Edgar's Book Round-Up, July 2024

Really loving living in a pivotal historical moment, still. Enjoying bothering my city council and my state representatives, though, and producing primary sources. It’s nice to feel some agency by, for example, sending esims to Gazans, or working locally to help people deal with extreme heat, or hounding your elected officials to do something about any of this. Here’s some books; links go to Bookshop.

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Leading off the round-up, we have Written in Red by Anne Bishop. In it, we follow Meg Corbyn as she escapes from the compound where she was raised and falls into the community of the Others, supernatural beings who live in enclaves away from humans, over whom they exercise a large measure of structural power — but Meg can’t lay low for long, and the nature of her prophetic powers is such that soon, she will have to face the crisis her escape has brought to her new community. Honestly, I found this one more frustrating than anything: there were glimmers of a cooler story and a more interesting look at the world Bishop has created, but that never quite made it to the page. I personally feel that, if you feel compelled to begin a novel with a brief history of the world, you may be fucking up a little. It was diverting, I guess, and the blatant yandere nonsense with the obligate sexy wolf-shifter tipped over into being outright funny, but I was genuinely shocked to see that this novel came out in 2013. It feels more like something that should have gone straight to MMP about 10 years before that — and if that had been the case, I might have liked it more. As it was, the vibe was very DeviantArt edgelord, down to Meg’s power requiring her to engage in self-harm. I might read more of them — because of course, there are several more of them — but I can’t say I truly enjoyed much of this on anything other than an ironic level.

The cover design reflects the style very nicely.

Fortunately, I followed it up with K. Patrick’s Mrs. S, a phenomenal coming-of-age novel whose central character would not recognize it as such — to its incredible credit. The novel follows a more or less nameless protagonist who has taken on the role of “matron” at a famed girls’ boarding school, and promptly falls in love with the headmaster’s wife, an elegant woman whose effortless femininity is at odds with the narrator’s inability to accept their own gender and, often, their own sexuality. As the narrator’s passion grows, so too does the pressing weight of the insular little school, so explicitly feminine and so implicitly bound by rules of class, culture, and nationality, until our narrator must, finally, face themself and their own desires. Patrick’s prose was, frankly, gripping: their brisk sentences bring across the narrator’s sense of being a mystery to themself, highlighting the vivid detail and papering over what the narrator cannot bear to admit. Having worked at a boarding school myself, the decision to characterize the girls throughout as “the Girls,” any one of them a “Girl” (it’s the capitalization I’m indicating, to clarify) felt very real, and the titular Mrs. S was by turns lovable, vulnerable, and manipulative, which also felt like the kind of person I’d have had a crush on in my early twenties. There’s a lot of yearning, yes, but Patrick’s prose is never sexless, and neither, blessedly, is the novel. I’d heard about this one in a review I cannot now locate, but I’m definitely looking forward to reading more of Patrick’s work.

Next up, in audiobook form, we have S. P. Q. R.: a History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard. Although occasionally divisive, in that there’s a contingent of classicists who dislike women in general, I’ve always been fond of Mary Beard: she’s a very effective writer on Roman history, communicating about that history and its culture in a way that is both academically sound and easy to read and follow. I picked this one up because I am going to be studying more Latin next school year, and wanted to refresh myself on the greatest hits of the late republic and early empire — and I could not have chosen a better source. Although the blurb describes this as a “revisionist” history, that’s a bit unfair: Beard isn’t substantially altering the events she relates and provides no new evidence for doing so. Rather, she offers a review of well-known events from the start of the republic to about 200 CE, outlining the story as it is best known and then diving in to new information that alters how one might think about these events, as well as lines of inquiry scholars are currently pursuing. It was a fun and informative read, and worked surprisingly well as an audiobook. Whether you left Roman history behind whenever it last came up in school, or are decently well-versed in the broad strokes but would like a refresher, this is an excellent book to get you back into it.

I next finished Bad Houses by John Elizabeth Stintzi, which I will discuss only briefly because it was an ARC direct from the hand of the author in the interests of me reviewing at greater length elsewhere. I mention it here to suggest that readers who share my taste pre-order it, because it’s very, very good.

Thanks again, Kansas City Public Library!

But! Moving on! I followed that with Joss Lake’s Future Feeling, also in print — and there’s a reason there’s a high number of print volumes in this round-up — after having begun it as an ebook and then not finished it before the hold was due back. The novel, which is set in an odd sort of future, follows Pen, a trans man who is unhealthily fixated on Aiden, an influencer whose beautiful body and seemingly painless transition irk him. But when Pen attempts to lay a curse on Aiden — by means of his, Pen’s, rather draggled aloe vera plant — it instead afflicts Blithe, another trans man who is thrown into the Shadowlands, when Pen and Aiden must extract him. Does it seem like there’s a lot of trans men in this story? Why yes, yes there are, and that’s why I wanted to read it: it struck me that, of the several novels I’ve read in the last while that have trans men or transmasculine characters, there’s like, one guy, and if there’s more than one of them, they don’t like each other — which really hasn’t been my experience at all. Obviously, there’s more to recommend the novel than that: Lake offers sly satire in his imagined future, with things like mood-attuned subway cars bringing a degree of whimsical prognostication to the proceedings. Equally charming, for the most part, was the Rhiz, a network of trans and queer people with, essentially, magical powers and a certain degree of funding to help other queer and trans people find their way through the Shadowlands and a variety of other ‘lands in which they may find themselves. The characters are less equipped, however, to deal with whiteness, which is sort of discussed and sort of problematized, but if anything in the novel feels underdeveloped, it’s that Lake seems to have tried to think through the intersection of whiteness, transmasculinity and, in the case of Pen, heterosexuality (i.e. Pen is a straight, white guy, except kind of not, because he is also trans and Jewish) but never quite manages to address it in a meaningful way. But that may be me expecting something from the novel that it wasn’t trying to give. I still enjoyed it, and would even recommend it for its charming observations on a world that feels very much like our own.

Really nice design work on the part of Coffee House Press on both cover and interior.

That’s enough nice things: time for Mónica Ojeda’s Nefando, which Cameron reviewed here. Like Cameron, I read Ojeda’s Jawbone first (and discussed it in my last round-up), and also like Cameron, I think Nefando landed a little better for me. The novel — more properly a novella, by length — follows a group of weird roommates living in Barcelona, as they are under investigation for producing the titular video game, available very briefly on the dark web. The game was built by El Cuco, a Spaniard and game designer in the demoscene (a word I had to look up and I do not think I am pronouncing correctly), but masterminded by three siblings ostensibly attending university, having moved their from Ecuador; also in the apartment are two Mexicans, Kiki, who is working on an erotic novel, and Ivan, who is wrestling with a lot of problems of embodiment. All of them are so thoroughly enmeshed in their own personal problems that the horror of what the Terán siblings propose, inspired by their own horrific experiences, barely rises to the level of exceptionality for them — and this is the genius of the novel. Ojeda’s exploration of internet-mediated horror, the horror of the internet, both as a construction with which we live and as a source of horror stories (everyone, and especially Ojeda, loves a copypasta) and a source of access to any horror anyone can imagine, is incredibly thoughtful, as is her exploration, buried a layer or two under the text, of what it means to have been the victim of something terrible. The flattening of every awful thing, strained through immediate and often unexpected access via the internet, is thoroughly and gracefully explored here. Nefando is not for the faint of heart — the translator’s note includes the glosses “unspeakable” or “odious,” but I think the Latin root nefas pretty much gets it — but, if you also spend a lot of time thinking about how we, as denizens of a world permeated, saturated, and mediated by the internet, experience awful things, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Next up is the audiobook that took up so much of my time this month: IT by Stephen King. I wanted to read it because I sensed, in Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Cuckoo (reviewed here) a deep connection to the novel, which I know she feels very strongly about, and I also liked the most recent movie version well enough; I’ve broadly enjoyed Stephen King’s work (as discussed here), and I figured I’d give it a go. I don’t think I’m stating a fringe opinion when I say that IT might well be King’s finest work by a wide margin, and I would even go so far as to say that it might be one of the more important novels of its era. We follow a group of friends as they are called back to their hometown by the one of their number who remained there, drawn by a blood oath undertaken as children to defeat a horrific evil that lives beneath that town. As these events unfold in the present of the novel (1985), much more of the book is concerned with the previous awakening of the titular entity in the 1950s, following the characters on the cusp of adolescence as they make their first assay against the thing. I don’t know that that summary was strictly necessary, but I did want to note the structure in play here: I knew that the film adaptations split the two time periods, but I did not expect to be so viscerally annoyed about it. King’s structure and pacing are incredible, and the novel really zips along (despite being a chungus of a novel and a 45ish-hour audiobook), balancing the horrors, both supernatural and man-made, that the children face against their effects in their adult lives. I also joked with friends that King was playing to his strengths, in essentially saying, “You know what I feel nostalgia for but also know was super fucked up? AMERICA and the 1950s.” Incredible too is how the novel both positions racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry (especially fatphobia) as central evils while also showing the characters engaging in them in a way that feels very real. Not to come in with hot takes, but: great novel. 10/10.

I really liked the stripped-down cover design of this one.

In taking advantage of Bookshop’s annual fuck-Amazon-Prime-Day event, I purchased a copy of Bram E. Gieben’s The Darkest Timeline: Living in a World with No Future. I was excited about it partially because I am excited about Revol press, which seems to be leaning into some cool stuff (by which I basically mean accessible theory); I understand Gieben runs a podcast but we all know I don’t listen to those. In any case, Darkest Timeline takes the form of a series of reflections on the plethora of terrors under which we currently live. I’ll admit, it never quite cohered for me, though I’m not sure it was meant to; the last two essays, which reflect on the Backrooms and corporate takeover of city centers and making things safe for brands and utterly inimical to human life, were by far the strongest. I also appreciate a good Conspiracy Against the Human Race reference, which Gieben provided. I’m still mulling this one over, and I read it fairly quickly; I suspect, though, that I’ll be returning to it in future (assuming, you know, that there is one).

I wasn’t initially sold on this cover design situation, but it’s growing on me the more I think about it.

As a gift from Cameron, I had recently received a copy of Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi, which is the final print book in this round-up. The novel follows a kaleidoscope of characters through a brutal 36 hours in New Lagos, a thinly veiled version of regular Lagos, as their lives are, to a one, upended entirely: focusing around the dissolution of Aima and Kalu’s four-year relationship, the titular rot seeps through everyone in the story. Long-time readers will recall that I love Emezi’s writing, and this one was no exception, right down to only taking me a day or two to finish despite having to, you know, go to work and stuff. Watching them grow and change as a writer has been exceptionally rewarding, and while Little Rot offers no happy endings — seriously, if you got into them with You Made a Fool of Death… you will not like this one — it’s interesting to consider in contrast to works like Freshwater, which was very heady, focused on the author’s own ontology and its flourishing. Even as the situations the characters face become increasingly dangerous and sexually fraught, Emezi reserves their greatest prose for sensual pleasures: the feeling of silk and precious metals, the scent of flowers in a window box, the taste of fanciful pastries. These moments of unbridled and unrepentant pleasure pierce the darkness of the novel like stars, making the awful things the characters endure and force others to endure feel even darker by their presence. Emezi is, as always, a delight to read.

We close this round-up with another audiobook: Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate. I read and enjoyed Mexican Gothic and Certain Dark Things (and reviewed them here and here, respectively, which also leads me to note that it’s funny that three times now, audiobooks of Moreno-Garcia’s works have been the last ones I finished in a month), but Silver Nitrate was very much My Shit(TM), and has definitely made me a fan. In it, we follow Montserrat, a curmudgeonly sound editor, and Tristan, a washed-up soap opera star, as they become embroiled in the mystery surrounding horror director Abel Urueta’s unfinished final film — and the dark magic that inspired it. Urueta claims the film was cowritten by a Nazi-sympathizing occultist, and the fact that the film was unfinished has left him accursed, but in their attempts to learn the truth of the matter, Tristan and Montserrat find their own lives spiraling badly. In addition to being a love letter to the horror films of the twentieth century (up to 1993, the year in which the novel is set), and a pacy supernatural thriller, Silver Nitrate is also on a meaningful level a very good book about magic and how it works. Often, I found myself thinking about John Bellairs’ House with a Clock in Its Walls, which is one of my all-time favorites in that genre, so I hope the magnitude of the comparison is clear. Moreno-Garcia’s conjuring of her setting, as well as the characters’ experiences in the film and television industries, felt really lived-in, too. It was a very good way to close out the month.

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That’s all for now. You can follow me and Cameron on Bluesky, or Broken Hands on Facebook and Tumblr. I also recently made the switch from Goodreads to The Storygraph, and you can follow me there, as well, if you want.