Palaver is a novel about an estranged mother and son who are suddenly staying together in Tokyo and have to try and navigate the spaces in their lives for their relationship. The son lives in Japan, having left Texas and his homophobic brother for life as an English tutor, spending his evenings drinking in a gay bar in Ni-Chome. All of a sudden, his mother arrives in Japan, unexpectedly. They struggle to live alongside one another, but as they slowly start to talk, and they both develop other connections in Tokyo, they start to gain more understanding of each other at this moment in their lives.
Having read Washington’s previous novels and short story collection, I would’ve read this anyway, but the fact that it is set in Japan and explores a gay man’s experiences in Tokyo was even more of a selling point. The book feels deeply immersed in Tokyo, and in ideas of community and location in relation to loneliness and separation. It creates a vivid atmosphere, even in the mundane details. The son spends time with a group who gather at a local gay bar, many of whom have moved from other countries to Japan, and the book is full of characters who move in search of home, whatever that might be. I liked the subplot about the bar patrons and the bar owner getting top surgery and them all supporting his recovery, which serves as a quiet reminder of queer community and family in a book all about the fact that family shouldn’t just be taken as a given.
Quietly powerful, Palaver is a book that manages to be deeply about its characters and their present and past, but also very much about its setting too, and the importance of places and what they mean to people.
The School of Night is a novel about a photographer who dreams of success, but when it comes, there’s a price to pay. Kristian is a Norwegian student who moves to London to study photography. There, he feels bored and frustrated, getting negative feedback on his work that he doesn’t agree with. He meets Hans, a Dutch artist who sees the world differently and is interested in the historical occult, and when something terrible happens, Kristian finds inspiration. However, Kristian’s success might not be as stable as it seems.
This is my first Knausgaard novel—I’d always assumed his work wasn’t going to be my sort of thing, but the connection this book has with Christopher Marlowe made me want to read it. It is really a novel of two halves, with the first half a story of London in the 1980s, a young photographer who becomes intrigued by Marlowe, a strange new friend, and what happens when the photographer does something terrible. I really liked the first half, with its vivid 1980s London setting and the way that Kristian is shown to be pretentious, often annoying, and focused on his own success over anyone else. There’s a lot of narratives running alongside each other and they all play together, in an accessible style and lots of detail (I liked how Kristian kept returning to trying to decide an order for his record collection, for example). I was intrigued how the motifs from Doctor Faustus that the story plays with were going to play out as the book continued.
The second half jumps forward in time. Kristian is now a successful artist with his photographs getting a major exhibition, and he’s balancing that with his wife and child. There’s a framing narrative at points throughout the whole novel that hints to his current position as he’s been narrating the novel, too. I found that the second half didn’t quite live up to the promise of the first half, for me. The things I’d liked about the first half—the specificity of detail, the lingering occult—were no longer really present, and maybe a few more flashes of time before reaching the final section would’ve made it feel more like it was getting across Kristian’s rise and readying his fall. The events of the second half, mostly around the same self-centred man now dealing with interviews and arguments with his wife before a final dramatic moment, were less exciting to me and felt more like any novel about an self-obsessed artist.
However, the conclusion to the novel does bring everything back together and I think it works quite powerfully to get across the novel’s message. I have to admit that I do find the middle part of Doctor Faustus less interesting as well, so maybe it was inevitable! I also just really enjoyed the 1980s pretentious artsy vibe and how it played into the Marlowe/Faustus side, whereas I’m less interested in the atmosphere of the second half, at least until the ending. Overall, I enjoyed The School of Night and how it engaged with Doctor Faustus to tell a story of ambition and the price of success. Also, it made me realise I should actually read more Knausgaard.
Greedy is a novel about a desperate man who finds himself the private chef to a billionaire with a specific greed. Ed is a British man who now lives in Japan with his Japanese wife and their young daughter. After losing his job, he fell into a pit of gambling that led to massive debts with the yakuza, and no way of paying them off. When he sees a newspaper ad for a private chef job that values discreetness over culinary skill, it seems like the perfect opportunity for Ed to pay off his debts. But the deeper Ed gets into this world, the more it seems like he might’ve gone out of the frying pan and into the fire.
This is one of those novels where you can guess even from the marketing what the twist will be, but it is all about getting there. The narrative spends a long time building up Ed’s mindset and each choice he makes that takes him further down the road to finding out his new employer’s secrets, and unless you’re someone who hasn’t worked out the twist, it does at times feel like Ed is incredibly naive, maybe frustratingly so. If you’re looking for a book that focuses more on the “special meat” side of the narrative, this isn’t that book, as that is more like the climax to the story and it isn’t necessarily explored as much as in other books that have similar themes, but instead it is more about the desperation and greed that people have.
I did like the final additional twist at the end, which brought an extra layer to the narrative that we hadn’t seen before, and made one character seem very different to what we had previously seen. Overall, it’s a fun book that is very predictable (other than the final twist, which I hadn’t predicted), but in the sort of way where you’re watching someone’s descent with a knowing eye whilst they don’t seem to realise.
Black Flame is a short horror novel about a closeted Jewish woman who works on restoring a film seemingly destroyed by the Nazis. In 1980s New York City, Ellen works restoring old film and dodging her mother’s desire for her to settle down and marry a nice man. As she starts working on a film brought in by a group of German academics full of queer debauchery and strange occurrences, not only is Ellen’s repression pushed to breaking point, but she starts to realise that the film is bleeding into real life.
Having read Manhunt and Cuckoo, I was always going to read Gretchen Felker-Martin’s next offering. This one is quite different, a shorter book that focuses on a smaller story centred around one protagonist. It explores queer repression, Jewishness, and the concept of things from film stock coming into the real world, and has a level of gore and sex that you’d expect from Felker-Martin. It starts off fairly gently as we’re introduced to Ellen, but it gets nastier as the book goes on, with some memorable moments near the end. The horror is more around the horrors of repression and violence rather than actually being scary, but it’s still more of a book for extreme horror fans like Felker-Martin’s other books.
Superfan is a novel about a college student who discovers a new boy band and becomes a huge fan, whilst secrets about one of the band members threaten to be revealed. Minnie is lonely, a freshman at college in Texas who feels like an outsider struggling to make friends. When she discovers a video of HOURglass, an American band created in a K-Pop model, she’s found her new obsession. The band, especially the group’s bad boy Halo, bring her happiness and an online community that is there for her as she struggles in real life. However, Halo himself is struggling, with secrets from before he became famous and the pressures of life in a band where everything is controlled by the record label.
This is a multi-faceted novel that combines a coming-of-age college narrative with a story about parasocial relationship and manufactured fame. It is told concurrently from Minnie and Halo (real name Eason)’s perspectives, bringing a dual narrative that you know must collide at some point beyond Minnie’s obsession. A lot of the book actually isn’t just about Minnie and the band, but about Minnie’s time at college as she attempts to find herself, but instead finds a controlling guy who isn’t quite her boyfriend and his creepy friend. It is interesting therefore that the book has a dual narrative, as it is easy to imagine it just from Minnie’s perspective, but by having Eason there as well with a separate tense narrative, there’s a lot more packed in. There’s a lot of realistic details about online fan communities, though there’s not as much resolution from that side of things, nor around the ways that the band were manipulated and the ethics of that.
Overall, Superfan is a campus novel crossed with a boy band novel and a dash of thriller, and it’s definitely fascinating for anyone who has spent time online seeing fan communities in action.
Taco is another instalment in the Object Lessons series, focusing on the taco and its fame as a Mexican food. The book explores elements of the taco such as the definition of what one is and what has caused variations such as soft and hard tortillas, whilst also delving deep into ideas of authenticity and who can make Mexican food.
The Object Lessons series is often delightful, but Taco has definitely been one of my favourites. I felt like I learned a lot not only from the information about tacos, but from Sánchez Prado’s personal experiences as someone from Mexico City who has tried a vast range of tacos (and has opinions re: some of the big debates around tacos). As someone from the UK (where tacos weren’t even that well-known not that long ago, especially anything other than an Old El Paso kit), I liked how the book touched on a lot of aspects of Mexican cuisine and culture, whilst also highlighting what has happened to the taco once it crossed the border into the USA. The only downside is, I’m now craving tacos.
Somebody Is Walking On Your Grave is a nonfiction book from Mariana Enriquez, whose short story collections and the novel Our Share of Night have previously been translated into English. The book explores her visits to a range of graveyards around the world, blending a travelogue, personal memoir, and history as she explores these places and what took her to their locations.
I liked the way she blends travelogue and personal essay, capturing the excitement of visiting new places (it’s fun that a few of them are so she can see bands in that country) as well as her clearly deep interest in graveyards and cultures around death in different places. As a fan of Enriquez’s writing, it was fascinating to find out more about her and travel with her on a few wild adventures (stealing a bone from the Paris catacombs the most thrilling). Some of the historical context I found more interesting than others—New Orleans was maybe my favourite—but it was good to find out more about not just the places she visited, but the people either interred there or connected to it.
Shy Trans Banshee is the sequel to Bored Gay Werewolf and it follows said titular werewolf, this time in London, where he and his supernatural-fighting friends are trying to pick up the trail of a missing colleague. Brian and his friends Nik and Darby are running a secretly supernatural shop whilst trying to work out what happened to the previous proprietor. They’re not getting anywhere, but then they find that fortune tellers are being kidnapped, and then they meet Maeve, an Irish trans woman who seems shy at first, but also has something she’s not telling them.
Bored Gay Werewolf was a fun book satirising manosphere-type guys with a slacker protagonist. The sequel picks up with Brian still lazy, but now much more able to control the werewolf side of his life, and the narrative has morphed into more of a ‘monster hunting friends’ situation than just focused on Brian. He is still the perspective through which the narrative is focused, but now there’s his friends and new friend Maeve, who is the shy trans banshee of the title (it is funny that the final word of that phrase isn’t revealed for a long time in the book, which is a bit frustrating when reading).
I like the fun, irreverent vibe of this book, which is similar to the previous one, and it makes the supernatural mystery solving element more enjoyable for me, as someone who isn’t a huge fantasy fan but does like sweary queer books. I was glad that the ‘Americans in London’ jokes weren’t too overdone (I’m realising now that this is an ‘American Werewolf in London’ book), though there was the odd detail that was weird for me as a British person (it’s strange to have a side character being described as UKIP when they’ve not really been prevalent or used as a descriptor in quite a few years).
I’ve seen other reviews mention that they wanted more Maeve, and I agree. I think that though she’s crucial to the plot, it would’ve been great to see more of her as a character and also delve more into what it is actually like for her to be a “shy trans banshee”. Maybe some way of having her perspective added into the narrative as well as Brian’s at some point would’ve helped. There’s an offhand joke from Brian at one point about the intersection between being gay and being a werewolf, and I do think that the quirky titles of the series don’t quite get the exploration in terms of that intersection, especially in Maeve’s case.
As the second in what is clearly a series (the book ends obviously prepared for another sequel), Shy Trans Banshee is a fun queer supernatural story that perhaps has a bit more style over substance at times. I think the pivot from the first book being more obviously satirical to this one being more of a quipping-friends-solving-a-mystery means that the humour is different and the engagement with the real world not as gripping (compared for example to books like Juno Dawson’s Her Majesty’s Royal Coven books, which very clearly integrate magic in to the real world and into real world issues). However, I did enjoy the characters and will read the sequel to find out what happens to them next.
The Decadence is a gothic horror story that offers a new take on the country house novel, as a group of friends flee to an old country house during lockdown. Jan and her friends are floundering, and now lockdown has made things even worse as they can’t even party to escape their lives. But there is one option: a couple of weeks at the old country house Theo inherited from his great uncle. Fuelled by as many drugs as they could bring, things start falling apart almost immediately, as their interpersonal dramas surface, but quickly it seems to Jan that there’s something else going on, and maybe the house isn’t the safe retreat they imagined.
This is a book that takes a lot of other works and reinvents them into something new, as Leon Craig discusses in her note at the end of the book. The narrative perspective (entirely from Jan’s point of view, a woman trying to fit in despite being a queer Jewish woman in a upper class English environment) and characters are from the country house novel, even pushing as far as (again, as Craig states) The Secret History as a kind of country house novel without the house, but with the in-group rarified from others. The haunted house side of things easily calls to mind Shirley Jackson, House of Leaves, and Tell Me I’m Worthless, and the latter in particular feels like a good comparison for this book, with The Decadence having less of the horror but a similar connection between the evils of Britain and the haunting of its seats of power.
The story itself is pretty simple, with messy characters and drama between them building to a climax alongside the weird things happening in the house, and being forced together in a claustrophobic setting adding to all that. It starts in a slow burn gothic style, mostly focused on the characters, before things ramp up as they all take an experimental drug. Sometimes this kind of book can lack a dramatic ending, but The Decadence builds to something that feels in-keeping with the atmosphere it has created (though I think having read Tell Me I’m Worthless primed me to expect something like what happens). Due to being from Jan’s perspective, you never quite know what was going on with the other characters, which again, suits the genre, and also the overarching theme of belonging and what is knowable.
I thought from hearing about it that The Decadence would be my sort of book, with its combination of haunted house horror, the Brideshead-style novel, and a queer protagonist, and I’m happy that I wasn’t disappointed. Craig uses the range of books that influenced her to create a new version of a gothic country house that fits into the claustrophobia of lockdown (which I’ve not mentioned otherwise in the review, but I liked how it came into the novel, and how it didn’t) and explores the messiness of belonging (or not) in terms of identity, money, and power in modern Britain.
Best Woman is a romcom about a trans woman attending her brother’s wedding who discovers that her high school crush is the maid of honour. Julia’s family is supportive of her, unlike many of her friends’ families, so she’s happy to be best woman at her brother’s wedding even with having to interact with so many of her extended family members, but she’s even more excited when she discovers that her high school crush, Kim, is the maid of honour. When they meet up, Kim assumes that Julia’s family are less than happy about Julia being trans, and Julia uses this lie to try and win over Kim via sympathy. As the wedding draws closer, however, Julia realises that she can’t keep up the lie forever, and being a romcom heroine doesn’t always pay off.
I was excited to read Best Woman as you don’t see that many trans romcoms, and I love to see what we are writing in every genre. The book follows a lot of classic romcom conventions, particularly around the fact that the protagonist lies to her love interest in the hope of fuelling their romance, and it’s good to explore what a trans version of that might be: in this case, using the idea of transphobia to garner sympathy. Whilst the romance side of things is important to the plot, the book really focuses on family, and the types of family support you can have, with people who are and aren’t actually related to you. Julia has to deal with how family members perceive her and the difficulty as a trans person of navigating relatives remembering you as a child, not always as you’d like to be perceived (definitely something relatable for me).
The comedy side of the romcom is snarky, with a lot of jokes about queer life, and I particularly liked Julia’s fittingly chaotic romcom friends, who in this case are a group of queer friends from New York City who do things like “borrow” clothes from pop stars. Oddly, the main thing that didn’t get any snark was a few references (from Julia’s POV as she’s the narrator) to Harry Potter, and given that there’s a comment about Silence of the Lambs and whether it is okay to like it, it felt disorienting that the Harry Potter references were neutral and didn’t at least get a bit of commentary about how Julia couldn’t help seeing the comparisons or memories even considering the author.
The story itself is simple, building up to the wedding with plenty of drama going down, but there’s lots of little moments exploring the complexities of Julia’s emotions around her family and what she wants in life in general (even the main bad thing she does, lying to Kim, is explored in its complexities, though the book never lets Julia get away with it as just being due to the pressures she feels). The ending has more of a focus on family, and without wanting to give any spoilers, there’s a fairly ambiguous epilogue that personally I felt the book could’ve done without, but I understand that some people are looking for that kind of epilogue in a romance book.
I’ve struggled to find romcoms with trans characters written by trans people previously, and Best Woman really hits that spot. It allows Julia to be a classic romcom protagonist making mistakes that outside of the genre you might think are a bit much, but in a romcom are just the kinds of drama you get, whilst also being a snarky look at what it is like to be around different family members both when trans and as a child of divorced parents. The cover I saw before reading had a quote from Torrey Peters, and the book does make me think of things she’s said about trans people writing in all genres, and how Detransition, Baby was a take on a comedy of manners with a trans lens, because Best Woman feels like it is not just a romcom with a trans protagonist, but also considering what kind of space that might be and how transness might fit into the “wedding romcom” genre.
Fiendfully Reading 
You must be logged in to post a comment.