...the Soul of Wit - Short Reviews

Hey everyone!

Here's the wrap-up of the past month or so. I have been mostly mood reading, and all over the place, which I'm afraid won't change in the near future because I probably won't be able to read as much in the upcoming month, due to Berlinale. I'll do my best, though. Hope you enjoy the short reviews!

P.S. A couple of notes for your calendar: Dutch horror author Thomas Olde Heuvelt will be at the Otherland Bookshop on March 31st (!), and Nine Inch Nails are touring Europe this summer and will be in Köln as well as Berlin (!!!). Very  - very - psyched about these!

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler

Wild Seed is the inaugural book of the "Patternist" series by Octavia Butler, which I have owned as a collection entitled Seed to Harvest for at least a decade, unread. Since I'm very serious about finishing up all the unread books I have in my home library, this is the book/collection I'm starting in the year 2025. I'm secretly proud of what good taste I had in the past and bought all these awesome books (even though still unread), and it gave birth to a weird sort of time travel game I'm planning in my head to buy books now for my future self. It's not another excuse to buy even more books at all.

The story of Wild Seed revolves around two people with extraordinary powers, Doro and Anyanwu, encountering and recognizing in each other something that ties them together. They're chained, so to say. Love at first sight, if you want to. But this is different than mere attraction as we puny mortals can understand it. Because these two people are immortal Africans. Anyanwu is a woman and she has healing powers and can transform into any animal, while Doro goes all Puff Daddy and establishes a sort of empire in the New World, in which he chooses the best people to mate with him and his clan, to form an absolute magnificent race. Anyanwu tags along with this weird person, who doesn't seem at all friendly nor trustworthy, plus he's involved in the ongoing Transatlantic slave trade, but she feels like it's best to stay with him, as there are advantages for her too. Against this backdrop of the horrors of slavery, we read about (in)humanity, monsters, violence and most of all power.

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary books. There are books which can agitate you, make you think, but there are also books which can do all of the above plus bring you down, pull you by the collar and take up all of your attention and time. I'd say, beside Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler is one of the master storytellers who can write such books, and it's a very mindful sort of writing, forcing you into a mindful kind of reading. There's no skimming the pages here, you want to read, suck in every word written. I can't wait to read the second book.

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix

The year is 1970 and we follow a group of teenage girls temporarily living in the Wellwood Home in scorching hot Florida. They’re living there temporarily because they’re all pregnant, which is not acceptable in the society they live in, so they are secretly driven there by night, hidden by their families until they give birth, after which it is understood the babies will be adopted to married, affluent families.

Our focus is on fifteen-year-old Fern who thought her high school boyfriend would be as happy as her to hear about her pregnancy; Rose, a hippie girl who is determined to take her daughter after birth and live self-sufficiently on a farm; Zinnia, the only black girl among them and a budding musician; and finally little Holly, barely fourteen, who does not speak and acts rather feral, and so young really, you have to wonder how she ended up as the youngest in a home for the youngest. All have a sad story behind them, some more, some less and in this environment of utter powerlessness, Fern encounters a librarian who will change her life by giving her a book about witchcraft, and help her get a little of power back. It’s not all roses though, craft is something not everyone can deal with, so maybe they weren’t supposed to be a coven? A meeting with a group of women living apart from society, in the woods will even further intensify things.

Hendrix’ characters are likable, lovable, rootable, they always are, and here some more because of their age and situation. You just can’t help but feel with these little people in an impossible situation and feel upset at the unjust done to them, or them being the only ones responsible for consequences of unprotected sex, even more so in the case of child SA. Assuming this has some historical truth to it, how many men are out there who weren’t held responsible for the babies they helped creating and who maybe don’t even know and care about what happened to their girlfriends and that they too have a child somewhere? So you see, the plot was very engaging and the pace really well, you can read or listen to this in one breath.

I am mentally rating this a little lower than what I usually rate Hendrix though, because this felt like a historical novel with really few elements of supernatural/horror. And it was OK since the character work is so good, and it’s not a boring book, it's just that this time it didn’t really deliver the horror.

A Darkness of Demons by Marc Todd

Seldom has puzzlement set the tone of a novel as forcibly as it does in Marc Todd’s second novel A Darkness of Demons. Where are we? Where is Emily? WHO is Emily? Who is friend and who is foe?

Reading this book, a sequel to Todd's debut Chains, which I have reviewed some three or four years ago, required some adjusting but I remembered enough of it that I didn't need a re-read, although there are many references and recurring characters that I think it's better to read both books subsequently.

Let's come back to Emily, whom we already know from the first book. Where is Emily? Is she in another dimension or another universe? Who are the coven of witches assembling to help her? But where's her actual self, her body?

In his second book Todd stays true to the main theme "good versus evil" and elaborates the trope with the help of local mythologies or folklore of diverse cultural backgrounds. The narration is very fragmented, chapters are divided into two or more parts, switching between dimensions, characters and points of view; Emily's, her mother Sandra's, or members of the coven which keeps an eye on Emily while she delves into eldritch adventures in a sort of rough wonderland, filled with monsters, new ones as well as familiar ones.

Although the pace was amazing, and it's easily possible to run through this book in one sitting, I found the main character a little devoid of character, not to sound too harsh. And how could she be anything but? She suffers from a sort of amnesia and basically runs from one adventure to the next, not leaving much space for the reader to build up a relation. Sandra, on the other hand, was someone I much rather preferred reading about.

Despite remembering the overall storyline, a lot of time has passed since the first book, and I had somehow lost the connection to the story. Had I read books one and two in succession, and hadn't there been so much time between the two tomes, I'm convinced that I would have had a different and better reading experience.

All in all, despite my inability to fully warm up to the cast of characters, there's much to enjoy in Marc Todd's latest book; primarily the unusual villains, the fast-paced adventures, and a compelling universe.

My thanks to Marc Todd for his trust and sending me a review copy.

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman

Masses of conservative American parents of city-dwelling young citizens, like Noah, are one by one falling prey to a far-right cable news channel, who for years has been working on their subliminal perception, telling them and making them believe they need to wake up and an uprising is imminent. 

Worrying about the state of his mom, Noah drives from NYC to Virginia and finds his mom in a horrible, Zombie-like state. And that's before she starts attacking him. What happens after is a whirlwind of a story with lots and lots of violent action scenes, and too many allusions to the state of current USA.

This was so crazy, I really don't know what I read. I'm gonna quote Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten on their first US tour in 1978: I'm too Unamerican for this shit.

The Book of Denial by Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Alejandro Magallanes (Illustrator)

I've always liked horror stories because I thought they honored an agreement, the same way that all the games of the world follow rules.
The rule of games: This is not real. No game is real.
And the rule for horror stories? They are not true. No story should be true.

Every now and then I'll read a graphic novel and since they're so rare, I choose the really nice ones. And this is a gorgeous hard cover in monochrome with mostly white writing on black pages, and a couple of pages black on white.

The story is about a boy who finds the book his father is writing. It is about all the children in history who were killed for the sake of nation, religion, economy, or a leader. Comes with a happy ending if you're OK to finish a little early, and a sad ending if you read until the very end.