Moonflow

What’s the book? Moonflow by Bitter Karella

How dark is it? It’s pretty dark. Slasher movie levels of gore and some of it involves children. There’s also a lot of graphic sex but that’s generally between consenting adults.

How good is it? On a scale from one to ten poisonous mushrooms, I give it a seven. 7/10 poisonous mushrooms.

The description on the back of Moonflow talks about the King’s Breakfast, a magic mushroom that creates truly transcendent experiences. The cover art is super psychedelic. This book is obviously about drugs but somehow I did not make this connection when I bought it. I feel a bit silly and hopelessly uncool for missing this. 

This book also comes with a content warning, as a lot of books do these days. I don’t pay much attention to these, as a rule. When I pick up a horror novel I expect, even want, to read disturbing material. Most of the time the actual novel isn’t nearly as disturbing as the content notes warn/promise. This novel, however, was even more graphic than the content note suggested, and I can’t say I wasn’t warned. Literally. On the first page. I was also warned about the heavy drug use depicted, though I really should have known that already.

We follow Sarah, a trans woman. She’s a grower and seller of magic mushrooms on a bizarre journey of weirdness and discovery. She is, indeed, looking for the King’s Breakfast so she can cultivate and sell it. This most magic of magic mushrooms grows only in the mysterious Pamogo forest way up in northern California. Her guide is Andy, who works in the State Park visitor’s center near the forest no one seems to ever visit. Only a few hours into their little forest jaunt we begin to see why there are so few visitors. It’s one of those dark and creepy forests where the landmarks seem to shift when you’re not looking. There are weird piles of racoon bones and Andy seems to navigate using dead hikers as landmarks. If you’re looking for a pleasant day hike, maybe a beautiful vista or two, the Pamogo will disappoint. This forest is more about mushrooms and mayhem.

The only people who seem to live in the Pamogo are a cult of mushroom-fueled radical feminists with nicknames like Skillet and Hell Slut and Mother Moonflow. Mother Moonflow is their visionary leader and their paragon of feminine power. She’s also constantly high and maybe not the most stable and grounded of people. The Moonflow cult seem to be on a quest to birth an avatar of the Green Lady, a spirit of pure plant-based feminine energy. There are a lot of psychedelics and female orgasms involved. Also murder. There’s lots of murder involved. 

When Sarah and Andy meet this cult they’re not sure at all what to think. The cult, likewise, isn’t sure what to think about Sarah and Andy. They’re all lesbians for political reasons, so Andy’s pretty useless to them, but they’re split on Sarah. Mother Moonflow agrees that trans women are women and it’s cool to have Sarah there but some of the other cult members aren’t so sure. Sarah and Andy would be happy to leave, only they’re hopelessly lost by the time they meet the cult so they’re pretty sure they’ll die in the woods if they can’t get directions from one of these women. Plus, Sarah figures out pretty quick that Mother Moonflow has access to the King’s Breakfast. Maybe they can get along with these women long enough to get hold of some. 

That’s the basic story but none of that explains how fast-paced, weird, and at times gruesome this story is. Maybe get really high and read this while fighting your way through a few hallucinations? (No, wait, don’t do that. I’m not recommending that to anyone.) What you should maybe do is go watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s cult classic Stalker. Andy, as he leads Sarah into the freakiness of the Pamogo, starts telling Sarah about Stalker, surprised she hasn’t seen it. I dutifully looked it up on YouTube (it’s free there) to see what the hell it had to do with anything and a)Stalker is also about a creepy dangerous forest where landmarks seem to shift when you’re not looking and b)both places seem to confront wanderers with the deepest truths about themselves. 

Many of Sarah’s deepest truths, and many of the cult members’ deepest truths, involve their complex feelings about humanity and femininity. Sarah, in particular, becomes ever more entranced by thoughts of the Green Lady and the cosmic femininity she embodies. She’s really not sure the cult has the answers she seeks but maybe the King’s Breakfast could show her a transcendant thing or two.

This book is funny and gross and horrific but it’s also deeply beautiful and visionary in parts. I don’t want to add details because the summary wouldn’t capture the book’s essence anyway, but Sarah really does find a kind of transcendence in the Pamogo. 

If you like fast pacing and weird twists and turns, and if you have a strong stomach and aren’t easily traumatized by books, you should give this one a try. It reads like gory splatterpunk fun but there’s a lot under the surface that will stick with you long after the bloodstains fade. 

Girl Dinner: a Review

What’s the book? Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake

How dark is it? Barely. The darkness is implied and discussed but rarely seen.

How good is it? On a scale from 1 to 10 murder weapons of choice? Pretty low. Maybe 3 knives. At best.

As you can see, I got this on sale.

It’s called Girl Dinner and there’s a bloody fork on the cover, so I hope I’m not spoiling anything when I say it’s about cannibals. Cannibals who are also sorority girls. Sounds great, right? Girl Dinner is very much billed as a satire making fun of the dog eat dog world of elite colleges and the pressure women feel to be perfect and successful in every way at all times. Unfortunately, this book is about 97% college stuff and 3% cannibalism, at best. I wanted more cannibalism. Also more actual humor. This satire didn’t work for me.

We alternate chapters between Nina Kaur and Doctor Sloane Hartley. Nina is desperate to get into The House, the best sorority with the most beautiful classmates and successful alumnae on campus. Sloane is sought after by one of those alumnae, who hopes Soane will become the sorority’s new faculty adviser. Nina is desperate to fit in and be validated by the most exclusive set of girls on campus. Sloane is desperate to avoid the disappointing “mommy track” to nowhere as she gets back into teaching after having her first child. Both are drawn deep into The House’s sisterhood even as hints appear that something darker is at the heart of it. 

Both our heroines are basically just bundles of feminist buzzwords and endless anxiety spirals. It’s a constant barrage of both. “Nina . . . didn’t care what a bunch of frat guys thought of her. She also understood that many of these disgusting frat guys would be competing with her for the same law schools and that, eventually, whether she liked it or not, their acceptance would determine her success in the workplace and in life.” “‘I’m glad she’s in daycare now,’ the pediatrician said, implying heavily that any given stranger would be much better for Isla [Sloane’s baby] than Sloane, a decorated academic who nonetheless could not nurture her only child to save either of their lives.” “Sloane looked up, noticing that Max was now gesturing broadly with his hands. She caught Alex’s eye, and there was a moment–a little slip of pretense–where Sloane became aware that Alex was performing attentiveness.” “Nina could finally rewrite the story, reorienting herself on the path. In six weeks, she’d wear the . . . letters like a badge of honor. Like a brand on her blessed, anointed chest.” 

It’s all like that all the time. Every single thought receives endless attention and analysis. There’s so much of it that there’s really not much room for the plot and there’s very little to the characters beyond the endless self-analysis. I’m pretty sure the characters are supposed to be flat, so full of education and expectations and anxieties that there’s barely room left for individuality, but that makes them pretty boring and annoying and kind of hard to sympathize with. I often felt like the book was trying so hard to Say Something that it didn’t end up saying anything much at all.

To be totally fair and honest, some of this is just me. Blake’s style reminds me heavily of Don DeLillo, meant to recreate a certain kind of inner landscape and emotional tone. DeLillo is a genius or whatever but his writing doesn’t speak to me at all, so Blake’s knock-off version speaks to me even less than that. If you’re a DeLillo fan, though, this book might speak to your soul.

Everything about this book bored and annoyed me except the ending, which was the only sad and horrific thing about this book (and the twist ending was definitely Saying Something. Finally. After more than three hundred pages of statements that didn’t add up to much.) I don’t want to spoil the twist but if you like Blake’s writing style at all, you’ll probably dig the ending.

I recommend you find this book in person, open it to any random page, and read that page right in the middle of the bookstore. If that page bores or annoys you this book is not worth your time, even for the twist ending. If you find that random page funny and interesting, you’ll like the whole book. Also, you’ll probably love Don DeLillo. Support your local bookshop by picking up White Noise or something while you’re there.

Mirrored Heavens: a Review

Spoiler alert: Mirrored Heavens is the third book in Rebecca Roanhorse’s Between the Earth and the Sky series and I can’t discuss this one without spoiling the first two. If you haven’t read Black Sun and Fevered Star (review here), go do that. The third book makes no sense if you haven’t read the first two. In fact, it only sort of makes sense even if you did read the first two.

I’m gonna be up front with you. I found this book kind of disappointing. By far the weakest of the three. The second book sets a lot of events in motion and the third book tries to bring them all together in grand fashion but, for me, it’s not a success. 

We start in a world on the brink of war. Serapio, avatar of the Crow god, and Naranpa, avatar of the Sun god, were supposed to fight to the death in the first book but missed each other due to unforeseen circumstances. They put off their fight to the end of the second book but their hearts weren’t in it. Instead of an epic battle, the second book ends with an uneasy truce between Serapio and Naranpa. It was a crazy twist. As the third book begins, Naranpa has departed for the northern wilderness to learn more about the gods and their dealings, leaving Serapio in charge of preparing Tova for war with the many nations conspiring against it. Naranpa feels that Serapio’s the best chance of uniting Tova’s clans and defending the city from the forces combining to attack it.

This book is setting us up for an epic clash between the Gods as the avatars of several deities each follow their own paths to Tova. Balam, the Jaguar acolyte, is leading an army to conquer the city. Xiala, now the avatar of the ocean goddess, crosses the ocean to avenge her people and aid Serapio. Serapio himself is caught between his own commitment to save Tova and his Crow god’s desire for an epic confrontation with the Sun god. Naranpa, avatar of the Sun, feels inexorably pulled toward that same confrontation, but Naranpa also has her eye on Balam. 

Complicated, right? As we’d expect from the third book in an epic fantasy trilogy. I’m fine with a series sprawling a bit, but this one never really comes back together and there are so many unanswered questions and story arcs that either fizzle or veer off course.

We follow Naranpa as she prepares for her epic spiritual battles, we keep following as she wanders off to rescue her friend Iktan, and we wish we hadn’t when she arrives in Tova ready for war and instead (huge spoiler!) just razes a huge chunk of the city without actually contronting either the Jaguar dude or Serapio. This pointless destruction is especially disappointing because it doesn’t fit with anything we’ve learned about Naranpa or the Sun she serves in the last three books. It makes no sense at all.

Xiala’s arc is slightly better. We follow her as she tries to rescue and avenge her people after one of the Cuecolan lords tried to conquer their islands. Parts of this plot feel forced and hamfisted but there’s some exciting action and it’s cool to see Xiala finally connect with the Sea goddess and become truly badass. She does manage to finally reconnect with Serapio as well, so that’s nice.

Serapio spends most of the book waiting for the other gods to show up and fight his god. To keep him occupied, the Coyote god throws him a bizarre multi-part prophecy to fulfill. It all feels a bit forced and random but at least it keeps Serapio busy? He does end up facing the Jaguar avatar (but not Naranpa or the Sun) and it turns out his true battle is against the Crow god within him as he fights for his independence from his destiny. This part is actually pretty underdone. This is an interesting conflict and it’s handled a bit too quickly compared to even the arcs of a few minor characters.

As this series went on the pacing got more and more choppy, and by the end of this book things just felt too disjointed to really enjoy. The trilogy started tight, opened out until it involved everyone on the map, and though it tried valiantly to bring all those threads back together and tie them up neatly, mostly it felt muddled and disappointing.

Still, right up to the end I loved the world building and cosmology of these books. Meroamerican history and mythology feel like fresh and exciting sources for fantasy world building and Roanhorse does great things with them. Even though the series petered out in a way I found deeply unsatisfying, I give her credit for amazing world building and detail. I would love to see what other fantasy authors could do with these influences. 

New reviews every Friday. Embrace the darkness and read more books!

Fevered Star: a Review

Spoiler alert: Fevered Star is the second book in the Between the Earth and the Sky series and I can’t discuss this one without spoiling the first one. You can read that review here. If you haven’t read Black Sun and don’t want it ruined, go read it now. I’ll wait . . . 

Okay. In Black Sun, Serapio (avatar of the Crow god) sets out to kill the Sun Priest (named Naranpa) and all the priests who follow her. He crashes their winter solstice ceremony, the moment when the sun is at its weakest and the shadowy Crow god is strongest. Everything goes according to plan for the Crow god, except that mere days before, Naranpa had been assassinated and replaced by a sort of puppet Sun Priest. The Crow god can tell the difference–all that killing and the Sun is not defeated. 

Which means Naranpa must not be entirely dead; somewhere, she must be alive and still holding the Sun’s power within her. 

Which means Serapio s mission is still unfulfilled. He was supposed to crash the Solstice ceremony, kill everyone on behalf of the Crow god, then die. His little crow friends sacrificed themselves to save Serapio but the Crow god isn’t too thrilled with the defeat and Serapio was not prepared at all for life after that battle. The Crow clan, who he thought would embrace him as family, has decidedly mixed feelings about their god walking amongst them. Some of them worship him as the Odo Sedoh, the Crow Grandfather, but many of their leaders wish their god had never returned. He’s upset the balance of power and the Crow Clan’s matron is afraid of reprisals from the city’s other clans. 

While Serapio navigates life as a living god (but also a nice young man), Naranpa is back in Coyote’s Maw, revived by her estranged brother and his witch friend. Once Naranpa is revived, she begins to realize she’s become more than just a priest of the Sun. She seems now to be the sun’s vessel on earth. Instead of escaping certain death, she’s still on a collision course with the Crow god. 

The book rocks back and forth between three stories this time. We follow Serapio’s story as he forms an uneasy relationship with Okoa, brother of the Crow Clan’s leader. We follow Naranpa as she attempts to find allies in Coyote’s Maw. We also follow Xiala, Serapio’s Teek friend, as she travels with Iktan, another surviving priest (an assassin, the Priest of Knives) to distant Hokaia. In Hokaia, the Eagle clan conspires with Hokaia’s spear maidens, a band of Teek warriors, and a couple of Cuecolan merchant lords (one of whom was briefly Xiala s boss in the first book. Small world.) Together, they make plans to attack Tova now that the Watchers are dead and the city is in confusion. Well, all those other people want to attack the city; Xiala just wants to find Serapio and help him out if she can. She misses her weird crow-loving friend. They really bonded in the first book and now that she knows Serapio survived his big revenge mission, Xiala desperately wants to see him again.

As epic fantasies tend to do, this one sprawls a bit. There are a lot more moving parts than the first book had, and a lot more secondary characters. We still have the central conflict between the Crow and the Sun, represented by Serapio and Naranpa respectively. Along with that, we now have impending war, with representatives of several nations planning to invade a fractured and weakened Tova. One of the Cuecolan lords, Balam, is also trying to master the magic of dream walking in order to defeat Tova and ultimately become the avatar of his own god, the Jaguar. As all this is brewing, Xiala’s mother is head of the Teek contingent and none too happy to see her daughter. Xiala is, in fact, sent packing back to Teek against her wishes, only to find Teek has become a shell of itself while she’s been gone. 

This book is messier than the first, not as tight or touching, but there are some interesting twists and turns, and the ending really surprised me. It ends, as the first does, with a confrontation between the Sun and the Crow, but this one turns out much differently than either of the avatars expect. In some ways it’s a much weaker ending but I respect it for going in a direction I did not see coming. At the end of this I was immediately itching to start the third book and see how Roanhorse was going to bring all this back together.

You’ll find out how that went next week. Until then, embrace the darkness and read more books.

Black Sun: a Review

Technically Black Sun (by Rebecca Roanhorse) is epic fantasy instead of horror and I actually didn’t pick it up for the blog at all. I was talking to a friend about the upswing in indigenous horror writers and she said she was reading this fantasy series set in the ancient Americas. It sounded cool so I got myself a copy and started reading. (I didn’t do this on purpose, but my copies of all three books are signed by the author because she’s got New Mexico connections. So that’s neat.)

The first chapter features a mother doing some very bloody ritual magic on her son, attempting to turn him into a vessel for the Crow God, and then throwing herself off a cliff as a sacrifice to complete the ritual. 

It was intense. It was dark. I loved it. I read the whole trilogy and now I’m gonna review it for you, one book a week, for the rest of the month.

Black Sun is set in a fantasy world inspired by various Mesoamerican cultures. There’s no one-to-one correspondence, just a fantasy mix of ancient fashions, hairstyles, beliefs and cultures. I found these inspirations refreshing and fun, and I enjoyed the truly polytheistic perspective Roanorse creates in this world. As the series progresses, more gods, through their various avatars, try to work their will in this world. She sets up an epic battle between spiritual forces without any of them being clearly good or evil. This first book was especially successful at that.

The book alternates between Serapio (the Crow God’s intended vessel but also quite a nice young man) and Naranpa, the Sun Priest Serapio is divinely mandated to overthrow. While Serapio sails from the Cuecolan coast toward the holy city of Tova (don’t worry, there’s a map in the front of the book), Naranpa is trying to revitalize the city’s priesthood and battling politics between the city’s four great clans and the poor clanless folks of Coyote’s Maw (don’t worry, there’s a map for this, too). 

As we follow both of them, we’re given tantalizing bits of the events that set both Serapio and Naranpa on their current paths. We learn about the Watchers, the priestly hierarchy Naranpa rules, that were created a few hundred years ago after a great war between several nations and their various gods. We learn that much more recently, a generation ago at most, the Watchers led a raid against the Crow clan. In attempting to stamp out worship of the Crow God with bloody finality, they drove one rebellious Crow to find a way to bring back her god in human form and exact revenge on the Watchers. Serapio, of course, is that vessel, born for revenge. This is mostly local politics but since Tova is officially the spiritual center for several nations, fights between Tovan factions can have much broader ripples.

Serapio knows this. About the Crow Clan and the revenge, I mean. Not about international relations. He was born and raised for revenge on the Sun Priest and educated in war and pain and dedication by his mother’s allies. He embraces his destiny. But he’s also barely an adult and this boat ride to destiny is the first chance he’s ever had to get out of the house and meet people. He becomes friendly with Xiala, the boat captain in charge of delivering him to Tova. She’s a Teek, a sort of Siren or mermaid from a small reclusive island nation. She tells him stories and he keeps her company as she guides the boat through the starlit night. For the first time in his life, Serapio finds a friend and for the first time in a long time, Xiala finds someone who just likes her instead of being fascinated or repelled by her Teek heritage. (There are a lot of superstitions about Teeks. They can speak to the sea and calm its waters so everyone wants one on their boat, but the minute things go wrong guess who they blame?) It’s a beautiful little relationship that deeply affects them both. 

Meanwhile, Naranpa is dodging assassination attempts while trying to revitalize her city’s faith. Naranpa is originally from that poor clanless Coyote’s Maw, while pretty much everyone else in the priesthood are honored members of the four major clans. She’s the Sun Priest, the head of the whole council, supposedly the greatest power in Tova and owed allegiance by most of the surrounding nations as well. Ever since that raid on the Crows, though, the Watchers’ reputation in the city is tarnished and to make things worse, the Clan leaders look down on Naranpa herself for her background. She’s got a tough road ahead if she wants to reform the city. 

I won’t spoil the inevitable confrontation but I will say it’s spectacular. The book takes its time, letting us really get to know our lead characters and several supporting characters, but this battle is always looming ahead of them. What I loved most is that I couldn’t decide who I was rooting for. Serapio is so sad and endearing, Naranpa is so idealistic and embattled. I loved them both but by  the end I also understood there could be no agreement between these two. This made for a moving and complex ending I thoroughly enjoyed. 

New reviews every Friday. Embrace the darkness and read more books!

Alchemized: a Very Long Review for a Very Long Book

I don’t usually do content warnings because I consider them implied in a blog about horror novels and murder mysteries, but this book deserves a content warning. SenLinYu’s Alchemized is awash in body horror, torture, creepy medical experiments on unwilling subjects, and a little bit of sexual assault. These are so integral to the book that I can’t even review it without talking about some of these subjects, so skip this review if you’re not up for this much darkness. 

My second warning is that SenLinYu is apparently famous for writing a Harry Potter fanfic where Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy get together and Alchemized is an expansion and reworking of that. Once I found that out (around 300 pages in, I think) I couldn’t unsee it. Hermione and Draco are definitely still visible in the main characters and that drew me out of the story at times, but the rest of the story is different enough that it didn’t bother me. If you feel a lot of feelings about the Harry Potter series or its author, it may affect your experience of this novel. 

That said, if you’re still here and game to try it, this is a pretty enthralling read. At over a thousand pages, it’s a brick of a book, but I’m glad the author resisted the temptation to break it up into a series. I loved being able to follow the long sweep of the story from beginning to end without interruption, and SenLinYu did a great job of keeping the story cohesive and moving forward even as it got bigger and more complex. 

Now, the details. 

Fantasy novelists love inventing new magical systems and societies, and this book is no exception. Alchemized is based on, unsurprisingly, alchemy. Historically, alchemy was a blend of art, science, and occult religion, and in Paladia it’s the same. In Paladia, though, a person’s alchemy ability depends on resonance, a sort of natural energetic affinity to various natural substances. If you have a resonance with iron or copper, for instance, you can learn to manipulate it and transmute it into other substances. If your resonance is especially strong, you might be able to affect quite a number of metals and natural elements, including human bodies and souls.

Paladia is the worlds’ main source of Lumithium, an element that amplifies resonance in humans and can enhance alchemical effects, and the key to scaling up alchemical processes to industrial levels. Paladia was founded and is still ruled by the Holdfast family; they’re both political and religious rulers, and they also run an elite alchemy school to train the best and brightest students with the strongest resonance, and to further the study of alchemy. The Holdfasts are in constant tension with various Guild families, mostly talented alchemists of various metals who perfected ways to industrialize the process and grow rich. 

When we enter the story, however, everything has gone horribly wrong and the whole country is now ruled by the horrifyingly immortal High Necromancer and his terrifyingly ruthless right hand man, Kaine Ferron. The Necromancer rules through a combination of cruelty to everyone and the promise of immortality to his faithful followers–only he has the alchemical secret to becoming Undying, and once you accept his “gift” you’re bound to the Necromancer forever. Everyone in this new reality is either miserably oppressed or trying desperately to impress the High Necromancer, mostly to avoid being miserably oppressed. Our hero, Helena, is the last living member of the Resistance. Newly discovered in a forgotten prison tank and missing a good chunk of her memories, it’s Ferron’s job to extract whatever secrets are hidden in that brain of hers. The Necromancer’s minions lock Helena’s wrists into manacles lined with “nullium” that deaden her natural resonance, then she’s packed up and sent to Ferron’s country estate for interrogation. Ferron one of those powerful alchemists who can manipulate all sorts of materials. He’s also a vivimancer, meaning he can manipulate people’s bodies and brains, so Helena’s interrogation less torture and questioning, more direct attempts to magically invade Helena’s brain and unlock the information the Necromancer wants.

The entire story is told through Helena’s eyes, first as she tries to figure out what the hell happened to her and what Ferron’s deal is, and later as her memories come rushing back and we see the war’s last year through her eyes. In part one, we see Helena fierce and almost pathologically self-sacrificing, still willing to do anything to protect a Resistance that no longer exists. She’s repelled by Kaine and his cold vicious ways, but also confused. As far as she can tell he’s a remorseless killer, always seething with barely suppressed rage and totally devoted to the High Necromancer’s every whim. But he’s also got some weird moral code; he seems almost protective of his prisoner’s welfare and he carefully holds himself apart from the casual sadism of his fellow Undying. He’s definitely a monster but not the kind of monster Helena expected. She also suspects he knows her, but whatever their history is, it’s clearly in the locked part of her brain.

The brain unlocking is proceeding pretty slowly when the Necromancer suddenly decides Helena should be part of a program to breed new baby necromancers. One of the few things Helena does remember from the war is being sterilized so she couldn’t pass on her own talent for vivimancy, so she’s pretty shocked to find herself part of a breeding program. One of the Necromancer’s creepy doctors have fixes for everything, it seems, and sure enough she’s “fixed” Helena’s fertility. Yikes.

Unlike the resistance, the Necromancer actually wants vivimancers to breed, and he decides Ferron would be the perfect match for this experiment. Ferron seems utterly horrified (but not totally surprised) by such an order but he has little choice but to make a baby with his prisoner. If he doesn’t do it, the Necromancer’s next choice will probably be worse and Ferron will completely lose control of Helena. This new project is awkward and horrible for them both, and Ferron’s handling of it furthers our suspicion that he’s got more going on than just blind devotion to his leader. 

As Helena’s pregnancy takes root, Helena’s stress levels spiral out of control and, ironically, all this stress loosens the locks on those hidden memories and causes them to come flooding back. Part two takes us back into these memories, and one of the first things we find is that Kaine Ferron was actually spying for the Resistance before they fell. That’s how he knows Helena. 

The war between the Resistance and the Undying had been going on for a few years before Ferron offered his help, claiming he wanted to avenge his mother’s death at the Necromancer’s hands. Exactly zero people believed this (even though it’s completely true) so he randomly asked for Helena to be his contact, implying some vague romantic obsession with her. This, the Resistance believed. A couple of Resistance leaders, Jan Crowther and Ilva Holdfast, essentially tell Helena to seduce him and encourage his obsession so Ferron will be pliable. 

Let’s just say none of this turns out the way any of them planned, and over the course of their alliance the two form a complicated relationship that eventually becomes a fierce love. They both become a bit obsessed with each other and we learn two important things. First, Kaine Ferron is much more a victim of torture and blackmail than anything else, which gives me great sympathy for him and the impossible choices he has to make. Second, the Resistance is a giant bag of dicks. Many of them are either intolerable snobs or self-righteous religious zealots, and almost none of them give the tiniest shit about Helena or what happens to her. She’s both a foreigner and a vivimancer so nearly everyone in the Resistance considers her vaguely distasteful and suspect, but all of them are happy to use her for healing their soldiers and seducing Ferron and literally anything else they need without giving her an ounce of sympathy or credit. Don’t get me wrong, the Undying are way worse than the Resistance, but the Resistance also sucks. They’re convinced with a literally religious fervor that they’re locked in an epic battle of good versus evil, and if only they have enough faith and optimism there’s no way they can lose. As the story progresses, even Helena begins to understand just how far their heads are up their self-righteous asses. It adds a lot of moral nuance to the story when you realize the only person to ever actually hurt the Necromancer is Kaine; even though he’s only doing it for personal vengeance, he’s the secret hero of the war.

Okay, no more spoilers. This review is long enough already. The romance between Draco and Hermione Kaine and Helena gets a little repetitive and overwrought at times; as the war drags on for months in a stalemate, so does their tortured path to love. Eventually the action picks up again, though, and the story does a pretty decent job of balancing their intensely personal drama with the epic events unfolding around them. Helena remains almost obnoxiously self-sacrificing, but also clever and brave and often pretty interesting. Kaine remains morally complex in a way that I really enjoyed–he becomes more and more a sympathetic character as he tirelessly works to bring down the High Necromancer without being suspected, but never entirely stops being a villain. I love complicated characters like that, and I thought Kaine was well done. 

This is a very long and very dark book that I devoured as fast as I could. It was tense and compelling, pulling me along nearly the whole time, and it balanced the intense relationship with some great world-building and political drama. I highly recommend it.

New reviews every Friday. Embrace the darkness and read more books!

Strange Pictures

I got Strange Pictures in Tucson, at Antigone Books. It’s mostly a feminist/social justice bookstore, which means its horror section is tiny (even tinier than it is in most bookstores) but also very dedicated to minority authors, which made for interesting browsing.

Anyway, I picked up Strange Pictures by Uketsu mostly because the author’s name was Japanese. My family lived in Japan when I was in high school and even though I don’t speak the language, I’ve read a lot of Japanese novels in translation. Mostly literary stuff but also authors like Yoko Ogawa and Ryu Murakami who write horror and speculative fiction. 

Since I don’t speak Japanese, I didn’t realize Uketsu’s mysteries were famous on YouTube until after I bought the book. The cover calls him a “mystery-horror sensation” and he may do horror tales on his channel but Strange Pictures is pretty much straight mysteries. There are several shortish mysteries, each one with its own solution, and they all nest together to solve a larger mystery.

This book was a quick read and very focused on logical puzzles and following clues. It had a very well done “Sherlock Holmes” vibe, where clues are clearly laid out and everything fits neatly together by the end. There’s not much exploration into psychology or deep emotions but the characters are pleasant and usually relatable. There are definitely some dramatic moments and a few surprises. Also, the “strange pictures” of the title are actually pictures that are printed in the book so you can try to solve the puzzles yourself if you want. 

On the one hand, this book has almost none of the weirdness and complexity that I look for in a darker book so it’s not gonna stick with me the way my favorites do. On the other hand, it’s so logical and neatly resolved that I was quite charmed and satisfied with the experience of reading it. I fully plan to find the sequel, Strange Houses, at some point. There are still several murders in this book so it might sound odd to say, but I think of this as light reading. 

Embrace the darkness and read more books. As always, follow us here or on Substack.

This is My Body

Let’s talk about This is my Body by Lindsay King-Miller. More specifically, let’s talk about how much I loved it because man, this book got to me. It’s got a possessed kid who levitates and eats the local birds and squirrels, but that’s not what haunts me. What haunts me is how relatable all the religious guilt and family dysfunction is.

Books about generational trauma seem all the rage right now and most of them don’t really do it for me. The trauma is so big and abstract, it’s hard to really connect to it on a personal level. This book, though, is a look at that trauma up close. Ridiculous amounts of repressed guilt and anxiety. Imprenetrable emotional armor and narcissism. Everybody blaming everyone else for their pain and everybody being at least a little bit at fault. If you pull back far enough you can see the epically oppressive institutions pouring pain down through the generations, but on the daily human level it usually doesn’t feel sweeping. It feels like a big painful mess that no one quite knows how to deal with. 

So. Back to the possessed kid. Or actually, we should start with the possessed kid’s mom, Brigid. Brigid has so much Catholic guilt. Like, as much Catholic guilt as you can fit into one person. When she was little, she and her mom (her single mom who was never married to her dad) had to move in with Uncle Angus, a domineering priest who always kept the curtains closed and wouldn’t let her watch TV or read books that weren’t the Bible. This already sucked, but when Brigid fell in love in middle school, Angus got even worse. Mostly (entirely) because Brigid’s crush was her best friend, Alexandra. I’m pretty sure a straight crush would have still bothered Angus but this gay crush was soooooo much worse. Angus rained down the wrath of his god and Brigid’s mom was pretty much on his side. It was bad.

Eventually Brigid grew up, officially came out of the closet, opened an occult bookstore, and cut Angus and her mom completely out of her life. If only she could cut the secret guilt and shame out that easily. Still, she’s tried hard to keep all that from her daughter, Dylan. Dylan’s gonna grow up pampered and protected and connected to a mother who really sees and understands her. History will not repeat itself, dammit! (Honestly, this is what most of us strive for with our kids. Sad thing is, when we don’t repeat our parents’ mistakes we usually make new and different mistakes instead.)

And then Dylan gets possessed. At first we’re not sure that’s what’s happening. Dylan’s a middle schooler and they can act pretty weird, especially when they’re going through some stuff. Dylan’s fighting with her former best friend, Kai, and when she punches him and then later actually bites him she gets in big trouble with the school. Dylan doesn’t want to talk about it and Brigid is freaking out, wondering where she went wrong as a mother. And on top of all this drama, Brigid is trying to reconnect with that old school crush of hers, Alexandra, who’s even more awesome as an adult than she was in middle school. Connecting with Alexandra (Zandy for short) is good but the timing really sucks.

Especially when, right before their first date, Brigid discovers all the dead animals in Dylan’s closet. A few pages later we’ve all decided Dylan is definitely possessed. It’s bloody and there’s levitation involved. The only person Brigid knows who’s ever exorcised someone is her shitty Uncle Angus. In the absence of better ideas, she heads to his house in Denver to beg for his help. 

This turns out to be a terrible idea. He’s just as awful as she remembers, only now he’s being all fake nice to Dylan, who is totally falling for it because she’s so delighted to suddenly have a grandpa. Brigid never told her why she didn’t talk to her family. Then Zandy calls; she googled Angus and found out he was actually defrocked in the 1980s for running a cable access show where he “exorcised” people on screen. Was the exorcism Brigid witnessed fake? But she saw it with her own eyes!

And things get even worse when Brigid finds an old journal her mother made before her suicide. It’s full of clear evidence that her mother never forgave her for being gay, but also full of news clippings of people who committed heinous crimes after being on Angus’s exorcism show. 

It’s all just crazy and Brigid has no idea what to do now. If Angus can’t actually exorcise her daughter, who even can? She has to save her daughter somehow but Brigid almost feels possessed herself, filled with panic and shame and a growing desire to just smash Angus’s face in. 

I’m not gonna tell you how it all ends. I’ll just say it gets worse and weirder before it gets better. This is a quick read full of drama and horror and I loved following all the mysterious little threads weaving together as the book progressed.

What I loved most, though, was how real and complex all the relationships felt. Angus is a hateable villain but we also get glimpses of where it all comes from. Brigid’s mom is incredibly frustrating and grossly unfair to her daughter but we also get glimpses into her own personal torture. She feels all too familiar to those of us who grew up in conservative religious families. Brigid and Dylan are sympathetic and relatable, while also being flawed and human.

I didn’t grow up Catholic but my background is close enough that this book was all sorts of familiar. I grew up during the Satanic Panic, around people who tried to “pray the gay away” and wouldn’t watch R-rated movies because they’d “drive the spirit away.” This book captures the spiderweb of complex emotions and relationships that culture tends to weave around you, while also being an exciting horror novel. If you like possession stories (which I do) and/or carry residual religious guilt (which I do) go read this book. Go read it right now.

Embrace the darkness and read more books. As always, follow us here or on Substack.

Mary: an Awakening of Terror

Let’s talk about Mary: an Awakening of Terror, by Nat Cassidy. This book, about a middle-aged woman going through perimenopause, is written by a man. A straight cisgender man, even. Nat is aware this might be weird, and he talks about it before we even start the story (and again at the end). I can’t say that as a man he perfectly captures the experience of middle-aged women. He only partially captures the weirdness of menopause and the female midlife crisis (both of which I have some experience with). But it’s a good effort and I enjoyed this book a lot. Unless you love romance, you’re not gonna see middle-aged women featured much in books and movies. They’ll get supporting roles but the stories are rarely about them. This story, and I give it a lot of credit for this, is definitely about Mary and a slew of other women her age. It’s wholly centered and focused on their feelings and experiences and it works to represent them in real and individual ways.

So anyway, on to Mary’s story. In a weird twist of fate, I am almost exactly Mary’s age as I write this. I’m a few months younger (we’re both a few months shy of 50) but way farther than her in the menopause journey. Mary has just begun to feel the joy of hot flashes, poor sleep, brain fog, irregular periods, and irritability that herald the menopause years. All of this really sucks but it’s also very “normal” and Mary’s doctor is zero help. She’s afraid to tell him about her more unusual symptoms–vivid nightmares, fits of blind rage, and really specific hallucinations. Every time she looks at a woman too close to her age, she sees terrifying images of damage and decay. It happens when she looks in the mirror, too, so that’s fun. 

This is her daily background noise–lonely apartment, dead-end job, no friends, intense and frequent hot flashes, terrifying hallucinations. Still, it’s her life and she’s doing her best to live it on her own terms. Until her boss lets her go, which means she’ll probably lose her apartment. As Mary is trying to figure out how to get a new job and stay housed, her Aunt Nadine calls from Arizona, begging Mary to come take care of her. Nadine says she’s dying but she’s probably just lonely. Nadine kinda sucks to live with (she sucks a lot to live with) but . . . she’s family, and it’s not like Mary’s got anything else going on just now. 

So Mary goes home to Arizona to take care of Aunt Nadine for a while and maybe figure herself out. And the horror begins almost immediately. I’m about to give away one key plot point so spoilers ahead! You’ve been warned! Skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know! Okay, here’s the spoiler: one of the main things Mary figures out is that in addition to being herself, a quiet bookish woman, she’s also inhabited by the soul of a local serial killer who used to target middle-aged women. This explains a lot about those face-melting hallucinations, as well as a few other things that started happening when she got back to town.

Okay, spoilers over. Without giving anything else away, it turns out Mary’s hometown has a dark history and is super haunted by terrifying ghosts with bloody clawlike fingers and bloodsoaked pillowcases over their heads. Crazy stuff starts to happen and Mary herself might be responsible for some of it. It’s all horrific and violent and confusing but it also does push Mary to find her own courage and power. Will she once again let life knock her down, surrender to the invisibility that takes so many aging women, or will she rise up and force the world to see her? 

This book is full of women struggling to be seen and valued. Some of them try to rebel, some try to be useful to those in power, some try to smile through it all and lean on other women, some are fiercely bitter and independent to the last. The story is relentless in this way; it’s entirely about women and it’s entirely about the ways the world totally fails to recognize and value them no matter what they do. This is a kind of depressing but vital aspect of the book because it makes you empathize with and root for pretty much every single female character even though some of them are actually pretty villainous. 

In spite of the dark themes of misogyny, this book is full of dark humor and exciting bloody horror scenes. Mary is personable and funny. Aunt Nadine is awful but also funny (and smart). A lot of the action is brutal and creative and satisfying in the way of classic ‘80’s slasher films. (Just for a taste of the humor, at one point Mary is literally saved from death by a hot flash.) I love it when horror stories can use a sense of campy fun to help us deal with dark and depressing issues, and this book does it well. It’s a fun book that horror fans will really enjoy even if you know zip zero about menopause and care not at all about middle-aged folks and their struggles. It will entertain you while giving you a bit of a new perspective. And if you know menopause intimately and know the struggles of middle-age, you’ll know exactly how Mary feels. 

Follow us here or on Substack. As always, embrace the darkness and read more books.

This Wretched Valley

This is a Trex book review for This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer.

I genuinely don’t remember where I saw this book first. I think it was in the free magazine from my public library. Anyway, it was on my to-read list for a while since I have a fondness for books where nature is trying to kill everyone. Fiction or non-fiction, I love a book where man’s hubris is checked utterly by nature. The book opens with the remains of four bodies and an abandoned Jeep being found on the side of the highway in rural Kentucky. From there we go back to who those four people used to be and how they ended up as a confusing set of remains.

Clay is a graduate student in geology at the University of Kentucky completing his dissertation using LIDAR technology to map rock formations. He finds what he believes to be an uncharted rock wall in Kentucky. With hopes to finish his dissertation and also turn this discovery into a career mapping climbing locations professionally, he plans a field excursion out to the wall. He brings in a fellow graduate student in his program, Sylvia, to help him research the location. Her research is in the relationship between native plants and geology. Clay also recruits his rock-climbing friend, Dylan, who recently received a sponsorship and is excited to be the first person to set climbing routes on this virgin rock wall. Dylan’s boyfriend, Luke, and his dog, Slade, come to belay for Dylan. On their way to the site, they stop at a diner for a last meal of sorts. The waitress tell them that the patch of forest they’re headed for is dangerous. People who go in don’t come out the same if at all. Obviously, they go anyway. From the get-go, things start to go wrong. Slade is scared and acting oddly, every plant Sylvia sees is poisonous, there is no sign of the huge rock formation they’re heading for, and the gps is misbehaving. Obviously, they push forward. 

Eventually, they reach the lip of a valley and see the giant rock. It’s everything Clay and Dylan hoped for. Slade has to be dragged into the valley. The rock has a magnetism to it, especially for Dylan. Drawn by the rock, Dylan wakes up before everyone else the next morning and starts to free climb. In her haste, she leaves the tent unzipped and Slade escapes. When Luke wakes, he’s beside himself. It’s unlike Slade to stray but he’s nowhere to be found. After an hour of looking, Dylan convinces Luke to quit. Now Luke is filled with resentment at her seemingly callous attitude toward their dog, ingratitude at the sacrifices he made to be there, and general disregard of his emotional state. Dylan is a woman possessed by this rock and her dreams of making it big as a climbing celebrity. Clay is somewhat inexplicably bumbling and brooding. Sylvia, at this point, seems to be the only person who is acting pretty normal and is doing responsible research and documentation. Slade remains missing. Dylan is mapping yet another climbing route and is high on the wall when disaster strikes. She falls and multiple of her clips fail. Dylan’s weight pulls Luke off the ground and the rope swings her like a pendulum into his body. Luke’s head smashes against the wall. She cuts them both down and it’s immediately apparent that Luke needs medical attention at a hospital. He is concussed and has seriously injured both an ankle and a wrist. This is when things really start to spiral for the group. 

From here, the book takes a slightly different course than I expected. From the first pages, it’s clear to the reader that the physical location is wrong or evil or…something. What was surprising was that in addition to the supernaturally evil locale, there are evil ghosts. So this is a place possessed. The ghost character and backgrounds for them are really interesting additions to the story. The interactions between our main characters and these ghosts are creepy and mind-bending. I wondered though if there were too many different eras of ghost. Clearly the idea is that the place is evil and hungry, corrupting and capturing the souls of those who dare enter. There is ultimately no explanation for why. I get it, it’s supposed to be like an eldritch evil that defies explanations of men but I still wanted more. Similarly, some ghosts were more evil and in charge than others but didn’t really have much more background. Why did the oldest ghost seem to date back to the civil war? That doesn’t seem long enough unless the civil war itself was a catalyst somehow. Another thing that bothered me some was how the ghosts and the land seemed to be sharing the corpses. It was an interesting idea that they were both feeding off the fear and death but the different mechanisms left something to be desired. Like why did Sylvia get turned into a skeleton but Clay was left largely intact? I appreciated the variety but felt there was just a tiny bit more explanation or exploration needed. Anyway, this is mostly me poking holes in an otherwise perfectly good and satisfying horror novel. There is plenty of gore, suspense, disgust, betrayal, and visceral sensory detail here to give you at least mild nightmares.