Jesus fucking Christ, what a month. Shit’s fucked; if you’ve got extra cash, consider donating one of these organizations working for trans people in Missouri. Here’s some books, linked, as always, to our Bookshop.

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I led off the month — which is long on ebooks and audiobooks — with Johnny Compton’s The Spite House, which I read in audiobook form. Eric, along with his daughters, is on the run from a life apparently in shambles: they’re off the grid, living in hotels and out of their car. But when Eric signs the family up to stay in a spite house which is ostensibly very haunted, in exchange for a life-changing amount of money if they remain, their secrets, and those of the house’s previous inhabitants, will be dragged into the light. That description, however, makes the novel sound a lot narrower in scope than it is, which does it a disservice: Compton balances many viewpoints from characters with a plethora of motives, ranging across time, to tell the story of the titular house. The narrative never rushed, but it also never slackened, keeping the reader fully enthralled. Compton’s engagement with the racial history of the American south, and its reverberations into the present for the Black family at the center of the story, was also incredibly thoughtful. The Spite House often reminded me, for all its references to other classic haunted-house tales, of Colin Dickey’s Ghostland more than anything else — and I mean that in the most complimentary of ways. I’m excited to look for more of Compton’s short fiction, and to follow his career going forward.

A weird crop of the cover, which I do quite like.

Next up, in ebook form, we have The Trojan War Museum: and Other Stories by Ayse Papatya Bucak. The collection, which came out in 2019, is the Turkish-American author’s first — and what a delicious collection it is. Bucak’s work straddles literary and speculative realms: the title story is a surrealist delight, while other stories cover more mundane territory; her publication history, with work in Fairy Tale Review and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet as well as more conventional outlets like The Kenyon Review, attests to her range. I picked this one up on a whim from the Libby app (filters: available now, and some others) based largely on the title, and I am thrilled to have done so. Bucak constructs stories — and, in trawling through her website, her nonfiction — with a steady, delicate hand, offering just enough to sink the reader completely into the world of the story but not so much that the reader feels confident that they know the full extent of what’s going on. Which, if it weren’t clear, I fucking love.

I followed that with back-to-back audiobooks, the first of which was that ever-dubious undertaking, a reread of a youthful favorite. That youthful favorite is Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, translated from Norwegian by Paulette Moller — which maybe explains some things. The novel — subtitled “a novel about the history of philosophy” — opens with the title character, approaching her fifteenth birthday, as she begins to receive mysterious letters, proclaiming themselves to be a correspondence course in philosophy, as well as postcards addressed to a stranger named Hilde. Gaarder weaves Sophie’s story with brief essays on European philosophy from Ancient Greece up to the nineteenth century, a narrower focus than the subtitle would suggest, but the essays themselves are brisk and clear, and play in increasingly delightful ways with Sophie’s attempts to unravel the mysteries in her own life. In revisiting it, I found it both more and less than I recalled: the limits of the novel’s scope are much clearer to me now, but the structure of the story feels much more interesting than I found it as a kid. “A bagatelle, Sophie,” appears as sort of a refrain, and that feels like the best way to approach the novel. I hope to revisit more of Gaarder’s work in the near future, having devoured so much of it as a child.

The cover, featuring the dragon from the ground floor.

Next up was Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower by Tamsyn Muir (which is currently out of print, but I’m linking to the publisher’s website so you can search it by ISBN if you want). Regular readers of this blog, as well as real-life friends, acquaintances, and coworkers, are by now well aware of my love for Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series; while Princess Floralinda is in some ways very different from those books, it is in many ways very similar. The story roughly follows the conventions of the fractured fairy tale, a genre for which I am always a sucker: the titular princess is locked at the top of a forty-flight tower by a witch and, after watching several princes get super-killed trying to rescue her, she decides to take matters into her own hands and fight her way out herself. In lesser hands this might have been an unconsidered kind of girl-power tale — but Muir knows what she’s doing, and is no stranger to writing monsters. As delightful and quippy as her prose can be, Muir is also fully capable of making the reader confront the horror that underpins the humor at pretty much every level, and Princess Floralinda is no exception.

I next finished another ebook, through which I had been trudging for way longer than its length should have allowed: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. I wanted to read it because I had attempted to read it as a child, and the line, “Catherine grows quite a good looking girl; she is almost pretty today,” has lived in the back of my head ever since. So I did, but… Look, I liked it, in that I enjoyed seeing a semi-contemporary send-up of gothicism as an enthusiast of the genre, but I didn’t really like it, if you catch my drift. Austen’s annoyance at, if not quite contempt for, Catherine is obvious, and while it was fun in short bursts, the satire grew tiresome after a while. I don’t know if it’s anyone’s favorite Austen, and while I’m glad to have finally read it, I can’t say I’m chomping at the bit to read it again.

The cover — serviceable, maybe a little on the nose, but gets the idea across.

Alexis Henderson’s House of Hunger was up next, in audiobook form. I quite enjoyed Henderson’s prior outing, and House of Hunger provided only more reason to sing her praises. This one, however, has vampires: young Marion lives in grinding poverty, but it is only after an altercation with her brother that she takes the plunge and becomes a bloodmaid — a source of vitality for one of the aristocratic vampires of the north. Hired on by the sickly but charismatic Countess Lisavet, Marion must contend not only with her mistress’s increasingly frightening desires but also with her fellow bloodmaids, until they begin to disappear. Fast-paced and often quite sexy, Henderson builds a complex world very efficiently, creating something that is both familiar and quite different from similar works. It’s an approach that feels closer to Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood than, say, Anne Rice, and it puts some refreshing new blood in the vampire game. I really look forward to whatever Henderson does next.

I next made my way through The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross, the third installment of Stross’s Laundry Files. I’ve touched briefly on prior entries elsewhere, and Cameron recently ran through them; I’m going to continue to postpone a more complete discussion, but I will note that this one was markedly better than the prior two.

The final audiobook of this round-up is Lucy A. Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster, and what a note to (nearly) end the month on! I love a body horror plague, especially a queer one, and Snyder offers that in spades. In a world that looks back fondly on the COVID-19 pandemic as the good old days, a new virus is ravaging the world — one that, for most people, is no more than a mild stomach bug. But for the three women at the center of Snyder’s novel, its disastrous effects and the societal upheavals they engender are life (and body-) altering. Snyder captures the reader with grody, often disturbingly sexy, body horror, letting that carry us through to the ultimately cosmic scale of her apocalypse. For all that, the narrative is very thoroughly grounded in the bodies of the women — whether it’s Erin’s fatigue as she struggles with her postviral complications, Mareva’s chronic tumors, or Savannah’s weaponized beauty, we stay in these women’s bodies as they live out their increasingly ghastly lives. It’s fucking great, man.

I close this round-up with an ebook: Jessica Johns’ Bad Cree. I do not recall how it came up on my radar, but I was very excited to dive in to Johns’ debut novel, which follows Mackenzie, a young Cree woman who begins experiencing terrifying dreams centering around her dead sister — dreams from which she brings things back — leading her to return to her family home and confront the dark forces that stalk her community. Johns, who is herself Cree, weaves together the contemporary and traditional, and violences supernatural and bluntly mundane, wrapping the reader in a beautifully balanced web of imagery and dream. As Johns notes in this NPR interview, the novel the intimately concerned with grief and loss, but there’s equal emphasis on Mackenzie’s relationships, both extant — her friendship with Joli is a delight — and waiting to be reforged that, by contrasting so starkly with the darkness of the novel, makes it shine all the more. I’m so excited to read more of Johns’ work.

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That’s all for now. Follow me and Cameron on Twitter if you want.

Edgar's Book Round-Up, March 2023