Tag: books

The Things We Do To Our Friends by Heather Darwent

fiendfullyreading

The Things We Do To Our Friends is a literary thriller in a dark academia type vein, in which the protagonist is drawn into a group of students who start up a secret project. Clare is starting at the University of Edinburgh and putting her past behind her, but she’s picky with who she wants as her friends. When she meets fellow History of Art students Tabitha and Imogen, and their friends Ava and Samuel, it seems that Clare has found what she was looking for: rich, beautiful friends who live somewhere far nicer than a student house, who make up plans that grow to include Clare, like going off to France. And, it seems, their new project, which Clare will have a vital role in, but it seems they might know what she’s running from.

The blurb suggesting this book was The Secret History but set in Edinburgh drew me in, and rarely can books live up to that comparison in my opinion (except perhaps The Lessons, but that’s just because it works for me personally). This one starts with a strange prologue scene and then we’re immediately in Clare’s first person narration. As she emphasises how she doesn’t have money, has to get a bar job, and feels like an outsider, the comparisons with The Secret History seem very vivid, and I thought it was going to be very similar, but just with History of Art instead of Classics. The narrative style works to lead you in, making you aware that Clare is telling this story with hindsight, but for me, the atmosphere wasn’t quite as vivid as I’d hoped for.

The actual “project” part of the book is a bit more generic and less shocking than I would’ve liked too, and not related to the university setting or initial focus on three of the group studying History of Art. Without wanting to get into spoilers, the narrative does engage quite interestingly with possible consequences of what they get into and is fairly gripping, though I think in general the stakes tended to not feel very high for Clare and the ending wasn’t entirely satisfying for me, seeming to be more about telling you how warped she is.

I liked the Edinburgh setting, though it fell away later in the book, which didn’t really sustain the atmosphere of the start throughout. A lot of the time I felt like it was too busy trying to be like The Secret History but not quite getting the dark eccentricity of Tartt’s novel as being a selling point. I also felt like the interpersonal relationships between the group weren’t really explored as much as they could have been, perhaps because the book is more focused on the plot element of their project as it goes on. I think people who are more interested in a dark academia type thriller rather than something that pulls fully on the twisted, toxic relationships and dark actions would maybe enjoy this book more than me, though it did keep me interested.

My favourite books of 2022: non-2022 publications

fiendfullyreading

As usual, I feel a need to give a shout out to my favourite books I read in 2022 that were not published this year. Apparently this is how I found the particularly good fiction this year (particular note for The Haunting of Hill House and Lost Souls for both living up to expectations) and a poetry anthology that I know I will be returning to over and over again.

See my favourite fiction and poetry books of 2022 for the more up-to-date offerings.

fiction

  • The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson – My review of this at the time was simply “Oh right yeah it is THE haunted house novel, fair.” and I stand by that. The writing, the atmosphere, the house. Watch Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House on YouTube for more great haunted house stuff.
  • Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead – Someone living in the big city has to return to their roots is a classic formula, and in this book, young Two-Spirit Jonny Appleseed has to attend the funeral of his stepfather and bring together the elements of his life.
  • A Safe Girl To Love by Casey Plett – Any short stories that can make it onto one of my lists must be impressive as it’s a form I often have issues really enjoying, but Plett’s range of trans girl experiences is a fantastic collection.
  • We Are Made of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner – I read this whilst trying to kill time sitting outside and in a cafe and it really transported me into a surreal world of British culture to explore national, queer, and migrant identity in a very weird way.
  • Lost Souls and Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite – It was finally the year, after wanting to since my teenage horror/vampire loving years, to read both Lost Souls and Exquisite Corpse and they were so far up my street. The former is The Lost Boys run through a Dennis Cooper novel (who I also read a lot of this year) and the latter the serial killers in love novel you didn’t know you needed. I’m actually glad it took this long to read them so I could fully appreciate them rather than just like the vibes as a teenager.
  • Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo – As I wrote when I finished it: “Loved this southern gothic street-racing in-love-with-your-best-friend suspicious-academia haunting horror novel.”

poetry

  • Ports by Calum Rodger – This pamphlet from SPAM Press reimagines poems through the lens of video games and I just really enjoyed the playfulness and form, plus what you could get about poetry, narratives, and games from doing that.
  • Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Díaz – There is a lot of poetry about bodies, but this collection really stands out. I’d been meaning to read it for a long time and was very happy that I did.
  • We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics ed. by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel – A beautiful anthology that’s perfect if you’re a poet as it’s packed full of inspiration and great if not just because there’s a lot of great innovative and experimental trans poetry in there.

My favourite books of 2022: poetry

fiendfullyreading1 Comment

As I mentioned yesterday, I read a lot of great poetry in 2022, so it was tricky to put together this list. A lot of my poetry reviews boil down to ‘vibes good’ and ‘imagery or lines that just hit me in the chest’ so this isn’t the most articulate list of why these collections are good, but just some of my favourites of 2022. Links to full reviews in the titles where I’ve written them.

  • Please Press by Kat Sinclair – A powerful pamphlet that I sadly cannot say anything else about because I am many miles from my copy currently and I did not write anything about it at the time. But go get it from Sad Press and see why it’s great.
  • Limbic by Peter Scalpello – I ended up with two copies of this, one from each of the book subscriptions I had in 2022 (Cipher Press and Lighthouse bookshop’s poetry subscription), which tells you it must be a good intersection of my taste. Sex, queerness, tracksuits, tiny moments – there’s plenty to enjoy.
  • All The Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran – A collection exploring violence and storytelling that was so compulsive I accidentally stayed up late reading it, not something I tend to do with poetry.
  • A Little Resurrection by Selina Nwulu – Some of my favourite parts of this great collection was the use of imagery and the engagement with space, as poems look at race and place and bring in elements of climate and convenience.
  • Yo-yo Heart by Laura Doyle Péan – Powerful poems moving through a breakup to show the political nature of healing, filled with wit and sadness.
  • The Moral Judgement of Butterflies by K. Eltinaé – I loved the form of these poems, which explore trauma and immigrant experience and the idea of home. One of the books I got from my Lighthouse bookshop poetry subscription and wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
  • Time Is A Mother by Ocean Vuong – Beautiful and highly readable. I expected a lot from Vuong and wasn’t disappointed.
  • At Least This I Know by Andrés N. Ordorica – Going to steal a line from my own review to sum it up: “I knew I was going to like the collection from the first poem ‘November 16th, 2014’, which is a perfect opening for it: a moment at border control, encapsulating fear and desire for a place to belong, and a poem that almost makes you laugh and cry at once.”

My favourite books of 2022: fiction

fiendfullyreading1 Comment

It’s been an interesting year for me for reading. As well as a lot of new and upcoming books, many of which did not make the cut for these lists, I read a lot of horror (including a month of it in October) and plenty of poetry. So much of the poetry was good that I’ve split up fiction and poetry into two different ‘best of 2022’ lists, so we’ll start with fiction. 

A lot of fiction I read this year was good, but not so good as to be one of my top books, so it is quite a brief list this year. Not only that, but two of them aren’t actually from 2022, only first published in the UK in 2022, which I’ve decided to count on a whim. Links in titles to full reviews where I’ve written them.

  • Nevada by Imogen Binnie – I’m counting the UK publication this year as making it released in 2022, though clearly it’s not from 2022. I actually read it right at the start of the year, before this rerelease, but still. Classic trans roadtrip novel.
  • Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li – This book was just very fun and I thought highly of it for that, plus it’s basically a genre of a film I enjoy. Chinese-American students do heists to steal artefacts and have various drama along the way. Ridiculous but great to read.
  • The Arena of the Unwell by Liam Konemann – A coming-of-age novel about male mental health and queerness in the grimy indie music underbelly that retains humour whilst looking at a toxic relationship and the realities of NHS cuts.
  • Shredded: A Sports and Fitness Body Horror Anthology ed. by Eric Raglin – Such a fresh way of viewing both body horror and the whole world of fitness, with a really diverse set of sports, characters, and takes on the brief. There was a lot around who can find places within sports and fitness (and what kinds of bodies), which felt like the perfect use of body horror.
  • Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton – Truly an epic. Another one where I’m counting the UK publication as making it a 2022 book, this is a complex tale of a trans woman obsessed with 60s band the Get Happiness and their mysterious leader B—. Fascinating look at music, creativity, self, and constructing stories and histories.

Scream by Michael J. Seidlinger

fiendfullyreading

Scream is an Object Lessons book which explores screaming, combining personal essay elements with a look at the variety of screams in the world, from fear to joy to catharsis. Seidlinger’s own music taste and growing up provide ways into some of the discussions, like alternative music and rollercoasters, and other elements focus on pop culture like Munch’s The Scream and film screams.

The Object Lessons series always interesting for such short books can combine, in different amounts, personal and analytical, with authors using their own experiences to explore the titular concept in each case. This one definitely appealed to me and it contains some of the things I expected—like the Scream films and fear—but also other elements I wouldn’t’ve guessed. I enjoyed the discussion of musical genres that use screaming, as I remember some of the 2000s fads for nu-metal and screamo and how the screaming element felt divisive, and I learnt about the different styles of scream-related singing. Scream has a lot of personal essay elements and it was very interesting to think about how these various scream-related things could say a lot about feeling out of place or alternative when growing up.

Extinction Hymns by Eric Raglin

fiendfullyreading

Extinction Hymns is a collection of horror fiction that explores weirdness, extinction, and humanity. There’s a huge range of stories in the book, from a monstrous angel helping a woman with drug addiction to killing Nazis in the death metal scene with magic (and many with less extreme summaries), but there’s a common look at how we treat other people and the planet, as the title of the collection might suggest.

I really enjoyed the variety of the collection, with a lot of fresh concepts, and I never knew where the next story would take me. Some are obviously horror takes on things—like ‘A Most Bulbous Congregation’ and conversion therapy or ‘The Last of Her Kind’ and preservation of species—and I really enjoyed these, which all had different vibes but said some interesting things whilst having some horrifying imagery. Some of the other stories were more focused on weirdness, on unnerving things and strange situations. Stories like ‘Floaters’ and ‘Boning’ combine violence with sad medical concepts and leave you with things to think about.

As with any short story collection, there’s some that jump out and others which blend in more, but Extinction Hymns is a collection with variety that offers a look at some of the darker, weirder sides of life. Having already read Raglin’s ”Til the Sun Wheel Turns No More’ in Antifa Splatterpunk, I was looking forward to this book, and it didn’t disappoint.

Kerf by Gareth Farmer

fiendfullyreading

Kerf is a poetry collection that explores woodworking and craft, autism, and language, often together, and is intercut with images of notebook pages and wooden crafts. Farmer’s thoughtful introduction ‘Kerf. A Brief Excursus’ sets up the book—I particularly enjoyed how the term ‘kerf’ was explored and then potential metaphors dissected. Some of my favourite poems from the collection are ‘And, Now What?’ with its repeated question and movement towards actuality, ‘Contra Expressivities’ for its thoughts and formatting, and ‘Sssssssstiiiiimye’ for the way it enacts experience and sibilance.

The collection seems to close with the longer poem ‘What’s That: Instead of Ego’ which moves through various phases to explore autism and woodworking craft hand-in-hand, though coming after this is both the ‘Glossary of Woodworking Terms and Concepts used in Kerf‘ and Further Reading. The Glossary was weirdly one of my favourite parts of the book, full of wit and offhand side notes that sit nicely alongside the linguistic cleverness and exploration of the poems that come previous. At times I became lost amongst the woodworking and theoretical terms in the collection, but I enjoyed finding my way back.

Now Go: On Grief and Studio Ghibli by Karl Thomas Smith

fiendfullyreading

Now Go is another of 404 Ink’s Inklings series and this one looks at ideas of grief within the animated films of Studio Ghibli. Covering not only traditional ideas of grief and death, but also considering grief in terms of capitalism and climate crisis, Karl Thomas Smith delves into what these films might say about grief and, most importantly, how there is hope and future within grief.

From the beautiful No-Face pixel art on the cover, this is a book that is filled with love for these films, and their often complex messages hidden beneath the visual beauty that has made many of them so famous. The comparison between Totoro and No-Face in terms of their similarities and differences was very interesting, as was the discussion of the kinds of grief you see in Kiki’s Delivery Service as something more related to capitalism and society. The book gives different lenses to view these films, some of which people may have already considered and others that may be new. There’s a lot to think about from Now Go despite being in such a bitesized package, and it’s a great book for anyone who not only likes Studio Ghibli films, but likes the fact that they are varied and ambiguous.

Reluctant Immortals by Gwendolyn Kiste

fiendfullyreading

Reluctant Immortals is a novel about female characters fighting to take control of their narrative, after living long beyond their pages. Lucy Westenra, famed victim of Dracula, and Bertha ‘Bee’ Mason, Mr Rochester’s first wife, are now living in Los Angeles. It’s the 1960s and whilst everything around them is hippies and the Vietnam War, they are caught up in their own nightmares, remembering their pasts and the monsters that held them captive. When Dracula and Mr Rochester both appear in San Francisco, it seems another face-off is coming, and they’re not just saving themselves, but other women who have been preyed on by these famous figures.

The concept of this book is undeniably ridiculous, and it is a romp of a horror novel, set amongst the unlikely backdrop of California (more Lost Boys than Dracula) and featuring a real twist on the Gothic novel. Told from Lucy’s point of view, the book follows a fast-paced narrative as Lucy and Bee attempt to thwart Dracula’s plans to return to full strength, stop Rochester collecting women at his new mansion, and find ways of living that don’t revolve around these men. It’s all pretty wild, but fun, especially for people who enjoy books that play with existing characters and tropes.

However, the characters themselves didn’t quite work for me, and you find yourself wondering why these two stories and these two characters combined. Bee in particular was an interesting choice to do a feminist reclaiming of seeing as Wide Sargasso Sea exists and this is very different to that (and that book was published the year before Reluctant Immortals is set). Perhaps having a split point of view between her and Lucy might’ve given her more of a clear character, as you only see her through Lucy’s point of view. I also don’t really know why it’s set in California, other than the film connection, though I do like the anachronistic time period for these characters to be battling, as I appreciate when vampire fiction moves from a historical period that has more of a gothic vampire aesthetic to one that is quite different.

Overall, this is a good book to not question too much, but to instead see it as a retelling that plays around with genre and character to focus on female empowerment. It wasn’t quite the horror novel I was expecting, but it was a wild ride.

Hide by Kiersten White

fiendfullyreading

Hide is a horror novel about a game of hide and seek with very high stakes, set in an abandoned amusement park. Mack has nothing, so when she has the chance to take part in a week-long game of hide and seek in an abandoned theme park to win prize money, she takes that opportunity. Well, that, and she has a history of hiding. As she meets her fellow competitors, she knows she’s not there to make friends, but when it seems less of a fun competition and more of a fight for survival, Mack might have to work with other people if she wants to get out alive.

The concept of the book is an obvious draw, with the setting a memorable one and hide-and-seek being a great horror concept. The opening sets up Mack’s creepy backstory, which drives her character throughout, and then you slowly meet the other competitors and watch as they begin the competition. The first few days and nights of the competition are particularly tense and I felt a real ominous sense before you fully knew what was going on. The twist won’t be to everyone’s tastes as the book becomes more supernatural horror, but I’d already expected that and I quite like how it plays out, a combination of human and otherworldly threat.

The writing can be a bit confusing as it changes perspectives quickly and once Mack starts the competition there’s a lot of characters for a while, but it wasn’t so much that I couldn’t keep track of what was going on, and it was fairly typical for some horror books that also try and cram in too many perspectives to build up tension. There’s ambiguity and not everything goes somewhere, but Hide is a fun horror novel with a good setting and an ominous atmosphere for the set up that turns into a fairly exciting narrative to end.