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: Spirit Houses by Die Booth

Alright, alright, let's come clean. This blog is officially on hiatus until August at least, but probably September. There are reasons but they are too dull to go into here.

Instead, I cite the bit of Twitter logic that brings me crawling back for a brief visit - if you like a book by an independent author, review it. A few weeks ago, I was recommended Die Booth's Spirit Houses, and my word, did I like it.

 A romping, almost steam-punk adventure following Manda Connor and her fellow Field Nurses in the D.P.M - the Department of Paranatural Medicine - it does not rely over-much on the apparatus of non-functional gears and eldritch threats, being instead driven by engaging and entertaining characters.
 It is a novel that quickly gives one the impression of being cast into a much larger world, so lush and fully realised are the premise and setting. Booth does not expend excess words upon world-building or set-up, but the detail of vision is constantly revealed by the plot. It's almost disconcerting how thoroughly built and convincing this alternative England is - the mental space it occupies feels more like a beloved film series, or long running television show than a novel. It seems so much bigger than it is; there is so much richness here, I sometimes felt the need to pace myself - although that may just have been the fact that I was screen-reading.

In tone cosy, the narrative and characters had an almost YA feel to them, something enhanced by both the institutional setting of the D.P.M, and the '20s pastiche of the setting - there is no sex, or language stronger than 'damn' - but there is a poise and maturity of theme that is reminiscent of Lanni Taylor. For all the tenderness with which the characters are painted, as a reader you worry about them. They are breakable, things may not turn out okay. And you want for it it turn out okay.

Naturally, it isn't flawless. If you have an issue with head-hopping (which I think is unfairly maligned, but each to their own) this is not the novel for you. Likewise the prose, while generally light and witty with moments of real beauty, sometimes loses itself in descriptors which grate - the characters do a lot of eye rolling. The opening chapters are also somewhat stilted, something not helped by the initial construction of Manda's character and the suggestion of a love-triangle surrounding her. However, Spirit Houses quickly finds its stride, and its protagonist's mixture of naïveté and passion soon create a heroine who is more than a cipher for events, or an idealised reader-insert. Spirit Houses is a novel about identity, about the choices we make and the people that we have to be to make them. 

It is here that Spirit Houses finds its strength. Characters are revenants, werewolves, displaced souls. They make deals with demons, lie, manipulate their friends. But these issues do not define them; they are merely facets of personality, burdens to be borne, actions of necessity. This is a compassionate novel, and is written from a standpoint empathetic with otherness. Characters are outsiders: the slow, hard-working Ray who refuses to take advantage of his privileged background; the brilliant, cold Daniel proving his genius despite the handicap of his working class roots; genial, foppish Alex inciting the ire of the more conventionally masculine and, of course, Manda herself, battling the prejudice she faces at her lycanthropy, desperate for a place in the world.With astute political awareness, Booth weaves these personal struggles into the wider world of the D.P.M, its language of respect and patient consent offering a kinder and more intelligent picture of the integration of the para-natural than I am used to seeing. 

I would hold this book up against Glen Duncan's brash and unconvincing The Last Werewolf as an example of what existence on the fringes of acceptability really looks like - not bloodbaths and 'gut-wrenching' last stands against cartoon villains as part of the great journey of the Virile White Man™ - but as the slow weight of judgement, the fight for dignity and health, for a normal life.

Well worth your time.