In the small, storybook town of F—, two women – once childhood friends – become rivals when they both decide to write books about the same subject: IlIn the small, storybook town of F—, two women – once childhood friends – become rivals when they both decide to write books about the same subject: Ilsbeth Clark, a local woman who was ostracised from the community and denounced as a witch in the 19th century. The first author, Elena, is a relentlessly optimistic free-spirit type who has achieved success and minor fame after publishing a bestselling ‘spiritual guidance’ manual. The second, Cathy, is a teacher who’s been researching Ilsbeth for years and becomes bitter and paranoid when she hears about Elena’s proposed book. The Witch in the Well opens with reports of Elena’s death, and is told through her journal, Cathy’s blog and documents reportedly written by Ilsbeth herself... in the present day.
The Witch in the Well sees Camilla Bruce making a welcome return to the winning formula of unreliable narrator + hints of horror/fantasy/folklore that made her debut, You Let Me In, so dazzling. The three voices are distinct, creating a tangible persona for each of our main players – and even where they seem to overlap, this only adds to the intrigue. Indeed, I wanted more of everything; the scenes involving Elena and Cathy as children, for example, are so atmospheric that I longed to spend more time in that particular milieu. Bruce is just incredibly good at weaving inexplicable, fantastical things into the stories her characters tell, while at the same time throwing in details that make you question/doubt everything you’ve just read. It’s a combination I find irresistible, and I enjoyed every weird, slippery word of The Witch in the Well.
I received an advance review copy of The Witch in the Well from the publisher through Edelweiss.
It pains me to give this rating. I think Batuman is a fantastic writer, The Idiot an exquisite novel – a masterpiece, even – and Selin a wonderfulIt pains me to give this rating. I think Batuman is a fantastic writer, The Idiot an exquisite novel – a masterpiece, even – and Selin a wonderful creation. Yet my initial reaction to the idea of Either/Or was more dread than excitement; I felt The Idiot just didn’t need a sequel, that there’s something in the very nature of such a perfectly self-contained coming-of-age story that makes a continuation feel like blasphemy. I should have stuck with that instinct and not read it at all, as doing so didn’t change my mind. The Selin in Either/Or feels like the work of a very talented fanfic writer rather than the same character from The Idiot. With the connection I felt to the first book thus severed, the narrative just reads as a series of barely related observations. I was reminded of how it feels to read the biography of a beloved celebrity and realise that everything you thought you had in common with them is actually part of a deliberately constructed public image.
The irony isn’t lost on me that some of the thoughts I’ve had about this book – does any extension of a Bildungsroman corrupt its essence? – feel like things Selin herself might contemplate within the narrative. (As the title suggests, it riffs on Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, with Selin debating the merits of the aesthetic vs. the ethical life.) I hoped for a moment of revelation where everything would suddenly click, but it never came. The good news is that if you didn’t have an intense personal attachment to The Idiot (and maybe even if you did), you can disregard everything I’ve said about Either/Or. For my part, I will now be trying my best to forget it exists, like I had to with Blues Brothers 2000.
I received an advance review copy of Either/Or from the publisher through Edelweiss.
Solid horror novella with a good idea at its heart: a virus that makes the infected unable to see the world as it really is, so that about half the poSolid horror novella with a good idea at its heart: a virus that makes the infected unable to see the world as it really is, so that about half the population effectively fall prey to the delusion that there’s a zombie apocalypse going on. (Or do they?) In the aftermath, Spence – one of the ‘cured’ at a rehab facility – is persuaded to break out by a new arrival who wants to track down her former friend/lover. With this new adventure juxtaposed with flashbacks to Spence’s time in the devastated world pre-cure (and gradual realisation that all is not as it seems), it reads like a combination of ‘Dogsbody’, the werewolf-virus story from Devlin’s collection You Will Grow Into Them, and They Live. I was hoping for more of the enigmatic weirdness of Devlin’s best stories (such as ‘Songs Like They Used to Play’), but the style is more commercial than that. Also, even for a novella, it’s very short, which doesn’t allow a lot of room for character development or backstory. An entertaining quick read that might’ve worked better had its premise been expanded further.
I received an advance review copy of And Then I Woke Up from the publisher through Edelweiss.
I know four stars seems like an unequivocal ‘I really liked it’ rating, but I’m actually pretty conflicted about parts of this! On the one hand, I wasI know four stars seems like an unequivocal ‘I really liked it’ rating, but I’m actually pretty conflicted about parts of this! On the one hand, I was fully immersed and I put the book down feeling satisfied: her little character sketches are sublime, the writing is so great at the sentence level, I loved every evocative glimpse we got of the future-world (although it niggled at me a bit that language apparently doesn’t change at all between now and the 25th century). But I really kept getting taken out of the 2203 plotline, which is arguably the most prominent, by the fact that the character of Olive is obviously (and it seems openly) an author self-insert. The book tour stuff is uninteresting, the family stuff is schmaltzy and uncharacteristically thin, and I’m not anti-Novels About the Pandemic but I didn’t think this really brought anything to the table in that regard. I would have liked to read a much longer book about Gaspery and Edwin, characters I came to love even within the small amount of space they’re allotted. So yes, it’s a very good novel and I’d still very much recommend it, but the rating ignores the dissatisfaction I felt after finishing it, and I did think it was left wanting in comparison to The Candy House (mentioning this because both are hotly-anticipated books, due to be published in April, that revisit characters from a previous bestseller, so I can’t help seeing them as a pair). I keep thinking I need to reread Sea of Tranquility to really get the measure of it but I wonder how much of that is just me wishing there’d been more of the parts of the story I wanted to read? Hmm.
I received an advance review copy of Sea of Tranquility from the publisher through Edelweiss.
(4.5) An incredibly intelligent, unpredictable novel that took my breath away not only with the scope of its storytelling (and the sheer complexity of(4.5) An incredibly intelligent, unpredictable novel that took my breath away not only with the scope of its storytelling (and the sheer complexity of the connections between its characters) but also the depth of its humanity. The Candy House partly revolves around the invention of the Mandala cube, a device that allows a person’s consciousness to be recorded and shared, but assuming this makes it a plot-driven sci-fi novel would be a mistake; while it ranges all over the map in terms of genre and form, its one consistency is that it is resolutely character-centric. This is a book that wants us to look closely at people’s lives, and if there is a technology it’s concerned with, it’s its own medium, fiction – fiction as an empathy machine. I found it difficult to put down: once Egan starts writing about a person, you want to stay with them; once a chapter finishes, you think, ‘just one more’... The Candy House’s sprawling web of stories is akin to other similarly wide-ranging and densely interconnected works: City on Fire, The Overstory, I Still Dream. (Also, a confession: while I have read A Visit from the Goon Squad, it was 11 years ago and I remember little about it; the links between the two books barely registered with me, and I didn’t feel like I was missing anything.)
I received an advance review copy of The Candy House from the publisher through Edelweiss.
A true crime writer comes to a small town in California to start work on a new book. His plan is to move into ‘Devil House’, where a double murder tooA true crime writer comes to a small town in California to start work on a new book. His plan is to move into ‘Devil House’, where a double murder took place in the 1980s, and then investigate and write about the crime. But the project goes in unexpected directions that reach back into our narrator’s past, not only changing the course of the story he chooses to tell but also causing him (and us) to question the very nature of storytelling itself.
The perspective and time period are switched several times. At many points in the story I felt disorientated, as though I was being led around in circles or not quite getting to the meat of the plot... But when I realised this was deliberate, everything clicked into place. Devil House really isn’t doing what you expect it to do; nothing is what it seems; the voices you hear aren’t the ones you think you’re hearing, and your perceptions will continually be challenged. It’s totally addictive – despite a meandering pace, I tore through it – yet incredibly thoughtful too.
The book it reminded me of most, by the end, was Kate Reed Petty’s True Story; I think it will really appeal to people who liked that book, but for my money Devil House is a far more successful version of what it was trying to do. Parts of it also made me think of The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas (for the... meta-ness of it all?) and the Six Stories series (but honestly this is probably just because I haven’t read very much actual true crime).
I received an advance review copy of Devil House from the publisher through Edelweiss.
If the premise of Sarai Walker’s sophomore novel sounds a bit Virgin Suicides – a cursed family with six sheltered daughters doomed to die in succIf the premise of Sarai Walker’s sophomore novel sounds a bit Virgin Suicides – a cursed family with six sheltered daughters doomed to die in succession – the end result is, thankfully (a hater writes), more like a mash-up of A Reunion of Ghosts,Three-Martini Lunch, and The Psychology of Time Travel sans sci-fi: a warm, highly detailed historical drama that draws the reader completely into its world. Looking at the blurb now I recall that what drew me to it, aside from Walker’s name, was the fact that the main character is an artist, and the idea of the story exploring how she reinvents herself after a tumultuous and tragic childhood. In fact, this figures very little. For most of the book we are firmly among the Chapel family in 1950s New England. This was a milieu I wasn’t sure I was interested in... until I found myself hundreds of pages deep and thoroughly engaged. Ultimately, I’m thankful I misunderstood what it was about; I probably wouldn’t have read it otherwise, and I’m very glad I did.
I received an advance review copy of The Cherry Robbers from the publisher through Edelweiss.
In recent times, it’s been hard for me to find thrillers I like. There are loads of them around, but they mostly seem to be about either increasingly In recent times, it’s been hard for me to find thrillers I like. There are loads of them around, but they mostly seem to be about either increasingly ludicrous plot twists or fitting into some literary trend, and there doesn’t appear to be much quality control happening when it comes to the writing. Friends Like These, though, I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s about five college friends who meet up 10 years after graduating, supposedly for a stag weekend – except they’re really staging an intervention for one of the group, who has a drug problem. Of course, it all goes wrong and they have to lie to the police... because they’re already hiding a big secret from all those years ago. You know a story like this is good when you don’t care what happens in the end because you’re just having so much fun along the way. I raced through this and had a great time with it.
I received an advance review copy of Friends Like These from the publisher through Edelweiss.
I can’t resist a ghost story anthology, and The Haunting Season looked set to be a sterling addition to the genre. Inspired by the tradition of tellinI can’t resist a ghost story anthology, and The Haunting Season looked set to be a sterling addition to the genre. Inspired by the tradition of telling spooky tales in wintertime, it features contributions from eight well-known authors, promising to ‘bring this time-honoured tradition to vivid life in a spellbinding collection of new and original haunted tales’.
It’s an odd collection, really. All but one of the authors are women, and most of them have chosen to write historical tales with a feminist message. Since so few authentic Victorian ghost stories deal with the experiences of women, it’s an obvious angle. But too many of them are extremely similar; the premises of three of the stories are practically identical. They don’t have anything particularly interesting to say, either. Ghost stories by women of that era were, in fact, far more innovative than the pastiches presented here (just look at Vernon Lee’s work, for example).
Perhaps unfortunately, this ends up meaning that the story written by the sole male contributor, Andrew Michael Hurley, is miles ahead of any of the others, because it’s the only one that a) opts for anything other than a Victorian (or thereabouts) setting, and b) does anything truly surprising. I enjoyed the contributions from Elizabeth Macneal, Natasha Pulley, Laura Purcell and Bridget Collins too, but I’d expected a lot more variation in terms of settings and styles.
What I think this book needed was either a stronger editorial steer, or for the brief to be more specific – four, perhaps five of the stories could be described as reimaginings of traditional 19th-century ghost stories with a feminist angle, so why not make the whole anthology about that? Personally, I wish there had been a few more modern stories and original ideas in the mix.
--- ‘A Study in Black and White’ is the first thing I’ve read by Bridget Collins, and it makes for an impressive opening to the book. While cycling through an unfamiliar village, an entitled man becomes fascinated by a beautiful house surrounded with chess-inspired topiary. Against the advice of the locals, he impulsively decides to rent it, a decision he soon comes to regret. The plot doesn’t do anything surprising, but a cosy seasonal ghost story doesn’t have to, and this one succeeds at capturing the essence of a classic spooky wintertime tale.
I loved Imogen Hermes Gowar’s contribution to the Audible anthology Homeless Bodies, so I was looking forward to her story, ‘Thwaite’s Tenant’. Having fled their former home in disgrace, a woman and her young son are installed in a disagreeable house belonging to her father, where they soon intuit a ghostly presence. Good in parts, but lacking in subtlety; I ran out of patience with the narrator quickly, and I’m also not a huge fan of ghost stories that try to push a ‘message’ too hard.
Natasha Pulley’s story, ‘The Eel Singers’, features characters from her novels The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Lost Future of Pepperharrow. This makes it feel a bit awkward at the beginning, as the first few pages have a lot of work to do in establishing the characters and their relationships. After that, though, it’s remarkably effective. An unorthodox trio of friends take a holiday in the Fens, where they meet a group of unnerving locals who are less benign than they first appear. Charming and atmospheric.
‘Lily Wilt’ by Jess Kidd: a photographer is sent to capture the image of a corpse, falls in love with the dead girl and sets about trying to bring her back to life. I’m afraid I really disliked this: it was too silly for me, and too knowing, and written in an annoying childish style. But this is an anthology, and it’s unlikely every story in it is going to work for every reader.
‘The Chillingham Chair’ by Laura Purcell is an enjoyable slice of gothic silliness in which a young woman breaks her foot and, recuperating in the home of her former suitor, finds herself confined to a haunted wheelchair. Similar in both ideas and execution to ‘Thwaite’s Tenant’, but more successful.
‘The Hanging of the Greens’ by Andrew Michael Hurley: YES!! This is what I came here for! The narrator’s tale is about something in his past he has never been able to forget, from a time when he was young and passionately devout. It’s a story about a broken alcoholic, the family who take him in, and how that relationship sours. It contains a wonderfully cinematic sequence in which our protagonist is shown a sequence of events he cannot change. Not only is Hurley’s story by far the best in the book, it is also an excellent distillation of the themes ever-present in his work: religion, insular communities, tradition, folklore. (It made me want to revisit his best book, Devil’s Day, which I did immediately after finishing this.)
In ‘Confinement’ by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, a new mother becomes convinced a witch is trying to steal her baby. While it has its striking moments, this is the third story of just eight in the book that a) is set in the Victorian era in Britain, b) is about an upper-class woman with staff, and c) involves her being somehow confined after an incident that restricts her options for freedom. There’s no editor credited for this book and I can’t help thinking it might have turned out better if the authors had been steered in slightly different directions from one another.
Elizabeth Macneal’s cleverly titled ‘Monster’ is yet another Victorian story, but a creative one, and ends the book on a high note. Having been a high achiever as a child, Victor’s adult life has been a disappointment. On a trip to a seaside town with his wife, he’s convinced he can turn things around by discovering a ‘monster’, a new fossil. Macneal paints a fantastic picture of her unpleasant protagonist, and it’s deliciously enjoyable to watch his dreams gradually turn sour.
I received an advance review copy of The Haunting Season from the publisher through Edelweiss.
I was stunned by this book. I wasn’t able to keep this review short, so here’s the one-sentence version: this is one of the best short story collectioI was stunned by this book. I wasn’t able to keep this review short, so here’s the one-sentence version: this is one of the best short story collections I have ever read.
The review copy doesn’t include any biographical details about Izumi Suzuki; I don’t usually read introductions (at least not until I’ve finished the book), but this is a case in which I would have appreciated one. The publisher’s website says she was a model and actress in the 1970s, became a prolific writer after the death of her partner, and died by suicide in 1986. The original dates for the stories aren’t given. Information about her in English is frustratingly scarce, and most of it seems to stem from a press release about this collection; I eventually found this short bio, which gives publication years for some of her work.
The reason I was so curious about this is that ‘prescient’ is too weak a word to describe the stories in Terminal Boredom: ‘prophetic’ would be more like it. Over and over again, I was mind-bogglingly thrilled by the fact that these stories featuring video calls and robot vacuum cleaners, reality TV, live streams and screen-addicted people, in which Suzuki treats gender as a progressive 21st-century writer would, must have been written in the mid-80s at the latest.
The crown jewel of the book is ‘You May Dream’, translated by David Boyd. In it, a dispassionate young woman meets her more emotional friend, whom she regards with disgust. The two have differing opinions of the government’s latest population-reducing scheme, in which citizens are selected at random to enter cryosleep, after which they’ll only be able to live on by transferring their consciousness to another person’s dreams. It’s a story about grappling with loneliness and nihilism and detachment, with being the sort of person who will say I’m a hardcore people-pleaser, even in my dreams on one page and I’ve always enjoyed making fun of other people, cornering them on the next.
Reading this story, I began to understand Suzuki’s grasp on her characters’ voices – the voices being the other remarkable thing about these stories. Suzuki has this ability to pin down a person’s worldview in just a few lines. The things they say feel so accurate somehow, as well as so modern, that it’s often unnerving.
Like most people these days, I don’t overthink things. I’ll go along with whatever. No firm beliefs, no hang-ups. Just a lack of self-confidence tangled up in fatalistic resignation. Whatever the situation, nothing ever reaches me on an emotional level. Nothing’s important. Because I won’t let it be. I operate on mood alone. No regrets, no looking back.
I know exactly who the narrator of ‘You May Dream’ is. If she was young now she’d describe herself as blackpilled in her Twitter bio and make memes that seem vaguely fascist, and she’d be delighted that nobody could figure out whether or not she was kidding, due to her horror of sincerity, which she’d believe to be the highest form of cringe. I mean, how 2021 is a line like I devote myself to the acme of emptiness... the sadistic act of self-creation? I’m obsessed with this story. It’s incredible. It’s going straight on my list of favourite short stories of all time.
The other standout is ‘Terminal Boredom’, translated by Daniel Joseph. Set in a world of mass unemployment and screen addiction, it finds a young man and woman wearily going through the motions of some kind of relationship, the real world seeming less real to them than what they see on TV. They’re indifferent to violence, hide their emotions beneath a cool veneer of disinterest, and find human interaction exhausting. Again, they feel like they could have been written yesterday.
I couldn’t tell whether I was genuinely pissed off or not. The performance had just become a part of my personality. If nothing else, I can be pretty sure I’m not happy, I thought vacantly.
Without a doubt, this is the most uncannily clairvoyant of all the stories in Terminal Boredom, with its celebrities as politicians, reality TV shows, a character who routinely films his daily life, live recordings of suicides and killings... It also gives us the clearest articulation of the mood of Suzuki’s fiction, when the narrator states that everyone lives in a happy-go-lucky-depression – they only take life half-seriously. That attitude is typical of the people we meet throughout the book. That serious half is one of profound sadness and exhausted apathy, but the detachment it fosters allows Suzuki’s characters a kind of deadened joy.
‘Women and Women’, also translated by Daniel Joseph, is a barnstorming opener which I loved: a tongue-in-cheek story about a female-dominated society in which men are relegated to the ‘Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupancy Zone’. But one girl, 18-year-old Yūko, is beginning to question the order of things, especially after she actually sees a boy. It’s so funny and irreverent, but spiked with thought-provoking details, and the characters have startling depth.
Several stories take place in alien worlds. In ‘Night Picnic’, translated by Sam Bett, a family on a far-off planet try their hardest to act normal, attempting to play out traditional roles: Mom and Dad, Junior and Sis. They’re the last remaining humans... or are they? ‘Forgotten’, translated by Polly Barton, is a haunting love story about the relationship between Emma, a human, and Sol, an alien. It is the most plot-driven story in the book, culminating in interplanetary war, yet its key strength is how it shows us the inherent incompatibility of these two people, and the pain that causes.
Addiction is a recurring theme: in ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, translated by Aiko Masubuchi, a woman is hooked on drugs that make her age rapidly. ‘That Old Seaside Club’, translated by Helen O’Horan, presents a more offbeat take, following two young women who appear to be having the time of their lives in a beautiful seaside resort... though their memories of the past are oddly blurry. Emma in ‘Forgotten’ also sustains herself through drugs and drink, and of course, the characters in ‘Terminal Boredom’ are numbed by their screen addiction. Always, it is not necessarily the stories that matter, but the way Suzuki tells them. She will make you laugh out loud, then punch you in the gut with an observation so acute, so seemingly personal, that it hurts.
I don’t think I’ve read a collection like this before: stories originally written by the same author, but translated by a variety of translators. I was worried the latter would dilute the authorial voice, would be distracting – but as I discovered, there’s little chance of that. If I had to compare it to anything, I’d say it’s Anna Kavan’s short stories spliced with Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings, but really, Suzuki’s vision stands alone. ‘You May Dream’ is an instant classic, ‘Terminal Boredom’ and ‘Women and Women’ are also outstanding, and the entire collection represents a striking body of work I’m thrilled to have been able to discover.
I received an advance review copy of Terminal Boredom from the publisher through Edelweiss.
The Art of Space Travel is an outstanding collection of short stories: some are speculative, some are not, some blur the lines, all are written in a rThe Art of Space Travel is an outstanding collection of short stories: some are speculative, some are not, some blur the lines, all are written in a rich and engaging style that makes each and every character feel like a fully-formed human being. That’s all anyone else really needs to know; the rest of this review is for me. There’s rarely any point in reading a book review written by someone who is obsessed with the author’s work, and like many of my Nina Allan reviews, this is going to be very long, and involve a lot of analysis based on her other books and stories, because I need to write this all down somewhere, and what else do I have a Goodreads account for?
In her introduction, Allan discusses how she selected the stories for this career-spanning collection – mostly on instinct, and because they express themes that remain important to her as a writer. Some are linked through recurring characters, others via ideas; ‘the sense of circling a central hub of meaning’. She also writes intriguingly of ‘intended inconsistencies’, differences left in place both to provoke discussion and to invite comparisons with the subjective nature of memory – cited as a key theme for the book, along with loss, time and sense of place.
Again, I can only review The Art of Space Travel from the perspective of someone who is already a fan of Allan’s work; so deeply entrenched in it, in fact, that it has become impossible to be objective. I’ve read everything of hers I’ve been able to get my hands on, and as a result I had already read every story included here with the exception of the last, which is brand new. One of the big pleasures of this collection – of seeing the stories gathered together – is being able to join the dots, to find the places where they converge and where they pull away from one another. At times, piecing together the characters, the themes, the worlds contained here made me feel like an inventor, like someone discovering truly revelatory things for the first time. It is a special thing, a real joy, to find a writer who makes you feel like that.
But what’s perhaps more interesting is that virtually none of them are stories I would personally have chosen as part of a Nina Allan canon. Looking through them, and then comparing them to my own favourites, it seems The Art of Space Travel is frequently concerned with feelings – especially those that seem inexpressible, or are impossible to capture in words – whereas the stories I would choose are more plot-driven, more often thrilling or horrifying. As collections of speculative fiction go, this one is definitely on the literary end of the spectrum, quiet and thoughtful, rarely dealing in extremes – though incredibly powerful when it does.
Stories I already liked, such as ‘The Art of Space Travel’ and ‘Neptune’s Trident’, I found I loved upon revisiting them; stories I had originally been unsure about, like ‘Microcosmos’ and ‘Marielena’, I had a chance to reassess, and in some cases change my mind about. The collection is ordered more or less chronologically; if you are a newcomer to Allan and want to dip into it, I would recommend reading ‘Four Abstracts’ or ‘The Art of Space Travel’ first. These stories are not only the best, but also highly representative of her approach as a writer, and if you like them you will find much to relish here.
--- The book opens with three stories first published in Allan’s debut collection A Thread of Truth (2007): ‘Amethyst’, which is mainly about the friendship between two teen girls in a seaside town (but also about aliens and a pop song); ‘Heroes’, in which young Finlay finds an unexpected connection with an elderly neighbour and his racing pigeons; and ‘A Thread of Truth’, which is about doomed love, and also spiders. In both ‘Amethyst’ and ‘Heroes’, the most interesting elements of the story seem to be the least clear, the least satisfactorily resolved, but the details are so good and true that the stories are still pleasurable.
It’s easy to see why ‘A Thread of Truth’ is included here: it’s irresistibly involving, and contains within it an unforgettable ghost story, but more than that it is thematically significant. It articulates so many of the things Allan’s characters grapple with: the fact of love as both an impossible thing and an essential one; fear and how it can be vanquished; choosing between a vocation and a passion; the idea of a story that has the power to echo through time, to repeat itself.
Next are two more stories I first encountered in another previously published collection, this time 2013’s Microcosmos.‘Flying in the Face of God’ is one of several Allan stories dealing with the fate of the ‘fliers’, who undertake space travel at great physical cost (a process known as ‘the Kushnev drain’). ‘Microcosmos’ is set in a world afflicted by rising temperatures and increasing drought, and follows a girl who is briefly left with a man her parents are visiting – a stranger to her – and has a disconcerting encounter. Of everything in the collection, my most dramatic turnaround in opinion happened with ‘Microcosmos’. When I first read it, I was both disturbed and confused by the character of Ballantine, and unsure what was being left unsaid. Having read it again, I’m not sure what it was that I didn’t understand, and while I still think Ballantine’s behaviour is slightly odd, I no longer find him as menacing as I clearly did at first.
‘Fairy Skulls’ (2013) is one of the lighter entries: the tale of a woman who ends up living in a house she didn’t want... and with a fairy infestation to boot. In the introduction, Allan writes about how ‘each of my short stories seems to me like an outtake from the novel it might have become’. This is often evident from the sheer amount of detail the stories seem to contain; it’s one of the things I love most about Allan’s fiction, but it can also mean there isn’t enough space to explore strands that seem potentially fascinating. In ‘Fairy Skulls’, these include Vinnie’s relationship with her eccentric aunt Jude, as well as the history of the fairies. But I really enjoyed rereading this after Allan’s most recent novel The Good Neighbours, which also features the ‘fair folk’.
The next two stories were written around the same time that Allan was writing her second novel The Rift, and explore similar ideas about mysterious disappearances/appearances and the possibility of travelling through time or between realities. In ‘The Science of Chance’ (2014), set in an alternate version of Russia, a little girl appears – seemingly from nowhere – in a train station; a woman must attempt to track down the girl’s family with only an old, apparently unrelated newspaper clipping to go on. ‘Marielena’ (2014) follows an asylum seeker, Noah, who becomes reluctant friends with an elderly homeless woman named Mary. In both stories, the protagonist is led to a bizarre yet seemingly inescapable conclusion about the origins of the person they are trying to help.
I was interested to see ‘Marielena’ included here because, before rereading it, if someone had forced me (e.g. at gunpoint) to pick a Nina Allan story I didn’t like, I’d probably have had to choose this. It’s the style that always throws me: its stark realist lyricism is at odds with the usual rich texture of her fiction. But it and ‘The Science of Chance’ are undoubtedly companion pieces to one another, and while I still think ‘Marielena’ is one of the weaker pieces in the book, reading the two together gave me a different perspective.
‘The Art of Space Travel’ (2016) is one of Allan’s better-known stories and was previously published as a Tor.com ebook. Emily is caught up in the hysteria surrounding the celebrity guests – two astronauts – staying at the London hotel where she works as head of housekeeping. At the same time, her interest in her father’s identity is reignited when her mother, who has dementia, lets slip a new detail. I liked this the first couple of times I read it; rereading it here, I loved it. It really ticks the boxes for a lot of things I love in a short story – vivid and interesting characters, a first-person narrative with a distinctive voice, a suggestion of something inexplicable (the mysterious book is a genius touch), speculative details that stay grounded in reality.
‘Neptune’s Trident’ (2017) takes place in a broken-down, near-future vision of society in which some, including the protagonist Caitlin’s partner, have become ‘flukes’, the victims of a strange new infection that is little understood. As with ‘The Art of Space Travel’, having a chance to revisit this made me enjoy it so much more. It contains a vivid moment of horror that is difficult to forget, made all the more effective by the scrupulous worldbuilding that surrounds it.
And then we have ‘Four Abstracts’ (2017). THIS STORY; this was the first Nina Allan story I ever read, and it is the story that made me fall in love with her work. It’s about an artist, Rebecca Hathaway; it’s organised around four of her most significant pieces of art, and told by her friend Isobel in the wake of Rebecca’s death. It is, to me, a practically perfect short story. It explores friendship, art, grief and guilt, all while demonstrating a quiet, brilliant, terrifying commitment to a thread of horror via Rebecca’s claim that the women in her family are part-spider. I know now that it is a sequel of sorts to ‘A Thread of Truth’, but I didn’t know that when I first read it, and it absolutely stands alone. Always a pleasure to reread, and a masterclass in how it should be done.
‘The Common Tongue, the Present Tense, the Known’ (2016) is a sequel to ‘Microcosmos’, featuring the same protagonist, Melodie. Having revised my opinion of the earlier story, I was better able to appreciate this one. It expands on the theme of climate change introduced in ‘Microcosmos’, and depicts the older Melodie’s friendship with inscrutable scavenger Noemi. It’s moody and poetic, with the aloof tone suiting its bleak setting. I already thought of this as a sister story to ‘Neptune’s Trident’, but reading them both in the same volume, I once again found similarities that I hadn’t previously identified.
‘The Gift of Angels: an introduction’ (2018) is one of the more literary stories in Allan’s oeuvre, the gently elegiac tale of a middle-aged writer taking a trip to Paris, the city in which his parents met. When I first read the story, I was not familiar with the film La Jetée, which acts as a motif within Vincent’s narrative, images from it recurring throughout. Since then, I’ve watched it; knowing now that it’s something of a classic, I’m a bit embarrassed that I hadn’t previously heard of it, but it also strikes me as significant that I had no problem believing it was Allan’s own invention. In fact, the film fits into her body of work with eerie precision, its themes (love, fate, memory, time) matching those of this collection.
‘A Princess of Mars: Svetlana Belkina and Tarkovsky’s Lost Movie Aelita’ is a new story and, as the title suggests, it (like ‘The Gift of Angels’) is heavily influenced by film. The plot is a mixture of autofiction and cinematic mystery as the narrator digs for information about an abandoned Andrei Tarkovsky adaptation of the science fiction novel Aelita. It’s fascinating and extremely readable, a kind of essay-story, and it is, at times, delightfully difficult to figure out which parts (or characters) are real and which have been fabricated.
--- I have (unsurprisingly) given considerable thought to the question of which stories I, personally, would put in a Nina Allan ‘greatest hits’ collection. ‘Four Abstracts’ would be there, of course, and some stories that would never have made it into The Art of Space Travel because they’re part of collections that are currently in print: the title story from The Silver Wind, ‘The Gateway’ and possibly ‘The Lammas Worm’ from Stardust/Ruby. From Microcosmos I would have selected ‘Orinoco’ and ‘A.H.’ (which, for what it’s worth, I think would have fit into this collection well).
Then there are the uncollected stories I love: ‘Astray’ (the basis for The Rift), ‘The Muse of Copenhagen’, ‘Vivian Guppy and the Brighton Belle’, ‘Bellony’, and most of all ‘Maggots’ and ‘A Change of Scene’. The last two are honest-to-god masterpieces, but I suppose I have to grudgingly admit that they are difficult to divorce from their origins: ‘Maggots’ (probably the best horror story I’ve ever read) is part of the anthology Five Stories High, wherein all the contributions take place within the same house; ‘A Change of Scene’ is, specifically and unavoidably, a sequel to Robert Aickman’s ‘Ringing the Changes’ (and, as I’ve said a few times before, is better than the original). Still, if you are at all interested in Allan’s writing, you must read them.
I received an advance review copy of The Art of Space Travel from the publisher through Edelweiss.
(4.5) Kitamura’s is writing that epitomises the phrase ‘deceptively simple’. Intimacies is a brief, seemingly straightforward novel that’s made comple(4.5) Kitamura’s is writing that epitomises the phrase ‘deceptively simple’. Intimacies is a brief, seemingly straightforward novel that’s made complex, rich and endlessly fascinating by its storytelling. It’s a precise study of how we move through the world, written so instinctively it seems to reveal momentous truths without effort.
The narrator, an interpreter from a rootless and itinerant background, has moved to The Hague to take up a year-long contract at the International Court of Justice (or simply ‘the Court’, as it is referred to here). As the story begins, she has been assigned to a high-profile trial, providing interpretation for a controversial former West African president. Meanwhile, a difficult situation emerges in her personal life. Her (somewhat distant) boyfriend, Adriaan, leaves the narrator living alone in his apartment while he visits his ex-wife and children in Portugal. At first his return seems guaranteed, but as the weeks go by and Adriaan neither comes back nor contacts her, the narrator begins to suspect he has reunited with his ex – and must decide what to do about what now seems a very strange living arrangement.
That’s the plot, but this is the kind of story that unfolds in small details, in moments, in thoughts. It’s called Intimacies, it centres on an interpreter, and it’s about those two things: intimacy and interpretation. In the same way that imagination was so important in A Separation, the narrator’s levels of interpretation are key to the atmosphere of Intimacies. Time and time again we are made privy to the narrator’s assumptions about a person or situation, only for her to be proven wrong moments later, and needing to reconfigure her way of perceiving things, sometimes multiple times in a single scene. This is, of course, very true to life, but so unlike how a fictional character’s interior monologue is usually represented; the effect is startling.
This approach can result in palpable tension, as when the narrator arrives for dinner with Adriaan and her friend Jana and, despite the two supposedly having not met before, finds them in what seems to be a state of collusion. While this is not a dangerous situation, the possibilities simmer with menace in a way that makes it almost frightening. Several scenes throughout the book in which the narrator encounters men she does not know – a party, another dinner, a rendezvous with the former president and his team – depict her constantly reassessing her judgement, recallibrating herself accordingly. These scenes of Kitamura’s appear to me like those tiny, perfect oil paintings or watercolours you sometimes see, very small – nothing to look at from a distance – but created with extreme skill and precision, the detail expertly condensed.
If I still cared about the Booker Prize, I’d’ve thought this a dead cert for the longlist/shortlist. There were so many points when I thought, this is exactly what I want literary fiction to do: capture reality in a way that makes it new.
I received an advance review copy of Intimacies from the publisher through Edelweiss.
Patrick Hamlin is a writer whose novel I thought Alexandra Kleeman might be a genius when I read You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine; now I know she is.
Patrick Hamlin is a writer whose novel Elsinore Lane is being made into a film featuring Cassidy Carter, one-time child star of Kassi Keene: Kid Detective, now halfway to being washed up and better known as a tabloid darling. Patrick has been given a token role as production assistant, something he quickly realises gives him no say in what the studio do with the content. With his wife and daughter cut off from civilisation at a ‘nature retreat’, Patrick is marooned in the neon sprawl of LA, watching helplessly as the material of his book – a personal, elegiac story about the loss of his father – is distorted into a bizarrely plotless horror movie.
All this plays out against the backdrop of something that gradually reveals itself as a five-minutes-into-the-future setting. In California, tap water is a thing of the past. Instead there’s a privately supplied, supposedly chemically identical, completely ubiquitous, artificial substitute called WAT-R. Patrick is rattled when he sees a group of disorientated people being shepherded into a green van; later, he learns they are victims of a new phenomenon known as ‘Random-Onset Acute Dementia’. When he decides to investigate the links between WAT-R, the new disease and the movie, who better to help than the woman who played super-sleuth Kassi Keene?
Something New Under the Sun is less weird fiction than You Too, but no less weird. The dialogue is often absurd, with sentences like ‘avoiding loss is impossible in a world that struggles to conjure even the basic sense of presence’ thrown out in casual conversation. People don’t talk like this, and it works so well – it knows its own absurdity, exists on its own plane. As in her debut, Kleeman is breathtakingly adept at taking symbols of capitalism, of celebrity, of consumer culture and warping them beyond all recognition, in doing so revealing the horror that lay beneath the surface all along.
The perspective switches throughout, often without warning, from Patrick to Cassidy and away from them altogether. It’s like a filmmaking technique itself – like a drone hovering next to the characters and then, bored, wandering away to pan through the empty rooms of a house, to zoom in on the movements of animals and insects in the scrubland. The land is just as alive as the people – indeed, so is the WAT-R; so are the highways and air-con units. The setting is a triumph, simultaneously fascinating and hellish. The style is unique: trippy, dreamy, undoubtedly odd, yet somehow really humane; against all odds, it doesn’t feel detached from reality at all.
If I had to compare it to anything... I suppose the mixture of a writer isolated from his family and hints of conspiracy, partly communicated through episodes of a TV show, reminded me of Red Pill, but god, this just does everything a hundred times better than Red Pill (and I liked that book! But Something New is more successful for me precisely because it leans into the weirdness of its weirdest aspects and lets that spin out in every direction rather than trying to tie everything back to events the reader will recognise). It could also be the eccentric sibling of We Play Ourselves, with its hallucinatory LA setting, and its blurring of reality as a film is made, and all its ideas and energy. I liked to imagine Patrick and Cassidy nearly, but not quite, crossing paths with Cass and Caroline.
Only Kleeman could have written this, I’m convinced. Only she could have written something with these themes, make it as earnest as it is knowing, and not have it turn into a dreary sermon. A film industry satire/cautionary climate change novel/conspiracy thriller/near-future science fiction, a bizarre, wild, colourful odyssey through a version of reality that seems to be melting, returning the trappings of modernity to the primordial ooze... It’s the best, most ingenious book I have read this year so far, and I’ll be surprised if I find anything to match it. As it turns out, the title is wholly apt.
I received an advance review copy of Something New Under the Sun from the publisher through Edelweiss.
I knew Camilla Bruce’s second novel had come out in the US, where it’s known by the arguably better title In the Garden of Spite, and was delighted toI knew Camilla Bruce’s second novel had come out in the US, where it’s known by the arguably better title In the Garden of Spite, and was delighted to find out there would be a UK edition too. I loved her debut, You Let Me In, SO much, and I knew I would want to read whatever she put out next. This is something quite different: a historical novel based on a true story, that of Belle Gunness, also known as ‘the Black Widow of La Porte’, a serial killer responsible for as many as 40 murders around the turn of the 20th century.
The book is divided into three parts, representing three stages of Belle’s identity. She is born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størset in a small town in Norway, where she undergoes a traumatising ordeal that leaves indelible marks. When she emigrates to America and marries a middle-class man, she becomes Bella Sorensen, a sweet-shop entrepreneur and foster mother; her desire for money and fine things grows, and so does her bloodlust. With a second marriage and move to a farm in Indiana, she finally becomes Belle Gunness, and her killing spree continues in earnest.
The problem with basing fiction on real events is that the author has to contend with stretches of the subject’s life that are really just not that interesting. Parts one and two are compelling – it’s thanks to the opening scenes in particular that I was interested in reading more about Belle, and when her true nature starts to emerge, there are fascinating and chilling details. But in part three, there isn’t much to recount except Belle murdering a lot of people, which makes it both slightly dull and unrelentingly grim.
The imagination on display in You Let Me In was so breathtaking that I can’t help but be a little disappointed Bruce chose to write this instead of another original novel. With that said, she does a great job of humanising Belle without ever making excuses for her, and the darkness of her narrative is effectively balanced out by the voice of her loving older sister Nellie. The result is both twisted (the later chapters are very dark and gruelling) and thought-provoking.
I received an advance review copy of Triflers Need Not Apply from the publisher through Edelweiss.
A Touch of Jen was one of my most anticipated books of this year. I mean, ‘a love triangle so toxic that it breaks the order of the universe and unleaA Touch of Jen was one of my most anticipated books of this year. I mean, ‘a love triangle so toxic that it breaks the order of the universe and unleashes a literal monster’? ‘Ottessa Moshfegh meets David Cronenberg’??? Hook it into my VEINS, or whatever it is that people say.
Remy and Alicia, a couple in their early thirties, are mutually fascinated by a woman called Jen, a former coworker of Remy’s. (It’s not really clear why, and that’s kind of the point; the obsession itself is more important than its subject.) Most of their conversations are about her, they spend huge amounts of time dissecting everything she posts online, and their sex life involves a lot of Jen-related roleplay. Remy and Alicia are mostly unlikeable yet somehow, against the odds, charming – you wouldn’t want to know them, but reading about them is pretty fun. Morgan writes their obsession with Jen perfectly: I really did believe that the idea of Remy hooking up with Jen was as exciting (possibly even more exciting) for Alicia as for Remy.
At least 90% of A Touch of Jen is a quirky comedy about the Remy/Alicia/Jen love triangle which, at its best, nearly matches the high-precision weirdness of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, but at its worst recalls the most random-without-a-cause sequences of Annaleese Jochems’ Baby. While the few glimpses we get of a monstrous, otherworldly presence are tantalising, they’re incidental until the story is almost over – at which point it suddenly explodes into the kind of high-octane horror-thriller stuff I associate with books like The Dark Net and The Changeling.
I did like the ending – the actual ending, i.e. the last couple of pages – a lot. It’s a better way to wrap everything up than I thought possible, while also being one of those ah, yes, of course endings that make perfect sense. But until that point, throughout the whole book in fact, I felt like I was constantly... waiting for something. I suppose it’s just that I was waiting for the moment I would really click with the story and start loving it, and that never happened. It’s a good concept, and fun, but much lighter than I expected, and ultimately just not a good match for my tastes.
(NB: not that I, or I’m sure most people reading this, take that kind of overexcited targeted-hype blurb language seriously, but it really isn’t anything like either Moshfegh or Cronenberg, if you were wondering. More like The Pisces meets John Dies at the End.)
I received an advance review copy of A Touch of Jen from the publisher through Edelweiss.
Frankie, a writer in her early forties, goes to stay in a Venetian palazzo, known locally as ‘the palace of the drowned’, that belongs to an heiress fFrankie, a writer in her early forties, goes to stay in a Venetian palazzo, known locally as ‘the palace of the drowned’, that belongs to an heiress friend’s family. She’s fleeing a scandal back home in London: having become obsessed with a negative review of her last novel, she attacked a stranger at a party, mistakenly believing the woman was mocking her. In Venice, she ekes out a quiet, solitary existence – until a young woman called Gilly approaches her. Frankie is suspicious of Gilly, but the latter is so persistent that they form a friendship, albeit one that becomes increasingly strained.
The first half is slow to get going, never really communicating much tension nor capturing the atmosphere of Venice. Gilly, meanwhile, is rendered almost too well; she’s so creepy and clingy that I hated to read about her, and was never quite convinced by Frankie’s acceptance of her ‘friendship’. Halfway through, something pivotal happens, and thereafter the plot becomes much more gripping. A feverish sequence portraying Frankie’s descent into paranoia is particularly effective.
I didn’t like this as much as Mangan’s debut Tangerine, but most of the problems I had with it – not enough suspense, the nature of the ending – are just matters of personal taste. It was a nicely absorbing tale for a lazy Saturday afternoon, and like Tangerine it would make a good holiday read.
I received an advance review copy of Palace of the Drowned from the publisher through Edelweiss.
So 2021 is going to be another year with a Brandon Taylor book on my best-of list. In years to come, these stories will be classics; what a pleasure tSo 2021 is going to be another year with a Brandon Taylor book on my best-of list. In years to come, these stories will be classics; what a pleasure to read them when they’re brand new.
In Filthy Animals, every other story (or, every story with a one-word title) is part of an interlinked, novella-length narrative circling Charles and Sophie, two dancers in a open relationship, and Lionel, a man who becomes involved with them. The other stories are standalones, but they have a sense of shared concerns, portraying young people – in their teens and twenties – navigating intimacy, desire, cruelty, loneliness.
As in Real Life, Taylor’s writing hums with some power beyond what books normally possess, causing me to lie awake thinking about his prose, like I’m a teenager and it’s someone I have a crush on. I took the time to read the stories carefully, pausing and taking notes after finishing each one. Filthy Animals most reminded me of Salinger’s For Esme—With Love and Squalor – not what the stories are, particularly, but how I felt reading them.
Discovering a new favourite writer at the beginning of their career is a unique delight. I can’t wait to read everything else Taylor is going to write. I especially can’t wait to see how/what he will write about older characters.
--- In ‘Potluck’, Lionel attends a party, his natural awkwardness concealing a far more serious trauma in his recent past. He meets a couple, Charles and Sophie, and seems to have chemistry with both of them, so that when someone follows Lionel on his way home and calls his name, the reader is unsure which of them it will turn out to be. I sensed a coldness here that I have seen some others talk about detecting in Real Life, something I felt was completely nullified by the sheer depth of Wallace’s character in the novel; at the same time I think the coldness may be intentional, reflecting the numbness Lionel still carries with him.
‘Little Beast’ opens with an absolute nightmare of a babysitting scene, so palpable I wanted to recoil from it. The narrator is Sylvia, who while navigating this job is thinking about how she's ‘blown up her life’, which is not elaborated on (at least not explicitly), though some other elements of her story are. My initial reaction was to believe that I disliked this story, but after sitting with it for a while I realised that I disliked what it depicted, found it tangibly oppressive, and the reason I felt that way was because it was so effectively described.
With ‘Flesh’ I came to the realisation that the stories are linked, as here we meet Charles again, taking a dance class the morning after he met Lionel. (You might be thinking, the very first words of the blurb call it ‘a group portrait’! But truth be told I didn’t read the blurb before I wanted the book or before I started the book. After Real Life, I would’ve read anything with Brandon Taylor’s name on it, sight unseen.) A scene that captures the ripples of tension and desire among the dancers, and the dynamics of a relationship.
Things I wrote down while while reading ‘As Though That Were Love’: The spaces between words. Needing to reread dialogue to understand what is not being said. The way sentences are juxtaposed. Taylor is so good at scenes that go on longer than they seem they need to. Me thinking, this character is a cruel man, and then someone in the story says it. Towards the end, strongly reminiscent of Joel Lane – the sex, the darkness. Almost a horror story.
With ‘Proctoring’, it begins to seem that Lionel is the protagonist of the book. Here we find him working, then meeting Sophie again. The story has a perfect opening paragraph and so many lines I want to quote. There’s so much here about intimacy – being outside it or within it. Taylor writes awkward moments so well, really captures how they feel rather than simply what they consist of.
In ‘Filthy Animals’, Milton heads out to a party with his friends, knowing that soon he will be heading off to an ‘enrichment program’ at the insistence of his parents. This is a story that suits its title – dirty and bloody. Is it an accurate portrayal of American boyhood, red in tooth and claw? I don’t know; I’ve never been a boy. But it feels like one. I kept thinking about this story later, all its menace and murk.
‘Mass’: After a routine visit to the doctor, Alek – one of the dancers from Charles’s class – is told he needs to have a biopsy. The news prompts him to reminisce about his family; he isn’t close to them. Again there is both brutality and softness here; the tyranny of perfectionism, the complications of love.
‘Anne of Cleves’ has another perfect opening paragraph. More perfect sentences. I’m running out of ways to say ‘the writing is perfect’. Marta and Sigrid are on a date, awkward at first, later comfortable; it flows outwards from there. Something about loneliness. Something about how love transforms you. Making me think about how a moment in a story can make you dislike a character, but it’s merely a moment; in reality it would be nothing.
‘Apartment’: Lionel, Charles and Sophie again, our pivotal trio, dancing around one another. This is a situation that becomes something else, or no, is morphing all the time, twisting so that Lionel can’t get his bearings. Unsure where to stand with this one. A lot of uncertainties, intimations of threat, of meanness.
‘What Made Them Made You’ is about Grace, who is sick and staying with her grandfather. Like many characters in this book, she is thinking about what family means, what human connection means, how they are the same, how they are different. This was a story I couldn’t find my footing with at first; when I did, it was magnificent.
‘Meat’ is a final story about Lionel, Charles and Sophie. It has a lot of tense, ambiguous moments; intimacy as unbearable suspense. It didn’t go how I wanted it to. This is not particularly helpful to say in a review, but it made me think about a few books I’ve read recently which I haven’t found satisfying in different ways, and how this story does many of the same things that made me ambivalent about them, yet I feel so differently about it. I really believe in the people Taylor writes, and when they take paths I wouldn’t choose for them, I understand that they are acting not as an author’s puppets, but as real people would act.
I received an advance review copy of Filthy Animals from the publisher through Edelweiss.
In the world of Girl One, a scientist named Joseph Bellanger succeeded in engineering human parthenogenesis (reproduction without fertilisation, i.e. In the world of Girl One, a scientist named Joseph Bellanger succeeded in engineering human parthenogenesis (reproduction without fertilisation, i.e. no need for a father) in the early 1970s. Nine ‘miracle’ children were born, all girls, on a commune known as the Homestead. The first of them (hence ‘Girl One’) was Josephine Morrow. The experiment ended in ignominy when a fire, allegedly set by a preacher who’d been an outspoken opponent of the ‘virgin births’, destroyed the Homestead, killing one of the girls along with Bellanger, who took the secrets of his scientific method to the grave.
17 years later, in 1994, Josie is a young woman studying medicine and hoping to follow in Bellanger’s footsteps. Like most of the other ex-Homestead residents, she’s largely disowned the controversy of her birth and has been trying to live a quiet life with her mother, Margaret. When Margaret disappears, however, Josie’s efforts to find her turn into a sort of road trip, visiting each surviving mother-daughter pair, and in the process unearthing plenty of secrets... including the crucial revelation that some of the women appear to have superpowers.
I feel torn about this book. I really liked the author’s debut, The Possessions, and I went into Girl One with high hopes, interested in both the premise and Josie’s voice. On the other hand, I’m not generally a fan of novels that combine science fiction with earnest liberal feminism – especially not when the plot deals extensively with reproduction and motherhood, as here – so perhaps I should’ve known it wouldn’t quite be my cup of tea. Although there are enough mysteries and twists to keep the plot engaging, my reading pace slowed as it went on, and I didn’t feel a great deal of investment in what ended up happening to Josie or the 'Girls’, most of whom I found slightly annoying. Oddly, Bellanger is the most compelling character despite not actually being present for most of the book.
It’s also one of those books that feels like it’s been written with one eye on the idea of a potential TV or film adaptation. I get why – I can see this story making a great miniseries – but what might work well on a screen can be very clunky on the page. The characterisation of each of the girls is implausibly broad, and you can see virtually every plot twist coming from a mile off, including a forced, inauthentic romance that develops between two of the main characters.
I received an advance review copy of Girl One from the publisher through Edelweiss.
(4.5) There is so much in this book that I'm not sure how to begin talking about it, and what exactly it was that I loved about it. I'm worried that m(4.5) There is so much in this book that I'm not sure how to begin talking about it, and what exactly it was that I loved about it. I'm worried that merely describing the plot won't make it sound as good as it actually is, because the language really makes it sizzle, and Silverman writes about complicated emotions in a style I found thrilling, and those things are difficult to communicate in a review.
Cass is a 33-year-old playwright who's had a tumultuous few months: after years of work, she's finally attained success, winning a coveted award – but this is swiftly followed by a spectacular downfall. Fleeing the fallout of a scandal in New York, she hides out at her friend’s house in Silver Lake, LA. While she tries to keep a low profile, she can't help being intrigued by her new next-door neighbour Caroline, a flighty, charismatic filmmaker. It isn't long before she gets caught up in Caroline's latest project, a documentary about a group of teen girls who organise violent gatherings inspired by Fight Club.
Here are three particular things about We Play Ourselves that I can't stop thinking about: 1. Cass's unrequited love for Hélène, the director of her play. It's just such a great portrayal of what it means, what it is, to feel like this about someone – painfully dead-on and, if you've experienced it yourself, exceptionally validating. 2. The scene wherein Cass is finally reunited with her nemesis, wunderkind Tara-Jean Slater. Odd and sparse and dreamy and lonely; a Hollywood hallucination. 3. The penultimate chapter!! I don't want to describe it because that would spoil the experience of reading it, but I will say this: if, after reading the first chapter, I had flipped forward and read the penultimate one, I would never have believed that both could have come from the same book. It's a tour de force in itself, and has to be read to be believed.
At first, I much preferred the New York flashbacks, which reminded me strongly – in language and in spirit – of Sweetbitter, one of my favourite books. I'll admit I found the LA plot less compelling, and Caroline and the teens less interesting characters than Cass, Hélène and Tara-Jean. But when the narratives eventually converge, everything slots together marvellously. I think Cass's realisations about what's important in her life – what 'success' actually means, and whether it matters at all – are exactly what many of us need to read in this era of uncertainty, when so many people have seen their professional and personal lives stymied by the effects of the pandemic. They certainly helped me.
This novel is a fizzing ball of ideas, a delightfully messy multilayered exploration of queerness and desire, art and ambition, and what it means to fail (or not). 'A strange miracle', as someone tells Cass. I adored Cass's voice and found a great deal to love about the story.
I received an advance review copy of We Play Ourselves from the publisher through Edelweiss.
When I picked up Blue in Green, I was in the middle of a painful extended reading slump. I'm still in the middle of it, really – but it didn't stand aWhen I picked up Blue in Green, I was in the middle of a painful extended reading slump. I'm still in the middle of it, really – but it didn't stand a chance against this miraculous book.
Blue in Green tells the tale of Erik Dieter, a once-promising saxophonist who has wound up as a teacher – something he sees as a failure, at least in comparison to the successful musical career he once thought he could have. At his mother's funeral, two things happen: he reconnects with an old flame, Vera; and he comes across a peculiar, menacing figure in his mother's study, holding a photograph. Afterwards, Erik thinks the person he saw might have been a nightmare, but he becomes fixated on the subject of the picture, a musician he doesn't recognise.
Inevitably, this mania leads Erik down a dark and strange path. The story is not a new idea (and to be quite honest, it's uncannily similar to the plot of the 'Spirit of Jazz' episode of The Mighty Boosh). But the stunning art elevates Blue in Green to something more than just another horror story about a man losing himself in obsession. It's endlessly beautiful; every page is a riot of colour, every detail is exquisitely rendered. Colours bleed and smudge into one another, lights seem to glow, and raindrops clinging to a window look so real you could touch them. The blurring neon of a streetlit night, the visual cacophony of faces in a crowd, the ghostly figures of people seen only in memories, the incomplete collage of a series of overlapping thoughts: all come to life as though they are not so much art as a live feed of the protagonist's mind's eye.
As soon as I finished reading the digital review copy, I went back to the beginning and read it again, and then I preordered a physical copy. I could never get tired of looking at this.
I received an advance review copy of Blue in Green from the publisher through Edelweiss.
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