Tag: books

The Pairing by Casey McQuiston

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The Pairing is a romantic comedy novel about two bisexual childhood best friends, now exes, who find themselves on the same European food and wine tour. Theo and Kit broke up spectacularly just before they went on their dream European holiday, but now they’re both using up their voucher at the same time. Shocked, they struggle to navigate their new dynamic, until they start a competition to see who can sleep with the most local people during their tour. Will holiday hookups help them work out how they feel about each other now?

My short review of The Pairing is that I had a great time reading it—I read it entirely on a train, which suits it perfectly, and I loved the combination of sumptuous food and locations with a messy yet sweet story of what if you know someone so well, but broke up. Of course, most of the things about it are ridiculous—Theo is the outsider in a Hollywood family, both Theo and Kit are ridiculously good with wine and pastry respectively, everyone in every European destination is bi and wants to sleep with tourists—but you don’t need to be picking it up looking for realism. Sometimes you just want a book that combines pretentious descriptions of eating and drinking with references to John Wick (especially for me as a fan of action films, trying food, and travelling).

One of the characters is non-binary, though they only come out to the other protagonist later into the book (but there’s plenty of hints in the narrative before this), and I liked how this was done, showing someone who is still working out all the details of how they are non-binary in the world, but also who has had time to develop as a person, even if they are still learning about what they want to be and do. As a non-binary person myself, it’s nice to have books that feature different non-binary experiences, and this one really focuses on what makes you feel good. Both Theo and Kit are flawed characters who don’t always make good choices (as you’d tend to expect from characters in a romance novel), but there’s also a sense throughout the book of the ways they have and still need to grow, and even that breaking up was what they needed to work out who they were separately before they could be together again.

As the premise might suggest, there is a lot of sex in this book, and I imagine that their hookup competition will put off some readers who only want the protagonists in a romance novel to be interested in or sleep with each other. I liked what it brought to the book, playing with the classic idea that you need to prove you’re in a better place sexually and romantically than an ex.

The Pairing is probably the McQuiston books I’ve enjoyed the most, as a lot of the elements were things up my street, like the food and drink tour, film references, best friends turned lovers turned exes, and the ways queerness fit into everything. Yes, it’s ridiculous and unrealistic, but that makes for a fun book that’s ideal to get engrossed in whilst travelling or as an escape, and it also has a message about needing to work out who you are as an adult and what you actually want that I liked alongside this.

Letters to the Purple Satin Killer by Joshua Chaplinsky

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Letters to the Purple Satin Killer is an epistolary novel made up of letters addressed to a serial killer. Jonas Williker earned the nickname ‘The Purple Satin Killer’ from the fabric found with his victims, and now he’s in prison awaiting trial. Positioned as a true crime book printing these letters, the novel builds up a picture of the people writing him letters: from his mother to fans to businesses trying to make money to people trying to convert him.

The title, format, and comparisons with Bret Easton Ellis intrigued me. I wondered how the book would work, but you quickly work out that this is barely a book about Williker: it’s a range of stories about different people, with a subplot that reveals some of his crimes and life, and it’s about how true crime has become such a phenomenon and the ways this preys on people. As I’m not a fan of true crime, I probably missed some references and satirical elements, but I felt like there was plenty to get into regardless (and other details I liked—I hope that the character with the surname ‘Bennington’ is a Bret Easton Ellis reference). Many of the characters fall into archetypes, and it’s fun to see how these play out, particularly with female characters who become obsessed with him and where that actually goes for them.

I like how little this book ends up telling you about Williker, which feels like it critiques people’s need to know every detail about serial killers (and there’s an interesting way this is twisted by one of the victims’ mother near the end). I saw another review compare the book to Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts, which I think is a good comparison as another book that is a range of voices discussing a central figure you never really hear from. Most of what you know about Williker’s crimes (and indeed the actual gore and violence you might get from the book) is offhand or even imagined by the reader, but regardless there’s a tense, eerie atmosphere, especially as the book never gives the satisfaction of finding out from Williker what is or isn’t true.

This fresh take on a serial killer story and on the true crime satire genre offers a darkly funny take on the media culture around killers, feeling modern and yet hilariously everything is a letter or a postcard and the epistolary form is one of the oldest there is. Maybe it is best if you had a misspent youth reading a lot of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk (like I did), but regardless, I had a good time with this book, and I love the creativity in ways authors satirise true crime these days.

And He Shall Appear by Kate van der Borgh

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And He Shall Appear is a novel about a young musician’s obsessive friendship with a fellow student, a charismatic magician who seems to tread a line between life of the party and dark power. The narrator, who remains unnamed, starts at Cambridge as an outsider, but he quickly discovers Bryn Cavendish, a powerful presence who does magic tricks like his occultist father. As the narrator is drawn into Bryn’s world and away from the academic drudgery, he starts to believe that Bryn holds far more power than it first appears, and as the narrator tells the story years later, this power might be still lingering.

This book is immediately going to fall into the ‘dark academia’ category, and admittedly, for once it actually lives up to that name in some ways, as it is very much focused on a dark side of being a student at Cambridge, and the narrator’s obsession with a particular musician lends it more of the ‘academia’ element that many books labelled dark academia seem to forget. The story is told to us from a present day, in which the narrator is returning to Cambridge for an event, but most of the book is set in the past of his first couple of years at Cambridge as he unfolds a particular story. As with many dark academia books clearly taking inspiration from The Secret History, he is an unreliable narrator, and indeed the book is preoccupied with ideas of the stories we create, leading to an ending in which we come to understand that there’s more than one way of telling a story, as with playing a musical piece.

I enjoyed reading this book, with its accurate Oxbridge detail and the undercurrent of dark magic and hauntings that are always meant to be a little mysterious, and the narrator’s obvious hiding of certain characters’ identities or their exact fates is fairly predictable, but still works pretty effectively to get across how he is potentially rewriting the past. However, at times it felt a bit ‘dark academia by numbers’ in its choices, and I do find it hilarious that so many books in the sub-genre tend to have a less posh/outsider-type person suddenly finding themselves at a fancy university and throwing off the regular people to find some mesmerising yet dark people (having done the former personally, it didn’t turn into any kind of dark academia set up, I have to admit). This book fits that stereotype and doesn’t do very much with it, and I do feel like the whole ‘outsider tries to make themselves part of the narrative’ thing felt too predictable given that I’ve read other similar books that do a similar thing.

The obsessive friendship element I did enjoy, though I felt that the book’s ending was the only place where this was really delved into very much, and there was never really enough space to say much other than ‘you can obsessively love someone platonically’ and then not really go anywhere with that. There might be something in the idea that these kinds of obsessive friendships are often depicted in fiction in ambiguous ways that could make them queer or not, and in this case it is meant to explicitly not be, and what that might mean for the book, and generally for how male obsessive friendships might be seen as weirder than female ones generally in pop culture and society.

Generally, this is a solid example of a dark academia novel and will appeal to people who like them, with enough accurate detail and sinister-seeming happenings to warrant it that title. For me, I found that it was often too predictable, not really delving into anything that might make it different or stand out in the category, so though I had fun reading it, I wasn’t captivated by it like I have been by books like The Secret History or The Lessons.

The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville

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The Book of Elsewhere is a novel about a man who cannot die whose quest for a mortal life turns into something far more complex. B has been known by many names and guises, and as a warrior who cannot die, but now he’s looking for a mortal conclusion. An American black-ops group wants his help and in return, they’ll help him, even though the devastation he can cause sows discord. When one of the soldiers suddenly comes back to life, it seems that the previous logic of B’s existence is more complicated, and there might be another force after something.

Just the very fact of the two authors will draw people into this novel, as it did me (mostly asking “what on earth must that be like?”). As reviews have already pointed out, this is not an easy book: it immediately pushes you into the world without mercy or explanation, there’s a range of interludes that even afterwards you can’t always be sure about, and the writing style is definitely on the literary end of sci-fi. However, being braced for this difficulty going in, I actually found The Book of Elsewhere far more readable than I was expecting. Sure, there were sections where I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but I don’t read that much sci-fi anyway because I don’t like confusing world-building, so I wasn’t going in expecting to get every moment and plot point.

Given Keanu Reeves’ involvement, it was impossible not to picture B as the actor, but for me that made it easier to engage with the character’s story quickly, without needing to build up a picture of him. I’m aware that the character comes from Reeves’ comic books, but I didn’t necessarily feel like I needed more knowledge of the character, particularly as the novel is meditative and not really about action (there are a few action sequences, but not many). The other characters were at times forgettable, but by the end I felt like I understood everyone’s place in the narrative.

This is a book that has the existentialism of immortality sci-fi, the timeline-playfulness of literary historical fiction, and the memorable main character of John Wick, combined into something that is sometimes confusing, pretty gripping, and generally much more of an enjoyable read that I was expecting.

Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson

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Anyone’s Ghost is a love story about destruction and the people who change your life. Theron David Alden is fifteen and spending the summer with his dad in New Hampshire when he meets Jake, who is older but likes the same things—bands, drugs—as him. They return to their separate lives, but over the next two decades, Theron is haunted by his love for Jake and how much he’s always hoped for Jake to want him too.

This is a novel about character and relationships rather than plot, a fact that’s made clear by the opening basically giving you the key turning points in the narrative at the start: three car crashes. That out of the way, there’s space to focus on Theron, and Jake, and a few others around them, and the impact of love and depression and a desire for oblivion, but also a hope of something. The first part of the book centres around Theron’s coming of age story, trying to avoid his own queerness and rationalise how he feels about Jake whilst they spend all of their time drinking and doing drugs, and then the second part moves to a twentysomething Theron, not long out of college and in New York looking for something, when that something becomes Jake suddenly visiting. This becomes a bittersweet story of growing up and still hoping to get what you’ve dreamed of.

The other main relationship for Theron in the book, with Lou, isn’t mentioned in the blurb, but is also central to the book, as they explore open relationships and what feelings you might burden a partner with, seeming in contrast in some ways to Jake’s relationship throughout the book with Jess, who as readers from Theron’s perspective, we know little about. There is a richness of queer relationships and ways of navigating the world, even when they are, as they are often in the book, melancholy ones and messy ones.

The third part brings the book to nearly the present day, and the tragedy already set up in the opening, by way of a speed through Theron’s life for a while. This part does feel a lot more rushed than the rest of the book, but does have a nice ending scene between two characters that feels like it rounds off the story well, whilst continuing the sense of ‘haunting’ pervading the whole thing.

Anyone’s Ghost is a bittersweet queer love story and an exploration of oblivion. I found the middle part in particular hard to put down, with its memorable image of New York City in a storm and two characters trying to find who they might be together, even briefly.

Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The Future and History of Transness in Cinema by Willow Maclay and Caden Gardner

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Corpses, Fools and Monsters is a journey through the history of ‘trans images’ in cinema, looking at how representations of trans people on screen have come about, changed, and evolved over time. The book is structured through time but also theme, taking into account wider changes in trans liberation and representation over the decades as well as cinematic depictions, and it is organised in a way that allows for a comprehensive overview as well as in depth exploration of individual films and performances.

The book is fairly academic but very accessible, not just for people studying film, and it is ideal for anyone interested in how trans people have been represented on film, covering some of the often more infamous examples as well as less well-known ones. It focuses on history and readings of films, not dense theory, and explore some of the debate and issues around films like The Silence of the Lambs or Boys Don’t Cry, whilst also looking at the work of trans filmmakers and where trans film might be going, ending with films like We’re All Going To The World’s Fair. By nature of the book as a history of trans cinema, it doesn’t go into particular analytical depth about films or creators, but it offers a journey through film that is likely to be enlightening for many people, trans and cis alike.

I Was A Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

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I Was A Teenage Slasher is a horror novel set in Texas in 1989, as a seventeen-year-old finds himself part of a genre he never expected. Tolly Driver spends all his time with his best friend Amber, isn’t cool, and isn’t really notable other than having a recently deceased dad, but when Tolly and Amber go to an ill-fated party, suddenly Tolly finds himself the centre of a narrative he never expected. What happens when you’re the slasher and you never had an option not to be?

Having read several of Stephen Graham Jones’ previous books, I wanted to read this one without really paying attention to the blurb, so I didn’t have any particular expectations going in, but I love how Jones takes the concept—what if the protagonist (and narrator) becomes a slasher and the world bends supernaturally to facilitate all the tropes of the genre—and makes it both full of slasher gore and quite emotional. Tolly is telling the story by looking back from some kind of present day, giving the narration a sense of knowing what will happen without revealing too many details (though the twist near the end I felt was set up as I expected it). The narrative follows a particular pattern—it is a slasher, even as Tolly and Amber try to stop it being one—and it’s decently paced even with Jones’ distinctively detail-packed style (I definitely took a couple of his books to get used to his style, as you can get lost in all the offhand mentions of things).

There’s a fair bit of meta-commentary on slashers in horror fiction these days, with writers like Jones and Grady Hendrix exploring how the inconsistencies of slasher films could actually be utilised for interesting storytelling. In this book, the supernatural nature and inevitability of slasher tropes becomes the centre for a fun story of unexpected consequences. If you like meta-horror and know some of the expectations of the slasher genre, you’ll probably have a good time with this one.

How We Named The Stars by Andrés N. Ordorica

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How We Named The Stars is the debut novel by Ordorica, about a Mexican American boy who goes to college and falls in love, and then has deal with heartbreak and loss. Daniel de La Luna moves from California to Ithaca, New York to start college, where he, feeling out of place, meets his new roommate, athletic Sam. Despite seeming like the opposite of Daniel, they quickly become close, and then in love, as the first year of college speeds away from them, but by the end of the year, they are separated. Daniel’s summer in Mexico unearths his family’s past, and then tragedy forces Daniel to reckon with the dead.

Having read Ordorica’s poetry, I was excited for this novel, and it surpassed my expectations, as a tender coming of age novel that explores how to move forward with heartbreak and grief, drawing strength from family and friends and a sense of queer community that spans time. It is told as Daniel’s recollections, narrating to Sam, with each chapter started by a diary snippet from Daniel’s uncle, who died before he was born. Through this perspective, you find out early on what happens at the tragic climax of the book, so the narrative is built around getting there, and then moving past it. Unlike some coming of age books featuring death and grief, this one felt complex and careful, asking what it means to keep going on living, especially when someone dies young.

There’s also a fantastic sense of queer community throughout the novel, from Daniel immediately finding gay friends when he starts college to ideas of cross-generational community even when you cannot ever meet someone. Even though it is romantic love at the centre of the book, it is also very much about queer friendship and about different kinds of friendship and love between people, and about learning about those as you grow up. At the same time, it is also about finding people like you, as Daniel is constantly realising how vital it is for him to find both people and writing that go beyond the straight, White experience.

Both the college and Mexico settings are vividly realised and this is a bittersweet book that doesn’t wallow in tragedy, but instead depicts sadness, love, and healing in a multifaceted way. How We Named The Stars is a gripping novel powered by character that feels like the next part of the lineage of queer coming of age literary fiction.

Plaything by Bea Setton

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Plaything is a novel about obsession, image and cruelty, as a Cambridge PhD student becomes entangled with a closed-off man with an ever-present ex-girlfriend. Anna moves to Cambridge to start her PhD, and soon finds herself top in her lab and with new close friends, even though she’s haunted by a chance car accident when she arrived. She meets Caden, a physiotherapist, and is enthralled, but she also feels the echoes of his ex-girlfriend, who he will barely talk about, and Anna starts to become obsessed, as the Covid lockdown removes other distractions from her life.

Told from Anna’s first person perspective, the narrative unfolds with a languid menace, an undercurrent of violence and a strange sense of unknowing because Anna doesn’t really know much about Caden, even when you think she should. The actual plot is pretty straightforward, with a twist or two at the end that leave unanswered questions about guilt and blame that do seem to tie together some of the themes of the book in their unanswered nature. The book is full of unlikeable characters and that makes it compelling in wondering what they will do (and why, as there’s a few random plot/character details that come out of nowhere and don’t really go anywhere).

The narrative explicitly states it is not a Cambridge novel nor a Covid novel at various points, but what is quite interesting is how it is those things. Though the book is at its heart about a relationship between two people who weren’t really connected to each other and about a clever twentysomething woman who should have it all but falls into a hazy world of obsession, it is also—despite Anna’s protestations—a look at Cambridge and Covid. The Cambridge element, not just the setting but in Anna’s position as a PhD scientist and elements like the cruelty of lab animals, catalyses the obsession, making her someone who needs to know, and it is interesting to think how much this is crucial to the narrative. At the same time, the book depicts the onset of Covid and the first lockdown, and that too feels crucial to the obsession and threat, and the choices people made during that time.

The central plot with Anna, Caden, and Caden’s ex-girlfriend is perhaps less interesting to me than a lot of the other elements of the book, but I enjoyed the atmosphere of it and its occasional forays into questions about what violence people inflict on others. I find it funny how much it was explicitly not dark academia, when for me, it’s the sort of thing dark academia should be, exploring how particular academic environments might cause violence and harm, and it’s interesting to see this kind of narrative focused on a scientist.

Them! by Harry Josephine Giles

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I first listened to the audiobook of Them! and then I read the physical book, so my review is split into two parts:

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Them! is a new collection of poetry by Harry Josephine Giles, and the audiobook is read by Giles herself, making full use of audio editing to get across poetic repetition and layering. I usually read poetry on the page or hear it performed, and this was the first poetry audiobook I’ve listened to, and wow, was it one to begin with. The collection is packed full of wit and hard-hitting moments, moving between register and style to explore the modern world of work, technology, and nature, and life as a trans person in that world.

I’m already a big fan of Giles’ work, but Them! is so packed full of things that get to me, from references to vaporwave, the Pokemon Mew, and the game Hades, to powerful commentary about existing. Many of the earlier poems take their titles from words relating to transness and queerness and I really like how these all formed different conversations with each other. A stand-out poem for me is ‘The Reasonable People’, which plays with public discourse around trans people’s existence.

I often form opinions on poetry collections based on whether they inspire me to write poems myself, and Them! was bursting with inspiration for me, and felt like a breath of fresh air, both in style and subject matter. I can’t wait to get my hands on a print copy to read alongside the audio performance and to return to over and over whenever I need it.

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And now to return having read the physical copy. It is fascinating to see how the two versions of the text work together and sometimes against each other, with some parts easier/harder to get from the audiobook and some from the print book. I loved that the print version of ‘The Reasonable People’ was much more glitched and messy than the audio version, and that some poems that I didn’t quite get from listening I could get a lot more from when I could see their layout on the page.

Some favourites: ‘Some Definitions’, ‘Them!’ , ‘May a Transsexual Hear a Bird?’, ‘The Reasonable People’, ‘No Such Thing As Belonging’, ‘Elegy’.

I don’t think there will be a more vital poetry collection for me personally this year. I’d highly recommend either formats or, really, both if possible.