As I write this, Can*Con is winding down to a peaceful and happy end, and I’m settling quite cheerfully back into a literary existence. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to be around my fellow speclit geeks, and I’m – of course – leaving with a book haul. The first book I’m cracking open is a sci-fi novel by Bruno Lombardi pitched to me as “what if, when aliens arrive, they’re not invaders – but used car salesmen?”
The first chapter of this already delivers BEAUTIFULLY on this promise. The newly inaugurated President of the United States is immediately faced with a “first contact” crisis – and pitched to by an alien going by “Bob”. He’s offered FTL travel, cures for all human diseases – act now, for exclusive rights and the low, low price of being an alien race’s bitch!
Obviously I don’t know where this is going, but that’s part of what makes this such a fun and refreshing read already. It’s bitingly sarcastic, silly, and fantastically written (it’s so nice when my only real visual/grammar complaint is an extra indent). Highly recommended already – and full review to come when I finish.
Tag: book review
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A little while back, I was getting frustrated with the sharpness of the divide between speculative fiction and literary fiction; specifically in their guidelines. While I knew literary fiction often delved into the supernatural, the guidelines for every market would say, very bluntly, “No speculative elements.” And the speculative markets? They would say “Has to have speculative elements.” On paper, this seems pretty blatant; but as someone whose mind rests very delicately on the edge between neurosis and psychosis and who’s always seen the world differently, it gets more complicated. Are my hallucinations “speculative”? Is plurality and dissociative identity disorder sufficient to make a story fantasy — or is that more than a little insulting? (Certainly it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)
It was after reading some of the classics of magical realism that the word came to me: that I was writing schizorealist work. Much like how magical realism depicts the world, the real world, through the eyes of a colonized people, the genre of schizorealism — if it were to exist — depicts the real world through the eyes of the psychotic, the schizophrenic, the plural. The disturbed, to say it the most general way possible, but in our own voices. This is our real, I would want it to say. But it’s mostly stayed an idea in my head… until now. The Death Scene Artist is the first book I’ve read since then that has met (artistically; I will make no commentary on the author!) my criteria for schizorealism, and it does it absolutely fucking beautifully.
The Death Scene Artist by Andrew Wilmot takes place in Hollywood, as a perpetual extra dying of cancer blogs about her disastrous love affair with a man known for playing death scenes — and only death scenes. Never the leading man, never the villain, but only ever the character who dies in the first few minutes, or at the hands of the slasher, or as the doomed pilot or childhood best friend. This is told in pieces, as M— flips between anecdotes in her blog (how they met, her childhood, her appointments with her therapist, her relationships with her friends and her sister), and intercuts fragments of scripts that M— and D— (the death scene artist himself) acted in together. This is already a book positioned to be a perfect fever dream of an experience.
And of course, it starts off with her talking about skinning people.
Very, very casually.
I love this book.
I won’t ruin any more than that in terms of the plot, but what I will warn about is that the book delves into mental illness and partner violence, as well as emotional parental abuse and body dysmorphia. The latter in particular is fascinating in how it pinged in very transgender ways without explicitly having either character be trans. (Wilmot themself uses they/them pronouns and has described this as a trans narrative, which I love. And certainly a second read for me will probably bring even more of that to the surface.) There is also a death by drug overdose and two to cancer, for those who struggle with those topics. More broadly, if you’re having a lot of dissociation, I would…wait. If you’re healing from a lot of dissociation, this might help.
I found myself aching for a little more of D–‘s perspective as I was reading. I don’t think this is really a flaw of the book so much as part of the point; despite knowing that normally it’d be his story (or a version of it prepared and packaged for the press) that I’d be hearing, I still longed to hear it. It doesn’t help that M— is such a surly character, but once again, this I think is part of the message, not a failure of it. Just because a character is charming and persuasive and lost doesn’t mean that they’re in the right, or the one who needs to be heard.
The Death Scene Artist by Andrew Wilmot is published by Wolsak & Wynn; you can buy it directly from the publisher here.
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Trigger warnings for the review: some minor gore discussion
Trigger warnings for the book: gore, surgical/body horror, ghosts, unreality/reality shifting shenanigans, period-typical misogyny (period is, like, Regency/Victorian-ish?)The Death of Jane Lawrence is a book I’ve once again deliberately stepped into while knowing very little about, and I’m very pleased to report that whether by luck or fate, this is absolutely, absolutely my shit. To be fair, I’ve already read – and adored – The Luminous Dead by the same author. So when I saw that Caitlin Starling had a gothic horror/ghost story coming out, I put that on my TBR faster than you can say “Daphne du Maurier”.
Still, it took me a while to get around to it, and new books are always a bit of a gamble. Jane Lawrence is mysterious from the start, with a main character who’s so uncanny about her own prospects and so organized that I was wondering (honestly dreading) that the reveal might be that she was a murderer. (Small spoilers: it’s not. Thankfully.) Jane Shoringfield is setting about finding herself the most suitable possible husband, now that her benefactors/employers are moving and not taking her with them. She wants a husband where there’ll be as little romance as possible, where she can make herself useful, and where there won’t be any fussing around about courtship or anything like that. After reviewing all the potential candidates, she makes her first choice Augustine Lawrence, reclusive doctor… who’s very surprised to hear about this. Especially since she has it all figured out ahead of time. (Having a wedding proposed To You like a job offer must be a bizarre experience. I truly, truly adore Jane as a character.)
After Jane helps him in his clinic, he accepts on one condition – she must never spend the night at Lindridge Hall, his crumbling family manor outside of town, where he has to spend every night. She’ll spend the nights at the clinic; he’ll sleep out there. Given Jane’s disinterest in sex/romance (at first, anyway – more on that) she’s fine with this. More concerning is the case she helps him with — where there is something growing in a man’s stomach. And despite their best efforts, despite a successful surgery, the man’s bowel turns necrotic during the night and he dies. An overheard conversation tips off Jane that there’s something more involved here; dark magic and meddling in the occult.
Of course, the nature of these stories means that obviously Jane ends up at Lindridge Hall. The story does some absolutely fantastic work with setting the tone and mood, and the dark magic and ghosts at work are both evocative of the long tradition Starling is working within and original enough to keep tripping up every prediction I made. The character work, however, is where I think I’m the most impressed. Jane Lawrence herself is a take on a particular archetype within older work (cf. Austen, the Brontes) and occasionally more modern literature, of the passed-over, overly-practical Plain Jane sibling/spinster/what have you. Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice is likely the most famous example, or at least the most instantly recognizable. But instead of entering into a loveless marriage and being punished for it, simply “making peace” with her lot, or just falling in love with Augustine with no other questions or demands, Jane is an active, questioning and flawed protagonist. Augustine, who in other books would be elevated or heroized, is both noble and pathetic, making choices that don’t feel like just “bad choices for plot” but the kind of squirrelly bad decisions that come naturally from his characterization. (And I have so much to say about the ending, but it’s best experienced without spoilers, truly.)
My one gripe with the book is ultimately a minor one, and one that only exists in context with the literary world as a whole. It was, I’ll admit, a bit disappointing when I realized about a quarter of the way into the book that Jane was falling in love with Augustine. I expected it; certainly I wasn’t disappointed with the narrative once I readjusted. But part of me enjoyed the set-up of a marriage of convenience with someone who came off as completely disinterested in sex/romance, but who could easily get embroiled in someone’s personal issues anyway. Ultimately, this isn’t that book, and I wouldn’t ask it to be any other book than it is, but it does make me a little sad that those characters still don’t exist as much as they could.
Otherwise, it’s a great read. Nothing jumped out at me in terms of bigotry, although I did wait a while before writing the review; the main thing is the misogyny inherent in the premise, and even that isn’t too bad. If you’re sensitive to gore, I’d give this one a miss. But if you like Mexican Gothic, Crimson Peak, Jane Eyre or Rebecca (the latter two of which I’m fairly certain are explicit influences) definitely pick up a copy.
The Death of Jane Lawrence is available through Barnes & Noble – or find it at your local indie store here!
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While I don’t get into the more triggering material in this review, the arrival of rain includes material about war, gun violence, child death, parental abandonment, semi-explicit sexual scenes, references to assault and racism.
It’s been a while since I got this particular book of poetry, but the anecdote around me getting it is still worth sharing. Adedayo Agarau shared a piece of poetry from it and linked the purchase link for the arrival of rain, which was retweeted onto my timeline, and – well, I love poetry, and I know that when I see something that grabs at me IMMEDIATELY, I want to buy the book. So I went to buy it.
And found out that it did not ship to Canada.
I usually don’t stress too much about this. It’s annoying, sure. But this time around, I actually went to the trouble of getting a friend to buy it and ship it up to Canada for me, because I WANTED this book! (Thank you very much to the friend in question, haha.) I was well rewarded, because the arrival of rain is phenomenally gorgeous. Agarau’s poetry is heavily visual and imagistic, criss-crossing religious concepts with those of the body and trauma, grief howling behind free verse.
It’s hard to pick out favourite poems. Each functions as a snapshot (some are actually titled as portraits) but a few definitely stick out. “i will one day grow to love you with my presence” is a standout (see quote below),
i am still the screamer & the voice. the echo that never made it home. i am still the shadow of a whole body or perhaps, the song dying along the pews of the cathedral. i am still the one with a pungent mouth. do not remind me that i am from a lineage of men who do not wait.
“i will one day grow to love you with my presence”, adedayo agarau, the arrival of rain pg.21Visually, the book is also a treat. With a gorgeous and lush cover and a typeface that feels both readable (for me, anyway; I can’t comment on readability for others) and artful, it’s worth owning! I also really appreciate Agarau’s use of slashes and backslashes to shape his words, making every paragraph, period, etc. very deliberate on the page. Some imagist poetry can feel gimmicky (it’s a poem about a bird, in the shape of a bird!) but the imagism here is more abstract, more about the flow of each word to the next.
the arrival of rain is published by vegetarian alcoholic press; check it out over here!
An excerpt from “the wooden cross is enough prayer” is used as an epigraph in Ghosts in Quicksilver: Book Two: Sulfur, with permission from Adedayo Agarau.
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Digging into a new poetry book is always kind of like opening a box of chocolates. Either it’ll be a little dull, or – in the best cases – it’s full of treats, all a little different from each other. Chloe N. Clark’s Your Strange Fortune is definitely the latter. It’s also an incredibly haunting book, full of dead monsters, zombies, ghosts, abandoned cities, and a general loneliness that is hard to place, but resonates in a place somewhere deep in your chest.
I will be honest. 2019 is a little bit of a blur to me, and I only got medicated for ADHD in late 2019 after suffering from it – apparently – all my life. So I am very embarrassed to admit that at some point, I got emailed an ARC of this – amazing – book and completely forgot about it. There are many reasons this happens, all of which make me sound terrible and none of which are easy to explain to neurotypical people! But I stumbled upon it while looking through my email and I’m very glad I did. (This is also why, while ‘I received a copy of this in exchange for an honest review’ is technically true…) Clark’s poetry is that type of blank verse that tells you a story while also painting a picture – poetry that almost tricks you into not thinking it’s poetry. There’s also a particularly strong visual element to Clark’s work – breaks in lines, use of space and word length, arrangement, all just as much part of the poetry as the actual work. “Flora and Fauna of the Outer Rings” is a particularly gorgeous and vivid example of this.
The thing that truly stands out to me the most, however, is the speculative element winding through all of these poems. It doesn’t feel even remotely strange or forced to jump from poetry about a chupacabra to an ode to museums about “Earth-that-was”, to songs about the end of the world. It’s all written in rich, gorgeous language – and with the same earnest sincerity that sells that these are all topics of the same import and worthiness. It’s lovely to read about topics that speak to the dreamer in me, not just the hurt, with just as much literary flair as more “serious” topics.
Chloe N. Clark’s ‘Your Strange Fortune’ is published by Vegetarian Alcoholic Press – get a copy!
Elliott Dunstan 