2025 read #46: Patience & Sarah by Isabel Miller.

Patience & Sarah by Isabel Miller

192 pages

Published 1969

Read from May 29 to May 31

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

A classic of queer literature, an intimate and insightful love story set in the early nineteenth century. Miller’s descriptions of the small daily intoxications of love and desire are among the best I’ve ever read. Her prose is at the pinnacle of the mid-century style, simple sturdy phrases that get to the innermost heart of emotions and human connection.

Miller balances her story of queer love with incisive critiques of patriarchal power and heterosexual norms. At one point, Patience’s brother says,

These are the passions marriage is meant to discourage and then extinguish. At first we imagine and hope, but in marriage we learn we are not wanted.

This contrasts with the all-encompassing technicolor love of the two women at the center of our story, in all its possessiveness, eroticism, and need.

2025 read #45: The Harp of Imach Thyssel by Patricia C. Wrede.

The Harp of Imach Thyssel by Patricia C. Wrede

235 pages

Published 1985

Read from May 27 to May 29

Rating: 2 out of 5 (generously)

I bought this book on accident years ago, mistaking it for an entry in the Riddle-Master of Hed series. In my defense, its cover uses the exact same font as the contemporary paperback edition of McKillip’s series, and features similar artwork. A sense that this book desperately wishes to be mistaken for something better pretty much sums up the experience. It isn’t bad, per se, but it’s preeminently forgettable.

You know the stereotype of mediocre 1980s fantasy novels that read like someone else’s D&D campaign? I think the stereotype is overstated, but Harp, at any rate, embodies it. There are generic kingdoms and warring factions and spellworkers around every corner. Backstory gets plopped in with all the subtlety of a successful history check. Puns stand in for clever dialogue. It’s a D&D novel with the trademarks sanded off.

We begin with a bard named Emereck and his companion Flindaran, who is an undercover aristocrat playing at adventurer. They ride into a sleepy town and immediately go to the inn. Flindaran wants to flirt with the mysterious innkeeper, but doesn’t wish for the ire of the redoubtable Cilhar monopolizing her time. But then the inn is attacked by disguised soldiers who are after the mysterious Cilhar. In the aftermath, Emereck and Flindaran stumble upon the titular magic harp, which confers immense power, but at immense cost.

Harp functions okay as a vehicle for empty fantasy cliches. The ending, however, crowds together too many reveals and sudden betrayals by characters we’d never been given a reason to care about. The clunky action is outdone only by the awkward exposition.

2025 read #44: The Star-Treader and Other Poems by Clark Ashton Smith.

The Star-Treader and Other Poems by Clark Ashton Smith

100 pages

Published 1912

Read from May 21 to May 24

Rating: 2 out of 5

I made a couple prior attempts to read this collection, and always found my interest waning by the third or fourth page of the opening number, “Nero.” Poetry nowadays is gorgeous but lean, scything through layers of meaning and confessional trauma with precisely keyed phrases. Antique poetry (and this stuff was a deliberate throwback even by the standards of 1912) tends to feel pompous to my modern tastes. You have to be in a particular frame of mind to appreciate a line like “This Rome… / Is made my darkling dream’s effulgency…”

But I want to become conversant with a broader range of poetry, and this was free to download, so here we are again. If you’re reading this review, I finally made it to the end.

Opening with plodding classical pretensions does Star-Treader a disservice, at least to modern readers. It’s really not as bad as that first poem would suggest. While we do slog through plenty of dusty odes to butterflies and pine trees, Smith is at his best when he (quite literally) reaches for the stars.

The titular poem is pretty good, a versification of the typical contemporary “I traveled through space and time in a dream of my past lives” contrivance. It’s a nice mix of sidereal Romanticism with early science fiction. “Medusa” is equally acceptable, a gothic landscape portrayed in words, bridging from Greek myth to a prototype of the Dying Earth.

Other poems expand on the theme of stars and the vastness of space, written at a time when the immensities of time and emptiness were first becoming understood. At the very least, Star-Treader is interesting as a document of these frightening new vistas and how they shook up anglophone conceptions of the universe and humanity’s place within it. This is demonstrated quite literally in “Ode to the Abyss”: “[God’s] might were impotent to conquer thee, / O invisible infinity!”

Perhaps Smith’s poetry is best appreciated as a vibe, with the occasional outstanding line. Later on in “Ode to the Abyss,” we get this banger: “Dark as the final lull of suns.” That carries more desolate cosmic weirdness than entire novels from later writers. Alas, there just isn’t enough of that to make up for all the rest.

2025 read #43: The Pressure of All That Light by Holly Painter.

The Pressure of All That Light by Holly Painter

71 pages

Published 2022

Read May 21

Rating: 4 out of 5

I tend to orbit the same few topics in the poetry I read, as well as what I write: queerness, nature, childhood trauma, and the American Midwest, plus speculative elements that expand upon or elucidate those themes. This collection checks all of my boxes except for the speculative elements. Naturally, I adore it.

Painter excels at the mythological primacy that shapes childhood, in all its petty glories and vast heartbreaks. “We slice a worm with a spade / and the dead fall out / but we are small gods: / we’ve made another worm,” she writes in “Lone Pine Cemetery.” She also has a deft hand with the confusion of new adulthood, spinning archetypal images of queer college life with its questions and experiments gone wrong.

2025 read #42: Come and Admire Him by Joe Koch.

Come and Admire Him by Joe Koch

15 pages

Published 2024

Read May 21

Rating: 4 out of 5

This is a one-story chapbook, an erotic horror short “in conversation” with the 1981 film Possession. I’d wanted to see the movie before I read this, but I desperately need something quick to get my reading back on track before it becomes an all-out slump, so here we go.

In our contemporary era of prudery and Puritanism, it’s a delight to read a tale this filthy. The poetry of rot and bodily fluids, of murder and dismemberment to feed the birth of divine hunger, is the spine and substance of this story. It is an exercise in decadent description, and Koch succeeds marvelously.

2025 read #41: The Greatest Adventure by John Taine.

The Greatest Adventure by John Taine

256 pages

Published 1929

Read from May 2 to May 5

Rating: 1ish out of 5

The period between 1912 (when Doyle’s The Lost World was published) and somewhere around the end of WWII (when the subgenre appears to have been discarded in the postwar reshuffle of sci-fi) was the heyday of the lost world story. They ranged from the horribly written and horribly racist (The Land that Time Forgot) to the still racist but at least somewhat interesting (The Face in the Abyss). The ’20s and ’30s, in particular, seem to have been rife with lost worlds now forgotten.

The unpromisingly titled The Greatest Adventure is one such novel, a book (and author) I’d never heard of until I happened upon a pulp reprint from the 1960s. With its simple, direct prose, bubblegum-wrapper approximations of humor, and telling-not-showing exposition, it reminds me of a 1930s boy’s adventure novel I read a long time ago.

I’m not wholly convinced that Adventure was intended for an adult audience, though I acknowledge that boy’s-life and man’s-life adventure stories had considerable overlap at the time. An odd beast, the book has neither the just-like-you sidekick of a boy’s-life, nor the horniness and cynicism I’ve come to expect of a man’s-life.

Regardless of its intended audience, this book is not that good. The same character beats / punchlines keep repeating, failing to enliven a rote adventure narrative. (If you took a drink every time Ole Hansen says “I have a theory,” you’d be dead.)

The “dinosaurs” here are some of the least interesting I’ve ever encountered in fiction. It’s as if Taine overheard someone in another room say the word “dinosaur,” and he winged it from there. The monstrous saurians that populate his Antarctic are torpid masses of armored flesh “three hundred feet long.” We’re a long way from Doyle’s active (and relatively well-researched) dinosaurs, which leapt off the page a mere seventeen years earlier.

The discrepancy does get explained in the text (spoilers: they aren’t really dinosaurs). I suppose it’s interesting enough on a history-of-sci-fi level that this is more of a prototype of a genetic engineering story, but I’d have much preferred another retread of The Lost World over what we get here. If anything, with its climactic twist, Adventure turns out to be closer to The Andromeda Strain than to Jurassic Park.

The book’s sole redeeming feature is Edith, a modern young woman who learns to fly airplanes and stabs a pseudo-dinosaur in the eye.

2025 read #40: The Towers of Toron by Samuel R. Delany.

The Towers of Toron by Samuel R. Delany

140 pages

Published 1964

Read from April 29 to May 1

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

One of the local book barns had its season opening recently. For once, they had a pile of old pulpy sci-fi novels, including a few boxes of Ace Doubles. No way I could pass up a Delany novel in an Ace Double for $2, even if it is a Delany novel I’ve literally never heard of. On researching it, I learned that it’s a sequel to another Ace Double book, Captives of the Flame, which explains the density of world-building and backstory in its early pages.

Fifteen hundred years in the future, on an irradiated Earth largely inimical to human life outside certain oases protected by radiation barriers, an isolated kingdom develops teleportation technology. They use this to wage war on the other surviving terrestrial enclaves, but they also discover that the universe is home to two other teleporting races, both of them psychic collective consciousnesses, one benevolent, one amoral. The story also features telepathic giants and neo-Neanderthals. A bunch of characters can turn invisible when the lighting is right. There are lightsabers and a circus and a man with a half-mechanical face.

At its heart, Toron is about war and how the powerful utilize it as a tool for distraction and control. At times, the book gets lost in the weeds of Delany’s worldbuilding; I probably should have waited to get my hands on Captives and read that first, but I’m not convinced it would have helped. That said, even in its half-baked condition, this is undeniably a Delany novel. Its richness of creativity, its dissection of propaganda and the dehumanization of colonialism, the occasional breathtaking prose (including the most poetic description of someone’s death by disintegration I’ve ever read), all of it is solidly Delany, even if the book as a whole feels somewhat lacking. The ending alone makes it worth the read.