Edgar's Book Round-Up, December 2023

A little business to finish up from last year, as we dive headlong into what promises to be yet another punishing time in an increasingly vile historical period. If you’re not also broke from the holidays, consider getting these books from your library and giving money to PCRF, for example, or purchase esims to help Gazans stay connected, but if you’ve got enough scratch for both, the links will be going to Bookshop as usual.

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I led off the the month with my birthday (no, seriously, my birthday is 1 December), but also by finishing up Ryan La Sala’s The Honeys in audiobook form. I read and enjoyed La Sala’s Reverie, and if anything, The Honeys shows real progress in La Sala’s skill as a writer. We follow Mars, a genderfluid teen who endures the violence of his sister Caroline’s breakdown and, in his attempts to understand its genesis, elects to return to the exclusive Aspen Conservancy Summer Academy, where he suffered from a mysterious act of bullying and his sister used to thrive. But the Conservancy is not all it seems, and neither are Caroline’s friends, a group of girls who make up the titular Honeys, and Mars will have to navigate the rough waters of supernatural terror and, worse, teens in groups to figure out what led to his sister’s unravelling. The book zips along pretty well, Mars’ voice by turns vulnerable, desperate, and charmingly mean, and La Sala’s ability to conjure an irreal and unsettling ambiance has grown a lot. If brightly-hued summercamp gothic sounds appealing, The Honeys is one to look for.

The cover of My Work Is Not Yet Done, held in my lap.

Next up was Thomas Ligotti’s My Work Is Not Yet Done, which collects the title story and two other, briefer pieces, all of which seem to be inspired by Ligotti’s twenty-year tenure at a reference and textbook publisher. As I am contractually obligated to mention whenever Ligotti comes up, I do have a tattoo of a line from Conspiracy Against the Human Race on my arm, and this book was certainly not the one to make me regret it. If anything, Ligotti’s abilities as a humorist are even more on display here than in some of his more fantastical writing (which I touched on here), allowing his narrator to indulge in flights of dark imagination — and I mean dark, both philosophically and in terms of their content — before puncturing them with unlooked-for efficiency that can only elicit hysterical laughter. (Look, I am a Ligotti Guy, unfortunately, to almost the same degree as I am a Dostoevsky Guy, and this is why I am awful at parties). It’s also both different enough and similar enough to his other work that I am almost inclined to recommend it to those who would like to get into Ligotti but find his better-known works a turn-off. But I’m biased. Maybe it’s the tattoo.

I next finished Magic: a History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present by Chris Gosden in audiobook form. Cameron has discussed it a couple times, and I broadly cosign what he had to say: Gosden offers a compelling and wide-ranging look at magic as an intellectual tool, a way of interacting with and understanding the world around you. Critically, Gosden positions magic as a logical response, and argues strongly for his case. His discussion of contemporary approaches was pretty once-over-lightly, but contemporary approaches vary widely, and he was pretty clear that it was beyond his scope. I admit, I am not well-versed enough in the topic to fully understand his decision to omit Indian and South Asian magics, but he was at least clear that he planned to do so. A useful corollary to conversations about rationality, as well as a brisk introduction to magic through a variety of different periods. I’m glad to have read it, and I’ll be gnawing on some of those morsels for a while.

The only ebook in this round-up is A Power Unbound, the third and final installment in Freya Marske’s Last Binding trilogy. I’ve read the books more or less as they’ve released; this one certainly didn’t disappoint. As the stakes grow ever higher in our plucky heroes’ attempts to keep magic from falling into the hands of a few corrupt aristocrats, this particular installment chugs along on the strength of the burgeoning romance (and well-written sexual interactions) of Alonzo Rossi, a.k.a. Alan Ross, a journalist from an Italian immigrant family, and the reserved, traumatized Jack Alston, Lord Hawthorn. Marske does a nice job of acknowledging the class divide between the characters, and how they find their way around it, while also deepening the sense of the magic in her imagined early twentieth-century England. This final volume wraps things up nicely without feeling too pat. It’s good!

A photo of The Decameron in the environs where I read most of it.

I next finished — after hammering away at it for over a month, with some breaks — Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, as translated by G. H. McWilliam. I had initially intended for this to be a plague narrative double-header with The Merits of the Plague, but the Decameron is, above all else, long. It’s very long. There’s so many stories. It insists so much on its structure, and I have yet to go back and see if that structure is doing much; certainly its group of ten young people, sequestered in a variety of picturesque environs to avoid the ravages of the Black Death, were ultimately difficult to distinguish from one another in anything other than the vaguest terms. The stories they tell each other were, frankly, impressive in their range and originality: Boccaccio pulls very little from mythology, instead inventing from whole cloth; his generally positive attitude towards sex and women (and women having good sex on a regular basis) was a pleasant surprise. McWilliam’s translation was light but didn’t shy from bawdiness when called for. I don’t know if I would have finished it if I hadn’t had some unexpected plane travel to undertake while reading it, but that certainly helped. I don’t regret it, but only time will tell if it was truly essential for me.

My next audiobook was Jamison Shea’s I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me, which follows Laure Mesny, a young, Black ballerina seeking to rise within the Paris Ballet — but when her ambition is thwarted, she’s introduced to a supernatural entity that dwells in a river of blood somewhere in the Paris Catacombs, and with their ruthlessness combined, Laure’s ascendance is assured. Unless, of course, whatever has been killing other up-and-comers gets to her. Shea’s prose is deliciously bombastic, and when they really dive in on Laure’s unravelling, the novel shines. I admit, I struggled with some of the more conventional YA romance elements, but that’s a problem with me and my expectations, not with the novel itself — I suspect in a different frame of mind, I’d be happier about those moments of fantastical relief. It’s one hell of a debut, in any case, and I am excited to see where Shea’s writing goes from here.

Library copy of Things We Lost in the Fire, featuring this cool poster.

I devoured Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories, translated by Megan McDowell. Readers will recall, and meatside friends and acquaintances will be painfully aware, that I loved Our Share of Night; I am only embarrassed that it took me until now to get into Enriquez’s short fiction. It doesn’t disappoint in any way, shape, or form: that same quality of maintaining uncertainty about the supernatural is present in these stories, horror borne from history and structural inequity that is, if anything, more horrific for its blend of realism and the gothic supernatural. I must keep this brief, because otherwise I will just talk in circles about Enriquez’s abilities, and since I got this from the library I no longer have it to hand to provide further details, but my god: what a talent. I will instead recount that, when I saw a coworker with similar tastes, to whom I had recommended Our Share of Night, while I was reading this one and after she had finished that novel, she embraced me and we both spent a full five minutes wishing long life to Mariana Enriquez, so we can continue to enjoy her work.

I could not prevent myself from taking a photo of Coffee Boy like this.

Next up, and briefly, was Austin Chant’s Coffee Boy, a romance novella that I purchased when I had the pleasure of visiting the Ripped Bodice in Culver City. Inspired in large part by C. L. Polk and Freya Marske’s use of romance tropes to power plots, I’ve been trying to read a little more of the genre to see how it ticks; Chant’s novella, about a young trans man going to work on a political campaign and falling in love with one of the campaign managers, seems to check a number of the boxes. There were some things I found annoying — the, apparently, low-stakes political setting felt a little too much like Parks and Rec, and the narrator’s youth contributed to an annoying propensity to assume the worst in everyone he encounters. But it was fun! It was short! It was cute! I got another one of Chant’s books while there, and I suspect it’ll be a little more my speed, but this was a nice little romp.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds is definitely on to read with pencil in hand.

Another quick read — though one with a lot more substance — was Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, his debut collection from 2016. Readers may recall how much I liked Vuong’s more recent collection, Time Is a Mother; while that collection was more subdued in tone overall, Night Sky is pyrotechnic, Vuong’s gift for ambiguity and striking imagery fully on display. In both collections, Vuong cultivates a robust yet dreamlike symbolic vocabulary which, though it feels intensely personal, is nonetheless readily relatable in a way that feels almost psychedelic. And I know I mentioned this before, but Vuong has a real gift for dramatic and meaningful enjambment: his line breaks are extremely intentional in a way that feels fresh as a ripped edge. Truly, great work.

The final audiobook in this roundup is Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory. Having been turned onto Due’s work a while back, and having watched the hype build around The Reformatory, I was very much looking forward to it — and needless to say, it did not disappoint. When young Robbie Stephens, Jr. is sentenced to six months in the titular reformatory for impulsively trying to defend his sister against a white boy’s advances, neither he nor his sister, Gloria, could possibly have prepared for the haunted hell that awaits him. As Gloria tries to find a way to free her brother, Robbie must try to survive horrors both supernatural and historical if he hopes to escape. This synopsis doesn’t really do the novel credit: Due is truly a great writer, and she paints Jim Crow-era Florida in vivid detail, blending historical reality with deeply creeping supernatural incursions. The proximate villain of the piece, Warden Haddock, is a highly memorable, chillingly believable creation, too, his own conviction of his righteousness painting his many (MANY) crimes into even starker relief. This is a genuinely great novel, one I cannot recommend highly enough.

The cover of Trauma coordinated really well with my living room.

Closing out the year we have Trauma by Patrick McGrath, which I picked up while scouring Half-Price Books for gifts for Cameron’s nephews and niece. I am a long-time fan of McGrath, having first encountered his short stories in my early teens, but I hadn’t revisited his work in some time. And, as with some of the other rereading I’ve done recently, I was stricken by how much McGrath’s approach to writing, psychological introspection, and even plot I had internalized. It’s all on proud display in this novel, which follows Charlie Weir, a psychologist specializing in trauma recovery — but of course, Charlie has trauma of his own, which begins to draw to a head with the death of his mother. Charlie is a deliciously unreliable narrator from page one, his resolute failure to deal with his own baggage even as he attempts to help others fuel for a fair amount of exclamations on my part. McGrath is also a master of atmosphere, conjuring 1970s New York City with all the gothic flair he usually brings to crumbling manor houses or, in at least one memorable short story, the nuclear apocalypse. I don’t think this is McGrath’s best novel — that’s probably either Asylum or Spider — but it was nonetheless lovely for me to read him again, and I hope to do more of that in future.

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That’s all, folks. On to more books next year. Follow us on FB, Tumblr, or me and Cameron individually on Bluesky.