mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

This is the fifth and final part of my book club notes on The Black Fantastic. [Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.]


"Spyder Threads" by Craig Laurance Gidney (2021)

( Disabled fashion models keep disappearing after they work with a mysterious designer. )


"The Orb" by Tara Campbell (2021)

( An environmentalist cult creates an ever-growing, consuming entity. )


"We Travel the Spaceways" by Victor LaValle (2021)

( A homeless man hears voices from deep space. )


"Ruler of the Rear Guard" by Maurice Broaddus (2022)

( A Black American woman travels to Ghana to join a pan-African repatriation movement. )


the end

Though these last few stories weren't my favorites, the collection overall had some strong entries. It was noted that there was more group consensus about which stories we liked and which we didn't than there has been in some other books we've read, so the discussions ended up being a little shorter than usual.

The group plans to continue with This All Come Back Now, the first ever published anthology of speculative fiction by Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors.

This is the first part of my book club notes on The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories. I appreciated the editor's introduction, which highlights connections between the oppressive realities of the past and present to the spark of Black speculative imagination—how can things be different, and whose ideas will shape the future? He's written a nonfiction book on this topic, Speculative Blackness, which I would be interested to check out.

Interesting to note that this collection places the stories in chronological order of first publication. We've had a number of conversations about how editors arrange stories in anthologies (similar themes together? most significant stories first and last?) and this is the first time I've seen this approach. It was mentioned that some books the group read before I joined did this as well, but those were more historical overviews that spanned a longer period of time, while these stories are all from the last 25 years. Perhaps the intention is to suggest a new history still being written.

There was also some discussion of the physical book itself having a good design and high quality paper and feeling nice to hold in the hand, to which I could add nothing because I have the ebook.


"Herbal" by Nalo Hopkinson (2002)

( An elephant suddenly appears in a woman's apartment. )


"All That Touches the Air" by An Owomoyela (2011)

( A human colony exists in uneasy equilibrium with aliens who can parasitize and control people's bodies. )


"Bludgeon" by Thaddeus Howze (2013)

( Conquering aliens are persuaded to wager the fate of Earth on a game of baseball. )


"A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i" by Alaya Dawn Johnson (2014)

( In a world dominated by vampires, a human woman collaborates with them to save herself. )

Two years ago, Angela thought things were changing for the better as she reconnected with her teenaged son and estranged husband. But then her son's sudden, unexplained suicide tore her life apart again, just as her mother's suicide had in her own childhood. Struggling with her grief, she returns to the house of her beloved, long-deceased grandmother, who was a Louisiana Creole vodou practitioner. Angela never believed in magic, but the more she discovers about her family's tragedies and the other strange events in this small town, the more it seems that her grandmother may have awakened a powerful and malevolent force that has been stalking her family for decades, and that only Angela can put it to rest.

I've read and enjoyed some of Due's short stories before but this is my first time reading one of her novels, and it didn't disappoint. Her deceptively plainspoken prose style belies its incisiveness; a hard-hitting line can sneak up and get you right in the gut. She has a great ear for dialogue and inner monologue. The book uses many POV characters to explore the plot from different angles, and every one feels like a fully realized person with their own voice. I especially appreciated her ability to write teenagers who sound like real teenagers and not an adult's idea of how a teenager thinks and feels.

It's a longer book and takes some time to set up all the moving pieces. But once it gets going, the plotting is tight and reveals happen exactly when they should, gradually building from weird events that could have a rational explanation to full-on supernatural horror that shatters Angela's beliefs about reality and herself. The scary parts of the book are scary not just because of what's happening, but because of what it means for these specific characters and their understanding of their world.

The one element that didn't hold my attention was the love triangle between Angela, her estranged husband, and her old high school boyfriend. It's not poorly written or anything, and it makes sense for the character and her arc, I'm just not the right audience for this kind of romance subplot where the lead has to choose between love interests. (Though I do think the author knew what she was doing in allowing her horror protagonist to be sexual and not punishing her for it, and was intentionally playing against sex-negative horror tropes and against stereotypes of Black women's sexualities, so in principle I appreciated what she was doing even though the way she did it wasn't my cup of tea.)

I was kind of ambivalent about the ending, which felt like punches were maybe pulled a little too much?

spoilers

Once Angela wins the battle against the evil spirit, time is turned back to before her son's death so that she can do things differently and save his life. I understand wanting to give her a happy ending after all she's been through, but I think it might be too happy and I felt it undercut the horror. We'd already established by then that Corey (the son) ended his life because he knew the baka (evil spirit) was about to force him to kill Angela, so it was actually a heroic end and an earned redemption for him, considering that his reckless attempts to use his great-grandmother's spells were how things had gotten so bad in the first place. I think it would have been enough for Angela to meet Corey's spirit when she meets her grandmother's and to get a chance to say she understands now what he did for her. Like, I'm not trying to be mean to the characters, I just felt it would have been more consistent with the themes of the book to reaffirm that sometimes the consequences of your actions can't be undone and you can't just use magic to fix everything.

But aside from that, I enjoyed the read and I'd like to check out some of her other books.

After a couple of failed attempts at Dracula Daily, I have successfully read Dracula for the first time! \o/

The book opens with newly qualified solitictor Jonathan Harker journeying to Transylvania to meet with a client who is planning to move to England. Count Dracula seems like a nice guy at first, only it's weird that he doesn't eat. Or go out during the day. Or have a reflection in the mirror. Uh-oh. Barely escaping with his life, Harker returns to England, but soon the Count arrives too and begins to stalk and drink the blood of women there, including Harker's wife Mina. Harker joins a nascent group of vampire hunters led by Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, and their attempts to outwit and destroy their foe are related in epistolary style through diaries, letters, news reports, and so on.

What surprised me the most about this book is how... cozy it is?? A lot of it is about a gang of loveable characters who all adore each other, bring out the best in one another, and never have conflicts that they can't resolve by just talking about it. They are constantly taking each other passionately by the hand and swearing bonds of eternal trust and devotion, and being moved to tears by how brave and strong and pure of heart everybody is.

This is not a criticism! I actually found it really charming! It just wasn't what I expected. I imagine Stoker's reasoning was that the plot is so scary that the reader would need unimpugnably gallant heroes to rely on or it would all be too stressful. But since it is unlikely that this plot would scare anybody today, you just have this endearing team of well-adjusted, hypercompetent, stoutly ethical people banding together to oppose an external threat that can't possibly break their bonds or their spirit. It's like the crew of Star Trek TNG fight a vampire.

( cut for length and some spoilers )

Also, Dracula is described as having a huge, magnificent moustache. I await the film adaptation courageous enough to be faithful to the book in this.

Dracula is in the public domain, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg if you like.

[Edited to correct Jonathan's job title, thank you raven!]

This is part 4 of my book club notes on The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories. [Part 1, part 2, part 3.]

The fiction pieces in this week's selection all leaned horror. I'm not sure how horror genre is defined in Chinese literature and I forgot I was going to ask if anyone else knew.

It is also the one year anniversary of my joining this book club. \o/


"Is There Such a Thing as Feminine Quietness?: A Cognitive Linguistics Perspective" by Emily Xueni Jin (2022) [essay]

( An academic take on translation. )


"Dragonslaying" by Shen Yingying (2006), tr. Emily Xueni Jin

( Mermaid-like beings are mutilated so they can walk on land and live as second-class humans. )


"New Year Painting, Ink and Color on Rice Paper, Zhaoqiao Village" by Chen Qian (2020), tr. Emily Xueni Jin

( A restorer of antiques comes across a painting of a faceless child which may carry a curse. )


"The Portrait" by Chu Xidao (2003), tr. Gigi Chang

( A demonic artist steals the essence of the women he paints. )

This is an anthology of horror (and horror-adjacent/generally dark-themed) fiction and poetry by Black women. I picked it up because it includes a story by Cherene Sherrard, who wrote that pirate fantasy story I liked so much, as well as one by Sheree R. Thomas, the editor of the Dark Matter anthologies. But I figured since the trouble was taken to do an interlibrary loan for me, I might as well read the whole thing.

It was a mixed bag, as anthologies tend to be. There were some pieces I really liked, some that were fine but not that memorable, and some that were so poorly written or fundamentally misconceived that they were hard to get through. The range of skill levels was pretty dramatic. It actually felt a lot like reading everything in a fic exchange, where you get very polished and compelling work rubbing elbows with stories that read like the author has never written a story before. The copyediting was also not the greatest, with a lot of typos and unintended scene/line breaks. (I think the Dark Matter books may have spoiled me a bit, in the quality of both the writing and the editing.)

( discussion of selected works )

( list of included works )

This is part one of my book club notes on Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, the 2004 followup to our previous read. As before, this is an anthology of speculative fiction by Black authors.


"ibo landing" by ihsan bracy (1998)

( Prose poem about Africans who chose death over slavery. )


"The Quality of Sand" by Cherene Sherrard (2004)

( Historical fantasy about a female pirate captain who attacks only slave ships. )


"The Glass Bottle Trick" by Nalo Hopkinson (2000)

( A modern-day, Caribbean retelling of Bluebeard. )


"Yahimba's Choice" by Charles R. Saunders (2004)

( I didn't read this because I was warned that it was about FGM. )

This is part 3 of my book club notes on Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. [Part 1, part 2.]


"Greedy Choke Puppy" by Nalo Hopkinson (2000)

( A story about a soucouyant, a vampire-like being of Caribbean lore that is said to drain the life force from the young. )


"Rhythm Travel" by Amiri Baraka (1996)

( A man invents a way to travel to any place and any time via music. )


"Buddy Bolden" by Kalamu ya Salaam (2000)

( Astral beings visit Earth as jazz musicians. )


"Aye, and Gomorrah..." by Samuel R. Delany (1967)

( All astronauts undergo a procedure to make them biologically sexless so they can survive in space. (This is way more about me than about the story, but it is my journal after all.) )


"Racism and Science Fiction" by Samuel R. Delany (1999) [essay]

( Delany discusses his experiences of racism in the science fiction community. )

A doctor looking to turn a scientific eye on paranormal phenomena gathers three others to help investigate an allegedly haunted house: Luke, the young heir of the family who owns the house; Theodora, an artist who's just had a fight with her girlfriend and wants to get away for a while; and Eleanor, a lonely and troubled woman who's never had an independent life apart from her terminally ill mother and domineering sister. Is the house really haunted? Strange events certainly do start to take place... and whatever the presence in Hill House is, it seems to be singling Eleanor out for special attention.

So much of the strength of this book is in its incisively drawn characters, especially Eleanor. Her desperate yearning to be accepted as a peer, as a fellow adult, practically vibrates off the page, and her instant chemistry with the bold and self-assured Theo vividly paints the classic baby-queer dilemma of "do I want to date you, or be you?" (The queerness sits, I guess, just barely on the border of plausible deniability, but let's not kid ourselves.)

Loving and leisurely attention is paid to observing how the characters feel about the growing reality that something very strange and hard to explain is happening. I often find that fictional characters don't have realistic reactions to supernatural events; they readily accept the impossible so the plot can continue. But this book is in no rush to get to the next horror set piece (of which there actually aren't that many), instead spending most of its time exploring naturalistic personal details like how people in a creepy house wouldn't just joke, but also keep looking to each other to make sure we're still all joking—it's not getting too real, is it?—or the surreal inconvenience of trying to measure how far a cold spot extends when your fingers are too cold to hold the ruler.

spoilery thoughts

My reading is that the book is about an abuse survivor finding herself at a crossroads. Eleanor can either start on the path to independence and autonomy (rejecting her sister's control, beginning to envision the life she wants as she describes her as-yet fictitious "little apartment" to Theo) or she can take the self-destructive path, letting herself be consumed by the toxic family dynamic that is the only thing she knows. Hill House targets her because of that vulnerability, and it defeats her. She never gets to have that better life. I see it as a cautionary tale.

The ambiguity of what's happening in the house underlines this. The other characters come to believe that Eleanor is responsible for the writing on the walls—it's like the way people can internalize abusive messages and keep repeating them back to themselves long after the abuser is gone. Whether or not there are ghosts in Hill House, it's no mystery that there are ghosts haunting Eleanor's mind. The doctor points out early on that ghosts can't directly hurt people, it's people's reactions to them that are dangerous, and that sets up Chekhov's gun to fire on the last page.

I came very close to DNFing this about a third of the way through because I had absolutely no idea what was going on and had literally fallen asleep trying to read it on two separate occasions. As a last-ditch effort, I read a plot synopsis with full spoilers written by a fan on Reddit, and from there I was able to navigate the rest of the book.

Oddly enough, I think I somehow ended up enjoying this book more than the first two? I found most of the focal characters in this installment more likeable—or if I didn't like them, it was because I wasn't supposed to—and I appreciated the change in setting to look at what's going on with the ordinary people in this universe while the necromancers are vying for power. The prose also seemed less repetitious, and there was almost none of the memelord humor that fell so flat for me in the previous book. (Though I suppose, if I am playing by the rules, I must announce that I did notice the moment when Muir subtly, but with clear intention, made all her readers lose The Game.)

I also found the plot and worldbuilding really interesting... I mean, once somebody told me what they were! I think I would have a much greater appreciation for Muir's books if she explained things in an even slightly more straightforward way, but obviously that's not what she wants to do. Maybe the books are supposed to be puzzles, and by using a "walkthrough" I was missing the point. But I guess I have a limit on how much evasiveness I can tolerate in a book, and I definitely hit it here, so thank goodness for Reddit.