Cameron's Book Round-Up: Late April, Early May 2023
Well, shit keeps happening. I’m closing out the semester and we’re going to be traveling a bit in the coming weeks. the next few posts are going to be pre-loaded before then, to give us a small bit of vacation.
Included in here is a wider variety of books than I normally read, because we have two novels that I read for the literature class I taught this past semester. Teaching literature is really different from teaching composition, and while I’d gladly do both going forward, I definitely need more practice as a literature teacher.
Anyway, let’s get to the books.
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Oh, Hav — secret crossroads of the world. The easternmost point of the west and westernmost point of the east.
Hav by Jan Morris
Bought at the same time as Moderan, and neither as niche or as funny, though still quite good. Morris primarily wrote travelogues, and Hav was believed by some to be just such a book upon its publication, if the introduction is to be believed. Instead, it is a kind of social science fiction or fantasy, speculation about a city on the Mediterranean that might have been Troy, but has also played host to Spartan, Greek, Byzantine, Islamic, Catholic, Armenian, Chinese, German, Russian, French, Turkish, and Italian regimes, only to end up ruled by a Cathar Theocracy after a vague “intervention” in the late 1980s. In feeling, the only other piece of media I can think of that works in a similar space was the webcomic Templar, Arizona by C. Spike Trotman. Though, now that I think about it, that isn’t true: there’s a lot of William S. Burroughs in the DNA, but part of what drew me to Hav was the possibility that it might have been an influence on Over the Edge, an RPG from Atlas Games that seems like a conspiracy heartbreaker until you realize it’s somehow on its third edition.
Morris wrote two novellas – Last Letters from Hav and Hav of the Myrmidons, both set in the city and written as if she had actually ventured there twenty years apart. The first story is a kind of idyll of the Mediterranean, with a certain weird cast, while the second is that same idyll perverted by forces of modernization and globalization.
It’s a strange story, partially because of how dislocated it feels in time. The first story was written in 1985, and brought to mind the Kosovo War, which didn’t happen until nearly a decade after, and the second story feels – rightly – like a reflection of the moment around 2001, though oddly ignorant of the ongoing War on Terror. This latter might be an artifact of Morris’s process – which I know little about – but which could very well lead to a ship that turns slowly.
The books are fascinating, being explorations of a 20th century that never was, something that I believe should exist more in fiction; it will take a long time for us to grapple with the titanic changes, and it may take more distance and better history education for that to happen. Steampunk stories try to do the same with the 19th century, itself a time of great dislocation, but even as wrenching as that century was, it has nothing on its younger sibling, hopped up on blood and gasoline and the fear of nuclear annihilation.
Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone
There is a bit of a late aughts CW promo image quality to the cover; however, the book is quite excellent and came out in 2012.
I enjoyed This is How You Lose the Time War, and Last Exit is probably my favorite book thus far this year, so I decided to tackle Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, though not all at once – I tend to avoid series. Three Parts Dead is, at root, a courtroom drama in a world where magic and law are analogous. This is an interesting conceit, and helps with the most common problem with fantasy fiction in high-magic settings, which is envisioning what the wizards do with all that phenomenal power.
So, in a world where wizards are lawyers, the gods are corporations, composed of soul-stuff and linked together with contracts, we follow Tara Abernathy, a young craftsperson who is involved with the murder investigation/restructuring of the god Kos, the fire god of the great city Alt Coulumb.
One could easily imagine that, underneath this, there is a hypothetical story of a disgraced law school dropout who becomes assistant to an eccentric lawyer involved in the sudden bankruptcy of Consolidated Edison or LADWP and stumbling into a murder plot. It could easily have been done that, but Gladstone didn’t – because stories like the work of John Grisham and Chinatown already exist, and I’d say that Gladstone falls a bit closer to the Chinatown end of the spectrum as far as quality of writing goes.
It’s a great little book, the magic is weird, and it actually grapples with the implications of the things that it brings in. Highly recommended.
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
The first of two books in this set that I read for my literature class – I wanted to cover something not generally covered at the undergraduate level, and also wanted to make sure that the books were short and cheap. Rulfo’s novel is strange one. Some have commented that this novel has the same place in Mexican culture as something like Goethe’s Faust has in German society – as a kind of encapsulation of a culture.
At just over 100 pages, this novella is surprisingly dense and strange. It follows a young man – Juan Preciado – who has come to the town of Comala at the insistence of his dying mother to find his father, the titular Pedro Páramo. However, Comala is both a literal and figurative ghost town, a place where voices from the past echo into the present. It is a story about regret and haunting, but it doesn’t quite end there. Páramo is an evil man, a landlord who married Juan Preciado’s mother in a bid to get out of debts to her family, and his shadow stretches far, shattering the lives of those it crosses.
The characters are expertly drawn but named in a somewhat silly fashion, being incredibly on the nose. For example, “Juan Preciado” means “Precious John”, the last name Páramo means “stony wasteland”, and I’ve never seen a better evil twin name than “Eduviges Dyada” (which means something along the lines of “strife-causing double”). Still, it’s easy to see why this novel has such a long tail, considered a masterwork by both Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges.
If one wanted to better understand Latin American magical realism, this book is an essential read.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
A fascinating novel about colonialism, though one that I have some issues with. It covers the career of a young woman named Baru Cormorant, whose island home of Taranoke is annexed by the Imperial Republic of Falcrest (also called the Masquerade). Taranoke has a vaguely Polynesian culture, with some elements of indigenous Amazonian cultures – notably the cultural institution of multiple paternity. Falcrest, on the other hand, is a less technologically sophisticated Victorian England, in the full swing of colonialism and eugenics.
Baru Cormorant is educated in a Masquerade school, passes her exams, and is sent to the northern province of Aurdwynn to act as a treasurer. While there, she works to uncover a conspiracy and becomes instrumental in a civil war.
The writing and characters are beautifully realized; the world feels somewhat incoherent. This is billed as a “hard fantasy”, like the earlier Song of Ice and Fire books, and there is a confusion of geography and tongues. Aurdwynn has a name that sounds Welsh, but there are characters that are named Tain Hu (which sounds Chinese), Erebog (which sounds Slavic), Autr Brinesalt (British? Kind of?) and Ixaxu (vaguely African?) It’s entirely possible that this is explained in one of Dickinson’s other books in this setting, but being tossed into this world without context made it difficult to get my feet beneath me – I’m all for invention, but it has to hang together and be possessed of a certain amount of unity that is not readily apparent.
The Destroyer of Worlds by Matt Ruff.
(Sequel to Lovecraft Country, covered here.) A new book, following the same set of characters as in Lovecraft Country. In that novel, notably, they enlist the help of the ghost of a dead magician, Hiram Winthrop, to combat the cultists that were plaguing them. In Destroyer of Worlds, Ruff turns his attention to that relationship: Winthrop, while he was an enemy to the villain of the first novel, is no less malicious in the long term; it’s simply that he’s entirely willing to work with the Black protagonists in the pursuit of that goal. We can maybe look at this as the supercession of ostensibly colorblind capitalism over the era of Jim Crow that came before it – outwardly, it is less antagonistic on racial grounds, but if the fatal package is marked “Occupant” instead of labeled with your name, it still has the same contents.
Ruff’s writing is, as in the first one, quite competent, and covers much the same territory. As with most well-written sequels, it simultaneously feels less like a new adventure than a continuation of the old one, and has enough background contained within it that I believe a new reader could approach it without serious danger of being lost. In addition, the novel begins to transition from a Lovecraft/Southern Gothic pastiche (though that is still present, especially in the sections dealing with Atticus and Montrose’s road trip to see the plantation where their ancestor was enslaved) to a more mid-century Atomic Gothic, best exemplified by the section where Hippolyta and Horace run through a Potemkin house set up to be destroyed by an atomic test.
Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang.
A sprawling (alternate) history of a late regency/early Victorian event called “The Translator’s Rebellion”. In a world where translation between languages is the foundation for magic, the British Empire makes a policy of recruiting children from its colonies and trading partners, raising them to be linguistic savants, and using them to drive the growth of their empire. This works through the ambiguity of translation: the lost meaning between the two parts of a “match pair” is the foundation for a magical effect. To work, they must be etched into silver bars and the two words spoken by someone who understands both languages.
The heart of this is Babel, the Oxford translator’s school, where translators are trained and silver bars are produced.
Our viewpoint character into this is a young orphan from Canton whose family dies of cholera – supposedly – and who is subsequently taken in (read: abducted) by Oxford Professor Richard Lovell. He is given a new name – Robin Swift – and trained to be a translator. Upon attaining the appropriate age, he is brought in to Babel, and the real adventure begins.
It’s clearly part of the “dark academia” genre, with a certain debt owed to other texts in that lineage, including but not limited to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (reviewed by me here), but (A) postcolonial in focus and (B) with more likable characters. Most reviews that touch upon it also link it to Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell by Susanna Clarke – and there is certainly a connection there (early 19th century British setting, functional and systematic magic, etc.) but the academic focus dominates for two thirds of the book – the conspiracy, which I have not mentioned, is present early on, but is not really in focus until the climax.
And by then, of course, things have thoroughly gone off the rails.
An enjoyable read, though one that rewards close attention more than anything else. I listened to it in audio book form, and it was great for walking to work; less so for housework.
A classic horror novel, and kicking off an exploration of some early Stephen King for me. I’ve seen Stanley Kubrick’s version of the story, but fundamentally, the Kubrick Shining and the King Shining are two different stories that grow from the same premise. Each exploits the strengths of their particular medium quite effectively (though, of course, I’m more convinced that Kubrick could have been a serial killer than that King is one; that may not be the point here, but it feels important to note.)
I’m not going to bother with a summary, not really. Most people are familiar with the story. A writer who lost his job teaching at a private school because of his explosive temper takes a job as an over-winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado, which has a long and sordid history. He brings his charming wife and his son – an innocent child who possesses a preternatural insight. The hotel warps him, and it ends tragically.
King’s version of the story is much more fleshed out than Kubrick’s, giving greater insight into the characters other than Jack Torrance and greater context for events. In addition – because King saw himself in Jack Torrance, that character is drawn with greater sympathy and a sharper critique. Far from being a haunting story first, it becomes a tragedy. The deficits in the experience of the novel is largely, I think, the result of cultural drift over time – though it feels less pronounced in The Shining than it does in The Dead Zone, reviewed further down. For some reason, possibly the familiarity of the story from watching the Kubrick version, the cultural differences visible in the Shining were less distracting.
I’m going to be using the term “Mycogothic” a lot going forward, I can tell.
Leech by Hiron Ennes.
(Reviewed by Edgar here.)
I largely agree with Edgar’s assessment of this novel, so I’m going to focus instead on a parallel critique. Ennes drops the bit of first-person-hive-mind narration fairly early in the novel. It’s a fantastic bit of work that this narration is present at all, but it makes sense that you can’t continue to do that through a whole novel. Horror novels suffer if there is no danger to the protagonist(s), and there would be a lot of hoops to jump through to make events seem threatening to the hive-mind protagonist.
While the novel is quite good – being a sort of post-apocalyptic mycogothic horror story, like Gene Wolfe or Paul J. McAuley doing their own take on T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead. My main issue is that it feels like the first-person collective mind narration bit is wasted in this story. It feels genuinely new and fascinating and it’s abandoned fairly quickly in a twist that feels telegraphed just slightly too hard.
This is not to say that it is not worth reading, but simply that I would like to see Ennes return to this setting and extend this throughout a whole novella or so. It would be a fascinating and difficult exercise, but well worth the effort, I believe.
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor.
The last novel that I read with my students this semester, Binti is aimed at a slightly younger crowd than my students, but I felt it was a great way to end the semester, especially as we had moved on, in the week prior, to a discussion of post-colonialism and the navigation of hybrid identities and cultures that result from it.
I have not read the other novels in the Binti sequence, I probably will at some point. It’s a fairly simple story: a young women leaves home to go to university, and encounters trouble along the way. In the hands of a less skilled author, it could easily have turned into a Die Hard pastiche. I’m grateful that Okorafor didn’t do that. What it instead suggests is that coexistence between diverse and distinct groups can only work when a certain amount of hybridity is allowed. In Binti, this metaphor is literalized – at the end of the story, the protagonist is no longer purely human, though this is treated not with the horror that this sort of thing is treated with in other stories. By creating a new culture that is shared between the different participants, a mutual understanding can be attained and lead to something new and resilient – the first step, though, comes in abandoning the means of coercion.
It’s a great novel, highly recommended.
I don’t mean any slight to the other books on this list, but they don’t make covers like this these days. You still could, but they’ve fallen out of fashion.
The Dead Zone by Stephen King.
This novel follows Johnny Smith, a former English teacher (King taught high school English at some point, I’m going to guess…yeah, no he did, also at a prestigious private school like the one Jack Torrance was fired from in The Shining) who is much less Stephen King than Torrance was, but does possess a kind of psychometric power, able to see memories and experiences embedded in objects that he touches. This power is weak at first.
After a date with a coworker, he is in a car accident and falls into a four-year coma, only to come out and find the world drastically changed, and his psychic abilities amplified to the point where he can see the future. This leads to trouble for him when he shakes hands with a political candidate for the House of Representatives, and sees him being sworn in as president and a subsequent nuclear war.
King’s metier is horror; The Dead Zone isn’t horror. There isn’t a problem with writers trying new things, and perhaps it’s the missed-the-last-stair feeling of picking up a thriller when you think you’re picking up a horror novel, but this one didn’t land as well for me as the Shining did or It currently is. There’s a kind of Richard-Condon-by-way-of-Ray-Bradbury thing going on here. In a scientific sense, I think that this qualifies as a successful experiment: information was received from it, and it seems to me that King largely sticks to horror (though I loved the more fantastical Dark Tower books for most of the series.)
It’s possible that he would be better able to tackle the story now, but I think that, as authors get older, they tend to experiment less – especially those who have found their audience as reliably as King has. After all, you don’t need to change the formula as much when you have a reliable payday.
We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow by Margaret Killjoy.
Margaret Killjoy is, paradoxically, a delight, and a generalist inside the bounds of speculative fiction. She tends toward science fiction, fantasy, and horror – generally, though, her most effective stories are either post-apocalyptic, or have the air of folk tales (which is not to say I don’t enjoy her other ones; the cyberpunk story about being abducted by a self-driving taxi that has decided you need to go to jail because you hit the wrong if-then was quite good.) The big ones in here are “The Northern Host” and “the Thirty-Seven Marble Steps”, which were recorded in audio from the It Could Happen Here podcast last year.
All of the stories have a somewhat leftist and anti-authoritarian cast to them, but this is not a position that Killjoy is trying to convince the reader of: she does not write propaganda, she writes fiction that is informed by her own beliefs – and if you think that this isn’t true of any of the other authors on this list, then I have a very nice bridge for sale that I think you’re just going to love. I highly recommend listening to the two recorded stories up above if you’re not sure: they do a better job of pitching the book than I can.
The book is quite good, though the title is somewhat generic.
The Good House by Tananarive Due.
(Reviewed by Edgar here.)
And here we reach my end point for the month. The Good House is a particular kind of story that crops up again and again in American fiction and film. It’s the story of a small idyllic town where something awful happened in prior generations, and it is up to the current generation to try to solve it. You can see this in It and in Twin Peaks and elsewhere. It’s an extension of the “town with a dark secret” motif that forms the cornerstone of American Folk Horror. Due takes it and makes a specifically black version of this.
The central character is Angela Toussaint, who periodically returns to her grandmother’s house in Sacajawea, Washington – she was raised there, and inherited it upon her grandmother’s death. On July 4th, 2002, she met there with her ex-husband, Tariq, and her teenage son, Corey. She and Tariq are trying to work things out, but this fails when Corey appears to commit suicide with the handgun that Tariq claimed to have gotten rid of.
Fast forward two years, Angela is a high-powered Hollywood agent, and she receives word that there is an offer for the Good House, her grandmother’s house. She and a friend go to look at it, and become embroiled in a series of events kicked off by actions taken by her grandmother all the way back in 1929.
It’s a great book – well-written, adapting American Folk Horror to accommodate voudoun in a thoughtful and well-considered way. The only critique I have, really, is that the timeline doesn’t seem to work out. Angela’s mother was born in 1921, Angela is in her early 40s in 2004; while it’s entirely conceivable that Angela could have been born when her mother was in her 40s, the generations in question feel more closely packed than the actual timeline suggests.
However, I’d offer that this is a very minor critique, and did nothing to actually detract from my enjoyment of the book.
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