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 #38: Shattered Spear by Otava Heikkilä.

Shattered Spear by Otava Heikkilä

55 pages

Published 2019

Read April 18

Rating: 4 out of 5

Back when I was lining up a future as an archaeologist, I planned to specialize in the Epipaleolithic and Neolithic in Southwest Asia. For a little while, at least, I lived and breathed the Natufian, the PPNA, and the PPNB. It’s a world that will always fascinate me.

This is a short standalone graphic novel that I learned about thanks to a sword & sorcery Discord server. It’s set in the Jordan River valley during Neolithic, and follows two women who encounter each other and form an attachment. The artwork is gorgeous, capturing the beauty and vastness of its setting as well as the character of its two leads. The storytelling is marvelously efficient, relating so much in such a brief space.

Absolutely worth a read.

2025 read #20: Sorcery and Cecelia by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.

Sorcery and Cecelia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: being the correspondence of two Young Ladies of Quality regarding various Magical Scandals in London and the Country by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

320 pages

Published 1988

Read from March 2 to March 8

Rating: 3 out of 5

My reading habits have wilted into nothing. Good thing I’d already decided I wouldn’t try for record book numbers this year. It’s hard enough just surviving day to day with the fashy bullshit coming at us faster than we could possibly process it.

This is an airy morsel of an epistolic novel set in 1817. Two young ladies — Kate on her London debut, her cousin Cecy envious and stuck in rural Essex — correspond about their adventures at balls and picnics, and their brushes with the affairs of English wizards (as well as a certain Mysterious Marquis).

Sorcery is calculated to appeal to anyone who grew up reading Austen or the Brontë sisters. The characters are likable, and the prose seems like a good match for the period, at least to this non-expert. The way magic is lightly sprinkled over a historical fiction setting is reminiscent of Stevermer’s later A College of Magics. I found the overall effect charming but not compelling (though that likely derives from the general anhedonia of having to survive another Trump era).

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 #88: The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo.

The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo

150 pages

Published 2024

Read from July 28 to August 4

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Lately, my partner R has gotten fixated on queer Appalachian fantasy and horror. I've been wanting to write in this niche myself, so from professional as well as personal interest, I should start familiarizing myself with it.

R recommended this slim novel as a good place to begin. Of course, no matter how slender the book is, it’s still summer as I try to read it, so I’m having my usual difficulties in finding opportunities to read (or the attention span to read when I do).

For its length, Woods is a slow burn, which didn’t help my focus. It centers on an "invert" named Leslie, a nurse with PTSD from World War I, who gets sent to an isolated community in the hills of eastern Kentucky in 1929. There he finds community hostility; an authoritarian brimstone preacher; a fellow trans man (as we might now consider him) who is being abused by the community; and something strange deep in the hills.

I felt that Mandelo does an excellent job at situating Woods in its time and place, conveying Leslie’s queerness and neurodivergence without resorting to couching them in modern terms. The peril of queerness in dangerous times makes for uneasy reading, and the loneliness of trying to model a form of queerness that doesn’t fit, at a time when few models were circulated even within the community, is heartbreaking. Humans (or at least Christofascists) are the true horror in Woods.

2024 read #75: Even Though I Knew the End by C. L. Polk.

Even Though I Knew the End by C. L. Polk

137 pages

Published 2022

Read from June 26 to June 29

Rating: 4 out of 5

This one is a queer noir set in an alternate Chicago rife with magic. Narrator Helen Brandt is a mystic, a specialist in divination, and a private eye working for a femme fatale downtown. Helen knows she only has a few days left on earth. She takes one last job to pad out the nest egg she plans to leave to her paramour Edith. But the case is much bigger, and much more dangerous, than Helen ever suspected, and she gets drawn in despite her plan to spend her last weekend with Edith.

Polk's pacing is crisp, setting up the characters, the world, the stakes, and the complications chapter by chapter, exactly when needed. Their prose is solid, contemporary, adding just enough pulp rhythm in to add atmosphere without the voice slipping into patter. 

2024 read #70: Queer’s One for the Ages, edited by Viviana Annaelise Montez.

Queer’s One for the Ages: An LGBTQ Historical Fiction Anthology edited by Viviana Annaelise Montez

84 pages

Published 2020

Read June 14

Rating: 3 out of 5

Collecting books and reading books are two separate pastimes. I’ve owned a copy of this anthology ever since early 2021, when I purchased it alongside a copy of the December 2020 issue of Prismatica Magazine (which was my very first print publication as an author). It’s come along with me on three big moves, but I’m only just now reading it. (To be fair, I didn’t do much reading at all in 2021. Too much fresh trauma and long-term recuperation.)

Ah, 2020. A miserable time for most, a tragic time for many. Yet it was also when I got reacquainted with the indie press scene. So many of the small litmags and micro presses that I read and published in back then are gone. A good chunk of my publications were lost in various website closures. In the case of Prismatica and its associated indie press, it enacted a small miracle by resurrecting after its initial shutdown in the summer of 2021. The magazine’s back catalog is still available to read online, which is another small miracle. All the press’s one-off anthologies and chapbooks, sadly, seem to be out of print, including this collection. I’m happy I got a copy when I did.

If any of the authors have since chosen different names, I  apologize. I don’t mean to deadname anyone here.

—

“White Flowers to the Sea” by Jameson Hampton. A brief but charming tale of a priest of Poseidon at Sounion, and his curiosity about the furtive Athenian man who leaves offerings of white flowers at the temple. Hampton brings out character with deft phrasing, making this story feel deeper than its length would suggest.

“The Keeper” by Jacob Holmes-Brown. After a tryst in the lighthouse, warrior Kallias must leave to accompany Alexandria's governor on a voyage. Kallias' love, Timon, a keeper of the lighthouse, waits for his return, but riots sweep through the city in the governor’s absence. An effective story. 

“Miindo” by Lyndon Ang. A sweet, sapphic tale of an enslaved entertainer named Jeonghyang and a painter named Yunbok. Dynastic Korea is not the ideal place to be a woman, a commoner, or queer. This story grounds our protagonists in that system, but is mostly concerned with giving them a glimpse of a life outside those strictures, literally seeing past the male gaze. It also graces us with a strong dose of the "queer panic" trope. Enjoyable.

“Loss” by A.R. Salandy. Nathaniel and Tom taste love on the eve of the American Civil War. 

“Gas-Flame Countess” by Percival Vogt. An atmospheric stroll through 1865 Paris, a world of nocturnal pleasures, tribades, and complaisants. This story was inspired by the real-life "Countess" and her queer community, which I just now learned about thanks to this story.

“By the Mahoning River” by M.P. Armstrong. One close to my heart, this story takes place in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1943. Tony works at a steel mill, missing her brother, who's been drafted. Then a new family moves in above a corner storefront, and Tony meets Beatrice, who also finds work at the mill. Another sweet little story, a brief but vivid depiction of a moment in time. I wish it had gone on longer.

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And that’s it! Overall, a solid and enjoyable sample of indie publishing. I’m sad the other offerings from the press are out of reach.

2024 read #41: New to Liberty by DeMisty D. Bellinger.

New to Liberty by DeMisty D. Bellinger

197 pages

Published 2022

Read from April 1 to April 10

Rating: 4 out of 5

A haunting, beautiful, tragic, aching literary novel, New to Liberty introduces us to three women navigating societally forbidden relationships in rural Kansas. Isolation and prejudice loom through each story: mixed-race Sissily traveling through with an older white man in 1966; Nella secretly rendezvousing with a disabled white man in 1947; Greta finding momentary love with a woman in 1933. Each of them are united by the themes of powerlessness in society, of being manipulated by the men in around them, of straining to find any scrap of control over their lives. Threads of old tragedies and past mistakes weave through each of the narratives, tightening them into a cohesive whole.

Bellinger’s prose hums with place and character, bringing dust-blown summers and horrific attacks to life with equal clarity. Her command of characterization is outstanding. The emotional weight of each of the three stories balances delicately between what is said and what isn’t, a boulder poised on the head of a pin. There are no easy answers, no pat fixes, no neat resolutions. Female solidarity — across racial lines, across lines of sexuality, across generations — is the only solid handhold any of the characters are offered:

We could do nothing…. I stood and swayed with her…. It was horrible, but nice. It was like being in church. It was all three of us throwing all hope to something outside of ourselves, hopefully greater than us three. Hopefully benevolent.

2024 read #37: The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff.

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

214 pages

Published 1954

Read from March 20 to March 25

Rating: 3 out of 5

As a precocious reader whose parent seldom let them access anything more recent than the Edwardian era, I’ve been something of an Anglophile my whole life, swooning over misty mornings on the downs and the ancient lines of hedgerows depicted by Doyle. And as a lifelong history nerd, Roman Britain was long a special interest of mine: an era of long-distance trade, culture contact, and people moving between continents long before any modern conception of “race” had been invented, with Britain itself a wooded land of fog and wolves at the edge of the world. It’s a shame that the definitive modern fantasy novel about Roman Britain (The Mists of Avalon) was written by one of those sex predators all too common in twentieth century SFF. I’ll certainly never make the effort to read it.

The Eagle of the Ninth got name-checked in one of the British histories I read in recent months, possibly In the Land of Giants. And for the most part, it delivers on what I’d want from an adventure novel set in Roman Britain. Its historical accuracy is debatable, but Sutcliff vividly depicts the culture and day to day life in Roman fort and town, from food to clothing to smells and sounds. The dialogue has a formal rhythm that makes the characters truly feel like they’re from a culture distinct from the reader’s. Sutcliff’s descriptions of nature beyond the walls are impeccable, poetic, worthy of any contemporary British nature writer:

He heard the bees zooming among the bell-heather of the clearing, smelled the warm aromatic scents of the sun-baked birch woods overlaying the cold saltiness of the sea; singled out one among the wheeling gulls and watched it until it became lost in a flickering cloud of sun-touched wings.

Most unexpectedly for 1954, there are distinct queer overtones to the companionship between disabled Centurion Marcus and manumitted Brit Esca. It’s no The Last of the Wine, but it’s far more emotionally tender and more intimately portrayed than I would have expected.

That said, Eagle absolutely shows its age. There’s the whole thing about Marcus purchasing Esca as a personal slave in the first place. (Accurate to the time period, but a dubious way for a writer to begin a relationship between two fictional characters, by modern standards.) There’s a line about how hereditary slaves, unlike those captured in battle, are simply used to slavery and don’t mind it. There's also a hugely uncomfortable age gap relationship between Marcus and a teenage girl named Cottia. Again, possibly accurate to the time period, but a questionable choice for a modern writer to make.

2024 read #33: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

308 pages

Published 2016

Read from March 4 to March 6

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

At one point, early in Cora’s escape from enslavement, an underground station agent tells her: “Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.” Cora follows his advice, but “There was only darkness, mile after mile.” That’s a concise thesis statement for this novel as a whole.

Much of The Underground Railroad’s marketing emphasizes how Whitehead literalized its namesake network. Physical trains chuff through physical tunnels, connecting vignettes to illustrate the Black experience in America. Enslavement, torture, medical exploitation and experimentation, sterilization, eugenic schemes, cadaver theft, lynching, genocide, rape, evangelism — all of them central to the American project, all of them linked by white Americans’ apostolic frenzy to dehumanize and subjugate Black folks. Stolen land worked by stolen bodies: the sickness and rot at the heart of everything this country has ever been.

Railroad’s vignettes are powerful, appalling, gripping, linked by the conceit its literal underground tunnels, at first a streamlining artifice of storytelling and metaphor that reaches its full brilliance at the end of the book. Regardless of marketing, Railroad is as magnificent, and as devastating, as you’d expect.

2024 read #19: Action Stories, December 1940 issue.

Action Stories, December 1940 issue (16:1)

Edited by Malcolm Reiss 

132 pages

Published 1940

Read February 5

Rating: 1 out of 5

I’m reading this for one reason and one reason only: the cover art for “Exiles of the Dawn World.” I have no illusions that anything here will live up to the pure pulp silliness promised by that cover. You can pretty much guarantee that the cover will be the best part of a magazine like this, anyway.

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“Ghost-Brand Maverick” by Jay Karth. The title is the best thing about this paint-by-numbers western, which has nothing to do with ghosts. Our hero, Ed Flane, has “opaque” blue eyes and no personality beyond stoic manliness. He arrives in town, supposedly fresh out of prison on a governor’s pardon; Ed had been locked up for killing his own father, but was let go on “insufficient evidence.” Naturally, the moment he sets foot in town, manly honor demands he fistfight a dude named Rick, who promptly dies. Ed Flane knows it’s a setup by local bigwigs hoping to take over his ranch and cover up who actually killed Ed’s dad (and not, like, Ed’s responsibility whatsoever for fighting Rick or anything). There’s also a gray-eyed waif who’s in love with Ed, but her father wants to shoot him; then her father ends up dead, etc. There’s even a twist reveal of lookalikes, assumed identities, and a second Ed Flane. It feels like a pressed and shaped chicken patty of a story, a product squirted out for rapid consumption and immediate digestion. I suppose it could have been worse? If I had to say something positive about it, “Maverick” does a decent job at escalation, adding fresh complications to Ed Flane’s situation. D

“Exiles of the Dawn World” by Nelson S. Bond. Stage magician and sometime ghost-exorcist Jeff thinks he’s investigating a standard haunted house in upstate New York; city reporter Beth thinks she’s exposing Jeff as the con he is. Instead, through a hidden passageway in a bookshelf, they discover Dr. Franz von Torp and his secret time-travel laboratory. Von Torp, to preserve his secrets, orders them into his time-machine; in the struggle, all three end up “a million years ago,” which turns out to be a pulpy mishmash of cavemen times and dinosaur swamps. Jeff’s magician coat comes in handy when befriending the local Cro-Magnons. Most of the fauna is a smattering of Cenozoic beasties — Dinoceras and Coryphodon get name-checked — but dinosaurs finally appear in the climax, specifically tyrannosaurs ridden by war bands of Neanderthals under the mad scientist’s command. Like “Maverick” above, this story is a checklist of pulp tropes run through with abandon. Weirdly, “Exiles” shows its age worse than the western does, particularly in its general attitude toward women. Still, it has cavemen fighting tyrannosaurs with fire arrows, which is exactly what I came here for. D-

Content warning for two next stories: sui ideation.

“Boothill Bait” by Tom J. Hopkins. Back in the saddle with another western, this time following Joe Fergus, a steely, stoic man with an actual character trait: he wants to die, but can’t seem to make it happen, not even in shootouts with bandits. When Fergus finds a town, nicknamed The Graveyard, where marshaling is a sure ticket to six feet under, he rushes to volunteer. That’s the only interesting wrinkle to this dud. Despite that setup, Fergus lights out for an even deadlier town down in Mexico the moment someone tells him about it, chasing another man who just wants to die. “Boothill” is trying so hard to be brooding and fatalistic, but it’s just silly. (And ultimately racist.) F

“The Devil’s Sink Hole” by Albert Richard Wetjen. I was premature when I said a suicidal hero was an interesting wrinkle, because we got another one: Stinger Seave, a former South Seas “trader” who has gone back to ruthless adventuring in his old age, after a bank collapse erases most of his colonialist wealth. Seave is frail, his mustache white, and he’s clean out of fucks to give. So the governor of colonial New Guinea offers to make him a magistrate on the frontier. Stinger could have been an interesting character, but this story is an exercise in colonialist bullshit. It’s just an especially vile western with palm trees. F

Clearly we peaked with the first two stories. We’ve long since  reached the point of diminishing returns.

“The Rider of Lost Range” by Bart Cassidy. Another western. Two bygone “pards,” Buck and Rooney, grew up and got ranches next to each other, but now they suspect each other of rustling their calves, because it’s manlier to stew in unfounded suspicion than to have an open and honest communication. You’d never guess, but a third man is behind it all, putting them against each another while he steals their cattle! (I sussed out the twist by page two.) The one redeeming feature of this tale is its depiction of high park and mountain scenery. There’s also a secret cave behind a thundering waterfall, leading to a grassy range open to the air, which is implausible but fun. Maybe F+

“Murder Sands” by John Starr. A tale of two men in the French Foreign Legion: a standup American sergeant, and a vicious bully of a Dutch lieutenant. The American noncom punches the Dutch officer, gets only light punishment due to past heroism, and now the Dutchman plots vengeance. Consistently uninteresting tale from the desert frontiers of colonialism. F

“Tejano!” by Harry F. Olmsted. All about some “loco” white dudes cow-punching in the Big Bend country. Murders and rustling and revenge get rattled off at breakneck pace, with all the standard racist western tropes. I almost wonder if this was some awkward attempt at a satire of pulpy westerns. No thanks, either way. F

“Fate Fans a .45” by Walt Coburn. Jack Badger, cowpoke turned investigator, traipses down to Mexico about a train robbery, following a hunch it was set up by someone on the inside. (Turns out Jack’s dad was killed in the robbery. It’s a vengeance story, because of course it is.) Insipid stuff, and excessively long, to boot. Didn’t expect much from this one, but what a flat way to end this issue. F

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For a moment there at the start, I had thought this magazine might have been more than meets the eye — only a little, maybe 5%, but still, more interesting than it would seem. But no, they merely front-loaded it with the best stories, and even those two were marginal at best. The rest was pure pulp filler. Not surprising, just disappointing.

2023 read #147: Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand.

Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

146 pages

Published 2015

Read from December 4 to December 5

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

This is the book that I had hoped The Doubleman would be.

It takes the form of an oral history recounting the summer British folk-rock band Windhollow Faire holed up in the titular Wylding Hall to record an album. The Hall is a sprawling countryside manor where the ancient magic, carried in strange melodies, lingers. A place of Neolithic barrows and dead birds and grimoires in the antiquarian library, a place where strange passageways open up one day never to be found again, a place where time itself seems to waver. Julian, the band’s genius guitarist, is obsessed with the occult, with magick: crafting spells in his music, opening doors that perhaps should have stayed shut.

The British folk-rock movement — and the wider folk revival of the 1960s and '70s — have been particular interests of mine for well over a dozen years. Wylding Hall could not have been more of a treat to this hyperfocus, name-dropping Sandy Denny and Steeleye Span and the Middle Earth venue. I love the hippie vibe of bringing back the Old Ways, the deep magic of the land we lost due to industrialization, enclosure, imperialism, Christianity. As much influence as the folk revival had on fantasy fiction, helping it grow away from the Howardian barbarians and into the New Romantic era, I can’t think of another book that captures the folk revival vibe, or reads as much like a love letter to the movement, quite like Wylding Hall. The only book that I can even think of that comes close in its reverence for strange old musical magic is War for the Oaks, and that deals with a punk band in the ’80s.

I was initially skeptical of the oral history format, but Hand pulls it off beautifully, infusing each “interview” segment with character and perspective. Each surviving member of the band emerges as a personality, each marked by the trauma of the Wylding Hall sessions in different ways: some credulous, some calling bullshit, some driven to alcohol, some driven to quit. It’s as fluently written and atmospheric as you’d expect from the author of “Echo” (read and reviewed here).

2023 read #142: Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth.

Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale, Taken from Facts, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires Before the Year 1782 by Maria Edgeworth

90 pages

Published 1800

Read from November 30 to December 1

Rating: 2 out of 5

I read this for one reason: I hadn’t yet read anything from the decade of the 1800s, and this sounded like the least uninteresting book I could find from those years. Plus, it’s short. Maybe someday I’ll take the time to read Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the years 1799–1804, but not today.

Rackrent is, for the most part, a delightfully snarky little satire of English colonialism in Ireland, ironically chronicling four heirs of the Rackrent estate, all of them some flavor of predatory English lord on occupied soil: “the drunken Sir Patrick, the litigious Sir Murtagh, the fighting Sir Kit, and the slovenly Sir Condy….” The satire is in a vein that should be familiar to anyone who’s read Early Modern literature:

However, my lady was very charitable in her own way. She had a charity school for poor children, where they were taught to read and write gratis, and where they were kept well to spinning gratis for my lady in return….

Beneath the slyly ingratiating surface, it’s all deliciously pointed.

Someone in the publishing process, however — quite possibly Maria Edgeworth’s father — took it upon themselves to bootlick tender English feelings in an introduction, insisting that English abuses of Ireland spontaneously ceased sometime around 1782, and that everybody is happy and congenial now and that the Irish simply adore their English overlords:

The Editor hopes his readers will observe that these are “tales of other times”: that the manners depicted in the following pages are not those of the present age: the race of the Rackrents has long since been extinct in Ireland; and… are characters which could no more be met with at present in Ireland, than Squire Western or Parson Trulliber in England. There is a time, when individuals can bear to be rallied for their past follies and absurdities, after they have acquired new habits, and a new consciousness. Nations as well as individuals gradually lose attachment to their identity, and the present generation is amused rather than offended by the ridicule that is thrown upon its ancestors.

Endnotes, also appended by this editor, made every effort to satirize the Irish at large for their “laziness,” their funereal lamentations, their litigiousness, drunkenness, not paying their rent on time, and so on. Unsurprising, given the overwhelming fragility of the colonialist ego, which we can observe for ourselves in our own era.

And, sadly, this editor wasn’t Rackrent’s sole letdown. There’s a plotline in which the wastrel Sir Kit marries Jessica, a Jewish heiress, which detours the narrative into some shitty of-the-era antisemitism.

2023 read #130: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas.

The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

345 pages

Published 2022

Read from November 5 to November 8

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Young Beatriz lost her father when the first emperor of Mexico was overthrown; he was dragged before the firing squad for collaborating with Iturbide. When Beatriz, hoping for stability and safety, gets engaged to Rodolfo, a man high up in the party that executed her father, her mother disowns her. Beatriz has nowhere else to go but Hacienda San Isidro, her new husband’s estate. She is determined to make the hacienda hers, to assume its command as lady of the house, to leave her mark. But she quickly learns that not all is what it should be beneath the surface of San Isidro. And rumors swirl regarding the fate of Rodolfo’s first wife.

A classic Gothic plot set in Mexico, The Hacienda inevitably draws comparisons to Mexican Gothic. But the two are quite different. No mind-controlling mushrooms here. In their place is a world of witchcraft, possession, and hidden murders. There’s forbidden pining between Beatriz and Andrés, the young priest (and secret witch) whom she begs to cleanse the hacienda. It’s a more conventional Gothic business, but a satisfying novel all the same. Cañas’ descriptions are evocative, full of the sweep of the storm-shadowed countryside, and the claustrophobic terrors of possessed home and colonialist social hierarchies alike.

2023 read #103: The Long Walk by Milton J. Davis.

The Long Walk by Milton J. Davis

145 pages

Published 2019

Read September 22

Rating: 3 out of 5

You never know what you’ll get with self-published (and, to an extent, small press) books. Sometimes you’ll get a fully polished and professional-grade novel like Exodus 20:3 or Robbergirl. Sometimes you’ll get something full of potential, but needing just a tad more editorial nurturing, like The Worm and His Kings. Sometimes, yes, you’ll get something borderline unreadable. I always DNF those and never review them, because I’m not in the business of tearing down anyone just trying to make a buck from their words. (Capitalism does enough of that for everyone.)

The Long Walk falls around the middle of the self-pubbed spectrum, a bracing story and a fascinating world relayed in flat prose. The writing isn’t bad, by any means, but it serves merely to pull us from A to B. We rarely get the chance to linger, to experience, to feel. Even character deaths pass by in a blink.

Twelve year old Patience de Verteuil leaves Trinidad in the company of her father, Maurice, a scholar and a soldier in a supernatural war. They’ve been summoned to Nicodemus, the Black-founded town in Kansas, at the behest of Harriet Tubman. But things quickly go wrong, and Patience finds herself in the company of other fighters, forced to wield her family’s ancestral bois in the fight against a vast evil. With her new companions, Patience must fight her way across the Reconstruction-era South, pursued by hell hounds, a ghoulish hunter named Cain, and a sinister figure called Jedediah Green.

The story feels a bit like a quest fantasy, with an adventuring party composed of a bard, a healer, and a dance-fighter, and a bit like a superhero narrative, all of it suffused with the righteous fury of history. I think if this were to be remade as a graphic novel, it would be outstanding.

2023 read #100: Washington Black by Esi Edugyan.

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

337 pages

Published 2018

Read from September 15 to September 18

Rating: 4 out of 5

I don’t feel stuck in a reading rut, necessarily, but in recent months I find I’ve been reading a lot of fantasy novels and dinosaur fiction and not much else. I miss the variety of genres and topics I used to read. As a writer, it’s insufficient to read only the genre you write. So when I found this historical fiction novel at my local library, I thought, why not?

It is unsurprisingly excellent, an assured work from the sort of literary author who makes you realize genre writers rarely bother with good prose. Edugyan weaves a marvelous, absorbing descriptive flow and makes it look effortless. She could write rings around most fantasists, even 21st century fantasists.

George Washington Black is born into the horrific conditions of chattel slavery in Barbados. His cruel “master,” Erasmus Wilde, has a scientifically-inclined brother, nicknamed Titch, who arrives with the makings of an aerostat, with which he proposes to make the first aeronautical crossing of the Atlantic. Titch requests eleven year old Wash as his personal and scientific assistant, planning to have Wash along as “ballast” on the trip. Wash discovers a natural talent for drawing, but knows this brief reprieve is not to last.

When family dramas, stoked by their own cruelties, convulse the Wildes, and leave one of their own dead, Wash is blamed. Commandeered by Titch into his aerostat, Wash escapes Barbados in the night, but the balloon doesn’t get them far. Turns out that escaping structures of power and violence isn’t as easy as spinning away in a balloon.

Washington Black is an intimate, subtle examination of one man’s navigation through the structures of white supremacist power, a Bildungsroman of Wash’s maturation against a backdrop of vicious cruelties and ingrained attitudes. Would-be white savior Titch commandeers Wash’s life; years later, a scientist who treats Wash as his intellectual equal nonetheless accepts that Wash’s name will never be given due credit in their shared projects. The book is horrifying and delicate and beautiful. I quite liked that Wash is never under any narrative pressure to forgive anyone. Rather, he is driven by an almost scientific need to understand, even — or perhaps especially — to understand those who have wronged, used, abandoned, and brutalized him.

“We had been estranged from the potential of our own bodies,” Wash narrates in the coda, “from the revelation of what our bodies and minds could accomplish.”

2023 read #77: Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.*

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson*

279 pages

Published 1886

Read from July 4 to July 7

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

One of my favorite books as a kid was Treasure Island. This is no doubt a common outcome when your father is controlling and abusive and doesn’t let you read much, if anything, more current than the Edwardian era. So it happened that, when I was still young enough to eat up Readers Digest condensed classics (those stalwarts of impoverished American childhoods in the '80s and early '90s), I was thrilled to get my hands on their bowdlerized version of Kidnapped from the dollar store. Another seafaring adventure from Robert Louis Stevenson! Surely it would be exactly as good as Treasure Island!

Kidnapped is, of course, a very different book than Treasure Island. It was one of the very first times in my young life that I learned I could dislike a book. I don't remember why I didn't like it, though. I wouldn't be surprised if the Lowland Scots dialogue muddled my preteen brain; even at 40, I have no idea what the exclamation “Hoot-toot!” is meant to correspond to in actual Scots speech. Additionally, I wouldn't have been able to follow the intricacies of Jacobite vs Whig politics as a child. Or maybe I tired of interminable wandering over the heather. Whatever the reason, Kidnapped was one of the vanishingly few books I had as a kid that I didn't reread even once.

Maybe as a consequence of that, Kidnapped became a book I've wanted to revisit for much of my adult life. (Or at least since I got my library card and began this blog, all those years ago.) Weirdly, the Suffolk County library system had exactly one copy, and it was a ratty old tome, fraying apart along the spine, so I didn’t try to read it. I finally happened upon a cheap Scholastic edition at the used bookstore a few weeks ago. At long last we can answer: Was it truly so mediocre? Or was it simply above my reading level?

After all these years, I can report: It’s fine? I guess?

Stevenson’s primary storytelling skill here is characterization. Uncle Ebenezer is one of the great bastards of Victorian literature, a standout in a crowded field. Ebenezer is so perfectly realized on the page: a miser in a flannel nightgown, refusing to have lights in the house, happy to measure out half of his own beer into David's cup if he wants a drink at dinner. David himself, by contrast, is insufferably smug and classist, perennially thinking himself superior to everyone and the master of every situation. There's a place for unappealing narrators, and I’m sure his priggishness was thoroughly realistic, but David being a titled prick who I want to push into a bog does the story no favors.

The true star of the book is Alan Breck, whose characterization here — a swaggering braggart in love with his own legend, a Jacobite partisan who forms a fast friendship with a Whig lad simply because the lad witnessed Alan’s feats of swordsmanship — is one I want to recycle for a queer sword and sorcery story.

When it comes to plotting, or even adventure, however, Stevenson does an indifferent job. Our young hero David caroms from seeking his fortune at his uncle’s house, to the titular kidnapping, to fighting beside Alan, to shipwreck, to a half-hearted Robinson Crusoe sequence, to a traipse across a couple Scottish islands, to witnessing a murder, to fleeing across the heather with Alan, to lying sick in a croft for a month, to (finally) talking to a lawyer. It is, if nothing else, thoroughly Victorian — a sprawling mess with a little bit of everything thrown in, for the kids to enjoy in their weekly serial. No wonder it was all too much for a kid in the early 1990s who just wanted some more swashbuckling.

2023 read #67: The Devourers by Indra Das.

The Devourers by Indra Das

307 pages

Published 2015

Read from June 14 to June 15

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

I read about two-thirds of this book on a plane to Las Vegas back in February 2020. Even then I felt uneasy around so many people, pooling and flowing their way around a claustrophobic world, sharing suspect exhalations. I didn’t know then that it would be the last time I would fly (whether forever or merely for some years, I don’t know even now). I didn’t know yet that the world I conceptualized around me would end. The book was a spell, a disorienting swirl of senses and violence and depths of time, read in the dark, suspended in clouds. When I got home, I wouldn’t finish it. Soon everything around me would halt, break apart.

Perhaps it’s easy to understand my reluctance to return to The Devourers. Indrapramit Das’ prose is sharpened to the edge of delirium, beguiling and sinister, fermenting with all the violence and rot of history, pulling you aside from the world into a parallel space of blood-spiced myths and hot breath on the back of your neck. It is a horrifying revelry, revolting, ravenous, seductive, predatory. But even now the book feels charged with the atmosphere of that first liminal unease, that last layover before the end of the world. I've wanted to come back, to start over, to finish it at last. But the book itself seems to have become a mythical artifact for me, weighted with associations. It hasn't been easy to make myself pick it up again.

I’m glad I finally read The Devourers in full. It most reminds me of Jordy Rosenberg’s exquisite Confessions of the Fox. The two books are far apart in tone and subject, but both are queer-centered deconstructions of historical atrocities, both told through the framing device of a scholar transcribing and annotating historical documents that reveal a hidden side to the world. Clearly this is a micro-genre that deeply appeals to my particular tastes. And I love a book or story where the title changes meaning by the end. That said, however—

[Content warning: discussion of fictional SA.]

I can’t review this book without mentioning my discomfort with sexual assault and forced pregnancy being major plot points. Even in the context of a novel thematically centered on the horrors of predatory masculinity, colonialism, and generational trauma, it feels questionable. Das handles these themes far better than, say, George R. R. Martin ever did, but inevitably there are some lines that don’t sit right with me (such as when we’re introduced to Cyrah’s perspective: she’s writing to her son and muses “I should have left… but then I wouldn’t be writing this for you, and should I regret that? I don’t know”). That particular line, and its sentiments, becomes much more complex and recontextualized by the end of the book, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that Cyrah is pressured to go on with the pregnancy for purely narrative purposes.

2023 read #64: Let the Mountains Be My Grave by Francesca Tacchi.

Let the Mountains Be My Grave by Francesca Tacchi

80 pages

Published 2022

Read June 8

Rating: 4 out of 5

Short version: Queer partisans killing Nazis with the aid of an ancient Italic goddess. A+, no notes.

Longer version: No, really, way more books should be about queer resistance fighters slaying the hell out of some Nazis. Especially stories about partisans killing Nazis — stories that remind us that not everyone acquiesces when fascists take over their country.

This slender novel is tightly constructed, Tacchi’s crisp, unadorned prose doling out exactly the information and imagery needed to build the story. Like our narrator, Mountains burns on a short fuse, just wanting to take out all the Nazi pigs it can before it ends. Comparisons to Indiana Jones — ancient gods, mystical relics, battling fascists to wrest a metaphysical power from their hands — are inevitable, perhaps, but unworthy. This little book is so much more than Saturday matinee fare.

2023 read #58: Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark.

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

185 pages

Published 2020

Read from May 27 to May 28

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Maryse, Sadie, and Chef hunt the Ku Klux Klan. Specifically, the monstrous otherworldly creatures that Klansmen allow themselves to become when their hate opens them up to evil magic brought back into this world with the release of The Birth of a Nation. That would be enough of a tag line to make me snatch up this book at the earliest opportunity. But Ring Shout, despite its modest length, is so much more than that. It is lyrical and revolutionary, a gorgeous and wounding document of trauma and righteous rage in the face of hundreds of years of hate, violence, and cruelty.

I loved how the story was constructed, vividly setting up our central trio and the twisted menace of the Ku Kluxes before expanding out to introduce Nana Jean, Uncle Will, and others on the righteous side of the fight. The world expands, new characters appear, and new information emerges chapter by chapter, paced with effortless skill and efficiency on the part of P. Djèlí Clark. The story is hopeful and heartbreaking, beautiful and horrifying. It is magnificent.