Pridejudice

*Everything is spoiled below, so be warned*

I haven’t read Pride & Prejudice since I was a grad student in the mid-90s, and it was fun to come back to Austen as a seasoned adult. Austen’s writing is always enjoyable, and what I learned this time around is that it reads pretty easily out loud as well.  (I read the novel to my wife, Ann, each night before bed.)

Austen’s wry sense of humor is always a joy, and it’s easy to see why her books still resonate today.  In many ways her books lay the foundation for the modern romantic comedy, creating its tropes and standards in a way I never appreciated before.  (Of course, I say lay the foundation, but I don’t know what books she was inspired by, so there are likely a whole set of books that precede her, though I believe the popularity of her own books set us up for what we see today.)

Coming to the book as a 47-year-old in 2019, the age of Trump and a crushing disparity between the wealthy and the poor, made it difficult for me to take an uncomplicated pleasure in the trials and tribulations of the Bennet sisters. Hearing sympathy for someone who only has 300 pounds a year when you know that governesses at that time made only 30 pound a year got under my skin. And Elizabeth’s love affair with Pemberley is stronger than her affections for Darcy. Yes, I realize that part of the point is that women in this society were entirely dependent on marriage for their financial well-being and that Austen is critiquing and working within those restraints, but Austen never questions the social structure that so well benefits her and her characters.  The concerns of money and reputation make for excellent dramatic constraints and define the stakes facing the characters, but I had a hard time buying into them at this point in my life, even for the sake of the narrative.  The pearl-clutching surrounding Lydia’s running off with Wickham requires you as a reader to accept terms in order to share in the concern.  The same goes for the Bennet girls losing ownership of Longbourne. Yeah, it’s painful to think of losing your family home, and yes, it’s a horrible system that can allow an estate to be entailed, but to worry about these women who have hundreds of pounds a year even without the estate when you know that working women in the class below them live off a fraction of that amount, it’s hard (or at least it was hard for me) to not let that willful suspension of disbelief sag and think these women need to not fear working for a living.

That said, I enjoy Austen’s writing immensely.  The scene in which Elizabeth rejects Collins’s proposal of marriage is one of my favorite scenes in literature.  Austen is an expert at mocking people, and I don’t think I ever appreciated fully how snarky and vicious she was.  I also never noticed how relentlessly she pushes the plot forward in this novel.  There could be Law and Order-style “donk donks” between the chapter breaks, especially in the first volume of this book.  Austen is an expert at getting to her point and then moving to the next scene.  Most impressively, she keeps at this pace while giving the impression of moving more leisurely.

Austen’s critique of Mr. Bennet struck me on this read through as well.  The criticism of her mother is readily known and typically delighted in, but she has really harsh words for her father too who she criticizes for abdicating his role as moral contributor to the family.  It feels like an oddly modern critique to say this loving father let his girls grow wild.  But having just stated Emma, I expect that blaming the parents will be a regular part of Austen’s storytelling.  That’s something I’ll be paying attention to going forward to see if some kind of analysis presents itself.

As a love story, I give the book lower marks than as an entertaining work of fiction.  I have never found Darcy particularly inviting, and my opinion didn’t change on this read through.  Elizabeth is bowled over by his moral rectitude once she realizes she had been treating him unjustly, but as she observes to Jane, the real point at which she fell in love with him was when she saw Pemberley.  Now, the book makes it clear that that statement was a joke, but it feels like a true statement, especially as we see that as she wanders through Pemberley she marvels at the idea that all of this could be hers instead of merely being stops on a tourist’s travels.  If Darcy’s prospects were grimmer, he would not have been a romantic interest let alone a romantic lead.

Austen seems skeptical of people who are socially adept because they are so good at winning favor. I’ll be looking to see if that holds true in her other novels as we re-read through them.

Regardless of the bumps and difficulties for me personally, I am glad I got to re-read the work and am looking forward to the remaining five.

Kai Ashante Wilson's The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps

*This post assumes that you have read the novel and may contain spoilers.*

I was off to a rough start when I began reading Kai Ashante Wilson’s The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps.  My wife and I have been reading novels before bed, or more specifically, I’ve been reading aloud to her at bedtime, 10-30 pages or so.  For the last year and a half, we have only been reading women authors and focusing on science fiction works.  We branched into fantasy with Ann Leckie’s Raven Tower, and then we decided to take a chance with Wilson’s novel because I had heard excellent reviews of it, and neither the author nor his main characters were white.

That there are no female characters in the story was a deal breaker for my wife.  We got through the first chapter, which makes it clear no only that there are no female characters of note but that the society that is the focus of the book is a patriarchal testosterone-filled one in which women are valued primarily as providers of sex and children.  She was out, and I was going to bow out as well. 

But I kept thinking about the novel and the language of it, and after a few days, I decided to pick it back up and continue reading it on my own. 

Sorcerer is about language in a lot of ways.  While many fantasy novels are set in world’s different from our own, they tend to have a common use of the English language, relying on formal British English from the 17^th-19^th century.  You don’t realize how much this has become standardized (or at least I didn’t appreciate it) until you are faced with Wilson’s characters, who speak general American slang and a variant of AAVE, including words like “brothers,” “thanky,” “y’all, “teef” (for teeth), “look-see,” “hot ass motherfucken heat,” “dudes,” “wilding,” “homeboy,” “Fo-so” as slang for “foot soldiers,” and “chuckleheads.” 

When I began the novel, I didn’t know what to make of language, because it felt so specifically modern American in this fantasy desert setting.  The words had historical significance that I thought seemed out of place for this alternative world.  One character spoke French, and the character who had a most Christian-like religious position used “Amen,” which is of course from Greek.  Other characters and places had distinctly Roman names.  It was a mish-mash that felt completely inconsistent. 

But of course, that inconsistency is part of the point.  Each chapter is headed by a letter or tale from other people within the universe, and the language of those passages more often mirror traditional fantasy language, using “husband” as a verb and “an” for “if,” as in this sentence: “And where is there a creature to take such a battering an he need not?” (99).  To add to this collection of voices, even the narrator is made a character who reveals themself only through their footnotes that seek to clarify or wonder over Demane’s language.  Maybe it’s more accurate to say that the editor is a character, since the editor comments on the narrator’s language, so that we have a narrator telling the story of Demane in the third person and an editor who is presenting that narration to us—in short, we have layers upon layers of voices and languages, just as history itself comes to us in layers and layers of intermediaries.

In the context of all these voices and layering, Wilson’s portrayal of the caravan members offers to lay bare the illusion that is the agreed-upon fantasy voice, which is rooted in white European and British cultures and should not be seen as anything natural for our fantasy characters and tales.  It’s a powerful and compelling way to make the point, and it is all excellently done.

On top of that, all that argument and suggestion happens in the background of an enjoyable adventure love story, so that you can greatly enjoy the telling even if you don’t give a fig about the language used.  Wilson has a wonderful talent and building and revealing the history and context of the world so that the exchanges between and thoughts of various characters are rich with meaning and suggestion.  Additionally, I’m a big fan of the scope of the novel.  Given the possibilities that the Wildeeps present, the final conflict could have been as grand and epic as Wilson wanted.  Making the conflict with the Jukiere personal was in perfect keeping with the rest of the book.  At the same time, the story is epic in reach, in that this is the personal story of Demane and how he became the one to watch over and time the Wildeeps when no one else would.

It’s a great story and a solid book.

It is a shame that there is no room made for women in the story.  Having his Aunty be important and a guide doesn’t make her much of a character, and there is nothing in the story that required a patriarchal background.  You can have a fair culture in terms of gender and still have it be homophobic, if having Demane and Isa’s relationship problematic is important.  Having half the caravaneers be women would not impact the story in any way, let alone negatively.  Wilson is obviously free (and encouraged) to tell whatever story he wants to tell, but I know Ann is not the only person who will not make it past the first chapter of this book because of these choices.  And that’s a shame, because this book has a lot to offer a thoughtful reader.

Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower

Ann Leckie is a talented writer.  I find I am never more in love with her writing than when she is exploring a supra-human perspective of the world she has created.  The first book in her Ancillary series was exhilarating in its presentation and narrator.  The two books that followed I liked less and less as the narrator became more of a Sherlock Holmes figure, human, but not.  Here in The Raven Tower, Leckie returns to that exhilaration by taking on the perspective of an ancient god in a fantasy world.

The basic plot of the story is simple and straightforward.  The heir to the throne (we’ll call it a throne for simplicity’s sake) is displaced by his uncle when the heir’s father abdicates the throne.  The heir’s best friend and aide investigates the situation and tries to set the situation right.  The whole novel takes place over only a couple of days, at least in the present time.  But told concurrently with this story is the history of our narrator, going back to their first moments of consciousness when the world was new and still covered in water, and it takes us from then up to her their present condition and intersection with the current story.

The novel moves back and forth between these stories, and each one is made more interesting by its companion piece.  Although honestly, I could have spent the entire novel going over the god’s past because I delighted in that character and their world so thoroughly.  The strongest aspect of the novel is Leckie’s world-building, which is top notch.  Her logic of godhood, their powers, their limitations, the nature of god-spoken objects, the power of speech—damn, it’s all just so good.  On top of that excellent construction is Leckie’s ability to breathe life and personality into the Strength and Patience of the Hill.  Their voice is human even as their perspective is not, and I found myself moved by their plight and confident in their abilities and ideas.

I read the entirety of the book out loud to Ann (as I do with many books), and the reading was always easy, which is the mark of accomplished writing in my book.  Moreover, I could always feel who was talking by the way they were talking, and the dialogue always felt natural, never clumsy.  The cast of characters are lean and focused, each with drives and relationships that charge the interactions.  We were driven enough by the writing to have a marathon reading session covering the last 80 pages of the novel.  And then we couldn’t sleep for some time after talking about the story and the writing and the clever way Leckie gave information throughout the novel to make sense of what is to come and reveal something gripping from the past.

This is a nice story of morality, commitment, and reciprocity.  The story itself is rewarding, but as with any wonderful book, the true power is in how the story is told.

Charles Portis's The Dog of the South

*Spoilers ahead*

Damn it’s nice to return to Charles Portis’s writing.  His magic lies in a number of things, I think: the way he creates vivid and quirky characters who never feel gimmicky, the way he diverges from one story to give you the details of another character or event with just the right details, the way he brings references and minor characters up again and again in unexpected moments to give them weight and resonance, and the way the individual narrative instances feel full of meaning and are completely absorbing so that the reader (or I, at least) am never in a hurry to get back to the “plot,” such that it is.  I leave his novels, and The Dog of the South especially, feeling like I experienced a whole world, like our own but sharper and more enjoyable.

Our narrator and protagonist is Ray Midge, a twenty-six-year-old Little Rock man whose wife, Norma, has run off with Ray’s old friend, Norma’s ex-husband, Guy Dupree, and they’ve taken Ray’s car to boot.  The novel begins with Ray having waited patiently for a month to receive the receipts from the credit card Norma and Dupree took with them, and now Ray goes through the receipts with a map to trace out their journey so far.  He then takes Dupree’s Buick, which they left in exchange for Ray’s Torino, and heads out to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to find them and get back Ray’s car, and possibly Norma.  Also looking for Dupree is Jack Wilkie, the bail bondsmen who is responsible to seeing the Dupree makes his court date (Dupree wrote threatening letters to the U.S. president).  When there is no trace of the runaways in Mexico, Ray figures they have headed down to British Honduras where Dupree’s mother has a farm, so he takes the Buick deeper into Central and South America.  In San Miguel, Ray picks up Dr. Reo Symes, an eccentric older con man of sorts who is on the run from the Texas authorities, heading to his own mother who runs a tabernacle in Belize.

Ray is a wonderful character and a hilarious narrator.  I love a well-done first-person narration, and Ray is a treat, much in the same way that Mattie is in True Grit.  They are not your classically unreliable narrators because you can readily believe what they tell you happened.  It’s just that they are such particular personalities, so certain in their views of the world, that they reveal how they think about and engage with the world in a fascinating way.  Ray is something of a control freak, critical of they way Norma, Dupree, and everyone else goes about living life.  I love his short exclamations at the world (“Topology!” (31), “Maintenance!” (25, 120), “Strength of Materials!” (58), “Gravitas!” (131)).  I love his cluelessness that he is oppressive to Norma in his rigidness—when he finally locates her near the end of the novel (I warned you there would be spoilers):

The English doctor had told me she could eat whatever she liked but I thought it best to be on the safe side and I allowed her no fried foods.  I had to turn down her request for fresh pineapple too, it being so coarse and fibrous.  After two days of forcing soup down her gullet I had her on her feet again, taking little compulsory hikes about the room.  She tottered and complained.  I bought her a shark’s-tooth bracelet.  I read to her from old magazines until she asked me to stop doing it (250).

This is a narrator I can listen to all day, even as I know I don’t want to spend more than 10 minutes in his actual presence.

Portis has an interesting habit of setting up a strong plot and then undermining it and taking the story in unexpected directions.  In the first chapter, for example, Ray packs his gun in his car for the trip, planning to have it in his encounter with Dupree.  In Texas, he hides the gun in a pie box at the bottom of his cooler, so that the authorities at the various ports of entry don’t confiscate it.  This is a genuine Chekov’s gun!  Only, upon Ray’s entering Honduras, the border agent finds the gun and takes it without ceremony.  Ray doesn’t spend any time trying to get it back or replace it.  The gun is just gone from the story.  When Ray finally tracks Dupree down on his farm, I was prepared for a confrontational scene, but it was a scene of blockages.  Dupree kept Ray at a distance, refused to tell Ray where either his car or Norma was, wouldn’t let him on the property, and wouldn’t give him any leads.  When Ray returns to force the issue with Victor and Webster at his side, Dupree isn’t there and Ray falls asleep in the field instead of launching his big assault.

In some ways, I feel like this is a story about Ray’s journey and the things he lost along the way.  He loses his gun.  He gives his bonds away to no purpose.  He gives Webster Mrs. Edge’s silverware (another item that seemed like it was set up for something grand within the unfolding plot).  He doesn’t buy his Torino when he finds it.  He drives the Buick into unusability, leaving it on the road and abandoned.  He makes no lasting friends (no one in Honduras writes him back, Dupree is gone, Norma leaves him again, Jack Wilkie gives him no lasting friendship, and Dr. Symes has vanished without sign of being either alive or dead).  He begins as an amateur-expert of history, but after making his way through the various battlefields in the Mexican Civil War (most of which he can’t find), he doesn’t even have that to guide him in Belize), so in effect, he loses his intellectual superiority as well.  Bit by bit, step by step, Ray is stripped of his belonging, certainty, and power—though it’s important to note that he is never broken.  The novel remains funny because Ray keeps trudging on with a wry sense of humor and an unrelenting stubbornness.

What we don’t get is a classic narrative of character development.  This is not the story of how Ray Midge went on an adventure that changed his life. Ray may have some moments of insight (say, about the way he should have treated Norma better), but none of those moments add up to anything significant, and we certainly don’t see him change his ways.  You could say that this book is more of a set of characters studies than a traditional “plot,” but there is a solid throughline that takes us from one encounter to the next.

For all that, I don’t know if I can comfortably say what this novel is about to me.  In some way it’s about the hubris of a white American in neighboring countries, but what it might be saying about that is unclear.  It might be about the way that we all intersect with one another without bending or yielding, bouncing off each other and taking momentary advantage of each other, seen all through a humorous lens to dull the pain of that realization.  It might be about how certain we all are (each character is as self-assured as Ray, certainly), and how that certainty creates barriers and miscommunication as characters speak across each other instead of to each other. 

Do you have any ideas?  I’ll be pondering over it for some time into the future I think.

I can tell how much I enjoy Portis’s writing because the politics of the novel, while a thorn in my side, are not enough to kill my enjoyment.  There is plenty of racism threaded through the novel in the mouths of our narrator and other characters.  There is similarly a reactionary attitude toward the counterculture movements of the late-sixties and seventies.  Yeah, the fact that it’s in the voice of this character softens the distaste, but there is no reason to think that these attitudes are not shared by the author (especially since they occur in the other books of his that I have read).  Even if the attitudes are used ironically, they do so in support of racist ideology and they are inexcusable.  It’s a shitty aspect of the novel.

The Stars are Meh

The Stars Are Legion was given to me as a gift for last Christmas, and I was very excited to get it.  I had been following Kameron Hurley on Twitter for some time and was looking forward to seeing her work.  In addition, my friend got me the joke cover that Hurley had made, where the original title was replaced in the same dramatic font with “Lesbians in Space.”  What was not to love?!  My wife and I have been reading a bunch of science fiction novels by female authors, and this immediately went to the top of the list.  I’ve been reading aloud every night for 10-30 pages when we go to bed, and so as soon as we finished the Ursula K. Le Guin novel we were reading, we dove into this one.

We made it about 20 pages in before we had to switch to another book.  We were both put off by the writing pretty quickly.  The prose itself was serviceable but not enjoyable.  The dialogue was flat and without subtext.  Things that felt like they were supposed to be clever weren’t.  Somewhere in the third chapter, I realized that my reading was only agitating Ann rather than giving her something to enjoy before we slept.

But the book was a gift, and I was interested to know if it got better, so I read on to myself over the next couple of months.  It took me a couple of months because I had other things I wanted to read more, and making progress in the book, in spite of what an easy read it is, was difficult.  Now that I have finished it, I can say that there are no brilliant turns or innovative revelations that lifts the book above the average contender for a reader’s attention.

Sometimes when I finish a book I did not enjoy, I flip through others’ reviews to see if anyone can help me put a finger on what I found unsatisfying.  Whew, the reviews here were not helpful.  People who hated it were either grossed out by ickiness of biological fluids or were just confused and irritated by that confusion.  The people who loved it loved the grossness, the all-female cast, and what they saw as the innovativeness of the worlds Hurley created.  Personally, I was excited by the all-female world, but I was disappointed that nothing particularly interesting was done with it.  The main reason in terms of plot that everyone seems to be a woman is that they all need to be able to birth things that the worlds require.  The worlds have no use for men since they can’t contribute positively to the ecosystem.  That’s a cool idea.  But it wasn’t an idea that was explored or played with; it just was.  In fact, I didn’t know why whatever words they used to describe people in this world were gendered at all, given that there was only one gender.  In a world where the people only know humans who can give birth, why would those people be called anything but “people”?  The word “women” exists for us in our culture in relationship to its binary “men,” so a translation from whatever language the characters speak into English would naturally seem to only have one non-gendered word: people.  That the book is set up as a translation is established from the first chapter when Zan struggles with the word whose meaning is both “world” and “ship.”

As for the ickiness and grossness, I’m good with it.  In my limited reading it seems to me that biotechnology is a hot topic at the moment.  So the biological aspect of the ship didn’t feel innovative to me so much as in the moment.  And Hurley’s interest in that biological structure seems to have been as a backdrop for fluids and flesh rather than, again, something to explore or mine for narrative richness.  Most of the second section of the novel is Zan’s movements through the lower levels of the ship, and each level gave us a new biological horror or oddity, like Odysseus moving from island to island in the Aegean seas.  We were there long enough to see something new, overcome a challenge, and then move on.  The characters we meet and the challenges they face don’t lead to interesting revelations of world or character.  For example, the hot-air-balloon-pulley-system escape from the lake level to the amber-light level doesn’t give us readers anything to chew on. Casamir is clever to create a hot air balloon, and there is supposed to be some tension in the pulleying up of the characters, but in the end it’s a flat event without insight, like a scene in a summer blockbuster full of light and spectacle, but not much else.

In my own final analysis, the book skims across the subject of its surface without ever penetrating into the world or the characters.  The first-person perspective is on the one hand necessary for keeping us readers in the dark about who Zan really is, but it also limits what Hurley can explore.  Zan is a woman of action and not one to explore her own feelings and motivations, or even the world around her.  As a result, she dwells on nothing, introduces us to no insight, and does not have the curiosity to tell us anything of value beyond the movements of the plot.

So what is the book about?  When you strip away all the science fiction trappings and biological goo, you have a story about 3 women who are trying to save their world from extinction by the most brutal means.  Relationships are all negotiations and posturing with everyone trying to come out on top as lord.  Only Zan has the best interest of others at heart.  And what is Hurley saying about this?  Is it an examination of friendships between women?  A look at the nature of power?  A study of the tension between self-interest and communal-interest?  A tale about the cycle of birth and death and how women’s bodies are at the center of it all?  Maybe.  I don’t know if it looks at any of those things enough to ever be anything more than a passing observation.

Obviously what I’m describing is an aesthetic difference between the way Hurley wants to tell her story and the way I like to be told a story.  I think it’s awesome that Hurley has a lot of avid fans for whom this book rocked their world.  I can get what I want from other authors.

I’ve been spoiled by some excellent literature, and I miss reading them.  I seem to be living in a 3-star world lately, with books that are competently written but not especially rewarding to read, not for me at least. 

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.