2025 read #19: A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark.

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark

432 pages

Published 2021

Read from December 24, 2024 to February 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

My partner R picked this book out for me for our annual Jólabókaflóðið exchange. I happily read the first 50 or so pages that day, then just kind of… wandered off to read other things. After that, I got weirdly avoidant about it. I didn’t pick it up again until February 13.

In 1912 Cairo, where magic proliferates on the streets and clockwork trams crisscross the sky, Fatma is a suave, well-dressed agent for the ministry tasked with the supernatural. She gets pulled into a case of murder that has roots in the origins of magic in the mortal sphere, a case that threatens global catastrophe.

Mysteries will never be my chosen genre. As paperback blurbs used to say, though, Djinn is compulsively readable. The setting is top-notch, living and breathing with vibrant detail. Clark expertly weaves examinations of wealth inequality, colonialism, injustice, and bigotry into his narrative. This is a book with something to say, inextricable from the story being told.

Also included in this volume is a long novelette: “A Dead Djinn in Cairo,” originally published in 2016. I kind of wish I’d read it first, as it comes before A Master of Djinn; much of the plot gets spoiled in the novel, as Fatma thinks back on the prior case. Still, it’s quite well done, balancing character and worldbuilding with its mystery plot.

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

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

285 pages

Published 2019

Read from September 28 to October 2

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

2024 read #97: Weird Tales, November 1930 issue.

Weird Tales: A Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual, November 1930 issue (16:5)

Edited by Farnsworth Wright

148 pages

Published 1930

Read from August 24 to August 25

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Thanks to online PDF archives, I have a phone full of weird old pulp magazines, most of them with one common denominator: dinosaur stories. I’ve even read one or two of them, to my lasting disappointment. Yet I can’t seem to stop tracking down — and downloading — more.

I had a moderately okay time reading the Women of Weird Tales collection last year. Even a book curated for modern tastes, though, had more than its share of offputting or just plain boring stories. I don’t have high hopes for this issue, which will be my first read of a full Weird Tales magazine. Let’s get into it, I guess!

—

We start off with an unpromising poem, “Teotíhuacán” by Alice l’Anson. It’s a rote, morbidly modernist fantasy of “pagan rites” and human sacrifice. The line art that accompanies it is far better than the poem.

What’s next is the sole reason I’m reading this issue:

“A Million Years After” by Katharine Metcalf Roof. Two masked bandits hold up a museum truck and make off with a box valued at a hundred grand. To their dismay, the box contains only a large egg, which they bury to keep the heat off them after the heist. Soon, moonshiners and deacons alike come face to face with a reptile the size of a house, with a serpentine neck and deadly claws. There’s a kernel of an entertaining story here, mixing Prohibition-era crime pulp with a predatory dinosaur loose upon the countryside, but Roof’s mediocre prose, lacking any point of view, makes it less entertaining than it should be. It ends anticlimactically. I’m in a generous mood, so maybe, in consideration for when it was published, I’ll give it a C-

“Tales of the Werewolf Clan: 1: The Master Strikes” and “Tales of the Werewolf Clan: 2: Hau! Hau! Huguenots!” by H. Warner Munn. A pair of amateurish outings thoroughly impressed with themselves, these linked historical fantasies stumble along through a checklist of 16th century clichés, mostly involving casual cruelty. Munn encumbers his tales with needless lore, and with dialogue like this: “The cat, witches’ familiar, mysterious and too-knowing night animal, sharing the secrets of midnight with the bat and the ghouls that ride the wind, had been but the messenger of the Evil One to bid the corpses rise and come to do his bidding!” I’m pretty sure lore posts on LiveJournal role-playing communities were better written and more interesting than this. F

“The Uncharted Isle” by Clark Ashton Smith. I only know Clark Ashton Smith through posthumous mock-ups that Lin Carter “found in a trunk” and published in his Year’s Best Fantasy series. (Earlier this year, I tried to read The Star Trader, but didn’t get far.) This story is a standard “shipwrecked mariner lands on a primeval lost shore” number, mixing in the lost continent tropes so beloved by Smith and his contemporary fantasists (and by Lin Carter). There isn’t much else to it. The prose is purple, but more fluent than anything so far in this issue. Racist vibes permeate the descriptions of the people our hero encounters, the persistent low-level background racism of how facial features are described and so forth. It also brings this issue’s human sacrifice count to two. Maybe D

“Kings of the Night” by Robert E. Howard. Right out of the gate, we’ve got human sacrifice number three. Clearly, this was something of a preoccupation at the time. A Pictish king named Bran wears a red jewel given to his ancestor by some dude from Atlantis. Our POV is Cormac, Bran’s Hibernian ally in the fight against Rome. This is Howard we’re dealing with, so we get plenty of weird bigotry to go around, with graduated “orders” of “civilization” within the Celtic umbrella. (For example, the Picts, with the exception of the kingly Bran, are apparently primeval, ape-like relics of the Stone Age, who are also degenerated refugees from Atlantis? I guess?) It’s all a lot of bullshit about masculinity and natural kingship and racial hierarchy; JD Vance would love it. As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s way too fucking long. F

“The Cosmic Cloud” by Edmond Hamilton. A rote space opera that feels like it could have been repeated with little variation in the early 1960s, which isn’t so much a compliment to this story as commentary on how stagnant the subgenre became after its blueprint was developed. The diverse men of the Interstellar Patrol (because even on worlds of tree people and crab people, it must always be men) stand between the peoples of the galactic federation and anything that might threaten them. Today, they’re finally getting around to investigating this strange cloud of ether that has reached out and drawn in thousands of ships over the last several days. This piece, for all its formulaic plotting and antique stiffness, has a certain musty charm, like something you’d see riffed on MST3K. Maybe C- (at least by the standards of 1930)

“Stealthy Death” by Seabury Quinn. You know, I had thought this issue (Howard’s tale aside) featured remarkably little racism for 1930, but this tedious murder mystery supplies enough for a dozen magazines. Otherwise, it’s mainly notable for featuring a broad stereotype of an Irish police sergeant who’s mysteriously named Costello. Absolutely sucks. F

A poem: “Great Ashtoreth” by Frank Belknap Long, Jr. It’s mediocre at best.

“The Portal to Power” by Greye La Spina. This one is a serial, broken up across four issues. This issue features part two of four, but because I’m not in the mood to start with the second part of a serial, I went ahead and downloaded the October 1930 issue to read part one instead. Like seemingly most pulp serials I’ve encountered, the plot is a convoluted mishmash of whatever was trendy at the time. Part one begins with a witch, hoping to foil the devil who deceived her, handing off a talisman of great power to a small town doctor, enjoining him to take it to the Circle of Light in San Francisco. In the wrong hands, she warns him, the talisman can open the door to the return of the Old Gods — meaning, inevitably, Pan, whose priest comes in on a motorcycle and gets handed a dummy talisman. Then an airship magnate enters the story to help the doctor. The magnate has a niece, who in turn has scarlet lips and a pet marmoset. It’s all modestly charming until a Black cook character straight out of a minstrel show gets introduced. That threw some ice water over my enthusiasm. I feel no need to read part two. D-

A poem from H. P. Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth” sequence is next: “4. Antarktos.” It’s fine.

“The Debt” by Eric A. Leyland. “Share my room because I’m scared of ghosts” seems to have been the 1930s equivalent of the “there was only one bed” trope. At least, this is the second story I’ve read from this era that uses it as a plot device. This story feels distinctively queer, between the haunted man carrying a photo of another man, and the narrator dwelling on how very handsome the man in the photograph is, especially after meeting the man’s ghost: “It was his smile, however, that was so charming. When he smiled, his whole aspect changed remarkably.” That elevates an otherwise forgettable story to a solid C

“A Message from Mars” by Derek Ironside. A bully named Bullivant flies a rocket to Mars, and sends a television broadcast back to Earth, just as the ant-like Martians retaliate for his violence. Hokey, but not terrible. Maybe C-

“Siesta” by Alexander L. Kielland (1880). A translation of a Norwegian original. A Parisian dinner party, its guests collected by a rich Portuguese man, wends through its various personalities, until an Irishman puts on a bravura performance with a piano and, uh, makes them spiritually uncomfortable? I guess? D?

One last poem: “The Cypress-Bog” by Donald Wandrei. At least it’s atmospheric.

—

And that’s it! My favorite thing about this magazine was the variety of subgenres we visited. There may not have been much depth to anything, but we got the full spread of what 1930s SFFH could offer. Which was mostly racism. But still.

My second favorite thing about this issue is the ad on the back cover, promising an “Astonishing Electrical Invention” that is “Startling” and “Uncanny.” “This unquestionably is the queerest, most incredible invention since the first discoveries of radio!” What is this prodigy of modern science?? It’s a car alarm.

2024 read #82: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older.

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

169 pages

Published 2023

Read from July 4 to July 17

Rating: 4 out of 5

I made the mistake of attempting this book during the summer, which is when I find it hardest to read. It’s a highly regarded queer sci-fi mystery, full of cozy touches, nice meals, and a gaslamp aesthetic. It’s about a pair of sapphic exes — one an investigator, one a researcher — who have to collaborate to solve a disappearance. It’s set on platforms high in the atmosphere of Jupiter. It has autistic representation!

As my partner R said, “It sounds like an episode of Doctor Who.” And it really does! I liked it!

But the academic who narrates most of the story uses a stiffly formal voice that, while it complements the quasi-antique vibe, did not suit my summertime brain, which is strained from having my teenage kid here (on top of all The Horrors of contemporary life and climate change). Dialogue like “I nonetheless had the impression that they would have noticed despondency” takes some adjustment when you aren’t in the proper headspace for it. As it is, I found my brain drifting off to other things whenever I read a paragraph, at least until the vibe finally clicked for me. Completely my problem, not the fault of the book.

The characters are dear, and the setting is unique and memorable. I’m indifferent about most mystery stories, but the way Older entwined this one through the long-ago fate of Earth, and the efforts to build a new home for the species above the toxic clouds of Giant, made for an engrossing read.

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. 

2023 read #50: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2000.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2000 issue (98:3)

Edited by Gordon Van Gelder

162 pages

Published 2000

Read from May 8 to May 9

Rating: 2 out of 5

CW: My introductory paragraphs discuss real life trauma from my teens, including homelessness, a house fire, and the death of a dear relative.

Like much of my pre-2010 F&SF collection, I got this one through a bulk buy of back issues on eBay. It wasn’t until I began reading “Loyal Puppies,” the first story, that I realized this wasn’t the first time I’d run into this issue.

In March 2000, a few months after F&SF editor Gordon Van Gelder had given me my first positive personalized rejection, I decided to follow the evergreen advice and actually read the magazine to which I was sending submissions. At the Barnes & Noble near the Dayton Mall, I leafed through this very issue. The first couple pages of “Loyal Puppies” were burned into my memory — not only were they the first bit of an F&SF I ever read, they would be the last for a long time to come, because of what happened later in March 2000.

That’s when my grandmother’s house, where I lived when I wasn’t living in my father’s car, was burned down. I escaped, as did my grandmother, though she died of a heart attack just a couple days later. I wouldn’t escape my father for well over a year, only to have to fend for myself without social skills or good emotional regulation in the nightmare of Dubya Bush-era capitalism. I was unable to find the energy to write through most of my twenties. I wouldn’t buy an issue of F&SF for myself until 2016 or so (though by that point I’d been reading F&SF stories in various collections).

Unexpected trauma trigger, this issue! So now I’m heading into this issue with a specific mindset: it’s almost a glimpse of an alternate future I could have had, one where maybe I could have focused on writing earlier on and maybe a little bit less on mere survival. (Though who knows, the poverty, neglect, and homelessness were always part of my childhood; my twenties were probably doomed regardless.)

“Loyal Puppies” by Rick Heller. The best part about this one is Van Gelder’s wonderfully dated introduction: “Here’s a story that takes the current cell phone craze a bit farther…” This story combines two of my least favorite things: “ripped from tomorrow’s headlines” consumer tech sci-fi, and a grown cis dude author writing from the POV of a shallow, boy- and weight-obsessed teen girl. It’s a tale as old as time: chip-implant cellphones, awkward future-teen slang, accidentally overheard conversations, a Hollywood heartthrob, drug dealing, and murder. It’s the kind of story where our narrator, on the run from a kidnapping, takes a moment to worry about her weight. I remember reading the first few pages of this at 17, there in the Barnes & Noble, and finding myself incredulous that this had gotten published in such a prestigious market while my stories had been rejected. Reading it now, in full and with much greater perspective, I can understand why my teenage writing wasn’t published, and can grudgingly admit that this story is at least readable, competently structured, and probably even enjoyable to someone who likes this sort of thing (none of which could be said about my teenage fiction). Since I don’t like this sort of thing, I’ll give it a D

“The Eye in the Heart” by Tanith Lee (from an idea by John Kaiine). A brief but chilling piece about a young woman’s joy in her marriage — and her Sect’s particular practice for young married women. A solid entry in the canon of “Actually this horrifying patriarchal cult is good for us oh-so-flawed women!” allegories, all too relevant here and now. B

“Crux” by Albert E. Cowdrey. Overstuffed and overlong, this sprawling novella (nearly the length of every other story in this issue put together) has a bit too much of everything. Three hundred years have elapsed since all-out nuclear war annihilated most of Earth’s population! Massive domes seal off the radioactive remnants of the old cities! Ninety percent of the Earth is a nature reserve thanks to an eco-conscious dictator! But humanity has spread to other planets and stars, so this story is also kind of a space opera! But also there’s time travel! A stolen wormholer! A rumpled private eye is on the case, doing the dirty work of the galactic empire! And the underground network that stole the wormholer wants to change the past and undo the nuclear war even though it means they won’t exist! Cowdrey’s Worldcity wallows in that problematic pan-Asian medley so beloved by white dudes in this time period, complete with a greedy “Confucian scholar” stereotype straight out of yellowface Hollywood; much of the story revolves around a red light district called Clouds and Rain. I probably would have been in awe of this story and wanted to imitate it when I was 17, but now? I don’t care for it. It’s much less than the sum of its parts. D-

“The Madness of Gordon Van Gelder” by Michael Swanwick. A chummy, humorous bit of yarn featuring the author of this story, the editor of this magazine, and the pandemonium that ensues from the phrase “I’ll buy that for a dollar!” A nice palate cleanser after that last story. As far as industry in-jokes turned into flash-fic go, this one deserves a solid B

“Rossetti Song” by Alexander C. Irvine. “Some people have always wanted to be President, or a baseball player, or a movie star, or a business tycoon. Me, I’ve always wanted to own a bar.” Standard red-blooded American masculine something or other revolving around a widower who runs the neighborhood bar of his dreams but needs ghostly intervention from a dusty old folk record to help him learn what it means to mourn. Not my kind of story, but it’s ably written; aside from taking a smidge too long to get past the mundane setup, it’s briskly constructed and does what it set out to do. And as a fan of dusty old folk music, I can at least buy into that aspect of the story. I suppose that deserves at least a B-?

“The Museum” by Henry Slesar. I grew up devouring Sherlock Holmes stories, yet mysteries are probably my second least favorite genre. At first this one didn’t excite my interest. A private art detective who retired to run a gallery, Mason Graves gets pulled into one last case when a Cellini sculpture goes missing in Vienna. Suddenly a rash of art thefts and missing artwork plagues museums around Europe and America. Fortunately, this one is another brisk, professional piece and was a painless read. And the final twist, while I probably should have seen it coming, was a surprise gut punch. B

“Conhoon and the Fairy Dancer” by John Morressy. Middling humorous fantasy with an early 1980s flavor. It plays with the usual tropes of broad-chested hero, crotchety wizard, fair princess, and tricksy fairies. To give you an idea of the vibe here, the main fairy our heroes pursue is named “Twisty Mike,” and on their quest our heroes spend a night with Mother McCrone. I can’t get worked up to feel one way or another about this. Maybe C-

And that’s it! I had originally meant to read this issue as an introduction to the Gordon Van Gelder era of F&SF, before I got sidetracked by traumatic memories. It’s a definite improvement over what I’ve read from the Ferman years, but — so far — it’s an incremental rather than a categorical improvement.

2023 read #14: A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee.

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

373 pages

Published 2021

Read from February 1 to February 3

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I don't think I can review this book without some substantial spoilers, so consider yourself warned. I'll do my best.

I expected this to be a book about dark magic, hauntings, and metaphysical mysteries. Most of what I read these days is fantasy, so of course that was my automatic assumption. The book's atmosphere is immaculate: set in a creaky old house at a girls' finishing school in the Catskills, famously founded by the daughter of a witch who escaped Salem and marked early by tragedies and legends of witchcraft. (I did my best not to let the book's hazy indifference toward the actual geography of the Catskills ruin my immersion in this atmosphere. Suffice it to say that the Hudson River and Esopus Creek are not the same thing.) Instead, it's a cleverly metafictional dark academia thriller, most closely aligned with The Girl on the Train out of anything else I've read in recent years.

Like The Girl on the Train, A Lesson in Vengeance is a story of gaslighting and manipulation. Vengeance has the added clever twist that our narrator, Felicity, is planning to write her senior thesis on the very same themes as the book itself. As Felicity sums it up: "Mostly how depictions of mental illness are used to build suspense by introducing uncertainty and a sense of mistrust, especially with regard to the narrator's perception of events, and the conflation of magic and madness in female characters." That thematic recursion was my favorite aspect of Vengeance.

As a whodunnit, Vengeance might have been a bit too easy to crack. Major spoilers here: The way Ellis was constantly manipulating and controlling Felicity made it too obvious that Ellis couldn't be trusted, and Felicity's own layers of false memories regarding the night her girlfriend Alex died also made it obvious that some degree of "darkness" existed in her characterization. But overall I found the ending satisfying. At least it avoided the trap Girl on the Train fell into, with its generic thriller standoff climax. The way Ellis and Felicity's stories wrapped up pulled everything into a tidy little circle.

2019 read #5: Dunleary by Monica Heath.

Dunleary by Monica Heath
143 pages
Published 1967
Read from February 8 to February 13
Rating: 1 out of 5

The other day I found this in a random thrift store in rural Ohio and picked it up because it sounded like some tawdry, trashy fun. A Gothic romance set on a remote Irish island haunted by a curse, where not even the heroine's husband is what he seems! Romance as a genre is ridiculed and devalued in our culture out of pure misogyny; having internalized that misogyny myself, I've read fewer romance novels than I have mysteries, and I despise mysteries. I've been meaning to remedy that deficit for a while now, and when I found this book, I followed an impulse to begin making up for that lack here and now.

This was a mistake.

Dunleary is a document shaped and fashioned out of misogyny. The lurid curse hinted at on the back cover dooms the women of Inish Laoghaire to "wantonness," which is the 1967 word for "having control over their own sexuality." Our heroine, "Deirdre the virgin" (as her future husband the Count O'Leary insists on calling her), meekly submits to her husband and holds fast to her "virtue," while the "curse" of the island is revealed to be the mad machinations of a "whore" who has been murdering women for decades in her frustrated desire to marry the Count O'Leary's father. On multiple occasions, the Count casually threatens to murder Deirdre with his bare hands if she proves unfaithful—and she goes and marries him anyway. It's a horrifying vision rendered yet more appalling by the realization that substantial numbers of people in our culture still view the world this way. 

As a work of fiction, Dunleary feels like reading with training wheels on. Every twist and question and revelation is underlined repeatedly in the text. At one point a character sneers at a born-out-of-wedlock boy that Maeve, the aforementioned "whore" at the center of the web of murder and disgrace, is his mother; on the very next page our narrator Deirdre wonders, "Could Maeve be the boy's mother?" It reminds me a lot of pulp fantasy from the 1970s, or pulp sci-fi from the 1940s.

Next time I try to read some romance, I shall learn from this error and find me some more recent books that aren't so appallingly regressive.

2018 read #9: The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton
Introduction by Kingsley Amis
186 pages
Published 1908
Read from March 24 to April 3
Rating: 3 out of 5

I honestly don't know how to approach this book. I rarely make pretensions to actual literary criticism, relying more on a metric of whether I liked a book or not, mixed with rambles of doubtful relevancy. But this is one of those meaningful, allegorical novels that (spoilers!), despite the "it was all a dream" ending alluded to in the subtitle, demands some level of critical analysis just to unpack its authorial meaning. The politics of the novel are distasteful: heteronormative family, religion, and "duty" are, at least in the eyes of our viewpoint character, the building blocks of any "free" society, whereas radical progressivism (including such modernist fancies as philosophy, feminism, and vegetarianism) is posited as the antithesis of "sane." Yet the depiction of the anarchist menace (however quaint that sounds now) carries with it some insights that still seem startlingly perceptive today:

"Mere mobs!" repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. "So you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question [source of concern]. You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always been objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats are always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' war."

The true menace of Trumpism, one might say, would lie in the coup scored by the rich in getting the (white) working classes to embrace and worship a particularly kleptocratic form of anarchism that undermines the very government the working classes rely upon. Chesterton's insight here has current resonance, even though one gets the impression that the nebulous "aristocrats" he has in mind align more with the 21st century fantasies of George Soros using his wealth to suborn family, religion, and duty, rather than the actual oligarchic catastrophe sweeping the planet.

Some substantial spoilers ahead.

I thought myself clever when I deduced, not even a third of the way through the book, that the "Council of Anarchists" (each named for a day of the week) were all police detectives recruited by the monstrous Sunday for some subtle scheme. The days of the week all fell in line with my guess, sure enough. What I did not anticipate was the whole thing taking a hard left turn into biblical symbolism and allegory, as the days of the week all returned to Sunday's feasting table during a fantastic masquerade, each day representing their respective associations from Genesis, with Sunday himself the embodiment of the vast "peace of God." There was something (borrowed from the Christ myth) about the forces of creation, or the archangels, or the "guards of Law," or whatever it was that the days were supposed to represent, experiencing "suffering" in order to fully understand, and thereby counter, the modernist complaints against society. It was a heady scene, one with much to unpack, and an especially bizarre way to cap what amounts to a comic spy caper or surreal detective novel.

And then, true to the subtitle, it turns out to have all been a dream.

2016 read #74: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
326 pages
Published 2015
Read from September 23 to September 26
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I tend to be suspicious of runaway bestsellers. Whatever the ingredient is that makes the likes of Tom Clancy, Robert Patterson, Stephanie Meyer, and their ilk so aggressively ubiquitous, I would not consider it to be "quality writing." I also tend to shy away from mysteries. Murder, clues, "whodunit" -- those words on a jacket flap make me drop a book faster than any others, faster even than "dream wedding." The whole setup bores me, with vanishingly few exceptions (the better Sherlock Holmes stories, mostly, which I haven't read since I was a teen). So I never would have given this book a second look, had not my college friend Francesca nominated it for our informal, two-person book club, on its first reconvening since Doomsday Book.

Spoilers ahead.

This book is intense. Almost all of its power comes from narration, from point of view, digging the reader so deeply into the heads and perspectives of flawed, profoundly damaged people that at times it can be exhausting. It was a slow read for me because the intensity took a lot out of me. The unreliability of the narration is brilliantly done -- and, further, shapes and defines the thematic through-line of the novel. For the longest time I was convinced I had seen through the red herrings and guessed whodunit -- only for the realization to stagger me, at the same that it chilled the central character, that I had been gaslit the entire time. The emotional rawness, the expert structuring, the master class on unreliable narration -- I remain astounded by the skill and intricacy at work here.

The only aspect of the book I didn't like, in fact, is the climax, which rather than building upon the anxieties and passions and disquiet of the rest of the novel, rather than delivering a more psychological payoff, devolves instead into a more predictable, generic thriller novel standoff, an altercation with a coldhearted sociopath in a goddamn thunderstorm. I won't denigrate the name of this novel by calling the showdown Koontzian, but... Hawkins could have done better, I think. Maybe she had the movie deal in mind.