"To Plant a Garden is to Believe in Tomorrow": Overgrowth, by Mira Grant

Overgrowth by Mira Grant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is basically a mishmash of War of the Worlds and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a bit of Little Shop of Horrors thrown in.

Mira Grant, the SF-horror pseunodym for Seanan McGuire, always makes her cross-genre stories interesting, however. I adore her Newsflesh and Parasitology series (zombies and sentient tapeworms respectively) and this book also has the virtue of being a stand-alone, even if the story could conceivably be expanded upon. What makes this particular book a bit more interesting, I think, is the prominent grappling with issues of found family, parental abandonment, and the existential question (also touched upon in the many extended quotes from War of the Worlds to open the book's five different sections) of whether or not the human race is worth saving.

This book is the story of an alien invasion by sapient plants. That one sentence barely encompasses the weirdness of the alien ecosystem on full (green) display here. It begins with a rather gruesome prologue straight out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, detailing when three-year-old Anastasia Miller wanders away from home, stumbles across an alien seed that fell to earth in a comet and germinated, and is swallowed up, digested, and spat forth again as a vegetable-human hybrid copy. She knows what has happened to her and tells anyone who will listen that she is an alien and the invasion is coming. Of course, no one listens to her (which is one of the major themes of the story--people not listening to the thousands across the world who are all asserting the same thing) until more than thirty years later, when an alien signal is received and the armada arrives--and then it is too late.

The author spends a fair amount of time on this fascinating, if horrific, ecosystem. Among other things, Stasia and her cohorts, once their final transformation commences, basically need blood--either human or animal, although the former is preferred--to maintain their metabolisms. Later we find out that consuming blood is necessary for the aliens to continue to be self-aware, which is why the armada endlessly visits life-bearing planets (called "gardens"), conquers and drains them of a great portion of their inhabitants, and moves on. It is a well-thought-out lifecycle that gets ickier and more horrifying the more you think about it. Which is what makes this book stand out: at the end, it comes down firmly on the side of the invaders against the humans.

How you feel about this story will depend on your acceptance of that fact, I think. The author does explore the ramifications of this theme, especially through the character of Antonia Fabris, who argues with Stasia on the subject pretty much throughout the book. (The side characters, including Toni, Stasia's best friend Mandy, and her trans boyfriend Graham, are well drawn and fully rounded people.) There is no last-minute rescue for the human race: the invasion proceeds as planned, with the "scouts" (people like Stasia, sent ahead to warn and prepare) managing to keep humans from nuking the planet. The final pages tell us what is going to happen: Earth will grow biomechanical ships of her own to wander the stars, and Stasia and her friends, along with many other converted humans, will be aboard them, exploring the galaxy. Stasia has been telling this entire story to someone, and at the end we find out who it is: her boyfriend Graham, who agreed to be digested and converted, and is about to wake up in his new vegetable form.

It's a pretty unique spin on the alien invasion trope, I think. I also suspect it will prove to be something of a marmite book--if you can’t abide the idea of humanity getting their asses handed to them, you won't like this book at all. But one of the H.G. Wells quotes sums up this book's approach:

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo….The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

Add to that the fact of humanity in the process of destroying the only place they can live through anthropogenic climate change, the accelerated extinction of species and ecosystems, and the mass misery currently being inflicted on the rest of the world by the planet’s sole remaining superpower, and I really can’t object to this book too much. At any rate, I thought it a fascinating read.

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"Merciful death, how you love your precious guilt"--The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones

One good reason to read Indigenous authors, or other authors of color, is that they tell stories no one else can tell. Such is the case with this book, where Stephen Graham Jones spins a tale of the dark history of the American West, where a vampire, for all his gory, bloodsucking ways, is by no means the worst thing out there. 

This book shares several themes with Ryan Coogler's terrific movie Sinners, which you should see right now if you haven't already (it's the best movie I've seen this year). Coogler sets his tale in 1932 Mississippi, where the vampires, for all their blood and gore, are only incidental to the true horror of Jim Crow and white supremacy. Jones's book has a three-layered structure, with a frame story set in 2012 told by Etsy Beaucarne, a professor trying to achieve tenure who is given an unexpected gift: a fragile, decaying journal found hidden in the wall of an old church, written a century earlier by her great-great-great grandfather, Arthur Beaucarne. Arthur was a pastor in Miles City, Montana, and a century ago he began writing down the purported "confession" of  a Pikuni (Blackfeet) Indian, Good Stab. Good Stab visited the pastor every Sunday, and over the weeks spun a fantastical tale of decades past, during the last days of colonization, when the bison were being exterminated and the Natives exploited and hunted to near extinction. Good Stab himself encountered a creature he called the Cat Man, who is obviously a vampire (although that word is not used until the very last page of the book), and was accidentally turned. Good Stab's story is basically the story of the second American sin (after slavery): the Native genocide, and specifically a real historical incident, the Marias Massacre, which the author skillfully weaves into the narrative. 

This is described in graphic terms:

I opened my mouth in what I would call pain, but it was deeper. It was all my sin trying to find a way out. Yes, I watched women opened from crotch to throat with knives sharp enough to cut through the heart of the world. Yes, axes were used on the few men in camp, once they were taken prisoner. Yes, the infants' heads were collapsed in with the butts of rifles, one blond soldier instructing the rest how less effort was needed if you came down on top of the head, where it was softer, so you just had to snap down and back, fast, like plunking a misbehaving dog away from your horse.

Yes, I remember the pungent smell of the piles of their bodies and lodges and winter stores, burning.

Arthur Beaucarne, as we find out, was not only at that massacre, he was more or less the instigator of it, with his goading the soldiers about "savages." The Marias Massacre has been the singular obsession of Good Stab's life: he hunts Beaucarne down and his weekly "confessions" are a sort of reverse psychology, weaving his way into the pastor's head to get him to bring forth his own confession. To do this, Good Stab racks up his own body count, killing many of the people of Miles City and dragging their bodies to the pastor's church in the climactic confrontation scene where he finally breaks Beaucarne down. 

There is a lot of territory covered before then, however, mainly in Good Stab's struggle to adjust to what he now is. The author does not depict him as some sort of "noble undead." Jones' version of vampirism has some unique twists: Good Stab can walk the earth in daylight even though his eyes are acutely sun-sensitive, for example, and in an extremely black-humored version of "you are what you eat," Good Stab (and the Cat Man, and ultimately Beaucarne) take on the characteristics of those whose blood they consume most often. Good Stab's hair and eyes change color, and he starts growing a beard, for example, if he persists in drinking the blood of "napikwans" (white people). He uses this to dispatch his enemies: he captures the Cat Man and feeds him fish blood until he transforms into a giant sturgeon and swims away. In the century-later climax to the story, Arthur Beaucarne, turned and kept alive for a hundred years by drinking prairie dog blood, until he becomes a seven-foot-long human/prairie dog mutant, is dispatched by his own descendant, Etsy Beaucarne. In this way the story comes full circle, as the great-great-great granddaughter who has inherited the sins of her ancestor closes the loop. 

It's fascinating how in this book, as in Sinners, the author uses the well-worn vampire trope to comment on issues far beyond undead monsters. This story is not for the faint of heart, as there is a lot of blood and gore, and not necessarily of the vampiric variety. This is the horror of the European colonization of the American West, and the grotesqueness of "Manifest Destiny," told from the viewpoint of the people who suffered and died because of it. It's not an easy read, but it's an important one. 

Review: The Games Gods Play

The Games Gods Play by Abigail Owen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With the hot trend in publishing right now being "romantasy" (a twee, overly cutesy contraction of "romantic fantasy," at least in my opinion), I've cautiously dipped into some of these books. The 800-pound gorilla in this room is, of course, Rebecca Yarros' Empyrean series. I happen to have all three books--although I picked them up at my library's used book sale for $5 apiece, including the latest, Onyx Storm (and I got that one when the hold list at the library was still 50+ people long, which maybe says something about the quality of the third book?). I've read two of the three, and I will just say...I like the worldbuilding and love the dragons, and let's leave it at that.

This book dips into the classical fantasy end of the spectrum, with the setting of Greek gods existing in our modern world (they even have cell phones and an honest-to-God group chat). Every hundred years they run a dangerous Survivor-type game they call the Crucible, which involves the thirteen top gods of the Greek pantheon picking mortal champions to compete and fight against (and maybe kill) each other to determine the next King or Queen of the gods. In this Crucible, there is a completely unexpected entrant--Hades, King of the Underworld. He has chosen an unassuming and seemingly unqualified young woman, Lyra Keres, to carry his banner. This story depicts the Crucible from beginning to end, with all its secrets, lies, and manipulations, coming both from the gods and the contestants.

It's definitely more on the "-antasy" side of the spectrum, which is a good thing, to me. The romance here, despite the fact that the entire story takes place over roughly a month, is of the slow-burn variety, and thus has more emotional heft than, say, Fourth Wing's Violet and Xaden. This is due to the superior characterization of both Hades and Lyra, and also the side characters, her rivals in the Crucible who gradually become her friends. Lyra has a lot of stuff to work through in this book: she was cursed by Zeus at birth to be "unlovable," and as a result not only does she have no friends and no one has ever been romantically interested in her, her self-esteem is in the basement. Her character arc involves learning to let people in and accepting her own strengths. Hades, on the other hand, while starting out as a typical and somewhat cliched arrogant little Greek god-snot, begins to show his emotions and his vulnerability, especially where Lyra is concerned. Yes, he has ulterior motives in choosing her for the Crucible, but he finally comes clean about it at the end and Lyra knows the stakes. (And of course the shocking twist in the final pages not only guarantees a second book but shows Hades threatening to burn down the world to save Lyra.)

(The only thing that took me out of the story a bit was the big Hades-Lyra sex scene. Yes, you can have--and you only need--one steamy sex scene per book, Rebecca Yarros! This particular one, though, struck me as being a bit unrealistic, as the fact that Lyra is an untouched virgin--she's never even been kissed!--is emphasized more than once. And yet when the time comes for Hades and Lyra to finally get together, her lack of experience and her possible pain, bleeding, awkwardness and trouble climaxing is not even mentioned. That should have been a good conversation for the two of them to have that would have deepened their characterization. It felt very much like a missed opportunity.)

Nevertheless, this book strikes me as a better example of the genre than some others I've read (to be honest, I think I'm only keeping the Empyrean books around for the world and the dragons, not necessarily the humans). Yarros' books have superior worldbuilding, I think, but the characters here are better developed. Now let me find a romantasy author that does well at both, and shows restraint when it comes to the sex scenes, and I'll be satisfied.

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Review: Annihilation

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I saw the movie made from this book before reading it, and I must say, this is one of the rare cases where the movie makes more sense. (I would encourage you to watch the film; it stars Natalie Portman and was written and directed by Alex Garland, who also did Ex Machina.) Of course, there were several changes made in the film version, which inevitably happens, but in this case, the changes were for the better.

My biggest gripe with this book, I think, is the vagueness and the stubborn, coy ambiguity. I realize this was intentional on the author's part, but when your characters don't even have names (they're just called "the anthropologist," "the psychologist," and the narrator is "the biologist") it's hard to get invested in them as people. This vagueness also extends to Area X: it's just an ill-defined area where people vanish and weird things happen, and there may be an alien being that the narrator can't even properly perceive. There is a heady sense of wrongness about the whole thing, and the atmosphere is suitably creepy, but when you're not getting any hints about why that might be, it turns the reader off eventually (or at least it did this reader). The biologist gradually realizes everything she has been told about Area X is a lie: no one, least of all the Southern Reach governmental agency who sent them in, has any idea how long Area X has been there or where it came from. Which makes all the expeditions (and there have been far more of those than she was led to believe) something like sacrificial guinea pigs. Including her husband, who volunteered for the eleventh expedition and who came back and eventually died of cancer. (And possibly that wasn't even her husband, but an Area X-produced doppelganger.)

Nearly all of this short book--only 195 pages--takes place in an internal context: inside Area X, inside the "Tower" (the tunnel spiraling into the earth) inside the lighthouse, and inside the seemingly alien being, the Crawler, who turns out to have sucked the lighthouse keeper inside it and is sustaining his body (which is another kind of horror) and finally inside the narrator, the biologist, who has a running series of flashbacks exploring her childhood and her relationship with her husband. Because of this, nothing ever gets answered and we get no real hints of what is going on here. Now, to be fair, perhaps this changes in the subsequent books in the trilogy. However, when I reached the end of this book, I realized I didn't care about any of it, and I am not likely to go any further.

Watch the movie instead. I think you'll get more out of it.

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Review: Faithbreaker

Faithbreaker by Hannah Kaner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the final book in the Fallen Gods trilogy, and it brings the series to a satisfying end. In this secondary fantasy world, gods are spirit beings that become intelligent, awake and aware through the faith of their worshippers. So the more shrines/prayers/offerings/sacrifices/followers a god has, the bigger and more real--and physical--he/she/it becomes. This leads to a few very powerful gods, but more common (and this comes into play at the climax, and saves the day for everyone) are literally thousands of small, unobtrusive gods, including a little antlered, winged god of white lies named Skediceth.

Over the course of the three books, a devastating war between the country of Middren and the fire god Hseth has been carefully set up, and in this book that war comes to its bloody climax. The king of Middren, Arren, attempted to cleanse his country of gods, but was forced to compromise his principles and make a deal with another fire god, Hestra, to keep himself alive (she occupies the space where his physical heart used to be). Arren's commander general, Elogast, left the court in bitterness and disillusionment after the battle of Blenraden and Arren's deal with Hestra, and fell in with a cranky godkiller, Kissen. Kissen came with an unwanted sidekick, a young girl named Inara with mysterious powers and a link to the aforementioned Skediceth. Over the course of the series we learn that Inara is in fact a "halfling," the offspring of a human woman and the god of change, Yusef, made flesh. Inara can talk to other gods and summon them, and as she draws close to Kissen and Elogast, she and Skedi become crucial players in the war against Hseth.

The relationship between Inara and Skediceth is at the heart of the series. Skedi grows from a lying manipulator to a true companion and friend to Inara, and at the climax of this book he sacrifices himself to bring Hseth down. The last quarter of the book is the huge sprawling battle against Hseth and her priests, but with the author's expert pacing and balancing of the characters, my heart was in my throat during the final chapters. There are other character deaths as well, of morally gray, nuanced characters who we have come to know and maybe not love, but at least understand.

Along the way the author grapples with questions of faith, and the murderous behavior that extremes of faith can lead to. All this is relevant to the hold religion and cult leaders have on some people in today's world, and is a taut, gripping and heartbreaking tale in its own right. I really liked this entire series, and heartily recommend it.

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To Sleep, Perchance To Scream: Cold Eternity, by S.A. Barnes

Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This author has carved out a specific, rather exotic niche for herself: sci-fi horror, and not of the supernatural type, either. This story owes a lot to the movie Alien, and also to the urban myth of ancient aliens that landed on our planet in millennia past and helped the Egyptians build the pyramids, or something (which is totally insulting to the Egyptians, insinuating that brown people couldn't have constructed those marvels all by their lonesome). This version of "ancient aliens" is far more terrifying.

Halley Zwick, our narrator, is a former high-class political operative, who saw something she shouldn't and is now on the run. Down to her last credits, she takes an under-the-table job working as a caretaker for the frozen people on board the Elysium Fields. More than a century ago, this ship launched carrying cryogenicaly preserved people, the dying and/or the powerful, gathered together under the aegis of the long-dead tech billionaire Zale Winfeld. Winfeld was a cult leader of sorts, promising immortality and a future cure for fatal diseases. But the reawakening process has never worked, and the ship is circling the solar system on an endless loop, carrying its forever-limbo ghost passengers.

However, working there is just the place for Halley to hide, to escape the scrutiny and pursuit of both her family and the politicians she ran from, with her insider knowledge of election tampering. No matter that the Elysian Fields is full of shadows and strange noises, and Halley is getting more sleep-deprived and stretched thin by the day (since she has to make rounds every three hours, and press a button on the bridge that confirms to the ship's governing board that its passengers are being watched and protected). The person who hired her, Karl, is doing maintenance and remodeling on the ship's lower levels, but that doesn't explain the strange skittering noises Halley hears at night, or the things she sees on the ship's cameras....things Karl insists aren't actually there.

Of course, they are, but the full horror of what is happening on the Elysian Fields takes its time being revealed, and is set up by the author beautifully. Suffice to say that we have alien parasites, a dead-alive tech trillionaire, and the trillionaire's three children who were supposed to be dead decades ago, but who have been uploaded into the ship's AI as a hellish artificial existence. This all comes together in a horrifying, gory, zombified stew in the book's explosive and action-packed final quarter.

Halley's voice very much carries the story. This book shares some similarities with Alien, none more so in the fact that Halley is a young, unassuming, everyday sort of character thrown into terrible circumstances who manages to step up and carry the day. Like Ripley, she does not think she has the strength or the smarts to cope with what is happening, but in this baptism of fire, she finds that she does. She is helped in her struggle by Aleyk, one of Zale Winfeld's uploaded children. There is even a romance of sorts between Halley and Aleyk, even though both know nothing can come of it. But Halley succeeds in freeing Aleyk, destroying the Elysian Fields and giving him the peace of true death.

The author has improved with every book, and in this one, the characterizations and the wonderfully creepy atmosphere of the story is her best yet.

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Review: Fable for the End of the World

Fable for the End of the World by Ava Reid
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In the Acknowledgments, the author states that this book was inspired by Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. The parallels are obvious: like Panem, this is a post-apocalypse dystopia (post-climate-change in this case, although there was evidently some sort of nuclear exchange as well) where the downtrodden masses are kept under control by their addiction to a brutal "game." In this case it is the Gauntlet, where trained teenage assassins pursue people (sometimes children, offered up by their parents, as is the case with the protagonist Inesa) who are so far into debt to the ruling corporation Caerus that they will never get out. The Gauntlet, and its sacrificial Lambs--literally--is livestreamed every few months, to distract the general populace from the misery of their living conditions.

In this future, the United States is apparently no more, having broken up into smaller city-states. The two we are focusing on are New England and New Amsterdam. The former still has nuclear capacity, as evidenced by the irradiated border between the two , which has spawned numerous animal and human mutations. New Amsterdam is the poorer of the two, slowly drowning from sea level rise. This is where Inesa, her brother Luka, and their mother live, in a ramshackle shack perched on stilts to keep it out of the rising water. Luka is a hunter, and Inesa is a taxidermist, preserving the dwindling numbers of non-mutated animals. (Although that is a very ironic definition of "preserving," as she stuffs them after they're dead to serve as a record for when normal animals finally vanish.) Inesa's mother has many problems, including, it would seem, mental illness: she has "sold her soul to the company store" to the point when she reaches the red five-hundred-thousand-dollar credit limit of her debt to the evil corporation Caerus, she offers up her daughter to the Gauntlet to avoid having to run it herself.

(Which of course makes her a cartoon evil antagonist, even worse than Caerus. Fortunately, we don't see her beyond one or two scenes. The author tries to inject some nuance into her character, but that pretty much falls flat.)

Our second protagonist is Melinoe (four syllables, like Chloe), the so-called Angel, or trained assassin, who pursues the Lambs to their deaths. Melinoe has been augmented by Caerus to the point where she's more cyborg than human, including an artificial eye with night vision. But as the story opens, she is suffering full-blown PTSD from her last Gauntlet, where she executed a young girl. She cannot get over this or forget it, despite repeated memory wipes from her handler. In a last-ditch attempt to redeem her, Mel is assigned to Inesa's Gauntlet, to serve as a hopefully audience-grabbing contrast: the ice-cold blond Angel pursuing another young girl her own age. Inesa, with the help of her brother Luka, has thirteen days to evade Melinoe and/or fight her and survive. The Gauntlet takes Inesa and Mel through the wilds of New Amsterdam, where they run into increasingly mutated animals--and mutated humans, called Wends, who attack them both. This forces the girls to work together, and of course the inevitable happens: after Mel is cut off from her handler, by virtue of Luka smashing the comm chip implanted in her temple, she and Inesa end up falling in love.

The romance is handled well enough, I suppose: it's a slow burn, and the sex takes place offstage. Still, it's a bit icky in a way, as Mel has killed how many people?--even though she has been manipulated and brainwashed by Caerus. This relationship takes center stage in the final half of the book, and your view of it will undoubtedly color your overall impression of the book. Mel and Inesa attempt to break free from Caerus, only to discover the cameras they thought were off have been following them all this time, laying bare what has been happening between them to a massive global audience. Another Angel is sent after them, and at the climax, Inesa "wins" by killing this second Angel, who seriously injures Mel. Mel is taken back to Caerus and given a final memory wipe, and then married off to one of the evil old Caerus executives (which is really icky. I could have done without that plot point, for sure). The book ends with Inesa, newly rich from her win, following Mel to New Amsterdam's capital city, where she is hoping to meet up with her love and make Mel remember.

I liked this well enough, but it's not as good as some other dystopian YA I've read. The relationship between Inesa and Luka is a high point, as well as Inesa's grittiness and determination to survive. The worldbuilding could have been better: this doesn't feel as real and lived-in as Panem. It all depends on how much you like Hunger Games knock-offs, I suppose.

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Of Music and Monsters: Sinners

 

The two movies I've seen so far this year have been just so-so. I won't name them--the second one was so mediocre I didn't even bother to write about it. This film, however, made me sit up and gasp. Short, non-spoilery recommendation: Sinners is a goddamn masterpiece, and you should go see it.

 

I'll get the obvious out of the way: yes, it is a vampire horror movie. Yes, the vampires stick to classic undead rules: they only come out at night, they can't stand garlic, and they have to be invited in. Yes, the third act does get violent and gory in all the standard vampire ways. 

But.

What writer/director Ryan Coogler does leading up to that third act is nothing short of remarkable. To begin with, the film is set in 1932 Mississippi and has a majority African-American cast. This setup makes the viewer think the characters are existing in a horror movie before the bloodsuckers even appear on the screen, and the film deals with how white people are worse than vampires. To be fair that context/commentary is certainly there, but it's not really what the film is about. It's not even about the vampires, for that matter. They're the monsters that our protagonists have to fight off until dawn, but they're not the central theme of the film.

Sinners is about music. 

This is made clear in the film's opening titles, which discuss two things: folklore about "haints" or the undead, focusing on Irish and Indian stories specifically, and the power of music to "tear open the veil between living and dead, and the past and future." All these things play vital roles in the plot, and in the fact the latter is the focus of the film's most jaw-dropping scene, which I will discuss later on. 

After those title cards, we open on a young black man driving a Model T to a church. He gets out carrying the snapped-off neck of an acoustic guitar, and we see he has four gory gashes--the claw marks of some nasty creature--across the right side of his face. He goes in to face the preacher, who is apparently his father, and the preacher breaks off his sermon and confronts his son, demanding he drop the guitar neck and give up what his father calls "the devil's music." The boy hesitates, unwilling to give up the remnants of his guitar, and another title flashes on the screen: "one day earlier." We then go back in time to discover what led up to that moment. 

This young man is Sammie Moore, an up-and-coming blues guitarist, who is meeting his cousins Smoke and Stack, identical twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan) just returned from Chicago (there's a throwaway line about them working for Al Capone) with a lot of possibly ill-gotten money, wanting to open a juke joint. They meet with a smarmy, condescending white guy to buy an abandoned mill for their juke joint--this is the kind of guy who denies that the KKK exists anymore, which you know right away is a damn lie--and then the two brothers split apart to recruit musical talent, food workers, and other volunteers from the community to open the juke joint that night. Along the way, Smoke meets up with the lover he left behind, a root worker living in the woods named Annie. 

The juke joint does open that night, but we know all is not going to be well because of an interlude scene: a white guy running across a field as the sun is setting, with suspicious puffs of smoke rising from his back and shoulders. He runs up to a cabin, says he is being pursued by Indians, and asks the homeowners to take him in. They agree, and the husband hustles the man upstairs while the wife stands guard at the door with a gun. Three Indians--Choctaws, if I remember correctly--do indeed show up, asking if the woman has seen or is harboring this man. The Indigenous monster hunter (and how cool is that? They deserve a story of their own) starts to press the matter, but as the sun has now set completely the Indians back off and leave. The woman then goes upstairs to find just who they have let into their home--a vampire, who has just turned her husband. 

Meanwhile, the juke joint has its grand opening, and the black community in the town comes to celebrate. We are introduced to several more characters, including Hailee Steinfeld's Mary, the lover Stack left behind. (Mary is no morose pushover grieving the man who left her; in fact, she proceeds to read Stack the riot act about his abandonment.) This middle section of the film concentrates on the juke joint and its music, celebrating the blues and giving a few hints of early rock and roll--and then Sammie gets up to play an original song. This sets the stage for the film's most astonishing scene, which illustrates the title card: "music so powerful it tears open the veil between the living and the dead, the past and the future."
 

Because as Sammie plays, this is exactly what happens. As the camera weaves between the people on the floor, an African drummer and dancer, in full native regalia, appear. Next is a black man holding an electric guitar, obviously meant to represent Jimi Hendrix. Then we see a deejay spinning an LP, and a rapper holding a microphone. All the while the camera moves around the room and illuminates these representations of black music, past and future, in a seemingly one-take shot which must have been stitched together but certainly doesn't look it. It is one of the most incredible scenes I have witnessed in any film. 

But Sammie's magic also draws the vampire seen earlier, named Remmick, and the two people he just turned. The bloodsucking trio shows up at the juke joint's door, asking to be let in. Smoke and Annie are summoned, and they refuse to let Remmick in (they don't know he's a vampire just yet, but he's setting off all sorts of alarm bells, particularly for Annie). The three retreat into the woods, and Mary makes a fateful decision: she offers to go talk to them, as she says they're bound to tell her more about who they are and why they're here than Stack. 

Well, you can guess what happens. Mary is turned and comes back to the juke joint, getting in without much trouble. She seeks out Stack and takes him to one of the upstairs rooms to fuck, which of course turns into her ripping his throat open and sucking his blood. Sammie, hunting for Stack, opens the door and sees them going at it. Then Smoke charges in, too late to save his brother, and shoots Mary. The bullets don't bother her, of course, and after proclaiming "We're going to kill y'all" she runs out the door, leaving Stack to die in his brother's arms. 

That breaks up the party, and the vast majority of the attendees leave to go home, marching right into the clutches of the waiting vamps. After a bit Stack wakes up, leading to a harrowing scene where he confronts Smoke on the other side of the closet he has been locked into, taunting him. He crashes through the door and nearly kills poor Sammie, but Annie, who has finally realized just what they're dealing with, douses him with her version of holy water, and he runs away into the night. 

This leaves a core group of characters inside the building: Smoke, Sammie, Annie, and a few others. Now the challenge is to simply survive the night inside the juke joint and resist the temptations and manipulations of the vampires outside to invite them in. This takes various forms, including one Chinese woman's husband saying he will leave to visit their daughter in town, implying he will turn and/or kill her if his wife doesn't come to him; and Remmick's urging Smoke to step out and join them, claiming that becoming a part of their vampire "community" will free him from the bigoted society he currently lives in. 

(Really, this would be quite a temptation for a black man in Jim Crow Mississippi. To have a chance to live forever, free and powerful, and likely taking revenge on the white people who have so tormented you? Smoke eventually refuses, but you can see him thinking about it.)

(This also leads to another music scene, as Remmick has his newly-turned group dancing to Irish step music. The sight of a bunch of bloodied vampires having a little party of their own in the woods, cheering and stepping to a fiddle, a banjo and a guitar, would seem incongruous to say the least. But it's all a part of the theme of music, how powerful it can be and what it can do for you, that runs through this entire movie.)

 

Inside the juke joint, the tension rises as the characters argue about what to do. In particular the Chinese woman, Grace, is reeling with grief and horror from her husband's being made a monster, and worry for her daughter. She insists they should fight the vampires, despite everyone's efforts to talk her down. In the end she is the one who breaks the logjam, screaming, "Come on in, motherfuckers!"

 

Of course, they do. 

 

This is the climactic, bloody fight scene of the third act, with the vampires overwhelming the people inside. Smoke ends up fighting his undead brother, and while we don't directly see him killing Stack (this will be important later) we assume that's what happens. Meanwhile, Sammie crawls out a window, carrying his guitar and pursued by Remmick. The master vampire wants to use Sammie's power to return to Ireland (it sounds like he was banished to this country centuries ago), and he corners the kid in a pond out back. Sammie busts up his guitar and stabs Remmick with a piece of the wooden body (hence why he is carrying the broken-off neck later on), but he doesn't quite hit the heart. But Smoke, appearing in the nick of time, does. This fight happens just before dawn (and you would think vampires would have a built-in sunrise detector, since after all the sun, y'know, kills them, but maybe they were just overwhelmed by the hunt), and the sun rises over the battlefield, burning all the vamps to ash and leaving Smoke and Sammie alone with the blood and guts and the few remaining human bodies. 

Said body count is going to rise a lot higher, however, because just after dawn the smarmy white guy who sold the brothers the property in the beginning (remember him?) shows up with his KKK bros, intending on burning the place. Needless to say, after the night he had, Smoke is in no mood for this bullshit. (In fact, Remmick had warned him this would happen.) Apparently Smoke fought in World War I, and he kept a couple of machine guns from the war--and when the white lynchers show up, he proceeds to lay waste to them, mowing them down in a hail of bullets. The sight of Michael B. Jordan just massacring the bigots seeking to murder his friends provides the biggest catharsis of the entire movie (with the possible exception of the final scene). Unfortunately, Smoke is shot by the head Klanster and dies there as well, with his last sight the ghost of Annie and their baby, who had apparently died years before. 

So this leaves Sammie the only survivor, and as we circle back around to the opening scene, we see Sammie driving his Model T Ford out of town, still clutching the neck of his guitar. This would be a fine ending by itself, but wait! we're not done! A few credits run, and a post-credits scene starts playing: exactly sixty years later, with an aged Sammie (played by real-life blues guitarist Buddy Guy) playing a show in Chicago. After the show, he is told two people want to see him, and the bouncer says, "I told them to come on in." And who should show up but Stack and Mary, still undead and unchanged. 

 

As we find out, Stack survived because Smoke could not bring himself to kill his brother, even knowing what he was. Smoke extracted a promise from Stack to leave Sammie alone. The vampire, knowing Sammie does not have long to live, offers to turn him, but Sammie refuses. He takes out the guitar he had painstakingly rebuilt on the broken neck he carried away, and plays the same song he played before. Then as the two vamps turn to leave, Sammie asks Stack if he ever thinks about that night. Sammie says he remembers it at least once a week in his dreams, and wakes up soaked in sweat. Stack replies that even though it was the last day he was alive, and the last time he saw the sun, "for those few hours, I was free."

 

Now that, my friends, is a post-credit scene done right. It ties everything together: characters, theme, and music. (Obviously, this film's soundtrack is incredible. It was done by Ludwig Goransson, who among other things composed the music for The Mandalorian.) This is, by far, the best movie I have seen this year, and it will be up for a slew of Oscars if there's any justice.

Review: The Last Hour Between Worlds

The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've read several of Melissa Caruso's books, and in each case what has impressed me most is her worldbuilding. She creates well-thought-out fantasy worlds and cultures that feel lived-in and real, with a multitude of small details that add up to a fantasy universe you can believe in.

This book is no exception, but I think in this story she takes a welcome step forward in her characterizations. Just the fact of her making her protagonist, Kembral Thorne, a new mother with all the attendant issues (sleep deprivation, leaking breasts, and a body that is still recovering from the stresses of pregnancy and labor) is a breath of fresh air. As the story opens, Kembral is at a year's turning party, this world's equivalent of New Year's Eve, and the first time she has been away from her baby for two months. Strange things start happening, and before Kembral knows it, the house where the party is being held slips into an Echo--alternate reflections of the Prime world that get weirder and more dangerous with each layer. Kembral and the rest of the characters come to know this well, as over the course of the book they slip into the deep and deadly unknown Echoes, eleven layers down.

This is obviously the author's spin on Fae and Faerie, although in this book they are called Echoes and Empyreans. The turning of the year is a big deal for the all-powerful Empyreans, as whoever names the new year as the clock strikes midnight is set to gain a great deal of power. Because of this, various Echo factions are playing a dangerous game to see who can win the right to name the year-turning, and Kembral and the partygoers are dragged into this deadly game. Most of them end up dying over and over again as the house sinks deeper into the Echoes, and Kembral has to ally with her nemesis, professional thief and con artist Rika Nonesuch, to save the party attendees and her city. And she has to do it by midnight.

This structure of an hour steadily advancing with each successive Echo the characters fall into ratchets up the tension and suspense (which is cleverly marked by succeeding chapter headings advancing five minutes for each new Echo). Kembral and Rika become unwitting players in the Empyreans' game, and they have to prevent the factions from slaughtering the partygoers in each Echo and reaching the bottom layer with a winning blood sacrifice that will enable them to name the year. They succeed in knocking some factions out, but others still remain, down to the last and eleventh Echo. Along the way, Kembral and Rika, who have a complicated history that is gradually revealed, come to terms with what happened between them in the past and set the stage for a new, possibly romantic relationship going forward.

This is a very well paced book with some nearly unbearable tension in the later chapters. The worldbuilding is wonderful, and the characters have depth. I think this is the author's best book yet.

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Review: The Fourth Consort

The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Edward Ashton writes fast-paced science fiction thrillers that tend to have a fair amount of psychological depth, and this book follows that pattern. We have what might be a bog-standard first contact story gone wrong, but then the author gets into themes of alien/human culture shock and a culture clash built around opposing concepts of honor and loyalty. It all serves to lift the story above what might have been cliches in another writer's hands.

Dalton Greaves is a bit similar to Ashton's breakout character, Mickey Barnes of Mickey 7, in that he is the designated "ground-pounder"--the muscle, in other words, protecting the two other crewmembers, one human, one alien, of the combination explorer/science vessel/first contact scout the Good Tidings. The Good Tidings is representing the Unity, an interstellar federation that is working to bring any sentient species it encounters into its fold. Unfortunately, the Unity has a rival, the Assembly, doing much the same thing (if with quite a bit more of almost religious fervor). On the newly discovered planet of the minarchs, the Unity and the Assembly clash, and Dalton is dragged into a mess of galactic and local politics.

Set in a near-future where representatives of the Unity have contacted Earth and take some specific people off-planet, signing them to contracts of exploration for a certain number of years in exchange for returning home very rich (if they survive) Dalton is a perfectly ordinary (if a bit unsettled and drifting) protagonist. He's very practical and pragmatic, and adapt himself to the increasingly weird situations he finds himself in. Just after contact is made with the minarchs, a ship of the Assembly arrives to try to steal the Unity's thunder. Boreau, the alien commanding the Good Tidings, attacks the Assembly warship, cripples and destroys it, and is himself vaporized, leaving behind Dalton Greaves, his crewmate Neera, and a "stickman," an alien warrior of the Assembly, seemingly abandoned on the planet. Dalton and the stickman, who later names himself Breaker, must band together to survive in a situation which escalates to scheming and murder. Dalton is pulled hither and thither between several conflicting sides, and must walk quite a tightrope to make it out alive.

Along the way, we explore the psychology and culture of both Breaker and the minarchs, and follow Dalton's sometimes deft, sometimes clumsy, and mostly desperate attempts to thread the needle. He is forced into becoming the titular "Fourth Consort" of a minarch queen, First-Among-Equals. Needless to say, he has no idea exactly what this entails, and gets ever more embroiled in court politics. Along the way, Breaker (who is a bit of a philosopher) has repeated discussions with Dalton to try to understand humans (Breaker calls humans "prey animals," and thinks Dalton does not have the slightest understanding of how a sapient apex predator--the minarchs--think, and he's right). The book's climax comes down to a fight to the death between Dalton and a minarch he names Scarface, and Dalton saves himself by hurling a spear through said minarch's throat.

(I think this is the first book I've ever read which asserts that what sets humans apart is not their warlike tendencies, or opposable thumbs, but their shoulder joints:

"You see that?" Stonebreaker said, and swung his shoulder around in an easy circle. "That is why we own this world, my friends. That is what we have that no other animal on this planet has. Your shoulder is the most complex large joint that evolution has ever produced, and it allows us to do something that no other creature we have yet encountered has figured out how to do: throw, with power and accuracy. When a lion decides to take down a wildebeest, she has to do it with teeth and claws, and she has to brave the horns. Do that enough times, and you're likely to wind up dead. Us, though? Ever since we figured out how an atlatl works, we've been able to kill at a distance. That means we can kill literally anything, from a rabbit to a mastodon, with minimal risk to ourselves. If you're looking for the one thing that sets us apart from everything else, well, that's it.")

This book doesn't give the aliens the depth and complexity of, say, an Adrian Tchaikovsky, and it's written in a lightweight, breezy style. Still, it has a plucky narrator and enough of a philosophical edge to hold the reader's interest.

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