A Decadent Affair: A Review of The Affair of the Mysterious Letter
Over at Spec Chic! The short take: if you like weird and wild Sherlock Holmes styled fantasies… you’ll like this.
I purchased it in ebook form, but I’m going to buy a dead tree copy just so I have one that I can press on friends.
Definitely recommended.
Mostly a book recap this week because really all I’ve done this week is either write books, critique books, or read books.
Four, count them FOUR!!! Highly recommended books. It’s been a very good week for reading.
First up: Alexis Hall’s The Affair of the Mysterious Letter. Just so much fun. It’s a Sherlockiana story twisted into full fantasy, where Sherlock is Shaharazad Haas, sorceress, and John Watson is John Wyndham, um, soldier. Either way, it’s quirky and delightful and fun. Look for a full review of it on Speculative Chic soon. If you read it before then, come on over and tell me what you thought!
Melissa Caruso’s The Tethered Mage. I mentioned that I had started this book before and ran out of time, bought it on ebook, and found myself stalling because I wanted it in book form. (If books strike me really positively, I want them in actual paper.) I checked it out again and zoomed through it. It’s wonderful. Actually, it’s so wonderful and so much of the type of fantasy that I wish I wrote that I had to take a day or two off writing to sulk about how good this was. Well, and order the next two in the series.
The other two books didn’t quite reach these heights, but were both fun and engaging reads.
The Reign of the Kingfisher by TJ Martinson. Technically shelved in urban fantasy (at my library at any rate), and yeah, there are glimmerings. But mostly this is an interesting crime novel based around a vanished superhero and the people left in his wake. If you want the superheroics, this is not the book for you.
Andrew Pyper’s The Homecoming. 
Another book that kind of misleads, but pleasantly. It starts off as a fairly straightforward family drama with the promise of horror, and ends… in a very strange place. Very readable.
Of late, my library hauls have been far more aspirational than actually readable, and that gets depressing, returning books without actually having had time to read them. So for the last haul, I allowed myself only three books, and determined to read them all. No matter what.*
(*Of course if I’d hated a book or just found it subpar for some reason, I wasn’t going to force myself, because better things to do!)
In the end, I read all three and enjoyed each of them in their own way.
I read Deanna Raybourn’s A Dangerous Collaboration, book 4 in the Veronica Speedwell mysteries. The previous three have been fun, but every single time I kept thinking, this reminds me so much of Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series. Book 4 of the Veronica Speedwell books broke that curse and I enjoyed it without once thinking wistfully of Elizabeth Peters. Veronica is a nearly impossible iconoclast in the Victorian Era, but Raybourn gets away with it because a) Veronica is so appealing and b) because she’s careful to show that other Victorian women have their own vibrant internal lives. Veronica is just overt about hers. And (small spoiler!) finally Veronica and Stoker get their relationship figured out.
I read Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, which has been recommended to me for years. And for years, I’ve side-eyed those who recommended it, thinking “really? I read it and it was AWFUL.” Oops. My bad. I had never read it. I read a book with a similar title (which was in fact awful). Once I realized my mistake, I sought out the actual book people were recommending. Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching is really enjoyable. In broad strokes, it’s sort of a haunted house story? But really, it’s a beautifully written and fascinating character study with a quiet, horror setting. TW: for eating disorders for anyone who wants to check it out. I will recommend it to readers in turn.
The final book I read was Jennifer Hillier’s The Butcher, a crime thriller with a gloss of horror. It’s not the best thing I’ve read in this genre by a long shot, but it was interesting enough that I’ll check out some of her other books. The characters are good though. The villain is suitably villainous and brazen. The heroine is suitably heroic. The greyscale boyfriend is… interesting. I liked that he wasn’t all good or bad. It’s definitely not a whodunit, because half the characters know who the villain is in the first chapter or so. (And the reader knows from the blurb!) So most of the tension is spent in wondering if the heroine will figure it out before she gets killed. Readable, at any rate.
Since that was successful, I decided to keep the next library haul small as well.
I picked up The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling which I want to read and am also kind of afraid to read. Caving. Not my thing. But space caving with horror? Maybe? The joy of the library. I can find out.
Liar’s Paradox by Taylor Stevens. Picked up on a whim. No clue whether I’ll like it or not. Again, yay for the library which lets me take these gambles.
Teeth in the Mist by Dawn Kurtagich. A YA horror novel in three time periods. I read Kurtagich’s Dead House and found it interesting enough that her name stuck with me, so I picked this up.
The final book is a cheat. I OWN this book, yet I checked it out from the library anyway. Because I haven’t finished it yet, and sometimes ebooks are just not satisfying. I don’t know. Some books want to be read on paper. Melissa Caruso’s The Tethered Mage is one of them. I actually checked this out once before, got five chapters in, went online and bought an e-copy. Then failed to keep reading it. IDEK. And now it’s buried under the pile of other ebooks. So, I figured maybe getting the actual book back in my hands will get me to finish it. I really loved what I read of it.
So this happened, which is wonderful. Maledicte, my first novel, is on sale today in ebook form! If you like murderous, genderfluid anti-heroes, dark gods, betrayal, and courtly politics, come take a look!
And hey, Maledicte even has its own TV Tropes page! (Which cracks me up, seeing all the tropes laid out like that.)
The cover art still blows me away with how gorgeous it is. David Stevenson hit it out of the park with this one. It’s lush.
Vigilance
Robert Jackson Bennett
Tor
190 pages
Why I Chose it:
C’mon. Robert Jackson Bennett is an autoread for me, and this particular book? As writers, a lot of us struggle with terrible public events, feeling like we should be able to put words on the page to expose the awful truth of things. But most of us just flail in that direction. So when I heard that RJB had written a satirical SF novel about America’s obsession with–and enabling of–mass public shootings, I picked it up.
I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy it. Satire is as often bitter as the truths it exposes.
The Premise:
Robert Jackson Bennett’s Vigilance is a dark science fiction action parable from an America that has permanently surrendered to gun violence.
The United States. 2030. John McDean executive produces “Vigilance,” a reality game show designed to make sure American citizens stay alert to foreign and domestic threats. Shooters are introduced into a “game environment,” and the survivors get a cash prize.
The TV audience is not the only one that’s watching though, and McDean soon finds out what it’s like to be on the other side of the camera.
Discussion:
I’m going to avoid spoilers for most of this review, but really there are no surprises here.
The blurb tells us right away that McDean will suffer the same fate as his “contestants”. There are some fiddly little twists, but overall, this book provides what you expect.
And that was… weirdly disappointing.
The book is compulsively readable. RJB is great at stringing words together and creating vivid characters, even in the shorter form of the novella.
That said, I expected more somehow. More of an edge. Something more potent than just the USA turning public shootings into a patriotic-tinged game show, which… I’ve seen before and before and before. So many story-lines go back to the bread and circuses of the Romans–death for sport. It’s not enough to really make me sit back and think. I’ve seen variations on it in Star Trek and Doctor Who and any show that ever declares “fight club to the DEATH!!!”. It’s trope is what I’m saying. And kind of a tired one to hinge the entire novella on.
(Now if someone wanted to write a satirical novel about the NFL and CTE, that would be interesting, and RJB touches on it a bit here.)
The big problem for me is that I expect a certain level of horror/shock or appalled laughter from my satires—like I did in reading Swift’s A Modest Proposal or Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens.
Or Terry Pratchett’s Jingo, which gave me this:
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.
This is giggle-worthy writing, bleakly true, and best of all, relatable.
In Vigilance, I got that sting only once in the entire book.
McDean’s guts flutter unpleasantly. He does not want to piss off Kruse—but he can’t share the man’s blithe confidence when it comes to subjecting his entire audience to a subliminal AI about which he knows fucking nothing at all. He’s heard Kruse’s people conduct tests on prisoners, and the thought horrifies him: prisoners don’t share the same race and economic backgrounds of any of his primary demographics at all. The population’s all wrong! If that’s his sample, then it’s skewed, utterly fucked! This could decimate his TMAs.
p 69
TMA- Target Market Activations, by the way if you, like me, are not up on marketing terms.
This point stung and resonated, twisted the common expectations of McDean’s horror in an effective way. We’re poised, after the thought horrifies him, for human rights violations, not poor demographic matches.
McDean is our primary voice, though there is a secondary POV from Delyna, the “Regular girl” who (rightfully) loathes Vigilance. But then, she’s not his target audience at all, being neither white, nor male, nor constantly afraid. She’s feels only tangentially there–much like the comforting commercials McDean airs between scenes of Vigilance–to soothe the reader and keep them turning the pages instead of turning away.
But in the end, Bennett uses Delyna’s POV in a wonderful (horrible) way to make his primary point.
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
The “Vigilance” TV-watching portion of the USA descends into gun-fueled chaos courtesy of the subliminal AI mentioned above. Chaos and bloodshed everywhere. Everyone turning on everyone else, guns ablazing like any old Western movie. Not a surprise. We’ve seen the writing on the wall from page one.
Then there are the customers in Delyna’s bar, and what happens when she dares to turn off the TV in the middle of the episode.
Her patrons don’t fall prey to that subliminal AI because she shut the TV down before the AI started its work; their minds are still their own. And yet… and yet… they still erupt in violence. Because, as Bennett suggests on every page, once you have a gun in your hand and fear in your heart, there’s no backing down.
So even though Bennett put a third party player on the page, he doesn’t let it absolve the citizens from their murderous, destructive spree. See, Bennett suggests, they (we) would have erupted eventually anyway.
That’s a powerful statement, and sadly, one that lacks an easy rebuttal.
Overall:
I’m glad I read Vigilance. At the same time, I wish it packed more punch. Maybe it’s that I keep thinking of Vigilance as a satire, and Bennett wrote it as a parable—a lesson for us to learn from. Maybe it’s the brevity. There was a lot of world-building glossed over or hand-waved away. Maybe it was just that this was such a White America story and I kept wondering where the other citizens were—just keeping their heads down, like Delyna? Trying to keep a low profile? Or fleeing the country for inexplicable welcomes elsewhere. I felt a lot of absence in this book.
I think, looking at the Jingo quote up above, I know what hampered this book the most for me. For it to be a satire or even a parable, we have to recognize ourselves in the pages. We have to say oh god, I’ve thought that, felt that, could I become THAT?!? And I never got that feeling here. McDean is a compelling caricature but he’s not relatable. I was never in danger of thinking, oh a few missteps and I’d be like him….
There was a tiny moment that zipped by, part of the set-up and explanation for how this game show came to be: ads accidentally get linked to violent footage of a public shooting and… the ad revenue soars because people keep watching and watching. And watching. That’s relatable. Our appetite for disasters is marketable. I believe it. Anyone who reads, watches, or otherwise consumes True Crime stories knows how thin the line is between observing a terrible act and glorifying it. Between analyzing it and mythologizing it.
I think, in the end, though Vigilance is an enjoyable, thoughtful read, and one I definitely recommend, it isn’t the story I wanted to read. Someone, somewhere has written or is writing something scathing about America’s Gun Problem ™ which holds a mirror up to each and every one of us “regular people”. That’s the one I want to read.
It’s that awkward time of the year where we’re careening between holidays and the dreaded LIBRARY CLOSURES. It’s not like I’m not surfeited with books in my house, but the very idea of a holiday without any library books to hand is… alarming.
So I zoomed in today after work and picked up:
Because I never trust pictures to really be worth a thousand words, the books are:
PJ Tracy’s The Guilty Dead, which is a Monkeewrench mystery. This is a strange series for me. Some of them are excellent. Some of them are tragic. And some of them just sort of misfire. The authors seem to cram other types of genre into their mystery so each book can be a pretty different reading experience.
Creatures of Want & Ruin by Molly Tanzer. The title made me think it was a sequel to Creatures of Will & Temper, which I quite liked. But if so, it’s a sequel by setting, rather than protagonist. That’s all right by me. Hopefully, this one the dog won’t eat. I had to buy the first book from the library after the puppy got hold of it.
Pop the Clutch: Thrilling Tales of Rockabilly, Monsters, and Hot Rod Horrors. Totally not my kind of book, but hey it fell off the shelf that I was browsing and it’s a library–it costs me nothing to give it a try (unless the dog gets involved). So I took it home.
Priest of Bones by Peter McLean. Technically, I have borrowed this book before. But, I had just cracked it open, decided I really liked the voice of the book, when it came due. The downsides to quickly browsing the “new releases” shelves when I’m in a hurry. It was back; I am going to read this one first this time. Seems like it’s going to do the difficult work of treading the path between “gritty” (bleh!) and “realism” well.
Kill the Queen by Jennifer Estep. Long ago, I bought Spider’s Bite, but never got around to reading it and misplaced it. It’s here. Somewhere. In one of the book piles. But for now, the idea of an epic fantasy with a modern urban fantasy sensibility seemed deeply appealing.
Also picked up: Rick Springfield’s newest CD The Snake King. (The man is STILL MAKING MUSIC! Is it any good? I will find out!) And Camila Cabello’s self-titled CD. I like the “Havana” song. It’s catchy.
So a fellow Speculative Chic has her book out this week! While I haven’t read the Steel Empires books yet, this sounds like a fun series, and I am going to remedy this lack! I’m always on the hunt for good urban fantasy. Mothers and daughters and vampires and that gorgeous cover! But I’ll be honest; she had me at sarcastic violin players. Definitely a series I’ll be checking out.
What’s it about? Look below!
This week, book 4 of the Steel Empires urban fantasy/alternate series is released! In a world with vampires, warrior-mages, weredragons, and sarcastic violin players, time travel seems like the obvious next step. Read on for more information about Steel Time, by J.L. Gribble
ABOUT THE BOOK
You’re never too young or too old to experience a paradigm shift.
Toria Connor is 25 when tripping over an artifact in the ruins of Nacostina thrusts her a century into the past, before the city is destroyed during the Last War. Now, she finds herself alone. Adrift in a time where she must hide everything important to her, from her mercenary career to her true magical ability.
Victory is over eight centuries old when she follows her adopted daughter. She has seen empires rise and fall, but never anything like this. She must survive alone in a city inhospitable to vampires, dodging friends and foes from her past alike.
Both of them know the clock is ticking down to the moment when the city is wiped off the map. Now, they’re in a race against time. To find each other. To escape the past. And to save the future.
Currently available from:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Direct from publisher
Carpe Librum (the author’s local indie bookseller)
Or support your own local independent bookstore by requesting a copy today!
ABOUT THE SERIES
It is possible to read Steel Time as a stand-alone book, but don’t miss out on Toria and Victory’s previous adventures!
Book 1: Steel Victory
Book 2: Steel Magic
Book 2: Steel Blood
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
By day, J. L. Gribble is a professional medical editor. By night, she does freelance fiction editing in all genres, along with reading, playing video games, and occasionally even writing. She is currently working on the Steel Empires series for Dog Star Books, the science-fiction/adventure imprint of Raw Dog Screaming Press. Previously, she was an editor for the Far Worlds anthology.
Gribble studied English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She received her Master’s degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, where her debut novel Steel Victory was her thesis for the program.
She lives in Ellicott City, Maryland, with her husband and three vocal Siamese cats.
Find her online at:
So the weird thing about working a day job as well as working for yourself is that you can take a vacation from one or the other as well as both. Having finished up a writing project (the draft of Ring of Stones is done! Hoorah! and in the agent’s lap! Hooray! Not my problem for a little bit!) I decided I wanted a week off without coming home from the day job and sitting right back down in front of the computer.
Not writing in the evening is giving me a strange, luxurious feeling right now. It won’t last. I’ll get antsy and the scene notes I’m taking currently (that doesn’t count as work, right?) will demand to be made into actual scenes and chapters and so forth. But for right now, I feel like I have all this free time!
I have watched the entirety of The Good Place, season 2! I do love those characters. I love how clever the show-writers are in making this premise continue to work for them. As a side note, I hate sitcoms, so the fact that I love this one should tell you they’re doing something quite different than the usual sitcom fare.
I have attempted to make stir-fried rice. That… was not quite a failure, in that the end result was edible. Just not good. I need to figure out the heat issue better, find a more useful recipe (though a friend linked me to an NYT recipe that looks good), and use the good cast iron skillet. The one I used is still pretty new and not as seasoned as it should be. The cast iron skillet that I took from my childhood home, on the other hand, is amazing.
I have read three books:
Stillhouse Lake by Rachel Caine: seriously intense thriller. I loved it. Had to put it down a couple of times just to go breathe. I think it’s that you know she has significant enemies, but like her, you just don’t know what direction they’re coming from. Recommended if you like thrillers. Or Kelley Armstrong’s Casey Duncan series.
Hazard by Devon Monk: Magical Hockey League. Wizards and werewolves on the ice, oh my! Not an unqualified success, but fun to read.
Hollywood Homicide by Kellye Garrett: I’m always seeing comedic mysteries compared to Stephanie Plum books, but this one kind of merits the comparison (in the good way!). Dayna and her friends are funny, a little nuts, loyal, and moving through LA society in a very entertaining way. That they’re trying to solve crime at the same time–a definite plus.
I’m embarking on City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett, both because it’s been in my TBR pile since it came out and as a consolation prize for being on a book budget at the moment and not buying Foundryside right away. Later, Foundryside, I’m coming for you! RJB is a writer I really admire, incorporating great characters–realistic, interesting, compelling–in a wonderful setting. You are definitely “there” when you read his works.
So I’ve been reading and reading all summer long, but not finding things that really satisfy. It’s the downside of being voracious and pretty indiscriminate about your reading: you get jaded pretty quickly–been there, seen that, seen it done BETTER, and now you’re bored. Every now and then, I just hit a run of meh books.
And every now and then, I stumble over something strange and wonderful.
In this case, the online novel All But a Bloody Mouth by Becca De La Rosa
The details:
All But a Bloody Mouth published on tumblr in 2016 and later assembled into a free download—technically self-pubbed, but not available for sale in stores. If you find it, it feels … serendipitous.
Written by: Becca De La Rosa
Genre: um…. I’m thinking of it as feminist noir horror? Which is a genre I didn’t know I wanted, but apparently was starving for.
Pages: 259 per pdf
Publisher: self-published, nicely formatted, not available in stores.
Why I chose it: During my podcast resolution over on Spec Chic, I listened to podcast Mabel (not reviewed yet–look for my review in Oct or Nov), and wandered over to the website and found the writer for Mabel had also written this novel. Since I was enjoying Mabel so much, and the premise of this book appealed to me, it seemed only natural to dive right in.
The Premise:
All But the Bloody Mouth. First published on Tumblr in 2016; a novel about murder, mystery cults, and apotheosis.
Eleven days ago Loan Santos came home to discover her boyfriend Jack violently attacking a young woman on the kitchen floor. Following the revelation, Jack admitted to committing the five murders attributed to the Red Deer Valley Slasher; he claimed he killed those five girls, however, for a very particular reason. Now, Loan must piece together the facts of the matter (a girl with a scar on her throat who knows more than she lets on, a monster in the wetlands) to find herself some kind of – meaning, or understanding, or transcendence.
All But the Bloody Mouth is free to download, read, and share.
Spoilers ahead, but I’m going to try to keep them small, because watching this book unfold is a delight.
Discussion:
I read a lot of serial killer stories. It’s almost inevitable. I love fantasy, but as a child, I cut my teeth on mystery. Nancy Drew, Kay Tracey, Meg, Trixie freaking Belden. And oh, here’s a fantasy twist: The Girl with the Silver Eyes, which was a childhood form of an urban fantasy—young girl with a magical gift learns that there are others like her and enemies out there who want to control them, and she assembles a team to fight back…. Tell me that doesn’t sound urban fantasy-ish.
The point being, after a while, mystery divides itself into cozies and murders. (Not that no one dies in cozies, it’s just that no one seems to care much.) So yeah, serial killers. And I enjoy the genre but it is definitely a genre of dead tortured women, usually with graphic scenes, where the saving grace is that many, many of the serial killer stories are written by women, with women as their active protagonists.
That said, there is a certain sameness to the formula. So, I really enjoy the books that turn the story on its end—the killer caught on the first page!? The story about the recovery of the people affected—yeah, show me that!
And All But a Bloody Mouth begins with Jack, the Red Deer Valley killer caught and jailed before the first page. Because he’s not the focus here. It’s about the two women he left behind—the woman who nearly died, and the woman who loved him, unknowing. But it’s also about pulling back the veil on the lives that women lead.
I said feminist noir and I meant it. Mandy Jane Donovan, the would-be victim is the blonde femme fatale, swanning through the story and helping to open Loan’s eyes to the world she’s always moved through, but always repressed. That Loan surpasses Mandy’s understanding in the end is also noir—Mandy is ephemeral, her importance is to lead Loan in the direction of the truth. Mandy is a vector of sorts, a proselytizer. But unlike classic noir, Mandy has her own successful agenda. She doesn’t come to ruin. She starts there and grows past it.
These truths are about men and women, more than anything else. And they’re not necessarily pleasant truths. Here, each gender is pretty much posed always in opposition to each other.
I also said horror, and I meant it. The horror here is both occasionally gory—though elegantly presented—and social; there’s a scene with Loan and her lawyer that’s just fundamentally upsetting in oh so many ways. Loan starts off quiet and repressed, but it’s definitely the quiet of a banked fire.
There’s real fantasy here also. But it’s a fantasy that is more about mythology than casting spells or having magical abilities doled out. It’s about change. I thought the ending was both surprising and well-led up to, if a little short on the mechanics.
There were small things that bugged me:
I wasn’t sure about Loan’s name. It’s unusual enough to strike the reader as continually odd. It felt more like a symbol than a name. Loan? Like lone? Or Loan, like her life had been on loan…. I don’t know. But it was distracting.*
I adored the ending, but thought it felt a little bit abrupt. A lot of the big moments in this book are a little rushed.
De La Rosa’s writing is full of literary goodness, but occasionally one of her metaphors falls a little flat.
In conclusion:
I’d actually recommend All But the Bloody Mouth to anyone who enjoys Gemma Files—the introspection, the dissection of relationships, the precision in language, and yes, the mythic horror. Elizabeth Hand as well. Try the first few pages; if you like those, you’ll probably enjoy the rest. If you don’t get a tiny little shiver at the end of the first scene, you might not.
*ETA and today, Kelly Marie Tran explains that her given name is Loan, and suddenly I have more context for the name. So, less odd, then. I have learned something!
So every so often, usually coinciding with intensive revision, I start telling myself terrible lies. Things like… you don’t need that much sleep; five hours is totally enough. You can do the laundry tomorrow. You can absolutely live on grilled cheese sandwiches for at least a week….
And that Wakefield Cookies are a valid breakfast food.
This is a recipe I got from my grandmother who got it from the popular cookie maker Ruth Wakefield. I don’t believe my grandmother ever met her; it was just a recipe published with her name attached. It’s one of the three recipes I have that calls for shortening instead of butter, where I actually leave it shortening. (The other two are torticas de moron, and the Pennsylvania dutch strawberry shortcake biscuit recipe.) Wakefield cookies are tasty! They’re crisp and tend to dissolve in your mouth and they’re full of giant oat flakes. Yum!
But… I get bored. I have started adding peanut butter, sometimes chunky PB, and mini semi-sweet chips. Sometimes actual peanuts. And you know, once you add peanut butter, it’s obviously a health food, right? We’ll ignore the chocolate.
So whenever I get into the crazy stage of writing–drafting or revising–I tend to make a batch of adulterated Wakefield cookies, because hey! This saves time for breakfast! I can eat two cookies and get right to work! Oatmeal is breakfast food! Everyone knows that! And peanut butter is good for you (unless you’re allergic, I’m sorry).
They sure don’t look like much, but they are tasty! And whether it’s the peanut butter oatmeal combo, or just the ramped up on sugar combo, I do seem to get a lot of work done when they’re around.
Currently reading: nothing too much. Too much fighting with my own revision! But books I sampled this week are Over Raging Tides by Jennifer Ellision (fun! will probably buy it later), The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert (put on hold at the library), Cusp of Night by Mae Clair (a maybe.) I did read (and enjoy enough to recommend) Daryl Gregory’s We Are All Completely Fine.
lane robins 