Review: Natural Beauty

Title: Natural Beauty

Author: Ling Ling Huang

Genre: Contemporary/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Body horror (major), sexism, misogyny (mentions, from antagonist), sexual content, death, medical content, medical trauma, sexual assault, pregnancy (mentions), death of parent (mentions), vomit, cannibalism (mentions), bullying (mentions), drug use (dubious consent), unreality

Back Cover:

Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost.

Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City.

Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures—from remoras that suck out cheap Botox to eyelash extensions made of spider silk—and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege and gives her a long-awaited sense of belonging. She becomes transfixed by Helen, the niece of Holistik’s charismatic owner, and the two strike up a friendship that hazily veers into more. All the while, our narrator is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister.

A piercing, darkly funny debut, Natural Beauty explores questions of consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity—and leaves readers with a shocking and unsettling truth.

Review:

I’m always down for media skewering the beauty industry. The damage the pursuit of beauty does to to the body and the psyche, consumerism masquerading as self-care, a mantra of “wellness” that only adds more work and stress to your life while claiming if you just did it right you’d never have a negative emotion again … these are all ideas that I find fascinating and compelling and I love to explore.

Unfortunately, that’s not really what I got with Natural Beauty.

Don’t get me wrong, it tries! It absolutely tries really hard to say a lot of things. But I think the problem was that it was try to cover way too many things in a book that isn’t nearly long enough. In addition to the commentary on the beauty industry, it also tries to talk about the value of music, beauty as social capital, the nature of beauty itself (through both physical beauty and music), complex relationships with parents, the inherent power dynamics of money, possibly sustainability – and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head.

One of the primary drivers of the book is a fascinating form of body horror serving as a counterpoint to Holistik’s beauty mandate, which was a wonderful idea and a form of body horror that I don’t see a lot, so I appreciated it both as a body horror fan and a beauty culture skeptic. But for it to have been done well, it needed to be a slow burn. And Natural Beauty is emphatically not that. In fact, in the first two-thirds or so, the bit that should have been the tense, gradual build-up to the true horror at the end, the changes happen rapidly – and our unnamed protagonist barely seems to notice them anyway, simply commenting on how her body has changed and going on about her business. What seems to be the message of the book has to struggle for page time among flashbacks to the protagonist’s past, her thoughts about piano and music in general, and interactions with her coworkers.

Then about halfway through, the focus slowly begins to shift. In case you couldn’t figure it out from the back cover or the first few pages of the book, there’s something very weird and very suspicious going on at Holistik. The story shifts away from the protagonist’s body and the idea of beauty and towards finding out exactly what is happening at Holistik. But even that is unsatisfying because the answers we eventually get don’t actually tie up all the questions that I had. (What about the deer? What about the hand cream?) The book gets weird, and not in the unsetting way I enjoy, but in a way that feels overdone and unbelievable. I was halfway through reading a particular scene before I realized it was supposed to be the climax and not just another outlandish even in the series of outlandish events that was the last third of the book.

The narration is straightforward and passionless, which is not always a bad thing, but in this case served to keep at a distance any emotions that would have made it impactful. It also made it really difficult to judge which scenes were actually happening and which were some kind of drug-induced unreality sequence. And as I mentioned previously, the body horror aspect could have been fantastic if it was paced better. But what really made it so disappointing was the fact that it couldn’t keep a focus. It started off with the beauty industry and the costs and dangers of being beautiful. But it seems afraid to go too deep into it or lean too hard into the horrifying, revolting underbelly. Whenever it approached anything particularly grim, it would back off to talk about music or the protagonist’s parents or her past. Then it shifted to “let’s find out how fucked up this company really is!” with the bonus that the protagonist wasn’t even particularly interested in this line of investigating, but got dragged along as her friends started to pry. Then at the end it abruptly switches back to body horror and beauty culture, skipping over the actual change that would have made me actually feel something about it and relying on the protagonist’s passionless commentary and opinions about how just entirely not participating in beauty is good, actually.

I wanted this to be something more than it was. I wanted a literary horror commentary on the beauty industry, beauty culture, and how the modern mandate of “wellness” just sells women more work and more reasons to appeal to the male gaze while convincing them it’s actually “self-care” and “empowerment.” What I got was an admittedly well-written but poorly paced and unfocused story about a young woman who got caught up with a really fucked up beauty brand. The ideas were strong and the concepts had a lot of potential. But the execution, at least in my opinion, didn’t do them justice.

Review: House of Hunger

Title: House of Hunger

Author: Alexis Henderson

Genre: Fantasy/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Blood (severe), death, injury, murder, violence, confinement, sexual content, toxic relationship (severe), drug use, mental illness, gore, animal death (mentions), child abuse (mentions), parent death (mentions), grief, terminal illness, emotional abuse

Back Cover:

WANTED – Bloodmaid of exceptional taste. Must have a keen proclivity for life’s finer pleasures. Girls of weak will need not apply.

Marion Shaw has been raised in the slums, where want and deprivation are all she know. Despite longing to leave the city and its miseries, she has no real hope of escape until the day she spots a peculiar listing in the newspaper seeking a bloodmaid.

Though she knows little about the far north—where wealthy nobles live in luxury and drink the blood of those in their service—Marion applies to the position. In a matter of days, she finds herself the newest bloodmaid at the notorious House of Hunger. There, Marion is swept into a world of dark debauchery. At the center of it all is Countess Lisavet.

The countess, who presides over this hedonistic court, is loved and feared in equal measure. She takes a special interest in Marion. Lisavet is magnetic, and Marion is eager to please her new mistress. But when she discovers that the ancient walls of the House of Hunger hide even older secrets, Marion is thrust into a vicious game of cat and mouse. She’ll need to learn the rules of her new home—and fast—or its halls will soon become her grave.

Review:

I have been dealing with some serious brain fog lately. This is the first book I’ve actually managed to finish in almost two weeks. (Ignore the dates of reviews posted on this site – brain fog has also made me slow at writing reviews.) It’s been hard to focus on reading anything, and that has definitely affected my reading experience. So there is a definite grain of salt to be added to the following opinions.

This book went hard on the dark and disturbing Gothic vibes, leaning into the pleasure in pain, debauchery, and hedonism of a wealthy blood-drinking court. But that’s about all there is to this book – vibes. There’s nothing deeper or richer than that.

The world is in general badly explained. Stuff like the political interactions of major and minor noble houses gets info-dumped, even though none of it matters and only one character from a house besides the House of Hunger is at all relevant. Stuff that actually was interesting and relevant to world-building and the overall atmosphere were completely glossed over. For example, a few sentences towards the beginning indicate that the north part of the world may be some sort of different realm or fae dimension that somehow connected to the ordinary world, but that is never explained or even confirmed.

The biggest drawback was the characters had absolutely no motivation. They do things for no discernable reason and stop doing them for no discernable reason, and nobody seems to think that people could have reasons. Nobody has desires or reasons to act. Marion, the protagonist, states some motivations and desires, but she doesn’t act like she has any. At one point, she decides on a course of action because the plot said so and practically says as much. I can’t even call the characters flat because they have to have at least one dimension for that. Most of the characters were bland pretty girls in pretty dresses drifting through a gothic mansion at the whims of the author.

This book is a strange reading experience because I 100% get what it’s going for. I intellectually know it’s going for a dark, creepy, gothic feeling, dripping with blood and sex and debauchery and hedonism. In my head I know that’s the picture that it’s trying to paint. But it stays in my head. There’s no feeling to it. The strange pacing probably helped with that, spending over half on setup that skipped over months at a time and then slamming directly to climax with hardly any middle to develop an actual story. Maybe it’s because of my brain fog, or maybe because the characters felt so lifeless. But it was all tell and no show. There were definite vibes, but no mood or atmosphere whatsoever.

I think I finished reading this book because I wanted a dark and atmospheric gothic fantasy horror. I expected something rich, lush, and atmospheric, with blood and silk and sex and horror blending into a velvet tapestry of violent delights, and kept reading hoping it would show up eventually. But what I actually got was the LaCroix of gothic novels – hints of flavor enough to tell what it’s supposed to be, but nowhere close to real or satisfying.

Review: Wizard and Glass

Title: Wizard and Glass

Series: The Dark Tower #4

Author: Stephen King

Genre: Low Fantasy Horror Western with strong Post-Apocalyptic vibes

Trigger Warnings: Death, parent death, blood, gore, violence, injury, fire/fire injury, animal death, animal suffering, guns, fire, infidelity, sexual content, sexual content between consenting minors, sexual assault, adult/minor relationship, forced marriage, verbal abuse, pandemic, excrement

Spoiler Warning: This book is 4th in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to major spoilers of previous books.

Back Cover:

Roland the Gunslinger, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake survive Blaine the Mono’s final crash, only to find themselves stranded in an alternate version of Topeka, Kansas, that has been ravaged by the superflu virus. While following the deserted I-70 toward a distant glass palace, Roland recounts his tragic story about a seaside town called Hambry, where he fell in love with a girl named Susan Delgado, and where he and his old tet-mates Alain and Cuthbert battled the forces of John Farson, the harrier who – with a little help from a seeing sphere called Maerlyn’s Grapefruit – ignited Mid-World’s final war.

Review:

I waited a while to pick up this one after finishing The Waste Lands, mainly because I can read a Dark Tower book in two days via audiobook at work but it takes the friend I’m reading the series with a month or two to get through each book. But this one picks up exactly where the last book left off, with the riddle contest with Blaine the Mono.

There are two different stories going on in this book. There’s the frame story with Roland and the ka-tet traveling along the path of the beam towards the Dark Tower. But a good three-quarters of the story is backstory, framed as Roland telling part of his story to Eddie, Susannah, and Jake.

It was kind of interesting to get that history. Susan has been mentioned as part of Roland’s past previously, but now we get to find out who she was, how Roland met her, and what tragedy happened that caused Roland so much pain and regret. There’s also more of Alain and Cuthbert, who have also been mentioned previously. This story expands on their personalities so we get to know them a little bit better – although it doesn’t cover what tragedy happened to them.

If the purpose of the story had been to fill in those gaps in Roland’s history, it would have been significantly shorter. I believe this is the longest book in the series, and the story of Roland and Susan is the reason. I did not like it all that much, to be honest. Roland and friends were focused on preventing or winning a war, but since we’ve spent the previous three Dark Tower books in a world where the war happened and went very badly, I knew how it ultimately ended and didn’t much care how it played out.

The rest of the plot was Roland’s young love with Susan, and it turns out I have very little patience for star-struck young love. So much of the romance had me rolling my eyes, wishing Roland would think with his brain instead of his dick and the story would just move along already. Since it was Roland’s story told by Roland, Alain and Cuthbert were not major contenders for reader connection, and Roland and Susan were too busy being stupid for love for me to enjoy them all that much. Roland himself, despite being fourteen at this point, is pretty much the same as the older version telling the story – less jaded and significantly more horny, but still clever, secretive, and dedicated to being a gunslinger.

The annoying thing is that I was actually interested in the parts of the story that were about our normal protagonists – Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake. They finished their ride with Blaine the Mono, ended up in a weird parallel version of Kansas, and had a bizarrely Wizard of Oz-themed encounter before continuing on the journey. That part, I enjoyed. The backstory I think should have been about half its length. (Although to be fair, if you think about all seven books as one single story as opposed to each book being an entry in a series, proportionally that’s a fairly reasonable length for telling a backstory. I just didn’t particularly enjoy it all stuffed in one book.)

This is not my favorite of the Dark Tower books. However, I am still enjoying Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake’s journeys through strange and interesting post-apocalyptic worlds as they hunt for this Dark Tower. I will be continuing the series – I just hope the next book focuses more on the present than the past.

The Dark Tower series:

1. The Gunslinger
2. The Drawing of the Three
3. The Waste Lands
4. Wizard and Glass
5. Wolves of the Calla
6. Song of Susannah
7. The Dark Tower

Review: Dead Silence

Title: Dead Silence

Author: S.A. Barnes

Genre: Science Fiction/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Blood (severe), gore (severe), death (severe), mental illness, forced institutionalization, death of parent, terminal illness, child death, violence, suicidal ideation, suicide, unreality, body horror

Back Cover:

A GHOST SHIP.
A SALVAGE CREW.
UNSPEAKABLE HORRORS.

Claire Kovalik is days away from being unemployed—made obsolete—when her beacon repair crew picks up a strange distress signal. With nothing to lose and no desire to return to Earth, Claire and her team decide to investigate.

What they find at the other end of the signal is a shock: the Aurora, a famous luxury space-liner that vanished on its maiden tour of the solar system more than twenty years ago. A salvage claim like this could set Claire and her crew up for life. But a quick trip through the Aurora reveals something isn’t right.

Whispers in the dark. Flickers of movement. Words scrawled in blood. Claire must fight to hold onto her sanity and find out what really happened on the Aurora, before she and her crew meet the same ghastly fate.

Review:

It’s a rare horror book that can start the story two months after the protagonist gets rescued, say in the first few paragraphs that the protagonist survives and everyone else dies, and still be interesting. And yet Dead Silence manages it.

I am slowly realizing that I don’t actually hate horror. I especially love the horror of big, dark, long-abandoned spaces, and the Aurora is that combined with “something horrible happened here and it could still get us.” Since it’s a spaceship, you also have the cosmic horror of the cold void of outer space, which doesn’t hate you because that would imply you were big enough to notice but will still kill you quickly and painfully just by its nature.

It’s intense, emotional, and terrifying. Claire is wrestling with an ugly combination of shame, regret, and survivor’s guilt that she can’t seem to escape, but she’s still doing her best to wrench an okay life from the wreckage of her past. She sees things that no one else sees that can give her information that she wouldn’t otherwise know, but can she actually see ghosts or is she severely mentally ill? Psychiatrists tell her it’s just hallucinations, but she is not confident of either explanation, and it makes her an unintentionally unreliable narrator. If she can’t trust that what she’s experiencing is actually happening, how can we the reader tell if it is or not? I’m not usually much for unreliable narrators, but an unintentionally unreliable narrator was fascinating.

I am glad I read this in broad daylight, because there were several spots where I had to yank my imagination out of the story and remind myself that it’s just a story, nothing is after me, and even if this is real it won’t get Claire because the book already told me she survives. It’s intense, emotional, and terrifying. I loved trying to piece together what happened on the Aurora from the bizarre, gruesome clues and trying to separate reality from unreality in Claire’s perception. My husband got to read this book vicariously as I told him each new revelation like it was hot gossip and sent multi-paragraph texts with my theories for how it went down. I started making a list in my head of all my friends who like scifi and/or horror who I could tell about this book.

Then about 80% in I finally got the reveal of what was really going on in the Aurora, and the whole glorious, vibrant, terrifying story fell apart.

I think I would have been less upset about it if I hadn’t already guessed the answer. Not only did I guess it less than a third of the way in, I immediately dismissed the guess because, as I told my husband, “It would be a really cheap answer.” And once I knew the answer and found it lacking, I found myself forcefully ejected from the magic of the story. Where the first 80% was deliciously nerve-wracking and vividly emotional, the last 20% felt predictable and melodramatic. The emotions felt less realistically overwhelming and more repetitive and overdone. The atmosphere of dread and the urgency of the very real threat to Claire’s life completely dissipated once I knew the ordinary, boring reason behind it, and once I wasn’t caught up in the volatile emotions of the story, I could see every plot point coming. And to top it all off, the two questions that kept me reading through that last 20% never get answered.

I don’t regret the read – at least now that I’ve had some time to let my rage at that ending simmer down. The atmospheric horror and the bizarre and gruesome mystery of the first 80% of the story were absolutely worth the time, and for as frustrated as I am with the answer to that mystery, I enjoyed the first 80% so much that I’m willing to overlook the sins of the last 20%. And let’s be honest here, my opinion that the answer was a cheap cop-out is just my opinion. Maybe I know too much about the relevant science to find it believable, or maybe I’m just mad that I guessed it so early. You may find it engrossing and thrilling all the way through. Personally, I’m glad I read it, but I don’t know that I’ll be recommending it to all my friends anytime soon – at least not the ones who know a lot about the real-world science behind this story.

UPDATE: It’s been several months since I finished this, and the absolutely fantastic first 80% have entirely outweighed my disappointment in the last 20% in my memory. In yet another example of why book reviews are never accurate, my remembering self has decided that Dead Silence is excellent, actually.

Review: The Waste Lands

Title: The Waste Lands

Series: The Dark Tower #3

Author: Stephen King

Genre: Low fantasy post-apocalyptic horror Western with portal fantasy elements is my best guess on this one

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, death of animals, death of children, mental illness, forced institutionalization (mentions), gun violence, body horror, injury, child emotional neglect, drug use (mentions), sexual assault, rape (explicit on-page), excrement, bodily fluids, suicide

Spoiler Warning: This book is third in a series, and reading past this point will expose you to MAJOR spoilers of the previous books.

Back Cover:

Several months have passed, and Roland’s two new tet-mates have become proficient gunslingers. Eddie Dean has given up heroin, and Odetta’s two selves have joined, becoming the stronger and more balanced personality of Susannah Dean. But while battling The Pusher in 1977 New York, Roland altered ka by saving the life of Jake Chambers, a boy who—in Roland’s where and when—has already died. Now Roland and Jake exist in different worlds, but they are joined by the same madness: the paradox of double memories.

Roland, Susannah, and Eddie must draw Jake into Mid-World then follow the Path of the Beam all the way to the Dark Tower. But nothing is easy in Mid-World. Along the way our tet stumbles into the ruined city of Lud, and are caught between the warring gangs of the Pubes and the Grays. The only way out of Lud is to wake Blaine the Mono, an insane train that has a passion for riddling, and for suicidal journeys.

Review:

Only Stephen King could put a fantasy version of a Wild West gunslinger, a heroin addict from the 1980s, and a disabled activist with multiple personalities in a riddle contest with a sentient train and make it feel like horror. And not just horror, but really good horror.

After The Drawing of the Three, I really wasn’t enjoying this series all that much. I only read book two to discuss it with a friend, and said friend (and a spoiler he gave me after I finished book two) was the main reason I picked up this book.

And I’m so glad I did, because I actually enjoyed this one.

I think a large part of that was the setting. Instead of desert in The Gunslinger and an interminable beach in The Drawing of the Three, Roland and company actually went to some interesting places in this book. They spent some time in a forest, traveling across a grassland, and in a small village entirely populated by elderly people. But the most interesting place to me by far was the city of Lud.

Lud has a very post-apocalyptic feeling – even though it hadn’t gone through one singular apocalypse, it’s been devastated by years of war, two different factions fighting each other within the city walls, and terrifying technological happenings that take on a supernatural element because no one understands how or why they work. Considering that the gang was just passing through, I got to see a remarkable amount of the city, but I wish I had been able to explore it more. I love the idea of a long-lost people creating great architectural and technological marvels and the people living with them now not comprehending what it was that the ancient people actually did.

This book also reveals some more details about Roland’s world and why it is the way it is (giving no answers but raising plenty of questions), a bit about Roland himself, and a lot more about Jake. It gets Eddie on board with the “find the Dark Tower” quest, but it still doesn’t explain what the Dark Tower does or why Roland wants it so badly. There’s several encounters with terrifying ancient technology that were really interesting, and it’s definitely leaning harder into horror than the previous two books did.

I can’t call this one of my favorite books, but I actually enjoyed it. I was already planning on reading the next book, and then this one went and ended on a cliffhanger. As annoying as that is, it makes me glad I’d already decided to continue the series. If nothing else, this world is finally getting interesting.

The Dark Tower series:

1. The Gunslinger
2. The Drawing of the Three
3. The Waste Lands
4. Wizard and Glass
5. Wolves of the Calla
6. Song of Susannah
7. The Dark Tower

Review: Severance

Title: Severance

Author: Ling Ma

Genre: Satire/Post-Apocalyptic/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Death, body horror, terminal illness, zombies, blood, gore, bodily fluids, existential horror, sexual content (minor), guns, death of children, pregnancy, confinement, death of parents, drug use (mentions), suicide, suicidal thoughts, car crash (mention), child abuse (mentions), religious bigotry, alcohol use, vomit (mentions)

Back Cover:

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.

So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.

Review:

I barely skimmed the back cover before picking this up. I’m trying to read more broadly. I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly read a satire, it’s by a Chinese author featuring a Chinese protagonist, and looked to be satirizing the meaninglessness of modern work culture (relatable) and post-apocalyptic fiction (I’ve read a lot, could be interesting).

This was published in 2018, but I had to check. I think it was supposed to be satire of the modern millennial life in NYC or modern work or the post-apocalyptic genre or all of the above. In 2018, maybe it was. But in February 2022, nearly two years into a deadly global pandemic that varies only slightly from the “epidemic” of the book, Severance isn’t satire – it’s prophetic.

This book is told out of order, altering back and forth between Before and After. Before and After what isn’t obvious in the book, but it’s clear to me. I can’t pinpoint a particular event or moment, but my life has definitely divided into Before Covid and After Covid. As Candace says, “It seemed to happen gradually, then suddenly.” Candace keeps going into work as everything slowly crumbles, keeps trying to do her job even though there’s less and less job to do, until suddenly it’s After and nothing is the same.

I am not going to talk about the After timeline. It has its own emotions and its own kind of horror, but the Before timeline is what mattered most to me.

I didn’t think I had much if any of that “collective pandemic trauma” people talk about. Then I read Severance, and it turns out I do. When Candace’s job started requiring N95 masks, I felt a sinking familiarity. When a character first said the phrase “these uncertain times,” it felt like a punch in the gut. This book pulls on the trauma of living through a pandemic and the horror of surviving an apocalypse and combines them into something vividly repulsive and hideously possible. It evokes the visceral terror of being in a place usually full of people and discovering you are alone; the agonizing helpless realization that even if you survive this, there is no future; the despair of knowing that even if the world is ending, the only thing you can do is get up and go to work.

I read this as an audiobook at work, my mind lost in the horror and despair of this barely-fictional world while my hands, nearly independent of the rest of me, did my job. Scan the box. Open the box. Take out the bag. Label the bag. Put the bag in a new box. Label the new box. I repeat the same process over and over again, just like the epidemic victims in the book. I think that – the monotonousness and mindlessness of modern work – is what Severance is supposed to be satirizing. But that is not what I took from it.

If there is an apocalypse, it won’t be like any of my post-apocalyptic novels. If it’s like any work of fiction, it will be like this. And if that’s the case, I don’t think I want to survive. I took several books off my to-read list. I have no more desire to read any post-apocalypses. I am too afraid of surviving the end of the world.

I’ve never legitimately described a book as life-changing before, but Severance is. I feel like I’ve just realized the world is about to end and can’t understand everyone continuing on and worrying about unimportant stuff. After I put the book down I felt off-kilter, like my life (or my psyche) was in a box that just got knocked off a table and nothing inside can ever be the same again. I feel like I have to sit down and figure out what actually matters because most of the shit I’m doing now just doesn’t.

Severance feels terrifyingly, painfully, imminently possible. If no one ever recovered from covid, we might be living in the world of Severance right now.

This book is not satire. It’s psychological, existential horror.

Review: Frankenstein in Baghdad

Title: Frankenstein in Baghdad

Author: Ahmed Saadawi

Genre: Contemporary/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Body horror (severe), death, blood, gore, injury detail, fire injury, terrorism, torture, police brutality, child death, war (mentions), sexual content (mentions)

Back Cover:

From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi—a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café—collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he’s created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive—first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path.

A prizewinning novel by “Baghdad’s new literary star” (The New York Times), Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white-knuckle horror and black humor the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq.

Review:

I picked this up because I was intrigued by the concept of taking the “man made of parts from multiple people” idea and setting it in early-2000s Iraq. Plus it was written by an Iraqi author who lived in Baghdad in the early aughts, which is always a benefit for authenticity.

The back cover makes it sound like Hadi is the main character, but he’s really not. There isn’t really a “main character” in this book, just a series of minor protagonists alternating perspectives to weave a story that feels less like a Structured Plot and more like part of real life. (The same thing is true of Celestial Bodies, so I’m beginning to wonder if Middle Eastern novels just have a very different structure from Western novels.)

The main players in this story are as follows:

• Hadi, who makes a living buying junk, fixing it up, and selling it, and who collected pieces of people blown up in car bombings and sewed them into a single corpse.
• An elderly lady who lives next door to Hadi and who refuses to sell her house and emigrate with her daughters because she still believes her son will come home.
• A reporter who desperately wants to be like his powerful, wealthy, connected, asshole editor and reports on the reanimated corpse roaming Baghdad.
• The monster himself, who has the opportunity to tell his story in his own words.

The monster’s story is almost entirely told as audio that the monster recorded onto an audio recorder and gave to the journalist, and that takes up a large chunk of the middle of the book. Beyond that, most of his story is told through other people seeing or hearing about his actions. The reporter has the most page time by far, but that makes sense since he is the most connected and in the best position to get the most parts of the story.

Each of the main protagonists in the story could be a complete character-focused story on their own.

• Hadi is suffering from a past tragedy and trying to hide the dubiously-legal steps he’s taking to deal with it, the emotional toll leaving him struggling to work even though he’s running out of money.
• The elderly lady refuses to move out of her dangerous neighborhood to live with her daughters because the picture of Saint George she has on her wall has told her that her son, who never returned from the war two decades ago, will soon come home.
• The journalist has been taken under the wing of the editor of his magazine, and desperately wants to be like him – whether that means cozying up to people he hates or abandoning his friends to get ahead.
• The monster doesn’t know why he’s alive but he knows he has a mission, and undertaking that mission has brought him many disciples with different opinions of how the mission should be done and what the monster’s ultimate purpose is.

In a lot of ways it feels like several smaller stories based around the protagonists’ character arcs were put into a single volume and somehow wove together to form a bigger picture of tumultuous early-aughts Iraq and a Frankenstein’s monster loosed on the streets of Baghdad. It’s like some sort of artwork in multiple pieces, where every piece is a complete image in and of itself but when you put them together it forms another, bigger image.

Frankenstein in Baghdad is a well-told story, I’m very impressed with how it weaves together multiple character-focused stories to form another complete story, it has a lot of commentary about early-aughts Iraq that I think I would find more meaningful if I had been aware of world news in the early aughts, and it did keep me interested enough to read the whole book. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it when it comes to entertainment, but it was creative and engaging enough – and regardless of my personal opinion, I think it does have objective literary merit.

Review: House of Salt and Sorrows (DNF)

Title: House of Salt and Sorrows

Author: Erin A. Craig

Genre: Fairy Tale/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Death of parent, death of children, grief (severe), injury details (severe), terminal illness (mentions)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 32%

Back Cover:

Annaleigh lives a sheltered life at Highmoor with her sisters and their father and stepmother. Once there were twelve, but loneliness fills the grand halls now that four of the girls’ lives have been cut short. Each death was more tragic than the last–the plague, a plummeting fall, a drowning, a slippery plunge–and there are whispers throughout the surrounding villages that the family is cursed by the gods.

Disturbed by a series of ghostly visions, Annaleigh becomes increasingly suspicious that her sister’s deaths were no accidents. The girls have been sneaking out every night to attend glittering balls, dancing until dawn in silk gowns and shimmering slippers, and Annaleigh isn’t sure whether to try to stop them or to join their forbidden trysts. Because who–or what–are they really dancing with?

When Annaleigh’s involvement with a mysterious stranger who has secrets of his own intensifies, it’s a race to unravel the darkness that has fallen over her family–before it claims her next.

Review:

I hadn’t actually intended to review this one. I had planned to make it just another book that I wasn’t very into but didn’t have strong enough opinions to write a review about – this book isn’t bad, it just wasn’t grabbing me. But then I realized why I DNF books just when I’m getting to the part where the story should be picking up and getting good, so this is part review and part reflection post about why I stop reading just when the book gets good.

This is a retelling of the fairy tale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” which I only know about because I had a Barbie and the Twelve Dancing Princesses coloring book as a kid. I am absolutely down for retellings of less-known fairy tales, and a horror retelling sounded especially promising.

It didn’t grab me from the beginning, but that happens and I wanted to give it a chance. When the book opens, the fourth sister had just died and the remaining sisters had not yet started sneaking off to dance all night, so I knew eventually they would find their way to sneak away and go dancing with the people the back cover hints may not be human. And I didn’t hate it, so I kept reading.

And then they found their way to sneak off their island home and go dancing. I was reading this at work and at that point I paused the story to go on break, and after break I queued up a different book and started reading something else. When I actually took a moment to think about it I wasn’t exactly sure why. It wasn’t stunningly fascinating, but I didn’t hate it, and I’d stopped right when it was promising to get into the meat of the story. And it’s not the first time I’ve stopped reading a book right when it should have been getting good (see here and here, for example). But with this book, I’ve finally figured out why I do that.

This is not a horrible book, and there’s nothing egregious to make me hate it. I just didn’t find the plot, characters, or what-have-you particularly compelling. But the back cover had promised me a Major Incident where something dramatic would happen to propel the story into more interesting dimensions. Without even consciously making the decision to do so, I kept reading despite being ambivalent about the book because I had the anticipation of the Major Incident. Once the Major Incident happened, though, the anticipation compelling me to read on was gone and I realized I was ambivalent about the book and had no desire to keep reading, even though I was at the point where it should be getting good.

This isn’t a bad book. I didn’t hate it, it just didn’t grab me, and I’m sure there are people out there who will like it better. It did help me figure out why I tend to stop reading books just when they’re “getting good,” though, so it was worth the read just for that.

Review: Monstress Volumes 4-6

It’s hard to write a full review of the Monstress books, because at this point they’re all chunks of the middle of a story and not discreet stories in and of themselves. It’s difficult to have unique things to say about multiple chunks of the middle of the same story. So for Volumes 4-6, I decided to do one review for all three volumes – that way I won’t be publishing three reviews that say almost the same thing.

Spoiler Warning: This review may contain mild spoilers of Monstress Volumes 1-3, but will not contain spoilers of Volumes 4-6.

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Title: Monstress Volume 4: The Chosen

Series: Monstress #4 (Issues 19-24)

Author: Marjorie Liu (writer), Sana Takeda (artist)

Genre: Dark Fantasy/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, death of children, gore (extreme), torture, torture of children, death of parents, body horror (extreme), child abuse, refugees, injuries (graphic)

Back Cover:

Maika and Corvin make their way through a warped and lethal land in search of Kippa, who is faced with her own terrible monsters. But when Maika comes face-to-face with a stranger from her deep past, startling truths are uncovered, and at the center of it all lurks a dangerous conspiracy that threatens the Known World. Maika is finally close to getting all the answers she ever wanted, but at what price? With war on the horizon —a war no one wants to stop — whose side will Maika choose?

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Title: Monstress Volume 5: Warchild

Series: Monstress #5 (Issues 25-30)

Author: Marjorie Liu (writer), Sana Takeda (artist)

Genre: Dark Fantasy/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, death of children, gore (extreme), torture, torture of children, death of parents, body horror (extreme), child abuse, war, injuries (graphic), sexual content/nudity

Back Cover:

The long-dreaded war between the Federation and Arcanics is about to explode. Maika must choose her next steps: will she help her friends, or strike out on her own?

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Title: Monstress Volume 6: The Vow

Series: Monstress #6 (Issues 31-35)

Author: Marjorie Liu (writer), Sana Takeda (artist)

Genre: Dark Fantasy/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, death of children, gore (extreme), torture, torture of children, death of parents, body horror (extreme), child abuse, war, injuries (graphic), sexual content/nudity, fire injuries, cannibalism

Back Cover:

War has engulfed the Known World, and Maika Halfwolf is at its epicenter. As she and her friends grapple with the consequences of their actions, long-buried secrets and long-awaited reunions threaten to change everything.

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Review:

I’ve said before that I don’t usually like reading comic books because I have a hard time balancing my attention between the words and the pictures. But this series is absolutely worth an exception. The Monstress books are just so good. Dark, bloody, gritty, and violent, but also complex, wise, and beautiful.

If you have not opened one of these books before, go do so immediately. The artwork is absolutely gorgeous.

As the story goes on, new threads appear and the tapestry they are weaving get more complex. Past and present collide – or perhaps it’s more accurate to say the only way to unravel the present is to delve into what happened in the past. New players arrive on the field, throwing new wrenches into the complexity that Maika usually just deals with through violence, but she’s so powerful that often violence works anyway. There are hints, though, that violence won’t take her much further.

I am adoring Maika’s character growth. She started off the series as a very compelling character, but she’s starting to grow into a character who is both compelling and likeable. (Kippa, of course, is and has always been likeable, and I adore how her sweetness and trust contrasts with Maika’s rage and violence.) The thing that lives inside Maika is starting to become a character in its own right instead of simply a force for violence. And even the minor characters are fantastic. Everybody has to make tough choices. Everybody is morally gray. Some of the antagonists are the kind you love to hate but every single face that appears in these pages is compelling.

I really, really wish I could have every single volume of this series in one big book so I can devour it all at once. It would have to be massive but it would absolutely be worth it. One of the main reasons I don’t get much into serialized works is because if I find one that’s really good, I want to read the whole story at once and not wait for future installments.

That’s what I’m going to end up doing here, though. Volume 6 was just released this year, and this story is nowhere near finished. I’m going to be mad about it, but I’m going to wait, and whenever Volume 7 happens I’m going to jump on it immediately. And if it takes a while and I have to read the first six volumes again to get myself back up to speed … well, there’s no reason to complain about that.

The Monstress series:

1. Monstress Volume 1: Awakening
2. Monstress Volume 2: The Blood
3. Monstress Volume 3: Haven
4. Monstress Volume 4: The Chosen
5. Monstress Volume 5: Warchild
6. Monstress Volume 6: The Vow

Review: Sawkill Girls (DNF)

Title: Sawkill Girls

Author: Claire Legrand

Genre: Horror

Trigger Warnings: Injury, body horror (mentions), death, death of parent, grief, car accident (mention)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 23%

Back Cover:

Who are the Sawkill Girls?

Marion: The newbie. Awkward and plain, steady and dependable. Weighed down by tragedy and hungry for love she’s sure she’ll never find.

Zoey: The pariah. Luckless and lonely, hurting but hiding it. Aching with grief and dreaming of vanished girls. Maybe she’s broken–or maybe everyone else is.

Val: The queen bee. Gorgeous and privileged, ruthless and regal. Words like silk and eyes like knives; a heart made of secrets and a mouth full of lies.

Their stories come together on the island of Sawkill Rock, where gleaming horses graze in rolling pastures and cold waves crash against black cliffs. Where kids whisper the legend of an insidious monster at parties and around campfires. Where girls have been disappearing for decades, stolen away by a ravenous evil no one has dared to fight…until now.

Review:

I honestly thought I might come back to this one and not leave it as a DNF. But I put it down at the end of the workday and couldn’t find any motivation to turn it back on the next morning. It’s just missing a je ne sais quoi that I can’t put my finger on.

Which is weird because, as has been my theme lately, there are a lot of things here I should have liked. Marian herself was set up as a solid and relatable character – the anchor for her family, talking on the emotional burden of her mother and sister so they don’t destroy themselves and being given no space for her own grief. She was immediately compelling.

Hers is not the only point of view in the book, though. There’s also Zoey, daughter of the police chief, best friend of the most recently disappeared Sawkill girl, and certain that social queen bee Val killed her. And there’s also Val herself, who is beautiful and cruel but also bound by birth to a shadowy evil that makes horrible demands of her. Each of the three perspectives had something to offer – an outsider perspective from Marian, investigating and an insider perspective from Zoey, hints of the truth from Val – but I didn’t find myself really invested in any of them.

The really intriguing part of this book is the plot. Girls keep going missing on Sawkill Rock and have been for decades. They are presumed dead but no bodies have ever been found. Zoey is convinced it has something to do with Val and her family, she just needs proof. She’s not wrong, but there’s something else, something supernatural and horrible, that has its claws in Val. And there’s tantalizing hints that the island of Sawkill Rock itself may be somewhat sentient and want this evil gone.

That is a really solid start and an intriguing idea. If the book had been more plot-focused, I probably would have enjoyed it much more. But it really wanted to be more character focused. The characters were perfectly fine – more fleshed out than would have been needed to carry a plot-driven story, but not full enough to carry a character-driven story for me. Even Marian loses a lot of what I liked about her after an accident has her preoccupied with some supernatural stuff happening with her senses. The characters were just not enough for me to grab onto in a character-focused story.

I really wish this had been more plot-focused, because the plot idea was interesting and I would be curious to see how it plays out. But the book is fairly long (13 hours as an audiobook) and moving too slowly to keep me engaged. There are really good ideas here, but for me, the execution just didn’t work.