Our rerun post for the day is another Gremlin’s Library from *checks*… dear god, this was four years ago? Nevertheless. Middlegame is now one of my favourite books, and is actually a major influence on my completed, currently-querying novel. So you can take this review to heart. No notes, other than the humorous commentary that I eventually did read Every Heart A Doorway and was much less impressed. (No shade to McGuire. It was just inevitably never going to live up to the hype.)
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.
This is a theory/fandom meta post I wrote a few years back, and I’ll be honest – while it does read a bit as a first draft, I’m still quite proud of it.
Due to the length of the column, I won’t be reposting the whole thing here; I forgot how long some of my posts were! Instead, a few notes as I reread it:
Number one, I’m genuinely surprised not just at how succinct some of these points are but at their relative lack of presence in discourse otherwise. It’s true that I haven’t been particularly present in fandom for the last while — I think 2021 was sort of my last hurrah in that sense — but I find it strange that even as incest-kink as a deeply Queer Thing comes up more (Empty Spaces, dollkink, etc.) the fact that there’s a long tradition of it doesn’t as much.
Two, I was actually checking the date and more than a little confused at me mentioning drag moms/drag kids this early on! I didn’t get into drag myself until mid-2023, and so I’d forgotten that I had even this much knowledge of the subculture before then.
Finally… I’ve always expected to get more hatemail about the ‘incest isn’t inherently bad’ thing? Perhaps it’s that I make such a point of differentiating between incest and incestuous abuse, but normally the kind of people who send hatemail aren’t the type to care about that sort of thing.
If you like the work I do, please check out my SubscribeStar over here! $5 a month goes a long way in helping to support me and my goals.
Our rerun post today is an old zine review, this time from Vanessa Maki! Full text below:
What does it mean to start over? What does it mean to reset the system, to reboot the software of your own mind? Vanessa Maki’s powerful poetry chapbook press ctrl – alt – del engages with this question with incredible grace and bluntness in equal measure. The chapbook carries the metaphor of a filing system throughout, with some files deleted and hanging around the ‘recycle bin’, and poems having names like ‘LOVE.exe’ and metaphors about admin control.
control is the slight luxury / when you happen to be admin / i configure /i install / i have control / control of body /
-“ADMIN”, pg 4 of ‘press ctrl – alt – del’, Vanessa Maki
I thoroughly enjoyed the poems in this chapbook, both under their own power and how they link with each other. It’s one thing to write a collection of poetry and another to make that collection cohesive. The same motifs repeat, never all at once; bitter fruit, broken glass, storm warnings and system shutdowns cycle around the poems, uniting to form an uneasy see-saw between the organic and the artificial. It circles back to oppression – to being traumatized, mentally ill, black, queer, a woman – and the constant balance of untangling what is ‘natural’, what is ‘real’, what is learned.
Of particular note are the final three lines of the chapbook.
i have no idea what it’d be like to be a fully functioning system that never needs constant repairs.
-B.S.O.D., pg 23, Vanessa Maki
While my marginalizations are largely different, this is a sentiment that lands, and lands hard. Being marginalized and traumatized in an oppressive system feels, most of the time, like a constant experiment in jury-rigging complex fixes with tape and glue. We survive day-to-day, waiting for the next big hit.
Vestigial to the chapbook itself but nevertheless part of the download file and the project, the image poems that come along with the chapbook expand on the theme. Each of them are short, fitting into a pop-up alert box that draws on older versions of Windows. While all of these are excellent, “DOWNLOAD ME” i think is some of the purest expression of the theme. Others expand further on the unhealthy relationship that weaves its way through Maki’s poetry, and all of them are further illustrated with pixelated icons. A skull and crossbones, a piece of pizza, a recycling logo.
One thing that I would have liked to have seen with this chapbook is interactivity – the format, with the dialogue boxes and talk of a system, teases at it but doesn’t fully follow through. It would be fascinating to see the disparate pieces of the chapbook put together in something like Twine or another digital-humanities interface.
Unfortunately time marches on; I’ve removed the buy link from this version of the post since it seems this chapbook isn’t for sale anymore (although I’m sure if you’re super interested, Maki would love to hear it) and X is basically a graveyard of accounts. But Vanessa Maki is still very much around and writing – her Payhip and other works are over here; and she can now be found on Bluesky over here!
There’s been a lot of people making peace with the political atmosphere with “well, we’re gonna get a lot of great music out of this” — which, I don’t think that’s a great coping mechanism, all things told. But so far, I can’t disagree. There’s a general atmosphere around music criticism that music is somehow worse or less diverse than it used to be, and that might be true in some senses. But every time I do one of these roundups, I’m always stunned at the variety and quality of the stuff that comes across my feed.
Before I get into the nitty-gritty, a few details about Genrefvckery. If you’ve released something lately and you’d like me to review it, send it my way! You can find me on Bluesky at @fiversdream or on SubscribeStar right here. There’s also a contact form on this site. I can’t guarantee I’ll get to everything but this is a great way for me to hear about stuff I might not otherwise. If you want to know how I find stuff, the best advice I can give you is to listen to music with purpose. The more diverse, strange and niche you make your listening habits, the more Spotify or Apple Music or your listening platform of choice picks up on that. My Release Radar gives me weird stuff because the algorithm knows I want stuff with less than 10k listeners.
Without any further ado, here’s my top ten for songs released in November 2024!
Никогда (Nikogda) – Lena Katina, ShonZi
If you put on this song and immediately feel like the vocals are familiar, don’t worry, you’re not hallucinating — Lena Katina first found fame as half of girl group t.A.T.u.! Unlike her co-singer, Katina’s remained pretty liberal, which is no small feat in Putin’s Russia; while the lyrics of Nikogda are pretty metaphorical, other songs of hers have flirted pretty closely with controversial topics while never quite getting blunt. (Who can blame her, considering Pussy Riot’s prison sentences?) ShonZi is less familiar to me, but appears to be an up and coming rapper. Language barriers aside, this song is awesome. The beat is engaging, the synth is smooth, and ShonZi and Katina’s vocals fit together beautifully. It doesn’t even feel like as short a song as it really is — it taps out at under two minutes.
2. Pretty Sweet Little Mess – Lilie Hoax
Lilie Hoax is another musician who can clearly be described as ‘up and coming’ – the first time I listened to this track, I could swear she had less than 1k listeners, and now, a month and a half later, it’s getting really close to 3k. (And that’s just on Spotify.) It’s not hard to see why, either. The track starts with a music-box intro and Hoax’s sweet voice in an almost singer-songwriter style. Hoax’s accent adds a really nice element to the song — I’ve always been sad about how often singers are ‘trained’ into singing with more or less American voices, and it’s lovely when someone gets some popularity singing with their own accent. (Bastille is another great example.) But the real achievement of the song is the chorus — where Joni Mitchell switches with a whine of guitar feedback to Sleater-Kinney riot-grrl energy. The overall energy is far closer to Alanis Morissette or Imogen Heap than anybody more ‘normal’, and it’s the kind of thing I dearly missed from indie rock. The best part is that this is from her first album and she’s 20 years old. I just hope she doesn’t get less weird over time.
3. I’m Not Sorry – The Pinpricks
We’ve been to Russia and Australasia — this time we’re in Germany with punk duo The Pinpricks, comprised of fiery female frontwoman Ronja Kaminsky and bass player Nils Degenhardt. I’m Not Sorry is from their second full album, and it’s got the raw energy of second-wave punk mixed with the acoustic grit of the OG grunge bands. Think Le Tigre meets Vice Squad.
What entertains me is that they’re apparently promoting themselves as pop-punk — which, I suppose, is accurate given production values and verse-chorus-verse models, but I’m always a little surprised at what counts as ‘pop’. The lyrics and music video are also an absolute hoot — low budget visual fun with a story that’s a more violent ‘No Scrubs’. I say this all one thousand percent as a compliment. If this means we’re finally getting pop-punk with some actual guitars back, then I’m down.
4. Day to Day – Acid Flashback at Nightmare Beach
Acid Flashback at Nightmare Beach is the project of phenomenally talented musician Lonny Starsky, who released the gorgeous Jazz from the Other Side Of The House in 2023 and is back this year with several singles. “Day to Day” is — not quite a sad song. It’s introspective, melancholy, and both about depression and — if I’m not projecting too much as a trans person living in horrible times — trying to take life ‘day to day’ after being handed an awful hand. Out of all the songs here, I think this is the one where the lyrics have affected me the most personally, and Starsky’s tender voice just makes them land all the harder.
Starsky’s work also defies categorization in a way I really enjoy, both creatively and as a stubborn hipster. Her works are tagged on Bandcamp as everything from ‘alternative’, ‘bedroomjazz’, ‘progressive lonnywave’ (a personal favourite) and ‘psychedelic emo’. This particular single hasn’t shown up on Bandcamp just yet and I’m not personally sure what words I’d use, butI think a lot of these tags speak for themselves.
5. Baliza – Driade
In case this list isn’t making it clear, I genre-hop with pretty extreme regularity. I listen to, quite literally, everything; I find the people who say “everything but country and rap” or “everything but opera” to be cowards. But the first genre I ever got into as a genre, under my own power, was metal. So I’m quite pleased to have at least one proper metal song on here, and what a song it is! Driade is a new band for me, but have been around under a different name since 2020. They’ve got a powerhouse combination of musicians, obvious just from listening to them, and it takes chops to play this kind of metal. All metal is a step or two up in difficulty; black metal is pretty high up there! (Although I’m still debating with myself whether this is black metal, doom metal, or gothic metal. It combines a couple different genre traits, and their Spotify unhelpfully lists them “modern, aggressive, delicate music from Madrid”. The only useful part of that is knowing they’re from Spain.)
Either way, though, this is a hell of a song and one I actually found much later than the rest of the list — it slid under my radar til well into December! I’m very glad I found it, and I’ll be keeping an eye on these folks.
6. Low Mood Season – Casey Lowery
This is the most popular song I think I have on this list, but in my defense… it’s very good. I love good singer-songwriter/folk-influenced work, especially when it’s not from the American South (Lowery is from the UK). And this song, about mutual struggles, hits in such a specific way. It’s not a coincidence that ‘Day to Day’ and this song are on the same list, but they also both came out in November, so who’s really at fault here? Winter, that’s who. Winter can go fuck itself.
Anyway, the production value on this song is incredible, but high production value also can’t do much for a song that’s already rubbish. Everything from the guitar to Lowery’s voice to the lyrics are like jigsaw pieces, and I’m almost annoyed at how much I like this song. I got a tiny bit of metal cred back with the last one and now here I am. Curses.
7. Say No To Drugs – We Don’t Ride Llamas
Now THESE folks are fucking cool. An Afro-Punk band of four siblings based in Austin, Texas, W.D.R.L. is made up of Chase, Max, Blake and Kit Mitchell. You might be expecting a silly song or a silly band, but ‘Say No To Drugs’ is actually a heartbreaking song about pain and — presumably — surviving withdrawal. With a surging soundscape behind Max Mitchell’s vocals, it’s a song you can fall into, and lyrics that might otherwise feel cheesy seem imbued with so much sincerity and genuine empathy that I find myself listening to the song over and over.
Another great note about W.D.R.L. – they were formed in 2014, which means 2024 was their tenth anniversary! Not a small achievement in today’s music world.
8. Riders On The Storm – Mortemia, Sirenia, Emma Zoldan
Next up is an absolutely bloody brilliant cover of ‘Riders on the Storm’ by The Doors. (There’s been a swath of really original cover choices the last few years — I only recently found out about In This Moment’s ‘ARMY OF ME’ back in 2023, on their album Godmode.) This is an odd case of redundant crediting, though; Mortemia is a one-man band comprised of Morten Veland, Emma Zoldan is the solo career of Emmanuelle Zoldan, and Sirenia in its modern format is comprised of…. Morten Veland and Emmanuelle Zoldan. So I don’t know what that’s about. Brand recognition? (Even that doesn’t make any sense, though, since out of all of these Sirenia is the most recognizable.)
Anyway, the song is gorgeous. The Doors are already a favourite band of mine — they’re often considered a precursor to the goth movement, which is one of those observations that sounds bizarre the first time you hear it, and makes sense the more you think about it — and ‘Riders on the Storm’ is, in its original form, a western-tinged song with just a hint of menace lurking behind its bassline. For the time, The Doors were already doing music much grimmer than normal — but of course, in today’s world of distorted guitars and shrieking synth, their work sounds very tame. What Mortemia and Emma Zoldan have done is take the lyrics and the basic frame of the song and opened it up to its full potential. It’s shorter, for one — two, the synths that in the 60s were still in their infancy are at full power here, and layered into a wall of sound that feels like a stormcloud. The guitars are louder, and Zoldan’s voice is a rich alto that feels like the only possible choice. (It would have been very tempting, I think, to go for either a male vocal or a soprano; but there’s a Valkyrie vibe to this that I don’t think would have come across with a gentler or more high-pitched voice.) For those keeping track, Sirenia et al. are Norwegian.
9. Charlie – The Hex
This time we’re in Ireland — look, I swear I didn’t plan this. And this is another band fresh on the scene, which always makes me feel good to cover! In fact, ‘Charlie’ is only their second single, after a release back in 2023. This is another pop-punk/riot grrl-flavoured song, and — amusingly — another revenge song, although this one is a lot more directly about jealously. The rhythm of the lyrics makes me absurdly happy, and I don’t have the knowledge to explain why — it’s just really well written. These girls also have incredible talent; for a second single, this is a hell of a song. They’re determined to play music in both Irish and English, and just in case anybody misses the memo, there’s a line in Irish in ‘Charlie’.
The members of The Hex are Caoimhe Garvin (singer), Katie Moran (lead guitarist), Helen McCarthy (bassist and pianist) and Peas Kelly (drummer). And I am looking very eagerly forward to their first album.
10. In Dreams – Suvitar
For our last song, we’re going to Finland! For those keeping count, we’ve had exactly two Americans on this list. (Which is still more than anybody else.) Suvitar is another brand new artist, which is amazing to me, cause this song is baller. It’s fast-paced with crunchy guitars and gothic vocals, so in other words, exactly my kind of thing. All I know about Suvitar so far is that this is her first single and that she’s very happily leaning into the gothic label. Which, GOOD. There’s been a SHORTAGE.
Thanks for reading! If you want to support me, my Patreon is currently decaying in a premature coffin and will not be returning, but you can support me on SubscribeStar for $5 a month! You’ll get all my columns 48 hours early, and one bonus column a month. For January, it’s a review of Night in the Woods, which I’m only seven years late to.
This is a post I’m EXTREMELY excited to rerun! As many writers know, the journeys that novels and novellas take to publication is not always linear; I was hired as a sensitivity reader for Pluralities, Or when it was living with one publisher, and things changed. Now, under the title Pluralities, Avi Silver’s wonderful novella is published by Atthis Arts.
Having not had the opportunity (funds, etcetera) to read the published version, I add an extra disclaimer that this is for the version of the novella that I read. Details may have changed — the nature of the rerun posts, of course, is that I’m serving you up older posts With Commentary. But I still can’t recommend the book, or Avi Silver’s writing, enough.
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.
If you like the work I do, please consider checking out my SubscribeStar! You’ll get my (non-rerun) posts 48 hours early, and one exclusive post per month. Also it’ll make a lot of assholes really really mad.
Elliott Dunstan 