I AM THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED, what a great title!

I AM THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED
EMILY ZINNIKAS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: TIME ONLY MAKES THE NIGHTMARE MORE REAL.

Something lives under Willa’s bed. As an adult, her fondest childhood memories are of the invisible entity under her bed who taught her how to read. Now thirty-two, Willa is a reclusive but successful painter until a bombshell news report exposes her identity as the controversial survivor of the unsolved Rapture Mystery Slayings, a small-town tragedy that splashed across headlines during her senior year of high school. Six teenagers died in the woods while Willa walked free, and everyone thinks she killed them.

When an old classmate calls about a funeral, Willa reluctantly travels to her sleepy hometown, where the possessed forest that stole her friends looms. The trees whistle for her attention, but she knows better than to listen. And the unexplained knocking from the shadows in the basement of her decaying childhood home is honestly the least of her problems.

As her past pulls her back to the place she swore she’d never return, Willa is drawn toward the monster she left behind—and becoming the villain her hometown has always believed her to be.

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My Review: Willa's desire to bury her trauma, not make theater of it, is at the heart of this creepy, atmospheric story of dread. It's impossible to decouple one's existence as a survivor of an unsolved mass murder from the event but Willa's kept her profile as low as is possible.

The exigencies of storytelling make that impossible. Willa's goin' in. Not willingly, not graciously, but in she's going. Into the past, into reckoning with her...odd...beginnings, into what one hopes can be a laying-to-rest of the horrifying truths of childhood sexual assault.

It's the season for uneasy-making reads. Based on the synopsis I rather thought this story would be more about supernatural unease, dealing with hauntings and entities and so on. Instead it's about the awful reality that some kids are not safe even in their own beds. It's very uneasy-making but all too corporeal. I was surprised to feel so compelled to keep reading. It's not exciting writing on a sentence level but it kept my eyes engaged for an entire day, difficult to achieve at this late date in my reading career, as Willa's return to the site of her trauma brings her sporadically, almost haphazardly, into contact with her unresolved pain. Normally I would be complaining that was disorganized, or lacked narrative thrust. Instead of feeling that intellectual response I felt it was me being in Willa's fragmented, damaged emotions with her, processing with her as she had to do and I was along to witness so I could stand in fellowship with her in her hours of need.

It was not the experience I'd expected to have in the read. It was in most ways a better, more real, more involving one. It was dark, and dangerous, and deliberately frightening at times; it was always Othering, intensely alienating to be with Willa in the recovered moments. They were not numerous or extended in ways that felt prurient to me-the-reader.

Horror that gets dressed in supernatural drag doesn't often work that well for me. I usually dismiss the supernatural elements, where this time I had a context for them that made them make sense to me. I won't recommend the read to all readers...check the CWs...and I suspect the truest devotees to horror reading won't get as much out of the read as I, with my self-supplied remapping of the story, did.

It was a successful, pleasurable read for me. I hope y'all will consider giving it a shot at your time and treasure.

HALF LIGHT, subcontinental queerness interrogated pre-decriminalization

HALF LIGHT
MAHESH RAO
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An affair between two men in India changes the course of both their lives forever in this searing queer love story about shame, hope, and identity.

“Rao sheds light without judgement…Thoughtful, tender storytelling at its finest.” —Marie Claire

High up in the misty mountains of Darjeeling, a landslide cuts off a crumbling hillside hotel from the outside world. Trapped together with other guests and staff, two men begin to exchange lingering glances. For Neville, a charismatic student, such encounters are nothing new—urgent kisses in stairwells, fleeting encounters in parked cars. But for Pavan, a shy hotel employee accustomed to hiding in plain sight, their growing connection threatens to upend the careful life he has built in secrecy.

Years later, the men meet again by chance, this time surrounded by the towering skyscrapers and ghostly smog of Mumbai. Neville is now a restless graduate, trying to find his footing in the city. Pavan has long since fled the hills and begun a new life for himself working in a luxurious city hotel. As their renewed flirtation quickly turns fraught, long-buried secrets from their shared past threaten to tumble into the light.

Set on the cusp of India's landmark ruling to decriminalize homosexuality, Half Light is an atmospheric, elegantly wry story of outlawed desire and the fragile hope for a life beyond concealment. From literary powerhouse Mahesh Rao, this tender exploration of the struggle for acceptance and understanding will appeal to readers of Douglas Stuart and Tom Crewe.

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My Review: In this year of our lord twenty-twenty six, the World has decided to valorize the ineffable experience of Yearning. Longing purposefully for someone, usually in its most effective iterations someone forbidden to you. I liked Heated Rivalry the book; I adored Heated Rivalry the TV series, because it yearned more obviously for me to invest in, cry over, relate to than in the text version.

I think this story would be even better filmed, too. Its couple aren't as charismatic, or even as much of a couple, as Shane and Ilya; but they have similarly disparate beginnings. Pavan is lower in class, and from a national minority:

𝐏𝐚𝐯𝐚𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐦𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐮𝐧𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐨𝐲. 𝐀𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞, 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐮𝐦 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐟𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭. 𝐇𝐞 𝐤𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐠𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐬𝐨 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐛𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫. 𝐀𝐭 𝐬𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐦 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐬: 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐛𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐝-𝐦𝐞-𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧𝐬 𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐞, 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫'𝐬 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐰𝐥𝐬, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐯𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐬𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐥𝐲 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐝. 𝐇𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐠𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐚 𝐦𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐥𝐞.

...and Neville is far better educated and insulated from Pavan's existential risks in acting on his gayness, in pre-decriminalization times, by being richer. Not that much happens in the story but they do a lot of soul-searching in gorgeously evoked scenery. They are existing as gay in a country with even farther to go towards QUILTBAG equality than the US.

It makes their interest in each other more difficult, of course, and it sharpens their desire to be in relationship. It's very much a story that foregrounds their interiority, which makes me feel the Yearn all the more. It is not a romance, though, don't hear me tell you that! It's a story of two gay guys who notice each other and wonder, separately, if it's even okay to yearn for the lovingkindness they see and can imagine in each other. Neville is able to shut down the desire for more by seeking casual sex with nobody-bodies. Pavan is more constrained in his sexual expression without the money and class position; their ideas of each other are thus similar: I can't get what I want but I want what I thought I had with him.

It's powerful, the yearning, it's cruel in the extreme to criminalize a person's identity over something as trivial as sexuality, and Author Rao doesn't let us forget the men's struggles are not simple or internally resolvable. I'll be honest: I didn't like either man much. I was never rooting for them to get past their fears and be together. I was fully invested in their yearning, for a just and fair world, for a life they could feel validated them as men, for a way to seek someone who loves them for themselves and they might love in return. Their differing repressive forces are equally unfair. Their ultimate fates aren't vouchsafed to us, exactly, but decriminalization does push Pavan into making some steps into a future under his control. Neville is a rich boy from start to finish, not inclined to be otherwise, so his course is merely more openly itself.

I had to take a star off the beautifully evocative rale set in vividly realized places because the men were so constructed as to make their didactic positions as catalysts for Pavan's growth and Neville's stasis their only real relationship. It makes the experience of reading Neville's arc feel as though I was voyeurizing vapidity. On the whole, though, I found so much enjoyment in the settings and societal developments feeling so real to me that I hope you'll send a copy to your local filmmaker!

AMERICAN CAESAR: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy, sobering and timely

AMERICAN CAESAR: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy
BRADLEY B. ONISHI
St. Martin's Essentials (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A chilling and urgently needed exposé on the forces pushing American politics and religion toward a post-constitutional autocracy

From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural pulpits, from Catholic monasteries to Beltway think tanks and Project 2025, a convergence is underway. Reactionary Catholics dream of a new Christendom. Protestant pastors invoke divine right over democratic rule. Tech billionaires, led by the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, argue that freedom and democracy are incompatible. Their solution? A singular ruler to bring “order” out of what they see as liberal chaos.

With a theologian’s sensibility, a journalist’s touch, and a historian’s eye for how movements evolve and adapt, Dr. Bradley B. Onishi traces the strange alliance between spiritual warfare and Silicon Valley libertarianism. At the center of it all is the desire for an unbound executive—one man, beyond checks, beyond balance, beyond democracy. This isn’t nostalgia for the 1950s. It’s an organized attempt to abandon the American experiment altogether. A former insider turned academic expert, Onishi brings unmatched depth to this investigation—tracing his own path from evangelical pastor to co-host of Straight White American Jesus, the nation’s leading religion and politics podcast.

As the 2024 election fades into history and a new political order takes shape, American Caesar is not just a warning. It’s a map of how we got here—and a call to act before the Republic as we know it becomes just another chapter in a forgotten history book.

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My Review: I'm highly suspicious of the notion that "order" is a Good Thing because who decides this for other people is generally who wants to control those other people's lives in close detail. Those kinds of people are almost always puritans of one or another sort, who believe "They" should not be thinking those thoughts/doing those things (usually, though not always, sexual) because *eeewww*.

Author Onishi adds in the tech industry's "thinkers" to the usual suspects but stops short of using the slurs I myownself hurl at them. Author Onishi is tendentious as hell, shouting and waving his arms at the public, determinedly pointing the fingers of both hands at sometimes strained parallels with a past distant enough to make comparisons very very broad. Human nature does not change from what I can see; the same playbooks are still effective because our psychology is much the same.

"Much the same" does not mean we're always going to succumb to the same ruses. Look at the demonization of immigrants that's largely limited to haters and shouters, who are always in every era a minority; how many more people did what Minneapolis did and showed up to disrupt ICEstapo raids? California's honking warners of imminent danger are not getting hate outside the small bubble of the haters and screamers or there would be giant crowds of people helping ICE instead of huge shortages of recruits.

I'm not trying to put you off the read, it says what I think and explains what I fear; it brings the receipts for its bases of argument; it's going a bit further into the "it's inevitable, prepare to suffer" direction than I suspect is fully supported by developments. I think its tone is alarmist in a time when alarm is not only justified, but required; however presenting the grim facts ought to serve, not presenting deterministic conclusions. Those tend to dishearten the ordinary person, not rile them into the resistance and non-compliance we so urgently need to support and spread as a mindset.

Flawed by an overly emotional tone or not, this book can and should be part of your pre-election reading.

JUSTICE FOR JEHANNE: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor, and thriver, and role model on top of all that

JUSTICE FOR JEHANNE: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor
SARA McDOUGALL
Princeton University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A spellbinding narrative history that defies modern assumptions about women’s lives in the Middle Ages and informs contemporary debates about sexual violence and the limits of justice

In the winter of 1472, the city of Dijon, France, became the stage for a remarkable legal drama. On the mayor’s orders, an investigator named Jaques Borestel went door-to-door questioning his neighbors about an alleged sexual assault—and about the victim’s history and place in the community. At the center of Jaques’s inquiry was a woman named Jehanne, who took the unusual step of making a criminal complaint in an age when victims of sexual violence did so at their own peril. Justice for Jehanne follows Jaques’s investigation as he uncovers one woman’s story of resilience and survival.

Applying forensic analysis to witness testimony and Jaques’s case files, Sara McDougall finds in Jehanne a woman of many lives and many secrets. An outsider on her own in Dijon, Jehanne had every reason to distrust the local authorities, who regularly extorted money from the city’s most vulnerable residents. Separating facts from falsehoods, McDougall challenges preconceptions about the experiences of marginalized women in medieval France, showing how neighbors, clergy, and other residents aided Jehanne throughout her legal struggles—and how justice of a sort was exacted from her attackers.

Richly detailed and powerfully told, Justice for Jehanne paints an unforgettable portrait of a woman who mounted an extraordinary response to a crime that was so difficult to prosecute at the time, and of a community that gave her shelter, protection, and acceptance as she endeavored to survive on her own terms.

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My Review: The idea that sexual assault is a death knell for a woman's reputation is *still* dying a slow, noisy death. It was my experience in my own lifetime that a woman pregnant and without some kind of man in her life to take the credit was a "slut" and never anything but; her reputation was set, her future decided, that was that. Many were the women who had abortions, fewer went away for "cures" and came back thinner; all were "fallen" ant thus tainted. This was the twentieth century pre-The Pill and well pre-Roe v Wade.

I thought that was just how it was, probably moreso in earlier times, but certainly not better.

Reading is very dangerous to one's ignorance.

A young woman arrived in Dijon, pregnant and alone, spouting some silly-sounding story about a husband visibly absent who...well, no one was buyin' it, but no one was really all that interested in it either because being pregnant was a very common and unavoidable hazard of being female in the world of men. Jehanne settled into a mundane life, making friends, doing work, being alive. All that came to a chaotic halt when mercenaries fighting some endless wars drifted through Dijon and...noticed...pretty, pregnant, manless Jehanne and bad things ensued.

So far it's a tale as old as time. But post-bad things, details not foregrounded (neither glossed over, just not dwelt on) in the text, Jehanne was not going to let herself be cowed into silence about the outrages she'd endured. One sees in this fact the root of her problem, and the reason she floated into Dijon instead of staying wherever she got pregnant in the first place. (Absent any details about this subject in the records, as Jehanne was not forthcoming, the author posits a possible reason for her landing in Dijon that I thought sounded very believable.) Seeking legal remedy for her violation was stunning in its effrontery, enduring the horrible humiliation of the trial, reliving the awful events, having deeply impertinent, invasive questions that can not be avoided asked, Jehanne showed amazing strength of character.

Her neighbors—including the very surprising man who conducted the investigation we still have documented—of fairly short duration, to my utter amazement, mostly had her back.

The records of the trial, the details of which are almost brain-meltingly boring...I deeply do not care about medieval tax-dodging schemes, but they were important to the witnesses' identities...made for what should have been a slog of an academic read. Author Sara, take your bow. Yes, I now know what people did for fun in 1470s Dijon, dreamt up ways to skive off paying taxes and damn do I wish I didn't, but this is leavened by Author Sara peppering the dough with interesting asides and details not strictly on topic. I will say that all those details added up to Jehanne's becoming a firmly embedded member of Dijon's community, a rough patch in the weave to be sure, but really part of a vibrant interesting bunch of folks.

It surprised me, it entertained me...yes, in spite of the stuff about who had what spurious tax exemption...and it gave me a ghost of gleeful recognition in getting to know Jehanne. She's someone I wish I'd known in the flesh.

Proof that academic, footnoted reads can be well worth reading for more than a degree.

WE NEVER CALLED IT FRISCO, debut art-critic novel

WE NEVER CALLED IT FRISCO
JED PERL
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A candid novel about the art, artists, and their tempestuous relationships in the countercultural movement of the 50’s and 60’s, by one of America's most celebrated art critics.

During intermission at a modern dance performance in San Francisco, esteemed and incorrigible cultural critic Marcia Lang collapses into a banquette and dies on the spot. Her lover, Burt, soon discovers that Marcia willed him her entire estate. His windfall includes her correspondence, her stilted redwood house in Marin County, and an incomplete draft of her unpublished memoir, We Never Called It Frisco. As he processes Marcia’s death alongside their cadre of Berkeley bohemians, Burt begins to reconstruct Marcia’s work in progress as an elegiac collage for the friend he’s lost and the city that found her.

In his first novel, Jed Perl guides his reader down the back alleys of a mid-century San Francisco populated with painters, puppeteers, paperback revolutionaries, and the writers like Marcia who determined their positions in the cultural ecosystem. Through energetic and immersive prose, We Never Called It Frisco tests the structural limits of the novel as a site of reconstitution and remembrance.

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My Review: The post-war history of US art, in novel form.

If nothing in you perked up at that précis, don't get this read onto your TBR because it's the sum total of the story. Marcia and Burt are names, not characters; their personalities aren't developed, though their...her...critical opinions about art are. Burt is quiet, he's more observant than Marcia's professional eye for art (and its movements) is.

The central tragedy, Marcia's early death, takes place before we-the-reader have the chance to invest in her whether positively or negatively. For that to work as a novelistic technique, the way we learn about her needs to be more personal, more through memories than through her writings. Burt's devastated, naturally; why would that not lead a storyteller into flashbacks, accompanied by her writings? Instead we listen to Marcia's judgmental pronunciamentos interspersed with Burt's sadness. It's not propulsive, nor was I expecting it to be; but it's also progressively less involving.

I liked the idea of this debut novel enough to finish it, and should Author Perl write more fiction, I will seek it out to read. It's not the best work he's done. But it's also not the best work he will do.

A MEDICINE GAME, men in friendship! rare find!

A MEDICINE GAME
JASON DONVILLE
North Vanguard Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Some games are played for victory. Others are played for healing.

When Moose and Jonathan, infantry officers in the Canadian Army and best friends since meeting at Royal Roads Military College, deploy to Sarajevo as peacekeepers, they are thrust into the inferno of a genocidal war. Tasked with reopening the city’s airport—a vital lifeline for humanitarian aid—they soon confront the brutal realities of human violence and the fragile boundaries of moral certainty. Snipers deliberately target civilians, often children, while the soldiers who witness these atrocities are ordered to remain neutral, powerless to intervene.

For Jonathan, a Mohawk soldier from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, healing has always meant something different. He carries with him something older than the uniform he wears: lacrosse—the Creator’s Game, known as the Medicine Game when played for healing.

Some wounds cannot be left on the battlefield. And the journey home demands a different kind of courage.

Spanning continents and generations, from Canada’s Pacific coast to the shattered streets of Sarajevo and the living traditions of Six Nations, A Medicine Game is a haunting and tender meditation on friendship, sacrifice, moral injury, and the long road home. Rooted in memory and illuminated by love, it speaks to an ancient truth: we are not healed before we learn to love. Rather, it is love itself that leads us—gently, and sometimes painfully—toward healing.

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

My Review: I've been vaguely aware of the existence of a game called lacrosse since Calvin's nemesis Susie Derkins hit him with a snowball she'd chucked at him with one of the game's playing sticks. (Clearly I'm not interested enough to find out anything about it, but at least now I know it exists.) I was acutely aware of the Tutsi and Bosnian genocides that took place in the same decade as each other, and as Calvin and Hobbes introduced me to lacrosse. The idea that lacrosse could heal the PTSD of the soldiers who were forced by bizarre and humanity-denying rules simply to watch as murderers commit murder on an industrial scale, then, would never, not once, occur to me.

It still would not after reading this story where it does.

It was a painful story to read, that of the companions Jonathan and Moose as they navigate young manhood seeking their places in the military. I wanted to shout at them, to force them to utilize their evident and complementary skills in humane ways not in military endeavors. Instead they are front and center for the Bosnian religious genocide; it unsurprisingly leaves them floundering amid unresolved trauma once they're home in Canada.

I did enjoy the evocations of Canada as a locale and as a polity that's the antithesis of the wartime theater of operations. I'm not surprised the characters were always processing their grief and rage in their homeland; the contrast could not be more stark. It was worth noting that the men who became friends under hard training, then harsh service conditions, remained friends...too few stories feature men in friendship with each other, so it was very pleasant to see.

DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival, I'm picturing Rupert Everett from Shakespeare in Love

DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
STEPHEN GREENBLATT
W.W. Norton (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending September 9, 2026

The Publisher Says: The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Will in the World reveals the daring and subversive life of Christopher Marlowe—Shakespeare’s contemporary, inspiration, and rival.

In brutally repressive sixteenth-century England, artists had been frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners were suspect; popular entertainment largely consisted of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world came an ambitious cobbler’s son with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry—a torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous skepticism. What Christopher Marlowe found on the other side of that door, and what he did with it, brought about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of his collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare.

With propulsive narrative flair and brilliant literary criticism, Stephen Greenblatt reconstructs the youthful involvement with the queen’s spy service that shaped Marlowe’s brief, troubling life and gave us his Tamburlaine and Faustus—dramatic masterpieces on power and its costs. And with detailed historical insight, Greenblatt explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, birthed the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world—involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.

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My Review: The Swerve was a life-defining read for me in 2012. In it, Author Greenblatt took a horrendously complicated, unpleasantly difficult classical Latin poem about atomism and made it into a living document that gave form to a way of thinking that defines modernity in the 21st century.

If anyone can make a sea of "maybe"s and "perhaps"es into a life story, it is him. And he does.

Kit Marlowe is of enduring interest to many of us for lots of 21st-century reasons, including his apparent sexual interest in other men, his apparent involvement in anti-catholic espionage, and his very obvious murder in what we think was a tavern brawl before he turned thirty; but there's enough uncertainty about all of it that one can't pin him down. His plays survive him; Tamburlaine the Great and The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta and The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus shocked then, shock now four hundred years later, and likely delight in their transgressiveness to the same degree though for very different reasons in both ages. Marlowe knew how to use the prejudices of the world he wrote to entertain to deliver pointed messages well beyond the obvious scope of his story.

A provocateur's work is never done. He can still raise a rage-filled shout.

I think that would delight Kit Marlowe. I know he's not as revered as Shakespeare, his contemporary; but that's down to chance, the unpredictable lightning of luck (and probably Shakespeare's longer life thus larger surviving body of work). It could also be that Marlowe's authorship of The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer, making the homoerotic subtext of male loving friendship that was so celebrated in Elizabethan times into blaring text, had a little something to do with it. Homophobia is an evergreen form of hate, powerfully corrosive to even the most wonder-inspiring talents' gifts. If the ewww-ick response is your default response to gay sex, why are you thinking about it?

Imponderables like this float through my mind as I read this fantabulous work of stitchery that sews a bit here, a scrap there, none of them large, into a very interesting if unclear portrait of a man whose unapologetic purpose was to confront and discomfit the world he so obviously saw in perfect clarity, then whipped out his microscope to look more closely at its flaws.

Dark Renaissance is well titled...the renaissance of a dark figure, the Renaissance's dark side considered then and now, the renaissance of darkness in Marlowe's lifetime and his life and times...layers, layers like an onion, gleaming, and making one tear up as the essential oils of a man's very skin hit your eyes.