FISHING FOR THE LITTLE PIKE, Finnish language translation of folk/cozy horror-tinged fantasy murder mystery...no, really

FISHING FOR THE LITTLE PIKE
JUHANI KARILA (tr. Lola Rogers)
Restless Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the utterly original, genre-defying, English-language debut of Finnish author Juhani Karila, a young woman’s annual pilgrimage to her home in Lapland to catch an elusive pike in three days is complicated by a host of mythical creatures, a murder detective hot on her trail, and a deadly curse hanging over her head.

When Elina makes her annual summer pilgrimage to her remote family farm in Lapland, she has three days to catch the pike in a local pond or she and the love of her life will both die. This year her task is made more difficult by the intervention of a host of deadly supernatural creatures and a murder detective on her tail.

Can Elina catch the pike and put to rest the curse that has been hanging over her head since a youthful love affair turned sour? Can Sergeant Janatuinen make it back to civilization in one piece? And just why is Lapland in summer so weird?

Fishing for the Little Pike is an audacious, genre-defying blend of fantasy, folk tale, and nature writing.

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

My Review: I'm endlessly absorbed in stories about the Arctic, and learning to be so about stories in the Sámi culture. The more I learn about these complex interrelationships, and the fascinating people and cultures they produce, the more acutely aware of climate change's personal costs I grow.

At no time was I sure what was going on. That's by the author's design. Is the mythic world of the Sámi real? I mean on the consensus-reality scale, none of what happens ought to happen; so is the Sámi model of reality real? It is to Elina, and the consensus-reality world of the story's framing device can't account for the stranger events, so....

It's just delightful to be in that "no, that thing can not exist but she's...omigawd, what?!" head when there's a police detective from the consensus-reality world as flummoxed as we are, as stymied as possible in the execution of an apprehension, and just as bewildered as we are. The people of Vuopio don't hesitate to gossip around her, like the time the mayor, well...her consensus-reality mind doesn't accept that.

The nature writing in this story is evocative enough to make me feel summer sunburnt and skeeter-bit, colorful enough to fit seamlessly around the frankly disturbing delineation of Sámi supernatural entities, and the gestalt becomes as immersive as The Man Who Spoke Snakish. I'm charmed, I'm unnerved, I've laughed, I've stressed my limbic system into believing I've Seen Things.

Slabber Olli told her about the places he had been. He had been to the bottom of the sea and wandered endless gardens of stars in outer space. He said that human time as we know it was over. That the waters would rise and then fall, and then fiery waters would come. The Earth would be reshaped into something new. Mud would flow. Boiling canyons would open up.

"The mountains are already starting to move,” Slabber Olli said.

He told her about creatures that used to live in the sea, like reptiles with two mouths, a horizontal one and a vertical one. He told her about creatures at the bottom of the sea shaped like elm leaves, with five eyes and long, bendy elephant trunks and scissors on their heads.

About sharks with anvils growing on their backs. Flightless birds three meters tall that ran after deer on graceful, muscular legs that bent and stretched, bent and stretched, their beaks opened wide. He told her about the rockets people would build to shoot themselves off to other planets, and how badly it would turn out. Humans would continue their journey. They would find doors to knock on and portals that wouldn't open when they knocked, and the humans would break them down, and the ones they couldn't break they would build keys for. And all the while, humans would be changing. Humans would be changed not just by time but by humans themselves, and before long you'd have to call them human derivatives, and then something else entirely. In the end, it was just matter rearranging itself over and over. What was the Earth? Nothing more than an entrance hall where humanity had once briefly waited.

The consensus-reality world doesn't knowingly or willingly contain these things. Elina, in her calm way, accepts this deluge of weirdness, and then goes on about being in Lapland to prevent a curse from activating and ruining her life.

After all, why else are there raskels, or frakuses, or that bloody murderous knacky who's trapped her into the highest-imaginable stakes card game? And was the mayor of her hometown really...disappeared...by a wraith? The consensus-reality detective, who just wants to bring Elina in for questioning as there's reason to believe she's, um, involved in a murder, certainly thinks so. The villagers say so, too. (The wraith thing not the murder, although....)

I'd give this truly wacky, fun, off-kilter setting all five stars alone. I can't get that high because Elina's curse is unsatisfyingly acquired and self-perpetuated. She's taken it on to process a set of guilts that do not properly belong to her. I'm down for the fantasy aspects of the story but I draw the line at emotionally self-sabotaging women.

I'm as close to all five stars as that grunt of dissatisfaction will allow me to get. I'll read anything Author Juhani Karila writes that's translated, though, because I had a fine old time with this story.

ROUGE, more than a color...a way of life and a (bad) reason to live

ROUGE
MONA AWAD
Simon Element
$28.00 hardcover, available now

One of Literary Hub's Best Reads od 2023!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?

For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.

Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.

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

My Review: I had the kind of mother who told her daughters, "you have to suffer for beauty, girls." Noelle reminded me a lot of Mama. Deeply shallow, focused to the exclusion of all else on irrelevancies, fripperies, and appearances, Noelle's my definition of toxic womanhood. Also very much the embodiment of what women were and are told they were supposed to be, to care about, and to focus on.

How horrifying. How titanically wasteful.

And how ripe for a loud, satirical takedown, which Author Awad delivers. Adding a supernatural edge to it, no less.

This kind of dark, menacing take on consumerism's extra-toxic focus on women and the messaging aimed squarely at their money is something I wish more women wrote. I remember my mother's obsessive regimens for her skin and how many perfumey unguents and masks she would bring home from the department store. I never saw the dentist and got one pair of glasses, one pair of shoes a year...she had dozens of these things littering her bathroom counter. Yep. I know this obsession is real.

The reality of it made, for me, the supernatural element...humorous, in a very black and cynical way. Of course there must be some awful, evil outside agent making us feel this way...no rational person would surrender to obsession so easily, you can hear the self-justifiers and excusers say. It was genius for Author Awad to make those evil outside agents the malevolent supernatural entities of La Maison de Méduse instead of the blandly corporate agents of evil called Lanvin, Coty, Revlon, et alii.

This gives her so much more latitude to poke fun, too. She's got her sights on the obsession with surfaces, and the ease of trapping women with such simple lures as beauty and youthful appearance. There's a whiff of colorism in the discussions of "managing one's skin tone" that made me cringe. It rang all the more loudly in my ears after I read her sketch of the beauty obsession that's gripped her middle-aged self in The Walrus (here). What a wonderful, wry way to send up one's own foibles and insecurities, I thought. What a talent this author has to make me, a certifiable man and victim of neglect by a beauty addict, read the story with such intensity and interest.

It didn't hurt that Author Awad wrote in that piece:

A bookseller once told me that when you buy a book, you’re also buying the idea of time in which to read it. A down payment on an extension of life, a shimmer of immortality. With my growing collection of serums, I was perhaps seeking something similarly existential. An illusion of control. A staving off of death.

Yep, as the saying goes, thass me.

Why I'd say to read it is that it's a great antidote to the huge ocean of mediocre man-blaming same-ol' same-ol' women's fiction. It's bracingly honest about the internal roots of obsession without ever excusing the forces outside that drive to turn it, purely for profit, into addiction.

FOLK SONGS FOR TRAUMA SURGEONS: Stories, 2021's Shirley Jackson Award-winner for Best Single-Author Collection

FOLK SONGS FOR TRAUMA SURGEONS: Stories
KEITH ROSSON
Meerkat Press
$8.95 ebook editions, available now

WINNER of the 2021 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single-Author Collection!

Rating:

The Publisher Says: With Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons, award-winning author Keith Rosson once again delves into notions of family, identity, indebtedness, loss, and hope, with the surefooted merging of literary fiction and magical realism he's explored in previous novels. In "Dunsmuir," a newly sober husband buys a hearse to help his wife spread her sister's ashes, while "The Lesser Horsemen" illustrates what happens when God instructs the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to go on a team-building cruise as a way of boosting their frayed morale. In "Brad Benske and the Hand of Light," an estranged husband seeks his wife's whereabouts through a fortuneteller after she absconds with a cult, and the returning soldier in "Homecoming" navigates the strange and ghostly confines of his hometown, as well as the boundaries of his own grief. With grace, imagination, and a brazen gallows humor, Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons merges the fantastic and the everyday, and includes new work as well as award-winning favorites.

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

My Review:

Per the Mudge standard, I'll use the Bryce Method of short, separate impressions and distinct individual ratings for the stories to give you an understanding of this award-winning author's debut story collection after who-knows-how-many anthologizations.

The Lesser Horsemen it's a little hard to believe that Pestilence didn't get that call from The Good Lord in 2020. A workplace comedy starring the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as The Good Lord gets them the therapy they so desperately need. 3.5 stars




At This Table




Baby Jill




Their Souls Climb the Room




Hospitality




This World or the Next




Gifts




Coyote




Yes, We Are Duly Concerned with Calamitous Events




Winter, Spring, Whatever Happens After That




Forgive Me This




Dunsmuir




Homecoming




The Melody of the Thing




Brad Benske and the Hand of Light