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?

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

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.

DAY BOY, dark fantasy & WEIRD FISHES, subaquatic cli fi

WEIRD FISHES
RAE MARIZ
Stelliform Press
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: AN UNDERWATER TALE OF FRIENDSHIP AGAINST MONSTROUS ODDS

When Ceph, a squid-like scientist, discovers proof of the ocean’s slowing currents, she makes the dangerous ascent from her deep-sea civilization to the uncharted surface above. Out of her depths and helpless in her symbiotic mech suit, Ceph relies on Iliokai, a seal-folk storyteller, who sings the state of the sea and has seen evidence of clogged currents as she surfs the time gyres throughout the lonely blue. Navigating the perils of their damaged ocean environment, and seemingly insurmountable cultural differences, Ceph and Iliokai realize that the activities of terrestrial beings are slowing the spiralling currents of time. On a journey that connects future and past, the surface and the deep, the unlikely friends struggle to solve a problem so big it needs a leviathan solution.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU. ***CW: rape***

My Review: I know a lot of folks are, um, squeamish about couples that aren't one-man/one-woman. Y'all gonna bust somethin' when it comes to intimate interspecies relations....

But my gosh! The worldbuilding in this novella would support a billion-page nonillionology for each of these cultures. And still the read manages to be truly satisfying. That is a major achievement. The consequences of human action starts the plot on its course; the circle of life gets closed in the end, but in a way I warned you about above.

I am delighted to say that every step leading up to the ending's unpleasantness contains no such activity. I can't say you're likely to be prepared for it with foreshadowing or desensitization. I can say it's stark and shocking when it happens, unambiguous in its cost, and fully part of the narrative arc.

And my goddesses did I hate it.

There's nothing like consequences to offer a lesson about what the author wants to say. I'm glad Author Mariz said it. But I still hated it.

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

DAY BOY
TRENT JAMIESON
Erewhon Books
$25.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A lyrical, tender story about role models and growing into manhood that reimagines the elements of the vampire myth in a wholly original way . . . while never breathing a word about vampires.

They worship the Sun: the only god as cruel as they are.

The Masters, dreadful and severe, rule the Red City and the lands far beyond it. By night, they politic and feast, drinking from townsfolk resigned to their fates. By day, the Masters must rely on their human servants, their Day Boys, to fulfill their every need and carry out their will.

Mark is a Day Boy, practically raised by his Master, Dain. It’s grueling, often dangerous work, but Mark neither knows nor wants any other life. And, if a Day Boy proves himself worthy, the nightmarish, all-seeing Council of Teeth may choose to offer him a rare gift: the opportunity to forsake his humanity for monstrous power and near-immortality, like the Masters transformed before him.

But in the crackling heat of the Red City, widespread discontent among his fellow humans threatens to fracture Mark's allegiances. As manhood draws near, so too does the end of Mark's tenure as a Day Boy, and he cannot stay suspended between the worlds of man and Master for much longer.

With brilliantly evocative, hypnotic prose, Trent Jamieson crafts a fang-sharp and surprisingly tender coming-of-age story about a headstrong boy—and the monster who taught him to be a man.

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

My Review: Erewhon does very, very interesting SF stories, like this wonderfully realized take on vampirism. The story of Mark, the Master/vampire's Day Boy coming of age in a system that is grotesquely unfair, is handled with care and with respect for his genuine struggle to come to terms with his privilege. As this is a struggle many, if not most of us with levels of privilege similar to Mark's have yet to engage with/in, the story isn't a Young Adult one. In my opinion, anyway.

I'd like to call y'all's attention to the descriptive prose. It is very well-handled. It doesn't overwhelm the momentum of the story, and it doesn't veer into for-its-own-sake lyricality. I'd excerpt some or you but the fact is it's best appreciated in its context...anything I call out won't have the impact I'm describing to you. Author Jamieson is one heckuva prose stylist and that alone's a reason for fans of the vampire genre, the post-apocalyptic genre, and social-comment fiction to read it.