Springing Horror
It’s hard to label anything as “creeping” when the pear tree in my backyard is blooming and, honestly, it would be a travesty of reading justice to keep horror to the year’s designated spooky season. I spent the last week reading several that are due out in the back half of April, for example, that are spooky as several Hells (and simultaneously funny, which is one of my favorite combinations), and I couldn’t be more pleased to have ghosts, visions of murder and mayhem, and psychopaths scattered throughout the warming weather and the return of all the colorful birds to my feeder.
Excited? Awesome, let’s go:
Love at Second Sight by FT Lukens (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 4/29)
Cam is best friends with a witch, has a crush on a werewolf, is hanging out with a medium and a sprite, and his parents aren’t happy about it. They’re even less pleased when Cam suddenly comes into his powers as a clairvoyant and the various supernatural factions start courting him as an ally. Cam’s more concerned about the fact that his first vision involves his crush, Mateo’s, favorite cousin being murdered. Cue Scooby Gang (Reese the sprite will not be part of a group named after a cartoon dog, TYVM). This Scooby Gang is much more interesting than the original however, and much less fraught than the Buffy incarnation though they do certainly have their drama and make their mistakes. Also, Leukens is hilarious and the humor baked into this YA keeps even the most dire moments from spiraling into complete despair, something I think its extra important right now (and pretty clairvoyant itself, considering the book was probably turned in a year ago).
I also find it telling that the people who ultimately can’t be trusted in this story are adults. Not all, by any means; there are some who are really amazing, like Al’s moms, some who are reasonable but who certainly have agendas, but there are also some who are truly awful, willing to force Cam into a magical analogue of conversion therapy to strip him of his powers. And that’s also prescient because… spreads arms out teachers are calling ICE on kids and parents are trying to pray the gay away and lawmakers are stripping kids of their rights to gender affirming care all across the country. And that’s not what’s supposed to happen. Adults are supposed to protect kids. We’re supposed to make sure they’re safe and secure and they have what they need to be happy and have the chance to grow into the people they want to be. Just to emphasize: the people they want to be. I’m not saying your kid has the right to be an axe murderer; that hurts someone else. But if your kid happens to be born in an XY body but is a girl? Then they’re a girl and it’s your duty as a parent to make sure they get to live that life. If your kid is non-binary? Again, your job to take sure they get to live that life. If your son wants to wear nail polish, let him wear nail polish. If your daughter wants to play football, let her play football (personally, I wouldn’t let either of my kids play football because I’ve had a head injury and no thanks, but the point stands). When you decide to become a parent, you don’t get to choose, but you have the obligation to love. So maybe read this book and take a look at how the adults behave and realize that’s not who you want to be.
Love at Second Sight: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781665950947
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito
This book is so fucking weird and I loved every second of it. I don’t think anyone has ever written such a hilarious psychopath before and the fact that you can’t help but see Winifred as charming, delightfully mischievous, and also not wrong is thoroughly disturbing. The fact that she’s playing a long game and is willing to do literally anything to achieve her aim - murdering the father who abandoned her and her mother - is… well, it’s justifiable, especially in a society where women who had sex outside of marriage were spat upon, sometimes literally, and children born out of wedlock were shunned but abortion was illegal and dangerous. And that stepfather… ugh. I hope she killed him too.
Is that me, sympathizing with a psychopath? Yes, it is.
Now, Winifred is a fictional psychopath. And fiction is how we live out our fantasies safely, including our revenge fantasies. In the isolated, hazy, dream worlds of books, it’s okay to get revenge by proxy on those who have wronged us, to transform the psychopath into a heroine, to cheer her on as she wields her knife. It’s okay for me to sympathize with her because no one in the story ever live or ever will. But examining Victorian Psycho from the outside, as a reviewer, forces me to acknowledge its boundaries and so, forces me to put aside fantasy and confront reality. It forces me to ask the question: would I sympathize with a real life Winifred? And that leaves me a little uncomfortable because I think the answer is, “yes.” But just as the book has boundaries, my “yes” has boundaries: I would, could, forgive her for killing the man. But the wife and children, no matter how horrible they are? That pushes past my limit (even if the boy is a little pervert).
Who knew a fictional psychopath could force one to confront herself.
Also, someone uses an arsenic green dress as an attempted murder weapon which, alone, is reason enough to read a book.
Victorian Psycho: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781631498633
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker (Mira, 4/29)
As a general rule, I don’t do pandemic books, because I was there, and I’m still here, and I’m not ready yet. I decided to give this one a try, however because I really like Kylie Lee Baker’s writing and I’m glad I did because it was amazing and because it deals with a topic that everyone who isn’t Asian and Asian-American decided to forget about really quickly: the anti-Asian sentiment that was rampant between 2020 and 2024 and is still happening in a lot of places (hi, Jewish, I see you).
This is a horror novel in more than one way. It’s a horror novel because there’s a serial killer. It’s a horror novel because Cora and her friends are being haunted by hungry ghosts. And it’s a horror novel in that very Shirley Jackson way (ya’ll know this is my twisted favorite) in that it reminds us that there is no monster more horrific than other people.
The things people do to one another in Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng are so much worse than the things the COVID does to anyone or the things hungry ghosts do to people (though the hungry ghosts do spawn my new favorite lines from a horror novel ever:
“She ate all my plates”
“She ate your roommate.”)
that murder is the least of them. At least the people who are murdered are dead(ish). But the racism, the spitting, the assault, the evictions, the microaggressions, those people have to live with and will have to live with for the rest of their lives. Even when the mind locks things up or glazes over them, bodies remember, the same way so many bodies remember COVID in the way they were changed by the virus. Cora’s body will never forget the way her Aunt Lois insisted she forgive Delilah’s murderer (not a spoiler). It will never forget someone else’s spit between her lips or the fingers on her arm. Blood spray on her face.
People who haven’t experienced these things don’t get it but Bat Easter and Other Names for Cora Zeng is so honest, so visceral you’ll at least get a sense of it, an understanding of the way bodies remember and the way people were changed, and are still being changed by what other people did and are doing to them. Of the way people were treated by other people just because they looked a certain way or spoke a certain language or were from a different country. Because racism is easier than science and kindness and it shouldn’t be.
It’s also a fantastic ghost story with a lot of insight into Chinese death traditions which I, as an end-of-life doula, really appreciated.
Come for the other-worldly horror, be brave and stay to confront the horror in this world. Maybe learn something. Your life will be better for it.
Currently reading: CJ Cooke’s The Ghost Woods.
Talk to you next week.
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9780778368458