Edgar's Book Round-Up, June 2024
It was fun!
I started off the month with the audiobook of Rachel Harrison’s Such Sharp Teeth. We follow Rory, who has moved back to her hometown to assist her newly-single twin sister with her pregnancy — but as she arrives, she encounters both her high-school crush and a werewolf, and soon, she’s slamming hotdogs in the convenience store parking lot and trying to hide her monthly transformations from the people around her. It’s a fun romp, inverting some of the cliches of the paranormal romance while adhering to others in ways that feel charming rather than forced. Harrison’s prior work in the horror genre definitely shines through as well, with suitably grody scenes of transformation and violence. It’s not breaking new ground, but it is a good time, and sometimes that’s all you need.
Next up, also in audiobook form, was the first of two Adam Nevill novels on this round up: The Ritual, which was also adapted into a movie on Netflix. Perhaps it’s simply because I saw the movie first, but the novel left me a little cold, its tale of four British men in their 30s on a camping holiday somewhere in the Scandinavian wilderness often feeling more like a pissing contest than anything with real stakes, and the hard turn Nevill makes towards the end, revealing the source of much of the terror the men have met with on the way felt forced more than earned. It reminded me of Christopher Golden’s Road of Bones, in that it felt like a men’s-adventure novel that never quite came together. I don’t regret reading it, by any means — I just didn’t care much for it.
The novel also won the Prix Inter!
The first print novel on this round-up is one I have been looking forward to for some time: Aliène, the second novel by Phoebe Hadjimarkos Clarke (which doesn’t seem to be on Bookshop). I loved her debut novel, Tabor, which I wrote about here, and Aliene absolutely did not disappoint. The novel follows Fauvel, a young woman who lost an eye to a rubber bullet, as she moves into a friend’s father’s house in the countryside to dogsit while the father and his very wealthy girlfriend are on holiday. But the dog Fauvel is watching is the American clone of a departed original (who is, in fact, taxidermied in the living room); there are hunters roaming the nearby woods, led by the clearly-disturbed, alien-obsessed Julien, out to find something that’s brutally killing the livestock; Fauvel herself is plagued by strange dreams, and throughout, the industrial noise of the mineral water factory resounds. In addition to this potent stew of themes and motives, Hadjimarkos Clarke offers a well-drawn supporting cast, from Mado, Fauvel’s friend who is always in love with someone or other, to Mich, a young academic working on a thesis about the prevalence of alien abduction stories in the region — to say nothing of Julien, who is both terrifying and charismatic, clearly unwell and just as clearly a danger to those around him. It’s a hell of a novel, and marks Hadjimarkos Clarkes’ transition from an indie press to the same imprint as Mariana Enriquez’s French translations — and it’s richly deserved. Francophone readers are highly encouraged to get ahold of this one with all speed.
My next audiobook was The Dead Take the A Train by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey, which Cameron reviewed here. The novel centers around Julie Crews, a paranormal jack-of-all-trades who is tricked into summoning an elder god and, of course, must find some way to put it back — but there’s also her high school sweetheart, back into her life while on the run from an abusive marriage, the jackass finance bro who is only too eager to sacrifice his personhood and everyone else’s to the horrifying entities at the center of the corporation he works for, and a anthropomorphized fly who works at an occult bookstore, to name just a few of the cast of character Khaw and Kadrey attempt to balance. Genuinely, I am not sure if it works: I wanted very badly to like this book, given my lifelong affection for stuff like Hellblazer, and my fond recollections (and less impressed attempts to revisit) Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files or Simon R. Green’s Nightside novels. It is definitely scratching the same kind of itch, and doing so with substantially better style than either Butcher or Green could ever muster, but something just never quite clicked for me. I think it may have been the uneasy marriage between Khaw’s intentionally decadent prose style and what I understand to be Kadrey’s typically grittier approach: passages felt outright overwrought, while others felt deeply implausible to no real purpose in the text. I don’t regret reading it, but I was left a bit cold by the whole affair. That said, I see it’s listed as the first of a projected series, and god knows, I can’t resist following a series. We’ll see, I guess!
Deeply unsettling!
Another audiobook: Jawbone by Monica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker. Cameron discussed this one here, and between his response and that of my dear horror bookstagrammer friend, I was very curious. The novel follows the exploits of a group of girls who coalesce around the beautiful Annelise, with much of the narration provided by Fernanda, who is often mistaken for her sister, if not her twin, due to the girls’ closeness. But no less a part of the girls’ orbit is their literature teacher, Clara, whose sanity is barely held together and whose reaction to the girls’ increasingly arcane pranks — to say nothing of their occult explorations of something Annelise refers to as “white horror” — will push her all the way over the edge. It’s not a long book, but it casts its net wide, plumbing Fernanda’s, Annelise’s, and Clara’s psyches with incisive recollections, troubling interview snippets and, in one deliciously unhinged passage, a school paper that can barely be graded due to its whole deal. Deliciously pretentious and as preoccupied with horror as a genre as it is with being itself a horror novel, Jawbone has, if nothing else, made me even more excited to read Nefando, which Cameron has also discussed elsewhere and which he has been after me to read since he finished it.
Once again, a phenomenal cover!
The next print book on this round-up is another one I’ve been eagerly awaiting: Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin. Her second novel with Tor Nightfire, Cuckoo takes place primarily in the mid-1990s, following a group of young queers who have been kidnapped away to a conversion camp. But although the camp offers the more-or-less standard abuse, brainwashing, and total absence of human kindness that one can find in the real world in such places, there’s also something very much awry: the counselors crawl unsettlingly through the improbable gardens in the desert; the campers dream the same dreams, and are subject to nonsensical brainwashing lessons. I personally feel that the back copy gives too much away, but I think it can be usefully observed that none of the main characters truly escape the camp, the monster at its heart still horribly present to their psychologies even long after their encounters with it. Cuckoo is, in almost every way, a bigger novel than Manhunt (which I reviewed here) was: a much larger cast of characters, the story spread over a much longer period; Felker-Martin’s avowed affection for Stephen King’s IT really comes through in this one, and that is, I think, to its credit. Again, too, Felker-Martin’s ability as a nature writer is on display, whether through the disturbing desert garden that should not be able to exist or through the moving descriptions of nights in the desert, and this gift for observation spills over into the telling details presented of the characters themselves: tics, nervous habits, and characteristics that begin in childhood are keenly noted and used to build up a cast that feels very much like real people. It is, fundamentally, a very good novel in a way that I feel like I don’t see as often as I’d like to in genre spaces.
Pretty much sums it up!
And here we have the second Adam Nevill audiobook on this round-up — and no, I’m not totally sure how that happened, but it’s fine — The Reddening. While I was a little lukewarm on The Ritual, The Reddening was, on a very basic level, much more My Shit: I love a cult town, and I love plot-relevant field recordings, and I love weird English stuff a la The Wicker Man, and The Reddening had all of that. Told from the alternating viewpoints of Katrine, a journalist whose career and well-being are hanging on by a thread, and Helene, a single parent mourning the untimely demise of her brother, the novel finds its focus around the gory archaeological finds near the town of Brickburgh — and the equally-gory modern-day practices they presage. Like several of the other novels in this round up, it’s not really reinventing the wheel, but it is engaging and entertaining, and Nevill’s prose regularly strikes a perfect balance between luxuriating in the gruesome practices it describes and clipping along briskly to keep the plot moving. It was good, and I’ll probably read more of his work.
Thanks again, Kansas City Public Library!
We close this round-up with a third print book: Blackouts by Justin Torres. The novel focuses on a young man — he gives his name as Salvatore, but this is strongly implied to be a lie — who attends the deathbed of an older one, Juan Gay; Juan lies dying in a place called the Palace, but it seems more like an institution (indeed, the two men initially met while institutionalized); Juan is in possession of a copy of Sex Variants, a mid twentieth century work on homosexuality that built on (or more properly coopted entirely) the work of Jan Gay, herself a lesbian and chronicler of queer life in the 1930s, but Juan’s copy has been redacted, blacked out to draw the poetry of queer lives out of the pathologizing text. It’s an ambitious novel, and an important one, self-consciously addressing questions of the queer archive while also engaging throughout with other works from Pedro Paramo (which I reviewed here) to Dante’s Inferno; Torres also teases the reader with tantalizing allusions to autobiography (his first novel was, notably, semi-autobiographical) but commits neither to autobiography nor history. This is a novel, and it’s genuinely one of the most satisfying, immediately alluring novels I’ve read in a long time, both for its literary quality and for its beauty as an object. I suspect I will be thinking about this one for years to come.
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That’s it, that’s all. Stay cool. Follow me and Cameron on Bluesky, or Broken Hands on Facebook and Tumblr.