Flyby…
We’re going to make it a quick one today because the kid and I are busy with a Black Forest Cake. Yes, we are getting very fancy here. We even made chocolate bark. Applaud at will.
The Devil She Knows by Alexandria Bellafleur (Berkley, 10/21)
I’m going to say right off the jump that I’m a little conflicted about this one. Normally, if I have beef with a book, I don’t review it or I go with, “Not for me but I’m sure it will find it’s audience,” because honestly, that’s most often true. There are very few books in the world that are objectively bad (very few, not none) and it’s not my place to yuk someone else’s yum provided that yum doesn’t include things like pedophilia.
For the record, there are no do-not proceeds in this book.
And, for the most part, I liked The Devil She Knows. I liked the book’s twist on the Faustian bargain (I actually have a book on the history of the said bargain checked out from the library). I love that the message is: find the one who loves you for you are, not for who you could be. Our heroine, Samantha, is a little on the predictable side, but demon Daphne is a whole lot of fun and brings the playful, vicious, and yet somehow intensely cozy vibe to the story, moving it along by being not at all nice but extremely kind and also my favorite kind of sassy. It’s a solid romance and it moved at a good clip. I had fun reading it.
What then, you may be wondering is the problem?
There is one on the page sex scene and it is awful. Not only is the act itself totally uninspired but Bellafleur uses words like “nub” and “slit” and listen, I know she’s won awards but as someone who appreciates all genders equally, Jesus Horatio Christ, if you’re going to write about big girl activities, you need to use big girl words. I know some people think anatomical terms are silly, but they’re better than the ones in The Devil She Knows and if you’re going to employ slang, please use ones two women might use while actually fucking. If you can’t, then just close the door and let people figure it out. I was so glad the remainder of the book proceeded without.
Read the book, skip the sex? The rest of it is a nice little escape from reality.
The Devil She Knows: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9780593952504
Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781685891046
The Last Witch by C.J. Cooke (Berkley, 10/14)
C.J. Cooke’s books are always creepy and weird in the most gothic of ways which I very much enjoy. And by gothic, I don’t mean the architecture or running across the moors in one’s nightgown holding aloft a candelabra, I mean in original literary sense of the word, the one in which the reader is never quite sure if the supernatural is actually making appearance or if sightings of ghosts and goddesses are the products of a tortured mind, if another world is actually touching ours or if someone is reaching so desperately for the explanation of something horrific that they fall into delirium or even madness.
The fact that The Last Witch is based on a real story, the main character, Helena Scheuberin, based on a historical figure, who was tried for witchcraft by none other than Heinrich Kramer, author of Malleus Maleficarum, who survived the trial and torture to see him ousted from Innsbruck, adds that much more terror to the story. What is done to Helena in the course of the story is a reconstruction but it is a reconstruction based on research and the torture she and her fellow accused endured is far worse than any of their supernatural happenings in the book precisely because it, or acts like it, were actually perpetuated by human beings upon other human beings. As I say so often in horror review, the books that scare me the most are the ones that play with Shirley Jackson’s favorite convention: no matter what supernatural monsters we may face at the end, as she shows us in The Lottery, other people are always the most atrocious monster of all.
The combination of the two works perfectly in The Last Witch, casting an eerie shadow over the whole book, the kind that has you checking over your shoulder or no discernible reason every so often, jumping when the cat walks by in your peripheral vision, and thinking about that time you screwed around with an Ouija board and maybe shouldn’t have. It is also frighteningly relevant now, six hundred years later and who would have thought we’d be saying that? Because I’ve never seen the devil, but I have definitely seen men like Heinrich Kramer.
The Last Witch: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9798217187799
Quick notes on some other stuff I read:
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King, Bilquis Everly, and Matheus Lopes: I, like so many other people, went out and grabbed this one after I saw Superman. It is an amazing. It is a lot. If you don’t know a lot of Supergirl, I am going to warn you not to expect a big blue girls out She cusses, she fights, she lies, she gets drunk, and she doesn’t like to kill but she will. She is what a lot of men like to call, “a nasty woman.” I, for one, love her but I love her because she is messy as fuck just like the rest of us. If you’re interested, anticipate at least a little bit of a wait; a lot of places are out or back ordered. I used bookshop.org and I think I waited about a month. https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781779515681 Your local might be able to do better but Woman of Tomorrow is from 2022 so they may not have been holding on to a lot of copies and I don’t know how quickly/if they’re adjusting to demand.
I Want To Be A Wall, Vol. 2&3 by Honami Shirono, (trans. Emma Schmacker) (Yen)
I Want To Be A Wall is a relatively short run at three volumes but it fit a lot into that space. It continued to be a really interesting mediation on life in what’s still a heteronormative society and how those who don’t feel they fit cultural norms can live a happily without sacrificing who they are and what they want. I always appreciate good ace representation, which continues scant in all mediums, and I really loved the way Yuriko and Gakurouta took the time to learn about and appreciate each other, as well as taking the time to establish a real bond, so that they could create a true queer platonic partnership. It’s the first real representation I’ve seen of that particular type of relationship in any media and I loved it.
I Want To Be A Wall: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781975338961
Semantic Error, Vol. 1&2 by J Soori (original story) and Angy (manhua script and art) (IZE)
Semantic Error is a novel turned manhua but I’m reading the manhua first because the first volume of the English translation of the novel doesn’t come out until January. It’s a full color comic which is super fun; we don’t get those often from Korea, especially not manhua that are multiple volumes. The art is gorgeous as well, switching back and forth from a traditional style to a sort of low-res-game style to a more graffitied style and sometimes putting them all in a blender and hitting “pulse” a few times; the combination not only suits the story’s aesthetic but also suits our leads: Chu Sangwoo, a computer programmer, and Jaeyoung Jang, a graphic design/art student.
Semantic Error also features some neurodivergence representation feels like either autism or severe OCD rep to me (both?) and embedded in that backstory is a parent who was probably doing the best she could at the time (I hope) but ended up programming Sanngwoo as regards intimacy and sex in such a way that his attraction to a man leaves him completely unable to function. His thinks his desire for Jaeyoung is a malfunction, and error that needs to be fixed, the “semantic error” in his program. But semantic errors can also refer to using the wrong word in the wrong context and the fact that words have meaning and intention and that these two young men who are more than attracted to each other are literally speaking different languages despite using the same words. About how the words we speak to our children matter so much more than we think, about how the things we say can follow them into adulthood even if we meant them as a throwaway comment when we were tired or annoyed or busy.
Anyway, BL manhua. It’s not just guys kissing.
Semantic Error: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9798400902628
On to the next!