So Suzanne made me cry a little with her comment on yesterday's post (now two days ago, hoping it won't turn into three) (update: it has turned into three). I really look forward to doing these posts - not because I think people are clamouring for them (other than a couple of my IRL friends who do, actually, clamour for them and it's adorable), but because I am always so scattered and struggling in January and it's an easy way to keep myself blogging. It soothes my nervous system to count and organize the books and assemble the posts (other than the times when I'm swearing at myself for not having taken adequate notes for a book that I now can remember VERY LITTLE about).
If Suzanne was anyone else I might suspect that "let alone say something meaningful in as few words as you manage" was a dig, but I DO know Suzanne, and even though I admire and am slightly envious of the lengthy, well-thought-out, detailed reviews she posts on her book blog, I believe she also doesn't judge me for the fact that my reviews are often shorter than the book synopsis. I have tried to write longer reviews, but my inclination is always to just get down how I felt about the book, and anything longer starts to feel like a grade-school book report. Oh hey, I have a new goal for this year - attempt some longer book reviews and try to figure out why they feel difficult.
We stayed at the Westin St. Francis, which is an old hotel with a lot of character and was really fun to walk around.
We flew from Ottawa to Washington on Monday, and then got on our flight from Washington to San Francisco. Everything was going great. I was reading a nine-hundred-page book, so I was happy to have a long stretch of reading time. I am always ridiculously amused and delighted by the warm nuts.
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I think the flight from Washington to San Francisco was supposed to be about five and a half hours. At about two and a half hours we heard a garbled announcement by the pilot that said something about landing. We were confused and flagged down a flight attendant. She looked uncomfortable and said there might be a security issue in the back and we might have to divert to offload a passenger, but usually when that happens they just take him off and continue on.
That was not what happened.
We landed, there were cops, there was talking, there was loitering, there was some laughing (not cool guys, read the room). There was a lot of nothing. Then this guy in his early twenties with kind of a smirk on his face was led off the plane by a flight attendant who was speaking quite nicely to him. Then we were told we had to get off the plane for it to be searched thoroughly. Then the nightmare began.
We were at O'Hare airport in Chicago. They turn off the heat at night because there are no flights, so it was cold. They brought out a bunch of kleenex-thickness blankets and gave us water and weird American snacks. The new departure time kept being pushed later and later. I didn't even really know what time it was or how long we had been there, between Ottawa time, San Francisco time (three hours behind Ottawa) and Chicago Time (one hour behind Ottawa, which I didn't find out until much later). I felt like we had always lived in Chicago O'Hare. There was a periodic announcement where some dude kept calling it the "Greatest Airport in the World!" sounding like a deranged Disney ride guide.
One girl had squirreled her way into the space between a garbage can and a large pillar. She was lounging on her luggage with her phone propped on her stomach. My mother would have been horrified. I thought it was the most brilliant thing I had ever scene. Some people laid down on the floor and slept. I read for a while and then I took my toiletry bag to the bathroom, took out my contacts and washed my face, wet my toothbrush and sucked what little toothpaste residue out of it I could, and then just sat with my eyes closed for a bit.
Some unknown time later (about five hours, Matt says) we got back on the plane. We had four and a half hours to go. Matt immediately went to sleep. I had circled all the way through exhaustion to wide awake-ness. I watched The Long Walk. I thought it was really good but it was three a.m. so who the hell knows. I watched some of the 12 Monkeys tv show I didn't even know existed (loved the movie). I watched some of the new I Know What You Did Last Summer which was terrible, and then I got a couple hours of sleep.
We took an Uber the forty minutes to the hotel. It was 6:30 a.m. and he was playing loud electronic music. I nearly said "I've been mostly awake for 24 hours, DO YOU MIND" but I couldn't figure out how to say anything without sounding like a total bitch, so I gritted my teeth and endured. I took a quick shower and laid down. Matt was refreshed enough from his plane sleep that he did a couple of calls and headed to the trade show. I slept hard for four hours and then felt pretty good so decided to go out for a wander.
Later in the day Matt found this on Twitter:
FFS, if I had known that I would have stuck my foot out and tripped him on his way out. And maybe tried to shake out some residual cocaine for my troubles.
Children's
Wundersmith: The Calling of Morrigan Crow (Nevermoor #2) by Jessica Townsend: Synopsis from Goodreads: Wunder is gathering in Nevermoor ...
Morrigan Crow may have defeated her deadly curse, passed the dangerous trials and joined the mystical Wundrous Society, but her journey into Nevermoor and all its secrets has only just begun. And she is fast learning that not all magic is used for good.Morrigan Crow has been invited to join the prestigious Wundrous Society, a place that promised her friendship, protection and belonging for life. She's hoping for an education full of wunder, imagination and discovery - but all the Society want to teach her is how evil Wundersmiths are. And someone is blackmailing Morrigan's unit, turning her last few loyal friends against her. Has Morrigan escaped from being the cursed child of Wintersea only to become the most hated figure in Nevermoor?
I love this series. It has all the requisite elements - imagination, wonder, a well-constructed fantasy world with wonderful characters, a plucky hitherto-mistreated child with an unsuspected power, and lurking danger. The author is Australian, which tracks, because I feel like Australian fiction has been increasingly available over here in the past few years, and I have taken to much of it with a passion. I have this in most of my libraries at this point, and am looking forward to giving it to my niece in a few years, along with The Colours of Madeleine trilogy.
YA
Dead Girls Don't Dream by Nino Cipri: Synopsis from Goodreads: Everyone who wanders from the path in Voynich Woods is never seen again. The neighboring town, in decline after the demise of a once-thriving logging industry, is now known for its mysterious folklore and missing posters, because no one who gets lost comes back to tell the tale.
Except for Riley Walcott.
Riley knows better than to stray from the trail in the woods behind her uncle Toby's house. But her little sister Sam breaks the rules in pursuit of a local legend, so Riley chases after her and discovers a masked, knife-wielding figure and a waiting grave.Madelyn lives deep in the forest. Subject to her mother's strict rules, she's forbidden from leaving home or using her magic--but one night, she risks everything to help a stranger who's lost in the woods.
At once tender, violent, and thrilling, Dead Girls Don't Dream is a novel of recovery, healing, and finding your power.
-”’I’ll kill you if you incorporate me into your ghost tour,’ she warned Toby.
Toby shrugged and said, ‘You sure? We can probably charge double for a tour with an actually undead guide.’
They stared at each other, stone-faced, until Riley’s lips quivered and cracked into a smile, and they both broke into laughter.
Madleyn’s confusion and concern was all over her face, and Riley shrugged apologetically to her. “Sorry, in this family we turn horrible trauma into stupid jokes.’”
This was excellent. There is the always-tempting cursed woods trope, and yet this still felt fresh and new, which is quite an accomplishment. It addresses the opioid crisis in small-town America but incorporates it almost seamlessly into the story. There are two extremely fraught mother-daughter relationships, with very different causes and results. There are different ways of being trapped and feeling beholden to family members. The energy between Riley and Madelyn is sweet and strong, and the body horror (which I go back and forth on in general) serves the story well - just look at that cover! I also come from a family that deals with grief and trauma through bad jokes, so that was very relatable.
Lovely Dark and Deep by Elisa A. Bonnin: Synopsis from Goodreads: From author Elisa A. Bonnin comes Lovely Dark and Deep, a YA dark academia novel exploring magic, loneliness, and the power of found family. Hidden off the coast of Washington, veiled in mist, there is an island that does not appear on any map. And on that island is Ellery West.
Except terrifying things are still happening to students, and the dark magic that was unleashed in the forest still seems to be at work. To stop it, Faith and the other Red Stripes will have to work together, risking expulsion from the magical world altogether.
Yes, yes there IS another possibly-enchanted, perilous forest in this book, AND a mysterious island. This was dark academia that hit perfectly. I loved seeing Faith bond with the other outcasts and regain her confidence and stability. The magic community she is so terrified of losing can be read as any number of communities, and the Red Stripe students are a wonderful found family example.
How to Find a Missing Girl by Victoria Wlosok: Synopsis from Goodreads: For fans of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder and Veronica Mars, this whip-smart thriller follows a sapphic detective agency as they seek the truth behind a growing trail of missing girls in small-town Louisiana.
A year ago, beloved cheerleader Stella Blackthorn vanished without a trace. Devastated, her younger sister, Iris, launched her own investigation, but all she managed to do was scare off the police’s only lead and earn a stern warning: Once she turns eighteen, more meddling means prison-level consequences.Then, a year later, the unthinkable happens. Iris’s ex-girlfriend, Heather, goes missing, too—just after dropping the polarizing last episode of her true crime podcast all about Iris’s sister. This time, nothing will stop Iris and her amateur sleuthing agency from solving these disappearances.
But with a suspicious detective watching her every move, an enemy-turned-friend-turned-maybe-more to contend with, and only thirty days until she turns eighteen, it’s a race against the clock for Iris to solve the most dangerous case of her life.
But Libby’s new home turns out to be anything but normal. Scores of bugs haunt its winding halls, towering stained-glass windows feature strange, insectile designs, and the garden teems with impossibly blue roses. And then there are the rumors. The locals, including the mysterious boy next door, tell stories about disappearances tied to the house, stretching back over a century to its first owners. Owners who supposedly hosted legendary masked séances on its grounds.
Libby’s mom refuses to hear anything that could derail their family’s perfect new beginning, but Libby knows better. The house is keeping secrets from her, and something tells her that the key to unlocking them lies in the eerie, bug-shaped masks hidden throughout the property.
We all wear masks—to hide our imperfections, to make us stronger and braver. But if Libby keeps hers on for too long, she might just lose herself—and everyone she loves.
-”Outside, white brick. Inside, clean green carpet and orderly metal bookshelves. Unlike our house, all the angles here made sense – crisp lines meetings corners just where they should.
And yet, somehow, the longer I looked, the more all the library’s right angles felt wrong. So tidy they almost made me nauseous.
My family was changing the house, peeling back its dusty exoskeleton one plank of plywood at a time – but what if the house was changing us, too? Recasting our sense of normal in its own warped mold. If I ever managed to feel more at home there, would I only feel more out of place everywhere else?”
The early part of this was kind of torture to read, not because it wasn't well written but because it was. It was impossible for me not to over-identify with Libby, and the way she had to hide her understandable feelings and reactions to what was happening because of the threat of not being believed and being sent away was excruciating. One of the most terrifying plot devices to me has always been having loved ones corrupted or taken over to the point that they are dangerous and unrecognizable. So the first two-thirds of this were bang on. Once all the story elements were locked into place and the last act started, I relaxed a little, but also felt that the last part could have used some tightening. Action of this sort is always better under-written than over, in my opinion, and it dragged a bit. I still found this a solid entry, with good characterization and some tropes and devices I haven't seen before.
Come Out Come Out by Natalie C. Parker: Synopsis from Goodreads: It's never been safe for Fern, Jaq, or Mallory to come out to their families. As kids their emerging identities drove them into friendship but also forced them into the woods to hide in an old, abandoned house when they needed safety. But one night when the girls sought refuge, Mallory never made it back home. Fern and Jaq did, but neither survivor remembered what happened or the secrets they were so desperate to keep.
Five years later, Fern and Jaq are seniors on the verge of graduation, seemingly happy in their straight, cisgender lives—until a spirit who looks like Mallory begins to appear, seeking revenge for her death, and the part Fern and Jaq played in it. As they’re haunted, something begins to shift inside them.They remember who they are.
Who they want to love.
And the truth about the vicious secrets hiding in their woods.
This delightfully dark and pointed novel calls out the systems that erase gay and queer and trans identity, giving space to embrace queerness and to unleash the power of friendship and found family against the real monsters in the world.
-”’Again, Kaitlyn smiled, the insult sliding off her as easily as rain. ‘Tell me, then. Say that you don’t like me even a little bit. If you can say it, I’ll jump off that ledge and leave you here to hate me in peace.’
Fern opened her mouth to give Kaitlyn exactly what she’d asked for, but there were no words ready. It took her only a second to realize that she couldn’t say it because she didn’t want Kaitlyn to leave.
‘Did you just bully me into friendship?’ Fern asked
Katilyn’s laugh was warm and husky. ‘Maybe I did.’”
I absolutely loved Beware the Wild by Natalie C. Parker, and to be honest nothing since has quite measured up. I loved this concept, though, and the execution was great. There is a gender-swapped Romeo and Juliet that begins to spark memories in one of the girls that is brilliant as a concept, and the contrast between the queer people who feel forced to hide and the ones that are comfortable with their sexuality is beautifully depicted. I will continue to follow Natalie C. Parker every time she leads me into the woods.
So Witches We Became by Jill Baguchinsky: Synopsis from Goodreads: If boys will be boys, girls will fight back.
For high school senior Nell and her friends, a vacation house on a private Florida island sounds like the makings of a dream spring break. But Nell brings secrets with her—secrets that fuse with the island's tragic history, trapping them all with a curse that surrounds the island in a toxic, vengeful mist and the surrounding waters with an unseen, devouring beast.
Easier said than done.
But when Nell's friends reveal that they each brought secrets of their own, a solution even more dangerous than the curse begins to take shape.
Perfect for fans of Courtney Summers and Rory Power and reading like a YA feminist spin on Stephen King’s The Mist, So Witches We Became is a diverse, queer horror about female friendship, the emotional aftermath of surviving assault, and how to find power in the shadows of your past
Sid Spencer has always been the most normal girl in her abnormal hometown, a tourist trap built over one of the fault lines that seal magic away from the world. Meanwhile, all Sid has to deal with is hair-ruining humidity, painful awkwardness, being one of four Asians in town, and her friends dumping her when they start dating each other—just days after one of the most humiliating romantic rejections faced by anyone, ever, in all of history.
Then someone kills one of the Guardians who protect the seal. The earth rips open and unleashes the magic trapped inside. Monsters crawl from the ground, no one can enter or leave, and the man behind it all is roaming the streets with a gang of violent vigilantes. Suddenly, Sid’s life becomes a lot less ordinary. When she finds out her missing brother is involved, she joins the remaining Guardians, desperate to find him and close the fault line for good.
Fighting through hordes of living corpses and uncontrollable growths of forest, Sid and a ragtag crew of would-be heroes are the only thing standing between their town and the end of the world as they know it. Between magic, murderers, and burgeoning crushes, Sid must survive being a perfectly normal girl caught in a perfectly abnormal apocalypse. Only—how can someone so ordinary make it in such an extraordinary world?
-”’Did you do something to deserve being tasered?’
”Brian puts his hands on his hips.’
‘He broke into my house and I didn’t know who he was,’ I say before he can speak. ‘I was scared.’
She looks me over, then she looks Brian over, pursing her lips as she reviews the information. ‘I can see how he might seem very tall to someone like you,’ she says seriously.
‘Yes, it felt excessive and unnecessary.’ I say.
Brian sighs.
4 1.2 stars, not entirely sure why I didn't give it five. Maybe because the magic system here seemed a little confusing at times (although it was different enough to set it apart from the crowd), but I don't really care. The main character? All the other characters? All the relationships, and snappy banter, and the setting? A freaking plus. I loved every minute of this. I wanted to squish Sid and her terrible wonderful self-deprecating hilariousness. The parts about being adopted and not feeling like you belong could have been preachy or clunky, but they dovetailed perfectly with the surrounding story (Robin Wasley also grew up in a family of adoptees). The solid friendships between people of the same gender and the other one, and the ways you can screw up mightily and still be forgiven? The author is adorable and I wish this wasn't her first book, or that I had discovered her four or five books in. This one was published in February 2024, I feel like MORE than enough time has passed for there to be a new one. Who do I contact? Who do I pester?
Graphic
I do not generally read graphic novels. I loved comics when I was a kid - like, LOVED them. I have no objection to people of any age liking graphic novels. The art is often quite intricate and accomplished. I think maybe it screws with my ADHD brain trying to figure out whether to read the words or look at the pictures first. These were both books that I put on hold because I recognized the author and didn't realize they were graphic novels.
This kind of slayed. June was an absolute badass, with a keen intellect and an iron will to go along with her Playboy body. Seeing every successive head added to the basket would not have been the same without pictures.
Victor Lavalle's Destroyer by Victor Lavalle and Dietrich Smith (illus.): Synopsis from Goodreads: The legacy of Frankenstein’s monster collides with the sociopolitical tensions of the present-day United States.
Written by lauded novelist Victor LaValle (The Devil In Silver, The Ballad of Black Tom), Destroyer is a harrowing tale exploring the legacies of love, loss, and vengeance placed firmly in the tense atmosphere and current events of the modern-day United States.
Short Stories
The Best Horror of the Year Volume 16 by Ellen Datlow ed.: Synopsis from Goodreads: For more than four decades, Ellen Datlow has been at the center of horror. Bringing you the most frightening and terrifying stories, Datlow always has her finger on the pulse of what horror readers crave. Now, with the sixteenth volume of the series, Datlow is back again to bring you the stories that will keep you up at night. Encompassed in the pages of The Best Horror of the Year have been such illustrious writers as: Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Stephen Graham Jones, Joyce Carol Oates, Laird Barron, Mira Grant, and many others.
Do you ever get scared reading horror? I don't usually. I can find something haunting or chilling, but just reading something doesn't provoke a fight or flight response the way a movie sometimes does (one scene in Weapons springs to mind, and the time I watched The Hollow Man when Matt was away and then had some serious regrets while trying to fall asleep).
A couple of these legit scared the hell out of me. Rock Hopping by Adam Nevill. I kept reading it over and over, while simultaneously faintly wishing I could wipe it from my mind. Sometimes when folk horror hits, it really hits. Lover's Lane by Stephen Graham Jones - well, you all know how I feel about SGJ, he basically made up his own myth and sold it to me. Hare Moon by H.V. Patterson - beautifully written and disturbing. The Teeth by Brian Evenson - I was scared for little Jens and angry on his behalf. Nabrok by Helen Grant - Icelandic, with a giant what-the-fuck at the end that I couldn't stop picturing. The Salted Bones by Neil Williamson - really got under my skin. The Motley by Charlie Hughes - HOW does this come out of someone's brain?
The Continental Divide: Stories by Bob Johnson: Synopsis from Goodreads: A country woman makes a Sophie's Choice regarding her family's survival. A small town marshal hunts his own son for murder. A former football hero must face his role in a brutal locker room ritual. Ferocious and real, the fourteen tales in Bob Johnson's blistering debut The Continental Divide explore the undertow of violence and sin along the St. Lawrence Divide in northern Indiana, where men, women, and children struggle to find their way in the darkness . . . of the divide.
-”Despite his pain and fear he’d felt an odd lushness in his chest, a twitching thrill. People will be reminded how much they love me. They’ll be sorry for the times they mocked me – my stammer, my soft body.”
It has suddenly struck me that, of all the short story collections I have read, almost none have been by men. Alice Walker. Lorrie Moore. Angela Carter. Carmen Maria Machado. I mean, I'm totally comfortable with this, boys are dumb. The good ones here were very good. Occasionally I could see through to the bones and that's always jarring. If I hadn't known it was a male writer I think I would have been able to guess. There was bleakness, and despair, and toxic masculinity, but also actual feelings. I think it did capture the spirit of the region well, based on what I know, which is admittedly not that much. Follow me for more perspicacious book reviews!
Ghostroots: Stories by 'Pemi Aguda: (Nigerian) Synopsis from Goodreads: A debut collection of stories set in a hauntingly reimagined Lagos where characters vie for freedom from ancestral ties.
’Pemi Aguda opens her collection of twelve stories with the chilling tale of a woman who uncannily resembles her sinister, deceased grandmother. When the woman shows a capacity for deadly violence, she wonders—can evil be genetic, passed from generation to generation?Set in Lagos, Nigeria, Aguda’s stories unfold against a spectral cityscape where the everyday business of living—the birth of a baby, a market visit, a conversation between mothers and daughters—is charged with an air of supernatural menace. In “Breastmilk” a new mother’s inability to lactate takes on preternatural overtones. In “24, Alhaji Williams Street” a mysterious disease wreaks havoc with frightening precision. In “The Hollow,” an architect stumbles on a vengeful house.
Evocative, strange, and yet familiar, “the speculative conceits of these stories are elegantly balanced with the gorgeous fullness of human emotion, all the hunger and longing and fear and delight of being a human in the world” (Lauren Groff).
-”He was bringing his zealous classroom energy to the excursion, Abisola thought; he began every Tuesday/Thursday class with a cheesy icebreaker, calling the rocks and rivers they studied ‘wonders of the world.’ She thought it was a little sad, a little naive, how he wore his excitement on his face, in front of teenagers who saw any kind of earnestness as weakness.”
One of the best things to come out of my haunting of the New Books browsing section of the library catalogue in an effort to be more like Sarah was short story collections by women from various other countries - Nigeria, Argentina, Zambia, Palestine. They mostly tended to magical realism, which is completely fine by me. The one that impacted me the most here began in a very quotidian fashion, with all the women of a community putting money into a fund that is then shared out to a different one of them every month. When someone can't keep up her share, though, the things that are taken in exchange are not material possessions but body parts. Not in a serial-killer literal dismemberment way, but in a metaphysical way. Still, I remember a professor once, talking about A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, and describing it as 'being led down the garden path, then clobbered over the head with a bird-feeder", and I had that same sense of dizziness and bruising realization here.
Another story, where all of the sons who live on one long street begin falling ill and dying, that laid me right out. I still see it in my mind like it was a film rather than a piece of writing. One story, called "Masquerade Season", I've read before, and thought about often. Just to be completely honest, my note for one story is "Felicity, born unhappy, turns into a bird or something."
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez: (Argentina) Synopsis from Goodreads: A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by “one of Latin America’s most exciting authors” (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)
On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed—all those birds were once women.Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists.
Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”
-”It’s possible the man could have survived if the ambulance had arrived in time. I can imagine Paulo, hammer in hand, watching from the window as he died, feeling like a small-time god with the power to decide another man’s fate. Would I have done the same thing if my family had been threatened? Maybe. It’s easy to have ethics when what you love is not in danger.”
I tend to rate short story collections generously, i.e. based on the ratings for the best stories. The first couple of stories especially were outstanding, with magical realism lending a melancholy, uncanny quality to more realistically grounded images of poverty and generational trauma. Even the frankly kind of gross story about the horny imaginary friends made an impact. As the collection went on I did feel like there was less and less intent and more of a collection of surrealistic fragments happening. There is a fine line between feeling like you're not quite sophisticated enough to catch the meaning of a story (which I can tolerate) and feeling like the author is just too lazy to put enough of a framework around a recounting of weird images. This could also be a function of poor editing, since I probably would have been more forgiving of the wobbly stories if they came nearer the beginning and were followed by stronger ones. But the stronger ones were very strong.
Obligations to the Wounded: Stories by Mubanga Kalimamukwento: (Zambia)Synopsis from Goodreads: In formally adventurous stories rooted in Zambian literary tradition, Obligations to the Wounded explores the expectations and burdens of womanhood in Zambia and for Zambian women living abroad. The collection converses with global social problems through the depiction of games, social media feuds, letters, and folklore to illustrate how girls and women manage religious expectation, migration, loss of language, death, intimate partner violence, and racial discrimination. Although the women and girls inhabiting these pages are separated geographically and by life stage, their shared burdens, culture, and homeland inextricably link them together in struggle and triumph.
Incredibly vivid, and an intriguing mix of centuries-old traditions and their smashing up against modern issues, particularly with regards to mother-daughter struggles. The story title "A Doctor, A Lawyer, An Engineer or a Shame to the Family" immediately evokes a theme that is woefully applicable across many cultures, and the way parents, particularly mothers sometimes, have to grapple with their identity being tied up with their child's, is present in many ways in these stories - gender identity, mental health, career choice. This is even more complicated, of course, when dealing with issues from colonialism or being Zambian in another country (I did originally think 'being African in another country', which lends weight to the concept that Western people are way too prone to thinking of 'Africa' as a homogeneous entity, and lumping Africans together. I'm trying to diversify my reading in a way that helps remedy that.)
Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions by John Langan: Synopsis from Goodreads: Award-Winning Author John Langan Returns with a New Collection of Stories A garishly painted figurine contains a terrible curse; the ten-year anniversary of a sensational horror film shot in an abandoned mine reveals stunning secrets; endnotes for a book review uncover a strange high-tech pathogen; a man witnesses something uncanny and unexplained as his friend succumbs to a watery death; a seasick woman aboard a ferry is pursued by a barnacle-covered specter; a professor reveals the mysterious connection between Joseph Conrad and Peter Pan; a man encounters the ghost of his lost sister in a liminal space between the land and sea; an academic meets a mythical creature on a mysterious island…
John Langan, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel The Fisherman, returns with thirteen new tales of cosmic horror in Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions. In these stories, he continues to chart the course of 21st century weird fiction, from the unfamiliar to the familial, the unfathomably distant to the intimate.Includes extensive story notes and an introduction by Victor LaValle.
"He wondered if Wayne Ahuja had known the same beauty as he was dying, if perceiving the world's grace was compensation for losing it, if the disappointed expression on Wayne's face post-mortem was because whatever came next could not approach the beauty he was leaving."
Langan also recommends reading Stephen Graham Jones and Victor Lavalle, which further endears him to me. Often when I read one of his story collections I end up already having read some of the entries in anthologies, and I always welcome the chance to read them again.
I admire the effort that was clearly made to not make this Ameri-centric. There are American, British, Argentinian, Finnish, Ukrainian, Belgian, Japanese, Indian, Swedish, and French writers represented, as well as a good span of time periods. Rereading The Screwfly Solution by James Tiptree, Jr. (who was actually a woman, I never know if I should assume that everyone knows this or not, I find her story so fascinating) always brings a fresh shock of admiration and desolation. The editors' determination to make this a diverse collection means that the tone and flavour of the stories differs greatly, while the central thrust motif is consistent. I had read many of the authors before, and have plans to read more by the ones I hadn't.
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