2026 read #32: She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore.

She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore
297 pages
Published 2018
Read from May 13 to June 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

This is the 1000th book I’ve read and reviewed on this blog. It’s taken thirteen and a half years to get here. Along the way, while I’ve reread books from my past, I haven’t read a single book twice. That’s a thousand different reads, good and bad, classic and contemporary, spanning centuries of literature and countless different versions of me. We’ve gone from the ineffectual center-right liberalism of Obama, when my kid was a toddler and groceries cost half what they do now, to the current spiral of fascism and ecological collapse and corporate inflation, with my kid now almost an adult. I’ve gone through a thousand iterations of self, as well—the person I was when I began is as far distant as my kid’s toddlerdom.

I first tried to read She Would Be King back in March 2019. After a promising start that year, my reading habits deteriorated quickly; this was one of several books I began with enthusiasm that spring, only for my attention span to atrophy. According to my ancient iPhone, I only read 14% of the file before lapsing. But this review of it has been stuck in my drafts for over seven years now. That was half the duration of this blog ago. This seems like an opportune time to blow the dust off King and try again.

It is an ambitious first novel, capital-L literature, dense and weighty. At her best, Moore refuses to sanitize or look away from horrors and griefs no words will ever fully encompass. Yet beauty mingles with the cruelty like blood and water.

The opening sections of the book function like novelettes introducing us to each of the three central characters. The stories are compelling, compressing generations of trauma into taut, moving narratives. It’s when the characters and their stories converge that King wobbles. Our three protagonists meet for approximately five minutes before plot contrivance forces them apart again. The structure of Moore’s examination of Liberian history requires them to part in order to witness different aspects of it, so off they must go to see it. But they keep thinking about each other, because the plot requires that too.

The second half of King occasionally still burns with vengeance, strives against the weight of trauma, and examines the injustices of colonialism, but the immediacy and intensity of its opening chapters gets lost in the business of nation-building. Liberia’s founding is especially nuanced, a colonialist adventure that opened a path forward for oppressed populations while also creating new conditions of oppression for displaced locals. Once her characters are placed where they need to be, Moore gestures toward some of this complexity and uneasiness, but none of it matches the powerful storytelling of the first half.

2026 read #6: My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen.

My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen

379 pages

Published 2024

Read from January 29 to February 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

This year, I hope to read books I truly want to read, instead of bulking up my numbers with disposable pulp that just happens to be brief. Reading for numbers has had a regrettable effect on what I read. I’ve been completely neglecting contemporary full-length fantasy, one of my favorite categories. I think I only read a couple of them all last year. Time to change that!

My partner R read this book just about a year ago, and loved it enough to recommend it in the highest terms. After reading it, I have to concur. Van Veen’s prose is understated yet beautiful, dispassionately depicting horrors of living and dead alike. The Dutch countryside is a character all its own, vividly described, haunted by the misty ghosts of wetlands.

As an abused young girl in the aftermath of World War II, Roos becomes attached to a spirit she names Ruth. Ghosts, in van Veen’s inventive worldbuilding, only linger when the body itself does; Ruth’s body has tanned for centuries in a bog, giving her spirit the classic appearance of a bog body. A mysterious widow named Agnes purchases Roos’s autonomy from her horrid guardian. It turns out Agnes, too, is attached to an ancient spirit of her own. But that’s just the beginning of Dreadful’s Gothic turns.

My favorite thing about this book is the conceit of truly ancient ghosts. More stories should incorporate ghosts from millennia ago. But even without that particular niche interest, this is a beautifully rendered tragedy of obsession, possession, and trauma. An outstanding book.

2026 read #2: A Horse Came Running by Meindert DeJong.*

A Horse Came Running by Meindert DeJong*

Illustrated by Paul Sagsoorian

147 pages

Published 1970

Read January 3

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

So far as I recall, this was the very first chapter book I ever read. It was in my older brother’s English textbook for 6th grade, the same textbook that introduced me to The War of the Worlds (via an account of the 1938 radio drama), and had chapters from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and Sweetwater, as well. The full text of A Horse Came Running was included at the end of the textbook, presumably for a capstone unit or something along those lines.

I ate it up as an 8 year old. I assumed it was set in Kentucky (which, as the old family home we returned to for summers in my youth, had been a major scene in my life), and the plot revolved around a tornado (one of my earliest fears and fixations). I’d never particularly been into horses, but I was a big-hearted child, and immediately loved the horses in the story. I felt very smart and accomplished, reading a book for 6th graders all on my own.

It took some time (and way too much money) to track down a copy on eBay. But it was nice to revisit it. It’s a solidly done children’s book, capturing the magical thinking and mental bargains that make up childhood thought. It creaks with age, unfortunately, emphasizing obedience as a virtue, and dropping some casual misogyny in a boy’s-life sort of way. There’s also a lot more “the young horse is now the wife of the old horse” chatter than I remembered. I think the textbook version wasn’t as complete as I always assumed; I didn’t recall the inevitable death of one of the horses, at any rate.

2026 read #1: Shadow on the Hearth by Judith Merril.

Shadow on the Hearth by Judith Merril

277 pages

Published 1950

Read from December 31 to January 3

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

The most interesting aspect of this tale of nuclear war is its domestic perspective. After bombs drop on Manhattan, the danger isn’t a breakdown of civil society or roving bands of Westchester wastelanders. Rejecting the notion that America could be caught flatfooted by its enemies, Merril has a secret squad of all-American white men prepped and organized in every community for this very eventuality. Instead, the danger comes from radiation sickness, boozy socialite neighbors, and gas leaks, plus the occasional over-zealous members of the White Man Squad all too eager to replace our main character’s missing husband or flirt with her teenage daughter.

Hearth is, inevitably, tainted by its era’s assumptions of gender and divisions of labor. It also sags in the middle, abandoning anything like pacing in favor of moment to moment verisimilitude and repetitive conversations. It is not, in any modern day sense, a good or essential novel. (I only began reading it because I was on a plane and I had it on my phone.) Still, it was worth a read, if only to get a different contemporary perspective on nuclear anxieties.

2025 read #83: The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett.

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett

89 pages

Published 1896

Read from November 3 to November 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

I went into this slender volume knowing little about it, beyond its date of publication (I want to pad out all my pre-1900 tags) and its setting in a small village in coastal Maine. It turns out to be an exquisite series of loosely connected vignettes, as our narrator sketches one villager after another in careful, beautiful phrases. It’s altogether charming.

The only sign of the book’s age is when it occasionally follows one of its character sketches a bit too far and gets lost in the weeds. (There’s also some unfortunate stereotypes spoken about South Seas islanders. Guess we can never have anything from the nineteenth century eschew bigotry entirely.) Otherwise, Jewett’s writing seems at least thirty years ahead of its time, crisp and modern and evocative. I was reminded, perhaps inevitably, of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.

2025 read #80: Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones.

Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

102 pages

Published 2017

Read October 29

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Writing a story, particularly a supernatural story laden with tragedy and the specific indignities of impoverished childhood, from a child’s point of view can go wrong in so many ways. It could be treacly, or patronizing, or heavy-handed.

This novella of a father’s ghost and the ripple effects it has on his family takes that risk, and crafts a stunning miniature masterpiece from it. Jones’s sharply observed prose catalogs the powerlessness and sympathetic magic of a marginalized childhood; the ghosts at its edges seem no less real, or unreal, than drifts of cigarette smoke in the car on the way to a clinic. Heartbreaking and superb.

2025 read #66: Into the London Fog: Eerie Tales from the Weird City, edited by Elizabeth Dearnley.

Into the London Fog: Eerie Tales from the Weird City, edited by Elizabeth Dearnley

319 pages

Published 2020

Read from September 13 to September 17

Rating: 3 out of 5

Another installment of the British Library Tales of the Weird anthology series, this one naturally centers stories set in London. Dearnley’s introduction is especially interesting, evoking the danger and weirdness of befogged London, a shifting terrain of social anxieties amid tumultuous change. Her story introductions also provide vital context to the authors and the topics they addressed.

—

“The Telegram” by Violet Hunt (1911). This story was a bit of a speed bump right at the start of the anthology. I went into it expecting a specific vibe from these Tales of the Weird collections, which this literary character study of a woman who just wants to enjoy her own life and flirt with men without settling for any of them did not meet. It’s a good story, a fascinating document from a leading writer of the New Woman era, and its eventual ghostly turn plays well with the story’s examination of women’s autonomy. But I had to get into the right headspace for it, and the story itself sure takes its time. B-

“In the Séance Room” by Lettice Galbraith (1893). Sociopathic men and patriarchy are the horrors of this piece, which portrays both with a frankness all too rare even today. More so now than ever, I understand the fantasy of supernatural justice depicted here. Heavy-handed and melodramatic as fiction of this era often was, it still works. Kinda. C+

“The Demon Lover” by Elizabeth Bowen (1941). Wartime retelling of the namesake ballad, brief but atmospheric. C+

“The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth” by Rhoda Broughton (1868). Suspiciously cheap apartments in Mayfair lead to supernatural death. Mildly entertaining, ends rather abruptly. C+

“War,” an extract from London in My Time by Thomas Burke (1934). Fascinating essay on London’s attitudes during the Great War. It’s an eccentric choice for an anthology of London Weird, with the surreality of zeppelin raids and dimmed streetlights supplying the weird, but it’s not entirely misplaced.

“Street Haunting” by Virginia Woolf (1927). Another creative non-fiction piece, a sensorium of walking and daydreaming through interwar streets, rather reminiscent of Hope Mirrlees’ Paris: A Poem. Dreamlike and mostly enjoyable. Like Mirrlees, however, Woolf can’t resist throwing in some riff on marginalized populations, here making a spectacle of the disabled segment of society for several paragraphs. 

“Pugilist vs. Poet,” an extract from A Long Way from Home by Claude McKay (1937). My first exposure to McKay’s writing, a too-brief extract on his experiences in London in 1919. Scintillating. I want more!

“N” by Arthur Machen (1936). I read and reviewed this story in the British Library’s Weird Woods anthology. There I wrote: “Machen’s primary interest here appears to be the art of reproducing rambly conversations between older men. All of which is a roundabout path to not much in particular. Only the last page hints at the story this could have been, had Machen been inclined to tell it instead of what we got.”

“The Lodger” by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1911). An early novelette treatment of what, a couple years later, this author would turn into the very first novel about Jack the Ripper. Working-class protagonist Mrs. Bunting, onetime foundling and former maid, wants to avoid the obvious conclusions after her lucrative new lodger proves suspicious. The story is less of a murder mystery and more of a complex psychological study in how financial insecurity leads to complicity. B

“My Girl and the City” by Sam Selvon (1957). An absolutely stunning mood piece about the fluctuating city. Again, not sure why it’s in a Tales of the Weird collection, but it’s lovely. A

“The Mystery of the Semi-Detached” by Edith Nesbit (1893?). Quite brief but well-written mood piece of suburban unease. B-?

“The Old House in Vauxhall Walk” by Charlotte Riddell (1882). A disinherited young gentleman, kicked out by his father that morning, shelters for the night in the antique grandeur of a Vauxhall house lately turned into a rental. The hauntings of the house pervade his dreams, and he decides to stay and find the late miser’s treasure. Interesting mainly as a document of how useless the upper classes are without working folk to take care of them. C+

“The Chippendale Mirror” by E. F. Benson (1915). A more conventional eerie tale, in which a secondhand mirror discloses glimpses of the murder it witnessed. Perfectly adequate. C

“Spring-Heeled Jack” by Anonymous (1884). Straightforward write-up of the titular urban legend, detailing alleged exploits then fifty years in the past.

—

And that’s it for London Fog! A major departure from other Tales of the Weird volumes, which all tended to feature tales of the, well, weird. Not much eeriness to speak of, but a good collection all the same, if you ignore its title and the vibe of the rest of the series.

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 #30: The Quarry Wood by Nan Shepherd.

The Quarry Wood by Nan Shepherd

213 pages

Published 1928

Read from March 19 to March 24

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Nan Shepherd came to my awareness thanks to the writings of Robert Macfarlane. I read the book Macfarlane positioned as her outdoorsy opus, The Living Mountain, and enjoyed it enough to look into her novels, beginning with The Quarry Wood. It stymied me for a long time, however; that early 20th century approximation of Scots English dialect takes some adjustment.

But what really kept me from getting into this book for so long, I have to confess, is a worsening aversion to literary fiction. The last mundane novel I read was back in December; before that, last April. The contemporary dystopia we have to deal with makes it difficult to get invested in a story that consists of “Look at these eccentric characters!” Give me some dinosaurs or magic or something, sheesh. I’m trying to survive fascism out here.

In my own writing, though, I still struggle with characterization, so I should probably make more of an effort to see how literary authors sketch it in. It’s always good practice to read as widely as possible if you wish to pursue writing.

The Quarry Wood is a coming-of-age novel following Martha as she grows from solemn, wide-eyed girl in rural Scotland, to young woman pushing against social norms and parental resistance to attend university. There, she develops a crush on her foster-sister’s husband, which turns into something of an obsession. The book, sadly, is less about Martha going to university when such a thing was rarely done, and more about her mooning after some married dude. (Repeat the evergreen TikTok audio with me here: “He’s just a guy! Hit him with your car!”)

This skeletal framework of a story is padded out with character sketches, rambling for a page or two at a time to illustrate the peculiarities of a secondary character’s husband or sister, usually someone who isn’t even in the scene. Shepherd’s prose is solid, and even sparkles at times — her descriptions of nature (which Macfarlane especially praised) can be magnificent. But these brilliancies occur too sparsely to light up the rest of the novel.

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 #49: The Wild Irish Girl by Sydney Owenson.

The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale by Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan

Introduction and notes by Kathryn Kirkpatrick

290 pages

Published 1806

Read from April 22 to April 24

Rating: 1 out of 5

I read this for the sole purpose of scrounging up another title for my list of 1800s reads. (Eighteen-oughts, that is — not eighteen hundreds.) That’s a form of historical interest all on its own, naturally, but it isn’t the most satisfying reason to read a book. It certainly didn’t help me stay engaged with the tedious, allusive, grandiloquent style of the era, or help me through the book’s desultory, epistolary structure (I can’t call it plot).

As a document of historical attitudes and advocacy, The Wild Irish Girl is interesting, availing itself of the unsophisticated political philosophy of its day to lay out a nationalist mythology opposed to English colonialism (hence the subtitle). Owenson responds to the 1800 dissolution of the Irish parliament by taking the broad, otherizing stereotypes the English consigned to the Irish people, and turning them into positive attributes. The usual English propaganda of uncouth, uncivilized barbarians across the Irish Sea is recast into a Rousseauean state of “wild,” “natural” grace, suffused with “primeval simplicity and primeval virtue.”

Many pages are spent enumerating fanciful mythologies meant to link the Irish to Phoenician exiles, the sort of nationalistic bridge between the Classical Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe so beloved by early Moderns, Victorian diffusionists, Thor Heyerdahl, and Twitter’s white nationalists. At one point, even the way women fold their scarves is underlined as a cultural link to Egypt. If you’re researching the history of how folklore gets spun to foment nationalism, this is a book for you.

The story itself isn’t worth a read. Horatio, our viewpoint letter-writer, is a woeful and apathetic wastrel, banished by his aristocrat father to western Ireland to rethink his ways. He’s prejudiced against the Irish people, buying into every negative English stereotype against them. Bored after just a few days, Horatio prowls around his father’s estate, where he learns the tragic history of an Inismore prince whose ancestor was killed and dispossessed by Horatio's own ancestor. Horatio, feeling the first pangs of conscience an Englishman ever felt over the depravity of conquest, decides to attend church and gawk at the prince and his family. Once there, he promptly obsesses over Lady Glorvina, the prince's daughter. He breaks his arm while stalking her, wakes up in her care, assumes a false identity to stay with her, pretends to be an art tutor to get near her, etc. Then he has the gall to get upset that she might be deceiving him. I couldn’t be done with Horatio fast enough.

Here in Turtle Island, we often forget that England’s second colonial venture was perpetrated in Éire. (Their first colonial venture, as even fewer people recall, was against their own lower classes.) It’s a depressing reminder of how vile colonialism has always been that the English literate classes needed to be informed by a half-English author that the Irish were human. The Wild Irish Girl takes that thesis and stretches a book out of it. Horatio lists out an English prejudice on one page, only to be shocked by the kindness and generosity of the Irish on the next. Again and again. For some 250 pages of modern typesetting. And such is the way of colonialist empire that this was considered too radical to publish by several presses at the time.

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 #39: Oroonoko by Aphra Behn.

Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave: A True History by Aphra Behn

Edited with introduction and notes by Janet Todd

133 pages

Published 1688

Read from March 28 to March 29

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

My partner R and I are in the midst of packing for a move up north. Almost all of my books are already boxed up. What’s left is a dwindling pile of books I’m unsure whether I want to pack or leave behind. This book, a Penguin Classics edition I got at a used bookstore for 75 cents, is part of this residue. Now that I've read it, I have no need to bring it!

I approached Oroonoko as a document from a transitional stage in the culture of Atlantic Europe. Recognizable concepts of race as a social hierarchy were gradually developing from the “Christian vs heathen” dichotomy, as a result of colonialism, plantation economies, and the slave trade, but these ideas were in their infancy, and far from universal. (See Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People.) Class and rank were more pressing concerns to avowed royalist Behn. Traumatized as a youth by the English Civil War and the joyless years of the Commonwealth, Behn wrote Oroonoko toward the tumultuous end of James II's reign, when another Stuart sovereign was on the verge of capitulation. The true horror for Behn is not that Africans were enslaved, but rather that an African prince, a natural aristocrat who quotes Plutarch and praises England’s “great monarch” Charles I, could have been enslaved, like a mere commoner.

Which isn't to say that the book isn’t horridly racist. It’s an Early Modern English caricature of a West African couple, set in an early colonial Suriname. It’s all kinds of racist.

Oroonoko is also a document of literary transition. Some consider it one of the earliest novels in English; it predates Robinson Crusoe by three decades. As a book, it’s as awkward as a toddler’s steps. Behn’s background in drama is clear; much of the book reads like someone is summing up for you a play they attended, all the melodrama with none of the poetry of line or command of performance. (At a climactic death scene, Behn writes, “[It] is not to be doubted but the parting… must be very moving.”) Behn claims in her dedication to have penned the story in a matter of hours, which I can well believe. The result is a dud, only marginally worthwhile due to its interesting position in the evolution of the genre.

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 #12: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

400 pages

Published 2010

Read from January 22 to January 26

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Much like Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, Swamplandia! is a Pulitzer Prize finalist from the early 2010s that stakes much of its critical reputation on the artful use of fantasy fiction elements, which ultimately prove to be mundane events filtered through the traumas and griefs of its viewpoint characters. Oh, and both were set in remote corners of the United States. Clearly this was something of a vibe at the time. (“It’s weird that it happened twice,” etc.) Both books would appear to be literary fantasies if you rooted your expectations in the cover blurb copy. Both prove to be contemporary realism long before the end.

In my review of The Snow Child, I went on a tear about how the literary establishment denigrates fantasy fiction, all while simultaneously scavenging through its storytelling vocabulary for the immaculate vibes. Go read that rant if you like. Today, I’m less bothered by it than I had been five years ago.

It helps that Swamplandia! largely lives up to its hype. It is luminous and strange, buoyed like an alligator between worlds, between sun and silt, between death and starlight, between its eponymous island theme park and the outside world the Bigtree children must confront for the first time. Russell’s descriptions are elastic and unexpected figures of beauty. Surprising metaphors add pop throughout the novel. The gravity of inevitability haunts its heart. If any “mundane” novel makes full use of the possibilities of fantasy, it’s this one.

As a white trash child raised in isolation myself, I related intensely to the Bigtree children. Ava’s perspective perfectly captured the magical thinking of being thirteen, the tensile eagerness of self-delusion. Her attempts to gain early entry to the world of competitive gator wrestling were reminiscent of my own naive confidence in my teenage authorship. At one point Ava narrates: “I was a fairy-minded kid, a comic book kid, and I had a bad habit of looking for augurs and protectors where there were none.” Which, same. Meanwhile, Kiwi’s rough introduction to mainland capitalism and social mores was instantly recognizable to someone who went from living in a car to working at a convenience store at 18. I identified with his anthropological notebook most of all.

(Unrelated to anything else, Kiwi’s chapters made me realize that the writers of Jurassic World could have given us a trilogy of dinosaur horror from the perspective of stoned teens working below minimum wage summer jobs at the park, and now I’m disappointed we never got that.)

Russell does the typical “first novel from an acclaimed short story author” thing: interweaving the Bigtree family’s tale with self-contained interludes, such as the brief emancipation and early death of Louis Thanksgiving (or, for that matter, the chapters from Kiwi's perspective). It works beautifully, though at times it tested my attention span.

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 #115: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Afterword by Elizabeth Hardwick

221 pages

Published 1818

Read from October 9 to October 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I’ve barely read anything in the romantic classics vein. My experience begins and ends with Jane Eyre. It was just last month that I learned what “sensibility” meant in the context of Sense and Sensibility. So naturally I should begin with a satirical send-up of the genre, right?

Right from the start, the narrative voice is delightful, commiserating over young Catherine’s disadvantages as a Gothic heroine: her mother is alive; her neighborhood lacks a suitable rakish heir or mysterious foundling to court her; her carriage arrives at Bath safely without any upsets or dramatic robberies. The first young gentleman she meets exclaims over her failure to keep a journal, and goes on at length about quality muslin. But Catherine soon has her hands full with arcane social protocols, competing suitors, manipulative friends, and tangled knots of social pressures and civilities, afflictions enough for any tear-drenched heroine.

The central conceit, of course, is that Catherine filters the prosaic afflictions and limitations of her bourgeois life through the expectations of a Gothic novel. Existing as a woman in this era (or any other era) is full of horrors all on its own, so for the most part, it works. Courtesy masks the deepest cruelty; truth is delivered only through irony; money and title override everything. Much is made of the young woman’s choice to refuse, only for social pressures to remove her ability to choose. There are times when the banal detestability of the Thorpes makes the narrative drag. Honestly, when Henry Tilney gets into his “Oh, you silly women” speeches, he’s just as bad — even before the narrative brings us to the titular Abbey and the scheming general.

Like every other book of its time, Abbey brims with the bigotry and mores of its culture, which makes it impossible to enjoy wholeheartedly, even with Austen’s wry commentary.

2023 read #110: Zone One by Colson Whitehead.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

322 pages

Published 2011

Read from September 30 to October 4

Rating: 4 out of 5

I detest the artificial distinction between mundane “literary” fiction and speculative, fantastical elements. Fantasy, sci-fi, horror — these are just different tools in the storytelling toolkit. Incorporating them into highbrow fiction is no stranger, no less literary, than utilizing romance, mystery, suspense, or fancy prose in your literary book. Yet the publishing industry (and book critics) shun anything that smacks of “genre.” Except when a mainstream highbrow writer dabbles in it, of course.

I haven’t read much of Whitehead’s work — just The Intuitionist so far — but from what I’ve seen, he never shies away from genre elements. (What are The Intuitionist and The Underground Railroad if not contemporary fabulism?) Yet the critic blurbs at the front of Zone One grab your sleeve to exclaim that it “is not the work of a serious novelist slumming it with some genre-novel cash-in…” Note the disdain, the monocle-shifting assumption that no one serious would sully their hands with genre work. Also the odd implication that SFFH somehow makes more money than mainstream mundane fiction.

It’s attitudes like this that cause lit critics to fall over themselves praising the originality of any literary author who uses a genre trope that’s been a cliché for fifty years. (I loved Never Let Me Go, but let’s be real here.) 

Anyway. Zone One is excellent, despite centering on a genre trope — zombies — that’s been a cliché for well over fifty years. Like so many others, I got burnt out on zombies back in the ’00s. I read World War Z, played lots of Left 4 Dead, and felt that Shaun of the Dead put a nice little bow on the subject. As expected, Whitehead is talented enough to find life left in the subgenre (pun intended). “We ignore the monstrous surrounding us in modern life” isn't the freshest take (again, see Shaun of the Dead), but what Whitehead does with it feels worthwhile.

If the zombie fad was borne of white Americans processing 9/11 and their vulnerability in the face of the Other, Zone One is a satire of how George W. Bush encouraged everyone to go shopping to defeat the terrorists. Survivor camps sell their own branded merchandise. Various corporate conglomerates offer “sponsorships” to survivors, permitting them to loot their brands, so long as the items cost less than $30. In exchange, the companies get hush-hush boons from the provisional government. Apocalypse celebrities — those whose exploits evading the living dead exuded true Final Girl energy — get appointed to cabinet positions.

While there are bursts of action, of grisly tableaux, ambushes of concise heartbreak, and the final seeping weight of tragedy, the bulk of the narrative spirals in desultory rounds musing about the suburban past and the hypothetical future. Our viewpoint character Mark Spitz, like so many other survivors, is distinguished by his mediocrity, his inconspicuous ability to fail upward. “A part of him thrived on the end of the world. How else to explain it: He had a knack for apocalypse.”

If Station Eleven was my personal harbinger of our current plague, painting December 2019 and January 2020 with prescient anxiety, Zone One feels like a suitable companion piece to the pandemic’s current stage, its ongoing horror and dislocation, its unaddressed traumas all conveniently punted out of sight in order for us to get on with tendering our bodies to capitalism, our cynicism seasoned with almost four years of officially acceptable cataclysm. Whitehead coins Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, a concept we need to grapple with here in the shambles of our world: “In the new reckoning, a hundred percent of the world was mad. Seemed about right.”

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 #62: Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon.

Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

356 pages

Published 2021

Read from June 2 to June 7

Rating: 4 out of 5

General spoilers ahead that you could probably have derived from the cover summary.

Mycelium had quite the niche cultural moment at the start of the 2020s, didn’t it?

As a writer who’s written more than my share of mycelium poetry, and as a fan of mushroom horror in general, it’s no surprise that I was enthralled by this book. I’m in awe of Solomon’s conceptual link between mycelium networks and the communication and preservation of memory, memories digested and drawn into the network — memories of the vast cruelties and appalling injustices of how white people have treated the Black and Indigenous people they enslaved and genocided. It is a brilliant thesis for a contemporary horror novel, and Solomon is an amply talented author, well able to handle the sprawling concept and to tell an engrossing, horrifying, heartbreaking story along the way.

Sorrowland has symbiotic fungus, not-deer chasing our protagonist Vern through the woods, horrifying visions of the monstrous acts of white supremacy past and present, blurring the lines between hallucinatory hauntings and reality, but only the first third or so fits into the atmospheric horror genre. Solomon is more interested in exploring the ways colonialist hierarchies can be fought. Most of the middle section is focused on building found family and intentional community, the joy and need for connection, however small that might be. The pacing can be uneven at times, but it’s an important subject to explore, more vital to what Solomon is trying to say than all the mushroom horror bits were.

Having to flee this newfound safety once again, Vern encounters a string of vignettes — hunters who react to something new with cruelty and domination, poor moteliers bickering back and forth about family trauma — and straightforwardly asks of us readers:

What turned babies, fragile and curious, into… men who could not interact with a new thing without wanting to dominate it?

What order of events did Vern need to disrupt in the lives of the millions upon millions who woke up every morning proud to be Americans? What made someone love lies?

Not the most subtle commentary, but here in the 2020s we’re long past the time for subtlety. The world is burning the fuck down and colonialist white supremacy, in all its forms, is responsible. To hell with it all. Paint this book’s message over all the billboards, please.