STRANGE LIGHTS, paranormal found-family horror/SFF tale of raising a chupacabra as a single mom

STRANGE LIGHTS
MIRA GONZÁLEZ
Bindery Books|Ezeekat Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: squeaks to four full stars

The Publisher Says: Parenting is never easy, but it’s a hell of a lot harder when your toddler is a chupacabra.

Paranormal investigator and cryptozoologist Reggie has embraced her fate as parent to an adopted toddler, Eldi—a blood-sucking chupacabra with a fondness for goats. Reggie wants nothing more than to put her complicated past in the rearview mirror and fade into as much obscurity as her toddler will allow. But a rash of UFOs in the night sky and a couple of crop-circle-carving Roombas force Reggie into an investigation that attracts the attention of an old enemy, an anti-supernatural agency hunting for creatures like Eldi. To outwit them, Reggie must team up with Calvin: a podcaster-turned-werewolf whose charm is a real threat to Reggie’s rule against romantic attachments.

With Reggie’s history quickly catching up to her and Eldi in the agency’s crosshairs, any shred of normalcy evaporates. Reggie must decide: Can she confront her dark past to save Eldi—and an entire alien species—from getting wiped out of the universe?

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

My Review: A Winnebago so tricked out it's almost a spaceship...but is much more than appearances suggest.

A single foster mom/cryptozoologist...raising a half-chupacabra toddler.

And several cornfields of crop-circle making Roombas.

Oh, and also a yummy-looking cryptid-debunking podcaster. Who's a werewolf.

Nothing's quite normal, quite as it appears, in Reggie's world. No one is ready for anyone else's unrevealed private truth; everyone's really fine with it when the masks come off. Mostly fine. Most of the time. It's a rollicking story most of the way, at about 55-60% it gets into necessary-but-long backstory exposition. It ends the forward momentum at the point in the story where it genuinely can't be recovered because there's not enough story left to do it. I think most readers won't really notice the placement (and there's no better way or place to do it, I really tried to figure one out) but could be slightly put off by how much the action slows while feeling totally wowed and bumfuzzled by what they're learning.

Reggie and Eldi are truly parent and kid-charge in the most endearing way, a slice of serendipity such as an uncaring universe fails to fuck up every once in a while. It's part of Author González' magic that while she's telling a wildly improbable wad of truth...the cryptid-debunking werewolf podcaster makes complete and entire sense after the initial laugh/headscratch/forehead wrinkle...she's sneaking the sentimental sniff and a teardrop out of you. Eldi the half-chupacabra will wring your withers with "baaawww"ness before the next goat goes. Calvin the werewolf, now *there's* a man I want to meet! They're all in a twilight zone between normies and the larger world whose truth we can't handle, to quote Jack Nicholson's speech pretty much whole. The fearsome task of running interference while running away from the Big Bads (plural very much intentional) is the root of the unit forming before us, and has now reached the point where there are pasts to normalize within this found family.

The intersubjective—the dynamic reality that arises from the interactions between objects with seemingly fixed properties—is the essence of the quantum world, and it is also the essence of human relationships. Who you become in a particular relationship is not any more you or less you than who you are in your deepest solitude, because there is no you—the self is not the container of your interactions with the rest of the world but the contents.

It's part of a fantastic essay my sister forwarded to me as I sat contemplating what to write about this book. It explains aome issues I've been noodling over and had got nowhere with trying to form usefully. The ineluctable quantum effects show themselves everywhere, now we've seen them we can't unsee them.

A story resonating on a quantum level and rocked by gravity waves is not going to stay tidy. It makes me feel a bit sad that many of y'all are going to wonder a little too hard about that backstory/pacing hurdle and choose not to spend your fiercely protected eyeblinks on the read; yet I'm never going to shy away from sharing truths I know are risky to tell. I urge you to go steadily onward to get yourselves to the ending.

It is where I vaulted from three-plus to a full four stars.

No more—spoilers—but an exhortation to do #Deathtober's spooky vibe with something fun, substantial, and weird as fuck.

R.V. RAMAN'S PAGE: Harith Athreya series 1 & 2...GRAVE INTENTIONS, and A WILL TO KILL

A WILL TO KILL (Harith Athreya #1)
R.V. RAMAN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$2.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: MIST, MOUNTAINS, MURDER.

Ageing millionaire Bhaskar Fernandez has invited his relatives to the remote, and possibly haunted, Greybrooke Manor, high up in the misty Nilgiris.

He knows his guests expect to gain from his death, so he writes two conflicting wills. Which one of them comes into force will depend on how he dies.

Fernandez also invites Harith Athreya, a seasoned investigator, to watch what unfolds.

When a landslide leaves the estate temporarily isolated, and a body is discovered, Athreya finds that death is not the only thing that the mist conceals. . .

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

My Review: First in a new series of private-investigator mysteries set in India. This Golden-Age style story about a murder yet to occur and fully expected by its purported victim that then morphs into a locked-room mystery is investigated by a Poirot-level famous private investigator. Or so we're told...I'm as always just a bit annoyed that I'm vouchsafed no evidence of this assertion, but that complaint is not one bit new or unusual.

I was set to love the read from the get-go because I read these reissues this summer. It's set in cool, misty mountains, and I about sobbed with jealousy as I compared that to the supersummer outside. *sigh* As I encountered more and more characters, beginning to wonder about a dramatis personae being notably absent. Such a simple thing to add, I mused, and so very helpful. It also struck me that the characters were more or less in the highwayman school: stand and deliver their piece of the narrative. That's a lot of time spent outside the narrative stagecoach waiting to get moving again.

A body is discovered. It means we're all in the stagecoach again, moving at a slightly bouncy, uncushioned pace. It becomes a locked-room mystery as we're moving along; no change of bouncing rocking pace as we clunk shins and bonk shoulders with characters who *are* going to say their piece, despite earlier attitudinal tics. It could have something to do with the sausage-fest we're having here, everyone is male and don't they just show it. A second body is discovered and there is more stand-and-deliver set-piece delivery. A big problem for me is no one who's died is at all, in any way, undeserving of their murder.

It's like a lesser Poirot story meant to convey the eerieness of The Pale Horseman. It works as a story well enough because we know where we're going. It's a bit less effective if the reader's not already on board with the Golden-Age conventions because then the solution, and its delivery by Athreya, ties everything to objects we're aware exist but not filled in on particulars about. It makes the solution a bit less impactful, more like the delivery of a sermon that we and everyone else, simply accept is true and so must be correct.

Points for period appropriateness, then, fewer for fair-play mystery solution, and please dear goddesses give me a damn list of who's who at the beginning. As a series starter I'm most definitely glad I've got all four in their reissue; I don't think I'd've picked up the second one (see below) if it had come out a year or more later.

The ebook is on sale, so definitely go get one!

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


GRAVE INTENTIONS (Harith Athreya #2)
R.V. RAMAN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Death, a cursed archaeological dig, and a beloved detective feature in this cozy stand-alone mystery set in contemporary India.

SECRETS

Seasoned detective Harith Athreya is back, this time to investigate suspicious incidences on a riverside dig in the heart of remote Bundelkhand.

SUPERSTITION

In this place, rich in myth and history, the legend goes that anyone who sets foot on nearby island Naaz Tapu would be cursed forever.

SLAUGHTER

When an archaeologist defies local folklore, the fallout is swift and deadly. Is the death a result of the ancient curse, or is it a more down-to-earth case of murder? Athreya needs to unravel the truth from legend before the curse strikes again….

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

My Review: Archaeology! Possible supernatural stuff! A Dramatis Personae! Yes, yes, yes to all of these as good omens, and ways to get my repeat business.

On to the story.

Book two sets itself the task of telling us binaries exist for a reason, there is nothing we do not want to be expressed in a well-matched faceoff between, eg, two young women who are chilly career driven professional/warm, inclusive, family-loving opposites. Athreya is on a holiday with the latter, a nibling of his, and the former is the director of a "cursed" archaeological dig where a local wise guy seems to be stealing artifacts the dig is uncovering. A local legend of lovers kept apart by centuries old political feuding placing the area under a curse offers a modern murderer cover is the first thought a mystery fan would have; but who wants the specific person dead and why? What is the dig site looking for? Do local customs only matter if the people flouting them are white/colonizer people?

Again requested to solve a crime yet to take place, Athreya immediately zooms in on the artifact thefts but...well...are they thefts or rescues of cultural patrimony? Who decides this? What difference does it make, if the end result is the object ends up far far away leaving nothing in its place? Knowledge of the past that will never be accessible to the cultural descendants is no more complete a theft than a profitably sold antiquity....

In the quest to solve the mysteries via fair play, Author Raman snuck a valuable clue past me...in plain sight! Well done, sir. I enjoyed the Murder in Mesopotamia meets The White Tiger vibes. It felt more cohesive and less speechifyin' in tone than A Will to Kill (above) did. The read passed with admirable velocity, the Dramatis Personae made a big difference to my sense of the read as under my control, and Athreya's enough more familiar to me this time around that I felt prepared from the off to invest in his resolution.

A career spent making corporate presentations and mentoring young entrepreneurs has taught Author Raman to stay nimble, to choose a principle at the center of the story he wants to tell then to be sure his story relates to that principle all the way through. That serves him well in this second Athreya mystery/thriller.