Trippy – Page 2 – Marked for Plot

A Parade of Horribles – Dungeon Crawler Carl #8

Like so many people, I am an ardent Dungeon Crawler Carl fan. I hopped on the bandwagon just as it was taking off, and I’ve been overjoyed that it has prompted publishers to take a hard look at supporting more self-published authors. This is Book 8 in the series, which means you should probably skip this if you’re trying to figure out if the series is good for you (a shortish review of book 1 can be found here).

The Premise:
This book follows Carl and Donut as they traverse the 10th and 11th floors – though floor 10 takes up most of the page count. Floor 10 is styled as races, where crawlers must make a variety of unwieldy vehicles and mounts function in increasingly zany environments. As it becomes clear this floor is designed to pit crawlers against each other, the team hunts for various ways to help their fellow humans escape the dungeon through increasingly esoteric loopholes. Meanwhile, the Dungeon AI is growing in power, threatening the very universe itself.

Read If Looking For: More Dungeon Crawler Carl, increasingly unstable Artificial Intelligence, crawlers getting whittled down to near nothing

Avoid If Looking For: new achievements, leaderboard updates, lootbox openings

Comparable Media: Mad Max, Fast and Furious

Works of Vermin – When Bugs Go to the Opera

I have been dying to read this book for ages. Eldritch bugs + magic perfume + creepy operas = one hell of an idea for a book, and every review I’ve seen has said it lives up to its premise. I got lost wandering the streets of Hiron Ennes’ imagination. It is a decadent new entry in the New Weird genre, and it feels extremely apt for a world that sees the potential for the first human being to become a trillionaire. This book is a masterpiece, and I really wish I hadn’t read it near the end of the school year as my brain is struggling to remember which hallway the copy room is in.

The Premise:
Guy is a vermin exterminator in the undercity, struggling to support himself and his younger sister. Aster is the chief perfumer for the violent Grand Marshal, who wears the skulls of those who would kill him as helmets. An insect with a taste for fine art has begun feeding in the city, and political unrest has begun to stir.

Read If Looking For: violent revolutions, weird worldbuilding, the dangers of capitalism, so many operas, big ass bugs

Avoid If Looking For: windowpane prose, clear explanations of how things work, dramatic fight scenes

Comparable Media: Perdido Street Station, Ambergreis, The Divine Cities

Monkey Meat – An Anticapitalist Fever Dream

I knew nothing about Monkey Meat other than its title and cover art. I didn’t quite know what to make of a hand crushing a Spam-esque can with a monkey on the front, but I knew I was interested in reading more. Monkey Meat: the First Batch is a zany and dark anthology that I fell in love with. It’s not the most original critique of capitalism I’ve seen, but it’s certainly one of the most engaging. I truly believe that if companies could get God to sign over the rights to people’s souls, they would absolutely do so. My only regret is that it doesn’t seem likely to get a sequel, but I will certainly be chasing down more of Juni Ba’s work in the future.

The Premise:
This anthology (though it might be better described as a mosaic comic) focuses on Monkey Meat Island. Once an untouched paradise, it is now ruled by a capitalist megacorporation cranking out questionably sourced meat, energy drinks made out of souls, and action figures showcasing the indigenous cultures the company eradicated to ‘honor’ them. Each story follows a different protagonist, but several characters run through the series, including the enslaved enforcer Lug and the supernaturally persuasive Salesman

Read If Looking For: unbridled creativity, unconventional art styles, episodic structures

Avoid If Looking For: consistent worldbuilding, subtlety and nuance, grounded characters

Comparable Media: Dungeon Crawler Carl, Invader Zim, Rick and Morty

Asunder – An Episodic Eldritch Fantasy

I think I’ve taken Asunder off my TBR about three times as I try to keep it at manageable levels. Invariably, I see a review that piques my interest enough for it to go back onto the pile. If I’m honest, the cover art put me off. It’s unfair, I know (don’t judge a book by its cover and all that), but Asunder’s cover is as beautiful as it is misleading. When I opened the pages, I assumed I’d be walking into a well-written romance with a teenage year old lead. Instead I walked through the dreams of dead gods as a 29 year old woman scrabbles to retain her personhood in the face of uncaring worlds. It will make you feel small and wonder and disgust and hopeless. If you’re willing to give it the space to breathe, it will take your breath away.

Elevator Pitch:
Karys is a Deathspeaker. In exchange for the ability to peer through the Veneer to see magic and talk to the recently deceased, she has sold her soul to an eldritch abomination with three faces and a body made of wings. During a job that’s gone horribly wrong, she stumbles across Ferain, an ambassador from her country’s former occupiers, who was attacked while returning home. To save his life and make a massive amount of money, she anchors his soul to her shadow. Getting him out proves to be much more difficult than getting him in, however, and the Saints of the eldritch gods she serves have taken an interest in this man. Her journey forces her into contact with a variety of haunted landscapes, uncaring gods, and ruthless criminals.

Read if: you like eldritch beings who bend reality to their will, episodic horror/fantasy hybrids, you want to feel the weight of selling your soul

Avoid if: you want a quick moving plot or dynamic action scenes, agreeable protagonists, straightforward romantasy

Comparable Media: The City of Stairs, Spirited Away, Wizard of the Pigeons

Lifelode – A Domestic Fantasy to Chew On

I am so happy that I read Lifelode. It isn’t a perfect book, but I love how it defies easy comparisons and pushed boundaries of fantasy in the 2000s structurally and thematically. It’s got delightfully weird worldbuilding and, if pressed, would use One Hundred Years of Solitude as the closest comparison I’ve read (though even that isn’t right). More selfishly, it’s also probably one of the best books I’ve read for a book club, simply because I think Lifelode makes so many bold choices that will spark interesting discussion. Certainly my views here on how Walton handled theme don’t seem to be universally shared amongst those who, like me, ended up reading far ahead for our midway discussion. Lifelode isn’t necessarily a dense book, but there’s a lot of interesting choices here which set a great foundation for discussion whether you loved or hated the directions the story took.

The Premise:
Applekirk is a rural farming town run by a lord and his family, who live in a large manor. Taveth is one of the four adults of the marriage, committed to maintaining the house. One of her husbands is Lord, another manages the sheep and farms. Meanwhile Chayra, the other wife of the house, has found joy in throwing pots. Their lives are thrown out of routine with the arrival of a flirtatious travelling scholar, a meanspirited ancestor to one of Taveth’s husbands, and a priestess of the goddess of marriage who has been sent to bring said ancestor to the goddess’ justice. Just as important, however, is the harvest and all preparations it requires.

Read if Looking For: books without easy comparisons, celebration of traditionally feminine work, Gods as hiveminds, reimagined family structures

Avoid if you Dislike: pastoral settings, relationship drama, complex family trees, peas, petty characters

Children of Time

I meant to read this book ages ago, but my dad (who never reads) picked it up off my bookshelf while visiting and took it back to Kansas. I finally resigned myself to not getting it back and grabbed another from a used bookstore. I’ve only read one other book from Tchaikovsky, and this confirmed that I like his books a lot, but they’re probably only for when I’m in the mood for something on the more breezy/readable end of things.

The Premise:
A planet was terraformed, meant to be home to monkeys infested with an evolutionary super-virus to help them prepare a civilization for humans to inherit. Things went wrong, and invertebrates ended up with the virus instead. We follow two societies across thousands of years: the spiders who raise from a simple hunter/gatherer society into spacefaring astronauts, and a spaceship carrying what may be the last of humanity, seeking one of the homeworlds. They will only briefly interact in this book, as their storylines largely remain separate but for a few discrete moments in time.

Read if Looking For: so many spiders, batshit crazy worldbuilding, spaceship politics

Avoid if Looking For: inhuman narration, stories focusing on first contact, messy thematic work

Tongues

It has taken me much longer to write this review than is normal. It’s tough to figure out how to talk about this book, or why I enjoyed it so much. I found this to be a bit like trying to point out a bird in the forest. The problem lay not with getting a friend to find the bird on the tree, but rather trying to get them looking at the right tree in the first place. Too zoomed in on specifics and a review loses any sense of cohesion, but too zoomed out and you have nothing interesting to say. There’s a lot to say about Tongues. Even when I end up disliking the choices an author makes in stories like this, I appreciate the gradual blurring of lines between Literary Fiction and Genre Fantasy. Thankfully though, I ended up liking Tongues a lot.

The Premise
This is a book that takes a bunch of elements from Greek myth (or, our cultural ideas about Greek Myth smashed into something eldritch and ancient) and fast-forwards the see how they’re interacting with the modern world. Prometheus befriends the Eagle who eats his liver each day. A teenager with a teddy bear on his back wanders through the war-torn landscape of Afghanistan. A girl is tasked by eldritch creatures to kill a god. A mysterious cult is gaining prominence in the region.

Read if Looking For:
– something weird
-something disturbing
– something baroque

Avoid if Looking For:
– something quick
-something sweet
– something simple

The Divine Cities Trilogy

Robert Jackson Bennett is currently getting laude for his Shadow of the Leviathan series (which are quite good on the whole). However, I think his Divine Cities Trilogy is by far the superior work, even if it’s taken me about four years to read the entire thing (I wrote in my review of book 2 that the finale would be ‘a priority for 2024’ yet I’m only getting around to it in 2026). These books are unlike anything I’ve read. The prose is straightforward enough, Bennett’s thematic work is ambitious and so very different from the examinations of imperialism we see in the 2020s, including his current series. It’s the type of mind bending and ambitious fantasy I love to read, and it safely sits as some of my favorite books in the genre.

Read if Looking For: spycraft/action hybrids, competent protagonists, weird gods, thorny questions without easy answers

Avoid if Looking For: direct sequels, purely happy endings, John le Carre style bureaucracy spycraft, straightforward morality

The Chromatic Fantasy

I’m all about unapologetically queer books, and The Chromatic Fantasy definitely fits that brief. This book isn’t a tour-de-force on the trans experience, but it’s an extremely fun romp a book with great art that didn’t disappoint in the slightest. I need to wait a week or two to see if this has the emotional staying power to crack my top 10 of the year, but I think it’s got a pretty good shot.

The Premise
Jules hates being a nun, in no small part because he’s not a woman. To escape, he makes a deal with the Devil, gaining immortality and becoming a thief, swordsman, and general troublemaker. When he meets his match a fellow scoundrel, the two figure out what a life together might look like. Turns out, this life mostly looks very, very chaotic. Looming over Jules’ new life though, is the Devil constantly pushing Jules into isolation, depression, and doubt.

Read if Looking For: tricksters and thieves, anachronism and whimsy, more color than a chameleon at a rave

Avoid if Looking For: fully coherent plots, historical accuracy (or even consistency in the intensity of historical inaccuracies), memorable villains, books without nudity

The Route of Ice and Salt

A Mexican horror novel following a ship captain of a ship transporting vampires, playing off elements of Dracula (which I haven’t read). It’s an excellent translation, and a dip into the more Literary side of horror than I normally go for. This was a good reminder of why I was a bad English major in college, and why genre fiction is my happy place over Literature. However, I’m glad I read this, and I think it’s much better at engaging with vampires’ historic associations with queerness in interesting ways than most other queer vampire books I’ve read.

The Premise
The captain of the Demeter has been hired to take fifty boxes of dirt to England. The captain spends the trip in a haze, torn between his constant desire for the companionship of men and his responsibilities as captain of the ship. And he dreams. Oh does he dream, and his dreams grow ever darker as strange things begin to take place on the Demeter, shifting what should have been an easy and profitable journey into a thing from nightmares.

Read if Looking For: intense focus on internal monologue, dream sequences, horror of the unseen, prose like liquid silk

Avoid if Looking For: direct plot or prose, ethical gays, paranormal romance elements, cute rats, protagonists who don’t sexually harass people, vampires with major speaking roles