Hello and welcome to February 2023’s Short and Sweet review roundup here on Track of Words. This month I’ve got three books to talk about, and unusually (and sadly) one of those was my first DNF (Did Not Finish) of the year. I don’t often talk about books that I don’t finish, but I’d got far enough through this one that I do actually have a few things I’d like to mention about it, and even though I didn’t quite get along with it I do actually think it’s an interesting book that a lot of other people might well enjoy. My review isn’t, perhaps, actually all that short…but this felt like the right place for it, rather than a dedicated review post which I don’t think would feel right given that I didn’t finish the book.
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
A pair of frail, ailing siblings rattling around their mouldering old ancestral home, on the shores of a sinister lake. An uncomfortable American doctor, an eccentric Englishwoman studying mushrooms, and some strangely-behaving wildlife. These are some of the eerie, unexpected people and things that retired soldier Alex Easton finds when they arrive at the House of Usher, responding to a worrying letter from the unwell Madeline. The longer they stay, the stranger the situation becomes, in this short but powerful, evocative book that starts off weird and rapidly gets decidedly – not to mention fungally – creepy.
While I’ve never read Poe’s short story The Fall of the House of Usher so can’t comment on the similarities, this is apparently Kingfisher’s reimagining of the classic horror story. What I can say is that this is a strange, unsettling tale that hooked me from the get-go and delivered everything I want in a modern, gothic horror book. It’s pacy and engaging throughout, with a brilliant protagonist and a real sense of growing unease that develops into something properly unpleasant.
Entirely unintentionally, I seem to have ended up reading several books recently which tackle similar themes, featuring creepy old buildings and/or mushrooms – Mexican Gothic, In the Coils of the Labyrinth and now this. Interestingly, the author name checks Mexican Gothic in her afterword where she talks about almost giving up on writing this after reading it, but I’m glad Kingfisher didn’t give up, because for all that Moreno-Garcia’s novel is beautifully written, I actually much preferred this.
Legion by Dan Abnett
The seventh book in Black Library’s epic The Horus Heresy series, and Abnett’s second, Legion was first published in 2018 and offered the first in-depth exploration of the Alpha Legion in the series…and arguably in BL fiction overall. It is, to be fair, as much a novel about the Imperial Army as the Alpha Legion, portraying the attempted compliance of a world called Nurth through the eyes of soldiers from the Geno Five-Two Chiliad regiment…and a Perpetual named John Grammaticus. While the unfortunate soldiers of the Geno are fighting and dying against the Chaos-tainted Nurthene, John is working on behalf of a shadowy group of xenos calling themselves The Cabal, and attempting to forge an alliance between his alien masters and the Alpha Legion. Cue much sneakiness, infiltration, espionage and double dealing, and a lot of dead Imperial Army soldiers.
I remember this as probably the first book in the Heresy to really stun me with its revelations – sure, the original trilogy opened up the Heresy and showed readers what to expect from this new style of Black Library novel, but Legion went big with secrets about Primarchs, the Alpha Legion and the Heresy as a whole. Reading it again, it doesn’t have quite the same impact given that I already know those secrets, but instead I really enjoyed it for the world building (something Abnett usually does very well) and the great storytelling. This is a different kind of story to most Heresy novels, focusing more on intrigue and espionage with the fighting largely in the background, and as far as I’m concerned it remains one of the absolute best in the series. It certainly stands up to a second reading, and I think I’d be happy to go back to it again – it’s a pleasure to read.
The Book of Eve by Meg Clothier (DNF)
Historical fiction meets fantasy in this tale of religious upheaval and spiritual power struggle, inspired by the Voynich Manuscript. It’s the story of Sister Beatrice, the unhappy librarian of her convent, who finds herself in wholly unexpected danger when a dying woman, taken in by the convent, hands her a book that at first seems to be completely blank, only to gradually grow in detail and begin to affect the world around it. I can’t say too much more about the plot of this one, because as much as I tried to get into it, I ended up putting it down about halfway through.
I had high hopes for this, especially as I love mysteries like the Voynich Manuscript, and objectively speaking, it is good – the prose is evocative and engaging, if a touch flowery at times, and it brings its setting to life wonderfully. Subjectively though, I just didn’t get along with it, partially down to a combination of fairly gentle pace and a lot of characters to remember. Not only that, but a couple of those characters – the loathsome, arrogant, power-hungry Brother Abramo, and the strict, performatively pious Sister Arcangela – utterly made my skin crawl. They were supposed to, mind, so they were clearly very well written…I just couldn’t stand reading about them.
I also don’t tend to enjoy reading about characters who lack agency, and who are forced to comply by suffocating rules and social norms. That feeling of constriction is something that often appears in historical fiction, particularly with female characters, and it can make a story feel very era-appropriate and deeply powerful…but I find it really hard to read. In this instance Beatrice has virtually no agency, constrained as she is by the strictures of the convent and the painful realities of her place in the world. It all works well in the context of this story, but it just made me uncomfortable, especially in moments when she was confronted by horrible characters like Abramo.
Of course none of these things are really criticisms of the story, but together they just contributed to a real sense of discomfort as I was reading. It reached a point where I had to accept that I simply wasn’t enjoying this – I do want to know what happens, I just can’t face the journey it would take to get to the conclusion. Of course my DNFing this book was very much down to personal preference over some very particular bugbears. If you’re interested in fantasy-tinged historical fiction with complex female characters at its heart, this is definitely worth looking into – it wasn’t for me, but the concept is really interesting, and you may well enjoy it.
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That’s all for this Short and Sweet instalment, but I’ll be back soon with another review roundup and more books to talk about. Hopefully they’ll all be books I finished, next time! If you have any comments about these roundups, or if there’s anything else you’d like to see me cover, do let me know. You can drop me a line in the comments below, or find me over on Twitter.
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