DESTROYER OF LIGHT, second novel from Afrofuturist monadnock Brissett & SORROWLAND, sad, powerful, painful read

DESTROYER OF LIGHT
JENNIFER MARIE BRISSETT
Tor Books
$25.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Matrix meets an Afro-futuristic retelling of Persephone set in a science fiction underworld of aliens, refugees, and genetic engineering in Jennifer Marie Brissett's Destroyer of Light

20 Must Read Space Fantasy Books for 2021—BookRiot
Most Anticipated Fall 2021 Sci-fi, Fantasy & Horror—BiblioLifestyle

Having destroyed Earth, the alien conquerors resettle the remains of humanity on the planet of Eleusis. In the four habitable areas of the planet—Day, Dusk, Dawn, and Night—the haves and have nots, criminals and dissidents, and former alien conquerors irrevocably bind three stories:

*A violent warlord abducts a young girl from the agrarian outskirts of Dusk leaving her mother searching and grieving.
*Genetically modified twin brothers desperately search for the lost son of a human/alien couple in a criminal underground trafficking children for unknown purposes.
*A young woman with inhuman powers rises through the insurgent ranks of soldiers in the borderlands of Night.

Their stories, often containing disturbing physical and sexual violence, skate across years, building to a single confrontation when the fate of all—human and alien—balances upon a knife’s-edge.

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

My Review: ↡↡↡ HEED. THE. CONTENT. WARNINGS. BELOW. ↡↡↡

Humanity is clinging to existence on the tidally locked planet called "Eleusis." Their enemies, the krestge, have destroyed Earth (no one knows why) and evacuated them to Eleusis without doing anything more to complete the extermination (no one knows why). But life must go on. Being humanity, you know what this means: infighting, resource grabs, atrocities, all the usual stuff.

We follow the entire nightmarish fight between people, used in the sense of "humans," who would do better to question the hows and whys of the aliens who exist among them, as the entire planet careens towards some climactic cathartic cleansing of...of...of what, exactly? Is it time for Humanity to finish its extinction at the hands of its squabbling selves? Or is it just barely possible that this awful mirror is held up to make Humanity confront its worst and most enraging aspects?

You don't know Author Brissett's work if you think she provides an answer to that question.

Intricately interconnected strands of Eleusis's enhanced and unenhanced human remnants, violently abusing themselves and each other, aliens with the demonstrated capacity to end the entire human lineage sitting still and doing nothing are some of the mainstays of this book's architecture. The manner in which Author Brissett makes one care about the architecture is, in common with the subtle and unjustly undercelebrated Elysium, left for you to discern. The clues are there. The point of the read is to get out of it what you put into it. While I myownself am indifferent to spoilers, having watched The Crying Game decades ago and thinking The Big Reveal was...kinda obvious...but in any event anticlimactic, I still think you'll enjoy the read more if you're left to mull over the roles of the krestge, the enhanced humans, the nature of the need for child soldiers, and the book's title. Hang on until the ending, and you will feel so very rewarded for your efforts.

There is MUCH to unearth. The pleasures in these words are very significant.

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

SORROWLAND
RIVERS SOLOMON
MCDxFSG
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

A 2021 NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 LOCUS AWARD—BEST HORROR NOVEL! Winners announced 25 June 2022.

The Publisher Says: Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.

But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future - outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.

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

My Review: ↡↡↡ HEED. THE. CONTENT. WARNINGS. BELOW. ↡↡↡

There are almost no good people in this world, and Vern meets the worst of them. What makes this a deeply satisfying read is that teenaged Vern, in their unbelievable indomitable drive to thrive not just survive, manages to do exactly that. Overcoming all-too-real obstacles? Check. Guiding new lives through a terrible world, explaining how to be better? Check. Vern raising their children is the single brightest take-away I have from this unhappy story.

Loving, worshipping, and bowing down to folks who harmed you was written into the genes of all animal creatures. To be alive meant to lust after connection, and better to have one with the enemy than with no one at all. A baby's fingers and mouth grasp on instinct.

If I were to seek my mental filing system's catalog for closest comparables, I'd have to go with Toni Morrison's deathless Beloved admixed with Octavia E. Butler's more trenchant Kindred, as written for Quentin Tarantino to film. Yes...violence and menace are imbued in every scene. No, it isn't a splatterfest. Yes, every single thing that happens evokes an emotional response. No, there are no "answers" or fancy nostrums to help us deal with the underlying hate, like the lava in a volcano, erupting for as long as it erupts.

Going against tended to end more rightly, more justly, than going with. People were wrong. Rules, most of the time, favored not what was right, but what was convenient or preferable to those in charge.

If you've read 2017's An Unkindness of Ghosts or 2019's Blood is Another Word for Hunger, you're ahead of me in this realization. If you haven't, read this book. You will not regret your introduction to the magical prose that Author Solomon uses being this story. I'm willing to bet you'll get on to their back catalog after finishing the read. If not, if this is just all too much for your sensibilities at the present, read their free online short work that's part of The Verge's "Better Worlds" project: St. Juju.

This writer is a Talent in a world that needs more of them.

To celebrate the end of a long, long, bad, bad year...

...I'm going to make a new start on reviewing the books I liked, but don't feel called to perform a full review on. There are, without exaggeration, hundreds of books I'd like to alert people to, books that really deserve your eyeblinks, books I can happily if not enthusiastically encourage you to seek out. I just haven't had a framework to do it in, like the simple three-sentence review structure you see at right. That meme was posted by Author 'Nathan Burgoine on Twitter in 2019. He was, before becoming an author, a bookstore manager, and this is the structure he encouraged staff members who felt overwhelmed by the idea of Writing A Review to use.

I'm adopting it, and referring to the process as Burgoineing in the author's honor. (I hope he sees it as an honor.) I will fairly regularly, once or possibly twice a month as a baseline and more frequently as events warrant, post three- or four-Burgoined titles together. You can see I've already begun. In the next few days more Burgoines will appear, this being year-end and a perfect time to make the decks as clear as I possibly can for the *amazing* books I've already got in the works for 2021 reviews.

I have to give 2020 credit for one thing. While a lot of authors saw their book launches rescheduled, publishers canceled their tours, and everyone was hugely distracted by the nightmare of COVID-19 (I had it, you do not want it), no one can fault the astoundingly wonderful literature we got this year. My own annual six-stars-of-five read was Zaina Arafat's extraordinary debut novel YOU EXIST TOO MUCH (review lives here), a thirtysomething Palestinian woman telling me my life, my family, my very experience of relationships of all sorts. I cannot stress enough to you, this is the book you need to read in 2021. A sixtysomething man is here, in your email/feed, saying: This is the power. This is the glory. The writing I look for, the read I long to find, and all of it delivered in a young woman's debut novel. This is as good an omen for the Great Conjunction's power being bent to the positive outcomes as any I've seen.

I read fifty-seven books this quarter. That's nowhere near a personal best, but it's a lot more than I would've read if I hadn't had the bump that Burgoineing has given me! Liberation from the demands of making a deep dive into a book, instead being allowed by my own inner demons to enjoy then describe why I did that this vastly simpler and handily codified technique showed me. The reads were in the main first reads or review-induced second reads. The re-reads, mostly of old Agatha Christie stories or novels that I could blow through quickly because they're already familiar. At my age, I don't really want to devote a lot of time to rereading because, in the ~170-ish months I can expect to live, writers won't stop writing and publishers won't stop publishing. I see wonderful things, to paraphrase Howard Carter as he took in Tutankhamen's tomb goods.

Many of the most wonderful things I've seen in 2020 were translated things, What's Left of the Night quite possibly chief among them...or was it the first-ever translation from Yiddish of The Rivals & Other Stories, that dark and bitter draft of unsentimentalism about immigrant/emigrant Jewish life...permaybehaps it was The Slave Yards, that unexpected and welcome ray of hope centered in Benghazi. Those stories from far-away or long-gone places, more and more, have come to mean the most exciting reading I can do. New Vessel Press, Syracuse University Press, a raft of publishers are out there looking for and finding wonderful tales, translating them, and waiting for you to notice. I'd say it's a great year to set a challenge of reading a translation a month. Click on the tag "#2020Goals" and I'll bet you won't be at a loss of where to start for long.

There were some really pleasant surprises, like SHUGGIE BAIN winning the 2020 Booker Prize and selling over 200,000 copies. The Only Good Indians and Ring Shout appearing on endless "Best of 2020" lists. The Light Years appearing on my radar along with its mensch of an author, R.W.W. Greene. A good guy, one to watch, go follow him and see what a relief it is to have someone as classy and good-hearted as him imagining our future into being. Jennifer Marie Brissett, whose first novel Elysium I really loved, announced Destroyer of Light will come out in 2021, and Nicky Drayden's Symbiosis appears in February. On and on, a litany of things I look forward to, a long and happy and heartening trail of good news. I'm so grateful for it all, all the stuff there isn't room to celebrate here but there sure is room in my world for it!

On the other hand, I failed miserably at my goal of publishing an average of ten reviews a month in 2020. Months without reviews came largely because I was pretty miserable after I got this rotten COVID-19, and there are some long-term effects I'm not happy about but don't cause day-to-day killing fatigue and wretched headaches. I'm going to set the 2021 bar at fifteen reviews average per month...an ambitious one hundred eighty, more than I've managed since the earliest days of reposting reviews in the "Pages" to save them from being deleted (back in 2013, I had only Goodreads and LibraryThing as my review venues, and each had its issues). I'm a little bit anxious about that lofty goal, which is how it should be. Challenges, a little fear, and a whole new chance to make the 2020s rock instead of having them rock us.

ELYSIUM, a fan-damn-tastic first novel from a writer who we need to hear more from soon

ELYSIUM Or, The World After
JENNIFER MARIE BRISSETT
Aqueduct Press
$7.95 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A computer program etched into the atmosphere has a story to tell, the story of two people, of a city lost to chaos, of survival and love. The program's data, however, has been corrupted. As the novel's characters struggle to survive apocalypse, they are sustained and challenged by the demands of love in a shattered world both haunted and dangerous.

I GOT THIS BOOK FROM MY LOCAL LIBRARY (THEN HAD TO BUY ONE). SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY, FOLKS.

My Review: The author, whom I follow on Twitter, commented rather sadly on some people in the blogosphere who took her to task for this book, which apparently was not to their taste.

It was to mine. I enjoyed it so much that, after reading the library's copy, I ordered one for myself because I wanted to have ready access to some of my favorite quotes to share with my Young Gentleman Caller. He's quite partial to this one:

"...You got wings now. You might as well learn how to use 'em. I'll teach you and then you'll come with me."

It makes me very happy to be able to share that with him, and have it mean something good to him, too.

But here's the thing, readers. Here's the central principle of this book as I understand it: Forget Reality. It doesn't exist.

As this idea bothers a lot of people, and some people more than is remotely justified, let me talk a bit (vaguely, sorry, spoilerphobes are every-damn-where like the Wicked Witch's flying monkeys) about why I think this is Elysium's core value. First, are the characters male or female? Straight or gay? Lovers, friends, family? The proper answer to this question is "Yes." Full stop. There are no binaries or trinaries (is that a thing?) here. There is a world beset by failure from within...the computer code between sections and chapters is you clue to remove linear expectations from your reading repertoire. You're not spoon-fed anything in this book, nor are you denied the clear and intentional signs of what the author wants you to know before continuing your read.

Antoine and Antoinette being one person, though not the same person, is an idea that frightens a lot of (mostly straight, though certainly not all) people. That these two names for one being, one soul as the more spiritually inclined would say, are frequently interchanged and in a constellation of ways in relationship to Adrian/Adrianne will confuse many. Which, I think, is part of the point. We're in a world whose worldbuilding includes the concept that this is all a malfunctioning program. And now the technophobes have checked out...no, no, no, no! It's not about a HAL-9000 programmed by an Australopithecus at a Cosmic Terminal controlling the Universe. Perish forbid Author Brissett be so uncreative, so bog-standard boring.

There is a point at which Hector/Helen, the relationship spoiler between the primary dyad Adrian/Adrianne and Antoine/Antoinette, becomes...repetitive...and a new role surfaces, a different means of being within the circle of safety that these connected beings represent. A sibling has a powerful position in a person's life. But here there must be room made for change. Partners don't often make that accommodation where siblings will. Now and then the relationship drama can feel overdone, but one is wise to trust a storyteller to make it all make sense.

The larger canvas, the backdrop of The World Ending, isn't overplayed, isn't made the blaring obvious focus of the people we're invested in's lives. It happens almost offstage, it's so much a part of the way the players play out their scenes. It happens, and it happens, and it happens; it is in this endless loop of recursion that the computer code "interruptions" become ligatures. The linking of all the worlds that are failing, losing, coming unstuck, is always being battled and resisted. Our main characters might not be the ones doing the fighting (note use of conditional), but they're at the forefront of the evolving disaster.

The disasters, regrettably, include a bit of characterization that I'd call transphobic. It was an uncharacteristically lazy slip-up. I'm not going to belabor the point because it's part of an overall branching exploration of dichotomy, a sense of making the characters (and latterly introduced characters as well) conform to standards that are slapped on with labels. That's not always comfortable to explore...but I believe Author Brissett, a Jamaican-British person resident in New York City, would be very much inclined to do. How many labels can one entity, one consciousness, support or bear or exemplify? All three main characters bear the entire range of them, and others determined by cultures only invented instead of observed.

Comes the ending. I was, at that point, hazy and a little tired; but the book's ultimate frame gave me the five-star glow. This ending makes every odd and jagged edge Right and Proper. I loved it, and was so very happy that it came to be.

But for the transphobia...that's the half-star off.