HOW TO DATE A FANATIC, two halves make a funny-shaped whole

HOW TO DATE A FANATIC
ARUNI KASHYAP
HarperVia (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this compassionate, poignant novel set in contemporary India, a young professor searches for connection and love during a time of political and cultural upheaval.

As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks relationships with other men on campus, until he meets and embarks on a delicate new romance with the effervescent Sayan, a literature student he hopes will be the answer to getting over Dhruv.

Rohit’s life soon becomes more complicated as the country's political tensions erupt on campus, sparking a turbulent student-led movement that entangles Rohit when Dhruv joins the fray, a tipping point that changes Rohit’s life forever. Set against the vibrant, volatile tapestry of modern India, Rohit and his friends must learn to navigate the challenges and triumphs of queer life to survive in an unpredictable political landscape.

Propulsive, tense, and charged with humor and tenderness, How to Date a Fanatic is an exploration of identity, connection, and the enduring hope for a better future in a rapidly changing world.

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My Review: India's right-wing horrible human beings are enough like our US versions that I was stressed for Rohit from the get-go; I was also reminded that au fond, humans are not different anywhere on this globe. The same insatiable desire to control others in every way, the same pressure to conform or else, the same kinds of violent resistance and repression, for reasons only cosmetically different.

The reason I'm not offering perfect ratings and warbles of delight for this clear-sighted takedown of the repression and conformity machine is simple: Dhruv's a bastard. Rohit needs to get over his addiction to an emotionally unavailable man, and that story is *uncomfortably* close to home. It's all on Rohit, of course, Dhruv's uninterest could've been more kindly expressed but that is not incumbent on any of us to come up with in the moment. Rohit losing himself in the pursuit of distraction is deeply relatable. His choices are very interesting to me because they're further evidence of human nature being consistent across cultures.

Where the mess that is the authoritarian horror India lives under (and the US seems to be rushing to emulate) takes hold of the narrative, the second half becomes more a political argument against authoritarianism while backgrounding Rohit's emotional life. The shift in tome is always going to be tricky to navigate; I didn't feel it was all that well handled. I was taken from one focus, on the intimate life and choices of Rohit, into another, the violent and vicious reactionary response of a right-wing regime to gay men.

Both were very involving, though a reader looking for more of the first story might not like being catapulted into the second much. Readers interested in the second stiry might have preferred it to be more than just lightly foreshadowed from the beginning. It's this dichotomy between the (roughly) halves that stalled me out at four stars. There are that many because I really liked and invested in Rohit and his happiness. Sure, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and demand he get on with finding someone who deserves his love. But he really deserves that kind of happy ending. (Other kinds too but permaybehaps on the page in my imagined other story...not this unsteamy one.)

A successful read for all my quibbly niggles, a story I'd enjoy seeing more of, should a follow-on tale eventuate. That ain't the most common end to a review I write about a book that frustrated me!

THE FIRSTS: A History of French Superheroes, fun and relevant and undemanding

THE FIRSTS: A History of French Superheroes
XABI MOLIA (tr. Alexander Hertich)
Dalkey Archive (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The ugly side of superheroes

What if you suddenly had superpowers? What would you do? How would your friends and family react? What would your obligations to society be?

The superheroes’ first missions—combating terrorists or rescuing disaster victims—are a boon to France. Yet while these actions bring the country pride, unity quickly starts to unravel. These superheroes, ultimately, are human. Paparazzi are everywhere. One has an affair with another’s wife. Another questions following the government’s imperialist agenda. Meanwhile the public carps on social media.

Molia takes our fascination with superheroes and adds a cutting portrayal of contemporary social mores to create an entertaining and disturbing work with deep dystopian underpinnings.

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My Review: Remember the 1995 one-hit wonder "(What If God Was) One of Us?" It was a monster hit around the world. Its central question was one I think troubles people; it makes us all wonder why her and not me, why is there such an unfair randomness to divinity, what Greeks explained as someone being a demigod like Achilles or Herakles.

What we now call "superheroes."

In the labyrinth of the human soul, the superhero is tucked into a corner along the same stretch of hallway as the demigod. It's about wanting the anthropomorphic Divine to share more substance with us, not seeing the genuinely miraculous, divine acts of creation we interact with daily: my meds, the ones that keep my blood free of oversupplies of uric acid, the ones that keep mmy heart beating in normal rhythm, the computer I'm typing on, the phone you're reading this on, the software, the microchips...all designed by a human, all manufactured by human-designed machines...miracles surround us, the divine in us engendered them. But we use our miracles profligately. The computer and internet that give us access to the immense body of knowledge that's enabled wonders also gave us social media and streaming news.

I think of the first examples as Divine, the last as what we humans do when our reach exceeds our grasp...or demigods those superheroes come to life. Philosophical 3am maunderings aside, the novel The Firsts uses our overreach to explain our grasp to us. The ordinary people with superpowers are observed, as we all are, and reported on, scrutinized as celebrities are as part of their bargain for our attention. It's not the newest wrinkle in the communal brain, the soap operas that are comic books have pulled this idea out every so often. I'm not blaming or running down the book or its author, no idea is totally new or it would be ignored or rejected. Delivering dystopian stories can't really add a burden of novelty onto the already painful message of self-examination's fruits.

Science fiction's used the media-snippets (notably, prize-baitingly The Sheep Look Up, about fifty-five years old) and for centuries before that epistolary novels (Dracula for one) fake that same sense of immediacy and intimacy of perception, for generations. updating it for newly available tech underlines the basic reality of the human desire to share...willingly or not...our fellows' and our betters' deepest depths. As long as they're glowed up, glossy, and either unthreatening or in some way humiliating to them but never to us.

It's not fresh, then, the format of this story's delivery, and it obeys all these rules. It's French so its reactions to two superheroes' scandalous infidelity is more gleeful in tone than the US puritanical moralizing judgment, but really what we have here is not groundbreaking fiction or social observation or advancement in techniques of writing.

But it's a damn fun day or reading as people, ordinary people, grapple with the tweaked superpowers we all factually possess (you read that list-paragraph above, right?); if you go into this read expecting a good time that's not as demanding of your concentration and thinking as most stories from this publisher are, you can enjoy a well-told tale in a format not new or fresh but well-used in the story's service.

THE BOOK OF THE JAGUAR, alt-hist post-Conquest fantasy

THE BOOK OF THE JAGUAR
VICTOR LADIS SCHULTZ
Fairwood Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The legions of New Serraña have a sacred custom: when a legionnaire falls in battle, a member of their company must bear the body home to the dead soldier’s family. Álbaro Ceynos is the only surviving member of his company. He’d been garrisoned at Presidio Los Primos, known as the realm’s safest assignment, until a fabled monster emerged from legend, crept down from the mountains, and laid waste to the old fortress.

Now, with one horse, one wagon, one sword, and all his slain brethren, Álbaro the bonebearer roams a decaying empire, bringing home his comrades' remains. As he meets an array of mourners who move him to question past choices and future commitments, he’ll reveal how the tragedy unfolded, death by death, and how it is that he yet lives.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Survivor guilt meets Odyssey in a fantasy-tweaked New World, one that's in a timeline not much like our own. and yet it's still recognizably the culture of merged Indigenous and Spanish Mexico...a bit like a folded down the long axis sheet of paper is still folded in half, just not what you're used to. I was fascinated.

The Presidio of Lost Souls has been obliterated. As is incumbent on a survivor of a group of soldiers, Álbaro bears his comrades' earthly remains...their bones...back to families that mourn, families that barely notice, families that want Álbaro to bear witness to the fallen man's existence...all the normal responses that accompany a person into their afterlife. It's a tidy way to do both world-building and character development in enough depth to keep we-the-reader invested and interested in both things.

It was a success to me in more ways than the usual following a story. I lost interest in the why of Álbaro's presidio's destruction almost immediately...invisible creatures aren't going to hold my interest for long as objects of folklore. As Álbaro met his companions' families and learned the whys and wherefores of their presence in the Presidio of Lost Souls among the other "slow horses," to use the Apple show as touchstone, I was more and more invested in the cultural landscape he inhabits. The different histories Álbaro learns that conflict with or outright contradict what his companions presented, the ones that minimized troubled pasts and magnified happiness...well, that just plain ol' human nature.

And that's the thing I most enjoyed about this novel. Chapters are episodes, the framing device isn't always as integrated into the chapter's story as I'd expect it to be, but the humanness, the humanity, the humane response of Álbaro to each family, outweighed any niggling nitpicks I could come up with. In my memory, this is a way of experiencing a cultural landscape I did not recognize in a physical landscape I often did. I was always interested in the different families' grief responses. I was always aware that Álbaro was responding to the grief as a kind of atonement. I was always involved in the lives lived, and all too often that's not an investment I can make in other SFnal stories.

It's a fascinating debut in a well-thought-through not-quite-consensus reality. I hope you escape seeking readers will give it your time and treasure.

UNTAMED COAST, historical mystery set in Alaska

UNTAMED COAST
KEVIN C. MORRIS
Ballantine Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A late-night mayday call drives a grieving man to embark on an unexpected journey along the wild Alaskan coast, unraveling a decades-old mystery of stolen gold, missing women, and murder in this atmospheric and propulsive debut novel.

After the loss of his wife, Marconi Franco is content drifting alone on his boat through the isolated waters of Southeast Alaska with no real destination in mind. But when a mysterious distress signal cuts through the static on his radio one sleepless night, Marco feels an overwhelming pull to help the woman whose plea he heard—a pull he can't explain or ignore.

His search for the missing woman draws him to Radioville, an abandoned 1930s communication outpost now decaying on an uninhabited island off the coast of Alaska. There, Marco begins uncovering fragments of a story long a Depression-era theft, a shattered marriage, and a disturbing pattern of disappearances. As he sifts through the past, his own grief starts to mirror the tragedies that echo across decades, and his search draws the attention of someone determined to keep the truth buried.

Told across three evocative timelines—a radio operator in 1938 collecting more than just telegrams, a young woman in the 1980s fighting to survive her abusive husband, and Marco in the present day searching for a voice in the static—Untamed Coast is a story of fierce determination, missed signals, loneliness and connection, and the unseen ripples that reverberate across generations, standing the test of time and the tides.

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My Review: "Marconi Franco" is one of the most nominative-determinist monikers I've run across in fiction. I think Author Morris took a big swing with it, making Marconi the center of the 2017 timeline, and could've whiffed on it very badly...and didn't. That's skill, sure, but even more luck as he's a debut author. I can readily see ten ways he could've fumbled such a "joke" but Marco never becomes a one-liner in a narrative that splits among grieving Marco who misses his late wife Michelle; Anya from 1982, struggling to survive marital abuse in a remote, isolated life fishing with her husbeast; and in 1938, there's gold-struck Joe Baxter in Radioville, a communication outpost who helps isolated prospectors stay alive while scheming how to get rich.

Yes, it's the radio that connects them all. As that oddness in the spacetime continuum plays out, though, Author Morris evokes immersively the bleak, spare beauty of maritime Southern Alaska, allowing readers to really *get* what it is that binds these characters to the life they've each chosen in harsh, unstable conditions.

The mystery of what connects the lives of each character is well-handled. It's always a danger to think in "supernatural" terms, and never moreso than when characters exist in separate timelines. In maritime Southern Alaska, there are a lot of details to survival in a really complicated dance of detailed actions, dangerous situations that have changed very very little in a long time, and thus things in concrete reality that have commonality among Marco, Anya, and Joe. I wouldn't call this a thriller, though there are moments throughout the stories that do indeed cause intense responses; I'd say it's a suspense novel because even in the not-thrilling moments, there are deeply drawn scenes of uneasy peace that feels unlike rest, there are oddball, off-kilter moments that point your attention irresistible *there* and away from *here*...lots of thought went into how to keep your reading finger turning pages.

If no one gives this book to Alan Ritchson's first-look company (he must have one, Reacher's such a success) to develop into a limited series for Prime, it will be a shame. He'd *slay* as Marco. Or Joe, if he prefers. (Not Anya, though.)

FRUITS OF OUR LABOR, very trenchant, very loudly thinking about taboo topics

FRUITS OF OUR LABOR
IAN PATTERSON
Shiraki Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A new world is emerging, one parthenogenetic birth at a time.

In a near-future America where women have just achieved asexual reproduction, Samara yearns for freedom from her dying relationship, and a child of her own—fully her own.

As parthenogenetic birth takes hold and the role of men in the survival of the species diminishes, protest and outcry sweep across the nation. Sierra, one of the first “partho babies”, is bullied relentlessly as she grows up and seeks her place in this new pressure cooker of changing gender roles and norms.

And in the aftermath of the “Days of Horror”, a period of violent backlash from displaced men, a professor of history looks back on the rise of PG birth in an attempt to understand the impact of this era of upheaval on the world.

Together, these three converging perspectives tell the story of a profound societal transformation that asks who gets to have autonomy, who gets to write the future, and who that future is for.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What fresh hell is this, Dorothy Parker famously (sort of) said. It's probably a situation that sounds perfect to some, reproducing only yourself; it eliminates some troublesome, destructive friction in society.

Does it? Would it? Could it?

"Maybe it’s evolution, maybe it’s divine influence, but at the end of the day, does it matter? I’ll let you in on a secret: I don’t think I’m special at all. I’m just the first woman to figure out she didn’t need a man to have a baby. I bet you we’re all capable of it, of self-birth. And if every woman out there focused on it like I did, I think we’d find our true power. And it would change everything."

It's a novella, under 160pp, and it's told in multiple timelines; pay attention, or who is speaking to you could easily slip away from your awareness. It's well-paced and well-designed to make its points with facts (parthenogenesis is seen in all other lineages, but not mammals, so it's not a stretch to see how it might develop) and conjectures (the Manosphere would have hysterics over this and it's not hard to see how violent the response would likely be to this). As an exploration of an idea this is fascinating. As a summation of the awful state of gender politics, it's chilling. And as a meditation on what is invisible to those in the binary mindset, it's...essentialist. No one transmasc has a viewpoint at all; I'm not surprised, because we're talking about exalting Woman, after all. No one transfem is in the book, either; are these oversights or just biases that permeate culture so deeply they're invisible in this Brave New World of all women?

Can't get to a perfect five, but I can definitely say I think more about these issues of sex-essentialism and gendered violence in this framework. I'm fascinated by every twist and turn in the compact story, and hope y'all will be too.

PRECIOUS CHILDREN...to whom? why?...questions with more answers than I expected

PRECIOUS CHILDREN
MARY G. THOMPSON
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A wealthy family trying to cheat death is overmatched—by a stubborn teenager hiding in a body that looks just like their son. In this taut tale of genetics and entitlement, nature vs. nurture goes horrifically wrong.

Dina Blake’s fourteen-year-old son, Geoff, has just died for the second time. But everything will be okay. The Blake family’s wealth has bought them thousands of clones of each of their children. These children are farmed out to loving families, but with the caveat that the bodies are always available to the Blakes.

After Geoff dies, the Blakes upload their son’s memories into Nathan, who is an unwilling host, desperate to stay with the family who loved him.

Dina’s younger daughter, Di, is terrified because she knows something her parents don’t—the memory transfer doesn’t always go as planned. The Geoff who’s been living with them since his first death isn’t the person her mother thinks he is, and the families of the bodies the Blakes steal aren’t all innocent.

When Geoff returns to life in Nathan’s body, he has to contend with Nathan’s frustrating desire to live and his unexpected ability to fight for his life. For some children to live, others must die. Dina must decide how far she’ll go to protect her children, and Geoff must find out if, and who, he’s willing to kill.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A scathing, unnerving judgment rendered on the Cult of Mother, the repellent entitlement of wealthy people, the absence of ethical consideration in fertility treatment's grey areas...a very modern set of concerns not that often addressed in either fiction or public debate.

There's no guts'n'gore, nothing supernatural, none of the usual markers of horror that do not appeal to me; instead we're immersed in a world where the privileged are able to command the use of the underprivileged as breeding stock for their own children at the expense of children of their own. A take on the same story as Never Let Me Go, the horror of it is more pointed as it's brought to a conflict point the Ishiguro novel never sought...the struggle of one person to survive at the cost of explicit death for another character in the same body.

Dina's one relatable trait is the single, vague qualm she sort-of has about killing an actual person to have her piece-of-work son back. It's sad that it was permitted by Authority to come to this, the entire practice should never have been permitted at all, but at least her repulsive entitlement took a slight ding at this appalling practice at last.

I'm not sure this is the lesson I was meant to take away from the read but it's the one I internalized: There is no way in which privilege does not warp the privileged in very ugly ways. Dina's ambivalence about her willingness to kill someone else's child to get her own back is too little too late for my tolerance; and this is less speculative than it's pretending to be, more prediction of things to come.

Deeply unsettling meditation on the repugnant greed that dominates our world. A read that's stuck in the corners of my mind.

THE EYE OF GOLIATH, Argentine Jekyll-and-Hyde take after the Great War

THE EYE OF GOLIATH
DIEGO MUZZIO (tr. Rahul Bery)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A dark, propulsive literary gothic novel that puts a modern twist on Stevenson and Poe, from a thrilling new voice in Latin American horror.

“Impossible to stop reading. It has all the fascinating tension of great literature.” — Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night

In this deliriously inventive twist on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Argentine powerhouse Diego Muzzio conjures a haunting story of shattering war trauma and the disturbing proximity of sanity and madness in his English-language debut.

In 1920s Edinburgh, war veteran Dr. Edward Pierce develops experimental therapies to treat mentally ill patients whose cases have been rejected by conventional psychiatry. One night, he receives a visitor who asks him to take on an unusual new patient: David Bradley, an engineer who was sent to inspect the conditions of a lighthouse on a remote island in southern Argentina. The sojourn was a disaster, and he returned completely mute, his body overwhelmed by a single compulsion: to swim and swim, in any environment, to the point of total exhaustion.

Bradley’s fragmentary diary reveals how this rational, disciplined man became the deranged individual brought to the sanatorium. Full of bizarre details and echoes of macabre events, it guides Pierce in his studies of his patients, propelling him into scientific terrain that grows increasingly grotesque.

With an ingenious structure that creates doubling and uncertainty at every turn, The Eye of Goliath is a masterfully tense novel that unites classic gothic atmospheres with disturbingly modern psychological horror.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A lot like seeing the narrative's events in the sweeping beam of the lighthouse that figures so heavily in poor David Bradley's utter unwinding. Pierce tries to tug the strips of anxiety back into overlapping armor-plate relationship as the are in most of us. Pierce's major problem with that technique has been, until now, the Great War's soulless killing machine dehumanizing men in battle.

David Bradley's issue is not the same though his condition, a mind unraveled by inputs beyond the owner's capacity to process and respond to in any adaptive manner, is the same. Compulsions to repetitive action are present in the men not able to build mental spaces that can contain their horror very often resort to obsessive actions to create rituals of safety. Spurious safety is still preferable to the events that left their minds in wreckage. We're vouchsafed access to the diaries Bradley kept at the lighthouse where...something...destroyed his psychological equilibrium; yet neither we nor Pierce, tasked with reversing this damage, know what the heck it was even *with* the diaries.

It's a very good thing the novel is short because that would be really tough to sustain over an Ann Radcliffe-length novel. We're definitely in gothic horror territory here, particularly given Pierce's own responses to everything, but not so deep into it there are ghosties and ghoulies and other accoutrements of gothicness.

It says here.

Ambiguity is always your friend in writing and reading good gothic fiction; don't pin too terribly much of the story to recognizable territory and the reader will do the work for you, will in fact make your story "better" because you love this trope and the author does not so doesn't explicitly use it so your mind fills it in where ambiguity is left. I wish more horror writers saw the utility of that! If you, o writer, are not as weird and twisted as Clive Barker, do what Author Muzzio did: keep it short, leave room for we-the-reader to people the events to our scare levels, and off you go...and so will your readers.

I'm only down a half-star because I found Pierce's entry into the gothic felt forced, felt incompletely integrated into the way the men he's treating's mindset. I don't think my pleasure in the read would've increased had his own psychotic break been more completely explored. It would've added page count without necessarily improving my eerie experience.

Which was, as said above, eerie and satisfying; it was the flipside of the model story's splitting the personality on purpose. It was a very involving, fast read. Psychological-disturbace avoiders, go to the next book on the shelf! Eerie creepy weirdness fanciers, come sit with me by the fireplace.

Maybe we can light a fire.