CAI EMMONS' PAGE: THE BELLS; two Bronwyn Artair cli-fics

THE BELLS
CAI EMMONS
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: As The Bells opens, thirty-three-year-old Niall O'Malley has failed a five-year mission to live as a monk and is attempting to redefine himself as a high school teacher in New Jersey. The transition has been bumpy. He loves teaching history to inner city teens, but he hits a roadblock when a belligerent student, Colton, possibly a white-supremacist, behaves in ways that threaten Niall.

As troubles mount at school, Niall's girlfriend Lluvia pressures him into make a deeper commitment to their relationship. She wants them to move in together with Lluvia's pre-teen daughter and elderly mother. Haunted by his failure as a Cistercian monk and his troubles with one man in particular, the abusive Brother Thomas, Niall abandons Lluvia and heads back to his old monastery in Massachusetts for a final showdown with Thomas, now dying of ALS. Redemption for Niall is elusive as he strives to mend his faith.

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

My Review: Odd as it sounds, unsympathetic people deserve sympathy and understanding, no matter how hard it is to offer. Niall, one of life's least-lovable characters, is a passive abuse sponge. In this story, we hear him absorbing the pressures that the predators around him...his female companion, one of his students in the high-school history class he teaches...sense his vulnerability and mount their cruelty campaigns against him to...what? prove they can? get a desired result from him?...it's this that resulted in my rating being under four full stars.

I completely get why this is a story worth telling. I know others will not be able to invest in Niall because he feels so passive, yet clearly feels rage about his many instances of abuse. As a horror story for the spooky season, this (to me) makes it a perfect read: Finally acting against Lluvia's pressures and demands, going back to the escape-turned-hellscape of his early adult life in the monastery, it seems as though Niall might at last lift the fog of rage that hides his horizons.

Resolving a lifetime of trauma is very very hard. Closer to seventy than fifty, I'm still mid-process. Niall's not even fiftyish, so I'm right there with him, understanding his issues and his weirdly ineffectual...has life taught him nothing?...attempts to gain a handle on the reality of a lifetime spent being acted on, not acting. It is a big ask to spend 250pp with someone floundering in wreckage he does not see clearly, has no map to understand, and no sense of agency (though plenty of urgency propelling him hither thither and yon) in coping with. It is truly psychological horror.

I'm sorry to say I wasn't satisfied by the resolution *on a story level* not based on the result that occurred. If I'd simply wanted a different resolution I'd be giving the writing alone 4+ stars. What I'm referring to is the resolution to the story does not use the beats to build to something, to make the read a journey. It is very probable that this is intentional, as Author Emmons was capable of writing effective outrage fueling logical story resolution.

It feels very poignant that Author Emmons gave the abuser her own fatal affliction as a trigger to cause Niall to act at last. ALS is a terrible, terrifying condition. It is nightmare fodder to understand what is happening to you and still to know what is happening can not be altered.

I'm not interested in most "horror" because it relies on tropes I find deeply silly and utterly incredible. The psychological horror of this story might, had the author lived longer, have resolved itself in a more effective manner commensurate with the investment of time and attention required of the reader. As it is I got genuine frissons of horror from this resolutely reality-anchored story of psychological abuse and its consequences.

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

SINKING ISLANDS
CAI EMMONS
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Sinking Islands continues the story of Bronwyn Artair, a scientist who possesses the power to influence the natural forces of the Earth. After several successful interventions, including one in Siberia, she has gone into hiding, worried about unintended consequences of her actions, as well as about the ethics of operating solo. But circumstances call her to action again, and an idea takes shape: What if she could impart her skill to other people?

Gathering a few kindred souls from climate-troubled places around the world—Felipe from São Paulo, where drought conditions are creating strains on day-to-day life; Analu and his daughter Penina from a sinking island in the South Pacific; and Patty from the tornado-ridden plains of Kansas—she takes them to the wilds of Northern New Hampshire where she tries to teach them her skill. The novel, realistic but for the single fantastical element, explores how we might become more attuned to the Earth and act more collaboratively to solve the enormity of our climate problem.

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

My Review: Now that Bronwyn's "out of the closet," so to speak, as someone with a unique and effective ability to change the world's weather as climate change bites us ever harder, she's got qualms.

The men who want to use her powers do not.Retreating from the pressures of the desperate world witb a scoobygroup of others she will teach how to use her newly discovered powers, Bronwyn learns, tests, grows.

Should she simply use her abilities to effect local changes without ever knowing in advance what the global consequences are? Should the same behavior, in other words, that was used to get us into this mess be used to try getting us out? Unlike lesser writers' heroes, Bronwyn considers this ethical and practical conundrum seriously. She does it collaboratively, not solipsistically. She does it with all due haste because the world is changing fast and the consequences are dire (I'd argue condign, as well, but I'm sorta Savonarola-y on the subject.) “Death turns everything inside out. After death, nothing’s the same, for the living or the dead.”

Then, when she's determined what the course of action should be based on all the evidence she can accumulate and all the counsel she can trust, the world feels her scoobygroup's efforts. As climate catastrophes mount, as Bronwyn and her support staff take more and more drastic action, things do change.

Change, then, is possible. Change is necessary. Change can...must...come from inside you as you effect it wherever you are, as you model its reality to anyone who looks or even watches you effect it, and those few who study your efforts to reproduce them for themselves.

This 2021 title deserves our attention, with its prequel for multiple reasons. One is the men and women who surround, support, and assist Bronwyn to bring her vision and her power to reality. Another is the sheer idiocy of male-dominated power structures in their dismissal or outright rejection of ideas from women. A further idea that needs wider currency is the need for women to simply up and do stuff because it all needs doing. Waiting for validation attention or perish forbid permission is no longer an option. The world is very badly in need of all hands running to the pumps to do their own best.

Author Emmons left Bronwyn and company here. I think that's a good thing. I felt the message was delivered, the ideas explored in the depth that informed and encouraged but stopped before overwhelm set in. The books are a good set, a good length of time with these admirable people, and that counts for a lot in a world with too much and not enough always tipping, tipping, tipping....

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

WEATHER WOMAN
CAI EMMONS
Red Hen Press
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 30-year-old Bronwyn Artair, feeling out of place in her doctoral program in Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, drops out and takes a job as a TV meteorologist, much to the dismay of her mentor, Diane Fenwick. After a year of living alone in Southern New Hampshire, enduring the indignities of her job, dumped by her boyfriend, she discovers her deep connection to the natural world has given her an ability to affect natural forces.

When she finally accepts she really possesses this startling capability, she must then negotiate a new relationship to the world. Who will she tell? Who will believe her? Most importantly, how will she put this new skill of hers to use? As she seeks answers to these questions, she travels to Kansas to see the tornado maverick she worships; falls in love with Matt, the tabloid journalist who has come to investigate her; visits fires raging out of control in Los Angeles; and eventually voyages with Matt and Diane to the methane fields of Siberia.

A woman experiencing power for the first time in her life, she must figure out what she can do for the world without hurting it further. The story poses questions about science and intuition, women and power, and what the earth needs from humans.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES OFTEN, THEY NEED US!

My Review: What the heck are women supposed to do when they discover they have actual, utilizable power? Hide it, or course, because some man somewhere will feel threatened by it because he doesn't have it, or have a way to control it, or simply doesn't like that a woman can do something without needing to check it until a man approves of it.

Meet Bronwyn. She's an ordinary woman in an ordinary relationship with an ordinary man. It ends because he ends it. It ends, in other words, because someone not her has determined her worth is not sufficient to deserve his august attention.

So far this is realist fiction with the twist that the woman has Something Extra. But how she discovers that, what it is, and how extremely valuable it is...that's Cai Emmons' secret story sauce. In giving ordinary-everywoman Bronwyn the Something Extra, Author Emmons is sneaking into a realist-fiction piece the verity that all women have power through the metaphor of A Power. She does this as the world...hers of 2018, ours of 2025...faces unprecednted challenges to our future as a species. This passage in time is very reminiscent of the Black Death in its existential crisis. And here's unregarded Bronwyn discovering she could very well have the means to alter a seemingly inevitable death spiral.

Exploring that is, I think, the reason most reviews and ratings that ridicule and belittle the story are by men. Author Emmons dares to say, "what if a woman has the solution to our crisis? Not because a man worked on it, or because she earned it by studying under men, but in and of herself she possesses the answer, the solution, our collective way out?"

Watch the rats empty from the sinking ship to devour the rope tying us to reality.

That's why I'm offering a full four stars to this cli-fic story of how stupid it is to think you know everything thus shutting down possibly lifesaving ideas from outside your purview.

TONGUELESS, unnerving psychological novel of losing your home without leaving it

TONGUELESS
LAU YEE-WA (tr. Jennifer Feeley)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping psychological thriller that sheds light on the current political situation in Hong Kong.

Tongueless follows two rival teachers at a secondary school in Hong Kong who are instructed to switch from teaching in Cantonese to Mandarin—or lose their jobs. Apolitical and focusing on surviving and thriving in their professional environment, Wai and Ling each approach the challenge differently. Wai, awkward and unpopular, becomes obsessed with Mandarin learning; Ling, knowing how to please her superiors and colleagues, thinks she can tactfully dodge the Mandarin challenge by deploying her social savviness. Wai eventually crumples under the pressure and dies by suicide, leaving her colleague Ling to face seismic political and cultural change alone as she considers how far she will go to survive such a ruthlessly competitive work environment.

Sharp, darkly humorous, and politically pointed, Tongueless presciently engages with important issues facing Hong Kong today during which so much of the city’s uniqueness—especially its language—is at risk of being erased.

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

My Review: China has been on a multigenerational project to Han-ize all the Sinosphere. Hong Kong's significant Anglophone population has been able to attract some out-of-China interest in the Han's Borg imitation, and from everything I've seen coming out about it in English, resistance is risky if not futile.

As little pale imitators, US fascists are doing their best to marginalize and poison the information space. No one in their dream world will know what to trust, therefore will accept their stupidification without the fuss and bother of rebellion and resistance to them. I think what's happened is that's scare a lot of people. Ones who weren't necessarily thinking about it before. Books like Tongueless can send painful shocks into the ideamakers that encounter it. Set in a very basic institution of Hong Kong culture, a language school, we are prepared in the set-up for those very reactions by those of the characters.

Teacher Wai is a very passive person, unable to put herself forward agreeably, or frame and present an idea persuasively. Her affect is so rigid that she's become faceless, just a messily-dressed part of the crowd. This works well enough while she's left alone to keep doing what she has learned to do. She is blindsided by the mandate to switch from her native Cantonese to the Han people now in charge's Mandarin. It's not like having to use Aussie or Indian slang and adapt to an accent. It's like having to learn, then teach in, Dutch. The alphabet and some words would look familiar but pronunciation let alone grammar? Not a hope. Wai, in her oddly passive way, sets about learning Mandarin but founders agonizingly slowly as the hopelessness of the task sinks in.

Ling's a Mean Girl. She's made it on marginal ability plus ruthless indifference to others' feelings or needs. She hides this behind a surface smarm...sorry, charm...that slips her in under peoples' radar. That route to her success is now closing off because it just won't teach her Mandarin. Poor Wai, with no interpersonal radar, is a prime victim for Ling to hate on. Ling's own focus on surface perfection and flawless presentation of self finds no echo in Wai. She doesn't understand the point of these things and lacks the flexibility to adapt to learning them (or Mandarin) to Ling's contempt...well-masked from others. Wai's failing attempts to survive in this horrible, cruelly indifferent new system lead to a true tragedy.

What's funny is that Ling is, on the surface, so good at masking that she presents herself as super-agreeable, and accepts that their language, Cantonese, is no longer going to be the one they're allowed to use...these're good Chinese girls, after all, and Authority Has Spoken. The manner of the adjustment is the difference between Wai's tragedy and Ling's desperate attempts to avoid failure, not the fact of its external imposition leading to resistance. It doesn't.

It's a brutal story. It's told directly...I picture Ling, our PoV character, sitting before an inquisitional interview recounting this story directly to us, the "camera" so to speak, with many soft little smirks and touchings-up of her hair and make-up. Ling is the one who, in Author Lau's subtle hands, shows herself as a slacker caught in a new system that pitilessly highlights her basic failures and failings in relation to that system. The narrative shifts in time though not always seamlessly. The very first pages give away a giant spoiler, but it is needed to set up our time-hopping. Ling is undergoing before our eyes the fate her students, to whom she always showed a smooth face hiding her contempt, worked hard to escape...and she can not do what they tried to do.

Ling escapes Wai's fate. She does not escape the fate of social collaborators everywhere: She loses her camouflage and has no skin underneath it to protect herself. Hiding is not possible; no protection or help is forthcoming.

I sometimes felt the story was in fragments of time or shards of context that did not always scan with my idea of what I had read. There was a reason for that; I'm going to urge you to read the Translator's Note before you start the story. I don't want to spoil certain things but spoilers are part of the book from page one! However, if someone chooses not to follow my advice, they should be able to proceed as they prefer. I myownself think "spoilerphobes" are spoiled, but no need to rehash THAT conversation.

Politically this story of a bullying overbearing linguistic minority imposing its words, values, and culture on hapless victims caught in an economic and social trap, suffering the loss of long-unexamined and too-little valued traditions and freedoms, could not possibly be more timely to read for the entire Anglophone world.

ALL THINGS SEEN AND UNSEEN, horror rooted in reality and scarier for it

ALL THINGS SEEN AND UNSEEN
R.J. McDANIEL
ECW Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 37TH Lambda Literary Awards for TRANSGENDER FICTION.

The Publisher Says: An incisive reflection on identity and wealth, and a refreshing racial queer story of survival

All Things Seen and Unseen follows Alex Nguyen, an isolated, chronically ill university student in her early 20s. After a suicide attempt and subsequent lengthy hospitalization, she finds herself without a job, kicked out of campus housing, unable to afford school, and still struggling in the aftermath of a relationship’s dissolution. Hope comes in the form of a rich high school friend who offers Alex a job housesitting at her family’s empty summer mansion on a gulf island.

Surrounded by dense forest and ocean, in the increasingly oppressive heat of a 2010s summer, Alex must try to survive as an outsider in a remote, insular community; to navigate the awkward, unexpected beginnings of a possible new romance; and to live through the trauma she has repressed to survive, even as the memories — and a series of increasingly unnerving events — threaten to pull her back under the surface.

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

My Review: What a wild ride. I knew, by the end of the read, what it feels like to have paranoid hallucinations, and let me tell you it was 1000% more effective than "spernatural" horror could ever be. Tell me all the mishegas is a demon, I check out; tell me the MC is fresh out of the bin and these weird things are happening, I'm terrified. Plus horror in hot climates works better on 80° (Fahrenheit, obvs)-ought-to-be-illegal me than sweater weather ever could.

Add in homelessness, that scourge of the capitalist world we love for its trinkets and need for its ability to keep us alive at the expense of our future, and my knees are knockin'. All of these elements are central to this story. Alex is genuinely unsure what's in her head and what's not. When, ten years ago, I had a stint in the bin, my roommates were schizophrenic...can you even imagine hearing voices, having hallucinations so real you respond to them like they're there? I don't think you can unless you've seen it, and you will never, ever again think of mental illness as a dodge, a lie, a clever ruse to work the system.

So I'm pretty much the perfect reader for this horror story. Where's that fifth star?

I loved Alex's unapologetic, unexplained queerness a lot. She's just...queer. Nothing's made of it; it just is. This does come with a price. Alex is also not connected to reality in part due to trauma that, again, just is. This makes some of Alex's behaviors feel unmoored to the (negligible) plot. That isn't a problem per se but does leave things, eg relating to Alex's ethnic identity, up in the air that could usefully have been expanded on. It's a quibble; I was drawn along by the sheer richness with which Author McDaniel wove the tapestry of Alex's experience of her world.

This is a horror novel for people who do not read horror novels. It's also truly the best novel I've read about the actual experience of mental illness, of fracturing in the mind, about how the world can simply weigh too much to be borne.

IN EXCESS OF DARK, new horror novella that does it all right

IN EXCESS OF DARK
RED LAGOE
DarkLit Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What if every terrible thing imagined came true? Every fleeting, nightmarish thought a reality?

For grief-stricken Karina, her newfound ability to turn her worst daydreams into palpable truths has sent her into a downward spiral of depression and guilt. Coupled with the appearance of an enigmatic shadow figure and visions of her dead family, she grapples to maintain her sanity while desperately attempting to harness her abilities and reunite with her loved ones.

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

My Review: Red Lagoe was introduced to me by Well Read Beard a couple years back. As I bought her books with my very own United States dollars, they went unreviewed...though not unenjoyed. This is not the first book-bullet the Beard has clipped me with, this author and her wild, fearless pursuit of story-logic's final destination (note horror-movie play on words, please), no matter how deeply grim it may be are now part of my regular rotation. I was very pleased to get this as a DRC.

I am not a chirpy soul. I genuinely believe the worst will happen because that is what the evil xian gawd, who clearly does rule the universe, wants for her victims. So as I read along in this book, I kept thinking, is Karina really just me? I tested my hypothesis by handing the Kindle to my Young Gentleman Caller on a flying visit he paid without telling him why I wanted him to read the book. Two hours later he handed it back and commented, "when did you meet this Red person, and Red had better be a she." So yeah...I related to Karina's nightmarish sense of deja vu as the horrors she is experiencing tie right in to her worst, darkest imaginings.

The worst things that can happen to a parent will spiral any one of us into deepest, most depressed misery. Not all of us see dark shapes that can mimic our lost ones. As a reader, I wavered between being sure this was a bad case of delusional grieving, and Karina's toxic mother's low-key emotional manipulations...and a little, uneasy sense that maybe, juuust maaaybe....

And by the ending, I was *still* not sure. To be clear, the ending has a full and satisfying reason for the events of the book...but I was still in that uncertain space until the very end of the read. That is quite a feat for an author to manage, as I started reading before young Author Lagoe was even born...I have seen every trick and ridden every trope before, and she still made me change my mind about what was happening multiple times.

I recommend this short, intense read to anyone whose life has included loss at an extremely deep level and who is willing and ready to process the darker side of it, as well as to those who think religious and supernatural "horror" are really quite silly. This book plays with those notions in a very unsettling, yet more grounded in reality, way that is very believable.

Karina and her disintegration are genuinely unnerving and upsetting, but for all the darkness on parade here, this is in the end a strong woman's discovery of her truest, most powerful self.

At 99¢, this is a great value. Look into it, and Red Lagoe, and I think you will come away glad to buy her work when you need a little challenging reading.

SOMETIMES YOU JUST KNOW, age-gap found-family gay male romance

SOMETIMES YOU JUST KNOW
BILL VAN PATTEN
Self-published (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Can a thirty-year-old man overcome his fears and find love? Arnie Violet is the son of an alcoholic mother and a father who abandoned him at the age of ten. Believing himself unlovable, he lacks self-confidence in everything from work to romance. Then, Arnie meets eighteen-year-old Peter Jordan. Peter is the opposite of Arnie: self-assured, frank, and assertive.

There is an instant attraction between them, but warning bells sound in Arnie’s head. His relationships never last long, there is a major age difference between the two men, and most importantly, Peter is his boss’s nephew. With the help of a new friend, Arnie embarks on a journey of self-discovery and learns to let go of the past and lean into life.

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

My Review: The synopsis is very precise and on-point, so we go into this read with a clear roadmap of the journey. It's not suspenseful...it is compelling to me, whose experiences of life are very close to Arnie's minus the maternal alcoholism. Abandoned by a father whose selfishness was complete? Check! Emotionally abused by a codependent mentally ill mother? Check! Involved in an age-gap romance? Check!

I know from reading the author's bio that he's telling us a story rooted in his own gay-male experience. This comes through in many facets of Arnie's story, and none more clearly than the opening scene where Arnie is raked over the coals by his supervisor, Rachel, not for the first or even tenth time, in the cruelest and most belittling way. This sets the tone for the read: Arnie in an awful and humiliating position, painfully unable to defend or extract himself from it.

As the narration is all third-person limited, we're privy to all the ways the action mirrors his past abuse. It can feel a bit repetitive, but it definitely sets the stakes. This is a man with a huge hill to climb just to get up to "bad." When glimmerings of good things come to him, if he even recognizes them, he's immediately on the alert for the fuckening. This being a romantic story, we know this is what we're here to watch him triumph over.

And do that he does...he's handed a dinner invitation by his boss hot on the heels of his very public humiliation by Rachel, and of course is all set for it to turn into a fiasco...especially when he meets the boss's handsome, sparkling dominant nephew. Who is all of eighteen. And beautiful.

And interested in thirty-year-old Arnie.

That CAN'T be right.

What follows is the journey to self-acceptance and to learning about accepting acceptance. Arnie is, at long last, among people who want to be with him. That's an intoxicating feeling to someone not accustomed to it. Arnie blossoms into a happy, still-nebbishy middle-aged guy. I'd've been a lot less kind if he'd suddenly changed completely, but he's a better-adjusted version of himself at the end of the book—not someone suddenly tured into a confident, self-motivated dudebro.

I liked this read just fine, and appreciated its positive resolution that stayed within realistic outcomes. A lot of guys could identify with nebbishy Arnie Violet. His trajectory, while pat (as expected in this genre), is never incredible. It's a warm comforting thing to see this ordinary no one much get to live out his happy dream.

No matter how banal the dream may be.

LITTLE EVE, US edition of the 2018 Shirley Jackson Award-winner for Best Novel & BLOOD MOON PROPHECY, debut YA fantasy

LITTLE EVE
CATRIONA WARD
Tor Nightfire
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street, comes the Shirley Jackson Award-winning novel Little Eve, a heart-pounding tale of faith and family, with a devastating twist

STARRED reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist! A LibraryReads Hall of Fame Pick! Winner of the (2018) Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel!

“A great day is upon us. He is coming. The world will be washed away.”

On the wind-battered isle of Altnaharra, off the wildest coast of Scotland, a clan prepares to bring about the end of the world and its imminent rebirth.

The Adder is coming and one of their number will inherit its powers. They all want the honor, but young Eve is willing to do anything for the distinction.

A reckoning beyond Eve’s imagination begins when Chief Inspector Black arrives to investigate a brutal murder and their sacred ceremony goes terribly wrong.

And soon all the secrets of Altnaharra will be uncovered.

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

My Review: The #Spooktober reading this year has made me feel quite gruntled. That said, however, I'm glad I read Sundial first among Author Catriona's work...the domestic-horror vibe, added to the all human all the time cast of horror-bringers, made me feel comfortable with her voice. I had no additional hill to climb to get past the cosmic-horror tropes I wouldn't necessarily choose to read.

But psych the cosmic-horror tropes I was expecting, given that this is a story about a cult whose organizing principle is the end of the world, "cleansed" by sea-serpent, were absent. Instead this was an historical fiction with seriously gothic overtones, set at the end of World War One and containing the usual gothic elements. It wasn't a *bad* surprise. It was, however, definitely a surprise.

Author Catriona received the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel in 2018 for this story. I think that's one helluva great accolade to get for one's second published novel. That we in the US are getting it only now suggests someone fell asleep at the switch back in 2018. I can't say I felt this was a perfect novel, it relied a wee bit too heavily on ghastly punishments for its unsettling-bordering-on-scary stuff and its cult aspects felt worn out pretty quickly. What I found to enjoy was Author Catriona's word-sorcery:

My heart is a dark passage, lined with ranks of gleaming jars. In each one something floats. The past, preserved as if in spirit. Here is the scent of grass and the sea, here the creak of wheels on a rough path, here a bright yellow gull’s beak. The sensation of blood drying on my cheek in the wind. Abel crying for his mother, Uncle’s hand on me. Silver on a white collarbone. The knowledge of loss, which comes like a blow to the heart or the stomach. It does not reach your mind until later.

The opening of the book...we know the Dark Sorceress Catriona has rattled her bone-bag of words and will be casting irresistible spells soon. And she does.

Just not the ones I expected.

The manner of unfolding the story was intriguing. The setting was wonderfully gothic. The characters weren't as fully realized as the ones in Sundial were, but that is entirely understandable and was not unexpected...a second book isn't going to have the same polish as a fourth one does. At least, if the writer is developing authorial chops, it won't; and she most definitely is a writer developing fast and well. What that meant to me, as I read along, was that I could see details that were not the ones I think Author Catriona would emphasize now (eg, some of Delilah's behaviors, and Uncle's almost mustachio-twirling one-note-ness). I will say that this is why I landed on the four-star key instead of a fraction higher. The four stars are, however, fully merited based solely on the plot's cohesiveness and its appropriately increasing pace. A headlong rush would not have served this story the way it did Rob's story in Sundial.

While the ending is, I've tried to think of a different word but no other one fits, condign, it isn't necessarily the one you-the-horror-reader are thinking it will be. That, above all things, was the reason I recommend this story to my horror-reading friends: It's good not to know.

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

BLOOD MOON PROPHECY
DILANI KAHAWALA (Legend of the Nyx #1)
Cedar Street Press
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Eleven years ago, Tilly Nyx did something she wasn’t supposed to. As a result, her mother was killed. Her village was destroyed. Her sister disappeared. And an ancient horror sent her into hiding.

Now sixteen years old, Tilly is determined to go home, even though she doesn’t know where home is or how to get there. All she has is the map that her mother made her swear to protect with her life.

Tilly soon finds herself plunged into the world where it all began—a world of oceans, sailing ships, and feuds between ancient magical families. She joins a fleet in search of the secret that her map holds, the secret that has been guarded by her family for thousands of years.

As Tilly learns how to cast sprites and make potions, she and her three friends must follow the trail of murky clues left by her ancestors before time runs out. But the closer they get to their destination, the more Tilly learns about her true identity–and everything is not as it seems.

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

My Review: Young-adult fantasy with cosmic horror overtones isn't my go-to genre reading. This debut novel got in under my radar because I liked the cover and the storytelling voice lulled my concerns about the subject matter.

Because most of the story is told in short chapters heavy on description, I wasn't asked to "listen" to a chosen-one teenaged girl. That was a huge plus to me. I still came away from the read wanting to swat this bratty child for being so completely and unwarrantedly willing to be guided only by her own thoughts and feelings. She never consulted anyone with more information than she possessed, she never changed her mind until her stubborn skull got thumped and hard...she is, in short, a typical smart teen. That made me nutso!

The reason I finished the read was that I liked the found-family aspect, I found the author's descriptions and world-building were very well done, and the cover art. Oh my heck. I am such a fool for a gorgeous cover. This one really fits the story being told...you'll see why. So much of the story's action is sea-borne that I mention it as a possible deal-maker or -breaker, depending on whom the read is destined for; the ships aren't, for once, the relation- type but the wooden type. The author's grasp of sailing is probably superficial but, as mine is too, I found nothing eye-rolling in her depiction of life aboard them. The sailing themes served as handy reasons to bring characters together but only briefly...as that is a deeply rooted feature of chosen-one quests, that worked very well.

Mei, James, and Nav, Tilly's scooby-group, are all standard characters. The vibe one gets from the read is very much Harry Potter and those Mortal Instruments books; the side characters, though very much side characters, are more than furnishings for the heroine's story. That dubious honor goes to the immense cast of secondary characters, seemingly dozens of them, all serving one and only one purpose. These are features of YA fantasy stories, I hasten to add, not bugs. The author is quite clear about her purpose for each one of the secondary characters. When the occasional one pops back up in a later chapter I felt quite surprised.

If you're looking for something to please your classical-magic loving tween/early-teen niece/cousin/grandchild, this introductory volume in what I expect to be a successful series will earn you early-adopter points. This is an author to watch...her journey, beginning here, can go to much greater heights.

REAL BAD THINGS, a very accurate title for a twisty story

REAL BAD THINGS
KELLY J. FORD
Thomas & Mercer
$4.99 Kindle edition, available for pre-order; releases Thursday

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of Cottonmouths, a Los Angeles Review Best Book of 2017, comes an evocative suspense about the cost of keeping secrets and the dangers of coming home.

Beneath the roiling waters of the Arkansas River lie dead men and buried secrets.

When Jane Mooney’s violent stepfather, Warren, disappeared, most folks in Maud Bottoms, Arkansas, assumed he got drunk and drowned. After all, the river had claimed its share over the years.

When Jane confessed to his murder, she should have gone to jail. That’s what she wanted. But without a body, the police didn’t charge her with the crime. So Jane left for Boston―and took her secrets with her.

Twenty-five years later, the river floods and a body surfaces. Talk of Warren’s murder grips the town. Now in her forties, Jane returns to Maud Bottoms to reckon with her past: to do jail time, to face her revenge-bent mother, to make things right.

But though Jane’s homecoming may enlighten some, it could threaten others. Because in this desolate river valley, some secrets are better left undisturbed.

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

My Review: Like her previous novel Cottonmouths (my review linked above), this book is set in a rural area that could be anywhere but undeniably is the American South. At no point do we feel the curiously unmoored sensation that many crime-centered stories have, that eternal-now anywhereness. It starts from when Jane is released from steerage, I mean the commuter plane, onto the hot tarmac of a regional airport. Her mother's nasty phone message hissing in her newly single, newly homeless ear, "don't even think of running." Why Ma didn't say "again" is beyond me, because Jane's running hasn't stopped since it was "away to Boston, there a lesbian to be."

So now she's coming back to face the music for confessing to her stepfather's murder a quarter century ago. Note: confessing to. Not murdering. And that demented witch of a mother believes her, always has, she's been squatting in this nowhere town stewing in her rage and hate for the abnormal daughter who (she said she believed) murdered the abusive man who probably would've killed Ma by now had he lived.

Ah. Family ties.

Like many women with no options, her Ma had never met a nice guy and this latest one was the most violent yet. And the whole town knew it. Not a soul stepped in to help...except Jane's young love, Georgia Lee. Things go very Beautiful Creatures for a minute...Jane's brother Jason gets pulled in...it's all a major clusterfuck, in fact, and when it all settles down there's no Warren. I mean, he's dead, but there's no body. So, no body = no crime. Confess til ya turn purple, Janey luv, no body = no crime. She does spend a goodly amount of time in juvenile detention. The second that ends, she gets the hell out of Arkansas.

What is really clear while reading this book is the quiet insanity of country life. People are all up in each other's hip pockets, they know what's happening, but not a soul interferes. Wouldn't be proper, if a woman lets a man beat her up that's her lookout. Those kids won't amount to anything anyway, so what they suffer.

It's really like this, folks. This is what the world is. And it's ugly as all get out.

Now that everything changed because there's a body, surfaced after twenty-five years, Jane's home to face the music.

What music? She was a juvenile, she was in state custody until charges were dropped, and now there's *a* body but no one knows if it's that right one. (Lotsa men disappeared from this town over the years. No one seems to've looked into it. Not like they were anybody much.)

So we have ourselves a problem. What's Jane facing? Trial? Still no body...conviction? LOLOL

Her life. Her mother. Her ex, her first true love Georgia Lee. Even the little brother who simply existed throughout this ordeal, offering nothing to Jane. All that and more; vaster than oceans and more deep is the need in Jane for answers rather than lies or silences. The answers she finally gets are deeply unsettling. I could never call the last meeting of Jason and Jane a case of healing by honesty, but it was certainly an explanation of parts of their past that seemed weird and random.

Kelly J. Ford was formed by Arkansas and she has never forgiven it for that. As revenges go, this book is a great step.

YES, DADDY is deeply affecting, upsetting, Queer, and dark...yay!

YES, DADDY
JONATHAN PARKS-RAMAGE
Harper Perennial
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A propulsive, scorching modern gothic, Yes, Daddy follows an ambitious young man who is lured by an older, successful playwright into a dizzying world of wealth and an idyllic Hamptons home where things take a nightmarish turn.

Jonah Keller moved to New York City with dreams of becoming a successful playwright, but, for the time being, lives in a rundown sublet in Bushwick, working extra hours at a restaurant only to barely make rent. When he stumbles upon a photo of Richard Shriver—the glamorous Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and quite possibly the stepping stone to the fame he craves—Jonah orchestrates their meeting. The two begin a hungry, passionate affair.

When summer arrives, Richard invites his young lover for a spell at his sprawling estate in the Hamptons. A tall iron fence surrounds the idyllic compound where Richard and a few of his close artist friends entertain, have lavish dinners, and—Jonah can’t help but notice—employ a waitstaff of young, attractive gay men, many of whom sport ugly bruises. Soon, Jonah is cast out of Richard’s good graces and a sinister underlay begins to emerge. As a series of transgressions lead inexorably to a violent climax, Jonah hurtles toward a decisive revenge that will shape the rest of his life.

Riveting, unpredictable, and compulsively readable, Yes, Daddy is an exploration of class, power dynamics, and the nuances of victimhood and complicity. It burns with weight and clarity—and offers hope that stories may hold the key to our healing.

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

My Review: Gay people are, for better or worse, people. With the usual people-faults like greed and selfishness, the usual weaknesses like hunger for validation and sexual power. With the flaws hidden or simply not discussed, we're reduced to side characters in other people's stores; with them celebrated, we're back in the bad old days of Cruising or The Boys in the Band or...well, pick your poisonous fear-mongering. This is one of the reasons I liked Bath Haus despite my reservations about some of its elements.

This story? Those elements are dialed up to eleven, and then blown (!) up by even viler perpetrators! So...why is this a full-four-star review, given the (admittedly partial) CW list and the main character's self-destructive greed? I gave Bath Haus a little less than four full stars, after all.

The reason is simple, really. Because I want to and because it's my judgment.

What makes this reading experience so much more agreeable to me is the way I'm introduced to Jonah. From the very first pages of the book, there's nothing, not one thing, that happens in which you, the reader, can place simple trust. You know what's gone down, and you see it from a simple first-person point of view, narrated in second person to make the stakes inescapably clear. It's more effective in eliciting my sympathy than was the igniting event of Bath Haus so I was much more ready to put my crash helmet on and tighten up the buckles.

As we zig-zag through the darkening, increasingly menacing landscape of the story's world, no matter how high the gloss or hard the glitter, one can't forget the first pages and their stark warning not to accept anything at face value...given how many religious people there are in here, that's another clue. The simplest acts, the calmest words, all freighted with suspicion because you (narrator, reader) simply don't know which ones are lies and which ones are just...air. And there's an ending which, under almost any other regime, I'd be rattling my tin cup against my cage's bars to protest...but remember when I told you about the way Jonah is introduced to us? It's my thinking that the next act's curtain will rise soon.

When the story really reaches for darkness, really digs into the terrible truths of our society's seriously screwed-up power dynamics, it becomes a little less glib and surface-oriented, which serves the story well. It's not like we're going to be subjected to Thomas Piketty and Yanis Varoufakis lecturing us on the inherent abusiveness of capitalism. It *is* very much a carefully thought-out tale of what happens to people who, for a large variety of societally mandated reasons, simply don't matter and aren't protected. We're even granted a glimpse into the genesis of the imbalance in this particular pairing of men, Jonah and Richard, though it's not the main thrust (!) of the piece.

Bad sex puns aside, this is a very, very sexual story. It will not be for most straight readers. If #MeToo made you mad, this will make you even more mad because I can almost promise you this is more fact-based than you might think. It's really interesting that certain famous entertainment-industry older men are...silent...these days...and one wonders what's happening with the announced Amazon Studios streaming film in the past couple years.

The paperback version dropped this past Tuesday, so permaybehaps we'll get to see the darkness of Daddy on our screens before long. I'm not all the way sure I will be one of the early audience members. I will need to build up my courage to go back into this seriously scary, very well-crafted story universe.

THE CHARM OFFENSIVE, keeping struggles real...in a fairy-tale world? Go on!

THE CHARM OFFENSIVE
ALISON COCHRUN
Atria Books
$11.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Dev Deshpande has always believed in fairy tales. So it’s no wonder then that he’s spent his career crafting them on the long-running reality dating show Ever After. As the most successful producer in the franchise’s history, Dev always scripts the perfect love story for his contestants, even as his own love life crashes and burns. But then the show casts disgraced tech wunderkind Charlie Winshaw as its star.

Charlie is far from the romantic Prince Charming Ever After expects. He doesn’t believe in true love, and only agreed to the show as a last-ditch effort to rehabilitate his image. In front of the cameras, he’s a stiff, anxious mess with no idea how to date twenty women on national television. Behind the scenes, he’s cold, awkward, and emotionally closed-off.

As Dev fights to get Charlie to open up to the contestants on a whirlwind, worldwide tour, they begin to open up to each other, and Charlie realizes he has better chemistry with Dev than with any of his female co-stars. But even reality TV has a script, and in order to find to happily ever after, they’ll have to reconsider whose love story gets told.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LIBRARY. THANK GOODNESS FOR LIBRARIES...USE YOURS SOON!

My Review: Reality TV isn't. I realize that's just the most startling thing you've ever read, but it is true. What it is, though, is made by real people and it features real people, with real emotions and feelings; they aren't dolls or puppets or robots. And while that's not something I expect most adults really need telling, intellectually, it's not...um...real. Somehow. (There will be, one day, a better vocabulary for these feelings-at-a-remove. I live for that day.)

But the thing that Author Cochrun did, in creating gorgeous OCD-having anxiety-experiencing Charlie, is something I think the world of reality TV, Romancelandia, and the entire entertainment world could do with a lot more of: She humanized the beautiful façades in a kind, supportive, and genuinely entertaining way. Her decision to make gawky, geeky Dev into a multifaceted man, her decision to have these two men, fractured and frantically trying to keep their heads above the dark, cold waters of mental illness's difficult times, find and learn about and accept each other is something still too rare. It is laudable, and the way she made it believable earns my admiration.

I can see a lot of eyes rolling at the idea of a gorgeously chiseled six-pack-sportin' tech millionaire having anxiety and OCD problems. Truth is many beautiful-looking people are beset by issues that onlookers don't think to wonder if they experience. The very idea is foreign..."if I only had money and/or looked like X I'd be happy all the time!"...but it honestly should shame us how much stock we put in that nonsense. People have problems. And when they're rich or beautiful or famous, they shouldn't. So when they do....

Brava, Author Cochrun, for slapping an ace on top of that tired old trick.

Then there's the Fun-Guy trope! Life of the party, always a laugh...he couldn't be depressed, he's got this great job and look at how many people he laughs his nights away with!...but the same logic applies. It's another good deed done to remind us that there's no one immune from the hurts of being alive. Putting the two of them together in this highly artificial, addicted-to-surfaces world was a great idea, and one that Author Cochrun pulled off with admirable aplomb.

What works well, works well. There's a minor plot-point left dangling, and there were two (2) foul, heinous, scum-dripping w-bombs. So there went that half-star. But there's no reason to go full-tilt ramming-speed mental when a medium-steam rom-com featuring two genuinely love-worthy, genuinely love-giving, thoroughly sweet men gets told in sentences like this:

Charlie hasn’t met many people like this—people who don’t make assumptions about you when they discover your brain doesn’t work like theirs; people who don’t judge you; people who simply stay with you and ask what they can do to help. People who trustingly hand you all of themselves in PDF form.
–and–
{He} curls into the fetal position inside the shower. This is what regret tastes like: regurgitated tequila and dirty cotton balls.
–and–
“It doesn’t have to be,” she says, “and you’re not obligated to figure it out, or come out, or explain yourself to anyone, ever. But also”—she drops her hands from their spectrum and tucks an arm around his shoulder—“labels can be nice sometimes. They can give us a language to understand ourselves and our hearts better. And they can help us find a community and develop a sense of belonging. I mean, if you didn’t have the correct label for your OCD, you wouldn’t be able to get the treatment you need, right?” {hear the Gospel of Saint Parisa, everybody!}
–and–
He pauses, and {his lover} explodes. “That’s such bullshit! There are so many people who have done actual terrible things who are actively working in tech! Mark Zuckerberg exists! And firing someone for having OCD—that’s got to be illegal."
–and–
"I don’t think happily ever after is something that happens to you...I think it’s something you choose to do for yourself.”

There's just no reason not to get this book, sink into it, and let the beauty of its fantasy world soothe crappy, warlike reality's wrinkles and creases right out of your face to be replaced by smiles.

SUNDIAL, an oddly innocuous title for an anything-but-innocuous read

SUNDIAL
CATRIONA WARD
Tor Nightfire Books
$26.99 hardcover, available tomorrow (pre-orders today, of course!)

Rating: I settled on four; YMMV

READ HER INTERVIEW IN The Guardian!

The Publisher Says: You can't escape what's in your blood...

All Rob wanted was a normal life. She almost got it, too: a husband, two kids, a nice house in the suburbs. But Rob fears for her oldest daughter, Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds her too much of the family she left behind.

She decides to take Callie back to her childhood home, to Sundial, deep in the Mojave Desert. And there she will have to make a terrible choice.

Callie is worried about her mother. Rob has begun to look at her strangely, and speaks of past secrets. And Callie fears that only one of them will leave Sundial alive…

The mother and daughter embark on a dark, desert journey to the past in the hopes of redeeming their future.

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

My Review: Y'all remember how I said I wasn't a member of the Cult of the Mother? Rob, the mother at the center of the pitch-black exploration of the Dark Heart of Motherhood, isn't a big fan of it either. And she, stupid asshole that she is, had a second baby with a man she dislikes despite the fact she doesn't like the one she already has.

So why the ever-lovin' hell did I keep reading the book? And what's that star rating up there all about? I can (sort of) explain....

I hate fewer tropes more than the Noble Woman Who Keeps Her Family Together™. This is that story. And I hate that about it. I'm not interested in reading about the vileness of animal experimentation. This is that story, too. I really, really do not like to read Exceptional Child narratives. I don't really need to say it again, do I? But once you open this story up, you're In It For The Duration. Believe me when I tell you, you're not going to come out the other side the same as you went in. Rob is really a bad, bad mother in that she became one at all, ever, after what her childhood was like. It's inevitable that very bad things would follow this woman around like roast-beef-and-brussels-sprouts farts. And yet her narrative voice never does the inexcusable and becomes whiny. She gets closest to it when she discovers that her best friend isn't. But even then, very early on, her tone is "goddammit! not a-fucking-gain!" instead of "how could this happen to meeeeee?" which last is the norm for most women's fiction/domestic thrillers I've perused.

It's what occurs to bring the matter to her attention that needs to be praised: Her youngest child contracts chicken pox. There is only one plausible way that could have occurred. And that, as the saying goes, is that. What matters as we go forward is what Rob is going to do about the stuff she learns: fix it. Every weird, unbelievably wacked out thing Rob does throughout this weird, wacked out story is aimed at fixing the problems she's got in her face right this minute. And it takes her less time to figure out what she has to do to have the best chance to fix it than you'd think, looking at the page count.

Not a one for deep self-reflection, our Rob. Had she been so equipped, there would've been no marriage and no children in her life. And believe you me, there should NOT HAVE BEEN.

So why were there a marriage and children in her life? Because...there are debts that one repays whether in this or another life, there are things that are absolutely yours and yours alone to atone for and to offer up to the evil life-force that this world was created to sustain. And that is where Rob and Callie are as this story begins its uphill climb against the gravity of reality.

When you start out a read as addictively written as this one is, you accept that there are things you won't like as much as others in it. Because something is marketed as horror, you know you're going to have to accept a certain level of gore, for example. The question is will you be too squicked to take the gore as it's intended, or will it just lie there on the book's floor waiting for the cleaning crew to make it all go away? This book seriously skated on the edge of calling the crime-scene cleaners as we got more and more into the scenes in the desert. I wasn't at all sure continuing was a good idea at multiple junctures.

I persevered, and despite the feeling that there could've been less of some gory moments, the fact is that the gore here is handled with deft assurance, and is applied to the plot with a care that one senses even as it deepens about one's ankles. The moments when the plot takes the path of least resistance, ie "it's the man's fault," there is in fact something more to it than that. There is a dark, echoing justice in the world the book creates, a seriously ugly but still urgent weighing of karmic scales that must happen to give this ending, any ending really, a hope of satisfying the reader.

The latent genetic flaw, or the generational trauma inheritance, or the epigenetic expression of ancestral agonies that come to the fore in the read are utterly predictable from the moment we meet Rob. But there's the small matter of how Author Catriona Ward writes to explain why one is compelled to keep reading on. It is this fact that caused me to power through very, very, very upsetting events that would normally have caused me to shut the book for good.

I don't think too terribly many of my regular readers are in it for horror reads. If that's you, skip this review. But horror people should, if they have not already, make this author welcome on their shelves. She's a good sentence-by-sentence writer, and while I'm not the most familiar with horror plotting, this story's absence of supernatural falderol accentuates the truth that I appreciate horror stories making plain: Humanity is made up of vile, irredeemable scum who, even when they say they're doing something for "the greater good" or whatever, are actually just looking for ways to excuse their inner cruel bastard coming out.

THE COLOUR OF MILK, a delight of a short novel about a horror of a short life

THE COLOUR OF MILK
NELL LEYSHON
Ecco (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Mary is a sharp-tongued farm girl, and she will do anything to learn to read and write. But as she does so through four seasons of one extraordinary year, she discovers that nothing comes for free. Told by a narrator whose urgent, unforgettable voice will break your heart, The Colour of Milk is an astonishing novel.

I CHECKED THIS EBOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARIES, FOLKS! THEY NEED US TO USE THEIR SERVICES!

ALL SPOILERS...ALL THE TIME...SPOILERS BELOW! THE PHOBIC ARE WARNED OFF!

My Review: First, read this:

this is my book and i am writing it by my own hand.

in this year of lord eighteen hundred and thirty one i am reached the age of fifteen and i am sitting by my window and i can see many things. i can see birds and they fill the sky with their cries. i can see the trees and i can see the leaves.

and each leaf has veins which run down it.

and the bark of each tree has cracks.

i am not very tall and my hair is the colour of milk.

my name is mary and i have learned to spell it. m. a. r. y. that is how you letter it.

I am utterly besotted with this book. My bookish friend Katie is the one who gets the blame, I mean credit!, for convincing me to try the read. It is short, and it has something I can't describe to you adequately that rings me like a bell. I think, I guess, it's a sense of the passionate urgency Mary feels in learning her letters...like that act, that piece of knowledge, will transform her, will make everything Different. If nothing else, it will give her a leg up on her noxious sister Beatrice.

Her life, Mary's, is about what you expect a woman's life to be at that time and in that class. It is nasty, brutish, and turns out to be short. It is simple, and it is without ornament. It is, in short, a titanic waste of the brain of a clever woman like Mary. As her story begins, she is sold by her father to the local vicar as a caretaking maid-of-all-work for the vicar's housekeeper. His wife is terminally ill, and there's no one whose job it is...no child, no sibling...to muck in and do the labor of cleaning the invalid, her bedding, keeping her as entertained as possible; the housekeeper needs the extra hands. The vicar? Men did not (and do not, by and large) do that sort of work.

Mary's waspish, direct honesty isn't easy. Not for her...it leads those around her to anger, more often than not...and not for the world she lives in. Making honest observations about the facts of life is not a fast way to make squads of pals. Mary's sisters don't much like her, her mother can't be arsed to care about much that isn't making her husband the drunken shit as happy as possible, and Mary's grandfather (her father's father) is crippled by an accident so despite his pleasure in her company he isn't much help to Mary in navigating the world.

What happens as Mary assumes her duties in the vicar's household is the oldest story in the world. She's raped. She isn't, however, going to put up with that, and that's what makes this story a five-star read for me. Mary serves up her revenge and takes her punishment with her eyes open, her chin up, and her heart unburdened by regret.

I fell in love with Mary from page one. If you read the above quote, which is from the beginning of the book, and do not feel the appeal, are not vibrating with the language's power, then skip the read. It won't get better...the story's really simple, it's unsurprising, and it's only half the point. The other half is the storytelling, the sense of being there with Mary. We're hearing a voice that shouldn't have reached us from a person who didn't matter when she was alive so she wouldn't have been allowed to leave a record after her death.

It's such a simple tale. It's such an oft-told tale. It's a beauty, because it's got something extra, a little trick up its sleeve, that thing that makes a story taller in the saddle. The risk is how many people will be put off by it. They will find it a gimmick, but I found the storytelling an enhancement of an otherwise unremarkable story a young woman writing about her unhappy, unjust, and in the end short life of work, abuse, work, abuse, rape, punishment; it's lifted to its next, finer level. It's about Mary's indomitable will, her absolute uncompromising need for More. I resonate to that story. The other, I don't.

And that's why I love it, instead of merely thinking it was an interesting, not always successful, stylistic experiment. (How does Mary know how to spell some of the complicated words she uses, eg "hierarchy"?) The effort to bring an unpolished and unmediated voice to life is doomed to artificiality, of course, since this is fiction and not a research project. But the mannerisms were successful in breathing life into a character whose essential reality overcame, for this testy old reader, the inevitable awareness of the story as construct, as artifact.

So I'll shout my thanks westward to my friend in New Jersey...the same one who warbled me into reading The Mercy Seat!...whose recommendation of the story was sufficiently enthusiastic as to make my read necessary. Thank goodness my library had an ebook available. I would've been much the poorer for not having Mary along for the ride into the rest of my reading life.

A story, a character, a book like this is a treasure. Get it, if you can.

FOUR GAY BDSM THRILLERS, the "Power Exchange" series by A.J. Rose

POWER EXCHANGE
A.J. ROSE (Power Exchange #1)
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the moment Detective Gavin DeGrassi steps into the world of BDSM to solve the brutal slaying of Dom George Kaiser, his course is not his own. Mesmerized by the context in which the victim lived and the images seared into his soul, Gavin has to find a way to navigate these unknown waters. With his personal life in upheaval due to a marital split, and his professional life uncertain with the assignment of a new partner, Gavin needs all the help he can get understanding the case.

Enter Ben Haverson, a psychologist and a well known Dom. With Ben’s help as a consultant on the case and attention to Gavin himself, Gavin delves deeper than he ever thought he would into the world of restraints and paddles. Forced to take a closer look at himself, his true nature, and his innermost desires, Gavin has a choice: keep the fear of submitting at bay, or dive in and solve the case with the knowledge he gains? When another victim is discovered, Gavin’s choice is made for him, and he’s pulled headlong into the deepest, most emotional journey of his life.

Unfortunately for him and Ben, a killer has noticed, has taken stock, and has set his sights on the D/s pair. Can Gavin outwit him, or will his first exchange of power be his last?

My Review: Everything that celebration of abuse and belittlement Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't in terms of the BDSM lifestyle. Realistic depiction of how contracts between Dom and sub work, and how very deep a D/s bond becomes in a very short time. It's amazing what committing to eliminating bullshit and nonsense does for a relationship. The sex is really better than the mystery. Not that I'm complaining. That was one fine cherry-popping, A. J. Rose, mighty mighty fine.

The mystery part wasn't deft. Gavin DeGrassi isn't detecting particularly well, given some very very basic events he seems simply not to have noticed. In fact, I spent more than a few minutes screaming at the frequently dumb as a box of rocks Gary Stu "detective" to act like he earned his badge and didn't simply find it in a box of Cracker Jacks....

I could have lived happily without chapter 13 being *quite* so intense. Going over the top here was skating on a razor's edge of being torture porn. Be aware: This is rape, this is abuse.

I picked up the next three in the series after Gavin's Dom said this:

“Gavin, we're going to grow old together, and whether you pick up a gardening hobby, or learn to make you won sushi, or even decide to learn an instrument, I will be right there with you, growing with you. We'll share our whole lives, our quirks and bad habits. It's not just learning your past and who you are today; its getting to see who you'll become tomorrow. I want to be there for that.”

Really, what more can one ask of a gay-themed series than to have the best of us mirrored in the world that even members of our own community regard with alarm.

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

SAFEWORD
A.J. ROSE (Power Exchange #2)
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Everywhere Detective Gavin DeGrassi looks he’s reminded of his attack by the Breath Play Killer. It’s in the house he lives in with his partner and Dom, Ben Haverson. It’s in the sympathetic yet pitying looks he receives from his fellow detectives when he returns to the force after a year-long hiatus. It’s in the suffocating coddling of his entire family, and the relentless reporter demanding an exclusive of his ordeal.

Most of all, it’s in his lack of submission to Ben, who isn’t convinced Gavin’s recovered enough to trust the power exchange between them.
The miraculous recovery of two teen boys from a twisted kidnapper gives him heart, and Gavin's determined to prove he can handle anything despite increasing strain between him and Ben, painful nightmares, and panic when anyone touches him.

But his next case is too close for comfort: a friend and colleague found raped and murdered in a fate chillingly similar to what could have been his own, and this killer isn’t stopping with one cop. As the body count rises and taunting souvenirs are being hand-delivered to Gavin, he faces a frustrating lack of leads, a crushing need to prove himself, and a sinking suspicion the imprisoned kidnapper’s reach is further than originally thought. A miasma of uncertainty and fear threaten to suffocate him when he asks a question with which he’s overwhelmingly familiar: what happens when a victim is pushed too far?

My Review: Wow, what a ride. What an amazing adrenaline rush of an ending. What can Rose do to top this one? I'll tell you below.

So, after I found out about Consent, let me revisit this book and explain why it is my personal favorite of the books in the series to date.

The end of Power Exchange was, to put it mildly, a horrific test of the men's strength and commitment. The awfulness of the events that Ben and Gavin endured can't be overstated. The impact of the extreme publicity surrounding the events can't be overstated. These two men were traumatized physically, psychologically, and publicly. In Consent, their violated beings are shown in the process of healing. Their family relationships are shown in all their realistic upheaval and flux. The source of their identity as a couple, Gavin's submission to Ben's Domination of his body and his spirit, is fractured and despite their mutual and deep desire to recover that connection, they aren't able to...but they are not either one vaguely in the mood to give up trying.

Ben loves Gavin, Gavin loves Ben. This is the given point from which this story operates. Nothing that has happened has changed them so much that the facts aren't true. But then there is the other stuff lying between them in huge mounds of rubble and vast slicks of toxic waste. The trust issues that follow in the wake of being raped. The fears of inadequacy in the face of your beloved partner's pain, which you can't fix. The awful moment when your own broken inner self seems to be too much for your partner to handle, so you feel you *should* release them from your further fulfilling your needs.

"You still need someone to take control sometimes, but now giving that control unbalances you. Believe me, I understand. I may not feel exactly the same, but I do understand."

"Do you?" I pulled back to look at him. "Does it bother you that I can't seem to trust anyone, even you?"

–and–

"You are the only one I want, sub or not, fucked in the head or whole. This last year, with you, I've woken up inside. I used to think it was the thrill of the whip, of seeing someone on his knees for me, or the heat of a freshly reddened ass that made me feel alive. Getting someone to fly with me, taking submission for the gift it is--that's a heady thing. It makes my nerves sing and my heart beat fast. Gets me hard and I feel like I can do anything. And that feeling is a pittance compared to being with you."

And then the sense of the thing reasserts itself: NO. NOT A DAMN CHANCE. Ben and Gavin each reach this awful precipice and look into the abyss of aloneness after each man finally discovers himself, his best self, in the other man's eyes. They say no, they grab hold of each other and they move together as far away as they can from that horrible annihilating aloneness.

And they do so while solving a horrible crime and rescuing innocent young men from vile servitude. They don't come out of this case unscathed but they come out changed for the better, is also a great deal sadder.

Far and away the best of the series to date.

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

CONSENT
A.J. ROSE
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Cole, what’s wrong?

Former detective Gavin DeGrassi likes his new life and his job as a university professor, molding the minds of the next generation of law enforcement. It keeps him in the field he loves, but out of the media and out of the danger he seems to draw. He’s settled and happy with his partner and Dom, Ben Haverson.

It’s Myah.

Until a middle of the night phone call from his brother, Cole, whose desperation and fear yank him back into the world of criminals and countdowns. Only this time, the stakes are much higher.

She’s missing.

Detective Myah Hayes, Gavin’s sister-in-law and former partner, has a past of her own, one that has returned to claim her. With only their instincts and the help of a rogue CSI, Gavin, Ben, and Cole will do whatever it takes to find Myah, following a flimsy trail of evidence to Chicago, where all is not what it seems—dirty cops, moral pimps, and a nest of snakes who call themselves businessmen.

They’re on a collision course with the worst of humanity, and more than Myah’s life is caught in the vortex. Can they find her, and if they do, will there be anything left to save?

Warning: contains scenes of rape and graphic violence and may not be suitable for sensitive readers. Discretion advised.

My Review: I will keep this short and simple: Author Rose, you have disappointed me. Chapter 25 was unnecessary and prurient, but my disappointment stems from the cheap and shoddy trick it represents on your delighted and dedicated readers. I am most definitely one of them.

I intend this as a compliment: There is no way I would ever have known from the way you wrote Gavin and Ben's relationship what gender you are IRL. On balance I would've expected you to be male, given the startling depth of your characters's physiological responses and the psychology before and behind them. But truly the way you've written the men's characters is simply good writing, something either gender can create if a given level of talent is present.

That makes the sting of being let down so forcefully by the torture porn in chapter 25 so much worse. It made the unpleasant shock of that unnecessary death much less effective as a surprise, a gut-punch, as it was meant to be. And Myah's later torture after the failed escape attempt was also rendered less effective as the horrifying gut-punch it truly was.

Had I edited this book, I would've made the following observation: This number of words would be better spent throughout the book humanizing Ben, Cole, and the elder DeGrassis via phone calls or something.

I will, of course, rush right out to read the fourth entry in this series because the deep and velvety pleasure of seeing myself (idealized, of course) in Ben is too satisfying to deny myself.

"But I’m not through with you, Gavin DeGrassi. I have plans to redden that ass and mark your skin. There are many more orgasms to deny you, and butt plugs to make you wear in public. D-rings I want to add to your corsets, since it’s clear you need restraining again. I haven’t bought our cabin in Colorado for our retirement. We haven’t been to the beach together. I want to go abroad with you. I haven’t picked out the porch swing we’re going to sit on when we’re eighty and yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off our lawn. I want a collar around your throat, and a ring on your left hand. I have plans for us, and I’m going to do everything in my power to see those plans through.”

He's the Dom that many subs crave, and seldom find: The one who loves you and needs to show you that you're his and no one else's. Ben needs Gavin as much as Gavin needs Ben: “I've seen the way you are together. He's your protector, and you're his purpose. He's your glue and you're his art.” That's the best of the D/s world. I need to go back there, and these books do that for me. But I will pick the book up with a heretofore absent wariness.

That hurts like fuck to say.

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

RESTRAINT
A.J. ROSE (Power Exchange #4)
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Who brings a Glock on a honeymoon?

Not retired detective Gavin DeGrassi. When his husband Ben asks who he plans to shoot, Gavin has no answer. They’re spending three weeks in Ben’s family cabin near Seattle, not chasing down bad guys. Or are they?

Ben finds evidence the car accident that claimed his parents’ lives more than fifteen years ago was not so accidental. To avenge the Haversons, Gavin dusts off his detective skills and unknowingly paints a target on their backs. Suddenly, Ben is the prime suspect in a crime and the message couldn’t be clearer: drop the investigation or suffer untold consequences.

Gavin will stop at nothing to ensure Ben’s safety and bring the Haversons’ killers to justice, but without help, they’re sitting ducks. Gavin must make unlikely allies in his quest to clear Ben’s name and stop a ruthless crime syndicate. But with his loyalties divided, how far is too far in his quest for justice?

My Review: One entire star off for twelve (12) instances of the w-verb. Seriously. Using any out-of-the-ordinary word twelve times in your book should be a red flag for an author. What am I shorthanding here? Why does this particular word need to be in my book this many times? Y'all'd agree with me if it was "coddiwomple" or "absquatulate" you know you would. "Wink" *shudder* is just as uncommon a word in every other branch of fiction writing beyond MM romance.

Anyway.

The story here is what happens when Ben, our Dom, goes back to his childhood summer home with Gavin, his sub, to celebrate their honeymoon. It's a delightful idea, the men going to gorgeous Seattle for some smexytimes; but this isn't to be. The smexytimes are really not the point. And that's a wonderful thing.

Seriously! It is!

The relationship between partners in a D/s situation matures with the parties involved as it does in all long-term relationships. With that maturity comes the change of sex life. Not lessening. Not death. Just change. In Ben and Gavin's relationship, their routinizing of D/s doesn't require them to compulsively repeat the same acts. They move deeper into each others' cores and negotiate the introduction of far more intimate and demanding behaviors. It is very much one of my pleasures in reading this series to enjoy this evolution of the characters' interactions.

Feelings of disquiet, anger, or aggressiveness, he considered big weaknesses in a Dom and particularly in himself. Funny opinion for a psychologist to have, but we’d been through this in therapy.
–and–
I leaned into his warmth, my heart fluttering against my ribcage like a murder of crows taking flight.

Being a series novel, there are cameos by characters we've met before; the fact that the entire DeGrassi clan is having Thanksgiving back in St. Louis without the men is played off well. And Gavin's call to a St. Louis source for some crucial help is answered, despite the risk to his helper.

“Why are you letting Gavin fight your battles for you? Can’t bring yourself to do it alone? It’s clear he has a brain, but he’s so blinded by devotion to you that he, a retired detective, is turning criminal to do your bidding, to set your mind at ease about Mommy and Daddy’s deaths. They’re dead. This revenge, or whatever you’re trying to accomplish, won’t bring them back. But you have a living, breathing, committed man by your side, and you’re apparently fine if he goes to prison for you. That’s fucked up.”

I like the honesty I see about D/s relationships in the series. It's hard for Ben to give up control; it's hard for him to feel helpless or actually useless in any situation where his earthly treasure, Gavin, is threatened. Every good Dom knows that horrible reality and, if we're at all honest, the creeping fear that our treasured sub will realize "hey! I don't need him after all!" and walk away. Ah, the joys of anxiety! All humans suffer from it. And so very few of us do the simple, smart thing and open up to our most trusted, most beloved partners. How very much pain would be mitigated or even disappeared by this simple, monumental, impossible act!

But such are the musings of one with no dog in this fight anymore. In common with all readers, I use books to teach me the truths I refused to accept from reality. Reading all four books in this series makes me long for a second chance to be young...as do all the other books I read. A joyous ache, a happy poignance, a learnèd innocence. How I pity those who aren't fellow addicts.