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chrisbiss's reviews
527 reviews
The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed
4.0
Premee Mohammed is an author I've been meaning to read for a long time and for some reason I've never got around to. Sometimes, when an author already has quite a large back catalogue, I find myself a little paralysed by choice and don't know where to start. Thankfully the Ursula K Le Guin Prize has come to the rescue and gave me The Siege of Burning Grass to read.
There's a quality shared by some books I really love. They have this sense that they're constantly building to something, that the plot hasn't quite started yet but that it'll kick in soon and in the meantime we're laying the groundwork for things. We're meeting characters, and meeting the world, and establishing the stakes, and slowly settling into a lovely warm bath of story. Then you look up and you've read 300 pages of the book, and you realise that the plot has been here all along, you've just been too absorbed to notice. This is one of those books.
Fantasy and science-fiction present us with stories of war regularly. Big battles are staples of the genre, played out in epic sequences across tens of thousands of words of violence and glory and bloodshed and heartbreak. Very few of those books are quiet, introspective, or mournful. The Siege of Burning Grass is all of those things.
Alefret is a pacifist, the founder of the Pact that resists a forever war that has blighted his country and the floating cities of The Enemy. Grievously injured by the bombs of his own side, imprisoned, tortured, and experimented on, he's convinced he's going to die for his cause. Then he's given a choice that isn't a choice at all - travel with one of your torturers to the floating capital of the enemy, infiltrate the city, and bring an end to the war. Thus begins a long, arduous trek across the war-torn country, on a journey that tests Alefret physically, mentally, and morally.
There is no glory in Mohammed's war. We begin with the torture of a conscientious objector and move through famine, child soldiers, and a government willing to salt its own earth and starve its own people in order to keep its resources out of the hands of the enemy. The senseless waste of it all is front and centre on every page, and the futility of it is only highlighted when Alefret reaches the floating city and discovers that "the enemy" never needed the resources his government was keeping from them - and their own people - the whole time.
Mohammed's writing is stunning. It's lush and vibrant but stark and violent at the same time, showing us the beauty and weirdness of her world with one hand while hitting us across the face with the banal brutality of it with the other. I could read her prose all day, and she slips from contemplative introspection to thrilling action with ease. And even the action is beautiful here; the sequence where the army stages an illusory dogfight so that Alefret and soldier/zealot Qhudur can cross the walls of the floating city is one of the most imaginative, stunningly-realised sequences I've ever read. It's one of those scenes that only takes up maybe a page in the book but which looms large in my memory of it. I know that when I reread this over the coming years - and I'll definitely be rereading it - I'll be perpetually surprised that this sequence isn't longer.
Although the war looms large over the narrative here, the central conflict is much more personal. Alefret spends every page of this book grappling with his dedication to his path of non-violence. There's a complex philosophical question at the heart of the novel - when is violence justified? Can it ever be justified? If your non-violence causes more suffering than an act of violence would, does an act of violence become an act of grace? - and it's given the space it needs to be thoroughly explored in way that never feels like sermonizing but that feels like an integral part of who Alefret is as a character.
This is a wonderful novel, and one I'm going to come back to again and again. Highly recommended.
The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley
3.5
I received a free review copy of this book via NetGalley. This re-issue of The Beauty also comes packaged with Whiteley's short novel The Arrival of Missives, which I intend to read and review separately.
Sometimes you read a book that defies explanation, that's entirely unlike anything else you've ever read. The Beauty is one of those books, and I have no idea how to talk about it.
Somewhere out in the wilderness, away from the bustle of civilisation, a commune of men gather round a fire to hear tales of the way things are and the way things used to be. All of the women are dead, buried out in the woods where strange yellow mushrooms grow from their graves. All the women are dead everywhere, it seems, and the surviving men don't know how to continue.
What begins as a fairly typical post-apocalyptic setup (though we don't receive any details about what caused this mass death of women or, in fact, whether this has impacted the wider world beyond the small community we're focusing on) very quickly takes a hard left turn into the realms of the weird. The dead women return from their graves in the form of mute mushroom people who the men find almost irresistibly arousing. They cook, and clean, and fuck, and the men begin to bear their mushroom children, and slowly a divide forms in the settlement between those who see this as wrong and those who want to protect the Beauty - and their new way of life - at all costs.
There's a lot of weird fungal body horror at the core of the novel, as the men become pregnant with mushrooms and their genitals shrivel and fall off. The prose is full of an almost visceral disgust regarding all things bodily, weak, dependent. It makes for an interesting read, not least because much of the "horror" here is so clearly a metaphor for pregnancy and the way women's bodies are treated by society. I suspect that for people who have borne children the "horror" of the transformations the men undergo won't feel particularly shocking at all.
The Beauty doesn't give much away, and on the surface it could be quite easy to read it as a simple "what if men weren't the dominant gender?" narrative, but there's much more going on here than that. Beneath the surface *The Beauty* is concerned with how society constructs gender, and how society tells women that they must be beautiful, and nurturing, and kind, and silent, and constantly sexual, always second to men. Atop that it's also about gendered violence and the way in which society enables it and in many ways rewards it.
Any story about a gendered apocalypse that presents gender as a binary inevitably runs into criticisms of being trans-exclusionary. And given that much of the body horror in *The Beauty* lies in what is essentially a forced physical transition of the men I think it's fairly easy to make that criticism here. It's a complicated one, because this is very much an issue inherent to the "gender apocalypse" sub-genre as it currently stands, but I do think Whiteley takes some interesting steps here. Much of the narrative involves setting up binaries - men and women, young versus old, fact versus fable, humanity versus monstrosity, tradition versus progress - and then blurring the lines until it's no longer clear whether there was ever a divide to begin with. This may not land for all readers, as on the surface it presents an understanding of gender that's at best outdated and at worst has been aggressively weaponised by TERFs in the decade since this novella was originally published. But if you're able to look beyond that and give Whiteley the benefit of the doubt, I think there's still a powerful piece of writing here about power, violence, nature, and the way in which stories shape our society.
Sometimes you read a book that defies explanation, that's entirely unlike anything else you've ever read. The Beauty is one of those books, and I have no idea how to talk about it.
Somewhere out in the wilderness, away from the bustle of civilisation, a commune of men gather round a fire to hear tales of the way things are and the way things used to be. All of the women are dead, buried out in the woods where strange yellow mushrooms grow from their graves. All the women are dead everywhere, it seems, and the surviving men don't know how to continue.
What begins as a fairly typical post-apocalyptic setup (though we don't receive any details about what caused this mass death of women or, in fact, whether this has impacted the wider world beyond the small community we're focusing on) very quickly takes a hard left turn into the realms of the weird. The dead women return from their graves in the form of mute mushroom people who the men find almost irresistibly arousing. They cook, and clean, and fuck, and the men begin to bear their mushroom children, and slowly a divide forms in the settlement between those who see this as wrong and those who want to protect the Beauty - and their new way of life - at all costs.
There's a lot of weird fungal body horror at the core of the novel, as the men become pregnant with mushrooms and their genitals shrivel and fall off. The prose is full of an almost visceral disgust regarding all things bodily, weak, dependent. It makes for an interesting read, not least because much of the "horror" here is so clearly a metaphor for pregnancy and the way women's bodies are treated by society. I suspect that for people who have borne children the "horror" of the transformations the men undergo won't feel particularly shocking at all.
The Beauty doesn't give much away, and on the surface it could be quite easy to read it as a simple "what if men weren't the dominant gender?" narrative, but there's much more going on here than that. Beneath the surface *The Beauty* is concerned with how society constructs gender, and how society tells women that they must be beautiful, and nurturing, and kind, and silent, and constantly sexual, always second to men. Atop that it's also about gendered violence and the way in which society enables it and in many ways rewards it.
Any story about a gendered apocalypse that presents gender as a binary inevitably runs into criticisms of being trans-exclusionary. And given that much of the body horror in *The Beauty* lies in what is essentially a forced physical transition of the men I think it's fairly easy to make that criticism here. It's a complicated one, because this is very much an issue inherent to the "gender apocalypse" sub-genre as it currently stands, but I do think Whiteley takes some interesting steps here. Much of the narrative involves setting up binaries - men and women, young versus old, fact versus fable, humanity versus monstrosity, tradition versus progress - and then blurring the lines until it's no longer clear whether there was ever a divide to begin with. This may not land for all readers, as on the surface it presents an understanding of gender that's at best outdated and at worst has been aggressively weaponised by TERFs in the decade since this novella was originally published. But if you're able to look beyond that and give Whiteley the benefit of the doubt, I think there's still a powerful piece of writing here about power, violence, nature, and the way in which stories shape our society.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
3.5
In recent years, largely due to the inescapable influence of BookTok, I've become interested in campus novels and "dark academia". As part of the generation who grew up on Harry Potter and made it a huge part of my personality until Rowling gave us all a rude awakening and forced us to find new personalities, and as part of the generation whose fondest memories were formed at university right before graduating into decades of economic crisis and stagnation, it's perhaps inevitable that I'd be drawn to stories in academic settings.
For some reason, despite knowing that novels such as M.L. Rio's If We Were Villains and Katy Hays' The Cloisters - both of which I loved - owe a huge amount to The Secret History, I've never got around to reading it. This week I decided to fix that.
This is a strange book. I know that I enjoyed it, and that I was having to fight the urge to put aside work I actually have to do in order to read it. It's beautifully written, and as I read the final pages I was fairly certain that this was getting added to me "favourite books of the year" list. And yet beneath all that is a slight sense that I've been conned, that the book has only fooled me into believing it's brilliant.
The Secret History has all the trappings of an inverted murder mystery, in the same way as If We Were Villains - not so much a whodunnit as a howdunnit, in which we're aware from page one that a murder has taken place, and the mystery that unfolds lies in the telling of how and why it came about. And for the first 300 pages that's exactly what we get, following Richard as he falls in with a group of wealthy, mysterious Classics students who will eventually murder one of their own.
Tied up in all this is the sense, established very early on, that our narrator isn't exactly reliable. We see him lie again and again, about his family and his upbringing and where he came from and what brought him to be studying in this specific school. And I felt very smart as I was reading it, picking up on hints that all was not as it seemed, trying to piece things together to work out what was going on ahead of the reveal that I knew was coming.
At almost exactly the halfway mark of the book the murder takes place, and our first mystery - how and why did this happen? - is solved. That leaves us with the second half, another almost 300 pages of novel, and the question of what isn't Richard telling us and his friends? I was hooked, and desperate for answers.
What follows is very well written and, at times, very beautiful, but ultimately it's all a little empty. There's no further mystery, and Richard hasn't been lying to us or to anyone else. Instead we're treated to a very slow wrapping-up as the dust settles around Bunny's death and everyone goes on with their lives. The first half of the book shows us characters who are possessed of an air of jaded disillusionment with everyone and everything around them; the second half turns that sneer on the reader, as if to say "did you really think there was more to this?" At one point Richard complains that he and Francis are unable to communicate in secret around Julian because he is just as fluent in Greek as they are. Upon reaching the end of the novel this passage sprung into my head again, now re-contextualised as a complaint that there are no more secrets to keep from the reader and, thus, no more fun to be had.
I think this is still among my favourite books of the year, and I'm very glad that I'll now have this context when I read more modern "dark academia" works that are in conversation with it, but while I often enjoy an unsatisfying ending to a novel this one feels like a joke told at my expense, and I'm not sure how to feel about that.
The Flesh Inherent by Perry Meester
4.0
I received a review copy of this novella via BookSirens.
I only heard about this book because I saw another author I follow talking about it on Bluesky, thus proving that the best marketing your book can possibly have is other people talking about how good it is.
"Weird west horror" is a genre that I absolutely love aesthetically but that I haven't read much of, and the same goes for science-fantasy, so this scratched a very specific itch for me. I didn't know what to expect at all going into it - I'm unfamiliar with Meester's writing and with the word that Ghoulish Books publish - but I was hooked immediately.
Meester's prose is mostly solid. At its best it's incredibly confident and evocative, doing a lot in a very short space of time. The stark, violent world we're presented with feels alive and real, the horrors crawling out of the crater in the night feel genuinely alien and unsettling, and the violence hits hard and fast. We're dropped into an ongoing situation and given no idea what's going on initially but it doesn't matter, as Meester drip feeds us exactly what we need to know when we know it with not a word wasted.
Where it falters is in the character work; I sometimes struggled to figure out whether we were in Jamie or Sidney's head, though that had more to do with some clumsy jumping between viewpoints in a couple of the action scenes rather than anything else.
What really shines here is Meester's portrayal of the messiness of queer relationships. Any story about queer relationships in a western setting is obviously going to draw comparisons to Annie Proulx but I think it's apt here, specifically in the way that sex is portrayed on the page. The sex scenes have the same urgent, aggressive intimacy as the earlier scenes of violence. That's something that I've always admired about Proulx's writing, and it's some of the strongest work in The Flesh Inherent, too.
This is a really solid debut novella, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for more of Meester's writing in the future.
I only heard about this book because I saw another author I follow talking about it on Bluesky, thus proving that the best marketing your book can possibly have is other people talking about how good it is.
"Weird west horror" is a genre that I absolutely love aesthetically but that I haven't read much of, and the same goes for science-fantasy, so this scratched a very specific itch for me. I didn't know what to expect at all going into it - I'm unfamiliar with Meester's writing and with the word that Ghoulish Books publish - but I was hooked immediately.
Meester's prose is mostly solid. At its best it's incredibly confident and evocative, doing a lot in a very short space of time. The stark, violent world we're presented with feels alive and real, the horrors crawling out of the crater in the night feel genuinely alien and unsettling, and the violence hits hard and fast. We're dropped into an ongoing situation and given no idea what's going on initially but it doesn't matter, as Meester drip feeds us exactly what we need to know when we know it with not a word wasted.
Where it falters is in the character work; I sometimes struggled to figure out whether we were in Jamie or Sidney's head, though that had more to do with some clumsy jumping between viewpoints in a couple of the action scenes rather than anything else.
What really shines here is Meester's portrayal of the messiness of queer relationships. Any story about queer relationships in a western setting is obviously going to draw comparisons to Annie Proulx but I think it's apt here, specifically in the way that sex is portrayed on the page. The sex scenes have the same urgent, aggressive intimacy as the earlier scenes of violence. That's something that I've always admired about Proulx's writing, and it's some of the strongest work in The Flesh Inherent, too.
This is a really solid debut novella, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for more of Meester's writing in the future.
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
Now that I've read it, I understand why this book was so hard to blurb. Because let's not mince words here - I absolutely loved this book, and it's easily one of the best things I've read this year. Yet when I've been talking to people about it I've really struggled to explain what it's about and why they should read it.
Chandrasekera's writing is lush and rich, and from the first pages I was completely enthralled. I felt the same way I felt when I first read Alif The Unseen or Piranesi, like I was stepping into an alien yet entirely familiar world that felt completely real. The characters are rich and alive, and there isn't a single wasted word. I felt like I was bathing in myth while reading it.
I do have a couple of minor complaints about the book. Given the title I was hoping that the Bright Doors might factor into the tale a little more. There's a lot of emphasis given to them in the first half of the novel and it all feels like it's building to some revelation about them that's never fully realised. There is slight pay-off towards the end, in a sequence in an embassy of Fetter's hometown, but it felt a little like an after-thought. The novel never really explains itself about the world or the magic, and that's completely fine and works well, but in the case of the doors I would have liked a little more meat to grab hold of.
Then there's the ending, which is hard to write about without spoiling things, which is something I don't want to do. I went into the novel knowing nothing about it, and I think you should do the same. All I'll say is that there's a narrative decision made towards the end which sees us pull away from Fetter's point of view and shift focus to a character who has been present but hidden throughout the novel. On the one hand, as a matter of craft, I really love how this was done and when I saw it happening I was absolutely delighted by how well Chandrasekera pulls it off. But the overall effect was that the end of the novel left me feeling fairly dissatisfied, like I'd been denied the climax we'd been building towards the whole time. And perhaps that's the point, but sitting here writing about the book 12 hours after finishing it I still can't shake the feeling that the ending didn't really work for me and felt more like a fumble than something intentionally unsatisfying. And that's a shame, because up until the final few pages I absolutely adored the novel and I don't like being left with even the slightest of sour tastes about it.
That's not to say that the ending killed the book, in any way. It's still a fantastic read and well worth your time. It functions both as a piece of entertaining fantasy and also as a deeper reflection about how we're manipulated by those in power, or about how colonialism rewrites the history of the people it displaces while shuffling them into the shadows of their own land to be eradicated. Especially in a world where the genocide in Palestine is still ongoing, this feels like a very important novel.
The Saint of Bright Doors isn't a perfect novel, but it definitely comes close, and it's fully deserving of every accolade it's received and will continue to receive. This is a must-read for any fans of SFF, and I very much look forward to picking up Chandrasekera's second novel Rakesfall at some point later this year.
4.0
It feels like I haven't been able to move without hearing about Vajra Chandrasekera's The Saint of Bright Doors this year. It was shortlisted for the Hugo, won the Nebula, was listed as a New York Times "Notable Book of 2023", won the Crawford Award, and is on the shortlists for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize and Ignyte Awards. There are probably another dozen awards it's won or been nominated for that I'm missing here, too.
My brain is a tricky thing sometimes. Often, the more I hear about how great something is and how much I'm going to love it, the less interest I have in it. I don't know what causes this - maybe it's yet another facet of the lovely AuDHD cocktail that I'm unaware of. It makes me an advertiser's nightmare. And because I've been hearing about this book so enthusiastically for so long, I'd reached a point where I absolutely was not interested in it at all. It didn't help that the blurb doesn't really do much to sell me on it, either:
The Saint of Bright Doors sets the high drama of divine revolutionaries and transcendent cults against the mundane struggles of modern life, resulting in a novel that is revelatory and resonant.
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy.
He walked among invisible powers: devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader world where divine destinies are a dime a dozen.
Everything in Luriat is more than it seems. Group therapy is recruitment for a revolutionary cadre. Junk email hints at the arrival of a god. Every door is laden with potential, and once closed may never open again. The city is scattered with Bright Doors, looming portals through which a cold wind blows. In this unknowable metropolis, Fetter will discover what kind of man he is, and his discovery will rewrite the world.
Now that I've read it, I understand why this book was so hard to blurb. Because let's not mince words here - I absolutely loved this book, and it's easily one of the best things I've read this year. Yet when I've been talking to people about it I've really struggled to explain what it's about and why they should read it.
Chandrasekera's writing is lush and rich, and from the first pages I was completely enthralled. I felt the same way I felt when I first read Alif The Unseen or Piranesi, like I was stepping into an alien yet entirely familiar world that felt completely real. The characters are rich and alive, and there isn't a single wasted word. I felt like I was bathing in myth while reading it.
I do have a couple of minor complaints about the book. Given the title I was hoping that the Bright Doors might factor into the tale a little more. There's a lot of emphasis given to them in the first half of the novel and it all feels like it's building to some revelation about them that's never fully realised. There is slight pay-off towards the end, in a sequence in an embassy of Fetter's hometown, but it felt a little like an after-thought. The novel never really explains itself about the world or the magic, and that's completely fine and works well, but in the case of the doors I would have liked a little more meat to grab hold of.
Then there's the ending, which is hard to write about without spoiling things, which is something I don't want to do. I went into the novel knowing nothing about it, and I think you should do the same. All I'll say is that there's a narrative decision made towards the end which sees us pull away from Fetter's point of view and shift focus to a character who has been present but hidden throughout the novel. On the one hand, as a matter of craft, I really love how this was done and when I saw it happening I was absolutely delighted by how well Chandrasekera pulls it off. But the overall effect was that the end of the novel left me feeling fairly dissatisfied, like I'd been denied the climax we'd been building towards the whole time. And perhaps that's the point, but sitting here writing about the book 12 hours after finishing it I still can't shake the feeling that the ending didn't really work for me and felt more like a fumble than something intentionally unsatisfying. And that's a shame, because up until the final few pages I absolutely adored the novel and I don't like being left with even the slightest of sour tastes about it.
That's not to say that the ending killed the book, in any way. It's still a fantastic read and well worth your time. It functions both as a piece of entertaining fantasy and also as a deeper reflection about how we're manipulated by those in power, or about how colonialism rewrites the history of the people it displaces while shuffling them into the shadows of their own land to be eradicated. Especially in a world where the genocide in Palestine is still ongoing, this feels like a very important novel.
The Saint of Bright Doors isn't a perfect novel, but it definitely comes close, and it's fully deserving of every accolade it's received and will continue to receive. This is a must-read for any fans of SFF, and I very much look forward to picking up Chandrasekera's second novel Rakesfall at some point later this year.
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
Did not finish book. Stopped at 15%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 15%.
One of the worst things I've ever read.
No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull
3.0
Cadwell Turnbull's We Are The Crisis is on this years Ignyte Awards ballot for best novel, and with it being the second in a series I thought I should probably read the first before I tackled it. It being urban fantasy, and that being a genre I traditionally don't really enjoy, I didn't have high hopes going into this. But I actually found myself pleasantly surprised by it.
Initially I was hooked, and hooked hard. The opening of the book is strong, Turnbull's prose is great, and this didn't really feel like any other urban fantasy that I've read before. I often think of werewolves as being part of the "big three" of classic horror monsters alongside vampires and zombies, and I regularly lament the fact that they're a little overlooked in fiction and cinema compared to the other two. Urban fiction as a genre loves werewolves, and I really like them in theory, so when this looked to be a werewolf book and I was enjoying it I thought that maybe I'd finally found an urban fantasy series I could love.
There was never a point in the book when I wanted to stop reading, but I definitely became less fond of it as time went on. That mainly coincided with the emergence of more of the standard tropes of the genre becoming present in the book - lots of different kinds of monsters outside of the werewolves that open the books, secret societies of magicians, etc. This isn't a criticism of the book at all, it's just the case that these are things about the genre I don't tend to enjoy and that despite how much there is to like here, this ultimately wasn't for me.
This definitely feels like it's trying to take the genre in a different direction to its contemporaries, and I applaud that. There are parts of this novel that are fantastic. I really liked the framing devise of the observer, a character who's never really given any explanation and who exists almost as a stand-in for the reader and whose eyes we see everything through, and the rest of the characters are equally strong and compelling.
Structurally this does some interesting things, starting with an event and jumping forward weeks and months at a time to show us how the world responds to it from the point of view of different characters who all sort of overlap and interact with each other but also don't, really. This was an interesting way of telling the story but, for me, it ended up making everything feel a little disjointed and disconnected. I never found myself with any full understanding of what was happening outside of the small scraps of individual stories we get, and I couldn't really find any significance in anything.
I suspect that a lot of this novel is spending time setting up things that will pay off in book two, but I'm not sure there was enough here to make this work on its own merits for me. Especially looking at the blurb now (which I didn't before reading it), I don't feel like the book really answers any of the questions the blurb asks.
On finishing No Gods, No Monsters I find myself conflicted. I certainly didn't dislike it, but I know that were the sequel not on the Ignyte list I wouldn't have any desire to read it. At the time of writing this post I don't actually know if I'm going to read We Are The Crisis or not, but I think that if I do it will be out of a sense of obligation to attempt all of the books on the list before I vote rather than out of a genuine desire to carry on reading these books. Turnbull's writing is good, and his debut novel The Lesson sounds like something I'll really enjoy and I'm likely going to add it to my reading list, but the Convergence saga just isn't for me.