Happy publication day to Blood on Her Tongue! Johanna van Veen’s My Darling Dreadful Thing was one of my favourite horror debuts I’ve read in a while — delightfully gothic and romantic and gruesome — so to say that I was excited about snagging an advance reader’s copy of Blood on Her Tongue may be an understatement. Thanks very much to the author, Netgalley, and Poisoned Pen Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Where does one end and another begin? This is the question this novel asks repeatedly. Where does Lucy end and her twin sister Sarah begin? Where does Sarah end and the thing she has become begin? And where does love end, where does family end, where does duty and morality and desire and… where does the horror begin?
I went in expecting a vampire story thanks to the Dracula epigraphs, the protagonist’s name, etc. and Blood on Her Tongue does certainly have vampiric elements. But it’s also much more, an intriguing blend of horror elements from the natural horror of death and decay to something decidedly supernatural. I loved the super evocative imagery, gruesome often to the point of grossness (the pen! the eyes!), and as someone who lives in rural Ireland I found it easy to call to mind the smell of the peat and the sucking thickness of the bogs, but I think even if you’re not familiar I think you would be able to imagine it based on van Veen’s writing.
Lucy is a fascinating protagonist. She’s not a nice person; she’s obsessive and greedy and haughty and her relationship with her sister is nothing short of toxic, and yet she’s so compelling. Sarah, too, is equally riveting. Even though so much of the action in the first half of the novel takes place around her, her presence is key and her perspective, as told through her letters and journal entries, rounds out the setting and the wonderfully creepy gothic atmosphere so well. And when she (or someone) starts to really take the stage, well. It takes talent to do a good exposition scene, and there’s one around halfway through this novel that’s particularly good, managing to build the tension while delivering a lot of information about the nature of the being that has gotten its grips into Sarah.
There are some great layers to the plot that also help to build the overall world of this 19th Century Dutch manor and its inhabitants. Early on, the men in the novel are quick to dismiss the sisters’ fears as mistakes or madness, and although the women’s violent actions in the latter half of the book certainly aren’t out of any sort of feminist intentions, Arthur’s and Michael’s paternalistic mindsets do bring an interesting element to the story, although as characters they are far less developed than Lucy, Sarah, or even some of the other minor characters such as Magda the serving woman.
Overall, I think I enjoyed this even more than My Darling Dreadful Thing (although I seriously loved that one as well). Toxic codependence will always be a favourite horror trope of mine, especially when it leads to devastating consequences, and it’s so well executed here along with an exquisitely-crafted story that grows the creeping, unsettling tension to a truly disturbing climax. Van Veen has quickly been added to my list of the authors whose work I will eagerly devour (ha) as soon as I see it.
I was thrilled to receive an ARC of Hungerstone by Kat Dunn back in January. It was published a few weeks ago and I strongly recommend picking up a copy at your favourite indie bookstore or local library!
“Who would I be if I was someone who wanted things?”
I only read J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla a few years ago, and I can’t believe I hadn’t done so sooner. The 1870s vampire novella pre-dates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by several decades and is beloved for its enigmatic, seductive title character and her relationship to the young woman upon whose hospitality — and more — the vampire woman preys.
Although Carmilla is not explicitly queer, understandable given its era, there is an undeniable sexual tension simmering just beneath the surface of her friendship with Laura, and therefore it is no surprise that Kat Dunn’s Hungerstone is not the first overtly sapphic retelling of or novel inspired by the vampire classic. But, in my opinion, it belongs at the top of the list.
In Hungerstone, Laura is named Lenore, and she is not an innocent teenager living a solitary existence with her widower father, but the mistress of an estate purchased with her handsome businessman husband Henry. Something is rotten in the state of Nethershaw, however; Lenore is tasked with revitalizing the crumbling manor even as her marriage falls into a state of disrepair.
Theirs was a marriage of convenience, Lenore bringing to it a prestigious lineage but no wealth, Henry offering money but relying on his wife to build his reputation; of course, a heir is essential to solidify Henry’s new standing in society, and by a decade into their marriage it is clear that there will be no child added to their family.
Resentful of and resented by her husband, and yet believing that she must endure her unfulfilled existence in order to exist at all, Lenore might have continued on in this unhappy marriage were it not for the arrival — via a startling carriage accident — of Carmilla Kernstein.
Beautiful, mysterious, uninhibited — Carmilla immediately shakes up life at Nethershaw. As Carmilla draws her under her spell, Lenore is forced to confront her secrets, her fears, and, most importantly, her desires. In some ways, Carmilla acts as the embodiment of Lenore’s inner self, saying the rude yet true things that Lenore will not dare to say, criticizing that which should be criticized, and goading Lenore into indulging in her cravings. This is the story of an awakening in more ways than one, not only of Lenore’s sexuality but also of her independence.
“What is a monster but a creature of agency?” Lenore muses, as she begins to take her life into her own hands to secure her future. As the novel hurtles toward its horrifying, violent climax, the events going on at Nethershaw get more bizarre, more uncanny, Lenore begins to liberate herself from the expectations placed upon her and embrace the strangeness of the happenings, and the beguiling, dangerous woman who brought them there.
The writing in Hungerstone is excellent, perfectly suited to its premise and setting. Sex, violence, and hunger form a triumvirate of themes, with so much overlap between how they are described, and that melding of fears and desires is so fantastically and unsettlingly on display here. From the eerie way Carmilla haunts Lenore in both thought and body, to the gory, brutal scenes of carnage, the novel is full of vivid imagery and visceral feelings.
I love that Hungerstone feels like both a fresh take on a classic story and genre, and like a suitable tribute to the same. Equal parts revulsion and seduction, this is a novel I won’t soon be able to cast out of my mind, much as Lenore couldn’t banish Carmilla from hers.
Many, many thanks to Kat Dunn, Zando, and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review; I feasted on this novel.
Final note: the line “I ate paprika on my tour, and I didn’t care for it” made me laugh. Despite their shared experiences in the company of vampires, Lenore definitely would not get along with my bestie Jonathan Harker.
I was up at a hotel just outside of Galway last Friday for a union meeting (join a union!) and because it was on a Friday and I was staying overnight anyway, I decided to book a second night at a B&B close to town and spend Saturday visiting some of my favorite places from when I used to live there. Luck was on my side and the Saturday was absolutely beautiful and sunny — and if you know Galway, you know just how lucky that is.
But if you’re taking a trip up, whether for Cúirt International Festival of Literature in April (and if you are, I’m jealous!) or just for a visit, you can have a great day whether it’s sunny and warm or windy and lashing rain, because you can spend your day exploring the wonderful bookshops (and pubs) of Galway. Here’s my recommended itinerary for a lovely and literary day in Galway city:
We’ll start the morning with a choose-your-own-adventure moment. If you’re staying east of the city, where many of the larger hotels are, then start your day at Kennys Bookshop. You can also walk out to Kennys from the city (about a 30 minute walk from Eyre Square, but if you have to hop in the car anyway, this is a good time for a visit as the walk isn’t particularly scenic — and if it’s sunny, you’ll want to save your steps for Salthill).
Kennys is my absolute favourite bookshop in Ireland, not only for the shop itself but also for its wonderful online store (which you can order from worldwide!). Featuring a mix of new and secondhand books, you can find pretty much anything you’re looking for here, including special editions, rare used books, and leabhair Ghaeilge.
One of my favourite things about Kennys is their special editions — whenever an Irish author I love announces a new novel, I always keep an eye out to see if Kennys will have a signed first edition to order, and they usually do. Often these editions have different covers, exclusive forwards, or some other special element. I have exclusive Kennys editions of Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (which I pre-ordered literally within two minutes of them sending out the email), Long Island by Colm Tóibín, several Donal Ryan novels, and more. Actually the only reason I didn’t buy anything at Kennys on this trip is because I have two upcoming novels pre-ordered with them, Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt and Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin.
If you choose Kennys for your first stop, you’l probably want some breakfast afterward to fuel up for your next bookstore browse. I recommend driving to the other side of town and going for brunch at Ard Bia. It’s my fave place to eat in Galway and possibly all of Ireland, and the only place where I never regret going sweet instead of savory for brunch because their French toast is just so good. Also a great date-night dinner restaurant (or any occasion, really, and to keep this book-related they also have a wonderful cookbook).
On the other hand, if you’re saving your trip out for Kennys for later in the day, you’ll want to go for breakfast before you hit up bookshop number one, because you will need to queue at my other recommendation. I passed by Magpie Bakery around 11 on Saturday morning and there was a queue at least 15 people long. Curious but not peckish at the time, I decided to come back Sunday morning and check it out. Despite arriving about 15 minutes before it opened, there was already a queue!
I have to say, it was completely worth the wait. I had a vegan sausage roll, a morning bun, and bought a loaf of lemon poppyseed sourdough to take home. All were delicious, and there were so many other fabulous looking pastries in the glass display case. So my recommendation is to arrive a bit before opening and start your day with coffee and a pastry (or two).
And, conveniently, Magpie Bakery is right next door to my other favourite bookshop in Galway/Ireland. Charlie Byrne’s is an institution in Galway. It’s got that classic bookshop feel — comfortably cluttered and packed from floor to ceiling with books (over a hundred thousand!) across a number of rooms. They’re also home to a host of events, with several book clubs every month, children’s story hours, and an array of book launches and readings.
Charlie Byrne’s also has a special place in my heart because the MA in Literature & Publishing at NUI Galway publishes a journal called Ropes every year and Charlie Byrne’s are always the first to agree to stock copies (although I do have to say that all of the bookshops in Galway are extremely support of of local work… and anyone is looking for my year’s edition of Ropes, I did see that Kennys happens to have a single 2014 copy on its shelves).
Unlike Kennys, I don’t tend to buy from Charlie Byrne’s online, so it would’ve been rude not to pick up a whole stack of books when I was there on Saturday, right? I bought three secondhand novels — Memorial by Bryan Washington, The Idiot by Elif Bautman, and Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood — Eimear McBride’s new novel The City Changes its Face, and a book of poetry by Alvy Carragher, who was doing her MA in Writing when I was doing mine in Publishing and whose poetry blew us away when she submitted it to Ropes so I’m delighted she went on to publish several collections.
Okay, now that you’ve bought a few books, it’s time to take a wander through town. If you need even more bookshops, you can call in to Eason and Dubray on Shop Street — even if they’re chains, they’re still local Irish chains and their Galway locations are worth a stop. At the top of Shop Street, you can also visit the statues of Irish writer Oscar Wilde and Estonian writer Eduard Vilde.
Otherwise, assuming you’re visiting on a weekend, you can wander down the street by St. Nicholas Church and check out the Galway Market, if it’s a sunny day you can stop for a pint and some people watching at Tigh Neachtain‘s, or you can call in to one of the jewellery shops and buy a Claddagh ring in the place of its origin.
Now it’s time to head west. If you’re lucky enough to be blessed with a sunny day (or anything short of a downpour, really), I recommend a walk out to Salthill. Cross the bridge at the Spanish Arch and stick to the road along the river (for first-time visitors, this is also where you’ll get a great picture of the Long Walk and its colorful houses) and then the path along the coast. From here to the end of Salthill Prom is about three kilometres.
When you get back to town, stay on the Claddagh side of the harbour. If you’re thirsty for a(nother) pint at this point, the Salt House has long been a favourite of mine (I’m sure in part because when I lived in Galway I lived all of three-minutes’ walk away), with a nice selection of craft beer and always a good atmosphere that’s lively but not so loud that you can’t have a chat. If something non-alcoholic is more to your taste, the Secret Garden a lovely little spot for tea and, on the bookish side of things, apparently hosts a weekly silent book club. Described as “happy hour for introverts,” this group meets on Saturdays at 5:30 to read, together but quietly. I love this idea and I want one in Killarney!
We’ve got one more bookshop on our little tour, and that’s Bell Book and Candle just up the street from the Secret Garden and next to the Crane Bar (which is the best spot for nightly trad music in Galway, by the way). It’s much smaller than the other bookshops in town, but it still has a great array of not only books but also records, cds, comics, and all sorts of other items, so it’s definitely worth a look.
We’ve come to the end of our bookish tour of Galway, but you’ve still got a whole evening ahead of you for good pints, food, and music — if you’re not just racing back to your hotel to read your new books!
Apparently all I want to do is write book reviews, but I’m just going to go ahead on keep on doing it. This is a book I received as an ARC late last year, but it was just published on Tuesday so I wanted to share my review here in case you’re looking for a solid non-fiction book to pick up this week. Support your favourite indie bookstore!
When a demon inhabits a body, it takes ownership of a person, a monster is temporarily housed inside of its victim, our body invaded, repossessed. The ghost does the same with s house: it breaks into it, takes possession of what is yours, and you can no longer trust the place you trusted the most. What’s more frightening than your own home turning against you?
A look at the haunted house in both fiction and non-fiction, Sick Houses by Leila Taylor is an interesting exploration of what happens when the place that, by definition, we feel most at home in becomes something Other, something not quite right. Each chapter looks at a different kind of house, from houses of witchcraft (real or alleged) to houses in miniature, dollhouses or dioramas that reflect or influence their life-size counterparts.
First of all, I appreciated the parameters that the author put on her subject. She says in the introduction that “I’m not talking about plantation houses because 1) fuck them, and 2) I don’t consider slave quarters homes,” and she avoids prisons and hotels as well. By offering a clear focus on homes and not just houses/buildings, it creates an immediate connection with the reader — we will of course consider our own homes, the feeling of safety and comfort we feel in them, and we will contemplate the horror we would feel if that sense of safety was pulled out from under us.
I was also very interested in her discussion of the contradictory nature of the ideals of the American Dream: “Manifest destiny told us to ‘go west, young man,’ but this part of the American ideology is in direct contradiction with the long-term mortgage that locks you not only to a city or state but to a specific property for decades.” This contrast relates to a tension that often appears in horror films — a family moves into a dream home and is loath to leave it even when the going gets bad, or a family moves into a home that turns out to be haunted, but they don’t necessarily have any other option other than to try to see it through — and the tying of classic horror movie tropes to broader societal concepts is always interesting, especially when laid out well and backed by solid examples, as is seen in this book.
Some chapters are more thorough than others — the Witch Houses chapter has many more references than the chapter on Brutalism, for example — but overall there is a good amount of evidence and a good balance between real-life and fictional examples. The chapter on houses in miniature was particularly interesting. The author writes about the dioramas in Ari Aster’s Hereditary, and the way that the film’s sets were built to evoke the feeling that the actors, too, are moving (or, more accurately, being moved) within a diorama. On the real-life side of things, the discussion of the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a diorama series of crime scenes used to improve forensic investigation, was fascinating.
I did have a few issues with the book. For one, the author spoils the ending of several films in instances where I don’t feel that it’s necessary to support her thesis. Obviously in some cases of books like this, you have to give away the major plot points of your examples in order for them to be relevant — if you’re discussing antagonistic father-son relationships you can’t really use Star Wars as an example unless you tell anyone in your audience who isn’t yet aware of the connection between Luke and Vader.
However, in this book, regarding films discussed like The Others and His House, I think that enough information about their plots could have been given to make the intended point while still leaving some mystery for those who haven’t seen them. I know that I often use this type of book as a way to add to my to-watch or to-read list, offering more examples of a trope I am interested in, so spoiling the endings of books or films I haven’t seen yet is frustrating.
It also felt in some places that more time was spent cataloguing the “contents” of the houses (i.e. the plots of the films set there or, in the case of the real life examples, the crimes committed there) than the houses themselves.
In particular, some of the examples focusing on true crime started to feel too tangental, straying away from the connection to the houses/homes and delving too much into the events themselves. For example, I understood what the author was going for in connecting the novel Room and the tragic real-life story of “feral child” Genie, but in the case of the latter there was little connection to the thesis of the book.
Furthermore, at the start of the book the authors understandably says she won’t include places like slave’s quarters because these were not “homes” to the enslaved people living there, but then it follows that surely a place of imprisonment for Genie (or, in fiction, for the kidnapped inhabitants of Room) was not a “home” to be discussed either.
From the second half of the subtitle, “the Architecture of Dread,” I was hoping for more on the design of houses themselves. While this aspect does certainly get coverage in some sections of the book, looking at architectural oddities on screen and in reality, the trope of architecture that is Not Quite Right — houses that are bigger on the inside, stairways that don’t lead where they’re supposed to — is one of my favorites and I would’ve liked a deeper dive into some of these given the supposed secondary premise of the book.
That said, the sections looking at strange and unusual architecture did have some good moments, most interestingly in dispelling myths about the Winchester Mystery House (no, Sarah Winchester wasn’t taking her orders from ghosts; she was just a hobby architect). On the fiction side of things, I enjoyed the brief foray into one of my favorite books of all time, Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi, as a particularly good example of both impossible architecture and a false home (although I found it odd that one of the other most well-known examples of these tropes, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, did not get a mention).
This book is a catalog of houses that have gone wrong and the ways our built environment can evoke terror and dread. But more so this is a book about the home, and the idea of home, and how horror perverts and manipulates one of the most personal and intimate experiences we have as human beings.
I think that Sick Houses will appeal mostly to readers who already have an interest in the topic. At points it feels as though the author has cornered you at a party and is explaining her research project to you. For me, that’s fine, as it’s a long-standing interest of mine as well. But it may not work as well for readers who aren’t already fascinated by architectural horror or the unheimlich feeling of a haunted house.
But if the above quote draws you in, then this is definitely one to keep an eye out for. Many thanks to the author, publisher, and Netgalley for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
Also, if this sort of book is right up your alley, you might also enjoy Feeding the Monster by Anna Bogutskaya (link to my review), American Scary by Jeremy Dauber (link to my review on Goodreads), and of course Danse Macabre by Stephen King.
“I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.”
We Do Not Part will probably be a lot of folks’ introduction to Han Kang, being that it is her first new release in translation since she won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. And I think that this haunting novel is a perfectly fitting place to start.
We Do Not Part encapsulates all of the things I have come to expect from Han’s writing — gorgeously poetic prose (this time translated from Korean by Emily Yah Won and Paige Aniyah Morris rather than her usual translator Deborah Smith), eeriness bordering on (and sometimes tipping over) the edge of horror, and unflinching references to the darkest parts of Korean history (in this case the 1948-49 Jeju massacre).
I didn’t realize until reading the lecture that Han Kang gave as part of the Nobel prize ceremony how often she incorporates elements of her own life in her work. I know very little about her personal life, and apparently few others do either — her husband, a literary critic, was referenced in a number of biographical articles of the author around the time of her Nobel win, but she then revealed that they have actually been divorced for many years.
Of course you don’t need to know much about an author to enjoy their work, and in particular it’s not necessarily any of our business how much of themselves an author does or does not put into their stories (and I’ve written before how frustrating it is that people often assume women’s novels are autobiographical in a way that they never do for men).
However, in this case it does seem that there are key elements of some of Han’s stories that were inspired by real moments in her life. In her Nobel lecture, she says that, like the unnamed narrator of the stunning The White Book, she too had an older sister who lived for only a few hours after birth. As in Human Acts, she happened on a book with photos of the Gwangju massacre that inspired her writing the novel.
And the dream in We Do Not Part, the dream of black tree stumps that served as markers for a mass grave by the sea, that dream was shared by the author and her protagonist (and the protagonist, like the author, is a novelist who wrote a 2014 novel about Gwangju in an effort to shake its hold on her, only to find herself further haunted).
While of course many authors have similar moments of inspiration that they draw from their own lives and insert, overtly or covertly, into their writing, in Han’s case these elements serve to further blend reality and unreality in a way that she does masterfully across her work.
In We Do Not Part, the protagonist Kyungha is called on by her friend and artistic partner Inseon to travel to Jeju and look after her pet bird while she is in hospital. What begins as a straightforward journey turns surreal when Kyungha finds herself in the midst of a snowstorm as she attempts to reach Inseon’s home.
And in the second half of the novel, as dreams permeate the waking hours, as ghosts visit the living, as past and present meld, the story gains further depth both in plot and in emotion. While the specific atrocity of the Jeju massacre is the main focus, broader themes of mourning and memory fill the pages.
In her Nobel lecture, Han Kang says:
I think the questions I was asking were these: To what extent can we love? Where is our limit? To what degree must we love in order to remain human to the end?
I feel that these questions are present not only in We Do Not Part but across all of Han Kang’s work, and that there is no more adept writer to ask and attempt to answer them. Her Nobel is extremely well deserved, and if this is the book by which new audiences are introduced to her work, then I think it is a poetic, poignant choice.
When I read Julia Armfield’s debut novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, I wanted to immediately call her one of my favorite authors, but it seemed silly to do so after only reading one of her books. When I read Salt Slow, the short story collection that preceded it, the feeling only grew. After reading Private Rites I’m completely confident in adding her to my list of favorites.
Did you ever, she once said to Isla, apropos of goodness knows what, read any of the weird shit that actually goes on in Revelations? In the Book of Revelations, I mean. People think it’s just hellfire and brimstone four horsemen and out, but actually the end times go on and on and on.
This is the way the world ends under capitalism, not with a bang but with a routine. When the seas rise so much that most of the population is forced to move to dilapidated urban centres in order to live in the high rises that are the only safe havens (unless you are rich enough to build your home high above the flood waters, of course). When the rain so rarely ceases that workers go about their days in a constant, sodden gloom (but they still go to work).
In the background, there is the creeping growth of uncanniness — strange practices, odd interactions, doomsday cults gaining membership — but for most people there is only the wet rot of monotony and misery as the world decays.
It is in this world— maybe, probably, a future vision of our world— that Private Rites takes place. It’s a serious slow-burner of a book, but with an explosive ending. This is the wrong genre Agnes thinks, but it’s only the wrong genre if you haven’t been paying attention. Like a river rushing up against a dam, the intensity builds and builds, and when the dam breaks, boy does it break.
Drawing inspiration from King Lear, the novel follows three sisters, held together and torn apart by the death of their wealthy but abusive father, as they struggle to find some sort of balance in their relationships and themselves in this world set adrift.
Isla, Irene, and Agnes are my favorite type of character — difficult to like but easy to love. At times, each one is frustrating, infuriating, endearing, enchanting. They live in this world of external and internal trauma that shapes them in some ways so differently and in some ways the same. I think Irene was my favorite of the three, but I loved each of them in their own way. I could have spent a lifetime with them.
The prose is exquisite, rich yet intimate, encompassing the overwhelmingness of the climate crisis as well as as the deeply personal moments between the sisters, their lovers, and the now-deceased patriarch of their family. The story crosses genres from family drama to speculative fiction to outright horror and creates a gradient that offers a full spectrum of everything in between. A truly fantastic novel that just further cements the fact that I’ll be waiting with bated breath on everything that Julia Armfield writes (and in the meantime, recommending her work to everyone who will listen).
thebestpossibletime 