C0smic Occurence

The Black Hunger

As part of pride month, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and discussing about how avoiding problematic tropes can lead to more problematic tropes. Bury Your Gays (other than being a Chunk Tingle novel I very much want to read) is a classic example of authors, playwrights, and screenwriters killing off queer characters as a way of saying this person was bad and immoral sort of like how literally every Disney Villain dies due to their own character flaws. That trend is bad and problematic, but its backlash led to such predictable happy endings that I didn’t get the same beautiful tragedy and sadness in queer speculative fiction that I could find in cis/het works. Thankfully, I think this is being seen and rectified, mostly by queer authors themselves. I’m all for tragic gays making a comeback.

The Black Hunger is a great example of how bad endings for queer characters isn’t problematic on its own. It’s only bad when used as a way to demonize queer folks. And while I had some issues with the book, I had a great time with it as part of my continued exposure therapy to the horror genre after being traumatized by watching The Mummy when I was five (I still don’t like beetles to this day). Unfortunately, this book struggled in other areas, mostly related to depictions of Buddhism, which will rightly be a dealbreaker for many.

The Premise:
John Sackeville is dying from a mysterious curse eating away at him. His partner is dead, and something horrible has happened to the world. He’s being interrogated for key information about a strange cult (partially of a dark sect of cannibalistic Buddhists, mostly Russian), but he starts at the beginning and takes his time getting to the juicy bits, spending a good among of time on his childhood, his years at Oxford, and his time in the British service in India. Part of his story also involves diary entries of a Jewish psychologist visiting the home of his ex-love to diagnose her with madness, and a letter said ex-love’s dead husband wrote to her about his experiences as a prisoner in Russia to a particularly Spooky count and his family.

Read if Looking For: older gay male representation, evil cultists (and Russians), far too many teeth, slow burn gothic horror

Avoid if You Dislike: multiple narrators, Epistolary novels that don’t read like letters, authors taking liberties with real-world religions without getting it quite right

DNF Roundup – January Through June

Something I am trying (and largely failing) to get better at is dropping books that I’m not enjoying. I feel a compulsion to keep reading, even when I’m not enjoying the experience or getting anything out of the book. Here are a collection of mini-reviews for books I didn’t finish this year. I’ll flag how far I made it in each book and the reasons I put it down, as well as try to acknowledge the things it did well.

I’m hoping to have more of these, not because I like trashing books, but because I want to get better at using my reading time for books I love, instead of fighting against something that isn’t working. Will it happen? Probably not, but who knows.

Don’t Let the Forest In

Despite being a middle/high school English teacher, I don’t actually read much Middle Grade or Young Adult works these days. Sometimes I’ll preview a book for class, but rarely for personal pleasure. Oddly, the vast majority of YA that I read is horror, despite it not really being my favorite genre (it’s growing on me, I promise!). I picked up Don’t Let the Forest In in as some first steps to introduce more aro/ace representation into my reading diet. Overall, I thought this was a good book, and one that I’m glad I read. While I think some elements will frustrate readers who primarily pursue adult books, I think it’s got enough good things going on to be worth recommending to a broad variety of people.

The Premise
Andrew and his twin sister Dove attend a prestigious and remote boarding school, courtesy of a rich (and largely absent) father. Dove is a straight-A student, but Andrew is listless, reserved, and anxious. The only thing keeping him afloat (other than Dove making sure he doesn’t fail any classes) is his best friend/roommate/crush Thomas. Thomas is wild and abrasive, the visual artist to Andrew’s creative writing. But Thomas’s parents are missing, presumed dead, and Thomas is a prime culprit. Things between them aren’t the same as they used to be, and that’s before Andrew realizes that creatures from the forest are trying to attack the school every night.

Read if You Like: unreliable narrators, endings that stick the landing, impactful twists, creepy forest monsters

Avoid if You Dislike: archetypical side characters/set dressing, romantic tension derived lack of effective communication, slow pacing

How to Survive this Fairytale

I’m a sucker for Fairy Tale mashups. I grew up loving Into the Woods, I binged Once Upon a Time in college. Retellings are wonderful too, but there’s something special about taking the idea of storytelling, throwing a bunch in a blender, and seeing what new comes out of it. How to Survive This Fairytale made me laugh, made me cry, and made me cry some more. I’m usually not a super emotional person, but this book got to me in a really profound way. Hallow has a fantastic debut novel, and I can’t wait to see what she writes next. This is definitely on my shortlist for book of the year.

The Premise:
This story centers on Hans, or Hansel from Hansel and Gretel. The story mostly takes place after the events of the original fairy tale however, and follows him through several decades into his adult life. Featuring prominently in his journey are a girl and her brothers (cursed to be swans), Snow White’s evil Queen, and a loyal dog. This book is focuses on Hans’ journey to see if a happy ending is possible. The story is told in second person, with the ‘narrator’ being a sort-of explicit character who interacts with the story as Hans experiments with different possible paths through the situations he faces.

Read if You Enjoy: Fairy tale mashups, characters processing trauma, romance subplots, aggressively paced books

Avoid if you Dislike: 2nd person narration, tidy endings, protagonists not always being the center of the story, books without fight scenes

Dad Magic

I picked up this book excited for an urban fantasy with a middle-aged gay parent as a protagonist. It’s about everything you could expect from a book called Dad Magic, and features a lot of elements I don’t normally see in fantasy (urban or not). Ultimately, I didn’t like this book terribly much, and wish that I had DNF’d it. I think there’s a lot of readers who would like it though, especially if they can get into the dad-bod jokes that exemplify the tone of this story.

The Premise:
Brent is a retired adventurer, now insurance claims worker. He sells products in case his clients get blown up by their own cauldrons or get run over by a drunk driver on a broom. He lives with his 17 year old daughter who wants to work with dragons (not Brent’s favorite idea in the world) and his best friend who eats way too much chicken cooked with time magic. After the pair of friends are forced to defend a city block from a violent behemoth, they get roped into working for the mage’s guild to investigate strange events in the city. At the same time, his daughter is coming to terms with her unique powers, a man who looks just like his ex-husband shows up, and people start hunting down Victoria for reasons yet-unknown.

Read If Looking For: platonic bromances, father/daughter bickering, corny jokes and names

Avoid if You Dislike: different names for everything, suspending disbelief for plot and romance, shallow characters

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!

The Premise
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.

Read if You Like: loner cops, creepy possession spirits, immersive magic

Avoid if Looking For: thrills and chills, resolutions to all loose threads, critiques of criminal justice systems

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

One of the things I love about fiction (and fantasy in particular) is that writers can operate within a shared bank of references, playing with old ideas and twisting them into new shapes. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is just that. It takes a deal with a devil, the moral ‘be careful what you wish for’ and spins out an engaging tale from it. This was a pick for an in-person book club, and I very much enjoyed my time with it, even if I thought it missed some golden opportunities.

The Premise:
Addie LaRue made a deal with the devil, if he really is a devil, to avoid being forced into marriage. She’s spent the last 300 years with immortal life and freedom, with a catch. She cannot leave an imprint on the world: people forget her as soon as she’s out of sight, she loses all belongings, and she can’t even break a window without it fixing itself. She is a ghost. That is, until she meets Henry in 2013, who can somehow remember her. Her life changes forever.

Read if Looking For: resourceful women, hot demons, leads going from overwhelmed to hyper competent

Avoid if You Dislike: constant flashbacks

The Long Past

Ginn Hale has been on my radar for a while. I hear a lot of praise for her Rifter series, and her new book (The Price of a Thousand Blessings) looks really interesting. However, when a wild west + dinosaurs book was pitched during an r/fantasy Pride Month post, I knew I had to give it a shot. I wasn’t blown away, but I see a lot of promise in Hale’s writing, and am interested to read some of her newer stuff.

The Premise:
Grover has done well for himself after the rifts opened up, flooding much of the United States and releasing dinosaurs into the world. He’s made a name (and a living) by taming an ostrich dinosaur mount, hunting and gathering valuable materials from the new wildlands, and generally staying as far away from the town’s racist priest and sheriff as he can. When an airship arrives with a contingent of mages (including the ex-boyfriend he thought was dead to the war) ready to look into mining the valuable materials from the rift, Grover is forced to take sides and reconnect with his beloved Lawrence.

Read if You Like: ranger archetypes, westerns, creepy twins, dinosaurs attacking airships, long-lost-loves

Avoid if Looking For: quick pacing, action-packed stories, deeply realized homophobic historical settings

Dudes Rock: A Celebration of Queer Masculinity in Speculative Fiction

I try to read a few anthologies each year, but it had been a while since I read one that wasn’t the collected works of a single author. Dudes Rock seemed promising, and I think the short story format has plenty of space to explore masculinity in bite sized chunks. I’d say that this was a pretty mixed bag in terms of anthologies. Some real bangers, but also a decent amount that I had little to no response to. But the stories that hit got me very interested in those authors’ other works.

I’ll review each story in a bite sized chunk below (in publication order), but I want to flag my standout favorites of this collection were Rosa Cocdesin by Aubrey Shaw (gothic), The Depths of Friendship by Candy Tan (cheeky and fun) and Cigarette Smoke from the Fires of Hell by Jay Kang Romanus (intense characterization). In general, I thought the middle portion was stronger than the start or end of the collection.

Read if Looking For: short story collection featuring magic dildos, himbo cults, haunted houses, fairytale princes, and stories in the form of badly written job application essays

Avoid if Looking For: consistency in depths of theme and experimentation across stories

Shoestring Theory

This is probably one of the maddest and rant-filled reviews I’ve written. Shoestring Theory had such potential to be a book I loved, and was headed in that direction. Having just finished the book, however, I can’t help but feel that a great book was sabotaged in the name of big reveals and a desire to capitalize on the cozy trend (to be clear, I love a cozy book, but I would not consider this a successful one). If you’re someone whom big fucking plot holes aren’t an issue, then I can heartily recommend this as a great read. I’m oftentimes that person myself, and I frequently read other people’s reviews for books I love thinking ‘that’s a great critique, but it worked for me’. I will highlight some of the things I liked about this book, but it’s going to be a lot of me venting about the direction it went.

The Premise:
Cyril is the Grand Mage of his country, and husband to King Eufrates. He’s also hiding in exile from his tyrannical husband, the land cloaked in a plague. After his dear familiar, a cat named Shoestring, dies, Cyril rewinds time to try and save the life of Princess Tigris, kill his husband before he can destroy the world, and generally fix everything that went wrong with his life. When he discovers that his Eufrates was brought back as well, through the magical bond Cyril formed on their wedding day, things get much more complicated

Read if Looking For: big twists, toxic ex-husbands, bossy older sisters, quick pacing, good dialogue, tidy endings

Avoid if Looking For: intelligent or competent characters, logically consistent situations, healthy relationship dynamics