Time flies when you’re just trying to keep above water, eh? Between a regularly scheduled depressive episode at the vernal equinox and the ongoing horror in Gaza, another hottest year on record, and fuckery at every level of government, I cannot say it was a good month for me personally — but it was a pretty good one for books. Links, as usual, go to Bookshop.

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We start off the month with Broken Hands favorite, T. Kingfisher, with What Feasts at Night, a follow-up to What Moves the Dead, her take on “Fall of the House of Usher” from the other year. We are once again following Alex Easton, this time to a dilapidated family hunting lodge — but the locals are unfriendly and, not particularly surprisingly, horror awaits in the Gallacian hinterland. It’s not really a surprise that I should like this one: Alex is, in many ways, the kind of protagonist to whom I find myself drawn instinctively, and kan brings a bluff charm to what is, at heart, a fairly conventional tale of a monstrous ghost. But I love a monstrous ghost, and I love Kingfisher’s brisk, beguiling storytelling, as well as her embrace of unfamiliar pronominal distinctions in made-up Gallacian (Alex, as a soldier, uses ka/kan pronouns, and this is one of several pronominal classes). A good start to the month, and the perfect length to burn through in a huddle on the couch.

Next up, in audiobook form, was have The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas, which was yet another recommendation from my favorite bookstagrammer and real-life friend. Blurbed as “Mexican Gothic [reviewed here] meets Rebecca,” the novel follows Beatriz, an impoverished woman of gentle breeding who marries the mysterious Rodolfo Solórzano in attempt to provide for herself and her mother, but encounters much more than she anticipated when she arrives at Hacienda San Isidro — including Rodolfo’s intimidating sister, Juana, and the kind young priest Padre Andrés, who has secrets of his own. So far, so much one might expect from the advance copy, but where Cañas really shines is her incorporation of Mexican history, setting the novel in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence. The long shadows of colonialism and political unrest underpin the novel’s action, and while it felt as if it never quite came together — the ending took a hard tonal shift that didn’t quite land for me — it was still quite enjoyable, and I’ll be seeking out more of Cañas’ work.

I’d have taken a bad photo of this one, too, but I forgot to before I returned it to the library.

Another print novella, courtesy of my beloved Kansas City Public: The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed. This is the first of Mohamed’s works I’ve read, despite thoroughly enjoying her social media presence, which is thoughtful and often funny — and it won’t be the last. The novella follows Veris, a woman in her 40s and longtime denizen of a territory at the edges of a vast forest, into which few dare venture and from which she is the only person known to have returned fully intact. But when the conquering tyrant’s children wander into the woods, Veris must rescue them, lest the tyrant destroy her home and community. I’ve mentioned elsewhere how much I enjoy stories about real adults with real adult problems, and Butcher of the Forest doubles down on this: not only is Veris bad-knees-years-old, she is also the survivor of the bloody annexation of her home, to which she lost her parents when she was a child. Mohamed probes the nature of exploration, of witness, of memory, to say nothing of the perils of encounters with, for example, animated skeleton animals that want to kill you. (They’re on the cover, even.) Her prose is crisp but studded with analogies and metaphors that manage both to be unexpected and not to pull the reader out of the story. This was another one that I blazed through in a day or two, and I am very excited to read more of Mohamed’s work.

Next up, in audiobook form, was Scott Hawkins’ The Library at Mount Char, a book that has been blinking on my radar for a while. The final push to read it, however, came from a Locked Tomb fan group I’m in on Facebook, where several group members recommended it as similar in vibe. And it’s not a poor comparison: Hawkins blends world-level stakes with moments of sly humor in a similar way to Tamsyn Muir, though given the date of writing, I’d also suggest that Library at Mount Char might be read as what would happen if Warren Ellis tried to write House of Leaves. Sure, God is missing and his awful children are trying to find out what happened to Him (assuming they don’t kill each other for real first), but there’s also Steve the Buddhist Plumber in there; there’s a wandering lion in the Virginia suburbs; there’s a Brock Samson analog and the closest thing to a main character we have spends most of the novel running around in a Christmas sweater, bike shorts, and leg warmers (but no shoes). It’s a wild ride, dependent on a cosmology that is both zany and eminently compelling. I’ve been yelling at everyone I know to read it more or less since I started it, and I look forward to continuing to do so.

Once again, I love the John Jude Palencar cover art.

I followed that, also as an audiobook, with The Parable of the Talents, the sequel to Octavia Butler’s classic Parable of the Sower, which I reviewed here and Cameron reviewed here. If anything, Talents is even more impressive: by integrating sections from the points of view of Lauren Olamina’s husband and her daughter, Butler complicates the messianic qualities of that sole narrator of the first book. How did others view the nascent Earthseed movement? How did things go when, as felt inevitable, the Christian nationalist demagogue win the presidency? (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, poorly.) Throughout, Butler’s prose feels effortless, and her multifaceted exploration of legacy and divine ambition and burgeoning fascism takes on real urgency in the present moment. Butler also evolves Lauren’s narration away from the youthful visionary of the Sower into that of a driven movement-builder, with the mental gymnastics that can entail, without making Lauren into another monster in an already monstrous world. As mentioned in my review of the first book, I regret only having waited so long to read the books, but I am so glad to be reading them now. Expect more Butler in these reviews in the future.

After that, my hold on the newest installment in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children books, Mislaid in Parts Half-Known, came through, so of course I devoured it with all speed. Picking up almost immediately after the previous book, and incorporating its narrator — notable for her ability to locate doors to fairylands at any time — as a key part of the plot, we return to the throughline of the novellas. At this point, many books into the series, summarizing it escapes me, but that did mean that we got to see more of Kade, who is one of my favorite transmasculine characters for a variety of reasons, as well as more hints to what Yumi might be up to. I’ve written about the series several times, and Cameron has also written on McGuire’s work, so I won’t spend too much more time on it, but if you’re already a fan of the series, and especially of the main-plot installments (which I prefer to the solo stories, as it were) it offers an excellent continuation of the plot.

It’s much harder to take cool book photos of academic books from academic libraries, because they are almost all bound in dark gray and are difficult to tell apart.

The next print book that I finished was The Work of Literary Translation by Clive Scott. Scott, a translator primarily of French verse, writes eloquently of approaches to translation in general: he posits that the translator should work with an eye to a polyglot, rather than a monoglot, reader; the text should be considered as an oceanic, or archepelagic, structure, its territory unstable and shifting. Indeed, Scott waxes rhapsodic to the point of mysticism — but he’s an English translator of French, and primarily French by literally-dead authors, which is a specific type of work that does not map well onto, for example, translations of works from antiquity, or works by living authors, when there may be an element of collaboration, as the writing on having one’s work translated by authors like Haruki Murakami and Umberto Eco suggest. He also uses a lot of symbolic scansion, which took me the better part of the book to puzzle out how to read. It’s a strange book, and, I think, a valuable one, just one that had in spades a problem I have noticed in criticism periodically: I agree with the broad strokes, but when it comes to execution, I cannot get on board. The number of times I found myself looking at one of Scott’s collagiste translations and thinking, “Man, I don’t want to read this,” was almost exactly the same as the number of times such translations appeared in the book’s pages (printed, I am sorry to say, in black and white, though the text makes repeated references to the use of different colors in the work). I did appreciate the granular qualities of Scott’s thought on, for example, the uses of punctuation in translation; maybe I’m just primed to view a more concrete approach to verse as somehow childish, which has more to do with my own early introduction to it than any inherent qualities of concrete verse. In any case, I’m glad to have read it, and I foresee Scott’s work as potentially useful in my own explorations.

I next read, in audiobook form, Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. It may be a surprise that a lifelong Wynne Jones fan — it’s me, I’m the fan — has not read this particular entry in her oeuvre, but I had not; in my youth, the transformation the central character undergoes squicked me out, so I never read it, despite loving many of her other works. But I’m an adult now, and also I really like the Studio Ghibli adaptation, so here we are. The movie shares the broad strokes of the plot: Sophie, a young milliner, is transformed by the Witch of the Wastes into an old woman; she seeks out the Wizard Howl for help. Wynne Jones, however, has long worked slyly funky things into her work, and here is no exception: to spoil a forty-year-old children’s book, Howl actually comes from what the reader would recognize as our own world, through means unclear to Sophie, and it is a John Donne poem that contains the secret to ending the curse that drives Howl. Wynne Jones couples this, however, with a truly delightful prose style, by turns knowing and blithe, often given to witty turns of phrase, but never at the expense of the emotional heft of the story. Like her other work, it’s very good, and this is another one I look forward to foisting on the children of my acquaintance.

The Libby app hold finally came through, and so I got to dive into what I anticipated would be a good old fashioned hate-read: Alex Michaelides’ The Fury. Long-time readers of this blog may recall my annoyed disdain for Michaelides’ debut, The Silent Patient, and my outright amusement with The Maidens, which is not a comedy; I looked for little better from The Fury. So I was shocked that, by about the halfway point in the novel, I didn’t totally hate it! Is Michaelides improving as a writer, or is he just being less of a shit? Hard to say: the novel follows a playwright, who seems to have had a single success and otherwise hung on the inheritance from his now-deceased, deeply unpleasant romantic partner, as he joins a famous actress, her second husband, their son, and a mutual friend for a weekend on a remote Greek island — a weekend which is, as it must be, interrupted by murder. There’s a little less space, perversely, for Michaelides’ absolutely groan-worthy classical references, and a little more room for what he does best, which is writing insufferable, self-obsessed men, a group into which the narrator falls squarely. It was even, dare I say, enjoyable: Michaelides is a little too impressed with his own cleverness in the structure of the novel, but this didn’t bog down the plot too much. I almost felt an emotion other than ironic attachment at certain points! I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was good, nor that I liked it, but it was certainly more enjoyable to me personally than Michaelides’ prior works.

I just think this cover art is really neat.

The only ebook on this list is Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson, which was another recommendation from my dear friend, the horror bookstagrammer. The novella follows Ro — short for Rosemary — as, in her attempts to settle in to a fairly small college town and recover from the dissolution of a fairly long relationship, she meets and falls in love with Ash, a vendor at the local farmer’s market. Beguiled by Ash’s beauty and the allure of her picture-perfect cottagecore lifestyle and wares, Ro ignores the warning signs in her burgeoning relationship with Ash — at her peril. Dawson handles the rising tension of the relationship well, allowing it to burn slowly through the first three-quarters of the novella before exploding into violence at the very end; there’s plenty for someone moderately well-versed in Romantic literature to fix on with respect to Ash: her secrecy, her protectiveness, her volatility all hoist the Byronic anti-hero flag high, and Ro’s failure to recognize them keep the reader on edge. I certainly look forward to reading more of Dawson’s work in future.

Another audiobook: Spell Bound by F. T. Lukens, which I found via a Tumblr poll blog and which I confess I read because I am not immune to (1) contemporary fantasy of the wizard-detective variety and (2) the promise of a nonbinary main character. I was not disappointed on either count: Edison Rooker, newly free of high school and left on his own after the death of his beloved grandmother, cannot live a life without magic, despite possessing no abilities of his own; to that end, he gets a job as the office manager for powerful cursebreaker Antonia Hex. The new job puts him in the line of fire for a variety of wacky hijinx, as well as in the path of Sun, the nonbinary apprentice of a fellow cursebreaker. But Rook, as he comes to be known, has plans for a way to give himself access to magic, and this will plunge all of them into a conflict with the highest powers of the magical world. Lukens holds their setting lightly but cleanly: the ins and outs of the ways magical and nonmagical society interact are explored enough to keep the plot chugging along, but they let the focus stay with their protagonists. The Great American Novel it ain’t, but it’s a good time.

The house copy of the Peden translation.

We close out this round-up with Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (though Bookshop seems only to have the Weatherford translation, a more recent iteration), which Cameron discussed here. This brief novel, a classic of Mexican literature, follows a young man as he returns to his father’s village upon his mother’s death. But, as is so often the case, the novel suffers in synopsis: the village is populated by the dead; the narrative weaves in and out of memories and polyphonic cries of desperation and despair; in its brevity and structural invention, the novel pushes the boundaries of the form. I do not speak or read Spanish and thus cannot speak to the qualities of Sayers Peden’s translation, but it reads about as easily as such a book could. I admit, I found this one unusually difficult; by about the one-quarter mark, I knew I was going to have to read it again. I understand this is a feature, not a bug — this NYT review (link to Internet Archive) of the more recent Weatherford translation cites Rulfo suggesting as much. I am still unsure of what to say about it, but I am glad to have read it, and I look forward to, once again, plumbing its stygian depths.

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That’s all for this month. Follow me and Cameron on Bluesky, or Broken Hands Media on Facebook or Tumblr.

Edgar's Book Round-Up, March 2024