this is some other stuff

For October, I had a couple new releases that I wanted to read, in addition to still wanting to make progress through the TBR as a whole. I succeeded! Another month where I read six books (plus two bonus short stories.)

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
Horror (subgenres: indigenous, vampire, revenge) - physical novel
5/5

In 2012, a journal is found in the wall of a church being demolished. The journal belonged to Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor, writing a century before. His descendant, Etsy, is given the chance to study the document. Within it, Arthur chronicles bits of his own life, but primarily focuses on his interactions with a Blackfeet—called Good Stab, among other names—who visited repeatedly to speak with him. Good Stab provided an accounting of his own life and the lives of the people around him, including the massacre of his people by white settlers, and his encounter with "The Cat Man"; a blood-drinking, immortal monster that made Good Stab into a creature like him.

My thoughts, some spoilers:

Reading this right after visiting Sand Creek was appropriate and certainly something.
I really enjoyed this book, but it was also very intense. Definitely not an easy read at times. It is deeply about long-running, all-consuming revenge, even at the expense of all else, and also about "just how much worse can this shit get?"
It also really kind of made me sit with sort of... moral ambiguity, I suppose. It is clear who the worst people are, but there's also very much not an unambiguous "hero." Which is good for the kind of story it is, but meant that for me at least there were some moments of "wow, I am 99% of the way with you, but yikes." (And yet knowing that the stuff that feels "yikes" is nothing in the scheme of things that happened.)
An odd thing I really appreciated was the way the narrative twisted something that at first felt like an honestly charming little character detail into something awful. I want to say what, but it's a pretty major spoiler. If you've read the book and are curious what thing I mean/know exactly what I'm talking about, please tell me so I have an excuse to tell you, because it was a weird thing to retroactively make my skin crawl, lol.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw
Horror (subgenre: haunted house) - ebook novella
3/5

Cat, Phillip, Talia, Faiz, and Lin, a group of friends, reunite on a trip to Japan. Phillip pulled the strings necessary to allow them all to stay in a Heian-era mansion, not typically open to the public. The location is reportedly haunted by the ghost of a bride who was buried alive after the death of her husband, as well as the ghosts of others who have been sacrificed in the same way. Talia has always wanted to get married in a haunted house, so this provides the perfect opportunity for her to wed fiancé Faiz. The reunion between the friends is not purely happy; many harbor resentments over past romantic entanglements or remembered slights, but they try to settle in to having a good time. It turns out the haunting of the castle is very real, and the ghost bride would welcome additional sacrifices...

My thoughts, spoilers:

I saw someone describe their own criteria for how they rate a book, based on what was interesting/boring/well-executed/poorly done, etc. Their 3/5 is split into what they call a "spicy three": something that did some things really well, and some things really poorly, so it averages out to a three, vs. a bland three, where it just did nothing remarkably well or badly. My scale is not really based on any objective or consistent criteria so much as "did I enjoy it?" but this book would be a "spicy three."
So... the good: it really did a great job, to me, of setting the scene and building up a nice sense of dread and creepiness. The building initially having incongruously clean parts that slowly begin to decay? Nice! The descriptions of the yokai painted on the screens and then later when those paintings and the figures within them begin to move and follow the characters? ABSOLUTE A+. I was picturing it like the stunning art and animation of Mononoke, and it was so so cool.
The bad: fuck all of these characters. This felt very much like a horror movie that I've seen before. I realize that was also something I said about Diavola last month, but in this case, I do not mean it as a compliment. In this case it was the cliche introduction of a whole group of people who are ostensibly supposed to be friends, but all insufferably hate each other. Why the FUCK are all of you getting together in a foreign country, even, with so many people you can't stand? I can't stand any of you.
Also, continuity errors. I realize this is something that seems to bother me slightly more than average, but it is probably the single thing most likely to throw me out of the story. In this case, part of what leads into the horror getting starting is the group of miserable assholes deciding to play a spooky game: 100 Candles. The gist is that you light 100 candles, then take turns telling scary stories, and you blow a candle out for every story you tell, then the last one still sitting in the slowly-darkening room (not freaking out or leaving) is the "winner." But there were two really annoying continuity issues at this point. One, when Talia decides they're playing this game, our main character, Cat, notes that Talia already had her fiancé set up the game, hundred candles lit and all. Cat goes into this room, has a creepy ghost encounter, some conversation, and then... the next scene is her complaining about how long it took for Talia to pick a room for them to set the game up in, because she didn't think any of them had the right atmosphere. Except... you already said it was all set up?
Then also with the game, we jump to midway through the game, where Cat is getting ready to take her turn to tell a story, and Talia walks into the room as she's about to start telling it. The whole point was to be the last one who didn't leave the room for any reason, but the one who wanted to play (who we get the impression is very competitive) is just wandering in and out?
That was actually an issue throughout: characters constantly seem to be entering and leaving rooms to facilitate having a conversation with Cat, but to an extent it felt really weird. Why are all of these people just randomly roaming around?
[For a bit I was trying to convince myself that these continuity errors and weird conversations had some purpose, like a hint that the characters were... idk, trapped as part of the haunting, reliving things in slightly different ways or something. But no.]
The neutral: the writing style. The writing style leans really heavily on figurative descriptions and narration. I liked it to start, but it started to grate on me. (It felt a bit like someone trying to do a writing assignment to use as much figurative language as possible, rather than something that flowed naturally. I didn't hate it, but I did get annoyed by it eventually.)
Mostly I was just disappointed by this one. It was blurbed by several of my favorite authors, and I had really high hopes for it, and then... I did not like it. With so many positive comments from writers I enjoy and respect, I felt like it was some failure with me, so I was a little relieved when I ventured onto its LibraryThing page and discovered that a lot of people felt similarly.
I was also a bit surprised that there were two Cassandra Khaw books included in the Tor ebook bundle (though The Dead Take the A Train was a co-write.) A little disappointed that I didn't like either of them as much as I'd hoped. I've heard a ton of recommendations for her book The Salt Grows Heavy, but I'm not super inclined to pick it up at this point.

Silver and Lead by Seanan McGuire
Book 19 of October Daye
Urban fantasy - physical novel
4/5

Now returned to the real world, after months spent in Titania's false version of faerie, October and the rest of her family are getting back to what passes for normal. For October, that includes being eight months pregnant, and her husband not wanting her to do anything that could put her or their unborn child's life at risk. Toby is ready to start climbing the walls, when Arden, the local Queen, comes to her with a request. During Titania's enchantment, a distressing number of magical items were stolen from the palace's treasury, and some of them are now being used to harm  some of the kingdom's citizens. Arden needs a hero of the realm to find the culprit and retrieve these objects... and Toby is it. "Hero" doesn't come with maternity leave. Of course, the plot thickens, and it becomes clear that this is a trap that may have been set for Toby, specifically.

My thoughts, some spoilers:

I basically always enjoy this series, and I'm glad to see everyone returned to the "real world." (And while we got two books in 2023, the switch to a new publisher made 2024 a long, sadly Toby-less stretch, haha.)
This is a mostly self-contained story/mystery, which tend to be the books that don't hit quite as well for me vs. the ones that focus much more on the overarching plot. This one was pretty enjoyable, though. (I liked it better than When Sorrows Come, which was the last mostly self-contained book.)
There was one part that annoyed me, because there's a character that I thought was the obvious culprit, there's basically a flag waved about "YES, [CHARACTER] WOULD HAVE BEEN FREE TO DO THIS THING", and Toby still did not suspect that they were involved. Then when [character] shows up, Toby literally thinks "Ah, I should have expected that!" and I'm like... "Yes. Yes, Toby, you should have, and I'm deeply annoyed that you didn't." Maybe it's just me, because I had latched on to [character] having a really recognizable magical signature, so it seemed like, heavily-handed obvious that they were the one being hinted at, but... come on. I really hate characters just suddenly being stupid or oblivious in order to facilitate plot. (This wasn’t as frustrating as in the aforementioned When Sorrows Come, where they just seemed to forget the powersets of the characters present, but it still bothered me.)
Other than that, I found it pretty enjoyable. Didn't expect Bucer to show up and be relevant. (But kinda wonder where he went at the end, there.)
One thing it did for me was absolutely feed Taylor's and my theory, which I'll give a separate cut to, in case you don't want to read about our speculation that feels more and more confirmed...

Taylor and I have a theory about Maeve:

We think she's Marcia. And everything that Marcia says in this book is just wildly confirming that theory to me!
Our board is not covered in red string, it's just painted solid red at this point.
I kept texting Taylor, telling them "I am looking directly into the camera, I cannot possibly be staring at the camera any harder. Marcia, you can't be saying that. You can't be saying that, Marcia."
- How conveniently it's explained why Titania's enchantment just didn't affect her.
- Gosh, Toby just somehow can’t tell what her heritage is… must be because she’s got so little fae blood…
- “Why do we value some family connections and not others?”
“[…] Like blood only matters up until a certain degree of removal.”
“I hate it.”
- Just quietly being unaffected by Bucer’s powers.
- Simon asking if she has children, and her answer: "It was a long time ago, and I don’t particularly want to talk about it. Their father and I are not presently together.”
- Simon saying that Maeve would have to be better than Titania, and Marcia just with a steely "She will be."

Fucking KILLING me.

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
Book 1 of Sworn Soldier
Horror (subgenres: gothic, body horror, possession) - ebook novella
5/5

Alex Easton, a 'sworn soldier,' hasn't spoken to kan* friends, the Ushers, in years. When Alex receives a letter from Roderick, expressing his fears for his sister Madeline's failing health, Alex comes to visit them. The Usher family house is in a terrible state of decay, and so are the twins. As Alex spends more time on the estate, ka sees even more without explanation: strange lights in the tarn by the house, hares that behave and move in bizarre ways, Madeline's odd behavior during bouts of sleepwalking... Alex fears there may be something more at play than any of them understand.

*Alex's native language has many sets of pronouns, including ka/kan, which is a set of pronouns used solely for soldiers, which supersede any gendered pronouns they might have used prior.

My thoughts, minor spoilers

This story is a retelling/reimagining of "The Fall of the House of Usher," seeking to create an explanation for the events of the original story.
I really enjoyed it!
As usual, I don't have as much to say when I enjoyed something as I do for the things I didn't like. The imagery was really creepy, I love the care given to the explanation that the author went with, and how it worked.
The blending of the fictional history of Alex's fictional country brushing up against some real history within the book hit a good tone for me.
(I also appreciated that the pronouns explanation early in the story served two purposes: it did explain Alex's own use of the ka/kan pronouns reserved for soldiers (with worldbuilding flavor about that history), but also brought up the va/van pronouns, reserved for children. Much appreciated when that came up later to creepy effect!)
Alex Easton is an enjoyable character, and I definitely plan to get the other two books in the series.

Queen Demon by Martha Wells
Book 2 of The Rising World
Fantasy - physical novel
5/5

Kai and Zeide; along with Zeide’s rescued wife, Tahren; Tahren’s brother, Dahin; and their younger charges Sanja and Tenes; return to the Rising World. The conspiracy against them, to destabilize the coalition and raise one of the Prince-Heirs to the position of emperor, has been revealed. Kai is perfectly happy to leave everything to the political powers to sort out, now that the conspirators have been unmasked. Unfortunately, before he’s able to fully retreat home, Dahin requests his help. Dahin thinks that he might have discovered the location of the Heirarch’s Well, the massive reservoir of power that they used in their conquest of the world. When an archeological expedition to the same area finds evidence that there was a Hierarch there far more recently than should be possible, the theory becomes something far too dangerous to ignore.
In the past, Kai continues to travel with Bashasa, the Prince-Heir who has become the leader of an alliance against the Hierarchs.

My thoughts, minor spoilers:

Again, I have so much less to say when I really liked something!
Much like with Witch King, I found the worldbuilding really enjoyable. I like the setting, I like that to me it feels like a very fully-fleshed world, even when some given group is not actively on the page. I like that different groups within similar cultures still feel extremely different from each other and can clash because of it. This book also gave us a brief glimpse of what normal life feels like, which I really appreciated. (I see that come up really often in writing advice; allowing the characters to breathe, getting the chance to see aspects of 'normal' life that they would desire to protect or return to. The story moves at a quick pace, but getting to see the characters relax with each other, even for just a few hours of in-book time, was nice.
While my above-cut summary mostly focuses on the “present” timeline, the one following Kai’s past is also still very enjoyable. I liked seeing him forced into the leadership role that in the present he seems to be famous for… even when he really wasn’t interested in that and kind of complains about it the whole way.
One thing that surprised me was that this book clarified the timeline a bit more, and it’s actually a lot less time than I thought it was… I came away from Witch King with the idea that the timeline in the past was very removed from the ‘present’ timeline, probably to the tune of a couple hundred years. (We simply have so many immortal principal characters…) It’s actually roughly sixty years, which changes the landscape a bit. It’s a bit more dismal that it took so little time for certain groups to decide that maybe an empire wouldn’t be so bad!
The relationship between Bashasa and Kai continues to break my heart. Like, we know what’s happened by the present timeline, but seeing them in the past as funny as it is when Bashasa just keeps getting cockblocked just guts me basically every time. (Especially paired with Kai's very obvious grief in the present, which felt more present in this book than the previous one. For understandable reasons; he isn't actively trying to solve his own murder in this book, and also just went on a location tour of where his time with Bashasa started.)

Bloodhunt Academy by Mynah Clement/adore
Book 1 of Bloodhunt Academy
Paranormal Romance - ebook novel - read as an ARC
4/5

Vampires struggle in the world; they’re often hunted by humans, who are taught to hate and fear them. Our main character was happy to live peacefully, content with her job as a night courier… until her home is burned down and she is attacked. She knows she’ll have to flee… and then she concocts a plan. Her final delivery was to a woman named “Jolene”: a letter telling Jolene to report to the Academy of Attack Magic, drafting her into training to join the nation’s military. She decides that she will take Jolene’s place; the academy will be a place for her to stay, and her vampiric powers will help her to excel… despite the danger of being truly embedded in hostile territory. There she finds herself drawn to her human roommate, Yulia, as well as to the golden boy of the academy and legacy student, Kian. “Jolene” will be forced to hunt eventually, as her menstrual cycle forces her to drink the blood of men. Soon it becomes clear there is an even darker secret than she could have guessed being hidden at the heart of the academy.

My thoughts, some spoilers:

When adore offered ARCs for her upcoming book, I definitely wanted to take her up on it.
I will say that this is a bit to the side of genres I typically read, but I do particularly like a good “why choose” romance.
Despite how long it took me to read, this was an extremely fast book! (The length of time was solely because I had so many other books I was trying to finish; once I had the chance to focus on this one, it went extremely quickly!) It was a lot of fun, and kept up a snappy pace the whole time.
I would say it does feel very “fanfic-y”, which is something the author herself has said she was going for. It’s meant to be a breezy, enjoyable read, and I think it hit the mark.
It’s a very… affirming book. Jolene is reassured multiple times by other characters regarding things many people struggle with: the necessity of rest, the importance of listening to your own body’s limits. When other characters or the systems around them don’t allow for this, it’s portrayed as a bad thing that is being done to the characters, not a mark of strength that the characters are “being tough” by having to push through those limits.
The story is heavy on themes of gender; vampires are always female, and they feed exclusively on men. Some of the prejudice that vampires face is very strongly linked to misogyny, which is an overarching theme.
The one thing I sometimes struggled with a bit was how few consequences there seemed to be within the academy itself, though I think that this mostly just turned out to be because the academy wants it to be a bit of a free-for-all when it comes to the students. But initially when ‘Jolene’ refused a mandatory ceremony with the school (and had to use her powers to escape) it was noted, but she didn’t face any immediate punishment. Later, when the students are pushed into fighting each other to “root out the vampire’s accomplice,” things just sort of carry on afterwards, with everyone going to class, and getting together socially, again without any apparent reaction from the staff or administration. It left me looking over my shoulder for something to happen in response, and it never really did.
I liked the eventual reveal of what the secret within the academy is. It’s perfectly diabolical in terms of the purpose it’s serving!
I am certainly looking forward to the conclusion to the duology!

Bonus short stories (because I don’t count short stories as “books” unless it’s an anthology):

“Shiver” by Jules Kelley
(Sequel to “Swelter”)
F/F Romance - ebook short story
4.5/5

Grace has transferred back to Alabama from her school in Colorado, wanting to be closer to her family. In late October, she shows up at Maya’s doorstep, asking her to go with to a corn maze. According to Grace, her brother, Rob, bailed, and she needs someone to accompany her. Maya agrees, even though their relationship has been entirely undefined since their hookup at Rob’s wedding.

My brief thoughts:

Cute and hot, just like the first story.
Funnily enough, the corn maze stuff was so nostalgic for me; I loved a particular corn maze that I went to a few times in college (Alex’s and my first official date was there!), but as it took off in popularity it just isn’t the same any more, and there was a hint of that same vibe to the one Maya and Grace go to.
I was glad to see Maya and Grace’s relationship continue, even if for them it’s still a bit undefined.
If the author ends up writing another continuation for them, I’d certainly be happy to read it.

“Soak” by Jules Kelley
(Kind of a 1.5 between “Swelter” and “Shiver”)
F/F Romance - short story on author’s website
4/5

Grace’s “spring break” plans are pretty well sunk after she has to come home after a health scare with her father. After getting drenched in a surprise rainstorm, Maya picks her up, and gives her a spot to wait out the rain.

Extremely brief thoughts:

I didn’t know this story existed, except it was mentioned in the front matter for “Shiver,” and I suspected that Shiver was referring to it a couple of times. Indeed! This one is a free short story on the author’s website, not available as an ebook.
I can sort of see why; it really is just a sort of bonus conversation between the two women, and unlike the other two stories, the physicality maxes out with flirting and kissing. They do have a sweet conversation about making the choice to come out or not. I actually really liked that conversation… while it’s in a lot of ways a good thing, most current queer romance I’ve read treats queer relationships as completely normative, and there’s really no worry about coming out, or wanting a relationship with a family that might not be supportive. So it’s actually nice to see the sort of acknowledgement that sometimes it IS a difficult choice to make.
Glad I did go hunt this one down (not that it took that much hunting.)

I am currently reading five books:
- Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian, my current main read
- Feeling the Heat by Emily Antoinette, my current brain-candy side-read
- Queen Demon by Martha Wells, immediately rereading it with Taylor
- Dead Silence by SA Barnes, reading with Alex
- Dracula by Bram Stoker, following along via Dracula Daily/Re: Dracula

And I did finish one in November so far:
- Overgrowth by Mira Grant, which Taylor and I finished yesterday