Tag: gothic horror

#REVIEW: Innamorata, by Ava Reid

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

Warning, maybe: reading this will make you reread Gormenghast.

Innamorata, and in case you’re wondering, no, I don’t know why the title is misspelled, is the fourth of Ava Reid’s books I’ve read. I actually own five of them; the fifth is the sequel to one of the other ones, bought at roughly the same time, and I think I read the first one and didn’t like it very much so I never got around to reading Book Two. Typically, once I own five of an author’s books, I’ve graduated to big fan of that author, or at least fan, and Reid, frustratingly, still hasn’t quite written a book that completely hit for me. And to be honest, I only bought this one because there was a ton of stupid BookTok drama and backlash against it that I’m not going to get into, and it pissed me off so I bought the book, striking back with my hard-earned money against the opinions of people I will never meet who similarly do not know I exist or that I bought this book to spite them and their unreasonable ideas.

Anyway.

Have you read Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books? If you have, knowing that Ava Reid begins this book with a quote from Gormenghast and that the castle that the main character lives in at the start of the book is called Castle Peake is probably enough to get you to pick this up. If you have not read any of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books, you should go read them, then come back to this post.

The book begins with a funeral, the funeral for an old woman known as the Mistress of Teeth, and her funeral is attended by representatives for the Master of Blood, the Master of Eyes, the Master of Lungs, the Master of Bones, and the Master of Flesh, and the first several Masters take their parts from the corpse before the Master of Flesh stomps the flaccid, shredded sack of meat that remains into the mud, thus ensuring that the Mistress cannot rise from the dead. The former Mistress of Teeth’s teeth are made into a necklace for the new Mistress of Teeth, and I’m given to understand that the necklace contains teeth from several previous holders of that title. The book ends– this is technically a spoiler, but I think I can get away with it– with something “stirring” in a murdered woman’s womb, a murdered woman who was very much not pregnant when she was killed.

This is Gothic body horror, a lot of it, and it is deeply fucked up, and here I allude to the controversy in that you should completely ignore the marketing text that tries real hard to pretend this is a romantasy, because it is very much not a fucking romantasy, although I will admit it has some elements of same, including some, well, fucking. If you read books for atmosphere and mood and language, and the notion of reading something that is very much like a modern take on Peake appeals to you, jump at it. If you read books for other reasons … maybe not. The book is 532 pages long; I put it down, somewhat unwillingly, with about 80 pages left last night, having read all of the rest of it during my road trip. I got home from work today and read those last 80 pages, and I kind of feel like at some point the actual plot collapsed under its own weight. There is some interesting character development throughout, but that character development is going to involve someone completely abandoning every personality trait and motivation and goal that she had at the beginning of the book, and some of that stuff sounded pretty interesting! Lady Agnes wanted to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps– that’s grandma getting stomped into the mud in the first few pages– and restore necromancy to the creepy-ass island she lives on. That’s automatically cool!

She decides not to, basically because she gets distracted, and you’re going to have to be okay with that if you’re going to have a good time with this. And that was hellishly disappointing, even if a lot of the other stuff that happens was, again, cool and atmospheric and creepy and another part of the controversy was about trigger warnings, and I’m just going to tell you a lot of fucked up shit happens and has already happened, and there is so, so, so much blood in this book, and some spectacularly poor parenting, and I eventually turned that into four stars, but the sequel is going to get read right after it comes out, even if I’m kind of hoping it digs itself out of a bit of a hole.

Let’s call that a cautious and conditional recommendation for Innamorata, and you should definitely read Mervyn Peake.

#REVIEW: The Black Hunger, by Nicholas Pullen

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

With about fifty pages left in Nicholas Pullen’s The Black Hunger, I showed my wife how much book was left and told her that there was no way the book had enough book left to end right.

I was wrong.

Real, real, real wrong.

Now, obviously I can’t spoil the book’s ending. I mean, I can; I’m not going to. But it makes the book kind of hard to talk about, because having read the ending, I now feel like it’s the only possible way that the book could have ended, and to be honest I feel kind of dumb for not having seen it coming. But God damn, Nicholas Pullen. My dude pulled an inside straight here, and I’m genuinely in awe of how this book is put together.

But before I get too far ahead of myself: The Black Hunger is a whole lot of things. It feels very neo-Lovecraftian despite not actually referencing any of the Lovecraft mythos; it’s somehow cosmic horror without quite being properly cosmic; it’s historical fiction, referencing real people and real events, right up until the point where it isn’t. There is, at one point, a story within a story within a story. It’s gory and supernatural and Gothic and super gay. I was already thoroughly enjoying myself even before finishing the book, and the last ten pages or so are a masterclass. It starts off at Oxford and wends its way through India, Tibet, Russia and China before it’s finished. Pullen even throws in an 1870s British paranormal spy agency and the Dalai Lama just for the sheer hell of it. The main character is an academic and a minor British lord who ends up in the civil service in the back-end of India just because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

In a move that really shouldn’t have worked and somehow did, the middle third or so of the book is a lengthy letter involving an entirely different set of characters that also itself includes a lengthy digression for another letter.

This, uh, appears to have alienated some people, from looking at the reviews, and the rest are mad that there is Gay. Do not trust Goodreads on this one, is what I’m saying.

Between this and The Poet Empress, I’ve definitely got some excellent early frontrunners for the end of the year.

#REVIEW: In the Hour of Crows, by Dana Elmendorf

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

A touch of housekeeping first– I have parent/teacher conferences after school tomorrow and Tuesday, and am expecting to get home a shattered wreck of a human being both nights, so I’m going to do my damnedest to get three book reviews written today so that I don’t have to get home and scribble something down after 13-hour days at work. In accordance with prophecy, this means that I absolutely will get home and scribble something down after both of those 13-hour days, but still.

Dana Elmendorf’s In the Hour of Crows is one of those books where I heard about the premise and then suddenly had the book; I don’t recall spending money or making an active decision that I needed to own it, but I heard “Appalachian gothic horror about a young woman who can raise the dead” and then it was on my unread shelf somehow. It’s a quick read at only 288 pages, and I started it before bed one night and finished it the next morning. The main character, Weatherly, has the ability to raise the dead by “talking the death out of them,” which I can imagine being the premise for something utterly ridiculous and instead ended up being this cool Christian/aboriginal syncretistic thing where she starts by whispering secret Bible verses into a dead or dying person’s palm and ends with her absorbing their deaths and literally spitting the substance of their deaths out into a nearby vessel, one that can never have contained alcohol before she uses it. She can only do this once for any person; if she tries it again, it won’t work, and her powers must be deliberately passed on to someone else before she dies.

Like, right away, yup, I’m in, and let me remind everyone again that part of the reason I like most of the books I read is that I have years of practice in determining what I like to read and what I don’t. And I was utterly on-target on this one; between the setting, the approach to magic, and the characters (Weatherly’s grandmother, who despises her, is a standout) I ended up really enjoying this one. The book actually ends up being a murder mystery, as Weatherly attempts to save someone and fails, leading everyone to assume that she did it on purpose, and her cousin Adaire’s death in a car accident ends up being wrapped up in that death. Weatherly herself is a bit of a hellion, or at least recovering from her hellion years– she’s in her early/mid twenties in the “now” of the book, but it jumps around in time quite a bit– and her utter lack of concern for what the law might want in any particular set of circumstances is occasionally kind of hilarious. Pretty much every move she makes makes her look more guilty of murder, and she … just does shit anyway, because she wants to. She’s great.

The book also features the single most disrespectful and petty funeral service I have ever seen in print; it’s probably only a couple of pages in total, but it’s the thing I’ll remember the most about this book after the details have faded on the rest of it.

I think this is Elmendorf’s debut, and I kind of hope she stays with this wider setting and style of book in the future, as I’d love to read more of it. More books about Weatherly probably aren’t super likely, but if she wants to write an actual sequel of sorts, I’d love to see something about the grandmother. Definitely give it a look.

#REVIEW: MEXICAN GOTHIC, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

An interesting fact, at least to me: I have read three books by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and I have liked each one more than the one before. I was not a huge fan of Certain Dark Things, I enjoyed her Gods of Jade and Shadow but wasn’t really doing backflips about it, and then there is Mexican Gothic. Which …

Yeah, this shit right here? This shit is my shit. And if this author continues on this trajectory I may not survive whatever she comes out with two or three books from now. Mexican Gothic is exactly what it sounds like one thing the book is not is subtly titled; a dark, atmospheric 1950s-era-Mexico gothic horror novel, set in an old crumbling house, the house and its owners well past their prime, with a socialite heroine who feels like she’s been transported in from another era and an excellently creepy multigenerational family mystery to solve. It’s a quick read– just 300 pages, and I finished it in two or three sittings, basically– but it’s exactly as long as it needs to be, I think; I didn’t finish this one feeling like it needed more detail anywhere and it’s definitely not overpadded.

A short review, I know, but this is definitely worth your time. Moreno-Garcia is somebody to watch out for, and her writing is perfectly suited for this type of genre. I really look forward to seeing what she comes up with next.