Book Review: Revolutionary Demonology by Gruppo di Nun

By Shan Powell

Content warning: sexual content, graphic descriptions of death and gore

When I saw the listing for Gruppo di Nun’s Revolutionary Demonology, I was intrigued. Gruppo di Nun “is a collective of psycho-activists based in Italy, dedicated to organizing forms of covert resistance to heteropatriarchal dogma.” I can get behind that…or so I thought. I’m not certain what I was expecting, but it isn’t what I got. Maybe I was hoping for something more introductory in scope. Maybe an illustrated text, like some others I’ve reviewed from MIT Press. Instead, I received a brick of a book, drenched with footnotes, and a hefty bibliography.

This book is far more academic than I expected. My understanding of demonology comes from a mixture of pop culture, White Wolf roleplaying game books, Sumerian mythology, and Christian boogeymen (I was raised in a Christian cult which believes in literal demons and devils). This book isn’t really any of these, although it touches upon them (and many more).

I think that to understand each of the sections of Revolutionary Demonology, close reading is necessary. I suspect that only someone with the appropriate backgrounds will be able to read this quickly. This anthology requires concentration, a good dictionary, and the patience to look up a lot of cited works. I wonder how much of this could be attributed to being a work of translation. This book was originally written in Italian, and I do not know Italian. That being said, fun can still be had by reading pages out of sequence and at random.

I enjoyed, but didn’t quite understand, this rather cyberpunk quotation pulled from “Ritual: Every Worm Trampled is a Star:”

The energetic decay of patriarchal temporal structures takes the form of a gradual and unstoppable feminisation of civilisation. Domesticated femininities turned monstrous haunt the nightmares of the declining West, in the form of rebellious androids, synthetic hormones, and painful initiatory scars adorned with glittering silicon implants.

Other parts I do understand, although I don’t hold them as truths. I enjoyed the poetic conceits of “Stilla Maris:”

We all bear upon our bodies traces of all ancient catastrophes that life went through during evolution. Being born is analogous to our far-distant ancestors’ traumatic origins as lifeforms emerging from the sea, and the penetrative sexual act is a ‘true regression to the ocean.’

Ok, I see what the authors are getting at and it’s an interesting concept.

Other sections of the book read like black metal or death metal lyrics. This is excerpted from “My Son, Do Not Abandon Me:”

The shreds of your disembowelled body continue to writhe in despair on the cross of creation, repeatedly pulsating in their dance of death as the eggs of countless parasites hatch, burrowing into the swellings of your belly.

If you follow the Left Hand Path and want to get deep into its philosophy, this book is for you. If you want to flip through randomly and find interesting little snippets out of context, you might enjoy this too. Just don’t expect light reading.

Thank you to MIT Press, a division within Penguin RandomHouse Canada, for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: God Isn't Here Today by Francine Cunningham

By Shantell Powell

Content warning: suicide, substance abuse, self-harm, sexual harassment

Francine Cunningham is an award-winning poet and author. She is the winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award and Grain Magazine’s 2018 Short Forms Fiction contest. God Isn’t Here Today is her debut collection of short fiction, and it delves into the speculative realms, frequently dipping into horror with a dark literary touch. It has been longlisted for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize.

Each of the stories is quite different from the other, but many are connected by themes of death and transformation and a fragrant throughline of lemon and lavender. The death of a barman brings life to others. A hunting expedition becomes a death sentence. A dead artist becomes an artistic medium full of love. A meet-cute in a porn shop turns ugly. A pleasure ghost gets a new assignment. The stories contain a distinct viscerality: hemoglobin and skin grafts, fantasies of rough sex and bondage, ice cream melting down forearms, and a DIY trepanation.

The stand-out stories for me include the eponymous story, a surreal tale of a young man seeking audience with God in an unoccupied office. Instead of finding God, he finds other people seeking God. It reminds me a bit of Waiting for Godot by way of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

I also enjoyed “Spectre Sex,” which imagines ghosts as working stiffs. The protagonist of this story is a sex worker who enjoys his job about as much as someone working in a dead-end cubicle farm enjoys theirs.

“Glitter Like Herpes” gives me a John Waters vibe. Michelle is an aging stripper who makes ends meet by stealing used panties from the other workers and selling them on the dark web. The seedy setting, the betrayal, and the climactic cat fight make me imagine this story acted out by Mink Stole and Divine.

“Mickey’s Bar” follows a deceased barman’s body parts as they bring parts of his personality into their organ recipients, and in return, their memories join with his.

Cunningham experiments with form in this collection. Some pieces are classic short stories, some are free verse, and some are hybrid works, such as “Thirteen Steps” which marches across the pages in paired columns of thirteen paragraphs. Cunningham has provided a musical playlist to accompany the stories in this collection, and the songs sing out the themes of each tale. https://www.francinecunningham.ca/post/god-isn-t-here-today-the-playlist

God Isn’t Here Today may appeal to fans of Joshua Whitehead, Chuck Palahniuk, and the trash cinema of John Waters.

Thank you, Invisible Publishing, for a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: The Devourers by Indra Das

By Shantell Powell

Content warning: sexual assault, cannibalism, graphic depictions of violence

Indra (Indrapramit) Das is a writer from Kolkata, India. His first novel, The Devourers, was written during his MFA graduate studies at the University of British Columbia. The Devourers was shortlisted for numerous awards and won the Lambda Literary Award in 2017 for best LGBTQ SF/F/Horror. He is a Shirley Jackson Award-winner for his short fiction, which appears in Clarkesworld Magazine, Asimov’s, Slate Magazine, and Strange Horizons, as well as in numerous anthologies.

I spoke with Indra at the Roots. Wounds. Words. writer’s retreat in January of 2023. There I learned that this gorgeous meta-tale of history, mythology, and bloodshed was inspired by a time when he protected a stray kitten from street dogs in Kolkata. The novel opens with a variation on that scene: Alok Mukherjee (a professor of history) protects a kitten from a pack of dogs while sharing a cigarette beneath the full moon with a stranger who claims to be half werewolf.

The story contains layers within layers: A predator (Alok) protects another predator (a kitten) from other predators (the dogs), while speaking to the most dangerous predator of all (the half werewolf). When Alok says he doesn’t think there are any wolves in India, the stranger says, “Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not there.”

This sentence can be seen as a microcosm of the book. Alok is a closeted queer person in a place where colonial laws have made homosexuality a crime. As a result, queer folks are hidden. Alok has been masking his sexuality in order to please his family. He feigns being a cisgender heterosexual man out of fear of brutal reprisal. Until the stranger comes along, Alok has never entertained the existence of supernatural creatures, because they’ve gone as unseen as he has.

The conversation between Alok and the half-werewolf leads to Alok being hired to transcribe a handwritten notebook. This book is filled with translations of diaries documenting the remarkable lives of shapechangers and the human woman who connects and complicates their lives. The stories of shapechangers and their prey have been hidden for centuries, but if you know where and how to look, the tales of their existence are ubiquitous.

The Devourers does for werewolves what Anne Rice’s seminal Interview with the Vampire does for vampires. It is a sumptuous and visceral look at what it is to be an apex predator in a multicultural world. It is an unapologetic look at survival as a queer person. It is a paean to the complex history of a colonial melting pot, where numerous peoples, religions, cultures, and mythologies violently collide. It traces generations of shapechangers and stolen lives. It shows how one culture forced itself upon another, just like how long ago, a European shapechanger forced himself upon a human woman from India.

The Devourers contains some of the most beautifully written depictions of graphic violence I have ever read. It is transgressive, transgender, trans-species, and trans-genre. It carries the reader along from seventeenth century Mughal India to twenty-first century Kolkata. It travels from modern cities to lost ruins, from caravans to harems to jungles, from the erotic to the repugnant, and it does so with the most delicious of vocabularies.

The Devourers may appeal to readers of Marlon James, NK Jemisin, Neil Gaiman, and Margaret Atwood. It will certainly appeal to werewolf fans.

Book Review: Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison

By Shan Powell

Content warning: body horror, non-graphic mention of childhood sexual abuse

Such Sharp Teeth is a quick read, and a cozy, contemporary paranormal story. It’s not quite a horror novel and not quite a romance, but if you’re looking for chick lit with elements of both, you’ll want to check this out. It’s like a Hallowe’en beach read. The author, Rachel Harrison, is a graduate of Emerson College, where she earned a degree in Writing for Film & Television and wrote horror screenplays. Such Sharp Teeth is her most recent novel, and it reads like a Netflix special. Her debut book, The Return, was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel.

Rory Morris is our protagonist. She has her life under complete control. She’s a big-city career woman with disposable income, a great wardrobe, and a penchant for anonymous sex with good-looking men. Her twin sister Scarlet is pregnant and about to become a single mother. When Scarlet asks Rory to come home to help out for a bit, Rory reluctantly leaves her fast-paced life to return to slow, boring, small-town mundanity. She meets her grade school friend Ian at the local dive bar, and after a drink and some reminiscing (when did he get so good looking?), she heads back home to her sister’s place. On the way there, she is bitten by a strange creature and her life is forever changed.

Rory copes with the increasing horror of her life with humour and sarcasm. She has to juggle with commonplace issues like her sister’s baby shower, healing a strained relationship with her mother, and, horror of horrors, the thoughts that she might actually be considering an honest-to-God relationship with Ian—all of this while learning to cope with her burgeoning lycanthropy. The transformation scenes are vivid and unique.

Such Sharp Teeth features a cast of female characters who look like they’ve got it all figured out but who are all deeply flawed. The interplay of their relationships is central to the plot. The characters are sassy, witty, and sardonic. The dialogue is rich with witty banter, and the story celebrates sisterhood and friendships while investigating female bodily autonomy, pregnancy, women’s right to anger, and childhood trauma. Such Sharp Teeth is emotional without being mawkish.

The author cites Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score as a primary influence. Such Sharp Teeth will appeal to fans of True Blood, Practical Magic, Wolf Like Me, and Sex in the City.

Book Review: Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard

By Shantell Powell

Suzanne Simard is the world’s leading forest ecologist, and Finding the Mother Tree is part memoir and part scientific investigation of forests as living organisms. This is her debut book, and it is a New York Times bestseller. It tracks her life growing up in the logging industry of British Columbia and her studies into what makes forests tick. 

I grew up in the same forests, and reading this book was of particular interest to me. Simard and I both lived in the same rural and remote areas, so when she describes particular regions, it fills me with corresponding memories. She was a 20-something forestry worker, and I was the pre-teen daughter of a man who worked in the forestry industry. Like her, I travelled all around British Columbia, from the towering rain forests of Vancouver Island to dense evergreens of the high Rockies to the arid pines of the Okanagan Valley. We both lived, worked, and played out in the bush. We both foraged and evaded grizzly bears. When she writes of the desolation of clearcuts, and how they look like battlefields, I too am taken back to these sylvan sites of mass murder, where traditional foods and medicines of Indigenous peoples and animals alike have been stricken from existence. When she writes about spraying glyphosate on healthy forests to kill “weeds,” tears prickle my eyes as forests and habitats die. I find it very easy to empathize with her experiences.

Finding the Mother Tree is also a type of mystery story. Why do some seedlings thrive and others wither away? Do regimented monocultures grow cash crop trees more prodigiously than the messy, hard-to-harvest natural forests? Does killing off competing plants let economically valuable trees grow better? Simard writes of her scientific experimentation done in order to learn how forests thrive. She writes of how plants and fungi have evolved to form symbiotic relationships, how humus and mycorrhizal fungi are vital for forest health, and she does so in an engaging manner. You do not need to have a background in forestry or biology to be swept away by this engaging book.

Forests have an intelligence all their own and co-operate and compete with one another. Like humans, forests learn and adapt, and can recognize their neighbours. Finding the Mother Tree demonstrates the spirituality of scientific investigation and shows that there is more to science than quantitative measurements. Finding the Mother Tree also shows what it is like to be a woman in a male-dominated field and is a David and Goliath-type story where she confronts rooms full of foresters to tell them their methodology is deeply flawed.

Finding the Mother Tree will appeal to readers of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, and Underland by Robert Macfarlane.

I love this book and will be returning to it again and again.

Thank you, Penguin Random House, for a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane

By Shantell Powell

Content warning: homophobic slurs, misogyny, slavery, racism

Wrath Goddess Sing is the debut novel of Maya Deane, a graduate of the Rutgers-Camden MFA program in creative writing and has been a fan of The Iliad since she was six years old. Wrath Goddess Sing is a retelling of the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of Achilles as a trans woman.

I was looking forward to reading this novel. As a Classics graduate, I have long been fascinated by Greek mythology. When I learned this novel depicts Achilles as trans, I was sold. This interpretation has bones. I can easily see how the story can be viewed in this way, and I was excited to read the tale of Achilles as written by a trans woman. That being said, I unjustifiably presumed this rendition would be retold in a similar vein to Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, which takes a more capital-L literary approach to the story. Instead, Wrath Goddess Sing reads more like an adventure story with a plucky, female protagonist who is overflowing with sass. Okay. I can dig it.

However, the story threw me a few stumbling blocks. The biggest problem I have with it is the rampant homophobia in the setting. This is orthogonal to my understanding of ancient Greek culture. Ancient Greece is notable for being queer as all get-out, with queer relationships considered par for the course. Same-sex relationships were not at all unusual and were frequently encouraged within the military based on improving morale. The Olympian gods and heroes had same-sex relationships, too, with such examples as Zeus/Ganymede, Herakles/Hylas, and Achilles/Patroclus.

In the alternate history of Wrath Goddess Sing, homophobia and gay bashing are rampant. I have a much easier time seeing Achilles looked down upon for presenting as female than I do for presenting as a gay or bisexual man. It seems strange to me that the character of Achilles is derided more for being gay than for being a woman. Generally speaking, women had a much rougher go of it in ancient Greece than homosexual/bisexual citizens.

A lot of liberties are also taken with other relationships of Achilles. His parentage is changed, and so is his relationship with Agamemnon. I found the sexual relationship between Achilles and Agamemnon to be bizarre. In The Iliad, Agamemnon is jealous of Achilles and treats Achilles abhorrently. In Wrath Goddess Sing, Achilles swims through a storm to seduce Agamemnon on his ship. Perhaps this was done in the book to show Achilles’ dominance over the king. But then Achilles swims back to her own ship to take care of her chariot horses.

The clincher that made me unhappy with this book was when Achilles’ horses were seasick and had vomited everywhere. Horses cannot vomit. I dearly wish an editor had caught this. This was the final straw for me, and I found myself unable to finish reading the book.

If alternate history/zoology/mythology appeals to you, and if you like sassy, girl-boss protagonists in a swords-and-sandals setting, this may be the book for you. It was not the book for me.

Thank you, HarperCollins, for a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

By Shantell Powell

Content warning: blasphemy

Good Omens is a satire about the biblical end of days as told by legendary authors Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett. It has been a cult classic since 1990, and now that it has been released as a live-action fantasy comedy series on Amazon Prime, it has gained even more popularity. Neil Gaiman is the award-winning author of The Sandman, American Gods, and Neverwhere. Terry Pratchett is best known for his Discworld series of fantasy novels. I cannot tell who wrote what in Good Omens. The transitions are seamless.

I have owned many different editions of Good Omens over the years, yet, I only have one copy left. This isn’t because I chose to offload some, but because the books were lent to people and were never returned. I think it says something about the quality of the book that it gets perma-borrowed so frequently. I know that I am not the only fan of the book who has this problem. People just can’t stop stealing Good Omens, and Terry Pratchett’s books were considered the most shoplifted in Great Britain.

I hadn’t read the book in a couple of years, so this time around, I decided to go with the full-cast audiobook produced by HarperAudio. This was my first time experiencing it as an audiobook. I wasn’t sure how this would translate since the text version of the book contains a multitude of footnotes, but I needn’t have worried because it works beautifully. There are fifteen different actors for this audiobook, and the cast includes the same actors as the film adaptation. The actors do a phenomenal job bringing the characters to life. With such a large, talented cast, this feels more like a radio play than it does an audiobook and is a master class in voice acting. I found myself just as engaged listening to it as I was reading the text version or watching the show. Good Omens is one of those rare gems where the film adaptation is just as good as the text version.

Good Omens contains biting social commentary about pressing issues such as climate change, pollution, war, capitalism, mutually assured destruction, and grid-locked traffic jams. It also delves into religious history, witch burnings, and misogyny, miraculously transforming these heavy topics into a literary confection as sweet and light as meringue. The book makes use of a wide cast of characters including angels, demons, witch hunters, a sex worker, children, insurance brokers, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Their interactions with one another make me laugh aloud.

If you are a fan of Monty Python, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and stories about the antichrist, this is the book for you. If you are appalled by blasphemous takes on Christianity, stay far, far away.

Book Review: Sexus Animalis by Emmanuelle Pouydebat Illustrated by Julie Terrazzoni Translated by Erik Butler

By Shantell Powell

Sexus Animalis is a beautifully illustrated and easy-to-read overview of sex in the animal kingdom. It was originally written in French by Emmanuelle Pouydebat, a permanent researcher employed by the French National Centre for Scientific Research at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Julie Terrazzoni’s illustrations are frame-worthy, and I’d gladly hang them in my house, although upon a double take visitors may wonder why I have a gay dolphin orgy on my wall.

I was raised with a repressive religious background where anything that was not cisgender, heterosexual monogamy was considered an abomination. However, I was also raised on the land around all sorts of animals, which made me wonder why cishet monogamists are outnumbered by “unnatural” sexual practices taking place in the natural world. This book provides a fascinating selection of how cishet sexual interactions are just one small facet of what is actually natural.

While there is nothing unnatural happening in nature, there sure are all sorts of things that some humans may find fantastically strange or kinky. Within the animal kingdom, there are all sorts of sex organs and ways they fit together. Polyandrous, polygamous, monogamous, and self-impregnating creatures abound. So do bisexual, heterosexual, homosexual, and interspecies relations. Masturbation is common to many species, and some creatures spontaneously change sex (the basis for Jurassic Park is real).

Penises come in all shapes, sizes, and abilities. Some are detachable. Some are spiked. Some are doubled-up. Some have four heads, and some are prehensile, which comes in handy for scratching itchy bellies. But while there are reams of papers written on penises, there is a woeful dearth of literature on clitorises and vaginas. It seems misogyny in scientific research has spread outside the study of humans. This is a big hole in our knowledge, and for what? The author invites researchers to rectify this oversight. Other sex organs are equally as amazing as penises.

The book is well designed. The typeface is easy to read and has ample margins. I find that many books cram the text too close to the middle of the book, which means you have to spread the pages so far you risk cracking the spine. This is not the case here, and to top it off, the paper is also of high quality.

Although this book is written with an adult audience in mind, it is the sort of book I would have loved as a child. Scientific terminology is used, but the book does not shy away from common slang or puns, which makes me wonder what slang and puns are in the original French version. Kudos to translator Erik Butler for making sure the English version of Sexus Animalis is easy to understand and fun to read. I tore through this book at record speed and enjoyed sharing the illustrations with my housemates. You’ll have all sorts of wild trivia to share after reading this one, and a whole new way of looking at the birds and the bees.

Thank you to MIT Press for a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: Potiphar's Wife by Mesu Andrews

By Shantell Powell

Content warning: racism, enslavement, domestic abuse, sexual assault, miscarriage

Mesu Andrews is a Christian author whose books are inspired by her faith. Her novel Isaiah’s Daughter won the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association’s Christy Award, and her website offers Bible study and ministry.

Potiphar is a figure in both the Quran and the Old Testament of the Bible. He is the captain of the Egyptian Pharoah’s guard and purchaser of the Hebrew Joseph (of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat fame) as a slave. Impressed by Joseph’s abilities and intellect, Potiphar puts him in charge of his household. Potiphar’s wife Zully, who has a reputation for infidelity, attempts to seduce Joseph. When Joseph doesn’t acquiesce, Zully accuses him of rape.

False rape accusations are a hot topic. They’ve been weaponized—extensively used to fire up racist lynch mobs against Black men. They are also a point of contention for those who are predisposed to disbelieve survivors of sexual assault. The tale of Potiphar’s wife is the seminal false rape accusation story, and I wanted to see how it was approached.

Research-wise, this book is excellent. The author does a good job describing the culture, the religion, and the differences between social classes. Xenophobia and religious prejudice are powerful forces in this book, and Egyptian, Cretan, and Hebrew characters regard one another with varying degrees of mistrust or disdain. The book includes a lot of politicking and intrigue, and sexual control and racism are running themes.

I had a difficult time getting into this book. The story is told from multiple points of view with Zully as the main character. I find her to be an unlikeable protagonist, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I have enjoyed books with despicable protagonists before. The problem here is that although I can get inside her head as a reader. I cannot understand what motivates her to make the decisions she does. She waffles like Hamlet but feels two-dimensional. The book begins well before she ever meets Potiphar or Joseph and shows her obsession with returning to Crete. Trapped in a foreign country, life gets worse and worse for her, and when she eventually makes her move on Joseph, the decision seems to come out of nowhere. The choice doesn’t seem to be in character, and I am unable to suspend my disbelief.

I found the other characters more agreeable. I liked Potiphar until about halfway through the book, Joseph seems like a decent enough chap, and Ahira, Zully’s maidservant, is an interesting character too. I think that if one of these other characters had been the protagonist, the story may have been more enjoyable for me to read. I just can’t wrap my head around Zully’s inconsistencies. That being said, other readers have enjoyed Zully’s character very much, so this could just be my own personal taste at play here.

Potiphar’s Wife may appeal to readers of The Red Tent by Anita Diamant or The Hippopotamus Marsh by Pauline Gedge.

Thank you, Penguin Random House, for a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: Death, The Deluxe Edition by Neil Gaiman

By Shantell Powell

Content warning: death 

Neil Gaiman is a writer who has reached superstar status. His author talks and signings sell out weeks in advance. His first major claim to fame was The Sandman, an award-winning comic book series extending off and on from 1989–2015. The Sandman was one of the first graphic novels to ever grace the New York Times bestseller list and won many awards, including the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, and a whole boatload of Eisner Awards. The series features the family of beings known as the Endless: Dream, Destruction, Destiny, Despair, Desire, Delirium, and Death. Death first appears in The Sandman No. 8 (August 1989).

Death: The Deluxe Edition is a collection of each of Death’s major appearances from The Sandman as well as from the Death miniseries and one-offs. In case you are unfamiliar with the character, Death is no cloaked grim reaper carrying a scythe. No, this version of Death is a perky goth girl with cat’s eye makeup and teased-up black hair, typically dressed in a black tank top and jeans while sporting a big ankh. I was a goth chick in the 1990s, and she was my style icon.

The stories offer a microcosm of late 20th century counterculture. Goths and punks abound, and the stories feature a diverse cast of characters from a wide variety of intersectional backgrounds. Decades later, the stories still hold up, although some of the earliest illustration work is pretty raw and unpolished. It begins with a foreword by Tori Amos, friend to Neil Gaiman and the inspiration for the Delirium character.

My favourite stories are from Death: The High Cost of Living, illustrated masterfully by Chris Bachalo. The collection includes an extensive Death gallery painted/illustrated by a who’s who list of artists: Michael Zulli, Dave McKean, Rebecca Guay, Moebius, Bryan Talbot, Gahan Wilson, Michael Wm. Kaluta, Jill Thompson, Clive Barker, Charles Vess, and more. The book ends with a one-off on AIDS, where Death, aided by John Constantine from the Hellblazer comic book series, explains safe sex and demonstrates how to use a condom.

Although the colour quality is superb throughout the book, I am disappointed with the layout and the thinness of the paper. On pages with a lot of white space, the material from the reverse side is visible. On dark or busy pages, this is not so much of an issue. My main complaint is with the layout: not enough white space goes around the comic cells, which means that in order to see the art and read the text, I must open the book so wide I’m afraid I’ll crack its spine. Because of this and the thinness of the paper, I don’t think the book will survive a lot of readings. That being said, the book itself is gorgeous, with a full-colour glossy dust jacket and an equally beautiful wraparound design on the book cover.

With Audible’s recent full-cast audiobooks of The Sandman and the forthcoming The Sandman Netflix series, I expect the comic book series and its spin-offs (including Death: The Deluxe Edition) will be flying off the shelves.

Thank you, DC Comics, for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by V.E. Schwab

By Shantell Powell

Content warning: violence, starvation, emotional manipulation, survival sex, depression, drug use

V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a dark fantasy romance with queer protagonists and a cast of shadowy, ephemeral characters spanning centuries and continents. If you are into vampire books, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue just might scratch that itch. Although Addie is not a vampire, the story includes such vampire tropes as immortality, agelessness, and a cruel sire.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is the story of a Faustian bargain. In 1714 France, a young artist is disillusioned with her life. She does not want to be a wife, and she does not want to be ordinary. Desperate to escape what she considers a boring, meaningless life, she prays for freedom and immortality without considering the ramifications. A dark god grants her this wish. She is given what she asks for, but the gift comes with a terrible side effect: no one will remember her. If someone were to be having a conversation with her and then leave the room, they would forget she ever existed, and she would appear as a stranger to them. To top it all off, Addie cannot say her name or leave a mark or a memory upon the world. Since Addie is an artist like her father, being unable to leave any marks is especially devastating. The story pairs the despair of loneliness and being forgotten with a joie de vivre and a love of learning.

After three hundred years of existing as a shadow and being tormented by the dark god, Addie encounters something new: someone who remembers her.

The story is told from the point of view of Addie and by the only person who remembers her. The book uses the third person point of view and includes epistolary elements.

This was my first time reading a book by V.E. Schwab, and I was enchanted by their writing. The language is lyrical, and some of the sentences are so lovely that I read them again and again. Schwab has an excellent command of language, and their poetic prose is so immersive that I could gladly swim in it. That being said, there are places where the manuscript could have used some editing, because as pretty as the words are, the story gets bogged down. Story threads are introduced and then abandoned, never to be picked up again. The most egregious example of this is when Addie becomes a spy during World War II, but the reader doesn’t get to experience any of it. It is only mentioned in passing but could have been an excellent balm to the flagging middle section of the book.

Faults notwithstanding, I do recommend this book for its delicious premise and gorgeous prose. I look forward to reading more of V.E. Schwab’s books. I expect they will get better and better as their career progresses.

Book Review: Blood Scion by Deborah Falaye

By Shantell Powell

Content warning: extremely graphic depictions of violence against Black people, including sexual violence, genocide, murder, and enslavement of children

Blood Scion is the powerful debut novel by Nigerian-Canadian author Deborah Falaye. It is the first book of a forthcoming young adult series, and it ends on a cliff-hanger. Blood Scion does not shy away from the awful realities of colonialism. It is an unforgiving and action-packed examination of what it means to be colonized, and what it means to be exterminated like vermin for the colour of your skin or for following the “wrong” religion.  It is relentless, dire, and ultraviolent—by far the most violent YA novel I have ever read. It is also the first YA book I’ve ever read which takes the reader through the ancient military practice/punishment of decimation. The story has a basis in the current and historical colonial contexts of genocide, slavery, and child soldiers. Using Yoruba-Nigerian mythology as a foundation, Blood Scion takes place in the land of Nagea, a land which has been brutalised by the invading Lucis for generations.

The Lucis are running a campaign of genocide to slaughter all descendants of the Orisha.  To do so, they conscript Nagean teenagers to do the dirty work. During basic training, the children are brainwashed and tortured both physically and mentally. They are forced to commit acts of unspeakable violence against their own friends and family, exchanging their humanity for their survival. Those who live through the process become soldiers in the Lucis army. 

Sloane is the protagonist, a fifteen-year old girl and descendant of the Orisha. The Orisha are deities of the Yoruba religion, and their descendants have powerful magic coursing through their veins. The descendants of the Orisha are called Scions, and it is almost impossible for them to hide from their oppressors. Their magical abilities cannot be hidden for long because not only are they difficult to control, but they are blatant when they manifest. Sloane is brimming with fire magic and does not know how to keep it under wraps. With the slaughter of so many Scions, survivors do not have the knowledge needed to control their powers. 

Blood Scion is a revenge fantasy, but it is also the story of resilience and friendship in the face of overwhelming oppression. The pacing of this book is as fast and hard-hitting as machine gun fire. I found it to be a very quick read once I got past the first couple of chapters. Although there are moments of tenderness in the book, they are few and far between. I would like to have seen some comic relief to break up the gut-wrenching trauma.  Reading this book is like speeding through an abattoir with your eyes and mouth wide open.

Blood Scion will appeal to fans of Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death and Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone.  

Thank you, Harper Collins, for a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: The Light of the Midnight Stars by Rena Rossner

By Shantell Powell

Content warning: violent death, murder, grief, sexual assault, anti-Semitism

Rena Rossner is a literary agent with an MA in history, living in Israel. She is inspired by the stories of her ancestors from Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Hungary, and Romania. She has a keen interest in folklore and fairy tales and is the author of The Sisters of the Winter Wood and Eating the Bible. Her newest novel, The Light of the Midnight Stars, is a historical fantasy with strong roots in Judaism and storytelling. Jewish folklore, the Torah, and kabbalistic teachings make up the skeleton of this book. Its universe is rich with shapeshifters, miracle workers, voivodes, mystics, and celestial beings. The writing is lyrical, and everyone has stories to tell. Some of the stories feel familiar to me from my knowledge of the Old Testament, but other ancient stories are new to me because I was not raised in the Jewish tradition. I expect people versed in those traditions will get much more out of this book than I did. I enjoyed being introduced to Jewish religious practices and customs. If you are into queer Jewish fairy tales with female protagonists, this is the book for you.

The protagonists are Hannah, Sarah, and Levana, the three daughters of the great Rabbi Isaac Solomonar and his wife Esther. They are descendants of the mystical tradition of King Solomon and they live in an increasingly anti-Semitic world. The story takes place in fifteenth-century Hungary when a strange black mist—a sentient sort of evil—spreads its way across Europe and is blamed upon the Jews. I interpret the mist as symbolic of the bubonic plague and xenophobia.

The book changes points of view between the three Orthodox sisters. Hannah, Sarah, and Levana each have their own sacred magical talents, personal tragedies, and complicated relationships with the rest of their family. When intense persecution forces them all into hiding, they escape to a more religiously tolerant area in Wallachia and pose as Christians.   

The book follows the themes of love, loss, trauma, and resilience in a time when it was dangerous to display one’s heritage. The overarching mood is oppressive and foreboding, but the text is not without hope. The Light of the Midnight Stars shows the lengths the young women must go to ensure their family’s survival.

I found the plot sometimes difficult to follow. I got lost in some of the stories and needed to flip back a few pages to re-centre myself. If you are at ease with intricate fantasy plotlines, this shouldn’t be a problem for you. If you like your stories straightforward, you may find this book challenging.

My biggest fault with the book is not with the content or the story but with one of the editing choices. Whenever the text is not written in English, the words in Jewish languages are italicised. I think this is an unfortunate practice which centres English as the norm and portrays other languages as curiosities.

This book will appeal to fans of Naomi Novik, Madeline Miller, or Jordanna Max Brodsky.

Thank you, Hachette Book Group, for a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: Gender Swapped Fairy Tales by Karrie Fransman and Jonathan Plackett

By Shantell Powell

Gender Swapped Fairy Tales is exactly what it sounds like. The stories are culled from Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, an anthology series published for children between 1889 and 1913. Aside from the gender swapping, the stories are virtually identical to their predecessors. These stories are familiar to most folks in the western hemisphere and include such classics as “Jacqueline and the Beanstalk,” “Gretel and Hansel,” “Mr. Rapunzel,” and “Frau Rumpelstiltzkin.” 

A few spurious claims are made in the authors’ notes. According to Karrie Fransman, Lang’s Fairy Books “collected the very best tales from all over the world.” This is not true: there are at least a couple of continents’ worth of nations and cultures whose folktales were not considered for inclusion. The stories within are primarily European in origin. I also take umbrage with the statement, “most cultures divide gender into ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine.’”  Gender does not work this way for many non-Western cultures.  For example, in the Anishinaabemowin language, the genders are not male and female, but animate, inanimate, and sacred. The authors describe nonbinary genders as a strictly modern phenomenon, and in doing so, demonstrate a colonial bias.

That being said, it’s interesting to read these European fairy tales with their strong male/female binary flipped. The gender-swapping of the stories was achieved by means of an algorithm programmed by creative technologist Jonathan Plackett. Lang’s text (which is in the public domain) was fed into the program, and with a bit of tinkering to change dresses to suits and Jacks to Jacquelines, was published without being otherwise rewritten.  Unfortunately, the book reads like a rush job. There are a few spots where the gender-swapping is incomplete and the sentences do not make sense. Take, for example, an exchange in Handsome and the Beast which goes as follows:

However, as she did not seem at all ferocious, and only said gruffly: 

“Good evening, Handsome,” he answered cheerfully and managed to conceal his terror. Then the Beast asked him how he had been amusing himself, and he told her all the rooms he had seen.

I read this several times and am still confused as to who is saying “Good evening, Handsome.” Is there a missing sentence? There are both a she and a he saying it, and nonbinary characters do not make an appearance in any of the stories….or do they?

In Jacqueline and the Beanstalk, a nonbinary cow makes an appearance. For whatever reason, instead of swapping in a bull for the cow, the cow is instead referred to as “he.” I also noted typographical errors, including hyphenated words which should not be hyphenated, likely hold-outs from copied-and-pasted text.  

Despite these problems, the illustrations and design work are top notch. The typeface is easy to read, and the layout is spacious and clean. The watercolour illustrations by Karrie Fransman have a bright and modern palette yet retain the timeless quality of the fairy tales.  It is unfortunate that more care was not taken with the proofreading and editing, because the book itself is a thing of beauty.

Thank you, Publishing Group Canada, for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!

Book Review: Metaflesh by Evan J. Peterson

By Shantell Powell

Content Warning: sexual content, body horror, white supremacist iconography, swear words 

Metaflesh is written by Evan J. Peterson, author of The PrEP Diaries: A Safe(r) Sex Memoir and DragStar!,  the world’s first drag performer role-playing game. Metaflesh is a book of verse and prose from the point of view of Frankenstein’s Monster. The reflections are inspired not only by Mary Shelley’s seminal work (double entendre fully intended) but also by the pop culture descendants of her novel. Sources include a wide variety of Frankenstein/mad scientist movies and song lyrics. The book also contains themes of Jewish folklore, queer culture, camp, and a lot of David Cronenberg-style body horror. The book covers the gamut of the Monster’s experiences through over a century of movies and songs, and portrays the Monster as both gender-fluid and a sort of chimerical film critic, reviewing portrayals of their self through lyric poetry and flash fiction.

This is an ingenious book of metafiction. Just as Dr. Frankenstein cut up different people and stitched the bits together, Peterson cut up and reassembled his sources, turning them into something greater than the sum of their parts. Borrowing from William S. Burroughs cut-up technique, he splices together Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with F.T. Marinetti’s Manifesto del Futurismo (Futurist Manifesto) and with J. G. Ballard’s essay, “Why I want to F*ck Ronald Reagan.” He apostrophizes the sexually explicit films of avant-garde queer Canadian creator Bruce LaBruce and doesn’t forget to include General Mills’ Frankenberry breakfast cereal or select lines from Mommy Dearest and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  The combined imagery of classical Greek mythology, white supremacy, drag queens, Judaism, and zombie erotica do not merge into a hot mess but meld together into a deliciously readable book.   

This literary retrospective is sad, funny, quirky, surgically precise, and captivating. I was never bored and didn’t skip through parts. I tore through my first reading at speed and have been taking my time through subsequent readings. The only spot which slows me down, pulling me to a frowning halt, is a simile in the poem, “His Name is In Me”:  “gross as the tallest savage.” Although I’m aware that white supremacist imagery is intentionally used throughout the book—punching up, not down—the use of the word “savage” feels out of place here. It is a racial slur used against Black and Indigenous peoples and stands out awkwardly in a poem strongly based in Judaic imagery. If it is a slur used against Jews, I am unaware, but this is my only quibble with the entire book.

I’d like to thank Evan Peterson for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.  This is my favourite book of poetry that I’ve read in the past few years.

Book Review: Providence (Compendium) by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows

By Shantell Powell

Content Warning:  sexual violence, harm to children, racism, eugenics, homophobia, misogyny 

Providence was written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Jacen Burrows. It was first released as a monthly/bimonthly comic book series in 2015 and was rereleased in July 2021 in compendium form. Alan Moore is famous for such graphic novels and comic books as The Watchmen, Swamp Thing, and V for Vendetta. Providence is his final foray into comic books, and what a swan song it is. The back cover blurb declares Providence to be the Watchmen of horror, and I agree with that assessment. I believe this graphic novel will become a classic of literary horror.  

Alan Moore is a ceremonial magician, and his nuanced knowledge of the occult is on full display in Providence. He is also a filmmaker, and his visual direction is cinematic and specific. Jacen Burrows’s crisp, clean illustrations are crucial to the magical realism of the setting. Kurt Hathaway’s lettering is put to good use: Providence is in epistolary form and contains pages and pages of dense, handwritten text. Juan Rodriguez did the colour work, and his sombre palette adds to the unease of the book. The story plays with a lot of tropes (cursed books, creepy cultists, ancient evils, descent into madness, breaking the third wall), and does so with surgical precision.  

The story takes place in New England not long after World War I, but it does not remain stuck in time or place. The protagonist is Robert Black—a queer Jewish reporter whose ex-lover has just died unexpectedly. Shaken by the death, Black takes a sabbatical from his job at the newspaper. He is researching an urban legend about a book called Sous Le Monde. Supposedly, anyone who reads the book ends up dead. He is intrigued by this and thinks researching the story will inspire him to write a novel. His research takes him throughout rural New England where he meets Howard Phillips Lovecraft and experiences increasingly unsettling events. 

In case you are unfamiliar, Lovecraft was an extremely influential horror writer. His sense of horror was on a cosmic scale but was influenced heavily by his xenophobia and ideals of racial purity.  Providence is a metafictional Lovecraftian story containing Lovecraft himself. Over the past decade, his fictional entity Cthulhu has become a kitschy part of pop culture, inspiring bobblehead and kawaii incarnations.  

Providence strips away all the kitsch to reveal just how disturbing and terrifying the Cthulhu mythos actually is, and just how dehumanizing things like eugenics, class warfare, and homophobia are. If you would like to revisit the Cthulhu mythos with fresh eyes, you need to read this. But be warned—you may want a brain-bleach chaser.