THE KING IN YELLOW (Deluxe edition), is indeed deluxe and handsome to look at!

THE KING IN YELLOW (Deluxe edition)
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
Pushkin Press Classics
$9.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending August 4, 2026

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers is a classic collection of weird tales that has captivated readers since its original publication in 1895. The stories in this collection are linked by the mysterious play "The King in Yellow," a fictional drama that drives those who read it to madness and despair. Set against the backdrop of a beautifully detailed yet unsettling world, the stories explore themes of existential dread, the supernatural, and the fragility of the human mind.

This illustrated edition not only brings the haunting prose to life but also offers captivating illustrations that enhance the eerie atmosphere of Chambers' tales. Alongside the stories, readers will find a summary of the collection, a biography of the author, and a comprehensive list of characters, providing further insight into the dark and mysterious world of The King in Yellow.

Chambers' masterful storytelling and exploration of the unknown have earned this collection a place in the genre of weird fiction, influencing later writers such as H.P. Lovecraft. This edition is perfect for fans of Gothic horror, supernatural fiction, and anyone who enjoys a chilling tale that lingers long after the last page is turned.

Whether you're reading for the first time or revisiting these tales, this edition of The King in Yellow offers a deeper connection to the eerie and the unknown, complemented by stunning illustrations that capture the essence of Chambers' haunting world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A collection of two halves, one being "The King in Yellow" sequence of gothic, eerie tales centering on the eponymous entity in art or (sur)reality; two stories set in Chambers' home country of the US (marked *) and two in the fin de siècle's default setting for perversity, Paris (marked **). These form what deels like a failed novel; like Chambers was heading for a larger goal but, for whatever reason, chose not to go there. I wondered if he simply lost interest once he thought to set the stories acrually *in* Paris, Sodom on the Seine working its decadent way on him as much as on his characters.

The remaining stories are only occasionally tinged with gothic overtones. They tend more towards romantic fiction in the older sense. They're not about modern concerns with coupling up and finding love, they're about the grand emotional sweeps and swoops of Romanticism. It's all very beautifully presented by Pushkin Press in this Deluxe edition.

In accordance with the Prophecy, the nine stories are herein dealt with by the Bryce Method of a short response to the story, a rating of it on its own, and the collection's gestalt being the overall rating.

**The Repairer of Reputations limns the iea of "have you found the Yellow Sign?" into your awareness. It is a strange, haunting, unsettling thing this sogn; it plays on arrogant narcissism ("Mr. Wilde" eh?) to induce paranoia which becomes the impetus for seeking it and the punishment fo seeking it at the same time. Deeply disturbing, very humidly told. 4.5*

*The Mask brings in the play "The King in Yellow," merely reading it will send a person into a spiral of madness! It unhinges all who dare to open it! Talk about a sales job, there's no better way to get huge sales for something than this except maybe banning it on grounds of immorality.

The sufferings of the artist who, drawn to experience these extreme things for Love (of course), mesh with weird period-appropriate pseudoscience in a fun but very, very 1890s way. 4.5*

*In the Court of the Dragon is so flippin' bizarre...why does the old weirdo want the guy's soul? What's the way he knows the guy's soul is of such interest and value? I fear this line of mental inquiry is why I'm just not a gothic-story habitué, but it's sure got the trappings of the best ones! 4*

**The Yellow Sign a coffin worm?!? *shudder* 4*

The Demoiselle d'Ys tells a very charming, if kind of trite in the twenty-first century, time-travel romance (in our modern usage). Left a mildly pleasant but very indistinct impression on me. 3*

The Prophets' Paradise compiles a series of prose poems that expand on the love, hubris, and dangerous supernatural bargaining of the first four stories' characters. Seems odd to me not to put it *within* those stories but permaybehaps Author Chambers didn't think of these small moments in time to do so...expanding the quotation from "The King in Yellow" that open the cycle's stories. 3.75*

The Street of the Four Winds is a Parisian tragic story in the era's typical style, with ruin and disaster following on from following a neighbor's cat. Very apt. 3*

The Street of the First Shell tells a deeply sorrowful tale set during the Siege of Paris (1870 through 1871), with tragic results from terrible decisions and awful actions forced by the cruelest of fates. 3.75* despite the melodrama (or because of it, NGL)

The Street of Our Lady of the Fields is another "bohemians bohemianing unoriginally across the dirty foreign streets of dirty foreign Paris' dirty foreign immoral soil." Spare me. 2.5*

Rue Barrée see above, only the story's as sick of the story as I am. Made it more fun to read. 3*
It's a beautiful object, and will no doubt be welcome for decorative value. I think many a gothic-story reader will get one, and that will be its fate. Sometimes it's not great to meet your heroes in person.

WHAT WOULD MRS. ASTOR DO?: The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age, about serious party people

WHAT WOULD MRS. ASTOR DO?: The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age
CECILIA TICHI
NYU Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This illustrated Gilded Age etiquette guide offers "proof that sliding around the naughty edges of society can be as informative as it is entertaining." (Alida Becker, The New York Times Books Review)

Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age. Between 1870 and 1900, the United States' population doubled, accompanied by an unparalleled industrial expansion and an explosion of wealth. America was the foremost nation of the world, and New York City was its beating heart. There, the richest and most influential—Thomas Edison, J. P. Morgan, Edith Wharton, the Vanderbilts, Andrew Carnegie, and more—became icons, whose comings and goings were breathlessly reported in the papers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. It was a time of abundance, but also bitter rivalries. The Old Money titans found themselves besieged by a vanguard of New Money interlopers eager to gain entrée into their world. Into this morass of money and desire stepped Caroline Astor.

An Old Money heiress of the first order, Mrs. Astor was convinced that she was uniquely qualified to uphold the manners and mores of 19th century America. "What would Mrs. Astor do?" became the question every social climber sought to answer. This work serves as a guide to manners as well as an insight to Mrs. Astor's personal diary and address book. Ceceilia Tichi invites us on a beautifully illustrated tour of the Gilded Age, transporting readers to New York at its most fashionable.

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

My Review: So much beauty and opulence shoved up to the surface by so much greed and theft.

Let's not go there this close to the leanest Yule in many a long year. We're not remotely out of the woods economically, but this book is about a time where the economic situation was far, far worse. It's discussed in here, though not exhaustively. It's a social history, it's about how etiquette came to matter so much, which of course requires we know a bit about how the men, all men, stole...made, sorry...so very much money to support the women's social construct.

the lady herself, in her finery painted for posterity

The very idea of entertaining at home was made aspirational by the "Four Hundred" (the number who could fit in Mrs. Astor's ballroom); as late as the 1960s, the idea was prevalent, and while the means changed, the manners barely did.

my generation certainly heard Emily Post's name, same woman and mostly the same advice

Lina Astor was an insufferable snob. Her ballroom was for "the best people," whose money was so old no one living could remember the hustler who got it. Nouveau riche industrialists' wives need not apply. It was a world she ruled, but it was a reign of terror that had to be agreed to; there was nothing forcing anyone into this restrictive social contract except made-up ideas like prestige.

two robber-baron "homes," Manhattan and Newport

Oh, and money of course. Lots and lots and lots of money.Author Tichi does not bear down heavy on the whole "robber baron" thing. There's no way around the money ocean they swam in. It's rather the point of a beautiful, illustrated book about luxury.

smart excessories...I mean accessories!...for Madame and Sir

It's astonishing what boredom does to a person. This time period, up to then the richest in world history, led to wealth disparities but also to the cementing of the idea that one could live a life not mere have an existence. Vacations to exotic places, to different places than you frquented as usual anyway, and recreational shopping (a Georgian idea embraced effusively by the Astor set) became ordinary for these wealthy folk:

shopping and sitting, two "fun" things

What I enjoyed most about this read was the way Author Tichi left it to me to judge, presenting facts and showing (as you see) examples and artifacts for me to decide what I thought about. We are in a new Gilded Age of wealth disparity, and at an economic crossroads, just like these folk were. We need to think carefully about what we individually do, because that becomes by default collective action.

The gifting season should be replete with beautiful tokens of love and affection; that doesn't mean they can't be thought-provoking, interesting, and relevant, too.

then, a residence; now a museum

WHAT MOVES THE DEAD, mycological nightmare fodder

WHAT MOVES THE DEAD
T. KINGFISHER
Nightfire Books
$19.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five
WINNER OF THE LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST HORROR NOVEL!


The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of The Twisted Ones comes a gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Fall of the House of Usher."

When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania.

What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.

Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

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

My Review: I've marked this as a story with "transgender representation," and although that is a way of seeing Alex Easton I don't know of it's one ka would approve of. I could simply be another American man committing a dreadful solecism in kan opinion. Oh well.

Now. On to the bad, awful, hideous, nightmarish stuff.

You've most likely read "The Fall of the House of Usher" at some point in your school career/teenaged glooms. (Not-Americans even know about this story, and I understand it's popular among Poe's French-speaking admirers.) So did T. Kingfisher, and did she have questions after reading it! Wowee toledo.

Alex Easton, our narrator-cum-PoV person, has a strangely English name and a uniquely different cultural outlook. Ka was born female and swore into the life of a soldier, an ungendered occupation among kan fellow countrymen. I suspect it wasn't uncommon for warrior societies to have permeable gender boundaries given that not all man-plumbed persons are suited to soldiering and not all woman-plumbed persons are suitable to motherhood. Those being the basic occupations of the sexes for much of human history, it would surprise me greatly if most didn't have some kind or sort of accommodation to this reality. I believe the warrior graves with female bodies in them discovered all over Europe and Asia are an indicator of this.

Easton, as ka is known to the Usher siblings ka knew in distant childhood and youth, has at last emerged from soldiering...one senses unwillingly...now that peace has returned. A letter from kan friend Madeline Usher brings ka at the trot: "Roderick thinks I am dying." For one thing, bonds that old...and ka was Roderick's commander during the war, to boot...can't be gainsaid. Off ka, and kan batman Angus, and kan horse Hob (all well-sketched characters of great sensitivity in their portrayal) trot to the Ushers' ancestral home in neighboring Ruravia (!) to Do What Needs Doing.

Thus the nightmare begins. Ka finds Roderick a wisp, Madeline a cold shell of her former lovely self, and Roderick's American friend Denton...whose soldiering was done in the Civil War, in a medical tent. Despite kan poor opinion of Americans, this earns him a degree of latitude for being gauche and unfamiliar with how to treat sworn soldiers like ka. (That little pronoun, in kan Gallacian language, is used for both sexes of sworn soldiers. Tidily solves the vexed problem of gendered soldiery.) Alex finds Denton, and the English language, adequate but frustratingly unsophisticated, leading to kan delightful outburst, "Damnable English language—more words than anybody can be expected to keep track of, and then they use the same one for about three different things."

I relate, my soul sibling Alex. I so so relate.

I don't think it helps anything to recapitulate "The Fall of the House of Usher." I am aware that some people haven't read it, though honestly I find that easier to conceptualize than to understand. Let's just say that the mycohorror subgenre that's come into being and has fetidly overgrown the various horror and adjacent literary fields...Annihilation and its siblings, The Girl with All the Gifts, on and on...have been gazumped (from German gesumpf, tossed into a swamp) by T. Kingfisher's lighter, brighter touch and inimitable ability to slosh humor over a rankly rotting, unnaturally ambulating, little-white-hyphae-shedding Object of Horror, and not have the results resemble a desecrated grave.

I loved the read. I think most people I know would at the very least like it. And, fellow old-enough-to-remember souls, I think Denton the American is a call-out to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I can't prove it...the author doesn't mention it in her self-deprecating endnotes...but I found myself humming "Denton, Denton/you've got no pretensions" every time he hove into view.

...wait...what are those little white...EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

THE CITY BEAUTIFUL, atmospheric horror-adjacent QUILTBAG fiction aimed at older teens

THE CITY BEAUTIFUL
ADEN POLYDOROS
Inkyard Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

FINALIST FOR THE 34th Lambda Literary Award—BEST LGBTQ YA FICTION! Winners announced 11 June 2022.

A BEST BOOKS OF 2021 – YOUNG ADULT SELECTION FROM BOOKPAGE!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Chicago, 1893. For Alter Rosen, this is the land of opportunity, and he dreams of the day he’ll have enough money to bring his mother and sisters to America, freeing them from the oppression they face in his native Romania.

But when Alter’s best friend, Yakov, becomes the latest victim in a long line of murdered Jewish boys, his dream begins to slip away. While the rest of the city is busy celebrating the World’s Fair, Alter is now living a nightmare: possessed by Yakov’s dybbuk, he is plunged into a world of corruption and deceit, and thrown back into the arms of a dangerous boy from his past. A boy who means more to Alter than anyone knows.

Now, with only days to spare until the dybbuk takes over Alter’s body completely, the two boys must race to track down the killer—before the killer claims them next.

Death lurks around every corner in this unforgettable Jewish historical fantasy about a city, a boy, and the shadows of the past that bind them both together.

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

My Review: I think there's nothing more delightful to me than queer representation in historical fiction. We were there, too, and deserve to be written into the zeitgeist.

This is Young Adult queer representation in the 19th century, and in my ongoing quest not to die above the neck before I do below it, I got the DRC. I'm really very glad that I did...this read was a great pleasure to me. The use of Jewish folk cultural touchstones...matchmakers, dybbuks being the most horrifying...the sprinkings of Yiddish, the focus...fierce focus...on family and loyalty, were all tastes of delight for this reader. The author doesn't spend inordinate time explaining things but he does provide context and some factual stuff for the more, um, ethnocentric stuff.

It is a sheer joy to see the story being set away from a) World War II, b) New York's Lower East Side, or c) the shtetl somewhere in Eastern Europe. The Jewish population of Chicago has never been teensy...the Great Lakes ports were as much a destination as New York, but they get less play. I'm also, since I read The Devil in the White City and read The Man Who Made Parks: The Story of Parkbuilder Frederick Law Olmsted by Frieda Wishinsky to my oldest grandson, a big aficionado of the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition (aka "the White City") in Chicago. That venue plays quite a role in this murder mystery, though exactly how and why shall remain a secret lest I be set upon by spoilerphobes next time I go grocery shopping.

What I will say is that the squeamish should not pick the book up. There are graphic moments of bloodyness, there are awful physical violences, and of course the element of supernatural possession can't be left out. There are more 21st-century concerns like homophobia and anti-semitism (this last pervades the end of the book to a sometimes uncomfortable degree), but this is Spooktober! A few scares, some terrible spooky goins-on, that is what this month is for! Be prepared, also, for the politics of the book. It's solidly anti-capitalist, despite MC Alter's determination to earn earn earn so he can bring his mother and sisters to the Promised Land...Chicago! imagine...because that's really situational not aspirational capitalism. And Alter's failed match-cum-bestie, young Raizel from downstairs in his apartment building, is there to keep him from falling *too* deep into capitalism's cess pit. (She is, in fact, one of the book's most delightful characters, propensity to splash tea onto laps notwithstanding.)

Putting on my YA-unlover's hat, the usual prolixity...why say in ten words what can make an entire chapter?...is fully present, the stakes are APOCALYPTIC ZOMG THE UNIVERSE WILL END!! and that gets really tiring to an old fart like me who knows that, after I and you and the author are all dead the planet will keep spinning on. Probably all the better for our absence.

But that is an elderly person speaking, the audience that's here for YA is going to *eat*this*up* because every one of the elements are handled with aplomb and without the edge of tweeness I've reacted to in other YA books like they're coated in cat dander. I don't at all recommend giving this to a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old. The realities of sexual abuse aren't in any way soft-pedaled. The realities of sexual desire, that it doesn't obey rules or orders, are best left to the older end of the YA spectrum, which I think of as sixteen and up. I know y'all know y'all's kids better than I do, so understand I'm speaking in generalities and not prescribing anything.

The mystery aspect of the story, the resolution to the murders and disappearances of Jewish boys, is very well-handled and was solidly made in serious mystery form. If you're up for it, match wits with the author; if you're not, read the spooky book or the coming-out (sort of!) book or the immigrant-makes-it book. They're all here.

I think my point should be clear: Read The City Beautiful. It will please at least 80% of the folks who read my reviews.

THE DICTIONARY OF LOST WORDS, Victorian setting--usual suspects--good story

THE DICTIONARY OF LOST WORDS
PIP WILLIAMS
Ballantine Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this remarkable debut based on actual events, as a team of male scholars compiles the first Oxford English Dictionary, one of their daughters decides to collect the "objectionable" words they omit.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the "Scriptorium," a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word "bondmaid" flutters to the floor. She rescues the slip, and when she learns that the word means slave-girl, she withholds it from the OED and begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.

As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women's and common folks' experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.

Set during the height of the women's suffrage movement with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men.

Based on actual events and combed from author Pip Williams's experience delving into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary, this highly original novel is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM MY COUNTY'S LIBRARY SYSTEM. USE YOUR LIBRARY, FOLKS! THEY NEED US!

My Review: First, read his:

Some words are more than letters on a page, don't you think? They have shape and texture. They are like bullets, full of energy, and when you give one breath you can feel its sharp edge against your lip.
–and–
I often wondered what kind of slip I would be written on if I was a word. Something too long, certainly. Probably the wrong colour. A scrap of paper that didn't quite fit. I worried that perhaps I would never find my place in the pigeon-holes at all.
–and–
A vulgar word, well placed and said with just enough vigour, can express far more than its polite equivalent.

There is an immense gulf between thoughts and words...Esme, as a girl in the almost-all-male world of dictionary-obsessed dad Harry, discovers again and again that the ideas we robe in words aren't seen by those who hear them as we've made them in our minds. The factual world of making the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) presided over by Dr. James Murray is expanded to include a fictional word-mad girl-child whose run-ins with lying adults, oblivious adults, and peers without her ruling passion for The Words We Use are the meat of this delicious, if difficult to deal with at times, novel. Esme Nicholl does not spend her life the way Dr. Murray's typically Victorian daughters do. Her days are spent being educated at school; her afternoons with the men at the Scriptorium as they collate and pigeonhole and excise the tens of thousands of definitions and attestations through usage that arrive in Dr. Murray's home/workhouse from around the world. Careless dropping or deliberate deletion, it makes no never-mind to young Esme. She re-homes them in her treasure-chest, under a housemaid's bed, their shared secret.

The dropped words, Esme notices as her life gives her more analytical tools, are often words commonly used by, among, and about women and their activities. Her world is coming for her, bent on controlling her and bending her to its will. Her Godmother Edith, a factual person really nicknamed Ditte, is a very unconventional woman and a prolific contributor the OED. She's acted as a co-parent, in a limited way, to Esme; yet she fails her when Esme desperately needs her simply because Ditte doesn't live in Oxford, let alone in daily contact with Esme.

“Dr. Murray said you and Beth were proflitic contributors,” I said, with some authority.

“Prolific,” Ditte corrected.

“Is that a nice thing to be?”

“It means we have collected a lot of words and quotations for Dr. Murray’s dictionary, and I’m sure he meant it as a compliment.”

The relationship is pretty tidily encapsulated there. Older mentor, not quite understanding the mentee but giving great guidance anyway; just not quite what was really needed. The words for things are centered; the denotations are generously given, while the connotations are left more or less to Esme's maturing brain to construct as best she can. She is, after all, equipped with well-designed tools...but no manuals to train their user in their best use.

In her word-collecting fever, Esme amasses much raw data, many denotations. Her goal for it remains unfocused until she realizes that the words' connotations give her the needed feminist perspective: she and her half of humanity are doomed to be controlled until they can participate in life as political actors instead of passive observers. Yes, she discovers Feminism and becomes a suffragette. And uses her life-long capacity to work with words to give sharp focus to her purpose.

If war could change the nature of men, it would surely change the nature of words.
–and–
“Words change over time, you see. The way they look, the way they sound; sometimes even their meaning changes. They have their own history.”

Something I wish people who fuss over neologisms and redefinitions would process. Things are growing or dying. There is no stasis in natural systems, and no homeostasis doesn't count...it is a finely balanced state but predicated on constant shifts and changes that must support a larger whole's proper, healthy functioning. Just like language...the words are always tip-tilting, reconfiguring themselves, shedding pieces and adding others; but the language as a whole lives and thrives and, broadly, remains the same. Only different.

It struck me that we are never fully at ease when we are aware of another's gaze. Perhaps we are never fully ourselves. In the desire to please or impress, to persuade or dominate, our movements become conscious, our features set.

That snapshot effect, the mask of Persona slid over a person's face, is what Esme is resisting as she rescues rejected and deleted words from the magisterial OED. Her women's words are the ones men most need, and are supremely reluctant, to hear. Esme's project, fictional of course, is the titular dictionary, with words like "menstruation" (simply too earthy and shuddersome for the frail little men making the OED) to "knackered" because it's vulgar and ugly when a more refined person could say "exhausted" or "listless." Esme thinks "bollocks to that" and spends her adulthood on the many pieces that must be moved around and reconfigured to make a society that can even properly think about a way to include women as adult beings.

And herein the reason I don't give this book a five-star warble of ecstasy...the passage of time. It doesn't. I'm herky-jerkyed into different stages of Esme and the world's life but the setting remains...internal. It's The Esme Show, instead of Truman; she's the star and no doubt. But there's a degree of alienation in that. Thank goodness there are so many dates to open chapters! Too bad they don't mean more. It's certainly true that we, in our daily rounds, don't think carefully about where the screens in the piston of our french-press coffeepot come from, or how and when to clean or replace them. But some sense of Esme's adjustments to the world around her, since her project is to effect true change upon it, would've helped me grasp the maturation parts of time's passage. I felt the lack of that connection keenly.

Esme's relationships were also a bit troubling to read for this reason. Lizzie, her female exemplar in residence, was a lower-class girl whose best hopes weren't as high as she's actually risen by working for the Murrays and becoming Esme's comadre. By rights she should be a dead young worn-out whore. So the way the privileged miss and the rough serving girl should practically leap off the page at me, right?

“Me needlework will always be here,” she said. “I see this and I feel…well, I don’t know the word. Like I’ll always be here.”

“Permanent,” I said. “And the rest of the time?”

“I feel like a dandelion just before the wind blows.”
–and–
My mother was like a word with a thousand slips. Lizzie’s mother was like a word with only two, barely enough to be counted. And I had treated one as if it were superfluous to need.

It's really the fate of most of us...we vanish into nothingness as soon as we assume room temperature. Ephemeral as life is, what I found wantimg in those perfectly lovely passages was the solidity of Life beating Esme with her own responsibility to and for the older but more vulnerable on a practical life-level woman.

Still and all, I'm so pleased that I read this wonderful story. I think it could have made more of an impact on me had some stylistic choices been made differently; that is always the way with making art, no one can create something as powerful and fully realized as this book is without making choices that won't work for everyone. I felt very strongly the aura of choices and decisions affirmatively, consideredly made at every turn. This is in no way a slapdash or ill-made work of fiction. Its real and its fictional characters are treated with equal gravitas. That the factual characters take up less screen time is a decision that the author and editor clearly planned carefully and executed deftly. I can offer no more heartfelt recommendation than "read this book soon." I *could* have, if certain other, less distancing, choices had been made, turned obnoxious pest and shouted at you to get the book NOW read it on the Jitney or in the Admiral's Club but just GET IT!!

But really, does it get that much better than this?

I thought about all the words I’d collected from Mabel and from Lizzie and from other women: women who gutted fish or cut cloth or cleaned the ladies’ public convenience on Magdalen Street. They spoke their minds in words that suited them, and were reverent as I wrote their words on slips. These slips were precious to me, and I hid them in the trunk to keep them safe. But from what? Did I fear they would be scrutinised and found deficient? Or were those fears I had for myself? I never dreamed the givers had any hopes for their words beyond my slips, but it was suddenly clear that no one but me would ever read them. The women’s names, so carefully written, would never be set in type. Their words and their names would be lost as soon as I began to forget them. My Dictionary of Lost Words was no better than the grille in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons: it hid what should be seen and silenced what should be heard.

Pip Williams: I salute you for writing a grown-up book for real, passionate readers.

WHAT'S LEFT OF THE NIGHT, three Parisian days in poet C.P. Cavafy's life when his world changed

WHAT'S LEFT OF THE NIGHT
ERSI SOTIROPOULOS (tr. Karen Emmerich)
New Vessel Press
$16.95 trade paper, $12.95 ebook editions, available now

WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD FOR PROSE
Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In June 1897, the young Constantine Cavafy arrives in Paris on the last stop of a long European tour, a trip that will deeply shape his future and push him toward his poetic inclination. With this lyrical novel, tinged with an hallucinatory eroticism that unfolds over three unforgettable days, celebrated Greek author Ersi Sotiropoulos depicts Cavafy in the midst of a journey of self-discovery across a continent on the brink of massive change. He is by turns exhilarated and tormented by his homosexuality; the Greek-Turkish War has ended in Greece’s defeat and humiliation; France is torn by the Dreyfus Affair, and Cavafy’s native Alexandria has surrendered to the indolent rhythms of the East. A stunning portrait of a budding author—before he became C.P. Cavafy, one of the 20th century’s greatest poets—that illuminates the complex relationship of art, life, and the erotic desires that trigger creativity.

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

My Review: Poets puzzle me. As in all arts, there is a paucity of genius to go around; a spark here, a flare there, and honestly so little of that is even comprehensible during the poet's lifetime. Remember that scene in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as Ford and Arthur are being strapped into the Vogon Poetry Appreciation chairs, the most dreaded of all torture devices? Even Prostetnic Jeltz wasn't the worst poet in the Galaxy, an English schoolgirl (recently atomized for that blasted bypass) was, while still (mercifully) unknown.

I think many of us feel the same way, attending slams and readings because we want to bag one or more of the poets (so totally guilty) without the fuss and bother of dating...ahem...I fear I've said too much. And the point is, this book's subject is one of the acknowledged geniuses of twentieth-century poetry around the world. Constantine Peter Cavafy was one of those gay boys who got bullied a lot. He was unhealthily attached to his mother, who in this book is called "The Fat One" as often as anything else. His family had a very great social fall, investments and wars and other things a young Costakis (one of his nicknames) really wouldn't know much about. He wrote and wrote, completing little and publishing not at all except in ephemera like magazines and broadsheets. He died at seventy, all unknown.

And now he's world-famous, acknowledged as a great master! Go read "Ithaka" if you wonder why. His fellow gay poets, Auden and Forster, bigged him up after his death; but honestly, it was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis whose death did the most to bring him Fame. ("Ithaka" was read at her 1994 memorial service.) How appropriate, I think; a woman whose life was begun, lived, and ended in a world Cavafy would've recognized...the haute bourgeoisie...and who, but for the lightning of Fate would've been his equal in obscurity, used (albeit unwittingly) her own fame to make his.

Okay. I've given you the stakes...poet of huge talent labors in obscurity his whole life like everyone else who commits poetry...now what's all this got to do with What's Left of the Night? Ersi Sotiropoulos wrote a paean, a song of praise, to the man at a critical juncture in his life, a birthing pain of a poet emerging from a boring failed bourgeois. Cavafy, the poet, doesn't appear like Aphrodite from the foam; he left behind a truncated-by-war but still considerable paper trail. His juvenilia were, in a word, mediocre. He lashes himself with this knowledge, but Author Sotiropoulos puts its cruel certainty into the hand of Greco-French poet Jean Moréas where Cavafy, not known to have met the great man on this flying tag-end trip, can see it en passant as it were. As with all artists, Cavafy responds to a hurtful characterization of his poems as having "weak artistry" by going off the deep end, by standing on his agonized, violated sense of himself and leaping head-first into an insomnia-generated sensory fugue state.

He develops an erotic obsession with a young Russian man, who on scant evidence he decides is a dancer; he spends a long passage working himself into a frenzy without so much as looking full-face at the man, and ending his very peculiar but very hot and sweaty public arousal with a mad dash to his bedroom for a (shameful, second) rub-out. Being a repressed, and very horny, thirty-four at the time, he recognizes that fleeting pleasures are not good for a whole lot: "...he already knew that his desire was far greater than the satisfaction would be, that the satisfaction would betray the desire…that this immediate relief would only disappoint him." A mature person with the drives of a lad, what could be worse.
For many of you, what I'm about to say is a death knell. I didn't want to say it at all. I thought of ways only to hint at it and still not have dirty looks cast at me when the duped reader ran into the wall of stream-of-consciousness prose.

For the six of you who are still reading, let me be plain, this is a *good* thing because Author Sotiropoulos is deploying the wooly sense of place and painful edges of reality that are most available to the writer using this narrative device in service of bringing you-the-reader into the deepest possible contact with Constantine's terrible, terrible agonies of self-knowledge. He is always, in every moment of this novel, in an altered state. He is sometimes, briefly, exalted by some male beauty. He is frequently unkind and downright abusive. And no one feels the sting of his lash more than he does himself. Always sure he is wrong, he projects his convictions without conviction; conversely, he spends gallons of tears sure he knows the location of the art locked inside him, a key nowhere to be found.

It is there. The key is always there in the great poets and writers. Sometimes finding it is more painful than they can bear to endure, so they fail; other times, they find the key and unleash...a hollow thunk; a mousy squeak, a pathetic mewl. To very few the key arrives at the moment they can most ably use the art within. Cavafy, in this book, is not ready; and he does not find the key; but he spends three Parisian days making a map that will lead him back to it: Men, sex, humiliation, and rage.

I caution the readers I know: Do not read past the scene in the Ark. A carriage draws up, a blond aristocrat appears, and shut the book. You'll feel better that way.

I really, really hope, despite my possibly off-putting advisories, that you will attend the birth of the incontestably great poet Constantine Cavafy as midwifed by Ersi Sotiropoulos. The book is gorgeous, and like its stylistic forebears, offers a unique and deeply participatory entrée into the shadowed corners and sunlit uplands of a unique individual's life at its moment of greatest impact. The poet is made to say, during the briefest of lucidities, that:

The purpose of art is to abolish distance.

Cavafy's observation, oneiric and onanistic as it is, explains perfectly this novel's appeal. I think it might be the most profound of the profound things that Author Sotiropoulos has Cavafy say.

Though "It must have been the perch" is a close flatulent second. Heh.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ÉMILE ZOLA, a wrenchingly sad case of a man exiled from his home for daring to speak truth to power

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ÉMILE ZOLA: Love, Literature, and the Dreyfus Case
MICHAEL ROSEN
Pegasus Books
$16.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: It is the evening of July 18, 1898, and the world-renowned novelist Émile Zola is on the run. His crime? Taking on the highest powers in the land with his open letter "J'accuse"—and losing. Forced to leave Paris with nothing but the clothes he is standing in and a nightshirt wrapped in newspaper, Zola flees to England with no idea when he will return.

This is the little-known story of Zola's time in exile. Rosen has traced Zola's footsteps from the Gare du Nord to London, examining the significance of this year. The Disappearance of Émile Zola offers an intriguing insight into the mind, the loves, and the politics of the great writer during this tumultuous era in his life.

I BORROWED THIS BOOK FROM MY LOCAL LIBRARY'S I.L.L. PROGRAM. THANK THEM BEST BY USING THEIR SERVICES OFTEN.

My Review: A very interesting digest of the paperwork, published sources, and private thoughts recorded between 13 January 1898 and Christmas 1900. The Dreyfus Affair's incredibly long shadow hasn't passed yet, though the anti-"foreigner" (Dreyfus was born a citizen) attitude of many of the French has shifted to the (also born citizens) Muslims. The rhetoric hasn't changed much.

Zola's response to the collective horror of his country's leaders...the men (all men, of course) charged with guiding the Ship of State into safe harbor, who listened to the lowest, the least, and the worst people in France and then gave them something they wanted...an Other to abominate and excoriate...was to scream his fury and rejection. These "leaders" then put the innocent-of-treason Dreyfus, that designated scapegoat to France's darkest impulses, onto a ship to die in their most horrifyingly ghastly prison colony. The baseness, the injustice, the inhumanity of it, ate at Zola like acid. He was the author of a multi-volume body of work called Les Rougon-Macquart, a daringly honest and searingly realistic 20-volume (!) cycle of tales about a clan of nothing-special French folk that earned Zola an international reputation for both talent and prurience. Reading them today, both seem reasonably accurate assessments.

So what, the guy's dead 118 years, the Dreyfus Affair happened 122 years ago.

Look around you. I would that we had a Zola to, in clear and direct prose, accuse the malefactors of our world of their crimes and, what's more, make the accusations stick. Would that it had been a lawyer named Mueller...I have kept hope alive that someone both could and would make a dent in the current administration's malfeasance. Now it looks as though there will be a coup attempt instead of a peaceful transfer of power! Hélas.

Rosen also includes translations of "Angelique," a "ghost story" that Zola wrote in London, as well as the stirring-if-stilted J'accuse! as it appeared in L'Aurore on 13 January 1898. If none of these events are familiar to you, go read this book immediately.

I'm stingy star-wise because Rosen's task includes the thankless one of framing his subject to people unfamiliar with the dramatis personae as well as the casus belli that got the whole thing going. As a result, he resorts to much inevitable spoon-feeding and that, I fear, caused my eyes to glaze over. It's necessary, it's even reasonably well-done, but it's bloody tedious and kept me from ever forgetting how Worthy the people were and how Relevant the warnings herein are. When my finger finds the overemphasis-via-shift key without being told to go there by my brain, we have a problem between us, Author Rosen.

Paradoxically, that makes me want all y'all to read this book all the more! The beauty of history is that we are able to view causes and effects in their entirety; a thing obviously impossible in the present. The tragedy of history is that those who don't read it don't learn from it; a thing that could prevent the present from repeating the past verbatim. I will say this: When you read this book, you will not feel like you're being told to keep chewing that wad of kale until it goes down your throat. More along the lines of, "here's some lovely dark bread to sustain you, love, and a big pat of real butter for yummies."

THE SLAVE YARDS, nightmarish Benghazi reality translated from Arabic

THE SLAVE YARDS
NAJWA BIN SHATWAN (tr. Nancy Roberts)
Syracuse University Press
$24.95 trade paper, $14.95 Kindle, available now

Special Offer—Save 40% off all literature in translation with discount code 05FALL24 now through October 15, 2024.

Rating: 4* of five

Save 40% off on direct-from-publisher purchases of all literature in translation with discount code 05WIT25 now through September 15, 2025.

The Publisher Says: Set in late nineteenth-century Benghazi, Najwa Bin Shatwan's powerful novel tells the story of Atiqa, the daughter of a slave woman and her white master. We meet Atiqa as a grown woman, happily married with two children and working. When her cousin Ali unexpectedly enters her life, Atiqa learns the true identity of her parents, both long deceased, and slowly builds a friendship with Ali as they share stories of their past.

We learn of Atiqa's childhood, growing up in the "slave yards," a makeshift encampment on the outskirts of Benghazi for Black Africans who were brought to Libya as slaves. Ali narrates the tragic life of Atiqa's mother, Tawida, a black woman enslaved to a wealthy merchant family who finds herself the object of her master's desires. Though such unions were common in slave-holding societies, their relationship intensifies as both come to care deeply for each other and share a bond that endures throughout their lives.

Shortlisted for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Bin Shatwan's unforgettable novel offers a window into a dark chapter of Libyan history and illuminates the lives of women with great pathos and humanity.

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

My Review: What a horrible life slaves have always led.

There's an earth-shattering insight for you. I can't believe anyone didn't say it before me, can you? Well, this book's like that. It's not telling you anything that you didn't know before. It's making you feel, see, smell it instead of intellectually knowing. Slavery, at its heart, is about bodies. The thing we take for granted, the autonomy of the corpus delicti of our lives as sinners on this, gawd's private torture grounds, is abrogated; no man controls his labor, no woman her womb, no child its curiosity. A slave exists, doesn't live. A slave possesses nothing, not even a soul, or else no religion would allow the practice. No religion has ever, to the best of my knowledge, forbidden slavery. At best a few wild-eyed bizarro outlier sects like the Quakers, or the Northern Baptists in the US, could even be bothered to protest its wrongness.

Many were the slaves who had forgotten the story of their enslavement and had integrated gladly into the life of those owned by Muslim masters. As for those who married other members of their own race and, in some cases, won emancipation, they were delivered from hunger to hunger, and from poverty to poverty.

That is a sad and eternal truth: Poverty closely resembles slavery, and as poverty is entirely curable, that cannot be an accident. It suits the people at the top to keep the system just unfair and evil enough that they can keep the best for themselves and run the lowest risk of the huge majority figuring out that they can't kill *all* of us and rebelling.

I hope to High Hallack that the US is at such an inflection point right now. But I digress.

At any rate. The Slave Yards tells a story, fairly simple in its outlines, about Atiqa growing herself up in Benghazi's Slave Yards, suffering multiple orphanings, and growing into a woman with a loving family, both made and born. Into that world comes a man with secrets to tell her about her past, secrets she buried during the worst night of her entire existence, and proofs that she was not just a slave girl and never had to be one. Too late, of course, to prevent the slave girl from suffering the degradation of not even owning the lungs she breathed with.

But Atiqa, the self-made therefore self-possessed woman of the story, doesn't come to this knowledge simply or directly. The whole novel is, as the title suggests, the Slave Yards whole and entire, its incredibly rich culture, its appalling degrading poverty, its joys and hates and endings and beginnings. The stories Atiqa remembers, tells herself anew, feels and smells again in her hard-earned, richly merited new life, are the meat of this book. Maybe "meat" isn't the word...the asida in the bazeen of this book. The story is dispensed with for long stretches of tale-spinning, of life-living memories. And that is a good, good thing.

I felt as though I had gone completely away from 2020 Long Island and its existential anxieties, thence to gain perspective:

Without a word {the groom} handed the bride's uncle a blood-spattered white sheet. The uncle...took it out to a group of men gathered in front of the house. This done, he gleefully set about emptying the contents of his shotgun into the air. ... The uncle unfurled it like a victory banner, the battle of innocence now won...they could hold their heads high in the knowledge that their honor was intact.

The present-day abortion-rights battles are the not-distant descendents of this kind of complete and utter idiocy. The entirety of monotheistic religion's thrust (please pardon wordplay) has been to stand on the neck of Womankind's autonomy out of anxiety. What? Anxious manhood? Perish forbid, say the abortion-deniers, and throw a thousand words into the void between their fears and the actual world. (THEIR daughters, white as snow, will always be able to get abortions...multiple women I'm related to had them pre-Roe-v-Wade. We're white. Connect the dots.) The real issue is control. The real issue is covering up for the men's fear of being robbed of their control over women's bodies:

Nobody seemed to notice that there was something wrong with the custom of having the groom use his hand {to break the woman's hymen} on the wedding night to determine whether his bride was a virgin. On the contrary, even the women thought is was perfectly normal. It had never occurred to them that it was just a way of covering up for a man's possible impotence.

Huh. Imagine that, a custom arising (you should forgive) to protect a fragile boy-ego at the expense of a woman. My pearls, my pearls.

So for a moment, I was swept into a world where the power imbalances made no smallest effort to hide themselves. It was a relief, in a way, to be in a place where the crushing and cruelty were open and acknowledged; were simply the way things are. Because to fight the way things are is to crusade, to smash and shatter and slaughter the old, the bad, but the *known* and the *open* awfulnesses. Today it is harder by far to protect gains not evenly spread, to defend boundaries set to deliberately disadvantage some, and then work to spread and reset them. The world of Benghazi in the 1890s, the 1900s was bitter to be Black in, and the wrongness of it was everywhere. To root out racism in the richest country on Earth? The battle never ends, the rebellion is bought and undermined and softened and, in the end, prevented from making changes that discomfit the wealthy.

Better to be somewhere else, then, even for four hours. To be, however temporarily:

...the legacy of those who didn't look at their dead, who closed their eyes so that they wouldn't see death's cruelty, leaving them open just enough to let their tears escape. I'm the plant that was watered by those tears.

Instead I look with horrified eyes at the photos of Emmett Till https://tinyurl.com/y53q9w9s or videos of fucking racist pigs https://tinyurl.com/y272hvz3
and think, "slavery? what the hell's the difference between that and this?"
and I have no answer for myself.

THE SECRET CASEBOOK OF SIMON FEXIMAL, unusually well-done relationship fiction with gay protagonists and urban fantasy underpinnings

THE SECRET CASEBOOK OF SIMON FEXIMAL
KJ CHARLES
KJC Books (non-affiliate Amazom link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: a warm and fuzzy four stars of five

The Publisher Says: A story too secret, too terrifying—and too shockingly intimate—for Victorian eyes.

A note to the Editor

Dear Henry,

I have been Simon Feximal’s companion, assistant and chronicler for twenty years now, and during that time my Casebooks of Feximal the Ghost-Hunter have spread the reputation of this most accomplished of ghost-hunters far and wide.

You have asked me often for the tale of our first meeting, and how my association with Feximal came about. I have always declined, because it is a story too private to be truthfully recounted, and a memory too precious to be falsified. But none knows better than I that stories must be told.

So here is it, Henry, a full and accurate account of how I met Simon Feximal, which I shall leave with my solicitor to pass to you after my death.

I dare say it may not be quite what you expect.

Robert Caldwell
September 1914

My Review: This isn't a novel, but a collection of connected short stories. I'm not upset by that, just noting it so others won't go in expecting something they won't get.

Most romantic fiction comes, these days, in series form. This book's series origins are in the short fiction world. Although the premise isn't unique, the untold story behind an unseen told story, it's got legs for a reason: It gives the read an intimacy, a sense that there is nothing held back, while at the same time holding back the more public face that never existed. I like that. It feels playful to me. It resembles Mark Dunn's hilarious (to me, at least) Ibid, the footnotes to a lost novel that was published in place of the novel so the publisher's loss wouldn't be total. That made me chuckle as well, for the same reason: It's playful! Too much Modren Litrachure is about as much fun to read as a root canal is to have.

Anyway, this book. I liked it for another reason: The protagonists age. They aren't 25 and 33 for the whole book. At the end of the book they're 48 and 56, explicitly stated, and have been together for 23 years. The math adds up! I damned near passed out. Too often the author doesn't do continuity like this in the world of romantic fiction.

In addition to my squeeing about the continuity thing, I need to mention the character development. As time goes by, any of us who have had any sort of long-term relationships know that the romantic urgency flies out the window at some point. You can't sustain that level of emotional excitement forever, and what takes its place in successful relationships varies. In the case of this couple, it's a shared calling/career. But as veterans of the relationship wars know, there's another powerful force that's inevitably part of the mix: Anger. People who are close, who live in close contact, inevitably rub each other the wrong way at times. In the case of Simon and Robert, the catalyst for the true, lasting anger that invades their relationship is family-based. How exactly true and accurate.

The resolution of that particular issue is just perfect. I was half in love with Author Charles before it took place, and completely infatuated after that story was finished. Oh that more romantic fictioneers would do this, would use the real stuff of living relationships to inform our fantasy of life with The One. It doesn't detract from Robert's love of Simon, or Simon's for his anchor Robert, for the story to include Robert going against Simon's well-founded and powerful desire for Robert NOT to save Simon's life.

Find bigger stakes than that. And then find another author willing to use those stakes to change the relationship the protagonists have in a new and realistic direction while still making the magical fantasy underpinnings of the story a part of that direction.

A very satisfying read. I don't give it more stars because, in the interest of fairness, I rate it based on its novelistic success and not its interconnected story success. Had it been presented to me as a set of stories, a la Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists, I'd give it more stars. As it is, I give it my recommendation to relationship fiction fans in search of realism within their fantasy life, fantasy of life, and life of fantasy.

NECROPOLIS, fourth Whyborne & Griffin Lovecraftian paranormal suspense novel

NECROPOLIS
JORDAN L. HAWK (Whyborne & Griffin #4)
Kindle edition
$4.99 available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Introverted scholar Percival Endicott Whyborne has spent the last few months watching his lover, Griffin Flaherty, come to terms with the rejection of his adoptive family. So when an urgent telegram from Christine summons them to Egypt, Whyborne is reluctant to risk the fragile peace they’ve established. Until, that is, a man who seems as much animal as human tries to murder Whyborne in the museum.

Amidst the ancient ruins of the pharaohs, they must join Christine and face betrayal, murder, and a legendary sorceress risen from the dead. In the forge of the desert heat, the trio will either face their fears and stand together—or shatter the bonds between them forever.

My Review: Book four in a series is a tricky point. There's a reason most of the fantasy/genre publishing world has been dominated by trilogies: We're mostly sick of the joke by the time we get to book three. Even of characters that are delightful and daisy-fresh and involved in unique endeavors, by the time we've read 300,000 words-plus about them, we're in full fatigue mode. It's the same reason there are danger points in marriages, cliffs that TV shows fall over, serial entrepreneurs.

We get bored.

So in a series of books that's about a pair of lovers becoming a couple, learning about themselves, each other, their families, and oh yeah by the way those monsters under your bed? totally real, how do we do the Bore-Me-Not Rhumba? At about the pace the men involved do it, per Author Hawk. Whyborne's antics in the first three books have led his gawky, scholarly self down some most unusual paths, and Griffin is deeply concerned for the safety and sanity of his mate. Their adventure in this book leads them to follow Christine, the token real girl, to the deserts of Egypt in order to thwart Nyarlathotep coming to Earth. (That's one of Lovecraft's Elder Gods, in case you're wondering.)

But the trip to Egypt is Whyborne's worst nightmare! Griffin, well, traveling is nothing to his former-Pinkerton self. He's quite looking forward to it...except he's worried about his beloved Whyborne, whose studies in sorcerous spells make him much more than a little nervous:

If the man couldn’t make an argument one way, he’d find another.

Welcome to marriage, Whyborne. Griffin is completely invested in you, your health, your survival. His happiness depends on your maintenance of all those things. He's going to argue with you about your behaviors when he sees you acting counter to what he knows is your best interest. That it isn't what you think is your best interest is what keeps marriages alive.

As is also bog-standard normal for long-term love, Party of the first part might as well be looking at a fun-house mirror for all the resemblance their self-image bears to Party of the second part's vision of them:

Griffin had once called me brave, but I couldn’t imagine how he would possibly think it. I feared everything: talking to strangers, leaving Widdershins, humiliating myself in public…the list went on and on. There was nothing for a man such as Griffin, who as a Pinkerton foiled bank robberies and chased down hardened criminals, to admire in me. But he thought otherwise, mad as it sounded, and his belief made me want to be that man, the one he could admire.

The bright face of being in love. How common a feeling, to want the beloved to be pleased with us! And how seldom we see that the beloved is looking squarely at us and seeing the strength that it takes to move in the face of fear. Griffin sees Whyborne's best in seeing his behaviors and knowing the fears and failings behind them:

How you burn, bright enough it almost blinds me. But I can’t look away.

And how often the beloved already is, far more than we ever credit or even believe when we're told as Griffin directly says to Whyborne above, possessed of our secrets and infatuated by our strength in the face of them.

It's a pallid but similar investment that the series reader makes in the series. This danger point, book four, sinks many a series under the weight of its tics and crotchets. Whyborne, our PoV character, is monumentally self-absorbed. The woman-ness of a lady isn't really an excuse for Whyborne's inability to see her, a new character in this book's, interest in him:

Her smile offered me no clues. “Very good indeed,” she affirmed, before turning back to the wall and leaving me to my confusion. ... I opened my mouth to ask what she meant. At the same moment, she leaned forward and kissed me.

And thus is a silly git shocked, shocked I say, by the mere existence of women aware of his desirability! It's played for comedy, and truthfully I've been Whyborne more than once in my life (it shames me to admit), but it's part and parcel of Whyborne's least appealing trait. It's very much at the fore here. It's a crotchet that could sink the series easily, as I found my eyes rolling without conscious volition...except Author Hawk got there ahead of me.

One of Griffin's refrains has been his concern for the effects of Whyborne's researches on his safety. Whyborne's counter is always, "look at how many times it's saved our bacon!" And this point is inarguable, but to one side, of Griffin's concern. Deflecting attention is a survival thing for Whyborne, growing up in a terribly dysfunctional family. It's been working fine until now, but Griffin and Christine are in much more danger than ever from multiple sources. All the sources are magical. All of them demand that Whyborne override Griffin's loving concern for his safety. All of the threats also demand that he de-absorb himself in his own head and notice, really and truly notice *in*the*moment* that his friends are real even when he's not paying attention to them.

About this time, most authors of series fail. They don't let the character that needs to grow make the leap. Author Hawk does, I'm very happy to say, and does so very explicitly. It is the reason I will read books five and up. I've included the quote as a spoiler, so look no farther down unless you're game for a spoiler.

******************************************SPOILER BELOW******************************************

REALLY AND TRULY THERE'S A SPOILER DOWN THERE


******************************************************************************************************************************

LAST CHANCE TO LOOK AWAY

******************************************************************************************************************************

Whyborne, afraid for his loved ones' continued safety after the supernatural enemies they faced down in this book, makes the following vow:

But I wasn’t helpless. And given the dark turns our lives had taken, the horrors we’d faced, it was my responsibility to arm myself as well as I might against any future threats. If we survived tonight, I’d stop pretending to be a dilettante and throw myself fully into the study of the arcane arts. I’d become a true sorcerer.

And now let the shenanigans commence. *gleeful hand-rubbing*

STORMHAVEN, third Whyborne & Griffin paranormal Lovecrafty Massachusetts novel

STORMHAVEN
JORDAN L. HAWK (Whyborne & Griffin #3)
Kindle Original
$4.99 Kindle, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Mysterious happenings are nothing new to reclusive scholar Percival Endicott Whyborne, but finding one of his colleagues screaming for help in the street is rather unusual. Allan Tambling claims he can’t remember any of the last hour—but someone murdered his uncle, and Allan is covered in blood.

Whyborne’s lover, dashing ex-Pinkerton detective Griffin Flaherty, agrees to prove Allan’s innocence. But when Allan is deemed insane and locked away in the Stormhaven Lunatic Asylum, Griffin finds himself reliving the horrifying memories of his own ordeal inside a madhouse.

Along with their friend Christine, the two men become drawn deeper and deeper into a dark web of conspiracy, magic, and murder. Their only clue: a missing artifact depicting an unknown god. Who stole the artifact, and why can’t Allan remember what happened? And what is the truth behind the terrible experiments conducted on Stormhaven’s forbidden fourth floor?

It will take all of Whyborne’s sorcery and Griffin’s derring-do to stop the murderers and save Allan. But first, they must survive an even greater challenge: a visit from Griffin’s family.

My Review: My Young Gentleman Caller buys me these. He does it because 1) it earns him major points against problematic behaviors elsewhere and B) he gets to read them too. All readers of romance do it because it's a way of deriving satisfaction not ordinarily available in the real world.

I’m here because I wish to be. Because I love you as you are, right now, today.

Everyone breathing wants to hear that. How many of you have? Ever? And here it is in black and white, clear and unambiguous. Stated as fact from one lover to another. Fantasy fulfilled.

I brought this up to him as we were discussing this book. It is a simple need, the need to be loved; by simple, I mean instantly recognizable and easily understood by all. Why is it so complicated in real life, so difficult to find another who fulfills it?

Rules.

Party of the first part: Flawed and unable to change. Deal with it. Party of the second part: Godlike in possessing all the abilities of a mindreader, psychologist, alchemist, trillionaire, world-class athlete, martyr, saint, and sex toy. Must possess exactly the fantasy of perfect looks on the day Party of the first part is looking at them. Must be able to change genders/sex roles/needs as Party of the first part changes whims. Must love/hate the same foods/drinks/social attitudes as Party of the first part.

Book-lovers are better than meat-lovers, who have a regrettable tendency to fart, have morning breath, leave their hair in the shower drain, forget to buy (soy/almond/2%) milk, then get annoyed/upset/offended by being taken to task for these hideous, disfiguring failings. Because they are Party of the first part in their contract with you.

Books are so much easier.

So reading, as always, comes to the rescue! Maybe not so much...who hasn't seen the memes around the text "Boys in books are just better"? Of course they are! They're your fantasy, created for you by someone made of meat and with the same fantasy life you have. It's like porn!

It IS porn. Unrealistic expectations of reality fostered...check. Perverting the consumer into expecting fantasy to come alive in reality...check. Deeply obnoxious and unpleasant stereotyping of the object of the reader's fantasy...check. Disdained by the overculture as a "lesser and unworthy" form of entertainment that remains HUGELY popular and profitable...check.

Speaking of "lesser and unworthy" forms of entertainment, in this Platinum Age of episodic entertainment (I am a resolute cord-cutter who ONLY consumes episodes on ad-free streaming, so can't call it TV anymore, while the YGC is not yet so infuriated by the vileness of advertising) we're experiencing, my Young Gentleman Caller and I indulged our fantasy of being filmmakers unafraid to make gay-male Lifetime movies out of this series of romantic paranormal novels (to call them mysteries is to misrepresent their specific strength as stories). It turns out that Boys in our Books blogger Ami asked Author Hawk about that subject several years ago:

A: If the Whyborne and Griffin series was made into TV series, who do you imagine playing the characters?

JLH: I really don’t know! It’s funny, but my characters are so vivid to me it’s difficult to imagine anyone in their places. That said, I’m sure if it did ever happen, I’d be delighted to see an actor’s interpretation.

Our only choice for Whyborne lacks brown eyes, though contacts are perfectly acceptable:

Tall, beautiful, deeply sexy but seemingly unaware of just how stunningly desirable he is. Yay Armie Hammer for being willing to play gay in Call Me By Your Name, although the role didn't require him to, errrmmm, cavort with the toothsome morsel that is Timothée Chalamet. I mean, wow, doesn't that porno play in your head the instant you see those two together on screen!

No? Straight people. How very odd y'all are.

When it came to Griffin, we had similar unanimity. Our only choice for the role was, in fact, indicative of the reason I enjoy our conversations so much. He proposed:

The choice of James Franco was perfect for me, since I'd been thinking the same thing. I was opening my mouth to mention coloring when out the YGC came with, "I think we should just switch the coloring descriptions and leave the actors as they are." This is exactly what I was thinking. I have known very few people in this life who say what I'm thinking before I can get it out, and it's always so much fun to find another one.

Is that why I enjoy the series so much? Because the lad I'm lovin' up gives them to me, reads them with me, plays mental games with me after reading them? No. Not solely that, anyway. I am a fan of the Lovecraft mythos. Author Hawk uses it as a story enhancement. I could do with it being used more, in fact. Also enjoyable to me is the love affair between broken men fighting fears and flaws in themselves while each is surprised that their lover doesn't think they are unworthy and unlovable because of these gigantic, disfiguring flaws. It mirrors my own life experience, flaws so huge the flawed think they're forever undesirable and the loving partner saying, "what's the fuss? I think you're amazing." I am not quite sure where Author Hawk is taking this series in terms of the supernatural elements. I like the Lovecraft mythos because the Elder Gods aren't personal, humanistic gods, they don't even see humans as we are so small and unimportant. We call them gods because their "powers" or abilities are so vastly superior to our own. We even call Cthulhu, explicitly not one of the Elder Gods, a god because his powers are godlike...though he is simply a superior life form in the mythos itself.

Author Hawk isn't creating a quasi-religious fantasy in the series. Whyborne, the sorcerous intellectual, specifically says he doesn't believe in a god in this entry into the series. He doesn't know why his speaking of spells works but he rejects the idea that it's due to some god giving him a gift. That's exactly what I want to hear. That's exactly what I myownself believe. There are things we don't know, questions we can't answer yet, but there's no reason to believe there is A Divine Plan made by A Divine Planner *for*our*benefit*— in fact there's a metric shit-ton of evidence that's absurdly wrongheaded.

So that is the fundamental reason I am Author Hawk's fan. I feel that the stories are aimed at me, designed to fill my specific needs for story-making. And I receive this gift gratefully from the stranger who created the stories for their own reasons, to fulfill their own needs.

Also from a certain lovely blond lad who both wants and knows how to please his old man.

THRESHOLD, second novel in the Lovecraftian paranormal series starring Whyborne & Griffin

THRESHOLD
JORDAN L. HAWK (Whyborne & Griffin #2)
Kindle Original
$4.99, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five, rounded up (actually out of four because there's a cat presented as a suitable companion animal for humans, which costs the perpetrator one star automatically)

The Publisher Says: Introverted scholar Percival Endicott Whyborne wants nothing more than to live quietly with his lover, ex-Pinkerton detective Griffin Flaherty. Unfortunately, Whyborne's railroad tycoon father has other ideas, namely hiring Griffin to investigate mysterious events at a coal mine.

Whyborne, Griffin, and their friend Christine travel to Threshold Mountain, a place of dark legend even before the mine burrowed into its heart. A contingent of Pinkertons—including Griffin's ex-lover Elliot—already guard the mine. But Griffin knows better than anyone just how unprepared the detectives are to face the otherworldly forces threatening them.

Soon, Whyborne and Griffin are on the trail of mysterious disappearances, deadly accidents, and whispered secrets. Is Elliot an ally, or does he only want to rekindle his relationship with Griffin? And if so, how can Whyborne possibly hope to compete with the stunningly handsome Pinkerton—especially when Griffin is hiding secrets about his past?

For in a town where friends become enemies and horror lurks behind a human mask, Whyborne can't afford to trust anything—including his own heart.

My Review: These stories are all in the Lovecraft Mythos. I think I wasn't au fait when I began the series. This makes my feelings about the reads quite different.

Whyborne and Griffin get invited to dinner at the home of Whyborne's much-despised daddy. He hires Griffin, thus also his son, to investigate paranormal doins at a mine that supplies his railroad. They recruit Christine Putnam, Whyborne's Egyptologist/Annie Oakley-level shot colleague at the Ladysmith Museum, as the backup muscle. (Seriously, does it matter why she's along? She has to be, so let's go with it.) They go to some ghastly little horror-movie burg in West Virginia (a state in which I say, from my own experience, there is nothing but horror-movie burgs):

The heights blocked the prevailing west-east breezes, leaving the air stagnant and still. Mosquitoes hummed above pools of water in the unpaved streets, and sweat prickled my neck beneath my collar. I longed for a bit of shade, but the lack of trees anywhere within the town made it a forlorn hope.

And this, laddies and gentlewomen, is Whyborne's first-ever trip away from Massachusetts! I can see the setting, I can feel the depths of utter horror poor, poor Whyborne experiences as he sees this vista of how the other 99.99% live.

The town is insular, cut off from reality, and that makes it vulnerable to alien invasion by creatures from outside our dimension of reality. (Watch that linked video on the Lovecraft Mythos!) In fact, the same thing that the white folk are using the mountain for...coal...is what attracted the aliens to the site. I don't know what spidercrabscorpion aliens would want with coal, but then I wouldn't, would I, what with being human and all. The aliens are called yayhos by the humans they...get to know...and are really, really, really revolting. It's mentioned several times that they smell of ammonia. Not a favorite smell of most humans. And what they say they want, just to be left alone to pillage our planet, makes them deeply analogous to Western colonial powers using Africa in the same late-19th-century timeframe as these books are set. The yayhos have a deep-seated need to learn and explore. Check. They have a callous indifference to whom they hurt in the process. Check. Small groups of them can inflict major damage on us, the natives. Check.

So no one needs to smirk condescendingly about the one-dimensionality of the story. It is making its social commentary and coming (!) to the correct, socially progressive conclusions on many fronts. The conditions for the miners in the town are portrayed accurately and judged harshly; race relations enter into the story and are dealt with accurately and found wanting; the role of the Pinkertons, Griffin's erstwhile employers, as forces of regressive and repressive capital is presented as part of a sub-plot linking Griffin to Elliot, the Threshold Pinkerton manager and Griffin's long-ago savior when he ran away from home to go to the Big City of Chicago.

Also coming out (!) of this entry in the series is the acknowledgment and inclusion in the arc of Griffin and Whyborne's relationship are the two stonking elephants in the room: Whyborne's life of privilege vs Griffin's hardscrabble beginnings; and Griffin's horrible, nightmarish confinement to a madhouse after he first encounters the Lovecraftian side of life. That was lightly touched on in the first book, Widdershins, but here we're faced with the man who found Griffin and made him a Pinkerton in the first place in Elliot. He was also the man who, after Griffin faced the madness-inducing terrors that cost him a partner in service of a Pinkerton case, slung Griffin into a madhouse. And walked away, never looking back. Elliot and Griffin have a lot to say to each other. They say it at an inopportune moment, sadly, leading to Whyborne coming to the hotel where he, Griffin, and Christine are all staying just as Elliot is leaving Griffin's room. A fight, unsurprisingly, ensues, in which some hurtful stuff is said and much, much miscommunication is experienced.

Griffin pleads to Whyborne in defense of his libidinous history with Elliot and with his dead partner Glenn, whose wife and kids were offered up to Whyborne as misdirection when he wanted to know if Griffin freaked out about Glenn's death because they were intime. Finding out that no lie was told makes not one jot of difference, of course, to Whyborne's sense of outrage:

“Believe me when I say I did a great deal more with other men, some of whom, yes, were married. It’s not unusual, you know. Many men like us have a normal family as well.”

It was, and is, ever thus. I speak from long, long experience when I say that this is going on right now and chances are much better than even that you know a couple where one or the other of the partners is in denial about her/is sexual preference. Especially if you live in a red state, or are a member of a religious community with strong opinions about how gawd wants people to eat/dress/fuck. Almost certainly you do if you're over 50.

But the author has much more in store for us than mere social engineering. We're going on a guilt trip! Perfidy abounds; double dealing reaches art-form nicety; the irredeemable are all around us, and their fate is condign. The biggest surprise comes as Griffin and Whyborne come out to each other as lovers:

The fingers of his free hand caught my chin, gently turning my face to his. His green eyes shone, and the smile on his mouth was soft and sweet. “You are my joy, Ival {this is Griffin's hideous nickname for Whyborne, who unsurprisingly hates to be called Percy}, and I love you more than I thought possible.”
Emotion tightened my throat. “As you are mine.”
“Even if I’m just the son of a farmer from Kansas, who happened to have a talent for mimicking his betters?”
I traced the line of his jaw, until my fingers came to rest just beside the curve of his lips. “You’re not just the son of a farmer from Kansas, or even the orphaned son of an Irishman, or anything else.”
“I’m not? Then who am I?”
“A good man. A man who wants to do what is best, by his friends and the world. But more importantly, the man I love.”
His smile was like the breaking of sunshine through clouds. “I think I can live with that,” he said, and kissed me again.

And that right there? That slayed me. What makes me read light romantic fiction, given the years and years of reading...forty-nine years since I got my own library card, fifty-two since I asked for and got my first very-own book...one might wonder. This is what: I want to believe. After almost sixty years on this wide green Earth of ours, I still want to believe that stories tell us truths we're waiting to live, show us goals we can actually achieve, let us love the loves we let go of, lost, failed, never found, just as if they were here and now.

There's not a lot of sex in these...wait...I've recently been told a book that had so little sex in it that I described it as heterosafe was, in fact, not so. I'll say this: The sex in this book is put in places and set at heat levels that match the storytelling. It's not shoved into places it shouldn't go, in other words.

I stared at that phrase for a good while before deciding to leave it there. If that double entendre makes you purse your lips, do not ever, ever buy, borrow, or gawd forbid *read* these books!