Small Gods of Calamity

This seems to be the week of book club reviews for me. I’m very happy to be a regular participant in r/fantasy’s Beyond Binaries Book Club, which focuses on queer speculative fiction. This month brings us to a supernatural police procedural story. It wasn’t quite as dynamic a story as I would have liked, but I really enjoyed the lead character, setting, and magic. If you want to check out the mid-way discussion of book club, check it out here!

Elevator Pitch
Kim Han-Gil is a police detective, one wildly unpopular with his own department. He’s aloof, a bit strange, and trouble follows him. He’s also part of the spiritualist community, helping keep ghosts and spirits from causing trouble. Currently, he’s hunting down spiritual worms causing a spate of suicides and murders in the city. These worms also took his mother when he was a child. Combine that with a new partner (who knows how long this one will last), and memories Kim Han-Gil’s past, and he’s in for a rough week. Doesn’t help that he hasn’t refilled his anxiety meds for the past four months either.

What Worked For Me
I love Kim Han-Gil as a character. Standoffish police officers aren’t exactly rare in these types of stories, but he’s a fun version of that trope. We’re in his head a lot more than you typically would be for this type of character, and its amusing to see him blatantly ignore inconvenient questions and hope that others won’t be rude enough to keep pushing as he walks away from them. He’s isolated from his department and the spiritualist community, in large part because of the way he handles situations, and that felt very real and tangible in the story, without being forced, awkward, or relying on problematic tropes from the genre’s past.

He was also a great example of how to write high-quality asexual and mental health representation. Neither is particularly prominent in the narrative, nor was their inclusion clunky or awkward. Those looking for a deep exploration of mental health or asexual identities probably won’t find what they’re looking for here, but it’s phenomenal at casually representing identities that often go unmentioned in fantasy books.

Finally, I loved the magic of this novella. It’s a great example of how soft magic can function to further a story. It’s always clear what something does: wards to protect against malevolent spirits, origami butterflies to track energy, incense to communicate with ghosts. The writing in these sections always pulled me in, sparked imagination, and did exactly what soft-style magic should do: establish tone and create a sense of awe and wonder.

What Didn’t Work For Me
In the end, I don’t think that this story worked terribly well as a mystery, thriller, or police procedural. The plot was very linear, without the sense of radical escalation or spinning out of control that I look for in stories like these. And perhaps that’s me misunderstanding police procedurals as a genre, but it felt like things got resolved too easily, and without any sense of surprise. I was craving a twist, even a small one, that would put me on the back foot a little bit.

I also ended the novella feeling that there were a lot of things I wanted to know more about. Kim Han-Gil’s time in Japan, what his relationship with his partner was going to be like (though this was hinted at) and why he could sense these worms when nobody else could. There were just a lot of hanging threads that I wanted to see pulled which didn’t get the attention they deserved. Typically, I want to see novels cut down a hundred pages. This book needed something longer-form to really shine, I think. He’s an interesting character, and I’d be happy to follow him on other cases if this were to turn into a series.

In Conclusion: a fascinating character and world in a story that desperately needs a plot twist.

• Characters: 4
• Worldbuilding: 5
• Craft: 2
• Themes: 3
• Enjoyment: 3