The Barrow Will Send What it May--more Danielle Can adventures

The Barrow Will Send What It May is the second book in Margaret Killjoy’s Danielle Cain series.  For me, it has the same strengths and the same weaknesses as the first book.  I’m about to spoil everything in the book, so read on at your own caution.

I really love the way Killjoy approaches the fantastic in these novels.  Her joining of small-town American life to supernatural has a flavor and look that is all its own, and that quality of freshness is not to be underrated.  Part of that uniqueness is the limited scope of the story told.  Here we have a necromancer who is raising the dead for a very specific and personal reason, and his plans affect two households in the whole town.  There is nothing earth-shattering going on here, and I like that restraint.  Similarly, Killjoy uses the tradition in detective fiction of the detective who encounters a pre-existing tangle of relationships and then has to navigate and untangle them to lay bare what is happening, if not solve it.  Crossing that detective fiction with supernatural investigation is a wonderful idea.

I admire Killjoy’s determination to create a pro-anarchy book with characters everywhere in the gender, sexuality, and romance spectrums.  She creates a world in which all these differences coexist matter-of-factly, and that’s just cool.

Finally, I like the thematic content of the book, the contrast of possessive and generous love.  Sebastian’s love for Gertrude is selfishness that disguises itself as generosity.  Vasilis has to face the fact that he too is powered by a selfish love for Heather and needs to confront that head on before he can progress.  Danielle’s sleepless night of jealousy over Brynn and Heather’s conversations is the point on contrast, in which she has to realize that her jealousy is about herself, not Brynn.  Thursday helps her come to this realization, so not all dudes are bad.  Thursday is of course held up for criticism when he is part of the dude-collective bringing firearms into one of the climactic scenes instead of contributing to the de-escalation effort that Danielle lead.  That’s when Brynn delivers the dismissive line: “Cis men.”

The politics of the book are front and center, and I enjoy that.  I also admire that Killjoy seeks to model good and open communication between characters, but it can read a little didactic at times.  When Danielle is talking to Isola in the library, she is careful to note that she doesn’t tread on Isola’s feelings: “I didn’t say any of that to Isola, though.  Because . . . me even pretending to understand where she was coming from?  That was bullshit.  I didn’t know shit about shit.  I’d never been kidnapped and murdered.”  She is, of course, absolutely right, and were that the only occurrence of such an exchange, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it.  Many of the conversations, though, show this kind of thoughtfulness.  I know I should be celebrating its existence, but something about it has the faint odor of after-school-specialness to it, to which I find myself reacting negatively.

And that leads me to the observation that there are some bad lines of dialogue in the book.  When there is a standoff in front of Sebastian’s gift shop, Danielle says to him that he doesn’t want to shoot Vasilis, and he responds “I don’t even know what I want anymore.”  Oof.  I read the entirety of the book aloud to my wife, so I was aware of every klunker.  That line, there is no good way to deliver it out loud so that it sounds believable.  Most lines of dialogue in the book are of course inoffensive, but there are very few that are noteworthy.

I like that cast of characters that Killjoy has assembled, but she doesn’t have a great way to handle all the characters in the team.  My complaint at the end of the last book was that we didn’t know anything of real meaning about anyone other than Danielle, and that doesn’t really change here.  Part of the limitation is that this is a first-person narrative, so we never get into the heads of anyone else, which raises the question: why is this a first-person narrative?  In detective literature, the first-person is necessary to limit the reader’s knowledge so that they can discover things with the detective.  In other literature, the first-person is necessary for the reader to be able to call into question what they are being told, which obviously doesn’t apply here.  In the first book, the first-person narrator made sense, since it was really about her discovering this world.  Now that we are a Scooby gang of five in their mystery van, it feels like the narrative naturally wants to broaden.  We didn’t learn anything new about Danielle in this book, and we didn’t learn anything about anyone else.

Finally, I’m not stoked about the magic feds.  Actually, I’m not stoked about the construction of magic in this world.  Apparently you can just pick up a book and do your thing.  Everyone learns from books, and they can apparently learn fast.  Doomsday has become something of an expert in short order.  It’s unclear what the magic draws on or what it costs.  I suppose both the magic feds and the shape of magic will be developed in later books, but I’m not seeing the groundwork or suggestions here.

I wish Killjoy and Cain the best in the books to come.  Unless something amazing happens, I think this will be the last book in the series I read.  The book was okay, but who has time for books that are just okay?

The Lamb with Slaughter the Lion

*There are going to be more spoilers ahead than Uliksi had ribcages in its collection, so don’t read on if you don’t want the book spoiled!*

There’s a lot to love about Margaret Killjoy’s The Lamb with Slaughter the Lion.  The novela has a great setup, a neat world, solid pacing, and a protagonist I was delighted to follow around.

I ordered the book on a recommendation because my wife and I are reading science fiction and fantasy by non-male authors lately, and the Danielle Cain books seemed right up our alley.  It arrived on a weekend, and I immediately started reading it out loud to my wife while we sat on the back patio.  The first third of the book flew by and we were hooked.

The book has a real noir feel throughout.  The lead character is jaded and idealistic, cautious and trusting.  Her personal quest to find out why her closest friend Clay killed himself brings her at the books opening to Freedom, Iowa, an abandoned town reclaimed by squatters and idealists.  The time and world that the novela is set in feels like a slightly more apocalyptic version of the here and now.  Were it not for the police and the existence of Walmart in the story, I would have told you that it must take place in a post-apocalyptic world.

I like Killjoy’s take on urban fantasy by divorcing it from the urban half of that name.  It’s more properly rural fantasy or small-town fantasy, thought neither of those names are particularly catchy.  The back of my edition calls it “anarcho-punk fantasy,” which is a much cooler name and a pretty good description since Freedom, Iowa is very anarcho-punk in its construction.  And I dig on that construction.  I love the casualness with which the world is peopled with every gender, sexual identity, and sexual orientation.  It might be one of the reasons the setting felt post-apocalyptic to me, because I could picture these characters existing in Avery Alder’s Dream Askew or Vincent and Meguey Baker’s Apocalypse World.  This world is not just unapologetically queer; it is celebratorily (is that a word?) queer.  Yeah, we need more of that in our fiction (and even more so in our non-fiction!).

As for the story itself, Uliksi is a great take on the old golem tale of a rabbi creating a guardian who then becomes a threat in and of itself.  Everything about the Uliksi is cool, from its three-horned, blood-red look, to its practice of eating hearts and sleeping on a bed of removed ribcages, to its stone-cold staring game.  It was a neat idea to have the Uliksi active only in daylight hours as opposed the the classic trope of having the creature that can only stalk at night.  And giving Uliksi an army of undead grazers and smaller animals was awesome.

It was only the in the final quarter of the book that it faltered for me.  First, what the hell is up with Clay researching only to leave quoted poetry that clarifies nothing?  He could have written, “we weaponized Uliksi, and for that we became the very things we summoned Uliksi to eliminate.”  Also, it is a pet peeve of mine (and I know I’m not alone in this) for characters to recognize obscure lines of poetry, and having Brynn casually recognize a misquoted Robert Frost line and a misquoted William Blake line was eye-rollingly bad, especially since the recognition gave neither the reader nor the characters any insight.  Another question: why did it take Uliksi years to figure out that it had been “weaponized” and only just now realized it and killed Anchor?  Rebecca and Clay were clearly aware before Uliksi was; why?  Someone of injures another person in the privacy of their own home and Uliksi just knows and is ready to punish.  Figuring out motives and actions is what Uliksi does.  It’s mere convenience that Uliksi started acting up the day Danielle arrived, and that feels hollow.  Then, having Uliksi pick and choose his work in the final scene is awfully convenient, settling on Eric as its final kill before skipping town because of the thinned veil.  It could have stayed and wreaked whatever vengeance it wanted before leaving, which it seems like it would be required to do given the nature of its summoning.

So I liked the pacing and the ideas in the ending, but it all just felt pasted together.

When the gang decided to become “demon-hunters” at the end, I actually laughed out loud because it was so unexpected.  First, no one in the group has any real experience with demons, so why would you feel called to do so.  Second, Uliksi was the most decent creature, having a set of rules and following them, as opposed to the humans who continue to fuck everything up, so why hunt demons?  Seems like it would be better to hunt humans who were awful, or hunt humans who used demons to do their bidding at the expense of the demons and other people.  Third, Danielle is the only developed character in the five-person team.  Everyone else is fun enough, but they are only vaguely even characters.  Vulture is a night owl (heh!) who takes pictures for Instagram.  Brynn tattoos.  The Days are a badass unit.  The team thing feels more like a gimmick to sell the book and the series as a TV serial than it does a logical next step.

So those were my frustrations.  They were not frustrating enough to keep me from ordering the second book in the series (which I admittedly did before getting to the final quarter of the book), and they won’t stop me from reading the second book.

A smattering of final thoughts: The writing is solid and direct, which fits the noir style nicely.  Dani is a better name than Danielle, so it’s disappointing that she insists on the latter.  Tall-as-Fuck is a brilliant last name.  It would have been nice to see anyone in Freedom, Iowa doing a lick of work to keep this anarcho-communist-punk paradise afloat.