Elliott Dunstan

The Gremlin’s Library: Pluralities, Or by Avi Silver

March 17th, 2020

Full disclosure! I was a hired sensitivity reader for this novella, so I acknowledge that there might be some bias. Also, a TW for misgendering and dysphoria within both the book and review.

It’s not particularly a secret how much I love the Shale Project – started by Avi Silver and Sienna Tristen in 2018, The Shale Project is a shared-world speculative fiction setting. However, I’m pleased to say that it’s not just the setting I’m in love with. The book Pluralities, Or is a non-Shale novella from Avi Silver, exploring non-binary identity alongside a science-fiction adventure about dependence and trust, and the writing is just. Absolutely top-notch amazing.

Pluralities, Or occupies that wonderful space in speculative fiction that’s alternately called ‘magical realism’, ‘fabulism’ or ‘slipstream’. In this case I think slipstream is the most accurate term – there are two distinct narratives at play, one set in our world, one set in a galaxy that might be very far away or very close, long ago or in the future – who knows? The connections between these two settings are vague but become clearer as the story goes on. The main thrust of the Pluralities, Or’s modern narrative is a narrator becoming less and less comfortable with their proscribed identity as a cis woman.

This narrative’s one touch of speculative fiction is around gender – in this, women wear ‘she’ stamps on their cheeks, advertising their gender identity. Men, by contrast, don’t need stamps at all – they’re the Default. This is a genius piece of worldbuilding on its own, especially as the narrator resists the urge to scrub off their own ‘she’ stamp – but it reaches a whole new level when the narrator befriends a trans man called Theseus. Outside of work, when he gets to be himself the most authentically, he wears a ‘he’ stamp – a concept unheard of among cis men. There is also a fabulous joke about how trans men tend to name themselves after Victorian kittens which is my favourite way of describing that Ever.

The science-fiction side of the story is harder to explain, and I won’t try. However, what I will say is that the relationship between Cornelius and his ship – Bo, or BODY – will hit home for anybody with a dissociative-spectrum disorder, dysphoria or both.

Pluralities, Or is a fantastic, complicated slipstream narrative – it’s a coming-out story completely and utterly devoid of the tropes that cis people use to understand trans identities, and without any of the voyeuristic pain that’s expected from trans coming out stories. There’s just as much gender euphoria here as dysphoria, and the narrator’s identities all play off of each other completely naturally. ALSO, it would be ABSOLUTELY REMISS of me if I did not mention that the narrator is aromantic! What! An aromantic character in slipstream/literary fiction??? Who isn’t miserable??? And enjoys sex/isn’t asexual??? This book comes HIGHLY recommended, especially since the custom covers from Penrose Press are gorgeous.

Pluralities, Or will be available from Penrose Press in May!
First Chapter Thoughts: The Changeling by Victor LaValle

March 12th, 2020

I made a point of seeking out Black horror to read in February, and the first book I read was the wonderful but strange White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi. The second is The Changeling by Victor LaValle – published more recently than the first (2017) but opening on the lives of two people in the late 60s-early 70s.

The first chapter of this book tells the love story of Brian West and Lillian Kagwa, a perfectly normal if fraught story about two individuals with scarred pasts who end up getting married. Lillian is from Uganda, a survivor of the violence there at the time, and Brian is the child of an alcoholic father. It’s a sweet story – and obviously, since this is a horror novel, it takes a turn at the end of the first chapter when Brian goes missing and leaves Lillian and their four-year-old son behind.

I’m not sure what to expect from The Changeling yet. I have to imagine that Apollo (the baby) is the titular changeling, but beyond that I have no theories. I do, however, love LaValle’s writing so far. It dips from dryly humorous to dead serious so quickly that I don’t always realize that there’s been a shift in tone, and it’s just very pretty!

Let’ see where the book goes from here.
The Gremlin’s Library: Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

March 10th, 2020

I’ve been meaning to read some of Seanan McGuire’s books for a long time, but – do you ever get that thing when a book or author comes so highly recommended that you’re scared of reading it because it might not live up to the hype? Well, I’m ace, and Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway is one of the few books that’s consistently recommended as ace rep, so – you get the picture. But Middlegame is a new book, stand-alone and – fascinatingly to me – had a Hand of Glory on the front, so I checked it out.

I am SO glad I did. Lucky, lucky, lucky me, the nerd who loves alchemy and weird mindscrewy nonsense, I picked a book that manages to combine a children’s novel, Conceptual Alchemy, goth sensibilities and the unmaking of reality into a shockingly coherent, gripping narrative that also includes time travel. Hilariously enough, McGuire’s afterword includes that she wrote the entire book partially because her agent said the pitch didn’t make sense. The galaxy brain involved. I love it.

Anyway. Middlegame is a novel that makes very little sense until you get at least five or so chapters in; it’s a mastercraft example of “just go with it and then you start catching up” – exposition-lite storytelling, or in media res, however you want to describe it. I’m the kind of reader who can happily do this, filing away snippets of information until they make sense, and there’s nothing I hate more than an undisguised infodump. McGuire is clever – the infodumps are so sneaky in the beginning that they don’t register as that. First, you see two twins, one of them dying, the other struggling to figure out what to do. Then you meet Asphodel Baker, aspiring alchemist, creating something terrible and wonderful – a golem, or mannikin, or homunculus, whatever you want to call it. And finally, even later still, you meet the same mannikin, Reed, presenting a group of alchemists with his great quest; to embody the Doctrine of Ethos within a human form, and how he has managed to embody it into three sets of twins.

And thus, our story begins.

What’s the Doctrine of Ethos? Well, it’s kind of unclear, but that’s part of what makes it so fun. Nobody seems entirely sure. It’s the blueprint to the universe, clearly, or the Word of God, or the key to the center of everything – Really, you just kind of have to go with it.

If you think this all sounds like nonsensical gibberish, you won’t like this book. You may very well enjoy Roger and Dodger (yes, I know) and their complicated relationship; they’re the best kind of separated-at-birth twins, with psychic powers and distant telepathy. Their ridiculous rhyming names are even mocked at length by pretty much every character including themselves – the only thing better than a trope is a trope with a sense of humour. But the core of the book, and the thing that brings me so much joy, is how blissfully and happily weird it is. This is a world of shadowy conspiracies and twisty timelines, self-fulfilling loops, faerie logic mixed with questionable science, and Alice-in-Wonderland aesthetics married to the frightening ups-and-downs of turbulent adult relationships.

If this review got you interested – good! You’ll like it! And if you’re confused? Chances are, the book wouldn’t be your thing anyway. Welcome to the trip.

Trigger warnings for this book include: a semi-detailed suicide attempt, abandonment issues/triggers, reality warping/unreality stuff, mind control, gaslighting, threat of hospitalization and a few extended murder scenes that freaked me out much more than usual murder does.

Middlegame is available through Indiebound and Barnes and Noble!

(If you like my reviews, consider leaving a tip! My reviews are all unpaid and labours of love.)
Short Story Review: “I live with him, i see his face, i go no more away” by Helen Oyeyemi

March 7th, 2020

Some girls wearing school uniform (lucky girls) helped me fold up the frills at the bottom of the skirt so that it didn’t scrape the floor. It was really too much. I wanted to kill myself. I know you hate it when I say that, and of course I don’t mean it when I say it, but often it seems I sort of do mean it because it comes out before I realise I’ve said it. It’s just that I get so desperate. I know I have nothing to be desperate about. But I get this sense of nothing being tolerable and then I’ll read a copy of the Metro that someone’s left tucked in between the seat and a glass side panel and while reading I get even more desperate because everyone else is the same and there’s no solution.

-“i live with him, i see his face, i go no more away”, Helen Oyeyemi, New Statesman America, December 18th 2006

This is an old story to be stumbling across, but I was looking for more of Oyeyemi’s work after finishing the beautiful White is for Witching. As it turns out, the borderline-psychosis of Witching is recurrent in Oyeyemi’s writing, as well as the blurring of reality, mental illness and fantasy.

This is a beautifully confusing story that yet somehow manages to make enough internal sense that it isn’t until the end that I went ‘wait, so what’s going on?’ After thinking about it for a bit, it came together. The most confusing part, or rather the part that’s hardest to catch onto, is getting into the flow of the narrator’s breathless, frantic voice. She’s been missing for a week, but oh, don’t be cross with her; she can explain Exactly Why.

This is a gorgeous, gorgeous story, and if slipstream is your kind of thing, I highly recommend reading it.
Short Story Review: Of Warps and Wefts by Innocent Chizaram Ilo

March 5th, 2020

In his other life, my husband is another woman’s wife. This does not perturb me. What sprinkles fear-flakes on my bones is the dark splotches my husband’s spouse leaves on his brown skin. She makes it obvious. Her catawampus nails burrow deep into the suppleness of my husband’s back, her torrid lips besmirch my husband’s nipples, and her tongue drips lava that scalds my husband’s navel. Every evening, when my husband walks into our bedroom, I am forced to deal with this awareness of sharing him with another person.

-Innocent Chizaram Ilo, Strange Horizons, 5 March 2018, http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/of-warps-and-wefts/

I don’t know if this story is deliberately about polyamory, but it sure feels like it. In a world where people switch genders between day and night, and are married to two different people, Chime/Dime is trying to balance both of their lives. It feels almost like a slice-of-life piece, except the life we’re getting a slice of is one with matchstick children and placentas that grow roots through childrens’ bodies, and gender as performance with very little indication paid to physical body. (It’s implied that their bodies change with their gender roles, but it’s put in vague enough terms to interpret it in many ways!)

This story is very confusing, but it’s confusing in a way that’s emotionally honest and easy to follow – you don’t have to understand why anything is a certain way; just the way it feels to the characters. The debate around ‘is magical realism Latinx-only or for all people of colour’ will probably never be definitively settled, but I’d call this story magical realism – it never explains where its metaphor ends and its reality begins, because that isn’t the point.

Back to the polyamory thing – it’s so, so nice to see a story about jealousy where the answer isn’t “leave the other person and commit your life to your One True Love”. The issue isn’t that Chime/Dime’s husband is wrong for having another lover. It’s just that he isn’t being a very good husband at home in the process. That’s exactly why it all feels so true – I’ve lived this, and this is exactly what most poly arguments feel like.

The Gremlin’s Library: Pluralities, Or by Avi Silver

First Chapter Thoughts: The Changeling by Victor LaValle

The Gremlin’s Library: Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

Short Story Review: “I live with him, i see his face, i go no more away” by Helen Oyeyemi

Short Story Review: Of Warps and Wefts by Innocent Chizaram Ilo