It’s been a long month and my bones hurt constantly and I didn’t read as much as I’d have liked to, but here’s a book round-up anyway. Title links, as always, go to our Bookshop.

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We lead off the the month with the audiobook of Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, which I read as part of a Discord-based book club. The novel follows the nameless Mother as, amidst the desperate loneliness of stay-at-home motherhood and the sacrifice of her art practice in the interests of raising her son, she begins to turn into a dog. It’s a premise that felt somehow familiar, and there’s more than a little of Angela Carter — specifically The Bloody Chamber — down there in the DNA. But Yoder takes the story in some unexpected directions, marrying a dissociated, fabulistic narrative style with a satirical approach to contemporary upper-middle class “mommy culture,” including the ubiquitous MLM component. While Yoder’s depiction of the terror and comedy of an MLM gathering doesn’t quite stack up to Torrey Peters’ comedic tour-de-force in Detransition, Baby, she uses it extremely well. I appreciated, too, that despite the flat affect of her prose, Yoder brought real depth to characters who might otherwise have collapsed into pastiche. While I might not have chosen Nightbitch for myself, I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I’m curious to check out Yoder’s other work.

I next finished Shadow & Claw, which contains the first two volumes of Gene Wolfe’s lauded Book of the New Sun. I’ll talk at greater length about the books when I finish the other two-volume set, but man, I forgot how rewarding and challenging Gene Wolfe is as a prose stylist. He never makes it easy, but it’s generally worth the effort.

My next audiobook was Tananarive Due’s The Good House. Due’s work came recommended by my friend Nina: she’s never steered me wrong, and The Good House was no exception. After a truly horrifying end to what should have been a lovely Fourth of July party at her family’s home, lawyer and talent agent Angela Toussaint must try to rebuild her life — but the house, and the secrets it holds, calls her back to face the evil that upended her life. This description doesn’t really do the book justice: Due’s plot construction is generous and enticing; her characters are lively and well-observed. I genuinely felt for Angela, stricken again and again throughout her life by tragedy even as she achieved a very high degree of success. The supernatural elements, too, were often disquieting or sad, rather than gross or would-be shocking, which I felt was an extremely effective choice. I’m given to understand that The Good House is in many ways in conversation with Stephen King’s oeuvre, and I can definitely see that — but I found that, in comparison to the King I’ve read, Due marshalled my sympathies and excitement much more effectively. I’m excited to seek out more of her work.

I next finished Ocean Vuong’s second collection, Time Is a Mother, which I got, along with several other items in this round-up, from the public library’s physical manifestation, rather than relying, as I have for so long, on the Libby app. I’d run up against Vuong’s verse elsewhere — I especially enjoyed this Poetry Unbound episode on one of the pieces from Night Sky with Exit Wounds — and been impressed, but this was my first opportunity to engage in a more sustained fashion. And what a gift! Many of the pieces in this collection draw from the recent death of several of Vuong’s loved ones, and his treatment of that grief is both thorough and thoughtful, but the collection on the whole is a raw joy to experience. His language is pleasantly surprising — his enjambment, especially, I loved — and the collection on the whole was both moving and exciting. I’m so happy to have had the opportunity to read Vuong’s work, and so thrilled that there is more to enjoy in his oeuvre.

I next finished the audiobook of Catriona Ward’s Little Eve. The novel, originally published in the UK in 2018, follows several young woman as they writhe and suffer under the thumb of their “Uncle,” in whose millenarian little cult they are raised on an island off the coast of Scotland just after World War One, awaiting the appearance of the Adder, an entity from the deep that will purify the world. I’ve written about Wards writing previously, and in both those instances I had some doubts. Little Eve was not enough to make me a diehard Ward fan — there’s too much that never coalesces, and too much that’s explained too thoroughly — but it was certainly more my speed than her other works. I liked the Wicker Man vibe to the proceedings, and it seems worth noting that this book, in which several viewpoint characters are explicitly hallucinating, was substantially less hallucinatory than her other works. It’s something, all right, and it has its charms (more of them, in fact, that her other works, for my money) but I just… I don’t know! I feel like there’s something I’m not getting in her work, something that draws me to her prose and repels me from her plots. Part of that may be because I’ve only experienced her work in audio form, but nonetheless, it never quite lands for me — but further, Little Eve worked better than the others for me specifically.

The cover, featuring this Eudora Welty photograph.

In any case, next up was another library find, The Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems by Robin Coste Lewis. I had seen the titular piece referenced in conjunction with the work of Kara Walker, who I love, and was very excited to find it on the shelves of KC Public. While the other pieces in the collection are — I say without hyperbole — beautiful, the title piece is, for me, especially haunting and compelling: a narrative composed from the titles and descriptions of works featuring or created by Black women and Black queer people from collections all over the world. Coste Lewis’s use of this limited category and her marshalling of the frequent repetitions of words and phrases to create a series of “Catalogs” based around different times and places is truly astonishing and beautiful, and — again, without hyperbole — I really strongly feel that it should be essential reading for anyone working in archives or cultural institutions. The Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, despite coming out in 2015, still feels simultaneously urgent and timeless, and I’m glad to have been able to read it.

We come next to another audiobook: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. (As an aside, I would like to note that, while JKR and all her works can rot in hell, Jim Dale did narrate probably half my childhood, and it was lovely to hear his voice again in this context.) I have to say, as much as I ultimately loved The Starless Sea, I had kind of avoided The Night Circus for reasons that proved to be entirely justified: it was very much the Circus Aesthetic (TM) to which I was overexposed in my Steampunk days. Set amidst the black-and-white titular circus — the circus ultrafans wear red scarves sometimes, for a bit of contrast — two youthful magicians compete against each other in a duel for which they have not been told the rules, in which the stakes are unclear, and the outcome of which is ultimately kind of pointless. I know many people love it, but it felt to me like an overlong retread of Steven Millhauser’s far-superior short story “The Barnum Museum” (available in the collection of the same name). That said, I am very open to having my mind changed, as it did on my second go-round with Morgenstern’s subsequent novel, and I would also note that my instinct is to say that I loved The Night Circus, even though I had very mixed feelings about it in actuality. Do with that what you will.

We come next to Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which in turn came to me highly recommended by internet friends. This is my first go-round with Clarke — I know, right, I seem like a Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell stan, but alas — and I can definitely see the appeal. We are introduced to the title character (not his real name) as he goes about his humble life in an apparently-infinite house full of marble statues, subject to the sea and weather. I am loth to say more, because the story unfolds in ways that are maybe not unexpected but are full of delight. There are a few things that didn’t quite land for me, specifically the capitalization of many common nouns — I understand why that’s happening, but it never stopped annoying me — and I did find the ending a little prosaic. But these were relatively minor concerns, standing out more because of how much I enjoyed all the rest. It was smart, and fun, and I’m annoyed that, when I was reading it, I never had the time to sit down and just plow through it, because it is really delicious.

I close this round-up with the audiobook of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, which I finished just now as I was out running errands. When the beautiful, bright Noemí is dispatched to High Place, the crumbling manse inhabited by the family into which her beloved cousin has married, she scarcely expects to become embroiled in the Doyle family’s gothic ways, but her cousin scarcely speaks, and the many rules and overwhelming decay of the house threaten to destroy them both. The novel received very high praise on release, and having now read it, I can see why: comparisons to Daphne duMaurier are not at all unfounded, and Noemí, with her academic ambitions and many stylish outfits, is a lovable heroine. Moreno-Garcia’s evocation of the bizarre and unpleasant scions of a British mine-owning family was also a lot of fun, rendering the various Doyles by turns disturbingly alluring and deeply, deeply gross. I’m very excited now to read more of Moreno-Garcia’s work, and looking forward to the miniseries adaptation.

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Edgar's Book Round-Up, November 2022