We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle has one of the best opening paragraphs I’ve ever read and the fact that it’s up hill from there is a testament to the craftsmanship of the inimitable Shirley Jackson. Our narrator is Mary Katherine ‘Merricat’ Blackwood, a young woman trapped in a magical-realist prison of her own making, burying hoards of treasures in her garden and casting spells of protection on her home by nailing her dead father’s possessions to trees. When we meet her, it has been six years since her family was almost wiped out after a mysterious poisoning and she lives with the fragments of the Blackwood clan in their dilapidated and isolated family home. Shunned by the local villagers, her only companions are her agoraphobic elder sister Constance, who passes her days in a faded parody of domestic bliss, and her uncle, Julian, who hasn’t been all there upstairs since the poisoning but is determined to set down all her remembers in a definitive book on the crime. However, when their estranged cousin Charles comes to stay after years of careful avoidance, Merricat’s sense of stability will be thrown into disarray. She’ll need all her resources to banish this unwanted intruder and restore peace to her curious kingdom. While the reader cannot help but be charmed by her quirky turns of phrase and mannerisms, they also cannot help but grow increasingly unsettled and disturbed by what lurks behind the doors of the Blackwood house.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
I do not know how to even begin attempting to summarise this book without sounding mad but here’s my best shot: A troubled young man named Johnny Truant discovers a mysterious text in the home of Zampanó, a recently deceased, blind agoraphobe. In this text, Zampanó has undertaken a detailed albeit chaotic analysis of a film called The Navidson Record, which is either a ground-breaking documentary that raises questions about the origins of planet Earth and the fundamental laws of physics or a found-footage-style horror movie hoax. In short, Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Will Navidson and his young family discover that their new home is somehow bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. And not in a cute ‘The Tardis’ way, in a ‘horrifying shifting labyrinth that may or may not contain monsters’ kind of way. And things only get weirder from there, because when Johnny Truant tries to find out more about this movie, it apparently doesn’t exist. You should also absolutely not attempt to read this on an e-reader because in some sections the text is upside-down, overlapping or reversed. If reading the above paragraph has already given you a headache, this book is not for you. This is not an easy read. It is demanding, complicated and confusing. However, if you’re brave enough to explore its dark and hidden recesses, there are treasures and horrors to be found. It’s a love story, it’s nightmare fuel, it’s a satire of academic pretentiousness and it will have you questioning your own reality as well as the reality of the book. Enter if you dare.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
If you want an uncomplicated, feel-good space romp that’s bursting with the ‘found family’ trope, then have I got a recommendation for you! The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet tells the story of the Wayfarer, a tunnelling ship that creates the wormholes that make high speed interstellar travel possible. She’s crewed by a rag-tag bunch of enterprising beings from across the galaxy, from Sissix the reptilian pilot, to Kizzy and Jenks, the chaotic engineers who hold the ship together, to Lovey, the sentient AI who keeps things from descending into madness. When Rosemary Harper wangles her way aboard the ship under a false identity, she’s looking to run away from her family. But amongst the stars, she finds a whole new one that expands her definition of what she thought a family could be. If you like your sci-fi with a side of lasers, blood and guts and political intrigue, this is not for you. If however, you are looking for character-driven, gentle sci-fi adventure to give you the fuzzy-wuzzies, this will be right up your street.
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez
A Sunny Place for Shady People is a spectacularly creepy collection of short stories that heavily draws on the wider South American magical realist tradition. Each of the stories in this collection takes the mundanities of every day life in Argentina and focuses on the county’s historical scars and fault lines, magnifying its murkiest moments to nightmareish proportions. Whether it’s the hardened neighbours in My Sad Dead, who are literally haunted by victims of violence in their neighbourhood, the shopgirls in Different Colours Made of Tears, who manifest the wounds of the dead woman whose dresses are donated to a thrift shop by her abusive husband or the daughter in Face of Disgrace, who finds herself slowly losing her face in the same manner of her mother and grandmother, this is a collection profoundly concerned with the echoes of trauma. Unable to rest, the horrors of the past continue to repeat themselves until they can be confronted. They say that sunlight is the best disinfectant and A Sunny Place for Shady People shines a bright light on many things other would prefer not to see. Perfect for fans of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties.
A tale of the construction and destruction of the self, and by extension art, that centres around a toxic but all-encompassing friendship between two young girls. It’s easy to make comparisons between The Book of Goose and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. However, for all there are surface similarities, The Book of Goose feels like an all together more strange and eerie tale. When Agnés receives the news that her estranged best friend, Fabienne, has died in childbirth, she looks back on their childhood in post-war rural France and the twisted series of events engineered by Fabienne to help Agnés escape to a better life. This book was very readable while still maintaining a sense of ambiguity and uncanniness that enhanced the sense that you are looking back through the mists of time onto a slightly fuzzy memory. As Agnés and Fabienne grow older, their games more distant and their connection more strained, the details come into sharper relief. In many ways, this is a gothic fairytale about what is lost when you leave the kingdom of your childhood behind and the ways that it can haunt you well into your adulthood.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
You know when you can tell from the very first page that a book is going to be right up your street? The Lies of Locke Lamora had me in a chokehold from the first sentence. The reader is launched headfirst into the city of Camorr, a fantasy-ified Venice built on the ruins of a mysterious lost empire. A city of haves and have-nots, an orphan needs brains, talent and a whole lot of luck to survive without being sold to the slavers. Locke Lamora has all of these things in abundance and after being saved from certain death by the mysterious Master Chains, he finally has the final thing he needed: A family, in the form of the Gentleman Bastards, one of Camorr’s many, many gangs of thieves. But the Gentleman Bastards have something that makes them different. They don’t shake down the peasants who are barely scraping by themselves or lift the purses of unwitting sailors who have just pulled into port. Instead they use their wiles and talents to pull off audacious scams of Camorr’s wealthiest citizens, who are usually protected from such crimes by an uneasy truce between the criminal underworld and the city police. But when you’re robbing the most powerful people in Camorr, you’re bound to make a few enemies and so when a violent civil war begins to tear the gangs of Camorr apart just as Locke and his friends are executing their most audacious heist yet, it’s only natural that this will get a little…complicated. This is exactly the kind of book I love. Vivid characters, sensual world-building, an intricate story that keeps your head spinning with all of the plot twists and to top it all off, a god-damned sense of humour. If you read Six of Crows and you’re still looking for something to fill that hole inside you, definitely pick up this book.
Okay so everyone said this was dark but hoo boy, I was not prepared. This book is not for the fainthearted and basically every page needs a huge trigger warning. Centring around Irina, an avant-garde photographer who scouts average looking men off the street as fetish models for her art, this is a pitch-black exploration of toxic femininity, power and gender roles. Irina goes through life like a wrecking ball, taking what she wants and leaving people shattered in her wake, whether that’s her obsessive best friend Flo or sweet, innocent, impressionable Eddie who she scouts from Tesco. She has taken all of the trappings of female beauty and desirability and uses herself as bait to lure people into her destructive orbit. And yet, for all she is an absolute monster, she is also intensely vulnerable. She is constantly putting herself into dangerous situations with alcohol, drugs and risky sex, as if daring the world to strike her down. Although she hurts herself time and again, the hurt she enacts on others is constantly dismissed and minimised, by herself and those around her. She is a uniquely female Patrick Bateman, a comparison which culminates in a fascinating scene where she more or less asks ‘Who do I have to kill for someone around here to realise how dangerous I am?’. I cannot honestly say I enjoyed reading this but it is certainly a thought-provoking novel with a compelling plot and stylish prose. I’m very interested to see what else Clark has written so I’ll definitely pick up one of her other books, just maybe after reading something a bit tamer first.
Quicksand is the lesser known of Nella Larsen’s two novels, but I actually think it’s my favourite. It tells the story of Helga Crane, a well-educated daughter of a deceased white mother and an absent black father, as she tries to find her place in the world in the 1920s. She vacillates between predominantly black spaces and predominantly white spaces, America and Europe, rigid institutions and freewheeling hedonism but nowhere is she able to feel truly and completely at home. She is either pitied, fetishised, patronised or tolerated but never truly loved unconditionally. Her relentlessness and bravery in her pursuit of true belonging made her a compelling protagonist but also made the ending of the novel shocking. Not in the sense that it wasn’t realistic but because it was so blunt about the mundane cruelty of the life that Helga is living and would continue to live. I was genuinely flipping pages back and forth looking for more, because my brain couldn’t comprehend that the story had ended where it did. I wanted more for Helga, if not a happy ending then at least something resembling it. The ending feels all the more tragic knowing that in her later years, Larsen gave up on her writing and vanished from the literary world of the Harlem Renaissance. Quicksand is a spare but impassioned cry of rage against a society that tried to force Larsen into a box because of her mixed heritage and her gender and a brutal reminder of the power that life has to grind down even the most determined among us.
Kindled Spirits 