Book Review: A Mouthful of Dust by Nghi Vo

A deeply unsettling addition to the series, bringing the connecting thread of food up to the forefront of the story.

Cover art by Alyssa Winans

TW: discussion of cannibalism

In the Singing Hills Cycle books, Nghi Vo has always been interested in food. Everywhere Cleric Chih goes, they linger on tastes - whether new and exciting or ones fondly remembered but unavailable tastes of home. It is one of the driving constants in a series defined by a new structural or thematic conceit in every volume, and one that I have remarked upon in previous reviews of the series here. So it is interesting and satisfying that food and famine are the core theme of this, the newest book in the series.

Chih has headed to the town of Baolin, famous for its sweet pork dish and for the famine that harrowed the people there some eighteen years before. On the way, they find some remains that could be human, a hint of unsettling things to come. With their neixin, Almost Brilliant, for company, Chih settles in to ask the people they meet to share their experiences of the famine time, and of their lives, starting with a young man, Li Shui, at a restaurant serving the celebrated Baolin pork. Vo lingers in this starting segment on the sensory experience of the food - which Li Shui gives them to sample - before bringing us to the story that goes along with it. Famine, in Baolin, is a physical, embodied thing, a gigantic demon that haunted the landscape, and whom Li Shui's mother escaped by her wits. Only a few pages in, and there's already a sense of the shape of things - food and its absence both as tangible experiences, the overwhelming physicality of them, playing with metaphor made real - right up until the narrative is thrown a little off the rails. The local magistrate clearly doesn't want Chih poking into stories of the famine, and so insists they come stay at his house, and conduct their interviews under his auspices. Here, trapped in a polite prison, Chih begins to see the realities, and legacy, of the famine, and to uncover things still buried from long ago.

As the sixth book in the series, it is hard to avoid comparing this with what came before, and it's an urge I'm not going to resist. If parallels exist, the closest I find for A Mouthful of Dust is the previous entry, The Brides of High Hill. I'll come to a second part of this comparison shortly, but the first thing that links them, the most prominent, immediately grasped connection, is how unsettling they both are, how creepy. While the Singing Hills books have never shied away from a little bit of darkness, these two particularly seem to bring it to the surface and make a virtue of it, A Mouthful of Dust even more intensely than its predecessor. In the use of the demon, and the dwelling - because there is a lot of dwelling - on the famine and its lingering effects in the people of Baolin, Vo has ratcheted up the atmosphere into something palpably oppressive and foregrounded in the story. It works exactly because it's an apotheosis of a theme that has been present throughout the rest of the series, but has been twisted from homely comfort into something nasty.

Frankly, one of the best things about this as a book is how well Vo talks about hunger, famine and how traumatic events like that live on beyond their immediate scope. I was particularly struck with the idea of the clay cookies, which people ate to try to stave off their hunger pangs, and which some of the survivors, now in a time of plenty again, still eat (and from which the title comes). Something about it being such a small thing, a thing that persists afterwards felt... raw.

And part of how well she talks about it is... well it's the cannibalism. Chih - and the narrative more broadly - is simultaneously both horrified and blasé about people resorting to cannibalism in hard times. It is treated as a terrible thing - an extreme thing that comes to humans at the end of the tether of survival - but also something wildly un-unique in the scope of the world's history that Chih, and the Abbey they represent, document and preserve. The rolls and stories are full of incidents of it, they say. Humanity has been driven to this extreme sufficiently often for it to be predictable. That is the true horror of it, that this kind of extremity and taboo can become the usual run of order. Vo takes pains to linger on that, to return to it as a touchstone, and it works very, very well. The demon may embody this horror, but its power comes from the distinctly non-magical parts of its makeup.

There are other strengths too, though none of them surprising to readers who have been along with the series the whole way. Vo continues to have a deft hand at worldbuilding, using offhand details to give us glimpses of greater depth, for example, when describing the magistrate:

His face was hard and still as stone, just a touch of dark makeup at his eyes and his temples to give him a distinguished air.

In one sentence, she gives us both a physical description of the man, makes us aware of a key manner of his presentation, and contextualises that presentation in the wider world. This is a world in which men of his station wear small amounts of makeup and that is a thing that allows them to look distinguished. It's a small thing, but it does wonders for giving a feel-sense of the shape of the world, especially when such moments are plentifully peppered throughout the novella as they are. Vo gives such a sense of the world as peopled, and those people as varied, and part of cultures, groups, families and geographies, and it that focus on the human that really makes this series sing.

Likewise, the breezy pleasantness of character portraits, the casual camaraderie between Chih and Almost Brilliant, the neat little portraits of the characters who come into and out of the story lens, and the way storytelling within the story is deployed to craft atmosphere, all of these are familiar tools in Vo's toolbox, and put well to use here again.

But... there is a but, and this is my second part of the comparison too... for all that there is much to like about this story, it falters a little when compared to what has come before. The Brides of High Hill, too, struggled under the weight of the structural expectations set by the preceding books, and A Mouthful of Dust suffers the same burden. We had four books which each had a clear, neat, structural conceit that distinguished them from their fellows, and from other novellas in the market. There was a clear USP, and my god it was good. But where The Brides of High Hill had still something that we could maybe squint at and see in it a relationship to those conceits, A Mouthful of Dust seems to have stepped away entirely. I find myself scrambling to try to find one, to conjure up a theory of one, but nothing comes. It's a well told story, but the problem all series must face is that each entry has to sit amongst its fellows, and live as part of the whole, as much as it can be a singular object. And it is here where A Mouthful of Dust fails for me.

The way I see it, series can go in one of two ways - either there can be some form of overarching plot/narrative/growth/change, something that drives along through and underneath each entry, pushing the series towards some sort of catharsis or ending, or there's a pattern, something that unifies the disparate pieces, setting some sort of familiar shape into which each fits. The Singing Hills Cycle, so far, has not seemed to embody the former to me. I think one could read each entry in any order and there would, mostly, be no loss of coherence. Cleric Chih as a person seems to be relatively static, and while Almost Brilliant does disappear to have a baby, her character seems mostly unaffected by the development, and the chick isn't mentioned at all in this entry, a brief diversion from the usual run of things. Up until the end of the fourth book, I would have gladly said that it fit the second pattern though, with the different structure of each one being the unifying feature of the series as a whole. But at this point, I am forced to admit that that seems to have faded away. These last two books have simply been "the further adventures of Chih and Almost Brilliant". Which is great, as far as it goes, but is missing something that made this series truly special. To go for a slightly fanciful description, the books feel like beads on a string, rather than a necklace.

Had they been this way from the start, had that expectation never been set, possibly things might have been different. Maybe the unifying feature would simply be these two characters, and its episodic nature and lack of progression would have been easy to accept and enjoy. But this is a series that did that. Each book must contend with what has come before. And in the light of that... A Mouthful of Dust doesn't quite shine. 

Which doesn't mean this is a bad book. I still enjoyed it. I will, most likely, still read any more in this series that Vo puts out. But I am starting to wonder where it's going. Where will it end? What could a good ending look like, for a series that looks like this? What could make it satisfying, as a wider project? Clearly, there was an answer to that two books ago. It is only in its absence that I begin to question.

And so - a good book. A good story. One that I think I would have enjoyed very much had I encountered it disconnected from the series as a whole. But since I cannot experience that, since I cannot detach it from my awareness of its context, it suffers somewhat under the burden of that comparison.

--

The Math

Highlights: continued excellent descriptions of food, genuinely unsettling atmosphere, subtle and well-crafted worldbuilding

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: Nghi Vo, A Mouthful of Dust, [Tordotcom 2025]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, Book 2: Dragon Haven

To build a new society, you must understand what worked (and didn’t) about the old

Dragon Haven is, at its heart, a meditation on self-determination, both on the level of the individual, and society more broadly. (In fact, both Dragon Keeper and Dragon Haven are organized around that idea, but I wanted to talk about other things last month, so we’re going to pretend that this theme is specific to this book.) When last we left our little band of adventurers, Alise had accomplished her heart’s dream, to accompany dragons in a quest for the lost dragon city of Kelsingra. She embodies the ideal of this book's thematic messaging: someone who rejects a role thrust upon her, creates her own role in the world, and thrives therein. At pivotal moments throughout this series, she will encounter people who compare the new self she has constructed to the old self she left behind. Although the comparison is complicated, in a Hobbian way, overall it turns out as well as is possible in the Rain Wilds. Alise is no longer the cultured society lady that she was at the start of the book: her hair and skin are roughened, and the man she comes to love is coarse and dirty. Nor does she grow into an elegant Elderling, the way the other dragon keepers start to do; and there are moments of tension that emerge as a result, a growing us-vs.-them sprouting between the dragon keepers and the still-humans. In every external metric, her transformation is a downward one. She loses money, power, even whatever physical charms she ever had. Her scholarship of those lost wonders is no longer valuable in a world with dragons and Elderlings returned, and Elderling cities rediscovered, with memory devices sharing their secrets with anyone and everyone who passes by. And yet, internally, she is happy and she is loved. And she has the strength of character to recognize those things as paramount. This is as close to a happy ending as you’ll get in a Hobb book.

The dragon keepers themselves have a less straightforward trajectory. They have no difficulties casting off their old life. Indeed, their old life cast them off first, by assigning them this one-way mission to take the dragons away. But people are people, and although they revel in the opportunity to build a new kind of life among themselves, nevertheless they reproduce, in microcosm, the same societal tensions that plague every society. Thymara, young and naive, basks at first in the feeling of having friends and peers, released from the strictures of a society that thinks she should have died as an infant. The other, older dragon keepers, clock immediately that this freedom from social constraint means that they can start getting down with each other. Back in the cities, people as heavily marked as them were allowed to reproduce, but here there’s no such constraint. Jerd, a young woman, sleeps around with most of the young men, before eventually settling down with Greft, the oldest and most cynical of the keepers. It’s made reasonably clear that this decision is not about personal preference or connection, but instead is because she becomes pregnant with (probably) his child. It’s not quite a life of hedonistic abandon, since the dragons keep them working pretty hard to feed and care for them, but it’s a lot more freedom than they’ve known.

But sex comes with consequences, and those consequences lay bare the problems inherent in building a new society. We’ve already talked about why they kill babies back in Trehaug. Jerd’s pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage is one of the most compelling demonstrations of how a society can get to that point. At every stage, I found myself nodding along: yes, I agree with Thymara that Jerd’s behaviour has directly resulted in her inability to pull her share of the work. Yes, I agree with Bellin that the work of caring for a sick pregnant woman falls on other people, and if you don’t have a committed partner willing to take on that task, then you are imposing it on other people who didn’t agree to be liable for it. Yes, if you die in childbirth and leave behind an infant who must be cared for, you have deprived the group of your labour, and left them with only a burden. There are reasons why casual unprotected sex outside of committed relationships is discouraged, and it’s not (only) thoughtless puritanical conservatism.

But what is the solution? So far, societies have tried constraining women’s sexual agency (Bingtown) or murdering babies (Rain Wilds). Neither seems like a good solution. These dragon keepers are not going to arrive at a better one on their own, but they have a much better understanding now of why the rules that they want to break so freely were put there in the first place.

Or rather, some of them do. Greft, Jerd’s cynical paramour, seems to think he has a much better understanding of human nature than the rest of them. In fact, his ideas about how society should be—based on power and enforced hierarchies—are fed to him by a Chalced spy who’s snuck into the expedition, and even that little detail is a beautiful example of the macrocosm rendered small into this group of explorers. Sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced, even if that war means a single Chalced spy stirring up discord in the Rain Wilders.

Hobb uses Greft’s adoption of these odious Chalced ideas as a means to have her say in a conversation that will be depressingly familiar to fantasy fans over the age of, say 25: namely, the need for “realism” in one’s worldbuilding. But in this conversation, “realism” somehow has less to do with complications of exchange rates and currency devaluation and tariffs (unless you’re Daniel Abraham or Seth Dickinson), and more to do with the insistence that it’s more “realistic” to write a world in which women should be childbearing machines and settle down with men to protect them from sexual violence perpetrated by other men. I’ve had to wade through this Disc Horse myself in my own family, multiple times. Hobb, in her turn, allows it to play out between Thymara, who’d rather not choose a man, thanks very much, and Greft, who insists that she must. She represents the argument faithfully enough, but at the very end of that conversation, she does something very satisfying. Thymara says that she will not choose any man, and walks away. And in her mind, her dragon Sintara says, Now you are thinking like a queen. There may be hope for you yet.

In other words, Hobb ends the conversation by reminding her readers, We’re in a world with DRAGONS. Who cares about your stinking “realism”? It’s an elegant way of integrating the meta-discourse into the dialogue of her book, and I enjoyed the smackdown immensely.

Oh, yes, dragons! We’ve got dragons too! And like the humans, the dragons are working on building their own society. Because unlike their forbears, who were ruthlessly individualistic, these dragons require some degree of social cohesion to survive. Not all of them have the memories that a dragon needs to be properly draconic; some seem properly half-witted. Heeby, Rapskal’s dragon, seems more like a beloved pet in Rapskal’s care than the magnificent, overpowering marvel that a true dragon should be. And yet it is Heeby who manages to recover the power of flight first. The dragon who recovers what all the rest of them aspire to is the one who is willing to let go her thoughts of what she should be, and instead make use of what she has: Rapskal’s clumsy, good-hearted, unfailing encouragement. Yes, it’s undignified to run around flapping her wings, trying and failing over and over again. Yes, OG dragons did not do anything as pathetic as failure. But—in a choice reminiscent of what we saw with the Liveship Traders—these dragons cannot have it all. They need to choose which element of dragonhood they will preserve. Sintara chooses dignity, and stays earthbound in the mud. Heeby releases dignity, and flies.

And then there is Relpda, who is more animal even than Heeby at the start of the book. She’s the one that Sedric targets when he eventually builds up the courage to steal scales and blood in his wildly foolish and politically unwise agreement to provide dragon parts for the Duke of Chalced. To Sedric, all the dragons are mere beasts. He cannot even hear their voices as anything other than animal noises. But he drinks some of Relpda’s blood, more out of curiosity than any other reason, and so forces a connection with her. She did not consent to this act of blood-sharing, but the connection is forged nonetheless, and what follows is one of the most beautiful elements of the story. In contact with Sedric’s mind, Relpda awakens. And their relationship—which is the beginning of Sedric’s redemption arc—deepens during a deadly flood of the river, in which she saves his life (multiple times). Why? he wonders. Why would she save someone who had so wronged her? And she responds, Less lonely. You make sense of the world. To me.

That thought is so enlightening. What must it be like to be a stunted, half-conscious dragon? Sintara is frustrated and furious because she knows what she should be. Relpda didn’t know even that. But she knew she was lonely. And then along comes Sedric, and wrongs her in a way that is the worst possible way a human can wrong a dragon. And yet, in his presence, she is no longer lonely.

It’s the same setup that allowed Hest to ensnare Sedric in his net: Sedric was lonely. Hest made him not lonely, even though he is unkind and cruel. But where Hest takes advantage of that power dynamic and uses it to control Sedric, Sedric does not do anything like that to Relpda. Perhaps it’s because even a half-awakening dragon is immune to mere human manipulation. Perhaps it’s because Sedric’s deeply buried but still present decency manages to struggle to the front. Whatever the reason, the two of them develop together, and forge a new kind of relationship, one built not on domination but understanding and gratitude and genuine affection. This new society will not be like the old, either the purely human, or the human-dragon partnerships of the past. OG Dragons could never. But these ones can, and must. And do.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Dragon Haven [Harper Voyager, 2010].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Book Review: God's Junk Drawer by Peter Clines

A story of expectations, the hazy memories of youth, and… oh yes, a plot and setting inspired by a famous TV show

Noah Barnes is a strange duck. He’s an astrophysicist. A bit of a loner. More importantly, he has joined an astronomy group going into the backcountry to get to some dark skies for observations. But he isn’t interested in astronomical observations and astrophotography. And gets annoyed when his own side project gets interrupted. He’s trying to find a phenomenon…

…a phenomenon that transported Billy Gather, a young boy, his sister and his father elsewhere several decades ago. The three disappeared, with just Billy returning two years later, halfway across the globe. No one believes in Billy’s story of dinosaurs and Neanderthals and strange artifacts in a valley lost to time. No one is serious, anyway. They figure it was some sort of gang thing gone wrong, an international kidnapping plot that whisked Billy across the globe. His father wasn’t eaten by a T-Rex, his sister wasn’t lost. All that is just books and stories. Right?

But there’s something I haven’t told you. For, you see, Noah is actually Billy Gather, the valley is real, and Noah’s attempts to return to the valley will accidentally draw in others and propel the plot of Peter Clines’s God’s Junk Drawer.

The way I’m going to continue this discussion is by quoting the theme song to a TV show from the 1970s:

“Marshall, Will and Holly,
on a routine expedition
Met the greatest earthquake ever known
High on the rapids
It swept their tiny raft
And plunged them down
A thousand feet below…
To the Land of the Lost.”

The high concept of God’s Junk Drawer is to take a solid SF approach to the existence of the Land of the Lost, having one of the expeditioners come back from the titular location, and decades later, seek a way to return to the valley. That high concept sold me right away and pushed me to getting a review copy of the book. I am of an age, like the author, to have seen the show in re-runs, and I wanted to see what a modern, more rigorous take on the concept might be like.¹

And that’s what we get. Noah and his unwilling companions are back in the valley, Noah on a quest to find his sister (his transport back to Earth was alone, and their father died a year before his escape). But Noah finds that the valley is larger, different than he remembered. He expected it to only be some years since his escape, especially with the time dilation he thinks is active—but he finds that centuries have passed. What’s more, many more people are in the valley now (from a variety of time periods), and Noah’s status is more than a bit of legend among them. The Gathers teamed up with another stranded figure in the valley: an android, Ross, and Ross has been around since Billy left, working with those who have arrived in the four centuries since. Ross does not, as it turns out, know what happened to Billy’s sister, which helps propel the plot further. The terrain is wider, larger, and landmarks are further apart. Billy’s valley and time there were a very different time, even through the lens of childhood.

Soon enough, Noah and his companions learn that the humans are not even in control of their own destiny, that a new and mysterious power has moved into the valley and controls its fate. So the novel plays a lot with Noah trying to reconcile his earlier knowledge of the valley with the current state of affairs and still trying to figure out what happened to his sister. And of course, survival in a much more uncertain world. To this end, Noah does get some flashback PoV sequences, as we see him arrive in the valley with his sister and father, and a few of their more memorable encounters. Clines is crafty, and these sequences help ground the theme (more on that in a bit) as well as show us the “then” state of affairs.

The technologic and scientific underpinnings of the valley come into play here. Noah thinks he knows what and where the valley is, but its true nature is part of the book’s journey. There are clues for a reader to make guesses, and all roads run to a mysterious character, the Castaway. The Castaway does not appear to exist in the present, so we only see them in flashback, and in Noah’s explanations of his past in the valley. The Castaway is a multidimensional being living in the center of the valley, and their multidimensional nature (including the dimension of time) makes communication with rather difficult. There’s a sadness, a pathos to the Castaway that reminds me, doubtless deliberate on Clines part, of the “intelligent Sleestak,” Enik, who finds himself marooned in this land just like the protagonists, and yet having a wider perspective on their journey. The teasing out of that is also part of the joy of reading and immersing oneself in the book.

The novel has a strong minor key on allusion, genre savviness and a love of genre. We get characters arguing about The Winter Soldier, for example, or making a Star Trek V reference, among many other genre references and touchstones. This is a novel that lives in a modern SF world, where everyone can and will likely understand or at least appreciate a casual reference to genre. Familiarity with pop culture is not needed to understand this book (just like, really, you need never have seen The Land of the Lost to appreciate this book), but it does add an extra layer to the proceedings.

That said, the novel also plays a lot with Land of the Lost itself. In the universe of this novel, that show never existed, although there were plenty of novels and books written about the Gathers and their adventures. And this all started with a routine rafting expedition (although instead of California, the Gathers disappeared while in Maine). Instead of the Pakuni from the show, we have Neanderthals as neighbors to the Gather family. There are obelisks, not pylons, and they act differently. There are plenty of dinosaurs—more species than in the TV series, in fact.

Clines takes this to the next level and makes allusions and references to Land of the Lost itself as things that are NOT in the valley. Several times there is an easter egg reference to the show, but through the weird lens of a world where that show did not exist. The author’s love of Land of the Lost and its formative aspects for him is on its fullest display here. Also, see the Castaway above.

There are plenty of inventions, speculation and surprises in Clines’s valley as well. This is not an expy of Land of the Lost; he has a considered and really interesting idea of when and where the valley is, why it scoops up people, and what it all means. We get to see his imagination unleashed on a Land of the Lost-like setting, and his speculative inspirations are wide and interesting. And some of what he finds are absolute surprises and delights for the reader, as well as perils. The valley is not a safe place in the least.

The underlying story of God’s Junk Drawer s, as I have started to tease out, two themes that emerge in the telling of the narrative. The first is “the past is a different country,” and that is triply true of one’s youth and upbringing. Billy Gather’s time in the valley is a hazy, almost golden age for Noah, and his memories of the valley being much more pastoral and peaceful (even with carnivorous dinosaurs) clash over and over against the actual reality of the valley now as Noah and his companions, and the inhabitants of the valley, find it. There’s a scene in the flashback PoV for Noah where Billy doesn’t really understand what is happening in an encounter with the Neanderthals, but the reader can and does put together the pieces quite quickly as to the true state of affairs.

The theme that is allied with this is the concept of science being willing to change or abandon hypotheses. Repeatedly, Noah shows that he is reluctant, at best, to change his mind to fit the actual facts on the ground, stubbornly insisting on an outdated and clearly incorrect information set. This is especially ironic and pointed given that Noah IS an astrophysicist, and his limited and incorrect understanding of the phenomenon of the valley allowed him (and accidentally others) to get back there in the first place.

Finally, late in the book, Noah does recognize that his assumptions are faulty, and that clinging to them is getting people hurt. It’s a real moment of growth for Billy, and this, combined with the theme of youth and memories, gives real ballast to the novel. This is a fun, entertaining, exciting and engaging read, and at the same time it has a strong emotional depth and heft.

Where I think the novel could have been slightly stronger is in its other protagonists. Billy/Noah’s journey is the main arc, and the remainder of those caught up in his trip to the valley, as well as the people who are already in the valley when they arrive, get much shorter shrift. Sure, some of them die, quickly or later, but it feels like there could have been much more done with the secondary characters. There are some interesting bits here and there (such as a guide who is not what he appears at all), but in general, the college students are more interchangeable in my mind than I really like.

The novel that comes to mind in thinking about God’s Junk Drawer is Chris Roberson’s Paragaea. That novel features a Russian cosmonaut, Leena Chirikov. Shortly after launching in the mid-1960s, she winds up in the alternate world of Paragea. The novel holds the tension of Leena trying to understand a world on her terms, while giving the reader enough clues to see it is a strange post-singularity world where civilization has regressed, manipulation of nanotech and the like is “magic,” and Leena clearly went through a wormhole. That novel features a major character, Hieronymous Bonaventure, from the British Royal Navy of the 18th century, who also fell into a wormhole some time ago and has been wandering around Paragaea ever since. To show his bonafides, Roberson has a scene where Leena stumbles upon a stone plaza that will be familiar to those who ever watched the show. Paragaea, like this novel, delights in its cultural references and allusions, but is more focused on the action-adventure side, sometimes following pulpy conventions.

I think that God’s Junk Drawer does a better job overall and balances the action and adventure and references, genre knowledge and allusions with an emotional core that gives the novel that extra note of emotional depth. It’s an entertaining and engaging read, and unlike some other novels that might tread in this space, succeeds at doing more than a relatively straightforward adventure story. LIke in Land of the Lost itself, while there’s plenty of action and adventure, God’s Junk Drawer contains veins of nuance, thoughtfulness and insight.

Highlights:

• Hard science meets a classic television show plot
• Strong emotional beats and character growth for Noah
• If you’ve ever been earwormed by the TV show theme song, this book is for you

Reference: Clines, Peter. God’s Junk Drawer [Blackstone Publishing, 2025].

¹ We are not going to discuss the Will Farrell Land of the Lost movie here, only to know that it does, in fact, exist.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Six Books with Chloe N. Clark

Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities (a pick for Best Books of 2020, NPR and The Brooklyn Rail), Patterns of Orbit, Escaping the Body, and more. She is a founding co-editor-in-chief of Cotton Xenomorph. Her next book, Every Galaxy a Circle, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press.

Today Chloe tells us about her Six Books!

1. What book are you currently reading?

What book am I not currently reading might be a fairer question at this point. After a period of not having much time to read, I've started carving out more dedicated reading time, and now I am feasting upon these long overdue delights. I can balance one non-fiction, one novel, and one short story collection at a time basically. Currently reading Why I Love Horror edited by Becky Spratford, Happy People Don't Live Here by Amber Sparks, and First Kicking, then Not by Hannah Grieco.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Oh gosh (depending on when this runs), I am looking forward to quite a few in my pile of TBR and pre-orders, including Ken Liu's All that We See or Seem, The Earth Room by Dana Diehl, Bitter Over Sweet by Melissa Llanes Brownlee, and so many more! I am cheating so much at this one book thing!

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

I love re-reading books, so I'm always hoping to re-read something. Right now, I want to re-read Victor LaValle's Devil in Silver before the show comes out.

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about—either positively or negatively?

There's a lot of books I've changed my mind about in a more negative manner (some because the book no longer connects to me and some because the author has turned out to be terrible). In positives, though, I think I had to age into Mary Oliver's poetry.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

The Alvin Schwartz Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series had a profound effect on me as a child. I got deeply into exploring folklore because of them. I also think the very disturbing and almost impressionistic illustrations greatly inspired the way I think about describing horrifying things.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest book is Every Galaxy a Circle. It's a collection of stories that spans almost two decades of writing and revision (it has a story that was my very first fiction publication way back in the prehistoric times). Story topics include pie, basketball, space ghosts, monsters, and the scariest thing that's ever existed—yes, I'm talking about leopard seals.











Thank you, Chloe!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Book Review: The Witch of Prague by J.M. Sidorova

An intriguing magical realism novel set in the run up to the Prague Spring of 1968.

Alica is a dyslexic teenager in Czechoslovakia. She wants a better life than what her mean and often quite thin circumstances will allow. Answering an ad to learn how to type does teach her that, but opens her up to two worlds. One is a chance at a job within the Communist Party, putting her in the halls of power at a propitious time, and a chance to make a life for herself. The other world revolves around a tapestry. A unicorn tapestry, in fact. But this is not just any copy of the famous medieval work. This is a unicorn tapestry that has an interior world of its own for Alica to immerse herself in. An interior world of symbolism that connects to the real world that Alica is faced with. A world that shows that Alica can have and wield more power than she imagines.

This is the story of J.M. Sidorova’s The Witch of Prague.

Sidorova’s novel starts off, strongly and boldly as a historical fiction novel about a time and place that is likely to be unfamiliar to a lot of readers. The author immerses us in Alica’s life, allowing us to get used to what life in a Soviet satellite state on the cusp of a brief and vibrant change is life. Alica’s life is not a happy or easy one when we meet her--she is dyslexic (and only learns that thanks to her typing tutor). The privations, in freedom as well as goods, and quality of life in the time and place of Soviet Czechoslovakia is made clear, in large and small ways. And yet at the same time we get to see the brief cracks in the wall of Soviet control and domination of the country as music and other ideas are briefly and haltingly impinge on Alica. A movie director from Italy. Music from the Rolling Stones. Foods from beyond the Iron Curtain. These small details, these dollops of a world that might be, show the contrast of what the world is, and what it might be, for Alica, and the other denizens of Prague.

As a result, the novel quite effectively captures not just the place of Prague but the moment of the Prague Spring, its run up and its brief flowering. It is the fragilest of flowers, and it did not last, but we can see, through Alica’s story and her interactions, how that brief, beautiful flowering could and did happen. We see the dark and dank soil of the greyness and relentless nature of authoritarian Soviet Czechoslovakia, and then we see that grasping for the light, a grasping and a search for a different way of living. The writing of the novel is immersive, evocative, and a unique and strong voice. Alica makes for an engaging young protagonist as she tries to navigate her family, a potential romance, work colleagues and rivals. Also, Alica finds that benign a woman in a patriarchal authoritarian workforce is often a very dark place indeed to inhabit. The author does not soft pedal what is like for Alica in her job in a Government ministry as a young woman, and some incidents in the book can be uncomfortable to read.

The magical realism elements of the book enter slowly, a steady drip of the fantastic (or fantastika, in the Gary K. Wolfe sense of the word). This is a book I feel that fits his idea of “evaporating genres”, as the novel effortlessly uses its historical fiction chassis to inject the magical realism, but not really to the levels you might expect in an urban fantasy novel. It’s not that the magic isn’t quite real, but it can be quite subtle.

The magical realism relies on the aforementioned unicorn tapestry, which does turn out to have magical power, and Alica’s relationship (such as it is) with it, and with its power. Again, aside from Alica’s brief immersions into the “world” of the tapestry, the magic that we see her eventually be able to wield, through the tapestry, is quite light. But it is the symbolism and the use of the tapestry as metaphor and as a framework for understanding what is happening in the Prague Spring is where the novel shines. If you consider the story told in the Unicorn Tapestries, one can see analogues and parallels between the elements we see in the tapestry and the real world, and Alica is caught, as it were, in between these two worlds. She doesn’t understand or parse what the tapestry is telling her, but the metaphors and literary use of the tapestry is a commentary and a frame for readers to parse what is happening in Alica’s real life. And, inevitably, that commentary has things to say with the burgeoning Prague Spring, too.

As a reader who prefers more fantasy elements than not in a novel, sometimes this novel was a little too mimetic for my general taste--but the historical richness and the attention to detail and the immersion of place helped allay my concerns. The Prague Spring has, in my personal experience, been not much more than a phrase, and some dimly remembered and briefly covered events in High school and college history courses. My knowledge in general of life behind the Iron Curtain has been similarly just some bits I’ve picked up, as well as anecdotes from some friends and acquaintances who had dared to go there.

So, that aforementioned historical fictional detail really did, for me, make up for the sometimes very light touch on the fantasy. In a way, given the time, and distance, and the world having changed so much from now to then, The Prague of 1968 really is a “different country” than anything in the experience of a vast majority of potential readers. As a result, it is a look into a something uncomfortable, sometimes dark, but also a hopeful place. In the slow run up to the actual rush of events of the Prague Spring itself, the author engages us, carefully and in measured portions, of a world that could have been, an awakening that does not fully happen in the end. But part of the point of the book, as we look in the interior life of Alica and the world of the unicorn tapestry, as well as the events of the book, is that the fight, the brief window of resisting a seemingly unstoppable empire, is a fight that is worth having even if the victory is transitory and fleeting. It is worth it to carve out those brief moments of joy, those brief moments of reprieve. It is worth it to fight, even if the odds seem daunting, and even if the victories are small and do not immediately last.

The story of the Prague Spring, as filtered through magical realism in The Witch of Prague, is a story, then, that has strong resonance in a world where authoritarian forces are on the rise and are seeking to shut down dissent and resistance. It is a novel that is ostensibly magical realism historical fiction, but like a lot of fiction, it is a novel about today and a novel FOR today.

The Witch of Prague is currently being funded on Kickstarter.

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Highlights:

• Magical realism novel with a light touch on the magic
• Strong historical fictional detail of Prague in a propitious time
• Strong use of symbolism and tie into its themes and ideas

Reference: J. M. Sidorova, The Witch of Prague, [Homeward Books, 2025 Kickstarter, 2026 General Release]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Anime Review: The Summer Hikaru Died

Creepy, artistic, poignant, coming of age, horror

The Summer Hikaru Died is a unique, hypnotic, creepy horror series with lots of coming of age angst addressing the stress of social and family pressures. The series is a perfect addition to the list of cerebral horror stories for those who don’t always like horror, but enjoy solid, mind-bending storytelling. High school age Yoshiki is devastated when his best friend Hikaru goes missing in the creepy mountains in their rural village. Hikaru is cheerful, funny, outgoing, and popular, whereas Yoshiki is more serious and reserved. The boys have been close friends since childhood, growing up in a small town where everyone knows each other. Hikaru is found safe a week later and his family and friends rejoice but Yoshiki is the only one who realizes this returned person is not the same Hikaru. When Yoshiki confronts the returned Hikaru, Hikaru admits the deception and quickly reveals his inhuman nature but states he wants to live as a human in Hikaru’s body. Hikaru asks Yoshiki to keep his secret because he doesn’t want to have to kill Yoshiki, (but he will). Yoshiki, in a moment of grief, decides that he would rather have this monster version of Hikaru instead of truly facing his loss. However, Hikaru’s presence begins to attract grotesque spirits and a mercenary demon hunter. All of this leads to disturbing revelations about the town’s dark past and danger for Yoshiki and his friends and family.

The Summer Hikaru Died is a clever combination of horror, coming of age, and friendship that artistically addresses deep questions about grief, identity, and the value of human life. Most of these themes are explored through Hikaru himself. The returned Hikaru has the face and persona and memories of the original young, fun-loving boy. But he is also lethal, physically monstrous, and comfortable killing innocent people. Through their strange friendship Yoshiki tries to teach Hikaru to respect life and understand emotional connection to others. Over time we also learn the secret backstory of the real Hikaru and the troubling history hidden by his family. This mix of slice of life, horror, and coming of age is vaguely reminiscent of the first two seasons of Stranger Things. However, the result is much more subtle and hypnotic.

The art design of the show is highly unique and captures the quiet horror aesthetic by contrasting normal slice of life vibes with sudden terror. The characters are drawn in soft lines with flowing movements that exude the soft fluid vibe of Studio Ghibli. However, that softness is dramatically contrasted with jump scares of shadowy, grotesque humanoid monsters with fearful faces. Additionally, the animated scenes are sometimes interrupted with abrupt real-live photographs, jarringly interposed on an intense moment. Even ordinary moments are given a creepy vibe by using unusual “camera” angles. For example, in one passing scene, Yoshiki is buying items at a small grocery store while the middle aged cashier gossips non-stop about the problems she perceives in Yoshiki’s family. We see the cashier from various angles including an odd view looking up at her face from below and close ups of her mouth. The criticism filled conversation is punctuated by the incessant beeping of the scanner and strange views of a cat shaped speaker near the register. All of this happens while Yoshiki stressfully absorbs the cheerily delivered comments about how messed up his family is. That small scene is filled with as much macabre tension as another scene where a very creepy monster directly attacks Yoshiki in the woods.

While the art design and the primary plot emphasize, and solidly deliver, traditional horror, the series is, fortunately, not oppressively grim. The creatures who haunt the town are more creepy than horrific and the violence is mostly off camera. In fact, much of the show is focused on Hikaru moving from faking an understanding of society (through his acquired memories) to actually seeking to truly understand his community. Through Yoshiki, Hikaru is encouraged to develop a taste for treats and to bond with their fellow classmates, Asaka, Maki, and Yuki. However, the show deliberately chooses genuine and terrifying complexity in the boys’ relationship rather than a happy linear redemption story. Hikaru and Yoshiki’s interactions becomes more fraught as Hikaru fails to maintain control and Yoshiki realizes how dangerous Hikaru is and is forced to make an upsetting choice. Against this backdrop, the series explores larger life themes of sexuality as well as societal and family pressures. Hikaru openly teases Yoshiki about possibly being attracted to him and the two have highly unusual and terrifying symbolic intimate moments in the form of body horror. It’s all so well done that it feels both hypnotic and horrifying at the same time.

The only disappointing element of the series is the subplot about the hired demon hunter, Tanaka. After a promising introduction in the early episodes, the character mostly just lurks and doesn’t offer up any helpful content to build the story. The other old men who hire him (and constantly yell at him) are equally problematic in their lack of usefulness to the story. Every monster movie needs a stereotypical monster hunter to explain the monster and to add tension. However, this character, despite periodic encounters with Hikaru and Yoshiki, ends up not really contributing anything in either of those regards—at least not in the current season.

The Summer Hikaru Died offers an unusual story in a gorgeously intellectual and artistic horror palette. Although I’m not primarily a horror fan, I do enjoy a well-executed, low gore, cerebral horror. The Summer Hikaru Died is fascinating, engaging, creepy, and disturbing, and is definitely the kind of show that is worth a re-watch to catch the subtle hints and one of a kind art design. The quiet storytelling and fluid art style stand out from most other anime and deliver an engaging experience on multiple levels. If you are in the mood for something creepy and emotionally fascinating, this story of a boy and a monster navigating life and death in rural Japan is definitely worth watching.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights:

• Engaging, cerebral horror
• Thoughtfully presented themes of sexuality as well as societal and family pressures
• Unique animation elements

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Film Review: Queens of the Dead

Tina Romero, daughter of the legendary George Romero, directs a comedy zombie thriller set in a queer nightclub that's all style and no real substance, despite an all-star cast and great vibes.

When I found out that Katy O'Brian was going to be in a new queer zombie movie directed by George Romero's daughter, I could not have been MORE excited. You may remember her and her incredible range from last year's excellent Love Lies Bleeding or opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. 

Alas, not even her incredible biceps (which should get second billing) could save this hot mess of a movie. I do not make this review lightly, as I wanted very badly to love it. I am no stranger to camp, and as y'all probably know by now, I tend to like almost every movie I see. And while I can definitely focus on a few fun parts of this one, I haven't been so underwhelmed at the cinema in a long time. And what's worse is that it's got a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes! What am I missing?

First, a brief plot synopsis: Queens of the Dead asks the question, "What would happen to a motley crew of LGBTQ+ characters if a zombie plague descended upon Brooklyn while holed up at a nightclub called YUM?" They would fight, battle, make up, get resourceful, and even have a craft session. 

If this all sounds incredibly cutesy, it is. And again, normally, I'd be down for this, but something just doesn't work right. It reads as cliché, boring, and very, very low-stakes. I love horror, I love comedy (I still am the only person defending SNL after 50 years), and yet I left feeling deflated. Let's see why.

What works

The casting in this movie is legit insane. Apart from the aforementioned Katy O'Brian, we have Jack Haven (I Saw the TV Glow), Dominique Jackson (Pose), Nina West (RuPaul's Drag Race), and tons of others from TV and Broadway. At one point, Margaret Cho rolls in on a scooter in coveralls, and the theater I was in exploded. Watching all of these people hang out for 100 minutes and throw shade at each other isn't the worst way to spend your time. It just doesn't make for a compelling narrative experience.

I read one of the must-haves for this movie was that most of the queer characters have to make it out alive. If you know about the #buryyourgays trope, you know that LGBTQ+ folks generally tend to meet tragic fates in films, books, and other media. By subverting this trope — and having the queer people be the heroes — you get a refreshing take that actually feels good. There's even a straight-man character sidekick who, literally, is a straight man from Staten Island.  The team of lesbians, drag queens, transpeople, and non-binary individuals work together to make it out alive, the very opposite of what happens in her father's Night of the Living Dead. It's also a breath of fresh air to see folks come together instead of tearing themselves apart with in-fighting.

The movie is filled with one-liners and sight gags, and given the sheer amount peppered throughout, several really land. I had more than a handful of actual belly laughs, including an aptly placed "death drop" pun by a dying drag queen. But for every one that lands, 5 or 10 more fall super flat. Again, I present to you my credentials: Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is one of my favorite films. And you, Queens of the Dead, are no Elvira. In general, the movie starts out strong but sort of just runs out of steam by the end.

What doesn't

Many reviewers declare the movie to be "camp," as if that magical word somehow expands on the film's hollowness. But generally speaking, just because a movie has drag queens and puns, that doesn't make it camp. Susan Sontag, in her essay "On Camp" lays out the groundwork for this phenomenon. Here's where I think Queens of the Dead fails the camp test: 

“In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.”

The movie is by turns incredibly disingenuous and then, a split second later, it will be cloyingly saccharine about a friendship breakup or drug abuse. It just doesn't work. It could be because the actors don't have the range to play at this level of theatrics (there's an extended plot line where a character has stage fright, and it goes absolutely nowhere), or maybe it's that worrying about emotions in a time of live-or-die lowers the stakes. 

With pure camp, you're also aiming to make a good movie and it fails. I don't think they set out to make an Oscar-winning film with Queens of the Dead, but neither do I think they set out to make a camp masterpiece. It's complicated, I guess. I just know that I adore honest-to-goodness camp and this one doesn't rise to the heights(or maybe the nadirs) of the likes of John Waters' films, Rocky Horror, and others. 

Another thing that doesn't work is the heavy-handed commentary on club culture and influencers. If George Romero was using zombies as a metaphor that could be read as reactions to the Vietnam War and racism, Tina Romero is addressing the "zombification" of young people due to smartphones and social media. When I say heavy-handed, I mean it: the zombies are literally walking around carrying their phones and live-streaming. It takes you out of the movie, and it's not even funny or thought-provoking! You've got to have at least one of those things to make a real point.

Overall, I think this could have been a great SNL sketch. Or an absolutely FANTASTIC Halloween episode of the late, great Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It's just not funny enough to be a true comedy, and it's not scary enough (or at all) to be a horror movie. 

Am I glad it exists? Yes! And I'm very happy for folks online who seem to love it. I just expected a lot more depth, edge, and nuance.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.