2023 read #66: A Dowry of Blood by S. T. Gibson.

A Dowry of Blood by S. T. Gibson

293 pages

Published 2022 (expanded from original 2021 version)

Read from June 12 to June 13

Rating: 4 out of 5

A vivid and atmospheric tale delving into the trope of the brides of Dracula (and what such a relationship would entail from the perspective of one such bride), Dowry traces a gorgeously sharp line from an initial seduction and power exchange to abuse, isolation, emotional debasement, and control. It luxuriates in the queer polyamorous monster-fuckery hinted at in Stoker’s novel, but at its core knocks the horrid rhythm of an abusive relationship, pulled from the depths still beating for us to see. Gibson skillfully portrays the allure of the vampire's power and how it curdles into domineering, gaslighting, and manipulation. As she writes in the dedication, “To those who escaped a love like death, and to those still caught in its grasp: you are the heroes of this story.”

Our narrator Constanta (so christened by the vampire upon her second birth upon a medieval battlefield) addresses the story to Dracula, hoping to justify, if only to herself, the actions she took, and to examine the hold he had exercised on her for so long. Dracula (never named as such, though an offhand reference to “that whole debacle with the Harkers” removes any ambiguity about his identity) uses Constanta’s own erotic desires to further ensnare her, toying with her in the tension between her insecurities and her lust. The introduction of Magdalena, in particular, is perfectly poised between Constanta’s carnality and Dracula’s paternalistic control.

2023 read #65: Watchtower by Elizabeth A. Lynn.

Watchtower by Elizabeth A. Lynn

227 pages

Published 1979

Read from June 10 to June 12

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I first tried to read this book at some point during my big book drought, sometime in 2017 or 2018. Watchtower was an important milestone in queer fantasy, according to this listicle I’d read: it was the first fantasy novel (or at least one of the first) with positively portrayed queer characters, and hints of a queer-normative culture. Lynn herself is openly lesbian. But the terse, clipped prose Lynn uses, all short sentences, didn’t click with me then. The introduction of a “swarthy” warlord from the south, while fully in keeping with fantasy conventions of the time, didn’t endear me to the story, either. I abandoned it before page 30, along with so many other books that I failed to finish in those days. (It was a wasted period of my life in a lot of ways.)

Spoilers ahead.

Watchtower is the tale of Ryke, sworn swordsman of the late defeated Athor, in Tornor Keep. Ryke agrees to serve the conquering Col Istor in order to preserve the life of Errel, Athor’s son. Col is a pragmatic conqueror but has a cruel sense of humor: he makes Errel perform as a jester through the long winter in the Keep. Ryke and Errel fall in with Norres and Sorren, a pair of messengers who prove to be martial arts lesbians in disguise. The two of them help Ryke and the prince escape and bring them to their hidden valley: Vanima, a commune where it’s always summer and an exiled idealist named Van teaches everyone aikido. Ryke is set in his feudal masculine ways; he resents and envies the joy Sorren and Norres share, and finds himself restless and uncomfortable in the martial arts utopia, longing for war, for wine, for a firm ending.

Lynn queer-codes Ryke’s relationship with Errel with such skill and subtlety that I’m not convinced every straight reader would pick up on it even now, let alone in 1979. (At one point Errel fletches arrows with locks of Ryke’s hair. I mean, come on.) Ryke’s growing dissatisfaction comes from his inability to overcome his feudal upbringing. He sees people living freely around him, but can’t get past his own prejudices to accept the possibilities of a different life, to open himself to his obvious feelings for Errel.

Lynn’s laconic prose becomes oddly atmospheric at times, freighted with sensory detail. The characterizations of the main quartet are vivid, with Ryke a prickly and skeptical viewpoint in the center. I didn’t quite buy it when Errel and Ryke return to the north with a troupe of martial arts “dancers” and a plan to defeat Col Istor; the narrative never gives Van and his aikido hippies any good reason to ride north to aid in Col’s overthrow, beyond some vague talk of why Van was exiled in the first place. The fact is, this was a ’70s fantasy novel, and joining forces to defeat the interloper is just the expected outcome. I would have much preferred Ryke staying in Vanima, learning and evolving and letting go of all that feudal garbage. Alas, Ryke instead rides to war, to discover the shittiness of his militant culture the hard way. It’s an ugly ending, but tales of lords and battle deserve nothing else.

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 #63: Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Volume One by Tove Jansson.

Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Volume One by Tove Jansson

96 pages

Collection published 2006; original comic strips published 1954 and 1955

Read June 7

Rating: 4 out of 5

My first exposure to Moomintroll came through this comic strip. Back in the days of online forums, I frequented a thread on newspaper comics where someone regularly posted strips from Moomin. The strips were strange, fanciful, unexpectedly dark and moving at times. I was quite taken with Jansson’s deceptively simple outsider art style. Later on I would learn of Jansson’s queerness and anti-authoritarian bent, both of which peep through Moomin and of course made me fall in love with it all the more. I’ve gone on to read a couple Moomintroll books and watched a good chunk of the old Moomin cartoon from the ’90s. This is my first time revisiting the comic in about a decade.

No cohesive timeline links the multimedia Moomin empire. Whereas The Moomins and the Great Flood begins with Moomintroll and Moominmamma searching for Moominpappa, and the cartoon (which adapts some arcs from the comic strip and probably the books as well) begins with the whole Moomin family living together, the Moomin comic opens with Moomintroll living the bachelor life in his own tower house. It’s silly, but I had to tamp down that insidious capitalist entertainment-as-product conditioning that demands a “canon” of in-universe continuity. To hell with canon. These stories are a delight.

This volume anthologizes the comic strip’s first four arcs: “Moomin and the Brigands,” “Moomin and Family Life,” “Moomin on the Riviera,” and “Moomin’s Desert Island.” All of them are wonderful screwball romps that careen from one unlikely turn to the next. “Brigands” begins with bachelor Moomintroll despairing over how to get rid of his houseguests, then getting his house eaten, then escalates to an accidental elixir that turns everything into its opposite, lands Moomin in jail, and ends with his newfound girlfriend Snorkmaiden defeating a camp of highwaymen, taking their jewels, and liberating their prisoners. All four arcs are similarly frenetic, though “Brigands” and “Desert Island” are my personal favorites.

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.

2023 read #61: Exodus 20:3 by Freydís Moon.

Exodus 20:3 by Freydís Moon

74 pages

Published 2022

Read June 2

Rating: 4 out of 5

In comparison to Heart, Haunt, Havoc, which Freydís Moon wrote first but published later, Exodus 20:3 is a more assured outing: polished, horny, and glittering with uneasy radiance. Moon’s prose is barbed and evocative, hungry and aching with holy lust. The Catholicism of Heart has been stretched raw to accommodate an almost pantheistic ravening for sanctity. Holiness here is the terror and wonder of being seen, of embodying creation with the sculpting of one’s body into its truest shape. Angel and human alike are conduits for the divine, the worship of the fragments of God scattered through creation. The unpacking of religious trauma has rarely felt this sexy.

2023 read #60: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.*

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton*

454 pages

Published 1990

Read June 1

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

* Denotes a reread.

Last weekend, when I visited my partner W, we happened to catch fragments of the movie Jurassic Park on basic cable in our hotel room. For months now I’ve been wishing that there were more good Jurassic movies — only the original and maybe half of JPIII are worth watching. I’ve also been craving additional books in this setting. The Evolution of Claire was abysmal, but if Universal cranked out more books like it, I have to admit that I’d read them. Not proudly, but I would.

So I guess it’s time to revisit the originals.

I first read Jurassic Park in 1993. The buildup to the movie was one of the first pop marketing barrages I can remember — it reached even me, despite the fact that I slept in motels, spent my days in a car, didn’t go to school, and wouldn’t be able to see the film in full until I was 20. I was a 10 year old dinosaur fanatic when I read the book, though, and it became an obsession of mine: I read it something like thirty times before I turned 16, wearing out my mass market paperback to the point where the corners were rounded smooth and the cover was held together with tape. It was my favorite book all through my tweens and early teens, until Raptor Red and, later, Dinosaur Summer elbowed it aside. Even after that, Crichton’s clipped, mechanical prose affected (or afflicted) my own writing for an embarrassing length of time.

I last reread Jurassic Park in 2011. It doesn’t feel that long ago, but the world and I both have changed so much since then. How does the book hold up after all the personal growth and ideological refinement I’ve undergone since then?

Most pertinently, I’m aware now of Crichton’s general shittiness. He followed up Park with Rising Sun, his novel of Yellow Peril in the business world, and Disclosure, his fantasy of perfidious women accusing poor innocent men of sexual harassment in order to advance in the workplace. Years later, he was one of the first to popularize the myth that global warming is a hoax perpetuated by greedy scientists who frame the poor innocent petroleum industry; undaunted by humanity’s seeming inability to affect the climate, these scientists somehow build a machine to change the weather — a self-contradicting narrative that crops up to this day among the authoritarian / antisemitic Right. In that same novel, he caricatured a critic of his as a pedophile, another classic Right-wing tactic. Crichton did a lot to advance some of the worst takes you've ever seen.

In Jurassic Park, a holistically anti-science (and anti-scientist) attitude curdles through Ian Malcolm’s rants. Malcolm, Crichton's mouthpiece, blames scientists for most of the ills of the modern world, and even claims that becoming a scientist involves no period of training and discipline before attaining the "power" of science (ignoring that undergrad, grad school, and postdoc dues-paying are a thing, and also ignoring that scientists have no real power). As if that weren't absurd enough on its own, Crichton’s undisciplined and irresponsible scientists are directly contrasted with "becoming president of the company," which is somehow construed as a position that requires humble discipline and slow mastery, akin to becoming a "spiritual guru," instead of something won through nepotism and greed. This ideological throughline gets even worse by the time we reach The Lost World. We'll address it more when I read that book (or not). It's such bullshit.

Rereading Park now, one of my least favorite things about it was one of its big marketing points in the '90s: Crichton’s supposed attempts at science education. The introduction functions as a goddamn op-ed about the dangers of genetic technology. The digressions into chaos theory drag down the story; without Jeff Goldblum's charisma, Dr. Malcolm is just a conceited tool who happens to be the author's didactic mouthpiece. Explaining every step of the paleo-DNA reconstruction swamps us with outdated technobabble. Just get us to the dinosaurs already!

As a book, it’s fine, I guess? My teenage self would be horrified to hear this, but here in 2023, I think the movie version holds up better. The book is a solid example of its mediocre genre: a corporate espionage technothriller that takes too long to reach the thrills. Like most mass market books, it’s fiction with training wheels. The characters are thinner than newsprint and experience zero growth. One whole section is just a series of increasingly contrived incidents to ensure the folks in the control room don’t spot Grant and the kids through the cameras. It’s screwball comedy plotting, but they call it chaos theory.

There are plenty of memorable action sequences, though, and I think Isla Nublar shines as a central character in the book more so than it does in the movie. Plus, many of my childhood favorite scenes never made it into the film: Lex playing catch in the stegosaur meadow, the night walk to the shed, the raft ride, the raptor fight in the hatchery, the waterfall (though that one was reworked into the Lost World movie). Those were nice to revisit.

One last note: I had the misfortune of getting the Ballantine tall mass market paperback, 2012 edition. When the press redid the typesetting to fit the new dimensions, they added an astounding number of typos that weren’t present in the original mass market paperback in the early ’90s. (Presumably they scanned the older text into transcription software and just didn't care about how many letters were misread.) I know it’s all part of modern day capitalism, and to be expected, but goddamn, that’s some nonexistent quality control.