bloodygranuaile

I decided that this spooky season I was finally going to read the OG of dark academia: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I borked the timeline a bit and ended up reading the first 100 pages or so in early November and the rest of it in early December, although frankly it also makes a very good gloomy early December book, so I’m not real broken up about it.

The Secret History is not really a whodunnit since the book kicks off by telling you that they did it. The question here is, why? How did our very ordinary, if pretentiously gloomy, narrator, end up committing murder? To this end the book’s long, detailed, almost Victorian approach to giving you all the context at great length really pays off, building up a very Gothic air of suspense and dread as the noose tightens slowly around the characters.

Our narrator here is Richard Papen, a lower-middle-class boy from a flat postwar California suburb, who is an ordinary type of misfit as far as misfits go, and therefore probably exactly the kind of narrator to be relatable to the type of people who would pick up a book like The Secret History: someone who finds the mass-produced newness of postwar suburbia to be lacking a certain depth or life or picturesqueness, bored by the plastic and fluorescent lighting and having the only discernible cultural value be making enough money. Richard is passive in a lot of ways–including some pretty terrible ones–but his “morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” causes him to rouse himself enough to take the initiative to transfer from a midrange college in California to a pricey, older liberal arts institution in Vermont, Hampden College, the kind of place with seasons and pine trees and buildings that are old enough to be considered historical by US standards.

In a small act of rebellion against his “you should take pre-med so you can be a doctor because doctors make money” type parents, Richard had in California started taking classes in Ancient Greek. When he comes to Hampden as an English major (an eminently practical major that has nonetheless become a byline for impractical majors, at least by idiot parents who believe everything they read in the news), he runs into a dilemma: He basically isn’t allowed to take Ancient Greek as an elective and remain an English major. In order to take Ancient Greek at all, he has to jettison everything except his gen ed requirements and only take Classics with the school’s only Classics teacher, a worldly, affable old eccentric named Julian. There are five other students who have done this, who all seem admirably picturesque to Richard: They are all rich trust fund babies who wear, like, tweed and stuff, and don’t mingle much with the hoi polloi of the school because they are busy being erudite and smoking cigarettes and otherwise being a college kid’s idea of deep and poetic. I have an enormous amount of sympathy for this, as I was also that exact type of person as a college kid and am basically just the less-idealistic and hopefully slightly less superficial version of that type of person now (look, there’s a reason I’m holed up in a 200-year-old house in a 400-year-old town, even if I did have to succumb to economic reality and learn how to behave professionally in order to land a job doing boring things for a big corporation to do it).

If “half-a-dozen students who are only allowed to take classes with one teacher and barely interact with anyone else in the school” is ringing the This Is A Cult bells in your head, you are on the right track! This clique is deeply emotionally unhealthy and its isolation leads them to into increasingly bizarre shenanigans about trying to tap into the ancient glory and power and wisdom or whatever of the ancients. Richard, as the new guy, is left out of this for a while until he is sufficiently sucked in.

The ringleader of the bad ideas band here is Henry, a reserved, dour rich kid who everyone thinks is very smart because he studies weird old stuff for fun and has a head full of esoteric knowledge that nobody else bothers acquiring in this day and age (the day and age in question being the early ‘90s; this book is about 30 years old). At some point partway through the book it is revealed that Henry’s grasp of ancient wisdom comes at the expense of having an even rudimentary understanding of modern knowledge: he doesn’t know that people landed on the moon, and he doesn’t seem to believe it’s possible that modern science could have achieved something that the vaunted ancients didn’t. Further revelations of utter cluelessness will be forthcoming at the plot-appropriate times.

Anyway, the stifling closeness of this band of fucked-up idiots and weirdos really gets dark when some of the deep dark ancient secrets shit they’re up to goes wrong, and they engage in increasingly desperate acts of covering it up. Richard learns more and more about all their seedy backstories as their facades of cool erudition start to crack. One of their number, Bunny Corcoran, a perpetually broke, gregarious, casually bigoted, borderline illiterate jock, becomes increasingly insufferable and demanding to the point where you can see the decision to murder him building up well before Henry actually gives voice to the idea. It comes as almost a relief to the reader that we don’t have to vicariously put up with Bunny’s behavior anymore, either, and can finally get to the aftermath instead. The aftermath, of course, is terrible for the classics clique, as they all become increasingly unhinged and even darker secrets start spilling out and all that Gothic stuff, as the book barrels toward its self-consciously (at least on Henry’s part) dramatic finale.

Anyway, I think this book does an excellent job of showcasing the seductive appeal of the “dark academia” thing–the desire for the weight and patina of history in one’s surroundings; the power of picturesqueness on a certain type of person; the now out-of-date promise of university as a place for a life of the mind, where you can study stuff because it’s cool and interesting and not just to develop Marketable Skills for future you to compete for jobs with. The way the desire to be cool can mislead people who think they’re above the desire to be cool because they can’t fit the mainstream definition of cool, so they create little countercultures where they can decide what’s cool, and end up recreating all the same problems with “cool” as already exist (nobody did this as full-throatedly as “geek culture” in the 2010s or so, but the dynamics on display here with the classics kids are familiar). The rot at the heart of all these prestigious elite institutions and the stories that they tell themselves about themselves.

Also, this book is insanely funny. Richard’s descriptions of everyone and everything are mean and bitchy and I enjoyed them a lot. Everyone is absurd. Everyone is very ‘90s, especially the people who are extremely determined to not be ‘90s, and the people who are stuck in the ‘60s.

Overall, A+ character work and an excellent book for people who like drama and don’t mind stories where the characters are both sympathetic and completely terrible people.

Hurrah, new Murderbot! Yes, I did preorder Martha Wells’ System Collapse as an early birthday present for myself and I did finish it within two days.

This one picks up after the events of Network Effect, and we’re still on the alien-contaminated planet, “we” in this case being Murderbot, ART, some Preservation folks, and some of ART’s crew. The task at hand is to try to wrangle the various disputing factions of colonists, who have been cut off from the rest of Corporation Rim “civilization” for four decades, and convince/help them not be sold into slave labor by the Barish-Estranza Corporation, which is trying to claim the planet as salvage. The plot thickens when the colonists reveal the existence of another faction of colonists who headed out to establish a second base near the terraforming engines halfway across the planet a few decades ago. Murderbot and co. must venture into the comms blackout zone where the terraforming engines are to try to make contact with this other group of colonists–and hope Barish-Estranza hasn’t gotten there first.

That’s the plot, more or less. Now, what the book is about, is Murderbot having PTSD, mostly.

In typical Murderbot fashion, it spends like the first third or so of the book redacting any discussion of its worst symptoms, until it really can’t avoid it anymore. This provides some fun structure even though it’s reasonably easy to see where it’s going.

The prose style is rambling and parenthetical even by Murderbot standards, which is saved from feeling like poor editing by instead being an absolutely dead-on portrayal of what obsessive, unhelpful rumination looks like when your emotional problems are interfering with your executive function, or if you’re a security cyborg, your performance reliability. Murderbot keeps its crown of Most Hashtag-Relatable Robot In Sci-Fi by outsourcing most of its self-awareness about its emotions to its therapist (“Dr. Bharadwaj says…”) and grumbling about how it knows it needs the trauma protocol, it just doesn’t want it and will totally do it later, OK? (Hey, Murderbot, remember how much you hated it when Dr. Mensah was doing the same thing a few books back?) This is saved from devolving into pretentious didacticism the same way it usually is–lots of arguing with robots, ridiculous gunfights, trying to understand humans enough to outwit them and then usually shooting them anyway, and goofy fake TV shows. (I still want to know what show Cruel Romance Personage is making fun of. I’m guessing Crazy Ex-Girlfriend?) Anyway, I enjoy these books immensely, they are my favorite comfort read.

A few Christmases ago I picked up a beautifully bound hardback copy of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla at the Strand, and then last year I subscribed to Carmilla Weekly rather than read it. This year, I decided reading the pretty book would be more fun!

Though it’s only been a year since my last reread, I once again forgot just how gay this book is. It is well-known that 19th century vampires stories–of which there are many, though for some reason every one that isn’t Dracula likes to present itself as the singular and only precursor to Dracula–are full of homoerotic subtext, and that knowledge exerts such a pull on my brain that every time I step away from Carmilla for like five seconds I apparently start thinking that it applies here, too. This is incorrect. It is not subtext. I swear to God one of these years I will remember that the homoeroticism in this one is just regular text.

At any rate, it’s such an excellent little creepy read! I swear it gets better every time I read it. Just a perfect little bite-size (heh) vampire story for October.

Sometime when I wasn’t looking, another Craft book came out. This one is called Dead Country and it promises to be the beginning of the Craft Wars series. It’s a lot shorter than Ruin of Angels, clocking in at just under 250 pages. Therefore, I was able to devour the entire thing in less than one weekend.

After the big, planes-spanning drama of Ruin of Angels, this one seemed–at least at first–much more limited in scope. We’re back with our series-starting protagonist Tara Abernathy, now going home to the desert farming community of Edgemont to attend her father’s funeral. Tara had never particularly fit in well in this rinky-dink village on the edge of the Badlands, even before they chased her out of town with pitchforks for witchcraft, and it doesn’t get any less uncomfortable when she shows back up in her fancy suit with her body covered in glyphs.

Tara’s plan to get in, attend the funeral, and get out is foiled by an attack from the Raiders, whose black magic curse is somehow different than it used to be–threaded through with some sort of white fibrous substance that seems to lend it extra vitality and malevolence. Tara ends up staying to help save Edgemont and take down the Raiders; to do so she has to communicate with the other people in the town in order to build wards that define and protect the town as understood by its inhabitants. There’s all kinds of heartwarming character growth and also some sick-ass wizard battles. And behind it all is the threat of bigger, even more fucked-up things than the old God Wards–big spidery things among the stars, and the possibility of the creation of a god born of Craft. It’s definitely a setup to the bigger arc that I assume the Craft Wars series will follow, and it’s definitely an engaging one! I will for sure be reading Wicked Problems when it releases in April.

I’m working through my Peebles Classic Library volumes this year, apparently, and also going to the beach occasionally, so my latest beach read was Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with a bonus of its little-heralded (for good reason, it turns out) sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The volume, as opposed to the two separate books within it, bears the more recognizable title of merely Robinson Crusoe, leaving me confused about whether I should consider myself to have just read two books or one. For ease of reviewing I am going with one.

While Crusoe is probably the most famous of Defoe’s stories among small children (although I’m sure most of them aren’t reading the original 1710’s text) and Moll Flanders is probably the most famous among English major types who know it’s considered the first English-language novel, my own familiarity with Defoe’s writing has mostly been the excerpts from Journal of a Plague Year that made their way into the Pearson Prentice Hall readers I edited a million of back in 2011-2012, and endless citations of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, which pop up in every single history book about pirates ever written, and while to be scrupulously fair it is highly disputed if Captain Johnson was really Daniel Defoe, it appears that every pirate book must name-drop Defoe anyway. I’ve certainly consumed my fair share of lost-on-a-deserted-island media, to the point where I’m unsure if it’s really fair to credit that whole genre to Defoe or if he was just real fast in getting there before a lot of other people.

At any rate, I figured I had a reasonably decent idea of what I was getting into when I started reading this. I’ve read my share of 18th century literature and I know it was all written by chronically drunk people with new and exciting coffee addictions and no access to a backspace key, and tends to read as such. I’ve also read a huge amount of British Empire Fun Explorey Adventure Fiction, from various time periods and in various stages of attempting (and various stages of succeeding) to correct the absolutely rancid assumptions built into the British Empire’s… whole deal, basically. So I wasn’t exactly surprised when Robinson Crusoe turned out to be full of imperialist English white guy bullshit; examining the assumptions built into these early novels is part of what makes them so rich for analysis.

What I turned out to not be quite as prepared for as I thought I was was the specific inconsistencies in the book, giving me constant tonal whiplash. This isn’t a mediocre book; it is just simultaneously a very good and a very bad book, which probably evens out to a mediocre book, but calling it a mediocre book makes it sound like I’m saying it’s consistently mediocre, and it’s not. A lot of it is really engaging and fun and handily indulges the fantasy of self-sufficient problem-solving and Rising To Challenges that provides the survival narrative with so much of its psychological draw, even though these days that sort of “vaguely imagining yourself doing ill-defined problem-solving shenanigans” seems better fitted to games. Robinson has to figure out how to hand-make all sorts of basic things from scratch with no guidance from any other humans, only items scavenged from the shipwreck that brought him there, which is always an interesting constraint to put on someone since it’s so different from how humans have historically pulled off doing literally anything.

The trouble begins when literally any other human being shows up, as it seems to require a minimum of one (1) other living creature who is not a parrot for Crusoe’s imperialist-white-Englishman worldview to reassert itself in ways that are predictably violent and entitled, but also sometimes less-predictably stupid. Like, there is a long history of white Christians renaming any non-white non-Christians they run into because they don’t think “pagan” names really count for anything, and they don’t feel like learning how to pronounce anything that’s not in one of a handful of European languages, and generally being provincial assholes about it. This is still a political hot topic sometimes so I’m familiar with the litany of culturally dominant excuses to blow off or change other people’s names. What I wasn’t quite prepared for was two entire books written without even the slightest awareness on the part of either Crusoe or, apparently, Defoe, that non-white people even have names for white people to change. I knew that there was a native character called Friday who was going to be in this book, but I sort of subconsciously assumed there would be some sort of reason, however half-assed or imperialist, for Crusoe to rename the man Friday–maybe he had amnesia, maybe he didn’t want to tell Crusoe his name, maybe his name is something Crusoe can’t pronounce properly but sounds sort of like “Friday,” Idunno, I hadn’t read the book yet–but it turns out that Crusoe, from his own perspective at least, doesn’t re-name Friday; it simply never occurs to him to ask in the first place, and Friday, a character written so servilely that I am offended on his behalf at almost every single sentence written about him, never says anything or in any way behaves like his name has ever been anything but “Friday” either. You can say what you like about the racism of the portrayals of other “cannibal savages” in 18th century literature (and there’s lots to say! Like the whole notion of “cannibal savages”!) but at least when Ishmael meets Queequeg he gets told that Queequeg’s name is Queequeg because he comes from a place where his parents named him Queequeg; Ishmael doesn’t just run into him into a hotel room as a mid-career harpooner and go “I’m gonna name you Bob” and have everyone just go along with it. The bar’s on the floor, man.

To be scrupulously fair, we must also weigh the evidence that this is not exclusively a racist blindspot of Defoe’s but a general novel-writing blindspot, as our narrator Crusoe rarely appears to think that the audience needs to know anyone’s name at all, to the point where every time a character is given a name it comes off as actively jarring. Other characters are identified mainly by their relationships to Crusoe or their ethnicities and jobs– “the Spanish captain,” “the French priest,” “the three roguish Englishmen” versus “the two honest Englishmen.” In the sequel, one of the three roguish Englishmen is eventually dubbed Will. Atkins; the other twenty or so people living on the island at the time don’t get names, except Will. Atkins’ “wife,” who is dubbed Mary when she is baptized as a Christian, a thing that happens at the very end of her and Will’s story arc, where she goes through several dialogues solely under the name “Wife.” This is a baffling writing choice to me. Like, I understand why eighteenth-century English writers would think it’s a happy story for a bunch of English sailors to “chuse” captive native wives they don’t know and don’t speak the same language as and then after five or ten years convert them to Christianity and have them “consent” to an official marriage one a clergyman shows up on the island so they can pretend that Christian marriages care about obtaining the consent of both parties when that never crossed anyone’s mind when the five native women arrived on the island in the first place and were parceled out as natural resources. But I don't understand why you'd give us like twenty major characters and not give us any names for them.

Also, from a modern perspective, it’s clear that Englishmen decided that Caribbean natives were cannibals solely so they could pretend that whatever Caribbean natives they captured and enslaved were only afraid of the Englishmen because they thought they’d behave like “savages” and eat them, and were totally grateful to be kept alive and owned as beasts of burden instead. I was honestly sort of surprised when Crusoe also went on a long rant about how awful the Spanish genocide of the indigenous populations of the New World was; apparently, if there is one overarching feature of Crusoe’s principles and values as an eighteenth-century middle-class white Englishman, it’s that they change on a dime from moment to moment based on whatever is most flattering to himself. In this I suppose Crusoe is a lot more like most of us than we’d like to think.

To be very clear, the worst excess of Crusoe coming into contact with, then therefore taking actions regarding, and, god save my poor eyeballs, having opinions about other people come in the sequel, which I am clearly putting in the “I Read It So You Don’t Have To” category. The sequel just flatly sucks. It’s entirely just Crusoe bouncing around the world being racist to people on four different continents. It has no redeeming qualities. Friday gets one final indignity by dying in the final tagged-on clause in a sentence that’s about half a page long and also features getting mooned by a canoe full of natives, which is funny, thus ruining any gravitas about poor Friday’s under-described death in battle. I am so mad about Friday I’m this close to writing fix-it fic about the glorious adventures Friday has under his own real name after refusing to go to England with Crusoe as his servant, because again, Friday deserves better at every single turn in both of these books.

The first book I will admit is worth reading if you want to be well-read on classics and the Foundational Texts of various important genres of fiction, and also like reading a lot about raisins, and also like picking apart the political assumptions baked into early modern moral novels. And yes, it’s strongly a moral novel, just with very 18th-century morals–it starts off with basically a three-page sermon from Robinson’s dad about the virtues of being middle-class, and this is used to frame basically all of his adventures as a cautionary tale of the dangers of being too bullheaded to appreciate a nice civilized middle-class British life. A huge part of Robinson’s character arc is the spiritual awakening he experiences from being stranded on a deserted island for decades with nothing to read but the Bible and plenty of raisins to eat. I actually liked the old-fashioned language–the sentences are long but they have some style, which is tragically lacking in the sequel–and I find Crusoe’s philosophizing and moral self-scrutiny to be fascinating to read, given how much the assumptions and received wisdom he’s operating with as an eighteenth-century Englishmen essentially doom him to be an operationally terrible person no matter how much moral reasoning he does, even when there’s nobody about for him to even be terrible to–the decent impulses he has all have to be filtered through a Protestant set of principles that frequently warps or undercuts them, leading to interesting moral feats like a much-lauded religious “tolerance” where he’s nice to Catholics because at least they’re also Christians. I find it genuinely very interesting.

The TL;DR: The first book has its ups and downs and is interesting largely as a historical artifact. The second book is also somewhat interesting as a historical artifact but as a book is entirely downs.

After finishing my reread of The Lies of Locke Lamora I was compelled to then reread its sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies. This one combines two very fun settings: the first half is casino shenanigans and the second half is pirate shenanigans. It makes for a rather convolutedly structured book as our heroes, Locke and Jean, find themselves buried under an increasingly convoluted set of interlocking scams.

I find myself a little of two minds about this. On the one hand, it was fun! I thoroughly enjoyed about the first 700+ of the 760 pages, including the jarring shifts from one scam to the other. But I feel like it didn’t quite stick the landing, and it’s one of those situations where I feel sort of bad about criticizing it because I certainly can’t think of a better way to stick the landing either, but the fact is that stories that have multiple plot threads that all look like they’re about to kill our heroes generally function as setup for the conclusion, and much of what’s fun about them is going “I have no idea how our heroes are going to pull this off!” and then watching our heroes pull it off in an unlikely fashion. And I know that some stuff has gotta be left open for sequels, but also… it feels like they didn’t pull off everything they were supposed to pull off? They escaped with their lives, for now, which I suppose is very impressive given how fucked they were, but it didn’t quite get that satisfaction of having everything snap together at the end, which is a pretty significant part of the fun of these kinds of complicated heist/con/scheme sorts of stories. Anyway it was still a lot of fun for most of it.

I picked up Patricia A. McKillip’s short story collection Wonders of the Invisible World several Readercons ago, and, like too many of my Readercon purchases, it sat around for a while. Last May I almost purged it while I was packing my books up to move; I rescued it largely out of guilt when I got the news last May that McKillip had died. I’ve never read any of her novels. I’m glad I didn’t purge the book, though, and I was prodded to actually read it by a Goodreads update that a friend of mine was also reading it. If I get on it now I’ll have someone to talk about it with, said my brain, and I chucked it into my bag last weekend, and started reading it in the bath at my mother’s place.

I am, as I have mentioned before, not very good at reading short story collections, although I seem to be very good at buying them, and when I do read them I tend to enjoy them enough that I think Hey, I should read these more. Wonders of the Invisible World has been no exception–some of the stories are sad and some are humorous; many have the comfortable dreamlike feel of most good fantasy short stories, of a little glimpse of a big world that isn’t overexplained, or sometimes even explained at all.

A few of the stories feature nineteenth-century British artist types of the sort that make all their friends pose like mythological figures for hours while they paint them and talk about poetry and whether women have souls and goofy shit like that, and these I found probably the most charming, because I have a weak spot for the Romantics and their earnest Ren Faire nerd bullshit. One of them involves a woman artist riding a kelpie to get away from a pushy douchebag in their social circle (this one is particularly satisfying because the douchebag actually realizes what a dick he’s being and decides to shape up); another involves the myth of the Jack o’ Lantern/will o’ the wisp on the moors of somewhere-or-other. They both made me want to have another pre-Raphaelite party (I’d have to clean up my backyard first).

While many of the short stories involve some element of magic being experienced by our protagonists in our world (or what seems like it), there are a few proper secondary world fantasies; these were a little longer and were probably my favorites of the ones that didn’t involve British pre-Raphaelites. “Knight of the Well” was a fun tale about a city with a magico-religious relationship to its water, which was threatened when the various water sprites and other nautical critters started acting up for reasons unbeknownst to the Water Mage, the Water Minister, and the sullen, lovestruck knight Sir Garner Slade. Garner is subjected to various indignities and shenanigans before the conflict is resolved, and it is very funny. I also enjoyed the little fairy story “Byndley,” about a wizard who had stolen something from the Fairy Queen and was having an arduous time attempting to return it.

These stories were all originally published between 1990 and about 2007 (the collection was released in 2012), and there’s a comforting familiarity to them even though I wasn’t previously familiar with McKillip as an author–they were written in a time that spans my formative years and so I guess will always feel the most “normal” to me, neither too old-fashioned nor too contemporary. The one thing where my sensibilities have changed enough that it kind of sticks out is the casual absence of queer people; other than that, this is just the kind of post-Angela Carter fairy-tale-influenced fantasy that I feel at home in, where the women have become people but nobody yet talks like Twitter has been invented. I should maybe check out her novels.

Several years ago a friend who knew I was interested in bananas Victorian Gothics recommended me The Beetle, so I was excited when, on the heels of the success of Dracula Daily, some enterprising fellow fan of goofy Victorian Gothics started The Beetle Weekly, specifically promising us more of everything that made Dracula bad and less of anything that made Dracula good, even though The Beetle outsold Dracula by like a factor of four the year it was released.

The Beetle starts off relatively strong with a sympathetic story of a down-on-his luck clerk, Robert Holt, who has been reduced to vagrancy via the pitiless capitalism of pre-welfare-state Britain and finds himself, in desperation, crawling through the open window of an apparently uninhabited house. He is incorrect about the uninhabited state of the house and that is where the horrors begin, and also it is all downhill from there, because the horrors are fucking goofy and also pretty racist. Bobert (as he is known to fandom) is hypnotized by an ambiguously gendered brown person whomst can also shape-shift into a giant scarab beetle, and this beetle/person sends Bobert to burglarize the house of an up-and-coming statesman named Paul Lessingham, even though Bobert does not actually have any burglarizing skills, being actually an unemployed clerk. This begins a comedy of errors–that thinks it’s a thrilling horror story–of Bobert breaking ineptly into Paul Lessingham’s house to steal his letters, Paul Lessingham having a mental breakdown when Bobert yells “THE BEETLE!” at him, and a mostly-nude Bobert running hypnotizedly away and straight into Paul’s romantic rival and our second narrator, absolute shithead Sydney Atherton.

Sydney Atherton is an “inventor” who is in love with Marjorie Lindon, his childhood friend who has become secretly engaged to Paul Lessingham, and who ought to be but is not in love with Dora Grayling, a wealthy young maiden who wants to marry Atherton and fund all his horrible inventions, like death gas for conquering South America. They have some very bizarre interactions, including one where Dora wants Sydney to “demonstrate” the death gas and then gets upset when he uses it to kill a random cat that he picked up off the street and decided was Paul Lessingham’s cat. There is some third person around who also is in love with Marjorie Lindon and Sydney almost kills him by continually Fortifying His Nerves with hard liquors on an empty stomach. Atherton hates Lessingham and continually calls him “the Apostle” which is sort of appropriate given how obnoxiously sanctimonious Lessingham is, except that Sydney is even more obnoxious. For some absolutely inexplicable reason everybody keeps coming to Sydney for like, life advice and stuff–Marjorie, Dora, Marjorie’s dad, and even Paul! Most of the things they want advice on are how to deal with one or more of the other people coming to Sydney for advice, so he kind of bumbles around letting them all eavesdrop on each other while hiding in his death-gas-inventing studio.

Things take a twist when a nearly-dead Bobert passes out in front of Marjorie’s house and she, taking over the narration, takes him in and gives him a bath and some food and calls Sydney to see what the heck she should do about this babbling unfortunate that she picked up because she is sooo compassionate and charitable even though she’s actually never passed up a chance to be nasty to anyone once in this entire book. Sydney, having run into Bobert previously and also been the subject of some completely unsolicited confessions from “the Apostle,” is super jazzed to know exactly what Bobert is babbling about but refuses to tell Marjorie about it because he’s a vicious little misogynist, so instead all he tells her is that it’s terribly dangerous and he and Bobert are going out and can he borrow a revolver and also she can’t come because it’s too dangerous, so obviously she insists upon going because he won’t actually tell her what’s too dangerous (she does not, however, bring a revolver, even though the one thing she does know about this situation is that Sydney thinks it’s the kind of dangerous that can be helped with a revolver). This is how Marjorie gets lost in the house that hypnotized Bobert earlier.

From here we move to our last narrator, the previously unintroduced solicitor Augustus Champnell, because what’s a nineteenth century Gothic without a serious, sober-minded solicitor to document that all the horrors are real and definitely not wild fancies? It’s not like we have to trust Sydney, both because he’s a mad scientist who’s been huffing poison gases or whatever and because far from a disinterested party. Paul and Sydney both immediately seek the services of Champnell in bailing them out of whatever nonsense they’re involved in, which is how we get Paul’s full backstory, finally–a jaw-droppingly racist lurid fantasy of evil Isis-worshiping Arabs in colonized Egypt who capture white Christian Englishwomen and sometimes Englishmen and subject them to various tortures and sexual assaults and such before offering them up to a giant beetle idol as human sacrifices and burning them alive. All very normal. Anyway, after hearing this remarkable story, and doing some extremely funny Marx Brothers-sounding shit where the three grown men bounce around town in a hansom cab built for only two passengers, Champnell, Atherton, and Lessingham chase the Beetle and Bobert and a captive Marjorie all around southern England in a variety of hansoms, carriages, and trains, until the Beetle is finally defeated via an off-screen train crash and also the underground Beetle Isis cult human sacrifice caves over in Egypt coincidentally explode for no documented reason whatsoever. A solicitor is telling us this so you know it’s very serious and not at all funny business.

Truly this book is awful in every way nineteenth century British writing can be awful all at once, and then some. I had so much fun reading it along with a bunch of insane people on Tumblr and Discord so we could all make fun of it endlessly and try to figure out what in the name of Aryan Jesus Richard Marsh was thinking. Just a remarkable feat of bad Victoriana.

Oh no! I’m now out of Murderbot to reread!

I reread all of Fugitive Telemetry in one sitting, because I’m still 10% sick and welched out of doing literally anything else at all that evening. I regret nothing.

This one is a straight-up murder mystery, where someone has been mysteriously murdered on Preservation Station even though that sort of thing never happens. Murderbot reluctantly joins forces with the human-and-augmented-human Preservation Station Security team to collaborate on solving the murder and also, at Dr. Mensah’s explicit directive, to improve its working relationship with them. In attempting to figure out whodunit they end up exposing both a crime ring (the good kind, i.e., the crime is breaking Corporation Rim “contract labor” laws) and some corporate espionage (DEFINITELY the bad kind). Murderbot has to learn how to do crime-solving in a non-surveillance-state, which it finds frustrating but which I loved. Gurathin continually saves Murderbot’s ass and Murderbot is too self-loathing to realize that Gurathin doesn’t actually hate it anymore. Murderbot and Gurathin are just similarly task-oriented and it is clear to ME that Gurathin is taking care of Murderbot, he’s just not touchy-feely about it, which Murderbot OUGHT to be able to RECOGNIZE except that it doesn’t want to. Anyway. I’m definitely normal about Murderbot and the Preservation survey team, I promise.

Last Christmas I picked up a copy of Octavia Butler’s Kindred at the Strand, because everything I’ve ever read by Butler has been absolutely steller, and then every time since then I’ve looked at my shelf to decide what to read I’ve decided to pick up something that seemed less depressing. I finally got past that a few days ago because it is February so a) good depressing reading time of year and also b) it’s Black History Month but I wasn’t in the mood for nonfiction quite yet.

Kindred tells the story of Dana, a modern young Black woman living in Los Angeles in 1976, because that was basically present-day when this book was first published in 1979. On her 26th birthday, Dana gets unceremoniously yoinked back to the 1810’s to save the life of a redheaded young white boy named Rufus, the son of a plantation owner in Maryland. Rufus, it turns out, is one of Dana’s ancestors a few generations back, and so apparently it is Dana’s cosmic responsibility to bail his accident-prone ass out of near-death situations to ensure he survives long enough to father her however-many-times-great-grandmother Hagar. In what is a short span of time on the 1970s end but over the course of about 20 years on the 1800s end, Dana makes six trips back in time to save Rufus’ life, as he grows from a bratty but more or less innocent child into a complicated, vicious douchebag of a propertied antebellum Southern man. Dana does what she can to complicate his understanding of the world but he’s still the son of a slaveowner who will grow up to be a slaveowner himself, and he’s nowhere near heroic enough to transcend his upbringing. Dana manages to talk him into a couple things that are progressive-for-the-time, like acknowledging his children and allowing Dana to teach some of the enslaved children to read, but every advance is a long hard slog and Dana has to fight Rufus and his shitty parents about everything.

The trips vary in length; the first trip she’s barely there for a few minutes; some of the others last months. On one of them her white husband, Kevin, gets carried along for the ride; he gets left behind when she goes back to the ‘70s, and she has to find him again the next time she’s pulled back, a week later on one end and five years later on the other. On these visits to the past Dana witnesses and endures all the horrors of slavery; she is reasonably privileged by being enslaved standards in that she “gets” to be a house slave instead of a field slave (minus one memorable episode where she gets sent into the fields as a punishment); she still endures various beatings and assaults and getting shot at and a dizzying array of indignities large and small. The novel also provides a fascinating psychological portrayal of learning to navigate–and, in the process, acclimatize to, a process that Dana is self-aware about–the degradation of enslavement.

The book is not just “torture porn,” though. The real horrors here, which Butler portrays thoughtfully and deftly, are the warped relationships and manipulations that characterize the internal politics of the plantation–the use and abuse of child slaves to keep their parents in line, the ways the adults do and don’t submit to abasement to try to “manage up” their capricious masters, even the tragic warping and destruction of whatever capacity for human decency the white masters might have been born with. Life on the Weylin plantation isn’t just straightforwardly horrific; it is complicatedly horrific, intensely dysfunctional even for the people who are on top of the heap–the Weylins are some of the most miserable bastards you’ll ever meet, with absolutely no coping mechanisms for their miserable bastardness other than inflicting even greater misery on everyone around them. Dana is constantly in danger; while she gets pulled into the past when Rufus’ life is in danger, she only goes home when her own life is–and she goes home six times, too.

A lot of critical literature has been written about Butler’s writing in the last few decades, and it’s been long enough since I engaged with any sort of literary criticism that I’m pretty sure I don’t have anything intelligent to say compared to the people who are still practiced in thinking deeply and critically about literature. But I will say that this book–and everything else by her that I’ve read–is a masterpiece and I recommend it highly.