chrisbiss's reviews
527 reviews

 

This one was always going to be a hard sell for me, frankly. Urban fantasy and stories about gods walking the earth aren't among my favourites and I often find it hard to connect with them. There's plenty to like here, and I gave it a real effort, but I ended up DNFing at around 37%. 

This has been compared quite widely to American Gods (P.S. Fuck Neil Gaiman), and though I can see the comparison it's fairly surface-level. Both books are about gods walking the earth and interacting with mortals, but that's about where the similarities end. What makes stories like American Gods and G. Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen work, though, is that they have a mortal character at the centre of them to ground us in the world. Shigidi is lacking that grounding, and I struggled to find any way to connect with the characters - especially Nneoma, a succubus who spends much of the narrative sexually assaulting people.

When the writing is good it's great, but there are moments - particularly in flashback sequences - where it becomes quite plodding and dense, and I felt like those sections were doing little more than providing exposition that didn't yet have any context to be meaningful. I'm sure it all pays off in the end, but I never got to that point.

The main thing I struggled with was trying to take the world that we're presented with seriously. This isn't something unique to Shigidi, it's something I struggle with in lots of urban fantasy when their are shadowy organisations whose role revolves around keeping the magical world secret from mortals. What little we see of the Orisha spirit company reminded me far too much of Monsters, Inc., and I couldn't separate that from Shigidi's early missions to kill humans by sneaking into their bedrooms and inflicting them with lethal nightmares.

I was managing okay with it and willing to give it a chance and see where it was going right up until the point at which Alesteir Crowley became an important character. After a scene in which Nneoma sexually assaults a magically-bound man in an alleyway and then grants Crowley immortality so that he can return to the narrative a hundred years later as a key part of their heist team, I realised that I was enjoying the book less often than I wasn't, and I decided to put it down. 

This is another book that was unknown to me before it appeared on the Ignyte ballot. The blurb promises a blend of dragon-riding and magic school, two genres that I love in theory but in practice often don't get along with. In particular I'm yet to find a dragon-riding book that I especially loved. Still, this is well-reviewed across the board, so I went into it with cautious optimism. 

I gave this about 120 pages before deciding that it wasn't for me and putting it down. Given that the Ignyte Awards explicitly has a YA novels category I was surprised when I started reading this that it felt like a YA book rather than an adult novel, and it definitely seems to have been marketed as YA or NA. That was the first thing that made me think, "I don't really want to read this". I have nothing against YA or NA books - I was a children's bookseller for years at the time when the post-Hunger Games YA boom was at its peak, and I've read and loved a ton of YA. But it's not what I what to read these days. Still, I decided to at least give this a chance.

Unfortunately it just wasn't doing anything for me. I enjoyed some of the earlier chapters, particularly Anequs' sighting of a dragon and her finding of the egg, but once the magic school elements came into play and we began to be shown some of the setting I lost interest. I was struggling to find anything to like about the main character, the world wasn't really landing for me, and after reading a quarter of the book I didn't feel like it was going anywhere.

One day I'll find a dragon-riding book I love, but this wasn't it.

 

I wasn't aware of S.L. Huang's The Water Outlaws before it appeared on the Ignyte ballot, which is surprising given that it's been shortlisted for a ton of other awards including the Nebula. Once I read what it was about, though, I was very excited to read it. I'm a big fan of wuxia films but haven't read any of the fiction that those films draw from, and a retelling of one of the most famous of those stories really appealed to me. 

I really enjoyed this, but I felt like it never really lived up to the promise of the opening chapters, which for me were the strongest part of the book. Our introduction to Lin Chong presents us with an incredibly strong character who's a master of her art, and treats us to some really exciting, cinematic combat as she trains a group of soldiers recruited into the Imperial army. Thirty pages in I was already telling friends that they were going to love this book and that they should read it. Everything leading up to the point where Lin Chong escapes the guards Gao Qiu has ordered to kill her and goes on the run is fantastic, and if the book had continued at that level it would have easily been one of my favourites of the year.

Unfortunately from that point on it started to flounder a little bit. It's never bad, by any stretch, but it loses some of the magic of the opening. The middle section feels fairly bloated, as we cut back and forth between Imperial experiments to develop a new form of god's tooth (the vessels that channel magic in this world) and the Liangshan Bandits doing bandit things. It's always well written, but thinking back on it now I struggle to remember any real specifics about much of what happened in the middle of the book aside from a couple of standout moments. There's a really great sequence late in the middle section of the novel where one of the bandits unleashes hundreds of ghosts sealed beneath a village onto the Imperial army massacring the residents, but it's over far too quickly and is simply never mentioned again.

As slow as it may be, one thing the middle section does very well is establishing that our "heroes" are not especially nice people. They may have a just cause, but there's very much a reason they exist outside of society. In one particularly gruesome section we see a group of the bandits torture and eat a man who has betrayed them to the Empire over the course of a night. I really liked the fact that Huang makes no attempt to sugar coat this sort of thing. Her heroes are villains, too - they're just not as villainous as the agents of the Empire who they're in opposition to.

Things do pick up again at the end as the Imperial army lay siege to the bandits, but the action is never quite as good as that first fight scene on the training ground. And given that vengeance is such a strong theme throughout the book - see the aforementioned eating of a peasant as just one example of that - it was a little disappointing that Lin Chong never really gets to have her final confrontation with Gao Qiu, the man who put her in this situation in the first place. She does face him, right at the end, but rather than the fluid wuxia combat we've been building to for the whole book it's more of a desperate scramble for Lin Chong to protect her friends and weather the storm of Gao Qiu's new-found power rather than an actual confrontation. She makes the observation that the only way to defeat him is to stop fighting, but thematically this didn't really land for me and it left me feeling a little unsatisfied with the ending.

Everything about the world was fascinating and I especially really loved the gods teeth and the way that magic was represented. There's a really strong mythic tone running throughout, and I enjoyed spending time with the cast. I just wish it had been a little more focused through the middle, and I felt like it never quite managed to recapture the magic of a very strong opening. 

 When the Booker Prize longlist was announced, Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake was one of the titles I was most excited to read and I was slightly frustrated that I was going to have to wait until September to be able to get my hands on it. Imagine my delight, then, when the people at Random House/Vintage agreed to provide me with a review copy. I immediately put the rest of my reading on hold in order to devour this over the course of a couple of days.

My early impressions of Creation Lake were that this is the most un-'Booker Prize Longlist' Booker Prize Longlist book I'd ever read. Initially it reads like a pacey thriller, and I was pleasantly surprised by it.

Our main character - 'Sadie', an international secret agent working un a pseudonym for a shady company that's never identified after being ousted from the FBI - is every modern thriller secret agent you've ever met. She's brash, she's cocky, she's funny, she's amoral, she has absolutely no doubt that everybody she wants to meet will fall into bed with her at the slightest provocation. The only difference here is that she's a woman, rather than a self-insert for an aging middle-aged author who wishes women would fall into his bed. It almost feels like Kushner is satirizing the leads of your classic modern thriller protagonist, and at times it's hilarious. And yet when you swap the roles like this it becomes much less unbelievable that our spy can seduce her way across the world, because of course rich old white men absolutely want to believe that the mysterious woman who's just shown up in their lives can't wait to sleep with them. "Charisma," Sadie observes, "does not originate inside the person called “charismatic.” It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist".

Although it feels like a thriller to begin with, it never quite delivers on the promise of page-turning action. Sadie infiltrates her group of eco-terrorists, but we spend most of our time taking in the scenery of southern France and perusing rambling emails about Neanderthals and pre-historic man written by the literal cave-dwelling hippy who founded the group Sadie is pursuing but is now largely absent from it. There's a strange juxtaposition between writing style and content here, where the rhythms of the language make us feel like the action is going to jump forward at breakneck pace but what's actually happening on the page is quite languid and introspective. I found it really gripping as a result, always wanting to know where it was going next despite it never quite seeming to actually go anywhere until the very end.

Much of the time we spend with Sadie is in exploring the motivations of the "terrorists" she's infiltrating, learning about their lives and their beliefs and why they're taking the action they're taking. At the start of the book we're rooting for Sadie, eagerly watching while she wheedles her way into the confidences of the group and begins to uncover their plans. Yet by the end we've learned that actually they probably aren't much of a threat, and that Sadie is - and has previously been, in her past postings - very much an agent provocateur.

While sifting through emails and discussing philosophy with the activists she's infiltrating, Sadie contemplates what it means to be human while at the same time stripping away her own humanity in order to mould herself into a simulacra of a person who the group can trust. Her name, her morals, her beliefs, even her body are all fake, augmented and reshaped to be whoever she needs to be at any given time. What begins as a thriller turns into a meditation on genre, and also on the nature of humanity itself. It asks us to think about the stories we tell ourselves about who we and what we believe, and to think about the way in which our fictions often strip the humanity out of characters in service of entertainment.

Creation Lake wasn't what I expected, but in the best kind of way. This one is definitely worth picking up. 

I've started this book three times, hoping that it would finally click for me. Each time I made it a little further before giving up, but the only reason for that was sheer stubbornness and not because the book suddenly began to make more sense.

This is one of the most impenetrable things I've ever tried to read. I never had any idea what anybody was talking about, what the world was meant to look like, what significance anything had. I couldn't glean any meaning from it at all. It's very rare that a book makes me feel stupid but reading this felt like sitting in a thick cloud of brain fog.

Not for me.

 

I'm a sucker for horror that focuses on films and the film-making process. Films like Censor and Berberian Sound Studio are among my favourites, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Silver Nitrate is one of the best books I've read in recent years. I've been meaning to read some Tremblay for a long time, so when I heard about Horror Movie I thought this would be a good place to start. 

The conceit is that the man who played "The Thin Kid" in a legendary cursed film in the 90s has just finished shooting the remake, and he's also recording an audiobook about his experiences during the making of both films. We're reading a transcript of the audiobook, which also contains the full screenplay of the original film. The narrative jumps back and forth between the present day, the early 90s, and the screenplay, and we slowly learn what happened during the shoot that made the original film so legendary.

Early on, Cleo - the author of the screenplay - states that her script is a little unconventional, and that that's intentional. And the script is unconventional, in that it contains huge descriptive passages and tells us about the thoughts, feeling, and backstory of its characters - things that would never end up on screen. I understand why Tremblay took this approach, but for me it didn't quite land because I never felt like I was reading an actual script.

The main character (whose name we never learn) is also deeply unlikable. He possesses an air of unearned superiority, and he reads like a specific kind of man I often encounter on Twitter or at conventions - an aging Gen X dude who's intentionally, aggressively edgy and obnoxious, cynical and disaffected, who really wants you to know how much he doesn't care about anything. He always feels like he's a few seconds away from telling you how in childhood he was kicked out of his house every day at dawn and didn't come back until nightfall, surviving on water from garden hoses.

There are definitely things to like in here. I enjoyed the sections dealing with the making of the original film a lot, and I wish that there had been more of them. The climax of that section is very impactful and personally I think works much better than the climax of the novel as a whole, which suffers from the same problem as a lot of the low-budget indie horror the book is in conversation with - namely that it feels like there's a big, violent ending that isn't really earned because the story didn't have anywhere else left to go. The ending also ramps up a supernatural element that's only previously been hinted at in the most oblique of ways, and that I wish had either been developed more thoroughly in the earlier parts of the novel or else had been cut entirely in favour of a more grounded, personal horror.

As I said up top, this is fine. There's certainly nothing bad about it, it just didn't really excite me in the way I hoped it would. 

This novella has been on my reading list all year and I've never got around to it, so when it showed up as a finalist for the Ignyte Awards I knew I should finally prioritise it. 

Despite my disdain for numerical rating systems I sometimes refer to a book or a film as a "solid six out of ten", and this is exactly what I mean by that. It's a good story, told well, without any flash, and I enjoyed it. It doesn't need to be any more than that, and it's always a pleasure to read something that sits in that space.

The opening section of The Lies of The Ajungo has the feel and cadence of mythology, and while it switches to a more traditional narrative once we're through that prologue the mythic tone remains throughout. The world is painted in broad, thin strokes that never pull the focus away from Tutu and his emotional journey, giving us only what we need to understand the setting and the magic and nothing more. And for me it's this decision to eschew many of the worst indulgences of fantasy as a genre that are the most impressive part of the book. Utomi manages to make this barely-100-page novella feel like it has the scope and space of an 800 page epic by using just the lightest of touches.

This is the first book in a trilogy and I'll definitely be checking out the other two.

 Every year I try to read the Booker longlist, and every year I find it's a roughly even split between books that I adore and books that I simply can't get through. I haven't managed to read all of 2023's longlist, and now that The Bee Sting, Western Lane, and In Ascension, didn't particularly care for How To Build A Boat, and couldn't finish All The Little Bird-Hearts or The House of Doors. Despite my feelings about the rest of the list, though, I usually enjoy the winner a lot.

Enter Paul Lynch's Prophet Song.

I won't bury the lede: this one was a miss for me. If I hadn't felt some obligation to finish it I would have abandoned it somewhere around the 40% mark.

Initially I really liked it. In the opening chapters I felt that the writing was strong, that the decision to eschew paragraphs lent an urgency to the prose that reflected the subject matter, and I was compelled by Eilish's worries about her misssing husband. But it wore off fast, and after the first couple of chapters I found myself zoning out and becoming distracted while reading it. Each time I reached a section break I would put the book down to do something else and not return to it for a while, finding that I could only manage to read it in 20 minute chunks. The book is only a little over 300 pages long and yet it's taken me four days to get through it, having stopped to read Headshot and Sift in the meantime. That's unusual for me.

Part of the reason I kept putting it down is that it's simply exhausting to read. Lynch's writing is strong, yes, but there's absolutely no variety in it. Sentences ramble and diverge with no change in pacing except that sometimes they become longer. The whole book is stuck in the same rhythm with nothing to break it up, so that it quickly becomes tedious.

I also found that my tolerance for Eilish as a main character lessened as the book went on. There are very few points where she actually takes action. Everything happens around her or to her, and even when other people try to convince her to act she resists. She definitely feels like a real person stuck in a position where she doesn't know what to do and is afraid to dramatically change her life even when the life she knew has already disappeared - she's realistic, and on that level the book succeeds, but it doesn't make for particularly compelling fiction. The most powerful moment comes late in the novel, when she actually attempts to find out what's happened to one of her sons and ends up in a military hospital. That section is a real gut-punch, and it's the one part of the book that I found I couldn't put down, but it comes far too late.

Prophet Song really wants to be an important book, and obviously the Booker judges believe it to be, but I'm not sure I agree. Lynch aims to show us what drives a person to leave their home, give all of their money to people traffickers, and pile onto an inflatable dinghy with their infant child to cross the sea to England in the dead of night. The problem is that the people who are likely to read a book like this are the people who are the least in need of convincing about this issue, and once you realise where the book is headed and have identified the message it contains it becomes clear that it's not doing very much else. And at that point it becomes hard to want to keep reading.

Prophet Song is not a bad book, but it was probably my biggest disappointment of the year. 

 I told myself that I was going to wait to start reading the Booker Prize longlist, but this sounded so good that I had to download it and read it straight away. And I liked it enough that I ended up ordered a physical copy too.

Headshot is completely unlike anything else I've read. It takes us through a girls' boxing competition round by round, putting us in the minds and bodies of the young girls punching each other over their two-minute rounds until somebody wins. As they fight we get intimate access to the thoughts, emotions, and physicality of eight uniquely complex young women.

Bullwinkel really excels at making her characters come alive. Each of the girls stands out as her own person, with her own voice and her own desire to carve a place in the world. And as we see them fight we go on a journey with each of them, learning what brought them to the point where they stand in a boxing ring in a tin gym in Nevada in front of less than two dozen people to touch each other over and over again, and learning where they'll go with their lives after the weekend is over. Each of them goes on a journey during their fights, too, and we get to experience it with them just as their opponent does.

In many ways this does what I wish Chetna Maroo's Western Lane had done, which was to give me more time with the characters and more time seeing what the sport actually means to them. In Western Lane the sport takes a back seat to the emotional journey that Gopi goes on, but here the two things are intrinsically linked.

My only criticism is that after we've spent so much time with these girls, after all the focus on the fact that they define themselves and are not defined by the men who train them, the men who judge them despite being less qualified than them, the men who don't particularly want to be there, we're shown the tournament final through the eyes of a male sports reporter. After the raw beauty and power of the preceding six fights I was ready for a big, cathartic final, and we aren't given it. Instead, like the girls who lost, it all ends with a whimper and then it's over. Maybe that's the point, or maybe there's a point being made about how no matter how much a woman excels her story will end up being shown through a male lens that diminishes her, but if that's the case it didn't really land and I feel like I'm reaching by trying to get that from the text.

Regardless of how the ending made me feel, this is a stunning debut and thoroughly deserves its place on the Booker longlist. One of my favourites of the year.