Unquiet
Things

Eagle-eyed readers of this blog may have noticed that I accidentally published the bare bones of this bookish round-up last month. Le whoopsie! I unintentionally hit the “publish”  instead of “save draft” button, and I totally blame WordPress for not throwing up a “are you sure you want to publish now?” warning on the screen to alert me! Yes, it is WordPress’s fault! At any rate, if you caught that, I guess you got a bit of a sneak peek!

It appears that I read quite a few books over the summer! I am not sure how many! I’ve added this up several times, and keep coming up with a different number, but it’s somewhere between 25-29 books. Including 5 graphic novels, which I didn’t write reviews for, but if you are curious, they were: Neil Gaiman’s gorgeous Snow, Glass, and Apples and the swoony sadness of The Dream Hunters; the chaotic dystopian frenzy of Philippe Druillet’s The Night; Jude Ellison S. Doyle Maw, teeming with terrible, monstrous rage, and Dracula, Motherf**ker which had a very cool cover going for it but, sadly, not much else.

Anyway, I suppose “quite a few”  books could mean different things to different people. To some of you, 25+ books is probably nothing, you do that in a few weeks. And to other folks, that number is your reading goal for the year. It’s all pretty subjective, I guess. But that many books read in three months feels pretty good to me!

Back to the subject of being eagle-eyed, or, in my case–quite the opposite. I’ve probably mentioned this before, but the problem with being active on so many social media platforms is that I forget where and when, or if I have already shared something. But with regard to all of the books I have written about below, they’re digital versions. Until I get my eyeballs looked at and get some new glasses, my physical books are gathering dust, unread, because I can’t see well enough to read them anymore. And before you get on me about the frequency of eye exams or whatever, lemme stop you there. These are (relatively) NEW glasses I’m wearing right now. I think I got them in late 2021. I’ve been wearing glasses since I was ten years old. My vision is terrible and it’s been getting worse. But in February or March of 2022, I just woke up one day and just couldn’t see the words on the page. It seemed to have happened overnight! So I am waiting until I can get on Yvan’s insurance because my glasses always end up being expensive as hell, and in the meantime, I am muddling by with my Kindle.

(Please don’t ask me if I am still, even as recently as last week, buying physical copies of books anyway. Because I think you know the answer. It’s a problem!)

Let’s dive into the stacks!

Unnatural Creatures by Kris Waldherr. Oh, how I adored the lush, transportive, and terribly heartbreaking beauty of this Frankenstein revisiting and reimagining, lensed through the perspectives of three women, all incredible in their own right. Caroline–Victor Frankenstein’s exquisitely gentle, selfless mother; Elizabeth, the beautiful and accomplished cousin betrothed to Victor, with secret torments and a mysterious past of her own; and poor, broken, and orphaned Justine, devoted to the family–but just how far will she go to prove it? I loved how richly imagined and fully realized these three characters were, and in my rapt, convulsive reading of this tale it dawned on me how desperately it needed to be told. (via Netgalley)

All’s Well by Mona Awad. I’m here for any old weird story that Mona Awad wants to tell us, the more unhinged and unraveling the better (see Bunny, which is a book I have recommended more than any other in the past year or so.) Miranda Fitch, a former actor/current theatre professor, suffers agonizing chronic pain due to injuries incurred in a stage accident a few years prior. Despondent at the lack of compassion and effective treatment from her dismissive, disbelieving doctors, frustrated and furious with the staff and classes who seem to be undermining all of her plans to stage a production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, and disturbed by her one semi-close friend’s dwindling rations of empathy, Miranda is going a bit out of her mind with grief, pain, and exhaustion. And then: a weird trio of “doctors” grants her a strange, golden cure. Delirium and chaos ensues where wrongs are twistily righted, just desserts are served, as if things are looking up for Miranda it may well be a dizzying descent into “be careful what you wish for” territory. I won’t promise you will love this one if you loved Bunny...but if you did love Bunny, you owe it to your love of Awad’s deliciously dark writing and magically bizarre stories to give All’s Well a read.

How We Disappear Novella and Stories by Tara Lynn Masih. I loved how this captivating collection of diverse stories felt like the intimacy of sharing a strange series of dreams with a friend. Each vignette was as distinct from the other as they were vague in form…they often seemed to begin at the middle, or the end of a journey, and yet they only seemed like a beginning. For all that, though, they were all emotionally filling enough to feel complete. I feel to say more than that is — (via Netgalley)

Daphne by Josh Malerman. I’ll be honest. I went into Daphne a bit skeptical. “A basketball ghost?” I know that’s a lazy summarization but after reading the book’s synopsis, that was my takeaway. A vengeful spirit brutally stalking a high school basketball team. Huh. I don’t know about all that. I mean, I am the reader who skipped through several chapters of Quiddich matches in the Harry Potter books because they were “too sportsball-y.” (Yes, I know JKR is a problem, but I can’t pretend I never read the books.) So when I admit that I found this psychological horror/slasher-esque/coming of age story about Kit and her teammates and the terrifying events befalling them in their beloved hometown of Samhattan to be immediately, irresistibly compelling, I think I was more surprised than anyone. So, yeah…not really a book about basketball. I mean there’s practice and there are games and there’s sportsy jargon being tossed around and camaraderie between the friends, but running through all of that, overshadowing it, underscoring it, are a number of other things. How secrets have a habit of festering and never staying buried, how darkness and demons are better faced than ignored, how it’s important to talk about the uncomfortable things, the painful things, even the pants-shittingly terrifying things. How we are more than the sum of our parts–more than our anxiety, more than being a basketball player, more than being the “funny one”, or “the good one”–but that said, we have to acknowledge and honor those parts of ourselves, too, and that’s what makes us whole. So well done, Malerman. I guess you made me read about a basketball ghost, after all.(via Netgalley)

The Wilderwomen by Ruth Emmie Lang was a unique coming-of-age tale about the bonds of family, both sisterhood and motherhood, and how those threads, through time and circumstance, can tangle and strain, and not always weave the sort of tapestry that you had envisioned–or in retrospect, was perhaps threaded with more secrets and unspoken private darknesses than you had realized. Zadie and Finn are two sisters with special gifts; elder 20-something Zadie has a future sight that she refuses to use, and just-graduated-from-high school Finn has the ability to step into the echo of a memory. Their relationship in a tenuous place after their mother’s mysterious disappearance 5 years prior and Finn’s subsequent placement into a foster home, they embark on a post-graduation beach vacation-turned cross-country adventure, in search of their mother. The sisters reestablishing their trust and rekindling their connection provided some lovely, grounding moments during a journey that proves to be unexpectedly, beautifully magical, and ultimately, happy-sigh-inducingly satisfying.(via Netgalley)

The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monae Well. This is embarrassing. I read The Memory Librarian earlier this summer and I just don’t remember much about it. I was really good about writing up reviews for most of these books immediately after finishing them because I knew there was no way I’d ever be able to remember all of them otherwise. It seems I didn’t even take any notes for this one, just one highlighted passage and an Instagram story where I demanded that everyone “READ * THIS * FUCKING * BOOK.” (Wow, so bossy.)  But please don’t take my failings here to mean it wasn’t immersive and really just extraordinary. If you enjoyed or were intrigued with the dystopian world of Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer album, then I think you’ll really savor this speculative anthology that expands on the concepts and narratives she introduced there. Monae and her co-authors expand on this world and explore themes of dreams, imagination, art; time and memory, resistance, identity, and community building, all through the lens of gender-expansive, marginalized people. The quote I highlighted if you’re curious, was this:
“… the hard, old way of forgetting, which is remembering with grief.” 

Though wildly different in place and setting from the previous books I had read by Catriona Ward, (The Last House on Needless Street and Sundial) the hallucinatory gothic mysteries playing out in the pages of Little Eve were equally, if not twice as compelling. I didn’t quite know what sort of story this was, or where it was going, when I began reading of this enigmatic, isolated family living in a strange, crumbling castle at the watery edge of a small village. As the tale unfolded and I began to settle in, a slew of things happened, murderous things, secret and sacred and brutal things, melancholic and tender things. As the past and present converged, these things twisted in and upon one another, and my “settling in” became increasingly unsettled…but of course in the very best, Catriona Wardiest-sort-of-way. (via Netgalley)

Zoje Stage’s Mothered brought to mind a funny thing I see on the internet sometimes. “Are you funny?” a meme with forgettable visuals asks… and then the gut punch of a punchline: “…Or did you have a happy childhood?” This never fails to elicit a bleak cackle from me, and I gotta tell you, Mothered is a mother-frikkin’ bleak cackle of a book. If you had a happy childhood, then perhaps the book’s premise doesn’t seem like the trappings of a potential horror movie: wherein Grace has just lost her job and her elderly mother, recently widowed and just out of the hospital, has moved in with her. Seems win-win; Grace needs the financial support as she has just purchased a home and being unemployed during a pandemic makes it tough to pay the mortgage, and her mother obviously is going to need a bit of help recuperating after having been unwell. And there is of course a lot of unhappy history there; Grace and her mother are estranged, there’s childhood neglect and trauma –and maybe some other stuff!–that’s never been adequately addressed and with all of this in their past, they are really struggling to reconnect and communicate while living under the same roof again. Grace begins having nightmares, losing time, and sleepwalking, and endures a heartbreakingly gruesome accusation by her mother. What’s going on? Is Grace slowly unraveling from sleep deprivation? Is her mother the one who is losing it? Maybe it’s both?! If you’ve got a dark sense of humor and that cackling darkness was developed as a defense mechanism, I think that you, like me, will find Mothered a grim, gripping giggle of a summer read.(via Netgalley)

I read Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas in one freaking sitting and I can’t remember the last time I did that! It’s got that lush, gorgeous, dark academia “we were perfect and beautiful because we were young” cloistered university student vibe, there’s these gothic, dilapidated structures the students are living in, the whole institution has this vaguely cult-like energy AND there’s a weird, speculative element to it as well. I will say that it is very long on atmosphere and maybe a little short on the plot. Ok, that’s not quite fair, in retrospect, but, and this is why I will never be a fantastic reviewer…I can’t quite put into words what I mean here. But when you dial the atmosphere up to 20 I can forgive anything! A few of the things I liked about this tale of sequestered students in this hidden-away and vaguely controversial school are the things it didn’t have going for it: it didn’t feel YA to me (I don’t know if the book is or it isn’t, but once I get that vibe, I lose interest) and it wasn’t too “here’s a 30-year-old thinking about that time their friend was murdered in college and hey look here’s a class reunion where secrets are going to be revealed” and it wasn’t too “wizarding world of whatever.” It was very much set in the real world of things…but just slightly…not. And don’t get me wrong, I’ll read all of those things I just pooh-poohed, but Catherine House was the perfect combination of none of those things and it was exactly what I needed.

The Rule of Three by E.G. Scott was sold to me as “three couples whose game night goes horribly wrong”…and that’s not quite it. I was expecting all three couples in the same house, playing the same game, and you know, someone’s necromancer summons a foul entity that shows up in corporeal meatspace and does some real-life murder and mayhem. No. That’s not this book. I probably should have read the whole synopsis, not just one line (but I think they need to revisit that line!) So, actually, the wives are having a book club night and at the same time, the husbands are having a poker night. All three men end up either dead or hospitalized, and if you’re thinking “gee, I bet they deserved it,” you’d be right; all three of them were pieces of work. So, who did it, and why? In this exclusive, posh community, it seems like every neighbor has a motive…and that’s not even counting the various reasons and resentments their own spouses might be harboring. Speaking of the wives, their internal dialogues/external conversations sound so familiar to one another that at first, I had a hard time telling who was who among the three main characters. They eventually differentiate themselves, but the “hive-mind” feel to their thoughts did throw a bit of a stumbling block for immersing myself in their story. Was it still a gripping story, fraught with tension, intrigue, and drama? Sure, it had all of that, and it was a fast-paced story that eventually drew me in and kept me engaged. I’ve just got a few nit-picky problems, is all. (via Netgalley)

The Sacrifice by Rin Chupeco A legendary island notorious for curses, missing people, and human sacrifices becomes the set for a Hollywood film crew in this tale of you-dumb-people-shoulda-left-well-enough-alone. Mysterious local, teenage Alon, becomes the guide for the documentary team, which is headed up by their fearless leader, a reality show survivalist who is hell-bent on making a comeback. Or is there more to it than that? Everyone is a bit more, or a lot more than they seem on this island where mysterious things breathe and move and won’t stay dead …or were never really alive…if they were ever really there at all? I loved the setting and the atmosphere of this story, which I thought was thrillingly original. The nonbinary Alon was aloof and enigmatic, and very, very cool, and if I was looking for some YA horror, I would have loved this. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t realize that’s… sort of what this story is. is. If that’s your thing, you’ll dig this.(via Netgalley)

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata. This book is profoundly weird and unpleasant,  tackling themes of abuse and control and personal autonomy and individual spirit vs. tradition and conformity–and there is absolutely nothing subtle about it. Which is not to say I didn’t like it. Young Natsuki doesn’t feel that she fits in, is treated horribly by her own family, and is in fact convinced that she is an alien from another planet. Her only comfort is her cousin Yuu, who either feels similarly on the alien front–or whom she has convinced that he feels that way because he does seem easily led. After a disastrous family visit to her grandparent’s mountain home where in the course of the stay she is forbidden contact with Yuu (maybe for good reason), she is thrust back into regular home/school life again, where she is being molested by a teacher, but no one believes her. Natsuki’s existence as an adult is deeply informed by her experiences as a child and she’s grown apart from society with, some might say, fairly antisocial and anti-establishment beliefs–and she still believes she’s an alien. She meets a man that she relates to, in a way, as he has had traumatic childhood experiences of his own and has grown up a jaded individual who also holds some unorthodox beliefs as well. In a bizarre bargain struck between them, they marry, but it’s definitely the sort of marriage made to keep their respective families off their backs and certainly not a love match. It doesn’t necessarily work as they’d hoped, and to escape scrutiny, they reconnect with cousin Yuu and go to stay in the now-abandoned family home up in the mountains. I’ve toned down the bizarre elements of the plot, so I don’t think I’ve actually given much away… even though it seems like I’ve walked you through the whole story!

Influencer Island by Kyle Rutkin. I can’t decide if this book was dumb or brilliant. Or maybe the brilliance lies in exploiting how dumb we are, the people reading this, or those who would watch something like this if it actually existed. A concept consisting of obnoxious social media celebrities lauded for …nothing, really– just as influencers in real life–pitted against each other on some desert island version of Big Brother Battle Royale Hunger Squid Games Or Whatever. Masterminded and orchestrated by some enigmatic avant-garde artiste who paints portraits of famous people right before they die. NONE of these contestants found that suspicious enough to have qualms about being under this guy’s thumb for a whole season’s worth of a tv show? But as obnoxious as the personalities were, I would have liked these characters to be more fully fleshed out, to feel something (even triumph!) when they die. But no, I felt nothing. I will say though, that as silly as I thought the story was, it did absolutely suck me in and keep me feverishly reading to find out who this masked artist was and what the heck was their deal. So I don’t know, I was brilliantly suckered in because maybe I too, am dumb. Or maybe the book was a brilliant commentary on all of this dumbness? At this point, I don’t even know. (via Netgalley)

In Full Immersion, Gemma Amor deftly spins a web fraught with deeply uncomfortable themes. Depression, grief, and trauma are tangled with ideas of memory, potential, possibility, and the vagaries of the human mind, and at the center of this cat’s cradle of weird science, pseudo realities, and the expanding horizons of dreams, is a woman in a medically-induced state of hypnagogia, deeply immersed in an experimental therapy. Will these pioneering explorations into her psyche save her sanity– and her life– or is she the catalyst for something much bigger, and is there much more at stake? I have a lot of admiration for the bold breadth and scope and vision of this story, all of the difficult fears and issues it examined and disturbing themes explored, without once losing sight of the human at the heart of it, the humanity at risk. If Full Immersion is a general indication of what to expect of this author’s works, then I look forward to reading many, many more of their offerings (via Netgalley)

An almost unbearably slow burn of creeping dread and atmosphere dialed up to 20, Darcy Coates’ Gallows Hill keeps its secrets close…until you learn all of those bonkers secrets and they’re getting *too* close, as a matter of fact, now they’re getting in the house and they are after you! Or after Margot, that is! Margot Hull has just inherited the family business, a winery up on Gallows Hill, on land that the townspeople believe is cursed. Her parents, from whom she has been estranged for reasons unknown to her, have recently died mysteriously in their beds, and the undertaker is doing nothing to convince her it was a peaceful passing. Alone in the rambling house that’s falling into ruin, Margot begins seeing strange, awful visions, and hearing noises that panic and terrify her. She comes to learn that the property’s curse–a terrifying bane about which the housekeepers. maintenance people, and workers at the winery are disturbingly nonchalant– is in fact, shockingly real, and that Margot herself may be at the heart of it… and that it will get much, much worse (via Netgalley)

Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney is a locked room mystery featuring an estranged, dysfunctional family with lots of secrets, and a really atmospheric location in the form of a crumbling old gothic home that gets cut off from the world when the tide is high. Our main character, Daisy, was born with a bum ticker and may be …an unreliable narrator? It’s Daisy’s beloved Nana’s 80th birthday and the family is gathering together for the first time in years, for the celebration. Everyone is already having a perfectly awful time…and then someone is murdered. It’s a bit much, in an over-the-top Clue murder mystery sort of way, and there is a twist, which you may either love or hate. I thought it was fun!

The Hollows by Daniel Church is proper scary. I found myself during the course of it –quite literally– forgetting to breathe! I have a fondness for mysteries and murder set in small, isolated wintry settings, and anything supernatural is a plus, so I was sure to have a good time with this intensely creepy story of a tiny village, trapped, cut off from the world, and banding together against terrifyingly vicious nocturnal creatures in the middle of a once-every-century strength snowstorm. And of course, there are the human monsters to contend with, in the form of a murderous clan of scumbags living in a farm at the age of town, and the subterranean Boss Monsters, who if, awoken, usher in the end-times. All this from a story that started with a dead guy, mistaken for a hiker who froze to death! This is the case of a story delivering much, much more than I was expecting, and it was indeed, a lot of fun. (via Netgalley)

Some titles with the word “Dark” in it, that I enjoyed but don’t have much to say about are:  Dark Things I Adore by Katie Lattari: artists, secrets, dark ambitions, trauma, murder, and revenge–very good, I liked this one and  Things We Do In The Dark by Jennifer Hiller: murder, dark pasts, celebrities, podcasts, not super dark- I would recommend if you’re looking for a fluffier mystery

The It Girl  by Ruth Ware: I will always read Ruth Ware, but her stories are consistently mediocre; college secrets coming back to haunt a 30-something, blah blah murder and twists and whatever)

Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter(thanks to Elizabeth of Reading Wryly for recommending this one) I had never read any Karin Slaughter before but she is definitely the antidote to the ubiquitously fluffy, mediocre Ruth Ware (sorry Ruth.) Karin Slaughter goes there and goes pretty hard while she’s at it. In Pretty Girls, the Carroll family is ripped apart when oldest sister Julie goes missing and in the ensuing years is never found, either dead or alive. The remaining siblings, Claire and Lydia, have grown apart, live drastically different lives, and are virtual strangers to one another –until Claire’s husband is murdered right in front of her and then in the following days, finds some truly distressing, reprehensible things on his computer. What follows is a gruesome, graphic, twisty, and harrowing story the likes of which I have not read since I was really young, like eleven years old or so–which id immensely, intensely disturbing itself– and picking out paperbacks from the used bookstore solely based on their lurid, provocative covers.

Insomnia by Sarah Pinborough. While I really enjoyed the last title I read from this author (Behind Her Eyes) this one was pretty forgettable. As Emma approaches her 40th birthday, she is quietly freaking out. But not for the typical, over-the-hill reasons. Much like her own mother in the weeks before her 40th, Emma is experiencing increasingly worse (and terrifyingly weird) bouts of insomnia, which in her mother’s case, resulted in the attempted murder of her own child, and a mental breakdown. And it’s possible Emma may share the same fate. I don’t want to say I didn’t enjoy the journey of this story, but the fact that I really had to struggle to recall how it ended is a bit telling, right?

Any Man by Amber Tamblyn. So the actress from Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (which is how I tend to think of her, sorry if that’s reductive Amber T.) is also an author and I do actually own a book of her poetry (Dark Sparkler, which I have never read. Again, sorry Amber.) In Any Man, we learn the stories of a handful of men, their harrowing experiences of sexual assault, and their attempts at picking up the pieces and living through that trauma. What makes this interesting–if that’s the right word to use here– is that this shockingly violent serial rapist is a woman. I don’t think I want to share any more than that.

 

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