Author: fiendfullyreading

Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle

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Lucky Day is a cosmic horror novel about a statistics expert who survives a global disaster only to try and work out why it happened and give meaning back to her life. Vera’s life was torn apart by the Low Probability Event that struck globally, causing death and destruction, so she hides away in her house, not wanting to care about anything. But when a mysterious agent turns up at her house asking for her help investigating a Vegas casino that seems to be linked to the event, Vera is drawn into the mission.

Having read both Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays, I was interested to see what Tingle would do with this premise. Unfortunately, I found that the book didn’t work for me, and I found myself frustrated with it at various points. To start off with, the narrative is told by Vera in first person present tense and there were turns of phrase in the narration that felt jarring, like slang that didn’t quite flow in the narrative voice. 

The overall tone of the book, despite being pitched as cosmic horror, is as comic as Bury Your Gays‘ satirical tone, and that matches the tone of the ridiculously gruesome violence that happens at a couple of points in the book (think Final Destination vibes), but not the fact that these events are meant to be genuinely horrifying to the narrator. For me, this made the novel, like Bury Your Gays, feel just a bit too ridiculous to feel serious, and that undercut the balance of the comic existential side (deaths so unlikely you’re meat to laugh) with the actual horror of contemplating the meaninglessness of that. Maybe the tone could’ve worked if it came together at the end to say something interesting about the concept of the absurd, but the end is a bit flat, feeling too neat and not really giving any of the characters a proper conclusion.

On that note, the characters also didn’t work for me. Vera was a series of stereotypes which move from ‘incredibly organised statistics professor’ to ‘depressed nihilist’ and then, by the end, never really resolves how she might rebuild something more like the former again, or how any of her former life and personality might be changed by her huge existential crisis. Her bisexuality feels like it is a plot device (which admittedly is a major plot device at the start and then that has a throwback later on which felt really randomly included) and Vera might’ve felt more interesting as a character if we learnt anything more about her experiences, either in terms of her sexuality and her relationship we see at the start of the book, or even just any interests she had before (other than presumably an X-Files-esque TV show that gets a lot of references in the book, without any further detail or point). Saying too much about Agent Layne would give away spoilers about the book, but again he was more larger-than-life stereotypes, and there aren’t really many other characters that appear more than momentarily, so the book really has to lean on these two.

I think that there will be plenty of fans of this book who like the fact that it is more of a campy sci-fi story with a few gruesome horror moments  (especially as Tingle has a lot of fans who like that campy vibe to his writing), as long as you don’t want greater meaning from the existential side other than ‘maybe things do have meaning actually’. As with Bury Your Gays, it felt like there were moments in the narrative where you were really being hit over the head with an idea, even when it wasn’t fully considered, and in fact the entire book felt like it was trying to take the concept of people saying bisexuals don’t exist and make it into an existential joke, but it never really does that in a satisfying way.

And on a personal note, I’m really interested in fiction about Vegas and it felt like this book could’ve done so much more with the setting and atmosphere given that it was almost entirely set in Vegas. There could’ve been so much more about the fact it is a casino that is at the heart of events, or about gambling, or even Vegas and queerness. But if you’re looking for queer horror set in Las Vegas, I’d suggest reading Torrey Peters’ novella ‘The Masker’ from Stag Dance, which says a lot more about queerness itself.

I’ve ended up writing a lot about this book because it frustrated me how I wanted it to be more interesting and engaging than it was, and how much it felt like a bunch of stereotypes and trope jokes put together without saying anything about them. However, as I said, I think if you’re looking for something silly in the vein of Tingle’s other recent horror books, you might have more fun with it than I did.

House of Monstrous Women by Daphne Fama

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House of Monstrous Women is a gothic horror novel set in the Philippines in 1986, in which a young woman finds herself in a nightmare of a house, playing a game alongside her brother and childhood best friend. Josephine lives in Carigara alone in the family home, running out of money since her parents were killed and her brother moved to Manila. When her childhood friend Hiraya offers Josephine a chance to come to her family’s old mansion to play a simple game that could give Josephine whatever she desires, it seems like a chance to escape. However, the house seems to not want to help, and the more Josephine learns, the worse her chances seem to be.

The book starts off slowly, building up Josephine’s family history and how tied their tragedies are to the political situation, whilst showing her exploring Hiraya’s house. Once the game begins, the book becomes much more fast paced, with a gripping run to the end. It also features some great horror moments like crawling through impossibly tight tunnels for your life and discovering the truth about the food served in the house. There’s plenty of the gothic side too in terms of social commentary, not just in the political situation but also the position of women in society and how Josephine is looking set to be forced to marry an older man, and the children’s game turned into a deadly fight fits in well with this.

Whilst the book was mostly a quite slow burn gothic novel for the first half, I liked how it then became more tense and also more creepy as it went on, especially with all the insects. If you like gothic horror, this book delivers a tense story that explores the complicated bonds between family and friends and a fight against oppression.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

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Lessons in Magic and Disaster is a novel about a trans witch who teaches her mother magic, only to find that magic might not always be the answer. Jamie is a trans woman, graduate student, and a witch, and she wants to do something to get her mother, Serena, back out into the world, as Serena’s been hiding away since the death of her wife. Jamie teaches her mother the magic she’s been using for years, all about exchanging something for what you most want, but Serena finds this magic a powerful force, and suddenly all elements of Jamie’s life are affected: her relationship with her mother, her marriage to Ro, her reputation at the college she works at.

I was drawn to this novel as I wanted to read a book by Charlie Jane Anders, and even though I’m not a huge fantasy person unless the fantasy is combined with more literary or general fiction, the selling point of the book being about a trans woman witch was enough for me to give it a go. Conveniently for me, Lessons in Magic and Disaster is not just a story about magic, and it is the kind of fantasy that is set in the real world except a few people can do magic, which is what I was hoping for.

The book is told both in the present day from Jamie’s perspective, and also in the past telling the story of her mothers, Serena and Mae. The present day narrative explores the magic side, and also Jamie’s research into a (fictional) eighteenth century novel and what it says about the real life historical women involved in it, whilst the story of Jamie’s mothers is more around queer community, sacrifice, and what makes a relationship. Sometimes this structure, particularly the chunks from the fictional eighteenth century novel and a fairytale story within its narrative, makes the book feel a bit slow-going, as it takes a while to get to the next bit of a plotline. However, the layered approach allows there to be a lot of things in conversation with each other.

The characters are flawed and messy, though I think some of the moral dilemmas and questions could’ve been more deeply explored as there’s some interesting stuff around trust and sacrifice and coping with things that gets reduced to characters taking in a “therapy-speak” style. There’s an online abuse/cancel culture plotline that again doesn’t quite get enough space to have nuance, and Jamie’s academic work (both research and her teaching/position at the college) always felt a bit pushed to the side even though there were so many chunks of the fake novel. I did like a lot of the character relationships, including Jamie and Ro’s marriage that hits tension when Ro finds out about the magic, and what we see of Jamie’s relationship with her dead mother, Mae.

Overall, I like how ambitious this novel is in combining the magic side with a tale of eighteenth century writer women and a look at queer community, whilst at its heart, having a story about a trans women and her relationships with other people in her life. At times I found it a bit slow and frustrating, but I found the ending powerful in terms of the character relationships and I think this book will be great for fans of queer fantasy with a literary edge.

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

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Katabasis is a novel about a journey into Hell, as two analytic magick students find themselves venturing into the unknown to bring back their PhD supervisor. Alice Law is an outsider—an American in Cambridge surrounded by white male academics—who wants to succeed, but when the death of her supervisor throws her goals into question, she researches how to get into Hell and find him. And suddenly, as she sets off, she finds her academic rival and once-friend Peter Murdoch is coming too. The two of them must debate texts about Hell, philosophy, logic, and everything else that makes up the magic they do if they have any hope of getting through Hell and having the life they want at the end of it.

Having read Kuang’s earlier Babel and Yellowface, I was assuming Katabasis was going to be similar to Babel, especially as it is very much marketed as dark academia. The “dark academia” label is basically meaningless by now, but I would say that despite both being about magic (and different kinds of fascinating magic at that) and Oxbridge, Babel and Katabasis are very different. Katabasis is what I want to call very affectionately “pretentious trash”, in that it is full of references to literary texts and philosophy and academia, but it is also a ridiculous story of two academic rivals who secretly like each other journeying through Hell. That’s not to say it doesn’t have plenty of serious things to say, about academic burnout and power structures and the misogyny and prejudices of academia, but it isn’t as deep as Babel and it isn’t trying to be.

The narrative is pretty simple, with a few twists and turns but mostly being a classic journey structure, with the characters meeting others along the way and things coming back to be relevant. The romance side of things is pretty low key, but it is also part of Alice’s wider need to realise there are things outside of just being the best in her field of magic. I enjoyed all of the references to literature about Hell and the way in which real texts and authors, both fictional and non-fictional, are a key part of the magic and mythology of Katabasis‘ world. The main issue I had with this book is that as someone who is British and knows Oxbridge fairly well, there’s a number of misused terms/references (mostly in a UK vs US way) that might be intentional (as Alice is American) or might be picked up later (as I read a proof copy), but for me that sort of mistake does pull me out of the story, especially as initially I didn’t realise Alice was American.

Even though Katabasis is a long novel, I found it gripping and fun to read. I love books about Hell and I enjoy reading about pretentious people having drama at elite universities, so I think I was always going to like Katabasis as long as it didn’t mess up on those elements, and for me, it fulfilled the kind of book I wanted it to be. Babel is probably a better novel (and I find myself telling people about its magic system and how it relates to colonialism quite often), but Katabasis just ticked off a lot of boxes for things I enjoy. Basically, if you want a Cambridge students of magic go to Hell book, this is a lot of fun.

We Are Always Tender With Our Dead by Eric LaRocca

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We Are Always Tender With Our Dead is a new horror novel from Eric LaRocca, centred around a cursed town, Burnt Sparrow, and what happens when three faceless creatures massacre a number of residents. Seventeen-year-old Rupert Cromwell is drawn into events by his father, and soon finds himself far too close to the dark cruelties that follow. It’s hard to say much more without giving too much away.

Having read most of LaRocca’s previous stories (liking some more than others as to be expected) and having a lukewarm reaction to his previous novel, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this one, especially as it is the start of a trilogy. However, I feel like this novel better showcases LaRocca’s skills in telling transgressive queer horror stories that explore human cruelty and trauma, whilst building up a sense of lore around Burnt Sparrow that I’m assuming will be continued in the later books in the series. The narrative is told from two characters’ perspectives, including a few horror stories told by those characters, plus some separate articles about Burnt Sparrow, and the narrative itself is episodic despite the overarching ‘plot’ of the three faceless murderers. By doing this, the book is able to delve deeper into some characters than you can in a shorter story, whilst still giving LaRocca space to weave shorter extreme horror stories and moments into the novel.

I’ll be fascinated to see what comes next in the series, as this one did feel like you were missing just that bit more about Burnt Sparrow, and the ending is quite sudden, with a lot of wider things left unanswered. The more extreme horror or splatterpunk moments in the book are quite brief, so whilst people should always take heed of trigger warnings at the start, I’d say that it isn’t as unrelenting as some other books I’ve read, and a lot of the horror comes from LaRocca’s trademark exploration of people’s choices and cruelty and the thresholds they are willing to cross. For me, this was one of my favourite LaRocca books, combining unnerving supernatural elements with the horrors of humans themselves, and using the novel length to weave in related stories.

Play Nice by Rachel Harrison

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Play Nice is a horror novel about a possessed house as a fashion influencer attempts to flip the house where her and her sisters were plagued by their mother’s insistence a demon was living there. Clio is a stylist and influencer with a devil-may-care attitude, unlike her sisters Leda and Daphne. When they find out that their estranged mother is dead, they convene at their father and stepmother’s house, but there Clio finds out that her sisters don’t want anything to do with their mother, not her funeral and not the house that has been left to them. Clio is determined to get the house ready to sell, but as she starts to learn more about what happened there in her childhood, the process isn’t as simple as it seemed.

I like Rachel Harrison’s style of high concept horror with modern day female protagonists, and Play Nice fits with her usual formula. The book is told from Clio’s perspective, so all of the family drama is filtered through her viewpoint. It is purposefully difficult to know what really happened, as the book explores the line between seeming crazy and trying to be believed about demonic possession. There’s not a simple answer to who you should sympathise with or what should be believed, but instead there’s plenty of classic haunted house ‘what is really going on’ moments. There’s also some commentary on how women are believed or not and the complexities of family dynamics and what matters when someone says they acted out of love.

The plot itself is pretty simple, with plenty of tension and an expected but fitting ending. There are some details or plot points that seemed like they might become relevant again but didn’t, and generally I think the influencer side of things could’ve had a bit more of a role in the book as it felt like there could have been more to say. Overall, Play Nice is another fun horror novel, one that isn’t particularly scary but which offers a family drama-centric take on the haunted house subgenre.

Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

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Catalina is a novel about an Ecuadorian student caught between the Harvard lifestyle and her and her grandparents’ undocumented status in the USA. Catalina is a witty English major starting her final year at Harvard, where she has a thing with the son of a famous filmmaker and gets invited to be part of a secret society. Back home in New York City are her grandparents who raised her in the US, but the two sides to Catalina’s life come together as undocumented immigrants become the focus of political battles.

This is a self-conscious campus novel, unpacking the often trivial concerns of campus novel characters through a messy protagonist who stresses about her thesis but also her and her grandparents’ ability to stay in the US. Catalina says that she was born in South America and now lives and studies in North America so how can she not call herself American, and that makes this book feel very “American”, as in it explores the complexity of the connection across these countries and in different spaces in the USA. There’s a lot of discussion of US literature and thinkers, as you’d expect in a campus novel, and also how Catalina does and doesn’t interact with South American history and thought, both through her grandfather and through Harvard. In this way, the book explores knowledge and the different ways people come by it. At the same time, it is an emotional novel, with a spiralling protagonist who rejects help from people when she needs it.

I’ve seen this book miscategorised as ‘dark academia’ and that isn’t going to do it any favours: it is a modern successor to the American literary campus novel, questioning what gets to be part of a campus novel and who is excluded, but it is certainly not going to fulfil anyone’s desire for dark academia. It is witty and sad, not really focused on a particular plot but more on Catalina’s character and her experiences across a number of months.

Spiralling by Cal Speet

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Spiralling is a novel about a gay man living in Manchester whose life falls apart after his boyfriend cheats on him, so he has to spend the next year trying to pull himself back together, with the help of his friends. Gabriel has just broken up with his boyfriend and then he’s fired from his job, so he’s ready to start spiralling. His best friends Tasha and Evie are there to help him, but they have relationship ups and downs of their own. As Gabriel tries to deal with his problems and not forget to care about his friends’ problems too, everything gets messy.

This is a fun book that manages to cover a lot of aspects of modern day life for gay men through Gabriel and other people he knows, delving into some serious topics but always keeping things pretty light-hearted. The story is told through a combination of first person narration, messages between people, and occasional other, more creative forms of writing, seemingly to reflect Gabriel’s desire to be a writer (even if he hardly ever writes, a highly relatable trait). There’s also occasional footnotes to explain things, which were meant to be humorous but sometimes read like the book was entirely aimed at straight people with no awareness of modern queer culture or any slang. Generally, the style of telling the story worked well to keep the book light and funny even as things went wrong, in the same way Gabriel tended to make jokes about things even when they were bad.

The Manchester setting was great, with a lot of recognisable details, and generally it is packed full of British culture and things like exactly which pair of Dr Martens Gabriel is wearing. It was refreshing to see this kind of book—someone down on their luck in terms of love and work who has a messy time with their friends—being about a gay man, and I liked how the book had space to explore some of Gabriel’s feelings about what it is like to be a gay man in the modern world. As you’d expect from the genre and vibe of the book, things are wrapped up pretty neatly with some potential big drama averted at least for Gabriel. Overall, this is a funny, messy read that reminded me of the sitcom Big Boys in its approach to both serious topics and showing modern gay life.

No Body, No Crime by Tess Sharpe

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No Body, No Crime is a thriller about two reunited women battling a powerful family whilst rekindling the romance torn apart by the guy they killed aged sixteen. Mel is a private investigator whose latest job sees her tasked by the Harper family to hunt down their daughter, Chloe. The thing is, Chloe was Mel’s girlfriend back when they were teenagers, after they bonded killing Toby Dune at Chloe’s sixteenth birthday party, and Mel’s been battling internally for years after feeling left by Chloe disappearing. Chloe had her reasons, however, and those reasons are still out there: a powerful local family, after something that Toby had stolen from them.

This book sounded like an adult version of Sharpe’s novel The Girls I’ve Been, and that’s really what it is: a fun, queer thriller that makes for an escapist read. Even though the book does touch on some deeper topics, like Mel’s brother’s drug problems or her abusive dad, these tend to be more like texture in the story rather than anything that is really explored. The narrative is told from a variety of perspectives, mostly Mel and Chloe but not just them, and this works pretty well alongside the non-chronological structure to build up a picture of events slowly, so revelations come at the right time. However, I was expecting a few more twists at the end, as the conclusion was all a bit too neat and perfect for a book that seems messier.

You have to take this book like you would when approaching an action film: sure, it’s going to be a bit ridiculous at times, with the two protagonists being ridiculously good at fighting and survival, but that’s the kind of fun you signed up for. As a queer person who loves action films, I like what Tess Sharpe does in making action thriller-type stories which also feature queer romance.

These Mortal Bodies by Elspeth Wilson

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These Mortal Bodies is a novel set at an elite university in which a young woman is drawn into the world of secret drinking societies and ancient power. Ivy grew up by the coast, but now she’s about to start at a prestigious university. Despite feeling like a outsider, she quickly finds intoxicating new friends and becomes intrigued by the drinking societies and the witchcraft-related history of her women-only college, but she has to decide how far she will go.

This is a dark academia novel that blends detail about Oxbridge with invented history of women accused of witchcraft, and blurs the lines between traditions and rituals, power and mysticism. The narrative focuses on Ivy and her friends’ first year at university, structured around each week of term, but it is more about small dramas and Ivy’s trajectory that big plot points, with the ending being more about characters coming into their own as ‘sisters’ at the college. For me, the ending felt more like a setup for a sequel than an actual ending, with lots of unexplored areas and unanswered questions.

The settings in the book are never specified, but the words used give it basically away, so the blurb I read specified that Ivy is from Scotland, but only particular terminology like Hogmanay’ made that clear, and the university is clearly Oxbridge (I assumed Cambridge as I was reading because it has a women’s college still and Oxford doesn’t, but given that it is fictional, it could be purposefully either). One downside of this is that I think anyone without a familiarity of the terminology used at Oxbridge may end up confused, trying to guess where it is set and unfamiliar with concepts like different colleges, drinking societies, and the short terms. As I am familiar with them, I liked the detail (and I like dark academia that manages to be realistic with the university detail of where it is set), and it did accurately explore the balance between academic work and other elements that becomes all the more apparent when terms are short and workloads are high.

The characters were intriguing but perhaps lacking in detail at times, even Ivy as the narrator (anyone else you could blame on Ivy’s perspective, as a lot of the side characters seemed to have no personality traits at al). Again, the blurb I read said Ivy is neurodivergent, but the book itself leaves that unspoken as far as I remember, and there are a lot of points like this where things are hazy and unspoken, but which perhaps actually needed to be spoken. Ivy’s obsession with binaries, which is foregrounded at certain points in the book, brought something interesting to what I was starting to think was a book obsessed with the difference between men and women, but again, it wasn’t really followed through on, not even with the one lesbian character or the one singular mention of the concept of non-binary people in the ‘dear’ part of a letter/email. I think it is a perspective on Oxbridge that often isn’t explored—how so much is set up as some kind of binary—so I would’ve liked more depth around it (particularly as a non-binary person who went to Oxbridge myself).

The toxic friendship and obsession stuff is enjoyable, reminding me of things like The Craft in which there’s a blurry line between this kind of obsessive female friendship and ideas of witchcraft. Oxbridge drinking societies do work quite nicely as a way to do dark academia (they are perhaps one of the most famous ‘dark’ aspects of the places) and the way they are worked into the characters’ dramas and relationships make them integral rather than background. I think the darkness and actual narrative drama could’ve gone further, as what actually happens in very tame (and I assumed things were setting up for darker plot points, but then didn’t). And once again with dark academia I feel that ideas around kinds of obsession and betrayal are so focused on female friendships and boys as the distraction from them that they don’t even explore the homoeroticism they contain, not even in this case where one of the friends is a lesbian (though she never really mentions this).

These Mortal Bodies is fun if you like dark academia vibes with an accurate (if trying to be non-specific) Oxbridge setting, but for me it lacked substance and the combination of darkness and charm that makes The Secret History continue to be a standout book amongst its many successors. It felt like the first half of something, without the ‘fall’ or fallout from events ever happening (I do find it hilarious that Ivy gets a first even when she constantly admits she doesn’t take her work as seriously as she should). However, I do appreciate when dark academia books do actually understand how to combine the academic setting with the ‘dark’ obsession side, and it was a good book to read in autumn with the new academic year feeling.