Cameron's Book Round-Up: August 2023

I hate summer. I hate summer. I hate summer. I spent a lot of my time this month lying flat on my back in the one room with air conditioning in our apartment and listening to audio books or reading a massive tome that I have (thus far) failed to finish — wait until next month, probably.

Links go to Bookshop.

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The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon.

It’s hard not to compare this work to Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow, though in feel it resembles Tom Parkinson-Morgan’s Kill 6 Billion Demons a bit more (though I suspect that part of that might be the comic’s vague resemblance to Planescape: Torment in places. If you’re familiar with that game, keep it in mind.) Of course, all of this is a bit harsh: Candon’s novel is her own.

Sunai is a former priest of the dead AI god Iterate Fractal. When Iterate Fractal died, it was connected to him and changed him from a human being into a “relic”. He is gifted with rapid healing and presumably indefinite lifespan. Given that relics are sought out by the Harbor, an organization that seems partway between NATO and the Freemasons, for use in their giant robot Engines, he is very interested in simply avoiding recognition.

This all changes when he is hired to go on an archaeological expedition to a hidden shrine by a man that he drunkenly slept with, who turns out to be a Harbor operative. This kicks off a long, elaborate, and quite fun journey through a verdant post-apocalyptic world.

It’s a good little book. I think I would have liked it even more in print, rather than as an audiobook: I lost track of several of the characters and their relationships, and it would be easier to manage that with the physical copy.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff.

In the past year, I’ve read a number of books that cover similar territory to this one — Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind and Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, which I quite enjoyed and which Edgar read first, both come to mind — and while these books make similar cases, Zuboff does so in a very measured listen-to-the-adults-in-the-room sort of way. This sort of style can be quite tiresome, but I thought that she made a very effective rhetorical case for her position.

The book argues that the old adage that “if a service is free, you’re the product” isn’t quite true. Instead, what she argues is that the service is free because the big surveillance companies — Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, et al., though Apple to a markedly lesser extent — extract a “behavioral surplus” from monitoring us and use this to sell advertisements. Initially, this is less sinister than most people believe: you’re not actually having your information packaged up and sold to malicious actors (and how accurate are they, anyway? When I was 25, I learned that Facebook believed me to be a middle aged black man, despite the fact that I had told them my birth year.) But, as you go deeper down the rabbit hole, the prognosis gets darker and darker. It doesn’t need to sell a file with your name up at the top to move you where they want you: they just need to push and press on your psychological pressure points, and they can do that without an explicit dossier with your name up at the top.

Still, the fact that this is becoming a recognizable genre of book perhaps means that someone will take notice and curtail the power of these behemoths. I just hope it happens before some kind of radical breaking point comes.

Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer

After that last bit, I thought I’d read something marginally more uplifting: Jeff VanderMeer’s post-historic body horror nightmare built on a vaguely Orphean frame. It plays an interesting stylistic game: there are three protagonists (dissolute artist Nicholas, his twin sister Nicola, and her ex, the principled mobster Shadrach) across three parts: part one is Nicholas, and it is told in first person; part two is Nicola, and it is told in second person; part three is Shadrach, and it is told in third-person. The implication that it is Nicholas, telling the whole story to Nicola, cannot be avoided, though for reasons obvious to anyone who finishes the story, that seems unlikely given the events of the story.

The story begins with Nicholas begging Shadrach for an introduction to Shadrach’s employer, the flesh artist Quin, so that Shadrach can buy a meerkat, which is Quin’s specialty. The narrative explicitly compares Quin’s meerkats to Stradivarius violins, which is an excellent bit of worldbuilding: it shows that the people of the world are aware of our history, but that they are extremely far away from the modern day indeed. This and the second section, from Nicola’s perspective, are really just setting the stage for the real story in the third section. They are not something you can skip, nor are they unpleasant, but it is in the third part that things really take off.

The bulk of the narrative takes place from Shadrach’s perspective, as he descends from Veniss into the subterranean levels that he originally emerged from. The people of Veniss have an instinctual fear of the underground — it’s not simply a “rough neighborhood”, each level is exponentially worse than the last. It starts with “neighborhood supposedly so bad the cops won’t go there” proceeds through “people are selling their own body parts at the Corpse Cathedral to make ends meet” and ends up with a real Boschean nightmare.

The corpse cathedral — it might have been referred to in the text as Cadaver Cathedral, this was a library book and I failed to take notes — is especially interesting, because VanderMeer has actually talked about how that sequence came to be. He was visiting England with his then-future wife, and they entered York Minster. VanderMeer was supposedly overtaken by a vision of the stone cathedral, all in white, with body parts strung up between the columns, fed on drips of artificial blood.

It was his experience, not mine, so he would describe it much better, but I bring it up because, for years, this image was all I knew about Veniss Underground, and I hadn’t had the opportunity to fill in the space around this moment until quite recently.

The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford.

Okay, an actual break from the paranoia and body horror. The Shadow Year is a book about childhood — or more specifically boyhood — in a very specific vein. Published in 2008, it’s hard not to compare it to Stephen King’s own meditation on a similar subject, It (which I reviewed here), though I think this comparison might be misleading. It is a cosmic horror version of Our Town, and while both it an The Shadow Year deal with memory and the death and disappearance of children, Jeffrey Ford’s novel is different in that people actually care what happens to the children. This simple change, and other elements that Ford bring in, give it more of a Bradbury feel than a King one. It’s more spooky than creepy — there’s very little subtle paranoia, and quite a bit of looming dread.

The basic idea is simple: the narrator and his brother (Jim) begin to hunt a peeping tom during the summer of 196X, with the help of their younger, somehow neurodivergent sister (Mary), who uses the narrator’s observations of their neighbors and their grandfather’s system for predicting the winners of horse races. The children are largely left to their own devices — their father works three jobs and rarely comes home, and their mother suffers from what seems to be obviously bipolar disorder, which she self-medicates through alcohol. Their grandparents try to help, but they are elderly and limited in what they can do, meaning that delinquent high school-aged Jim is largely the authority in the family.

They spend their time working on odd projects: the narrator performing an ethnography of the neighborhood, Mary constructing an elaborate narrative for her imaginary friend Mickey, and Jim building a perfect scale model of the neighborhood called “Botch Town”.

And then people start to disappear. But Mary, using the narrator’s observations and the scale model of Botch Town, can predict where everyone will be.

It’s a fun little book, and a nice respite from the body horror heavy reading I’ve been doing lately. I need to read more of Ford’s work, especially if it can strike this same sort of Bradburian-Lynchian balance that he has here in his other works.

Your Mind is a Terrible Thing by Hailey Piper.

The retro-70s aesthetic of the coverspeaks to the style.

This is the second of Piper’s books that I’ve read (see my review of The Worm and His Kings here). This one was a science fiction horror series that involves some rather unnecessarily macabre setting elements — like, Event Horizon-level unnecessarily macabre (which, for the record, I’m a fan of.) Specifically, instead of robots, the civilization in question makes use of “wraiths”, which are corpses with cybernetic enhancements.

Despite this, the aliens encountered by the protagonist, Alto, are somehow yet worse. Hailey Piper is, after all, a cosmic horror writer. I won’t get too deep into it, because, honestly, it’s a novella. There’s not that much material there. I look forward to Piper’s upcoming full-length novel: while she obviously enjoys writing works of that length, I think that her style would really benefit from having the space to really breathe. It is possible that her work is simply better in the novella format, like that of Martha Wells, but I suspect that she will thrive.

Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker.

A horror story that begins with a young girl, Fernanda, being kidnapped by her teacher, Miss Clara. Fernanda is a student at the Delta Bilingual Academy, an Opus Dei boarding school for girls in an unnamed South American country (perhaps it was named? I didn’t catch it.) She is taken to a cabin in the forest and bound, and the majority of the story is then told in flashbacks.

Fernanda is part of a clique of girls that prominently features her “sister” Annelise, and the two desperately try to match one another, despite Annelise being motivated to create stories about a horrific “White God”, who is the source of the protean “white age” that wracks the girls’ bodies — a clear reference to puberty. The mythology that Annelise creates is shaped by Lovecraft, Melville, and online “creepypasta” stories, but at its core it is deeply Freudian, speaking of a cannibalistic opposition between mothers and daughters.

The story is very well-written and has some amazing stylistic experiments in it, but it was ultimately targeted at an audience other than me. As such, I can appreciate what it’s doing, but it didn’t hit me as it might have hit one of my several friends who attended one of the Catholic girl’s schools. Much of the book drips with what Edgar has called “feral girl energy”, and I simply didn’t have the context to fully decode what was going on. So: recommended, but highly targeted.

Glasshouse by Charles Stross.

The real standout for me this time around. I’m a big fan of Charles Stross, as has been established already, but this one is a stand-alone work rather than a part of a series. It’s a paranoid, post-human thriller of sorts, and it has many layers.

Robin is a veteran of the Censorship War. He was at one time a historian, then a soldier, and then the sort of soldier that needs a historian’s training. Now, it’s peacetime, and his side technically lost: the war was fought against a computer virus called Curious Yellow (hello, Vurt reference) that was erasing knowledge of it and its creators, information which is heavily attenuated.

To recover, Robin gets memory surgery, excising the memories, and while in recovery he is recruited into a study recreating a Dark Ages (read: 20th - 21st century) society. Participants are randomly shuffled, and so he wakes up in the body of a woman named Reeve, and has to get her feet underneath her, and make peace with the feeling that something isn’t quite right with the study, which has some major methodological problems.

Now, it’s almost impossible for me to read through this and not compare it to Altered Carbon, which I had major issues with. When Stross does it, though, he commits to the bit. Robin becomes Reeve and experiences annoyance but no dysphoria. He has been women in the past, and she picks herself up fairly quickly and begins to fashion a crossbow for self-defense. On the other hand, her partner, Sam, experiences a great deal of PTSD and gender dysphoria that is explored further into the book. This leads them to a sexless marriage, which Reeve is just fine with, given that she lives in a society that has abolished pregnancy, reproducing by other means.

Stross is an excellent writer of speculative fiction. Sometimes a note is sour, but he is never without imagination, and he is absolutely brilliant at thinking through the implications of the world he has built. Highly recommended.

Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy A. Snider.

(Previously reviewed by Edgar here.)

A post-COVID body horror story that takes a jump directly into cosmic horror fairly quickly. It rotates between three parts, each centering on a different protagonist: the relatively normal Erin, who succumbs to the PVG pandemic fairly quickly and suffers horrible post-viral symptoms; the beautiful and amoral Savannah; and the sweet and unfortunate Mareva.

I was somewhat less taken by the sexy body horror than Edgar was, though I recognized its presence and how the author was using it — there is definitely a queer sensuality at work here that is the focus of much of the story. What really captured my attention early on was that this was part of a larger mythos, but not the standard Lovecraftian mythos: the references to Castaigne and the image of black stars in the sky suggested to me an affinity for John W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow, and my one critique is that the timbre of the body horror was more similar to the traditionally Lovecraftian, instead of trying to carve out a more specifically Carcosan variety of body horror to dive into. There are glimmers of this, but the emphasis on a cephalopodian aesthetic during later parts of the story detracted from things a tad. Snyder may have benefited from being less committed to an explicitly Carcosan story and constructing something of her own.

This is not to say that the story was not enjoyable. Snyder is excellent at writing body horror — all three of the major body horror authors I’ve read this month, Piper, VanderMeer, and Snyder, all did quite well with their work, it was all positively nauseating — and did a fantastic job creating sympathetic characters that you knew were destined for a bad end. The tragic elements she wove in elevated it from mere gore into something that edged into the profound in places. Quite highly recommended.

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