Where Has the Summer Gone?

If you stick you’re head outside in PA right now, you’ll be slapped in the face by the fact it’s still alive and well despite the date on the calendar. If you take a peek at my reading journal, you’ll see that I’ve spent a great deal of it with books. Let’s get started.

Blood Sisters by Vanessa Lillie (Berkley 10/31)

Many of you have probably seen a video about Manitoba’s government refusing to allow the search of a landfill for the bodies of two missing indigenous women. Remains the Winnipeg police have publicly stated they believe to be on that property. Unfortunately, homicide against Indigenous women is extremely common: between 1980 and 2014, there were a reported 6,849 cases of homicide against female presenting people in Canada with 16% being perpetuated against Indigenous women. The percentage by year in that window ranged from 9% in 1980 to 20% in 2014. Keep in mind these are not cases reported to police (which are only a fraction of cases) but by police (a fraction of a fraction) and these statistics don’t include missing female presenting individuals. And before anyone in the US thinks it’s any better here, a reported 84.3% of Indigenous people who present as female have experienced violence during their lifetime, 56.1% have experienced sexual violence, and there is currently “no reliable count of how many Indigenous women and girls go missing each year.”

These are government stats from both countries so the truth is probably even worse.

See those dates? Those aren’t old timey statistics. Those are numbers from the last 10 years. The US Government, with all of its resources, right now, today, has no idea how many Indigenous women and girls go missing each year.

Which is why we need books like Blood Sisters.

Y’all know I’ve been on the Indigenous horror train for a while now. Blood Sisters isn’t horror. Horrifying, yes, horror no. It’s doesn’t use monsters or myths or folklore to augment the atrocities (none of them use it to replace them which makes the horrors of humanity all the more terrifying). It’s a story of women refusing to give up on one another, of guilt, of the love between sisters, of mistakes, of forgiveness, and of the best and worst of humanity.

You should read it. And then sit down, shut up, and give the people who need the space to speak some space at the table.

https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9780593550113 (Blood Sisters)

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns (Doubleday)

This one is an Indigenous horror novel and it’s scary as shit. An amorphous monster, ghosts, generational secrets, and generational curses (that last one is for sure the scariest, at least for me. It’s about the way mothers and daughters and aunties love one another with their entire souls, the ways the curse one another without meaning to, and the ways in which, in reclaiming themselves, the reclaim one another.

It’s a creature feature, sure, but it’s also a story about trying to live in two worlds: one that you long for but that rejects you and one that loves you but keeps secrets for your safety perhaps, but also to your detriment. About those who love you underestimating your strength because you underestimate your strength, about them not seeing your whole self because you don’t see it, about trying to come into your own when you’re not sure what that is. It’s about coming home and coming home and realizing that to move on you may have to move through which can be bloody and it can hurt but in the end, you are as strong and and whole and you as you think you are and those women you thought didn’t get you? They do. They just needed you to explain it to them a little louder.

https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9780385548694 (Bad Cree)

The Night Eaters Vol.1: She Eats the Night by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda (Abrams)

When you tell me the team that did Monstress did another thing, I will read it.

This was a very good decision in the case of The Night Eaters and I am super excited that I already have an ARC of the second volume in my stack because dang, cliffhanger and there was definitely a part of it I did not see coming.

This is a perfect fall graphic novel. It is terrifying and splooshy, the mythic version of a slasher. Think Trese, think Black Cranes, that very special sort of Japanese, Filipino, and Indonesian body horror that ends not in domination but reclamation for the female characters and domination (or in this case, adorable male-wifery) for the lead dude. I’m also learning new mythology, which I always do in Liu and Takeda’s books and which I absolutely love; I’ve grabbed bits and pieces from the many, many Eastern lores here and there but I always want more and getting it in illustrated form with this caliber of writing? A privilege.

Also, I have to admit, it’s sort of fun to see privileged little shits completely lose their minds. Very much a “rich asshole gets stuck and Burning Man” situation. But with creepy dolls, tentacle monsters, and a lot of slime.

https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781419758706 (The Night Eaters)

https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781632157096 (Monstess)

https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781950912193 (Trese)

https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781947879560 (Black Cranes)

The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon (tordotcom)

This is a fascinating book. The concept: the world run by mechs. The mechs dig down into the very root systems of the worlds. People come to worship the mechs as gods. The mechs corrupt as all tech eventually does. The mechs slaughter their adherents, leaving only a select few alive and…

That’s only the backstory.

Candon very skillfully does in The Archive Undying one of my favorite things: she writes a massive, cosmic-level story by allowing her readers to watch it play out on the micro level in the relationships between people we grow to care about. This is not an easy task. Many try. Many fail, miswiring, misfiring, or crafting characters who are generic templates onto which any story could be grafted. They don’t live, they don’t breathe, they’re terrible kissers, and we give zero fucks about what ultimately happens to them.

Not so here. I was invested in Sunai. I cared about Viyadi and I adored Jin. I needed to know what happened to all of them. And sure, I’ll admit to being a little confused and getting hung up in the book book version; easily solved for those of you who hit the same stumbling block: I switched over to the audiobook and finished it in maybe four days (16+ hours and I work from home)? There was something about listening to it that allowed my brain to let go of trying to remember the rules (which change) and what time period the characters were in (which shifted) and just enjoy the absolute absurdity of the work (Harrow the Ninth style). Which, newsflash, is okay to do. Think about the last book you read wherein the author spelled everything out for you. Was it a good book? Possibly. Did you have fun reading it? Probably not. Why? Because when an author gives you every last detail and traps you in a framework, reading is work. You have to remember everything and I don’t know about you, but I read for fun and I have since I graduated from that second bachelors unless I was specifically writing an academic paper and when I do that now, I do that for fun. When an author Da Vinci’s that shit? When they leave gaps or flip everything upside down or throw it in that carnival ride that spins and you stick to the sides and pray you don’t throw up in your own face? That’s them trusting you, the reader, and your intelligence and creativity! They’re leaving space for you to interact with their book in any way you see fit! What an honor!

Have some fucking fun.

https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781250821546 (The Archive Undying)

https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781250313218 (Harrow the Ninth)

Another Mythology by Maxwell I Gold (Interstellar Flight Press)

I don’t have a ton to say about this one other than I am not a huge “sit down and read poetry” person but I say down and read an e-arc of this one and then purchased my own hard copy because I wanted to be able to sit down and read it again. It’s sad and joyous and infuriating and wonderful and queer and pensive and impulsive and I want to be able to reach for it at any moment, flip through, find my feelings, and put them into Gold’s words.

That is all.

https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781953736246 (Other Mythologies)

Shadow Baron (The Burnished City #2) by Davinia Evans (Orbit 11/14)

Listen, okay, I was trying to wait until closer to release date for this one but I had a slump and I knew I was going to do a happy dance so I cheated and I was not disappointed.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the second book in a series is rarely up to the standard of the first because… it just isn’t. It is also a truth universally acknowledge by me that books that are next in series written during the pandemic have been… not my favorites. There are at least four series I either quit or didn’t finish the last book of I’d been following for years because the pandemic entry was just… boring. Long swaths of nothing happening and nothing happening and more nothing happening.

I am happy to report Evans’s The Burnished City is not one of them. The Shadow Baron is great and I can’t wait for more even though I just finished this one like, a week ago. Opening this file was like jumping back into a land of friends I couldn’t wait to spend time with and finding out they’d made an even bigger mess than we’d thought and I was going to have to help bail them out of it but I didn’t mind.

And, and! While the dudes were still around doing their dude things (affectionate), this was, at heart, Anahid and Zagiri’s book which have me no end of joy because they both had the opportunity to grow and change and fuck the patriarchy and learn and fuck the patriarchy and kick ass in the way that suited them best and also fuck the patriarchy.

This series is so special and so special to me. It contains so many of the elements of this newer wave of fantasy I love so much: non-western setting, free queerness, class warfare, smart women, tangled mythology and folklore that is definitely shaken and not politely stirred, and absolute weirdos.

Long may it reign.

https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9780316398237 (Shadow Baron)

Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology edited by Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason (William Morrow & Co)

Sometimes, when I’m in a reading slump, I’ll pick up an anthology as a way to scope out new authors, especially if that anthology also has a couple of writers I know I like (I figure if the editors who curated the anthology thought they went together well, I might feel the same way). Other Terrors scrolled by on my Twitter feed (it’s very, very occasionally still good for something) and I figured with spooky season incoming, I’d grab it from the library. Again, as I have said several times this month, I was not disappointed.

Of the 26 stories, I only skipped 4, which is a pretty decent ratio, IMO. There was one other where the theme was phenomenal but the writing was… weird but not good weird so… 1/2 a point? That’s still a pretty high approval rating. I’d vote Stephen Graham Jones’s Tiddlywinks, Tanarive Due’s Incident at Bear Creek Lodge, Shanna Heath’s Miss Infection USA, and Holly Lyn Walrath’s The Asylum as my favorites if I had to pick but I really loved the different ways in which all of the authors interpreted terror: some went with the monster within, some the monster outside, and many in ways I never would have thought of or considered.

This one has a fair few content warnings - if you have questions feel free to contact me through the website.

https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9780358658894 (Other Terrors)

Hope you found something to settle down with. I’ll be back soon with another armful!