KILL DICK, a strangely compelling long stare at too-smooth, too-shiny surfaces

KILL DICK
LUKE GOEBEL
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending April 19, 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A fever dream, Kill Dick is a literary thriller that plunges into the chaos of Los Angeles where addiction, privilege, and corruption combust.

At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be she’s an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, and Susie’s ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to her father’s ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together.

Then there’s Peter Holiday, a disgraced professor running a rehab scam so audacious it’s almost admirable. When their lives collide, Susie and Peter are dragged into a web of privilege, corruption, and violence, where every escape leads deeper into the rot.

Dark, satirical, and razor-sharp, Kill Dick is a modern literary thriller that unflinchingly dissects wealth, exploitation, and the perilous line between survival and self-destruction.

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

My Review: Health scammers, like Peter Holiday in this story, might be the lowest scum on this wide, green Earth. Preying on those desperate for their very lives...! My mother's father fell for the Laetrile scam in the 1970s. Luckily he survived more than a few years after it was exposed to all as a hoax, but it cemented my powerful disdain for health scammers as it was an expensive lesson. Fast-forward from my family's 1970s to Susie Vogelman, our PoV character, in a circle of hell called the glittering world of too-rich too-dimwitted 2016 LA.

What's worse than an addict without morals or boundaries? Worse even than an enabler of the addict? The addict turned enabler. Susie, who apparently never so much as once looked into a mirror that showed her anything except her surface, is a participant in a lot of different kinds of enabling in this story. It's very well done, it never lets the pace of revelations slacken, but it also never once shows even a glimmer of realization in Susie or her coterie of criminally negligent creeps. But their surfaces are pretty! And their credit cards are limitless!

I wanted to shake Susie into awareness of her hollowness, lest she implode causing still further damage. But Author Goebel is careful to make this world honest by giving it consequences despite no one in the cast being anything but appalling. Bad things are going to happen, and I didn't care about the consequences to any of the cast just to the folks who were victimized by the cast. The suppurating wounds of vapidity exacerbated by the absence of empathy (honestly, I'm not sure Susie in particular even has a theory of mind) in every character are never allowing anyone to escape dire consequences.

When they come I was deeply surprised to feel...sad is too strong, sympathetic is in the wrong emotional register, wistful is too kindly meant...to not feel triumphant? I think that's closer. I was eager for the comeuppances to be passed around, and Peter the scumbag to get seconds. After all, this was the moment that the country saw Trump installed in entirely the wrong kind of government housing. What use is fiction of not to redress horrifying imbalances?

Showing them to us, forcing us to see that the rot is there even when it's plastered over, and there are ways you can recognize it despite the glittering surface. Less wish fulfillment than cautionary tale. It's well done. Author Goebel (Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours via the deeply cool publisher FC2) has storytelling chops. He has very cool film scripts in his CV, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Anne Hathaway in them. His current publisher is Kate Gale's always interesting and frequently tastemaking Red Hen Press. Given these bona fides why is this not a full-five review?

Because I got uneasy as I crested the halfway mark, feeling I was still outside Susie's world with my sarcastic voyeur of a guide being invited to laugh at and judge these buffoons. It's what they deserve! is implicit in each and every moment I'm in the story's flow. Which, fair—it is indeed what they deserve; but is it your point, Author Goebel, to stop there or is it to force me-the-reader into looking deep into the shine of these surfaces and ask myself "why are you still here with these tacky people." I didn't think it was terribly clear what your purpose was; the only reason that was an issue is its consequence of popping me out of the story-flow to examine the whole read again and again.

That's a big ask, but your story is a national bestseller so I guess it worked. I'm glad it did, and does, and will do the trick again in future.

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.

STORIES FROM THE EDGE OF THE SEA, an edge I can see from my home, and wonder what's over it

STORIES FROM THE EDGE OF THE SEA
ANDREW LAM
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

One of LitHub's 100 Notable Small Press Books for 2025!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Andrew Lam returns with a literary exploration of love, lust, and loss among Vietnamese immigrants in America.

At times humorous and ecstatic, other times poetic and elegiac, the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband’s death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover’s home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam’s short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes. Together they seek to chart barely explored country.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: How to go on, when you honestly think your world is ending, is at the heart of any immigrant's story. Your world is ending, are you going to end with it?

Not while someone is cold and hungry, I'm not. I immigrated from my happy world to this ugly, mean-spirited one entirely against my will. But here I am. My kettle's got words, but heads need filling...feeding...too.

In accordance with the Prophecy, the fourteen stories will be dealt with by the Bryce Method.


She in a Dance of Frenzy suffers. Beautiful faces and empty hearts so often go together. Why some people are gifted with looks but left, like all of us, without a single clue as to how to be truly happy.

Because, girl of great beauty, woman of the thousand broken hearts, empty vessel hollow drum moon void of course: Your value of face has no depth of learning, and only learning fills you up. 3.5*

Agape at the Guggenheim takes a solid look at how love, lust, longing, and the essentially fruitless effort of making sense of your own inner workings all walk around, sloshing and thumping into over and around one pretentious little culture queen's head.

Quit worrying about it, said old-man me to this youthful Asian version of me. Get up and find him or stay sitting and watch him go, either way chasing a fantasy won't explain you to yourself. But when your façade is as brittle and shiny as the lacquer on your umbrella handle, you won't listen, or hear when you do.

Told in a slightly annoying ever-so ever-so tone that will really rub the rust scales of some, that amused me no end. 4*

This Isle is Full of Noises provides the required amount of New Weid as vampires and werewolves crash a frat party where a Vietnamese immigrant lad, on the way to a glittering career as a doctor...he thinks...is apparently trippin' balls and working through some very, very serious PTSD.

Not my personal favorite, but it sure as hell twists its twist with absolute conviction! 3.5*

October Laments follows a woman who processes her grief in real time posts on Facebook, in a foreign language, for the hushand she shared twenty-five years of life with. As her teenaged daughter comments on some posts, the awful truth of marrying someone a lot older than you, marrying someone who becomes ill, withers and dies by choice, to end suffering, is caustically real.

The grief of being left behind, feeling greedy for wanting more, the resposibility of living on...well, social media is good for something after all. 5*

A Good Broth Takes Its Time "I insure people against tragedy, in a country built on it," says Toan, survivor and thriver on pho's magically Proustian-madeleine insubstantial waft. A solid thing, love, and it sloshes in the transparent magis of water, heat, and time that transmutes grossly physical things...nothing on Earth is more grossly physical than oxtail...into wafts of delightful odor.

Tragedy plus time equals comedy, said the long-forgotten hilarious inventor of The Tonight Show, Steve Allen. He specifically meant ha-ha comedy. I'd be amazed if Allen, and Author Lam, didn't also mean that tragedy turns its other mask to the reveling, partying eater of the divine pho. Savoring the tough bits, eating the insubstantial essence of things whose flavoring we call "herbs and spices" but whose bodies (leaves, fruits, seeds) we use up and discard. The broth that takes its time? Rich in the essences of things we can't see. Replete with the powerfully sensed, unseen, untouchable, enfolding vapor of the dead.

Heady. 5*

Bleak Houses are more than structures, they're memory palaces of lives unlived. Visiting someone you once loved deeply, were passionately entwined with, in his home now shared with a wife who knows who you were, with kids who know little enough about the world (such a kid thing) to Make Judgments, is...awkward. Seeing a ghost is the least of it. 4*

To Keep from Drowning tells us how lives end, how hard it is to live one, how much it costs in blood and treasure is only the beginning. Never tell all you know and it goes into the Void with you. And how that is okay.

Living each life is hard work, dying each death, moments you don't know what what's coming are the ones you should treasure because they are the ones that let you rest before the next bend on the hill. A family of origin takes shape on this trip to Land's End. And it is at the end your beginnings fall into focus. Rose's pain, Ben's work, Lou's seeking, all of them launch their family from the end of the land, from the muddy border of dirt and water and the air so redolent of rot. 4.5*

The Shard, The Tissue, An Affair said something deep, something profound, after smacking me in the teeth with some very self-indulgent poetry:

To fall in love is to have one's sense of geography grafted onto another's, no matter how tenuous, so as to form a new country. I saw Houston in my mind, a city of strip malls, grand old homes and gleaming glass-and-steel skyscrapers that coexist cheek by jowl. He, in turn, imagined San Francisco with its Transamerica Pyramid poking the blue sky, windblown hills the color of embers at twilight, sailboats gliding on the bay like white butterflies; he imagined—and I could tell this from his voice—that there was freedom somewhere in the next valley.

It's true. You see their world with your own. You do not know, then, what that moment of vision will cost...sometimes a lot, others it pays you. A fleeting moment or a painting on the wall of your shared home.

A short work, a love song to the departed. 4*

Love in the Time of the Beer Bug gives me the heebiejeebies. COVID killed people still walking. It ruined so many lives. It put the stake in the heart of many a vampiric relationship, like Jan and Stan's.

It was a very annoying style to read it in but a story I thought I wouldn't see in here...the ending, and even then, a beginning as the narrator accepts a place in Yale's English department. 3.5*

Swimming from the Mekong Delta is proof that the old adage about lemons becoming lemonade only works if the lemonchucker gets a full, even overflowing, glass. And you get to watch as they have to drink it.

A standup routine I'd actually resubscribe to Netflix to see. 4*

What We Talk About When We Can't Talk About Love is dark. What talking does, in this immigrant's world, is fill the hot-air balloon that wafts him above the heads of the struggling so he won't see how hard it was for him in their sweaty. soot-streaked faces. The fire's coming, blow it out with words. Blow up into the ballon. Blow harder, blowhard.4.5*

5A, 5B, DEST: SGN gives someone ordinary a second chance. It's a beautiful dream, the second chance so deeply desired it connects your past self to a present you just...don't love, care about so little that you're ready to jump into the past without hesitation.

The "Canterbury Tales" format works well enough, but honestly it's so self-indulgent and sentimental I need insulin. 3*

Muni Diaries collects the vignettes a writer, a real dyed-in-the-wool wordhammerer, never leaves behind. The smallest moment stays in the filter like a random whole bean. It blocks the flow of coffee until you take it out and grind it just to get it out of the way.

The resulting liquid isn't quite coffee; it's not strong enough. Drop it into steamed milk? it's barely a macchiato. Slosh it into the instant oatmeal? Palatable, but after it gets cold waiting for you to finish your call, it's stodgy and there's no good way towards finishing it that won't result in gagging.

So blow the dust onto a napkin and draw faces with the dregs in the cup. 3.5*

The Tree of Life Elegy to a mother's love:

Fitst of all, when things get tough, remember to make soup. And, if you can, feed the hungry. More importantly, open your heart, stand with all your strength, with all your courage for life and living, even in the face of darkness and despair. Despite all your sadness and tears, stand steadfast under that tree and tend to it and watch its branches blossom and bear fruit. Stand until the very last light.

You can do no better than to live by these words. 5*

TREE SPIRITS (2nd edition) is a great gift for your youngest, lap-sitting reader

TREE SPIRITS
LOUISE WANNIER (illus. April Tatiana Jackson)
True Roses Books
$24.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Tree Spirits is an interactive picture book that encourages creativity, social emotional intelligence, and seeing the world with fresh eyes. Encouraging children to develop their imagination, creativity and emotional intelligence.

With 25 color photographs of trees, the rhyming text asks, “What do you see when you look up at this tree?” inviting a child to use their imagination. Turning the page reveals an illustrated overlay of a charming animal inspired by the lines and shapes of the tree bark. Each animal introduces a different emotion helping children to understand their own inner spirit and feelings.

For parents and grandparents and friends and family it is a fun book to read with the children in their lives. The book includes 4 sheets of tracing paper to invite them to begin drawing what they see and ends with encouraging children to go out and look at the trees in their neighborhood and keep noticing, “What do I see?”

LOUISE WANNIER “Safta”—“Safta” is Hebrew for grandmother and, as of this printing, she is very lucky to have five grandchildren. As an artist, Louise is fascinated by observing patterns and loves the discovery of how the camera shifts the focus and emphasis from what our eyes natively see. Beautiful illustrations by talented Graphic Artist April Tatiana Jackson.

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

My Review: Cool little book for very, very young readers, and pre-readers with grandparental help. Accustoms kids to observing, and interpreting their observations, not just staring at things in their worlds. It's got beautiful images of trees, which is always a good thing to expose a child to; it's got drawn overlays to point up the author's intended images to be found when looking at the tree photograph...and because it's an overlay it is a separate experience from just looking at how beautiful the trees are.

This is an absolutely delightful lap-book for your smallest family member. Start at about two or three, it seems to me.

Enjoy the first pages of the book.

It's beautiful, it's got a great message all our descendants need to hear, process, and internalize, and it's exactly right for Yule gifting.

SPRING IN SIBERIA, a well-honed spear of a story is thrust into one's readerly guts

SPRING IN SIBERIA
ARTEM MOZGOVOY
Red Hen Press
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 1985. Russia. As the Soviet Union disintegrates and Western capitalism spreads its grip across their land, the Morozov family finds itself consigned to the remote, icy wastes of Siberia. It is here that their only child, Alexey, is born.

A sweet and gentle schoolboy, Alexey discovers that reciting poetry learnt by heart calms his fears. That winter gales can be battled with self-invented games, and solace found through his grandmother’s rituals and potions. But when Alexey’s classmate, the son of KGB agents, confesses his love, the desire of two boys to be together clashes violently with the mad world around them.

Exploring the healing power of literature, the magic of first love, and the ways our family and homeland can save (or shatter) us, Spring in Siberia is a coming-of-age novel that, in the darkest of times, glows with hope and the yearning for freedom to be oneself—completely.

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

My Review: A sweet, gentle childhood spent among adults who love him doesn't mean Alexey/Artem wasn't always made aware of how different he was from other boys. His father's mother, whose earthy peasant lifeway he came to root inside, never made anything easy but always taught him that he, and he alone, was responsible for his life by never excusing him from the work of wrestig food for his supper from the unforgiving Earth of Siberia. She taught him to accept the gift of belonging where you plant yourself with her stories of her own early life spent in the Russian west before she was sent to Siberia to care for her brother and then made her life there.

This lesson, above all, would serve the young man well: Make your own life, and thus your own happiness.

The entirety of Artem's...do pardon, Alexey's...life was spent in upheaval and dislocation as the old Soviet Union collapsed and a new old country Russia was (re)born. Being a child with a firm grounding in self-reliance, he takes the new world in his stride. I found his mother's transformation from a depressed, moping lump into a purposeful and energetic capitalist very interesting...and Alexey's trotting right along behind her, using the first money he ever earns by selling flower arrangements on a set of beautifully bound Pushkin books he sees in the local post office. It challenges this planned-economy-raised kid's willpower to save his money instead of spend it well beyond its breaking point, which everyone here should probably relate to. He sees his very first TV commercials and nothing on this wide green Earth will do but he must have some vile, neon-colored sludge to drink...much to his grandmother's appalled confusion, as he's been working with her to pick and preserve wild berries his whole life. What is suddenly so appealing about this new stuff?

In this quiet little moment in a boy's life, the entire tragedy-to-come of Russia: An old, bad system ends with nothing to replace it and a new on with inscrutable rules that aren't like the old rules confuses the bejabbers out of most people who aren't like Alexey's freshly liberated mother.

Her love for her son isn't smooth...he's mistaken for a girl a lot, is clearly a femboy, and is bullied mercilessly. Alexey's father, less successfully capitalist than his wife, is repulsed by the growing strangeness of his only child; the family disintegrates under the many stresses of the world. As Alexey enters adolescence, his isolation from his peers is ameliorated by the love of Anton, expressed in a sweet, sweet, strange and menacing scene on a balcony. Things for th young lovers go poorly, as one would expect them to, given the world's homophobia. Anton and Alexey, eventually, are driven apart by adult cruelty and hatred. How that plays out is so deeply sad, and so universally relatable, that I wanted to jump into the story and shepherd them through the hateful nastiness of small-souled bigots.

Alexey, smart as a whip and hell-bent on not being like Them, goes to university on a "red diploma"—a free pass into the higher education system. He chooses, as did Artem the Author, to train as a journalist in a country about to lose even its unfree statee-supported press. He's trained to observe from birth by being Other, so he has a clear vision of how unfair the new system is to the old system's relicts. Here, then, is the main pleasure I got from reading this sad, oft-told tale of growing up Other in a world that genuinely and utterly, in a bone-deep way, hates you for being yourself.

It's not just gay people, it's not just smart people, it's Them...whoever it is that isn't like the one hating with all their tiny soul's capacty...and every living one of us is Them to someone. Alexey realizes this in a blinding, road-to-Damascus moment in a school hallway.

Life is cruel to Others. This well-honed spear of a story is thrust into one's readerly guts. You'e never again going to look at that butch girl or that femme of a boy and think "Other" after reading this story. Artem/Alexey is a human being and, as we follow him through a rough and turbulent upbringing in a hostile world without a safety net of any material, social, or spiritual sort, we can no longer pretend that we're not all guilty of glossing over the costs of our own quiet little prejudices. Emma Goldman, social activist and poet whose lines are on the Statue of Liberty in New York's front door to the USA, said:

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another.

LIVID, think "12 Angry Men" but make it 1 ENRAGED woman

LIVID
CAI EMMONS
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman who is suffering from a tragic loss is placed on a jury with her estranged ex-husband.

Sybil White Brown returns from Boston to the small West Coast city where she once lived, hoping to heal after a terrible loss. Summoned to jury duty, she is dismayed to be assigned to the jury of a murder trial alongside her ex-husband with whom she had a rancorous divorce. As the trial progresses, she and her ex tiptoe around each other but eventually become disastrously entangled. Meanwhile, Sybil obsesses about the female defendant, whom she believes is innocent. The situation explodes during jury deliberations when Sybil comes face-to-face with her own unexpressed rage.

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

My Review: If anyone knows the deep contours of female rage, it's Author Cai Emmons...she's received the death sentence that we all dread. Her life will end, and not at some distant and amorphously unknowable date, but quite soon.

The question looms large: How does one assert oneself as a person, a woman, without a speaking voice, without sound waves commandeering attention?

Losing her voice to ALS has not silenced her, she says in LitHub. I'm glad it hasn't...I'm sad it won't get better...I'm deeply empathetic with her character's outrage!

As it happens, Author Emmons reached the end of her journey on the second of January. She was ten days short of her seventy-second birthday. I believe in some kind of afterlife, not one of personal survival or linked to An Eternal Reward or suchlike...but authors, for sure, experience an afterlife as long as their words, ideas, stories are read and thought about by we the living. I myownself will never forget Author Emmons for describing me, through the lens of someone else:

She wasn't old. Indeterminate thirties—everyone seems younger than I am these days—but her skin had been worked over, thickened and textured as if it was used to sealing things out, a skill I recognize.

It is the gift of an observant person to see past surfaces. It is the skill of an author to turn surfaces into substance, to make a whole of a glance and a brushed-past contact into a deep, layered bounce.

When I read in the Acknowledgments that Author Emmons was fired up to write Livid by watching the Supreme Court nomination hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, I was so deeply outraged and infuriated that I put off reading the book. I knew, deep inside the withered and wizened recesses of my whatever-replaced-a-soul, that I would screech in outrage at anything inspired by the travesty of justice and comedy of errors that put the United States of America's Supreme Court in the hands of the scum presently on it. A bit much for me at the time. I put the book aside.

Reading that Author Emmons had died on the second, I felt gripped with the need to learn what she wanted us to know when she chose this inspiration to follow as she herownself began to let go of her grasp on the world. I know there are more books by her coming out this year. I can't say it strongly enough: I think her work is important in subject, appealing in style, and worthy in its spiritual aims. I hope you'll buy them all.

In this story, from its inspiration we can be sure there will be no shortage of enraging subject matter. It's still startling to me that there's a man left alive who has managed to willfully un-know that their condescension and contempt for Womanhood (as opposed to for an individual woman, a different kettle of fish) is a source of volcanic rage and what I'd call a "fond return of contempt." I'd run over the plot for you, but you can read, it's right up there. What I want you to know is how deeply and genuinely Author Emmons explores that fondness I called out.

Sybil, our narrator, seeing Drew, her ex-husband, for the first time since a genuine and deeply painful tragedy ended their marriage, is assailed by the deep and fundamental existence of her anger.

The past will not die. It festers in the body's cells, inflames the tissues, refuses to relinquish its grip. In the face of such intransigence, what can you do but flee?

It is, as Sybil realizes, not possible to extricate her anger from her very being. That realization is central to everything that occurs in this short novel. Drew can't comprehend that Sybil is not going to "move on" or "forgive and forget," both of which nostrums are idiotic and unhelpful as concepts and impossible as goals in my own experience and in Sybil's. What she has done in her lifetime away from Drew and their shared hometown is...heal, scab over the wounds, to give herself a chance at making it through the nights and existing fully in the days of a different life than the one she left behind.

The jury that forms the book's internal audience for Sybil and Drew as the process the real reasons for the end of their relationship is largely faceless and affectless. The two people who count are Sybil and Sybil. Oh, and also Sybil. She is telling the story. She is setting the terms of our relationship with her. She is Responsible. And one gets the distinct impression that this is a unique experience in Sybil's life...think of Marguerite Duras' statement, "I believe there is a miracle in Wanda. Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and action. Here that distance is completely eradicated", quoted about the actress Barbara Loden's one and only directorial outing. In Sybil, Cai Emmons does much the same thing: She utterly erases the barriers between the reader and the character. Not solely by having Sybil narrate the story. The story that Sybil narrates mutates, alters, grows as she tells us more and more of it. By the time the ending comes, heralded by a startling act of redemption, Sybil has finally filled all of her personal space. Sybil has, unlike generations of women, fully and completely claimed all of the mass, all of the depth, all of the breadth of her body, her mind, her heart.

She is, for the first time, her own and her full, self. I was left in complete awe of this feat. Sybil did not, as she began speaking to me, seem as though she would be the kind of character who could, who would dare, to answer this call and stretch her self into the last corners of the mold we call "selfhood." Yet by the end of this compact book, I was standing in Sybil's sole, shining presence. Her rage was too huge to be contained another moment. Her actions, at long last, balanced the delicate and fragile state of inaction and indifference to her self that Sybil was required, as a woman, to assume.

It was deeply and pleasantly surprising as well as subtly and satisfyingly performed in this closely built, quietly molded work of art. I hope you will honor the memory of Cai Emmons in your own way and starting by reading one of her last works strikes me as fitting.

COFFEE, SHOPPING, MURDER, LOVE, horrible gay people say & do awful things for fun & profit

COFFEE, SHOPPING, MURDER, LOVE
CARLOS ALLENDE
Red Hen Press
$25.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A campy dark comedy for the angry and the disenchanted.

Last November, I found a dead body inside the freezer that my roommate keeps inside the garage. My first thought was to call the police, but Jignesh hadn’t paid his share of the rent just yet. It wasn’t due until the thirtieth, and you know how difficult it is to find people who pay on time. Jignesh always does. Also, he had season tickets for the LA Opera, and well . . . Madame Butterfly. Tosca. The Flying Dutchman . . . at the Dorothy Chandler . . . you cannot say no to that, can you? Well, it’s been a few good months now—Madame Butterfly was just superb, thank you. However, last Friday, I found a second body inside that stupid freezer in the garage. This time I’m evicting Jignesh. My house isn’t a mortuary . . . alas, I need to come up with some money first. You’ll understand, therefore, that I desperately need to sell this novel. Just enough copies to help me survive until I find a job . . . what could I do that doesn’t demand too much effort? We have a real treasure here, anyhow. Some chapters are almost but not quite pornographic. You could safely lend this to nana afterward!

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

My Review: Okay, I admit it: I loathed Jignesh, I despised Charlie, and I detested the victims...all of them see themselves as victims, of course. I was shocked by the hateful, racist nastiness, the body dysmorphia, the sex and the violence was all very tame though...and I still, to my slightly horrified embarassment, laughed out loud.

I feel dirty and ashamed admitting that. Like Charlie does after, um, sealing the deal with Jignesh. (This happened under such murky circumstances I was shocked that Author Allende didn't go into gory detail, but thank goodness no.) The things that make the book fun to read are the ways that Author Allende harks back to The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts in all their embittered, Hollywood-materialism-hatin' glory. The things that aren't as evocative of the bitter, sarcastic West-world are the things that slow us down, like the switching PoV between Charlie's verbal fleuve and Jignesh's hugely overacted rages and the evil things he does in secret to express them. (No one can think of a reason to beat him up if they don't know it's him doing the nasty stuff to make their lives miserable. Except his mother, of course.)

So, with the two leads being such a pair of pricks in WeHo Princess drag, what's in it for the reader? A truly unvarnished look at what the hell we've done to our culture? A raunchy ride through the libido of a sad, little man who loves no one and nothing except what he's been told makes him look good? An immigrant whose family isn't made up of people who have any use for him, Family First culture back home be damned?

All that and more. The sheer volume of words coming out of Charlie does get numbing but goodness me, look at how much you learn about abuse and violence meted out on his short little self. Jignesh thinks all the trouble in the world is going to fall directly onto his head and, preemptively, gets angry enough to...avoid it, somehow. It's quite startling. He's definitely on the way down and...Ganesha gives him luck? The horrible racists he works with call his overweight self "Ganesha" behind his back, and I'd say "shame on you" to them via the author if Jignesh didn't get himself some brilliant, if cruel, revenge on each and every one of them.

By the end of the story, I was worn down. I'd been dipping near the Lake of Fire with Charlie prating and mewling to any- and everyone about things a slightly sentient person would've known not to say anything about. I'd seen Doom flying in on her broom, aiming right for the pair of 'em. And *snap* up comes the handle and the bristles of Doom's broom give a light dust-off to their plans as she flies away. By the end of the book...Deirdre and Jana and the mural for Jignesh's clients...the phone call from Mike, Jignesh's boss...I needed a lie-down.

So what's up with my rating not being a Full Five? It was headed for 3 early on because Charlie's narrative voice *really* got on my nerves. Jignesh's career as a Kindle Direct Publishing fantasy novelist (SALMONELLA IS A DISEASE, JIGNESH!) wasn't carried throughout the read, but used as a parsley garnish on a tiramisù. Charlie's sexual escapades were, while undetailed thank goodness, really not necessary to say anything new or more about his character (or lack thereof) and honestly weren't titillating to make up for their uselessness in plot or characterization terms. The crimes and follies that Jignesh and Charlie careen into and hurtle out of are fun, and highly kinetic; but they don't do anything the second, or third, times that they didn't do the first one.

That said, I am never going to forget either of these lousy human beings because they kept me rapt for several hours, bashing the Kindle screen a little harder than necessary each time I needed to move on to the next page. It was a good, fun ride, just one that went a *little* too often over the same curves to be exceptional.

UNDERNEATH, brutal yet concise true-crime novel about Mother & SHELTER, psychological horror in Australia

UNDERNEATH
LILY HOANG
Red Hen Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Martha Johnson wants to be a good mother and a devoted wife. It’s all she’s ever wanted in life, and she tries her very best, but when her husband threatens to leave her, her desperation reveals only one strategy that can save her family, punish her ungrateful husband, and earn power: murder.

Over a five-year period, Martha Johnson murders her four children, one by one, in order to punish her husband when they argue, but Martha is no ordinary serial killer. She murders her children by using the bulk of her 250-pound body to suffocate them. Unlike other fictionalized true-crime novels, Underneath neither valorizes nor focuses on the specific acts of violence. Instead, it attempts to understand how feelings of powerlessness, the residue of trauma, and the need to find justice in a world that refuses to give a fat body justice finds its only respite through murder.

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

My Review: Disturbing story of disempowerment's most extreme and appalling cost. That it is based on a true story made me feel ill.

...I'm pretty sure this isn't purgatory, either. It's more just like, extension. Continuation. We the murdered continue on, right underneath the living, but we aren't alive anymore. We're just here: bodies, but not bodies, too. So far as I can tell, the living can't see or hear or feel or smell us, but sometimes, if I get close enough to Martha, I swear she can taste me. ... Because we were murdered, this is our punishment.

As one expects from stories published by Red Hen Press's Kate Gale, monadnock of the LA literary publishing scene for {undisclosed} years now, there is a weird and unsettling tension between the lovely language and the sheer awfulness unfolding inside those pretty phrases and unnerving images. Why should the murdered, especially these child-victims, be made to suffer punishment? Discuss amongst yourselves after reading this intensely book-clubbable book.

Incest...prostitution...child-murder...maternal child abuse...domestic violence...and told through a dead child's point of view. "Is this old man round the bend for good?" I hear y'all thinking, as you read my sentence above about the book being "intensely book-clubbable." No: I'm hoping to make it plain to you that this story is so viscerally real, so eye-wateringly honest about the actual experience of mothering for a not insignificant segment of women, that y'all bougie book clubbers could do with a corrective lens to all the saintly, rise-above-it-all, succeed succeed succeed "women's fiction" guff that gets Oprah'd and Reese'd. Please note that I am not attempting a knock on these book clubs, they are hugely popular for a reason and their choices are not all in one and only one vein...but they are very fond of a certain type of story (described above) and return to books telling it quite often. Don't fix what ain't broken.

I want people to look past the usual and see the raw edges where things have failed and fragmented in different ways. Where the fault lines that exist in much of the world go at a different angle. I include myself in this, as my periodic reviews of *shudder* poetry and *urp* YA stories demonstrate. Successful for me or not, these reads are in areas I'm hell-bent-for-leather not to ignore simply because I so very often find them...unpleasant...to read. As I've said many times, I do not want to die above the neck before I die below it. So I'm out there sayin' "yes" when people offer me the damn things instead of running away like I want to...challenging my prejudices is the only way I know to prevent them from becoming part of the bone structure.

With Underneath, Author Hoang very much did that kind of challenging. We're not innocents, readers all, we've read The Lovely Bones and/or seen its movie. Dead narrators in fiction go a long, long way farther back in time than that. I'm not sure this take on the story she's telling here, a sort of slo-mo In Cold Blood, is one I'd've recommended to her. (I sure as hell wouldn't've recommended using w-bombs.) But when you're fully in the flow of the story you can see why this choice was exactly right, and possibly the only one she could have made. There was no other structure which would've enabled the Bernice-to-Martha-to-Arlene transmission of woman-violence to come clear. It needed an eyewitness whose eyes weren't in the same place they used to be. Like, Earth.

The pace of storytelling...well...I don't exactly know what to tell you. This isn't a novella, but it's not a long book. It doesn't linger on any scene. It simply is Arlene...talking to you. The story seems, in my experience of reading it, to tell itself to you in some peculiar way. Maybe the narrator being a child, who specifically says she's a child but one whose, um, existence after death keeps her learning, is so disorienting that the story becomes more of presence than she is? I can't be sure...but to me, the story was its own narrator, and it called itself Arlene. (If that makes any sense to you, could you explain it to me?) It doesn't repeat itself. It doesn't leave stuff out (for long). It's got a pull like a river's current, not dramatic but inexorable and powerful, like it won't let you go once you're there.

So go with it.

The structural facts of a novel told in vignettes...in discrete story-slices, layered with the sadness that floats under the surface of the ever-expanding skin of mother eating, of child growing, of marriage to a man who loves only what he needs and not what he wants bloating as its death-gases seek escape...is irregular, like the crumb structure of the best bread is. Not for Author Hoang, writing about cake...endless cakes made and eaten, made and eaten, never ever shared...the dense, regular, sweet crumbs left on an unused party-plate. The coarse and unappealing crumbs, food for scavenging ants, of hollow-sounding adulterated loafs of dollar-store bread; these make Martha's and Arlene's lines as they slip and catch and form shapes no one wants to see, just sweep into a trash can or, at best, into a crumb-catcher for possible crushing and reuse after they're fully hardened and useless as food in themselves.

There is a crisis in this world. It's a crisis of unlove. There are so many, many people in the world who are unloved. Who can't love or return love or even conceptualize it. They're incapable of it; they need it the more desperately because of that. But they don't and can't and won't get love. They are love-less. Bernice? Martha? Even, in the end, Arlene...love-less. Love, you see, isn't a word or a fancy chocolate bar, or a birthday card. It's action, investment of time and emotion. And the tragedy, in the ancient sense as well as the modern, of this story is that It. Is. True.

Beautiful sentences telling a dreadful, tragic tale of love, in its absence and its perverse, incomprehensible to normies, twisted shapes. Read this and be very, very glad you are none of these people.

Read this and shudder to your bones: You are all of these people. Happy Spooktober.

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

SHELTER
CATHERINE JINKS
Text Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Meg lives alone. Her little house in the bush outside town is the perfect place to hide. This seclusion is one of the reasons she offers to shelter Nerine, a young women escaping an abusive ex-partner. The other is that Meg knows what it’s like to live with the looming threat of a violence at the hands of someone you love.... Nerine is jumpy and her two little girls are frightened. This tells Meg all she needs to know about where they’ve come from, and she’s not all that surprised when Nerine asks her to get hold of a gun. But she knows it’s unnecessary. They’re safe now. Or so Meg thinks… Then she starts to wonder about some little things. A disturbed flyscreen. A tune playing on her windchimes. Has Nerine’s ex tracked them down? Has Meg’s husband turned up to torment her some more? By the time she finds out, it’ll be too late to do anything but run for her life.

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

My Review: Remember the first time the old aphorism, "No good deed goes unpunished," held real, tangible, awful Truth for you? Strap in....

Meg is the kind of friend you hope you'll have in an emergency or crisis. She's been there, she's done what she could, realizes how important the mere fact of showing up is. She'll give you shelter, she'll offer support, she will feed you and listen to you and Be There in the psychological, supportive sense of the words.

That's because she did not get those things when she so badly needed them during her devastatingly abusive marriage.

Nerine and her two daughters are, as we're shown, in a situation where Meg, her home (which she's ever so aptly named "Bolt Hole"), and her way with others are just exactly what they need. In they come; settle they do not. Nerine is in constant motion, constantly talking taking talking about how horrible the girls' father is (right in front of their scared little faces), how bad their lives were, how the courts have...insanely, incomprehensibly...given this vile predatory abuser visitation rights! Can you even imagine! she asks Meg, never waiting for an answer.

Then the nightmare turns real...awful things having been said, there are suddenly weird and unnerving things happening...frightening but, as yet, not violent things...footprints and noises where and when they shouldn't be, and all the time Nerine's talk talk talk about the horrors of the past makes little Analiese and Collette, her very young daughters, scared and jumpy. Meg, a grown woman with an estranged daughter living in England (can't forgive Mum for staying with the awful narcissistic personality disorder-having Dad), empathizes with all three, tries her best to distract and entertain the girls with rural life's many pleasures. Nerine? Nothing changes her focus. She is wound way too tight, experiences all things as threats and blames everything on the violent, awful ex who will, it comes to seem, jump down from a tree onto them with a machete!

As the unnerving stuff escalates into actual violence (CONTENT WARNING: ANIMAL CRUELTY), Meg begins to piece together some very, very strange facts and comes up with a truly frightening picture.

As I read the story, I was genuinely unsettled and disturbed. I can't say I expected the twist, having thought from the get-go there was going to be one. What it was, however, surprised me. Author Jinks deserves big ups for her unnerving choice of an ending. It was not what I'd thought it would be, and made the story that much more appealing to me.

Animal cruelty cost the book a star. I understood why Author Jinks made that choice, and I wasn't inclined to put the book down for good because of it, but it was dreadful and I warn my more sensitive readers (Kathy!) not to consider this tale for their own shelves.

The topic of incest and the crime of rape are factors in this story. They are hot buttons for many. I will say that Auhtor Jinks does not sensationalize them. They aren't dwelt on with ghoulish and repugnant "look! LOOK at how AWFUL men are!" glee. They are presented as facts, and as crimes; they are part of the women's experiences, and are told to us, the readers, as such.

I quite liked the pace set by Author Jinks. We're not in a hurry to get where we're going; there are interesting side characters and the land itself is a character of a sort. That, from my point of view, set the stakes effectively high for Meg, and for the reader. Anything that disrupts this lovely woman's Bolt Hole is a Bad Thing. And boy oh boy, the bad thing is very, very bad indeed. As Spooktober reads go, I think this one is as scary and as nightmarish as they come. Perfect for y'all ghoulies looking for a safe place to be wound up and scared witless!

FROM THE CAVES, Thea Prieto's Red Hen Press Novella Award-winning cli-fic dystopia

FROM THE CAVES
THEA PRIETO
Red Hen Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Environmental catastrophe has driven four people inside the dark throat of a cave: Sky, a child coming of age; Tie, pregnant and grieving; Mark, a young man poised to assume primacy; and Teller, an elder, holder of stories. As the devastating heat of summer grows, so does the poison in Teller's injured leg and the danger of Tie's imminent labor, food and water dwindling while the future becomes increasingly dependent on the words Sky gleans from the dead, stories pieced together from recycled knowledge, fragmented histories, and half-buried creation myths. From the Caves presents the past, present, and future in tandem, reshaping ancient and modern ideas of death and motherhood, grief and hope, endings and beginnings.

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

My Review: As tough as it is to sit in my air-conditioned room, with my instant access to hot and cold clean running water, my adequate...ample...luxuriously lush supply of food and think of the horrors to come for all those I'll leave behind in a decade or so, I am not required (yet) to decide if someone should live or die.

And that is the new standard I'll measure my irks and crotchets against: Did I have to decide whether someone else lived the rest of this day? No? Well then, belt up.

The story we're being told here in this novella is a simple one: How will Humanity sustain itself when the Earth declines to forgive us our trespasses any more? Five people, a remnant of the Los Angeles that once was, are living—eking an existence—on the shores of the Enemy Ocean in what was once Pasadena, near the Observatory. This information is lodged in the simple, basic words that Author Prieto puts in our sad, burning, withering climate-changed humans' mouths, but you need to be familiar with the place to get it.

As we meet Sky, he is doing something mundane until there is a major event: Someone falls from a height onto the shore. And just like that, five become four. It was Green, the group...made up of teenaged Mark (so called for his nasal damage), Teller the story-rememberer, Tie who is very heavily pregnant, and Sky the lad who will be our third person close-camera point of view...leader of sorts, the one who knew the reasons to put up the fog net to catch water only until the summer storms become too violent and how to grow their food-tubers in a dark cave that was once a lower floor, where a removable brick can bring in only enough scorching, sizzling light to enable it to grow...you see how crucial he was. The sun and the ocean grew more menacing with his loss.

As he climbs across the dunes and back into the quiet darkness of the caves, Sky wishes he could see the floating green and sparkling things Green liked to describe, wishes he could imagine people traveling by land and sea, but it's easier to remember sadness, thirst, and hunger when the ocean is an endless expanse of brown waves, a wide desert of seawater broken only by the distant, half-submerged remains of Old City. Out to sea, the torn shell of a single skyscraper and a lone section of a bridge loom out of the white-capped breakers, and the empty windows facing the beach are only sightless squares to Sky. Even though low tide reveals the flat tops of road signs and the hollow heads of street lamps, the only happiness Sky can summon from the past is remote, quiet, and small.

There is so much wrong with this picture...but the story is merely drawing its breath.

When I say "story," I want to be sure you're with me. This is a story. This story is, like every story you and I and all our ancestors have heard, seen, read, invented, based on an established need: Humans need stories to live. And this story, the one I want you to go spend your United States or Canadian or Australian or New Zealand dollars on, is rooted in ancestral stories of its own. I'm sure the repetition of the word "cave" will have its desired effect as a summoning bell for your memory sooner or later....

Maybe it would help to hear the story again. We don't have to sing it like Song or—Tie pauses—or remember all of Green's words. We can tell the story any way we want.

Tie looks at the globe, at the Moth message, and then at Mark.

We will remember and make new memories at the same time, she says.

And there is another story that Author Prieto retells, one that is a favorite of mine, from that same Ancient source. Here it goes by the name of Bear and Moon, and its lovely lineaments should summon you back to a symposium from longer ago than any of these characters can even conceptualize. Tie, heavily pregnant with the future, tells her men that she will accept nothing less than memories to put with the ones she already has.

It is a deeply meaningful moment. It is spoken from a heartbroken place. But it is, like all of Life, a burden she carries alone. In such a small group, each person carries their burdens alone despite the constant demands of survival. Even Sky, all of nine or ten when the story takes place; he's never forgiven for the crime of just Being when it cost his mother her life to make him. The group is in a terrible way. The can just barely pull it together to subsist...scrape by. No wonder the too-young-to-help Sky treasures words, "deep scratches of words" as Author Prieto calls them; although Lonely will always mean more than it probably should for one without blame for the hate he carries from his angry, unforgiving brother Mark. A moment when "Sky asks, what's an apple?" on hearing the word in a story...Poor poor pod of people...what a dry, hateful world they can't escape from is in the unremitting heat.

Because Teller has an accident as he, over angry Mark's objections, gives dead Green a funeral oration. Tie, pregnant with Green's child, has no strength for arguing, just follows doggedly as Teller gives his burning friend a farewell. But that accident...in a world with no food, you can be sure there's no Neosporin, and Teller slowly succumbs to an infection. In his long, wretched death the group comes to a new configuration, one that will have to last them for a long while. The burdens of existence are horrifyingly out of proportion to the endless luxury of those "progeny" who came before enjoyed.

The entire story will take you two, two and a half hours to read. But, if you're at all a sensitive soul, you'll spend that long afterwards thinking about the Code Red IPCC report just issued. If you're reading one of my reviews, you're 99% likely already on board with the "stories = survival" articles I've linked above. Now I want this to be clear to you, in case it isn't already: Author Thea Prieto has told us a fable of the lives our descendants can look forward to living if we don't heed that Code Red. She's done so by harking back to foundational stories Western readers are, or are very likely to be, familiar with. And in doing this she's created a story that, while all her own, owes its life to the unimaginable, incalculable, and unsustainable privilege we're enjoying.

I very deeply and humbly encourage you to buy and read this story as a work of literature that transcends its simple existence as that and offers you a hand held out in hope: We will not die; but we can, and should, and must do better than we are now doing. Our children's children's children need us to.

SUMMER OF THE CICADAS, a moody cli fi novel of self-discovery and healing

SUMMER OF THE CICADAS
CHELSEA CATHERINE
Red Hen Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Summer of the Cicadas is about a West Virginian town where a brood of Magicicadas emerges for the first time in seventeen years. The cicadas damage crops and trees, and swarm locals. Jessica, a former cop whose entire family was killed in a car crash two years earlier, is deputized during the crisis. Throughout the book, Jessica must deal with her feelings for her sister's best friend, Natasha, who is a town council member. After Fish and Wildlife removes the swarm, Jessica must also confront the two-year anniversary of her family's death, Natasha's budding romance with a local editor, as well as a sudden but devastating loss that changes everything.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK FROM RED HEN PRESS VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A book of eerie, unnatural-nature events pushing one lone and lonely lesbian, returned to small-town West Virginia from a law-enforcement career, to deal with Life. After many years' effort to Fit In (as she sees it), a personal tragedy derails her attempts to build an authentic life in Washington, DC. Coming home makes her fall into old, rejected-by-all patterns of thought. Jessica, whose first-person close PoV we're in for the entire book, is a past mistress of negative self-talk. The habit was established early, despite her close and accepting family...she relives a moment where her country-farmer father has The Talk with her, emphasizing that he loves his daughter and supports her exactly how she is (!!–this is how we know it's fiction)...but living among people who smell, sense in some way anyway, your Otherness and make your life a living hell can undo even the best parenting.

It does go a long way, this 'tude: "Fine," I say to Mason. "But no handcuffs this time." She's speaking to the sheriff, her ex-boss, and referring to the time he had to arrest her at a local strip club and then, because she was coked to the tits and causing a disturbance, fire her. There's a real risk to making your PoV character a smartass in a first-person present-tense novel. Author Catherine, for the most part, stays on the correct side of the line, but it's always an uncomfortable slip away from unpleasantness. It wouldn't ever take much to slide into "oh FFS get ***OVER*** yourself" territory in a story about a woman coming to terms with the boundaries and limitations and unhappinesses of an isolated rural lesbian life. Her crush object for half her life is Natasha, whose best-frienddom with Jess's dead sister keeps the two orbiting each other. Their flirtatious dance is sexual on Jess's part; Natasha is a tease, totally aware of what Jess is feeling and always dancing a bit ahead, to the side, never quite letting her have the prize.

The strange thing is that Jess, dopey lovesick girl that she was for Natasha, doesn't rush in and demand the whole package. But, then she'd have to act; action comes with consequences; and possibility, even at the price of a tease, is easier accept when you're about 99% sure that the real answer is NO. And then there's the whole "everybody hates me, nobody loves me, I'm gonna go eat worms" issue that Jess has with her fellow Mayberryans. (Yes, like THAT Mayberry. Roll with it.) The first third of the book is spent setting the stakes; now it's go time.

This summer is the one where the seventeen-year periodical Magicicadas endemic to deciduous forests in the Eastern US are expected. No one who's experienced it will forget the noise these damned things make. They're black and orange, have red eyes, and fly sluggishly.

Most of the time.

Not this year: Jess's pity party is trumped by the weirdness of the new hatching. These are brightly blue or green with red eyes, bodies as much as five inches long (!!), and whose normal sap-feeding habits are having strange, lethal effects on the trees around the crops already blighted by a hotter-than-usual summer. They're also swarming oddly...and attacking people with some regularity. No one appears to be more than injured by the sharp mouth-parts for a while, but the sheer weirdness of cicadas flying voluntarily and swarming humans, ordinarily pretty much invisible to them, makes the rural farming community scared as hell.

Jess and Mason, who's rehired her for the duration of this weirdness, are propelled into action; the actions are taken, the problem subsides, and Jess and Natasha are forced into ever-closer proximity. Events, as they do, take their course and, as the cicada problem reaches crisis proportions, all of the public and private abscesses in Mayberry burst in Jess's face.

To every birth its blood.

By the end of the book, I was satisfied that Jess's trajectory was altered; that's what I look for in a satisfying read. Up or down, good or bad, not stasis, or I lose my shit and shout mean things at my Kindle. Like it has magical powers to transmute my unkindness and frustration into pain for the offending creator (or Creator, depending). I can hope.

There are lapses in story logic...Mason's injury prevents him from walking but later he's clomping into a meeting? the deputy who's a meathead is also a good kid but is scared of a confrontation?...but honestly, I won't make a fuss about them because the characters are plenty enough to be going on with. The science part's harder to forget, though; there is nothing made of the parts of the story concerning the cicadas beyond a quick fix that works, A star vanished for that application of handwavium creme. Yes, fine, give me the first-person propulsiveness of Jess's PoV and her obsessions, but have the science folk part of her orbit! Tell me that they're acting scared, or shifty, or something to explain why what happened happened; and how they had canisters of handwavium creme handily tested and everything, though this is a seventeen-year periodical species?! That needs some questions from Jess that the science folk must answer somehow.

I liked Jess, though I wanted to shake her sometimes. I liked the self-knowledge she won her way through a miasma of misery to use to take herself off the hamster-wheel of self-loathing. But I wasn't *completely* satisfied, so here we are at a four-star ending.

THE FALLS OF THE WYONA, a coming-of-age novel about last midcentury set in beautiful Appalachia

THE FALLS OF THE WYONA
DAVID BRENDAN HOPES
Red Hen Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In The Falls of the Wyona by David Brendan Hopes, four friends growing up on the banks of a wild Appalachian river just after WWII discover, almost at the same time, the dangerous, alluring Falls and the perils of their own maturing hearts. Seen through the eyes of his best friend Arden, football hero Vince falls in love with the new kid, Glen. They have no context for their feelings, and the next few years of high school become a tense, though sometimes funny, artifice of concealment. The winner of Red Hen’s Quill Prize, The Falls of the Wyona is the first of three achieved (and several more projected) novels by this author imbued with the magical atmosphere of Appalachian culture.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK FROM RED HEN PRESS VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The thing about historical novels, ones set in a past deep enough to have lost its currency, is that they might as well be fantasy novels. On the other hand, historical novels that take place when one's parents were getting married and having their first children are in a peculiar place between contemporary and stuffy-old-fashioned nostalgia fests.

I went on this journey, to be sure, knowing where I was headed. The historical part wasn't that historical to my frame of reference; the queer part contained my frame of reference; so what was I doing here, exactly? Touristing a bygone age's homophobia, knowing it would end badly? Or listening to the gift of a story told by a person whose life was more firmly rooted in that time and place than mine? In the end, it's a matter of semantics, distinction without difference. I went to the Wyona River and I saw the Falls, felt the way it broke the people of its town into parts. Boys and girls led very separate lives when I was growing up, too, but the river being so exclusively (in the narrator, Alden's, mind) male rang me like a bell. The funny thing for me was seeing how open Vince, the coach's only child, was about his love for Glen...but only by the maleness of the Wyona.

Arden's narration of the moments that small-town Southern football-playin' boys shared then and now, if Friday Night Lights et alii are to be believed, came close to wearing my armor thin. I didn't like those guys, they didn't like me, and I was right back there in those awful, ugly hallways. Arden, a jock, and Tilden the smart jock, both orbit Vince or Vinny (depending on some weird social cue I never worked out, the nicknames interchanged) in a way that I saw clearly as a former high-school nobody. Glen finds them, and improbably gets to hang with them; many are the jealous glances the four received, I'm sure. Vince falls in love with Glen. Arden knows, but doesn't really care, because the knowledge doesn't touch his love for Vince or fondness for Glen. Tilden starts to figure it out, a little, but can't quite contextualize it.

High-school loves are always hotly urgently NEW and DEEP!! A parent as doting as Vince's former football-star father is begins to dread this reality...it's the 1940s, that was inevitable...and horrible, wicked, cruel things begin to happen. Poor Glen...a gloriously romantic tableau ends in as awful a passage as any I've read. The most poignant, delightful scene I read was when Glen's father visits Arden at his home, admits he knows that Glen was in love with Vince and says in effect, "I wouldn't have changed what I told Glen to do to win over his true love even if I'd known then what I do now." Arden doesn't know what this means, kid that he is, and Glen's dad asks him just to be Glen's friend. It was a heartbreaking, lovely moment, deeply felt and viscerally real. It gave me the true tragic heart of the story, and it is the best reason I can give you, straight or gay, parent or not, to read this story.

The ending of the book, of necessity I think, is crowded and over-wrought. People come to accommodations that are not adequately explained, the sudden realizations and restorations aren't very realistic, and the theme of Love Conquering All feels fragile and thin. I don't think there was a better way off this horse, though. The need to end the story at this point and in this specific gestalt really could not be gainsaid.

But that troubled my readerly gravity, pushing me out of the gravity well when I expected to be reeled in and landed. Author Hopes has a lot of storytelling behind him. It shows in every beat he counts. It is always agreeable to be guided by a steady, firm hand. In the end, this tour was ended abruptly and I left the read wishing, regretting ever so slightly, wondering how, or if, the ending could've been more rooted in the story told.

I can't answer that, and it is that fact which left me with a three-plus star rating instead of the four-plus I'd expected to leave.