ABIGAIL is one of those movies that technically has a big twist, but if you’re aware of the movie at all, all of the marketing, including the trailers, has spoiled the shit out of that big twist already, and it happens early enough in the film that the twist is kind of also the premise, which makes it hard to talk about. So this sentence will serve as the spoiler-free review: Abigail is kind of a failure as a horror movie– I am bad at horror movies, and I have been since I became a father, and I was never scared. It is, however, a pretty damn effective, predictable but wildly entertaining horror-adjacent action/slasher film, and all in all I’m going to recommend it, so long as you go in with the proper expectations. Expect something closer to From Dusk Till Dawn than to The Exorcist or Paranormal Activity and you’ll be fine.
So, yeah. Spoilers from here out, although once you know the premise, you already know the broad strokes of the movie.
Alisha Weir, am I right? I haven’t seen a child actor this effective since Season 1 of Stranger Things Millie Bobby Brown, and I really don’t think Millie has ever had a role that allowed her to cut loose the way Weir gets to in this movie. Millie has never gotten a line as iconic as “I’m sorry for what’s going to happen to you.” But let’s back up and talk about the actual movie: Abigail starts off as a heist movie, as a group of criminals kidnap a little girl from a massive mansion and then, rather inexplicably, spirit her off to a similarly massive but much older and creepier mansion out in the middle of nowhere, where Giancarlo Esposito tells them to wait with the girl for 24 hours, during which time he’ll extract a $50 million ransom from her father, which they can all split and then be off on their separate ways.
Only, oops, the little girl is a vampire, and, well, it doesn’t go great for them. This plan has some flaws even before you get to the vampire, and my wife called another minor twist early on– all of the kidnappers have screwed over this little girl’s vampire crime lord father at some point or another, and she’s managed to bring them all here so she can hunt and kill them. Two of them die before it’s immediately clear what’s going on, and the reactions of the rest to being hunted by an actual vampire are kind of hilarious. Eventually the main female character survives, blah blah blah, you know how this is going to go.
This movie rides on the strength of its atmosphere and its characters, and the house is effectively creepy, Amelia’s penchant for tossing ballet moves into her fighting style and her hunting (watching her tiptoe across a stairway bannister on her way to try and kill somebody is impressively fucked up; her movement and physicality throughout the movie is excellently done) and the gore level is turned up to 15; the number of bodies and/or body parts that literally explode in this movie is … significant.
And, again, the characters are fun, if broadly drawn; the ex-undercover cop turned criminal, the dim-bulb Quebecois muscle guy, the e-girl hacker, and the Main Character With a Dark Past, along with an ex-marine and a druggie wheelman, plus Giancarlo fucking Esposito, who has never in his life not elevated anything he was in. The biggest problem with the movie is that everyone in it looks like someone more famous than them; the Quebecker looks like Elon Musk, the hacker looks like Winona Ryder circa Beetlejuice, the ex-cop is Not Ryan Gosling, and the druggie is basically playing the exact same character he played in Euphoria, which I guess isn’t quite the same thing but it’s still kinda weird. They all bounce off of each other nicely and most of them get at least a couple of cool moments here and there to chew some scenery of their own. I mean, this moment here. I love it:
The house itself is straight out of Resident Evil, and I mean it as a compliment when I say this movie would make a great video game, although it kind of already did, except with a little ballerina girl instead of nine-and-a-half-foot-tall Lady Dimitrescu. The scenery is great, the pool scene is horrifying, the ‘plosions are gross, the characters are fun, and at least some of the acting is absolutely phenomenal. Again, it’s not scary, so don’t go in wanting that, but I’m really glad we actually sat down and watched this last night. I don’t watch many movies any more so I like to be able to recommend them when I do. Two thumbs up.
I was a big fan of Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson’s Shadows of the Short Days, which made my Top 11 Books list last year. The sequel has been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to get to it for a minute, and I just finished it tonight, and …
… well, I’m kinda torn. Shadows got tons of comparisons to China Miéville, and Storm has been as well, but this one isn’t Miéville so much as it is pure Lovecraft. Like, it’s a book-length Icelandic reimagining of Mountains of Madness; there are byakhee and Elder Things and what amounts to a Deep Ones cult and a talking brain in a jar and unnamable colors and fungi from Yuggoth. It’s so overt that I don’t understand how anyone managed to miss it.
That’s not a complaint, mind you, as I remain an unabashed fan of Lovecraft’s mythos despite the fact that the man himself was the worst kind of trash. And this is absolutely good nu-Lovecraft, which is something I’d like to see more of. But there’s no escaping the fact that one of my favorite things about the first book was its breathtaking uniqueness compared to everything else on my shelves, and this book is a lot of things, but “breathtakingly unique” isn’t one of them.
It also ends strangely, with the climax a good hundred pages before the end of the book and then a leap forward by a decade or so, and while it very well could be my fault for trying to read after getting home from work on a Friday I felt like the last part of the book was somewhat incoherent and unnecessary. I’ve only said this once before, but when you hit that time jump, if you’re not a hundred percent invested, you can probably get away with putting the book down at that point. It’s not quite as severe as the quality drop in Seveneves— I’ve never seen anything else that has been– but it’s jarring and more than a little under explained.
(There’s another connection with Seveneves, actually; take a close look at the cover.)
And it’s at this point where I realize that I’m in paragraph five and I haven’t mentioned the plot yet, but really, you already know. If you liked the first book and you like Miéville and Lovecraft and don’t mind a lot of Icelandic vocabulary you ought to pick this up. Hell, if you haven’t read the first book you can probably get away with reading this one anyway, as the connections to the first book aren’t as strong as you might generally expect. It’s a loose sequel, and saying more would constitute spoilers, but I think it works as a standalone.
A confession: I am, for no clear reason, less enthusiastic about writing this post than I usually am. I’ve done this every year that this blog has been in operation, and it’s a post that I look forward to all year long. For most of this year, that has been true! And right now I’m looking at a mostly-blank screen and God, I’m so tired.
The really weird thing: the quality of these books, and my enthusiasm for them, is as high as it usually is and frankly the differential between book #1 and book #11 is lower than it has ever been; most of these books could have been top three, at least, in any other year, and more than ever this is a “don’t pay too much attention to the specific rankings” type of year. I went to 11 this year because I couldn’t leave either of those two books off of the list, and as always there’s an Honorable Mention at the end.
Also, as always, that asterisk up there means “new to me,” a lot of these books did come out in 2023 but not all of them and coming out this year was not a criteria for making the list.
11. Shadows of the Short Days, by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson. You’re going to see a little bit of a theme with several of these books, which is spectacular worldbuilding and really cool magic set in places and/or times that I typically don’t see people using for fantasy books. In this case, Shadows of the Short Days is set in Iceland– Reykjavik, specifically– but not remotely an Iceland that matches the real world’s. The book sets you up nicely with a six-page glossary of terms that you cannot pronounce with letters you’ve never seen before, and it is not going to be nice to you with the vocabulary, but the end result– a dark urban fantasy with sorcerers and fascist governments and what looks like a bog-standard “brilliant wizard gets kicked out of school because he’s reckless” subplot that upends itself when the scholarly authorities turn out to have been one hundred percent correct— is just an absolute joy to read. This has a sequel sitting on my TBR shelf right now but I think it’s one of those sequels set in the same world but with unrelated characters; one way or another Shadows stands on its own very well. There are 11 books on this list because it came down to this book and the next one and I couldn’t leave either of them off.
10. The Witch and the Tsar, by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore. Here’s another mini-theme: books that are sort of historical fiction, or at least feel that way, but aren’t. Also, books where I have to double- and triple-check the spelling of the author’s name. In this case, the titular witch is Baba Yaga, and the tsar is Ivan the Terrible. This can’t be historical fiction, because Baba Yaga rather inconveniently isn’t real, but it does its damnedest to feel like it; there’s a lot of Madeline Miller’s DNA in here, if that comparison helps any. At any rate, the book is from Baba Yaga’s perspective, but there’s a lot of real or at least real-feeling Russian history in here, and Russia during the sixteenth century is something I’m happy to read about to begin with, and once you throw in magic and the slow waning of Russian pagan gods in favor of Christianity (and, oh, those pagan gods are real, and they’re pissed) it ends up becoming a really interesting story. It does sort of fill the same niche as Shadows of the Short Days, but again, I just couldn’t convince myself it was okay to leave either of them off of the list.
9. The Spear Cuts Through Water, by Simon Jimenez. Did I mention pagan gods? Well, okay, maybe not pagan, because this is a second-world fantasy and Christianity isn’t a thing, but this is probably the weirdest book on the list, and I absolutely mean that as a compliment. I didn’t mean pagan, I meant edible. Sorry about that.
What?
No, seriously, there are multiple places in this book where gods are eaten, and the book veers between first person, third person, and second person narrative, and apparently it’s all a play? Until it’s not? And the story is at least outwardly about a pair of warriors escorting the body of a goddess to her final burial place while alternately dodging and defeating her sons, who are known as the Three Terrors, only I’m pretty sure it’s about a few dozen things the than that. It’s inventive as hell and I loved it, and the interesting thing about it is you twist it a little bit and I’m talking about my least favorite book of the year, because this book makes a lot of choices that most of the time will kill my interest in reading something, but man, this was amazing.
8. Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, by Stephen Puleo. There’s always a couple of nonfiction pieces on the list, and this is the first of two and a half (you’ll see when I get there) and I think perhaps the most broadly interesting of the three, if not specifically the most interesting to me. I only learned that Boston had had a molasses flood this year, and ordered this book within about ten minutes of making that discovery, because how can you not want to know more about that? It can be very tricky to write a micro-history like this of a very specific event, because if you just write about the event the book is ten pages long, and it’s really important to pick starting and ending points that make sense and stay interesting to the reader. This book does an exceptional job of that, and ends up being a history not only of the flood itself but of capitalism and manufacturing in New England, as well as being a half-decent courtroom drama as well. It also managed to add a brand new way that I really don’t want to die to what was already a long list; there are probably less pleasant ways to die than drowning in a literal tidal wave of molasses, but I could do without the bit where once the flood is over it hardens and everyone has to be literally chipped out of the sea of frozen sugar left behind. No thank you. Read the book, though.
7. Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, by Robert M. Sapolsky. I said when I first wrote about this book that I really wanted someone else I knew to read it so that I would. have someone to discuss it with, and thus far, unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet, although I convinced one friend to pick it up and bought it for my brother as a Christmas present, so hopefully it’ll happen soon enough.
At any rate: Sapolsky is a neuroscientist, or maybe a neurobiologist, or maybe both; I have to admit I’m not a hundred percent clear on the distinction between the two, and he’s convinced there is no such thing as free will. Entertainingly, he’s not happy about this conclusion, and his hangdog insistence that everyone is going to hate him for the arguments he’s making echo through every page of this book, which wouldn’t be half as much fun to read were it not for Sapolsky’s sense of humor. Now, I am no kind of neuro-anything, and have no especially relevant expertise to this book, so all I can say is that I read the first half without ever going “Wait, what about …” at any point and without spotting anything that felt like an obvious hole in his reasoning, and he’s exceptionally talented at making complex scientific concepts feel understandable. The second half of the book, about the societal implications of free will’s nonexistence, are not as airtight but that’s why I want to talk to somebody about the book. Please go read it and get back to me?
6. The Warden, by Daniel M. Ford. I always feel the need whenever I talk about Dan’s books to mention that I know him in the sort of parasocial “he let me into his Discord and knows my real name but we’ve never met” way that the Internet allows, but it’s also fair to point out that this is the sixth of his books that I’ve read and the first time one of them has shown up on my end-of-year list.
One way or another, though, The Warden is delightful, one of only two books on this list I’d apply that word to, and it is strongest in its worldbuilding and its characters. Aelis de Lenti, the titular Warden, is an absolute slam dunk of a character and one of the best arrogant assholes I’ve encountered in print in a long time. A Warden is a sort of combination of a cop, a governor, and an ombudsman, and Aelis graduates fresh from her training and gets more or less banished to a little village in the middle of nowhere with a crumbling tower to live in and a very persistent goat as a roommate. The book has a very old-school D&D feel to it without feeling like an adaptation of someone’s campaign, and there are at least two more in the series coming. I will also say that if you’re going to read one book from this list, I actually want you to pick this one up, as Tor kinda fumbled the rollout of the book and I feel like it needs more attention. Another reviewer called it “the most underrated book of the year,” and I really feel like it deserves a look.
5. My Government Means to Kill Me, by Rasheed Newson. Another book from the “sorta historical fiction, I guess,” genre, Government has the words “a novel” right there on the cover in big letters and I still had to look into the author to confirm that he wasn’t old enough to have lived through the AIDS epidemic in New York in the 1980s. I get into more details in my initial write-up for the book, but this really feels like a personal memoir, and the inclusion of a number of actual historical figures as characters does nothing at all to diminish that feeling. The main character, Trey, moves to New York from Indiana and more or less immerses himself in gay bathhouse culture for the first half of the book, doing what he can to get by from day to day and filling his nights with anonymous sex, and then the epidemic hits and he begins working in an unlicensed AIDS hospice, caring for men who have fallen victim to the disease. It’s a hard book to read on a lot of levels, and there are trigger warnings galore for it, but it feels important in a way that a lot of other books I read this year didn’t, and Newson is an author I’m going to be keeping a close eye on in the future. Honestly, this book is perhaps the best example of “don’t let the rankings matter too much,” as it and basically everything that comes afterward could easily have been #1 on a different day. I’d particularly recommend it if you’re in your mid- to late forties or older and remember at least some of what was going on during that time.
4. Siren Queen, by Nghi Vo. Third of the “Historical fiction, but …” genre, this is the second year in a row that a book by Nghi Vo has made the top 10, and in a lot of ways Siren Queen feels like it could be a loose sequel to The Chosen and the Beautiful. It’s set in the Golden Age of Hollywood, during the transition between silent films and “talkies,” and the main character is a Chinese-American actress named Luli Wei, who is willing to do nearly anything in order to break into acting, and this is a book where selling your soul for fame and fortune is literal. Much like The Chosen and the Beautiful, Siren Queen puts you into a world absolutely pregnant with magic without going to any real lengths to explain any of it– at one point in Wei’s youth a ticket-teller lets her and her sister in to a movie without paying for tickets in exchange for an inch of her hair, and the book gives you nothing to help you figure out why that might be important– and, again, much like TC&TB, the big selling point of this book is Vo’s incredibly atmospheric and immersive writing. She can do a million of these books and I’ll read all of them. I loved it.
This is where it got really, really hard to rank the books, by the way, and if you want to just call all three of them #1, I won’t bet mad about it.
3. Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang. Speaking of selling your soul to the devil, R.F. Kuang has now written five books across three very different genres, all five of which were absolutely fucking spectacular, and she is somehow still only eight years old. Yellowface might be my least favorite of her books and it’s the third-best book I read this year! How the fuck is that even possible? I don’t know. She’s clearly a deity of some sort, and as soon as I finish this post I’m going to start working on getting the cult started.
At any rate, after writing a three-book fantasy reimagining of the war between China and Japan and a work of dark academia set at Oxford, Kuang has now written a brutal work of satire about the publishing industry, set in the modern world, with not a trace of magic or fantasy to be found, because that’s fair and one author should definitely be talented enough to be magnificently fucking good at all three of those things. It’s about a white woman who literally steals a manuscript from a dead friend and publishes it under her own name to immense acclaim and success, and even as someone who doesn’t really have a dog in this particular fight I was wincing at some of the events in this book. It’s so, so good, and Kuang is so, so good, and the notion that she’s still in her 20s and has decades of work still to come actually gives me a little bit of hope for the future.
2. Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree. Okay, I’ll be honest: on a technical level and even on a lot of non technical levels, Legends & Lattes isn’t necessarily as good as a lot of the other books on this list, particularly after the amount of praise I just directed toward Yellowface. But for a large chunk of the year I was thinking of this as the best book I’ve read all year, or at the very least my favorite book of the year, and the reason for that is how I felt while I was reading this. Remember a thousand words ago when I said that The Warden was one of two books I’d apply the word “delightful” to on this list? This is the other one. This book is delightful. It delights. And if you’re reading that and thinking “Didn’t he say that about TJ Klune at some point?” you’re right, and yes, I mean it as that high level of praise.
Legends & Lattes is about an orc named Viv who puts down her sword and opens up a coffee shop. She hires a succubus as her barista and some sort of nonverbal rat-thing bakes scones and cinnamon rolls for her. And I loved it. The sequel is on my shelf right now and I haven’t read it yet because it’s set before Viv opened the shop and I’m not sure I’m nearly as interested in her as an adventurer. I want more of the coffee shop. I will read about Viv and Tandri making delicious coffee and being quietly and happily in love for a hundred years, and I will love every second of it. I mean, stuff happens, there’s some conflict, it gets resolved, blah blah blah. This book’s strength is in evoking emotion, and it does so magnificently, and I loved it.
1. To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, by Moniquill Blackgoose. I really wasn’t sure, when I wrote my initial review of this book, if it was going to hold up against the initial high I was on after I read it. I used the phrase “book-drunk” in the review, and I’ll stand by that; this book is intoxicating in the best way and it is the best book I read this year. It also fits into a few of the sub-themes I had going on this list; it feels like historical fiction, as it’s set in Canada during the … 1700s, I’ll say? Colonial era? Only the English are the Ainglish, and while it doesn’t get into a ton of detail that I hope is coming later in the series, because I love nothing more than I love thorough worldbuilding, but it feels like the real world, only the Norsemen took over the world instead of the English, and also there are dragons. And dragon school. The main character is Anequs, a young First Nations girl who more-or-less accidentally bonds herself to a dragon egg early in the book, and then gets swept off to an Ainglish dragon school to legitimize her connection to her dragon in the eyes of the government.
Did you read Fourth Wing and Iron Flame? I did, and I liked them both. In a lot of ways To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is a very similar book to both of those, and if you read and liked them you absolutely need to read this book, as it’s better in nearly every imaginable way, from the characters (I compared Anequs to Rey Skywalker, and now that I’m thinking about it she has a lot of Aelis in her as well) to the nature of the school to the actual writing itself. Oh, and there’s chemistry. No, not between the main characters– actual chemistry, only magic-tinged, and at the end of the book the author manages to connect magic and chemistry and dancing in a way that is absolutely inventive as hell and when does the sequel come out again because I want it right now.
This was a great year for reading, and To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is the best book I read this year. Go buy it.
HONORABLE MENTION, in NO PARTICULAR ORDER: Ocean’s Echo by Everina Maxwell, Hell Followed With Them by Andrew Joseph White, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee, The Daughters of Izdihar by Hadeer Elsbai, In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune, Into the Light by Mark Oshiro, the entire The Faithful and the Fallen series by John Gwynne, Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Dead Take The A Train by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey, and Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig.
WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT AWARD: Hospital, by Han Song.
This is going to look kind of weird on the page, but having done the usually done thing by starting this book review with a high-res copy of the book cover, let me now pivot and … embed a YouTube video:
The episode that clip is from aired in April of 2000. According to Wikipedia, Stephen King has written thirty fucking books since then, and I own nearly all of them. But King is 76, and it is really starting to feel like publishing is jockeying for who gets to step into his shoes when he passes. We all know the dude’s never going to retire; he’ll die at his keyboard and there are probably two decades of unpublished manuscripts out there. I’ll be dead before the last “undiscovered Stephen King manuscript” gets published, probably after being finished by Brandon Sanderson. And thirty books ago, King was already being lampooned (I’m not sorry, shut up) for being a guy who just throws shit at the wall to see what sticks.
A few years ago, Chuck Wendig wrote Wanderers, a book I liked a whole lot. The elevator pitch on that book was “What if Chuck Wendig wrote THE STAND,” and the book and the publicity all leaned into that comparison really hard. Since then he’s written three books: The Book of Accidents, which I wasn’t terribly fond of but not in a way that I blame the book for, and a sequel to Wanderers that for the life of me I can’t remember the name of right now. But the King comparisons haven’t stopped, and the massive change to his writing style to something more comfortably commercial that he debuted with Wanderers hasn’t changed, and anyway all of this is a long introduction so that I can write this sentence:
Black River Orchard is about evil apples.
I would like to submit that evil apples are at least equally as ridiculous, if not more so, than a lamp monster. But if Stephen King wrote a book about a lamp monster, I’d probably read it, and Chuck Wendig’s book about evil apples is six hundred and seventeen pages long and I read the whole thing cover-to-cover in less than 48 hours. It has been a long time since I have started a book, read the first 100 pages in a gulp, and then resolved that I was going to be doing more or less nothing else until I finished the book. I went and voted today. That and read this book are all I’ve done.
It’s a book about evil apples and it’s real real real fucking good. If Wendig’s books lately have shared a common weakness it’s that I haven’t loved their endings; this book nails the dismount. Orchard does not end happily; every character who survives is broken and changed by the horror of the book’s events, but it ends correctly; there are a lot of ways this book could have gone and most of the rest of them would have been wrong.
(Was it a good choice to read this at the end of October, by the way? Yes. Yes it was.)
Anyway, point is this is a good book. It’s creepy as hell– one thing Wendig hasn’t changed about his writing style is his ability to write about completely fucked up shit in a tremendously effective way, and I had to put the book down for a few minutes last night after a particularly brutal scene– and it’s nicely unpredictable. It also manages to be about something ridiculous without ever making fun of its own premise; I told my wife at about the 1/4 mark that I wasn’t looking forward to what I thought of as the inevitable scene where one of our protagonists has to convince someone that The Apples Are Evil, because how the hell do you write that conversation without being completely ridiculous and inadvertently comic, and, well, Wendig does it by being a better and smarter writer than me and by setting his book up in a way that a number of non-apple-eaters are slowly drawn together over the course of the book and so they never really need to convince anyone of anything; everyone has experienced the Apple Evil in their own way and so talking anyone else into it isn’t really necessary. Putting in a conversation where the book was making fun of its own plot would have broken it; that never happens.
Five stars, seven thumbs up, one of my favorite reads of the year. You’ll hear about this one in December, I’m sure.
Remember when I used to do reviews of stuff? I feel like it’s really been a while, but I do actually still have opinions about media once in a while, and last night my wife and I sat down and Watched a Movie Together, that being Searchlight Pictures’ The Menu. I miss movies; I used to reliably see at least thirty or forty a year, then I went into this long period where I only saw superhero movies, and now I don’t even give a damn about those, so it was a good feeling to be able to carve a couple of hours out of a Friday night to be able to watch this. Given that 90% of the television I watch involves cooking in some form or fashion, there really wasn’t any way I was going to be missing this.
And … man. I really didn’t know last night what I thought about it, and it took until taking a shower just now (yes, it’s the second-to-last day of break and 6:52 PM and I just took a shower) to figure out what I think. And the tl;dr is that if you watch the trailer and think Yeah, I might want to see that, then go ahead and follow up on that feeling, and if you feel like the trailer is for what seems to be a really schizophrenic movie that maybe can’t decide what it wants to be when it grows up, well, roll with that feeling too.
I can imagine people loving this film and I can imagine them hating it, although people who hate it are maybe a little easier to imagine? And one way or another, I think maybe they made the wrong movie. Want details? Massive spoiler territory from here on out, although it’s not like the trailer conceals a lot of secrets and one way or another the film tells you exactly where it’s going at about the halfway point and I think counts on you to not believe it in order to continue to maintain dramatic tension.
So! A short black line, and then spoilers ho!
The one thing that you might be thinking and be wrong about, having watched the trailer, is that there’s probably a scene where they discover that they’re eating people at some point during this movie. No! I am as surprised as you are that they resisted their urge, but no; I don’t know how much the food can be considered food, really, but there’s no cannibalism, intentional or not. What there is is basically a suicide cult among the head chef and his various kitchen and front-of-house staff, and they’ve decided that this is their last service and as such it’s the one where everybody dies.
You get no insight into how this decision was reached or how he (presumably) managed to talk everybody into this nonsense, and you will discover as you watch that the dinner guests are remarkably passive about their impending demise. At about the halfway point the head sous chef shoots himself in the head right in front of everybody, and Ralph Fiennes’ Chef Slowik literally says “You’re all going to die” to the guests at more than one point during the movie, so there’s no real argument to be made that they aren’t aware of what’s going on, especially when one of them actually does attempt to get up and leave and gets a finger chopped off for his trouble. It eventually turns out that everyone in the room has offended Chef Slowik in some manner or another (and some of them are really cheap; John Leguizamo’s character is a washed-up movie actor and apparently he was picked for death because he was in a movie Slowik didn’t like) except for Anya Taylor-Joy’s character, who is effectively a replacement +1 after her dinner date’s girlfriend dumped him.
There’s some effective creepiness here, and some fun satire of the way high cuisine works and (especially) the way major chefs are treated as gods and eventually expect to receive that treatment. Unfortunately basically every character in the film, especially the dinner guests, is some form of douchebag or another, really excepting only Taylor-Joy’s Margot and the hostess whose name escapes me. There are a lot of words that describe her, but “douchebag” isn’t one of them, I think. In some ways she’s the movie’s scariest character. And the thing is, a lot of what’s going on in the film either doesn’t go anywhere, doesn’t make any sense, or some combination of both, and the notion that any of these people just sit around and wait to die is almost too ridiculous to bear. Also, Slowik’s operation apparently involves both a sophisticated hacker and an actual kidnapper, along with one hell of a surveillance and intel operation.
The movie should have been about one of the sous chefs.
The problem is that Slowik is such a guarded character, and the chefs by and large are entirely faceless, that you really can’t get any clue as to why any of them might go along with this insane plan to, eventually, and this is not a joke, dress up all of their guests as human s’mores and then burn everyone involved to death. And the fact that the guests don’t fight back just doesn’t make any damn sense. No; what you do here is you make the guests mostly faceless and terrified and you pull us into the cult of personality around this chef, and you hire a more charismatic actor than Ralph Fiennes, or at least cut him loose to be charismatic, because Julian Slowik, as he’s portrayed, couldn’t talk a kid into eating ice cream. I don’t know if I should blame Fiennes for that, or the director, or the script, or all three, or what, but this is not the guy. Nobody dies for this dude, or if they do, we’re gonna have to get a lot more background as to why, and you can keep all of the satire elements without them descending into utter ridiculousness like this one does.
(A prime example: the guests pay their bills and are given gift bags, all while wearing marshmallow serapes and chocolate hats, before they are set on fire and killed. Slowik tosses off a line about how their gift bags each contain a finger from a guy who is drowned as one of the “courses” earlier in the film. I have no idea whether the line was supposed to be funny or creepy or what. It’s ridiculous.)
The movie should have started off with a hot young chef getting hired by this dude– go ahead and let Anya Taylor-George play that character instead– and go through a couple of normal dinner services and some moments with Chef where it becomes clear why people might be willing to kill/die for him before getting into the murder shit, and have her be the one chef who decides she can’t be part of it. Or, hell, leave her conflicted! You can still have your horror satire if you want. Or, hell, have her be the hostess, so she’s outside the dynamic of the kitchen and maybe not part of The Plan but still enough on the inside of everything that we can see why this guy might have made the decisions he did, and why people might have followed him, and why people might have decided to go ahead and be burned to death instead of fighting back, which … no, sorry, I can’t buy it.
Here we go here we go here we go, the post I spend most of the year looking forward to writing: my top 10 new books of 2022, where “new” in this case means “I never read it before,” and as it turns out most of them are pretty new but the oldest book on the list came out in 1977. We have, for the first time in three years, returned to the original 10-book list, mostly because I read fewer books this year than I did in the last several years and I don’t want the list to get much past 10% of my reading. Fifteen out of 101 just doesn’t feel special enough, especially when you consider that I always throw an Honorable Mention at the end. Pick five of those if you like.
Also worth pointing out: this is the tenth of these lists, and part of me feels like I should do a top 10 of the top 10. That’s not coming before the end of 2022, though; it’s going to require a lot of thought and possibly some rereading. Previous years:
10. Rust in the Root, by Justina Ireland. This was the most recent of my reads to be added to the list, as I just finished it a few days ago. I generally like to have a few days to see if the shine wears off a book (or, as will happen later, if a book improves in my estimation or not) but I don’t see this one falling out of favor anytime soon. I don’t recall off the top of my head if Justina Ireland has shown up on this list before, but this is a great example of her style: historical fiction with a supernatural twist, told from the perspective of a person of color.
In this case, it’s 1937, and the United States is still recovering from the Great Rust, a cataclysmic event where anything created with the aid of the magical art known as Mechomancy has suddenly fallen apart. This includes pretty much anything that has been constructed, so the effects are immense and wide-ranging, although some areas have been harder hit than others. There are other schools of magic beyond Mechomancy, and the main character has some strength in several of them, including Floromancy, the ability to transform plants and seeds into other things. Branches of magic beyond Mechomancy are frowned upon and sometimes flat-out illegal, and the fact that most of their practitioners seem to be people of color doesn’t help. Laura moves to New York City at the beginning of the book and takes a job with the Colored Auxiliary of the Bureau of the Arcane’s Conservation Corps– sound familiar, by any chance?– and gets sent off to deal with a Blight, an area where the effects of the Great Rust are worse than usual. Much worse, as it turns out.
This is the first book of a series, and I’m really looking forward to the rest of it, especially as I want to know a lot more about this magic system and Ireland makes a point of only giving you as much information as you absolutely need to comprehend the story. I am, for example, dying to know why walnuts and okra seeds, specifically, are so important to Floromancy. She literally wears a bandolier full of seeds. Tell me mooooooooore.
9. The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, by Alexis Hall. Sherlock Holmes is, in and of himself, a great argument for why awesome things can happen when copyright is allowed to expire. Affair is a not-very-thinly-veiled Holmes pastiche, crossed with H.P. Lovecraft, and if you know me you should already be smiling at the thought of me crawling over people and knocking over furniture in my rush to get my hands on this book. The main character, a military veteran named John Wyndham, takes up lodging at 221b Martyr’s Walk with a “consulting sorceress” named Shaharazad Haas. Wyndham’s war, by the way, was in another dimension, as opposed to, say, Afghanistan, and Ms. Haas has every bit of Holmes’ investigative acumen and invincible arrogance, combined with magical powers well beyond Holmes’ imagination. There are vampires and pirates. Wyndham gets to punch a shark at one point. It’s delicious.
The story begins with adapting A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes novel, but continues to branch off into its own mystery as it continues. I don’t know if this is intended to be part of series or not, but I would love to see more. This combination is just too irresistible for me; I loved this book.
8. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, by Humphrey Carpenter. I have to imagine that it’s rather difficult to write autobiographies of academics. I have some evidence to this effect, as I’ve read a handful of biographies of professors and authors that basically boiled down to “he got this degree, then he wrote this, and then he wrote that, and that made some people mad, so he wrote that after that in response to this,” and a life that was lived by someone who was objectively interesting just becomes a long list of publication credits. Tolkien himself basically was a hobbit, and his homebody tendencies add to the problem, but somehow Humphrey Carpenter makes his biography every bit as interesting as the man it’s about. Tolkien’s friendship with C.S. Lewis is covered fairly extensively as is a lot of the detail and etymology that went into the writing of The Lord of the Rings, along with Tolkien’s obsession with internal consistency and detail, which once led him to correct some details in a reissue of The Hobbit and literally blame them, in the text, on Bilbo Baggins himself.
I was light on nonfiction this year, and there will be a handful of other books showing up in the Honorable Mention, but this one was definitely the standout. It’s not like I needed an excuse, as Tolkien has been a huge influence on my life and this book came out when I was a year old, so it’s actually kind of surprising that I never read it before now, but I read this in preparation to watch The Rings of Power and then never watched The Rings of Power. Oops.
7. Seed, by Ania Ahlborn. I called this book “deliciously fucked up” when I wrote my initial review of it in October, and I absolutely stand by that, as Seed wins this year’s award for Book Most In Need of Multiple Trigger Warnings for this year. In particular, if violence against and occasionally by children is going to be something that gets to you– if you are a parent, or really if you have ever even seriously considered becoming a parent, this book is gonna fuck with you. Whether that experience is something you’re interested in or not is your call; I spent the first night of the two it took to read this book with my skin crawling, and I figured out what the ending was going to be early on in night two and spent most of the rest of the read in slowly-mounting dread that I might have been right and desperately hoping that I was wrong.
I was not wrong. This book is somewhat predictable, generally considered a weakness, but that only increases its ability to screw with you. It’s about a generational curse, and family trauma, and there’s pet murder and car crashes and projectile vomiting and and all sorts of godawful shit and it’s beautifully written and it’s scary as all hell. You may wish you hadn’t picked it up when you’re done with it and you should read it anyway. I wish I could write this scary, and that’s the highest compliment I think I can pay the book. Just be glad it’s short.
6. The First Binding, by R. R. Virdi. What was that about short books? The First Binding is 832 Goddamned pages long. It’s a doorstop. You could kill small animals with it. You could probably kill medium-sized animals with it, although reading it would probably be a better use of it. It’s the first of a series, and I have not the slightest idea how many books are planned for it but this is gonna look great on the shelf assuming the author doesn’t develop a case of Rothfuss syndrome and never finishes it.
We’ll get back to the Rothfuss stuff in a minute, but it’s worth pointing out that this book initially wasn’t on my shortlist for 2022. I added it in this week after realizing that I was still spending a fair amount of time thinking about it, so it’s a book that I gave a five-star review to initially that has managed to grow on me since I first read it.
To be wildly unfair about it, The First Binding is The Name of the Wind, only with a vague feeling of Southeast Asia about it. Or, alternatively, it’s Christopher Ruocchio’s Sun Eater Chronicles but not in outer space. It is, in other words, a first-person autobiography-style story told by an old and vastly powerful being, with occasional jumps around in time and lots of references to stuff that’s going to happen later on in the series. And, honestly, Name of the Wind crossed with Asian cultural influences really will give you a damn good idea of whether you want to read this or not; I feel pretty comfortable saying that if you (at least initially, before 10 years of Rothfuss’ nonsense) liked NotW, you’ll like this, and you should give it a look. Just, uh, maybe think about it in ebook format unless you have strong forearms.
5. The Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao. I literally just now pre-ordered the sequel to this book, which unfortunately isn’t due out until August of 2023, but this is the first book on the list where drooling enthusiasm could legitimately be part of my talking about it, something that will be a theme for the rest of the list. (I never said this: in general, don’t pay too terribly close attention to the order of the books, except maybe for the top two, but I do feel like there’s a bit of a division between the top five and the bottom five. If I had waited until tomorrow to write this list they might have been in different order.) It also has, hands down and far away, the best cover of any of this year’s books, to the point that I had the wraparound without the text on it as my desktop background for a while after reading it.
Also, if you Google Xiran Jay Zhao, the author, they are wearing a cow onesie in the first pictures that will pop up, which is a reason to buy the book all by itself.
Right, the story: imagine Pacific Rim crossed with The Handmaid’s Tale: giant mechs beating the shit out of each other piloted by tiny, soft humans, only one of them has to be male and one has to be female and very frequently piloting the mech will lead to the death of the female pilot. Now make the main character one of those female pilots and make her hate men to a degree that is almost attractive. Wu Zetian is an amazing, fascinating character and even if she didn’t have the fascinating worldbuilding around her (and y’all know what a sucker for good worldbuilding I am) I’d want to read the book to know more about her. I read this back in January– I think it was one of the first books added to the shortlist– and I still think about it all the time. Absolutely madhouse brilliant. Go buy it.
4. Between Two Fires, by Christopher Buehlman. In a world where I had never read Seed, I’d start this off by talking about how amazingly fucked up Between Two Fires is and how I don’t read enough good horror novels, but I already wrote the bit about Seed, which is both scarier and more fucked up than Between Two Fires but somehow isn’t quite as good of a book. I think the difference is that Between Two Fires is a more complex story; it’s going to scare the hell out of you and gross you out and push some buttons that generally have DO NOT PUSH on them in blinking lights, but there’s more going on with this one than with Seed.
Anyway, it says “An Epic Tale of Medieval Horror” right there on the cover, and, well, yeah, that’s what this is, only the Middle Ages were kinda a horror story all on their own, and this particular book is set at the height of the Black Death, so it’s historical fiction about what very well may have been one of the worst times and places to be alive and human in history.
The main character is Thomas, a former knight who leaves a life of wandering the countryside stealing and looting and trying to avoid sudden, horrible death when he rescues a young girl from a band of men who are more or less just like him, and if you’re getting a hint that violence against children is part of this book, yeah, maybe roll with that? Only thing is, this kid might be a prophet of God, as she’s convinced that the plague is part of Lucifer rising up against Heaven, and hey, relative stranger, would you mind escorting me to Avignon so that we can do something about the impending literal end of the world? Pretty please?
So, yeah, maybe that’s what’s going on. Or maybe she’s just sick and delirious. Either way I’m sure it’ll be fine.
3. The Chosenand the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo. I was talking earlier about how certain things falling out of copyright protection led to (or at least could lead to) cool reinterpretations of the source material, and that leads to me wondering if The Great Gatsby is in the public domain yet. I can only assume that it is, as Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful makes no attempt whatsoever to hide the source material, right down to keeping all of the character names and locations the same. The mysterious Jay Gatsby is still the central driver of the book, his mansion is still across the bay in West Egg, and a certain green light and optometrist’s billboard are still there to be obsessed over by generations of English teachers.
The big difference? Vo’s Jordan Baker is a Vietnamese adoptee, and queer to boot, and she has a relationship going with not only her Gatsby lover Nick Carraway but also Daisy Buchanan herself. The book is thick with magic, too, although it’s fascinatingly expressed; where I’m usually a sucker for “magic systems” and worldbuilding and such this book has absolutely no interest in explaining things, and you’re just going to have to take that little vial of demon’s blood at face value, damn it, or (in one of my favorite scenes) the speakeasy that can only be accessed by crossing the same bridge three times in a row, or the paper doll that Daisy animates and sends to a social event that she doesn’t want to attend.
Don’t misunderstand me; I’m a big fan of Gatsby, which I haven’t reread in a while and need to get to, and the story of this book fascinated me from start to finish, but that’s not why it’s on the list. This book, more than anything else I read this year, is on this list because of the quality of the writing. I’ve read a couple of Vo’s books in the past and I didn’t quite realize she had this in her; the writing is beautiful, with sentences I wanted to lift off the paper and roll around in on nearly every page. It’s stunningly well-written, and even if you aren’t generally into speculative fiction or you haven’t read Gatsby you should allow yourself the pleasure of a night or two with this beautiful little book.
2. The Shadow of the Gods, by John Gwynne. I considered making it official that you were to consider both this and its sequel The Hunger of the Gods as both being in second place, since I read both books this year, but whatever, you get it. As you’ve no doubt figured out I read a lot of series fiction this year, more than I usually do even though that’s always been a big part of my reading diet, and this book is an amazing example of the grittier, slightly-more-reality-based side of fantasy literature. Slightly, mind you, as the cover of this one features an absolutely enormous dragon and the sequel has a wolf half the size of God on it, but it still feels like low fantasy for all that.
Shadow is Norse-themed, possibly post-Ragnarök-Norse themed, as there’s gods but they’re all dead, and the main characters are all phenomenal badasses and they all cart around lots of axes and seaxes (which is a dagger) and everybody’s cold all the damn time and there are letters like ð scattered through a lot of the words so you need to know to pronounce it like a -th. There are three main POV characters that the book cycles through, and by the end of the book none of them have even met yet although their stories have overlapped in certain ways; this was very clearly written as the deliberate first part of a trilogy and not a book that got successful so they greenlighted sequels.
This is not the most complicated nor the most literary book on the list. It is, however, an extraordinarily well-crafted example of a genre that I have loved since I was a kid, and discovering John Gwynne’s work was an amazing treat. I have another book by him that has been sitting on my shelf for a while because it’s the first book of a (completed) tetralogy and I strongly suspect I’ll be reading them close to back-to-back, so I’ve been waiting for the year to end, because I already have two books by this guy on my list and I can’t have two entire series. I loved it, and you should read it.
Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, by R. F. Kuang.
This is the part where I inevitably get pissed at WordPress, which cannot be convinced that just because I have started a line of text with a 1 does not automatically mean that I am about to create an indented list. It can not be talked out of this. It cannot be edited. It barely makes any visual impact at all, and it nonetheless drives me insane.
Anyway. Babel represents the best minor thing that happened to me all year, which is that I got a pre-publication ARC and got to read it a couple of months before it actually got released. R.F. Kuang’s name is not going to be unfamiliar to anyone who has been around here for a while; her Poppy War trilogy is one of the greatest achievements in fantasy literature of the last ten years, and she is somehow only 26 or 27 years old. I believe all three of her previous books have made my top 10 list; the second one might not have but the first and third definitely did. Babel, in all its academic colonic title glory, has absolutely nothing to do with the Poppy War trilogy, and instead represents yet another alternate history, something I’m only just now realizing was absolutely the genre of the year for 2022.
Babel is set in the 1830s at the Institute of Translation at Oxford University, a giant tower that occupies most of the center of campus and very much does not exist in the real world. The main character, called Robin Swift because none of the white people in the book can be bothered to learn his real name, is a Chinese orphan basically kidnapped by an Institute professor and brought to England to serve as a translator for the Chinese language. This world’s entire magic system (there’s that phrase again) is based on translation, and the Institute has a death grip on the technology that this magic makes possible, so Robin, along with his three friends– an Indian Muslim and two women, one of whom is Black– are put in the position of wanting to be scholars and translators but having to literally participate in stripping cultural resources from their homelands in order to do it.
It’s magnificent. It’s angry and dark and complicated and fascinating and eventually it almost turns into an espionage novel– don’t miss the bit about the Translators’ Revolution in the title– and I thought the Poppy War books were wonderful but they feel like a warmup in comparison to how confident and assured the story Kuang is telling with Babel is. Dark Academia has become an interesting subgenre in the last few years, so if you’re into that, or historical fiction, or really just into good books at all, it is the best book I read this year, and you should have read it already, so get on that.
Honorable Mention, in No Particular Order, Except for One Book: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World, by Riley Black; Kings of the Wyld and Bloody Rose, by Nicholas Eames, which you should understand as the unofficial #11 on this list; The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Serial Killer, by Dean Jobb; Leviathan Falls, by James S.A. Corey; Under the Whispering Door, by T.J. Klune; Six Crimson Cranes, by Elizabeth Lim; Bluebird, by Ciel Pierlot; The Architect’s Apprentice, by Elif Shafak; The Doors of Eden, by Adrian Tchaikovsky; The Rage of Dragons, by Evan Winter; and Scythe, by Neal Shusterman.
I am trying really hard not to make this review a single sentence: This book is deliciously fucked-up, and you should read it.
Because, really, that’s the money graf, right? Nothing else I write is going to matter much more than that single sentence, other than maybe the content warnings, because man, this book needs itself a content warning. Because if you are a parent of young kids there is a real good chance this book is going to fuck you up hard, and my son is roughly the age of the older daughter in this book. This book will grab you by your daddy-brain or your mommy-brain and shake you until you’re concussed, and I would understand if you don’t want that to be your reading experience.
Seed is a slim volume, totaling only about 220 pages, and I read it in two big gulps over two nights. The first night it scared the shit out of me and the second night, going in prepared, I was able to resist freaking the fuck out until I started to get a horrible inkling of how the ending was going to go, and this is one of those books where it’s going to hit you how it’s going to end and then you are going to spend the rest of the read with your skin crawling and hoping that you’re wrong and then you’re going to be right and it’s going to be awful anyway. It’s one of the most effective horror books I’ve ever read. Your mileage may vary, especially if you aren’t or haven’t ever been a parent,
(Jesus, why did I phraseit like that?)
… especially if you aren’t a parent, but if you are? Christ, I can’t let my wife near this book. Seed features generational curses, abusive parents, demonic possession, amnesia, grinding poverty, pet and animal death, murder, disintegrating marriages, poltergeists, car accidents, projectile vomit, ghosts, disapproving stepmothers and what may Goddamn well be the devil himself and it has crawled under my skin and it’s going to live there for a while. Ania Ahlborn has written a bunch of other books and I absolutely will be reading more of them. This is a great book to read in October if you don’t mind losing sleep and possibly a couple of sanity points to it. Go pick it up.
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