Decadence and ruin

I can’t remember who recommended me Lara Elena Donnelly’s Amberlough, but I like spy stuff so when I remembered I’d heard of it I popped it onto ye olde library waitlist, where it came in just at the perfect time to disrupt my carefully scheduled plans to reread both Locked Tomb books by the end of winter break. Ah, well. I don’t particularly regret it, as it was a very entertaining book.

It doesn’t actually have any fantasy elements, in that there doesn’t seem to be any magic, but it’s nonetheless a spec fic book in that it takes place in a fictional world that seems to be loosely based on interwar Germany, with Amberlough City the decadent, cabaret-filled Berlin. Everyone is having a grand time except for the mathematically improbable rise of a militantly uptight political faction that hates fun and likes stealing elections, which should sound familiar to anyone with even a minimal familiarity with German history. We have three viewpoint characters, more or less: Cyril DePaul, an intelligence agent who fucks up real bad and winds up supporting some people he doesn’t really like in order to save his own ass; Aristide Makricosta, a performer at the Bumble Bee Cabaret with a side hustle as a drug kingpin; and Cordelia Lehane, the lead stripper at the Bumble Bee Cabaret, with whatever side hustles she can get. These three work sometimes together and sometimes separately as they make increasingly desperate decisions to survive the political disintegration around them, and they are all enormously slutty, to a degree that is exhausting even to read about. It is very funny and very thrilling and very violent, which are all things I definitely like in a decadent gay spy thriller. It’s a trilogy, so I will probably get around to reading the other two sometime this year, as the sequels have blessedly already been published, which is not the case for all the other trilogies I’m currently working my way through.

Book two of 2021: A reread

 It is always dreadfully difficult to review Edward Gorey books, because it’s not always possible to figure out what’s actually going on in them, and it doesn’t get any easier the second time around. The Other Statue is just as bafflingly delightful as it was the first time I read it.