2024 read #155: And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ.

And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ

189 pages

Published 1970

Read from December 18 to December 20

Rating: 2-ish out of 5

This book is a strange, often off-putting experiment of a sophomore novel. What opens as a fairly standard space opera gets filtered through the literary affectations of the New Wave. The text revolves from impression to impression with all the logic of an acid trip. An old man eating plums in the moonlight leaps into somersaults at the lightest touch, flames at his heels. Russ’s prose is sweeping and ambitious, but even after I’ve read the whole thing, I’m still not sure whether it was supposed to make sense or not, or if it was meant as a suite of vibes.

I momentarily got excited when Russ revealed that main character Jai Vedh is gay — rarity of rarities in 1970 sci-fi! — but then on page 23 he muses, “I wish I knew what it feels like to be a man who loves a woman,” and by page 51 he’s dream-fucking one of the women from a putative “lost colony.” Later, “homosex” is lumped in with the “exports” of a decadent, sickly dystopia, while Jai ruts through various heterosexual encounters, many of dubious consent. All of which is in keeping with the mores of this era, but it feels like a particular letdown. (You mean to tell me this is the same Russ who would later publish We Who Are About to…?) There are also some deeply uncomfortable passages that I assume (or rather, that I hope) are a feminist critique of the pedophilia at the root of patriarchal heterosexuality.

If you persevere through Chaos’ deliberate opacity and its unfortunately antique construction of sexuality and gender, it turns out to be just another Social Statement sci-fi novel making a contrast between the “natural,” vaguely Taoist society of the colony’s outer space telepaths, and the polluted, listless, technocratic dystopia of future Earth. The book’s main effect was to make me wish I were rereading The Dispossessed instead. Every now and then, though, Russ turned a phrase that made me concede it was worth reading:

Evne, like a woman of salt, fled into the walls in metal crystalhood, where he followed her, turned into a bee (all eyes), a fountain (all mouth), wrapped herself around her own bones inside out, spread herself one molecule thick along all the lines in the ship: the two of them, pulsing miles across, breathing with the lungs of incurious strangers, seeing through other eyes, petrifying in flashes, pursuing each other in the shapes of walls, floors, volumes of contained air. He followed her.

2024 read #154: Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany.

Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany

92 pages

Published 1966

Read from December 17 to December 18

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

This novella is about perspectives, about growth and the understanding that there is no single point of view, but rather a plethora of perspectives on every action. This is brilliantly orchestrated right from the first page, a bravura introduction of character and POV. The rest of the novel is a somewhat picaresque Bildungsroman following the education — and, separately, the learning — of Comet Jo, a young farm worker from a backwater “simplex” community, as he leaves home and journeys across the wider universe.

Delany uses Jo’s credulous perspective to ironically explore institutions built upon slavery. A rich “multiplex” benefactor impresses Jo with the necessity of enslaving the Lll, the sacrifice required to own them, and the protections the Lll enjoy, while the narrative slowly builds a picture of how the galactic powers that be destroy any Lll who dare to defy their own “protection” in order to be free.

I love Delany’s blue collar space milieu from this era of his career, full of barefoot and mildly homoerotic “shuttlebums” and poets. Empire Star isn’t as compelling as its companion novel, Babel-17, possibly because of the novella’s brevity, possibly because its picaresque aspect didn’t click with me quite so well. But Star is a must-read all the same.

2024 read #153: Sphere by Michael Crichton.*

Sphere by Michael Crichton*

378 pages

Published 1987

Read from December 15 to December 16

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 (though it probably deserves 1)

* Denotes a reread.

I’m somewhat familiar with the writing habits of more literary authors, but I have no idea how an automatic bestseller conveyor belt like Crichton would have worked on his books. Sphere was the immediate predecessor to Jurassic Park; are their similarities the result of Crichton working on them at the same time, or is it because he had so little creative depth? On one hand, grumpy mathematician Harry Adams reads like a first draft of Ian Malcolm. On the other, Beth Halpern is just another iteration of Crichton’s standard Strong Female Character, which his limited imagination translates to “woman literally bulging with muscles.” And, unsurprisingly, Sphere is riddled with fulminations against some monolithic idea of “scientists” and their collective irresponsibility.

When I was a tween, Sphere was my third favorite Crichton novel, behind only Jurassic Park and The Lost World. It’s competently constructed for an airport thriller, dispensing with unnecessary setup and doling out technobabble as required. I don’t carry the same nostalgia for Sphere that I hold for Jurassic Park, but what little I found to recommend rereading it now is undoubtedly tinged with tweenage fondness.

The book hasn’t aged well. Our normative white dude POV — literally named Norman — withstands minority perspectives in the form of Harry (Black genius from the inner city slums) and Beth (man-hating feminist who longs to manipulate men), both of whom muck up the undersea situation for poor old sensible Norman. It’s that classic “senior white man explores social tensions from the clarity of his own neutrality” motif of the 1980s and ’90s, elevated to a central role in the plot.

Especially in its final third, the book becomes a flagrant example of the conservative truism: “There are two genders, male and political. There are two races, white and political.” It’s all rather vile, really. No surprise that this is the guy who would go on to write Disclosure, Rising Sun, and State of Fear.

2024 read #152: Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

219 pages

Published 1966

Read from December 11 to December 15

Rating: 4 out of 5

Once again, we have a Delany number that feels two decades ahead of its time. At its core, Babel-17 is entirely 1960s: a dramatization of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis set in space, centered on the titular language, which offers world-altering clarity to those who understand it. Yet the book’s sympathies and language, its perception and maturity, all feel far removed from its contemporaries.

Delany throws everything into the creative mix, from body-modded furries to discorporated ghost crew members, from clone assassins to polyamorous navigators. He plays with language, prose, and format in ways I wouldn't expect from sci-fi of this era. This is, in short, a novel that would have felt cutting-edge even in 1986. Or at least it does right up until the end, which climaxes with a scene of logical paradox that would have been right at home on the original Star Trek.

2024 read #151: High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson.

High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson

157 pages

Published 2022

Read from December 4 to December 11

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

In my little corner of the writing world, a lot of people have become besotted with the trope of disaster gays. The trend didn't begin with Lana Baker, scribe and protagonist of Low Parliament, but she could be cited as a prime specimen of this archetype. She's a drunk and a flirt who can be relied upon to make a foolish choice for a pretty face. She lets some kissing cloud her judgment and winds up exiled to Parliament, a sort of Doggerland EU chamber of human and fairy politics, where she faces drowning (along with the rest of people who reside there) should the politicians remain deadlocked.

High Times is a delightfully horny number that builds its world with an admirably light touch. Unfortunately, about halfway through, the narrative loses some of its initial momentum and gets lost (like its protagonist) in a repetitive series of rooms and botched liaisons that don't add much to the story. I expected the meat of the story to involve backroom talks and roguish scheming, as Lana figures out how to use her charisma to avert catastrophe. Instead, we get an unusual amount of what felt like filler for a book this short, only settling back into a solid groove again for the final third of the book. 

All in all, though, High Times is an enjoyable romp and a fine allegory of class solidarity in the face of supernatural Brexit.

2024 read #150: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2008 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2008 issue (115:1)

Edited by Gordon Van Gelder

162 pages

Published 2008

Read December 4

Rating: 2 out of 5

Ah, the summer of 2008. A wonderful time in my life. When this issue was on newsstands, I was vacationing with my polycule in Florida, preparing to help one then-partner move to New Mexico for grad school. I was flourishing in undergrad, and looking forward to the election, when surely Obama would finally put an end to the fascist Bush regime and solve America once and for all. At least for me, it was a simpler time, before I really knew anything.

I wasn’t writing short fiction, wasting my time instead on a massive and unpublishable novel. I wasn’t really reading SFF magazines back then, either. I wish I had been; maybe I’d be a better writer today.

If I had picked up this issue at the time, I wonder if I would have been encouraged or jealous that someone else was getting a dinosaur story published by Gordon Van Gelder, the editor who had told me nine years previously that he didn’t really care for dinosaur stories.

—

“Fullbrim’s Finding” by Matthew Hughes. Hughes was a mainstay in this era of F&SF; it seems like half the ’00s and ’10s issues in my collection feature a story by him. The first one I actually read was “The Mule” in the March/April 2022 issue, which I praised for its early modern esoteric magic setting. Imagine my surprise to learn, via today’s story, that Hughes’ “discriminator” tales began in a technological Old Earth setting, chock-full of spaceships and quantum physics and wan attempts at sci-fi humor, which became the subsequent fantasy setting via cosmological “cycling” of the universe. It all has a 1970s fantasy serial vibe to it. I like fantasy serials in theory, but after a certain point, just write a standalone story in a standalone setting, you know? All that aside, this tale is mildly entertaining. C+

—

“Reader’s Guide” by Lisa Goldstein. So much has happened since this issue was printed, and so much in the culture has shifted, that it’s difficult to remember that 2008 wasn’t that long ago. I was startled to find a metafictional list story here, but I guess it isn’t that surprising, really; a lot of the threads that comprise contemporary genre fiction were gathering throughout the ’00s. “Reader’s Guide” is an interesting prototype of the list stories that have proliferated in our time. A fantasy story about the metaphysics of storytelling would have been well-trodden ground even in 1988, let alone 2008, but I liked it all the same. It’s charming. B

—

“The Roberts” by Michael Blumlein. The editorial introduction calls this novella “edgy,” and the story opens with the protagonist content in his mother’s womb. What masculine hell are we in for?

Sure enough, we’re treated to just about the most banal 20th century upper-middle class white boy checklist imaginable. Our hero Robert gets born, goes to college, has a fling with art, finds a first love, switches to architecture, has a first heartbreak, needs to work to “feel like a man,” loses an eye in a freak accident likened (what a surprise!) to castration, then finds another love, a professional contact whom he nags and wears down until she finally goes on a date with him. And that’s just by page three.

“The Roberts” compiles 55 pages of numbingly rote masculine concerns and (literal) objectification of women. A quote: “[Robert] needed a woman. In the past it had never been hard for him to meet women, and it wasn’t hard now. Women liked him, and what was not to like in a man so charming, so attractive, so victimized by circumstance and so willing — indeed so poised — to put it all behind and reestablish himself?” It only gets grodier from there; soon enough, Robert is employing a parthenogeneticist to engineer a woman for him.

Edgy, my ass — it’s the same color-by-numbers bullshit pampered male writers have been regurgitating for decades, for centuries, while congratulating themselves on their originality and their fine perceptions. It’s literally the cultural default. “The Roberts” could have been published in F&SF in 1978 and no one would have batted an eye.

One might even conclude this is all a vicious satire of how certain men view themselves as main characters and how they view women, categorically, as muses, helpmeets, accessories, mommy-maids, “miracle workers,” anything other than fully fledged and autonomous human beings with their own fully developed interiority. But if so, it’s one of those satires that cuts alarmingly close to seeming sincere. F

—

“Enfant Terrible” by Scott Dalrymple. After that mess, this slight sketch of a brain parasite run amok in a classroom is blessedly forgettable. C 

—

“Poison Victory” by Albert E. Cowdrey. An alternative history piece set in a world where the Nazis won and serfdom has been reestablished in Russia under a new German aristocracy. “Nazis won the war!” has always been an oversaturated theme, especially when in retrospect we realize the Nazis won the peace and have been entrenched in our power structures this whole time. “Victory” is well-written and atmospheric, a solid enough story of its type. B-

—

“The Dinosaur Train” by James L. Cambias. I’ve only read two dinosaur stories published in the pages of F&SF, and both of them involved trains. (“I’d have two nickels,” etc.) This one is much better than Ian Watson’s “In the Upper Cretaceous with the Summerfire Brigade” (published in the August 1990 issue), but that’s an incredibly low bar. Essentially, “Dinosaur Train” steals the idea of a traveling dinosaur circus from Dinosaur Summer (no shame there, I plan to do the same someday). Cambias even replicates Greg Bear’s pairing of old-timey filmmakers and the lost world. It’s unabashed Dinosaur Summer fanfic, which would have made my 2008 self especially jealous. Cambias’ story hits a pleasing mix of family drama and dinosaur zookeeping — nothing revolutionary, but solid enough to put it in the upper echelons of dinosaur fiction (which is also a very low bar). B

—

And that’s it! I’m happy to report that “The Dinosaur Train” — the sole reason I read this issue — was worth reading. “Reader’s Guide” was also quite good.

2024 read #149: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

133 pages

Published 1927

Read from December 2 to December 3

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Growing up a white child in the 1980s and ’90s, one with a particularly controlling and paranoid parent at that, I subsisted on a steady diet of “canon” classics. The authors were comprehensively white and overwhelmingly male, though one Shelley did sneak in among the Wellses, Vernes, Twains, and Doyles. I also had a clear sense that there was another layer of “classics” awaiting me in adulthood, a stodgier and more respectable “canon” from the early twentieth century, books that might get referenced or parodied enough in cartoons for me to be aware of them, but with a vague sense that they weren’t “for” me.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey fits into this category. As a kid, I knew of it by name, but I had no inkling of its plot — or its length, which is one reason I decided to check it out — until I found it the other day while browsing the library. If you didn't know it either, Bridge is a series of interconnected character sketches that converge upon the titular footbridge and its fatal collapse. A Franciscan monk who happened to witness the collapse investigates the lives of the victims, seeking to prove the justice of his god in their fates.

The theological detective angle turns out to be little more than a framing device. The individual stories are about what you'd expect for a lauded 1920s literary outing, delicately teasing apart the victims' obsessions and unhealthy attachments, with a moderate amount of ethnic stereotyping (though less than one might expect). The prose is crisply modernist, detached and faintly ironic. On the whole, I’d say Bridge holds up pretty well. Unlike a certain bridge.

2024 read #148: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar.

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

127 pages

Published 2024

Read from December 1 to December 2

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Sofia Samatar became one of my favorite authors thanks to exactly one book: A Stranger in Olondria. I’ve wanted to read The Winged Histories for years, but just haven’t done so, for various reasons. One of the reasons: It’s become increasingly difficult for me to focus, so the lush density of Samatar’s prose requires me to be in a certain headspace, which I just haven’t found that often lately. A novella is the perfect opportunity to savor her writing once more, as I slowly build back my attention span.

This is a beautiful yet harrowing examination of caste, class, captivity, exploitation, and community aboard a mining ship in endless orbit. It is a story about making sense of the conditions we’re born into, about ways of looking. It is about systems of control and patterns of resistance, patterns of survival, the cruel math of the pampered classes. It is a tale immense beyond its page count.

Having read so much sci-fi from the sixties and seventies, all those smug white men writing tales of white boy messiahs who bridge the cosmic links between ordinary people, it’s a revelation to read a story that actually does something meaningful with that framework, a story that finds the substance beyond the stale platitudes. 

2024 read #147: A History of Dinosaurs in 50 Fossils by Paul M. Barrett.

A History of Dinosaurs in 50 Fossils by Paul M. Barrett

160 pages

Published 2024

Read from November 30 to December 1

Rating: 3 out of 5

Much like A History of Plants in Fifty Fossils, this is a coffee table book illustrated with photographs of the namesake fifty fossils, presenting a brief, glossy overview of dinosaur science. Unlike Plants, I went into Dinosaurs knowing quite a lot about the subject matter. The state of science publishing is dire, however, so I’ll take what I can get at this point. And I’ve been out of the loop with dinosaur science long enough that I might learn things even from a pop science book.

Considering the limitations of its structure, A History of Dinosaurs does a fair job at doling out beginner information: what defines dinosaurs, their evolutionary origins, their diversity and adaptations, and so on. The illustrations include paleo-reconstruction artwork as well as fossil photos, which was nice. While I do wish popular science books would return to trusting their audience instead of spoon-feeding them printed listicles, this one wasn’t a bad effort.

2024 read #146: So Far So Good by Ursula K. Le Guin.

So Far So Good: Final Poems: 2014-2018 by Ursula K. Le Guin

90 pages

Published 2018

Read November 30

Rating: 4 out of 5

Rhyming descriptive poetry about nature and spirit has been a mainstay for so long that you could, at best, call it a worn-out cliché. Yet Le Guin's deep compassion and enduring humanity infuse these short poems with the urgency of life. 

Seemingly simple lines stagger, as in "Come to Dust": "All earth's dust / has been life, held soul, is holy." Everything connects; the universe flows from star to spirit and out again.

Her meditations on mortality, aging, and the business of being alive transcend old forms and invest in them something vital: "the grace / of water to thirst" ("Lesser Senses").

2024 read #145: Songs of a Sourdough by Robert W. Service.

Songs of a Sourdough by Robert W. Service

99 pages

Published 1907

Read November 30

Rating: 1ish out of 5

Maybe I first heard of Robert Service through a stray reference in a Robert Macfarlane book, or maybe “Service poem” cropped up somewhere as a shorthand for manly-man-in-the-manly-wild poetry. Either way, I found a pdf of this book under its American title, The Spell of the Yukon. Now, I haven’t read much old poetry, and almost none written before 1970. (When you reach the era of obligatory rhyme, it all gets a bit musty.) But I want to change that, so here we are.

Some of the poems are almost okay, especially in the early pages. I can put myself in a mindset to appreciate what its original audience found in it, even if, for me, it reads like a calculated grind of commercial exotica, peppered with clichés, exemplified by the opening of “The Heart of the Sourdough”:

There where the mighty mountains bare their fangs unto the moon. 

There where the sullen sun-dogs glare in the snow-bright, bitter noon,

And the glacier-glutted streams sweep down at the clarion call of June.

If I thought I could escape with nothing worse than some over-wrought description, alas, I was wrong. “The Law of the Yukon” is multiple pages of Social Darwinism, with the land, personified, ranting about how virile men are awesome and should rule, and how much the “enervated” urban poor suck and should die. That poem singlehandedly brought down my opinion of this book from bemused indifference to active dislike. Subsequent poems extolling Empire and the glory of colonial warfare and the like served only to reinforce this.

2024 #144: Black No More by George S. Schuyler.

Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940 by George S. Schuyler

Introduction by Danzy Senna

195 pages

Published 1931

Read from November 27 to November 29

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Black No More is science-fictional satire of race written by a onetime Black socialist and full-time misanthrope, who in later years would become a member of the John Birch Society. If, from that trajectory, you guessed that Black No More’s ideology would be a bit of a mess, you’d be right. Schuyler eagerly lampoons Black and white targets, esteemed Black leaders and Atlanta Klan wives alike; everyone is in it for the con.

When Schuyler’s jabs land, they land hard. His depiction of the Givens family, and their newly founded Knights of Nordica, could be a snapshot of Trumpists today, reminding us how deep into history our contemporary problems run. There’s also some depressingly evergreen material on how capitalists use “race consciousness” to strip away class consciousness from the workers. But then Schuyler will turn around and spend far more pages mocking Black liberationists as grifters, all of them happy to profit from white violence and maintain the status quo.

One gets the sense that the suburban white boys who loved to quote the Dave Chapelle Show would adore this book. Which is unfortunate, because in many ways it’s an important read to this day. I never knew, for example, how the modern Republican policy of “attract businesses with low taxes and minimal regulations, putting the burden of taxation on an impoverished working class” dates back to the postbellum South. The continuity (or rather, the long stagnation) of racist white thinking is both astonishing and depressing. 

2024 read #143: The Fires of Vesuvius by Mary Beard.

The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard

337 pages

Published 2008

Read from November 21 to November 27

Rating: 4 out of 5

Remember a couple years ago, when there was that meme of asking young men how often they think about the Roman Empire? Rome has been a playground for the fascist imagination since, well, the invention of fascism. (It’s right there in the name!) What should be studied as an era of culture contact and movement of trade and peoples between continents is, instead, a minefield of shitty takes and the hard-ons of contemporary would-be authoritarians.

Mary Beard’s Roman histories are among the few that I would trust for this particular subject. Always no-nonsense, Beard’s prose is fluent and a touch wry, cutting through the later bullshit that often adheres to Roman history. She never romanticizes or fetishizes the Roman world, and doesn’t shy away from the heinous inequalities, vile sexism, appalling hierarchies, or autocratic tendencies of Roman society.

Vesuvius is splendidly constructed. Beard takes us step by step through life in Pompeii, beginning with the roads and taking us through personages, trades, government, religion, and so much more in between. 

2024 read #142: Cunning Folk by Tabitha Stanmore.

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic by Tabitha Stanmore

232 pages

Published 2024

Read from November 15 to November 21

Rating: 3 out of 5

Reading this book immediately after Magic: A History wasn't serendipity; I had Cunning Folk checked out from the library and waiting. It provides some of the depth I had longed for when reading Magic. As a history, Cunning Folk offers a Peter Ackroyd-like sampler of primary-source anecdotes from aristocrat and commoner alike, spanning from the Medieval through the Early Modern period. It isn’t memorably well-written or especially eye-opening, but it’s solid enough.

2024 read #141: Magic: A History by Chris Gosden.

Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present by Chris Gosden

465 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 15 to November 15

Rating: 3 out of 5

It's been a long time since I regularly read nonfiction. When I say I struggled with this book, that’s entirely on me. (And on the election. And on life stress before that.) Gosden’s prose is dry and a touch academic, but should be quite readable to anyone whose attention span hasn’t been fried by the last four, eight, twelve years of ~everything~.

And right in the middle of reading this book, we got set back so many decades, and have so many decades of work ahead of us to undo the damage, if it can even be undone.

Magic is a broad overview (perhaps too broad) of the role and practice of magic in human societies over the last forty thousand or so years. The scope of Gosden’s thesis tends to crowd and minimize each region and time period, with sometimes unfortunate results. It’s one thing to say that life during the Ice Age is beyond the conception of modern minds; it’s quite another to write “Understanding Chinese thought and action requires considerable imaginative effort, but is definitely worthwhile.” Wild to see something that amounts to the cliche of the “inscrutable East” get published in 2020.

Gosden’s occasional otherization aside, I would love for any of these chapters to get expanded into a full length book. My own bias would be for Paleolithic, Mesolithic, or Neolithic cultures, or perhaps for Early Modern learned magic, but I would adore a more in-depth examination of anything in here.

2024 read #140: A Dream of Kinship by Richard Cowper.

A Dream of Kinship by Richard Cowper

239 pages

Published 1981

Read from November 9 to November 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

Eight long years ago — maybe three or four subjective lifetimes ago — I was reading the first book in this series, The Road to Corlay, on a fateful Tuesday in November.

I already owned A Dream of Kinship, but in half-conscious superstition, I avoided reading it afterward, packing it up in moving boxes as I spent the following eight years bouncing from New York to Ohio to North Carolina and back to New York. Now that the worst has happened again, and Trumpenfascism has thrown open the door to Christian Nationalism, I figured: Fuck it. Might as well go ahead and read the book I’d irrationally been avoiding this whole time.

In a future of melted ice caps, sea level rise, a militant church, and a return to feudal polities, the Kinsmen are a standard-issue love-and-brotherhood movement founded by a standard-issue white guy messiah in The Road to Corlay. Kinship picks up a few months after the death of Thomas the piper, with the church and its secular enforcers moving in to destroy the heretical Kinsmen, even as a child is born and grows up into another white guy messiah in his own right.

Sci-fi authors of this era couldn’t get enough of the idea that a very special white boy would convince the world that cosmic love held the universe together. The setting’s gender norms are straight out of the 1950s. Women characters who start out as fighters either die or live long enough to become madonnas. The faith of the Kinsmen is little more than hippy-ish Christianity, spiced with some far-out clairvoyance. Such powers are hereditary — meaning the messiah, whether the author consciously thought it through or not, has a stink of eugenics around him.

There’s also a through-line that the church’s officials are attracted to boys, which isn’t presented in the sense of “men in power like to abuse power,” but more in the gross old “haha, priests are gay” line of bullshit. 

Cowper’s prose was the highlight of The Road to Corlay, but even that was a disappointment here. Much of Kinship is couched as a historical review looking back on the events of the novel from the perspective of the religion they promulgated. That can be a fun narrative device, but it’s applied inconsistently here, and, in my opinion, not done well.

I don’t think I’ll bother to persevere into The Tapestry of Time. Well, probably not. Maybe four years from now, if I’m still around.

2024 read #139: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 14 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 14 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

191 pages

Published 2023 (English translation published 2024)

Read November 9

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 1 was the very first book I started reading after my partner R and I moved into our house, back in April. We had moved to New York in part to position ourselves for a potential return to Trumpenfascism, planning either for blue-state protections or for proximity to Canada, should that prove necessary. But as we settled here, and the Harris campaign became the can’t-possibly-miss-it choice for America’s future, those anxieties quieted. I dared to imagine a life of humble satisfaction and community joy instead of mere survival. Dungeon remained a fixture through all of that summer into fall, as I finished the first season of the anime and spaced out the manga.

I finished Dungeon in a different world, a darker and meaner and shallower world. This week, I sped through the last few volumes to wring out what comfort I could. I’ll miss it, going forward.

Volume 14 serves as a loving coda to the characters, quickly but thoroughly tying up loose ends and giving each of the central cast a lovely moment of farewell. Kui’s storytelling continues strong even in this victory lap, doling out just the right amount of closure for the characters and their story. After the unrelenting gallop of the final climax, I’m so happy Kui gave us this last little time with characters I’ll never forget.

2024 read #138: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 13 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 13 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

175 pages

Published 2023 (English translation published 2024)

Read November 9

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Continuing Kui’s unparalleled run with another incredible installment. Stunning art, gorgeous layouts, satisfying storytelling, thematic continuity, payoffs rooted in all the patient character work she put into this series — truly, what more could you want from the penultimate volume of this story? Absolutely wonderful.

2024 read #137: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 12 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 12 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

239 pages

Published 2022 (English translation published 2023)

Read from November 8 to November 9

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

What began as a fun adventure with a clever hook — eating the monsters on our way through a dungeon! — has broadened and deepened into an exploration of desires, consent, grief, and what it means to be alive. Kui’s art and storytelling continue to be astonishingly dynamic, twists and developments conveyed in amazing compositions. At the heart of everything are the characters we’ve gotten attached to, even the secondary and tertiary characters from various factions, all of them drawn together in an extended climax that never feels overwhelming. And as always, the loving central emphasis on food, on cooking, on feeding one another as an act of care.

An excellent installment of a superlative manga. When I began it, I never imagined our world would be what it is here near the end, never expected the comfort I would find in these monstrous times. I’ll be so sad to reach Dungeon’s end.

2024 read #136: E.T. the Extraterrestrial by William Kotzwinkle.*

E.T. the Extraterrestrial in His Adventure on Earth by William Kotzwinkle*

247 pages

Published 1982

Read from November 7 to November 8

Rating: 1-ish out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

This was not the world I expected to be living in when I reread this book.

E.T. was a staple of my youth. Not the movie — this novelization. I found it in a thrift store when I was like 11 or 12, and while it never approached Jurassic Park or War of the Worlds on my list of compulsively-reread novels, I read it quite a few times. I read it so often, in fact, that as an adult, I didn’t realize I had never seen the movie until my partner R and I watched it last year.

I found it again last month in a used bookstore, and thought it might be a nice winter season comfort read. I imagined a cozy winter in our little house, secure in the knowledge of incremental social and economic progress under the coming Harris administration. Instead, here we are, right back in the raging shit river of the Trumpenfascist timeline. Instead of gentle winter blues, I’m fucking devastated, crying over everything, scared for the future. I’m so very tired.

But we keep going, because we cannot stop.

Anyway. This book.

I was surprised to learn that E.T. was novelized by William Kotzwinkle. I haven’t read anything else of his, though when I briefly contemplated reading all the World Fantasy Award-winning novels, a few years ago, his name stuck in my head as the author of 1977 winner Doctor Rat. The writing definitely feels like a literary fantasy prose-smith (or at least the 1980s idea of a literary fantasy prose-smith) signing up to cash a check. 

A bit of personal trivia: This book was my first exposure to Dungeons & Dragons, which is portrayed in all its Satanic Panic glory as a gateway to teen hooliganism, drugs, and depravity. Divorced suburban mom Mary frets: "Have I raised my babies to be Dungeon Masters?" I don't think it was intended to be as absurd as it reads today. Though maybe it was a satire on Reaganite family values pearl-clutching, for all I know. 

The book is grotesquely Eighties in other ways. The movie, wisely, leaves out the subplot of E.T.'s attraction to Mary. An actual line from the book: “How ironic it was that the willow-creature, the lovely Mary, pined for her vanished husband while in a closet, close at hand, dwelt one of the finest minds in the cosmos.” The straights should never be allowed to write anything monster-fuckery.

The film is also free of Kotzwinkle's Eighties-man-writing-a-woman flourishes. Every other sentence from Mary’s POV may as well be: “I’m horny and I’m desperate and I’d fuck the first man who looked at me, and also I’m a terrible mother who can’t stick to a diet.” There are a lot of jokes about roving perverts for a novelization of a kids' movie.

It’s like what America proved to be on Tuesday: a lot worse than I remembered.

2024 read #135: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 11 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 11 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

215 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2022)

Read from November 6 to November 7

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

The last 36 hours have felt like two weeks. I'm exhausted, in mourning, filled with fury. I've lived through so much despair, clawed my way back to grim determination, over and over again. And hardly any time has gone by.

This is another excellent installment of Delicious in Dungeon. Kui's compositional skills are simply astonishing as we hurtle toward the climax of the Winged Lion arc, and with it, the climax of the series. We get some of the best storyboarding and artwork of the series here, and some big plot developments that are well-executed and pay off on all the character groundwork. It’s really good.

2024 read #134: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 10 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 10 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

223 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2022)

Read from November 5 to November 6

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

What are we even doing here?

Joy is inherently antifascist. We have to keep taking care of ourselves. Etc. etc. All important words, but in the moment, they feel like the tritest of truisms. I don’t feel the point of anything right now. I don’t feel much of anything beyond despair, rage, grief, fear. Futility.

That’s precisely what the fashies want. So I try to keep hope (and myself) alive. They voted knowing they won’t get anything tangible out of their dear leader beyond spite for the people they hate. So I try to spite them back, by living. By finding my own joy. But it’s so difficult, and I’m so tired.

I’ve been trying to distract myself from the horrifying outcome of the election, but it’s impossible. Focusing on even my favorite manga for more than a page or two at a time is a chore. Inevitably, I find myself crying, or numb, unable to concentrate.

What the fuck are we doing here?

Look at me, I read another volume of Delicious in Dungeon. Yay. Go me.

It’s an excellent installment in an excellent series. There are dungeon bunnies and necromancy and cooking and character development and foreboding tension in the plot. There’s heartbreak and a cliffhanger. Kui exceeds even her high standards for artwork and storytelling. I cried. The book is good.

But none of this feels important anymore. Not the reading, not the blogging. I’ve always maintained this blog for me — no one else reads it, aside from the fucking plagiarism bots that scrape every word left unprotected on this dying web. I keep going because I don’t know what else to do.

I keep going, because otherwise, I stop.

2024 read #133: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 9 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 9 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

207 pages

Published 2020 (English translation published 2021)

Read from November 4 to November 5

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Another fucking election coming up. Time to distract myself as best I can, by checking out every single remaining volume of Delicious in Dungeon from my local library. Truly the most 2024 way I could compartmentalize my anxieties.

I had been looking forward to the succubus arc — who doesn't love a sexy monster? But in Ryoko Kui's hands, not only do we get sexy monsters, we get an astonishingly well-constructed arc with emotional stakes, ending with my favorite character moment ever for Izutsumi.

Perhaps it's just the contrast with the pretty but flat art of Tsukasa Abe in Frieren, but Kui's art is absolutely phenomenal in this volume. Her storyboarding and storytelling, too, are at their finest here. We learn more about the dungeon, and that all might not be what it seems with everything we had learned before. Top notch stuff.

2024 read #132: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 7 by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 7, story by Kanehito Yamada and art by Tsukasa Abe

Translated by Misa ‘Japanese Ammo’

187 pages

Published 2022 (English translation published 2023)

Read November 3

Rating: 3 out of 5

This is my library’s last volume of Frieren, so it’ll be the last one I’ll be able to read for some time.

After the extensive arc for the magic examination, this tankōbon brings us back to the series’ more typical episodic structure. We wrap up loose ends with the other mages, head back out into the northern wilds, help a village or two, and find a hot spring. It’s an understated entry, but I’m fond enough of the characters that it didn’t feel at all like a waste of time. It’s as good a stopping place as any.

I do think the series has won me over enough that I do want to continue it, whenever that might be in the cards.

2024 read #131: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 6 by Kanehito Yanada and Tsukasa Abe.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 6, story by Kanehito Yamada and art by Tsukasa Abe

Translated by Misa ‘Japanese Ammo’

189 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2022)

Read from November 2 to November 3

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Any disgruntlement that the magical exam storyline continues from Volume 5 (and in fact comprises all of Volume 6, as well) is mollified by the fact that the second test is an extended dungeon raid. Yamada hits an excellent balance of action, character moments, and clever dungeon encounters, setting this volume a nudge above the rest of the series so far.

I’ve been wavering about whether to continue this series or not; this volume lands me solidly in the “continue” column. Which is almost unfortunate, because my county library only has copies of Frieren up through Volume 7. Just one more book after this one, and I’m stuck having to buy them if I want to keep going.

2024 read #130: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 5 by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 5, story by Kanehito Yamada and art by Tsukasa Abe

Translated by Misa ‘Japanese Ammo’

188 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2022)

Read November 2

Rating: 3 out of 5

From the start, the most intriguing element in Frieren was the light touch of melancholy and loss that pervaded its story. Frieren, a seemingly immortal elf, didn’t realize how much her adventuring friends had meant to her until almost all of them had passed away. The idea of drifting through time, watching the world change and those you love wither away, is an obvious outcome of the standard post-Tolkien fantasy setting, yet not one I’ve seen explored that often. Even if I had middling opinions regarding individual volumes, Frieren as an overall story arc had promise.

Jump ahead to Volume 5, and Frieren’s side quests have brought her to a magical qualification exam, randomly assigned to a team with two young mages — one tightly buttoned up, one in hot pants — who can’t stop bickering long enough to perform their sorcerous tasks. It inevitably leads to a bunch of mages with main character syndrome settling into a battle royale. It feels so forgettably generic, so bog-standard for fantasy manga, so… Harry Potter. (Shudder.)

It’s especially frustrating when you recall I only began reading this series to fill the Delicious in Dungeon-shaped absence in my heart. Now that is a worthwhile manga series. Frieren? I get less and less convinced that I’ll make it to the end with each new book.

The magic exam storyline takes up this entire tankōbon, and continues into the next. While I felt it didn’t fit the series’ vibe (or at least wasn’t the vibe I wanted from it), I did get into it, sorta, eventually. Populating a battle royale with brand new characters is a difficult task. Abe’s art contributes many dynamic character designs for the rival mages; easily half a dozen of them look cool enough to star in manga of their own. I’d certainly read an entire series of Übel flirtatiously fighting with everyone.

There are even some scraps of character development and backstory for our dear Frieren, squeezed in between all the mayhem. That appeals to me more than the magical violence.

2024 read #129: Timeline by Michael Crichton.*

Timeline by Michael Crichton*

496 pages

Published 1999

Read from October 30 to October 31

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

This feels like the end of an era. If Kamala Harris wins, she's positioned herself too far to the right to inspire confidence in any lasting progressive change, but at least the MAGA parasite throttling American politics could be finished (barring some episodic violence here and there). If Trump wins — or, more likely, gets appointed against the will of the electorate by a corrupt Supreme Court and Speaker of the House — America as an idea is over.

Though I didn't know it at the time, Michael Crichton's Timeline also marked the end of an era. It was the last present my grandmother bought me before she died. Less poignantly, it also represents a strain of technological optimism that withered away sometime after the turn of the Millennium, its death hastened by conservative politics and 9/11 and Forever War.

Crichton, in his own small way, helped kill the optimistic future: He would soon abandon his career-long shtick of “thrillers that make normies think they learned something” in favor of conspiracy pap and brainrot. State of Fear, one of the origins of the “Humans can't alter the climate, so evil scientists built a weather machine!” bullshit that reached mainstream audiences after Hurricane Heléne, was published just five years after Timeline. So this book was the end of an era for him, as well.

I remember reading Crichton’s introduction here, which in characteristic fashion spoke of the promise, and the dangers, of the coming quantum technology. A teenager at the time, I imagined a future of quantum miracles: teleportation, multiverses, space exploration, potentially even my personal holy grail, travel into Deep Time. Instead, the last twenty-five years have erected a second Gilded Age, with corporations and Big Tech racing to deregulate, stagnate, profit off consumers, and siphon free money from the government. Instead of anything useful or groundbreaking, they've given us drone strikes, social media, private equity, and rockets that blow up. Perhaps the extremely wealthy might know a future of quantum promise, but we peons certainly won't.

I've avoided rereading Timeline as an adult, in large part because it’s not that good. Crichton wrote exactly one and a half okay books in his long career, and this isn't one of them. Perhaps recognizing this, Crichton conspicuously emulates the plot beats of Jurassic Park, even opening with a middle aged man worried about getting lost on vacation as his wife gives insufficient directions. Crichton then follows the JP blueprint through some medical procedural chapters and some boardroom scenes, and brings us to a dig site funded by the nefarious corporation. Knights perform the role of Velociraptors. Even the end goal is the same: a theme park. It’s basically Jurassic Park from Temu.

Those early portions, spackled over the old Jurassic Park framework, are almost okay, at least by technothriller standards. Once the crack team of grad students is inserted into the multiversal Middle Ages, Crichton’s thriller instincts flail about in self-parody. The medieval times ultraviolence overshoots “thriller” and lands in inadvertent slapstick. There’s a sequence with a pine tree and a cliff face straight out of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. The action is soundless, weightless, going through the motions. The plot contrivance that inevitably strands the students in 1357 is particularly silly, as well.

Overall, Timeline is somewhat better than I remembered — and inspired way more of my own fictional time travel mechanics than I realized. It’s still a late period Crichton, though, and about a hundred pages too long, at that.

2024 read #128: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Summer 2024 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Summer 2024 issue (146:3-4)

Edited by Sheree Renée Thomas

258 pages

Published 2024

Read from October 25 to October 29

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Here we are, practically in November, but only now do I have my hands on a copy of the Summer 2024 issue of F&SF. I could’ve read it a couple months ago, but I like to collect the physical copies, and didn’t want to spend extra to read the digital version. No new issues have come out since then, though, so my streak of reading the current issue (begun March/April 2023) continues.

—

“What It Means to Drift” by Rajeev Prasad. Saraswathi volunteered to be a “merchant”: a human implanted with artificial remote organs to assist a Titan, a cyborg civil servant grafted around a human consciousness. Saraswathi’s job is to feel emotions, to sustain love and heartbreak for her Titan, Avni. But both Saraswathi and Avni are becoming unmoored, adrift in their respective roles. A solid sci-fi story.

“On My Way to Heaven” by Alberto Chimal (translated by Patrick Weill). This is a long novelette, one built around a topic (alien abduction) that has been considered passé in sci-fi publishing for decades. It also centers a trope that I generaly disdain: Did the speculative element “really” happen, or was it all in the mind of the character? Yet “Heaven” absorbed my attention from the first page, and kept it to the end. It’s written with assurance, pulling you into the complications of family, politics, protest, marginalization, mental illness, music, and UFOs with deceptive ease. Another all-time classic from this era of F&SF.

“Mister Yellow” by Christina Bauer.  Dr. Jordan invents a headset that permits her to interact with other dimensions overlaying her own. Mister Yellow is her contact in the sixth dimension. The government confines Dr. Jordan to maintain control over her invention, but various dimensions affect each other in ways she doesn’t expect.

“Water Baby” by Tonya R. Moore. A vivid and compelling story of rising waters, a disintegrating community, and a mystery from the sea.

“Metis in the Belly of the God” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Brief retelling from Greek mythology, as strange and excellent as you'd expect from Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

Next, a poem: “In Her Footsteps” by Suzanne J. Willis. It's all right, though its stated origin as background for a novel feels obvious; it doesn't feel complete in itself.

“She's a Rescue” by Marie Vibbert. The literature of kids/teens coming of age in single-family space freighters is small, but I’m always happy to see it grow. This one is a solid entry, expertly balancing its family drama with its blue collar spacer vibes.

“Snowdrop” by Raul Caner Cruz. A sweetly domestic retelling of “The Snow Child,” rich with a sense of place.

“Dog People” by Esther Friesner. Humorous contemporary fantasy mixing the undead with classical goddesses in upscale Manhattan. It felt like a throwback to the consciously cheesy humorous fantasy of the 20th century. Not really my kind of thing. 

“What You Leave Behind" by Ken Altabef. A magical realism-esque piece literalizing the grief and trauma of terrorism. Also not my kind of thing.

“Another Such Victory” by Albert Chu. Quite simply the best mecha pilot story I have ever read. It’s never been a subgenre that interested me, but this long novelette is stunning, immersive, vital, unremitting in its allegory against imperialism and systems of oppression. Another instant classic. I don’t subject contemporary short fiction to my arbitrary letter grades, but if I did, this one would be an A.

“Growth Rings of the Earth” by Xinwei Kong (originally published 2018). This almost-novella feels like the kind of grand, sprawling, consciously philosophical sci-fi you’d find in Asimov’s in the late 1990s, the kind of sci-fi that first fired my ambitions to become a literary SFF author instead of a mere pulp writer. In the moderately near future, most humans have abandoned their bodies to upload their consciousness to a digital “heaven.” Our narrator is the last human on Earth, raised by physical book enthusiasts who lived out their days in the Library of Congress. There’s a plot strand about the kind of artificial intelligence you used to find in a lot of sci-fi before, say, 2022, when planet-killing spellcheck software peddled by billionaires co-opted the term “AI.” True to the 1990s Asimov’s comparison, there’s also some iffy age-gap sex, which was unfortunate. I wish we could bring back the sprawling Big Idea sci-fi vibe of that era without its more questionable trappings. Still, aside from that, this is a worthwhile read.

After two longer stories, we’re treated to a couple poems. First: “I, Magician” by Julie Eliopoulos. I liked it.

Next: “City as Fairy Tale” by Richard Leis. Also solid.

“Jacob Street” by L. Marie Wood. GPS horror that saves itself from comparisons to a certain episode of The Office by unraveling into a delightfully feverish spiral. Pretty good.

“Red Ochre, Ivory Bone” by Deborah L. Davitt. Seeing that title on the table of contents, I didn’t expect a multi-species space opera piece. I think it’s a difficult vibe to capture in short form; at times, the story derailed to offer descriptions of the many species present at the station, which is a lot of information to throw at the reader. The plot itself draws from medical examiner procedural tropes. Yet Davitt pulls it all together into a satisfying story.

One last poem, one I’ve been looking forward to: “In a castle far from every prince” by Marisca Pichette. It is excellent, as always.

“The Glass Apple” by Ivy Grimes. A strange and beguiling original fairy tale. Quite good.

“Slickerthin” by Phoenix Alexander. An amazing endcap to this issue, delightfully visceral and goopy and queer, a take on Greek folklore like nothing else I’ve read. Excellent.

—

And that’s it for this issue! Definitely not my favorite of the Thomas era, but still solid.

F&SF has been criticized for sitting on stories for unprofessional lengths of time; they’ve been closed to submissions for well over a year now, as Thomas works through the stockpile of material the magazine had already accepted. Perhaps I’m reading into things, but at times, this issue felt a little bit like the result of that process. Not the dregs, per se. Many stories were good, some even exceptional. But overall, this didn’t rank up there with what Thomas has been releasing during her tenure. (Or maybe I’m just too depressed to appreciate anything, with the election looming so near.)

2024 read #127: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 4 by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 4, story by Kanehito Yamada and art by Tsukasa Abe

Translated by Misa ‘Japanese Ammo’

188 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2022)

Read October 28

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (maybe 3, if I’m generous)

I’m struggling with my attention span lately. The election (and its inevitable fascist violence, no matter the outcome) is a week away. Even short stories are too much for me right now. So back into the Frieren well I go.

This tankōbon begins unpromisingly, with a humorous interlude of Frieren, having learned that skilled cleric Sein likes older women, awkwardly trying to flirt to with him to get him into the party. Maybe humor is harder to translate than other things. It gets worse in the next chapter, which is some cringey heteronormative “boys and girls are so different!” stuff, extremely entry-level romantic manga material.

This volume eventually settles into a more typical groove, with self-contained episodes of adventure and character development, with villagers giving side quests, but even there, I’m beginning to lose some of my patience for this series. Yamada and Abe have a tendency to speed through big chunks of time in montages, and in many cases, those single-panel moments of adventure are more interesting than the rather banal focus of that chapter.

Sometimes a tinge of melancholy will pass through the story, the inescapable drift of time and memory, and I’m reminded of why I’m interested in Frieren the character and her journey in the first place. But I’m losing any hope that Frieren the manga will ever become as good as Delicious in Dungeon or Witch Hat Atelier.

Still, the final chapter of this volume introduced the human mage Übel, who looks like if Little My from Moominvalley grew up to become a leather-clad assassin, so once again I’m intrigued enough to continue.

2024 read #126: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 3 by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 3, story by Kanehito Yamada and art by Tsukasa Abe

Translated by Misa ‘Japanese Ammo’

196 pages

Published 2020 (English translation published 2022)

Read October 26

Rating: 3 out of 5

The best thing about library books — aside from the fact that they’re free — is that I don’t have to pace myself reading through series. I checked out volumes two through seven of Freiren, and I fully intend to keep speeding through them as my interest allows.

This volume concludes Frieren’s confrontation with the demon Aura the Guillotine, which starts out interesting but wraps up with a power-level cliché straight out of Dragon Ball. The rest of the book is a scattershot series of vignettes and side quests that don’t even try to live up to the stylish menace of the demons. Some backstory and character moments are sprinkled in, and we get a new addition to the party in Sein the priest, but overall I felt it was an unremarkable outing.

2024 read #125: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 2 by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 2, story by Kanehito Yamada and art by Tsukasa Abe

Translated by Misa ‘Japanese Ammo’

196 pages

Published 2020 (English translation published 2022)

Read October 26

Rating: 3 out of 5

When I read Frieren’s first volume, I wasn't sold on it. It was fine, perfectly adequate, but it didn't grab me the way the first installments of Delicious in Dungeon or Witch Hat Atelier did. It intrigued me enough to keep going and see if I would get hooked, but not enough to want to spend actual money on it.

Enter the arcane magic known as library cards.

This second volume continues along in a similar meter. I like Frieren as a character. I think a near-immortal elf confronting the mortality and loss of her old companions is a neat twist on the standard Tolkien / D&D legendarium. But the very nature of her characterization makes Frieren seem flat on the page, distant and unresponsive. Her apprentice Fern, despite being human, is similarly stoic, rarely reacting with more than half a smile. This book adds apprentice warrior Stark, who at least has some pep in his personality, but compared to Delicious or Atelier, both of which had vivid and memorable characters and creative elaborations on their respective tropes, Frieren continues to be just… fine.

There’s nothing wrong with a good old fashioned fantasy adventure. Chapter 14 even introduces some stylish antagonists: demons, who look more or less like tieflings in ruffled dresses and shirts. The demons have no nuance to them, just pure eeeeeevil, but they’re fun.

2024 read #124: Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Fall 2024 issue.

Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Fall 2024 issue (18)

Edited by JW Stebner

47 pages

Published 2024

Read October 25

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

We live in a golden age of speculative short fiction. Short form sci-fi and fantasy are the best they’ve ever been, full stop. Diversity, depth of character, quality prose, an unparalleled range of styles and subgenres—SFF is unmatched right now. Random token-pay webzines will consistently publish better stories than The Big 3 did forty years ago; the occasional story will surpass most things The Big 3 published twenty years ago. Yet there’s less monetary support than ever, at all levels of the field.

I’m trying to do a better job at keeping up with the market, including spending more time with those amazing indie magazines. Today, I’m returning to Hexagon to read the current issue, my second in a row from them.

—

“A Death Rattle’s Chime” by Adialyz Del Valle Berríos. When I say that fiction in token-pay markets today is superior to mainstream newsstand fiction from forty (or even twenty) years ago, I have stories like this in mind. It’s a bleakly atmospheric eco-fantasy set on an island that disappears a little bit more each full moon, where our narrator processes fish from a decaying sea. A haunting, exquisite story. Somehow this is the author’s first published story. An amazing start!

“A Thousand Steps Up Godwich Road” by Michael M. Jones. Urban legend piece with a twist ending. Nothing remarkable, but nothing to complain about.

“Gusher” by EC Dorgan. A pleasing petroleumpunk tale that could have come straight out of the 1990s, all about mall rats and “oil vamps” in a Saskatchewan boomtown, with the unexpected bonus of dinosaurs. One of the most creative takes on vampire lore I’ve ever read. Excellent (and I’m only slightly biased here because of the momentary dinosaurs).

Next comes a one-page comic: “Craftsman No. 1: ‘Already Cut and Fitted’” written by Jimmy Stamp, illustrated by Xavier Saxon. I felt indifferent about its reheated cosmic horror, aside from the role of the craftsman kit home, which I appreciated.

“The Gold Coast: At One with the Fun!” by Aggie Novak. A mutated amusement park needs to be fed, and Soph has the ill luck of shuttling an Aquaduck full of tourists to their imminent doom. Fascinating and enjoyable blur of genres. Quite good.

—

And that’s it for this issue! A solid read, well worth your time, especially “Chime,” “Gusher,” and “Gold Coast.”

2024 read #123: Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith.

Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith

76 pages

Published 2011

Read October 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

A meditation on loss, grief, and survivorship, spanning from the cosmic to the intimate. Grand science fiction promises of tomorrow unravel and lose their meaning in the violence of today. But life continues, in some fashion, through laundry and early mornings, through poverty meals and the memory of those gone. Smith's words are disarmingly direct, crisp and clean and quietly vital: "The grass bends / then learns again to stand."

2024 read #122: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.*

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury*

294 pages

Published 1962

Read from October 21 to October 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I first read this book about twenty years ago, freshly stamped into adulthood, wearied with the anchors of childhood trauma. Even in my premature old age, I don’t think I caught the fact that this book is about getting older, not then. That it’s about the end of childhood, the tangible bruises of maturity, the price so many would pay to go back. Rereading it here in 2024, a long track indeed into the wrong future, when my knees and ankles ache and fascism once more slithers openly in the halls of power, it hits particularly hard.

Bradbury’s greatest strength as a writer is his earnestness, the breathlessness with which his words tumble over themselves to press hot poker emblems of sensation and longing into your skin. No adjectives, no arabesques, no multi-jointed similes are enough for Bradbury’s sentences. His words carry this book, jabbing elbows and uppercuts until you get out of its way, a clattertrap locomotive shedding sparks and trailing fume. The more mixed the metaphor, the better.

Beneath all that, Something Wicked is very much a novel of its time, a nocturnal book of fathers and sons, where mothers sleep serene in their own lack of interiority. Bradbury reserves his vision for white men and boys who have no need to consult elsewhere, because the answers are theirs and theirs alone. It’s a stifling perspective, a claustrophobic mirror maze that reflects its own concerns back to it. A worthy classic, yes, but riven with the rust of its age.

2024 read #121: Jesus Loves You God Hasn’t Decided Yet by K. Blair.

Jesus Loves You God Hasn’t Decided Yet by K. Blair

13 pages

Published 2024

Read October 21

Rating: 4 out of 5

A micro chapbook: nine poems about religious trauma, slow apocalypses, wax play, and standing up despite the patriarchy. Blair excels at parallels, shocks of connecting synapses that throw sexual and religious motifs into chiaroscuro relief. Birds deliver prophecies, and kings turn women into birds; women and birds alike wind up in cages. Christ’s stigmata might give him a shiver of arousal, like pressing upon a bruise. Proverbial father figures and daddy issues loom in the heavens: “As long as you realize that / Father is always right.”

A breathtaking and brilliant little collection.

2024 read #120: Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World's Ends, edited by John Miller.

Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World's Ends, edited by John Miller

350 pages

Published 2022

Read from October 8 to October 21

Rating: 2 out of 5

As autumn cools (however reluctantly, in our age of global climate change), it seems fitting that my next British Library collection should be a chilly one. (It’s also the last one I own that I haven’t read. Technicalities.)

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“The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon” by James Hogg (1837). A novella of some 80 pages, yet in spite of its early date, I found it engagingly readable. (There is excellent English prose dating much further back, of course, but when writing from this era is bad, it’s bad.) Hogg’s narrative voice has a cheeky thread of satire woven through it. His rustic sailor recounts the scientific bent of his captain with irony and indifference, and the story generally spoofs the tropes of the shipwrecked survivor genre, particularly the castaway’s newfound piety and trust in Providence. Allan praises his God and the Bible, yet remains an awful and unrepentant cad. His first impulse after the shipwreck is cannibalism; only his inability to access his late crewmates redirects his focus to the ship’s supplies instead. Once he gets into the wreck, he drinks a hogshead of brandy in a closet for a whole month, waking with a beard. Allan proceeds to orphan, then tame, a polar bear cub he dubs Nancy. The two of them go on a whirlwind tour of the Arctic, riding in comfort on a mountainous iceberg. When they find a lost settlement of Norwegians, Allan earnestly tries to become a bigamist, then abandons his children to polar bears when he gets a chance to escape, all while praising his Lord. They story would have been a classic at a quarter of the length, but even as it is, I’d give it a solid C+

“The Moonstone Mass” by Harriet Prescott Spofford (1868). There isn’t much substance to this tale about a man who, desirous of fortune, heads out in search of the Northwest Passage, gets stranded on a block of ice, and is tantalized by an unobtainable lump of moonstone. Spofford tries to turn it into a prose poem of the far north, but the tastes of the era make it seem stuffy rather than evocative to modern eyes (or to my eyes, at any rate). D+?

“The Captain of the ‘Polestar’” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1883). The least offensive Doyle story I’ve read as an adult, though he still pulls his characters from his catalogue of racial stereotypes and physiognomic bullshit. At its heart this is a ghost story, though one that doesn’t make a lick of sense if you think about it for a minute (why would a young woman murdered in Devonshire lure her sweetheart to his death in the Arctic?). Unsurprising coming from the pen of the Spiritualist evangelist who would later inflict The Land of Mist upon the living. Overlong, but it could have been worse? D+

“Skule Skerry” by John Buchan (1928). It's a stretch to include this tale of a liminal isle in the Orkneys in a collection of Arctic fiction, but I'm glad to have the chance to read it. This feels like the sort of story Robert Macfarlane would weave an essay around, linking it to, say, the work of some 1980s woodcarver, the back to the land movement, and the impact of overfishing and plastic pollution on shorebirds. But that's enough Robert Macfarlane fanfic for this review. “Skule Skerry” is, when you boil it down, the story of a comfortably well-off man who gets nervous on an island, yet it's so beguilingly described that I can't complain about it. C+?

“The Third Interne” by Idwal Jones (1938). Of all the stories of the Far North that found their way into Weird Tales, surely some of them would have been more apt for this anthology than this “mad science in a Siberian prison” number. Seemingly inspired by the supposed experiments of Sergei Brukhonenko, this piece certainly fits the bill for a lurid Weird Tales page-filler, but wasn’t what I wanted here. At least it was written serviceably well. C-

“Iqsinaqtutalik Piqtuq: The Haunted Blizzard” by Aviaq Johnston (2019). Brief but good modern day yarn about a supernatural shadow lurking inside a blizzard. B

At this point, poised between the Arctic and Antarctic sections of the collection, I spent another week (hopefully the last) attending to a family crisis on Long Island. I couldn’t find the book, and assumed I left it at home. I tried to interest myself in other books, but nothing stuck. While packing for my trip home, I found I’d brought Polar Horrors after all. So I didn’t read for a week for no good reason.

Anyway. At least I’m home now.

“A Secret of the South Pole” by Hamilton Drummond (1901). I struggled to get into this one, in part because it always takes a while to get back into reading after an extended pause, in part because of the narration, which is filtered through the dialect-heavy speech of an old salt. I did enjoy it as an early precursor of weird fic. Three sailors find a drifting derelict, centuries old, with a mystery — and death — in its hold. Maybe C-

“In Amundsen’s Tent” by John Martin Leahy (1928). In the right hands, pulp can be an amazing aesthetic. But then you get stories like this one, which remind you why pulp was a term of dismissal for so long. I wanted to enjoy this early prototype of polar creature horror (published a decade before Who Goes There?), but the framing device yammers on at length, dropping character names like Bond McQuestion and Captain Stanley Livingstone. The meat of the story was equally amateurish, with awkward dialogue and repetitive, antiquated rhetoric. Leahy strains toward cosmic melodrama, but lands in the vicinity of silly: “It would mean horror and perhaps madness!” Still, there’s a kernel of a cool idea in here, buried under Leahy’s unpracticed efforts. Maybe D

“Creatures of the Light” by Sophie Wenzel Ellis (1930). Tediously overlong novella that reads like a paint-by-numbers of 1930s sci-fi: Life Rays! Eugenics! Psychic powers! An electric super-plane! A secret facility in a verdant Antarctic valley! A hunchbacked super-scientist breeding the Adam of a new age! Replacing placental gestation with Leyden jar mothers! At least, I’m pretty sure it was all meant as a broad criticism of the contemporary scientific eugenics movement, though Ellis never extricates herself from the more casual layman’s eugenics of her time, with physically perfect modern man Northwood growing disillusioned and disgusted with the methods (though not the ideals) of the disfigured Dr. Mundson. There's some faint entertainment value in how ludicrously au courant this story is, but it's a lot of eugenicist garbage and internalized misogyny to slog through. D

“Bride of the Antarctic” by Mordred Weir (1939). Refreshingly competent prose and storytelling elevate this Antarctic ghost story. Predictable but enjoyable. C+

“Ghost” by Henry Kuttner (1943). Charming techno-ghost story set in an Antarctic supercomputer complex (though Kuttner employs the delightful term “radioatom brains”). The story’s reliance on outmoded psychology theory dampens my enthusiasm a bit, but I’ll still give it a respectable C

“The Polar Vortex” by Malcolm M. Ferguson (1946). After his death, Lemming, a multimillionaire who dabbled in science, is revealed to have orchestrated a sadistic “experiment” at the bottom of the world, exposing an unsuspecting layman to the immensity of the night sky. It’s certainly a concept, I suppose, but this story left me flat. A shrug. D?

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And that’s all for this collection! Somewhat disappointing, especially considering how many stories could have fit the bill for this anthology. But there were several okay stories, and I’m not sorry I read it.

2024 read #119: From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea, edited by Mike Ashley.

From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea, edited by Mike Ashley

317 pages

Published 2018

Read from October 4 to October 8

Rating: 2 out of 5

Back at it again with another themed volume of public domain tales from British Library. With life stuff continuing out of my control, I want escapism, but can only manage bite-size morsels. Short stories are the obvious choice, and these collections are often more fun than strict reference to quality would suggest.

This volume differs from the other BL books I’ve read by presenting its stories out of chronological order. I suppose some thematic structure might emerge as I read.

Into the briny deeps!

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“The Ship of Silence” by Albert R. Wetjen (1932). This is an ably-written and winningly atmospheric tale of a derelict ship found adrift, Mary Celeste-style, the sole clue to the crew’s fate found in the screams mimicked by a parrot. Gets surprisingly good mileage out of never actually solving the mystery of the disappearance, and never showing us the monster (which is heavily implied to be prehistoric). A respectable B-

“From the Darkness and the Depths” by Morgan Robertson (1913). Another solid entry, hailing from that early period of modern physics when “Röntgen rays” were cutting edge, and the possibilities of other rays seemed endless. Talk of rays (and the applications of ultraviolet photography) is only a prologue to a yarn about an invisible creature shaken loose from the seabed by the eruption of Krakatoa, and the capsized mariners who must contend with it. “Darkness” isn't at the same level of pulp storytelling as “Ship of Silence,” but for what amounts to a man's-life adventure with a high body count, it's creative and atmospheric. C+

“Sargasso” by Ward Muir (1908). Ah, the peril of the Sargasso! It’s right up there with quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle on the list of childhood anxieties. This story’s diary format puts us at some remove from the action, but otherwise it’s a deliciously pulpy tale of seaweed that seems to have a mind of its own, and the creatures that prowl its surface. Could easily be a seafaring D&D encounter, which I count as a recommendation. C

“Held by the Sargasso Sea” by Frank H. Shaw (1908). Published the very same month as Muir’s story above. Clearly, the Sargasso was a pressing concern in 1908. A persistent anti-union, anti-working class vibe clouds this piece, which is about the bond between a ship and her captain, and what the ship does after its worthless layabout crew mutinies. The narrative mocks the mutineers for wanting to get rich without labor, as if the capitalist class didn’t have a monopoly on that endeavor. Even aside from its distasteful classism, this just isn’t an interesting story. D-

“The Floating Forest” by Herman Scheffauer (1909). Mediocre old melodrama about insurance fraud (and its comeuppance) on the high seas. Overwrought, disjointed, and not especially interesting, although I did enjoy the concept of a floating wreck accumulating vegetation before drifting into the open ocean. D?

“Tracked: A Mystery of the Sea” by C. N. Barham (1891). The turn of the century fad for the occult manifests in this soggy story of a "clairvoyante" locating a lost ship. Barham's phraseology reads like an early 2000s forums dork straining to emulate Victorian diction: "The narrative will be unquestionably denounced as an utterly unreliable romance. It will be accepted as a positive proof that the writer is wholly destitute of the critical faculty. Nay, more: not a few will from henceforth conclude that I am facile princeps in the reprehensible art of lying." This, mind you, arrives four pages into a preamble on clairvoyance and somnabulism. Just a bad time all around. Maybe F+

“The Mystery of the Water-Logged Ship” by William Hope Hodgson (1911). Not as engagingly weird as the other Hodgson pieces I've read; in fact, it gets a trifle repetitive. Nonetheless, this tale of a drifting derelict, and the surprisingly populous yacht that tries to salvage her, is welcome after the last few stories. Vague spoilers: the mystery’s denouement is in the idiom of Jules Verne. C-

“From the Depths” F. Britten Austin (1920). A German officer, formerly a submarine commander during the Great War, passes himself off as a Swedish captain, commissioned for an operation to salvage ships sunk by U-Boats in the war. Inevitably, we get vengeful ghosts communicating in Morse code. The melodrama of it all almost works. Characterization is next to nonexistent, but I’ll be generous and say C-

“The Murdered Ships” by James Francis Dwyer (1918). A scuttled ship seeks vengeance on the crew that did her in. Nothing especially interesting to me. D

“The Ship That Died” by John Gilbert (1917). Continuing the Great War preoccupation with “dying ships,” this one is kind of a pointless yarn, enlivened only by the imagery of a ship rotting and sloughing away (which is, inevitably, explained by a throwaway reference to an unknown ray). Not much else here. D?

“Devereux’s Last Smoke” by Izola Forrester (1907). The ghost of a Broadway man haunts his young widow when, on her way to remarry, she takes the selfsame steamer he died on. A strain of internalized misogyny sours this one, which felt rote even without it. D

“The Black Bell Buoy” by Rupert Chesterton (1907). A tedious affair about a haunted buoy that, once again, becomes an instrument of vengeance. D

“The High Seas” by Elinor Mordaunt (1918). One brother bullies the other from childhood into long-standing murderous rage, then they happen to ship together on the same crew. Incredibly tedious and unnecessary retelling of Cain and Abel. Nothing of interest to it whatsoever. Maybe F+

“The Soul-Saver” by Morgan Burke (1926). Finally, a touch of strangeness that isn’t just a vengeful spirit or some such. Captain Morbond is a violent bully of a man who, over the course of his career, beat two people to death, and he insists that their souls came into his keeping as little white mice. Well, I guess the souls do get a taste of vengeance in the end. Maybe C-

“No Ships Pass” by Lady Eleanor Smith (1932). An astonishingly modern story that, as editor Ashley notes, could have served as the inspiration for Lost. Shipwrecked mariners over the centuries have found themselves within swimming distance of a magical island. Saved, they soon discover it to be inescapable, a limbo where they can never leave, never age, and never die. I could easily see this getting published sometime in the 1990s, antique gender norms and all. Not perfect, but a solid enough B-

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And that’s it for this collection! It began so strongly, yet Ashley’s selections quickly veered out of my own personal sweet spot for old pulp. Ah well. 

2024 read #118: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 8 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 8 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

200 pages

Published 2019 (English translation published 2020)

Read October 3

Rating: 4 out of 5

Spoiler warning if you've never seen the anime.

This volume begins with the fan-favorite changeling arc, a charming and adorable switcheroo that has led to countless cosplays (especially of elf!Senshi, as the old fanfic communities would have dubbed him). But then we reach the end of what’s been adapted into the anime, and we reach completely new-to-me story. A huge milestone!

Immediately, things go off the rails, storywise. I mean that in a good way: Kabru brings the elven Canaries into the dungeon, before we learn who the Canaries are and what their methods are, and chaos is the result. I’m assuming we didn’t just lose a major secondary character — in a story like this, he’s bound to turn up for the next twist in the tale — but it was a dramatic and unexpected moment all the same.

Now I have to wait until next month before I can allow myself to continue the story, for financial reasons. 

2024 read #117: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 7 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 7 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

216 pages

Published 2019 (English translation published 2019)

Read from October 2 to October 3

Rating: 4 out of 5

When I watched the Delicious in Dungeon anime, one of the few things I disliked about it was pacing. The Red Dragon arc seems like it should be a season-ending climax, yet in the story Kui has set out to tell, it’s just a jumping-off point for a deeper, stranger, more complex narrative than a simple culinary dungeon crawl. I think that comes across better in the manga, perhaps because I have the benefit of hindsight, and have adjusted my expectations to fit the story in hand.

This volume guides us through more table-setting: giving depth to Izutsumi and Kabru, and introducing major new factions in the Western Elves and the residents of the Golden Country. Plus, we get Senshi’s tragic backstory, one of the emotional highlights of the series so far.

All in all, a solid installment.

2024 read #116: Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic, edited by Daisy Butcher.

Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic, edited by Daisy Butcher

285 pages

Published 2019

Read from September 28 to October 2

Rating: 2 out of 5

Can we take a moment to appreciate how the editor of an anthology of killer plant stories is named Daisy Butcher?

I’ve gotten hooked on these anthologies from British Library. They were behind the Weird Woods collection I read last year; it could have been weirder and woodsier, but was still an interesting read. In need of dopamine the other day, I splurged on several more volumes. My bank account is unhappy, but it would’ve been unhappy anyway, and now I have books!

Evil Roots differentiates its theme from that of Weird Woods with an emphasis on specific killer plants, often exotic (thus foreign, and threatening), rather than the familiar (though still dangerous) English woods. Butcher’s introduction proposes that Charles Darwin’s studies on carnivorous plants fed (heh) into Victorian and Edwardian fears of nature, of Man (I would specify White, English, Male, Upper Class, Imperialist Man) losing his supposed place in the great ladder of creation. My perspective? I’m just hoping for some tentacle vines and lowbrow cheesiness.

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“Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1844). Long-winded and repetitive, this story takes an ungodly number of pages to spell out quite a simple idea: In early modern Padua, Doctor Rappaccini, ruthless mind of botanical science, has cultivated a poisonous daughter through vaguely defined arts of mithradatism, and a young medical student is losing his mind over her. For all its antique storytelling choices, though, I didn’t really hate it. Maybe C-?

“The American’s Tale” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1880). This tall tale of a man-eating flytrap in the Arizona wilderness is remarkable for two things: its astonishingly forced “Western” dialect, and its equally shaky grasp of North American biogeography. Predictable action, broad stereotypes instead of characters, and not much to it beyond that. As was so often the case during this time period, the climax happens “off screen.” D

“Carnivorine” by Lucy H. Hooper (1889). Late Victorian stiffness can’t fully obscure the gloriously absurd spirit of this story, which brings us to rural Campania to witness a giant, betentacled sundew, coaxed into locomotion by an obsessive young scientist. Once again, we don’t get to see the actual climax of the story, just (spoilers!) our narrator bursting in after the fact to dispatch poor Carnivorine with a single bullet, because surely that is how plants work. Still, this was exactly the sort of thing I hoped to read in this book. Maybe, by the standards of its time, I can give this a C

“The Giant Wistaria” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1891). A brief number, and basically just vibes, but I enjoyed it. It’s constructed around the delightful contrast between its New England Gothic overture, set in colonial times, and the idle young holidayers who rent the manse for a lark in the present day. C+

“The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” by H. G. Wells (1894). Another ironic narrative juxtaposition, this time between the protagonist’s dull suburban mediocrity and the febrile “romance” (in the 1890s sense) of colonialist exploration. I’m sure Wells intended social satire on both ends of the orchid collection pipeline, but after reading The Sleeper Awakes, I will never give Wells the benefit of the doubt about the racism his characters express. Maybe D+

“The Guardian of Mystery Island” by Edmond Nolcini (1896). This one feels like a hodgepodge of randomized plot elements. Annoyed by the locals’ superstitions, and intrigued by rumors of Captain Kidd’s treasure, a young man decides to venture to an isolated island off the coast of Maine. He lands in a storm, and gets led by a dog to a dilapidated mansion, where he finds an ancient woman rambling about the French Revolution. When she dies, he goes in search of treasure, and gets attacked by a plant. He goes back to get help from the locals, only to find the woman (and the dog) have disappeared. I presume it’s meant as a sort of ghost story, the woman’s death replaying whenever someone new sets foot on the island, but honestly, it’s just a mess. D

“The Ash Tree” by M. R. James (1904). An Edwardian prototype, perhaps, of the true crime narrative style. It's a rambling and uninteresting fictional history of an aristocratic family’s fortunes after their forebear testifies against a witch. The most interesting aspect is how James lampoons (or at least references) the Early Modern well-to-do's phobia of nature. “It can hardly be wholesome,” says a bishop, “to have the air you breathe strained, as it were, through all that leafage.” That was the only spot of enjoyment I got from this dull piece. D

“A Vine on a House” by Ambrose Bierce (1905). Another disappointment, a brief and fairly pointless anecdote. D

“Professor Jonkin’s Cannibal Plant” by Howard R. Garis (1905). Something approximating an actual story, with the titular Professor Jonkin feeding the titular pitcher plant on beefsteaks until it towers to the peak of the greenhouse, leading to an unsurprising outcome. It isn’t a good story, but it’s a slight step forward. Still D

“The Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson (1907). The story I’ve looked forward to the most, ever since I saw Hodgson’s name on the table of contents. Hodgson’s novel The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” may not have been “good” by modern standards, but it was memorable, lingering in my mind long afterward. I’ve wanted to read more by Hodgson ever since. “Voice” is a fungal tale, rather than botanical, but it’s the best story in the book so far, so I’ll forgive the editor for that. Deliciously creepy. In comparison to everything else that came before it in this collection, I’d say it earns a solid B-

“The Pavilion” by Edith Nesbit (1915). Mildly entertaining piece deconstructing gentlemanly hubris. It’s set during the 1860s but was written with full wartime irony. Two gentlemen, competing for the affections of one young lady, make a bet to spend the night in a supposedly haunted pavilion. Her plain friend Amelia, whom everyone ignores, has misgivings. This story has an awesome moment where Amelia — the real protagonist of the tale — reveals a dagger she had concealed in her muslin flounces, quite possibly the earliest example I’ve ever encountered of that particular trope. I can’t take humble Virginia creeper seriously as a bloodthirsty plant, but still, this story deserves at least C+

“The Green Death” by H. C. MacNeil (1920). Perfectly serviceable, if overlong, mystery novelette about an apparent murder at a society soirée. The story’s inclusion in this volume robs us of any suspense over the solution. Even though murder mysteries will never be my thing, I can recognize this as an ably written and effectively structured entry. C

“The Woman of the Wood” by Abraham Merritt (1926). In my limited exposure to A. Merritt, I’ve felt that his stories would have had promise, if only he had been coaxed away from his vile racism. This tale of a Great War vet, recuperating from his PTSD at a serene lake in the Vosges, who gets beckoned into a fight between the trees and some axe-happy landowners, doesn’t fix my issues with Merritt, but it demonstrates his potential. The prose is lovely without being overwrought, evocative, breathing life into the familiar yet alien personifications of the forest. With the exception of the era’s gender norms, “Wood” functions as one of the better faerie stories I’ve read in some time. A respectable B-

“The Moaning Lily” by Emma Vane (1935). It’s almost a shame this story comes at the end, because, while the plot is another spin on the same old formula — botanist collects a vampiric flower, is determined to show it off even at the cost of his life — Vane’s prose is crisp, and this is one of the better variations in the book. It’s also much creepier than many of the earlier iterations on the theme. But it’s fighting an uphill battle for my interest here at the end. I’ll give it a C

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As is often the case with these collections of older stories, I had a better time with Evil Roots than my rating would suggest. The individual stories might not be great shakes, but it’s always fun to read weird old pulp.