Author: fiendfullyreading

Your Driver Is Waiting by Priya Guns

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Your Driver Is Waiting is a novel about a ride share driver whose new romance sets off a dangerous chain of events. Damani drives for a ride share company to make enough money to care for her mother since her father died, trying to pay bills, and spends time with her friends. The city is filling up with protests by drivers and others against injustice. When she meets Jolene, a wealthy white woman who is an ally and cares about Damani, everything seems great, but as Damani tries to show Jolene the world she lives in, things go badly wrong.

This is a book that combines social satire and politics, particularly around what kinds of action people take and who that action helps, with a character focus that explores the varied life of Damani, who is torn in several directions but always has to return to the identity of ‘driver’ to keep existing in the world. The narrative starts quite slow and then builds up, reflecting the monotony of Damani’s days and then the whirlwind of everything that happens with Jolene. The depictions of working for a ride share company are good too, as you really get a sense of time and the desperation of needing pings on the app to actually make anything close to a living.

Through the narrative and characters, Your Driver Is Waiting explores axes of oppression and kinds of communities, particularly the coming together of people to build alternative communities to fight against societal structures in solidarity, and how other people don’t understand this. The way in which Damani thinks that Jolene’s points of connection with her—having read books, been to protests, and being queer—might bridge the large divides between them, and then her obsession with hearing from Jolene when they don’t gives the novel both emotional and political power, as structures impact personal lives.

Weaving together activism, romance, and fighting for the money to live, Your Driver Is Waiting is a gripping novel with satire and heart.Through the humour and anger, it shows how things are complex within and outside of activist spaces.

The Insomniac’s Almanac by JP Seabright

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The cover of The Insomniac's Almanac by JP Seabright

The Insomniac’s Almanac is, as the name suggested, a book of poems for a year of sleeplessness, moving from January to December. The hybrid layout combines altered photographs of sleep with the poems, which are stark like the unsleeping night, and the whole collection has a real feeling of the middle of the night, of an uncertain time that people shouldn’t be awake for. Each poem ends with the sort of generic advice given to people with insomnia, really highlighting the gulf between clinical advice and the poetic exploration of dealing with insomnia.

One of my favourite poems in the book is ‘Cage & Kane’, the title a pun on the time, and the idea of being caught “between silence and psychosis” is a memorable image that lingers after the end of the collection. I also really enjoyed ‘Summer Night City’, which carefully paints a picture of a quiet, hot night, the sort of night you can’t help but feel the atmosphere of. This is a collection that feels like such a beautiful package, with the poems and images and general atmosphere all coming together to create a vivid portrait of insomnia and of the nighttime.

Note: as per the Kith Books page for the chapbook, “All proceeds from this chapbook will go to two charities that help provide that support: The Albert Kennedy Trust in the U.K. and The Trevor Project in the US”, and it is also possible to donate to other trans/queer organisations and still get a free copy, so take a look and donate!

She Is A Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran

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She Is A Haunting is a young adult horror novel that combines romance with haunted house horror and colonialism, as a Vietnamese American girl on the brink of going to college faces a building her family has history with. Jade doesn’t feel like she’s anything enough, has fallen out with her best friend, and wants to tell her mum she’s bisexual, if it wasn’t for the worry of how her mum will react. When her and her younger sister stay with their estranged father in Vietnam for the summer doing up an old French colonial house into a guest house, Jade is meant to be dealing with it, but instead, the house seems to be warning her and things feel very wrong. Her sister and dad don’t believe her, so with the help of Florence, who Jade has just met, she sets about making the house seem haunted, but the house has other plans.

The book is told from Jade’s point of view, with interjections focusing on the house, and you don’t quite know what is going on. There’s ghosts, there’s a romance with Florence, there’s Jade managing all her anger and family issues, and there’s a lot of dead insects around. Jade has plenty of complexity, a teenager about to go to college who has to face up to how she feels whilst also dealing with a haunted house with a dark past, and it’s interesting how she sees the other characters, particularly her dad. The story is tense and is creepy, with a claustrophobic feeling and a scary sense of not knowing if you’re in control of your own actions, though the ending doesn’t feel quite a resolution.

Queer horror is a great genre and She Is A Haunting combines a coming-of-age, caught between cultures story with an unsettling ghost tale that explores how a place can turn people against each other. For a young adult book, this is genuinely a pretty spooky horror novel that has very menacing undertones and some creepy bug moments. 

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

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Bad Cree book cover (red with black birds all over) on a bookshelf with Totoro in the background.

Bad Cree is a novel about a woman whose unnerving dreams lead her to return home and confront the death of her sister. Mackenzie is a young Cree woman living in Vancouver, spending time with her friend Joli and hardly speaking to her family. When her dreams result in her waking up with a crow’s head in her hands, and they feature memories of the campsite in the woods where she went with her twin sisters and cousin, she knows she has to speak to her family again, and face the death of one of her sisters that she’s been avoiding. But when she returns home, the dreams continue, and Mackenzie and her family must face what happened at the campsite by the lake.

Told from Mackenzie’s point of view, the book draws you into not only the world of her creepy dreams and the threat within, but also her waking world, in which she is trying to survive without thinking of her grief or the family she has run from. There’s a lot of things explored in the book, not only grief and family, but also use of the land, addiction, and generational trauma, but it is at its heart Mackenzie learning to reconnect with her family and solve the mystery of her dreams, both of which are connected. I liked how it combined horror and coming of age elements alongside Cree traditions and modern day realities, bringing layers to the book, and it is also very readable with great characters (I particularly liked Mackenzie’s friend Joli and sister Tracey).

(This post is part of the Bad Cree blog tour – check out the other reviews as they’re posted!)

Bad Cree blog tour from 10th Feb to 18th Feb from Scribe UK.

Within Light by Arthur DeHart

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The cover of Within Light by Arthur DeHart: a black background with flowers on top.

Within Light is a collection of poetry that combines love and longing with the harsher realities that surround them. What particularly stands out when first reading is the love poems in the collection, in various forms, from the eye-opening point of ‘Catch Your Breath’ to the realities of ‘Dirt’, and also the tiny moments of love that are suffused throughout most of the poems, including those talking about mental health. It is a collection that doesn’t idealise love, but presents it as both mundane and life-sustaining, and also a method of queer people forming the lives they want to live.

I also enjoyed the poems about being a poet or poetry running throughout the collection, a musing on what it means to be a writer but also how sustainable it is, and the amount of wishing and hoping that comes along with being a poet (particularly as I too find myself ending up writing poetry about writing poetry too often). One of my favourite poems in the collection is ‘Sunday’, which reclaims the day from a religious past and offers a laziness that can come post-transformation, both of the narrator and of the day itself.

Within Light is a tender collection that still has raw moments, exploring what love can mean and what a poet can be.

(Within Light is forthcoming from Kith Books in March 2023)

White/Other by Fran Lock

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White/Other is a collection that defies boundaries, made up of prose-poetry-manifesto-essay pieces that explore the treatment of those who are white working class “other” in society, combining personal and cultural essay fragments with discussions of the purpose and history of language and who is allowed what language.

Language is the thing that jumps out the most from the collection: repetition, fragmentation, and the importance and slippiness of meaning. The title itself sets this up, with a question that is returned to again and again: what does “white, other” truly mean in the categories of neoliberal society and how does that materially impact people’s lives? The lyrical prose that makes up a lot of the collection plays with language as it asks which words are allowed and how much which words are used matters. At the same time, there’s plenty of consideration of class and politics, because it isn’t just systems of language that are questioned and attacked.

There’s a lot in White/Other as it moves between topics and thoughts, an angry trove that uses poetry to ask what can be represented in poetry and whose voices can be heard. I enjoyed the fragmentary style that flows between ideas and the repetition and echoes that make powerful points about how people are perceived and represented.

Don’t Fear The Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones

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Don’t Fear The Reaper is the sequel to Stephen Graham Jones’s My Heart Is A Chainsaw, picking up four years after the events of the first book. Jade Daniels, now going by Jennifer, has been released from prison after what happened in the town of Proofrock previously, but unfortunately this is timed with an even more memorable sequence of events for the town, as serial killer Dark Mill South escapes his prison convoy and ends up in Proofrock. Jade has sworn off her slasher-film-obsessed past, but the deaths seem to be reminding her of something, and with her remaining allies in the town, she must fight through snow and blood to work out who is the final girl this time.

I enjoyed My Heart Is A Chainsaw, with its distinctive combination of horror film obsession and dark realities, so I was excited to read Don’t Fear The Reaper. Stephen Graham Jones has such a distinctive writing style, which occasionally I get lost in, but I found this one easier to orient myself even, even with a range of perspectives. At its core, the plot is fun and clever, playing with horror tropes as should be expected from a book series with a protagonist who overthinks them all, but also a bloody slasher story, with a lot of dead teenagers and some gory moments.

This one focuses less on Jade’s emotional wellbeing than the first, but shows her attempts to throw off her past and then realising that she still needs to harness who she was as well as who she now is. Unlike her loner self from the first book, by this point you can see the connections she has with people (it’s deeply sad that she believes that Letha is only her secret best friend, as if she doesn’t even want to admit that), but this all comes through the reality of her being in prison for some of the killing from the previous book for multiple years. 

What Stephen Graham Jones manages to do is create a horror sequel that really does engage with the aftermath of the first one and how behind the slasher tropes, there’s a likelihood that the hero still gets in trouble. This is stylistic horror with notable writing (it flows better for me than the first, maybe because it isn’t punctuated by Jade’s essays on slasher films this time) and a classic plotline of short time frame, bad weather, and lots of dead bodies.

The Hollow Kind by Andy Davidson

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The Hollow Kind is a horror novel about a family and the danger of inheriting seemingly cursed land. Nellie flees an abusive marriage with her son Max after finding out she has inherited her grandfather’s estate in Georgia. It is a falling down farmhouse and weirdly silent woods, once used for turpentine, and it offers hope for Nellie and Max, but the strange whispering voices and unsettling sense of ancient power suggest it is a place less safe than Nellie imagined.

The book is split between the “present” narrative of 1989 and an earlier one featuring Nellie’s grandfather and father, using the dual timelines to unfold the family secrets and the kind of gothic horror based on echoes of the past and inheritance of this terror. It is a pretty standard horror, with a few side threats from real men blurring the line between what is supernatural danger and what is very real life danger. Max is a mature-for-his-age horror child, and the relationship between Nellie and Max is a highlight of the book, especially how the book explores parent and child relationships and the complexities within them. The earlier parts of the book, with more subtle unnerving horror as you don’t really know what is going on to Nellie and Max and weird things are happening in the house, is perhaps scarier than the later more dramatic scenes, but the book does build up to a good climax that forces the family to face up to the generational horror.

Brutes by Dizz Tate

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Brutes is a novel about teenage friendship and its strange wildness, as a group of thirteen-year-olds obsess over a missing girl. In swampy, theme-park-filled Florida, a group of friends—all girls, with Christian an honorary girl—are obsessed with Sammy, a preacher’s daughter. They watch her, but then she suddenly goes missing, and the group watch the town instead, with a sinister sense of hunger underneath.

Most of the chapters are told from a first person plural perspective, with the group of thirteen year olds the ‘we’ telling the story, and this really sets up the conceit of the book, the weird friendship group, the ‘brutes’ as their mothers call them, watching and wishing. The narration is very effective, showing the strange bonds and the ways in which this breaks down, as well as a dark story of trying to get more than a run-down Florida life. Some of the chapters are told from the perspective of one of the group as adults, and this works less well because they’re very fragmented and don’t quite come together with the rest, although some of these chapters work better than others.

An ambiguous book that dives into a vivid Florida and a specific group mindset, Brutes is likely to divide between people who like the style and ambiguity, and people who wanted more definitive answers about what is going on.

Home by Cailean Steed

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Home is a novel about someone who escapes a cult, and then ends up going back to try and save their sister. Zoe works in a coffee shop and lives in a little flat, trying to build a life she never imagined. When a man known as the Hand of God appears in her flat, the past returns to her, the cult of the Children she escaped and their compound, Home. What the Hand of God tells her makes her know she has to return, but going back won’t be simple.

The narrative is told from a split perspective, one from ‘present’ day Zoe and one from her past in the cult, as she navigates the horrors of her past and what the cult is still doing. The story is quite slow burn, almost entirely set with the ‘Home’ of the cult, so you slowly pick up their beliefs and lies. The cult itself is very focused on gender roles and has an almost Handmaid’s Tale vibe at times, and there’s a few moments in the book that suggest why people are drawn to it, which was quite interesting, particularly as it comes from the perspective of Zoe who was born into the cult.

The book is tense without quite being a thriller, as it is more focused on character and the realities of a cult. Personally, I would’ve liked to see more of Zoe’s life outside of the cult, as most of it is through flashbacks and glimpses, and it would be really interesting to think more about the impact of it on her, but the cult and the physical location it occupies is the focus of the book. The horrors are mostly alluded to rather than shown, so though a lot of the stuff that goes on is quite heavy, through a combination of Zoe’s lack of awareness and trauma, you don’t see everything, which means the book feels a bit more subtle than using shock tactics. There are some conversion therapy type parts that are quite intense though.

Home has a gripping story that explores a pseudo-religious cult and what happens when an escapee has to go back. I enjoyed the character stuff more than the thriller element and found that the book explores some interesting things. I liked the exploration of gender within the book, particularly how the cult frames a gender binary and then there seems to be a place for Zoe outside of that, but only in what turns out to be a horrifying and manipulative way. The fact that Zoe finds queer community outside of the cult is a nice touch too.