NonHuman Lead – Page 3 – Marked for Plot

Thirsty Mermaids

Kat Leyh is a pretty huge name in middle grade comics. To my knowledge, Thirsty Mermaids is her first take on an adult story, and I found it a roaring success. The type of book I finished in a single day because I kept telling myself ‘just one more page’. Sometimes graphic novels can really push you to slow down and grapple with difficult ideas, but other times you just want a fun romp of a mermaid cracking leg jokes as she tries to figure out how they work. This book was perfect for a lazy Saturday, though I sort of wish I’d read it in the middle of summer while at the beach.

The Premise
When Pearl, Tooth, and Eez drunkenly decide to try out being humans, they don’t have a plan on how to turn back. They find themselves stranded on land without an understanding of money, housing, or how to walk without stumbling. They’re taken in by a generous bartender, and each faces their own struggles as the trio try to find their way back home. This book is silly, emotional, and vibrant.

Read if Looking For: heartfelt and cartoonish adult comics, found family vibes, eldritch ocean aunties, casual queer representation

Avoid if Looking For: dense or ambitious graphic novels, innovative take on mermaids

City of Strife

The City of Spires has been on my radar for a while as a great example of what ambitious queer representation can look like. It’s also gotten nods as the modern inheritor to Swordspoint, the seminal Fantasy of Manners book with pioneering queer rep in the 80s. I ended up not loving the book, but I see the appeal and am intrigued to continue at some point in the future. But if you’re looking for a queer ensemble cast, I can’t think of something better than this.

The Premise
Isandor is a city with class problems. The rich live (quite literally) above everyone, in towers connected by bridges, holding them above the world. The poor are at the whims of the games of the noble houses. And the city plays host to an embassy of an Empire intent on conquering the world. Many different characters lives intersect in this book, connecting apprentice mages with shelter owners with idealistic nobility. Each character’s agendas and concerns are different, but this book lights the match that will set the city ablaze (quite literally). There’s enough going on that focusing on any single plotline will do a disservice to describing what the book is about.

Read if Looking For: many queer identities in one book, ethically upright protagonists, sadistic villains, impassioned monologues

Avoid if Looking For: deep characterization, flashy magic, political maneuvering

Frontera

This is a book that’s been in my classroom library for a while. It hasn’t been super popular unfortunately, likely because it looks a little to realistic for kids who are browsing in the fantasy section of my library. When a kid had rave reviews for it, however, it was easy to give it a try. Frontera is a quick and emotional read. Immigration is a topic that affects pretty much any country in the world, but Frontera’s relevance is strongest to those living in Mexico and the US. At a brisk 240 pages, it won’t take too much of your time either!

The Premise:
Mateo lived in America his whole life before being deported his Junior Year in high school. He and his parents make the choice to have him make the crossing back into the US to live with his grandmother. On the perilous journey, he encounters Guillermo, a ghost of a man who died during the same crossing many decades ago. Guillermo now helps others cross the border as he refuses to come to terms with his own history. However, perhaps the two can help each other more than either is willing to admit.

Read if Looking For: immigrant narratives, heartfelt characters, badass cats, angsty teens that feel realistic

Avoid if Looking For: tightly plotted stories, lots of speculative elements, romance storylines

Regicide: Saints of Firnus

Every once in a while a book recommendation passes beneath your nose that captures your attention. Regicide was that way. It started with a compelling cover, a blurb that promised grimdark fantasy elements, and a lack of clear romance plotline. It lived up to some of those promises and had some legitimately interesting developments, but was undercut by a dire need for another readthrough and round of proofing and edits.

The Premise:
This is the story of Holt, a member of the ‘vermin’ beastkin whose lands were colonized by the Panthera. He now lives as a beggar, supported only by his partner, whose untimely death pushes Holt. towards new connections with the underground resistance and old traditions of his people. However, this is Holt’s story told after he’s become an infamous legend. An elder shares the ‘real’ story of Holt to others of his kind. They live underground, still firmly under the paw of the Pantheran government, meaning you know from the very beginning that the ending of the story wouldn’t be a happy one.

Read if Looking for: Redwall for adults, morally upright protagonists in dystopian worlds, author-created illustrations, characters who happen to be gay

Avoid if You are Looking for: polished prose, multi-POV stories, deep themes or nuance, romance, books without depictions of intense racism, lots of magic

Fables: Volumes 1-3

After trying to hype How to Survive This Fairytale everywhere I could, I got recommended the Fables comics as another take on a dark fairy-tale mashup story. Sort of like if the TV show Once Upon a Time had been produced by HBO instead of Disney, which I think is a pretty good comparison point. This review covers the first three volumes ( Legends in Exile, Animal Farm, and Storybook Love). I’ll definitely be reading more of this, but I didn’t love it so much that I’m putting the rest of my backlog on hold to keep pursuing it.

Read if Looking For: fairy tales with blood, gore, and sex; morally dubious characters, traditional American Comic Book Art with modern storytelling sensibilities

Avoid if Looking For: thematic depth, emotional art styles, niche or non-European fairy tale references (so far)

Perdido Street Station

This is a book that’s been sitting on my ‘priority read’ bookshelf for about three years now. New Weird is a genre I’d been interested in, and Miéville’s reputation as an author who is concerned with his books as political objects pushing against the autoritarian status quo of fantasy really appeals to me. However, I’m finding that extremely large books put me off more than they used to, and I kept pushing it off until I was in the right mood. I left the book with mixed feelings. In some parts I felt in awe of what Miéville was accomplishing, and elsewhere I was disappointed in the choices he made to the point where I considered stepping away for a week or two. I have the feeling that I’ll be thinking about this book for a while, as it seems the type of story to sit with you.

The Premise
New Crobuzon is a dirty, grimy city. It’s filled with trash, corruption, and enough police brutality to make Vladmir Putin proud. It’s also home to humans, cactus-people, women with scarabs for heads, avian humanoids, literal demons, hands that can posess people, a whole caste with intensive plastic surgery forcibly grafting on mechanic or animal parts onto their bodies, among other things. This story mostly follows a dating couple: Isaac (a scientist) and Lin (an artist). Isaac gets recruited by a bird man without wings to get him to fly again, and Lin is recruited by a crime boss to create a masterpiece sculpture. Events spiral out of control, bizarrely leading to eldritch abominations let loose across the sprawling metropolis.

Read if You Like: unhinged worldbuilding, examinations of power and culture, eldritch horrors, characters without happy endings, books to chew on

Avoid if Looking For: fast paced stories, consistent female characterization, happy and mindless books

Mister B. Gone

I’ve known the name of Clive Barker for a while now. Hellraiser is influential enough that even someone who absolutely despises horror movies knows its basic imagery. He’s an author lauded as a pioneering queer writer and an author I had no intention of touching with a 10 foot pole. Mister B. Gone was recommended to me by a friend who swore it was their favorite book of all time though, and so I took the plunge into this dark comedy. It wasn’t a perfect book, but the writing was engrossing enough that I’m curious to try some of his books that are more widely lauded.

The Premise:
Jakabob Botch is a demon. A rather incompetent and pathetic demon really, who can’t even work magic properly. And he’s trapped inside a book, the book you’re reading incidentally. Throughout his recounting of his life’s story on Earth, he besseeches you to burn the book in your hands, to end his pitiful existence trapped in ink and paper. But fine, why not, he’ll tell you a little bit more, but only if you promise that you really will destroy the book by the end of it all.

Read if You Like: Fourth-wall breaking, morally bankrupt (but likeable) protagonists, humorous asides, demons and angels

Avoid if You Dislike: books without a strong A-Plot, engrossing climaxes, straightforwardly gay characters

Toward Eternity

It’s been a while since I read a book whose back cover so poorly represents what is in the book itself. Anton Hur was done dirty by his publisher on this one, because the premise for the book is much more interesting than what’s shared. I expected a story about how society is adapting to technology that turns people immortal, with a focus on a patient/researcher and his poetry AI bot. While all that is indeed there, this story is actually a millennia spanning reflection on what it means to be a person, a unique individual, and how choices can echo across time. It has at least seven different POV characters who almost never repeat past a single chapter. A much more ambitious novel than it appears; it reminded me a lot of The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez, which is about as high of praise as I can possibly give.

The Premise:
Okay, let’s try to do a better job than the publishers. This book starts in a near-future world where emerging research shows nanomachines can turn you immortal and cure pretty much any ailment. Dr. Beeko runs this lab with Yonghun (who has undergone the research) and who has disappeared mysteriously. One of the only witnesses is Panit, Yonghun’s AI poetry-analysis machine who has been collecting dust for years. From this setup, we start exploring these events from these character’s points of view, then shifting to other patient’s experiences with nanotherapy, before jumping forward in time to explore a new version of the world where we see how these nanobots have shifted the world again … and again … and again. To give some sense of scope, the book is split into five sections: near future, future, distant future, very distant future, and eternity, and the choices of the original cast filter down into later storylines, they aren’t lead characters continuously throughout the novel.

Read if Looking For: books spanning millennia, philosophical musings, epistolary novels

Avoid if Looking For: straightforward stories, single POVs, everything explained in the end

Heart of Stone

Vampire love stories are a dime a dozen. And while vampires can capture my attention, it’s pretty rare. I was part of the Twilight generation, and have gone full circle from ‘binge read all four’ to ‘these suck’ to ‘actually for YA they’re fine, and the first movie is delightful with a glass of wine’. Some other stories that lean more into the horror or gothic history of vampires, such as The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean, left me extremely impressed. Heart of Stone, however, is a pretty straightforward vampiric romance, and thus not something I was enthused to pick up. Enough people had praised it, however, that I decided to give it a shot. It was a pleasant surprise, and one of the better fantasy romances I’ve read, if nothing else than because it wasn’t trying to be like every other fantasy romance out there.

The Premise
Henry is a vampire. Every few decades he moves, starting a new life, a new set of hobbies, and bringing some household staff who are ‘in the know’ with him. Theophilus is his new secretary, terse and introverted, frighteningly competent, unwilling to give any indication of his personal ideas and ideals. Both are gay, yearning for connection, and generally unwilling to speak about that part of their lives because London in the mid 1700s isn’t a great place for gay men. The book chronicles the growth of relationship into friends, and then into something more.

Read if you Like: contemplative and slow books, romances without hamfisted setups, extended conversations that exist without the need to push plot forwards

Avoid if you Dislike: characters who refuse to talk about their feelings, magic age gap romances, low spice books

Falconsaga

Falconsaga made it on my reading list as one of the rare books about queer men written by a queer man that I’ve found so far published this year. While I thought the representation did a great job of presenting gay men as humans independent of their romantic and sexual identities, I generally found the book to be on the disappointing side, especially after a few Urban Fantasy books that really blew me away. However, for those looking for something that dives into Icelandic folklore, I think it would be a great fit. I’m also very much in the minority so far based on other reviews, so take my opinions with a grain of salt.

Read if Looking For: prophecies, tragic backstories, sinister family members, Icelandic myth, grounded gay representation

Avoid if Looking For: tightly plotted books, subtle foreshadowing, page-turners, critical takes on magical age-gap relationships