Dear reader, I haven't been posting book reviews here on the blog as much as I would like the last few months. I've still been writing some reviews over on Goodreads, but I haven't even been keeping up over there. It has been a busy few months, and the energy for blogging has often been elusive.
I could keep castigating myself, or I could just post the reviews!
After I post this, I have two more reviews to finish of Death's End by Cixin Liu and Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King. I may also return to a holiday tradition from my past: reading Tolkien's Lord of the Rings! I may even read A Christmas Carol, which I've been thinking about the last few years in line with my tradition of watching holiday horror movies.
Anyway, here are my reviews of The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, Books of Blood, Vol. 3 by Clive Barker, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, Speculative Whiteness by Jordan S. Carroll, The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, The Fall of Gilead (graphic novel inspired by Stephen King's Dark Tower), and The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden.
Happy Holidays to you and all sentient beings! May all beings be jolly!
The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
A phenomenal, heart-wrenching novel. We are all haunted by the ghosts of the past even if not everyone can see the haints.
Inspired by Due's real-life uncle, who died in a reform school, The Reformatory is the story of a boy in the 1950's dealing with the loss of his mother and the fact that his civil rights union leader father is hiding from the authorities. He gets in a silly fight with a white boy and ends up in a reform school, the kind that actually existed in the US until surprisingly recently (I think some were around until the 1970's). I also really liked his sister, who we get to know as she works to get her brother released from the prison/school.
Most of the horror of this novel comes from the horror of history. These places actually existed. And many children were abused and killed. The haints don't really show up until maybe a third of the way through the novel, but the haunting starts earlier.
The novel itself is immersive and engrossing. It's not necessarily a fast read, because you need time to sit with it.
Without giving any spoilers, I can say that Due crafts her own story, partly because we often just dont' know exactly what happened to the real-life children. The haints are real, too, but they exist on the spiritual plane of history. If the US is ever going to come to terms with the horrors or our past and present, we need to confront the ghosts that still haunt us. And maybe novels like this one are one way to begin.
See also my Goodreads review.
Books of Blood, Vol. 3 by Clive Barker
Gotta love Clive Barker: so gnarly! I'm working my way through the Books of Blood, and here I am at volume 3 (I read the previous two volumes around Halloween in recent years).
"Son of Celluloid" starts with a man dying of a bullet wound in a hidden part of a movie theater, and things get much weirder from there. "Rawhead Rex" and "Human Remains" both deal with ancient history coming to modern Britain, again getting weirder than you think (or weirder than you would think if you didn't know you were reading Clive Barker). "Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud" and "Scape-Goats" are both a more literal titles than you might think, and both are almost a bit funny without losing that Clive Barker edge.
I will look for the next volumes sometime, maybe for next year's Spooky Season! In the meantime, I hope to re-read Everville (sequel to The Great and Secret Show) and finally get to others I haven't read yet like Imajica, The Damnation Game, and Cabal (the basis for Nightbreed, which I recently watched... speaking of films, I heard there's a film adaption of "Rawhead Rex," so I may have to find that even if Barker apparently didn't like it).
See also my Goodreads review.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Re-read Oct. 2025: I think this is my third time reading The Dispossessed, and now I realize how much this novel has influenced me. Reading it again makes me feel even more like a Daoist anarchist, with all the complications that creates. An amazing, transformative novel that leaves you a different person, ever so slightly, if you let it. May write more later. Maybe not. After all, how could my words add anything to Le Guin's already sublime words?
See also my Goodreads review.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
One of my favorite books. I've read it three times now, and somehow I've never reviewed it. So, let's accept that this fact is about to change, like everything else.
There's so much to say about this book: a hauntingly plausible dystopia, an unflinching look at the hierarchies humanity imposes on itself, an exploration of care and empathy even in the hardest of times, a deep dive into philosophy and religion...
Let me focus a little bit on the Buddhist elements. Lauren Olamina is just trying to be a teenager in a collapsing society set in 2020's California (this was written in the 1990's). Shit hits the fan, she goes on the run, collecting a merry band of weirdos along the way. Oh, and founding a cult.
Or something? What is it? She calls it Earthseed. Is it a religion? A philosophy? A multi-level marketing scheme? Or maybe it doesn't matter what we call it as we read about it mostly in Lauren's teenage poetry, which is a lot better than MY teenage poetry in any case.
The Buddhist connection is clear if you keep in mind a few things: Buddhist philosophers deny a self, by which they mean that what you call a "self" or a "person" is really something like a node of cause and effect in constant causal contact with the rest of the universe, rather than some secret monad of self-ness separate from the rest of reality. This is also where the core Buddhist idea of impermanence comes in: I think "I" am a persisting, relatively permanent "self," but "I" am changing like everything else. In later Buddhist this gets developed into the idea of nondualism and eventually interdependence--in some sense everything is the cause and effect of everything else.
Or as Butler puts it: "All that your touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change."
This theme can also been seen in how Lauren accepts the often painful changes in her society, while many people live in denial. But the only helpful way to deal with change is to navigate it. To shape it.
One other interesting aspect of Earthseed is its goal of having humanity take root among the stars. There is no traditional personal afterlife in Earthseed. No real personal "God" (although Lauren uses the word God, as when she says "God is change.") Space travel becomes a sort of science fictional eschatology. Is this a good goal for humanity? I don't know, but I do think it's better than whatever most people's goals are now... I guess, dominating, hurting, and killing others as a salve for our own fear of change, and ultimately, fear of death?
And maybe that's as worthy a goal for humanity as anything else we can come up with?
That Butler asks such deep questions in a horrifying dystopian novel is why she remains one of my all-time favorite authors.
See also my Goodreads review.
Speculative Whiteness by Jordan S. Carroll
It's probably appropriate I learned about Speculative Whiteness from the Hugo shortlist, because the main reason I started voting for the Hugos was my annoyance with the alt-right Sad/Rabid Puppy fiasco of the mid-2010's. I started reading this book to vote for the Hugos, and then waited to finish it until I had a chance to buy a copy. I'm glad I did! I'm also glad this won the Hugo for Best Related Work.
Carroll introduces the reader to just how deep the ties go between science fiction fandom and the alt-right. I learned a lot, and honestly I'm glad Carroll did this research, because it would probably be hard for me to spend much time with these primary sources. It's some despicable, deeply racist stuff.
Readers (especially non-academics) should probably be warned that this is primarily written in an academic style, particularly of cultural studies and literary theory. Occasionally I lost the forest for the trees in Carroll's discussions of the details, but usually I was able to follow a trail back to Carroll's main points about "speculative whiteness."
While paleoconservative white supremacism tends to look to a mythical past, the alt-right fosters "speculative whiteness," which locates the full expression of whiteness in a racist, fascist future; hence, the ties to science fiction. Speculative whiteness also has ties to old-fashioned racism, sexism, anti-semitism, as Carroll shows, but the main idea is that some inner-core of white essence will make the future great again. And therein lies the contradiction that Carroll identifies: speculative whiteness rests on a contradiction between an ahistorical immutable racial essence and the vast possibilities of future changes. This also, Carroll notes, makes for bad science fiction.
Here's a quote that I think summarizes the main take-away of the book: "... if we want to maintain our hope for a future that belongs to everyone, we must dismantle the limits imposed upon our utopian imaginations by speculative whiteness."
See also my Goodreads review.
The Witching Hour by Anne Rice
Like most 1000-page books, this one is probably longer than it has to be. There's a 400 page(!) digression into 300 years of Mayfair family drama in historical report form (I almost gave up several times in there). There are hundreds of characters, most of whom we barely get to know (really there are only four main characters, one of whom remains literally shadowy through most of the book). There are hundreds of pages of characters dong mundane things--walking around, thinking about home renovations, managing money in obnoxious rich person ways, planning parties and vacations, etc. And some weird/disturbing sex, because: Anne Rice.
But for all that, there's enough here to keep me interested. And the take on secret societies, ghosts, and witches ended up being fascinating and not what I expected, along with some interesting thoughts on death and whether we should overcome it if we can. And the ending ... well, let's not spoil it. Eh, bien...
See also my Goodreads review.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
A good read for Native American Heritage Month (November). One interesting thesis Dunbar-Ortiz develops is that there are essential connections between the vicious militarism of the US government toward the Indigenous people of this land and its vicious militarism around the world (along with deeper antecedents such as the Spanish invasion of the Americas and British use of the Scots-Irish to settle Northern Ireland and then America). Historical writing is often about seeing connections where the weeds of history have overgrown, and that's one thing this book does particularly well.
See also my Goodreads review.
The Fall of Gilead by Robin Furth, Peter David, and Richard Isanove (graphic novel inspired by Stephen King's Dark Tower)
I don't do a lot of graphic novels/comics, but I do love the Dark Tower and of course want to know more about the fall of Gilead, which is mentioned but never really told in the main novels. My public library has these on the shelf, so I figured I'd check it out. It's not the same depth as reading Stephen King, but it's cool to spend time in the Dark Tower universe to learn more about Roland's back story. I really enjoyed the art, although I have to admit it's hard for me to tell the characters apart sometimes (maybe if I were more proficient in the art of comics I wouldn't have this issue).
See also my Goodreads review.
The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
Itʻs appropriate to end with a wintery book!
I'm not a huge fan of the genre of modern retellings of fairy tales, but this was a pick for my book club, so here I am. This still isn't exactly my thing, but I found it well done for what it is. I'm not too familiar with Russian folklore, so that part was interesting. There's not much of a plot aside from the main character's coming of age story, at least until the last quarter when it comes together (or falls apart, or goes off the rails, depending on how you felt about the first three quarters of the book).
The glossary is a bit weird--some key terms are not defined while other things you don't need defined are given extensive entries. I could have used a dramatis personae, especially given the Russian penchant for multiple nicknames for everybody (this also caused me a lot of trouble with The Brothers Karamazov). There are also--in true fairy tale fashion--some genuinely creepy parts.
And in the end, the message is: don't let people tell you who to be. (At the risk of mild spoilers) Be the wild forest witch you're meant to be. Make friends with demons and the spirits of home and forest. Communicate telepathically with horses. Crash in the house of death. And definitely don't let your stepmother send you to a convent.
See also my Goodreads review.
And there you have it! Now I can close all those browser tabs Iʻve had open for months... Happy Holidays!
I always appreciate these reviews, Ethan! If you want to dig in to more ideas around Dunbar-Ortiz, Gloria Anzaldúa’s La Frontera/Borderlands goes hand in hand. It’s more on the philosophy of liminal spaces but also makes great connections on transnational people’s movements. Thanks again for doing these!
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