encounter in a bookstore, this home gains one more resident.
This is my "if you read only one" fic of this post! FINALLY THERE IS A ZOMBIE AU FOR THIS FANDOM. (Although, uh, zombies have not actually appeared yet.) Instead this is a lovely quiet piece about survival and friendship, and I just love the interactions between Rose and Hannibal. Also it has Cora in it! Who doesn't love Cora?

What did you just finish?
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent. A history about, well, what it sounds like. The more famous elements of Prohibition – the gangsters, the speakeasies, the enforcement agents – get a few mentions, but they're not the main drive of the book (not that I really wanted more topics, since the book's already over 400 pages in hardcover). Instead, it's focused on the politics of the whole matter: both how it was originally passed and then how it was quickly repealed. Which is pretty fascinating; I'm always intrigued by that weird moment in American history where the Republican and Democratic parties basically switched places in regard to progressive social policies. There's a ton of other fascinating little tidbits in here as well (the cruise industry's start as a way to drink alcohol in international waters! hilarious beer ads of the 1800s! Prohibition's connection to issues as diverse as women's suffrage, the first income tax, and the rebirth of the KKK! Joe Kennedy: not actually a bootlegger!).

The huge number of people involved occasionally made the action a little hard for me to follow, especially when the author seemed to expect the reader to already know some of them (apparently the Bronfman family and Eliot Ness are super famous! Sadly, I am ill-informed and did not recognize either). But despite that, the book's more of a page-turner than political history has any right to be.

What are you currently reading?
Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile. A novel from NetGalley, about an art teacher from LA who implausibly ends up as the owner of a sugarcane field in Louisiana, with only a few months and almost no money to bring it to harvest. I've only just started it, but it seems charming so far.

Also, curtana wrote me this amazing little story about Hannibal Sefton, and you all should go read it and love it.

What did you just finish?
Good Man Friday by Barbara Hambly. This is my least favorite of the series. Which is not to say that I don't like it! I do, it's just that I like the other books better. I do like the new setting, and I really love the baseball subplot, but I think ultimately I miss Rose and Hannibal and Shaw and all the other characters. Though on the other hand, I do like getting to see more of Dominique and Chloe and Henri, and Edgar Allan Poe is pretty much my favorite historical cameo.

In terms of the mystery, I'm not really into the long strings of numbers and codes (I still don't understand how the 'Tumbling Squares' code works, but to be fair, I didn't really try to understand it. Also I keep picturing the magic squares as sudoku, and I don't think that's really accurate). I do like the trick with the Rowena's description being wrong. It's such a little thing, and yet capable of throwing off so much of the book! On the one hand, I'm not sure it's realistic she would have lied about something that could have so easily have been caught as a lie (if only one other person had described Singletary!), and yet, if you read closely, she seems to lie about all sorts of random things, so I suppose it's just part of her personality.

I really like the long flashback to the day Livia, Olympe, and Ben were bought and set free. It has such great character details for each of them – Ben crying from loneliness, Olympe spitting on Janvier's shoes, Livia neglecting to mention (or just assuming) that the children are coming with her. I'm also still so curious abut what Ben and Janvier's relationship was like. Janvier seems generally pleasant (he certainly spent a lot of money on Ben, between buying him a piano and sending him to France for school), but Ben has such a lack of emotion in his memories of him that I think they can't have been close. I hope we find out more about it in some future book.

And he remembered, in coming and going from the dissections – and mostly he and the other students had to spend the night in a hayrick or a stable, since the city barriers weren’t open again until first light – he would sometimes see the anatomy assistant Courveche in quiet converse in the shadows with furtive, unshaven men whose peasant clothing always smelled of grave-mold.
Interestingly, just a few days ago there was just a post about this on Barbara Hambly's facebook! So I guess it was luckily we ended up doing this book later than originally planned. I quote:
I hate it, hate it, HATE it when I find out after a book is published that I got something wrong in my research. In my post a week or so ago I mentioned finding a book that would have been TOTALLY useful in researching something that's already in print (and wasn't published until AFTER my book had come out...). Well, after not finding ANYTHING that said there was any difference between English medical practice in the 1820s and French medical practice - while I was writing the Ben January book, Good Man Friday - come to find out that France was the ONLY country in Europe where nobody had a problem with dissections and cartloads of cadavers were dumped every day at noon on the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Dieu, for the med students to pick through for subjects. I gather the atmosphere in the dissecting-room could get a little thick (students smoked cigars as a measure of relief - that sound you hear is my mind boggling at the thought of what the place must have smelled like), but other than that, no prob. They fed the scraps to the Hotel's dogs afterwards.
So, everybody just disregard January's reflections on dealing with grave-robbers in France. Never happened. My bad. My reasoning and extrapolation (hey, it was a Catholic country!) were at fault.
Thank goodness January's reflections on the subject was all it was, and that no plot-point turned upon it.
But I'm still vexed. Grr. Wonder if I can talk my editors into doing another edition?
(Apparently the book in question is "The Greater Journey" by David McCullough, if anyone is interested in the topic.)

‘They are Americans: drunk as holes and crazy as sticks.
Is this an actual French saying? Because if so, I LOVE IT. I did not know holes were particularly drunk (or sticks particularly crazy), but this is hilarious to me and I want to adopt it as part of my regular vocabulary.

It's interesting to me that Ben seems so very remorseful over killing Quent, since he's killed people before in the series without fasting for a year. I suppose because it wasn't in self-defense (or at least not immediate and direct self-defense), and wasn't in the heat of the battle, but was a fairly cold and conscious decision, is what makes the difference to him.

I can never figure out if Thèrése is a slave or a paid servant. As it makes a big difference in how sympathetic I am to Minou at the end, I wish I could figure it out.
And link to the FFA discussion, which is very brief. But still open! If anyone wants to comment.


Mike and Psmith (just to be confusing, the same book has apparently also been published under the titles The Lost Lambs and Enter Psmith, and as the second half of the book Mike) by P.G. Wodehouse. I've been meaning to read the Psmith books forever, since they have a tiny but very enthusiastic fandom. And they deserve it! Psmith (pronounced the same as 'Smith'. As he explains: "There are too many Smiths, and I don't care for Smythe. My father's content to worry along in the old-fashioned way, but I've decided to strike out a fresh line. I shall found a new dynasty. The resolve came to me unexpectedly this morning. I jotted it down on the back of an envelope.") and Mike are new students at Sedleigh, a small stereotypical British public school, in the early 1900s. Mike is a jock – a cricket star! – and Psmith is witty and eccentric, goes about wearing a monocle and calling everyone "comrade". Together they fight crime cause crime.
This book had a lot of cricket, a sport I continue to absolutely not understand, despite friends making me watch games or try and play (I could not even hit the ball. It's way more difficult than it looks! I'm impressed by your skills, Mike).
Overall, really lovely and funny, and I'm definitely going to read the other books.

What are you currently reading?
Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking, and the Table by Massimo Montanari, trans. Beth Archer Brombert. So far it's been more historical theorizing of the "how do we know what we know?" sort rather than the actual topic, but I'm not very far into it yet, so I'm holding out hope.