THE BLACK TREE ATOP THE HILL, folk-gothic horror novella & MENEWOOD, decade-in-the-making sequel to HILD

THE BLACK TREE ATOP THE HILL
KARLA YVETTE
CLASH Books
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: What came first in this Gothic Western, the ghosts, or The Black Tree Atop the Hill? Set in an alternate American old-west that is hauntingly familiar yet strangely off-putting, Marisol is the first to see the tree on the hill, but that’s only to be expected. As the witch of Jack Boyd’s ranch, her job is to notice threats, even amid a most disastrous calving season. It is up to Marisol and the ranch’s ghost to work together to stop mysteriously spreading trees from taking over their ranch, California, and the entirety of the country. But real magic requires sacrifice, and Marisol is not certain she is prepared to accept the consequences of what she must do to stop the trees’ advance.

This is a story about believing in intuition against the rain, about the violence of nature and of those who inflict it. Gothic gardeners explore the question of nature’s home in a progressing world.

Oozing with conflicting resolutions and twisty insides, this is a stunning debut by Portland artist Karla Yvette.

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My Review: I'm not sure how I got through the awful animal-horror bits. Must be because they weren't perpetrated upon the poor things after they were alive, but were part of a really awful curse that was put on this ranch—and the rest of California—in this altered Western. Folk horror-Gothic horror-tinges of cosmic horror...why the heck would I, materialist extraordinaire, like reading this?!

For one thing, it's short and succinct. Marisol's got a job to do, protecting people from the rampant ill-meant magic flowing everywhere. She doesn't dawdle around being scared or feeling put-upon, she focuses on her protection duties...thank goodness!

What worked best for me in this read was the pacing. A close second was the fact thar Author Yvette never put in any excessive "world-building" aka infodumping stuff...you're where you are, get used to it...and that works best when I'm being asked to suspend disbelief for the space of a novella. If this were a full-on novel, I'd miss the infodumping. The brevity of a novella, which is the exact right length for this story, is stodged up by too much detail of the rules the characters are all playing by. They know them, and I'm happy to follow their lead...for this long, anyway.

Marisol, as expected, carries the story forward. Her ideas about the curse, about the ghost of the rancher's dead wife, and her job, are the really interesting part of the read. The thing that always engages my forward-going gears in a read is a story of underdogs who face down the Powers That Be when it would be easier, and more sensible, to give in and give up. Not being too much of a giver-upper, I like that plot. The Lodge, in this story, functions as a church of sorts regulating magic and punishing its misuse...as, of course, defined by the Lodge. Marisol's magic isn't sanctioned by the Lodge yet she's the one who figures out what the heck is making things on Jack's ranch go so awfully wrong. That's always going to poke the people I don't like in their softest spot: Their hegemony.

All the way around a good tale well-told, an interestingly off-kilter from consensus normality setting, and a heroine whose power comes from her own resources. Definitely a winner for me!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

MENEWOOD
NICOLA GRIFFITH
MCD x FSG
$35.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the much anticipated sequel to Hild, Nicola Griffith's Menewood transports readers back to seventh-century Britain, a land of rival kings and religions poised for epochal change.

Hild is no longer the bright child who made a place in Edwin Overking's court with her seemingly supernatural insight. She is eighteen, honed and tested, the formidable Lady of Elmet, now building her personal stronghold in the valley of Menewood.

But Edwin needs his most trusted advisor. Old alliances are fraying. Younger rivals are snapping at his heels. War is brewing—bitter war, winter war. Not knowing who to trust he becomes volatile and unpredictable. Hild begins to understand the true extent of the chaos ahead, and now she must navigate the turbulence and fight to protect both the kingdom and her own people.

Hild will face the losses and devastation of total war, and then she must find a new strength, the implacable determination to forge a radically different path for herself and her people. In the valley, her last redoubt, her community slowly takes root. She trains herself and her unexpected allies in new ways of thinking as she prepares for one last wager: risking all on a single throw for a better future...

In the last decade, Hild has become a beloved classic of epic storytelling. Menewood picks up where that journey left off, and exceeds it in every way.


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My Review: Pearl-clutchers get your grips ready: I'm going to say some nice things about a christian abbess.

Of course, her christian belief is...muted? inflected? yes, inflected...by the ancient practices of seventh-century Northumbria (a name she wouldn't have known of or used, but firmly established in our modern idea of the time and place). Her christian belief is, by most modern standards, heretical. The Roman priests in this story don't come off that well. They're not alone. King Edwin, whose godmouth Hild is still, is singularly blind to the way his rulership's grip drives the agendas of many angry, ill-willed forces around him.

They are using deeply predictable pathways to bring his rule down, yet he needs Hild's counsel to identify the threats. It's ever thus: Power is as always its own worst enemy. Look at the extensive historical record. All dictators eventually fall, even if it's sometimes quite a lengthy process. What Griffith does brilliantly is in the construction of the story of Hild's rise and the fall of an older world. Her inventions and fictionalizations of this history make sense of some things that our few contemporary(ish) sources apply generous slatherings of handwavium to. It's not, in the end, a story with huge depths of character but rather one with immense scope and sweep of events, and actions taken, purposes found, lives changed and morphed. That being a good kind of historical epic strategy, I'm on board.

Good thing, too, as there are seven hundred-ish pages of Hild's story.

Expect action, don't expect explication. The last book's, um, meatyness and squalor as I think it's fair to characterize it, is still a major register of the narrative voice. You're going to want to bookmark the maps, the notes, and the glossary. There is also, in the ebook, a hyperlink to the author's website where there is a wealth of information about who was who and who never really was and what the hell all those freaky-deaky names mean. In fact this historical novel has more source citations than many history books claiming factuality I've read here recently. It works very much to Author Griffith's favor that she spends a goodly amount of time in her endnotes explaining why she made some choices regarding names and naming conventions, as well as giving a Cliffs Notes course in the unreliability of our best sources on the grounds of non-neutrality.

For this cranky old man reader, Hild is only coming more and more to matter as she moves from fey young girlhood to her surprisingly potent womanhood. I love the fact that this woman, this member of a group outrageously repressed and abused for the majority of the millennium-plus since Hild's death, is the only person powerful enough to change the course of the world (go look up the Synod of Whitby). That isn't in this book, but it'd better be in a future one. This character is far, far too amazing to drop now!

A hardcover of this length is pricey and hard for older and disabled people to manage as an object as well as a significant purchase. All I can say is that the read is worth accepting these obstacles to get in your head.