bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with occult

In my search for weird spooky season reads I figured it was time to finally pick up the rest of Montague Summers’ The Vampire (originally published as The Vampire: His Kith and Kin), the first two chapters of which I read sometime when I was still in school, and which I have been moving around from house to house with a bookmark in Chapter 3 for a good 15 years now.

Montague Summers is not an easy read. He was an incredibly strange person, initially studying to be an Anglican priest and then converting to Roman Catholicism and styling himself a Catholic priest despite there being no records of him having ever been ordained. He believed wholeheartedly in witches, vampires, werewolves, demons, and all sorts of things that the Catholic Church had since come to see as embarrassing superstitions. He was writing in the early 20th century and dressing like it was the late Middle Ages. He is the absolute wordiest man in the world, and his writing is full of long rambling digressions, vehemently earnest editorializing, untranslated passages in Latin and French, half-translated passages in Greek and German, and quotations from every conceivable source, no matter how dubious–from Ovid to newspaper articles to “an authority” to some guy he once met. His works are likely best read on a hefty dose of NyQuil.

That said, the book furnishes us with a fascinating array of legends, ghost stories, and murders, as well as whatever other anecdotes Summers feels like telling on any subject whatsoever. To the degree that they are tied together by anything, they are being sorted into Summers’ attempts to “prove” what beliefs about vampires are true and which ones are embellishments. He is entertainingly disdainful of people who do not believe in them at all, and extremely judgmental in his tours through the folklore of the world. I don’t remember very much about the first two chapters, since I read them umpteen years ago. The third chapter, “The Traits and Practices of Vampirism,” talks a lot about suicides and Greek drama, then relates many interesting folkloric beliefs about types of blood-eating ghosts and demons from various places and what causes someone to become one of these ghosts, then embarks upon a supremely awkward analysis of “love-bites” before relating to the reader the career of serial killer Fritz Haarmaan, who would have been reasonably recent news at the time of publication (Haarmaan was exposed in late 1924). The fourth chapter concerns vampire legends in “Assyria, the East, and some Ancient Countries,” which is very A Nineteenth-Century British Guy Writes About Asia at times, but is great fun if you can remember not to take any of it seriously (which is easy, given that Summers is largely relating these legends with an eye towards somehow proving that vampires are real, and therefore takes great pains to point out commonalities with European vampire legends and explain away differences).

The last chapter is undoubtedly the funniest and the most obviously dated. It is called “The Vampire in Literature” and it is like 75% about French theater. It references many interesting-sounding works that have apparently not stood the test of time at all as I have never heard of them, and I have heard of a lot of old vampire literature. He discusses Polidori’s The Vampyre at little length and then the bajillion stage adaptations thereof at much greater length. He professes that good scary stories have to be short, which is hilarious coming from the Reverend Augustus Montague Summers, Wordiest Motherfucker in the World, of all people. He opines that even Le Fanu’s Carmilla is possibly starting to get overextended in how long it is (it is a novella); he then immediately contradicts himself by gushing over what an impressively long-running artistic work the 800-page monstrosity Varney the Vampire is. (He also misattributes it to Thomas Peckett Prest, which is one of his more understandable errors–this was a popular belief at the time.) His gushing praise for Varney contrasts hilariously with his disdain for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the unprecedented popularity of which he attributes solely to the fact that it’s about vampires, as he thinks that it is too long, the characters are boring, only the first five chapters have any real narrative tension, and–predictably but hilariously–that Bram Stoker erred in including aspects of the vampire legend that are poorly sourced and that Summers has therefore concluded are unfounded, and he thinks that Stoker should have stuck only to true and proven vampire facts. It is extra funny reading this in the context of doing the Dracula Daily readalong on Tumblr, where everyone is discovering anew after decades of unfaithful movie adaptations that “the polycula,” as it has been affectionately nicknamed, consists of absolutely fantastic characters that movie makers have done dirty for years. Of course, the only Dracula movie adaptation that even existed at the time this book was published was the unauthorized German expressionist film Nosferatu, and anyway, Summers does not acknowledge that movies exist. He instead closes out the book by slamming the Dracula stage adaptations and misspelling Bela Lugosi’s name.

In short, this book is almost unreadably terrible in an uncountable number of ways and yet I am tempted to be like “Absolutely perfect, 10/10, no notes,” because if it were in any way better it would be less funny. Highly recommended if you want to get real serious about insane pseudo-scholarly works on the occult by eccentric throwback Catholics who fancied themselves real-life vampire hunters.

In preparation for Nona I read Harrow the Ninth for the third time. This time I tried to read it more slowly, even though my reading-slowly-on-purpose skills have somewhat deteriorated over the years. I don’t think I’m quite clever enough to have figured out who’s in the last section, but I will only live in ignorance for another week or so. (I don’t usually try to guess twists, I just want to see how they happen, but I’ve been wondering Who Is Nona for like a year now so I tried to pay attention.)

Even knowing the big reveals, this was still a tricksy little hobbit of a book. Only part of this is due to the protagonist being possibly-insane-possibly-haunted-definitely-unwell; the rest is due to much of the rest of the cast also being possibly insane, haunted, dead, and various other things (and definitely unwell). God continues to be just some guy, and extremely cringe to boot. I can’t wait for the next book.

So while I am generally intending to read all the books I’ve borrowed from other people in the next four weeks or so, I decided to take a quick detour to get (or stay) in the occult mood and read A. E. Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, which I picked up at the gift shop at the PEM last year.

All my tarot decks are based on the Rider-Waite-Smith in terms of what cards are what, but I don’t have an actual copy of the classic RWS deck, so I’m not super familiar with Pamela Colman Smith’s iconic illustrations, or at least not as much as I probably should be after reading tarot on and off for like 20 years now. Fortunately, Pictorial Key contains black-and-white versions of all of Smith’s cards, so the reader can more easily follow along with Waite’s discussion.

The book is structured a little oddly and is definitely most valuable as a historical document and foundational text (™) more than as a primer for new readers. Waite spends a lot of time dunking on earlier occult writers, especially French ones. (I find this extremely funny; YMMV.) The Major Arcana are covered in two separate sections, one of which discusses the illustrations and their symbolism (and is accompanied by pictures of the cards), and then a separate section gives their divinatory meanings in a simple list. The Minor Arcana give the divinatory meanings right alongside the illustrations and discussions thereof, in a section that sits between the two Major Arcana sections, and also for some reason goes in reverse order (King, Queen, Knight, etc. down to Ace). Major Arcana card 0, the Fool, sits in between card XX (The Last Judgment) and card XXI (The World), with no reason given other than that Waite decided “not to rectify” it. There are also some spreads, including the famous Celtic Cross, and a hilarious bibliography that seems to be mostly about how much Waite hates nearly everything else that had ever been written about the occult as of 1910.

This will probably not become my go-to reference on card reading anytime soon, however, it’s an invaluable document all the same, and I’m glad I read it and will be keeping it.

I do not have the faintest recollection of when or how I picked up a copy of Alexander Roob’s Alchemy & Mysticism, an art book about (unsurprisingly) alchemy and mysticism. It is not quite the Alchemy And Mysticism For Dummies book that I think I would require in order to actually start understanding all this alchemy stuff in a way that makes at least narrative sense to me (obviously the actual material is just… entirely made-up weird nonsense) but it certainly helped add some things to my very piecemeal knowledge of alchemy and associated esoterics.

The art is… well, not all of it is necessarily good, although a lot of it is quite magnificent, but it is all definitely a lot, and it is very strange and interesting. I didn’t really look at the details of all the diagrams and charts and allegorical drawings, partly because a lot of them are heavy on calligraphic text (often in other languages) and partly because I can’t be arsed. I know that doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement but guys, alchemy is bonkers. This book was an experience.

Occasionally people will talk about a book and it won't catch my interest too much because they are leaving out a key piece of information, and then when I get that key piece of information, the thing shoots up a million spots on my To Be Read list.

Such a book was Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth. A bunch of friends had discussed it, fairly positively, as being about lesbian necromancers in space, which is certainly a hook. But it took a promotional email from Tor with a link to an article titled Gideon's Guide to Getting Galactic Swole: An Epic Tale of Skele-Flex Trashbaggery for me to realize that the book is ALSO about a big obnoxious jock lady with big obnoxious biceps and an internal monologue in a register that can only be described as Extremely Online. Given that the internet doesn't exist in the necromantic space empire Gideon lives in, it's quite a feat for her to be as Extremely Online as she is.

Gideon Nav is a big dumb redheaded meathead of an orphan who lives in the Ninth House of a creepy and extremely Goth necromantic space empire. The Ninth House is the creepiest and Gothiest of all the houses, of which there are, predictably, nine. The Ninth House is basically a weird religious colony that occupies a big crack in a planet that is definitely not based on Pluto. Gideon hates living in the Ninth House's Isengardian fortress of Drearburh, and everyone in the Ninth House hates her right back, although possibly not in that order. The only other person Gideon's age in Drearburh is the Reverend Daughter of the House, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, who is Gideon's opposite in every way--tiny, dark-haired, a gifted necromancer, basically not a dumbass at all, deliberately and cunningly cruel, and completely lacking in anything resembling muscle. She is, however, also a lesbian, although not nearly as easily distracted as Gideon is. Of course, they hate each other's guts.

However, due to a series of events in varying levels of deliberateness, Gideon winds up being the only person even remotely suitable to serve as Harrowhark's cavalier when she is summoned off-planet to compete to become a Lyctor, which is basically a sort of immortal knight-saint to the Undying Emperor. Necromancers absolutely must be paired with cavaliers, because they always have been, and necros and cavs ascend to Lyctorhood in pairs as well. So either they will both become immortal or neither of them will. Then most of the book takes place on the planet of the First House, which isn't really a proper House--the First House is technically the Emperor (I think?) but he's not allowed on the First House's planet, which basically exists as a big, ancient, crumbling, but much-warmer-than-Drearburh temple complex. The challengers--i.e., the necro and cav pairs from the Second through Eighth houses--basically have to hang out there with three priests and a bunch of reanimated skeleton servants until they figure out how to become Lyctors. From there, stuff starts going wrong.

One of the things I realized about a third of the way through the book that made everything ten times more hilarious was the realization that if this were a normal adventure book about a competition between different feudal houses, it would definitely have had a different House as its viewpoint. One of the ones that dressed sort of normal, at least. Probably the Fourth House, whose challengers were both teens, if it were a YA book. But the Ninth House would be the mysterious fan favorites--the weirdest, most distant House, with a lot of mystery surrounding them, both of its representatives aloof and inscrutable, wearing black robes and skull makeup and skulking in and out of scenes without talking to anyone. Harrowhark forbids Gideon from talking to anyone, so everyone else thinks she's taken a vow of silence because she's a creepy shadow cultist penitent, and are therefore spared from Gideon's walking-pile-of-memes thought processes until much later in the book, where they are (unsurprisingly, but hilariously) floored to hear how she actually talks. Just the contrast between the Ninth House's aesthetic and Gideon and Harrow's actual personalities makes me want to see this book adapted for TV; it would be the absolute funniest shit ever.

Even not filmed, it's still pretty funny shit. I made the mistake of reading it on the T a lot this weekend because I had to take the T a lot, and I was having the hardest time not absolutely losing it in public every time some absolutely idiotic meme got snuck in in a way that somehow made perfect sense, or whenever Gideon dramatically put on her sunglasses over her skull face paint or busted up the tone of some courtly dialogue by calling somebody an assmunch.

Another thing I liked about this book is that there is not very much romance! None of the romance that there is is robust or explicit enough to constitute a romantic plotline. There is a lot of Gideon being easily distracted and telling very bad suggestive jokes, and there is some unresolved but very tense tension in and among Gideon and Harrow's incredibly fucked-up lifelong loathing of each other, but nobody actually wastes any time on fluffy stuff because they are all very busy fighting epic bone constructs and getting completely covered in gore repeatedly and in the grossest ways Tamsyn Muir can think of (which are pretty gross; I am quite impressed).

So, in short: Goth stuff, ultraviolence, jokes, skellingtons, upsettingly large biceps, and no wholesome fluffy shit. This one definitely falls under the "It's like it was written just for me!" category.

I have a lot of friends that are into superhero stories. Like most of my friends, these tend to be fairly left-wing friends, and ones with strong critical thinking skills about literature and whatnot. They haven't shied away from or gotten defensive about the discussions going on in SF/F right now examining the strengths and weaknesses of superhero stories as a genre, the inherent sort of regressiveness of the individualistic, vigilante, strongman sort of narrative deep in the structure of the superhero concept even when an individual superhero story takes on other, more progressive politics. And some superhero stories do take on politics pretty head-on, with powers that embody the fantasies of marginalized people or directly rebuke regressive myths.

Libba Bray's The Diviners series is, pretty much, a superhero story, though that word is never used in it. It's about a bunch of teens that all have special powers, powers they don't understand and that society doesn't really believe exist. It takes place in the 1920s, which is a fun twist, but overall, so far so X-men.

I've never before read a superhero story, especially not a YA gothic historical fantasy novel, that was so explicitly about eugenics.

Earlier in the series the eugenics was lurking a little more in the background while the main plot revolved around Ouija boards and solving highly occult-signified murders, but as the series has progressed, the story of the Diviners has gotten more and more explicitly mixed up with a storyline about the myths of American progress--a storyline about medical experimentation, who counts as a person and an American, the violence of industrial capitalism, the narratives of "progress" and "science" used to provide cover for bigotry and exploitation.

We're currently at a tumultuous time in American history that has no small number of parallels to the 1920s. It's a time when we're being called to confront the sins of our past, where the inherent contradictions of trying to build -- or telling ourselves we're building -- a land of liberty and justice for all, on a foundation of genocide, slavery, and land theft are coming to the forefront. It's a time when technological advancement is being turned to regressive, invasive, and inhumane ends. It's a time when the government is disappearing people, although the government has done that to those it considers expendable throughout most if its history. It's a time when white supremacists are marching through city streets and anti-immigrant sentiment is high.

Sadly, there are no flappers. That's going to come back into style real soon, right? We're going to make this happen. Rouged knees and cupid's bow lipliner, the whole deal. It's not any dumber than purple highlighter.

Anyway. We're on to Before the Devil Breaks You, the third installation of what I thought was going to be a trilogy but is apparently going to be a quartet, which means Jake Marlowe isn't dead and the man in the stovepipe hat isn't defeated, although we do certainly learn a lot about both of them over the course of the book, in addition to learning a lot of other things about our main characters and how the Diviners were made and what Project Buffalo was really up to. It's a huge sprawling complex narrative spiced up with delightful banter, lots of toothy murder ghosts, some arson, some drunken escapades, and other fun stuff like that. The Italian anarchist dude who I have wanted to have a plotline for two books now finally gets a plotline, which sadly relies heavily upon Bad Ideas Anarchists Were Really Into In The 1920s And From Which Their Reputation Has Never Really Recovered, by which I mean blowing stuff up. Johann Most has a lot to answer for. This is also the book wherein everybody gets laid, which is how you know we're 3/4 of the way through the story (most of it happens almost exactly 3/4 of the way through this book, too).

In this book, though the sleeping sickness from Lair of Dreams is gone, the city is being haunted by angry ghosts calling themselves the Forgotten, who can possess people and get them to kill each other. A lot of these ghosts are attacking the Kirkbride asylum on Ward's Island, which is one of those little islands in the river around Manhattan where they put institutions for socially undesirable people (much like Blackwell's, which was operating around the same time). Others are wandering around the city. The Diviners all get together and learn to develop their powers, which they then use to go around killing the ghosts, which is only a temporary measure since the ghosts are being somehow activated by the man in the stovepipe hat, and also the ghosts have a point that it's bad that they've been forgotten. All our main characters, whether they're Diviners or not, are wrestling with various things in their past that are resurfacing, and how. In Theta's case, a person she thought she'd left behind literally shows back up in New York; for Evie, she learns a lot more about her dead brother James and what Project Buffalo has to do with everything. A lot of people besides Sam are being sort-of haunted by the telepathic voice of Sam's mother Miriam, which Sam has many feelings about. Jericho is being blackmailed about his iron lung juice that keeps him alive, so he ends up going up to Jake Marlowe's estate/lair/secret government agency to get shot full of more weird serums that basically turn him into a science project for Marlow's Future of America exhibition, like a rapey, irradiated Captain America. (Jake Marlowe firmly believes that radium is good for you. I hope his jaw falls off in the next book.) Memphis and Isaiah learn who Bill Johnson is and draw the attention of the wrong people. The dead are mad at Ling, probably because she keeps helping blow them up, and Ling has to wrestle with the disappointment of learning more stuff about Jake Marlowe, like a 1920s version of all those weird nerd dudes who get mad when people dunk on Elon Musk. Mabel, of course, is hanging out with anarchists, plotting to blow up Jake Marlowe's uranium mine. Why is he mining shit-tons of uranium in the middle of New Jersey? For plot purposes, obviously.

Anyway, it's all barreling towards some kind of major showdown for the contradictory soul of America, and I'm mad that I have to wait another entire year to find out what it is. America continuing to be what it is, I have a feeling that it's not necessarily going to end in the final defeat of the man in the stovepipe hat...

Since it is Labor Day weekend, I felt very strongly that I did not want to do anything that could be considered productive if I did not have to; in addition, I was in need of a palate cleanser after reading the educational and distressing Evicted. In other words, it was Cheesy Vampire Novel O'Clock.

I decided upon Deborah Harkness' The Book of Life, the third book in her witch/vampire romance All Souls trilogy, a set of doorstoppers stuffed with witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, time travel, srs bsns historical research, fake genetics, wealth porn, gratuitous Frenchness, the obligatory impossible vampire pregnancy plotline, elite academia, sexy libraries, and lots of wine (some vampires never drink... vine. These are not those vampires). In short, it's like Outlander for vampire nerds (and less racist, not like that's the world's highest bar to clear).

My biggest issue with this book is entirely my own fault, which is that it's been like six years since I read Shadow of Night and I forgot a lot of what happened? I remembered they went back in time to 1591 and Diana got pregnant and met Matthew's several-decades-dead terrifying vampire patriarch, Philippe. And that there was a Scottish vampire who had been a gallowglass and now his name was Gallowglass, just in case you were afraid we were going to leave out the sexy Scotsman from this time-traveling vampire romance. But this is a very big complex story with many threads and many, many characters across timelines, and vampire families are huge hierarchical monstrosities of tangled pack dynamics and generational sprawl, and so I was very lost for quite a lot of it. That's what I get for acquiring too many books and not finishing series in a timely manner, I suppose.

Like many vampire books, huge chunks of this series are basically just wish fulfillment for nerdy ladies. While some of the wish fulfullment aspects do not reflect any of my wishes and therefore fall a bit flat ("He's authoritarian and broody but he's also terribly tall" is basically Why I Do Not Read Romance Novels, also, I honestly consider "interested in genetics" to be a huge red flag, although perhaps it is less red flaggy for actual genetics researchers), other aspects of it go right to my lizard brain, like "has magical powers" and "gets to live in multiple fancy homes from multiple interesting historical time periods," not to mention "elite access to extremely fancy libraries" and "can actually memorize mystical shit beyond half the Tarot deck" (I have been reading Tarot for 15 years and only have half the deck memorized; this is how much I don't rely on my own brain for things). Diana also apparently goes months without checking her email, which annoys all the other characters but honestly sounds fucking glorious.

The book also features interstitial excerpts from Diana's commonplace book from the 16th century in which she takes notes on the signs of the Zodiac, and if you think I'm not going to copy them into my own little baby Book of Shadows later this morning, you have underestimated how much I am witchy pop culture trash.

I was very, very good at Readercon this year, and only bought three books, which I admit I was pretty sulky about because it's hard to be at Readercon surrounded by so many lovely books and resist buying them. But one of the books I did buy was Elizabeth Bear's Stone Mad, a novella that's the sequel to the delightful steampunk Western Karen Memory.

This story takes place a bit after the end of the last one. Karen and Priya have bought a cute little ranch together and, upon first moving into it, decide to celebrate their unofficial marriage with an unofficial honeymoon, by going to the only fancy restaurant in Rapid City, which is the dining room for the only fancy hotel in Rapid City, and then going to an illusionist show. This plan is interrupted when two young mediums interrupt dinner by levitating a table in order to scam a free meal, and in the process, wake up the hotel's long-dormant resident tommy-knocker, which had been hiding in the basement since it sort of accidentally did a multiple murder upon first being imported from Alaska several years ago.

Karen, Priya, the two medium ladies (who are sisters), and the illusionist--an elderly lady who was the wife to a previous famous illusionist, who had also been having dinner in the fancy dining room--all join forces to find and handle the tommyknocker before it kills anyone else. Because this is an awesome female-coded story, handling the tommyknocker does not mean fighting it, because that would end poorly for everybody: It means trying to figure out what it wants and how to communicate with it well enough to return it to its natural habitat.

While the tommyknocker is the main action plot, the main emotional plot revolves around Priya and Karen. Early in the tommyknocker sequence of events, Karen does something thoughtless and she and Priya get in a fight about it, and the rest of the book is largely them figuring out how to both have the space to feel their feelings (i.e., be mad) without it tanking their relationship, and how to communicate even when mad so that they can get through it to a point of not being mad anymore. Karen has some good internal monologuing as well as discussion about her own self-assessments and theories of relationshipping, but Priya really shines here as the queen of emotional intelligence. Her speech near the end about how easy it would be to misuse the power of being the injured party is disturbingly on-point--we like to think of abusive relationships as clearly defined and with abusers as monsters, but we all have the capacity in us to do shitty things for our own benefit if we've got the leverage and incentives to do so. It requires a certain degree of actual emotional intelligence and self-awareness to not do that.

Anyway, who's got two thumbs and Blind Guardian's "Tommyknockers" stuck in her head now? This girl!

"Tommyknockers with lyrics blind guardian" (Watch on YouTube)

I finally got around to picking up the third book in Max Gladstone’s excellent Craft Sequence, Full Fathom Five. I decided to prioritize this over the other giant pile of stuff I have to read because I am mentally exhausted reading about capitalism and politics and so wanted some nice escapist fantasy. And also because I am apparently stupid and self-sabotaging, since the Craft Sequence is basically all about technocorporate capitalism, just with souls as currency and gods taking the place of… fossil fuels? Basically energy utilities.

My favorite thing about Full Fathom Five right off the bat was that one of its viewpoint characters is very poor, which the previous ones have generally not been, so we get some scenes in which poverty is literally soul-sucking. Izza is a street thief, and it is through her that we see the effects of running low on soul—blurred vision, faintness, dizziness, basically what it sounds like it would be—when she has to buy incense when her goddess dies.

Full Fathom Five takes place on the small touristy island of Kavekana, the main industry of which, besides tourism, is the creation of idols—rudimentary godlike constructs that can be built upon request and worshiped by Kavekana’s priests, as a stable, safe investment with less sacrifice required than traditional actual deities. There are parallels here to any number of complicated financial hedging products that exist all up on Wall Street and elsewhere, and some other distinct parallels to the economies of assorted lovely small islands in places with nice weather that are referred to by residents of larger jurisdictions as “offshore.” The core of the plot is the core of so many stories of modern finance: a bunch of smart finance bros build products that they think have permanently beaten or ended some element of risk in the market, but the thing they thought they’d eliminated the risk of happens anyway. No one can get one over on capitalism indefinitely.

Our other main viewpoint character is Kai, an idolmaker/priestess who ill-advisedly attempts to save a dying idol, nearly dies herself, is hospitalized and demoted, and winds up uncovering a giant conspiracy involving idols, an insufferable poet, and Cat the drug addict policewoman from Three Parts Dead. By the end it also involves Dickensian street urchin Izza and features a cameo by Teo from Two Serpents Rise, forming a wacky girl gang of priestessy types with terrifying powers. It’s FANTASTIC.

After the initial exciting bit with the idol dying and Izza’s goddess dying and Kai almost dying, the plot takes a somewhat leisurely but not too slow pace to really put together a full idea of what’s going on and how urgent it is to fix it, but that’s fine because the backstory and worldbuilding and meandering around Kavekana getting drunk and looking for poets is quite a lot of fun. It’s clear from pretty much the beginning that Izza’s Blue Lady is the idol Kai tried to save even though that’s supposed to be impossible, but this is OK because the real mystery is how the hell that happened, and it’s fun to see when and how the two main characters will finally cross paths (it’s a small island so they run into each other a bunch of times before interacting properly, which is probably a little gimmicky but I liked it?). I figured out who the bad guy was probably a chapter or two ahead of the protagonists; I think it’s pretty heavily telegraphed but only for a little bit, so the period of time you spend basically going “Don’t go into the basement with just a thimble!” is limited.

Kavekana also features a terrifying rock-based police force, although one quite different from the gargoyle-derivative black ops-y Justice agents in Three Parts Dead. These are called Penitents and they are basically big magic geodes/iron maiden type things that criminals are trapped in until their wills are brought in line with the programming of the Penitents. The Penitents basically wander the streets scaring petty thieves, while the rich powerful folks are able to use the Penitents on their enemies to help them cover up crimes. This has no analogies to our current society’s issues of police militarization and their being used by large corporations (like, say the DAPL builders) against regular citizens whatsoever, I am sure.

I’m planning on getting to the last two books in this series later in June when I get up to Maine. I’m really, really glad I finally got around to reading this series; it’s just so great to have well-done fantasy that also indulges my love of reading about financial crime.

I loved Three Parts Dead so much that I immediately ran, did not walk, to borrow the sequel Two Serpents Rise from my roommate, and then I ate it (by which I mean I read it really fast; eating other people's books is rude).

The book started off inauspiciously with me catching two minor terminology errors in the first chapter, which depicts what is clearly a game of no-limit Hold'em, one in which our main character makes a very bad fold. But at least the book knows it's a bad fold, so it's got that going for it. Fortunately, things get better after that, as we learn more about the city of Dresediel Lex and the complex system of creepy magic that keeps it supplied with water.

Dresediel Lex, part Las Vegas and part Tenochtitlan, is a desert city that is trying to be very modern and run on Craft and ignore its prior history of human sacrifice, a history that only ended a few decades earlier. Our main character, Caleb, is the Dresediel Lex equivalent of an annoying finance bro, doing risk management and analysis for Red King Consolidated--the magical Concern that runs the city's water supply--and playing a lot of poker. He has daddy issues -- quite understandably, since his dad is one of the last priests of the old religion (the one that feeds its gods hearts) from before the God Wars, and he keeps running around trying to overthrow the Craftsmen and return to the old ways, and basically being a creepy terrorist zealot.

In classic annoying white bro protagonist fashion, Caleb picks up an Obligatory Love Interest by seeing a woman out and about and immediately becoming completely obsessed forever. In this case, the woman is a cliff runner named Mal, who turns out to be a Craftswoman for the firm that Red King is currently in the middle of a rather complicated merger with.

Meanwhile, back at Caleb's job, one of the reservoirs is suddenly full of creepy demons, and while that initial attack is sorted out easily enough, it really wasn't supposed to happen and it turns out to just be the first in a long line of complicated god- and demon-related acts of sabotage that somebody somewhere is committing against Red King Consolidated and Dresediel Lex's water supplies. The resulting complex web of law, religion, magic, explosions, and creepy lobstery water demons is fantasically difficult to sum up but it all makes sense in the book, I promise.

Despite my general underwhelmedness with both Caleb and Mal as people -- seriously, they're perfect for each other, because they're both irritating and I would not like to hang out with either one of them in real life -- I thoroughly enjoyed the book. They were still entertaining enough characters, and they certainly went through enough interesting shit. Plus a lot of the secondary characters were great, especially the Red King, a coffee-drinking skeleton who usually appears in a red bathrobe, because he lives in the creepy pyramid that is the Concern's headquarters. Caleb's dad is also actually quite hilarious, despite being a giant scary religious zealot.

Anyway, it's a book about unsustainable resource extraction, but it's also about giant fiery serpents and water gods and human sacrifice and all that good stuff, so it's quite a head trip in a good way.

For BSpec's book club I finally got around to reading the first book in Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence, which I have been meaning to do for at least two years now. I have the last two books in the sequence signed, but the first one only in paperback, and am missing the second and third. To make it even more complicated, the books take place in a different order than they are published -- they are ordered by the number referenced in the title.

The first book, therefore, is Three Parts Dead, which follows the adventures of young Craftswoman Tara Abernathy as she is hired on probation at the necromantic law firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao under the mentorship of terrifyingly efficient senior Craftwoman Elayne Kevarian. Tara graduated from Craft school under dubious circumstances that involved her trying to kill one of her professors and getting thrown out of the school, literally, which is pretty dangerous because the school floats up in the sky, as all the best magic schools do.

Tara's first assignment is in the city of Alt Coulomb, which runs off the power of its god, Kos Everburning. Unfortunately, Kos has died under mysterious circumstances. Tara, with the help of a hilarious sheltered young priest (or Novice Technician, as he is called) named Abelard and his junkie policewoman friend Cat, has to help Elayne figure out who killed Kos and why and how and who benefits and all that stuff and generally unravel the massive conspiracy hidden in the heart of the Church.

While the story is plenty funny, it's not as much of a comedy as one might think from some of its elements -- demon lawyers! a vampire pirate captain! divine contract law! -- and the world of magical techno-corporatocracy that Gladstone builds is convincing, at once both weird and distressingly familiar.

Tara is a great protagonist, driven and talented and badass and definitely in a bit over her head, and Abelard is a great dual lead, being an earnest bumbling weirdo in an arcane religious order who chain-smokes to show religious devotion and doesn't know what a newspaper is. They're a fantastic, fantastic team, especially since the book very sensibly eschews the unnecessary romantic subplot that I think a lot of authors would have found obligatory. Instead of romance we get, like, shape-shifting gargoyles and blood magic libraries and a nine-story demonic BDSM nightclub and stuff like that.

The philosophical underpinnings of the main conflict ends up having a lot to do with free will and consent and the dangers of clever, talented technolibertarian douchebags being allowed to exploit other people without adult supervision, so suffice it to say that the book is not all fluff and explosions, although like any good urban fantasy it certainly has quite a lot in the way of fluff and explosions, and even an instance of leather pants.

I think we're going to get a really good discussion out of it. I've already started reading the next book in the Sequence, so we'll see how many we get through by the time book club rolls around.

I started reading Elizabeth Bear's One-Eyed Jack: A Novel of the Promethean Age a little over a year ago, in the bathtub at Mohegan Sun.

It has taken me so long to finish the book not because it wasn't good, but because I have only read it in the bath — sometimes at casinos but also sometimes not, otherwise it would have taken me even longer, especially considering the last casino I stayed at only had a shower. My copy is now very water damaged.

Anyway. I had picked One-Eyed Jack for my casino bath reading because it's about the spirit of Las Vegas fighting to keep his city from being annexed by the spirit of Los Angeles, so it seemed topical.

There are actually two spirits (or genii) of Las Vegas: the One-Eyed Jack, who has one normal eye and one magical eye he keeps hidden under an eyepatch; and the Suicide King, otherwise known as Stewart, who seems to have a magical ability to kill himself and then resurrect again. Jackie and Stewart are boyfriends in addition to sharing the job of genius of Las Vegas. This seems like it would break a lot of workplace regulations but it looks like being a magical symbol isn’t a very well-regulated field considering all the other stuff that goes down in this book.

Jackie and Stewart eventually form a coalition with several interesting characters, including two ghosts of different John Henrys, some "media ghosts" of unnamed TV spies, and vampire Elvis (though this vampire Elvis is very different from the vampire Elvis of the Sookie Stackhouse books). The antagonists include Angel (the genius of Los Angeles, in the form of a young ingénue), a character known only as “the assassin,” a Promethean Mage, and the ghost of Bugsy Siegel.

I was a bit confused about who precisely all these people were, since I am not much up on my ‘60s TV spies — nor on my Las Vegas history, really, although I do at least know who Bugsy Siegel is. But once I got used to identifying the spies by their descriptors instead of names, it was all easy enough to follow.

The book takes place mostly in 2002, and as is usually the case, I still find it a bit jarring to realize how long ago the mid-2000s were and how much it really was a different era — it makes me feel old — but it’s impossible to miss because stuff in Vegas changes so fast that, even without ever having been there, I know a bunch of the properties mentioned in the book have since shut down and new ones opened; also, Jackie wears black leather cargo pants because he is terribly cool, and it’s become hard to remember that there was a time when cargo pants really were cool and not just a shorthand for sartorial laziness. Other bits of the book take place in 1964, because that’s when all the media ghosts come from. The time travel isn’t flashy; it just sort of happens—there’s enough ghosts in the story already that visiting the ghost of 1964 isn’t that big a deal.

Since this is a spy story I don’t want to talk too much about the plot but suffice to say that, in keeping with the general theme, it, like a game of poker, features long stretches of quietly waiting and thinking about things (I don’t believe poker is ever boring) interspersed with moments of high drama that vastly change the dynamics at the table. (Poor Angel spends the first three-quarters of the book chipping up relentlessly only to spew off her entire stack in one dumb play. Been there done that; it’s awful.) All the disparate threads and meticulously solved riddles finally come together near the end to put a fast-paced and deceptively simple end to the conspiracy.

One of the unifying principles of how magic works in this book is that it relies very heavily on symbolism and stories and beliefs, reminding me a lot of Discworld if the Discworld books were about twelve thousand percent more serious. Genre savviness is important for our heroes to figure out what is going on. Gaming-related symbolism abounds, which is fitting, because gaming-related symbolism abounds in English writing anyway, only this time it’s all looked at a lot more closely than usual.

Like the other Elizabeth Bear books I’ve read, this was pretty weird and I think I’d have to read it again to figure out some of the weird stuff I didn’t get the first time around, but I’m probably not going to because I have at least three unread Elizabeth Bear books on my shelf at the moment. I always like her stuff but it tends to end up taking me a lot longer to get through than I think it’s going to.

I recommend it to anyone who likes metafictional genre-savvy stuff. Pairs well with a Lush bath bomb, a nice hotel room, and an adult beverage.

So Andrea decided to reread The Haunting of Hill House for Halloween and suggested on Twitter that this was a cool thing that all the cool kids were doing, rereading The Haunting of Hill House, because clearly it's a fun book that you want to read more than once, so I figured I should be cool too and read it for the first time, especially since I read We Have Always Lived In the Castle for the first time a few years ago and I liked that one.

The Haunting of Hill House is by Shirley Jackson (Ms. Jackson if you're nasty), author of the very famous short story The Lottery and the person the Shirley Jackson Award is given in honor of at Readercon every year. Both The Lottery and We Have Always Lived In the Castle were deeply creepy, but they still did not prepare me for the creepiness of The Haunting of Hill House, which, as you can probably guess from the title, is a haunted house story, and I am highly susceptible to haunted house stories anyway for basically the same reasons that I love wacky old houses, which is that I am an overly sensitive dork.

Even by haunted house story standards, this one is creepy because, while there is definitely something otherworldly living in Hill House, this seems to be the result of the core problem that the house itself is simply fundamentally, unreservedly evil, and has been from the moment it was built, even before it was finished being built. Its very architecture is apparently designed to psychologically torment anyone who looks at it, let alone anyone who spends time in there. It is weirdly imbued with all the psychological unhealthiness of the morbid weirdo who commissioned the thing, and it is dark and all the angles are wrong and it is buried deep in the feet of the hills and none of the doors ever stay open.

Our main characters are four people who go to stay in the house for a three-month study of paranormal phenomena; two of them are women who have experienced paranormal phenomena in the past. Our narrator is a timid, dreamy, somewhat internally spiteful oddity named Eleanor, who is thirty-two years old and reads like she’s eighteen, and I say this as someone who is both younger than thirty-two and continually feels like she’s still a teenager. Eleanor’s sense of stunted, prolonged adultulescence isn’t formed by widespread economic collapse like mine and my peers’ is; it’s instead due largely to having spent most of her adult life shut away caring for her sick and not-just-internally spiteful mother, plus an overbearing sister who treats her like a child. Eleanor basically has to steal the car and run away to get to Hill House, which is totally how functional adult families work.

When Eleanor finally arrives at Hill House, and meets Theodora and Luke and Dr. Montague, and the creepy-ass housekeeper and his creepy-ass wife, things go one of three ways in a series of exquisitely paced and plotted scenes: Sometimes, Hill House is just disorienting and unpleasant, with little supernatural activity and a lot of tilting minor annoyances, like things maybe moving just outside your peripheral vision, or just being oppressively dank and Victorian. Other times, the company and good food and occasional bout of nice weather mean that they actually are having quite a nice time, exploring the brook in the backyard or drinking brandy and playing parlor games, all shut up together in the parlor where they can safely keep an eye on each other. And sometimes, there are the manifestations, which are when shit gets really creepy: writing on the walls that calls out Eleanor by name, blood all over Theo’s room, banging noises and creepy laughter in the hallway. It’s all done in a way that is fantastically, exquisitely chilling, and even now thinking about it I have had to pull my legs to the side where I can see them because they felt unsafe all the way under the desk in the dark, and the heat vent is gently blowing on a wall hanging and the noise is making me jump out of my skin with every taptaptap of the wooden dowel on the wall, a noise that usually becomes quite invisible to me by the end of the first day of having the heat on.

But Hill House has plans for Eleanor, and they are not to scare her into leaving; they are much more sinister than that. And seeing Eleanor’s thought process change and morph as she goes totally Yellow Wallpaper on us is even more terrifying than any of the manifestations Hill House throws at her, except perhaps the one where she’s holding Theo’s hand in the dark while there’s a voice manifesting in the next room and then when the lights go on Theo’s too far away for it to have been her hand. Why that one scared the shit out of me the most I’m not sure; probably because it’s more deceptive than the more cinematic hauntings like the white, white trees against the black, black sky. In unrelated news, I’m going to bug the fuck out next time I try to wear my black shirt with the white tree on it, aren’t I.

Apologies to our beautiful shy cat Amaranth who tried to come in and meow at me in a rare display of friendliness while I was writing this review; I didn’t mean to jump out of my skin and shriek at you, it was just very bad timing. She’s probably going to hide from me for like a month now.

Anyway, I feel like this book certainly has earned its reputation as the scariest ghost story ever told, and I will not be reading it again anytime soon, although Andrea has threatened me with the movie. I don’t know if I’m strong enough.

The Raven King is, I think, the most Raven Cycle-y of the Raven Cycle books. It’s also my favorite because my copy is signed by Maggie Stiefvater herself, which is always a plus. But it’s also a really fulfilling end to the series, drawing on all the themes and motifs set up right at the beginning—Blue’s prophecy and the vision of Gansey’s death and the tomb of Glendower and all that stuff—but also introducing wacky new elements and characters right up past where you’d ordinarily think you’d be getting much new information in a story this long. Henry turns out to be pretty important, and while it seems weird to be basically adding a fourth Raven Boy a few hundred pages from the end of a four-volume series, Henry is too awesome for it to matter—as is RoboBee, Henry’s magical robotic bee that functions as something between a familiar and a James Bond spy gadget.

Much of the series thus far has dealt with uncovering family secrets, but there are still more to be discovered, and they’re pretty big ones. Ronan has the most outlandish ones, and you’d think they’d be predictable after a while but they’re somehow not—after finding out in book two that his father dreamed up his mother and in book three that he dreamed up his brother, you wouldn’t think there would be more things to find out that he accidentally dreamed up, but there are. And that’s not even getting into the business end of things. Adam is still in some sort of weird possession/communication with the spirit of Cabeswater, which was getting better for a while as he learned to listen to it, but which is not becoming a problem again as Cabewater gets infested with the demon awakened at the end of the last book, which looks like a giant-ass black hornet (because wasps and bees and stuff are a huge recurring thing in this series and if I’d known I would have insisted the bees panel talk more about it at Readercon) and seems to function a lot like Hexxus from Ferngully. Henry has… well, he has the backstory that gave him RoboBee. Gansey is dealing with all his rich dude legacy problems, plus the having died already once thing, and while this Glendower quest has taken him all over the world, it turns out the answers might lie closer to home than he suspected.

Blue may be having the worst of it, though, because they found her father and brought him home, and he’s been cowering in a broom closet avoiding Gwenllian for the whole time, and it’s kind of sad. And then there’s some stuff where Blue might be basically part tree, and it’s pretty weird, even though Blue already has a lot of experience with being weird. It’s above and beyond weird and Gansey is still going to die.

On top of that, Piper, who has graduated to becoming our main villain after murdering her husband and adopting the demon hornet, might be more knowledgeable about magic shit than her husband was, but still does not seem to really grasp the gravity of what she’s doing when she decides to sell the demon hornet to the magical-object-collecting community. Frankly, the Piper/demon alliance is not the most seamless pairing of personalities, and it’s pretty hilarious. Piper also disses Legal Sea Foods, because she is the worst. Legal is a venerable Boston institution and their food is delicious even if they are functionally a chain now.

While the plot gets darker and weirder and more and more people die and Cabeswater is unmade, the language in the book actually gets funnier and more Stiefvater-y, and somehow it works. Part of this is because there are deceptively goofy-sounding characters like Piper and Henry, who are, respectively, amusingly shallow trash and using humor as a form of camouflage/coping mechanism for all the weird shit he’s part of. But even the third-person narration has gotten even less invisible than it was at the beginning of the series, using all sorts of interesting tricks like repeated lines, words and half-words floating about with no punctuation, stream-of-consciousness description, and jokes. Also, how do you not laugh every time you see “RoboBee” written on the page, no matter how dire the situation? Especially when everything else going on is so medieval?

Overall, it does end up reminding me a bit of the Lynburn Legacy books, with a similar blend of death and jokes, and of the modern and the historical. I’d definitely put it in the “sassy Gothic” subgenre that I wish was larger because it’s basically the sweet spot of Relevant To All My Interests. I can’t wait to see what Stiefvater comes up with next.

Current Mood: caffeinated

I got back up to Maine to finish the Raven Cycle books! Go me!

Technically I started Blue Lily, Lily Blue the last time I was up there but I only got a few pages into it. But this time I splonked down on the porch and pretty much ripped through the whole thing. It was pretty glorious.

In this one, Blue’s mother has disappeared to go look for Blue’s father underground. Blue and the Raven Boys start sort of looking for Blue’s mother, but also looking for some entities known only as the three sleepers. One of them is the king they’re looking for, Owen Glendower. They’ve been warned that one of the sleepers must be woken and another one must not be woken; apparently, there’s no word on the third.

Of course, it’s the third one they end up actually waking first; this is Owen Glendower’s awesome and thoroughly batty witch daughter, Gwenllian. (No, I don’t know how to pronounce that. Irish I’m starting to get a hold of but Welsh is still quite beyond me.) This is possibly not even the weirdest thing going on, even though Gwenllian speaks in riddles and songs and wears multiple dresses at a time and has giant curly hair that she keeps things in and generally sounds like a cartoon character drawn up by a disgruntled Disney animator on acid. I heart her.

We meet more bad guys, including the Gray Man’s insufferable former employer, Colin Greenmantle, and his similarly insufferable wife, Piper, who—in a fun twist that I appreciated more than words can say—Colin seems to believe is his trophy wife but who actually knows more about creepy magic shit than he does and has a lot more experience dealing with it and, consequently, can command more power and get up to more nefarious things that Colin doesn’t quite understand. It’s enormously satisfying.

In other news, Gansey and Blue start secretly sort-of dating; Adam is dealing with how to interpret invasive communications from Cabeswater, with help from Persephone; Ronan is doing sketchy dream stuff at the Barns that no one seems to quite understand and that isn’t working anyway; Noah is still dead but having an increasingly bad time of it; and Gansey’s British friend Malory has found a mysterious tapestry featuring three bloody-handed ladies who all look like Blue.

Most of the magical action in this book focuses not on Cabeswater but in a cave on the property of a man named Jesse Dittley, a large farmer who speaks in all caps and only eats Spaghetti-Os. The cave carries a curse on it that results in a Dittley dying in it every couple of decades or so, otherwise the walls of the farmhouse bleed and all that other poltergeist stuff. There are actually multiple caves because there’s also one for the sleeper who must not be woken (guess what happens to that one at the end of the book), but it’s complicated figuring out where they are and how they’re all connected, because magic.

We also meet an amusing Aglionby student named Henry who does not seem very important at first, just very friendly and cheerful with big hair. He drives an electric car. He will be important later.

I’m getting some of the plotlines confused in my memory because this book does quite a large amount of setting up things that are going to explode spectacularly in the next book and I don’t always remember where one book ends and the other one begins, with the exception of the bit with the sleeper who must not be woken. But it doesn’t have that lack of tension that some books that are all setup have. Things are moving along and weaving together in complicated ways that all will probably make sense eventually and everyone is having lots of feelings and there’s some lovely register-switching going on depending on whose head we’re in at the time. Colin Greenmantle has a glib, dismissive, affectedly witty inner voice that’s simultaneously as insufferable as he is and genuinely funny to read. It’s almost painfully modern in the context of all the mythological timeless stuff going on in the rest of the series, even though it’s reminiscent of writing styles that I love when they’re on the Internet, but it does an extremely good job of characterizing Colin as a superficial type who doesn’t really understand what it is that he’s messing with. Meanwhile, the rest of the book is filled with lush, colorful prose interrupted by periodic bouts of swearing, usually from Ronan.

Ronan, by the way, is an underappreciated comic genius. Probably nobody would ever tell him that since he is angry and powerful and all dangerous and stuff, with his pet dream raven and his biker jacket and his fighty attitude and his adorable crush on Adam, but his trolling abilities are top-notch (especially regarding deployment of the murder squash song) and he can do wordplay in both English and Latin. Also, Chainsaw might be my favorite character in the whole series.

The book does end on a massive uh-oh, with a bunch of people dead and bunch of other people who were previously either lost or dead being recovered, so I can understand why fans of the series were very upset about having to wait for the next book to come out. It’s the sort of thing that’s why I waited so long to read this book in the first place, and I am glad I did, because it meant I got to jump right into The Raven King.

Current Mood: caffeinated

Some lovely person bought me a copy of Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven's Prophecy tarot deck off my Amazon wishlist. While most decks come with a little pamphlet that fits inside the card box, with a bare-bones explanation of each card -- usually one sentence or less -- this deck comes with a proper instruction book, although the result is that the box does not really fit the deck of cards. I'll need to find something to wrap them in.

The instruction book is called Illuminating the Prophecy and it's shorter than my main Tarot instructional book, but it's still more than enough to get a beginner started, and it's an excellent supplement to other materials. Stiefvater explains the artistic choices she's made for this deck in particular, which makes it easier to remember the card meanings when using it to do readings, It's also a very good explanation of tarot in general, so it should be useful to use for other decks, if you have other decks that come with useless tiny pamphlets like most of them. Each card is given a couple of keywords, then a page or two of explanation on how it fits into the greater patterns in the deck, what it can mean in different parts of a reading, how Stiefvater feels about the card personally, and anything else that she deems highly relevant. The personal stuff is quite useful--tarot readings are very personal and how one person reads something might not quite fit in the same way with how someone else reads it, based on a reader or querent's life/personality/relationship to the concepts represented by the card. The booklet also has much of Stiefvater's characteristic voice, if not quite as nutty as the one she uses on Tumblr, so it is quite entertaining as well as informative.

I've started entering some of the notes from this book into my own tarot notebook, which is a jumble of things I've learned from different sources but overall draws heavily on Tarot Plain and Simple, which has been my main instructional for years (I lost most of the notes I had from when I first started reading tarot, so now I only use the things I remembered from back then, which was more than a dozen years ago, so that's not a huge amount and it's not nearly enough to do readings from memory with). I think I'm going to end up incorporating a lot of what Stiefvater says into the way I read; I think it's a bit more on my wavelength than some of the tone of the other book.

Overall, A+ deck, A+ instructional booklet, would occult with again. Also, the Queen of Pentacles card is so preeetty.