Clean is a tense novel narrated by a maid in a locked room, telling her side of the sequence of events that left her there after the death of the daughter of the house. Estela moved to Santiago and found a job working for a well-off middle class family, a doctor and his lawyer wife and then their newborn daughter. She describes how over the seven years, things began to go wrong, always alluding and building up to the death of the girl.
This is a book that unfolds with dread, like a nightmare, as Estela narrates what it is like to work as if invisible, unless she does something wrong. As her life is contrasted with that of the family she works for, she argues that this didn’t cause resentment, but as death starts to impact them, it becomes hazy as to exactly what is happening. The book leaves as many questions as it answers, trapping Estela and her narrative in a limbo in which the reader can interpret, but not know for sure. One notable thing is how isolated Estela is, even with the backdrop of political change, and how much her story is about her isolation, not just the ‘present’ of the narrative in which she is locked in a room. In a way, you are locked in with her, forced to see the disgusting side of the family and the work Estela does, and it seems to give her some kind of purpose to be narrating, even though without any kind of response, there’s no real sense anyone is actually listening to her.
Clean is ideal for fans of literary thrillers, weaving together class and domestic work in Chile with a memorable character who is an invisible woman, a forty-something maid. It is especially enjoyable to get this kind of narrative instead of the many thrillers centred around the perspective middle class characters and families, and in that way it reminds me of fiction like the film Parasite, using class and wealth disparity as part of the tension in a thriller.
Horror Movie is a novel about a cursed film production, as the only remaining major cast or crew member gets involved with a big budget reboot. In 1993, a group of filmmakers made Horror Movie, but what happened on set meant that the film was never completed, and only three scenes (and the screenplay) were leaked online. In the present day, the only surviving cast member, the guy playing the infamous masked ‘Thin Kid’, is now a famous figure, as fans try and work out what really happened, and he’s involved in the reboot of the film, whilst also now narrating this story he’s telling about the present and the past of making both versions of the film.
Lots of horror these days plays with ideas of internet obsession and fandom, and in this case, Paul Tremblay takes the lost media and cursed production ideas to create a novel that is part screenplay, part unreliable narrator tells all. Despite being about a film that is pitched as a slasher, this isn’t a novel about jump scares and desperate running from the bad guy. Instead, you get the script, with its weird horror movie moments, and the narration, which is more about setting up ideas of what horror actually happened, and leaving you question it all even after the book ends. People looking for horror that is scary might be disappointed, as this one is quite a slow burn, with some vague body horror elements, but really exploring the horror of what you do and don’t see, and do and don’t believe.
I liked the whole mask thing, which reminded me of the Goosebumps book The Haunted Mask which I found very scary as a child, and the messy way that the unreliable narration left you unsure what the characters actually did or were even like. The purposeful distance through this, with the narrator having been purposefully distanced during original filming, means that you don’t really get much of any character, not even the narrator really, and the most coherent narrative is the script you’re reading, and even that narrative is questioned in the novel in various ways, through different shooting ideas or queries about if that version of the script is the original one. The book forces you to be the kind of voyeur that the narrator hates, the internet fan trying to piece together what happened, and also the voyeur that the script creates through the three other teens who aren’t the Thin Kid.
I don’t know how much Horror Movie will stand out from other examples of cursed film production fiction, but its focus on what we get to see and what perspective the viewer/reader gets makes it a very interesting book, if not a scary one. I found it fun to read and easy to get through in a single sitting, and I like the mythology around it, with the mask and the crocodile poem. I think the endings of both timelines leave a lot of interesting ambiguities, but I also think there’s other things that could’ve been delved into further (for example, one thread of the book is the unsafe set practices and ways in which the narrator became the character, and the dynamic of having two female characters in charge of this whilst the narrator is male and asked to diet, wear just underwear, etc is something that isn’t really explored, despite being a flip of a lot of traditional Hollywood dangerous/bad set myths).
Private Rites is a novel about three sisters as the world slowly floods, coming to terms with their father’s death and their relationship to each other. The rain has been ongoing for so long now, and sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes live separate lives, until their rich architect father’s death forces them back together. There’s his distinctive house, there’s the mystery of their mothers and what happened to them, and there’s the sense that this bleak, claustrophobia world expects something from them.
Vaguely ‘King Lear if all of the daughters were queer’, this apocalyptic novel feels very much a follow up to Armfield’s Our Wives Under The Sea, a damp-infused book in which not very much happens, but there’s a lingering sense of dread. The narrative moves between focusing on each of the three sisters, plus a kind of chorus of the ‘city’ that seems to be non-specifically London, and for a long time, the book seems to mostly be a family drama with the backdrop of this flooded world. I really wasn’t sure where it was headed, but the climax of the novel gives it a bit of a twist, bringing together some of the threads in a maybe unexpected way that changes the genre.
The ‘all three sisters are queer’ angle is interestingly explored, with each of them in a different place in their romantic lives and particularly Irene and Agnes’ relationships are important throughout the book. Agnes’ character development throughout the novel was one of my favourite elements, and I also liked Irene and Jude’s relationship. Iris is pleasingly flawed as a character, trying to control what she cannot, and once you get into the book enough to understand who these characters are and what’s going on with them, it is very character-driven.
I found it hard to get into the book at first, as it doesn’t feel like it is going anywhere, and I don’t think this was helped by the fact that I’d not read anything about it beforehand so wasn’t aware it is vaguely King Lear (which is one of my least favourite Shakespeare plays). However, as the slow tension rose (and so did the floodwaters), it became more gripping, and by the end, it felt like it did have a good payoff, though it does leave quite a lot of ambiguous. Armfield is great at the literary unsettling novel, and Private Rites is a fascinating take on a climate crisis future and sisters with pent up resentments once it gets into it.
Cuckoo is a horror novel about a conversion camp that aims to make queer teens a whole new person, and a group of kids who fight their way out to stop it. In 1995, a group of queer teenagers forced by their parents to attend Camp Resolution realise that it is more than just abusive staff and religion: the camp is far darker than that, stealing their very selves. Despite this, they band together, find friends and lovers, and hatch a plan to escape, but even getting away isn’t enough, and the survivors, now adults, have to try and stop it at the source.
Anyone who has read Felker-Martin’s Manhunt is surely waiting with baited breath for this book, and Cuckoo didn’t disappoint, as a book very different to Manhunt and yet still exploring what happens when the worst horror happens to queer people. Cuckoo has a big cast of protagonists and I was initially wary (after the prologue that serves as your horror ‘here’s what is going on’ opener) that it would be too hard to tell the characters apart. However, by midway through, I wasn’t worried, and had a good handle on the various characters, who all have different lives, flaws, and experiences. One of the things I enjoyed about the book wasn’t the horror, but was the fact that it takes a bunch of different queer teens and imagines not only them under pressure, but then how they react as adults.
Notably, the book doesn’t end with the 1995 narrative, but moves forward in time to the characters as adults (it’s hard not to compare this to It), and I was excited when I realised it had done this, as it is so rare to get a good deconstruction of the aftereffects of extreme horror on the characters. This later part has to be a lot faster in pace and by the end quite action-centric, but you still get the chance to see that these characters are still broken, have grown up into adults not only dealing with the trauma of Camp Resolution, but also normal things, like relationships and grief and money and the difficulties of being queer in the world. A lot of stories about queer people only show one point in their lives, and a lot of horror stories don’t deal with the aftermath, so combining these elements offers a different picture of survival.
In terms of the horror, there’s unsurprisingly from the title body snatchers-style fear, alongside abuse and trying to survive in a desert, and a decent amount of body horror from the cosmic evil threat. I liked that the body snatcher stuff didn’t focus too much on the protagonists not knowing who had ‘turned’ or not at the camp, as I find that kind of horror quite frustrating, but instead it was more about the wider implications in the world, particularly at the end (the ending has similarities to Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless, playing with the horror’s impact on a happy future). Felker-Martin makes the audience very aware of the horror tropes she is playing in, with plenty of overt and subtler references, and this is far more gory horror than scary, as a lot of queer horror seems to focus on at the moment.
Overall, the book plays with ideas of replacement and parents’ anxieties around queer kids, particularly around the idea that having a queer child makes parents act like their child has been replaced because they aren’t “normal”, and what that might mean if they really were completely different. As conversion therapy horror, it really digs into the idea of what changing means and if it would even be the same person, making it actually quite a good exploration of the philosophical issues (never mind all the myriad other issues) with conversion therapy as a concept. I liked Cuckoo more than Manhunt, and some of that might be because I find its take on the subgenre it is in even more interesting (and also I liked the characters and their dynamics).
As with Manhunt and a lot of other queer horror out there at the moment, there’s going to be people aren’t going to ‘get’ it, either because they don’t like the amount of body horror and sex or because they don’t like having a load of messy, flawed characters who don’t do the right thing all the time or even necessarily learn from things. For me, I really liked how it explored the horrors of conversion therapy and abusive families, but also toxic relationships to yourself and with others. The characters didn’t all get neat resolutions or development, but how could they be expected to in a world in which this can happen to them? If the idea of the cuckoo and body replacement tells us anything, it is that anyone can really be anything underneath.
Like Water Like Sea is a novel about loss, self-discovery, love, and mental illness, as it follows a queer woman in three moments of her life. Nia lives in London and ten years after her sister’s death by suicide, she is struggling for what she wants out of her relationships and how to relate to her mother, who has bipolar, now that she is also an adult and with their shared grief. When she makes two new friends, a couple who found her at a low point, a journey starts in which she will make mistakes, navigate her connections to other people, and emerge at fifty years old with fresh realisations.
This is a complex novel that weaves together a lot of emotion, exploring not just the grief that runs through the book but also types of love, queerness, race, and ways of living in a harsh world. The styles of narration change, with Nia’s perspective predominantly, but also sections near the start that explore the lives of her sister and mother, and also a final part that is more ambiguous, offering up three potential endings (with one marked as most probable). This offers a cacophony of perspective and the idea that there’s not just one way of living, especially living with grief and in different kinds of relationships. Queerness plays an important part in these endings, exploring how family structures are created, and generally the book explores how relationships are often not made on equal or matching emotions, and must be navigated as such.
Another very crucial part of the book is bipolar and cyclothymia, and the impact this has on Nia’s mother and sister, but also how it is not everything about them. It is refreshing to see this kind of depiction and the complexity of mental illness and how different people experience things. Generally, the book explores the fluidity and messiness of many things, and always returns to kinds of love. Though the narrative is more of a self-discovery, meditative one than big events happening, changes in relationships do mark the passing of time and structure in the novel.
Like Water Like Sea is a powerful book, at times bittersweet, and filled with different snippets of experience and emotion. It is great for fans of literary fiction that engages with feelings and self-discovery, and with ways of forming families and relationships.
No-One’s No One is a coming of age novel about friends, bands, and DIY culture, as an aimless seventeen-year-old finds something to pour his heart into. Thomas has just finished exams at college and has a long summer ahead of him, and longer. As everyone else makes plans, his main plans are to continue going along to the weekly Car Boot Sale with his dad, where he finds secondhand cassettes to develop his musical education, and doesn’t think about his estranged best friend. When he meets a new guy at the Boot Sale, Thomas’ world starts to widen, far more than he originally expects, and soon he has found a world of house shows and bands he couldn’t have dreamed of.
This is a book thoroughly infused with music, not just rock and pop and punk as you might expect, but also jazz and classical, and a love of discovery. In fact, that’s what the book really is about: discovery of not just new music and books and films, but of friends and what the world might be. Alongside this, it’s about queer discovery, and the importance of all the steps that open your eyes to the world and who you could be in it. Thomas has fairly secluded and sheltered life, particularly for someone who is almost eighteen, and the novel delves into what he needs to go beyond that, and to take up something for himself rather than because his parents thought he might like to do it. This positions the novel in that space coming of age books often inhabit, the time after teen fiction when things aren’t neat, they are messy and experimental and uncertain, and it embraces this, as Thomas learns from others and also passes on recommendations to other people, full of community spirit and sharing and pitching in.
There’s something so fun about books that are a love letter to a scene like No-One’s No-One is (and Thomas is highly aware of this, wanting to be part of an artistic scene and have that community), and the reader gets to experience the DIY house show scene like Thomas does: as an overwhelming, exciting experience that changes the whole feel of the novel. From the drifting feeling of the start to the hope and disappointment in love Thomas experiences to the fresh promise that makes up the ending, this is a book that offers a hopeful, realistic queer story of finding the right people (and a few wrong ones along the way).
Bad Habit is a novel about a working class trans woman growing up in Madrid and navigating communities and places, death and violence. The unnamed narrator grows up from a young child barely able to understand why she’s drawn to groups of women and to the one trans woman in the neighbourhood, to a teenager living with the weight of hidden first love, and then an adult finding and losing community, and then returning to her original neighbourhood and someone she never knew well enough before. All the while, she grapples with how to live as herself amidst the violence of being working class and different.
Translated from Spanish, this is a lyrical novel and the translation really captures this, moving through scenes in sometimes a hazy way, a remembered way, and also a constructed way, as the protagonist builds up a mythology for herself, her neighbourhood, and the people around her. The narrative focuses around particular moments and scenes in her life, rather than a main story, and it has a coming of age feel, as she discovers forms of sisterhood and community even whilst a lot of her connections with people are fleeting. By the ending, this becomes a memorable concluding vision, bringing with it an idea running throughout the book: that we are and become part of a lineage, that the people and stories that come before are important, and also why we must keep going.
This is a beautiful novel that depict darkness and violence, but also connection and forms of community, and particularly the importance and complexity of finding role models as a trans woman growing up. It questions putting people on a pedestal whilst also acknowledging it can be hard to avoid when you need proof that you have a future and can exist in, or outside of, society.
Evenings and Weekends is a novel mostly spanning a weekend in London and Basildon, as an interconnected group of characters across two generations face up to the messiness of life. Maggie is pregnant and on the cusp of moving back to Basildon from London, but she doesn’t want to leave, and her boyfriend Ed seems distracted. Her best friend Phil is falling for his housemate Keith, but Keith’s in another relationship and Phil doesn’t want to upset the current balance. Phil’s mum Rosaleen has a cancer diagnosis she wants to share with her son, but doesn’t know how, and Phil’s brother is soon to get married, but keeps disappearing. And there’s a whale stuck in the Thames.
This is the kind of kaleidoscopic literary fiction novel in which there’s not a huge amount of plot, but there is a lot of character moments of crisis and change, and you can get deep into the world of the interconnected characters. At first, it seemed that the “normal” life of Maggie and Ed wasn’t very interesting, but then it became apparent how much of an act this was. Other characters, particularly Phil and Rosaleen, have engrossing narratives around being haunted by their past and looking towards who they are now and how they relate to other people. There’s a lot of supporting characters too, who sometimes get a POV moment, and though this often doesn’t work in books, in Evenings and Weekends it did feel like it added colour to the tapestry, so to speak.
I liked how there was a lot about queerness underpinning the novel, and various characters’ relationships with queerness, particularly in a London millennial way, but also relating to class and growing up. The messiness of the characters’ lives felt very real and their complex experiences of love and sex brought a lot to the book, particularly by the ending. It was refreshing to have a novel explore some of these realities, alongside a great sense of London atmosphere, and the title is reflected in the way that the book is all about the times outside of work, the human moments, rather than another novel about millennials hating their jobs.
The ‘whale stuck in the Thames and a marine biologist who looks like Princess Diana’ subplot was a great element, but I did wish that it felt like it had an actual conclusion or connected with the characters by the end. Weirdly for a literary fiction novel without much plot, I feel like it could have a sequel, which explores further the characters’ decisions, maybe with a time jump to make them older and have different experiences.
Evenings and Weekends is a novel about not wanting to give up who you could be, that potential for excitement and fun and love, and it is also an exploration of London and small-towns, and the complexities of what futures you could have as a queer person. The range of points of view through the narrative will be divisive, but I didn’t lose track of how anyone was and enjoyed the little insights you got from a sudden change to a supporting characters’ POV.
Blue Ruin is a novel about art and power, as a former artist finds himself facing his past. Jay was an artist in London, where he was in a relationship with Alice until she ran off with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. Now, however, it is the early days of the pandemic, and Jay is an undocumented gig economy worker delivering groceries. When a delivery to a huge house in the countryside reveals Alice, suddenly Jay is confronted by the art world once again.
It doesn’t feel surprising that Hari Kunzru has written a pandemic novel, even though Blue Ruin is a far more an exploration of being an artist, culture, immigration, and money, than it really is about Covid. The pandemic forms the weird coincidence that ignites the plot and fuels the paranoia of the rich that compares with the way in which rich people fund the art world, something that the characters, particularly Jay, reckon with throughout the book. The book follows a present day narrative of a lockdown in a country house, but also extended flashbacks to a much younger Jay, Alice, and Rob, their relationships, and, particularly, their art. There are twists and turns, particularly in the present day story, whilst the book asks, what are the conditions to make art, if any exist, and can you live a life of art.
There are some unfinished threads (for instance, Jay never quite has to face up to anything external, like his app-based job), but generally, this is a book that poses a lot of questions, pokes fun at the 90s art scene, and also looks at race, immigration, and how people can move through the world. It plays with the joke that an artist could do anything and claim it is art, whilst exploring where the power and the money is. As someone who knows very little about the art world, I nevertheless found this a gripping novel, that has a lot of modern commentary but tempers it with an across the decades look at what makes an artist and how an artist makes money.
I’m New Here is a novel about a Taiwanese-British man who goes to Taipei looking for meaning, only to instead find a mysterious man with an unusual request. Sean has been fired from his job as a photojournalist and has split up with his girlfriend, and he’s at a loss, in Taiwan even though he feels caught between his heritage and not part of Taiwan. In a doughnut shop he meets Charles, an older man who seems to take a sudden interest in him, wanting his photography and skills, and as Sean is drawn into Charles’ world, things get weirder, and Sean can hardly be sure what is real.
The distinctive writing style of this book draws you in to Sean’s head, not always a great place to be as he’s depressed and self-loathing, full of internalised racism and a lack of belief in his own abilities. It’s hazy yet fast paced, reflecting the dream-like way in which Sean experiences things and the uncertainty around what might actually be happening or not, especially as the novel draws towards its conclusion. The kind of style, which feels similar to other recent novels, isn’t one that I’ve seen before used for this kind of caught between cultures narrative, and it works well to position Sean as an outsider who also seems to be alienated partly due to his own mindset.
In terms of the narrative, it feels almost like a film to me, with the photography element lending itself to making the book feel quite visual, and the strange events add to this. I liked this visuality, and the way that the narrative itself could almost have been a black comedy crime story at times, but also a literary exploration of alienation and depression. I’m New Here dives into the mind of a self-hating man looking for purpose, combining hazy ambiguity with internalised prejudice, and it’s a great short novel that was gripping and hallucinatory.
Fiendfully Reading 
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