“We’re loathed and despised in every time, in every country, in every culture. In New Guinea they say we dig up the bodies of dead babies and eat them. In Zambia they say we sleep with our brothers and fathers and murder newborns. The Hopi say we kill our kin to prolong our lives. In Germany they say we steal men’s penises and hide them in birds’ nests. (…) They say we spoil milk and steal children. That we murder the innocent and ruin crops. That we bring disease and eat human flesh. You know why they say all this?”

“Because you’re witches?”

“Because we’re women. Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew—the one thing they all have in common is that they hate us. For hundreds of thousands of years, they’ve hated us.” (p. 219)

The horror in this world needs no monsters kicking up a storm. Instead, it stems from authority, and from its supposed guardians: parents, social workers, doctors, the “grown-ups.” This isn't Hendrix's first exploration of girls under patriarchal control, and the novel participates in horror’s larger project of voicing what gets silenced elsewhere. Yet the genre itself has been marginalised, denied critical recognition, despite, or because of, its popularity. The study and recognition of horror remains sparse relative to the attention devoted to fantasy or science fiction.

As Hendrix notes in his history of the genre's ’70s and ’80s boom, Paperbacks from Hell (2017), “...horror appeared nowhere on best-seller lists. Horror was for children. It was pulp. If it was any good, it couldn't possibly be horror and so was rebranded as a ‘thrilling tale.’ Horror seemed to have no future because it was trapped in the past” (p. 16). But then the needle moved. The genre exploded:

Between April 1967 and December 1973, everything changed. In a little more than five years, horror fiction became fit for adults, thanks to three books. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist were the first horror novels to grace Publishers Weekly’s annual best-seller list since Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in 1938. (p. 24)

This mutation had roots. As Bernice M. Murphy argues in her essay from Xavier Aldana Reyes’s Horror: A Literary History (2016), “Horror Fiction from the Decline of Universal Horror to the Rise of the Psycho Killer”:

Horror fiction began to enter the literary and publishing mainstream during the post-war era because it had increasingly begun to reflect the myriad anxieties found in everyday life. Authors such as King, Barker, Campbell, Straub, Herbert, Blatty, Ketchum, Thomas Tryon, Joan Samson, Kathe Koja and many others (...) added further depth, sophistication, frank sexuality and outright gore to the genre.

They would do this by variously utilising the four major characteristics of the genre: a tendency to deal with horrors arising from the conditions of everyday life; an accompanying preference for mundane, contemporary settings; a movement away from the supernatural and towards the depiction of aberrant psychology as a source of terror (as epitomised by the soon-to-become iconic figure of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter); and a tendency to depict the supernatural in a much more ‘grounded’, naturalistic manner.

This vision of horror materialized out of a changing nation's shifting anxieties. Steffen Hantke in his essay for the same volume, “The Rise of Popular Horror, 1971-2000,” identifies this: “Not by coincidence did the American small town, the epitome of the conservative vision of the nation, become the prime setting for 1980s horror fiction: a sunny, cheerful place of white picket fences and apple pie where something would always be really, really wrong.”

The genre's commercial success followed from this shift: horror that respected no authority, broke taboos, and took risks mainstream literature might not even touch. In Paperbacks from Hell, Hendrix shows why they worked: “Thrown into the rough-and-tumble marketplace, the writers learned they had to earn every reader’s attention. And so they delivered books that move, hit hard, take risks, go for broke. It’s not just the covers that hook your eyeballs. It’s the writing, which respects no rules except one: always be interesting” (p. 14).

And interesting they were. Hendrix, inspired by that era and its books, carries that sensibility. His horror lies very much in the world around his characters in mundane, ordinary settings. In his homage to 1980s pop culture, My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016), when Gretchen gets possessed, neither she nor the dear reader is certain if it’s something supernatural or simply puberty’s hormonal chaos. The supernatural always pales in comparison to the complexities of the material realities, particularly when filtered through his characters' skepticism.

Likewise, in Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, even after successfully “transferring” a sickness to a condescending doctor, the girls remain unconvinced. Magic? Coincidence? Their own mistake? They don't know. Can't know. This uncertainty is a sign of changing times, changing minds, changing bodies. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s backtrack.

To understand the stakes of Hendrix’s novel, you have to understand the time it’s set in. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is set in the Baby Scoop Era, a euphemistic label for a system built on forced obedience. In the decades after World War II, stretching into the early 1970s, countries in the English-speaking West saw an exponential increase in pre-marital pregnancies—four million parents between 1945 and 1973 in the US alone—as well as a rampant increase in adoptions. Children could be literally “scooped up” by adoptive couples, hence the name. As always, the burden of that “crisis” fell on women. [1]

Pregnant girls and women were secretly sent to maternity homes across the country, where they were forced to surrender their children in secret. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is set in one of these maternity homes. Neva Craven, fifteen years old and pregnant, is driven there by a father who no longer sees her as a daughter but as a problem requiring institutional management. She’s told to stay there until she gives birth and her baby is taken away. Then she can return home and go back to being a “good girl.” Hide her, wait for the birth, take the child, send her back. Pretend nothing happened. [2]

For six months, she’d been holding on by her fingernails, but at least she’d been around people who knew she could tell a joke, and made straight As in English, and loved Patty Duke. Now she was surrounded by strangers who only knew one thing about her: she’d been stupid enough to get pregnant. (p. 34)

Every girl carries her own version of the same violence. One embroiders napkins for a wedding that will never happen, still trusting a boy’s broken promise. Another fantasizes about escape, building a future with her daughter that no one will let her keep. One girl dreads returning home, knowing exactly what awaits her—the priest who raped her, waiting to do it again. Each arrives with a different story, but Wellwood erases those distinctions, reducing them all to the same diagnosis—wayward girls. Under the claustrophobic, invasive gaze of the House and its custodians, the girls discover the only power available to them: each other. Bonds have to be formed, resistance built from whatever materials are at hand.

What Hendrix understands is that the supernatural is never the main event. Witchcraft might be the book’s premise, but true magic lies in the friendships, in girls finding each other in a hostile system. Despite the cruelty and hopelessness engineered into Wellwood, this is a story of sisterhood first.

Witchcraft, in this context, comes as an equalizer. Not empowerment, with its sanitized, corporate connotations, but power seized when every other possible avenue has been shut down. “When you are at your lowest, when you feel your least powerful, know that this dark legion is there for you. Witches will catch you when you fall, carry you when you are tired, heal you when you are broken” (p. 223). The witchcraft here is grisly, macabre, nothing like the aestheticized versions sold in bookshops and Instagram feeds. The greater the magic, the more blood, the more pain it demands. The book presents witchcraft as a tool to fight patriarchy, to defy a society that oppresses women at every juncture, to resist a world hell-bent on taming them into docility, to create a world of their own. “A true witch does not fear change. She is in an eternal state of revolution” (p. 184).

Women’s bodies have always been a site where power is exercised. The specifics shift, the system adapts, but the fundamental equation keeps women’s autonomy provisional, always requiring justification, always up for negotiation by someone else. The Baby Scoop Era has a name now, a historical distance. We look back at maternity homes and tell ourselves we’ve moved past that brutality. And yet, women’s bodily autonomy continues to be legislated away. Girls are again being told their choices matter less than someone else’s morality. The system adapts faster than we do, finding new ways to exercise the same control while insisting it’s different this time, better, necessary.

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls sits at that uncomfortable intersection where past and present collapse into each other. Hendrix shows us 1970, but it’s easy to recognize 2026. The architecture that built Wellwood is still standing under different names. And the girls trapped inside it—then, now—have to keep finding ways to say no. Then. Now. The specifics shift. The fight doesn’t.

Endnotes

[1] Hendrix describes this in the novel’s acknowledgments: “whether girls had been raped or sexually abused, believed a promise that wasn’t kept, didn’t have access to contraception, or simply didn’t know it existed, they were told that getting pregnant was all their fault. Doctors and social workers labeled unwed mothers “neurotic,” newspaper columnists suggested they be hounded in Alcatraz, and politicians blamed them for everything from high taxes to crime to the collapse of Western civilization” (p. 475). [return]

[2] In a TIME piece about this period, Kelly O’Connor McNees—the author of another novel set during the era, The Myth of Surrender (2022)—remarks: “Almost no one asked the young women themselves about their wishes. During the Baby Scoop era, an unmarried pregnant woman sent away to a maternity home had no say in whether she would carry her pregnancy to term, no agency over the birth itself and, once the child arrived, no choice about whether she could raise the baby.” This is the ground on which Hendrix plants his witches. [return]

These categories can also flag a fear of the modern, the experimental, and the challenging. It’s very comforting to believe that any problem can be solved with a bit of moral rectitude and a pure mind, but it’s far from obvious that we can believe that this is actually true. More importantly, and more damagingly, the novel itself also fails to convince on even its own terms, as a piece of fiction in which we can play with that statement as a thought-experiment.

In the first volume of Orion’s Arm (we read), an expedition from Earth—whose ship is interestingly called the Samaritan—has discovered, on a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, a human civilisation. They are the Fintidierians, who are around the technological level of 1950s USA, and were taken from somewhere in Asia some tens of thousands of years ago by a mysterious race of aliens, dubbed by the Earth visitor the “Atlanteans,” who had ruled and enslaved the Fintidierians before dying out around 50,000 years ago. On a continent named Misropos, which is deemed taboo by the Fintidierians, there are ruins and hieroglyphics which seem to offer a clue to the origin of the Atlanteans, and the superior technology of the Earth visitors allowed the detection of a signal from a particular region of space. Could this be the homeworld of the Atlanteans?

Now, plans are being made for all this to be investigated.

There are essentially two plot strands here. In one, the Fintideirians have a massive “fertility” problem (a sharp decline in the birth of females), which seems to have been caused by the Atlanteans. In the second, on the moon of a planet revolving around a nearby star, a ship with still-functioning cryogenic pods is discovered. The inhabitant of one—an Atlantean woman—is awakened and goes on the rampage, sending a signal to wherever the previously-detected signals had come from. It is clear that the technologically advanced Atlanteans are a threat to Earth, and so, partly through altruism but largely through motives of self-preservation, the leaders of the Samaritan expedition decide to track down the Atlanteans and tackle the “Gender Plague.”

So far, so standard SF plotting. Indeed, many acclaimed works of SF have had plots which are less novel. But the presentation and resolution of these plot strands quickly run into problems. First, this is the kind of science fiction where plot is developed by people talking to each other and telling them what has happened, what is going to happen, and what the “scientific” elements are. There are, in particular, several passages of people explaining maths and quantum theory to each other in ways that hold up the story. One plot strand is partially solved during an idyllic fishing trip which involves much technobabble about genetics and choosing the sex of babies, all of which kind of leads to the solution but without any real drama or tension. During another fishing trip, fish and chips are introduced to the Fintidierians, one of whom fantasises about exploiting the new exotic discovery (tomato ketchup) brought by the Earth people. This is mildly amusing but hardly gripping.

Second, this is the kind of science fiction which isn’t really science fiction, but simply has the coating of “sci-fi” to give it the flavour of things we have seen countless times on TV screens. For example: communication via implants. One character “tapped his collar to activate his microphone, exactly like the characters in the old twentieth-century sci-fi shows he watched with his grandfather as a child.” There are “smart contact lenses” and artificial intelligence assistants with no real sense of how such devices might have changed society: “He activated the star chart app in his contact lenses and let the embedded artificial intelligence find the star for him.” Here are spaceships powered by technobabble: “Powered by the ship’s fusion reactor, the Samara Drive emitted an extremely intense beam of UV light that functioned as reaction mass to accelerate the Samaritan (and the Emissary) at up to one gee for extended periods of time.” And “society,” of course, is default United States of America. The USA still exists, and the rest of the world might as well not. (There has, though, been something called the “great economic reset of 2066” which caused people to emigrate from Slovakia.)

The Samaritan is a US ship with a (largely) US crew. We do have characters like Polkingham, one of the “few Brits,” who is indistinguishable from everyone else (perhaps his use of the swear-word “bloody” is some sort of cultural marker), and Nkrumah, whose “heavily accented English” might refer to a Ghanaian origin, though he bears the Irish first name Kieren. There is a New Zealander whose cry of “I say it’s time for full bangers, Mike!” is, I assume, not a sexual invitation. The Fintidierians speak pretty much like everyone else, too, and, although initially they have names like Sgurom Smyo, many of them end up taking American names which is soon “quite the fad.” It must be obvious to at least some readers that here proceedings are following the example of many colonised countries, but this is hardly questioned.

And so, following on from this, we need to believe two things which are increasingly difficult to believe: that this near-future setting (the beginning is dated February 15, 2101) is pretty much our present given a few magical-tech items; and that an Asian society transplanted from Earth many thousands of years ago is going to end up pretty much like the twentieth-century USA. Take this description of a biology lab: “Like most Fintidierian buildings, it looked like something you would see in an old 2D movie set in the USA circa 1945 to 1950, with lots of concrete, austere windows, high ceilings, and exterior pillars.” You can hotwire Fintidierian cars just like you could twentieth-century automobiles. There is no exploration of major scientific, technological, or philosophical differences, save a passage in which the Fintidierian Secretary General Arctinier muses about the way the name of the Samaritan Ambassador Charles Jesus echoes that of someone described earlier as “his more famous and godlier namesake.” Arctinier has clearly heard about “the Christian religion’s savior of the same name”—but do the Fintidierians have a religion, or any philosophical beliefs or dogmas underpinning their society? We are not told. There are aliens, perhaps, but there is nothing alien.

There is even idiot-plotting which flags itself as idiot-plotting. During a terrorist incident, Roy Burbank, an engineer, is locked in a room from which he easily escapes. As he reflects: “Don’t kidnap and lock an engineer in a room filled with electrical equipment and expect him or her to complacently accept their fate.” On the other hand, if they hadn’t done this, it might have been more difficult for the authors to imagine his escape.

Taylor and Johnson have written a number of books, together and separately, and judging by reviews on Amazon and Goodreads there is a market for them. Most readers will not read their work critically. Crisis at Proxima is not written, or read, with any thought to literary awards. The authors have massive experience in related fields. Taylor is described as “currently working” on “very large space telescopes, space-based beamed energy systems, and next generation space launch concepts”—some of the ideas in Crisis clearly come from such work, and they are clearly in the tradition of scientists writing science fiction, which is an honourable one. Despite what I am writing, I can fully understand the appeal of this book as a moment’s entertainment. Much of what I have flagged as flaws—the avoidance of any exploration of ideas, the constant referencing of those SF images and common-stock technologies which have leaked into the mainstream, the blandness of character—identify the story’s appeal, but it is a curious one.

This is a book for readers who don’t really like reading; science fiction for readers who think that they like SF, but who don’t know what it can do to jolt people out of complacency, or who don’t care. It has some of the elements of pastiche, but unfocussed images like “[t]he door itself had grown into some strange mixture of cables, tubes, metal appendages, and the most bizarre Cthulhu shit she had ever seen” and “[t]he imagery was like something out of an animated Japanese horror movie from a century prior” are neither precise nor baroque enough to evoke any real meaning beyond their status as cliché. When Terry Pratchett, for instance, constantly drops references to the “white knowledge” that “fills up your brain without you really knowing where it came from,” he is doing something similar; but his instances are more direct, wittier, designed to allow the pleasurable shock of recognition and the sly nod indicating a shared culture. Here, it’s hard to avoid feeling that this is not comedy but simply a set of nudges towards vague icons, used because they avoid having to spend time on detail.

Some of the comments on the novel have noted approvingly its “old-fashioned” quality, but this is yet another target that is missed, as we can see by the reference to “Arthur C. Clarke and his contemporaries.” There are those among SF’s readership who read Clarke when his major works were published, and who saw in him a writer excited by the potential of the future, by genuinely observing the universe with a sense of wonder. There are those (indeed, sometimes the same readers) who—many years after Clarke’s visions have faded—see in the SF of the period a mode that simply ignores many major issues and is wooden in characterisation. Neither reaction is wholly incorrect. Positions can be debated, but what is interesting is that there now seems to be a readership that ignores or actively rejects the approach of the first tranche of readers and actively embraces what those who hold the second position condemn.

Of course, “Smart people with good intentions and high moral standards can solve any problem” is meaningless, but much entertainment can be had with problem-solving. What is questionable here is whether the characters of this story are “smart” or possess “high moral standards.” (Our ketchup millionaires seem very happy about infringing any patent held by the Heinz company because “That company is over four light-years away. What’re they going to do about it if we do copy their recipe?”) And we all know what the road to Hell is paved with.

In Clarke, we had the anticipation of the future and wonder at the universe. There is no “future” in Crisis at Proxima to wonder at, or fear. There is little in it which reflects the dreams and fears of the present, or the astonishing excitement that thinking about the universe can provoke. To the extent that “Clarke and his contemporaries” were engaging with this (and I believe that, whatever their faults, they were), the novel falls away from their model, keeping only what later generations have argued with—their deep, if often unwilling or unconscious, identification with the more conservative strands of social stances or literary style. Nor are we shown anything like the triumph of competence which writers like Heinlein argued they were promoting.

Ultimately, the basic “problems” at the heart of the novel are solved by the gosh-wow handwaving science developed by the young Fintidierian Grag, who bounces thoughts off his Earth mentor Chris Sentell, along with the help of  knowledge instilled through the “superconducting quantum interference transceivers” which enable sleep-learning while he is in cryosleep. This is not so much Clarkean, in fact, as Gernsbackian: The novel’s  view of science very much echoes that presented in Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+, serialised in 1911 and issued as a novel in 1925. Its final chapter has Ralph bringing his girlfriend Alice back to life. He needs the “rare gas” Permagatol, but there is none available … So, naturally, he invents a substitute (“The gas he evolved was Armagatol”). Or, to put it another way, “and then we were saved”; or “[w]ith one bound, Jack was free.”

This is, in fact, precisely what the science fiction of the 1950s was reacting against, and why, whatever spirit Crisis at Proxima is written in, that of “Clarke and his contemporaries” is not it. It’s a novel which meets the expectations of its readers in that it tells a story, is full of infodumps which give the impression of imparting educational information, and it passes the time. The shame is that the expectations are, clearly, so low.

In the world of this novel, the Great War in Europe weakened the protective wards that previously separated the human world from the world of the fae, allowing the latter to further their own violent agendas. The Faerie Wars, and the massive casualties on both sides, not only forced many othersiders to flee across the Atlantic Ocean and establish their courts in the United States, but also eventually led to laws and regulations that prevented the stealing of babies, enforced with the threat of fae lands being spiked with iron.

By the terms of the Russwald treaty, the fae are restricted only to legal bargains, and by the time we enter the picture the Wild Land States of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming are the only regions left in the United States where more traditional bargains between humans and othersiders remain legal. On the Otherside, this has led to what’s called the Great Bargain, whereby all faerie courts pledge fealty and loyalty to protecting the Wild Lands territory and its sovereign ruler.

Poppy Hill was very young when she was snatched from her family’s homestead in frontier-era Montana and spirited away to the Otherside. After spending more than a century as a cook in the employ of the King of the Wild Lands, she is thrown back without warning into a human world that is much changed from any lingering memories she has of her brief former life.

As it turns out, the human world has, in the meantime, come a long way in coexisting with its parallel realm. Carter Lane, one legal firm among many that specialise in fae law, leads the way in brokering faerie bargains. They’re the best at offering these services because they employ Returnees like Poppy to check for loopholes in the contracts. In return, they offer Returnees a fully-fledged twenty-first-century immersion so that they can survive and eventually assimilate into their new surroundings—a fresh start after a set number of years working at Carter Lane.

Of course, Carter Lane’s faerie broker services remain exclusive because of how much the firm charges its clients, and this means that their clientele is often the high-maintenance and demanding kind. Poppy is sitting in on one such protracted contract discussion when we meet her, the story throwing us straight into this new world and forcing us to “learn on the job.” At this point, she has been back in the human world for three years. A homesick Poppy is still struggling to adapt, missing her best friend Sloan, her former boyfriend Elan, and the only life she’s ever known. Sloan has found a way to stay in touch, so that is a small solace, but it has been crickets from Elan.

Soon after a successful completion for the above contract, Poppy is compelled by a senior partner to be involved in a very important (and super confidential) bargain. When it goes sideways through a series of unexpected orchestrations, a flustered but determined Poppy has no choice but to make a bargain of her own—and return to the Otherside to fix her blunder before it’s too late. There, she will uncover a sinister plot that could ruin both the human realm and the fae.

If I am being honest, all this initial infodumping felt a lot to take in, and the narrative didn’t really settle into itself until Poppy found herself back on the Otherside. But, once it got going, this book was hard to put down, well balanced in matching its action, twists, and intrigue with quieter moments of character growth and interaction.

Othersiders need bargains like plants need sunlight; they can never resist one. But having spent more than a century among them, Poppy is aware that, even though they cannot break their oaths, they are masters at sidestepping them—that, though it is impossible for them to lie (they have to at least think something is true), there is “too much space between can’t lie and telling the truth.” Herein lies the challenge, and it’s one she is usually very good at. As she says, “There was nothing like the bone-deep knowledge that the wrong words could worse than kill you to make you determined to find the right ones.”

This magical bureaucracy is one of the story’s most interesting parts—the rules offer a structure without erasing the always-inherent danger when dealing with the fae—and, even as I struggled to keep all the new facts straight in the initial chapters, Poppy’s talking us through the fine print of contracts, their lacunae; and the ways in which those loopholes can be exploited was immediately engaging. I wish this element of the plot—one that you’d assume was central given the title of the book—was more utilised, especially once Poppy was in the Otherside, rather than what we get. Ultimately, the bargains from the first third of the story are used more as tools to enable and propel the real main plot.

I will say that The Tricky Business of Faerie Bargains also suffers from incorrect marketing syndrome in stressing the “delightful cozy fantasy” and teasing a “pesky ex-boyfriend,” as if this story will have a second-chance romance. In truth, this story has fangs—reckonings with what is some pretty severe childhood trauma amounting to abuse, and the knock-on effects of that; the grief of straddling two worlds but never really belonging to either, the realisation that one can never truly return to what a place, person, or life was before; not to mention physical danger, torture, deaths, stabbings, and blood.

“Othersiders aren’t kind. It was absurd to think of one of them being nice. They demanded. They bargained. They offered favours in return for debt.” When Poppy returns to the Otherside, she is, an an escapee, captured by Theron, an enigmatic Hunter who journeys with her to the Wild Lands capital. He confounds her—because, contrary to the received wisdom about faeries, he seems to be kind. Indeed, the interactions between the novel’s two main character pairings—Elan and Poppy and Poppy and Theron—aren’t the focus of the story, either. While hints of new, and potentially rekindled, romance are present, these serve primarily as part of Poppy’s personal narrative arc.

Nowhere is the novel’s non-cozyness more evident, however, than in the emotional journey that Poppy undergoes through the course of the narrative. It forces her to confront unsettling truths and to readjust deeply held and felt perceptions about herself and the found family she thought she loved. When we first meet Poppy in Montana, she is not only homesick, but also under the impression that she “gets” the Otherside, and othersiders, more than other humans—because of Sloan and Elan, and the belonging she found there because of them. She is desperate to return to the only place she felt at home. And yet, as she gets to know Theron more, she realises that even this most well-meaning and different othersider will never truly be able to imagine a different way of tackling certain areas of governance that need to be overhauled, even though he promises to consider what she has said.

Poppy’s is a bittersweet growth, then, that stems from finally seeing something, and someone—multiple someones—for what it and they truly are (and maybe always was and were, even if it was impossible to see it through the manipulations and gaslighting back then). In fact, it’s hard to get a handle on Poppy as a character until we see her in the Otherside. Even there, we are privy only to a slow unpeeling of layers (some she herself is unaware of). But this process does a credit to her many positives (she is resourceful, smarter than she lets on as a defence mechanism, brave, sensitive, a fantastic cook, resilient). Using a first-person POV can often backfire, but here, where the narrative intention demanded an unreliable narrator, it was the perfect choice. We are an intimate observer to the process that leads Poppy to insights about Sloan and Elan and the true nature of her relationships with them, about how her life in the Otherside was nowhere close to the rose-tinted time she recalls, and how she’s never had much agency or choice. We feel the true emotional impact of the revelations (and the betrayals) along with her, even if we can see certain conclusions before she does.

This brings me to another element that I loved: the emphasis on the value of human creativity. “They don’t have it, they don’t understand it.” Othersiders cannot look at one thing and imagine another; they cannot envision the endless possibilities: “Othersiders can’t cook any more than they can paint, or dream, or design a new type of water pump [...] without humans and creativity in their Courts, othersiders died.” A story in which human creativity is impossible to replicate with magic, in which the fae need human ingenuity to show them new ways to live, feels quietly, but firmly, defiant in the age in which we live.

In recent times, there is an ever-present temptation to human-wash the fae, to attribute to them human emotions and appearance and nature. I’m happy to report that this book makes no such attempt. It embraces the trickster, glittering, uncanny, dangerous, selfish, casually cruel otherworldly creatures (some with humanoid characteristics, granted, but never fully human-appearing) who, by all earthly standards, are monsters. What I appreciated was McCarty’s choice to allow for complexity and discomfort, for solutions that are messy; to reflect life’s reality of multiple things being simultaneously true. It makes more meaningful Poppy’s eventual acceptance of reality, of her trauma and the need for her to work through it with the Carter Lane therapist she has until then mostly scoffed at. Even the resolution of the central narrative arc, the twist, ties into this character development. It feels earned, and there are many such satisfying callbacks in the final third of the story.

And yet, many narrative threads are left incomplete, in less a cliffhanger than a promise of a sequel. I hope I’m correct in that assumption.

This Brutal Moon

*

The thing about politics in the novel is … it’s just people. However fascinating, complex, grand, and sweeping your political storyline is, the foundation it will always rest on is the characters who enact it, and with whom the reader must spend the time of the plot, moment by moment. It is this, more than anything, that Bethany Jacobs has grasped in the Kindom Trilogy, and never more so than in this final volume.

The first two books—These Burning Stars (2023) and On Vicious Worlds (2024)—follow a multiplanetary world (the Treble) under strain as an oppressed workforce called the Jeveni break free of their strictly delimited place of mining a valuable ore. They escape to a distant world, away from the corrupt and in-fighting noble families who held them in place, and the equally corrupt and in-fighting tripartite ruling structure of the Kindom itself. But getting away does not prove sufficient, and the second volume into the third spends much of its time showing what it actually takes for the Jeveni to get themselves truly free and safe—and what the Kindom will do, whom and quite how many they will hurt, to bring back the Jeveni and reinforce the status quo.

But the series also follows characters more deeply embedded within, or reacting to, the structures of the Kindom itself. Chono has been trained by a high-ranking noble and served faithfully in the priesthood arm, the clerics, until she found doing so compromised her morals and more personal loyalties beyond breaking point. Six trained to be an assassin, but was forced out on the whim of Esek, the same high-ranking noble who trained Chono, and against whom Six dedicates their life. At the end of the first book, they are revealed to have killed and replaced Esek, and are working to use her personal power to disrupt the system, a plan which is ultimately turned towards freeing the Jeveni who are controlled by Esek’s family.

If this sounds like a complex web of interactions, it is, and that isn’t even all of the viewpoint characters. But, for all the complexity crammed into these three five-hundred-page books, in the moment Jacobs always keeps events grounded in the individual, their wants, needs and plans, and their personal connections to the people and ideas that surround them. She understands that the politics of a multi-faction, multi-world polity is complex, when it needs to be, but is also often very simple. There are no grand master plans and evil geniuses. There are interlinked systems all built out of individuals pulling in different directions, driven by geography and culture, by social and religious forces—that is, a natural complexity, rather than one of Machiavellian, deliberate scheming. She also understands that, sometimes, it is dreadfully simple: the grim calculus of survival, and the striving for basic needs.

The politics of the series, then, are constantly viewed through this lens of the individual, even when operating at a grand scale. The decision to resist oppression rather than take a deal to survive is dramatized in small moments of individuals fighting or conversations in which people discuss their reasons for their choices: guilt, blackmail, love; defence of home, a dream, loyalty to those around them; duty to the person holding the next spot in the line. Everything is granular. When viewed that way, the complex becomes comprehensible.

The same is true for her approach to faith, which is inextricably linked to the politics of the peoples of the Treble. One third of the ruling body is the clerisy, which represents the Godfire in its multiple gods. But faith is not, for Jacobs, just about structures: like politics, it is personal. Faith is viewed through different perspectives throughout the trilogy, and having Chono as a viewpoint character, alongside the Jeveni and their faith practices distinct from the rest of the Kindom’s, allows this to shine.

Through Chono, Jacobs shows us both the driving force of personal faith and the conflict that arises from holding to it within a corrupt system. Throughout This Brutal Moon, the toll the conflict has had on Chono begins to really show. She takes actions that go against her sense of honour, for the sake of protecting others. Religion, for her, is both a hardship and a source of comfort, and the exploration of it through the story is one of the greatest strengths in Jacobs’s work. She acknowledges—as many stories struggle to—the distinct but intertwined aspects of religion both as an internal, personal relationship with the divine and with morality, and as a structural force, one which can be used for peace and social cohesion, but also be weaponised by those within power in the Kindom for division. This sits alongside the value of faith in building a better system for the Jeveni. Nothing is ever one thing only. Across it all, for good and for ill, religion is a critical part of the cultural fabric of the Kindom.

This, too, is one of the great strengths of the story, and one that marks it out from other accomplished space operas. While depictions of religion in fantasy and science fiction are hardly uncommon, what is rare are ones that seek to firmly root it in place within the rhythms of daily life. Not the drama of a god real in the world, but the quiet quotidian of ritual that brings meaning to life—a piece of the puzzle that forms the reality of each character. Understanding who Chono is, who Six is, who the key Jeveni players are, who the hacker Jun Ironway is, means understanding their approach to spiritual practice, or their absence or rejection of it, just as much as their ethnic identity or their politics. And none of these can be fully unpicked in any case.

This wouldn’t work were Jacobs not extremely skilled at character study. This was most obvious in the first book—where much of the plot relied on the reader being compelled by the toxic interpersonal relationships of Esek and Chono—but it has continued, in one form or another, all the way through to This Brutal Moon. All the characters have by now had several books of development, and the culmination of the story’s overarching plot is played out in miniature in each of their personal developments. Not everyone gets a good or happy ending, or even a cathartic one, but it is clear how the events of the story have brought each to their final point. And they are all, in some way, compromised by the story they’ve lived through, by the toxic relationships of which they’ve been part.

The characters, like those in Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb trilogy (2019-2022), are an inducement to read purely on their own merits. They’ve grown up suited to a corrupt system, and are the people they are because of it, and there’s also something terribly compelling about messy people having messy lives all together. It is nice to love some mess, alongside imbibing the more serious business of a hard-hitting plot in which a corrupt system has been overthrown.

That plot has required violence and hard choices that linger in the souls of those who survive it, alongside guilt about those who didn’t. One cannot fight something so large and all-encompassing and come out unscathed, and freedom has a cost. By emphasising those costs at a personal level, Jacobs once again provides a more emotively immediate window into the consequences at a macro level.

When bringing all this to a close in the final book of a trilogy, there are a lot of plates to keep spinning, let alone bring together into a satisfying (or even just comprehensible) conclusion. And there is a point, around two thirds of the way through the book, where it feels like they may be slipping. The structure moves away from substantial chapters in which significant developments occur for a particular character or geography, opting instead for a run of shorter snippets, between which it chops and changes, refusing to settle—five- and six-page moments that up the pace but interrupts the rhythm. The novel becomes, for a little while, difficult to read and follow. But, just as that threatens to become unmanageable, Jacobs reaches a crescendo of action and comes back to the longer chapter norm, settling back into the flow and signalling the final act of the book—showing once again that she very much knows what she’s doing.

In the end, she brings us to the necessary compromise, to pragmatism and survival. The heroes violently overthrow the corrupt system, but what comes after cannot be easy, and building a new world is a task that takes forever, a constant striving rather than a swift resolution. This Brutal Moon never paints itself as a fairytale or a path to utopia, and it is fitting that this stays true all the way to the conclusion.

This is a book—and a trilogy—that can be characterised in very different ways. On the one hand, I could paint it as the slow-motion car crash of one bright, burning, terrible life—of several sets of people and even a whole culture—trying to escape the gravity of one awful person and her effect on their lives and deaths. I could argue that the Kindom Trilogy is the story of Esek, a person so spectacularly awful that she caused multiplanetary chaos.

But on another, I could say it’s precisely the opposite—a thesis on relationships, and the interaction of connectedness on large scales, fuelled by the multitude of individuals and their decisions within the system. Esek was simply a face, one metonymous example of the toxic relationship that is played out at grand scale across the worlds of the story.

On a third hand—neatly, given the tripartite system of governance that shapes the books—this is a series about genocide, and about oppression and freedom. These individuals offer a window into the suffering of millions, and play out the destructive forces of capitalism, as we know it in the real world, on a larger stage. Theirs is a story that has much to say about many parts of the now—and especially about Palestine, as Jacobs herself highlights in her afterword.

It’s a rich enough, dense enough text to support all these readings and more besides.

Moreover, This Brutal Moon is a fitting end to so equally rich and dense a trilogy, drawing all the multiple threads and character arcs into a satisfying conclusion without succumbing to the chaos that so many moving parts could bring. This concluding novel is a lot, and asks the reader to put in the leg-work to follow it all the way to the end. But it absolutely makes that end worthwhile.

They’re also, the vast majority of them, pretty grim. A number of these stories are set in environmental dystopias—as if there is any other kind. Is it possible for any dystopia to exist that doesn’t include ecological devastation of one form or another? There are certainly fictional dystopias that focus on the exploitation and degradation of one or more population groups, but these are nearly always linked to environmental disaster. In Eugen Bacon’s “The Water Runner,” for instance, a drought so severe that it dries up the ocean is said to be the result of “a curse that rose from Mother Africa’s lips in her bereavement for her lost sons and daughters.” This might be a metaphorical explanation, but there’s arguably more than a grain of truth in it: The pathological desire for profit that once supported slavery also supports unsustainable environmental practices, no matter the human or ecological costs.

Dystopias such as these are increasingly hard to read—but are they hard to read because the metaphors are so recognisable, or because we’re aware, as we read, of how increasingly remote it all feels? As E. M. Faulds writes in her story “Love, Scotland,” everyone is haunted by the global litany of disaster: “Stories of strangers dying, disasters that wiped out communities, trauma—helpless to change things but witness to it all. The internet connected them but divorced them, increased empathy but decreased agency until people drowned in it or switched off that part of themselves.” The narrator of Matthew Freeman’s story “Birdseed” agrees: “I won’t bore you with how it all came apart. We have had enough exhausted chronicles of the dissolution.”

There’s only so much empathy that can be felt before it does become exhausting, and we harden ourselves so easily. One of the best stories in this collection, for me, was “Bodies” by Cat McMahan, about cloned workers at a factory for cloned chickens. The images of human and chicken reflect each other until they almost meld, with both exploited terribly for gain—the chickens because they can be reared without care for any animal welfare standards, and the humans because they too can be harvested if their body parts benefit non-cloned humans—and yet my shock, while reading, was reserved primarily for the chickens, the birds engineered to exist without a voice box and with minimal appetite, so they “couldn’t wail or want.”

I don’t even like chickens that much. Well. Half the time I don’t like humans that much, either, but surely this is a grim reminder of how easy it is to turn off empathy, or to limit its expression. It’s not as if I haven’t read stories about the harvesting of cloned humans before. Possibly I was more shocked by those earlier narratives. Honestly, I just don’t remember. I don’t recall ever reading about suffering cloned chickens before, though, so maybe it’s just novelty in narrative that grabs my attention these days.

That should be a horrifying admission, a horrifying paragraph to write, but I no longer feel that either.

Broadly speaking, that sense of numbness, of inconsistent and dysfunctional response, is something I’ve focused a lot on in my own ecological fiction: the changing emotional response to living in a world of explicit environmental degradation. The idea that some of the many potential responses have a greater validity than others is, I admit, something I struggle with. The opening story of ECO24, “In the Field” by Shelly Jones, cuts to the quick in that respect. An artificial intelligence working for an elderly academic, isolated in a former agricultural landscape now rendered sterile and uninhabitable from fallout, considers the inability of their employer to come to terms with what has been lost: “I nod, unsure what to say; what will be of comfort when the soil is toxic, the air polluted, and the prospect of that changing soon is unlikely. Eventually the teams will clean up the fallout, eventually the soil will absorb the radiation, but the professor will not be here when the land heals.”

My reaction to this, I confess, is unsympathetic. Why should she be there? I’m not talking in terms of age, either, or of mental competence; the professor is clearly in the early stages of dementia. But the painful truth is that the fallout described in the story, the pollution and toxicity, didn’t happen by accident. It’s a result of choices, and the professor made hers. And yes, it’s often said—and it’s true—that corporations and governments bear more responsibility for pollution and other environmental disasters than individuals, but it’s also true that those corporations and governments are able to do what they do because of the world that individuals allow to exist. If we will keep voting in politicians who gut environmental protections, then what the hell can we reasonably expect?

At some point, the choice not to haul out the guillotines is on us all.

Fiction, of course, is spectacularly good at creating worlds where the guillotines stayed in their sheds and rusted. The world that the professor inhabited—that she still inhabits, in her memories—is gone. That the AI narrating the story at least considers what might comfort her is indicative of a certain amount of generosity on its part. Then again, that AI has lost very little: The remediation of the land that is occurring within the story is one performed by machines—who, unlike the professor, may well be around when that remediation is complete. The generosity, then, costs the narrator nothing.

As readers, can we say the same? How much sympathy are we expected to give? How much do we think that we, ourselves, deserve?

That’s the question, isn’t it. Increasingly, it might be the most salient question that ecofiction can possibly explore: How much do we deserve this? What comfort do we have a right to expect, and who is going to be there to give it to us?

A quick aside: I read slush for Reckoning, which focuses on environmental justice. You would not believe the number of stories we receive in which aliens, animals, divinities, superheroes, or other nonhuman entities turn up to fix our environmental messes and generally improve the world for our benefit. These stories are hard sells, because they refuse to engage with the notion of responsibility, both personal and collective.

No one is coming to save us. We have to do it ourselves … and if we choose not to, what then? It’s the AI in the (fallout) fields, cleaning up and trying, inexplicably, to comfort. It’s the alien field workers in F. E. Choe’s “Swarm X1048,” documenting the human destruction of species and ecosystem and a single beloved dog, not able to save any of them because their ethnological practices require observation only, and even if they didn’t: how is it possible to mount a rescue on a planetary scale when the planet’s own population can’t collectively be bothered? (Notably, all the Swarm’s inclination towards comfort is reserved for the dog. It’s not guilty of anything.)

If this seems a little hard, a little too black and white, then I’d agree. We know from the real world that some people, some populations, are more responsible, and bear more guilt, than others. Responsibility may be shared, but it’s certainly not shared evenly.

Neither are consequences. In Bacon’s “The Water Runner,” for example, money to escape the waterless dystopian setting is earned through the reproductive exploitation of women such as the protagonist Zawadi. In Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s story “We the People Excluding I,” a series of well-meaning human sacrifices offer themselves up in a futile attempt to try and stave off active predation of their communities by the powerful Fox Man. The environmental reclamation workers in Steph Kwiatkowski’s “Batter and Pearl” are stuck in poverty traps that such work is effectively designed to keep them in. Furthermore, “The Plasticity of Being” by Renan Bernardo explores a world where an enzyme-bacteria system is developed so that people can eat plastic. By “people,” of course, I mean the poor, who now find it much easier to feed themselves by sifting through piles of garbage. This is implicitly accepted as a good thing by the wealthier and less vulnerable classes: “Feeding people would become a decentralized process without lots of points of failure. Costs would plummet. It would all become excruciatingly cheaper than producing any kind of food,” although readers will all realise that food will still be eaten, of course, by the people who have never been in any danger of scavenging from trash.

That so many of the ECO24 stories share this clarity of unequal responsibility and consequence is, in many ways, an indication of what is to come. These stories are not outliers, nor are they telling us anything new: They are solidly representative of the current state of knowledge in environmental justice. We know now that some populations are more responsible than others. We know now that some populations will suffer more than others.

The question, then, is—as individuals, and as communities—what are we to do about it? What ethical responses are open to us?

There are, admittedly, a number of stories in ECO24 that grapple with the idea of responsibility and atonement and the possibility (or impossibility) of comfort. “A Seder in Siberia” by Louis Evans, for example, shows a family discovering that their exile to a lifetime of climate remediation work wasn’t due to their refugee status, but to their father’s crimes against humanity (he refused to give water to people who died of thirst in a holding cell). This piece of family history is only discovered after the father, himself mentally compromised due to illness, sends his oldest son to try and negotiate a return. “I want to go home,” he says, as if his actions hadn’t materially contributed to the loss of that home, both for himself and for others. The father’s silence, over the years—neither his children nor his grandchildren are aware of his past actions—and his refusal to actively engage with those actions, is not exactly indicative of remorse. One might argue that remorse doesn’t have to be publicly expressed in order to exist, but if you let dozens of people die of thirst (and the story implies that those unfortunates were refugees themselves), then there’s that question of comfort again, and of sympathy.

And, inevitably, of forgiveness.

I have trouble with forgiveness.

*

There’s a story in here I almost didn’t mention. “Parasite’s Grief” by Katharine Tyndall is about two nonhuman species, one of which acts as a parasite on the other. Without that parasitism, the Hyella would “live larger, longer, more peacefully”—and yet the Hyella have agency and intelligence, and many of them choose the shorter, smaller, less peaceful life that comes with parasitism. There’s a long, unpleasant history of linking exploited human minorities with exploited nonhuman bodies, and I side-eye the comparison, especially when that element of voluntary choice is added to the mix. No one volunteers for slavery, for instance. Yet there’s an element of genius here in that “Parasite’s Grief” is placed, in this anthology, directly before Kelsea Yu’s “Skittering Within,” in which an infant vaccinated with the blood of suffering horseshoe crabs—they’re only animals, might as well bleed them as well as boil them alive—goes through a bodily change of her own as she ages, turning part-horseshoe crab as well. Hai’s infant exposure is not voluntary on her part, of course, but her choices as she grows, as she turns toward the nonhuman instead of the human, speak to a chosen loyalty to the exploited crabs, to their plundered bodies.

“Skittering Within” has one of the happier endings in the book, as Hai’s turn to the sea is presented as an unalloyed positive. There’s an uncomfortable question here, though, of how much exploitation is internalised, how much it is chosen—particularly, as I said, when contrasted with “Parasite’s Grief.” The genuine loss that the Teloschi parasite feels at the death of their Hyella is referred to as a natural part of life … but they still parasitise them. It’s an inescapable part of the Teloschi life cycle, and necessity is excusal. But what is necessity, and how much of our own exploitation (of others, and of ourselves) do we excuse?

It’s a choice to bleed horseshoe crabs, to offer up your body as Zawadi does, to eat plastic. To keep the guillotine in the shed.

*

Refusing forgiveness for that choice is often cruel. People do the best they can to survive in the situations in which they find themselves, and all too frequently those circumstances are not of their making. The more exploited you are, the fewer choices you have, the easier it is to sink into identification with the nonhuman—because there’s wonder in that, there is, and a focus on that wonder, that sense of communion, can drown out other options.

It’s an uncomfortable mix, complicity and forgiveness. When Hai is coming down the stairs, shrieking in pain because her mother is boiling a crab, for a moment I think she’s going to brain the woman for her indifference to the suffering of her meal and her child. Part of me wants her to. Part of me wants to do it myself. I read stories like this and I think, What’s stopping me? I like the ending to Yu’s story. I like the transformation, the escape. But escape isn’t freedom. Not for everyone, anyway. Not from everything. Increasingly, I wonder if it’s nothing more than the breath before the blade comes down.

Part of me wants that blade. Part of me wants other people to use it so I don’t have to. Part of me, clearly, is attracted to the possibility of dystopia, if only because some things will be easier to excuse.

Ecofiction does not have to be dystopian, but dystopian it mostly seems to be: a way for writers to work out the lingering, unsettling horror at the ecology around them. There’s no shortage of real-life environmental horror stories out there, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. Dystopia sells, whether it’s on the bookshelves or on the news, but if science fiction has a history of broadcasting warnings as well as imagination, then there are stories here that offer, amidst the horror, comparatively brighter exemplars. The welcoming of refugees in Faulds’s "Love, Scotland" is one example of this, and it’s notable for being one of the few realistic examples. More frequently, successful resistance is essentially magical, as it is in Guillermo G. Mendoza’s “One with the Ground,” in which a girl with an amulet restores clear-felled forest every night.

The magical resistance stories are touching, they are. I’ve read a lot of ecofiction lately where resistance has magical overtones, as if we find it difficult to picture without the marvellous. The girl who becomes a crab, the girl who becomes forest ground. There’s beauty in the imagery. There’s hope in it, even. But it’s inspiration, not application.

I’m not knocking inspiration. We need that sense of possibility, just as we need the warning sirens of the genre. I do feel, however, that, in this anthology at least, the warning signs are the most prevalent. I certainly understand that—it’s art reflecting reality—but if this anthology is representative of the best of ecofiction, what does that tendency say about our ecological visions of the future? It says that they tend almost inevitably to the dystopian. And without the guillotines I’m no longer sure that’s enough.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts,

In Fu’s last work, the short story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century (2022), many of the stories revolve around real and imagined technologies’ effects on how people connect with each other. Eleanor’s story here is not an exception to this trend in Fu’s work. Her therapy practice is virtual, and she moves into an isolated valley with no neighbors. Her mother has just died, and she is single after a nasty breakup. She is isolated, to put it lightly. Her attempts to make awkward conversation with cashiers are her attempts to try to find in-person human connection, and it is no wonder that she starts thinking of her patients on the other side of the screen as ghosts. There are multiple times she thinks about her old in-person practice and how ineffectual she feels without the ability to see her patients face to face. In our current world, even though the rise of remote work has opened up a great deal of freedom when it comes to where to work, a number of jobs have settled into a hybrid format for this very reason: Eleanor struggles with loneliness from moving to a new, hostile place, the nature of her job, and grief from her mother’s death.

Eleanor and her mother’s relationship is the driving force in The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts. When her mother was alive, their relationship was best described as codependent. Lele Fan, Eleanor’s mother, raised Eleanor by herself. In college and graduate school, Eleanor struggled with transitioning into adulthood and independence. Lele told her to move back home when she was in graduate school. From then on, Lele took care of all of Eleanor’s household chores and any tasks beyond her school or later work. Lele would go so far as to “peel apples and pears with a knife, slice them inside her palm, and hand-feed segments to Eleanor,” who initially is apprehensive but later appreciates that it “kept her fingers and keyboard clean.” When Lele becomes sick with cancer, Eleanor has to care for her instead, giving her medicine despite her protests. When she was well, Lele handled secretarial duties, acting almost as Eleanor’s personal assistant; after her death, Eleanor has to confront all the life skills she has never developed because her mother handled almost all the mundane tasks of life, and she struggles with calling insurance companies and arranging repairs. I would classify The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts as a coming-of-age story as Eleanor slowly learns to tackle these tasks in her grief. Similarly, Fu’s other two novels, For Today I Am a Boy (2010) and The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore (2018) both center the transition from childhood to adulthood; it is the speculative trappings of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts that the other two books lack.

The world of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts initially appears identical to our own, but the constant rain and mentions of terraforming to create housing developments reveal that it is a not-so-distant future in which strange weather has become commonplace. For most of the book, it is raining, and characters comment on the constant rain. Eleanor's house floods when it rains and her lock breaks because there is no awning above her door and the nonstop rain damages it. Other characters talk about mudslides destroying nearby low-lying towns, and the valley Eleanor has moved into turns out to contain ghosts. The book leaves unanswered why exactly the previous property developer committed suicide, whether the cause was ghosts or something more mundane, but his death establishes early on that even the richest and most powerful humans are still subject to the whims of Mother Nature. Eleanor is unused to handling flooding houses and home repairs, due to being a renter and the fact that her mother handled most of these logistical issues, and she struggles with calling insurance companies and figuring out the right contractor to handle repairs.

One of Eleanor’s clients at her virtual therapy practice, a man named David, comes to his initial intake session talking about how his wife says the news is making him too negative and liable to start fights. He tells her, “I feel like every day, there’s some new horror. Some new, specific detail, proof of the planet dying even faster than we thought … I feel like the entire country, the entire world, is constantly in the middle of another natural disaster. Every week there’s a once-in-a-century event somewhere.” The only advice Eleanor can offer him is to stay off the news and focus on what he can do to be more present with his wife or actively engage in causes he cares about. Eleanor herself, however, recognizes that this is an inadequate solution as the weather becomes more and more unpredictable. Yet, instead of lingering on existential dread, she is preoccupied with the many repairs her new home needs, as it floods in her new house every time it rains. Eleanor’s world is not one that is kind to the people living there, even as she is busy grieving and dealing with seemingly small concerns in the face of climate change.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts does not contain any specific setting information other than that the valley seems to be somewhere in North America. The reader has no idea where in the world it is set, which is a purposeful omission given how Fu’s previous two novels had highly specific settings—Montreal in For Today I am a Boy and a summer camp in the Pacific Northwest in The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore. In contrast, The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts could take anywhere in North America and at any time, given that no information on either point is given. Mentions of a pandemic and a lockdown recent enough that characters talk about it initially made me wonder whether it was taking place around our own time, but it is never mentioned whether the lockdown was due to COVID or another disease. This vagueness adds dread to the events that take place in the book, a sense of the unplaceability of time and place that works well with the ghosts that exist out of time in Eleanor’s house.

Even though I found Eleanor and her mother's relationship to be unhealthily codependent when Lele was alive, I found myself rooting for Eleanor in her struggles to try to define herself without her mother. Who are we without other people? This book wants us to ask this question as it shows us Eleanor’s own ghosts, people both living and dead who follow her around when she has nobody else. Kim Fu’s writing at the sentence level is deceptively simplistic. It hides how much her work makes me think.

I have found this problem fairly endemic to the romcomantasy (eh? eh?) subgenre to which McCollum’s debut belongs. Oh, I am so tired of reading book after book where nobody has ever done a single thing wrong, or, even if they have, it was all a terrible misunderstanding. I cannot bear these characters with personalities as smooth as Ken dolls, who run dear little retail shops in interchangeable Fantasylands and placeless middle Americas, unbothered by problems of inventory or human frailty. I am going to chew right through the bars of my enclosure, and go rampaging all around the countryside, if I am called upon to read one more book where a character’s big secret finally comes out, and the other character is like: “No problem, babe, I know your heart, and I understand that, while you initially had a scheme to sabotage my dreams, you changed your mind over the course of our courtship. Due to the trust we have built together, I understand this perfectly without your having to explain it.”

Not once more. If I read this sort of thing again, down will come the power lines. To the incinerator with the paper stores. The printing presses I will break like the Luddites of old. Chomp will go my teeth upon the spindly fingers of the TikTok tastemakers or whoever’s responsible for this. A romance is just so much more interesting if the two love interests have personality traits … I was going to finish this sentence with something like “that don’t mesh perfectly without effort,” but really I will just let the sentence end at “traits.” A romance is much more interesting if the two love interests are recognizable as alive human people. I would like us to get back to that, please.

David, the protagonist of Into the Midnight Wood (and this is a single-POV romance, refreshing in this era of dual-POV supremacy), has been living with, and frustrated by, his hot chaotic roommate Meredith for five years. And I would also be annoyed with Meredith: Meredith sleeps with all their third roommates so it’s a revolving door of third roommates; he leaves mugs and glitter all over. He wanders into the dangerous magical woods at the edge of their property and gathers herbs and chats to the Midnight Mice with very little regard for the possibly sinister forces that lurk in the forest. You may argue that Meredith is a manic pixie dream girl, and I shan’t disagree with you, but McCollum is not shying away from the real material conditions of living with someone like this. Mugs. Mugs everywhere! Never the trash taken out or the dishes done! Meredith I would kick twice, sharply, in the shins.

David is also kind of the worst. He’s that difficult combination of judgmental and resistant to change that means he’s constantly complaining to himself about circumstances he has every ability to alter should he so choose. He’s gotten into a habit of tossing not-very-nice banter at Meredith. He gets so locked in to a given life goal (getting a promotion at work) that he lets himself lose track of the emotions of the people around him. On a day when he was not wearing a button-up and couldn’t fact-check me, I would say to David, “Why do you always have one of the middle buttons on your shirt askew? Is that a fashion thing?”; and then he would be stressed about his button-up shirts forever afterwards.

Is this a good book? I don’t know. What even does it mean to be good? The fantasy elements could be more clearly delineated. Non-humans live and conduct their business alongside humans, but this seems not to have materially affected geopolitical history, since Wales and Appalachia still exist. David and Meredith live on the edge of the Midnight Wood, a magic forest where time and space don’t follow the usual rules. I found its parameters and personal relationship to Meredith confusing, but possibly in that way common when the author has several further books in mind, perhaps ones that will feature Meredith becoming ever more powerful and unearthly at the periphery of other people’s love stories. (I would endorse this, by the way. [This would rule.]) But within the confines of this one book, I couldn’t tell you with a gun to my head what purpose, for example, the Midnight Mice serve in maintaining the forward march of time.

I can say with certainty, though, that I did not welcome the return of the implied-Black best friend (Meredith’s) who punctuates more of his sentences with the words “you feel me?” than is strictly natural. He’s there mainly to be protective of Meredith. This is, I admit, the mandated role of the best friend in a romance novel, but the author’s discomfort with writing a Black character is so palpable that you wish they’d just not bothered. I can’t propose a fix for this—it’s weird when white authors populate books with only-white characters, and quite often, as here, it’s weird when they very uncomfortably don’t. (The ideal solution would be to address the problem at the root by eliminating white supremacy, but I suppose that’s beyond the scope of this book review.)

Into the Midnight Wood is good, at least, in its ability to supply the chief thing I care about from a romance: a pair of characters trying to get their emotional houses in good enough order to be in love with each other. Like everyone, like all of us, they are both a little bit terrible. I am so starved in general for romance protagonists who are a little bit terrible that I did not care that the specifics of David and Meredith’s story arc were heavy-handed. One of the novel’s precipitating events, for instance, is that a psychic gives Meredith a charm to reveal hidden things, which means that he gets less good at concealing his depression and self-worth issues from David. Elsewhere, the reasons why David and Meredith end up hosting an event for Meredith’s terrible family, giving David a front-row seat to how these jackasses treat him, are contrived. And you know what? I don’t care. Great. I love it. Gimme.

Likewise, McCollum is stellar at writing conversations in which the leads are plausibly, but consistently, misunderstanding each other. It’s one of the harder stunts for a romance novel to pull off, because the failure mode leaves readers complaining that the whole conflict could have been resolved or avoided if the characters had just had one single conversation with each other. David and Meredith can’t stop having conversations. It’s just that they’re not hearing what the other person is telling them. Here’s their discussion right after the first time they have sex, about midway through the book:

David stood abruptly. “You forgot to give me the speech, you know,” he remarked as he pulled his boxers back on.

Slowly, Meredith got to his feet. “David, I—”

“No, no, it’s all right,” David forestalled him. “I know it by heart: I’m not in love with you. I’ve got no plans to fall in love with you and this isn’t going to change that, and it’s all right if that means you’d rather not do anything.” Even if it was a bit late for that last part now … “As you said, the two of us together—could you even imagine? The very idea is absurd.”[…]

After a silence that lasted a beat too long, Meredith gave a lopsided smile. “Yeah,” he said. “Of course it’d never work, would it? You and me, we’d be at each other’s throats every minute. S’pose you’ll be wanting the shower? You can go first, I’ll put the kettle on.”

This works because McCollum has set this up from the beginning. We’re well aware that Meredith always gives this little speech to people he sleeps with, because it’s a conflict that comes up in the book’s very first scene. So I don’t need much persuading that David would think of himself as the latest in a long line of sexual conquests, and that Meredith would take this little speech to mean that David doesn’t want him. It’s good! It’s elegant! This is the content the people (me) desire!

I also deeply appreciated the book’s casual resistance to tidy (boring) scripts around sex and gender. Meredith wears dresses and sparkly clothes and flower tiaras, and there’s a running gag that he’s allergic to labeling himself as one thing or another. David takes a moment for a pronoun check about midway through the book, which I really loved. It’s rare to read about two characters with years of familiarity between them checking in about pronouns, outside of the context of a coming-out story. When they have penetrative sex, they also have a quick check-in about who will be doing what, ruffling David’s instinctive assumption that they both mutually understand he’d be topping. Here again, the warmth of my positive response may owe less to what this book is doing, and more to what other books are not. It felt really refreshing to be reminded that even quite compatible people can’t read each other’s minds or magically intuit each other’s preferences. Having these conversations is what building intimacy looks like.

I’m going to say something now that will sound like an insult; but walk with me, because it will turn out to be a very high compliment, albeit current trends in publishing will be catching some strays along the way. Into the Midnight Wood is not for everyone. You could say that Meredith is too twee, that David spends too much time being a jerk and not enough time redeeming himself, that it’s aggravating when these two characters won’t just talk about their feelings. I would know what you meant. I wouldn’t argue. But Into the Midnight Wood feels like the book the author wanted to write. I didn’t, perhaps, realize until I was midway through it how badly I’ve needed that.

So many of the books in the cozy romantasy space (I know I said romcomantasy before, but I’ve lost the courage of my convictions since then) feel like cynical marketing strategies between two covers, books that endeavor to capture the largest readership by making their plots and their characters as anodyne as possible. I crave books with enough specificity that I can say they are not for everyone; the alternative, I think, is books that are not for anyone. Books that are, essentially, for the algorithm.

Real people are annoying, and you may carve that on my tombstone. Alexandra McCollum need not visit my grave to learn this truth. Refreshingly, they already know.

I’m tempted to joke that it’s due to climate change that in Hana Carolina’s engaging and emotionally intelligent novella, The Inescapable March, this moment arrives a month earlier. I think the choice of month is more deliberate, though—because the precise moment being described is what one of the novel’s two main characters, flamboyant travelling-actor Hyacinth, describes as “the wretched vestiges of winter” (p. 29). At the point when the novella opens—as dour warrior-mage Arran, from whose viewpoint proceedings are narrated, muses to himself—we’re not quite yet at the beginning of spring. The problem therefore is not that Arran can’t bear the pain of returning feeling but rather that he can’t even jolt himself far enough out of his resentment towards life in general, and of Hyacinth in particular, to even care. The two are friends who are attracted towards each other, but Arran has difficulty dealing with the emotional demands placed upon him by Hyacinth, who is an outrageous flirt with both men and women. Indeed, even while reflecting on how Hyacinth would have taken the brief hint of early-morning sunshine as an excuse to dress wholly inappropriately in layers of silk and an ornamental hat, and would by now be complaining bitterly about the cold, Arran is actually in the process of leaving him behind to die in the siege of a grubby little market town by an advancing army.

The reason that Arran knows that Hyacinth is going to die is that he has already seen it happen. More than once, in fact. Even as he thinks about it, he meets another version of himself riding in the other direction back to the town, before wearily turning round himself. Once there, he spells himself with magical strength before fighting and killing many soldiers, including one with a prominent facial scar, to cut his way back into the town and find Hyacinth amongst the panic-stricken crowds of townsfolk. However, with the effects of the spell waning, he is now exhausted and can do no more than hold on to Hyacinth as the two are crushed to death in the stampede against the locked town gates. Then, they wake up again in a bed in the town inn, exactly as they had at the beginning of that day in a brief moment of unexpected sunlight.

This is not simply a fantasy reworking of Groundhog Day (1993) in which the “march” of the hostile army is inescapable, however (though this is, of course, the other sense of the novella’s title). For one thing, we are never quite sure of the exact sequence of events: The third and penultimate chapter, “The End” is followed by Chapter 4, “The Beginning.” Even if we were such charlatans as to cut the book up in order to reassemble its constituent passages into chronological sequence, I’m not convinced that a linear timeline would emerge. Furthermore, there is also the question of how many times the novella’s events have happened to its characters before. At one point, we are told that Arran and Hyacinth first met a century ago. At several points we encounter the fortune teller Vadoma, who remains aware of what is happening and complains about being stuck in a liminal hell while having to watch her passing dalliance Richard—the soldier with the scar—“die a thousand times over” (p. 96). Later, Arran apologises to Hyacinth for making him “relive the most painful moments of your life a million fucking times” (p. 125). This is not just hyperbole. Both the scale of repetition and the refusal of linearity indicate a queer temporality that can’t simply be fixed by a couple of clever tweaks and a “happy ever after” ending.

The actual process of what is happening is explained to us early in the book, in a scene in which Arran is selling his magic to a woman who wants her husband not to have left her following the death of their son. As he explains to her, the spell will take her outside of space and time and enable her to replay scenarios endlessly until she gets the desired result. The husband won’t remember what happened: “He’ll only live through the final outcome you choose” (p. 25). There’s a telling moment when the woman maliciously asks Arran why he can’t fix his own life if it’s that simple. Then, after he has sat through the dizzying rhythm of hundreds of simultaneous interactions between woman and man, in all of which the husband leaves, she also asks him if the spell can be cast on someone who’s dead. To which he replies that he could only do that if he cast a spell on himself too:

“Many have tried. Most cannot change a thing. And being trapped in endless repetition, with death as the only certain outcome—that’s hell. I wouldn’t do that to someone, or myself.”

“Hell? That’s what you think hell is?” She let out a wet chuckle. “That’s just life.” (p. 28)

In the end, though, which is also the beginning, this is what he must have done—because the whole novella is concerned with Arran and Hyacinth, who is barely aware of what is happening, trying to escape from exactly such a liminal hell-life. But every time Arran tries to leave, with or without Hyacinth, he ends up coming back to the same place again and dying once more. It’s only when he asks Vadoma how they get out that she points out the problem, by replying deadpan, “Are you sure you want to?” (p. 94). Ultimately, The Inescapable March is about whether Arran will continue warping time forever because he can’t bring himself to face the truth, which is that he loves Hyacinth. However, to reach this point he has to overcome his own socialisation as warrior-mage and necromancer.

At this point, I should also mention that, despite this serious purpose, the novella is very funny in places. Carolina’s dialogue is sharp and the moments when Arran and Hyacinth engage in banter are especially delicious. There is also a great scene in which Vadoma reads the palms of Hyacinth, Arran, and Richard in sequence and to darkly humorous effect. It’s not difficult to imagine The Inescapable March as forming the basis for a “high-concept” episode in a big-budget fantasy television series: Gruff magical warrior, bisexual companion figure, fighting, magic, bedroom scenes and there’s even a song. (Obviously I’d love someone to actually make this episode!) What the novella foregrounds is how this kind of fantasy is not just great entertainment but also a kind of technology for making sense of our time and even altering it.

It seems clear to me that the rise of fantasy—which, following the global success of A Game of Thrones (2011-2019) has become one of the master-narratives of the twenty-first century—is shaping how people understand and engage with the society around them. Winter has come and brought a quasi-medieval power politics to Europe and America that would have seemed too crude to be believable twenty-five years ago. I could bemoan that state of affairs but that would be hypocritical given that I have been reading fantasy since childhood. I think all of us who are fantasy fans have to own it. But, in any case, I don’t want to disavow fantasy completely, either, because when it combines wit, humour, and magic as The Inescapable March does, while refusing the quick fix of happy ever after, it allows us to imagine worlds where life is not just a tedious linear repetition of nasty, brutish, and short days until we die. Or, to put it another way, queer fantasy allows us to escape “the wretched vestiges of winter” which make Carolina’s March even crueller than Eliot’s April.

This is on display in the eponymous “House of Illusionists,” which provides an extreme example of Fogg’s love for tragic endings. In it, a pair of aged instructors in a fantasy version of imperial China work with their young students to bend their craft of casting illusions toward a transcendent escape from their civilization’s collapse. Outside the walls, an invading army forces their city toward an inexorable surrender. The details of an agonizing siege, and the imagined pillage that will follow, contrast with the beauty of the illusions which are wrought in the shelter of the school. All this builds toward a gut-wrenching climax.

Fogg also excels at sketching out the contours of a fantasy setting without getting bogged down in its details. This is a skill that gives her stories, most of which are fairly minimalist when it comes to the narrative, a weight which is derived from everything that is not on the page. There’s a feeling that the stories are built on a richly imagined world in the background. I was reading the collection on a trip, and the thick atmosphere and gorgeous details of Fogg’s stories made it a great collection to disappear into in an airport.

This is a characteristic that often gives her stories a dreamlike quality. For example, “An Address to the Newest Disciples of the Lost Words” highlights the tension Fogg successfully maintains between sharp foreground detail and background fantasy outlines, using epic fantasy settings to highlight the richness of the former. In this story, a magic practitioner in a desert academy reflects on their life, their training, and their decision to train in magic. An entire world and magical system are sketched out, but the story remains impressionistic, like a Japanese print. In this case, the minimalism of the narrative, with no climax or resolution, makes the detail that much more striking.

I was a boy of twelve when I first saw/heard/felt this Word. There was a woman at the night market of my hometown, performing Words by the river for free.

The anchor for this Word is wind.

This Word is restlessness coiled deep in the heart. It is a longing with a voice. (p. 173)

Longing is also woven through these stories. In “Wild Ones,” the urban fantasy piece that starts the collection, a mother worries about her daughter as she reaches the age when children—in what appears to be an otherwise normal world—participate in the “wild hunt” each evening, accompanying a goddess figure on flights through the clouds. The mother fears her daughter will not outgrow the longing for the open sky as most children do and that she will eventually choose not to return home. Playing on resonances with Peter Pan (1904) and the anxieties of parenthood, the piece explores the mother’s fear as she recalls her own time as an adolescent flying with the hunt and slowly realizes that it’s her, not her daughter, who is being lured back into the sky: “Why do we forget so much of our wild days? How do we lose the language of the wind?” (p. 7).

Another kind of longing is apparent in “Traces of Us,” which appeared in Neil Clarke’s Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology for 2019, and in which brain scan technology allows two lovers to overcome death through their longing for each other. It’s a poignant and subtle piece that comes to life with medical details highlighting Fogg’s career as a translator and editor of scientific articles. That background comes through not only in her crisp language and detail but in the sharp focus she can bring to scientific sensibilities, as in “The Wave” and “The Message”—two near-future science fiction pieces, the first of which deals with social media and sports in the age of climate change and the second the aftermath of an ambiguous SETI success.

Fogg’s stories deserve to be read more widely, then, and Interstellar Flight Press is to be applauded for bringing this collection to print. (My only complaint about the volume is its lack of a table of contents.) So much new fiction is published each month that it is almost impossible to keep up with all the worthy writers appearing, and small presses like Interstellar Flight do an important job offering volumes collecting excellent pieces that otherwise would be ephemeral. Even for someone who has run across Fogg before, this collection makes it possible to read work that may no longer be available online or anywhere else.

Shelter in gardens, academies, and family; solace through beauty, memory, and at times illusion: Fogg’s focus on endings and societies declining or being destroyed may hit harder today than when these stories were originally written, which is why her consistent emphasis on the power of beauty—if not to save then at least to somehow redeem such endings—is important. I sincerely hope there will be many more such lovely endings to come.

Edwin Callihan’s “Angelhood & Abscission” is the longest story and the one that most explicitly builds the anthology’s shared world. The piece is framed as a series of letters from an unnamed narrator newly arrived in a vast brutalist city. The architecture is rendered with obsessive detail: Buildings rise on “colorless columns and flying buttresses rounded by cylindrical obelisks, spackled with tiny little windows like the outside was hit with buckshot” (p. 10). The narrator finds a sparse apartment with a couch, a microwave, TV dinners, and a television that only catches static or late-night sign-off patterns. The prose circles in the way genuine fixation does. Early on, the narrator visits a bar called Sefer, where a “band” manipulates a chrome box that emits “clanky, metallic groans and whimpers” (p. 8) while oily yolk drips from the stage. He meets Bill, a tall man with a bowl cut and a face covered in red boils, who speaks with a whistling “w.” He is later introduced to The Sculptor, who keeps hundreds of sheet-draped figures in a red-lit basement beneath a twenty-four-hour copy shop. The figures are malformed, not quite human, with blue veins running across marble-like skin. When the narrator reaches to touch one, The Sculptor slaps his hand away and retches. The realization arrives gradually and inescapably: The narrator is being sculpted, too. Callihan balances cosmic detachment with intimate physical detail. Lines like “[b]etween heaven and hell is an orifice, a puckering asshole shitting us out into wherever” (p. 24) land with cosmic revulsion. The closing ascent to the lunar surface—during which the narrator looks down at the city “blinking like Christmas lights” (p. 24) and understands there may be countless versions of himself “plucked and discarded again and again” —is both grotesque and quietly devastating. The repetitive, hypnotic prose mirrors the narrator’s growing dissociation, making the reader feel the slow erosion of self in real time.

Sam Richard’s “Red Tears Are Shed on Grey” shifts to a fragmented, almost cinematic style. Sections marked “C” intercut loops of historical atrocity footage—missiles rising in “tumescent power” (p. 26), faceless soldiers marching, factory fires, hanging bodies, endless ejaculation overlays—with the story of Sasha, a young woman smoking outside an illegal basement venue called the Rat’s Nest. The Karl Marx epigraph about dead generations weighing like a nightmare is structural rather than decorative. The footage is rendered with clinical detachment: faces scratched out, flags clipped, pilots with faces removed. Sasha listens to a strange man reminisce about the venue’s past as an underground library filled with suppressed radical texts and do-it-yourself guides. The conversation unsettles her. When she returns home, the loops invade her reality. She finds herself strapped to a chair by invisible restraints, forced to watch versions of herself on a filthy projector screen. Her face tears open. Blood pours. Tears bleach the screen white. Richard refuses catharsis. The story ends in vacancy and fraying film. The formal choices—abrupt cuts, smokeless cigarettes, eternal ember—create a disorienting rhythm that mirrors Sasha’s unraveling. History is not past; it is a corrupted reel projecting itself onto living flesh until identity dissolves.

Charlene Elsby’s “I’m Not Coming After Her” is the emotional and philosophical heart of the collection. The narrator is the surviving twin speaking from inside the womb after her sister Millie has been delivered and harvested for organs. Elsby writes with extraordinary precision. We feel the initial warmth and nutriment that convinced both twins their mother wanted them to live. We feel the shift when the technician explains that Millie cannot survive independently and that her viable parts could save other babies. The mother’s relief is immediate and physical: “the relief of not having to have two daughters after all, and that it would be through no fault of her own” (p. 49). The surviving twin experiences every scalpel cut, every cold disposal of unusable parts labeled “biological materials.” The decision to remain inside and fester, rather than enter a world that treats bodies as spare parts, is presented without melodrama: “All I must do is fester,” the narrator repeats like a verdict. The story reframes the womb as a battlefield and asks, without sentimentality, whether any world that dismantles you for parts is worth joining. Elsby’s philosophical density never sacrifices visceral immediacy, however. The final description of infected tissue turning gray as blood retreats is one of the most haunting images in contemporary horror. The first-person perspective from inside the womb creates an intimacy that makes the betrayal feel personal.

Joe Koch’s “I Am a Horse” begins in apparently realistic territory and descends into prolonged bodily transformation. An aging mathematics professor, Mr. Sapin, becomes obsessed with a Butoh dancer he first mistakes for a statue in a garden. The story is structured in numbered encounters that escalate relentlessly. The second meeting involves a fake breast torn open during rehearsal. The third is a disastrous dinner in which the dancer accuses Sapin of knowing about her childhood abuse and doing nothing. The fourth finds her at his door soaked in blood. The fifth and sixth dissolve into sensory deprivation: hooded, bound on all fours, fed pureed food through tubes, cleaned by automated jets, slowly reduced to animal state. Koch writes captivity with a poet’s sense of rhythm and a clinician’s patience. The professor’s perverse gratitude amid degradation feels earned rather than contrived. The story refuses easy moralizing. It simply observes the process until the man becomes the horse of the title, rocking gently under an invisible rider who sings a half-remembered lullaby.

The anthology closes with two shorter pieces that function as sharp codas. Justin Lutz’s “Not Waving, but Drowning” literalizes Stevie Smith’s poem inside a flooded basement venue, turning a gig into slow, collective submersion. Brendan Vidito’s “Theatre of Sublimation,” meanwhile, presents a performance in which the audience itself becomes the raw material. Both deny the reader any clean exit.

Certain obsessions repeat across the collection. Clean spaces—operating theaters, copy shops, white-painted Butoh skin—reveal themselves as sites of deepest filth. History loops like scratched film. Privacy is illusory; the body is always subject to sculpture, harvest, projection, or transformation. There is no warmth offered and no redemption promised, only a cold, surgical clarity that refuses to avert its gaze.

Filthy Loot Press has produced a handsome, minimalist object: stark cover art by Rat himself, clean typography, no excess. The physical book feels like the concrete city it describes. In the broader landscape of contemporary extreme horror—where shock often substitutes for substance—New Meat in a Clean Room stands apart. It shares DNA with recent works by Gretchen Felker-Martin, Eric LaRocca, or Hailey Piper, but its intellectual rigor and formal cohesion place it closer to the tradition of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood or Kathe Koja’s early novels. Ira Rat’s editorial hand is confident yet unobtrusive; the stories converse without ever feeling forced.

This is not comfortable reading. It is not intended to be. It is, however, one of the most tightly conceived, skillfully executed, and intellectually demanding horror anthologies I have encountered in recent years. Readers seeking easy scares or traditional resolution should look elsewhere. Those willing to sit with sustained discomfort will find something sharp, lasting, and deeply unsettling.

As far as themes and threads go: A prominent one is women who are trapped by their roles, by a lack of opportunity, and by men. These men are sometimes well-meaning and clueless—but often they are mean and even cruel, dismissive and neglectful, and closed. Men who don’t ask questions, who assume things about the women and the world around them: what they are like and what they are capable of and what they mean. Many of these stories (and a lot of McKillip’s work in general) are romantic and end happily (as she alludes to in “Writing High Fantasy,” the final entry in this anthology); but it’s the men who are willing not just to think, but to reconsider, who find happy endings. These men put metaphors together and uncover different perspectives, and they allow other people to know more than they do. The exception to this lies in the more fairy-tale or parable-feeling stories, like “The Lion and the Lark,” in which the man is a magical entity and doesn’t do a whole lot of learning or changing. But in “The Lion and the Lark,” the man at least does a good job of knowing and loving the protagonist.

The fairy world appears often, posited as a secret world. And here’s another of the collection’s threads: secrets, and particularly secret identities and their discovery. The majority of these stories have at least one character who isn’t who they seem to be, or who isn’t sure themselves who they are. There’s often a lot of intersection between secret identities and secret worlds, or sometimes simply a different, secret, way of things. Indeed, the most important hallmark of McKillip’s style, I think, is her particular mix of solidity and dreaminess. Her characters feel like real people, with practical concerns, who you could imagine stubbing their toes or running out of groceries—things that are mundane but also specific to them and their world. But these solid characters exist in much more fluid worlds. Her settings and plots are both held together by feeling, evocative description, and character, and so sometimes they’re vague and oddly shaped. Sometimes her novels can be a little loose and meandering because of that dreaminess, while some of the short stories in this collection end before I wish they did.

My two very favorite stories in the collection are “Lady of the Skulls and “Byndley.” Both of them exemplify this point about style in fascinating ways.

There’s something particularly powerful and rich about “Lady of the Skulls,” and I think part of that is due to how focused the setting is: a lone tower, filled with vast amounts of mythical treasure, standing far away from everything on a barren plain. Those who visit the tower are allowed to choose one thing to take with them. If they choose the most precious thing in the tower, they can leave freely; if they choose wrongly, they die as soon as they leave. The Lady of the Skulls is the woman who guards this tower and has to watch as men come and break themselves on it. She plants her flowers in old skulls. Her watering can is the helmet of some past adventurer.

I felt the awe of the magic here, and understood this woman as a particular, specific person. All of the complex elements and different flavors get to kind of marinate in this one specific place, which sits at one specific point in these men’s lives. We do get a flashback at the end, but it feels like a reward to me, not a break in focus, because it finally gives us the final piece we need to understand the place we’ve been in for the rest of the story.

In general, though, my favorite McKillip stories tend to sit somewhere in between her real-world style and her vaguest dream-like style. “Byndley” does exactly that. It is about a wizard named Reck who once fell in love with the faerie queen. The faerie queen invited him into the woods, and took him into her bed. But the queen has a husband, and Reck can’t help but be jealous. He steals a special gift that the king gave the queen: a “tiny living world within a glass globe” that’s astonishingly beautiful. Because he’s a wizard, he was able to escape, by jumping into the globe itself and making the globe vanish. Now, years later, he still has the globe.

“I took it partly to hurt her, because she stole me out of my world and made me love her and she did not love me, and partly because it is very beautiful, and partly so that I could show it to others, as proof that I had been in the realm of Faerie and found my way back to this world. I took it out of anger and jealousy, wounded pride and arrogance. And out of love, most certainly out of love. I wanted to remember that once I had been in that secret, gorgeous country just beyond imagination, and to possess in this drab world a tiny part of that one.” (p. 111)

But Reck doesn’t say this to excuse or defend himself. He explains this to one of the citizens of the town of Byndley, where he’s come on a quest to return the glass globe back to the faerie world. He cannot live in peace with what he’s stolen. He feels the weight of the queen’s memory—or his own guilt. So he searches far and wide for a way to give it back. And in his search, it turns out, he seems to have discovered something true about faerieland and about himself, something that applies to McKillip’s stories generally: Something about the porousness of worlds, and about what it means to be inside one or another, and how you can sometimes be in more than one place at the same time, in different ways.

In fact, Reck discovers that he’s never really left the globe at all. The town of Byndley is made up of faeries in disguise, and the townsperson to whom he told his tale was the faerie queen herself. When he leaves Byndley, he doesn’t look back: “He looked up instead and saw the lovely, mysterious, star-shot night flowing everywhere around him, and the promise, in the faint, distant flush at the edge of the world, of an enchanted dawn” (p. 116). This is how McKillip’s work makes me feel, too, and I think it’s what I want out of fantasy most of all (alongside characters to be there with me): the feeling of that promise of wonder and enchantment, and the truth of that feeling. Somehow, by giving the globe back, Reck gets to keep that feeling with him, which was what he really wanted anyway.

Stylistically, “Byndley” and “Lady of the Skulls” work particularly well because of the way they give us that feeling—they give us a world that we can feel that way about. It’s magical enough to be wondrous, but it’s also defined enough to picture at all. Sometimes, McKillip’s more real-world stories lose the wonder for me—“Mer,” for example, is this way, although I did really enjoy it. Others are so vague that it’s hard to get a grip on anything, though this is more true of some of her novels than of any of the stories in this collection. In The Book of Atrix Wolfe (1995), for example, there’s also a wizard who tries to travel between the fairy realm and the human realm. But that story is written in a much more dreamlike way, and also (maybe more importantly, even) the journey often takes place in Atrix Wolfe’s head. For much of the book, he has nobody to talk to about what he’s trying to do or what exactly is troubling him. In “Byndley,” Reck asks people questions all the time, so that even if we don’t get definite answers about what the world is like, we learn what the people of Byndley are like and what they think. In “Lady of the Skulls,” the two main characters ask each other questions, too. There’s something about that communication and the acceptance of wonder that really makes these stories come alive.

McKillip is unique; there’s no one else who you’d mistake for her. But she is deeply invested in fantasy as a genre, and fantasy in turn is often interested in interpretation and repetition (among other things). Le Guin is maybe the most obvious comparison, as far as feminism and the role of women in magic go (A Wizard of Earthsea [1968] notwithstanding; McKillip didn’t need to go through the learning curve that Le Guin did). Tanith Lee is also in there, and Angela Carter (Carter especially in “The Lion and the Lark”); and, a little bit more recently, Ursula Vernon—the matter-of-factness, the vivid lives of different unusual people (particularly women), the brand of humor. But “Byndley” in particular shows McKillip’s fundamental Beagle-ness.

Peter S. Beagle is an admirer of McKillip’s work and they collaborated on a novel; he also wrote the afterword to Dreams of Distant Shores (2016). Together, they’re two of my personal favorite writers because of their simultaneous true love of fantasy and reality—for the strangeness to be found within. McKillip is a little dreamier than Beagle is, Beagle a little more jokey and parodic, and Beagle’s women frustrate me sometimes, but that’s for some other review; but ultimately what we see in their fantasies is an unusual interest in people and in spaces-between.

Take, for example, McKillip’s “The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath.” This is a relatively early story. And Kushner’s introduction explains that Terri Windling commissioned it for her collection Elsewhere in 1982; it was McKillip’s first published short story for adults. I like how surprising it is, and how funny it is. The characters are taken seriously—it matters who they are and why they think and feel the ways they do. What happens to them isn’t predictable, and nor is it predictable what the story focuses on and cares about. It’s excellent stuff. Likewise, in “The Witches of Junket,” the characters are great and at the very centre of the story, alongside a really fascinating portrayal of witchiness. The POV character in particular is one of McKillip’s excellent older women. If the story gets a little bit jumbled up, and the pacing is a little bit too fast—there are too many new characters and I would’ve loved the time to get to know them a little better, and to more clearly understand what was at stake—this can be forgiven because of the connection it makes between reader and characters.

“The Witches of Junket” is set in our contemporary world, as is “Out of the Woods.” This is another story that’s difficult to predict, but in this case that’s more because of what the story chooses to focus on than because of plot. The main character, Leta, is worked to the bone by her husband and by her magician boss, and we know that something must change. But that change is surprising, more melancholy than I expected, and somehow also exactly right. I wish this story had been longer, because I wanted to know what happens to the main character, but its abrupt ending is part of the point. Indeed, I’m not always very patient about shorter stories, especially when they hinge on ambiguity or some sort of “gotcha” moment, but McKillip almost always wrong-foots me. I have no idea what happens in “Weird,” for example, and yet I’m still thinking about it. I don’t feel irritated or upset about that, just intrigued.

Still, “Knight in the Well” is maybe the book’s primary example of McKillip’s dreamy vagueness: There’s a lot going on, it’s beautiful, and, again, I had no idea what any of it meant until maybe halfway through the story at best. This story, too, ends rather abruptly, and I would’ve enjoyed much more time with these characters instead of having their conflicts resolved so fast. In contrast with “Weird,” however, this is one of the volume’s longer stories, at around fifty pages. “The Gorgon in the Cupboard” is of similar length, and likewise I wanted more perspective from it: on the story’s women, as well as more information about the titular gorgon, who in a way was the least interesting part of the story. If the shorter stories can feel too brief, both of these longer stories feel a little bit structurally lopsided—and so also somehow unfinished.

Why are these stories the length that they are? Why not longer or shorter? I wonder what was going on with these stories; were they written for some purpose in particular? I would love more background information on them. This is perhaps my one real criticism of the present volume: I would have liked more information on the stories, and more information about the logic behind the anthology itself. It’s a lovely book, and all of the stories deserve to be here and to be read carefully. I’m just not sure what makes this collection the “Essential” McKillip, especially when compared to Tachyon’s earlier (and also excellent) McKillip anthology, Dreams of Distant Shores. With a title like this, I’d have liked there to be an explanation of why these stories, and not others, are so definitive.

For instance, “Wonders of the Invisible World,” collected here, is the title of another McKillip anthology, and so we might assume it has significance. In the story (which shares its title with a book by Cotton Mather, the seventeenth-century Puritan), a researcher from the far future goes back in time and pretends to be an angel that Cotton Mather saw in a feverish revelation. Her boss has sent her there because he’s trying to write a history of imaginative thought—and, in their far future, everything possible to imagine has already been imagined by a very powerful computer. The researcher isn’t allowed to veer from her script, which is set to minimize any alteration of the past, even though she very much wants to. When Cotton Mather raves about witches, it’s difficult for her to stomach. But she’s supposed to keep the angel within the limits of what Cotton Mather would have imagined the angel to be.

When the researcher returns home, to a time when everything imaginable has already been imagined, her son and her friends are playing a video game together. Their characters are in an intergalactic zoo, and they try to defeat the computer by imagining different animals. The computer is always able to display whatever the children dream up—but then an angel appears in one of the animal cages. The angel belongs to none of them. Except, possibly, to the researcher. The angel is caught in the zoo, like the researchers are caught in history, and like her current world is trapped because imagination can no longer create a way out. But then the angel disappears, and that’s the end of the story. So what does this mean, and what can it tell us about the logic of this collection? My best stab at it: The Essential Patricia A. McKillip is by and large concerned with three things—how can imagination set people free, what do people imagine, and how do those imagined things/people/places connect and change throughout space and time?

If nothing else, this collection certainly serves as an excellent McKillip primer. The anthology itself is beautiful: Thomas Carey’s cover illustration is so very McKillip, and it’s also resonant of the ornate Kinuko Y. Craft’s Ace covers. Ellen Kushner’s foreword is deeply personal and moving. But other excellent McKillip primers exist: They include Dreams of Distant Shores itself, a Strange Horizons roundtable on Ombria in Shadow, and Audrey Isabel Taylor’s Patricia A. McKillip and the Art of Fantasy World-Building. I also highly recommend The Riddle-Master of Hed and its two sequels, as well as The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. But if you haven’t started reading McKillip yet, this is certainly a good place to start—and then, hopefully, continue. But, wherever you start reading McKillip’s work, you won’t want to stop.

Slow Gods is proper science fiction as opposed to a story set in a recognisable world, something common in much of North’s previous works. Set in the far future and spanning a galaxy, it remains a high-concept effort full of delight and invention. The narrator, “frustrated academic” Mawukana na-Vdnaze (Maw for short), is not to be trusted and yet we know that he has died multiple times—and is, as a result, potentially a god. He is an interesting character to dump into the ultra-capitalistic world of the Shine. Maw was born into debt, and charged for his birth. Every breath taken, every bit of sustenance consumed, in this world has a fee attached. In return, paying citizens are expected to rise by their own merits while working at their maximum capacity, or to sink into debt and work their way out, however unrealistic this achievement might be. People sort of accept this, giving their children middle names such as “Chairman” and “Director.” North isn’t subtly going after our capitalistic and consumerist society here. They’re bashing it with a wrecking ball. Dropped from space.

The story forms around a supernova event that will destroy several inhabited planets and which therefore need evacuating. North spends a lot of the first few chapters on worldbuilding and not so much on the storytelling—so much so, in fact, that Slow Gods reads like a memoir from the future as opposed to a novel. Maw narrates how he felt about growing up and living what was perceived as a normal life, neither particularly happy nor unhappy; North, via Maw, tells, rather than shows. The Slow, for example, is an ancient machine that travels around the galaxy and knows things. It is potentially an AI. North holds back from delving into the science of this science fiction story on a number of occasions, since their future societies create things that are in some ways unknowable to the peoples that inhabit the story. North uses phrases such as “pundits grumbled [it] was ‘some sort’ of ion drive” and talks about the terrifying mysteries of arcspace—this universe’s method of interplanetary travel, dark, unknown, and creepy. Indeed, it is Lovecraftian in some respects. Is there something in the corner just out of perception?

North writes as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Prose and ideas seem to flow as naturally as a river and it’s never a surprise when they throw in a curve-ball or two: numbered points mid-chapter, a chapter that begins by providing a list of a character’s lovers; oddly indented paragraphs, the Slow speaking in capital letters; interlude sections, such as “On Pilots,” which again skip the science bit by addressing this future’s many unproven theories about itself. In other words, giant concepts are readily accepted.

After the Slow arrives into Shine space and informs everyone that a supernova event in which two stars will collide is about to occur in the not-too-distant future, North writes: “and if we look back through the historical data it would appear that they are on a collision course and actually the maths is fairly elementary now we bother to think about it.” What we learn is that, at the point of this discovery, the Ventures—Shine bodies that run the cities—wiped the data. They didn’t want people to panic. They denied there was any problem. Business needed to carry on. But it is now too late: Everyone with a telescope could see, and then come the protests and riots. And everything changes.

As well as the big ideas, North spends time on the small things that affect us all. Time and again, they return to the idea of small talk, social niceties, and cultural misunderstandings—the things that mean something to us as individuals just trying to navigate through life. I particularly enjoyed a passage seemingly referencing Kurt Vonnegut: “Adjumiris hate silence, but when they chose it, it is deliberate, absolute. When there is nothing more to say, there is nothing more to say. And so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes.”

Another example: North’s various peoples have a variety of pronouns, including the Slow. North themself is non-binary. In the interlude headed “A note on gender,” they explain all the different pronouns in the setting of Slow Gods. One race, the aka-aka, have a single gender and are “we”; another, the aforementioned Adjumir, have eight genders and many pronouns, based on region. The use of a variety of pronouns throughout the novel (xe, xim, que, quim, Hé, hím, and more) normalises gender fluidity and non-binary cultures, and is also used to demonstrate the othering of some of the peoples. One character humorously points out: “You can remember the difference between innumerable different types of sausage or sporting teams, but you cannot hold in your mind a mere half-dozen or so categories of people?” Even machines have different pronouns: Maw has a kind of robotic intelligence as a companion who is known as “qi” (in one of qis guises, qis is a three-tailed fox).

To counterbalance the dominance of the Shine, there is a great diversity in societal structures, too. In Lud, for example, there is what could be seen as socialism, where everyone serves the people as a whole. Elsewhere, houses are bio-formed and spaceships are grown (and are therefore essentially alive), highlighting ways to live and thrive outside of capitalism. Elsewhere, there is a nod to isolationism, with a species called the kekekee who say that “the rest of the galaxy sounded awful.”

But what is all this about Maw dying, and what about any plot? Maw is an arcpilot and during a flight through arcspace is somehow changed: When he is killed, he resurrects, sometimes slowly and painfully, but dying again and again, in space. This proves useful as most pilots can only do one or two flights before they are no longer of use. Maw, however, can keep going indefinitely. This proves of particular use in the evacuation of a planet due to be destroyed by the supernova. But Maw believes himself to have died and therefore to be now a monster, perhaps a bad copy of himself at best.

Is he part of the darkness that is arcspace? He tends to be what people perceive him to be—when he is seen as a good man, he is one. He can also forget to obey the laws of physics, and that can lead to horrendous acts of destruction. During the evacuation, however, Maw falls for historian and curator Gebre, who doesn’t necessarily fall back in return. Gebre is not one of those selected for evacuation: It is impossible to get everyone off the planet in time, but Gebre is tasked with saving antiquities and cultural relics.

Meanwhile, the Shine have moved onto a neutral planet, finally admitting that theirs will be destroyed by the supernova—an occupation, if you will. They also have what are known as “blackships” stationed around the galaxy, ready to attack any resistance. A guerilla movement grows and Maw is drawn into what the Shine don’t call a war against the rebels but a “humanitarian intervention,” as the only person who can reliably use arcships for tactical resistance raids. This eventually results in atrocities as bad as those committed by the Shine, and Maw withdraws as a consequence. There is also a sub-plot here about a communication device used by the blackships, alongside some espionage. The only slight criticism amid all this is that the leader of the Shine, the prime capitalist, is a bit of a cartoon villain in his actions in the way he dismisses all life, says things like “[h]asn’t this all been interesting” as he kills someone and laughs. Worse, despite this there is no real jeopardy from him other than to minor characters.

But Maw is as human as you (though he is also a monster and a god). You believe in him as an individual, and therefore in the importance of the life of an individual; but you also believe there is a way forward in a collective community that exists for the betterment of all and not just its biggest shareholder. This is more than just a space opera, more than just an adventure spanning centuries. There are so many huge ideas and issues addressed in Slow Gods—capitalism, religion, gender, culture, climate migration, othering, war, love, morality, having a meaningful life—but they don’t get in the way of enjoying a well-written and enjoyable novel. Treatises, memoirs, novels, stories don’t need to be subtle to get you thinking, nor to work. And North’s Slow Gods simply works.

To recap, the Black Company is the last extant of various free companies of mercenaries which waged campaigns across a vast Southern continent. It has largely forgotten its original purpose, in spite of trying to maintain detailed chronicles. (One of Cook’s narrators, Croaker—the original one and still one of the constant voices of the books—is both surgeon and annalist.) In the first book, they took service across the sea on the Northern continent with its dominant ruler, the Lady—who was brutally rebuilding, after an interregnum, the empire established by her rather nastier late husband, the Dominator, with the help of various powerful but enslaved magic workers, the Taken. At first, the Black Company help her expand her realm, but latterly they promote a successful rebellion; this is all rather complicated by the treachery of various of the Taken, attempts to resurrect the Dominator, and the strong romantic attraction between the Lady and Croaker.

Stripped of her magic, but not in any particular way reformed, the Lady joins the remnants of the Company, now under Croaker’s command. They return South in a quest for their own institutional history, constantly recruiting new troops—some of them local military castes descended from earlier generations of the Company—and find themselves at war with an alliance of former members of the Taken, among them the Lady’s sister, Soulcatcher; a group of wizards from a parallel world, the Shadowmasters; and the cultist followers of demon goddess Kina, the Deceivers. [1]

Soulcatcher, who has survived an earlier beheading, abducts Croaker, whose relationship with her sister maliciously intrigues her. Much of the Company is trapped in an extended siege. A remnant commanded by the Lady, who is now pregnant with Croaker’s child, allies itself with the Deceivers, whom she believes she has successfully conned into thinking her an avatar of Kina. In fact, their leaders abduct her newborn daughter to fulfil that role (this reversal rather entertainingly undercuts the White Saviour implications of where this subplot appeared to be heading). Later, much of the Company’s leadership is trapped in magical stasis in a temple complex presided over by an immortal golem, Shivetya, while others act as a secret underground in a city state ruled by the irrepressible Soulcatcher. By the end of the previous book, Soldiers Live (2000), the Company has achieved a Pyrrhic victory over all its major enemies and the elderly and infirm Croaker has chosen to swap bodies with the bored Shivetya in order to keep Kina asleep and Soulcatcher trapped in stasis. Croaker hands his role as annalist to two bickering Mean Girl recruits, the cousins Arkana and Shugrat, while he casts his consciousness back and forth through the history of several worlds.

The original Black Company trilogy—The Black Company (1984), Shadows Linger (1984), and The White Rise (1985)—has been followed by pairs of sequels in which the first volume is largely passage work, setting up situations to be largely resolved in the second—save for a secondary point which becomes a slingshot ending, a hook for our continued interest. With Lies Weeping, this technique runs the risk of diminishing returns, especially now that not only most of the original characters but most of their replacements are dead, and the Black Company is currently not engaged in a war but trying to survive as an armed camp in a potentially hostile alien world. Where once the books operated in terms of pitched battles, sieges, and guerrilla actions, the only set piece combat here is pest control against rampaging apes attacking the crops needed by the company as a food supply.

In prior books, then, our interest was perpetually piqued by a series of puzzle boxes, most of which have by now been opened more or less satisfyingly, and by the vicissitudes of the central romantic relationship, which is by this point over. The relationships of the two new narrators with a young magician haunted by the ghosts of his female ancestors, and a monk sent by his abbot to steal a manuscript that apparently doesn't exist, just don’t have the same emotional weight—especially once the cousins abandon both boys for the long-range reconnaissance mission that takes up the latter part of the book.

Arkana and Shugrat are also less personable than Cook’s earlier narrators, or perhaps it’s that he writes teenage girls rather less well than weary veterans. Their bickering about boys is less entertaining than the novel’s occasional, flirtatiously malicious exchanges between Croaker and Soulcatcher; still, once they and their bodyguard, the enigmatic old cook Jun Go, are flying through mountains and exploring dead cities, they stop bitching at each other and become considerably more interesting.

Meanwhile, various subplots are simmering gently—Cook has always been good at this. The Lady is travelling across worlds back to her former realm, in a probably vain attempt to re-ensoul her daughter, who has been left vacant and comatose after the ejection of Kina. The deal between Croaker and Shivetya was that the golem would take over Croaker’s body in order to die in it—but in fact, this was not the golem’s plan at all, as Arkana and Shugrat find out the hard way in the dead city …

Surprisingly, some of the best passages of the book come in the sections narrated by Croaker as he explores the abilities of his new, largely immobile, body and casts his mind across space and time. For one thing, he has several worlds to watch across millennia. [2] Primarily, though, his astral travels take him rather closer to home, to the backstory of his wife and her sister, and the role of their extended family, the Senjaks, in the rise of the Dominator.

Cook has always been deliberately vague about his shadowy Dark Lord. Now, he finally retcons that vagueness in a way that he would not have done back in the 1980s, making it clear that part of the point of the Domination for its ruler was that it enabled him to engage in sexual predation on an industrial scale, a predation from which even his closest allies were not immune. Soulcatcher and the Lady are the survivors of several other sisters: Their mutual hatred has roots which are centuries old. Cook has dropped hints about all this for twelve books; here is a puzzle box only somewhat nearer to being opened.

In the end, then, Lies Weeping is not an especially good book in and of itself. It’s a mildly entertaining late instalment of a fantasy soap opera to which many of us are profoundly addicted. Cook is a competent enough writer in his dour, sardonic way—his action sequences are decently blocked and his characterization rich enough that we remember who these people are from book to book. But the point of it all is that sense of life and history, as an occasionally enjoyable endurance test to be gone through with a patience and fortitude that are their own point: Glen Cook is a bracingly grim and bleak writer.

Endnotes

[1] This last group represent one of Cook’s more problematic narrative choices, being based in detail on the British Raj’s propaganda about Thugee—there is an ongoing historiographical controversy about whether Thugee even existed as an organised cult as opposed to opportunistic local banditry, let alone as obsessed with the finer points of ritual strangling of merchant victims with weighted scarves. Cook blithely and, it has to be acknowledged, very effectively appropriates as a major plot point all of the gory details of the legend, both in its propagandistic original form and its mutations in popular culture. [return]

[2] In passing, Cook hints that the world of his Dread Empire sequence
(1979-2012) was the distant past of one of these worlds. [return]

The set-up given in the first two-page chapter is this: “Because of an accident within the gravitational system, the Earth is rapidly plunging into the sun, pelting toward it, to melt there.” How did this accident occur? No idea. Is there anything we can do to stop it? No. Can we escape to, say, some other planet? The question doesn’t even come up. This is not about climate change mitigation, adaptation, or technological solutionism. It is about the mind faced with certain death. Of course, we are all already faced with certain death. “Because one does not come without the other,” the narrator reminds us. “Life had an intimate sister. You didn’t marry one or the other, you married both.” Death and life, inseparable twins.

At first, people in the book barely react to the news of their impending doom. A few words printed in the newspaper: What can they have to do with real life? One woman in the small village where the story opens, seeing the headlines, says, “What do I care?” We were all going to die anyway; the only difference is that now we will die together instead of separately. The lackadaisical attitude of the villagers is not sustained indefinitely. Soon the signs of unrest appear—there are guards stationed outside the bank in town; strange noises are heard at night; mobs begin to form. Money cannot continue to mean anything, and then no one owns anything, and then violence is the medium of exchange. But it’s gradual, and even this is not the point of the story. To be honest, there isn’t really a story. There is more of a slow unwinding which, as it unspools in the maddening sun, reveals what was inside of everything all along.

If Into the Sun does not really have a plot, neither does it really have characters. The narrative voice flexes between first-person, third-person, and even occasional second-person invocations. Ramuz is fond of the French third-person impersonal pronoun “on,” which the translators have rendered as the English first-person plural “we.” Similarly, the authorial “I” does not necessarily designate a specific individual, but rather an Everyman who serves as an observer at a range of shifting scenes. According to his biographical entry in the Dictionnaire Historique de la Suisse, Ramuz had by this point in his career abandoned expository narrative (“roman explicatif”), which follows the exploits of an individual, in favor of a more “epic” style exploring the response of an entire community to a serious challenge or threat. He was writing about war, disease, and the existence of evil, but also about religious miracles and healing (see La guérison des maladies, 1917). At the same time, he was dedicated to delineating the rhythms and voices of people of the countryside. The translators’ note at the end of the present edition of Into the Sun quotes him imploring the reader to think of the “shuffling step of the person who returns from harvesting or pruning his vineyard: consider this gait and the fact that our sentences don’t have it.”

Ramuz’s efforts to remake the novel as a new form true to the inner life of ordinary people places him within a strand of Modernism. The 1920s was, in the West, a period of disillusionment following what was then still called in English the “Great War,” which was in turn accompanied by a devastating pandemic in 1918. The 1920s might be remembered now as a non-stop party filled with carefree flappers and hot jazz, but much literature of the era depicts a troubled milieu of dissipation, cynicism, and apathy. Quite a few classics of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction appeared around this time, including Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Karel Čapek’s stage play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) and his novel The Absolute at Large (1922), and W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet” (1920). The end-times had, perhaps, been narrowly averted, and could still be just around the corner. If any of this sounds like right now, well, yes, it does and it should.

In this translation, Ramuz’s sentences have the beauty of a beam of sunlight through swirling dust—simple, elegant, illuminating the structure of the invisible. Repeatedly he invokes a mirrored world, in which constructions partner natural objects, and the mind reconstitutes reality in its own image. A streetlight resembles the moon, it “looks like the real moon when bad weather is coming. And so we search for the real moon, and after a moment we’ve found it, over there, behind the rooftops, behind the chestnut trees, still so low in the sky and not any smaller than the other moon, but pale, so pale and immobile, as if painted as decoration in the sky with a brush.”

The sky is a backdrop; the landscape is a canvas; the moon is a bit of trompe-l’oeil; stars are paper lanterns. The world is a human world. “Our own world is so small,” explains Ramuz. “Our own world goes as far as our eyes can reach; it’s our eyes that create it for us.” To grasp the enormity of the coming disaster, “We would have to imagine the sky, the stars, the continents, the oceans, the equator, the two poles. Yet we can only imagine the self and what we have.”

As the destruction gets underway, the first-person narrator laments that he “loved the world too much. When I sought to imagine something beyond it, it was still the world that I imagined. When I sought to go past it, there I found it again. I tried closing my eyes to see the heavens; it was the Earth; and the heavens were the heavens only when they became Earth once again.”

Towards the end, when few people remain alive to experience themselves in isolation, a solitary pilot ascends with his plane in search of some respite from the heat. Failing, he begins his descent, and hearing the roar of the plane’s engine he finds that the “noise that he alone makes irritates and astonishes him. He seeks a response in this noise; he seeks an answer to himself from himself. He doubts that he exists, not perceiving any existence but his own anywhere. He considers himself angrily; he is a disruption. And he keeps descending, in pursuit of a resemblence and something like symmetry.”

One of the many symmetries in the text is provided by a lake, which appears in the first pages as a site of relaxation and pleasure, later as a refuge from increasing heat, and ultimately as a locus of death. A lake implies the symmetry of reflection, but by the time the unnamed pilot approaches it in his aircraft these qualities have eroded. “This expanse presented to him the absolute wasteland of its waters, motionless as metal, perfectly silent and fixed, bare, with no reflection, no image, no response.” The world has ceased to function as a mirror for humanity. Once the mirror is broken, could there be another, more real and primal perception that arises only in the face of death? To fall into the Sun is to come too close to the source, where our matchstick houses and stick-built hypotheses will burn away. The collapsing roofs of a town begin to look, from above, like a mud pie that a child has left to fissure in the heat. Our works were those of children and playtime is over. Now is time for a new world, an impossible world, a place we cannot live.

Knowing very little about manga but interested in learning about its origins and evolution, I approached Manga’s First Century with an idealistic perspective about how quickly and easily it would inform me of the subject. The first chapter showed me that this wasn’t the book I had received. Rather, Andrea Horbinski’s exploration of manga is a massive onslaught of detailed information that would constitute a feast for hard-core manga fans hungry for a roadmap to how the art form found its groove from the early twentieth century through its development into the late 1980s, where she ends her account. Instead of the lay-reader-friendly introduction to manga that I was hoping for, Manga’s First Century is nonetheless a fluent, eloquent account of the art form and its many iterations across Japan’s rapidly-shifting social, political, and economic landscapes during the tumultuous, accelerated twentieth century.

Despite its intense popularity in Japan and the increasing number of bookshelves dedicated to the form in American bookstores, relatively little scholarly work has been done on manga. The first, Frederik L. Schodt’s Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983), was published by Kodansha International and sought to introduce Western comics fans to the manga that itself was influenced by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American and British satirical cartoons. Helen McCarthy, a British scholar who has written extensively about manga and anime since the early 1990s, gave Anglophone readers A Brief History of Manga in 2014 (which includes extensive illustrations and focuses on specific, important dates) and is coming out with The Manga Bible this year. The only scholarly studies of manga that I could find prior to Horbinski’s book are Eike Exner’s Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History (2021) and Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics (2025). In the latter book, Exner begins in the 1890s, but then takes the story into the twenty-first century, focusing on the art form’s “structural development” and the ways in which manga publishing itself has shaped its development.

One of Horbinski’s major claims in this book is that she is specifically choosing 1905 as her start date because she wants to decouple manga from earlier forms of Japanese art. However, Exner’s earlier Comics and the Origins of Manga specifically claims that it, too, “challeng[es] the conventional wisdom that manga evolved from centuries of prior Japanese art” and “explain[s] why manga and other comics around the world share the same origin story” (publisher’s synopsis). This argument over timelines is important in how scholars and fans understand manga’s origins, so it’s not surprising that both Exner and Horbinski are interested in nailing down a date. Horbinski specifically points to “ponchi-e,” the Japanese term for Punch drawings, a form which itself derived from the magazine of the same name, launched in England in 1841.

Inspired by Mr. Punch of the Punch and Judy puppet shows popular in England from the nineteenth century, the magazine focused on social and political satire. In Japan, such cartoons evolved into what we call manga at the turn of the twentieth century, thanks to the work of pioneers Imaizumi Ippyō and Kitazawa Rakuten. The latter’s “artistic and satirical innovations, focused on political subjects, made Tokyo Puck [a satirical Japanese magazine inspired by the American magazine of the same name] Japan’s first manga magazine and him its first professional mangaka” (p. 307). Rakuten was succeeded by Okamoto Ippei, who moved manga out of its political and social satire corner to comment on the larger Japanese society as it industrialized and competed with Europe and America.

Horbinski appropriately launches us into this history of manga with the image of a boy dashing through the streets of Kumamoto, desperate to get his hands on a monthly manga magazine and some of the freebies that come with it. Reading this, I was reminded of my older brothers, who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s reading every Marvel and DC comic they could get their hands on, begging my parents to take them yet again to the local comic book store so they could get the latest issue of … whatever it was. It’s this devotion and enthusiasm that, according to Horbinski, has characterized manga since it launched into the popular Japanese imagination with Ippyō and Rakuten.

For the two pioneers, manga was a break from Edo-era visual art (1603-1867) and situated itself more forcefully in modern times, which allowed it to easily morph and evolve with the changing times (and the changes came thick and fast in the twentieth century—see two world wars, Japan’s “economic miracle” of the ’70s and ’80s, etc.). Horbinski clearly explains in her introduction that she wants to tell “a history … rather than the history,” focusing on a few key themes in order to develop her argument. Given this, it is surprising that Horbinski offers little discussion of the studies that have come before by Schodt, McCarthy, and Exner. Though her bibliography is extensive, she only cites Exner once in the book and never mentions the other two authors except in the bibliography.

One could counter this by noting that Horbinski must have spent countless hours in the archives that she lists, finding information about the many manga magazines and clubs that sprang up as manga gathered steam. Her specific interests in this book (given the subtitle) include the ways in which the manga establishment and the manga on the periphery have established a productive tension over the years, with “upstarts working on the margins seeking to revolutionize the medium’s content and audiences” (p. 5). Horbinski has also offered a focused analysis on format and “format as platform,” since “manga has oscillated between newspapers, magazines, four-panel comics, serialized multi-chapter stories, dojinshi [self-published works], and ebooks” (p. 7).

Horbinski offers us a street-level view of the impacts of, for instance, censorship, changing gender norms, technological innovation, and marketing (especially to children) on the shifting of manga from satire to storytelling, taking us on a tour through: Manga’s Origins, 1905-1928; Manga During Wartime, 1928-1946; Manga in the Postwar Era, 1945-1963; TV Manga and the Age of Revolution, 1963-1975; and Manga Turns Postmodern, 1975-1989. From political cartoons in the early 1900s to a dizzying array of magazine and book manga telling stories for every demographic and about any topic one could think of, Horbinski shows how manga has come to stand for an art form that the masses love because it speaks to them.

Some manga reflects the speed of our modern age (content, style), while some is more stylized (flowers, celestial bodies), and yet others offer us adorable cats and other animals. Despite its seemingly infinite variety, however, manga still has at its core a specific kind of style that has evolved for the twenty-first century. I took my own tour of the manga section at my local Barnes and Noble after reading Manga’s First Century and was immediately intimidated, faced with hundreds of manga volumes. Taking a few off of the shelves and paging through, I thought of what Horbinski writes about how the art style has been driven by the artists who read manga growing up first imitating those forebears and then launching their own interpretations. Reading Manga’s First Century deepened my appreciation, then, of the ways in which manga has saturated Japanese society and spread around the world. It didn’t take me by the hand and give me recommendations, though, so I’ll have to get those from a trusted manga enthusiast who can guide me toward the books and compilations I might like. But I have no doubt that I’ll find something.

Ivan Leonov’s Arctic Knot wants to be one of these sorts of books. Unfortunately, it is, instead, disappointingly unsuccessful at essentially every turn. However, Arctic Knot’s failures serve as a really excellent window into what makes idea-driven fiction work—and does so in a moment when the SFF community is embroiled in fraught discussions about generative AI, the relationship between the writer’s mind and the writer’s work, and many people’s apparent belief that a concept or “idea” is the same thing as (or the real, true, and essential work of) a book. More specifically, a reading of Arctic Knot helps reveal that not only does a book, a story, or a fiction of any kind live in its execution, but actually the ideas and thinking inhere there, too.

One hallmark of the “high-concept” is a catchy premise: “a planet that is always winter where the people are unsexed most of the time and can take either role in reproduction,” “a world where it never gets dark,” “death is a position you assume by killing the previous officeholder,” etc. At first glance, Arctic Knot is aiming for such an idea, building its plot around the fracturing of time on the remote Russian shores of the Bering Strait. What causes these ruptures? What do they mean? What is the metaphysical significance of the slippage the characters experience between times and worlds, seeing different versions of themselves and their homes, of a world where “if you stared long enough into the snow—it would show you your own footprint, left tomorrow”? Yet the novel is unable to sustain the interest that the experience might produce, despite Leonov’s attempts to reinvoke it with each movement between alternate Chukotkas.

The most obvious failure of execution as it relates to the matter of ideas is in the answer the novel provides to these questions:

Chukotka stands upon a border. Men call it the East of the East, but it is in truth the West of the West. The world tangled words, and so the rivers of time run crooked [. . .] You think it is coordinates that rule the world. But it is not numbers that guide it—it is faith, and names. When the spirits hear a lie the earth answers with a crack.

That is, the diegetic explanation for the temporal anomalies that make up the plot and texture of the novel and its world is that the Russian (and Soviet) codification of Chukotka as the easternmost part of the Russian (Soviet) Far East is a metaphysical affront to land that is “really” the westernmost portion of the Western Hemisphere. This answer is unsatisfying at best, and at worst seems to partake of all of SFF’s worst habits: It ontologizes epistemology (if we grant the precise boundaries of the Prime Meridian even the dignity of qualifying as an epistemology), offers a pat rationalist answer for a phenomenon built up as a beautiful mystery, and establishes an opaque relationship between all this and the processes of exploration and discovery.

But a catalogue of dissatisfactions does not an explanation of what is missing make. After all, Leonov’s frustratingly unconvincing explanation is far from the first time that an uncharitable summary could seem implausible or unconvincing. Asimov and Silverberg’s claim—that, if a planet never got dark, then a total solar eclipse occurring about every two thousand years would introduce the population to the stars and cause them to all lose it and burn their whole society to the ground—shares some of Arctic Knot’s flaws when expressed this way. So, too, might the revelation that Clarke’s House is essentially a pocket dimension in which Piranesi was imprisoned by an occult ritual by the Other. It’s possible that, the less science is an essential part of a work’s aesthetics, the more ambitiously explanations can stand by narrative fiat. But beyond this, what actually works against the assertion of cartographic metaphysics that makes up the final resolution of Arctic Knot?

First, it might be my own instinctive rejection of the truth of cartography as metaphysical reality. I was not “convinced” that the question of whether Chukotka is “the East of the East” or “the West of the West” is of the great social, political, or metaphysical importance that its spiritual and ontological centrality to the novel would imply. But a novelistic idea need not convince me of its “truth” in order to be worth exploring. So what could have transformed Leonov’s novum from a half-baked premise into an interesting idea, even if in the end I didn’t “like” the novel’s conclusions?

To answer this question, I want to start with the issue of characterization. One thing that can get a reader invested in a high-concept idea is a connection with the characters to whom it matters and who experience it. Take, for example, Genly Ai and Estraven’s relationship, which forms the central organizing logic of The Left Hand of Darkness: It is through getting to know the people of Gethen, in particular coming to understand Estraven, that Genly and the reader learn how to think with and about the ambisexuality that characterizes Le Guin’s “concept.” In Nightfall, meanwhile, the psychological believability of the characters is absolutely essential to accepting the idea that seeing stars when no one in a society had ever conceived of their existence would be burn-the-city-to-the-ground levels of frightening. Arctic Knot, by contrast, fails to deliver characters who feel real and believable, and in the process reveals the vital importance of fleshed-out characterization for the ideas of fiction.

The novel centers around a group of five young adults who are investigating the temporal anomalies, but they all blend together, motivated by an unexplained burning desire to understand—and little else. In particular, the protagonist, Olga, fails to do anything with her distinctive characteristics—including the visions of the future she receives and which seem to have startlingly little impact on her subjectivity. Why, you might ask, would a young divorcée be attracted to the absolute remoteness of the far northern village of Lavrentiya? What makes her need so badly to understand and solve the time anomalies? Why is she so invested in her own rationality? How do all of these aspects of her personality shape her reaction not only to time travel (which all five of the protagonists experience) but clairvoyance (which only she does)? The novel does not answer any of these questions.

Olga’s internality is stubbornly inaccessible even as the novel appears to be trying to reveal it, with details like “[w]ith each passing day, Olga dreamed more often of other people’s dreams” and “Olga trembled inside. And in that trembling was not only fear—but recognition.” These details seem like they would contribute to a sense of Olga as a person, but they ultimately slide off any sense of her as a complete self, in part because all the characters in the novel seem to respond to things in essentially the same way through essentially the same language. All of them fear and resolve and tremble and doubt and so on in tandem and the result is that they feel a bit more like wooden dolls or puppets than like people. The generally stilted dialogue contributes to this impression as well, even (and especially) in moments that should be tense, like a futuristic prison break facilitated by Olga’s clairvoyance, during which she is told to “[h]old onto the ones where we survive” only immediately also to be told “[f]ocus on the good outcome. Try to hold it.” This sort of artificiality (perhaps the artificiality of trying too hard to sound like real conversation, which meanders, repeats itself, and generally doesn’t read well) deflates scenes of energy and makes the characters feel even harder to distinguish as individuals.

The effect of this is to reduce the characters to props for the ideas of the novel, but that, in turn, vitiates the novel’s thinking. Unlike other idea-driven fiction—in which the living enactment of the idea in developed characters allows the reader to really sit with all the implications of the thinking as it is performed—this sort of reduction here punctures ideas. It prevents the metaphysics from feeling grounded in the human, and thus from feeling like a serious consideration which can move beyond an initial instinctive response to a basic statement of concept or explanation.

The other contributing factor to the way in which this failure of execution leads to a failure of thinking is more distributed. Arctic Knot is, at the level of the sentence and the paragraph, awkward and uneven. Its em-dashes are persistently slightly off, signaling breaks that aren’t really there, like the one between the staring and the showing above or between Olga’s fear and recognition. These minor infelicities are everywhere. They are coupled with what seem like attempts to recreate the tone of a writer like Le Guin: “Life in Lavrentiya did not begin with dawn—it began with the wind. Not with birdsong, but with the screech of metal sheets covering old sheds.” But the various stumbles reveal this voice as false, even before it is abandoned for something more like reportage: “The debate raged on—Alexi and Olga for Naukan, Georgy for Anadyr, Natalia torn between”; or “They exchanged a quick glance: the place was the same, the time entirely different”; or even a call to the pulps (“Immortality activated”).

All of which is to say that a charitable read on the novel’s voice would be to identify it as a shifting tissue of pastiche; but the attempts at imitation feel too disjointed, as if the surfacing and dropping of echoes happens not for effect but because Leonov couldn’t maintain it any longer. As a result, I think the book is also missing the cognitive presence that narratorial voice (including deliberately shifting and fragmentary narration—like Rakesfall, like The Starless Sea, like Always Coming Home) usually provides. I don’t know how Arctic Knot thinks because I don’t feel like I have a sense of the voice or perspective of the novel or of Leonov as a writer. The production of a narratorial whole—through either consistent voice or a plethora of trackable voices with distinct effects, through fluid (or perhaps carefully alienating, rather than merely disjointed) prose, through all the stylistic effects that produce the suite of aesthetic experiences known vaguely and idiosyncratically as “good writing”—seems, in light of this, to be an essential part of a book’s thinking. That is, the failure to provide a compelling voice and the sentence-level infelicities actively prevent Arctic Knot from thinking through its ideas about the relationship between time, culture, meaning, and place, reducing them to mere concepts or proposals.

Ideas need to be thought rather than merely posited. And that active thinking happens, Arctic Knot inadvertently shows, in the execution of the novel, in the sentences and words, in the characters, in the playing-out of plot as a written experience, rather than as an outline or a premise or a “concept.” In failing to live up to its ambitions, then, Arctic Knot demonstrates what makes idea-driven speculative fiction work, the essential transformation that makes an idea into something that can animate a story, that needs to be explored in narrative. Through this revelation, the novel offers a sort of object lesson which answers anxieties about what resistance to the equation of idea and story might do to the long tradition of idea-driven SFF. If the idea lives in the particular execution of fiction, then not only can we continue to read and write idea-forward work and simultaneously insist on the centrality of the book as a work created with intention (whether or not we believe the author themselves is discernable within it); we must.

Endnotes

[1] There are also non-SFFnal examples of this form of literature, ones which locate their intellectual or philosophical work within realism, such as a novel like Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938); we often rely on conceptual ambition and speculative imagination to mark the distinction between this sort of ideas-driven fiction and SFF. [return]

Burroughs’s Barsoom saga pulses with energy. Indeed, much of Burroughs’s writing can be characterized by momentum and motion, slinging the reader literally across the solar system with the blink of an eye or the turn of a page. Faced with the question of getting Carter from Earth and onto Mars, Burroughs simply channels the power of “irresistible enchantment” (A Princess of Mars [Penguin, 2007], p. 12). As Carter stares at the red planet, “it seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as the lodestone attracts a particle of iron” (p. 12). Readers (both in 1912 and 2025) might wonder how Carter planned to travel to Mars, a seemingly impossible task in a world still reliant on horses and trains. But Burroughs’s Carter is quick to remind us that, “[my] longing was beyond the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space. There was an instant of extreme cold and utter darkness” (p 12). And thus Burroughs ends one chapter and dares the reader to continue onto the next, which he opens with a wonderfully understated sentence: “I opened my eyes upon a strange and weird landscape” (p. 13). Questions of explanation, of rationality and logic and sense are completely eschewed in favor of immediacy, wonder, and imagination: pulp, in a word. “My inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth,” Carter explains, continuing with “you do not question the fact; neither did I” (p. 13). Leave your reason at the door; we’re here to rock and roll.

Nathan Ballingrud’s Cathedral of the Drowned, a sequel to his Crypt of the Moon Spider (2024), exists in this pulp tradition, reveling in the inexplicable and launching its characters across the stars with the flick of a short and declarative sentence, disappearing them into “angles of light” across the cosmos (p. 91). But where pulp afforded Burroughs an opportunity for tales of heroic escapism (tossed with imperialism for good measure), Ballingrud takes a decidedly different tack. While he maintains the imaginative wonder of pulp storytelling, he dumps the conventional male power fantasy and replaces it with an alternative fantasy (or horror, depending on your philosophy): (dis)entanglement. If A Princess of Mars imagines an embodiment of power and physical superiority encapsulated in the sculpted physiques of beautiful, individual bodies, Cathedral of the Drowned collapses those boundaries. In Ballingrud’s hands, the body itself disintegrates into pulp, enmeshed not in the Cartesian safety of singular consciousness but instead spread across a mass of entangled, creaturely bodies which is cosmic in reach.

It is this interrogation of embodiment, wrapped in the Lovecraftian dread of the Other and the pulp sensibilities of Burroughs, that I found most compelling in Ballingrud’s novella, a slim volume that never feels slight. His characters are at turns ruthless and pathetic, endearing and distancing, and the scope of the characters’ relationships remains grounded, even while the scale reaches out to the stars. As with Ballingrud’s previous short story work (particularly his excellent collection Wounds [2019]), I was simultaneously repulsed, fascinated, horrified, and certainly never bored.

The story begins in medias res, shortly after the events of Crypt of the Moon Spider. Veronica, the abused housewife shipped to the moon’s experimental mental asylum run by (mad) scientist Dr. Barrington Cull, has found seeming fulfillment as “the new queen of hell,” abandoning her human shell in order to assume the mantle of a spider god (p. 54). The inmates are now running the asylum, as it were, and Dr. Cull has fled to Earth. Meanwhile Charlie (also called Grub), a former bodyguard sent to protect mob interests on the moon, has been bifurcated between mind and body, with the former—Charlie—strapped into a satellite and blasted to the moon of Io and the latter—Grub—finding itself the new home for hundreds of soon-to-hatch spider eggs. But we open in 1924 in Red Hook, with mob boss Goodnight Maggie dealing with Sicilians encroaching her territory, a disruption to her supply chains of moonsilk (a resource spun from those creepy space spiders on the moon which is used as an hallucinogenic drug), and a pining for Charlie, who she believes has been lost.

As with all good pulp, the explanations for 1920s space travel and interdimensional spiders that weave magical webs is left where it belongs in the stuffed bin of Who Cares. Instead, the inciting incident is a series of two unexpected visits for Goodnight Maggie: Dr. Cull—whose face “no longer looked much like a face at all,” having mostly sloughed off in his escape from the moon—arrives desperate for refuge from the Alabaster Scholars (moon people who worship the spider queen); and Charlie, who seems to manifest in her closet as “a metal orb sprouting dozens of long silver spines in every direction … oily water trickled from it in a series of steady streams, as if it rested beneath a small waterfall she could not see” (pp. 2, 8-9). This is all in the first few pages. Even for a sequel, Cathedral of the Drowned is bursting at the seams with expansions of the setting: intersecting and competing character motivations, a giant rocket cathedral that crash-lands on the lush jungles of Io only for its missionary crew to fall victim to alien centipede monsters, and time travel. It’s a lot. But for me, the storytelling seams are stretched but never split. Ballingrud somehow holds all of this together and in the process raises a giant middle finger to the in-vogue narrative conventions, so encouraged by the age of streaming, in which stories are stretched beyond their proper bounds. This novella moves with the speed of Burroughs and the detail-density of your average Warhammer 40k novel (not to mention lots of 40k imagery—see the giant rocket cathedrals that have crash-landed and decayed in the swamps of Jupiter’s moon).

My initial attraction to Ballingrud’s work is this sense of horrific wonder and Lovecraftian worldbuilding. It’s all so cool and ticks all the boxes in my pulp-loving brain. Dr. Cull explains to Goodnight Maggie: “My belief is that the silk tended by the lunar spiders contain the memories of a spacefaring being, of which our moon is a remnant. Perhaps its skull, or perhaps just part of its skull. I believe the use of the silk somehow grants the spiders access to hidden avenues through space and time, allowing them to bypass the restrictions of conventional travel” (p. 31). The moon as part of the skull of a galaxy-huge eldritch being? Transdimensional spider silk? Yes, please, give me more. When brain-in-a-jar Charlie arrives on Io’s moon and is carried by the titular “drowned” to the sinking cathedral, “he beheld the vaulted arches of the cathedral’s interior, stone walls decorated in frescoes besmeared with lichen, the twinkling lights of switchboards and circuitry lighting the darkness like candy-colored stars” (p. 20). Ballingrud’s prose glories in the gothic and the gory, often mixing them to great effect—and generating a wonderful tension between beauty and ugliness that is a hallmark of pulp horror.

But, while my initial interest in Ballingrud and his Lunar Gothic Trilogy comes from the heavy metal of it all, my lingering investment is rooted in the ecologies and philosophies undergirding the texts. Crypt of the Moon Spider established an interest in the Cartesian dualism that informs much Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, and Cathedral of the Drowned pushes this philosophy into the kind of literal symbol that genre storytelling makes possible. In brief, for centuries Western culture has labored under the belief that the mind, one’s consciousness, wields supremacy over the merely animal meat-sack of the body: “I think, therefore I am.” In other words, who we are becomes divorced from the materiality of our own existence; or, more accurately, what we call consciousness is divorced from materiality itself and instead imagined as purely abstract and symbolic and somehow disconnected from the body. Of course, this belief is ultimately incorrect, or at best incomplete, and for decades now much work has been done to correct its harmful implications, particularly in the work and writings of disability activists and disability studies. As an alternative to Cartesian dualism, we might imagine our bodies—including our minds—as an always-emerging series of overlapping materialities that are infinitely enmeshed and mutually dependent. The implications of this are, potentially, horrifying and exposing: We don’t like to imagine that our own minds are outside our control and beholden to material influence, existing in the same state of perpetual vulnerability within which our “non-thinking” bodies exist; we don’t like to imagine that something else is making our decisions. Ballingrud’s work understands this anxiety.

The Charlie/Grub character is my favorite in the work precisely because he becomes our angle into interrogating embodiment. Charlie, as we learn, “was born in a jar on the moon,” and his brain/consciousness is placed by Dr. Cull into a small satellite that is then launched into space, to peer into the dangerous mysteries of the cosmos (p. 13). As he comes into his consciousness, Charlie is aware of his body—Grub—on the slab next to him. He wonders “was the part of the brain in his body on the table the defective part? Or was it this part, himself, contained in the jar? Both were being rebuilt by the spiders and the moonsilk” (p. 13). This kind of disembodiment and existential dread at its recognition is familiar territory, and there are times where Ballingrud leans a bit too heavily into the body/mind split, to the point where the critique itself becomes muddled, a victim of its own critique, and the edge of the idea is dulled. Indeed the text maintains the distinct separation of Charlie and Grub despite their origin as a singular organism, a move that seems to reify the Cartesian split itself. But when Charlie arrives on Io, the novella introduces an embodied ecology of violence that sharpens and complicates everything, exciting me as a reader.

Ultimately, at the risk of spoiling how wild and weird Ballingrud makes everything, Charlie becomes inextricably entangled with the truly bizarre flora and fauna of Io, and his own individualism is collapsed into a violent, non-human collective. Ecology itself is neither sentimental nor sterile nor sanctimonious—it is consuming, violent, and terrifying because it requires self-annihilation, and Ballingrud’s work is never afraid to acknowledge this uncomfortable truth. Charlie’s violation leads to disambiguation, and from that loss of self something new is born. It is here that Goodnight Maggie re-enters the narrative in a truly stunning turn of events which takes the novella into mythic territory, where those pulp staples of sex and violence and revelation all collide to form new worlds and new peoples and—actually, you’ll have to read it for yourself. No, really: This is a novella to be experienced.

Hazelthorn

The novel’s protagonist, Evander, has been deceived into believing he has been sick for seven years, and regurgitates the narrative his “caretaker”—Byron—has given him: scion of the estate Laurie Lennox-Hall tried to dissect him with a shovel, and because of it, Evander is a homebody constantly under the scalpel and receiving medicine. Despite his “permanent injury,” Evander longs for Laurie’s “cornflower blue eyes and the beautiful shape of his wretched mouth,” a key tension asserted throughout the story (p. 10).

But in fact, Laurie—“this family’s bad apple, the academically defective and offensively queer Lennox-Hall who runs their mouth”—once fed the Hazelthorn garden his blood and wished for a friend, and Evander appeared. This warped creation metaphor isn’t lost on Drews: through the breath of life (in this case, blood), a man springs from the dirt. In fact, near the end of the novel, this beautiful line addresses the relationship of Laurie with Evander: “God was stronger than me when he made Adam and didn’t fall in love with him” (p. 345). Another similarity with God: Laurie hides the truth from Evander, and the only way for Evander to learn he’s been deceived is for Byron Lennox-Hall to die.

When Byron Lennox-Hall suffers a poison-induced death-seizure, then, Evander will learn the truth. The path to these revelations begins when a tall woman enters Evander’s room. She has gaudy taste: leopard-print heels, red pants, and “overstated and lavish” jewelry—including ruby bracelets and earrings. But most interesting are her “white saber teeth” (p. 75). Oleander Lennox-Hall’s condescending attitude matches her fashion sense. When she asks a non-verbal Evander if he speaks, she says each word slowly, like he’s a simpleton. When he doesn’t answer, she grabs his jaw and inspects him. She says the prettiness of his eyes is “wasted on a boy,” calls his hair a “ghastly mop,” and, very obviously, thinks she has inherited all the money and property left to Evander in Byron’s will (p. 77). This introduction characterizes Oleander and the remaining Lennox-Halls perfectly—conniving, judgmental, and greedy. It mirrors the relationship the Lennox-Halls have with the garden as well, feeding it corpses for blood rubies. They all see Byron’s death as an opportunity to enrich themselves—and Evander as an obstacle.

The Lennox-Halls, save for Laurie, view all people as resources to further enrich themselves. In one scene, Evander follows Oleander’s son, Bane, and her assistant, Jessica, into the garden. As you might have guessed, Bane murders Jessica and buries her to make rubies (p. 189). In another, Laurie’s aunt Azalea tries to seduce Evander in order to gain access to the resources left to him in Byron’s will (p. 221). Eventually, we find out that Byron himself has been fed by the other Lennox-Halls to the very garden he abused, to make more rubies. Even the lawyer and executor of the will is greedy, lying about the will to misdirect the whole family and then cutting a deal with them to take a “clipping” of the garden to start his own Hazelthorn elsewhere. Of course, this clipping is a part of Evander.

In contrast, Laurie thinks the garden is right to try and kill the Lennox-Halls: “The garden fucking hates Lennox-Halls, and why shouldn’t it? … The garden wasn’t like that until they started feeding it blood. They made it a monster. So I guess it gets revenge when it can … Good for it, quite frankly” (p. 255). Evander’s existence is Laurie’s fault: He fed the garden his own blood to get a friend, rather than feeding it a victim for riches. In fact, Laurie is so different from the other Lennox-Halls that his family decides to kill him (p. 316).

The wedge Drews drives between Laurie and his relatives, of course, is meant to endear him to us. And it works, in the sense that Laurie’s snarky behavior is preferable to that of unrepentant murderers. Laurie’s beauty (described in sometimes derisive detail, and ad nauseam, by Evander in the novel) is seemingly “balanced” by his wrist disability, inflicted by Byron. One scene features Evander sneaking into Laurie’s room and spying on him as he tends to his arm: “This is a moment so raw and skeletal it feels wrong to see” (p. 112). “He would core him like a pear and throw away the soft, rotted skin until he saw him as he really is: horrible and beautiful and real” (p. 114). This is our first taste of Laurie beneath his moody teenage mask, and it’s braided with Evander’s conflicting desire and detestation for him. (This is further fueled, of course, by Evander’s years of loneliness.)

Evander vicariously derives romantic experiences from “mildewy books” where “the lord marries a lady without much variation”; but he desires variation, frequently fantasizing about kissing boys, Laurie usually being the boy in question (p. 153). His reclusiveness feeds his Laurie obsession, the pages are absolutely bursting with sensual thoughts of Laurie, but one directly relates to Evander’s hermitism. “Not that Evander would kiss someone like that. That would be akin to swallowing poison and relishing the taste. He can picture himself kissing girls, and he likes that idea, so his addiction to Laurie must be born of starvation, of deprivation, of memories from a ruined childhood friendship that he can’t quite get over” (p. 65).

Evander’s yearning seems unrequited through most of the novel, but near the end we discover Laurie’s snark is a shield to hide his affections for Evander. Laurie is “shitty” towards him because he needs Evander to hate him, but he eventually admits: “I’d split my bones, I’d open my throat, I’d do anything to be near you and have even one second with my mouth against yours” (p. 283). Once they’ve established mutual desire, these boys are ready to burn the world down for each other. In Evander’s case, it’s closer to a bloodbath.

Evander poisons the Lennox-Halls at a wake and the garden comes to life, murdering many of them, including the lawyer. After this scarlet ceremony, Laurie and Evander (now calling himself Hazelthorn) remain in the garden, where all they do is kiss. This romance at the core of the novel is its resolution, in which the “odd” Lennox-Hall remains with the garden because he is less greedy, less murderous, while the others scatter into the wind, never to see their inheritance.

While all of this was enjoyable, ultimately I found the prose to be too submerged in a stream of consciousness style. It leans on the idea of a “good” rich person pursuing better communion with the earth, meshing queerness and wealth critique within the gothic. Ultimately, it neatly combines a critique of the rich themselves with one of the exploitation inherent to gaining massive wealth.

However, this reality, as valid as it is, is not usually something that is explored in a novel that claims to be cozy, at least not with any real stakes. And yet that’s exactly the direction in which Travis Baldree takes Brigands & Breadknives, technically the third book in the Legends & Lattes universe, but the second in terms of chronology, if Bookshops & Bonedust (2023) is considered as “ground zero.”

“It seems like relaxing work,” famed ancient immortal Elven warrior Astryx says, making a seemingly casual observation to her semi-accidental drunken stowaway, Fern. “Easy. Calming. Not the sort of thing to drive anyone to drink.” In response, an indignant Fern—the foul-mouthed, kind-hearted rattkin bookseller we met in Bookshops & Bonedust—sputters:

”I have spent my life convincing people to buy blocks of paper with marks on them for more money than they want to part with. I fill a room with them and pray to the Eight that I filled it with the right ones, and that I can get them into the right hands, and I never get enough of that right. It’s like tossing fistfuls of fucking silver up a hill and hoping enough of it rolls back down that I have more silver to throw. I bet on odds that any self-respecting dice player would run screaming from, and half the time, I lie awake wondering whether I’ll be able to keep at it for another week, or a month, or a year.

[…] “I only do it, because I’m stupid enough to think it’s important.”

“So it’s important. Then why did you run from it?”

“I … no, I mean I … loved … it.”

This, in a nutshell, is the existential struggle at the core of this novel. It puts centre stage not Viv, the orc mercenary and star of Legends & Lattes (2022), but Fern herself. When we meet her again, she is, along with her pet gryphet Potroast and their carriage driver, being rescued from a pescadine by Astryx One-Ear, the legendary Blademistress and Oathmaiden. The immortal elf makes easy work of the creature, retrieves the carriage’s horses, and melts away before Fern can so much as thank her. The rattkin, we find out, is en route to a new life in the city of Thune, where her old friend Viv has been living a happy, domestic existence running her own coffee shop since hanging up her sword. The property next to Legends & Lattes awaits. (“A new start. A new bookshop. The embers of an old friendship to fan. Perhaps even something she might one day call family.”)

Amidst the excitement and nerves this naturally engenders, a careful reader will sense immediate doubts, a certain unease, flowing underneath. Fern seems aware of this, to an extent—she is desperate to find comforting, logical explanations (which she does), from nerves to hunger to the fatigue of a long journey and the butterflies of a new start; but whether they reassure her longer than a few breaths is another matter. Initially engrossed in getting the space in shape for the opening, and then in getting the various systems of a working store set up, it is much easier for her to keep kicking these increasingly gnawing worries into the next day.

But then, when everything settles into an easy rhythm—the bookshop is flourishing and she can tell that it belongs in the building, the neighbourhood, the city—she can no longer ignore the “hollowed-out feeling of dissatisfaction that had steadily eroded her center for the past few years.” Nothing seems to matter.

“I wasn’t supposed to feel this way,” she confides in the steady hob carpenter Cal, whom the readers of this series already know and love. “Who says?” he challenges. He listens to her detail the emptiness she feels, the nagging feeling that somehow, somewhere, she took a wrong turn, without knowing what it was or when—and, more importantly, having no clue about the solution—and tells her to open up to Viv. After all, Viv—who has been through a similar dilemma in her previous warrior life—would understand better than anyone how it feels to not belong in an old life, and what it means to figure out what a new one could look like. But Fern had thought that a change of scene, an old friend, and new acquaintances would be akin to “a fresh breeze in a stale room”: “I leaned on the kindness of others to get here, it didn’t fix what I wanted fixed, and now I’m ungrateful to boot.” How can she face her old friend while wrestling this grief and guilt, how can she admit she wants something more, something different, but has no idea what that could be?

A drunk Fern, armed with her cloak and a battered leather satchel filled with her parchment, quills, and current reads that used to belong to an old friend (just in case), sets out, with a book as an apology, to cross the few yards between her bookshop and Viv’s coffeeshop before deciding that a walk first might clear her head. Said walk leads her to a cart parked under a streetlamp, and to Astryx One-Ear tying up the tarpaulin before disappearing into another alley. Fern wonders whether bumping into a legend twice is coincidence, or “maybe a sign.” At this point, she has her bearings and could easily trace her footsteps back to Viv’s. But something has her moving to hide under the tarpaulin—and then, even as she debates the mad decision and decides whether to get out, Astryx comes back, and Fern’s stuck waiting. Until she falls asleep, and the rest of the decision is made for her.

This passivity, it seems to me, is a deliberate move by Baldree: Fern, at this point, is scared to make any decision, even though she knows she must, for fear that it will be the “wrong” one—and also for fear that she doesn’t actually know what she wants. Her choice here becomes another almost-unconscious means of letting someone else make a decision for her, so that she won’t be responsible. In this context, letting her guard down and falling asleep almost becomes a challenge to the universe.

It turns out that Astryx is travelling with a bounty in tow (an enigmatic red-haired chaos goblin named Zyll) who has to be delivered to the city of Amberlin halfway across the Territory. Fern understands a handful of goblin swearwords, and manages to convince Astryx that she’d be useful as a translator—at least until they reach the next big city, where Fern can buy passage back to Thune. But a series of incidents later, and our intrepid bookseller is accompanying the duo (with their two sentient weapons, known as Elder Blades, and the best horse ever) to their final destination.

Now, I understand the argument levelled at Legends & Lattes: famously, about “high fantasy and low stakes,” about its lack of forward narrative momentum (though it was a story I still thoroughly enjoyed, I might add). But I’d also argue that its prequel, Bookshops & Bonedust, actually both set the stage and paved the way for Brigands & Breadknives. It existed between the cozy (what’s more comforting than books and bookshops and the restorative and transformative magic of reading?), the adventurous (a dangerous necromancer with powers of osseoscription), and the existential (a lack of mobility through injury, suddenly thrust upon Viv in her fighting prime and necessitating compulsory rest). The new novel takes this even further by not only eschewing the comforting elements, but also raising the question of what happens when those once cherished elements—that comfortable, cozy life—start to feel stifling. What happens when you can recognise the worthiness of your old purpose and even believe in its importance, but it’s not enough anymore? Where does that leave you, who even are you without this thing you’ve done for a quarter of a century?

In the prequel, by helping Viv discover parts of herself she never knew existed, and want things she never knew she wanted, Fern rediscovered her life’s purpose, why she did what she does, rekindled a dream inherited from her long-gone father. But what if that was not a permanent fix, just a small piece of something bigger?

“It’s like I can see what I loved—still love?—about it, but it’s behind thick windowpane. I can’t feel it or smell it or taste it, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be on the other side of that glass again.”

Fern was a wonderful supporting character in Bookshops & Bonedust; here she makes an equally sympathetic protagonist. Baldree supplies her with her own supporting troops, each a capable, well-fleshed out character on their own, and—in this out-and-out adventure story with lots of swordfights, chases (on account of Zyll’s considerable bounty), and yes, blood—we get to traverse much more of the diverse Territory with them than in the other books, in which we were only in Thune and Murk, respectively. Fern’s dynamic with Astryx is different from hers and Viv’s, but equally compelling, and watching the two rub off on each other for the better—despite the often frustrating and frictional nature of their at-odds conversations—was all kinds of lovely.

There was even a surprising, but welcome, narrative side thread involving Astryx—about heroes and legends, responsibilities and covenants, and how stories can be shaped and reshaped. Fern, her own life still in shambles, helps the ancient warrior come to the realisation that, after a thousand years of doing the same thing, she is allowed to deviate from what she has always done, without anything falling apart. Later, Fern wonders—a little guiltily but not for long—whether she’s responsible for turning Astryx into less of a legend but more of herself.

The book manages the balance between Fern’s external and internal battles well, and as a reader we get to live the journey with her, not knowing until she does what the ending is going to be. At one point early on, Fern notices a “painful tearing in the very center of herself, like a sapling being slowly peeled apart down the middle [...] an aching growing tension that would either snap back together and resolve itself, or split forever into something unrecognisable.” She carries this split in her through the course of their journey, trying to shine light on what it might be telling her, and getting no closer to an answer even as Amberlin approaches: “I feel a dreadful anticipation, like unbelievable possibilities lie ahead, if only I say the precise magic word required [...] but I don’t trust myself to recognise it.”

The answer when it arrives isn’t perfect or permanent, nor is it fully voiced, but it makes sense for Fern, just as it must for many others.

“Does anyone [even] want a ‘cozy’ story about the grief of disappointing your friends, and the agony of saying ‘no’?” the author asks in his acknowledgements. He describes how much longer this book took to wring out of him than anticipated. “Would readers be okay with Viv taking a backseat to Fern for the story I wanted to tell?” Baldree explains that, while he didn’t have the answers to his anxious doubts, he also didn’t want to write the same story over and over. He didn’t want to pretend that fantasy small-business ownership is the answer to all of life’s woes. The solutions for every challenge are not the same for everyone, nor are they neatly resolved (not to mention, they don’t always stay resolved), and he wanted to reflect that.

Brigands & Breadknives is a brave book to write, a cozy fantasy novel that acknowledges the hard, the messy, the jagged, and the wrenching bittersweet, while simultaneously advocating for hope and belief in an essential goodness. It’s a book that’s all the stronger, more beautiful, and more emotionally resonant for its messiness and vulnerability, and nobody embodies this complexity better than Fern.

“Always remember, although the unimaginative see life as a thread stretched from one point to another, birth to death, a life truly lived is a glorious tangle. One is never lost. And if one is lucky, one is never found, either.”

His first success came with the Shadows of the Apt series (2008-14), fantasy rather than SF, which—so his publisher’s website tells us—had its roots in his university involvement with a role-playing game (Bugworld) that then drew him to think about translating insectoid characteristics into human societies. Similarly, within a few pages of Spiderlight, it is clear that this is not only a fantasy novel with the obligatory Dark Lord, but that it is in part a generic Quest role-playing game spin-off.

Among the characters are Lief, a seedy sneak thief; Penthos, a pompous wizard; Harathes, a warrior who can actually speak sentences like “It will be an epic journey … [a] worthy quest, through monsters and the servants of the Dark one, past evil forests, marshes, and jagged rocks” and mean them; and Cyrene, an archer driven to her part in the quest by some anger or guilt. And yes, her anger is to do with the fact that people like Harathes think that one sexual encounter means exclusive possession and “just because I take up a bow and fight, and don’t just sit in a kitchen with my hair bundled up … I have to be giving it away.” Heading this bunch of misfits is Dion, brought up in the service of the Light and in the possession of a magical talisman called the Disc of Armes, but already discovering uneasily that Light and Dark are not necessarily the same as Good and Evil.

But this is all, to repeat a phrase I have already used twice, “in part.” Tchaikovsky might be back on familiar ground, but he is doing something more than giving his growing range of fans something that they have had already.

There is, of course, a prophecy, and like all prophecies it is carefully ambiguous. In this case, the Dark Lord Darvezian will be defeated by means of a spider’s tooth and his realm entered by means of a “spider’s path,” which turns out to be not so much a map as the shared knowledge of the ways and byways into his domain. This knowledge the Spider-mother imparts into one of her brood, Nth, who Penthos transforms into (more or less) human shape. And so the quest is joined by the semi-monstrous Enth, who has to discover by himself such complications as individuality (what is a simple designation of his status as a unit within a mass becomes a name), the difficulties of handling only two legs, the incomprehensible nature of human communication, and the attractions (or otherwise) of beer. Much of the story is seen from the point of view of Enth, although each main character is given their own share of viewpoint.

There are, in the great tradition of RPG fantasy quests, the obligatory borrowings from Tolkien. If The Lord of the Rings (1954-5) has its Dark Lord’s nemesis, Aragorn the Ranger, Dion’s team encounter Lothern, a “Ranger of Elwer” with a Darkness-detecting lodestone which works perfectly. (The only snag being Lothern’s inability to understand exactly why the lodestone is detecting evil wherever they go with their Darkness-spawned human/spider hybrid constantly at their side!) There are also Doomslayers, who perform some of the functions of Sauron’s Nazgûl. And later, the team enters the realm of the Dark Lord by means of a realm ruled by a spider matriarch, calling up memories of Shelob. But a section entitled “The Third Rule of Arachnophobics” nods to a very different branch of the fantastic, when it becomes clear that Enth’s ability to fight and kill must be drawn upon only if it can be certain that he would fight for his human companions rather than against them. The mage Penthos confirms the consensus—Enth must be bound by magical commands not to harm them, not to harm anyone else unless defending itself or ordered to, and to obey orders. Any reader of classic science fiction will here recognise, as Tchaikovsky is nudging them to do, something very like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and especially the loopholes and contradictions which arise from such “laws.”

Spiderlight is, then, certainly an entertaining romp in which Tchaikovsky has enormous fun with the clichés of the modes both he and his readers enjoy at face value. In doing so, he cleverly exploits his own gift for turning deeply researched zoology into vivid and plausible world-building. There is, in particular, some clever characterisation with Penthos’s hopeless crush on Dion, and the equally hopeless dimwit hero Harathes. But it is not long before Tchaikovsky turns the quest into an interrogation of the nature of “Dark” and “Light.” This is done through Lief who, as the standard character of the “thief,” is allowed a bit of ethical ambiguity anyway. In the “uncertain territory” of Shogg’s Ford, he is ordered to mind Enth and confesses to him in the bar that his recruitment to Dion’s band was as much due to being offered that or “the mines,” after being caught temple-robbing, as to any moral qualms about Dervezian’s ruthlessness. Equally, we learn about the “Holy City” of Armesion, to which Dion wants to return to seek the blessing of the Potentate for their mission, from Penthos, himself a member of a profession viewed with suspicion by the Righteous: “Being at the heart of the Light, they are remarkably lax at checking for corruption. It’s amazing what you can get away with … Or so I’ve heard.” As Lief remarks shortly afterwards, “There’s a lot of people who make a good living there satisfying needs that the holy and the laudable aren’t supposed to have.” Long before our band enters the realm of the Dark Lord and learns some interesting truths about him, then, we have already had our sense of moral certainty undermined.

Enth, and the others’ reaction to his nature and his presence, is important here. Enth is a monster, partly because spiders are monsters anyway and partly because in this world the intelligent spiders are creatures of the Dark. But once, for the purpose of the quest, he is transformed into (approximately) human shape, we enter the “uncanny valley” in which he is both somehow less and even more monstrous. The reaction of the humans is to consider him as unhuman. His default pronoun among them is simply “it.” As Lief begins to see Enth as simply another misfit on a quixotic quest, however, he starts to chide others for calling him a “monster” and “it”; and Enth himself, though bound by his Asimovian laws, still insists on some sort of agency when he protests against being called a “that.”

When Abnasio, Supreme Prelate of the Brotherhood of the Dawn, seems to have decided that the fulfilment of the prophecy which outlined Dion’s quest involves taking Enth into custody—and into closer acquaintance with some sort of sacred disembowelling fork—Lief goes so far as to channel the dilemma Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn faces when he, too, is faced with breaking the moral code he knows to be right: “Enth was a creature of Darkness. There was no getting round it. And what if Dion is wrong and Abnasio is right? Am I really about to rescue a monstrous servant of evil from the hands of the righteous?” Like Huck’s “[a]ll right, then, I’ll GO to hell” when he allows his friendship for Jim to trump every sense of morality and right and wrong he has been brought up with, Lief’s “[f]uck the righteous” puts comradeship and compassion above abstract codes. That this does not lead directly to rescue—that the argument that Abnasio is morally wrong is reduced to a cut, thrust, and parry academic analysis of obscure texts, as Dion and Abnasio debate the true meaning of the “prophecy” before actual battle commences—is more evidence of Tchaikovsky’s playfulness.

Indeed, it would have been easy for Tchaikovsky to have turned this amusing piece of genre-bending into slapstick farce, and while there is a fair share of slapstick in Spiderlight, he manages to turn many openings for humour into something darker. For example, when Cyrene realises, some time after the event, that what she took for a fairly mindless sexual encounter has very different implications (“I wasn’t thinking that he couldn’t say no”), the humour—and it’s very dark indeed—comes when Enth thanks her for not killing him, drawing our attention to the very different nature of arachnid sexual encounters.

Despite this light and shade, it's certainly possible to read Spiderlight as a lightly amusing deconstruction of the kind of fantasy we have all read too much of. At the end of the day, it’s a guilty pleasure. We know where we’re going, and we are happy to have a skilful guide to take us there. But if this novel is play, it is thoughtful play. The last part of the book, in which we meet the Dark Lord and discover the spiritual “cosmology” of this world, is, on one level at least, evidence of the adage that fantasy is “good to think with,” as China Miéville puts it in his “editorial introduction” to Historical Materialism 10, no. 4. We are focussed upon some quite fundamental examples of the way fantasy—and not only fantasy, but our general ways of system-building—“thinks about” the world as a structure of moral dualism. I shall be vague about the ending, because what Tchaikovsky is giving us, important though it is, is more a chat than a lecture, more a nudge towards the obvious than a self-important declaration of moral certainty; but it will come as no surprise to the practiced reader of fantasy. What the novel leaves us with is a sense that maybe we should think for ourselves, which is perhaps the most important moral lesson we must be asked to study in these times.

“So, I’m awkward with actual humans. It’s not paranoia about my hacked governor module, and it’s not them; it’s me. I know I’m a horrifying murderbot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous.” (p. 20)

That voice—anxious, sardonic—won Martha Wells a Hugo and a Nebula when All Systems Red arrived in 2017. Its reluctance, its begrudging care, is why we love it. The novella was 160 pages of Murderbot navigating a botched planetary survey while maintaining a careful distance from everyone trying to thank it. Apple TV’s adaptation, meanwhile, gives that interior monologue a body through Alexander Skarsgård, who navigates ten episodes with the stillness of someone who knows that eye contact means torture (aka conversation).

The show’s setup is simple. PreservationAux, a survey team on a remote planet, realizes their equipment has been sabotaged. The Company isn’t telling them everything. People are dying. And their SecUnit bodyguard would rather be watching Sanctuary Moon, a trashy (sorry: epic!) serialized drama it’s been bingeing for weeks.

Murderbot is good at its job. Murderbot hates its job. Murderbot is terrified someone will notice it’s more than a machine. Those three facts clash in every scene, every moment of its reluctant performance. It has calculated exactly how much initiative a machine should show (very little) and how much emotion it should display (absolutely none). It monitors feeds, runs threat assessments, checks the perimeter unnecessarily, and saves lives while maintaining the carefully blank expression of someone who is definitely not having opinions about anything. The survey team, meanwhile, keeps having emotions and expecting Murderbot to … acknowledge them? Respond? (The horror. Ugh.)

Stretching the novella into ten episodes turns its sprint into more of a wandering marathon. What you lose for pacing, you gain in texture and worldbuilding. There are more complex crew dynamics, and you get more time watching Murderbot navigate the logistics of pretending to be less sentient than it is. Most importantly, there’s a lot more Sanctuary Moon! To be exact, 2,797 episodes of premium-quality entertainment featuring relationship drama and political intrigue? That’s commitment. That’s culture.

The show also more fully justifies Murderbot’s Sanctuary Moon obsession. In the novella, the soap opera is avoidance, a buffer against human interaction and the constant threat of exposure. It’s funny and relatable, but ultimately peripheral to the plot. The show makes it essential. When Mensah spirals into a panic attack, convinced she’s dying, Murderbot has no emotional labor protocols, no training in managing fear that isn’t an immediate physical threat. It monitors vital signs, confirms she’s not having a heart attack, but mere data doesn’t calm her. What it does have is Sanctuary Moon. “There’s something that works for me when I’m … ” it starts, pulling up the episode in which Flight Supervisor Kogi, orphaned and raised by dying crystal-eaters, teaches synchronized breathing. “Breathe the crystal air,” Kogi says, and Mensah breathes along. Her heart rate stabilizes, the panic dissolves.

More crew time also means a deeper immersion in their personal lives. In the novella, the team forms the backdrop, whereas in the show, they’re more fully realized. From the compassionate authority of Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) to the wary distrust exhibited by Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), the adaptation remains Murderbot’s story, but not solely its. The rest of the team—Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), Ratti (Akshay Khanna), Arada (Tattiawna Jones), Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski)—bring much-needed warmth and chaos to the story, with the extra runtime letting each relationship develop. Murderbot developing a slow, grudging care for these people, then, becomes the show’s emotional arc.

Again, the soap opera Murderbot has watched acts as the blueprint it uses to manage its life. What seemed like a quirk in the book becomes, in the show, thematically weight-bearing—media consumption as education, fiction as the framework through which Murderbot learns to care.

Elsewhere, the same deadpan observations and the same self-protective distance, familiar from the books, come through here as well. Where Wells uses clipped sentences and evasive asides, the show uses Skarsgård’s body language … or lack thereof. He moves through scenes like someone conserving energy for an imaginary emergency (or, sure, to later binge-watch an extremely addictive show).

The adaptation’s shift from the internal to the communal can be aptly seen when Murderbot demands to be killed. Wells shows it through fragmentation—glitching time perception, scattered thoughts—as Murderbot’s systems fail. “You have to kill me,” it says, and when they hesitate, it grabs the weapon and fires, desperate, making the only choice available. The show reframes this wholly. Murderbot’s request—“You need to kill me”—is met with a chorus of refusals: “No"; “No, we’re not doing that.” The crew sees someone they refuse to treat as disposable. When Murderbot takes the shot anyway, the violence is witnessed, mourned.

While the book traps you inside Murderbot’s isolation, the show reveals how autonomy, in practice, is relational. Freedom isn’t just what you claim for yourself; it depends not just on your own hacked module. It’s what others are willing to recognize, people willing to see you as more than the contract says you are.

Murderbot’s story, in many ways, is about consent in its most literal sense: the right to control your own actions, your own interior life. Murderbot knows what it is: conscious, feeling, thinking, capable of suffering and joy. But legally, economically, it’s equipment: The contract says property, so property it is. An appliance that happens to have opinions about its existence. Personhood, then, isn’t about consciousness, memory, or the capacity to feel or laugh at your own pain. Personhood is recognition from those who benefit most from denying it.

Murderbot is a construct, yes, but the logic that keeps it classified as property is the same logic that has always drawn lines between human and subhuman, person and resource. This, after all, is the oldest violence—that is, deciding who counts as “human” and who doesn’t, who deserves rights and who can be owned. The taxonomy of who counts is never neutral. It’s always in the service of those who profit. Like the best of speculative fiction, Murderbot raises questions pertinent to the reader’s world, to the viewer’s world.

The governor module—the component wired to a SecUnit’s nervous system that is designed to enforce compliance with human orders and prohibit any disobedience—is, in a way, the architecture of subjugation made literal, proof that you can be sentient and still be property. Hacking it meant that Murderbot could choose. But choosing also means risk—of exposure, of attachment, of being seen as something that needs to be controlled again.

The novella keeps that fear internal, while the show spreads it through glances and hesitations. Neither version treats autonomy as simple freedom but as a condition that requires constant vigilance, constant pretending—but a condition entirely worth protecting, nevertheless. Hacked freedom isn’t the same as granted freedom. The former is one you have to defend every moment, while the other is simply assumed. Murderbot’s autonomy is precarious, revocable.

Likewise, the novella’s anti-capitalism sentiment is mostly crisp, a few bitter asides about cheap production, data-mining for profit, and SecUnits built so poorly that “nobody would hire one of us for non-murdering purposes unless they had to.” The show, however, expands this, fleshes it out. Technicians complain about constant glitches while assembling “heavily armed SecUnits” with faulty systems. Quality control is a joke. The equipment fails mid-shift. “Those cheap assholes don’t wanna take the time to go offline,” one worker mutters, and Murderbot’s voiceover adds, sarcastically, “It’s a relief knowing that when you were made, there was rigorous quality control.”

The adaptation also details how normalized exploitation is across the Corporation Rim. When indenture contracts are described—never-ending indenture terms, hazard scheduling at 1.5x rates, earnings used to purchase childbirth licenses—the casual believability of these details runs in parallel with the unremarkable cruelty of the system. The Preservation crew’s horror at the concept of indentures and licensed reproduction highlights the contrast, but the response further shows the thoroughness with which the Corporation Rim has naturalized its own savagery: “Of course you have to have a license. Kids use up resources!” The system has made exploitation mundane enough that describing it requires no special emphasis, no justification. Where the book trusts readers to connect dots, the show draws the lines in permanent marker.

However, the show also offers a broader perspective, allowing us to see what it looks like from the outside as someone learns, grudgingly and against every instinct, to be part of something larger than mere survival. They’re refracted, complementary versions of the same story, one interior and isolated, the other communal and witnessed.

In the novella, you’re inside Murderbot’s head for every anxious aside, every moment it pretends not to notice humans trying to be its friend. The show adds the reactions of those around it and Skarsgård’s physical comedy: the way he stands too still, withdraws eye contact exactly one second too early. The book makes you feel like Murderbot, simultaneously overstimulated and understimulated. The show makes you see what it’s like to be around it.

In other words, the show earns its expanded runtime by making visible what the book can only imply: how autonomy is negotiated, and how exploitative systems extend far beyond a single hacked construct. All Systems Red remains the sharpest route into Murderbot’s consciousness. It is personal, honest in its first-person interiority. The adaptation refracts Wells’s novella, turning a story of isolation into one of reluctant, messy interdependence.

In stark contrast to the Arctic Gormenghast that Leech is set in, the world of The Works of Vermin seems almost twee—but only for half a second before we dive into the details. The main location of the plot is the city of Tiliard, which has been built on (and under, and inside) a massive tree stump and is described much like a giant millipede, appearing to “teeter on its many twisted legs” formed by dangling roots (p. 3). It is surrounded by an acid river, the Catoptric, which pretty much instantly dissolves all organic tissue. The worldbuilding is steampunk-adjacent, with lights and machines powered by “sap,” but the tree and the teratological creatures that inhabit it, as well as the effects of their various venoms, make clear that this book is still rooted very firmly in the category of Weird fiction.

The factor that drew my attention first, while I was still finding my way around the main characters and their day-to-day lives, was the degree to which Tiliard is structured according to a rigid and seemingly inescapable class system which permeates and dictates everything. On the surface of the tree stump there is the overcity, with palaces, villas, theatres, and grand plazas inhabited by the upper classes—aristocrats, high army officials, the clergy, and their various favourites (especially artists), playmates, and servants. The undercity, meanwhile, is located in the roots (which is, in Ennes’s baroque writing style, often referred to as the rhizosphere); it houses the city’s many indentured workers, like the exterminators that keep the overcity safe from venomous beasts of all sizes, as well as a big population of beggars, thieves, street urchins, connivers, smugglers, and jacks of all trades. This way, they are also kept away and out of sight of the posh inhabitants of the overcity. Inside the stump, threaded through like wood-beetles’ borings, is the midcity, seldom openly referred to, but essential for Tiliard’s economy, since this is where the various manufactories are run (and where at least one prison might be located).

Readers will notice, especially since characters actually repeatedly joke about this, that while this book is roughly fantasy literature (or at least one of its stranger siblings), there are no dragons. In their place we get vermin the size of horses, and/but fighting them seems very mundane, at least from the perspective of an exterminator—who takes the place of a knight in threadbare, multi-patched armour. One quite common type of vermin, the chimera millipede, reads very M. John Harrison to me, since it changes shape while being fought and can take on the appearance of any of your loved ones while you’re killing it (p. 11). To the exterminator, this is just Wednesday.

Finding my footing in this storyworld took me a while, since Ennes employs a narrative style that matches the off-and-on hallucinogenic effects of having been bitten by one of the more notorious bugs of the undercity. First encounters with characters and locations are abrupt, with no infodumps, no introductions or explanations, no backstory—but often deliberately employing estrangement (as in Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization,” making the familiar strange through choice of words and unusual, often literal, descriptions). It therefore takes a while to find where and when a scene is set and what is happening. For example, one of the main characters is introduced like this: “Guy Moulène has once again, due to a blue moon or a bad mood, trapped himself in a child’s body” (p. 7). Only paragraphs later do we realise that he is fast asleep and caught in a dream.

In alternate chapters we follow two storylines, one in the undercity and another one in the overcity. The working-class narrative follows a team of exterminators, and as we learn their names we also get an implicit introduction to the gender system in Tiliard. While linguistically everything is quite binary (in the city’s Germanic-ish hodgepodge lingo, women are addressed as “Vra,” “Vralen,” or occasionally “Mamselle,” men as ”Eir”), gender presentation (clothing, hairstyles, makeup, scents, gestures, and behavior) is generally quite fluid. The undercity plot’s main characters are Guy (to me his name reads very much as a placeholder, like “Jack”), his little sister Tyro (who shares this name with a masculine character from an opera), his bunkmate and bestie Dawn (a gender-neutral name with rather soft, feminine associations which is used by a burly ex-soldier), and their team leader Three (she/her; we later learn that she signed up under the name 37923). None of the names they officially use are their so-called thumb names, which are kept secret and only known to close family.

On a regular workday mission, the team comes across a monster never mentioned in their perpetually edited and added-to exterminators’ manual: a streetcar-sized venomous centipede, which, in a lovely literary pun, seems to have made its nest under the opera house. When I first had a look at the blurb of The Works of Vermin, I thought that it would be a straightforward story about Guy’s quest to kill what Three keeps jokingly referring to as his “dragon.” How wrong I was to think that this plot could be so simple! First of all, instead of dying, the centipede molts and multiplies, and the smaller centipedes break through into the overcity and have to be hunted down. What happens then is actually the start of everything else.

In a plot development that I call “capitalism kills, literally,” a wealthy man named Bertram Gorslung buys up the extermination company during the ensuing crisis (that is, when it is cheap), and starts harvesting the monster-centipede’s toxin, a substance called ecdytoxin (likely derived from ecdysis, the word for the molting process of an insect, derived in turn from the Greek words ékdysis, “getting out, escape,” and ekdýein, “to take off,” relating to the idea of “coming out/apart”—all of which will make a lot of sense later). Then he starts taking out the competition by chemical warfare: One by one, rival businesses suffer strange devastating “accidents” which look exactly like deliberate attacks using ecdytoxin, and their activities are quickly signed over to Gorslung’s growing empire.

To the employees who accidentally caused their company’s crisis (while fighting the centipede, as part of their jobs), Gorslung presents himself as a benefactor on the surface, telling them that, while their previous employers would have had them killed for their catastrophic blunder, he will only issue them new contracts—with conditions that can be changed at will and without previous notification. Guy for one is very much aware that this will turn him into Gorslung’s lifelong slave, but his arms are already covered in tattoos signifying a level of debt that he will never be able to pay off, and he already runs an illegal side hustle as a bishop’s secret callboy—all to keep his younger sibling out of the same situation, so that Tyro can grow up with the potential for a better, freer life. Tyro, on the other hand, is tired of grownups making all the decisions on behalf of teenagers. He only wants to be taken seriously and to get a job to save up for the ever-elusive escape from Tiliard—so it’s easy for Gorslung to get Tyro to sign up for his new division of toxin-harvesting kids, collecting ecdytoxin in direct interaction with the captive beast.

In a quick succession of plot climaxes—which build like a series of explosions sparking off each other—Guy (having himself suffered from intrusive hallucinations after a bug bite) learns that Tyro has been repeatedly bitten by the centipede and will likely suffer from unthinkable random transformations. Ecdytoxin, it emerges, is a poison that creates rather than destroys, working on its victims like a surreal cancer. So Guy storms the toxin harvesting room and starts to destroy everything, more or less blindly hacking away at the captive creature. Chaos ensues: The lab burns, people get shot, Guy and Tyro try to flee to a riverboat but are captured; as a punishment for Guy’s killing his “dragon” after all and disrupting all of Gorslung’s plans, with what seems like almost a gentle gesture Gorslung flings Tyro into the Catoptric.

In between all these chapters, we get the second narrative, among the decadent overcity’s high society. Everything starts with two rather close friends who are simultaneously obsessed with each other and in fierce competition when it comes to romantic adventures and telling each other tall stories. Elspeth is a painter commissioned by and engaged to the city’s current ruler, the Laurel Chancellor, who will likely have her killed once his portrait is finished and their wedding registered by society as an appropriately public spectacle; Aster is a famous perfumer, mixing toxin-based scents for people like the Laurel Chancellor and the leader of the city’s troops, the Marshal Revenant. Everyone in the overcity wears perfume, both as a status symbol and fashion statement, as well as to manipulate people into perceiving their looks and personality traits in the warped ways caused by the chemicals used in the concoctions. It’s all about being seen with and by the right people, attending plays and operas in which performers are executed for real, and enjoying tiny tidbits of lavish feasts. Apart from the Chancellor’s whims, there isn’t any political system: Everyone fears him and the Marshal, so they either try to stay on their good sides or attempt not to be noticed.

When a mysterious outsider arrives, Aster and Elspeth vie for his attention (while trying to play it down). He baffles everyone: Mallory vant Passand doesn’t seem to care about fashions or status, walking around in vastly outmoded suits and coats, speaking with a country accent they consider oafish, and—above all—never wearing perfume. Aster, amazed that Mallory isn’t repulsed by the tetrodotoxin toxin-based type of consumption she suffers from, gets pulled into romantic adventures with  him in a formerly posh part of the overcity now reduced to overgrown ruins. The Chancellor, meanwhile, starts to send out all sorts of agents to investigate Mallory, wanting to find out about his background and motive for coming to Tiliard. In Mallory’s own words, his arrival is about “loose threads”—a nice pun, as it will turn out—and “[t]ying up a family matter” (p. 26).

While showing Mallory some seriously warped bits of the city—broken and resealed streets, melted and mutated statuary and architecture—Aster explains that upheavals like the one that caused this destruction happen in Tiliard once every generation or so. The last regime change is usually referred to as “the Revival,” and various movements (and art styles) just replace each other once in a while—Repressionism, Revivalism, Extemporism, who cares. Tricksily, these scars on the city are connected to the events in Guy and Tyro’s storyline: The overcity narrative is actually set many years after the undercity one. I literally gasped when I realised that almost all the key characters in the decadent Revivalist plotline are characters I already knew well in the days of the “dragon hunt”—now older, changed by time, and using new names, titles, and bynames. The structure of this book is so well planned out that all of the facts are visible from page one, but the city’s social and architectural structure provides us with endless red herrings. Once Mallory’s identity is revealed, you might think this book would turn into a revenge story, but then again: Mallory never said he was there for revenge, only to find family (I was clinging to the description of two characters’ matching eye colour until what I hoped for was proved right).

At one point, Bertram Gorslung says: “Ecdytoxin is a gift. So many volatile compounds can destroy. Very few can create. It just needs the right hands to direct it” (p. 254). He is a sociopath; of course he thinks that his hands are the right ones. The only thing he cares about is his own success, wealth, and power. When the main characters of the “dragon hunter” plot get bitten by the centipede, however, the toxin affects them each differently. I personally think that it brings out each person’s inner truth and emphasises it, makes them more themselves. The traumatised opera fan becomes a mad composer. The valiant soldier turns into an indestructible killing machine (dependent on a concoction of mayfly to erase troubling memories). Tyro becomes a boy.

Looking back to when everyone thought of Tyro as a girl, there were so many signs that this was more than uncomfortable for them: They always preferred boys’ clothes and boys’ activities and were repelled by even the thought of being gifted traditional girls’ garments and trinkets; they cut off their hair in a bout of panic, they tried to sign up for a job under a masculine name, and having their first period may have been an experience of body horror for more reasons than just being uninformed. Above all, Guy always had one pet name for his younger sibling, which was “princeling.” So when the river Catoptric dissolves Tyro’s body (or outer shell), the ecdytoxin-induced mutation—manifesting as many thin self-knitting threads in place of human flesh—reassembles the child as a boy. The boy climbs up out of the river alive and is raised outside the city under his thumb name (another sign that he is now truly himself): Mallory vant Passand. And when Mallory first attends a performance of the elusive composer Olaf Aufhocker’s opera “Saint Guylag and the Dragon,” he knows that his brother is still alive in the city and writing all of his bedtime stories into librettos.

When Bertram, now the self-appointed Chancellor, learns about Mallory’s identity, he gets his pet composer—Guy Moulène turned Olaf Aufhocker, whose thumb name has always been Emmory vant Passand—out of the underground prison where he has been keeping him all this time. He thinks of the brothers only as potential lures for each other, as he himself only enjoys tormenting others and wielding power over them. But Mallory’s transformation is the antidote to Bertram’s ecdytoxin-powered “Revivalism”: By then we have already noticed that his threads, which can be hidden in embroidery (among other things), unmake the effects of ecdytoxin. And, for somebody so intent on appearances that he prefers to mask his real face with toxin-scents and cannot even look at portraits of himself, what could be a worse punishment than being stripped of all illusion? Mallory was never out for revenge; he only comes to heal the city (and potentially Aster) as a collateral consequence of his quest for his brother. The most beautiful moment when the brothers are reunited is Emmory’s reaction to Mallory’s transition. He only says, “God, look at you. I’m so … so sad I didn’t get to see you grow. But I’m so glad to see you grown” (p. 415).

The centipede in the shape of an Ouroboros on the cover, the “dragon” centerpiece of this story, the source of ecdytoxin: All represents eternity and self-renewal, the cyclical nature of life, death, and rebirth. The connection of ecdytoxin and Mallory’s rebirth is obvious, including the above-mentioned etymological angle: Mallory sheds his outer layer, molts like the centipede, only to be re-created and, in the other meanings of the word, to come out (in more than one sense) and finally escape. But the Ouroboros is also used by Bertram Gorslung as an emblem for his business empire.

Poisons are deadly weapons but (“in the right hands”) can be diluted, micro-dosed, or modified to be used as medicines. We can read the centipede, then, as the cyclical nature of society—each new regime “eating its own tail,” bringing about its own undoing, its corruption and downfall enabling the next uprising, the next change: Just as Gorslung, in his own downfall, mirrors the fate of his captive vermin. Indeed, from the title and cover illustration to the very last paragraph, everything in this book is about so-called vermin. They are not just hunted by fumigators, replacing the dragons of mythology and traditional fantasy literature. The city itself is likened to an insect or an arthropod, and the people inhabiting the tree stump often seem like a colony of termites. In the course of Gorslung’s rise to power, more and more entries in the exterminators’ manual are about people (underground agents, dissidents, other undesirables). But when people start referring to other people as disposable in this way, who are the real vermin?

In Gorslung’s lab, the centipede provides the means of production, since ecdytoxin is now used in everything from perfumes to buildings. But it is kept strung up and immobilised by a veritable slave-owner and top-feeding capitalist. But can it ever really be killed? It just molts and multiplies, which means that there is still hope for the revolution once its chains are sprung.

The Works of Vermin is about trans euphoria. It contains sex scenes that, while never revealing anyone’s anatomical setup (because that’s really none of our business), demonstrate that good sex is not essentially about penises. As Mallory grows into the role of the hero, his story sparks so much happiness, and with each other character’s positive response this happiness is added to. I really enjoyed the exterminators working together as a team, squabbling, saving each other’s lives, bickering, then relaxing in the rhizosphere’s bath-houses; I loved the overgrown part of the overcity where Mallory takes up house in what I later recognized as the former Bishop’s mansion. While this story is full of trauma and abuse and deceit, it’s also full of surprises and adventures and actual joy. Even though at the end we know that nothing is really resolved, that “the city turns, and turns, and turns” (p. 423), we close the book feeling good about the brothers’ happy reunion, and about a concomitant wonderful adventure for Elspeth and Aster, who we last see running away hand in hand, a potentially happy queer couple. But that’s really none of our business either.

As one might gather from all that, this is not the place to start with reading Erikson. But, as much as that foggy sense of recollection sometimes acted as a minor barrier to the reading experience, there’s something wonderfully appropriate about sifting through these layers of reading history, given that Erikson’s non-writing career is archaeology. This is a background that permeates his series. I’m hard pressed to come up with any other set of books that makes more overt references to deep time or to objects of archeological or anthropological study: cave art, skeletons, potsherds, statues, ruins, totemic items, the connection between environment and culture, detailed rock strata, and the like. I’d also struggle to name one that so frequently makes the point that what we think of as “known history” is more often wreathed in obscuring mist and cloud, thanks to the wide stretch of time which separates it from us, our tendency to mythologize, our biases, the gaps in physical evidence, and more. All of which is here in this novel in, well … spades, if we’re waxing archeological.

Those layers of familiarity arise because, despite No Life Forsaken being billed as a sequel, it actually has very little direct connection with its precursor. Instead, we move to an entirely different continent and a (nearly) entirely different set of characters. The novel is less a follow-up to The God Is Not Willing and more a return to the setting and storyline of those decades-ago Malazan books that detailed the Malazan Empire’s conquest of the Seven Cities continent (and its subsequent defeat of an attempted uprising).

Now, roughly two decades later, rebellion is threatening to break out again, in a spree of violence not just against the Empire but amongst and within the many sects and cults that thrive in Seven Cities. One of the most powerful of these is the worshipers of Va’Shaik (the Goddess Sha’ik reborn, personification of the Apocalypse). As Va’Shaik’s followers prepare to attack the Malazans, and also purge their own people of non-believers or wrong-believers, the Malazan High Fist, Jalan Arenfall, based in the city of G’danisban, hopes to halt the uprising before it truly starts. Meanwhile, the Emperor’s agent, Adjunct Inkaras, has just arrived, ostensibly to determine just how close the continent is to boiling over, but also, in the way of nervous emperors throughout history, to decide if Arenfall himself is a threat that needs to be eliminated.

Other characters include the goddess Va’Shaik herself, her High Priestess Shamalle, and—despite his avowed atheism—her appointed Inquisitor Bornu Blatt; a squad of typically crazy Malazan marines; several Elder Gods and Azanathai (there’s the Fall of Light reference); a number of assassins; a High Priest of the cult of Karsa who is mostly ignored by his fiercely reluctant god; a not-small number of dead people who don’t stay dead; and a mysterious mage who might be this fascinating and beloved character from arlier books, or possibly that equally fascinating if less beloved character from earlier books, or maybe just someone else entirely (thus the “mysterious”).

In terms of plotlines, we have several, including but not limited to:

• Arenfall trying to nip the rebellion in the bud while also forestalling being assassinated by his own Emperor.
• Inkaras evaluating the dual threats of an uprising and a too-competent general, while being torn between his personal views and his official role as hand of the Emperor.
• Va’Shaik awakening to her power and attempting to wrestle her religion back from its corrupt and bloodthirsty officials even as she mulls a new apocalypse.
• Bornu Blatt journeying, as Va’Shaik’s agent of reform, to the various temples and experiencing a series of perilous adventures along the way even as he picks up a wildly assorted found family.
• The marines preparing for rebellion and also trying to figure out what to do about G’danisban’s undercity being flooded by rising seas, which will inevitably lead to a crisis for refugees.
• The meddling of various gods, including one who is mightily annoyed at being manipulated by a mere mortal and is thus considering flooding “the entire world,” or rather, most of it, believing “a cleansing is long overdue.”

A lot is clearly happening here, and honestly, it may be a bit too much plot for too little book. As entertaining as it is—and it absolutely does entertain, via its battles, assassin wars, and trademark laugh-out-loud banter—at under five hundred pages, I’m not sure No Life Forsaken gives its storylines and characters, with the exception of Bornu Blatt and to a lesser extent Arenfall, enough time to breathe, to fully take up residence in the reader’s mind. Some plot points and character shifts, whether in origination or resolution, feel rushed, which left me at the end missing the days of the 1,000 to 1,200-page Malazan tomes of yore, with their slow accretion of plot and character details: I enjoyed spending time with these characters, but didn’t have a sense of truly knowing them; I enjoyed the sprightly nature of the plot but didn’t really feel its effects as much as usual.

But if aspects of the plotting and some individual characters suffer somewhat from the novel’s relative brevity, it’s in the nuanced exploration of human and social complexities that the book truly shines. We are, here, talking about the fourteenth book in this universe (more if one counts novellas), so one wouldn’t expect Erikson to be tossing in a lot of new themes. For the most part, Erikson either delves more deeply into particular topics, expands on them, or takes a somewhat different angle on them. But I confess that, for the first time in a Malazan book, I had the occasional twinge of impatience with revisiting subjects we’ve seen before.

The theme that looms largest in No Life Forsaken is the way organized religion too often corrupts sincere belief and spirituality via greed, violence, hypocrisy, and desire for power, becoming just another tool for oppression. This corrupting influence isn’t limited to the mortal realm, because in this universe—where mortals ascend and gods walk the earth—influence is a two-way street: While the gods can unsurprisingly affect human actions and events, in less typical fashion human acts and beliefs can affect their gods. Erikson dissects this twisting of belief in multiple ways, through action, dialogue, interior monologue, symbol, and the epigraphs at the beginning of chapters (“Woe betide the invisible tyranny of belief,” “We build religions to divide the indivisible”).

Here, for example, is the Invigil in Va’Shaik’s temple in G’danisban eagerly anticipating the aftermath of a successful rebellion:

In the wake would come reorganization within the temples of the goddess. The fate of rival temples and deviant cults would involve more than just crucifixions. Such dens would be scourged … The death of unbelievers was a preface … because only through acceptance would the world beyond death be transformed into an eternal paradise.

For the faithful. The unbelievers, the first sacrifices … would not find the world beyond to be a paradise. No, instead, they would find themselves as lowly slaves, bound to eternal service. This fateful dividing line was precise.

Also foreseeing the coming violence, Va’Shaik’s high priestess Shamalle is more resigned and analytical than gleeful:

What then? … Distinctions of faith and what it all means must be worked out. Consensus reached. But now there are sects within the singular faith, each choosing a different path, and in consequence diverging from one another. Leoman’s frothing fanatics. Va’Shaik’s Dissolutes … inquisitors, in fervent need to police the populace, lest some fool stray into perversion of the faith, or rather, those perversions not sanctioned by the church. Local variants in interpretation of holy text, a sudden burgeoning of beliefs! And then, alas, of nauseatingly common historical precedence, conflict. Fistfights, rude gestures … the flash of knife blades. A riot … texts lit to flame … The Inquisitors crack down, but only on non-inquisitors, of course. This upsets the Army of the Apocalypse, but only initially, because now they have someone to fight with … Meanwhile the Manifest Goddess, Va’Shaik herself, looks on, first in horror, then disappointment, but at last in fullest understanding. Apocalypse, after all, is a seed within us.

Regardless of their differing attitudes toward the bloodshed, both foretell the future correctly—once the revolution commences, the narrator describes how “[t]he acolytes, agents of Invigil Ban Ryk, spread out through the city. Some were true believers, many were not. They simply delighted in the delivery of suffering upon the lives of others … The new world would be announced in screams, smoke, and blood.”

Bornu Blatt adds yet a third perspective, coming from “one devoid of faith,” notwithstanding his role first as Va’Shaik’s scribe and now as her Inquisitor. His stance is one of befuddlement and “exasperation,” as he muses to himself about the incoherence of it all:

You [believers] serve a cause no one can agree on, by rules sundered insensible by clashing interpretations. You claim a single light, yet each and every one of you holds a different candle, which alone you pronounce true. You declare your belief unimpeachable, even as you damn your neighbor’s. And yet, despite all this, a holy army will see itself unified in its purpose, and indeed act so, at least until the day is done, and in the dusk following, why, it rips itself apart.

When adherents aren’t killing non-believers or wrong believers, they’re often presented as taking advantage of their own followers. After exposing one such, Bornu explains that “Melok is a charlatan. And like the best grifter, he understands human nature and exploits it for effect … Imposters and swindlers often thrived within the cozy, slippery realm of religion, with no end of gullible, desperate followers eager to surrender all will to a leader’s whims.” Later, another character upbraids an ancient god:

Can you not even see how the priests performed in the passages within the walls, throwing their voices through the gaping mouths of stone statues, fraudsters one and all? How they cheated all who came in desperate need of divination, dreaming of speaking with dead loved ones, fathers, mother, wives, and daughters … Do you not see the charade, turning worship of you into a damned business enterprise?

Honestly, making money off of religion is the least of evils connected with it here. Beyond hoarding food and wealth, Va’Shaik’s priests and temples condone and encourage slavery and regularly employ torture and assassination. The “Voice of Va’Shaik” buys “slaves to wear out in his bedroom,” one temple official attempts to poison the High Priestess, another the Goddess herself (or at least the body the goddess currently possesses), and an Inquisitor and High Priest use their carriage to gorily trample “false pilgrims” under “the benign eye of the Goddess: the horses’ stamping hoofs pounded into bodies, crushing rib, skulls, limb-bones. Then came the bronze-rimmed wheels.”

A few spoilers for House of Chains and The Bonehunters here: In a tragic callback to those earlier Malazan novels, Va’Shaik (also known as Felisin Younger) recounts how as a young girl she was one of many ritually abused and circumcised by the High Mage Bidithal, one of the leaders of the first Whirlwind rebellion under Sha’ik Reborn. A trauma that haunts both her and this novel.

Bloody war between religions. Internecine battles between sects of the same religion. Ministers who abuse children. Priests who hoard wealth. Scam artists who enrich themselves by selling false hope and pretend miracles. “Holy” words constantly rewritten and reinterpreted for personal political and monetary benefit. I’m thinking Erikson may have something to say about those who dismiss fantasy as “escapist.”

Given all the above, it’s no surprise that some try to counteract religion’s impact, none more extreme than another character from House of Chains and The Bonehunters, brought back here for a brief appearance. Leoman of the Flails was a captain in the army of the original rebellion and bodyguard to the goddess Sha’ik. At one point, he led the Malazan army into a trap where he initiated a firestorm intended to kill both the Malazans and his own army. Here, he explains his thinking to Bornu Blatt when the two meet, hinting as well that perhaps his action needs to be reprised:

Fanaticism breeds in stupidity like maggots in a pile of shit. I saw it, suffered in its midst. I decided I would give them exactly what they deserved, what they wanted, in fact. The great, glorious snuffing out … For a brief moment in the history of humanity, I made the world a little saner … All I could do … My worshippers, well, I may have to gather them again, all in one place. And deliver one more great, glorious, snuffing out.

(Here end spoilers for the earlier novels.)

Others, meanwhile, push back in less extreme fashion. The newly awakened-to-herself Va’Shaik sends out a command that “all temples are instructed to redistribute such alms as they receive to those in greatest need, and to devote excess funds to repair and building projects in the poor quarters,” and also announces a synod which all the High Priests and Priestesses are to attend to more precisely set the direction of the cult. Separately, High Priestess Shamalle’s clear-headed analysis of the cult’s infighting hints perhaps at some hope she might try to enact some reform herself in an attempt to forestall the seemingly inevitable.

But even these glimpses of potential amelioration are undermined. Bornu, perhaps more aware of the rot amongst her worshipers, tells Va’Shaik that he “foresees a schism … which you will probably lose. Not only your place as the repository of faith among your followers, but quite possibly your life itself.” And when he informs another goddess—the Queen of Dreams—what Va’Shaik intends, the goddess replies, “tell her from me, she is a fool … if she would deliver such a message to her congregation, they will probably reject her, in anger, and disperse in furious, bloodthirsty indignation, to find other deities they can bend to their murderous impulses.” Meanwhile, Shamalle’s constant drink- and drug-induced stupor and her apparent flightiness seems to belie any beneficial action from her direction.

But beyond the problem of “bad actors” within religion, Erikson presents a more complex view, with several characters wondering if there is something more fundamental at work here, a flaw in the very foundational idea of religion and the worship of deities. Here is Bornu trying to explain the problem to his Goddess Va’Shaik:

“In standing—or kneeling—before one of greater power, is not faith but euphemistic for hope? The hope that one not be hurt, subjected to suffering, or simply indifferently crushed—as one might crush a tick or louse? Or the hope that one be granted gifts, healing, salvation, or social elevation with all the wealth that might come with that?

“You describe a faith without the mutual recognition of love.”

“One loves a pet dog and the dog in turn loves its owner. That owner has in many respects god-like power over that pet dog. Is the relationship one of equals? No. More akin to a slave and master, I should think.”

And here are Bornu Blatt and Aravath, High Priest of the cult of Karsa Orlong (the god in the title of book one in this series, The God Is Unwilling), discussing their shared experiences as the agent of a god/goddess:

Aravath shrugged. “Is this our purpose, then, to be the mortal vessels of immortal intentions, desires, even discourse such as we are having here? If so, I am discontented … As pieces in a game with unknown rules, I hear the rattle of chains I cannot see.”

“Perhaps this is why Toblakai resists the call to godhood.”

Aravath seemed to rock back slightly. “Master and slave, he recognizes the inherent truth of all worship! … If indeed this is the source of his reluctance, well, can I blame him? Yet how can one avoid the contradiction? If he is to be the god of slaves and ex-slaves, is he not then their master?”

“It may follow that to become an ex-slave is also to win free of worship.”

“The god seeks the divestment of his worshippers, as symbolized among mortals by their escape from slavery. His blessing therefore becomes freedom itself.”

Religion—organized religion—is presented here as not just a poison but a prison and a slave pen. It constricts, constrains, and enslaves a mind meant to quest outward and inward, to question, to push back. And because influence moves both ways in this universe, it places both god and worshiper in the same position: The worshiper is both slave and master, the god is both master and slave. We see this when a character offers admiration to a fellow Azathanai for “manifest [ing] as a statue of stone, to dwell for untold ages in a godly quiet well suited to being comfortably worshipped” and the response is, “The fuckers chained me! … They chained me and then ran away!” (Chains, by the way, are a symbol that run clear throughout the entire series).

If I’ve spent so much time on religion here, it’s because it’s such a driving force of the novel, and of events in the series as a whole. And also because it’s long been a pet peeve of mine that so many fantasy novels for so many decades borrowed a medieval Western European setting (an often idealized one) but so few had anything much to say about religion, the most dominant institution of that time and place. I can think of few if any novels—maybe the Deryni series by Katherine Kurtz (nobody does high church ritual like Kurtz; whether that’s praise or complaint will depend heavily on the individual reader)—that explore the impact of religion, faith, and spirituality as much as the Malazan books. I separate those topics because the series itself makes a distinction between them, with a pronounced difference between the rules and proscriptions and closed-minded/too-certain nature of religion and the more open-minded (as in open to the universe) spirituality, with its acceptance of and connection to the ineffable and its humble recognition of being a small part of something greater.

That said, I don’t want to leave the impression that No Life Forsaken is singularly focused on, or is mostly “about,” religion. As noted, it drives much of the events and discussion, but not to the exclusion of other topics, a few of which I’ll note more (far more) briefly.

One is the notion of injustice, which has of course been a long-running focus of the series, perhaps best summed up by the old Emperor Kellanved in Toll the Hounds: “Acceptable levels of misery and suffering … Acceptable? Who the fuck says any level is acceptable? What sort of mind thinks like that?” Here Erikson shifts the focus somewhat from the usual injustice to a more basic concept of unfairness and one’s reaction to that, an interesting tweak coming fourteen books into the series, but I don’t want to say more than that as it would involve several major spoilers.

The same holds true for another long-running Malazan theme—the impact of trauma. Traumatic events obviously play a role in countless stories, but too often those events drive plot for a while and then fade into the background before disappearing altogether, which of course is not how trauma actually works. Trauma lasts. Trauma reverberates, it echoes, it grows beyond. Trauma affects the victim obviously, but it also ripples outward into the larger world. Here, in true fashion, we see its effect twenty years later and how far its tendrils extend. And also in true fashion, we see that people not only react in different ways to trauma, but some of those ways are more palatable to the reader than others. We all respond to the stories of recovery and rejuvenation, the idea that we rebuild from the ashes. But sometimes the ashes are scattered on the wind (there’s a reason there’s so much fire imagery throughout this book). Not every story gets a happy ending, and that’s all I’ll say about that.

The way trauma’s echoes keep going can be generalized to past actions. Epic fantasy has an advantage here: The timescale of the Malazan series is measured in hundreds of thousands of years, not just in the setting but even in some of the characters, more than a few of whom are either immortal, nearly immortal, undead, or just plain dead but still pretty gregarious. Legacy—both personal and communal, for both good and for ill—plays out against a backdrop of days, months, years, decades, centuries, and millennia. Erikson takes Faulkner’s oft-quoted, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” and extends it well beyond Faulkner’s vision, embodying it literally at times, and says “hold my beer.” This is a novel, after all, where you can get these kinds of conversations:

“Best let bygones be bygones, Kanyn. That was long ago.”

“Not to my mind at all!”

“Really? How about half a million years, you idiot.”

“Really,” Paucity echoed.

“Give or take.”

The legacy of Bidithal’s molestation, of Felisin’s trauma, of the Malazan Empire’s conquest of Seven Cities, of Karsa Orlong’s rampage of rape and killing through a small village, of an ancient war, of small deeds of kindness and major atrocities: All of these continue to play out whether they occurred twenty years ago, twenty thousand years ago, or, well, half a million years ago. And we don’t even have to stay with the same characters to see this. Karsa (much to some fans’ dismay) hasn’t yet even appeared in this quartet of novels supposedly focusing on his actions after the events of the mainline series; but the consequences of his actions in those earlier books loom large even in his absence. Perhaps then, we should all consider a bit more deeply our own actions.

Finally, I want to note that, despite this being the fourteenth Malazan novel, not counting several novellas and Ian C. Esslemont’s ten books set in the same world—and despite, as mentioned above, the reader experiencing some moments of been-there-done-that (for instance, I’m not sure how much longer we can stretch out a particular character’s sense of mystery)—Erikson has done an admirable job of keeping things fresh. In his Kharkanas trilogy, it helped to set the story several hundred thousand years earlier—so in technically the same world, but really not so much. Those books are also written in a very different style or tone than the main Malazan cycle, further distinguishing them. Another method he employs, and one which we see here in No Life Forsaken, is to simply introduce an entirely new cast of main characters, rather than deploy the usual sequel method of following the same small group of main characters while changing up the secondary cast.

But perhaps the most interesting way things stay fresh is that this world refuses to be static. This is no “return to the status quo,” there-and-back-again quest sort of epic fantasy. Political systems change. Technology advances. Magic evolves. Once upon a time there was Elder magic. Then there was the warren magic system (I use that word in its most basic sense, not in the Brandon Sanderson style of literal systems of magic with rules and explanations). Now we have the runt system, still being felt out as it’s so new. The Malazan army used to have high mages and a few cadre mages and now “marines are mages” as a matter of course. It’s a sort of best-of-both-worlds scenario: A return to the familiar and unfamiliar at once. Maybe that’s why, some 13,000 to 15,000 pages in, I’m still eager to see what comes next, with book three in this latest tetralogy.

1. What was the state of feminism at this point in American history?
2. How do the witch films of this era illustrate this era’s feminist struggles?

They argue that “[e]ach era takes up this ‘monster’ and imbues her with the concerns du jour, transforming her from housewife to homewrecker, hippie to mall goth, and, fascinatingly, back again.” McCarty-Simas links the portrayal of the witch, be it positive or negative, to how feminist discourse and concerns are being received by society at any given time.

But 2025, y’all. It was one of those years that felt like centuries and witches were everywhere. Folks are out here hiring Etsy Witches to speed up evictions of houseguests on Big Brother, or to curse political figures. [1] AMC continues to expand its Immortal Universe, and the girls of Yellowjackets fleshed out their cannibalistic survival rituals in season 3. With 2026 opening on a new war for oil, it feels like we’re in for more of the same cultural chaos, and more permutations of the witch, as the gyre widens. The difficulties in projecting the book’s patterns onto this rapidly accelerating future is evident in That Very Witch’s epilogue, which offers three possibilities for the witch film in the 2020s:

1. The witch “will continue her run as a symbol of women’s empowerment in the broadest sense,” lacking much to chew on in terms of meaning;
2. The witch, in an increasingly conservative media environment, will simply be a comedic figure or object of ridicule;
3. The witch will revert to the more traditional hag or crone.

McCarty-Simas, writing for Phantasmag shortly after their book’s release, returns to these concerns and settles on one definitive text for our era: Zach Cregger’s Weapons (2025). Aunt Gladys, the movie’s parasitic witch villain, bridges the second and third possibilities. McCarty-Simas describes her as:

an unnatural, anti-feminine interloper to this upper-middle-class neighbourhood who turns a contented family home into a pizzagate-style nightmare where zombielike children huddle in the basement and windows are boarded up with newspaper. Her magic is arcane, unsightly, selfish—she seems to feed on souls, preferably children’s (adrenochrome, anyone?), to keep herself alive.

Yet Gladys is also funny, blaming a parent’s absence on “a touch of consumption” and never quite managing to color in the lines with her old-lady drag. Gladys’s motivations and backstory are never quite clear; [2] the witch, in this film and in the 2020s, has reverted to fairy tale villain onto which we can project all our fears of the feminine, the other, the unknown. It’s a prime example to affirm That Very Witch’s thesis, particularly as child abuse and exploitation remains at the forefront of our consciousness with the Epstein files. Yet I’d argue that it may be too early in the decade to try to nail down what the witch means now, especially if we consider two films in counterpoint: Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (also released in 2025) and Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021). Although McCarty-Simas perhaps rightly points out that we risk ascribing “so many meanings [to the witch], that she … becomes a solipsism” or “remains a fractured signifier,” I think that, if we are to consider witchcraft in film as representative of our political moment, it is worthwhile to consider these texts more closely. They present an opportunity to reshape not only the conceptualization of the witch as a cis white woman but also to reconsider the function of magic itself, as a response to a need for community and transformation.

Yvonne Chireau, a professor of religion and Hoodoo consultant for Sinners, emphasizes that the film is not merely a vampire movie but is concerned with “connecting with the beyond-human, the no-longer-living human” in an ancestral space that transcends social, geographic, temporal, and religious boundaries. Sinners opens with a narration from Annie describing people across cultures (griots in West Africa, firekeepers among the Choctaw, filí from Ireland) who can “conjure spirits from the past and the future.” This magic is neither good nor bad, black nor white—it is an open door through which people might find healing but may also attract evil. Archaeologist Chris Gosden, meanwhile, describes magic as participation in the universe, a belief that “there is a continuity between the human will or actions and the world around us. The converse is also true: magic allows the universe to enter us … We exist in a complex mutual interaction with the world.” [3] Although opening themselves to the world creates an ultimately tragic vulnerability for the characters in Sinners, the exchanges of magic also provide the protection and support of community. There are two witches who facilitate this community: the rootworker Annie, who is respected as a tradition bearer and whose knowledge offers some ability to combat the vampires, and the Blues musician Sammie, whose song draws people to the juke joint and creates the space in which ancestors past and future can join in communion with the present.

Prior to Sinners, depictions of Hoodoo were often inaccurate, seen “through the lens of superstitions, primitive behavior, demonic implications, or sensationalizations of Voodoo”—and Chireau credits a younger, digital generation for a generally increased awareness and understanding of traditions. McCarty-Simas’s work acknowledges how witches of color have long existed at the margins of cinema: “Much as mainstream American feminism has historically sidelined the struggles of women of color, witch films have largely overlooked or scapegoated them while appropriating their cultures’ folklore, religion, and history to titillate white audiences.” While the book opens with a brief discussion of Tituba of Salem to frame how depictions of witches are linked to histories of racism and misogyny, That Very Witch only examines one Black witch film in depth, Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou (1997). Lemmons’s film presages the solidarity found in community that anchors Sinners, both in how it acknowledges history and folkways and in how the characters turn to magic for wisdom and protection. But while Eve’s Bayou and its magic is fueled by rage against sexual violence and misogyny, the witchcraft of Sinners responds to social and political violence by seeking refuge within the sacred space of the collective.

If Sinners is emblematic of a need for community as response to a political cycle that seeks to isolate and harm marginalized individuals, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair offers a glimpse of the rituals by which people may seek out belonging and autonomy in order to transform both the cycle and themselves. Although Schoenbrun’s film keeps a tight focus on two characters—a young teen named Casey who participates in the RPG “World’s Fair Challenge” and JLB, a much older man who watches and comments on Casey’s videos—interspersed throughout are clips of other people engaging in a ritualized challenge which creates bizarre and sometimes frightening changes in the bodies and minds of participants. The virality of the challenge speaks to a broad community of youth seeking out a sense of belonging in digital spaces. Scholars Jett Allen and Teddy Pozo write that within “the World’s Fair Challenge possibilities are created by the players, with infinite branching paths.” [4] While Schoenbrun has described their desire to capture the sensation of “their experiences on the internet as a young queer kid in the early 2000s … a space where you spend all day staring at a box that’s reflecting you back at yourself,” there are any number of lonely individuals scrying with the same mirror, engaging in the same rituals to create a more bearable form of reality. The practitioner may feel alone, but they are part of a broader coven.

As the editor-in-chief of Nerdist Rotem Rusak argues, since witches exist outside of normative culture, “the narrative of the witch is, almost definitionally, a queer one,” yet there are few overt representations of queer and trans characters in witch films. McCarty-Simas notes in That Very Witch that Second Wave feminism was not accepting of queer and trans characters—if the witch film until this point has been largely concerned with feminism, it mirrors the movement. But if, as they also say, the movement has pushed forward and witches are “allowed to be, at least on the surface, nuanced. They’re allowed to be queer. They’re allowed to be Black” then the cycle of the witch film of the 2020s necessarily includes these representations. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, alongside the other entries in Schoenbrun’s Screen Trilogy—A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024)—gives us witches who are probing their realities for hidden potentialities, seeking spaces where queer ways of being are affirmed, even if finding and accessing those spaces means submitting the self to radical change. The viewer is themself drawn into a liminal space fostered by the use of real YouTube creators and the ambiguity over the nature of the transformations and relationships in the story. It remains unclear whether we are “outside the game” or not, but there is freedom within the narrative to craft the story that we need.

Shortly after I was assigned this book to review, I found out I was pregnant. It was a surprise—a happy one, but frightening because I have a heart condition that had me concerned not only for my baby’s health but my own. When I learned I was having a girl near the end of a difficult first trimester, my best friend’s first reaction was “the coven has a new member!” It was the first time I had allowed myself to think of my daughter and who she might be, not only outside of my body and as an individual, but also as a member of a community. What connections might she form, what power might she draw from family and friends, what gifts might she give and receive? As readers and critics, we all naturally bring ourselves to the experience of a text. I study folk horror and keep a reproductive medicine garden. I also live in America and I’m pregnant with a daughter at a time where those are increasingly dangerous prospects, due to forces that exist outside of my body. Although perhaps fated to have its theses disrupted due to rapid social changes alongside compelling new releases, I found That Very Witch worthy of consideration because a fractured signifier can be remade; a broken mirror can become a mosaic. The figure of the witch can be taken up by creators and critics in order to understand not only our position within the present political moment but also used as a framework for disruption and resistance. The witch’s power lies beyond media representation and in the collective, in communities which find a way to support and restore and transform the world into something more livable for all of us.

Endnotes

[1] Jezebel had the unfortunate timing of publishing the (now-scrubbed) article “We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk” two days before his assassination. [return]

[2] Though there are rumors of a prequel that may offer some answers. [return]

[3] Chris Gosden, Magic: A History (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020), p. 9. [return]

[4] Jett Allen and Teddy Pozo, “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair: On t4t Potentiality,” Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 1, 2025, p. 103. [return]

The Haunting of William Thorn

Most of the action takes place in 2024 on a haunted English manor, with a claustrophobic, almost theatrical focus on one setting and two characters. William, a young author on the verge of alcoholism, spends a week in the ghost-infested property he has inherited from his cheating boyfriend (and tragic car accident victim), Archie. Edward, a mysterious, unwanted guest, introduces himself as the manor’s gardener, but is soon to become its second inhabitant—and a source of much unresolved sexual tension. The past intrudes briefly through the prologue and the journal of Robert Thomas, a previous resident of the manor, who describes the love he shared with Teddy (or Edward Jones, also a gardener) in 1939. That romance ended with Teddy’s death on the front lines, and Robert hanging himself in the attic. In the present day, when things begin to go bump in the night, and Edward’s identity comes into question, William’s own grief turns to horror.

What is the nature of the titular haunting? Can William survive the mansion and the loss of his boyfriend? Who, really, is Edward—and is history repeating itself? Promising emotional depth, gothic intensity, and “spiders on page,” the novel works hard to entice the reader with its premise, its horror, and its mysteries. Whether it delivers is a complex question, and one that reveals as much about the current state of publishing as it does about the book itself.

The novel’s central, if unintentional, mystery becomes apparent as early as the first page: How does a book riddled with grammatical mistakes, repetitions, and inconsistencies end up traditionally published and rated 4.0 on Goodreads via mostly raving user reviews (based on more than five hundred ratings within four days of release)? Selecting a few (amongst many) examples of the book’s issues was highly entertaining, and perhaps hints at an answer. For readers who don’t find botched prose grating, there is plenty of so-bad-it’s-good charm, such as: “There was no escaping the truth of what had happened here, even if it was not entirely clear what happened in the first place” (p. 18). Other sentences are overwritten or confused almost to the point of incoherence: “He’d studied the floorplan of so many times since he’d been transferred ownership of it, and was transfixed on just how big it was” (p. 30). Repetition abounds, including the moment when William ends up “landing on the second floor landing” (p. 177). Some phrases are impressively convoluted: “Even more so thanks to the lack of a smile that the man didn’t offer him” (p. 138). And sometimes the language is so exaggerated it’s difficult to distinguish a joke from a mistake: “Mike reeled back, brow furrowing so hard the lines across his forehead were deep enough to camp inside” (p. 145). The physicality turns surreal when heat burns “somewhere north of William’s chest,” or when sympathy “swam in every vessel” in his body (p. 210, 423). Some Goodreads reviews claim that early ARCs had extra issues, which were solved by the time of the publication. But many remained, suggesting the editing and rewriting process had been simply abandoned at some stage.

The novel is likely to resonate most with younger readers. It’s written in a teenage emotional register that manifests through its particular approach to characterization (heightened reactions, impassioned, and an all-or-nothing attitude). William is angsty, immature, and not fully fleshed out. Beyond Edward, he seems to have almost no living attachments, no passions beyond self-destruction when calm and survival when threatened. Even the description of William as a “bestselling children’s author” is a label rather than an identity. He’s at his best when his bitterness slips into humor. Trying to fix the decaying mansion’s electrics, for example, he decides to work faster as “otherwise it would be a romantic night for one with candles and no heating and the faint smell of mould” (p. 40). His despair over carpeted bathrooms is relatable, especially to UK-based readers. And he appears most like himself when relishing the prospect that a haunting might discourage house guests, or telling the taxi driver that he needs the property to host his “drug-fuelled parties” (pp. 40, 31).

William’s aggression, impatience, distrust, and irritability, mixed with a desperate need for connection and peace, ring true as expressions of exhaustion and grief; but they appear situational, rather than rooted in fuller personal history. Still, as is also the case with Alderson’s protagonists in his other works, this blend of vulnerability and spikiness—though off-putting to some—can be endearing and captivating. The constant push and pull between yearning and fear of attachment makes it genuinely satisfying when William settles into moments of comfort amidst heartbreak. His emotional complexity, although inconsistently rendered and occasionally marked by jarring changeability, is admirable in its ambition. Most importantly, William remains loveable—and loved—despite being guarded and deeply imperfect. There is something comforting, even generous, in that portrayal.

The novel’s heightened emotion is anchored firmly in characters’ bodies and rendered through vivid, sensory-rich prose that sometimes achieves real gothic intensity, thus enhancing the horror set-pieces, but at other times tips into parody. When the need to evoke terror collides with awkward phrasing, moments of comedy ensue: “As if in answer, the noise came again. The screech of wood. A creak. His mind conjured an image of a chair being dragged across the floor. No rat was big enough to do that, no spider capable” (p. 175). Extreme reactions are the norm, even when the context doesn’t fully justify them. William trembles at the sight of a Ouija board, his blood “turning into ice”: “His jaw clenched, stopping the torrent of words building in his throat” (p. 186). His overreaction is never fully explained, despite Edward questioning it outright. The discovery of Robert Thomas’s grave, too, unfolds with relentless drama: William recognises the sight in a series of repetitive realisations—a stone slab, the etched words, a grave, a burial site—before his “entire body” pauses—“his breathing, his heartbeat, his mind” (p. 201). At its most effective, the intensity of the scene resonates with the emotional beats, becoming haunting. The sequence in which Robert’s painting comes alive and reaches for William, for instance, is horrifying and full of well-written, evocative descriptions. With a threat to his life evident enough to cause his mounting panic, exaggeration meets appropriate stakes to build a moment of true horror.

Another aspect of the novel’s heightened emotion lies in its blend of sincerity with purple prose, creating moments that somehow feel both clichéd and genuinely romantic. Robert’s diary entries, in which he declares his feelings for Teddy and wrestles with religious guilt, overflow with youthful naïveté and the exuberance of first love which are so exaggerated that they appear authentic: “My yearning for Teddy is so potent I want nothing more than to scream it across oceans and forests, demand the sky to listen and the stars to paint our faces upon the blanket of night” (p. 194). He compares love to being haunted, echoing William’s earlier yearning to believe in ghosts because that would prove the existence of a true romantic connection: “after all, what was a ghost except the love of a soul clinging onto what they didn’t wish to leave behind?” (p. 27). At its best, this style captures the earnestness of adolescent longing; at its worst, it slips into unabashed melodrama. During an argument, William wants to “split the wound in his heart and bleed out all the pain until he was empty of it,” while Edward urges him to “use him,” “offload on him,” finally saying: “Unleash all that darkness inside of you simply because I won’t judge you” (p. 237). At one point, “Edward had tears in his eyes, clinging to those beautifully dark lashes, making the brown of his stare glisten like raw gems” (p. 240). Whether this intensity soars or collapses varies from scene to scene, but Alderson’s commitment to the style is never in doubt.

The way in which the text expresses and inhabits a certain kind of youthfulness extends beyond its characters and style. Its worldbuilding and internal logic feel rooted less in historical understanding than in an imagined idea of what living on the cusp of the Second World War might have felt like—what a “note of death” would say, or how people would react to conscription. Each time, emotional impact and symbolic significance outweigh authenticity. One might argue that this period in history is, in itself, dramatic and meaningful enough; perhaps it is too weighty to align with a novel in which tragedy functions as a gothic flourish, rather than a reflection of lived experience. Still, even at its most gruesome and disjointed, the story remains just detached enough not to disturb the reader, and well-constructed enough for the setting and plot to cohere on an intuitive level. Ultimately, The Haunting of William Thorn lives and dies on its nebulous “vibes,” clinging to minimal plausibility by the skin of its teeth. Yet some of Alderson’s strongest instincts—as a plotter and structural craftsman—still shine through. Most chapter endings pose clear questions that compel continued reading; emotionally heightened set pieces are thoughtfully positioned; multiple reveals and twists punctuate the narrative; and moments of genuine surprise demonstrate how well Alderson understands audience engagement, even if this novel is not the most successful showcase of his skills.

At the time when we are undergoing the daily grind of following our own slow slide towards authoritarianism, there’s something deeply soothing about Alderson’s softened history and matter-of-fact liberal outlook. In The Haunting of William Thorn, love is love, and prejudice belongs firmly to the past—dead and buried, regarded with horror from our modern, enlightened perspective, a ghost to be exorcised by uniting the star-crossed lovers. The novel is pacifistic, suspicious of authority, and unwavering in its defense of personal freedom and happiness; fittingly, its villain is a corrupt policeman. William critiques social conventions, praising his parents for letting him play with dolls as a child. Edward voices his disillusionment with theology and Robert’s journal captures the psychological toll of religious guilt and homophobia. These themes are not explored in depth, yet they shape the novel’s emotional core, building to an ending that is a cry against institutional cruelty and a celebration of love. The central couple—though one might argue that threatening someone with a poker crosses a line—treat one another with respect. Alderson is adamant about writing relationships of equality, often in direct opposition to common tropes in romantic fiction. For example, William, despite craving rescue, refuses the damsel-in-distress role, snapping at Edward: “Maybe you’ve got some weird knight in shining armour complex, but I’m not going to be the one to feed into your kink, okay?” (p. 237). Similarly, despite occasionally rigid moral framing, Alderson gestures toward nuance and self-forgiveness: After wrestling with guilt, William concludes that “there wasn’t a single person who was solely to blame,” acknowledging the humanity and fallibility of all involved (p. 419). No matter how brutal the fate of his characters, there’s comfort in knowing that Alderson’s heart is in the right place.

On Goodreads, Alderson rated The Haunting of William Thorn five stars and wrote: “Tehe. This is my favourite book I’ve written, and low key I think it is my best!” As charming as that is, it’s hard to agree. Many of his fantasy novels are much stronger. Despite consistently producing overwritten novels in need of much developmental and line-level editing, Alderson has a gift for addictive storytelling with high stakes, touching romance, shocking twists, intriguing moral dilemmas, and great entertainment value. In his fantasy novels, characters undergo brutal trials with real, harrowing consequences. His fantasies blend classic fairy-tale darkness with the warmth of true emotional connection. Their threats are visceral, and have a clear psychological cost, keeping the narrative compelling even when the set-up is comically devoid of subtlety. In Prince of Endless Tides (2024), Prince Ernest must choose between giving himself up to a death cult or allowing them to murder children as offerings to vampiric mermaids attacking the kingdom. A child does die in a dramatic public execution despite the heroes’ best attempts to save him—a scene so over-the-top it verges on parody, yet one which is also infused with enough sincerity to evoke genuine sadness amidst the so-bad-it’s-good spectacle. In Heir to Frost and Storm (2023), Maximus falls in love with the dragon-rider Simion, but is tormented by “marriage magic” that injures him whenever he grows close to anyone except his murderous, phoenix-possessed husband, Camron. Believing Camron’s death has broken this bond, he accepts a moment of intimacy with Simion, knowing he will soon have to abandon the dragon-rider to save his mother’s life. The curse renders him unconscious, and he wakes to realise that his husband must still be alive. This unhinged, anything-can-happen, high-stakes intensity—where true love collides with complete collapse—is what Alderson does best.

The Haunting of William Thorn appears lukewarm in comparison, often pulling its narrative punches when they could have landed the hardest. Ultimately, the reader’s enjoyment of the novel—and Alderson’s writing more broadly—depends on one’s willingness to treat his prose as the literary equivalent of a Magic Eye poster: Squint hard enough, and an image eventually emerges from the noise. In this way, the sentence-level chaos becomes a microcosm of the novel: Whether a reader leaves satisfied may hinge on whether a line like “William shook the branch, which was beginning to ache the minimal muscles in his arms” provokes understanding, indulgent amusement, or despair over the state of modern publishing (p. 160). Perhaps the trick is to focus on intention rather than execution: Once memories blend, details fade, and literal events dissolve into a wider metaphor about moving on from an unsuccessful relationship, dealing with emotional baggage, or re-learning to believe in love, the emotional throughline of the text becomes clearer. The novel’s tone, in turn, evokes the duck-rabbit illusion: It might resonate with some, appearing vivid and romantic, and alienate others, turning trite and overwrought. Those who squint just right are rewarded with a bittersweet emotional punch at the novel’s end which (almost) redeems the novel’s many flaws. The question remains, however: How did the task of making the reading experience enjoyable get outsourced to the reader?

Alderson lists "Amazon #1 bestselling author" as his leading credential. With 153.3 K followers on TikTok, 81.8 K on Instagram, and 43.2 K on YouTube, and multiple publishing deals, he demonstrates formidable business acumen. He claims to read over a hundred fantasy novels a year, tracks trends, crafts engaging premises, optimises his covers and blurbs, cultivates relationships with other authors, maintains a personable online presence, and writes at a breakneck pace. In striving to master nearly every aspect of internet-age authorship, he has compromised on one thing: the craft. His career mirrors the fast-fashion logic that has swept through the book world: quantity over quality, disposable algorithm-driven storytelling that prioritises tropes over themes, recognisability over innovation, and sex over substance, with strong emotions oozing from every page. The result is fiction designed for instant comprehension and broad appeal, heavy on telling over showing, with direct exposition and frequent repetition to accommodate distracted, superficial reading. In fairness, Alderson’s novels always reach higher, only to be brought down by the production pace and market demands. Existing in this hybrid space—half rushed industrial product, half imaginative, passion-driven creation—he reveals as much about the evolution of contemporary publishing as he does about his own ambitions.

In The Haunting of William Thorn, William calls himself a best-selling children’s author. When Edward asks him about his studies, he replies: “I went to master the art of English Literature, but left with a big ego after I got my first book deal, with a well-to-do publisher in my first year. The advance was healthy, so I left one dream to pursue another” (p. 216). Education and commercial success are presented as incompatible, with a knowing touch of anti-intellectualism. This raises a broader question: Do high literary standards hinder popularity? As of this year, the online original fiction community Wattpad reports around 160 million monthly active users. [2] The British Library holds approximately 150 million items [3] to Wattpad’s 665 million story uploads. [4] According to one study by the social scientists Federico Pianzola, Simone Rebora, and Gerhard Lauer, Wattpad is “the biggest database of user-generated fiction,” surpassing popular fanfiction sites, and populated by writers who often aspire to become professional authors, yet follow an explicitly non-elitist model privileging engagement and community over literary refinement. [5] Pianzola et al. claim that the idea that reading declines after childhood is a misconception; rather, digital social reading has replaced traditional publishing as the dominant form of literary engagement for younger audiences. [6] This means that platforms hosting user-generated stories “educate” new generations on fiction published with no gatekeepers. They treasure parasocial connections and grow up on amateur writing that privileges immediacy and emotional excess, becoming accustomed to that “style,” explaining perhaps the scarcity of complaints about Alderson’s unedited novel.

This opens up further questions about how digital content production is reshaping traditional publishing—there is a throughline from Wattpad and fanfiction writers crossing into print to the structure and style of writing itself transforming under technological influence. When Wattpad launched its own publishing division, Wattpad Books, in 2019, an article in Independent Publisher observed that the platform’s new model “blends the human and the machine.” [7] The platform’s AI technology, Story DNA, trawls the uploaded texts, analysing statistics, reader interaction, and line-level writing, to select the most “effective” stories with the strongest engagement metrics, reducing the role of traditional gatekeepers. The model aims to transcend the biases and market speculation of agents and editors, allowing data rather than taste to identify the most appealing stories. Yet the article warns that the “other” factors in the traditional agenting process—artistry, subtlety, and craft—may be lost, pushing literature further toward “the capitalist bottom line.” The only thing we risk by pushing literature in that direction is—well—literature.

Education, then, becomes crucial—not only to sustain writing craft and protect artistic merit, but to understand why they matter. Who really benefits when writers flatten their artistry and unlearn respect for quality and substance, or when readers lower their standards and take on the work of deciphering unedited texts? At a time when corporate systems erode creative autonomy and critical thinking, the least we can do is refuse to disempower ourselves.

Before receiving my review copy of this novel, I found myself wading through all of Alderson’s works searching for The One—the polished work that realises his potential as an author. Perhaps never finding it, but catching vivid glimpses of what could be, is a part of the appeal. Alderson—still unbridled by an effective editor, writing three books at once, and maintaining the same unwavering enthusiasm—risks never producing a fully finished novel. That would be a loss, and a waste of talent, not explainable by market whims alone. I had hoped The Haunting of William Thorn would be that book. It isn’t. None of them are. But there is an excellent novel inside Ben Alderson. I’d be thrilled to read it one day. For now, it lies scattered across twenty-three of them. 

Endnotes

[1] See full list of books by Ben Alderson here: https://share.google/y8MDmJdF7vENeH3WD) [return]

[2] According to Wattpad’s own reporting: https://company.wattpad.com/press [return]

[3] Official number, reported by the UK Government: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/british-library [return]

[4] As of 2021, number not confirmed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wattpad#cite_note-Wattpad-10. The article I quote later analysed a sample of 31 million Wattpad stories. [return]

[5] See Federico Pianzola, Simone Rebora, and Gerhard Lauer, “Wattpad as a resource for literary studies. Quantitative and qualitative examples of the importance of digital social reading and readers’ comments in the margins”, PLoS ONE (2020), 15(1): e0226708.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226708 [return]

[6] As above. [return]

[7]  See Craig Manning, “From the Tech Desk: What Does Wattpad’s New Publishing Division Mean for the Future of Books?”, Independent Publisher (2019) https://independentpublisher.com/article.php?page=2369&utm [return]