NEEDLEMOUTH, latest K-Ming Chang women's wrongs weirdness

NEEDLEMOUTH
K-MING CHANG
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of Bestiary, three cousins are forced to complete an impossible and violent task set by a vengeful demon.

Cousins Cindy, Yangyang, and Mandy’s hot, tedious summer unfolds in their grandmother’s hauntingly familiar house. Mandy, the eldest, seeks connection online and exchanges emails with a stranger. Yangyang, the youngest, retreats into her own imagination in search of meaning. But every morning Cindy wakes with strange objects in her mouth: a button, a berry, a coin.

One night, a starved figure with a mouth the size of a needle-tip appears at Cindy’s bedside. She is hunger-afflicted, a demon with no descendants to feed from: she is Needlemouth. Part vampire, part hungry ghost, Needlemouth forces the girls into a grim task to end a man’s life.

Cindy, Yangyang, and Mindy are plunged in and out of the demon realm, where they are called to break out of the indifference and numbness of their claustrophobic worlds, and where they are met with the most rageful and resistant parts of themselves. In a quest to satisfy the demon’s hunger, they unravel their shared grief and reckon with the cyclical violence that shaped their family. For readers of Akwaeke Emezi and Carmen Maria Machado, K-Ming Chang has crafted a reimagined coming of age novel that asks: what does it mean to become the monster instead of slaying it?

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My Review: Cecilia was my intro to the...earthy, primal...fascinations of K-Ming Chang. A writer with a strangely lyrical way of presenting yucky realities of having a female body goes right into the lifeblood (!) of blood in menstruating females and vampires.

Needlemouth wants the cousins who are her targets to figure out a major problem for her: Daddy Dearest is a horrible, abusive, misogynistic, etc etc world without end, bastard who's cursed her...see title...and thus end her pain. Oh, and theirs, because he's involved in their family's losses somehow. (It was explained, I *think* anyway; either poorly or incredibly in the literal sense. I retain no sense of it.) It's your fates, women, to either rebel or collaborate. Passive little Yangyang already collaborates that way. The other two? Ready to ride and/or die to strike a blow for Womankind! Passively Yangyang goes with. Astounding, no? (Why is it Needlemouth, an actual demon {if female-presenting} can't do this herself, exactly?)

To accomplish their task the cousins are transported (disorientingly and that uncertainty I can say with certainty is deliberate) between mudanity and the demon world of the vampires. It is a beautiful virtuoso performance by K-Ming Chang, noticeably, lyrically lovely in sound...I read it aloud at times...and very effectively indicating our frame of reference has shifted. Author Chang does not write workmanlike prose at any time in the two books of hers I've read; this perspective shift still stands out as graceful and intense.

The young women are, as I am learning is usual with Author Chang, aware of the living human body. It is very, very, very present. I'm beginning to wonder if "K-Ming Chang" is not simply Chinese for "Joe Abercrombie" or, at the very least, if she is not his descendant. I thought The Devils was a shitty, as in "shit-filled," story. Hold my beer, says K-Ming Chang. It can, at times, overwhelm my sense of the complexities I'm needing to track in the story. It is a fine balance to get right. It's not always calibrated properly for even my pretty strong stomach.

You will not clutch your pearls upon learning Needlemouth is not always a reliable narrator. She might've left some details about consequences out of her stirring pitch to the cousins. I'll say this about how it all turns out: I was shocked, repulsed, and downright irked at how very much of the human body's workings were made plain, laid bare, and how intense and viscaeral the poetice prose-hallucination was; but the ending was unexpected, was so balanced on a kinfetip let alone edge, that I reattached the full fourth star that slipped off after a particular...facial, let's call it.

My squeamish sensitive souls should not come within hailing distance of the story. All the female rage, all the smoldering hatred of petty tyranny all the shrieking outrage at the tyrannical, unfair patriarchy will not make up for that...facial.

Take my word for it: Revenge and vengeance are only cousins, not siblings, and their goals are not always compatible.

Vengeance is a nobler victor.

AMERICAN WEREWOLVES, Emily Jane's ruminations on end-stage capitalism and toxic masculinity

AMERICAN WEREWOLVES
EMILY JANE
Hyperion Avenue (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: America’s venture capitalist werewolves meet their match in USA Today bestseller Emily Jane’s third rollicking, genre-defying novel.

“It takes aliens (or an Emily Jane) to help us see our society for the bizarre, sugary, microplastic-poisoned dream it is.” —Edgar Cantero

From the author of On Earth as It Is on Television and Here Beside the Rising Tide…

Many full moons ago, a young American boy with ambition in his belly and the moon in his veins followed his destiny west, determined to carve a path to success no matter the carnage.

Two centuries later, a city is captivated by the strange and savage murder of a young woman. Her roommate, Natasha, no longer able to afford their apartment alone—and hounded by both rumors of wolves and a pop-star’s angry fan-swarm—has resorted to living in her car. There’s nothing left for her…except vengeance.

Across town, Shane LaSalle is about to see his wildest dreams come true. He already has a gorgeous apartment and a high paying job in venture capital. Now the partners of Barrington Equity have invited him to board the company’s private jet for an exclusive retreat. But with partnership finally in his reach, Shane realizes he’s losing his taste for just how ruthless and all-consuming the firm is.

Epic and electric, American Werewolves brings readers from the wilds of the New World to the opulent board rooms and golf courses of the twenty-first century, where devouring the weak is an American birthright as old as the country itself.

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My Review: I was really amused by On Earth as It Is on Television last year. It made me smile and chuckle in a year when those were not my first choices of response to the world and its shenanigans. I'd hoped for the same experience here.

Mostly got it, though entirely without humor. Toxic masculinity and predatory capitalism are worthy targets for Author Emily Jane's sharply observed snark. Told in two narrative strands, this story of modern-day Shane, an ordinary young man who's just found out he's now a partner in an equity-capital firm; modern-day Natasha, a downwardly mobile woman who is determined to find out how her bizarrely murdered roommate, Marie, died and why no one else seems to care; and, in the nineteenth century, a boy called Bit who wends his way West to make his fortune. There's a horrible animal attack on Shane, to bookend Marie's murder by an unknown creature; it's the first of many such events that Author Emily Jane presents in a dry, unsensationalized framework for us to, ermmm, chew over. Why this character? Why now? What really happened here, who's noticed, and why are we seeing the responses that Emily Jane shows us?

It's just incredible that these people are somehow existing in relation to each other. It does feel stretch-y, like the need of the storytelling trumped the need of the characters; none of them are ever going to be easy in each others' headspace. Which is the point. It just left me with a sad, uneasy emotional aftertaste. I'm clear that the rape-culture and misogyny elements are presented in a highly negative and critical light. I don't know for sure that they're necessary to foreground so much...put it down to my dislike of these themes, not the author's overuse of them in making your decision to read the story or not.

I suspect that, my quibbles above notwithstanding, it will be Author Emily Jane's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell-esque urban fantasy elements regarding lycanthropy and its invented factual history that will cause most of y'all to give the read a pass. I get it...the technique can feel off-putting if over- or awkwardly done. I found these elements very well-chosen and did not find them out of place or obtrusive in the author's hands. Werewolves or aliens, from her previous book—makes no odds, each is as unlikely as the other to be objectively verifiably present among us.

Your taste in humor will matter a lot in your experience of the read, so get that sample under your belt. If you run across this: "Veronica tried to convince him that werewolves weren't supposed to cry, until her dad explained that werewolves could cry when they needed to and it didn't make them any less werewolvesy," and do not at least chuckle, this read will flop for you likely quite resoundingly.

Most of the rest of us will, however, get our grin on. I think it's worth the time and treasure it will take to get it read.

THE MIDNIGHT KNOCK, does several #Deathtober-y things, none well

THE MIDNIGHT KNOCK
JOHN FRAM
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A locked-room mystery meets white-knuckle horror in this mind-bending thriller, where strangers must survive a deadly night in a remote Texas motel.

In the frigid west Texas desert, weary travelers converge at a lonely roadside motel nestled at the foot of a massive mountain. Ethan and Hunter have left behind a corpse, a fire, and a horrific act of violence. Kyla and Fernanda are fleeing for the border. Stanley and his granddaughter are returning from Mexico with a mysterious man in hot pursuit. All of them are on the run from something. All of them are hiding something.

And somehow, they’re all connected to the motel’s other guest, an enigmatic woman named Sarah Powers.

Within hours, Sarah is dead. The strange twins who run the Brake Inn Motel inform the surviving guests that her murder demands justice. The guests are given an ultimatum: uncover the killer by midnight—or die when the protective lights around the motel go out.

Because something very old and very dangerous lurks in this corner of the desert. And it’s hungry.

But nothing at the Brake Inn Motel is quite as it seems. As time ticks away, alliances fracture, secrets unravel, and the guests will not only have to confront the violence of the past—they will need to face the darkness within themselves.

A masterful blend of psychological tension, supernatural horror, and layered storytelling, The Midnight Knock pushes the boundaries of what a mystery can be. And with its unforgettable climax, this novel cements John Fram as a contemporary master of the genre.

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My Review: Gore for the sake of being gory isn't my usual fare; I'm no fan of "supernatural" stuff because I don't believe it's real; but a locked-room mystery, now...with those fripperies added on, let's see how this plays out.

Okay.

Why the people just...accept...that there's a deadline against which they're required to work Or Else puzzled me. So that one woman died...why should that mean anyone else will? Why not just shove past those overbearing twins and start walking til you have cell service?

I'm not the platonic ideal of a reader for this story, as you see. I'm pretty much off this storytelling beam for good from when Groundhog Day-type time loops start happening. The Ship-of-Fools trope was really powerfully evoked by everything from the setup to the ragging on gabardine as a suiting-material choice. I'm sure someone not prone to laughing at Saw movies because they're so deeply dumb will get much more out of the read than I did.

That said, I thought the rural West Texas setting was effective, for me anyway. It's a dry, unnervingly empty place, and the place being at the foot of a mountain is unsettling amid so much nothing-much. It wasn't enough to overcome my reality fetish but it was a solid choice.

When I'm told a story is a locked-room mystery, I expect there to be a serious, logical, undeniable reason the cast can not...not do not, not choose not to...leave. I also expect the mystery to make daytime-world, no spookieghouliewoo-woo reasonable sense. Not delivered. Plus I did not care about the affront to Ma'at that was this victim's murder. I was glad she was dead.

So on balance, I'll say you know your spooky-season reading needs so are best equipped to determine the fit between you and this story. I don't regret reading it, but I still wish I'd got the promised mystery at the least.