RAGNAR JÓNASSON'S PAGE: The Criminologist Helgi Reykdal three-book series

THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE MISSING CRIME WRITER
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Victoria Cribb)
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: One winter evening bestselling crime author Elín S. Jónsdóttir goes missing.

There are no clues to her disappearance and it is up to young detective, Helgi, to crack the case before it's leaked to the press.

As he interviews the people closest to her—a publisher, an accountant, a retired judge—he realises that Elín’s life wasn’t what it seemed. In fact, her past is even stranger than her stories.

As the case of the missing crime writer becomes more mysterious by the hour, Helgi must uncover the secrets of a very unexpected life . . .

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

My Review: Three timelines again: 1965 (investigated by Hulda, whom we see but all is not what it seems), 2005, and book-present, 2012. Dirty deeds done in each. It is now a Ragnar trope. While each one was, in fact, required to resolve the crime Helgi's investigating, the book-present ends on a cliffhanger...but not the one you're expecting. Still, the phobic about such things should know that before committing to the read.

Elín S. Jónsdóttir seemed to me to be Over It All before she disappeared...her 2005 interview (with Kristin, fellow series-readers) was, shall we say, adversarial and quite insinuating. I was left with an impression that this would go somewhere more central than it did...still played its part in a different way. It is not presented anywhere in its entirety, but is broken into chunks...I saw why, but it took time.

I think this might be the thing I enjoy most about Ragnar's storyverse. Everything does always connect up, only sometimes not where you thought it would. Helgi is a listener first and foremost. He comes across to more action-loving procedural readers as a bit passive. He's a thinking machine. (Anybody remember Futrelle's character, or am I the sole survivor?) Only better-looking....

It's a series, and it slots into other series written by Ragnar; the storyverse must needs be left a bit baggy at the knees in individual cases to work the way they must as a unit. One consistent factor that appeals to me is Helgi's explicit love and reverence for Dame Agatha Christie. It is obvious to me that Ragnar wants the Icelandic love of reading and its astonishing book culture to be on display in this series. Fine by me! You go, reader-boy! "That's what books are for: they help you travel to places you wouldn't otherwise be able to visit, journey through worlds that don't exist." I'd have that tattooed on me if I could think of a place to have it where I wouldn't have to explain who "Helgi" was every five minutes.

Lastly, let me just say that I hate Bergthora even more now. And Helgi needs to get that mess sorted by professional means. He's a cop faGawdsake!

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

DEATH AT THE SANATORIUM
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Victoria Cribb)
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 1983

At a former sanatorium in the north of Iceland, now a hospital ward, an old nurse, Yrsa, is found murdered. Detective Hulda Hermannsdottir and her boss, Sverrir, are sent to investigate her death. There, they discover five suspects: the chief physician, two junior nurses, a young doctor, and the caretaker, who is arrested following false testimony from one of the nurses, but subsequently released.

Less than a week after the murder, the chief physician, is also found dead, having apparently fallen from a balcony. Sverrir, rules his death as suicide and assumes that he was guilty of the murder as well. The case is closed.

2012

Almost thirty years later, Helgi Reykdal, a young police officer, has been studying criminology in the UK, but decides to return to Iceland when he is offered a job at the Reykjavik police department—the job which detective Hulda Hermannsdottir is about to retire from.

He is also a collector of golden age detective stories, and is writing his thesis on the 1983 murders in the north. As Helgi delves deeper into the past, and starts his new job, he decides to try to meet with the original suspects. But soon he finds silence and suspicion at every turn, as he tries to finally solve the mystery from years before.

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

My Review: At last we really *meet* Helgi. He does appear in Whiteout, though not very prominently. I say this with all the love in my heart...I like Helgi more than Ari Thór as a lead character. He's still got the bookishness, the clear love of puzzle-solving; he is a bit more of a distinctive character to me because he's explicitly an Agathan. It comes through in this resolution to an unresolved murder ("cold case" just feels on the nose for Icelandic crimes somehow) previously worked by Hulda Hermannsdottir, whose retirement he is enjoying by being brought home to Iceland from the UK to replace her.

One of humanity's great achievements, largely undersung about, is the reduction of TB from pandemic to chronic disease. As John Green reports in his Everything is Tuberculosis, an excellent book and a must-read for those in need of heartening, it's been a partial victory but still a very significant one. This murder took place in a TB asylum in 1983 as its use case was disappearing. In the novel's present day, 2012, the asylum is empty of patients and used as a research facility. As Helgi assumes his duties, he uses retired Hulda's involvement in the unsolved murder as the topic of his dissertation; so now he is in the same country as the scene of the crime, he determines to find out what really happened in 1983. This does mean we spend more time with Hulda. That's not a bad thing for Helgi or we-the-reader. Old wounds are not healed, it would seem, and another murder occurs that needs solving as Helgi's poking around picks up steam.

Vintage Ragnar-style, the setting is spooky and cold and full of bad energy or haunted by ghosts or something like that...it's never really explicit just what it is, which leaves room for we-the-reader to decide what works best. The limited pool of suspects for the original killing is still alive, so no problems of needing a medium to conduct interviews. It might've been safer that way. Helgi goes about studying the crime, the building a case for the new crime, with the same calm, assured demeanor. His doubts, like his very murky personal life...I hate his partner Bergthora a LOT!...are present in the story but not very foregrounded. I appreciate Ragnar offering us a sleuth-centered procedural that does not feel the need to make it indistinguishable from a domestic novel.

It was, if anything, a bit gothic in its TB ward in snowy conditions, an unknown killer stalking the place, whose identity I genuinely never expected to know...I thought this would remain an unsolved case...but when revealed became inevitable and so very sad. There is a brief excursion from 1983 back to 1950, that while necessary is definitely a pacing-killer. Ragnar's books aren't tearaway action plots. In this dual-timeline story, the pace is of necessity slower as there is much to relearn about the old killing. Helgi is a character who listens more than he talks. That won't work well for all readers but does for me.

Why I'm missing a star from the review is simple. There's a kind of coda on the ending that...annoyed me. You'll see, but maybe won't agree with me that it was an unnecessary add-on to a really absorbing, involving read.

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

WHITEOUT
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Quentin Bates)
Orenda Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When the body of a young woman is found dead beneath the cliffs of the deserted Icelandic village of Kálfshamarvík, police officer Ari Thór Arason uncovers a startling and terrifying connection to an earlier series of deaths, as the killer remains on the loose...

Two days before Christmas, a young woman is found dead beneath the cliffs of the deserted village of Kálfshamarvík.

Did she jump, or did something more sinister take place beneath the lighthouse and the abandoned old house on the remote rocky outcrop?

With winter closing in and the snow falling relentlessly, Ari Thór Arason discovers that the victim's mother and young sister also lost their lives in this same spot, twenty-five years earlier.

As the dark history and its secrets of the village are unveiled, and the death toll begins to rise, the Siglufjordur detectives must race against the clock to find the killer, before another tragedy takes place.

Dark, chilling and complex, Whiteout is a haunting, atmospheric and stunningly plotted thriller from one of Iceland's bestselling crime writers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Ari Thór is very much the center of the action here; I tell you that because this page is dedicated to the latest series-starrer Helgi Reykdal. He appears in this book, so I'm not just being capricious.

Ari Thór is asked by Tómas, now a superintending detective from Reykjavík, formerly Ari Thór's boss, to be on the team investigating this crime. Helgi, as a UK-trained criminologist, is on it too, in a less visible capacity than Ari Thór. The basic mystery is why the young victim, raised in this now-abandoned village, is there dead in the same place her mother and sister were each found dead not all that long ago.

Family secrets, societal ills, the usual suspects...and speaking of suspects you'll know who committed the crime quite soon, if you're at all experienced in the ways of crime fiction. That said, the real reason to read the story is the wonderfully evocative writing, a setting both familiar...what genre reader hasn't read at least one Icelandic mystery in 2025?...and foreign enough to give one the frisson of difference from one's surroundings. The seasonality is very much a part of the appeal as well. It's close to Yule, and cold...Iceland, remember...and full of little sidebars about rituals (Jólabókaflóð!) and legends that both inform the action and involve the reader. This reader, anyway. I'm not sure if I like Ari Thór as much as Helgi from the later books, but they're both unrepentant bookwyrms: “The usual magnificent tree stood in the center of the Town Hall Square. The people of Siglufjordur were quietly getting ready for the holiday...with evening mass at the old church and then dinner and unwrapping of presents, followed by what in Ari Thór’s mind was one of the most important Christmas Eve traditions of all—the reading of a book well into the night.”

My homie, is Ari Thór. Yours too, I suspect, if you're reading this. I haven't seen Ari Thór since I took up with the more cinnamon-bun-y Helgi, but both are deeply convinced readers, so either is welcome. There's a condign resolution to this tragedy, and there's the satisfying sense of ma'at being served in faraway Iceland that now feels more like a home-from-home than a strange Norse myth of a country.

Starting your acquaintance with Ragnar's world right here is no bad thing. What you don't already know is gently explained to you. The ending might be a bit...pat...for some readers, including me, but be patient and pursue the series. It does make sense. Remember Ragnar is writing in a storyverse that just happens to be set in a real country, and enjoy the tidbits.

SWEET, SOFT, PLENTY RHYTHM, reckonings are brutal...on everyone involved & I FEAR MY PAIN INTERESTS YOU, young feminist's récit

SWEET, SOFT, PLENTY RHYTHM
LAURA WARRELL
Pantheon Books
Trade Paper $17.00, available now

LONGLISTED for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction!

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer, a forty-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man, lives for his music and refuses to be tied down. Before a gig in Miami, he learns that the woman who is secretly closest to his heart, the free-spirited drummer Maggie, is pregnant by him. Instead of facing the necessary conversation, Circus flees, setting off a chain of interlocking revelations from the various women in his life. Most notable among them is his teenage daughter, Koko, who idolizes him and is awakening to her own sexuality even as her mentally fragile mother struggles to overcome her long-failed marriage and rejection by Circus.

Delivering a lush orchestration of diverse female voices, Warrell spins a provocative, soulful, and gripping story of passion and risk, fathers and daughters, wives and single women, and, finally, hope and reconciliation, in answer to the age-old question: how do we find belonging when love is unrequited?

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

My Review: It depresses me to say this, but this book was...despite truly, deeply impressive writing...

The girl may have been the end for him.

That the wind shifted and sent a chill across her freshly cleaned skin so that she sensed her own solitude in a way that no longer frightened her as she walked bare and unhindered toward what was new.

...lovely and fully sensory-universe-planted but, and this is the crux of the matter for me, it's about a man.

A group of women have different relationships with one man.

Ground-breaking stuff, no? Never read anything like it before! Except about half the Western canon. Women circle Circus, whose name suggested to me clownishness that I found ample evidence for. They *keep* circling Circus no matter what. And, folks, if there ever was a man whose actions and inactions invalidated his Manhood Card℠, it's Circus. He never met a responsibility he didn't shirk.

But his Art! is usually the rallying cry I hear. His art my lily-white one. He's a bog-standard self-absorbed arrested adolescent, probably a libertarian and a religious nut although those are my own interpolations, with a good line of patter and some skills in sexual gratification.

He is, bluntly, the kind of person I look down on and the kind of character I am deeply sickened to see recrudescing on best-of lists and getting all sorts of happy talk said about it. He's a serial cheater, an emotional abuser, and an unworthy object of our cultural attention because his brothers are teeming like maggots on a shit-pile, exuding their spurious shine that so many seem to see as attractive when it's actually the slime they secrete to slip out of any kind or sort of commitment that inconveniences, annoys, or bores them.

Yuck.

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

I FEAR MY PAIN INTERESTS YOU
STEPHANIE LaCAVA
Verso Fiction
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A punky, raw novel of millenial disaffection, trauma and 1960s cinema

Margot is the child of renowned musicians and the product of a particularly punky upbringing. Burnt-out from the burden of expectation and the bad end of the worst relationship yet, she leaves New York and heads to to the Pacific Northwest. She's seeking to escape both the eyes of the world and the echoing voice of that last bad man. But a chance encounter with a dubious doctor in a graveyard, and the discovery of a dozen old film reels, opens the door to a study of both the peculiarities of her body and the absurdities of her famous family.

A genre-bending, atmospheric and emotionally honest account of a young woman's investigation into her past and the complex reactions of her body.

At once an analysis of the abandoned 1968 Cannes Film Festival and a literary take on cinema du corp, Stephanie LaCava's new novel is an audaciously sexy and moving exploration of culture and connections, bodies and breakdowns.

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

My Review: ...and now for something marginally different...

Screwed-up child of famous parents is failing at Life because Trauma and she's got these awful habits that substitute for character and her whole head...this is a récit, not really a novel because the whole point is that we don't leave the lady's head and are reminded of it...is stuffed with shards of images and sounds and they all sort of coalesce into an image of...

...I have no way to finish that sentence. I didn't get an image from Margot's chaotic maunderings.

Yet again there are men at the center of her trauma. Men: Don't have relationships with women. It doesn't go anywhere good. You'll end up blamed for something and quite possibly sued.

That's my main take-away from this mishegas. There's no way for me to pluck a piece of the text out for your perusal because they all rely on each other, in a cumulative-effect way, for their power. I will say that, as little as I enjoyed the story I was quite interested in the way the author assembled the shards into an effective mosaic. Brightness, shadows, saturated colors; a vague grey smog of dissociation surrounding it, getting between the bright moments, eclipsing some of them. It's an interesting effect.

But the problem is it's telling me an oft-told tale of poor-little-rich-girl and I'm just not interested. Handed a life of family connections and a modicum of talent? Use 'em or reject 'em, but wallowing along in the gutter next to the highway and under the sidewalk is a choice for people like Margot. So I don't see the point of empathizing with her. "Make a different choice" is the callous, dismissive response Margot elicits from me.

Yet I read the whole book....

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.

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!