Review: The Book of Hidden Things, Francesco Dimitri

Set in the stifling heat, twisted olive groves, and relentless machismo of rural Southern Italy, and dealing strongly with themes of masculinity, it is perhaps no surprise that The Book of Hidden Things is something of a blokey book.

That isn't intended as an insult, and it is something the text itself resists, trying to have a bit gay rep as well as showing women as varied, empowered, and active characters while never actually centering them. That the women themselves come out a little in the Iain Banks Goddess mould is probably only to be expected and isn't, of itself, a criticism, just a warning to regular readers of this blog which has always had something of a feminist slant.

That aside, however, The Book of Hidden Things is excellently written, wedding a thriller plot both to an emotional story of growing up and some philosophical pondering on the very nature of magic. It is a book about brotherhood and betrayl, about that awful moment when you realise that you are no longer young, that your die is cast, your bright potential squandered, and your fuckups irredeemable. More importantly, it asks the terrifying question of what happened to all of your potential, all of your dreams, and to what ends would you be prepared to go in order to get them back again?

Following three childhood friends trying to solve the disappearance of the fourth of their group - the one who had always formed the linchpin of their group - the enigmatic and tellingly named Art. Alternating between their four viewpoints, we are led through the lies and exploitation of the local church, the threats and protection of the local Mafia, and all of Art's deceptions, crimes, and debaucheries, the mystery is gradually solved. But as it is, three lives are also opened wide to us - the secrets and exploitations of adolescence leading us in to the disappointments and compromises of adulthood, and the constant sense that somewhere, the path was lost.

Meanwhile, Art's actions lead to a climax and a decision that would do any thriller proud - even if it was a very sudden change in pace.

Honestly, this book bewitched and unsettled me in equal measure. One for fans of Nick Harkaway, China Miéville, and anyone likes things a little darker than the Blood and Icecream trilogy.

Review: The Wine Dark Sea, Robert Aickman

Sometimes, it's all about synchronicity. Like how I was walking across town shortly after Time's Fool had been released when a nice local gentleman stops me, tells me he's read it and enjoyed it. Have I, he asks, ever read any Robert Aickman?
Who?
Wrote ghost stories. Apparently my work reminded him of it.  

And what should my excellent godparents have got me for Christmas this year but a copy of Aickman's The Wine Dark Sea? With such a lovely co-incidence in place, how could I resist reading it?

And reader, I must say, I am terribly flattered.

Aickman is nasty. Cold, a little detached, his writing is wonderfully chilling, creating quiet, horrible ghost stories with some moments of gorgeously dry observation cutting through it all. This is the real world, stifling and mundane, shot through with horror that is never lessened by explanation. This is not the vaulting, heartless skies of Lovecraft, this is an insiduous little curl of darkness in your very heart.

Of the collection, my favourites were probably The Fetch, and Never Visit Venice, just because... *shudder*. Perfect build of atmosphere against the gothic set pieces. Love it.

Look, alysdragon dot blogspot isn't a book reccomendation site, really, or a review blog, or even - as I'd once hoped it would be - a criticism blog, really it's just a place I come to write about books in whatever form I see fit. Normally, this takes the form of reviews because normally my response to reading is weighing the good and the bad of any given book and trying to work out who else might enjoy - even if I didn't. Sometimes, my emotions hijack me and I want to rave about something, or else throw it in to the firey pits of perdition. But occasionally, a book is simply mine. I'll read something and not want to judge it, or pull it to pieces, or even reccomend it. I just want to put it on my eternal reread shelf and stroke it occasionally because it is mine and I have just discovered it.

I could talk about Aickman's politics, or his prose, or my analysis of his stories, or the fact that he actually seems to like women and the surprising amount of lesbianism in this book, and I might do all of that when I get a chance. 

But for now I just want to say with credit to a local reader and to my godparents, I've just discovered Robert Aickman.

This book is mine.

Review: The Book of Dust, La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman

One of the reasons I don't use a formal rating system on this blog is that assigning something a certain number of stars always seems to result in injustice. For example, if a book by my favourite writer isn't quite as sublimely brilliant as I know they're capable of producing, I might give it four stars, even three if I'm feeling vindictive. However, were I to read the same novel by an unknown, it would have breezed its way to an effortless five based on my surprise by all the skill and qualities which familiarity would otherwise cause me to take for granted.

As a reader, a writer's work cannot be separated from their oeuvre, nor indeed from what they have meant to you at various points in your own life. Therefore, when I encounter a book that, taken solely on its own merits, is a perfectly adequate piece of middle grade fiction trying to pass itself off as an adult novel, I would probably be likely to give it three stars. Unless, of course, it was written by Philip Pullman, when I would feel a remarkable degree disgust, anger and personal betrayal.

Look. I loved His Dark Materials. I read them relentlessly as a child, they being one of the few things that did not talk down to me in terms of content, character, or events. I've written before about the state of middle grade and YA fiction for avid and intelligent readers of fantasy when I was that age, and Pullman was a huge part of me making the transition from Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper to Robert Holdstock and Angela Carter. I cannot overlook this when I say that La Belle Sauvage is such a dreadful disappointment.

You see, it wants to be The River at Green Knowe when it grows up, an ambition which perhaps misses the point that The River at Green Knowe is a children's book. 

Moral messages that were subtle and carefully handled in the original trilogy are here presented with all the nuance of a cosh to the back of your head - we get it Phil, the church are the bad guys - the wonder and strangeness of Lyra's world is replaced by a series of frankly generic folkloric cameos, and our deeply abrasive, awkward, believable protagonist is replaced with... Malcolm.

I'm not even going to start talking about Malcolm. 

But on top of this dumbing down of style and content, there was the insistence that this was one for grownups. Perhaps the very same grownups who had grown up reading His Dark Materials, and it was this that really stuck the knife in because, put simply, La Belle Sauvage does not function if viewed as an adult novel.

It has long been a conviction of mine that the difference between adult, YA, and children's fiction is not so much a matter of content, as one of structure, pacing, and focus. Just as children's fiction - good children's fiction - is not merely adult fic with the 'inappropriate' content taken out and all the nastiness coddled up, adult fiction - or at least, good adult fiction - is not just a children's story with a bit of sex, swearing, and an absolutely gratuitous implied rape thrown in to it.

The two modes serve different needs, tells a story differently, talk to their readers in a whole different language, and this is why you never really outgrow good children's fiction - because its qualities remain. Historically, Pullman knew this. His Dark Materials is frequently devastating, lyrical, powerful - they are children's books, unashamedly, and in the very best senses of the words.  

La Belle Sauvage isn't even a very good children's book.

Ultimately, if this hadn't been something I was reading for bookclub, I wouldn't have finished it. I don't want my childhood heroes to diminish this much in my eyes. And, if that weren't enough?

[Spoilers for His Dark Materials, and La Belle Sauvage below]

Review: Life After Life - Kate Atikinson

This is a great book.

(Fred, that isn't a review.)

Fine. So:

 Life After Life is a book I wouldn't have encountered without my book club, and - going to be honest - hadn't really heard of Kate Atkinson before it was added to the list. But that's the joy of a book club, and yeah, maybe it throws up more duds than gems, but every now and then?

I mean, it is really, really good. Intricate, complex, intelligent, the characters glow through the premise in a way that kind of reminds me of A.S Byatt. If I had to sum it up in a word, that would be "nourishing" - Life After Life a book that feeds your story sense, that builds a world, a family, a life (we'll come to that later) in a way that is just so satisfying. I'm not often a big fan of realist fiction (again, we'll come to that in a minute), but when it delivers, it triumphs - and this book is a triumph. It's just so well written. Yeah, I will quibble with the faint conservatism that pervades it, with the handling of some of the characters, or the tropes that are leaned upon - but my gods, it's well written and just good to read.

So, the premise is simply this: when the Ursula Todd dies, her life begins again from the start. While she cannot strictly remember her earlier lives, trace memories linger, allowing her to guide this 'replay'. This is the only fantastical aspect of the novel, and Ursula is not the only active agent: her fate is affected to some extent by chance, and the decisions of others. This premise offers quite some commentary in what it means to live our best lives, and how even the smallest decisions can send us on wildly differing courses, making us vastly different people.

But the real strength of Life After Life is not in exploring such questions - rather it is offering us a powerful vision of the various lives one could live in the first half of the twentieth century (limited, of course, by gender, class, sexuality and skin colour.)
[Mild spoilers below] 

Review: The Talisman Ring, Georgette Heyer

You know, I came kind of late to Georgette Heyer. I think it was catching the dramatisation of Friday's Child on BBC Radio 7 (now 4extra) that did it for me, but it wasn't until a good few years after that I finally read one of her novels - whereupon I learned that my mum had been an avid Heyer reader in her youth, but that she'd thrown them out in a fit of Respectability when she went to university.
"Why didn't you tell me about her?" I asked.
"I didn't think they'd be you'd sort of book," she replied - which led me to wonder what she thought my reading habits were as an early adolescent, but never mind.

Anyway, what can I say about The Talisman Ring? Well, in short, it's a Georgette Heyer novel - one of her historical romances, mind, not one of the murder mysteries. Best read in tattered paperback format while snuggled under a blanket with a box of Malteasers, or else your preferred cheap-posh chocolates (Aldi do some nice ones.)

So far at the plot goes,  the heir to a great esate has been banished for a murder for which he was framed, and clearing his name all hinges on the eponymous Talisman Ring. Unfortunately, he's currently living as a smuggler and the excise men are after him - can our intrepid heroines keep him safe until the inevitable double wedding?

You've got the impulsive, spitfire heroine (the cultural stereotype Eustacie de Vauban as she runs from an arranged marriage) and the wry, sensible one (Sarah Thane). You have three whole pretty boys to chose from, all nicely in the Heyer mould: the sexy, reckless Ludovic Lavenham; the taciturn and melancholic Tristam Sheild; or the arch, dressy Basil 'Beau' Lavenham - although one of them is, naturally, a desperate villain. People fall in love and are picturesquely injured, pistols are fired, punches are thrown, smugglers smuggle and schemes are hatched. The clothes are fabulous, all the men drink too much, and everyone plays cards wittily.

Basically, it's funny, delightful, and positiviely begs for slash fiction. There is a reason Heyer is the acknowledged queen of the genre. Yeah, obviously, she was a dreadful classist, and yeah, there's antisemitism, and yeah the gender rep is a terrible - so really, I suppose it depends where you set the bar for these things. Books like this are written to scratch a very particular itch and if you're content to ignore those faults The Talisman Ring delivers admirably - plus, you get to see Ludovic in a dress. That's got to be worth something, right?

Review: In Exile by Alexandra Turney

When I was a child, I wanted to be a Maenad. At about nine years old, Anglican and living in rural England, I read the myth of Orpheus - how he was torn apart and eaten by the followers of Dionysus and thought, "Yep. Reasonable life goal."

Just putting that out there, really.

Anyway, Turney's debut novel, In Exile is fucking gorgeous.

Capturing the stultifying disaffection of fifteen in a city that doesn't fit you, it tells of Dionysus reborn in modern Rome and weaves a captivating story of worship, obsession, and sacred transgression in a world with no space for gods, that spoke to the deep buried, teenage part of me. It's really hard to describe the power of this book, occupying as it does that uncomfortable space between metaphor and fully committed fantastical fiction. It engaged deeply with the implications of godhood and worship with a deity wildly removed from omnibenevolent, monotheistic connotations, while also portraying the deeply familiar experiences of fear and trauma around blackout drunkenness around and boys whom you know are Bad News.

The aftermath, for example, of the first Bacchanal as Grace, Caroline, and Sarah go for coffee is a wonder of the sordid, dirtiness of the morning after: "All she had was a headache, a stomach ache, and the worrying sense that she was not merely forgetting, but was actually repressing what had happened. She couldn't shake the feeling that some part of her mind was trying to protect her."

Turney's young female characters are wonderfully realised in their stunted, problematic reality. Although at times it felts as though Grace - the protagonist - was made a little too heavily in the 'plain and execeptional' mould, I can see why those decisions were made, and her relationship with Caroline brought back plenty of memories of the uneasy, competitive and repressed nature of that time in life. Likewise, while (as a Pagan) I'd want to explore the conception of Dionysus more deeply, within the scope of the narrative, both his malice and his tragedy are brilliantly written. 

This is a book that I finished, and just knew I was going to reread, that it might even find itself of that special pile of books that never really find their way back to my shelf. Honestly, it feels as though that first, breathless read only got to scratch the surface, and to a certain extent I resent writing the review now rather than when I've had a couple of years to think on it properly.  There is so much there to talk about, and 2-300 words can't really cover it.

But, in the interests of brevity, if you're here because you like the way I think, then you need to read this book. It's brutal and powerful and glorious. Alexandra Turney is a writer I am going to watch.

Review: The Labyrinth of the Spirits, Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Oh boy. I'd been waiting a while for this one. Let's take a deep breath and begin:

With this RSI inducing tome, the incomparable Zafón completes his Cemetery of Forgotten Books cycle, and believe me, he is not fucking around. Plunging us back among the cursed writers of Barcelona, presents an intense, intricate novel that leads us through years and horrors as Daniel Sempere tries to solve the mystery of his mother's murder, Fermín Romero de Torres tries to pay a long standing debt, and a vengeance is extracted for a terrible crime.

I will admit to being unfairly harsh on The Prisoner of Heaven in my initial review, but will not deny that The Labyrinth of the Spirits brought back all my breathless devotion. There is a poetic intensity to the prose - maintained once again by the wonderful translation of Lucia Graves - that leads to the almost worshipful quoting, of sheer loss of self in the glory of the prose. This is not to say The Labyrinth of the Spirits is merely an exercise in style - Zafón's grip on the horror, on atrocity, is perhaps fresher and more powerful than I have seen it before. He does not shy from brutality, but looks it direct in the eye and permits us to see how truly appalling mankind can be.

And, as I said before, he is not fucking around. Hitherto, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books has been generally political, perhaps even Political, as it engaged with the cost of war, the way class, power, and money twist our lives, but in Angel's Game and The Shadow of the Wind these were often lost in the genre expectations and dreamlike qualities of the tale. Yes, The Prisoner of Heaven was very direct in its criticisms of Franco's regime and those who enabled it, however it is not until The Labyrinth of the Spirits that Zafón brings the full lyrical power of his prose to communicate the genuine horrors of fascist authoritarianism. This is not a Labyrinth to enter lightly, nor one to leave you unchanged.

It has long been my theory that these novels present us with devils, with tortured lightbringers who are perhaps more sympathetic than the monstorous men surrounding them, but who left the side of the angels long ago. To the damned pair that are David Martín and Julián Carax, Zafón adds Alicia Gris - who fulfils her part with incredible power - but he also lets us see that there has been an angel present all along. Perhaps one who wears old newspapers inside his coat and who is unashamed in his lust for pneumatic stars of the screen, perhaps even one who fell as far and as hard as the devils ever did, but one who remains an angel nevertheless.

But before this turns in to one of my failed reviews, I suppose I must make the inevitable complaint: I didn't like the ending. I can see why the ending is as it is, can even appreciate the cleverness with which it is all done, may even feel more kindly about it when I've read the whole series as one (which I will when I've cleared my reading pile a little) but I didn't think it was necessary to tie everything together so neatly, draw it out so long, or answer all those questions.

On top of all that - I simply did not like it, and reserve the right to feel that way.

Review: Vicious Rumer, Joshua Winning

I had the great privilege of sharing the stage Joshua Winning during the genre panel at the Unbound Author event in Nottingham last October. Eagle eyed observers in the room may have noticed my jaw hitting the stage that during the "who are your influences?" question when Winning answered that his were Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Robin Jarvis.

Suffice to say, I bought the damn book.

It's bloody good. I mean, really bloody good.

Vicious Rumer follows Rumer Cross, hard-nosed, solitary, and damaged, as she tries to escape the legacy of her mother: Celene Cross, the so called 'Witch Assassin'. Not so easy when a mobster with a propensity for throwing his enemies in to oubliettes decides that your  mother left a mystical weapon in your care, nor indeed when said mother might placed a curse on you that means anyone you get close to dies a horrible death.

Fast paced, slick, and nasty, this is a cracking thriller that manages to be kinda charming despite not holidng back on the pain, darkness, death and despair. The plot races through blood-magic, political conspiracies, and mob violence without letting up for long enough for our protagonist to have a shower. I tore through reading it at much the same pace. Winning captures Rumer's voice perfectly, her mixture of affected heartlessness and vulnerability providing a capable, sympathetic female protaganist who you are willing to follow in to some very dodgy places and questionable actions.

Honestly, go read it. Jarvis would be proud.

Review: Fighting Proud - Stephen Bourne

Oh, dear, that is quite a large pile of books I've read but not reviewed yet. I'm even going to miss LGBT+ History month by the time this one goes live and I read it in December...

Moving on anyhow, I picked up Fighting Proud, The untold story of the gay men who served in two World Wars in Norwich's wonderful The Book Hive as pre-Christmas present to myself after getting a full set of stamps on my loyalty card by buying books for other people. The title caught my interest and, unlike a lot of non-fiction I've read, Fighting Proud does exactly what it says on the tin - delivering in sparse, engaging prose, a compendium of information about the (primarily British) men who served in the Forces during the First and Second World Wars. While it does address famous figures like Wilfred Owen, Ivor Novello, Noël Coward and Alan Turing, Bourne fulfils the 'untold story' as much as possible by making the the focus the book on the ordinary gay serviceman, and an examination of the social mores surrounding homosexuality in the military at the time.

Honestly, it's a fascinating read. Using photographs, letters, personal writings and - where possible - interviews, Bourne creates a well structured, highly readable book that is informative, rigorous, compelling, and in places deeply moving. With a focus primarily on the Second World War - due to an acknowledge paucity of sources for the First - Fighting Proud finds gay stories from the Army, Navy and Airforce, as well as paying attention to the experiences of gay men on the Home Front, and in the both the state sanctioned and independent entertainment industries of the time.

 I loved it, and devoured it at a speed with which I usually struggle to read non-fiction books. Bourne portrays excellently the 'knife-edge' of homophobia, prejudice, with which men who had sex with men had to live in those periods, as well as the tacit (and occasionally open) recognition by comrades and officers that "these things happen." More importantly, it makes a very clear statement of the fact that 'we were always here', and that homosexual desire, love, and devotion, are not a new phenomenon in any part of society, or among any type of person - regardless of politics.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fighting Proud is primarily concerned with the service record of those whose stories it tells - and I think if the book has a weakness it's the way it sits uneasily between being a queer history and a military history, and operating a little tentatively with its appeal to either discipline. There were a couple of moments where one felt oneself being bombarded with military accolades so that an archetypal straight reader would come to understand that Gay People Can Be Brave, Too. Also, from a personal perspective, I would have preferred more attention to be paid to the books subjects as men outside of their military service, but this is less a request for a different study than for more of this book - and it will certainly send me off to do some further reading, especially on Ian Gleed, of whom I had criminally not heard before this book.

My only other real criticism would be the ever-contentious issue of modern labels in queer historical context. Bourne is very careful in this project to rely upon his sources and not make any but relatively conservative statements about the orientation, or indeed gender, of his subjects. While a love letter between two men can generally be read fairly unambiguously*, examining possible transgender history in a time when not only transition, but even the language to describe it, was not accessible to most people is an intensely difficult undertaking. The line between drag and trans identity isn't clear or stable even now, and many closeted people use drag as an outlet before - or indeed, instead of - coming out**. As such, I feel perhaps a little more house room could have been given to possible trans interpretations of cross-dressing and gender non-conformity in certain cases, even if - in the absence of more solid evidence - Bourne was reluctant to commit himself to such a reading.

Similarly, Bourne generally divides his subjects in to those who were gay and those who had gay experiences when in all-male environs but were otherwise straight, but seldom does the word 'bisexual' make an appearance. While I appreciate that many of these men would disown that label heartily, as an historian who shows such sensitivity when regarding how homophobia and self-closeting problematise writing the history of gay men, it is a little disappointing that he does not address the effects of structural biphobia and the self-erasure and closeting that many bisexual men face even today.

However, Fighting Proud is still an immensely valuable book and one I will doubtless revisit. Well worth your dime.

 * despite what some historians insist...
** Not that I speak from experience or anything

Review: The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School

Yes. Yesssssssssssss.

Oh, my blog was having its hiatus when the last one of these came out. The one where I bought half a dozen copies, gave them to all of my friends for Christmas and went, "Look, look! IT'S US!"

So: Did you go to a single sex school? Did you fucking hate it? Or, did you love it, but find yourself the 'red headed stepchild' all the same? Are you still mates with some of the weirdos you met there?
 
Okay. You need to read Drearcliff Grange. 

How to describe this? Superpowers and eldritch abominations at St Trinians? Rip-roaring adventures, jolly hockeysticks, defeating facism, and overcooked swede? These books are nuts and it's fucking marvellous. Newman is the King of Pastiche and he owns this totally.

I need to calm down.

The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School is the second in the Drearcliff series, and expands both the world and the themes that Newman developed in the first novel. It suffers a little from being a transitional piece between the self-contained first book, and the wider series - but it is still an immensely satisfying read. Moreover, Newman addresses that aspect of it thematically, taking Amy, Frecks, Kali, and Emma from the plucky girlhood and simple moralities of The Mysteries... to a adolescence, and a reappraisal of what it is to be a hero.

Certainties are challenged, characters change, and we explore the awkward ground between the broken and the malevolent, balance law agaisnt lawlessness, explore the dangers of privilege, the worth of trust, and the harm that can be done by the simplest of actions. At the heart of the novel is Amy, whose role as the benevolent Kentish Glory is reconsidered as she wonders if she might not do better as the more terrible Death's Head Hawkmoth.

Of course, its all terribly referential, both to adjacent literary worlds and Newman's other works, but that's all part of the fun. If that isn't your sort of thing then... honestly, you might want to find another book review blog.

More seriously, Newman's great strength as a writer is that he manages to drop every name under the sun without ever detracting from the story he is telling at that moment, and this book carries off that trick admirably. An absolute joy.

I loved it so much, I did cosplay.

Review: Domini Mortum by Paul Holbrook

Let's keep things ghastly here for a while.... Paul Holbrooks Domini Mortum whisks us off to the smoggy streets of Victorian London, where misanthropic Samuel Weaver is sketching the dismembered bodies of murder victims for The Illustrated Police News.

I mean, I'll let you make your own content notes, here - just be sure to cast a broad net. This is genuine old-school horror, full of apparitions, murder, mayhem, and gallons of gore. Sharp, funny, really quite upsetting in places, this a really satisfying novel for those who like things on the darker side.

Samuel is, as they say, a piece of work. Talented, arrogant, blockheaded, he blunders through his investigations following both a trail of mutilated bodies and his fixation on the cannibal serial killer, Sibelius Darke.Twists, turns, conspiracies, madnesses and god so many murders take the reader through a plot of high melodrama and human depravity, while Samuel himself is brought to understand several terrible truths.

Honestly, it's a great read.
<<light spoilers from this point out>>

Awful as Weaver might be, I rapidly became rather fond of him and he is cordially invited to take his place in my collection of trashy murder-boys. Part of this was because of the way the central plot was contrasted with flash back sections of Weaver's home life and upbringing in York - with his priest father, doting if neglected mother, and his early taste for the chaotic and the macabre. I don't know what it says about me, but while I seldom read realist historical fiction, if you weave a lot of period-appropriate family drama and social commentary in to a horror novel and that will be my favourite bit.

Similarly, I found myself struck far more the social interactions and class consciousness of the characters than the actual rip-roaring chases through London, and the dismembered bodies - but I think that actually stands testament more to Holbrook's skill in conveying the rich and painstaking he has done (and my own weird way of engaging with things) than it does to any deficiency on the part of the plot. In fact, the world that Holbrook presents is wonderfully realised - he crates a real, tangiable sense of a specific historical moment that transcends the genre expectations 'London Smog.'

If I had a complaint, however, it would be that the final third of the book does not stand up to the promise of the set-up. The scale, scope, and violence evoked in the early part of the novel make what is objectively a very creepy and unsettling ending seem a little anticlimactic. I'm aware this is the second book in the series, and that Holbrook may indeed resume the narrative at some point, but personally feel that had the events of the denoumont been given more space to breathe, then both the narrative complexity and personal intensity could have been kept to the same pitch they'd had throughout and given the twist ending more power.

All in all, however, this is a bloody good book (pun intended) and great fun to read.

Review: Uncle Silas, Sheridan le Fanu

So... owning up time. Who else always gets this one confused with Silas Marner?

Just me? Good good.

Right, I picked this one up in the secondhand bookshop, knowing nothing more about it that it was apparently a Gothic, and it was written by the same guy who did Carmilla. It was pretty much what you'd expect. Heiresses! Crumbling stately homes! Evil plots! Laudanum! Trains!

As you can probably tell, I really enjoyed this one, but struggled to take it particularly seriously. It was quite predictable, and like many Romances of Terror, if you look at things from a plot perspective, it didn't really deliver on many of its promises.

That said, there are a few things to be said for it - firstly, Silas Ruthyn himself is one heck of dish. Quite the silver fox, much prone to dabbing his temples with cologne and sighing about all the bungling fuckwits by whom he has the misfortune to be surrounded. Honestly, from a slightly biased perspective, I would say the character was wasted and we could have done with a lot more of him - but then I have a type.

Secondly, and because this is a respectable literary blog (I say, as you all collapse in to laughter) I was quite taken with Le Fanu's clarity and precision. Uncle Silas is what happens when Northanger Abbey meets Udolpho  - Le Fanu recongises that county men and respectable countries are as full of rogues and abusers as the most fantastical stories, it is only that the villains must comport themselves more carefully. The blending of modernity - at least, for the time of writing - and isolation was really powerful. Rather than Stoker's triumphalist use of technology, the railway in Uncle Silas simply makes the world feel smaller, more limited. It offers no escape to our protagonist, only faster transport for her persecutors.

Le Fanu also came through in his fairness both to young female characters, and female friendship. Barring Silas himself, and Dr Bryerly, the male characters we encounter are relatively anodyne. For all the men drive the plot,  they are not a patch on the vividness of Milly, Meg, or even Madame de la Rougierre - who may not actually do much, but who remain with you. Milly and Maud's friendship, especially, was delightful to read.

I won't mince words - Maud Ruthyn herself is something of a drip. She does not have the poise or intelligence of Carmilla's narrator, and occasionally I wanted to smack her across the side of the head, but even still, Le Fanu is fair to her. She is shown to grow over the course of the novel, and her adult commentary on her youthful follies are quite incisive. Despite all her silliness, she is never treated as a joke, or deserving of suffering - yet neither is her lack of worldliness of common-bloody-sense held up some sort of unrealistic paradigm of virtue. She's immature - that's all.

I like that about Le Fanu - while I might not agree with everything he writes about gender, he didn't hate teenage girls.
 Naturally, it was written in the 1860s, so warnings apply for all the usual 'hilarious' and 'shifty' bumpkins, virulent antisemitism, fetishing of Romany culture, and 'sinister foriegners'. I do so wish they wouldn't.

But, aside from that, an absolutely fine Gothic novel. Better than Udolpho, although that isn't difficult.

Review: The Log House, Baylea Hart

The Log House is a very strange novel. Set in a dark dystopia where humanity lives in worn thin communes, huddled away from the forest where monstrous children prey, murdering anyone they can catch, we follow Penny on her quest for revenge after she is cast out for a crime which becomes clear only as the story unfurls.

Warped by her past, Penny is a unsettling and repulsive protagonist, and her dogged, shambolic traipse through the forest has a nightmarish intensity that frames the grotesqueries of the plot excellently. There is a horror of birth and parenthood that runs through every word of the narrative, a profound body horror realised both by the hairy, murderous creatures hunting her, and the almost bloodless quietness of both the child she has left behind.

Because Penny - the fertile - inhabits a dystopia where childbirth creates monsters, and is surrounded by older, worn-down, people, living limited lives in dark houses splinter-filled houses, people who clutch after her and her son with the same uncomfortable intensity.

This is a book of madness, of suddenness, of hatred that seethes, and children that bring death. The cataclysm that brought about the dystopia is ill-defined, and the books main flaws come about when that aspect of the story is discussed. From a personal perspective, I would either say it need more space and depth to be expanded - to give us a relatable normality against which to play the nightmare - or to be glossed over with only the most general sense of a society slowly withering away. Dystopias breed questions, both as to their sustainability and their scope, and what little we learned of this one didn't give a clear picture of either.

But despite this, The Log House is a deeply creepy tale of threat and revenge, guaranteed to give you a landscape for your bad dreams for quiet some time.

Review: Tempests and Slaughter, Tamora Pierce

Beautiful cover though!

Oh, GAWD, someone give Varice Kingsford a hug from me!

To those not familiar with Pierce's work, Tempests and Slaughter is a prequel to The Immortals series, and takes us deep in to the backstory of one Numair Salmalín as we watch his struggles at the Imperial University in the years before he became known as the most powerful mage alive. An occassionally awkward cross between school/college narrative and... political thriller with magic? Tempests and Slaughter is an incredibly compelling read full of wonderful characters, deep intrigue, and powerful worldbuilding. While the wonderfully foreboding ending either leans quite heavily on the rest of the series, or an eventual sequel, it also stands alone surprisingly well.

Pierce shows both the glory and the cruelty of Empire, and the subtlties of class and race relationships. One of it's treasures - the Imperial University is a wonderfully realised: a study in petty ambitions and academic genorisity, whose seclusion from the world is thematically and narratively engaged with throughout the book, even while it provides a much needed refuge to the young Numair.   

It is often difficult to categorise Pierce's novels by age group - despite inhabiting the same world, The Protector of the Small often reads like the upper end of middle grade fiction, while parts of The Song of the Lioness are clearly young or new adult.  While this novel follows Numair from mid childhood, it has the feel of something pitched slightly older - a more jaded and slightly colder worldview that is reminiscent of Battlemagic, or The Will of the Empress rather than the other Tortall books. There was also a lot more focus on the practicalities of society - taxation, disease management, exploitation - rather than the simpler morality of her early work. A cynical reader would say was influences by A Song of Ice and Fire but Pierce was already engaging with these themes in both The Circle of Magic and The Protector of the Small, and it was lovely to see these developed unflinchingly without her characters ever being shown as less kind, or humanity as less redeemable.

However, Pierce does attempt to show the same run of crushes, dating, and physcial developments of adolescene that her other protagonists go through - which, perhaps understandably - represent one of the weakest aspects of the novel. It made sense for Kel and Alanna - surrounded by cis boys - to be hyperaware of menarchy and the development of their breasts - but hearing, however briefly, about Numair's involuntary erections felt a little superfluous.

What is remarkable about Numair is not that he is a boy (Pierce has written Briar, after all) but that he is Gifted - in both senses of the word. Pierce's stories find their strength when they hit upon what it is that stands at their character's heart - Daine's was her trauma and her recovery, Alanna's was that she was Chosen, and Kel's was her hardworking normalness. Numair is Gifted, and Pierce provides a touching portrait of the privileged insularity attendent upon that as Numair's social and political naïveté is contrasted with his already formiddable magical Gift, as well as the loneliness and rejection he faces as both someone both markedly different, and so much younger than his peers. 

At the heart of Tempests and Slaughter, is survival - from the gladiator Musenda's battles for his life, to Orzone, the "leftover Prince"and his struggle to survive the turbulent politics of court, and win acclaim. Which brings us to Varice and the hug. Because while he might be isolated, Numair is not alone in these years - Varice and Orzone are shown as two other highly gifted young people, and provide him both with friendship and comradery as the three of them grow. But whilst Numair gradually learns to focus on the realities of world around him, and Orzone is drawn in to court intrigues, Varice goes from the forthright ringleader of their little group, to a careful peacemaker, agonised by the way her intelligence is mocked and belittled by their academic circle.

This is quite a bold move for Pierce, who is most famous for stories of how young women come in to their strengths, gaining the acclaim of recognition. Varice is clearly and explicitly diminished by the narrative, her survival strategies (and the social judgements placed on her skill sets) gradually locking her in to a more and more constrained role - in which part we meet her in The Emperor Mage. Heartbreaking as this was as a reader, it provided a welcome aspect of realism on the way female brilliance is often forced to diminish itself, and was done with such sympathy and gentleness that it felt almost an apology for Varice's implied vapidity in the earlier novel.

Yeah, I got a signed one

I really enjoyed this book - but that was pretty much a given. Numair is one of my favourite Pierce characters, and while I will admit that I came to this book with both unrealistically high expectations, and a couple of dearly held headcanons that - alas - remained unfulfilled, it still gave me more than I needed. Also, while Pierce is not interested in providing fanservice, she does seem to have made a real commitment to representation in her books, and it is nice to see a handful of LGB characters. (Although since when has Orzone been white?) It was nice to see a couple of nods to faces we recognise from the other books, although potentially these were a little overdone in places.

Review: Sour Fruit, Eli Allison

Ha, it's not quite been two years since I last posted - that would just be an embarrassing delay, right? But what better way to restart this blog than with a book that I've not only been looking forward to, but that I actually helped make happen!

Yes, I am proudly listed among the supporters to Sour Fruit by Eli Allison, and if you aren't I reckon you missed a trick here. Anyway, it's now available to buy in shops and all the usual bookselling websites.

Set in a brutal, near-future dystopia, Sour Fruit is a exploration of powerlessness and dispossesion, of the cruelty and the humanity of those who find themselves on the bottom rung. Told through the eyes of Onion, a girl "forced into a knife fight with a world that has just pulled a machine gun on her" we are given a bleak and occasionally touching view of what people do to survive.

Shackled to the gentle, passive-seeming Rhea, Onion tries to escape the ghetto of Kingston and reinstate her Provisional INC number, thereby becoming a citizen again before the crime boss Milton Mooluke can sell her to a the sinister Toymaker. But as Kingston erupts in to violence, it becomes clear far more powerful and dangerous forces are at work around them.

The whole thing is framed by Onion's interrogation by sinister Doctors some time after the events and we get the story first person. Abrasive, rude, and mistrusting, Onion makes a compelling narrator - her grim flippancy and verbal dexterity provide a necessary contrast to the darkness of the novel, and giving scathing descriptions of the various grotesqueries we meet. While some readers might find her aggressive lack of charm somewhat repulsive as a character trait, Allison uses it to convey Onion's youth and lack of agency, creating a portayal of vulnerable adolescence that is by turns heartbreaking and hilarious.

Meanwhile, the dystopian England portrayed - a ruthless, corporation-owned police state which has created a subclass to deal with the effects of climate disaster and a migrant crisis - is terrifyingly plausible, and Kingston's reaction against that is reminiscent of Angela Carter's nightmarish visions of a fallen America.


If Sour Fruit has a flaw, it is that Onion's POV is perhaps too limited for the events of moment that are occuring around her. The history of Kingston and the factions within it, of the Charlie babies and the rise of the INC numbers are fascinating ideas which don't get enought the space to breathe. This can stop what is a very well realised world from being conveyed clearly. It also affects the pacing of the novel in places, where the compelling action sequences are sometimes difficult to follow without further exposition.

That aside, it's a gripping, affecting novel which I would definitely reccommend to people who their dystopias violent and irreverrant. It reads likes something Margaret Atwood might write if she habitually took 'shrooms and spent her Friday's throwing down with Chuck Palahniuk in the Chatham dockyards of the early 90s, so if that sounds like your kind of thing then you will love this. 

And pparently it's the first of a trilogy, so there are more goodies to come!

Review: Tigerman, Nick Harkaway

Well, this wasn't Angelmaker, either.

Of course it wasn't, Alys. Stop wanting things to be Angelmaker.

But... but there are no steamtrains!

No. There are no steamtrains. Now write the review.

Humph. Alright.

Robust and generally ethical, Nick Harkaway is quickly becoming one of my favourite writers. Even though not all his books have war-elephants and steam trains in them. Tigerman returns us to the faintly post-colonial, magical realist kind of setting you find in The Gone-Away World. Weird stuff is happening because of unchecked cultural imperialism and Western exploitation of resources - and now we've established that backgroud, let's have a rolicking adventure.

Which is what is delivered, if I'm honest. This is a superhero story with questions that are not answered because what kind of idiot asks that sort of question (but why is there a tiger? What do the clouds actually do...?) Oh, stop whining and enjoy it.

I do sometimes wonder if a white, Western writer addressing issues like the ecological ruination of island populations, with a male British soldier playing Western-saviour* to the inhabitants of an ex-colony, shouldn't bother me more, and it is a uncomfortable issue. However, within the realms of wildly enjoyable narrative, I think Harkaway handles it with a certain carefulness. Ultimately, I think it better that he is prepared to address the ugly underbelly of our society and government - however clumsily - than blithely ignore it. I accept that some might disagree.

This is probably my least favourite Harkaway book thus far but the other two are such an enduring joy that this isn't too much of a criticism. It's a clever inventive novel with a heart. Perfect weekend reading. 

Now, all together: I. DO. NOT. TRAIN. NINJAS!

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*I may be wrong, but I'm pretty certain that nowhere does it state that Lester Ferris was white.

Review - Little Star, John Ajide Lindqvist

Oh, Gods, I shouldn't read Linqvist novels. Not because they aren't good - they're brilliant. Not because I don't enjoy them, because my Gods, I do, but because everyone else in my life could do without me vanishing into yet another tome, emerging only to snap that it would be nice if the people around me were... well, not around me... and finally coming out the other side, shell shocked, prone to dark reveries and really quite disturbing connections.

You will never look at baby food in the same way again.

Oooooooh, *rubs hands together* you can't really go wrong with Lindqvist - provided you don't mind gore, twisted characters, a uniquely Scandanavian bleakness, and rock music. He tells outsider stories in which you recognise just enough of yourself to think, there, but for the grace of God. If you had been that bit lonelier, if the bullies had come down that bit harder, if this lifeline had been snatched from you, or that one offered instead...

His characters are not likable, not honourable, but, oh, but, they can still be redeemed. The dark little strands of love which hold them together might just be strong enough. Or, if they could only break this run of bad luck then, maybe - maybe they can save themselves...

Little Star is very much about those hairs-breadth redemptions and damnations. Its about the doom you bring on yourself by taking babysteps into the ocean, each one so small, you do not notice them until you have gone too far to swim back, and then you realise that the tide is coming in. It's about those moments when your life veers off in a completely different path because of some random chance - as Lindqvist himself writes, "It's frightening to think how apparently insignificant events can influence the direction of our lives." If I had not opened the door then, if I'd crossed to the other side of the street, if, if, if...

A recurring theme in recent reviews is the way that it a writers humanity - rather than their inhumanity - that makes their work horrific. Lindqvist is a prime example of this and - in Little Star - something he manages admirably. You care for his characters - bitter, corrupt and morally questionable as they might be - because he is prepared to take their side, to give them sympathy, to let you see all the ways in which they are broken and struggling. Whether they commit or suffer terrible things, ir is something you must process upon a human level, rather than as part of a careless splatter-fest.

As to the plot? Oh, the plot is weird and disturbing and dark. Another thing I like about Lindqvist's books is the way his blurbs are written - giving away only enough to hook the reader's attention.
I don't want to spoil that with this review. All the same, taking on his usual themes of bullying, isolation and dysfunctional relationships, Little Star also branches out into the more contemporary themes of internet trolling and reality TV. He handles them beautifully, and gives the tired idea of the 'lone wolf' - beloved by online misogynists -  a deserved battering.

What makes this book for me, however, is its enduring mystery. Casually magically realist, Linqvist recognises that some things are not - and need not - be known. We see everything but the explantation, because that would break the power of his work. Instead, we follow slow, blinkered, methodical paths to the conlcusion which - when it comes - could have been prevented so easily, but which, with hindsight, seems inevitable.

Up a Road Slowly - Picking A Side, Part Two.

One year ago, I took screwed my courage to the sticking place and decided to make a phonecall. I'd been prevaricating for a while, but decided that it needed to be done.

Actually, I picked a bad time to call and - not wanting to cause worry them - I didn't make a big deal about it and said I'd call back later. Then, I scheduled one of my encyclopaedically long texts to be delivered to them both of my parents the next morning - the jist of which was, "Not in fact a girl. Pretty sure I'm non-binary. Probably gender fluid. Thought you should know."

Yes, I did include the links.

Thirteen days later, the entire internet knew. 

This is less to do with the fact my parents are terrible gossips, or demon bloggers with a penchant for outing their children than the fact that I am rash, impulsive, and the human version of the expression, "without further ado." Basically, I lost my temper on Twitter and what started out as a rant aimed at Germaine Greer turned into me shamefacedly saying more or less the same thing I'd told my parents less than a fortnight earlier.

In retrospect, this was a mistake.

As with stories about religious conversions, people like transition stories to be neat and finite. It is a genre of absolutes and binaries - male and female, pre-transition and post-transition - a genre of certainties. One says I always knew, I always felt. The end point is a clear, an obvious stopping point, the movement from one category to another - the pay off.

I don't wish to say that no trans people ever experienced gender and transition that way - I'm sure many have - however, that particular story has a certain cultural capital. It is the accepted narrative, the story that one is pressured to present if one wishes for support or medical transition, the one that flatters cisnormative and patriarchal ideas of gender. The more often this story is repeated, the more it becomes default, and the more that recently out trans people are expected to conform to it in order to be perceived as valid.

And the harder it becomes to recognise what is going on if you don't quite fit the model.

My journey to tranition is a mess. 

I couldn't say that this time last year. I had to be together, to be bullet proof in the face of saying something pretty major about my identity on a public platform. But how I felt then was just a brief moment of calm in the middle of a life-long muddle.

After all, I was pretty sure I wasn't a boy. I wanted to be one, sometimes. It would have been simpler. If I could just fool them in thinking I was one of them, then I could have lived with that - but I knew I'd be faking it.

And as to being a girl? Well, people kept telling me I was, so I supposed they must just be right. There was no repugnance there, per se, just a discomfort - the sense of jumper that was too tight around the cuffs, a skirt that kept riding up and tripping me, a label with a panic-edge scratch on the back of my neck. I had to trick them, too. Pretend I knew the rules when I didn't.

It took me a long time to work it out, an embarrasingly long time. I edged and shifted around the cracks of what I could do. My life - from the age of twelve to twenty one - was a long process of working out a kind of femininty I could inhabit without turning myself in to a quivering, self-hating wreck.

I assumed that this was me growing in to womanhood, that it was an Anne of Green Gables affair, that I would emerge from this tumultuous journey, ready to take up the mantle of adulthood, all the awkwardness grown out of me. That I would rebel, but keep my rebellion within certain limits. That I would thereby succeed. This is the cultural myth we give non-conforming AFAB children. We tell them that they will soften, the will learn, and will eventually prove themselves. We tell them that they will get there.

Instead, what I got was a series of costume changes, a womanhood that was entirely performative, that had no substance beneath its layers of ruffled lace or fragile silk. It was less an identity than a set of masks that dodged and evaded such absolute terms as "woman". I was a flower child, a Ren Fayre type, a tomboy, chic vampire, rocker, manic pixie, punk, goth, earth mother, pantomime boy, or riot grrrl.

And, of course, I cross-dressed quite a bit.

I was mildly notorious for all this - showing up massively over-dressed, like the whole world was my costume party. I was striking, unconventional and, frankly, weird. Then, just when you were wondering what I'd pull from the wardrobe next, I'd appear in standard gear - black t-shirt, a paint-spattered army surplus shirt, a pair of torn jeans and my hair over my face. Sorry - but I'm not a performing monkey.

Because every time a role or identity or performance began to chafe, I'd chuck it back in the cupboard and pull out another one. Yeah, I never felt like I belonged, that I was entirely convincing. There'd still be the days when I couldn't look at - let alone touch - my breasts or my stomach, the days when I'd look at my face and body and ache for something different, when I'd yank handfuls of my hair and shout about just hacking it all off, but hey. Time for another costume change.

You can survive like that. You can survive like that for a very long time.

Until you have children.

It's not just that getting pregnant makes your body do that horrible puberty thing where it changes without you asking it to, not just that your breasts swell up and you stomach bulges out and your skin gets spotty and your muscles melt away. It's not that, afterwards, you're tired all the time and can't be bothered with hair or make-up.

Actually, that (or most of it) was pretty good for me. I stopped giving a fuck. I stopped seeing myself so much through other people's eyes (Do I make a convincing woman? Were they fooled?) learned to rejoice in slobbishness and practicality. But the costume changes were harder.

No - I can't wear that, it has a fiddly side zip and I can't breast feed in it. Recycled silk tears if you wear a sling over it. Floaty layers of dragonfly colours snag on changing bags and push-chairs. Tight lacing means you can't bend down to hear what they're saying. Long skirts tangle in your legs when you go from standing and kneeling. Mirrors stitched in to clothes scratch little faces. Velvet does not appreciate having noses wiped on it. And the second there was clumsiness, mess, rips and shabbiness, I wasn't convincing any more. The mask was ripped away and underneath...?

No. Shrink. Find a niche where you can hide from it.

My in-use wardrobe became three pairs of jeans and an endless succession of black t-shirts, my social circle to the other mothers at parent and toddler groups. And there, I began to see just how very binary the world still was. I'd forced myself to look away from it, to see presentation as play, as dress up. But for the first time since my early teens, I was surrounded by women - real women - who apparently didn't feel like they were faking, who said things like, "we're all girls together" and actually seemed to mean it. People who believed gender was innate and meaningful.

Meanwhile, I was trying to be a gender neutral parent, trying to bring up the Sprogs with a wide range of interests and the knowledge that they could do and wear and be anything they wanted. I pushed (very gently) against the waves of pink that threatens to engulf AFAB children and put blue ever so slightly forward, hoping that this would counteract the inevitable wider socialiasation. More than that, I pressed for green, red, yellow, purple, orange. I read them books with a wide variety of protagonists who did gender non-conforming things. I bought them lots of animal toys, bricks, musical instruments, duplo - but very few cars and even fewer dolls.

And I had to face other parents saying things like, "That's right dear, pink for girls and blue for boys."* I had to hear every, "typical boy" and "daddy's little princess", had to nod vaguely at every "Well, you know what men are like. I think women are just more ____, you know?" When, in truth, I didn't know, and was obliquely offended by the implication.

I spent a lot of time getting angry on the Sprogs' behalf.

And, to preserve my sanity, I got on Twitter and made all sorts of interesting friends, and found myself involved in intersectional feminism - rather than the second wave variety on which I'd been raised. I discovered and read and educated myself. I learned about queer theory, trans rights. Things formented. I decided this was all very well, but I was too far along in my life to do anything like that any more. That this was great for the kids, but I was more use, more radical, as a Gender Non-Conforming woman.

My body returned to its usual shape. I found I could - occasionally - wear my nice clothes when the children were about, provided we weren't being too active. I stopped breastfeeding. The end of nappies was just visibile on the far horizon. I tried to grab with both hands the next bit of the journey, the bit which all the stories promised would come next - the unconventional but totally respectable adult womanhood.

 And I found my tenuous peace with my dangling mammary glands had come to an end. That I hated the weakness in my shoulders and my core. That I had an anxiety attack if I went out in a dress unless I'd spent an unconscionably long time getting my 'mask' in place. I tried to ignore it making a desperate bid for femme-ness, for my birthright - even as I acknowledge all that was rubbish. I was desperate for confirmation, compliments on how well I did this woman thing, but getting them sent me into a spiral of self-hatred.

I made a few stupid decisions.

I tried very hard to be normal for my children.

And one night, sick and furious and reeling from a tough year, I sat in the bath cut of all my long, red hair with nail scissors. It felt incredible. Men hated it.

I hit Google, trying to work out what was wrong with me, why I couldn't pull it off any more. Why people were seeing through me, recongising me for a confused kid playing dress-up rather than the confident woman I wanted to portray. I wondered why the fury I felt at every "it's a girl thing" felt less like an attack on the Sprogs, and more like a knife under my own skin. I wondered why, when I kicked off about it, I raged not about essentialism or sexism, but the gender binary.

In retrospect, I am astonished at how slow I was.

My partner listened to my rants and my angsting. My searches changed from things likes, "male identified woman" and "am I a man or a woman" to "diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria" and, finally, "how do I tell if I'm gender queer?"

It took months of emotional upset and yet more angst. If you see my blog posts from this period, I use strange (and probably inappropriate) circumlocutions to talk about bodies and gender - things which still interest me a lot. I'm letting them stand because they show a point on my journey, to remind everyone that no-one is born knowing everything.

My partner assured me that - whatever I did, whatever I decided - he would still love me. With him, all labels were temporary, open to change and flux as I tried to work it out. I started lifting weights and looked in to taking up a martial art. I looked at the cost of binders, built up shoes. Sometimes, I stole his clothes. Then I realised that I'd always done that.

Once, mid-freak-out, I called my sister and she talked me down and gave me love and reassurance. After a time - a very long time - I had something approaching a label (gender fluid) and a sense that it probably applied to me. I had a list of websites and resources, and a binder on order from eBay. I was seeing my parents at Christmas. I didn't want to hide - not from them. I also definitely did not want to come out on Christmas dinner after far too much wine and my usual absence of tact. ("So, I'm BI!" - yes, thank you for the memory.)

I did not have pronouns. I did not have a plan or a referel to a GIC. I had no real opinion on hormones or top surgery (second question my mum asked). I had no idea how this was going to affect my life, my relationships, my self. I'd not even really squared it with my faith. All I actually had was a starting point, a label, a subject heading.

I've spent the year trying to work out what to write underneath that. 

Slowly, tenuously.

But after outing myself on Twitter - then following it up with a blog post which is even more popular than my one about Alan Garner -  I have done a lot of that in public. More than I'm comfortable with.

Currently, I am in the unenviable position that most people in my daily life perceive me as cis female, but that my gender identity is one of the first things that comes up when you google my name. I still have no idea how to correct someone who misgenders me - and I remain by turns rubbish and embarrasingly blasé about coming out.

But I'm getting there. I'm on my feet and I'm fighting it. You all help - lovely people. If I'm ever awkward about it, it's because I've put myself in this place, not because you aren't wonderful.

If you want to know how I'm getting on: 

I have pronouns now (they/their/them), and a noun (I am an enby.) I've started using the label non-binary trans. I still don't know how I feel about the medical aspects of transition, but have switched Ms for Mx, and am lobbying for the use of Myr as an alternative to Sir or Ma'am.

More importantly: in my small, old-fashioned town, I get a lot of funny looks and the occasional slur yelled from passing cars. Then again, I was goth for most of my adolescence so that's nothing new. I'm more concerned that - now I present as fairly masculine - my partner and I will get hassle for being a same sex couple, and that serves to drive home how much privilege I've had in my life thus far. Also, I'm exhauseted by the balance of being 'authentic' and remaining safe when it comes to things like changing rooms and public toilets - where there often isn't a gender-neutral option.

However, I get less bog-standard street harrasment (WIN) and while people do try to figure me out, they do it more through intense and disconcerting stares than intrusive questions. I've also noticed a slightly increased tendency for my Martial Arts teachers to use my name rather than call me Ma'am, and for unfamiliar shop keepers to avoid honorifics all together.

 Oh, and disapproving matrons give me 'the look' a lot. For the first time in my life, I am not cowed. You are not seeing through me - you are seeing me.

No, I probably wouldn't have chosen to do it this way. What's more, I worry that sometimes I go on about this whole gender thing too much - we're here for the vampires and the folk songs, right? But if my being out and loud about it helping anyone else struggling with this, then, honestly, it's worth it.

Besides, we all know that genies don't go back in to bottles.

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* Yes. This happened.

Review: My Glass is Runn, Die Booth

Zombie stories I actually liked!

Okay, that isn't a review. Let's try again.

Die Booth's latest collection of short stories My Glass is Runn is a delightfully ambiguous mix of terror and tenderness. These are stories that are not afraid to look at the dark places, but are capable of remarkable grace, and it is in this tension that the collection works.

Take a story like 'The Ghost Bride' where a bereaved mother is haunted by a white clad apparition - the victim of a terrible crime. The sense of eireeness, of the uncanny, of the awful things one does for love are intense - but Booth never looses that human dimension, giving the denoumont it's power. These are tales that slip through cracks, offering different constructions on horror truisms, motivations that come at you from the left field. These twists of perspective can be used to offer a redemption, even a happy ending. Sometimes, they can throw you headlong in to the shockingly dark. Perhaps most unsettling, however, is when Booth decides to bring the two into ambiguous synthesis.

This is a collection that is wary of authority, or conventional success. It sides against parents, bosses, peers groups and urban life, in favour of more equitable, human connections, life lived on a smaller scale. There a real tenderness here, even in the most uncomfortable moments - a sense of outsiders tenuously clinging to one another, seeking some desperate relief. This is not to say there aren't some distinct and impressive scares - 'Don't Be Afraid of the Lights' is a glory of skin-crawling horror - but Booth deals in a quieter unease which I found remiscent of Kate Mos.

However, for all its strengths, My Glass is Runn is an uneven collection; many of the stories have previously been published elsewhere and some of the shorter examples have the abruptness I associate with a tight word cout. It isn't that they aren't perfectly satisfying ghost stories as they stand, it is only that compared to the longer pieces in the collection it becomes clear that they could could have done with a little more space to breathe.

Indeed, Booth's fiction seems more suited to a slightly longer tale - with the exception of 'Dust Bunnies', my favourites tended to be those where more time was allowed for character development and the slow build of terror. And, where this suceeds, it is sublime. 'Maketh the Man' is probably my favourite, and a nightmarishly intense look at infatuation and its consequences, but 'The Fourth Ape' is also a fantastic take Gothic, while 'To Be Heard' is a wonderful ghost story in the old style.

Also, zombie stories that I liked.

There really is an awful lot to love here. Booth balances the familiar ghost story form with a fresh and unconventional voice. Not only is My Glass is Runn a book to read - he is an author to watch.

Review: The Loney, Andrew Michael Hurley

Another stopping point in my ongoing horror bender was this nasty little novel.

Oh, no, I mean that as a compliment.

The Loney has everything that you want - bleak, dangerous landscapes, religious fanaticism, taxidermy animals, locked rooms, oppressive atmosphere, and a premise so disturbing and horrible it will creep inside your mind in the cold hours of the night. There is nothing comforting here, nothing nice.

Its a novel of very English horror, but not in the warm, stately-home, M.R James sense. It's more the grey meanness of respectability, the mud and hostility of the countryside, the threat of the sea in the off-season. There's a real grubbiness to it, the kind that gets under your fingernails, that coats your tongue. It is immediately familiar, and deeply unsettling: the priest who puts a bit too much vehemence into correcting his young charges, the big-shot from Town, who brings with him dirty banknotes and a young woman whose relationship to him is never defined. This novel has darkness layered upon darkness upon darkness. Not all of it is, or needs to be, explored in depth - the inference is enough to chill, to build and build to the real, terrible point of it all.

The Loney is upsetting, viscerally so. It is by no means the best novel that I've read this year, but as a work of horror, it has a impressive impact.

Not for the faint-hearted.