Review: What Stalks the Deep

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This third book in the Sworn Soldier series centers on Alex Easton, a non-binary retired soldier from a fictional European country, Gallacia, who has a habit of stumbling upon alien and/or supernatural beasties. The first in the series, What Moves the Dead, is a chilling retelling of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" with a creeping sentient fungus that can puppet dead bodies. What Stalks the Deep, inspired by--according to the author's afterword--H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," moves the series in an interesting science fictional direction.

Alex and their friend Angus come to America at the request of Dr. James Denton, a character from the first book who stood beside Alex during the horrors of the "tarn" (the lake infected by the fungus in the first book). Denton has seen something he cannot handle, and urgently asks for Alex's help. Denton's cousin Oscar has disappeared in a played-out old coal mine in West Virginia, after writing Denton letters saying he had discovered something very strange within. Denton went to the mine but did not venture very far inside, as he said it just "felt wrong," the same way the Ushers' house and the tarn did. His first thought was to reach out to Alex for help, and despite their strong wish to run away from anything like the tarn, Alex comes.

The mystery of the Hollow Elk mine turns out to be an ancient hive-mind jellyfish-squid creature who has spent thousands of years asleep at the bottom of the mine, only to be awakened by modern blasting during the search for coal. Said blasting calved off a section of the creature, a Fragment (which is what it names itself) who cannot reunite with the "wholeness" and ventures into the human world to search for ways to return to the rest of its kin. This creature is a boneless, gooey shapeshifter who must use sticks absorbed into its body to walk, and in one memorable scene, it skitters along the ground with a human-looking torso atop a slimy centipede body with many legs. It is also intelligent and followed the human miners through the mine while it was being worked, eventually learning to read and write.

Fragment is the most interesting character in the entire book, as it helps Alex and their friends defend themselves against Sentry--another chunk of the hive mind originally intended to guard its people, who eventually came to want to be its own "wholeness." To survive, Sentry ended up eating organs from the bodies of nearby townspeople and impersonating a dog. Fragment talks to Alex and their friends about being human, and persuades them to see it as a person instead of a monster. At the end, with Sentry burned and gone, Denton and Angus help Fragment reunite with its wholeness, and the former owner of the pseudo-dog agrees to stay and guard the mine against any further intrusions.

Along the way, we learn a lot about coal mines and their various kinds of "damp," one of which plays a crucial role in the climax. As usual, Alex Easton is the down-to-earth practical sort of character with a dry wit at which the author excels. I really liked this, however, for the unexpected SF turn to the story. It's a nice exploration into the mind of an ancient alien sea creature. I hope, if there are any further books in this series, the author keeps that science-fictional bent.

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Review: The Library at Hellebore

The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Horror is currently in the midst of a resurgence, for what should be obvious reasons. Especially for those of us living in the US, the real-life horrors in the news each day require some sort of escape, I think. A chance to face down the monster, in a simple black and white world where they are evil and we are good, and send said monster whimpering back to its lair, never to be seen again.

Of course, that sort of thing can easily be twisted to make a monster out of something or someone that isn't monstrous at all (as is also happening in real life). People are far too easily categorized as "the Other," Not One of Us and therefore suspect, and when that happens, it calls into question exactly who is the monster. That's one of the themes this story tackles. This book is also part of a recent subgenre that could be called "dark acadamia" and/or "boarding school horror." There are several books I have read that are part of this category: Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy, R.F. Kuang's Katabasis and Babel, and Emily Tesh's The Incandescence (with the latter two being sterling examples and fantastic books you should absolutely pick up).

The Library at Hellebore is both of these, but it falls much further into the "dark" and "horror" end of the genre. In fact, it reminds me of a book I doubt many people remember nowadays: The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins. I read this book ten years ago, and to my knowledge there's never been a sequel to it. I don't know if Cassandra Khaw was inspired by that book, but hers is similar in a lot of ways.

Including, to be blunt, the sheer scale of the horrors within. This is one of the most gruesome books I have ever read, full of death and blood and guts and gore. If you have any aversion to full-on body horror, do not touch this with a ten-foot pole. At the same time, said death/blood/guts/gore is so beautifully, poetically written that I could not bring myself to abandon it, even as I was wincing and squinting my way through it (and had to take it in small doses with deep breaths after, which is why it took me several days to finish it).

This sounds like an oxymoron. I assure you it is not. Just a few examples of the prose (spoilers for delicate stomachs):

SPOILER

SPOILER 

SPOILER (also, do not eat while reading this, or the entire book for that matter)

This was neither the first time I'd come to with a body at my feet, nor was it even the first time I had returned to consciousness in a room transformed into a literal abattoir, but it was the first time I woke up relieved to be in a mess. The walls were soaked in effluvium. Every piece of linen on our beds was at least moderately pink with gore. The floor was a soup of viscera, intestines like ribbons unstrung over the scuffed wood; it'd been a deep gorgeous ebony once, but now, like the rest of our room, it was just red. (from p. 1)

The word hirsute didn't begin to describe Ford's abundance of beard and curls and overgrown brow, dark and sleek; he was a bear of a man, a figure cut straight from the annals of Viking history, a fact he recognized and celebrated, I think. No one else on campus swanned through the winters swaddled in a bearskin coat with the poor animal's head for a marching, still-attached-t0-the-body-by-a-strip-of-neck-fur toque, and if Ford wasn't quite so massive, so oppressively jacked, he'd have looked like any white trust-fund kid with a costume budget.

While there was no official route out, Hellebore wasn't inescapable. At least not if you were inventive. There was a canopied bend of road that curled behind the school's greenhouse, a monstrosity of plated glass and cast iron pained white. A behemoth disrobed of its meat, green where its lungs should have been, green along the carved ribs of its roof. Condensation slicked the glass like sweat: it seemed to pant some nights, heaving with life. Most of the time, Professor Fleur marched us past its front door when leading us to class. But on this day, we had to make use of the more circuitous route--a failed ritual had left a thin lamina of living godbrain over the usual path. If I hadn't already been looking, if I wasn't so desperate to get out of Hellebore, I might have missed it. 

The titular Library is where kids are taken, kids who abruptly awaken with deadly magic that can kill and overthrow governments. Many of them, like the protagonist Alessa Li, are girls who discover their powers under stress, such as when they are threatened with rape by their stepfathers. (Let's just say that in Alessa's case, the stepfather begged her to kill him.) She is told she will graduate in a year, once she has learned to control her powers, but she soon learns that won't be the case. It's likely neither she nor her fellow students will even be alive in a year. As she discovers, the faculty are not human at all, but eldritch horrors straight from the depths of Lovecraft who will kill and consume the students one by one over the course of three days, until only one is remaining.

This is the story of how Alessa fights, kills, and ultimately survives. It is told in a somewhat non-linear fashion, flashing back and forth between times Before and Days One, Two and Three of the trial (all helpfully noted in chapter headings). It is a bit of work to remember what's happened and keep up with the narrative, but I appreciated that the author didn't condescend to her audience, trusting that they could follow along. Over the course of those three days, and amidst much gore-soaked death, Alessa discovers how to defeat the faculty. The ending is a bit ambiguous, I think, as it implies that not only did she survive the bloody climax, she is now some kind of avenging spirit, coming for all those who would capture and use kids like her. She has learned how to be a monster, and she is good at it.

This is definitely not a book for the squeamish, but if you can handle it it has a lot to say about power, authority, and monstrosity. In its way, it is the perfect book for our times.






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Review: Flight of the Fallen

Flight of the Fallen by Hana Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the second and final book in the Magebike Courier series, a recent trend I like. In the past, so many authors sold massive trilogies with only two books' worth of plot, and the middle volume was on many occasions a meandering underwhelming mess. The recent trend of duologies, however, means that if well done, the author sets up the characters and world and makes the stakes plain in the first book, and ramps up the tension and resolves all those plot/character threads in the second.

This second book does all that, and does it right. We learn much more about this world and its history, and the characters and their relationships are deepened. This series also dips its toes into what I personally like to call "science fantasy." We discover there is actually something of a science fictional background for this universe--the world and its civilization was a colony planet abandoned by its colonizers, the long-ago Road Builders. Whether these Road Builders were human is left up in the air, although it's plausible to this reader that they were. The Road Builders were not the greatest bunch of people, however, as evidenced by the fact that their descendants, the people living in the wasteland cities, were apparently genetically engineered by the Road Builders and abandoned as "useless and abhorrent." But these descendants have powers that come down firmly on the fantasy side of the equation: Talents, which use a magical and increasingly rare substance called "mana" as their fuel.

In fact, the scarcity of mana fuels a major part of the plot, as our three main protagonists, Jin, Kadrin and Yi-Nereen, become embroiled in a search for the so-called "First City," the mythical original settlement of the Road Builders. This is necessary because the magical storms of the wastelands are becoming worse and more deadly, threatening to overcome the shieldcasters protecting the remaining kerinas, or cities. Yi-Nereen is an extremely powerful shieldcaster with a secret: she can literally steal another person's mana, and thus their Talent, from that person's body, and take it for her own. (She does just that in the first book to save Jin's life, and the aftermath of suddenly being made Talentless forms a major part of Jin's character arc.) The search for the First City also embroils those who wish to overthrow the tyrannical religious factions controlling the kerinas, in particular the main city in which most of the action takes place, Kerina Sol. As the magestorms destroy neighboring cities and Kerina Sol is forced to take in refugees, the tensions between the Talented and Talentless, and the rulers and the ruled, come to a boiling point. When a crisis strikes and Kerina Sol's mana spring appears to be drying up, Jin and Yi-Nereen, along with a couple of others, strike out across the wastelands on their search. They find the First City and the secrets of the Road Builders, and have a final showdown with Yi-Nereen's father Lai-Dan, who wants to take the First City as his own.

This story is mostly told through the rotating viewpoints of Jin, Kadrin and Yi-Nereen, who eventually end up becoming a polyamorous triad (and I rather appreciated the author's not writing an explicit sex scene when they get together). The book's ending focuses on Jin and what she has been through and learned, and wraps everything up in a nicely satisfying manner. This book is definitely better than the first, and it's nice to see the author leveling up like this.

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Review: Realm of Thieves

Realm of Thieves by Karina Halle
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The latest publishing craze is "romantasy," which is a cutesy mashup of "romantic fantasy" that is being pushed like it's a Brand New Thing (it isn't). I tend to be wary of such books on general principle, but occasionally I test the waters. Most of the ones I've read are unsatisfying on both counts, the "roman" and the "tasy." Unfortunately, this book falls into that category.

Now I will admit that I am sometimes demanding of both my fantasy and my science fiction. The most important thing about an SFF book, to me, is worldbuilding, followed closely by characterization. I can forgive a lot--even a slow, meandering plot--if those two items are up to snuff. In this book, the worldbuilding is sketchy at best, and some of what's there doesn't even make sense. For instance, one of the protagonists has purple hair, and some other characters have blue and green? What's up with that? (The male protagonist, on the other hand, has good old-fashioned dark hair. I get the feeling that she has lavender hair because she's Supposed To Be Special, which is, ummm....not a good way of indicating that.)

This is a story of dragons which are not the usual sentient, talking creatures--these dragons are wild, savage animals. Their eggs, or more specifically the fluids drawn from those eggs known as "suen," give enhanced abilities to those who ingest it, up to and including immortality. The dragons are confined to an island by a magical dome, but some people--thieves--visit the island to steal eggs for their suen. Our protagonist, Brynla Aihr, is one such thief, and as the book opens she and her giant teleporting hound, Lemi, going to steal some dragon eggs. (How Brynla and Lemi can pass through the wards but the dragons can't is a bit of handwaving that is left as an exercise for the reader.)

But on the island, Brynla is confronted by a man, Andor Kolbeck, who unbeknownst to her has been observing her for a while. House Kolbeck needs Brynla for a special heist, one that will shore up their house and its allies for a war that is coming. Andor is determined to persuade Brynla to work for them, even if he has to resort to a bit of subterfuge (and kidnapping).

(As a side note, it's a bit unfortunate that this is his name. Every time I read it, it kept reminding me of Star Wars' Cassian Andor, who is a more complex and better-written character in every way.)

Thus Brynla is swept up in the politics and the court intrigues of the Houses, and also into a romance with Andor. This is another place where to me the book falls short. When the romance gets started, it pretty much shoves the worldbuilding to the side, which I don't care for. I mean, if you've seen one cock/cunt/mind-blowing orgasm you've seen 'em all, you know? I find if you have to have a romance, I am much more invested in the emotional beats of the relationship than the physical ones. (And if you are writing explicit sex scenes, please do only one. Any more than that wastes pages and becomes boring and redundant.)

Nevertheless, Brynla and Andor pull of the heist and steal the immortal dragon egg, and Brynla discovers something about herself that....severely broke my suspension of disbelief. That was pretty much a "wtf" moment, which kind of ruined the book's ending. Yes, the two protagonists have their happy ending and the epilogue sets up the next book in the series, but I don't think I'm going any further. Rebecca Yarros may go completely overboard with her own sex scenes, but she knows her dragons and her worldbuilding, and that makes all the difference.

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Review: The Folded Sky

The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the third book in the White Space series. The author does an interesting thing with this series: each book is a complete story for those particular characters, with the "series" part coming only in the common setting (although a prominent character in Book 1, Ancestral Night, does make an appearance in the second volume, Machine ). This far-future, hard-SF setting showcases the Synarche, a multispecies federation humans are a part of.

In this particular book, the protagonist is Dr. Sunya Song, an "archinformist" whose speciality is hunting down, sorting and making sense of alien historical information. She is participating in a research study of the Baomind, an ancient artificial intelligence orbiting a dying star. The Synarche is trying to rescue as many pieces of the Baomind as it can, but the situation is complicated by pirates who hate any kind of artificial intelligence and want to destroy it. Sunya's ship is attacked by the Freeporters, pirates, on its way in, and they succeed in setting up a blockade around the system. The Baomind will protect the researchers and their station, but the pirates are attempting to starve them out.

This story of big stakes is balanced by the personal stakes of Sunya's family--her alien wife Salvie and their two children--as well as Sunya's personal insecurities and her having to deal with a rival scientist, Vickee DeVine, who years ago stole Sunya's research. These two conflicts could have ended up dragging the story down, but the author handled the opposing plotlines very well. Sunya has to shake off the lingering trauma of her previous relationship with Vickee DeVine, readjust her family relationships, and oh by the way save the Baomind and the people aboard the research station. It's quite a stew, with some terrific, well-written action sequences. This is also some pretty hard, physics-oriented SF (once you get past the necessary handwaving of "white space" with allows for faster-than-light travel).

This series seems to be getting better as it goes along. I've heard there's a fourth book coming. I certainly hope so; the series is on my must-buy list.

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