Blood, blight, darkness, slaughter

Despite having been somewhat disappointed in The Witches of New York I decided that I was indeed going to add All The Witch Books Whose Titles I Keep Getting Mixed Up to my library holds list, and thus my Christmas plane reading this weekend ended up being Alexis Henderson’s horror novel The Year of the Witching.

It is perhaps a mark of how tired I am with everything that when I read the basic premise–feminist horror-fantasy about a misogynistic, Puritan-esque society getting its comeuppance–I was not quite as excited as I have historically been about that sort of thing and was instead worried that it would be, perhaps, a bit done, or perhaps that it would have the same sort of glib girl-power sensibility as Witches of New York that thought it was fresher and more radical than it was. But I had heard only good things about The Year of the Witching whereas I had in fact heard in advance that Witches of New York was a bit, hm, white.

I need not have worried, because even with living here in Massachusetts, a 45-minute drive from the tasteless Gothic Disneyland of Salem, where I learn stuff about Puritans all the livelong day whether I care about it or not (I do, though; they were interesting), The Year of the Witching was still weird and new and different. For starters, the religion of Bethel, while in many respects matching quite closely what I’ve learned about agrarian Puritan colonies in the times of the witch trials, a lot of it is… bloodier. Animal sacrifice features prominently, and marriages are marked by having a sigil cut into the bride’s forehead, in a ceremony known as “cutting.” Polygamy is common, with the “prophets”--the high-ranking men of the church–claiming more wives the higher up the hierarchy they are. Bethel is a very, very closed community, living in fear of the Darkwoods, where the Mother and her malevolent witch followers are in power, and of the “heathen” cities of the rest of the world. Obviously as readers we are inclined to be at least a bit Team Darkwoods even though we know this is a horror novel and the malevolent witches are probably going to do malevolent stuff.

Our protagonist, Immanuelle, is the orphan daughter of two teenagers who were executed for a series of crimes that centered on their trying to be together instead of quietly letting Immanuelle’s mum get sold off at the tender age of 16 to the current Prophet, who is both mean and several years her senior. Admittedly this series of crimes did involve Immanuelle’s mom trying to murder the Prophet with his own sacred dagger but all things considered, this was a sensible and righteous course of action and I support it fully. Immanuelle has thus grown up under the shadow of her mother’s excommunication and is not very popular. However, despite her attempts to keep her head down and not make a fuss, Immanuelle finds herself all mixed up in a series of horrifying plagues that start afflicting the town, and is stuck in the role of “only person who can stop them” since they are definitely mixed up with her mother’s history, if she can only figure out how. As such, with periodic help from her obligatory male love interest (the prophet’s son and heir, whomst has questions about what a dick his father is), Immanuelle has to uncover her family history and set Bethel on a path to, to put it bluntly, not being the sort of place that people wind up with good reasons to set horrible plagues upon.

Overall I found this book to be pleasantly creepy and quite engaging. It certainly had some familiar beats but mostly was able to keep me wondering what fucked-up thing was going to happen next.

A lovely boating holiday

The 69th book I read in 2021 obviously had to be a comic novel. I went with Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, which has been sitting obliviously on my Kindle since I read Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog god knows how many years ago.

This classic travelogue concerns three young men of the nineteenth century–our narrator, J., and his friends George and Harris–and their dog, Montmorency, as they decide to take a two-week boating excursion up and down the Thames. Unsurprisingly for a comic novel, things go poorly and everyone makes fools of themselves. Three Men in a Boat is basically the 19th century predecessor to works like EuroTrip or the National Lampoon’s Vacation series.

There is not, per se, a plot; the trip in question is more of a structure to hang jokes upon, the structure in question being the length of the Thames. Many of the jokes don’t really have anything to do with the trip at all; our narrator continually digresses and goes on random tirades about everything from British history to additional stupid things that George, Harris, Montmorency, and himself had done at other times. The narrator’s main trait is his absolutely stunning lack of self-awareness, which works quite effectively to ensure the reader never feels too much sympathy for him and instead thoroughly enjoys his constant discomfort. (It is also the closest thing to a deep insight into the foibles of human nature that the book provides, although it might be giving it credit for more subtlety than it has to characterize it as “commentary” on the levels of lack-of-self-awareness that the human mind is capable of. It is just Jokes At J.’s Expense.)

The two biggest issues I had with the book are neither of them the author’s fault; one is simply that my cheap ebook version replaced what I assume were illustrations with odd little notations that served only to tease me that I was missing out on illustrations, and the other is that it has been just over 130 years since the book was written and I simply don’t know enough about the 1880’s English boating scene to follow half of what they’re talking about. I don’t even know much about the modern American boating scene; I’m not rich enough to be part of it.

At any rate, if you like laughing at self-absorbed Englishmen, this book should elicit many a sensible chuckle.

Blight in the PNW

For plane reading on the way back from New York, I decided to settle into Cherie Priest’s steampunk doorstopper Boneshaker. It was a 45-minute flight but we did get to the airport stupid early, so it seemed necessary to start a 400-page novel. Fortunately, I enjoy big fat ridiculous steampunk novels here in the dark days of winter, and this one was pretty good!

It takes place in an alternate version of Seattle where Seattle has been quite substantially destroyed, and a big wall has been built around it to contain a mysterious contagion called the Blight. The Blight was started after a wacky inventor named Leviticus Blue who built a big mining rig at the behest of the Russians to dig gold in the Yukon, and instead took it on a joyride underneath Seattle and robbed all the banks.

Our dual protagonists here are Briar, Leviticus’ widow, and her fifteen-year-old son, Zeke. Zeke is curious about his dead family members, mainly his dad and his grandfather, a policeman who heroically jailbroke a bunch of people who had been left to die in the evacuation of Seattle. Briar doesn’t tell Zeke much of anything, so he rather predictably runs away and sneaks into the walled-up ruins of Seattle to go find things out. Briar, of course, goes after him, and thus commences several hundred pages of foggy, zombie-filled post-apocalyptic steampunk adventures featuring many dodgy but colorful characters and lots of gas masks and airships.

First of all I must say that reading a whole book about people who have to keep their masks on except under very specific closed circumstances, otherwise they shall catch the blight and die, is much more nerve-wracking to read now than it was when the book was written in 2009. On the other hand, at least the masks we have to wear aren’t full-head gas masks with goggles and seals and stuff.

I have absolutely nothing deep or insightful to say about this book whatsoever. It was a steampunk adventure book, and steampunk adventures it certainly did provide! If you want 400 pages of steampunk adventuriness I recommend it highly.