Author: fiendfullyreading

Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk

fiendfullyreading

Thirst is a vampire novel, telling the story of two different women in Buenos Aires across two time periods. In the nineteenth century, a female vampire escapes Europe and the dangers of hiding those she must kill to satisfy her thirst, ending up in disease-ridden Buenos Aires where she can haunt the streets, but still she knows the danger of her need to take blood. And then in the present day, a woman deals with her ill mother and how to explain it all to her young son, whilst also being given a mysterious key to something in a crypt.

This is first and foremost a gothic novel, following in the vein of particularly nineteenth-century gothic novels that use their tropes and atmosphere to explore present concerns. In Thirst‘s case, this is fear and loneliness, and the isolation of sadness, as well as elements of women’s roles in society, and the changing city of Buenos Aires. The first half of the novel tells the story of our vampire, her struggle to drink blood whilst remaining hidden, and her desires and the ways in which sex, desire, and blood-sucking intermingle. It tells a similar story to many vampire novels, old and new, with the battle between thirst and loneliness and monstrosity. It is harsh and bloody, with a great atmosphere.

The second half of the novel is from the perspective of a woman in the present day, who cares for her young son and faces her ill mother’s impending death. When she’s given information about a mysterious crypt from her mother, you know where the book is going, but it takes a long time to get there, and this section’s tone is much more about the woman’s sadness and her struggles to cope than the vampire element until the very end. The style, like a diary, brings it back to the gothic novel, however, and there’s some interesting thoughts about creation and agency throughout.

I love a vampire novel, and it is interesting how Thirst plays with being a very traditional vampire novel, and also a story about grief and sadness that almost forgets the vampire part for a while. It is a book about uncontrollable desire, and the loss of desire, and whilst the two halves don’t entirely come together, I enjoyed it nevertheless.

Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki

fiendfullyreading

Gifted is a short novel about a woman working as a hostess in Tokyo who suddenly has to care for her terminally ill mother she left home to get away from. The unnamed narrator lives and works in Kabukicho, the famed entertainment district in Shinjuku, and her tattoos hide the burn scars from an incident with her mother when she was younger. Now, her mother is very ill, and stays with her between hospital visits, and the narrator must face her relationship with her mother as well as the other people in her life.

This book is a dreamlike experience to read, following the narrator’s thoughts and her constant returning to her apartment, and offering glimpses into elements of her life rather than in-depth explorations given the short length. You never quite hear everything about her and her mother, but that feels right given that she doesn’t know everything about her mother, and her mother’s death isn’t bringing some dramatic closure to their troubled relationship. Instead, you hear about how she unlocks her door—the main form of safety she seems to have—and snippets about her and others working in Kabukicho, not just the hostess and host clubs and the clients, but also the twenty-four hour drugstore, the difficulty getting a taxi. The way these parts are woven together was something I really enjoyed, though there were occasional points where the translation made for clunky sentences that were hard to get your head around.

Gifted offers a novella about a difficult mother-daughter relationship that also picks up on the tiny details of the narrator’s life and offers glimpses into Kabukicho. Like the poetry the narrator’s mother writes, this short book doesn’t give you everything laid out as a chronological narrative, but leaves space for piecing things together or not knowing.

Feast While You Can by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta

fiendfullyreading

Feast While You Can is a queer horror romance novel about a monster that tries to steal your life, messier and more full of potential the better. Angelina Sicco has lived in mountain town Cadenze all her life, where her family are well known, but especially her, a mixed race lesbian. She lives with her brother and tries to draw tourist women to visit Cadenze to give herself a dating pool, but when hot butch Jagvi—who is also her brother’s ex—returns to town, it seems Angelina’s life got more complicated. Until, of course, the local legend monster from the pit targets Angelina, grabbing her memories and controlling her, seeming to set up for the final feed—and only Jagvi seems to be able to repel it.

This book was so much fun that it was difficult to put down. It’s about hungry, desperate desire, and also a hungry monster desperate to steal someone’s life, past, present, and future. It’s also about small towns, and escaping them or not, and the different assumptions people have. The horror and romance elements are deeply intertwined so, without wanting to get too deep into spoilers, the book doesn’t really need to pull between these elements (especially in horror it’s rare to find sex scenes so integrated into everything else), and it makes the book more brutal and raw as a romance too. This isn’t a fluffy ‘small town and big city queer experiences collide’ romance, but instead it is about two angry, desperate women whose future holds something more terrifying and complex than ‘where would they live’. I particularly liked Jagvi as a character, a brooding figure who has a complex story of belonging and queer identity hidden underneath.

The element that did confuse me a bit was the book’s setting, as at first I thought it was set in the US as that’s what it felt like, and then it seemed to be set in non-specific Italy, with a lot of references to history that would place it in Italy and mentions of dialect etc, but never does it actually make this explicit. It also turned out from a line at the very end that the book was set in the 90s, which I also had no idea about from reading it. I can see that it is meant to be an ambiguous setting, but it threw me out of the reading experience trying to work out where it was meant to be set. As I read an ARC, this might be more apparent in the marketing or final book.

I had a great time reading this book, which has possession, light body horror, a consuming romance, and a memorable butch love interest (which a lot of lesbian romance lacks). It’s not a scary kind of horror, but more of a monstrous, grotesque kind, with a darkness to the ending, and it shows that queer horror can have many guises.

All The Hearts You Eat by Hailey Piper

fiendfullyreading

All the Hearts You Eat is a horror novel about life and death and the bonds that tie people together, as dead trans girl Cabrina appears to loner Ivory and to her best friends in life Xi and Rex. Cabrina Brite washes up dead in Cape Morning, and Ivory finds her death poem lying nearby. Ivory didn’t know the girl, but she seems to be haunted by her now. Meanwhile Cabrina’s best friends are also dealing with the realisation that Cabrina’s presence is still around, in this small town that held no space for her.

I didn’t know anything about this book going in, so it was a very welcome surprise to discover that it is, if you really want to boil it down, a trans vampire book. All of the main characters are trans and the book explores who you can choose to be and who you can’t, using the gothic horror of a town haunted by vampiric creatures and a mysterious island. One of the great things about this book is the complexity and messiness of the main characters, especially the complex relationships between the three teenage characters who are just reaching adulthood. The ending really highlights how this isn’t a simple ‘trans characters versus the world’ book, but a horror novel with the space to explore different ideas about who someone is and how they might act when treated badly.

I found the book took me a while to get into, with the writing style quite obtuse at first so I couldn’t quite work out what was going on. Once I settled into the book it became much more enjoyable, though still occasionally a bit confusing. As everything else about this book was so up my street, it was a shame that I found it so hard to get into at first. However, this didn’t stop me really appreciating this book, from its depiction of the messiness of feelings between trans teenagers to its exploration of what it means to feel like a outsider and how that might cause you to react to promises from supernatural creatures. Piper uses horror to tackle a lot of interesting things about growing up trans in a small town, but doesn’t forget to include gory and dramatic moments along the way.

Benothinged by Alvar Theo

fiendfullyreading

[I was asked to blurb this book by the lovely Haunt Publishing, so this is a mini review I wrote for that.]

In Benothinged, Alvar Theo asks what if the real monster of queer horror is isolation, mental illness, grief, poverty, and all of the other things that people face in modern day Britain, and if so, how might we defeat that monster? The result is a book that is haunting, bittersweet, and yet also full of tiny joys, as the trans protagonists learn to work together to build a world free of this monster.

House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias

fiendfullyreading

House of Bone and Rain is a novel about revenge, as five Puerto Rican friends must come together to face the horrors in their lives. Five friends—Gabe, Xavier, Tavo, Paul, and Bimbo—in Puerto Rico are used to death, hearing all stories are ghost stories, but when Bimbo’s mother is killed, they agree to help him avenge her. As they fight their way to get information, a hurricane comes, and the lines between revenge, natural disaster, and otherworldly happenings are blurred.

Though positioned as a horror novel, House of Bone and Rain is more complex than that (the comparisons with Stand By Me perhaps reflect this fact well). The narrative is told mostly from Gabe’s perspective and it offers a complex picture of not only these friends, but others around them, and the lives they lead. Gabe, for example, is torn between his home, his friends, and the memory of his father’s death, and his girlfriend’s dream of leaving Puerto Rico. Even as Gabe is drawn into the violence of revenge and taking on a drug kingpin, he is also looking for purpose, and also sees the mystical happenings that show the world not to be as simple as some paint it.

The narrative is a coming-of-age story mixed with a classic revenge narrative: boys growing up and violence begetting violence, but also the undercurrent of colonialism and ecological collapse. It feels like a crime thriller film mixed with horror and I really enjoyed that, and the fact it didn’t shy away from the weird side of the horror as well. If you go into the book just expecting horror, you might find a lot of the book quite a different tone, but there’s a lot packed into it. Iglesias doesn’t give answers to everything and this works well as a coming-of-age novel that acknowledges the things that haunt you as you grow up can’t always be resolved or explained away.

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

fiendfullyreading

Small Rain is a novel about a fortysomething man facing a sudden health crisis, and what such an event can lead someone to think and feel. The unnamed narrator has a pain out of nowhere and his partner, L, encourages him to go to the hospital. Once there, it turns out his pain is something serious, something he’d never known of before, and now he’s stuck in a hospital bed, experiencing the American healthcare system.

Having read Greenwell’s earlier novels, I chose to read this one despite the blurb not being the sort of thing I would usually go for. The focus on hospitals and illness isn’t something I’d usually pick up a novel about, not out of squeamishness but more health anxiety and the horrible realities of healthcare, but Small Rain explores someone suddenly in hospital when they weren’t expecting to be, and the disorienting effects of assuming your own health and then being told otherwise. Essentially, the story that the novel has—of the time the narrator spends in the hospital—is a way of meditating on ideas of health, life, love, and art, and how the narrator thinks about these things in this context (as the story seems to be autobiographical, presumably some of these things Greenwell also thought about in that context).

The writing style is beautiful, but also picks up on the kinds of routines and details of medicine and healthcare. The narrative has many reflective digressions by the narrator, which mostly add to the portrait and the story, though even as a poet who likes to read and think about poetry I found the one analysing poetry a bit too long and digressive. Generally, I found the novel quite unlike other things I’ve read, including Greenwell’s other novels, in the way that it confronts something so terrifying and mundane in a literary way, exploring some of the complexities of human life and love through this lens. This is not a novel to go into unprepared: it is about being in hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic due to a different health issue, with vivid descriptions of needles going in and other elements that people might find hard to read. I found it full of tenderness and real snippets of emotion; even if it doesn’t sound like something you might usually read, it’s worth giving it a go.

Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram

fiendfullyreading

Coup de Grâce is a horror novella about a man trapped in an impossible subway station. Vicken is on the subway, planning a one way trip to the Saint Lawrence River, but when he gets off, he’s in a huge, Brutalist station. A station with no exit and no return line. A station that changes as he explores. And suddenly things aren’t as certain as they seemed when he stepped onto the train.

This novella combines some fantastic horror elements: liminal spaces, fourth wall breaking, body horror, and the kind of terrifying impossibility of space you get in House of Leaves. It is also a dark look at depression, suicide, and self-harm, and the warning at the start is important to note because it does make up a lot of the book. What you end up with is something visceral and weird, almost absurdly funny in the way it paints hopelessness and lack of control by its ending, and a book that never quite offers a reprieve. The ending might be a bit divisive, leaving a lot up to the reader, but it is exciting to see this kind of horror, that isn’t afraid to be unrelenting, and I loved the creepypasta and liminal space elements (the book itself feels like it could be a creepypasta even as it refers to them).

William by Mason Coile

fiendfullyreading

William is a short horror novel about a reclusive robot engineer who creates an AI consciousness in his house. Henry doesn’t leave his home and spends all his time on his project, an AI-powered robot he’s called William, even though it is impacting his marriage to his wife, Lily. As William starts to turn dangerous, Henry tries to stop him, but their high tech house shows William’s power is further reaching than Henry thought.

This book was compared to Stephen King, Black Mirror, and Frankenstein, and unusually, I think that’s actually quite a good set of fiction to compare it to, particularly as it doesn’t give away too many of the twists whilst still setting up the kind of vibe you’re going to get. Initially, there’s the creator/creation thing that is key to the book, exploring ideas of artificial intelligence and what kind of ‘spirit’ might be created. Then you get the kind of horror when a house seems to work against its inhabitants, and that’s where you can really picture the book adapted for the screen as it cuts between different parts of the house.

The length is ideal for a quick, gripping horror story that purposefully focuses in on certain parts of the plot and characters, and it feels precise rather than too short. William is a tense, fun read that builds on a lot of existing ideas and tropes to play on fears of things we create turning out to not be as they seem, and ideas of creator and creation.

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the race that will change the world by Parmy Olson

fiendfullyreading

Supremacy is a book charting the race between OpenAI and Deep Mind to bring out their AI products, focusing on their founders, Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis. Journalist Parmy Olson explores these two founders’ starts in the tech industry, interest in AGI (artificial general intelligence) and ultimately the race between their two companies (and the tech giants behind them) to have the best AI product on the market in this generative AI age.

As someone who reads and teaches people about AI, I was interested to see how this quite recent race would be turned into a book. The narrative starts early and quite broad, looking at Altman and Hassabis’ initial failures and interest in AI, as well as early tech industry contacts, and I found this part of the book was a bit too obsessed with the ‘tech genius’ idea, not just from them but around people like Elon Musk as well. Thankfully, as the book goes on, Olson moves away from this idea and looks more broadly at the big picture, including the struggles around both ideas of AI safety and of AI ethics, and the need for the AI world to be dominated by existing tech giants like Microsoft and Google.

The part of the book describing the invention of the ‘transformer’ and the impact of this on work to build better AI models was a highlight as it was an approachable explanation of why this breakthrough was so important, helping people to understand why these huge AI products seemed to come out of nowhere a few years later. I found the section that explores how effective altruism ended up connected to some of the movements in AI also interesting, showcasing how it is often the ideas of billionaires that have a massive impact on world-changing technologies. There was plenty I learnt from the book, even as someone who has a fair interest in the topic, and knowing where these companies came from is a useful part of critiquing and evaluating generative AI.

I did find that sometimes the book was so focused on tech billionaires and companies that it dragged, sometimes accepting at face value what these people say and argue for. Especially by the end, there was decent discussion of many of the issues surrounding AI, but I did think some were notably absent, particularly the climate impact of the GPU power needed and the human cost of data labelling for training data. The climate angle in particular I felt was needed, given that these companies often try and hide their negative climate cost, and it links back to other technologies like cryptocurrency that are mentioned in passing in the book. I do think that the way the book clearly distinguishes between AI safety and AI ethics, and how these can even be in conflict with each other, was very useful, especially for raising awareness of these to a general audience reading the book to learn more about the world of AI as it has become.

Overall, Supremacy is a detailed account of these two AI juggernauts over the past fifteen years and the road to get to tools like ChatGPT that have become household names, and it is a good place for people who want to know where AI has come from recently to start. For me, I found it did lean too heavily on ideas of the solitary tech genius billionaire and I wasn’t interested in that much detail about conversations between them, but the book didn’t go entirely in for the AI hype and did address a lot of the issues and controversies around AI at the moment.