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.

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.