CBR16 Book 62: "A Sorceress Comes to Call" by T. Kingfisher

Page count: 400 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

CBR16 Bingo: Dun Dun (From pretty much the first chapter, where Cordelia is "made obedient" there is a creeping sense of dread all the way through this novel)

Cordelia knows her mother isn't like other mothers. Other mothers can't take over your limbs and puppet you, or force you to stay still and motionless for hours or days on end. Other mothers permit doors that can be closed in the house and let their daughters have friends. Other mothers don't have a magical horse who spies on the daughter when they are out on rides. Cordelia's mother wants her to marry a rich man, and to launch her daughter properly into society, Cordelia's mother needs a rich husband who can provide her with the lifestyle she requires, and then conveniently disappear. 

Cordelia's mother, Evangeline, has found a suitable candidate, a middle-aged country squire who she now just needs to charm sufficiently for him to propose marriage to her. She can't enchant him, because all magical spells are dissolved once the wedding takes place (it involves water, wine, salt and holy ground). Fortunately for her (certainly not anyone else), Evangeline is beautiful and enticing and more than manipulative even without using magic. What she had not taken account of when plotting, was suspicious relatives. 

The squire's spinster sister, Hester, recognises Doom (as she without fail refers to Evangeline) the second she arrives on their doorstep, and she has no intention of letting her brother fall into her clutches. Hester is initially unsure whether Cordelia is her mother's creature and will take Doom's side, but after observing some of their interactions and speaking to the servants (Cordelia sometimes goes to sleep hidden in a wardrobe), she concludes that the girl will also need to be rescued from her ambitious and merciless mother.

I see lots of people saying that this is a dark fantasy set in the Regency era, but I really didn't see a lot of traces of a specific time period in the story. It could just as easily be set in some generic historical fantasy past. I have only read two books by T. Kingfisher previously, but even What Moves the Dead, which had me uncomfortable throughout, really kept me turning pages just to see what would happen next. Nettle & Bone was one of my favourite books of 2023. It also features a sinister threat and a sense of dread throughout, but in A Sorceress Comes to Call, the feeling of discomfort and unease begins in the very first chapter and doesn't really let up until the very end, because Cordelia's mother really is that unpleasant and so clearly extremely dangerous, and you really don't want her to cause harm to anyone, let alone the protagonists, Cordelia and Hester.

It should also be mentioned that this has some elements reminiscent of the fairy tale of The Goose Girl, but not enough that it feels right to call this a fairy tale retelling. The horse Falada certainly plays a very different role in this book than in the original fairy story. 

Cordelia has never known kindness or affection, and having seen her mother do terrible things in the past, she knows the Squire and Hester are in danger, but she's afraid to talk to anyone. She knows that the tale of her mother's magical powers will most likely not be believed, and she fears she will be seen as her mother's accomplice. Luckily, Hester is an observant and clever woman, who takes Cordelia under her wing and listens to her, even when what she says appears preposterous. In an attempt to slow down Doom's seduction attempts somewhat, Hester invites a number of close family friends for a house party, to ensure that the Squire is never entirely alone with the scheming sorceress. 

Cordelia and Hester are both such likeable protagonists. By letting the readers share the POV of Cordelia, Doom's traumatised young daughter, Kingfisher is able to show first-hand just how terrifying her mother really is. Giving Hester, a wise middle-aged woman the other POV gives the readers hope that there may be some way to thwart Doom's plans and hopefully give Cordelia a safer future. 

Hester loves her brother but is by no means blind to his weaknesses. She knows that if she doesn't act quickly, Doom will have charmed herself into marriage with her brother, and after that, it's unlikely that either Hester or her brother will live for very long. Hester also regrets some of the choices of her past, which means she gave up on love and marriage of her own, and now she is older and has a bad knee and feels she would only be a burden to a potential husband. Thankfully, someone disagrees with this (there is a minor romantic subplot that I found very sweet). 

I don't think Kingfisher's full on horror books are for me, because her suspense books are frankly more than unnerving enough. Luckily, I have a large back catalogue to choose from, and likely many good reading experiences in my future.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR16 Book 57: "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov

Page count: 448 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

Nowhere Books Bingo: Banned books (Wasn't published until 27 years after Bulgakov's death, and only then in a censored version. )

CBR16 Bingo: Cult (cult classic, and there's the whole Devil and his entourage as a central plot point - that's pretty cultish, right?)

I can't remember exactly how long The Master and Margarita has been on my TBR list, but it's certainly more than twenty years. A quick glance on Goodreads shows me that 15 of my friends have rated it four or five stars, with several naming it one of their favourite books. So why has it taken it so long for me to read it? Some of my reticence comes from having tried to read translated Russian novels in the past, and in on one memorable occasion, nearly losing my will to read anything at all (Anna Karenina, I am absolutely looking at you). So the idea of tackling another Russian classic wasn't always that appealing. Knowing that so many people whose opinions I respect and trust rate it so highly, also makes me nervous - what if I don't like it and they'll be disappointed in me?

I made an attempt to read my mother's Norwegian translation of the novel for the first couple of chapters, but because the copy she had was translated in the 1970s, the language was heavy and archaic enough that I struggled. So instead I read the 50th Anniversary edition, translated into English by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky. Once the language flowed more smoothly, reading became a lot less like unpleasant homework. As readers of my reviews know, I mostly read genre fiction like romance, fantasy and science fiction, where the plots are light-hearted and the books are very easily digestible. That is not the case with this book, written in the 1930s and up until the author's death in 1940, and finally published in 1996. It's an allegorical political satire, written in a very different time and culture, and getting into it felt like a bit of a slog.

I feel like I'm letting down all of my bookish friends and acquaintances when I confess that the first part of the novel mostly either bored and/or confused me. So much of it is absurdist and strange, and there is a long series of, to me, mostly interchangeable men with long Russian names either dying or ending up in an asylum, as a result of their encounters with Woland (the Devil). Nor was I particularly interested in the sections that involved Herod and Yeshua.

The novel finally got interesting to me in the second part, where the reader finally gets to meet the eponymous Margarita, and discovers the lengths she will go to to be reunited with her beloved, the Master. This section seemed more like a dark fairytale for the most part, and while it also had some odd twists and turns, I was mostly enjoying what I read. I can also faithfully say that at no point could I predict where the story was going to go next, and certainly not the way it was going to end. 

If the entirety of this book had only been the main story of part two (which involved Margarita and her beloved), I think I would have liked the novel a lot more. 20th-century history was never an area that particularly interested me, and while I know some of the atrocities committed in the Soviet Union under Stalin, I am in no way well-versed enough in the background of this novel to get the many layers of satire that the author has created. I found all the digs at literary intellectuals and various officials tedious. 

I don't regret finally reading the book, even though the first part was very hard going. However, I think I can also conclude that great Russian literature is not for me. I have tried several authors now, and if this, which so many of my bookish friends rate five stars, only for about half the novel, entertained me, it may be time to accept that I'm just not cut out for the Russian greats. I can see why it has been a controversial novel since its publication, not just for the political critique, but for prominently featuring the devil and witchcraft as part of the plot. 

Judging a book by its cover: There are 1229 (!) different editions of this listed on Goodreads, so obviously there are also a huge amount of different covers available. Most of them seem to have a black cat somewhere on the cover (Behemoth is a very striking character, who can blame them?). My e-book edition seems to have the black cat in upper corner and the face of a young woman (obviously Margarita) in the lower one. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR16 Book 47: "Gemina" by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Page count: 672 pages

Rating: 5 stars

CBR16 Sweet Books: Binge

Nowhere Book Bingo: A YA novel

Smart Bitches Summer Bingo: Epistolary romance

CBR16 Bingo: Part 1 and Part 2 (the book has more than 600 pages)

This is the second book in a series, and starting with this one means a lot of stuff won't make much sense. I also don't think it's possible for me to review this book without spoiling the previous one, so if you're not up to date, start with Illuminae.

After the disastrous events, first on the mining colony of Kerenza, and then on the space fleet evacuating survivors, the only remaining ship, Hypatia, is on its way to Jump Station Heimdall, hoping for aid. BeiTech, the organisation which launched the attack on Kerenza and utilised the bioweapon which led to a plague, cannot risk word getting out about their heinous deed and therefore need to make sure that they eradicate the Hypatia. To do so, they will need to use the jump station's wormhole, and later make sure that there are no survivors on Heimdall left to reveal the truth.

Entirely unaware of BeiTech's sinister goals are two teenagers aboard the Jump Station, Hanna Donnelly and Niklas "Nik" Malikov. Hanna is the station captain's beloved and pampered daughter, Nik is part of the Malikov crime family, and Hanna's occasional drug dealer. There's clearly an attraction between them, but Hanna is in a relationship with the dashing Jackson Merrick, one of her father's officers, and consequently doesn't really have time for more than some light flirtation with Nik. Life onboard a space station surrounding a wormhole obviously isn't very exciting for either of them, but Hanna tries to pass the time by studying, parties and working out, while Nik reluctantly assists with his family's business.

Both of their lives are irrevocably changed once an elite team of BeiTech mercenaries arrive, and very rapidly take control of the station. The mercenaries start by wiping out the people who helped their ship get onboard (Nik's family) and Nik only survives because he's on his way to deliver party drugs to Hanna. Thankfully, while she's annoyed that Nik is late for their deal, Hanna is also spared from seeing her father shot in the head when the mercenaries take control of the majority of the station. Now, Hanna might seem like nothing but an airheaded, fashion-obsessed teen, but being the daughter of a military commander with a keen interest in history, she's picked up a lot of useful knowledge about strategy, tactics and how to be stealthy. Nik, meanwhile, has only one family member left alive and is determined to avenge the Malikov crew in any way he can deal hurt to the mercenaries. Unfortunately, in all the sudden danger, both Nik and his computer genious cousin Ella completely forget about the very dangerous alien parasites hatching in a secluded part of the station (long story, the drugs the Malikovs sell are derived from some truly scary creatures, who should not be left unattended and allowed to crawl through space station vents and the like). Of course, the BeiTech baddies don't know about them either.

The BeiTech kill squad need to take control of the wormhole so that a second kill team can be sent through to deal with the Hypatia. They were not expecting to be foiled by a few teenagers and a few officers having sealed themselves on the bridge of the space station. Can Hanna, Nik, and Ella with a few ragtag allies foil their enemies, warn the Hypatia, save the remaining crew and thwart BeiTech's evil schemes? (This is book 2 of 3, what do you think?)

Fans of Ezra and Kady (her dad is the chief of security on Heimdall), not to mention AIDAN, will be pleased to know that in the latter half of the book, they do appear, although they are not the focus of this story, that would be Hanna and Nik. While Kady and Ezra had a past, and many months of separation with only computer chats to make the heart grow fonder, Hanna and Nik's attraction to one another is basically put to a boil in an insanely tense and demanding situation, where they are fighting for survival, grieving loved ones and trying to find a way to help complete strangers aboard the Hypatia. 

Hanna is unbelievably badass, and Nik may seem like he's got a dangerous and ruthless past but is really just a big, tattooed cinnamon roll (who will still do what is necessary if his or others' lives are in danger, he just needs more time to process it than Hanna). Ella is more of a secondary character, but the girl is fierce, especially since she's not really able to move around except via her computer. I love all of them and am so glad that Kaufman and Kristoff had the surviving characters from Illuminae take a backseat so readers could get to know these guys as well.

I am also grateful that while the lanima (super creepy alien parasites) are scary and unpleasant, any scene involving them (including the early ones where it's explained how they incubate) was a pale shadow of all the horror with the virus rage zombies of the previous book. I really liked how the book includes the photos and call signs of all the BeiTech mercenaries, and how as the book proceeds, more and more pictures are just crossed out (they may be teenagers, but Hanna, Nik and Ella are NOT messing around). 

Having now read two of these books, I have absolutely no idea what the authors are going to come up with next, but I'm hopeful that eventually the BeiTech corporation will be brought to justice for all the horrible things it has done. Having now heard so many cool things about the audiobooks, I may do the third and final book partly in audio.

Judging a book by its cover: While the first book was all warm colours, red and orange, this one is all cold, with a cloud of something (dust? smoke?) blue over a black background. I think this entire series has a very well-done cover design, with the covers of the trilogy complementing each other so well. 

CBR16 Book 16: "Butcher & Blackbird" by Brynne Weaver

Page count: 360 pages

Audiobook length: 8 hrs 43 mins

Rating: 5 stars

CBR16 Sweet Books: Excited (I love this book and would like everyone I know to read it, but also understand that it's very much NOT for everyone).

Spoiler warning! I will do my best to review this without major plot spoilers, but if you want to experience this book without any prior knowledge of the contents, possibly skip this review until you've read the book.

Sloane "Blackbird" Sutherland and Rowan "Butcher" Kane have a rather unusual meet cute. He finds her locked in a cage, starved and desperate, and a decomposing corpse on the floor just outside the cage door. Sloane and Rowan are both serial killers, but only murder other killers. Obviously, they don't meet a lot of people who share their unusual hobby, and once they establish that they know of each other's reputations, end up having lunch and agreeing to a friendly competition. Once a year, they'll meet up to hunt the same killer. The first to five kills gets the honour of killing a particularly infamous one. 

Rowan is smitten with Sloane from their very first meeting, and Sloane certainly finds Rowan attractive. She's just so shy, paranoid, and socially awkward that she cannot imagine what a handsome, charming, outgoing, and flirtatious man like him might see in her. So they develop a friendship, which clearly starts developing into more with each meeting, but it takes more than four years before Sloane actually dares believe that Rowan likes her as more than just a like-minded friend. Can the two of them, restless, dark-souled, murderous, and obsessive, actually make a relationship work? And will they survive long enough to enjoy a HEA? It's not like their recreational activities are risk-free. 

There is a LONG list of trigger warnings at the very start of this book. If you find eyeballs and the removal of them unpleasant, then this book is probably not for you. These people are murderers, and there are graphic depictions of both a violent and sexual nature (there's a lot of mutual pining until about 60% into the book, and then they really make up for lost time and things get very 18+ afterwards). I tend to find suspense novels stressful, I don't really like horror. I never understood the fascination a lot of people have with True Crime. This book is basically what you'd get if Hannibal had a baby with a snarky romantic comedy. It's adorable, laugh-out-loud funny, very romantic, extremely spicy, and very very gross in parts. Both protagonists kill without remorse, and experience some pretty dangerous situations over the course of their strange murder quests. Yet I absolutely adored this book. 

Sloane is so shy, dorky, and socially awkward. She literally has one friend in the entire world, no siblings, and doesn't seem to talk or interact much with her parents. Since she seems to be bad with people in general, it's no wonder that she's intimidated and a bit confused by Rowan at first. He's outgoing, gregarious, charming, and very good-looking. He seems to flirt with everyone, so for a while, it's understandable that Sloane doesn't clue into the fact that he's clearly completely obsessed with her. 

I was completely hooked by this almost instantly. I bought the audiobook in an Audible sale in early January and thought it might be a fun and unusual read for Valentine's Day this year. I started listening in the morning on my way to work and stayed up late so I could actually finish the audiobook the same day. While I don't have as much time as I used to just for reading, I do occasionally finish a book in a day. But I can't remember the last time I finished a whole audiobook the very same day I started it, even listening at x1.5 speed.

I had a major book hangover and kept thinking so much about the book and the characters that I had to just start the audiobook all over again. That level of obsession only happens every few years for me, and should tell you something about how much I loved this book. The list of content warnings for this book is on the author's website, so if any of these seem like dealbreakers to you, it's probably best to skip it. On the other hand, I also have two friends who were disappointed that the book didn't go enough into detail about the planning and actual murdering, so that's also worth bearing in mind. 

Judging a book by its cover: The neon pink and purple against the black background is eye-catching even before you see the details, like the chainsaw, cleaver, axe, and obviously all the bones. It's sort of cute and sinister at the same time, which pretty much perfectly sums up this book. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR16 Book 14: "Illuminae" by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Page count: 602 pages

Rating: 5 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo: An epistolary novel

CBR16 Sweet Books: Binge (I have already bought the next two books in the series in paperback, so I can read all of them as soon as possible.)

Official book description:

Kady thought breaking up with Ezra was the worst thing she'd ever been through. That was before her planet was invaded. Now, with enemy fire raining down on them, Kady and Ezra are forced to fight their way onto one of the evacuating craft, with an enemy warship in hot pursuit.

But the warship could be the least of their problems. A deadly plague has broken out and is mutating, with terrifying results; the fleet's AI, which should be protecting them, may actually be their biggest threat; and nobody in charge will say what's really going on. As Kady plunges into a web of data hacking to get to the truth, it's clear only one person can help her bring it all to light: Ezra.

Kady is a talented hacker and is fully aware that the evacuated passengers aren't being told much of anything. She is determined to find out the truth of what is going on, especially after the AI of the leading evacuation ship, AIDAN, blows one of the other two up unexpectedly. Naturally, the remaining ship's crew are rather nervous about the incident being repeated and the AI needs to be shut down until they can figure out why it acted so erratically. Ezra is recruited as a fighter pilot, working to defend the evacuation fleet, not exactly a job without significant risks.

As Kady becomes more and more isolated, and the losses really start affecting her, her illegal communication with Ezra becomes one of the things that keep her going. Neither of them has anyone else significant left in their lives, and it becomes clear that the reasons why Kady dumped Ezra in the first place become very insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and now they would just like to be reunited, before they quite possibly die. 

As the back of the book says, the novel is "Told through a fascinating dossier of hacked documents—including emails, schematics, military files, IMs, medical reports, interviews, and more". I am very glad I got the paperback from the library, I'm genuinely not sure how in the world this book would work in audio, and I don't think I would have found it as engrossing a read on an e-reader screen. There were sections where I literally had to keep turning the book sideways or on its head to be able to read everything. It's a very interesting take on the epistolary format. 

I can absolutely see why this book wouldn't be a 5-star read for some people. It was a bit slow to catch my interest in the beginning, but since it's not divided into chapters like a traditional book, but interview transcripts, memos, chat logs, and the like, it's very easy to get tempted to read just a little bit more, since each individual section is so short. Once things really started escalating, I had trouble putting the book down. I stayed up until far too late o'clock on a work night just to finish it (and had to actually peek at the ending about halfway through the book because all the tension was going to kill me if I didn't know how it all turned out). So to me, this was a five-star read, even though some of the characterisation probably could have been deeper, and parts of the book were pure horror, and really upsettingly graphic when it came to the violence perpetrated by those afflicted with the virus. 

I have now bought this book for my keeper shelf, along with the two sequels, if they're even half as gripping as this one, I want physical copies of them for my very own. Also, having read the first one in a physical format, I'm not even sure it would be possible to get all the necessary information if you read them as an e-book or listened to it in audio. 

Judging a book by its cover: The reds and oranges are very eye-catching and I'm not entirely sure what the cover is supposed to show, but I think it might be a firestorm, suggesting either the original attack on Kady and Ezra's home world or the subsequent explosion of one of the evacuation ships. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR15 Book 67: "Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery" by BROM

Page count: 305 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Connecticut, 1666. An ancient spirit is awoken in the darkness of the wood, fed by blood and the prayers of the wild spirits name him Father and Slayer. They lure a clumsy farmer into a cave to feed him to the spirit, making young Abitha a widow. Abitha already doesn't fit into the Puritan community with her outspoken ways and questioning of the rules. Having grown up in London, Abitha was sold by her drunken father and married off to a stranger, who thankfully turns out to be a gentle and rather simple man. Unfortunately, his gentle ways also make him easy for his domineering older brother to manipulate, and Abitha's brother-in-law is furious when the community elders allows Abitha to stay on by herself on the farm after her husband's death. If Abitha is able to raise enough crops to pay off the farm's debts, it's her brother-in-law who will be in trouble with the magistrate. 

Abitha nearly kills herself working the fields on her own, until she befriends Father (who she names Samson, after the goat that the forest spirits first killed to raise their slayer) and he starts tapping into ancient memories of being one with the land. His magic allows Abitha to grow plenty of corn, but her brother-in-law breaks into the farm at night and burns most of her harvest. Desperate, and unwilling to let her odious brother-in-law win, Abitha makes another deal with Samson, who gets the bees to produce huge amounts of honey and honeycomb, allowing Abitha to pay off her debts. 

Abitha's mother, who died when she was still a teenager, was a wise woman, who helped people with simples and healing potions. Abitha has also been helping some of the women and young girls in the community with little blessings and managed to cure one of the preachers' daughters of measles. This obviously comes back to haunt her when her brother-in-law decides to accuse her of witchcraft. Ironically, he's not entirely wrong, she has been dabbling with magic to succeed, but his wild accusations of her fornicating with the devil are obviously untrue. Sadly, because the community gets carried away, no one is willing to listen to Reverend Carver (whose daughter Abitha healed), and his wife Sarah is accused of aiding a known witch and tortured nearly to death before she finally breaks down and denounces Abitha. The villagers have tortured and murdered Abitha's cat, humiliated and tortured a kind woman whom Abitha respected, and done their best to torture "the truth" out of Abitha as well. If they want a witch, Abitha is determined to give the community what they want and fear. She accepts Samson's bargain when he comes to save her (he's been off fighting his own battle for his identity) and together she and Samson enact vengeance on the community who spurned her.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the truest monsters in this book, set in Puritan America in the 1660s, are the humans who get caught up in religious hysteria. The forest spirits lure a goat and an impressionable man into a cave and get them killed to reawaken their forest god, and try to set him to kill all the colonists (this doesn't really work out as they planned), but Father/Samson feels deeply confused and conflicted and refuses to do their bidding. Some people die at his hand, but usually none who don't deserve it. There's some quite graphic violence in parts of this book, and I really wish that so much of Abitha's eventual vengeance didn't involve bugs (so many bugs *shudder*), but the most upsetting parts to read are the ones where Abitha and Sarah are tortured by the so-called righteous magistrate and his minions. 

This book was very well-liked by my book club and we had an interesting discussion about it during our meeting. It was agreed that one of the things that probably made it a bit different from another witch hunt during the Puritan era novel was the aspect of the forest god/Father/Samson, and the nature spirits and their attempts to eradicate the white colonists. Samson is a deeply conflicted character, and it's revealed over the course of the story that this is because he has been many things over the years, and the remaining forest spirits have only tried to revive one aspect of him, so he's separated from his true self. He doesn't really want to be a slayer and a vessel for vengeance, he delights in the simple worship that Abitha offers him and the nature magic he is able to perform with her. He needs to go on his own quest to discover who he once used to be, and when he returns, he discovers what the townsfolk have done to Abitha. 

The story isn't just anti-colonialist, the forest spirits clearly remember the natives coming to their land and seem to be against anyone encroaching on their territories. We discover in the latter half of the book why the forest spirits have become so vengeful, and it gives the book an interesting dimension that with the exception of a few men, usually motivated by greed, there are no really evil players here. Everyone has their reasons for doing what they do. It was also pleasantly surprising to me and gave the story more nuance that not the entire Puritan community was against Abitha from the start. Reverend Carter and his wife Sarah are portrayed as genuinely good people, which makes what happens to them in the latter half of the story even more tragic.

This has been one of my favourite book club reads so far this year. I haven't read anything else Brom has written, but based on this, I would absolutely be open to reading something else as well. 

Judging a book by its cover: I'm not surprised that cover art is gorgeous, considering the author is also a professional artist. Nevertheless, the cover for this actually made a couple of the members of my book club gasp audibly when we were shown it at the meeting last month. It's so incredibly pretty.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR15 Book 36: "What Moves the Dead" by T. Kingfisher

Page count: 160 pages

Rating: 4 stars

CBR15 Bingo: Dwelling (the "haunted" house is pretty central to the story).

This was my fantasy/sci-fi book club's selection for May, and while I normally don't like horror books, I read this mainly because I was so impressed with T. Kingfisher's Nettle & Bone, and also because it really was very short. It's a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, which I have never read, and because I'm not a huge fan of Poe, I didn't bother reading it before reading this, either. I just read the Wikipedia summary, figuring that would be more than enough. 

Our non-binary protagonist, Alex Easton (uses they/them pronouns) is a retired soldier who receives a letter from an old friend, Madeline Usher. Alex was in the army with Madeline's brother Roderick and is shocked when they arrive at the absolute wreck of a house the siblings live in, and see the physical state that their old friends are in. Both siblings are emaciated and deeply pale, and have thin, white flyaway hair, both on their heads and bodies. According to an American doctor who is also there, Madeline is seriously ailing, and struck with frequent fits of catalepsy, moving around the house with rigid limbs, speaking in a distracted, eerie voice. She rarely remembers what happened during these fits when she is more lucid. Her brother Roderick is pretty much a nervous wreck. Easton wonders why the siblings haven't just moved, but both seem determined that they must stay in their old, dilapidated family home, even when something there might be killing them.

Easton is deeply worried about their friends and with the aid of the American doctor and Miss Potter, a British botanist who is travelling in the area (she's revealed to be Beatrix Potter's aunt - probably fictional), tries to figure out what is causing their strange behaviour. Next to the house is a creepy, murky lake, which has strange lights within that glow at night. There are also a host of strangely behaving wildlife, including hares that move about with jerky, unnerving movement, and that don't seem to stop moving, even when dead. 

What Moves the Dead has a lot of Gothic elements and the creeping sense of unease just grows as the story progresses. It's a very well-written story, and several of the members of my book club wished that it was longer and that we got more out of the story. For all that it's a novella, Kingfisher includes some interesting worldbuilding. Easton is from a fictional European country, where they have a lot more pronouns than many languages. There are, for instance, specific pronouns used only for children, and some that are used only for God. In this country, members of the army are also given a unique pronoun, which means that no matter what gender the soldier is originally, once they become a sworn soldier, they are referred to with ka/kan pronouns. The explorations of the fictional European country and its language give added depth to what is really just a very quick read.

I don't like a lot of horror, and I find fungus generally very creepy. So there were a lot of elements that really worked to make this a rather uncomfortable read. Nevertheless, I also really liked the story and especially Alex Easton, our protagonist. It seems that this novella is the first in a series featuring Easton, with the next one out in early 2024. In a lot of cases, I don't want to keep reading the series of our book club selections, but in this case, even if Kingfisher stays with the horror genre, I will keep going, because I was so entertained. 

Judging a book by its cover: The really very unnerving image on the book gives you a fair idea of what the book features. The hare is absolutely riddled with fungus and little pink mushrooms, including some piercing it. The UK cover features a raised hand covered in mushrooms, which seems tame in comparison to this. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR15 Book 9: "Hell Bent" by Leigh Bardugo

Page count: 484 pages

Rating: 4 stars

This is the second book in the Alex Stern series. This review will contain some spoilers for the first book in the series, Ninth House because I'm not sure how to review it without referencing things that happened in the last book. So if you're new to this series, start there. 

Darlington is still missing, "in Spain" to those not in the know, and in Hell, possibly dead to those initiated in the secrets of Lethe House. Galaxy "Alex" Stern doesn't have a lot of friends, and she's not going to let anything or anyone stop her from finding a way to rescue Darlington. Thankfully, her fellow Lethe member, Pamela Dawes is firmly on board with the plan, even when the higher-ups in Lethe forbid them from trying. Of course, finding a portal into hell isn't going to be easy and they have no guarantee that they're going to succeed in bringing Darlington back. 

In addition, a blast from Alex' past is making things complicated for her. Her dead boyfriend's former drug dealer boss has figured out what Alex did before she ended up in hospital and later at Yale, and unless Alex agrees to do some work for him, he's going to kill her mother. There's also a series of mysterious murders on campus, which may or may not be magical in nature. Alex and Turner try to figure out the cause and the culprit, but begin to fear that the murders are connected to the dark presence at Black Elm, Darlington's family home, and the bigger challenge of retrieving him from Hell.

I re-read Ninth House in preparation for this and am very glad that I did. Otherwise,  I would never have remembered all the intricacies of the magical houses of Yale and all the bad stuff that Alex suffered before becoming a student there. After the dramatic finale of the previous book, Alex is aware that she can do much more than see ghosts. She can hear them, almost constantly, and she can pull them into herself to gain almost superhuman strength for a while. That makes her more confident, but she nevertheless faces some pretty steep challenges in this book, the least of which is passing her classes at Yale. 

Alex has clearly been a loner for much of her life, and the only true friend she's had so far died in horrific and tragic circumstances. So learning to depend on others and finding people she can trust is very unfamiliar to her, and it was great to see that over the course of this book, she finds some true friends and allies, and is much better prepared for whatever challenges the next book is going to throw at her. After all the danger in the previous book, Alex and Dawes are now firm friends and completely united in the rather mad and dangerous quest of rescuing Darlington from Hell. Once they discover that to open the portal to Hell that is hidden on the Yale campus, they need to recruit some extra help, and the cranky Turner and happy-go-lucky Tripp Helmuth also join their band of unlikely allies. The final member of their little band is Mercy, Alex' roommate, who in many ways seems a lot more suitable to be Virgil of Lethe than Alex ever was. She is fascinated and intrigued to discover that magic exists. 

This book doesn't just have a creepy cover, it has certain scenes that were almost too close for comfort for me. I really don't like horror, and certain sections of this book were uncomfortably over the edge in that genre. Still, I made it through and am glad I persevered, because this book was a thrill ride. The previous book took me longer to get into, and I wasn't really sure about Alex and Darlington as characters. With all the world-building setup and major characterisation sorted out in the first volume, this could just pick up and get right into the action. It was a much quicker read than Ninth House, but got so intense in places that I had to put it down and read some other stuff in between just to not be overwhelmed. 

As with the previous book, this one ends on a cliffhanger. I found the one at the end of this one slightly less frustrating, however, and will happily wait the extra year or so to find out how Alex' supernatural adventures continue. 

Judging a book by its cover: This is a book cover with a sinister aura. The poor bunny can't help being albino, but there's something about the big, seemingly naked ears, the red eyes, and the very pink paws that just screams creepy. Well done, publishers, I'm immediately on my guard. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR14 Book 40: "Monstress, vol 1: Awakening" by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Page count: 202 pages

Rating: 2 stars

CBR14 Bingo: Monster (there are several monsters in this story, both humanoid and not)

Official book description:

Set in an alternate matriarchal 1900's Asia, in a richly imagined world of art deco-inflected steampunk, MONSTRESS tells the story of a teenage girl who is struggling to survive the trauma of war, and who shares a mysterious psychic link with a monster of tremendous power, a connection that will transform them both and make them the target of both human and otherworldly powers.

So total honesty here. This was my local fantasy/sci-fi book club pick for March. Yup, nearly eight months ago. I read the first three issues, then got incredibly distracted by something or other, I don't even remember what anymore, and just left the trade paperback lying unattended until I finally got round to finishing the book in the middle of October, because it seemed like the easiest way to complete the "Monster" bingo square. Also, I was annoyed at myself for not finishing what is basically six issues of a comic book, something I can normally get through in about an hour. 

Splitting my reading of the story this way means that I barely have any memory of what happened in the earliest issues, and my comprehension of the later issues was somewhat hampered by me just spending some time re-reading. As the blurb says, the story is set in an alternate history, in turn of the 20th Century Asia, where instead of the majority of society being ruled and controlled by men, women are in power. So far, so cool. There's clearly been some sort of horrific war, and there are humans and talking cats and strange animal/people hybrids. There seems to be an organisation of powerful women who take the shall-we-say non-standard people captive and perform horrific experiments on them. Our heroine is a young woman called Maika Halfwolf, who is now an orphan and has suffered a bunch of trauma due to the wars. She only has one arm and is the Monstress of the title because some sort of scary life-sucking monster has taken up residence inside her, and they are now battling for control. 

For those with a weak constitution or sensitivity issues, there are probably a whole host of trigger warnings in this story. I recall there being horrific violence all over the place and generally a lot of unpleasantness, which is why I put the comic down in the first place. At the same time, this series has a lot of critical acclaim and has won a bunch of very prestigious awards over the years, so I should probably go back and give the book a new chance at a later date when I'm in a better headspace. The art by Sana Takeda is next-level and so beautiful that some of the unpleasantness just gets even more visceral. However, at this juncture, the book gets only 2 stars from me, because I pretty much finished the first volume out of stubbornness and remember very few details about the story at all. 

Judging a book by its cover: Sana Takeda's art really is breathtaking. While I probably should have given this book more dedicated attention, there is no denying that the art is amazing, and this cover image is very eye-catching. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR14 Book 28: "Svarte-Mathilda" (Black Mathilda) by Tor Arve Røssland

Page count: 154 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

Twenty years after a teenage girl was brutally murdered in a small town near Bergen, Elizabeth moves into the long-empty flat with her mother. Elizabeth's parents are going through a divorce, and in a tragic accident a while back, Elizabeth's older brother died in a fire. She hates that they had to move away from her old home and her friends in Bergen, that her mother doesn't seem to want to talk to her at all, and she certainly doesn't like their new home. The flat never seems to get warm, even if they keep a fire on in the fireplace and turn the heating up to high. In addition, Elizabeth's phone doesn't seem to be holding its charge and has very spotty reception, so she can't call or message her friends.

In the first few days there, Elizabeth also experiences some really scary things. She's convinced the sees blood all over the bathroom floor at one point and gets locked in there while she feels long clawed fingers reaching for her. She also hears voices whispering and is getting very freaked out. Meanwhile, her mother hasn't noticed anything out of the ordinary, except the unusually cold temperature in the flat, and she thinks Elizabeth may have a delayed grief reaction and considers getting the girl a therapist.

When Elizabeth starts her new school, the teacher seems shocked when she announces where she lives, and one of the boys, Philip, claims that her flat is known as the "murder place". He recounts how twenty years earlier, Marie van Vleet was found locked in the bathroom, stabbed multiple times, with her face all scratched up. Philip's dad is a policeman and this was his first murder case, so it made an impression on him. Elizabeth is a bit skeptical, but at the same time, her new home being the location of an unsolved murder might explain some of the strange paranormal stuff she's been experiencing. When she gets home, after spending several hours at the local burger joint listening to Philip recounting grisly murder details, her mother is upset that she's late, but also happy she seems to be making a friend. Later, Elizabeth once again finds herself locked into a room, this time, it's her own bedroom and a voice seems to be whispering warnings to her. She feels something shoved into her hand and discovers that it's the library card of Marie van Vleet. 

Elizabeth convinces Philip to accompany her to the local library the next day, where they make up a story about Philip's bedridden aunt who really wants to find a book she borrowed over twenty years ago. The junior librarian, Viggo, helps them but is reprimanded once the senior librarian discovers what he has done, and whose book records he's shown the two nosy teenagers. She explains that Marie van Vleet is long dead, and the teenagers should stop lying and leave the library. Viggo, however, is quite intrigued and offers to help the kids do research. Marie was clearly doing some research of her own, having read a lot about local history and a lot about folklore and the supernatural. They find a picture of a dark-haired and dark-eyed young girl called Mathilda from the 1880s and Viggo remembers an urban legend of a "Bloody Mary" style ghost called Black Mathilda. Supposedly, if you go into a dark room with a mirror, holding a lit candle or a flashlight, and call her name seven times, she will appear. He claims it's all coincidence and superstition, but Elizabeth is not so sure. Viggo has also found what seems to be Marie's diary among the library archives, and gives it to Elizabeth, as it's not really library property.

When reading the diary, Elizabeth discovers that the ornate and creepy mirror in their bathroom, which seems very old and not at all in the style of the other bathroom fittings, was in fact put there by Marie, who found it in the attic along with some old paintings. She, like Elizabeth, was living with her mother after her parents split and seemed determined to do as much as possible to aggravate her Mum. Putting in an ancient mirror seems to have done the trick. Further reading of the diary seems to suggest that there might be a link between the 19th Century Mathilda and the mirror, and the urban legend might not be so fictional after all. When Philip suggests they test the theory by locking themselves in the bathroom with a flashlight and calling for Mathilda, Elizabeth reluctantly agrees, and unsurprisingly, some really creepy and very much supernatural stuff goes down.

Parallel with the story of Elizabeth, Philip, and their investigation of Marie's murder, the readers get the story of a young happy couple in the 1880s settling on a large, prosperous farm in the west of Norway, a few hours away from the town where Elizabeth now lives. The wife has a baby, whom they name Mathilda, but she dies while Mathilda is very young, and a persuasive and slightly scary governess is hired, who brings her own daughter with her to the farm. Mathilda befriends the girl, who is disabled and seems to be feared by the other local children. As the years go by, the governess comes to wield a lot of power in the household and keeps persuading the father, who is also the local magistrate, to spend more time away from the farm. Then one by one, the local children start disappearing and are found dead and mutilated in the woods. How does this sinister tale intersect with that of Elizabeth and Marie?

Svarte-Mathilda is the first book in a trilogy about Elizabeth and her scary experiences with Black Mathilda. In the first book, Elizabeth's friend Philip disappears without a trace after they foolishly perform the ritual. Elizabeth is left stabbed in the stomach with her mother convinced Philip attacked her and ran away. Elizabeth needs to figure out the connection between the scary mirror in her flat, her friend's disappearance, and the historical events she has read about, or the curse of Black Mathilda will end up with her dead. 

This is a really rather creepy ghost story, with the suspense gradually building and some really nice touches throughout. All three books in the series have apparently been bestsellers and very popular among teens, and nominated for "Uprisen", a national book award voted for by teenage readers throughout Norway. My colleagues and I who teach Norwegian are currently all reading a little bit of the book out loud to our Norwegian class each lesson, and I obviously had to read the book myself before teaching it in class. Since our second theme of the year (very suitably for autumn) is going to be Scary things, reading a horror mystery seemed fitting. Some of the kids have already read the book, but are very good about not spoiling things for the rest of the class. 

I can see why this book has remained popular among teens since it was released in 2010. At under 200 pages long, it's a quick read and it mixes historical fiction with a contemporary murder mystery and a ghost story really well. Some of the contemporary mystery stuff could easily have been the plot of a 'monster of the week' episode of Supernatural. 

While my TBR list for the coming months is pretty packed, I'm absolutely going to find the time to read the two sequels as well. I need to find out more about how Mathilda became a vengeful ghost and whether Elizabeth is successful in locating and saving her friend Philip.

Judging a book by its cover: While maybe a bit simple, the cover strikes a nice tone for a mystery, with the font being very old-fashioned, in keeping with the historical side of the story. The fancy frame of the mirror, complete with a creepy child and blood-red background seems like a very obvious choice. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR14 Book 13: "The Beast and the Bethany" by Jack Meggitt-Phillips

Page count: 256 pages

Rating: 4 stars

 

Ebenezer Tweezer is 511 years old, but you'd never know it to look at him. He lives in a great big house, surrounded by exciting treasures and artifacts and all of this is possible because of the hideous beast he keep in his attic. In return for Ebenezer feading it interesting things, the Beast gives him potions once a year that keep Ebenezer young and beautiful. It's also given him all the special things in his house. However, the Beast is greedy and grows more demanding with each passing year. It only wants to eat things it's never tried before, which in 511 years you can imagine isn't that long a list. The Beast has decided that it wants to eat a nice, juicy child, which may be a line not even Ebenezer will cross.

 

Of course, if the Beast withholds Ebenezer's potions, he'll start aging at a rapid pace, and after a day or two of feeling the effects of age creeping up on him, Ebenezer starts pondering solutions. If he were to feed a really bad child to the Beast, would that really be such a terrible thing? At first, Ebenezer tries to steal a child from the zoo, but all the children there seem terribly well protected by parents. Then he's told about the local orphanage and goes there to find a child that will do instead. However, Ebenezer isn't expecting to get so charmed by so many of the children. Then he encounters Bethany, a very surly and unpleasant little girl, and she seems to be the solution to all of his problems. Then, when Bethany actually meets the Beast, she insults it so gravely it almost refuses to even consider eating her, which would very much be counter to Ebenezer's plans.

 

He decides to take Bethany away and try to fatten her up a bit (she's terribly skinny), while also trying to persuade the Beast that Bethany is in fact exactly the sort of plump and succulent child it has demanded. Completely contrary to Ebenezer's plans, however, is how he starts to warm to her and see actual improvement in her behaviour after a few days together. The longer the two spend together, the more like friends they become, and soon, Ebenezer can no longer live with the idea of feeding Bethany to the Beast. He is aging rather rapidly, though, and the Beast really doesn't like to be told it can't have what it wants. It's up to Bethina to come up with a solution that gets rid of the Beast once and for all, so she and Ebenezer can live happily ever after.

This is delightful middle grade book which I very much look forward to my own son reading at some point in the future. I suspect readers of Roald Dahl, A Series of Unfortunate Events or fans of Despicable Me would find it very entertaining. The book is illustrated throughout with beautiful and very funny pictures by Isabelle Folath, and it was a very quick read in a month when I otherwise managed to complete very few books. I know that there is now a sequel, so I suppose I should see if my local library has a copy. I wouldn't mind spending some more time with Bethany and Ebenezer. 

Judging a book by its cover: I pretty much adore this cover. The almost neon green to draw your eye in (on my copy, the endpapers are sprayed the same lurid colour!), the fang-tastic maw and the no-nonsense little girl in the middle. I wanted to read this the first time I saw it on a library shelf.

 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.  

#CBR13 Book 42: "Through the Woods" by Emily Carroll

Page count: 208 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

CBR13 Bingo: Shelfie

In five creepy stories ranging from the historical to more recent times, writer and artist Emily Carroll gives us her take on proper spine-tingling fairy tales. Accompanied by her absolutely beautiful art, the tales are all the more chilling because of the illustrations. This absolutely qualifies as a graphic novel, or probably more accurately a graphic short story (or fairy tale) anthology. Some of the stories are short, some are longer, all managed to truly unnerve me, while also entertaining me greatly. 

In Our Neighbour's Place (this one is probably my favourite), three sisters of varying ages are left alone at home in their cabin in the woods while their father goes hunting. His final instructions are to take refuge in the neighbour's house if he is gone for more than three days and nights, which he is. As the food and water supplies dwindle, both the elder and younger sister disappear from the house, after talking dreamily about a man outside in a wide-brimmed hat. In the end, the middle sister, the tale's narrator, has no choice but to follow her sisters out into an unknown fate.

A Lady's Hands are Cold sees a young woman married off to a rich man and goes to live in his big house, where she wanders the beautiful rooms and the manicured grounds and every night hears a sad, plaintive and unnerving song. None of the staff seem to understand what she is asking about, although all are clearly upset by her questions. When her husband leaves for a hunt, the lady decides to go looking for the source of the mysterious singing. She quickly realises she should possibly have left matters as they were.

His Face All Red is a tale of brotherly jealousy and a hunting accident gone terribly wrong (the hunt seems to be a common motif in these stories). One brother is haunted by his actions, and try as he might, he cannot undo what he has wrought.

In My Friend Janna a young woman recounts the tale of her best friend from childhood, a woman she was so close to they might have been sisters. Janna worked as a spiritual medium and our narrator was the hidden figure in the walls that assisted her in making the crowd believe in the supernatural. One day, the young women find a dead hare at the side of the road. Janna touches it, her friend doesn't, and after that, Janna is never quite the same. She appears genuinely haunted, but there's no such things as ghosts and supernatural spirits, are there?

While all the previous stories have a much older historical setting, the final tale, The Nesting Place, appears to be set in the early 20th Century, where Bell, a teenage girl goes to stay with her adult brother and his new fiancee Rebecca while on holiday from boarding school. Rebecca is beautiful and gracious, but there seems to be something slightly odd about her. The elderly housekeeper tells Bell that when Rebecca was a girl, she disappeared in the woods and was missing for three days. She warns Bell to be careful when wandering alone in the forest. Since everyone tells her that Rebecca never goes into the woods anymore, Bell is surprised to see her soon-to-be sister-in-law wandering there one day. She follows, and discovers exactly why her brother's intended doesn't seem entirely like everyone else.

I was given this beautiful hardback as a Christmas present by my husband back in 2014, and it has graced my bookshelves entirely ignored and overlooked since. It's been packed up and moved from one flat to another, all without me giving it a chance because I wasn't sure I was up for a horror collection. Nevertheless, when this year's bingo came around, and there was a square for a shelfie, I figured this gorgeous hardback would finally have its day. More like a few hours (I could have finished it quicker, but I needed a break between each story to process the words and the art and savour the pleasant unease each story evoked in me).

Ms. Carroll's art style, especially some of the ways in which she depicted people as similar to that of Kate Beaton, although while Ms. Beaton does most of her work entirely in black and white, Ms. Carroll uses colours, if mostly a mix of muted browns and dramatic black, white and red. 

Now that I finally read the book, I tried to find out what else Ms. Carroll has published. She doesn't seem terribly prolific, although there is a horror comic from 2019 that I may have to try to track down. Through the Woods is well worth checking out, both for the scary stories and the wonderful art. 

Judging a book by its cover: A simple, yet effective image in stark black, white and red, with the moon front and centre makes the cover of the book very striking. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR13 Book 32: "Meddling Kids" by Edgar Cantero

Page count: 442 pages

Audio book length: 12 hrs 54 mins

Rating: 4 stars

CBR13 Bingo: Book Club (the July selection of my fantasy/sci-fi book club here in Oslo. I read it in early June)

Official book description:

The surviving members of a forgotten teenage detective club (and their dog) must reunite as broken adults to finally solve the terrifying case that ruined them all and sent the wrong man to prison. Scooby Doo and the gang never had to do this!

1990. The teen detectives once known as the Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in the Zoinx River Valley in Oregon) are all grown up and haven t seen each other since their fateful, final case in 1977. Andy, the tomboy, is twenty-five and on the run, wanted in at least two states. Keri, one-time kid genius and budding biologist, is bartending in New York, working on a serious drinking problem. At least she s got Sean, an excitable Weimeraner descended from the original canine member of the team. Nate, the horror nerd, has spent the last thirteen years in and out of mental health institutions, and currently resides in an asylum in Arhkam, Massachusetts. The only friend he still sees is Peter, the handsome jock turned movie star. The problem is, Peter s been dead for years.

The time has come to uncover the source of their nightmares and return to where it all began in 1977. This time, it better not be a man in a mask. The real monsters are waiting.

Long-time readers of my reviews know that I'm not a huge fan of the horror genre. Luckily, this book is more in the vein of Stranger Things or Cabin in the Woods, a mix of comedy and horror that makes it a lot more palatable for me, even as I cringe occasionally. It doesn't hurt that Cantero, originally a Spanish novelist, in his first English novel has a way with language that really appealed to the language nerd in me, even as he occasionally described eldritch horrors in a little bit too much detail. This is also a book full of pop culture references, and for someone who read and re-read all of Enid Blyton's Famous Five novels at an early age and then graduated to Nancy Drew, there are a lot of fun nods, not just the place where the children used to meet up being called Blyton Hills (the dog is even called Tim!) I never really watched a lot of Scooby Doo, but the nods to this are also obvious.

This was the July selection of my local fantasy/sci-fi book club and I ended up listening to the audio. Kyla Garcia does a good job with the narration, which isn't always easy as the POV switches between all of our protagonists, as well as some supporting characters. The plot is action-packed and suitably creepy, with your teenage detective gang turned twenty-somethings with clear trauma responses to some of the bad stuff they experienced as adolescents. While some of them are reluctant, they go back to the place of their many childhood adventures to revisit their last big case, which is still haunting all of them in various ways. The town is no longer as idyllic as it once was, and it becomes clear that something sinister is indeed still lurking in the wilderness.

Yet again, I'm reviewing this far too long after finishing it to remember a lot of specific details, but the book has a fun cast of characters, some exciting and interesting twists, decent queer representation, a few jump scares, an excellent dog companion, some Lovecraftian monsters and kept me entertained throughout. The other members of my book club who finished the book also enjoyed it, but we agreed that it wasn't necessarily the deepest or most nuanced work of fiction we'd ever read. It's a fun, pop-culture infused read, and I'll keep my eye out for more of Cantero's English-language work. 

Judging a book by its cover: Occasionally, you can judge a book a bit by the cover. There are most certainly tentacly horrors from the deep featured in this novel, as well as a group of plucky protagonists with a lot of issues to work through. The bright neon colours are fun, as are the contents of this book. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Book 82: "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War" by Max Brooks

Page count: 352 pages

Audio book length: 12 hrs 9 mins

Rating: 4.5 stars

Official book description:

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the audiobook captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the listener, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”

As it's getting harder for me to find the motivation and time to read (and review) coupled with the fact that I'm getting older and more set in my ways, I have a tendency to pick up only books I'm pretty sure I'm going to like, and rarely move out of my comfort zone. I've also gotten better about just giving up on books that just aren't working for me. This year, that was The Three-Body Problem, seriously, after a third of the book, I gave up, read the Wikipedia summary, which was just as boring and confusing to me as the book had been, and concluded that I'm just never going to read that book. One consequence of only picking books in my "safe zone" is that it gets harder for me to pick my worst of the year, as I rarely finish and review books I truly loathe anymore. Another consequence, of course, is that I rarely get properly surprised. 

One exception to this comes from my book club selections. There's obviously the Cannonball Read book club, and also my fantasy/sci-fi club, which meets the first Wednesday of every month (sadly only on-screen now, with corona restrictions). Not all of the books of the month are books I would have picked up on my own (this is also why I've read part of, but not finished the aforementioned The Three-Body Problem). Our book pick for October (to be discussed in November) was this, World War Z. The book is not exactly new,  so I'd heard about it, but never read it - because I really am not a big fan of zombies. The fact that the movie adaptation was supposed to be dire didn't exactly make me more excited about it.

Still, I try to show up prepared and like to have read at least part of the books in question. Another member recommended the all-cast audiobook (telling me to make sure I got the full text, not the abridged version), so I got it on Audible. Within only a few chapters, I was utterly engrossed and found myself listening to the book every chance I got. This book was such a wonderful surprise because I'd thought I would suffer through it, getting squicked out by horror and gore, and instead found myself fascinated by the way the story is told and the way Max Brooks (who I also had no idea was the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft until I read up a bit about him) structures his narrative. I will be very surprised if this book isn't on my top 10 of the year - something I wouldn't have believed before I picked it up. 

I have a Masters Degree in history, and for much of my university courses, I specialised in medieval history and particularly social history at that. I really am not all that bothered about battles, politics, various heads of state, and the like, give me the nitty-gritty of how people lived and all of these big events impacted on regular people, and I will eat it up. So a book chronicling the aftermath of what is known as the zombie wars, where we hear from ex-soldiers, scientists, politicians, regular people and so forth all over the world, which in itself was very refreshing. There is no singular focus on America and Americans here, but "witness accounts" from every part of the globe, even Antarctica, and even features interviews with ex-astronauts. The book covers part of the actual war, but also a lot of the aftermath, and the changes the zombie outbreak caused to society, including social, political, religious, environmental, and financial developments. 

As with Station Eleven, which was certainly a strange book to reread during a global pandemic, a book where the various government powers are criticised for their shortsightedness and how ill-prepared they are to handle a global crisis also took on unexpected additional relevancy now - with the death toll from Covid-19 still rising steadily, especially in the USA. The book was picked for our book club long before we knew what this year was going to look like, so as with Station Eleven, it was just one of those strange coincidences.

I'm really glad that I turned out to be wrong about this book, and my fellow book club member who recommended the full cast version was not wrong. It's an excellent way to listen to the book, and it makes the fates of the various people we meet seem all the more realistic, as you hear them not through the voice of one narrator, but as if you were listening to actual interview recordings. The voice cast is very star studded (go to Wikipedia to see the full list) and I had fun trying to identify some of the actors taking part.

This book should stand as a reminder to me that it's important that I still read outside of my comfort zone occasionally and that I try genres and books that I think are going to be difficult to read or that might make me uncomfortable because occasionally I discover a new favourite - and that's never a bad thing. 

Judging a book by its cover: I've got to admit, the rather plain and unremarkable cover of this book is one of the reasons I've never really bothered to give the book much of a second look. It's not exactly inviting, in shades of muddy brown, with only the plain title on the cover. Doesn't look too riveting, does it?

Crossposted by Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Books 65-67: "The Sandman, part 1" by Neil Gaiman and Dirk Maggs

Page count: 632 (covers the collected volumes of Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll's House and Dream Country)

Audiobook length: 10 hrs 54 mins

Rating: 4.5 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Happy (I never thought that Sandman could be adapted into an audio story, so this made me very happy indeed)

Official book description:

When The Sandman, also known as Lord Morpheus - the immortal king of dreams, stories and the imagination - is pulled from his realm and imprisoned on Earth by a nefarious cult, he languishes for decades before finally escaping. Once free, he must retrieve the three “tools” that will restore his power and help him to rebuild his dominion, which has deteriorated in his absence. As the multi-threaded story unspools, The Sandman descends into Hell to confront Lucifer, chases rogue nightmares who have escaped his realm, and crosses paths with an array of characters from DC comic books, ancient myths, and real-world history, including: Inmates of Gotham City's Arkham Asylum, Doctor Destiny, the muse Calliope, the three Fates, William Shakespeare , and many more. 

In July 1998, my life changed forever. In those days, I still lived in a suburb of Oslo and didn't necessarily visit the centre of the city all that often. When I did, I always took a trip to Avalon, the dedicated fantasy/sci-fi/all things nerd book shop there (the book shop sadly closed long ago now). On a display table near the front of the shop was Fables and Reflections, by no means the first volume in the long-running Sandman series, but an excellent introduction. I think Neil Gaiman had recently visited Oslo for the first time, and the shop was promoting his most famous work. I had never read any graphic novels before but was drawn by the description of the series. I bought the book, started reading it on the bus on the way home, and my mind was blown. I had never read anything like it before, and I was utterly hooked on the stories of dreams and nightmares, the family dramas with references to all manner of mythology, classical literature, comic books, and the like. 

This was a time when Norwegian libraries were not particularly well-stocked with fantasy of any kind, and certainly not English-language comic books and graphic novels (I'm happy to say that that's changed massively over the last 20 years - one of the public library branches in Oslo is now dedicated entirely to comics and graphic novels in different languages. Hence, I had to buy each volume before I could read the full story. My records show that it took me about a year to get all ten volumes of trade paperbacks, some of which I've now had signed by Neil Gaiman himself. 

Funny story, one of them isn't actually signed to Malin, because my dear friend Ben was a bit of an idiot back when he took my copy of Preludes and Nocturnes to a signing in Newcastle. This was back before I really knew him, and he was still just my then-boyfriend, now-husband Mark's school friend. See, Ben and another of Mark's school friends, Ruth, had initially joked that his Norwegian girlfriend's name was Helga. By the time Ben was taking one of my precious trade paperbacks to Newcastle to get it signed as a favour, he'd met me several times, and knew my name was Malin. But when he got to the front of the signing line, and Mr. Gaiman asked him who to sign the book to, Ben (lovable moron) blurted out Helga, and only after he'd left the shop remembered that it was not, in fact, my actual name. This is also why I have a signed copy of Anansi Boys, where Neil Gaiman apologizes to me for getting my name wrong. 

 

Anyway, the long and rambling introduction to this review is included to show just how long Sandman has been part of my life, and how much it means to me. It was my introduction to graphic novels and the writings of Neil Gaiman. It showed me a whole new way of storytelling. I never thought it could be adapted well in a million years (I'm still skeptical about the Netflix series). I've rarely been so happy to tell you I was wrong. This was an excellent adaptation, and I think I liked parts of it a lot more than the actual original comics issues (while a lot of the artists and artwork used in the series was state of the art back in the 1990s, it's sometimes a bit "grimy-looking" now - unless you have the stunning Absolute Sandman volumes, that cost a small fortune). 

So how do you successfully adapt what is both a written and a visual medium, you ask? You hire an excellent ensemble cast, so that all of the various characters we meet in the pages of the first three volumes of the graphic novel opus are voiced by different and distinct voices (there's a huge ensemble of people who do multiple voices over the course of the audio drama, but never in the same scenes, making it much easier to keep track of who's speaking at any given time). You also get someone to narrate and describe the various scenes and characters in them (or occasionally add descriptions of the setting and characters to the inner monologues of one or several of the people in a scene), so the listener is told what they would have seen on the page if they were reading the comic. That the narrator here is Neil Gaiman himself (whose voice I find very soothing) just seems extra fitting.

I read several reviews of this audio drama that complained that with very few exceptions, everything is kept exactly as it was in the original 90s comics, with no attempts to adapt or bring it more up to date. This was mentioned as a criticism, I didn't think it was a problem. I also know the source material being adapted exceptionally well, having read the comics multiple times. Even so, as I kept listening, I actually pulled my trade paperbacks off the shelf to halfway follow along. To someone who's never read the original graphic novels, it may be harder to follow the plot, even though the team who adapted did a very good job in filling in with background sounds to give you an idea of action and plot.

Each issue of the comic is one approximately 30-minute long episode, with little audio credits and everything. It felt like I was listening to an old-fashioned radio play, and I loved it. How well the adaptation works for you may also depend on how you feel about James McAvoy. I love him and his voice, and think he did a splendid job voicing Lord Morpheus. Kat Dennings worked surprisingly well as Death. The only one I wasn't entirely happy with was the guy playing Desire, whose voice just didn't "fit" with my mental image of what it should be. 

A brief trigger warning towards the end. In both Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll's House and Dream Country, there are elements of horror. The issue 24 Hours, for instance, where a number of people are kept trapped in a diner by an escaped Arkham Asylum inmate in control of Dream's ancient ruby and are slowly driven increasingly more insane over the course of the story was even more horrifying than it is on the page because all the various people got their own voices and felt more real than they do when you just read them. It was harder to stay detached. There are also stories of serial killers, and child abuse and women being raped and beaten - so be aware of that. 

Now I'm left impatiently waiting and hoping that this becomes enough of a success for Audible that they'll choose to adapt the rest of the series as well. Recording audio dramas must be something that should be perfectly doable even now, with production halted on so many things due to Covid-19.

While I'm choosing to use this for my "Happy" square for this year's bingo, it could just as easily have fit with "Nostalgia", since this was such an important part both of my adolescence and so ground-breaking for comics in general during the 1990s. 

Judging a book by its cover: I have tried to track down the name of the cover artist for the dark, broody image of Dream, without any luck. It's a good depiction of Lord Morpheus, and I like that it looks like he himself is made up of sand or dust and kind of blurring at the edges a bit. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.