i got my hands on an early finished copy (♥ you, nightfire!) and LO! just like Nettle & Bone, there's a little spoNOW AVAILABLE!
**********************
i got my hands on an early finished copy (♥ you, nightfire!) and LO! just like Nettle & Bone, there's a little spooky-shiny surprise hiding underneath that gorgeous dust jacket
[image]
and some kickass endpapers
[image]
nightfire is KILLING IT!
**********************
i had food poisoning recently and spent the day in bed reading. first i read the poe-medley that was The Last Laugh, and then i read this one, which i had just gotten in the mail the previous day, making all the books that have been sitting here unread for months n' years SO MAD.
it was a risky decision, though, because this one is ALSO poe-themed, and i was worried that i would get the two books mixed up in my dum-dum brain, or that i might get so poe-saturated that i wouldn't be able to enjoy this book, which i'd been looking forward to almost violently ever since i first glimpsed its stunning cover, which is gonna be such great shelf-buddies with this book when it comes out:
[image][image]
fortunately, t. kingfisher always comes through, and this The Fall of the House of Usher rework was nothing like The Last Laugh's treatment of the same source material, so they didn't meld in my brain, and there was room for both in my heart.
which brings me to the author's note. sure, it may be unconventional to call out the author's note before talking about any part of the book (besides that cover), but bear with me. raaar.
so, you know how fungal horror is, like, a thing now?
well, What Moves the Dead is also about fungi—in fact, it opens with a particularly unpleasant description of a particularly unpleasant mushroom, and the fungus is among us until the very end.
but, so kingfisher was blithely writing this book, gaining steam and pleased with her progress...
...and then I happened to read the magnificent novel Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and thought, "Oh my God, what can I possibly do with fungi in a collapsing Gothic house that Moreno-Garcia didn't do ten times better?!" and shoved the whole thing in a virtual drawer and took heavily to the bottle. (Seriously, put down this book and go buy that one. Then pick this one up again, of course, God forbid anyone not finish the Author's Note, but make sure you've put Mexican Gothic on your reading list.)
But.
Well.
As writers say to each other, "Yes, it's been done, but you haven't done it yet."...and also my fungus was different, dammit...
i find it absolutely delicious that kingfisher, who has written a billion excellent books, is both (unnecessarily) concerned about her writing not measuring up and also so generously enthusiastic about other people's writing, but the main takeaway from that is even if you're all fungi-d out, take a note from my poe-athon and make some room in your heart for this one.
you won't need to make much room; this is trim and streamlined—a gothic novella stripped of the genre's usual hundred or so pages spent shadowing the heroine as she stumbles down corridors weighed down by dread and restrictive undergarments.
here, we have the magnificent lieutenant easton, who is gendered as a soldier, not by their plumbing, and tho' they do become weighed down by dread after being summoned to ruravia—the location of the crumbling manor house inherited by their "genteelly impoverished" childhood friends roderick and madeline usher—"dread" is the only rational reaction to what they find on their arrival: roderick whittled down to the bone, madeline so very pale and wispishly addled, the grounds riddled with staggering hares, the pondfish bursting with slimy fibers, the waters around them aglow.
but soldiers don't let dread (or tinnitus) prevent them from taking action, and along with eugenia potter (aunt to beatrix, illustrator and would-be mycologist, if females were permitted to mushroom), dr. denton (but not the pajamas), and angus; easton's batman (but not the emo superhero), easton and what's left of the usher siblings investigate the puzzle of what's rotten in ruravia, and What! Moves! the! Dead!
t. kingfisher never needs to worry about taking the well-trod road, because even when she does, her style and skill make her the most memorable traveler, so even when you know where she's going, you'll enjoy the journey AND the destination.
i got my hands on an early finished copy (♥ you, nightfire!) and LO! just like Nettle & Bone, there's a little spooky-shiny surprise hiding underneath that gorgeous dust jacket
[image]
and some kickass endpapers
[image]
nightfire is KILLING IT!
**********************
i had food poisoning recently and spent the day in bed reading. first i read the poe-medley that was The Last Laugh, and then i read this one, which i had just gotten in the mail the previous day, making all the books that have been sitting here unread for months n' years SO MAD.
it was a risky decision, though, because this one is ALSO poe-themed, and i was worried that i would get the two books mixed up in my dum-dum brain, or that i might get so poe-saturated that i wouldn't be able to enjoy this book, which i'd been looking forward to almost violently ever since i first glimpsed its stunning cover, which is gonna be such great shelf-buddies with this book when it comes out:
[image][image]
fortunately, t. kingfisher always comes through, and this The Fall of the House of Usher rework was nothing like The Last Laugh's treatment of the same source material, so they didn't meld in my brain, and there was room for both in my heart.
which brings me to the author's note. sure, it may be unconventional to call out the author's note before talking about any part of the book (besides that cover), but bear with me. raaar.
so, you know how fungal horror is, like, a thing now?
well, What Moves the Dead is also about fungi—in fact, it opens with a particularly unpleasant description of a particularly unpleasant mushroom, and the fungus is among us until the very end.
but, so kingfisher was blithely writing this book, gaining steam and pleased with her progress...
...and then I happened to read the magnificent novel Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and thought, "Oh my God, what can I possibly do with fungi in a collapsing Gothic house that Moreno-Garcia didn't do ten times better?!" and shoved the whole thing in a virtual drawer and took heavily to the bottle. (Seriously, put down this book and go buy that one. Then pick this one up again, of course, God forbid anyone not finish the Author's Note, but make sure you've put Mexican Gothic on your reading list.)
But.
Well.
As writers say to each other, "Yes, it's been done, but you haven't done it yet."...and also my fungus was different, dammit...
i find it absolutely delicious that kingfisher, who has written a billion excellent books, is both (unnecessarily) concerned about her writing not measuring up and also so generously enthusiastic about other people's writing, but the main takeaway from that is even if you're all fungi-d out, take a note from my poe-athon and make some room in your heart for this one.
you won't need to make much room; this is trim and streamlined—a gothic novella stripped of the genre's usual hundred or so pages spent shadowing the heroine as she stumbles down corridors weighed down by dread and restrictive undergarments.
here, we have the magnificent lieutenant easton, who is gendered as a soldier, not by their plumbing, and tho' they do become weighed down by dread after being summoned to ruravia—the location of the crumbling manor house inherited by their "genteelly impoverished" childhood friends roderick and madeline usher—"dread" is the only rational reaction to what they find on their arrival: roderick whittled down to the bone, madeline so very pale and wispishly addled, the grounds riddled with staggering hares, the pondfish bursting with slimy fibers, the waters around them aglow.
but soldiers don't let dread (or tinnitus) prevent them from taking action, and along with eugenia potter (aunt to beatrix, illustrator and would-be mycologist, if females were permitted to mushroom), dr. denton (but not the pajamas), and angus; easton's batman (but not the emo superhero), easton and what's left of the usher siblings investigate the puzzle of what's rotten in ruravia, and What! Moves! the! Dead!
t. kingfisher never needs to worry about taking the well-trod road, because even when she does, her style and skill make her the most memorable traveler, so even when you know where she's going, you'll enjoy the journey AND the destination.
this is a gothic-historical science fiction rework of The Island of Dr. Moreau, set in 1871-1877 and transplanting the broad outline oNOW AVAILABLE!!!
this is a gothic-historical science fiction rework of The Island of Dr. Moreau, set in 1871-1877 and transplanting the broad outline of wells' classic tale of messin' with science to the yucatan peninsula, a region rife with conflict and rebellions.
carlota moreau has spent her whole life on her beloved father's property where, along with gloomy-drunk overseer montgomery laughton, she cares for the human-animal hybrids her father has created and she considers extended family.
these hybrids are not brute beasts—although their appearances are shocking, with their animal features and abilities, they are capable of speech and higher thought, and help run the estate; a beautiful, sprawling property, isolated for reasons.
dr. moreau's experiments are financed by his wealthy patron hernando lizaldes, who has supplied money to fund his own desire for workers more manageable than humans, but he is becoming frustrated by moreau's lack of progress in that department.
mistakes were made. secrets were kept. and when lizaldes' bratty son eduardo arrives, falling for carlota and getting in the way of montgomery's unexpressed, unrequited love for her, things are bound to go badly.
like Mexican Gothic, this is a spectacularly atmospheric character-driven set piece, and it contains many paradoxes—it's a fast read that builds slowly toward its conclusion, where it explodes with an unexpected, tho' somehow also inevitable, revelation.
if you're into retellings and genre mashups with sweeping social and psychological themes, this one's a keeper.
Maybe everyone has a story, but not everyone was interviewed by Barbara Walters at age twelve, cross-legged on a couch in a red dress
NOW AVAILABLE!!!
Maybe everyone has a story, but not everyone was interviewed by Barbara Walters at age twelve, cross-legged on a couch in a red dress and Mary Janes, skin still red from stomach acid, getting chastised for her wantonness. Not everyone was in a Western 45 Gun Company handgun ad just to pay the hospital bills. Not that I was the one who shot him. Not everyone is the fictionalized star of pedo-erotic-true-crime fan fiction and actual porn, posted on the deep corners of the internet, some version of me wandering around a subdivision in pigtails naked, save for a red-hooded cape.
this was a three-star-read for me, but it's a high three stars. not to be confused with three high stars:
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i love fairy tale retellings, especially when familiar stories are transplanted into contemporary times, forcing the modern reader to re-examine the messages we've been passing down unthinkingly through the generations, many of which are, as they say, problematic, even in their softened, disneyfied forms. lots of happy endings for women kissed sans active consent by powerful men whilst deeply comatose, ladies choosing to relinquish their power of speech to be with a man, women punished for their curiosity, for running late, for talking to strangers—fairy tales are not typically great for females.
i'm not sure if angela carter was the first, but she was certainly one of the pioneers in the "feminist reclamation of fairy tales" genre, which somehow, despite a finite pool of source material from which to draw, is still thriving as authors find inventive ways to build new stories on the canon's bones.
the creative hook to this one is centered around a therapy group for women who had once upon a time lived through a variation of a familiar fairy-tale scenario; girls who grew up to become women deeply scarred by their traumatic experiences, which are reclassed here largely as true crime stories: a woman married to a blue-bearded billionaire serial killer, a girl who saved herself and her brother by murdering the woman who kidnapped them, a girl seduced by a predator on her way to visit her grandmother.
because if anyone's gonna need some therapy, it'll be someone who was swallowed up (if only temporarily) by a killer masquerading as a trusted relative. and the formerly little red ruby's...not doing so well. her riding hood(ie) story is reshaped as an encounter with a sexual predator, flattered and manipulated by a wolfish creature in an interaction that reminded me very much of the highly uncomfortable must-read graphic novel Panther. here, we see her grown up to become a wayward substance-abusing cutter; sarcastic, self-destructive and self-effacing—always sweaty, always hungry, wearing a truly grotesque fur coat made of the wolf who consumed her and drawn to debasing casual sex with men drawn to her damage.
Emil and I have this on-again, off-again storage-closet romance. "Romance" is a strong word for it. He sometimes nonexclusively jams his junk down my throat over lunch breaks until I can't breathe.
Emil has the personality of a drunken pirate trying to clean up his act. For three weeks out of each month, he treats me like a siren trying to shipwreck him. When he's exhausted himself from abstaining, he'll reappear with that hungry, wanting look. Later, he'll pawn it off as a moment of weakness that was my fault, saying things like "Well, when you wear that dress" or "You finally washed your hair." We keep doing it, just like that, in a way that's annoyingly unstoppable, like how you find yourself singing along to a crappy pop song on the radio that you unfortunately know by heart.
ruby is just one of the women assembled into this group by the blandly inoffensive will—a therapist with an ulterior motive. well, two ulterior motives, and one icky, sticky secret. his (stated) objective is to provide a safe place for these women to share their experiences with others like them; survivors of unusual and horrific circumstances whose details were salaciously media-twisted, their lives raked over the coals of public opinion and spoiler alert—they are a judgy bunch.
"To be honest, I thought Gretel, of all people, would get it," says Ruby. "We both escaped being eaten for lunch, just to have the media eat us for dinner."
the women come to the group for their own personal reasons and hounded by their own personal demons, but will's sales-pitch-goal for them is empowerment—taking back their stories from the spotlight of their abusers and the media’s framing of them as complicit in their own victimhood, or presenting reductive versions of themselves defined solely by their trauma, their rescue, their proximity to real-world horror.
so, these are revisionist fairytales of women whose experiences were already revised by scandal-hungry media; their lives exploited for the titillation of viewers, news cycles splaying out their worst days before abandoning them, rapidly moving on to the next bleeding story without pausing to consider what happens to these individuals afterwards; the real people behind the true crime stories, the "where are they now?" survivors carrying on living after their experiences have been scrutinized and dissected into unrecognizable form: Sensational or sanitized, there's no middle ground.
this book is the middle ground.
the best backstories here are ruby's and bernice's, who is surrounded by the chattering voices of her blue-bearded husband's former lovers, now trapped in the objects he made from their bodies, finding herself guilty by association; lumped into the crimes she had no idea he had committed...until she did.
In my new neighborhood bodega, the cashier stared, then looked over near the window. I followed his eyes to a display of newspapers and tabloids. I picked up a paper where an op-ed headline read WHEN CURIOSITY KILLS, as if opening the door had been the real deathblow. A tabloid had a photo of me on the cover, on the day of the funeral, wearing a dark navy dress, almost smirking under a rainbow umbrella. TRUE BLUE! The headline shouted in bold lettering. The subheading: BLUEBEARD'S GIRLFRIEND STANDS BY HER MAN.
I was always a reference point for someone else. I was born into the last name of a father I hardly knew, in school I was always my sister's little sister, in the mansion Andrea had called me Taylor, and now I was the nameless possessive of some stupidly named serial killer.
"Wearing navy to the funeral," said one apparent expert in an unnamed field," suggests that she's still aligning herself with Bluebeard." They write about me as if I'd attended the funeral of a mistress I was complicit in murdering. They compared me to the smiling wives of cheating politicians and the adoring fans of death-row inmates.
i also enjoyed ashlee's story, an outlier in that she's not attached to a specific fairytale, but is kind of catch-all for every "happily ever after" princess story—the winner of a Bachelor-style reality dating show called The One, who got her prince but was emphatically not a fan favorite.
hers is a wonderfully caustic behind-the-scenes look at reality show production—the manipulation and grooming and sneaky editing. i have never seen The Bachelor because i am a monster who hates love, but the whole grueling process, the women blindfolded, sequestered, transported to undisclosed locations like prisoners of war was fascinating and also horrifying. and that "prince" was certainly no prize.
gretel's story was the weakest of the bunch and for whatever reason adelmann decided to be very cagey about disclosing raina's identity until the Big Reveal, so i'll respect that choice, but overall, while i enjoyed the witty observations and commentary, the parts didn't cohere into a satisfying whole.
the premise and the individual stories were great, but it needed more connective tissue to make the big-picture story work; to make this operate as a novel instead of a loosely-bound story collection. my issue isn't with the writing, it's with the construction. she's got a strong concept, it's funny and there are some sharp insights, but it mostly just scratches the surface of its themes of gendered power structures, identity, and the squickiness of true crime as entertainment without developing it into anything more than raised questions.
YMMV, of course, and my inability to be over-the-moon-wowed by this is probably because i've pretty recently read These Women and Notes on an Execution, where the whole "taking the narrative away from the serial killer to focus on the lives of his victims/survivors/women surrounding his story" offered much more thorough explorations of the theme, and More Than You'll Ever Know did an excellent job examining our obsession with true crime in general.
as far as this one goes: great cover, great moments, good book.
A river of black, wet earth and pebbles and moss and tiny blind helpless worms erupts out of Eurydice’s smile, splattering so hard onto his mother’s p
A river of black, wet earth and pebbles and moss and tiny blind helpless worms erupts out of Eurydice’s smile, splattering so hard onto his mother’s perfect plate that it cracks down the middle, and dirt pools out across the table and the worms nose mutely at the crusts of the almost-burnt toast.
He clenches his teeth as he clears the dishes. Eurydice stares up at him, her eyes swimming with apologies.
“It’s fine,” he says, curt and flat. “It’s fine.”
this is a chillingly beautiful rework of the orpheus/eurydice myth. in the original, you will recall, orpheus' attempt to rescue his dearly departed bride from the underworld soured when he disobeyed the pretty straightforward instructions to not turn around and look at her until they were well out of hades, and when he did, she was swooshed back down to the land of the dead.
this is what happens when you don't look back. it is much, much worse.
valente's version unfolds in close third person, following orpheus' POV through his new life with his corpse-bride, her decaying body really putting a strain on their relationship.
it's a very modern adaptation—eurydice in a smiths t-shirt drinking lamb's blood microwaved by her rock star spouse, and it features a number of cameo appearances by familiar-but-tweaked characters—sisyphus in a t-shirt that says Rock ’n’ Roll Forever, cerberus as an emotional support dog, prometheus lighting everyone's cigarettes, etc.
some of these little easter eggs were great, some a little too on the nose, but i appreciate that she included so many in-jokes for those familiar with the story or those fluent in ancient greek (or fluent in googling ancient greek*) i'm sure i missed a bunch of references—what, pray tell, is the significance of all the vintage star wars glassware?
DIGRESSION: when i finished reading this story, i did a little refresher on the original myth, to see if i could catch any more of the references, and i discovered that orpheus' father is, in some versions, king oeagrus of thrace, but in others, it is apollo. which, yes, makes him eurydice's half-brother. i don't know if that matters when the d in the dna stands for 'deity,' and considering how free with the d those olde timey gods were, everyone's sharing some of the same god-genes, but it's an interesting detail new to me.
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"ewwww, NO, eurydice! you're my sister! sometimes."
END OF DIGRESSION
anyway, if you aren't familiar with the source material, you can read this as a story about a relationship that should have ended a long time ago—after all, marriage is hard enough when both participants are alive and don't need to be scrubbed of persistent mold on a regular basis. true love never dies &yadda, but this is not a love story, and their relationship is more toxic than any of the stuff oozing out of poor eurydice. orpheus is a shitty husband—a golden boy whose music was so powerful that "the world opened itself up to him like a jewelry box," and he's an entitled and selfish man resentful of eurydice's lack of gratitude for bringing her back to the living world.
She didn’t even thank him for making her breakfast. He doesn’t want that to annoy him the way it does, but he can’t shake it. She owes him. She owes him so much.
his attitude is even more reprehensible when it becomes clear—to everyone but him—that he's holding on, not to who she was before she died, but to the idea of who she was before she died. to him, eurydice is "adoration in human form," and he doesn't care about how she feels, but how she made him feel. the very foundation of their love story is rotten:
He was famous. She was beautiful. What else did anyone need? They were young and it was easy. Orpheus saw himself as he knew he could be reflected back at him in that heated, shimmering stare. He wanted it. He wanted that ease forever. He wanted himself as she saw him.
Just because he went home with a maenad that night and had to be reminded of her name when they met again a month later doesn’t make it any less love at first sight.
Orpheus has repeatedly explained that to their therapist.
their new reality takes some getting used to, and although eurydice frequently comes across as passive and pliable, there are sharp moments where her bitterness pokes through.
She runs a couple of miles a night, hood drawn up, headphones in. It tenderizes the meat. Orpheus has tried to tell her it isn’t safe for her to be out alone. She laughed in his face.
one of the most intriguing things about the story is how little we know about "this" eurydice. because this is all told through the might-as-well-be-narcissus perspective of orpheus, we only get tantalizing glimpses of her life in their therapy sessions (bruises on her arm the night they met whose origins are undisclosed-but-hinted-at, her own abandoned musical aspirations he knows nothing about).
she doesn't get much of a voice, but she certainly has a presence, and the hair dryer scene'll rip your heart out.
she only gets one extended speech, delivered towards the end of this story, but it's a killer.
(view spoiler)[“Why didn’t you turn around?” Eurydice whispers.
Orpheus tells the truth. “I knew you were there, baby. I never doubted it for a minute.”
Children yell and play in the neighbors’ gardens, high-pitched giggles fizzing up into the streetlights. “You didn’t know. You assumed I was there. Behind you. Like I’d always been there. Behind you. You couldn’t even imagine that I might not do as I was told, that I might not be where you wanted me to be, the moment you wanted it. That was my place, and you assumed I would be in it. What in your life has ever gone any way other than as you wished it?” (hide spoiler)]
oops, i accidentally wrote a long review for a short story.
* although eurydice's menin aiede qea sweater required an extra step; the phrase—according to some guy on the internet—is a conflation of two different translations of the iliad's opening line: menin aeide thea and MHNIN AIEDE QEA. why all-caps? i don't know; ask that guy on the internet.
fulfilling my 2021 goal to read one book each month by an author i love that i haven’t gotten around to reading yet
this beauty and the beast retellingfulfilling my 2021 goal to read one book each month by an author i love that i haven’t gotten around to reading yet
this beauty and the beast retelling is the very antidote i needed to erase the last B&B adaptation i read from my brain: For the Wolf, in which an incurious would-be heroine meanders through her captivity in an increasingly unstable environment while an uncommunicative semi-immortal man refuses to tell her how to help him keep the chaos at bay. and then they kiss and stuff.
this one is so much more to my liking, with a heroine who is efficient and level-headed, and a romance that is earned by *gasp* communication, conversation, getting to know one another, instead of a young woman's near-pathological fixation on what the love interest smells like and how his hair looks.
the lode-bearing parts of this story are pretty faithful to the beauty/beast original, with some modifications. first off, bryony is no beauty, and she's perfectly fine with that fact. secondly, she is not a virgin sacrifice (nor even a virgin) gifted to the beast by The Patriarch. here she stumbles half-frozen into her own fate—taking shelter from a blizzard in an enormous, seemingly unoccupied though well-kept house that seems to magically anticipate her needs. bryony and her horse fumblefoot eat, drink, rest and revive and, before departing for home, she takes a rose from the table for her sister ivy, whereupon the beast appears, reluctantly informing her* that this transgression has consequences and she belongs to the house now, ignorantia legis neminem excusat &yadda. he permits her to return home for a week to say her goodbyes to her beloved sisters and her even more beloved garden, and to pack anything she might require to make her new surroundings more tolerable.
to her credit, she doesn't weep or strategize how to avoid her fate—as practical as a jane austen heroine, she accepts her punishment and honors the rules.
her willingness to accept this situation makes sense because she's already experienced some significant upheaval in her life; her prospects for her future narrowed when her father lost their fortune and died in disgrace, leaving his three daughters alone to fend for themselves and bryony happier for it.
"When everything was sold, and all we had left was a cottage so far away that nobody wanted it...I stopped feeling miserable. It was like I'd come out the other side. I remember this kind of crazy exhilaration as we left the city."
"Because we were finally leaving?" asked Holly, the teacup forgotten halfway to her mouth.
"A little. But more..." Bryony spread her arms. "If that could happen to us, if we could be rich and then suddenly have nothing—if life could change that much, overnight—then anything could happen. Birds could turn into fish. The sun could rise at midnight. I could learn to fly. The world was obviously wilder and stranger than anyone knew. And there was nothing left to lose. Nobody could take anything from us, because we didn't have anything left to take. I felt invincible."
bryony was never interested in marriage and was relieved to be out of the courtship game—she shared her equally unpretty sister holly's exhaustion of entertaining suitors halfheartedly pretending they were desirable for their merits instead of their money. their youngest sister ivy was pretty and girly and loved all that fairytale stuff, but all bryony wanted was to be in her comfy gardening clothes with dirt under her nails.
a passionate gardener who hated roses even before one sealed her fate, the only things she brings to her new home are plants and seeds, turning a small portion of the beast's sprawling grounds into her own botanical paradise.
once ensconced in the house, in the most emphatically pink room of all time, bryony soon discerns that she is not the beast's prisoner; that they are both prisoners to...something else, possibly the house itself, as it clearly has a personality and a sense of humor to go along with its magical abilities.
the beast can't tell her much about whatever sinister force is keeping them imprisoned together, but—unlike the tight-lipped fellow in For the Wolf, it's not that he won't, but that he can't—each time he comes too close to divulging too much, the house makes its displeasure pretty clear until the beast walks it back placatingly.
bryony clocks the rules pretty fast and becomes a proactive and resourceful investigator, soon finding a way around these restrictions in order to figure out how to lift this curse and get back to her life.
but overall, although she misses her sisters, it's not a terrible place to be. she has her garden, the house can summon anything she could possibly want, and the beast has a kickass library. a booknerd whose own library was greatly diminished by her family's financial ruin, she's delighted by the beast's shelves, although a little embarrassed at the sheer greed that the Beast's library awoke in her.
in short, she acclimates, becoming part of her surroundings without losing herself to them. she has no interest in the frilly pink dresses and jewels the house keeps laying out on her bed, but she's gracious enough to make some concessions and endure what she can, meeting the house's sartorial preferences halfway. she also gets used to the beast; their compatibility surfacing in unexpected ways, familiarity breeding respect and understanding, and bryony's kind enough to try to make the beast feel less self-conscious about his physical appearance. although he attends the formal dinner every evening, he will not eat in front of her, out of consideration for her likely disgust having to watch a beast eat. eventually, she makes him get over his damn self:
"You might as well pour yourself one," she said wearily. "Ask the house for a bowl or something."
He stiffened. "It is—"
"Unsightly, I know. Beast, does it matter? You are what you are. I promise that I will not be horrified if you lap your wine instead of sipping it." She rubbed a hand over her eyes. "Perhaps I should beg your pardon for sipping it. Who is to say which one of us is doing it correctly?"
their blossoming relationship is perfect, made up of playful banter that develops into a genuine appreciation for each other's company, even as she turns down his nightly, curse-ordered marriage proposals.
the ending is very different from the original, traveling some very dark ground before resolving in a satisfying and fitting conclusion even better than the original happily ever after. and one MUCH better than For the Wolf. if only all romances were as genuine and un-gooshy as this, i might like 'em more...
* after this outstanding meet-cutewet too long to quote in the body of the review, that showcases everything that makes these two characters so appealing, and reason #138 of Why I Love T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon:
"I never faint," she said aloud. "I consider it revolting. I have no patience for women who faint." She pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers.
"On the contrary," rumbled the voice of the Beast, "I felt that your skull bounced most charmingly on the carpet...And the way in which you soiled yourself with terror was graceful in the extreme," added the Beast.
Bryony's eyes flew open and she sat bolt upright, ignoring the ringing in her ears and the immediate stabbing pain behind her eyes. "I did not!" she cried, and then the smell hit her, and she realized that she had.
"It is not right that I am going to be both dead and mortified," she told the Beast. "Either kill me now or give me a change of underwear."
He was kneeling down, which put his head on a level with Bryony's. His golden eyes were cool and sardonic and amused.
"I am not going to kill you. And I fear that I do not carry women's underwear about my person."
"You are not a gentleman!" cried Bryony. It was not that she was too furious to be afraid, it was that fury was sitting on top of the terror and riding it like a horse.
...it was a foolish thing, a childish thing, to think that monsters only showed their teeth at nigh
NOW AVAILABLE! JUST IN TIME FOR SPOOKTOBER!
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...it was a foolish thing, a childish thing, to think that monsters only showed their teeth at night.
even though my brain knows that The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is set in new york, it FEELS like such a new englandy story, and growing up, whenever the wretched summer finally ended, making way for the cozier fall; the leaves flaring before crisping, the scent of autumnal spices on the air, there you would find young karen, sipping warm cider on a horse-drawn haunted hayride, listening to someone read aloud the tale of ichabod crane and the headless horseman.
because of this, i've always had a nostalgic fondness for the story, so i was over the moon excited to read this book—the cover gave me full-body shivers, and i loved henry's Lost Boy: The True Story of Captain Hook and was excited to see where she'd take this material.
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i didn't...love this one.
there's not much retelling going on here. it's more of a "what came after" story that checks in on sleepy hollow twenty years later, when brom and katrina's fourteen-year-old grandchild ben starts questioning what she's been told about her parents' deaths and the legend of the horseman.
it started off so well, giving me vibes like The Village
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Very little about Sleepy Hollow had changed since its founding. It was like the Hollow was caught inside a soap bubble, or maybe a spell—always the same, never growing or changing. There weren't even that many visitors, generally—people sometimes passed through, but they rarely stayed. Any newcomer was like grit in the Hollow's eye, and the people of the village would rub at it until the grit was removed.
but there's no big payoff-reveal here, no revisionist slant taking what we thought we knew about sleepy hollow and refracting its light in another direction, the way she subverted our good/evil assumptions of Peter Pan in Lost Boy: The True Story of Captain Hook (and, presumably, in her other retellings, all of which i have bought and are still sitting here unread.)
this village-as-isolated-snowglobe scenario is simply establishing the scene—an outsider-wary village whose people accept magic and the supernatural as a fact of life.
Sleepy Hollow believed in spirits and demons, because they lived side by side with those beings. The people of the town believed in magic. And why wouldn't they? Magic was woven into the fabric of the Hollow. It drifted in the air. It rode through the night on a fast horse.
the headless horseman does indeed ride through these pages, but the more immediate, kid-chomping threat is...something else, so the story is less a reimagining of the source material than henry taking the original and tacking a narrative branch onto it.
there are actually two horsemen here—the one that ichabod crane encountered, whose story has become part of the village's mythos (and it confirms what washington irving insinuated about the horseman's identity in the original tale), but there’s also an enigmatic quasi-spectral horseback'ed figure who seems fixated on young ben, his intentions a combination of sinister and protective.
more than anything else, this is ben's story. ben is an orphan being raised by her grandparents. she idolizes brom, and is impatient with katrina, specifically with katrina's insistence on her dressing like a girl, keeping out of the mud and being ladylike, when ben has never felt like a girl, preferring boy's clothing and pursuits to the suffocating expectations of smalltown womanhood.
but ben's destiny lies elsewhere.
and as far as that goes, this is a very good book about yearning, and becoming, but the indifferent scaffolding of the horseman tale makes this pretty flimsy, storywise.
people who accept magic’s existence don't necessarily embrace it with open arms, especially when their children start dying, and ben's otherness soon becomes a liability.
In little villages like ours, those who don't fit in were cast out.
this didn't have to be a sleepy hollow-rework. it could have been set in any small town where "different" means "dangerous," it could just as easily have been a retelling of The Crucible. in fact, one of the best parts is ben's slow-dawning realization about what, specifically, all of katrina's dismay over ben's gender nonconformity and her attempts at behavioral adjustments have been trying to prevent.
I recognized that grief had driven him mad. I also knew, with a deep uneasiness, that any accusations of witchcraft might be taken seriously by the people of the village.
as a headless horseman adaptation, this missed the mark for me, but the guts of the story are sound, and i really enjoyed the character relationships and ben's whole achin' to be struggle.
i'm flickering between 3 and 4 on this, but if we're judging a book by its cover, it's an easy five.
last year, amy(other amy) tipped me off to this cool thing she was doing: the short story advent calendar, where you sign WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
last year, amy(other amy) tipped me off to this cool thing she was doing: the short story advent calendar, where you sign up to this thingie here and you get a free story each day.
i dropped the ball and by the time i came to my senses, it had already sold out, so for december project, i'm going rogue and just reading a free online story a day of my choosing. this foolhardy endeavor is going to screw up my already-deep-in-the-weeds review backlog, so i don't think i will be reviewing each individual story "properly;" i can't be treating each short story like a real book and spending half my day examining and dissecting it, so we'll just see what shape this project takes as we go.
and if you know of any particularly good short stories available free online, let me know! i'm no good at finding them myself unless they're on the tor.com site, and i only have enough at this stage of the game to fill half my calendar. <--- that part is no longer true, but i am still interested in getting suggestions!
DECEMBER 13
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Everything that lives can have jaws that bite and claws that catch, if the need is dire enough.
this is SO MUCH FUN!
it's a standalone set in a the world of well-known children's story, so it's all the spooky joy of mcguire without any anxiety that you might be missing out on references if you haven't read any of her UF series. which may be a fear only i have, or had, when i first saw this one.
it has all the strengths of her kind of characters, with a nice fairytale feel to it in its language and themes, and even its cadence at times:
When I was very small, no more than a comma of a creature compared to the pages and paragraphs of my parents, they used to tell me stories of the world outside the wood. “It’s terrible there,” said my mother, shivering. “Their sense is nonsense, and their nonsense is sense. You can trust nothing outside the wood. Nothing. All of it waits only to destroy you.”
“It’s terrible there,” said my father, with eyes like chips of ice, so cold that they burned. “Their truths are lies, and their lies are truth. You can believe nothing outside the wood. Nothing. All of it waits only to disprove you.”
wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, i loved it to pieces.
if she has any others that are standalones and suitable for this project, lemme know, please!
I want a brandy, and then another brandy, and then another brandy after that. Then I want to start drinking.
i don't love hemingway. i don't love harryI want a brandy, and then another brandy, and then another brandy after that. Then I want to start drinking.
i don't love hemingway. i don't love harry turtledove. so how do YOU predict i would feel about a story by harry turtledove reimagining The Sun Also Rises, with...a twist?
well, in case you are someone who thinks four stars is a BAD rating, allow me to translate my rating and surprise you with the fact that i really liked it! i read this out of desperation—there was no new free tor shorty posted this week, so i had to go back into the archives to find one i hadn't read, and after searching for aaaages, i reluctantly chose this one. and since we're being honest, i totally chose it for the 'cover.'
which is outstanding, although somewhat misleading.
anyway, i'm certainly glad i reread The Sun Also Rises pretty recently. t-dove's homage hits all of the sparknotes plot points while also doing a slow striptease reveal of his version's MAJOR DIFFERENCES. cringe at all of the proper nouns, but the rest of it is surprisingly fun, with some sadtwinges w/r/t the almost.
oooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best mystery & thriller 2021! WHAT WILL HAPPEN LET’S FIND OUT!
"My Jane," he says, his voice low and rough,
oooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best mystery & thriller 2021! WHAT WILL HAPPEN LET’S FIND OUT!
"My Jane," he says, his voice low and rough, and I swallow hard, nothing feigned now, no illusion.
"I'm not yours," I manage to say. "I'm free as a fucking bird."
now, this is a jane eyre i can get behind. you may groan and growl, with your do we really need another retelling of Jane Eyre?
and i say YES!
it’s a breezy adaptation, set amongst alabama's idle rich, whose gossipy tongues start wagging once the help—their neighborhood's plain-jane dogwalker—catches the eye of the recently-widowed eddie rochester (a terrible boating accident involving his wife bea—née bertha—and her bestie blanche), quickly making herself right at home in his spacious mansion.
It’s been two weeks since I more or less moved in with Eddie, two weeks of soft linens and sinking into the plush sofa in the living room in the afternoon, watching bad reality shows on the massive television.
I’m never leaving this place.
however, that final sentence becomes a bit ominous to those of us who have read Jane Eyre and are familiar with the fact that sometimes, a wife isn't "dead" so much as 'locked up in the attic, and pretty unhappy about the whole situation."
it's a surprisingly fun and twisty bit of domestic suspense; there's plenty that stays true to the original, with little references dropped throughout, but jane is a lot more modern, a lot less willing to endure her station in life—coming up in the foster care system has taught her that in this world, you gotta take what you can get and keep moving.
jane isn't even her real name, she's changed it after fleeing an incident in her last foster home; embarking on the path towards carving out a rage-to-riches story on the strength of her own grit, determination, and calculated manipulations, with some light kleptomania along the way. "jane" has a strong personality and a potty mouth, but she's learned how to survive by playing the game, coveting so badly what the rich take for granted.
I had no idea you could spend over a thousand dollars on fucking solar lamps that look like gaslights.
But here I am, loading up packages of those lights into the back of Eddie’s SUV, his credit card practically smoking in my wallet. He won’t care, I know—he told me to get “whatever it is Emily has decided she can’t live without”—but I was eating ramen and cereal for just about every meal only a few months ago, so hearing the cashier at Home Depot say, “That’ll be $1023.78,” as I checked out with nothing more than lights made my chest hurt.
My first week on the Neighborhood Beautification Committee is obviously going really well.
it's a story about class, identity, and secrets, and jane isn't the only one here with skeletons in her attic.
and speaking of that attic, (view spoiler)[i get the justification for why there’s a bed in the panic room (wakka chikka wakka chikka), but there’s a shower in the panic room, too? there’s such a big deal made of bea thumping the bed on the floor to try to get jane’s attention, but would no one hear the pipes and water? (hide spoiler)]
in any case, it's a fun spin on the original, bringing some much-appreciated lightness, humor, and female ferocity to a story that used to be about how great it is to be patient and is now about how great it is to be proactive.
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i keep winning so many gr giveaways because 2020 is like the one who broke your heart and then tried to win you back by giving you lots of gifts. keep 'em coming, 2020; maybe you'll get lucky.
The keys clatter as he locks the cell and then reaches in to unshackle my wrists and attach the manacle to my ankle.
“Never unchain a killer unless you
The keys clatter as he locks the cell and then reaches in to unshackle my wrists and attach the manacle to my ankle.
“Never unchain a killer unless you must,” he says cheerily.
this one is a novelette, so it’s on the longer side of the free tor short-verse, but it’s a good’un, so whether you are still TRAPPED IN YOUR HOME developing all those weird add-on features that creatures in the super-deep ocean, so far from the sun, have evolved into or, you know, not, you should take the time to check it out.
it’s an alice-in-wonderland revisit, wherein alice has ascended to the red queen’s throne, trailing clouds of madness, sometimes coming out a little cute-bonkers:
“How am I to dress without my maid?” She stomped her foot, frowned at it as if it ought to make a noise even though she wore no shoe and stood on thick carpet. She picked up a book and tossed it at the wall as she stomped again. When the book made an apparently satisfying noise, she smiled at her foot.
and sometimes as stark raving shatterbrained desperation:
Guards come. A knight, tall and polished and far more dignified than most of the people here, enters the room.
“Are you in danger, m’lady?”
“Every day,” Alice says. “Bring me something to please me. Plan a ball. Find me a new dress. Burn it all down.”
“Your Majesty?” the knight asks.
fortunately, another young woman has fallen into wonderland, up to the challenge of navigating the slippery logic of wonderland and the slippery moods of its queen. it may not be a storybook romance, but we’re living in a world where MURDER HORNETS are a thing, apparently, so a merrily problematic relationship between a madwoman and a serial murderess feels more contemporary than a happily-ever-after would, and here in lockdown, any relationship between two people who aren’t already occupying the same limited square footage already reads like the most outlandish fantasy to me.
for the past two years, i’ve set december’s project aside to do my own version of a sh
WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
boilerplate mission statement intro:
for the past two years, i’ve set december’s project aside to do my own version of a short story advent calendar. it’s not a true advent calendar since i choose all the stories myself, but what it lacks in the ‘element of surprise’ department it more than makes up for in hassle, as i try to cram even MORE reading into a life already overcrammed with impossible personal goals (live up to your potential! find meaningful work! learn to knit!) merry merry wheee!
since i am already well behind in my *regular* reviewing, when it comes to these stories, whatever i poop out as far as reflections or impressions are going to be superficial and perfunctory at best. please do not weep for the great big hole my absented, much-vaunted critical insights are gonna leave in these daily review-spaces (and your hearts); i’ll try to drop shiny insights elsewhere in other reviews, and here, i will at least drop links to where you can read the stories yourselves for free, which - let’s be honest - is gonna serve you better anyway.
HAPPY READING, BOOKNERDS!
links to all stories read in previous years' calendars can be found at the end of these reviews, in case you are a person who likes to read stories for free:
scroll down for links to this year’s stories which i will update as we go, and if you have any suggestions, send 'em my way! the only rules are: it must be available free online (links greatly appreciated), and it must be here on gr as its own thing so i can review it. thank you in advance!
DECEMBER 27
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Veronica, mindful of her Bible Camp pledge, tried to forgive Asenath for her antics — she really did — but it became increasingly difficult, given how her cousin seemed to want nothing more than to shock the whole school. Every day, she came in wearing a different appalling outfit — tweed blazers and slacks, Hawaiian shirts and brightly-colored shorts, leather jackets and jeans — and with some new girl on her arm, inevitably giggling like it wasn’t social and spiritual suicide for her to go out with a woman. Veronica was mortified, and the worst part was, she didn’t even have cheering as a respite. Whenever Asenath showed up in her mascot’s outfit to practice, the girls went crazy, mobbing her like she was the captain of the football team. Veronica thought that was sick, but she couldn’t say anything — Beth, the team captain, had gone out with Asenath a few times. “She’s the best-looking boy in school,” was her only comment when Veronica remarked on the queerness of it all.
Interestingly enough, for once, the cheerleaders were in the minority in terms of popular opinion; they might coo over Asenath, but the rest of Miskatonic High did not. Girls whispered whenever she walked by; guys shouted epithets. Veronica sensed Asenath was enjoying the attention and would have been more than happy to let Asenath reap what she sowed, just like in Galatians … except Asenath’s refusal to act normally began to reflect poorly on her.
dear authors, if you're going to rewrite a lovecraft story (here, The Thing on the Doorstep), and you want me to like it (and you should, because i have become a pretty glum person and it would be nice if the world would unite in trying to cheer me up), be sure to set it in an early-90's high school (miskatonic high!!) and pepper it with references to caboodles and off-the-shoulder esprit sweaters and dj jazzy jeff (and that other guy) and twin peaks and members only jackets. that will make your story so much better. you can even throw in all that lovecraftian stuff about yawning pits of despair, and i will put aside my usual complaints about how tedious i find the ineffable, as long as you mention wayfarers and walkmans (walkmen?) and handi-snacks (oh, my!), especially if it seems like you also might be tongue-in-cheeking it a little in your descriptions of said ineffability:
She was somewhere that was nowhere, standing at the edge of something that was nothing. Inside the nothing was more nothing, but a denser nothing that writhed — and laughed.
in short, this is one of the veryfew lovecraft homages i have enjoyed, and while i'm not sure i would necessarily enjoy the rest of the anthology from which it comes, She Walks in Shadows, i do kind of dig that it's an all-female collection, since lovecraft's whole thing was misogyny, racism, homophobia and tentacles. take back the fright, &yadda.
there are so very many enthusiastic superfans of Peter Pan out there, and so very many retellings and variations of the story have been published to entice these superfans. and before we go any further, let me out myself: i am not one of them.
i don’t dislikePeter Pan, but my only exposure to the story has been through the disney-filter, and i was never really keen on any of the disney movies with people in them - give me The Fox and the Hound or The Aristocats any day, but Sleeping Beauty? snooore. so, while i saw the cartoon, and i read the little disney picture books about peter pan, i was never really driven to seek out the original, which i expect, given what i know about the disnification of other stories, is very different from its source material.
all of that is to say that even though there are likely many references and allusions here that i didn’t catch or understand the full significance of that will no doubt delight you superfans, i still really enjoyed this book.
i'm fond of the ‘villains redeemed’ genre that gregory maguire popularized and to which so many other authors have made offerings, and it's amazing to have such a wealth of retellings of beloved stories to satisfy readers’ cravings to revisit their favorite characters, no matter what shape the retelling takes, or how successful it is as a book on its own. i am myself a superfan of Wuthering Heights, and will read any and all retellings, even if they are atrocious. as many of them are.
but fear not, peter pan kids, this one is a million miles away from atrocious. which is not surprising, considering how popular this author’s Alice in Wonderland retellings are, both of which were bought excitedly by me, only to sit unread on my shelves, because we have already established that i am the worst.
but i read this one, so ppbblltt! and it is such a fun, bloody ride.
here we have jamie, the future captain hook, and the first boy peter chose to join him in his world of adventures and eternal youth and endless irresponsibility. since then, jamie has been peter’s right hand man boy, his first and most special friend, and has witnessed the arrival of so many other chosen boys over the years. and he has also been responsible for burying them. because - fine print - eternal youth is not the same thing as immortality. and on peter’s island of fun and gleeful romping, there are also pirates and crocodiles and the many-eyed and illnesses and … the battles. and while one of the most appealing characteristics of boyhood is the freedom from thinking about the future, or consequences, or anything other than what the next adventure will be, jamie has started to feel the weight of his actual years, and is troubled by peter’s short memory when it comes to all of the unnecessary lives lost to dangers sought out for no other reason than a lark, an adventure, a game. which simmering disquiet is already beginning to complicate their friendship and is made worse when peter brings back a boy who is way too young for peter’s rough-and-tumble ways, and jamie feels responsible for protecting him from the many dangers of the island, not the least of which is peter’s easily-bored carelessness, jealousy, and inherent lack of remorse.
it’s a really interesting dynamic, as jamie assumes the parental presence lacking in these boys’ lives even before they were abducted, and peter is just collecting temporary playmates, like a kid with a jar full of frogs who forgets to punch airholes in the lid.
it's a clever twist, a great character study, and did i mention all the carnage?? it’s like Lord of the Flies with a much higher body count.
i am very eager to finally grab those two alice books from my shelf, as soon as the mighty stack of promises allows.
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