Author: fiendfullyreading

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

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Biography of X is an epic novel, simultaneously a fictional biography and not one, an alternative history, and a story of a celebrity artist and writer with many guises, feuds, and collaborations. X is dead and her wife CM, angry at an incorrect biography of her, starts trying to unravel the mysteries and history of X, a woman who may have been born in the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that came out of a rift in the US and now reunified. As CM charts X’s various identities, adventures, and encounters, it is clear that X was complex, but CM may be heading towards what she doesn’t want to think about: the truth about their relationship.

This feels like a unique book, something which takes elements that feel familiar—the fake citations for interviews, the tone of both biography and not, creating an alternate American history—but combines them in a way that is ambitious and surprising. Perhaps the most notable macro element for me was the way in which the book tells an alternate history not only of America, with divided Territories and changed politics, but also of art and culture, changing art history into something female-led and adding X into male creators’ works. In many ways, this seems only incidental to the central concept of the novel, the attempt by the narrator to write something that is not a biography, but is about her dead wife and her metaphorically shapeshifting past. However, in actuality, both these elements are deeply related as the book plays out a multi-faceted look at storytelling and constructing stories, both as an everyday activity and when actually writing.

At times the sheer amount of content and detail dragged, and at other times it felt exciting, though perhaps no point more so than when I got to the references section at the end, in which Lacey acknowledges all the changes made to real life quotes and incidents to make the book. The levels of playing with storytelling were fascinating and it was that element I liked most. There’s also a lot in the book about the nature of art, and the way that CM seems to focus on presenting herself as the antithesis to art, not understanding X’s work at times and focusing on how she herself is plain and a journalist focused on apparent facts, even when people tell her there are none.

Audacious, exciting, sometimes slow and sometimes fast, with ridiculous characters and an alternative history that verges on completely satirical, Biography of X is an experience. The concept of truth is complicated so much that you reach the end unsure if it’s even true that you just read a book, and that was fascinating.

Bitter Apples ed. by Eric Raglin

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Bitter Apples is a collection of horror stories about teaching, written by teachers and exploring both realities and dark permutations of both school and university level teaching. There are seven stories in the book, each quite different and using different kinds of horror, from ghostly students to zombie apocalypse teaching, cult-like teachers’ groups to offering morbid payment in return for a better classroom. All of them, however, consider the stresses of teaching in some way, particularly around education budgets and frustrations about what you can actually do as a teacher.

My favourite story in the collection was ‘The Chalk Martyrs’ by the book’s editor, Eric Raglin (who I’ve read other stories and a collection by), as it combined a wince-inducing body horror conceit with the harsh realities of wanting better for your students, and I loved the details in the story. I also liked ‘Make Sure You Fill Out Those Evaluations’ by Aurelius Raines II, which has a fun training session format whilst creating a picture of a zombie horror dystopia in which teachers still need to try and make school a safe space for students, and the different uses of hauntings in both ‘Drip Drop’ and ‘There’s a Reason They Collect the Pencils’. A couple of the stories didn’t work so much for me as they were more low key, surreal horror that I didn’t click with, but that’s often the case with anthologies.

Combining a variety of horror with the often horrifying reality of the conditions teachers have to work in, Bitter Apples is a clever anthology that would probably make a particularly good gift for teachers or ex-teachers who like horror, and a good read for fans of horror anthologies in general.

Wild Geese by Soula Emmanuel

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Wild Geese is a novel about a woman who spends a weekend with her ex-girlfriend and explores the messiness of life. Phoebe is trans and Irish and lives in Copenhagen, where she moves through the world largely alone, with the company of the dog she looks after, Dolly. When her ex-girlfriend Grace suddenly appears on her doorstep, visiting the city for the weekend, something is kindled between them, but it isn’t straightforward, and both of them have pasts and places to reconcile and a sense of being lost to face.

This is a beautiful novel, set over a single weekend (with timestamps) from Phoebe’s point of view, and manages to capture a lot of wistfulness, loss, and hope within the writing. It combines poetic, literary prose with modern references (Blåhaj being my favourite, but I was sat with one whilst reading) and the limited timeframe of the narrative allows for a lot of space for not only thinking about the past, but also plenty of thoughts about the present and future. I spent a fair bit of the book worried about how sadly it might end, but actually I think it was a powerful narrative with a conclusion that was satisfying and shows how things can be complicated and messy, but also help you to move forward.

As the title suggests, this is a book about two women chasing things and hoping to find them in each other as they reunite. Wild Geese is both an emotional look at a relationship and the changing nature of one, and an exploration of escaping place and gender and how these can feel intertwined.

Blessing The Boats by Lucille Clifton

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Blessing The Boats is a book of Lucille Clifton’s collected poetry spanning 1988-2000, now published under Penguin Modern Classics in the UK. The poetry within spans a huge range of subjects from injustice and race to motherhood and health, the Garden of Eden to Superman. Clifton’s style is deeply engaging, with a lot of precise and concise lines and imagery and short poems, sometimes in a sequence talking to each other.

 Some of my favourite poems in the collection were the ones about Lucifer and Adam and Eve (strangely the collection had already got me thinking about writing poems about Lucifer before I reached multiple of them to read) and the poems to Clark Kent. I also really like the ‘shapeshifter poems’ which I think would sit very nicely alongside a lot of modern poetry. In general, the poems felt really timeless to me, and it is the sort of collected poems that makes you want to return to it, and also read more of Clifton’s individual collections.

Synthetic Jungle by Michael Chang

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Synthetic Jungle is a poetry collection that plays around with space, words, and humour, questioning what poetic language really is and what people want in a poem whilst also looking at identity, self, and shared reference points. I enjoyed the witty, catchy lines (one of my favourite things in poetry) – “app says our order’s in the river / you’ll be the one getting wet” being one example of some that stood out to me on first reading – and the range of pop culture references, but also the metacommentary on what poetry is and who can and should read poetry. Fresh, compulsively readable, and very funny: Synthetic Jungle is great if you like poetry that doesn’t take poetry too seriously, but still says some interesting things.

A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

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A House with Good Bones is a horror novel about a woman who returns to her family home to find things not quite right, the house seemingly returning to how her dead grandmother would’ve wanted it, and uncovers some family secrets as she attempts to work out what is going on. Sam is a specialist in bug archaeology who ends up back visiting her mother, who lives in the home that was Sam’s grandmother’s before she died, a house they briefly lived in too during Sam’s childhood. Gone are the signs of her mother’s quirky personality and in their place is the severe normality of her grandmother and also her grandmother’s roses in the garden. As Sam worries about her mother, things keep getting weirder, from vultures watching the house to ladybirds appearing, and Sam must work out what she believes is happening.

I’ve read a couple of other T. Kingfisher horror novels and I was interested to see what this one brought, even though I don’t always enjoy her writing style. There were points in this one where I didn’t like the style (particularly the tendency for random parentheses to make offhand comments), but the story was gripping and I enjoyed the creepy world created in the novel. The narrative has a slow lingering build up as Sam tries to work out what might be going on and then a fast paced conclusion that really twists the book from quiet family secrets horror into something more supernatural. There’s some good creepy moments as roses and bugs seems sinister and though the book has gothic and magical elements, it is balanced in an interesting way by Sam’s scepticism.

Though at times the writing style wasn’t for me, A House with Good Bones is a gripping book that you can read quickly, centred around a house I could really picture whilst reading. I think fans of Kingfisher’s other horror books will enjoy this one, with a memorable quirky protagonist who is sure of herself and a weird family to unravel.

Blue Hunger by Viola Di Grado

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Blue Hunger is a novel about an Italian woman who goes to Shanghai after her twin brother’s death and finds herself in an obsessive love affair. The narrator, who doesn’t share her name but often goes by her brother’s, Ruben, moves to Shanghai to fulfil the dream of her brother, who recently died. She teaches Italian and meets Xu, a Chinese woman also trying to avoid the past. They meet in abandoned factories and slaughterhouses and in Xu’s apartment, filled with rotting food, where they take yellow pills and hunger for pleasure and pain, but the narrator always wants more.

This is a dreamlike novel that combines the imagery of consumption with ideas of grief and need. It also explores language, particularly the gaps in between Chinese and Italian (the novel is translated from Italian), and how language impacts self and identity, and the narrator’s views of different cultures. The relationship between the protagonist and Xu is filtered through this, and through the fact that you can only see the relationship from one side. The relationship itself is a fairly classic kind of all-consuming love in a foreign city, focused on hunger and need, and whether what we want is good for us, though blurbs describing the book as abolishing all taboos are definitely over-exaggerating.

The book presents an interesting, uncanny view of a grieving person in a foreign country, seeing both place and language through their own lens, and someone looking for an all-consuming kind of pleasure to erase the past. As you’d expect from the premise, it isn’t really a book with much of a plot, but more moves through scenes in an artistic way, more surreal than engaging with the realities of their lives.

The Trees Grew Because I Bled There: Collected Stories by Eric LaRocca

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The Trees Grew Because I Bled There is a collection of dark short stories by Eric LaRocca, exploring some of the more sinister side of human nature as well as trauma, body horror, and twisted relationships. From people having to make horrifying decisions about what to do with family members to blog posts detailing a cancer diagnosis, the stories delve into very human moments in weird and unexpected ways.

Having read LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes and You’ve Lost A Lot of Blood, I wanted to read this collection, and it has a fair amount in common with the former book, in the way the stories have an ominous tone and generally explore strange dynamics between people, but also weave in queerness without it being the focus of the stories. As with any short story collection, there’s going to be stories some people prefer and others don’t, and for me I think my favourite was ‘You’re Not Supposed To Be Here’, a tale of two men in a park with their young son who suddenly meet some very odd strangers, as it felt like a classic horror film concept distilled into a short story. I also enjoyed the lingering body horror of ‘The Trees Grew Because I Bled There’ and the gradually unfolding darkness of the final story, ‘Please Leave or I’m Going To Hurt You’.

As with other LaRocca stories, these have some truly stand-out titles, and though I didn’t enjoy some stories as much as others, there’s a lot of gripping premises, weird goings-on, and protagonists making horrible choices to make this collection an enjoyable and occasionally uncomfortable (in a good way) read.

Bound In Flesh: An Anthology of Trans Body Horror, ed. by Lor Gislason

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Bound in Flesh is a trans horror anthology that brings together thirteen body horror stories to explore the extreme limits of flesh, gender, and humanity. From people exploring their desires, as weird and body horrific as they might be, to those just looking to exist in a body, there’s a huge amount of variety in the stories in this anthology, despite the fairly niche theme of trans body horror, both in terms of plots and general vibes.

The opening story, ‘Wormspace’ by LC von Hessen, is a great way to set the tone, delving into weird desires and changing your body (and has a fantastic ending). One of my favourite stories in the collection is ‘The Haunting of Aiden Finch’ by Theo Hendrie, due to the way it uses the format of transition-charting videos to tell a horror story, one which is perhaps more slow burn and ominous than others in the book and with some creepypasta vibes. ‘Mama Is A Butcher’ by Winter Holmes takes a story of acceptance with a Frankenstein-type theme and makes it a friendship story, with the sort of lingering ending that you want from good body horror where the image feels seared into your head.

Though not all of them jumped out at me quite as much, there weren’t any stories that I didn’t like in the collection or any that I found too hard to get into. There’s some really great, twisted ways in which the stories use body horror as a lens to consider transness, for example if you are forcibly shape-shifted into the wrong gender, but also stories like the closing piece, ‘Looking For The Big Death’ by Taliesin Neith, in which the body becomes a different kind of place, something to desire death but also, it seems, resist it, and being trans is just a part of that complexity.

Trans horror is one of the best kinds of horror (of course) and this anthology shows some of the wealth of options for using trans writers using body horror as a way to tell stories, whether directly or not about being trans. There’s lots for body horror fans and lots for trans horror fans, and plenty to wince at in general.

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

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In Memoriam is a novel that tells the love story between two schoolboys-turned-soldiers during the First World War. For Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt, when war breaks out in 1914 it feels far away from them at their boarding school, where their main problem is the fact they both believe their love for the other is unrequited. However, when Gaunt’s German mother asks him to lie about his age and enlist to protect the family from anti-German sentiment, he agrees, and finds himself at the front facing the horrors of war. Not long later, Ellwood joins him, and their world of schoolboy troubles seems miles away, even as more of their classmates turn up around them.

In many ways, this book is exactly as you’d expect, similar to other First World War novels and especially those that depict love stories. There’s lots of historical material woven into the plot, as the afterword explains, and a good amount of depiction of the complications around war, like fighting in one despite being against it. The move from schoolboys to soldiers and the varied ways in which the characters react to this is also very interesting, from Ellwood and Gaunt’s respective literary interests clashing with the realities of war to some of their schoolmates’ jovial reactions.

I had trepidation reading the novel as personally for me the combination of the tormented slow love story and the threat of death looming over everything doesn’t always make for a book I enjoy reading, but I did appreciate what the narrative did with the characters and the love story, managing to encapsulate horror and brutality, but also perseverance and small tender moments, making it less unrelentingly bleak and heartbreaking than I was expecting from the title and my assumptions. Thanks particularly to the characters and relationships, In Memoriam is likely to be popular with a lot of people. It is a love story that looks at war, class, and historical queerness, with a narrative that’s quite dramatic and maybe too neat, but still works for the genre.