Lost in Lualand

In August, I read 11 books:

1. We Used To Live Here (Marcus Kliewer)
2. The City, Not Long After (Pat Murphy)
3. Operation Bounce House (Matt Dinniman)
4. Constellation Games (Leonard Richardson) (re-read)
5. This All Come Back Now (Mykaela Saunders, Ed.)
6. Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel)
7. The Hollow Places (T. Kingfisher)
8. Nekropolis (Maureen F. McHugh) (re-read)
9. Alien Clay (Adrian Tchaikovsky)
10. The Twisted Ones (T. Kingfisher)
11. Hench (Natalie Zina Walschots)

This month was heavy with Horror/Horror-adjacent books.  I like horror, but often books that other people find really disturbing leave me sort of flat.  I'm like this with horror movies, also (I watch a lot of them, but there are only a handful that I really connect with).  We Used To Live Here was a decently atmospheric story that appears at first to be about worrisomely friendly visitors you can't get to leave, but winds up being more about being lost and isolated, and I think made a good choice to gesture at the resolutions rather than spelling them out fully. I put a libby hold on another Kliewer book, but it has a long wait.

Alien Clay I would say is horror-adjacent, more than horror; I wouldn't recommend it to someone who dislikes horror, but there was a lot of interesting spec-fic content in it.  I feel like it worked better for me than the somewhat similar Semiosis (both involve humans being altered or cultivated by alien eco-systems in ways that are very horror-y).  I definitely preferred Shroud to Alien Clay, but I am pretty sure I am generally up for what Adrian Tchaikovsky is doing. 

The Hollow Places was definitely straightforward liminal space horror, and I liked it slightly better than The Twisted Ones, but they didn't really horrify me as much as they were aiming to.  I imagine I would read more Kingfisher horror, even if it has the same basic template (Chatty narrator takes over a space belonging to a family member (largely physically absent from the narrative, but emotionally very present), creepy things relating to a liminal space start happening and a colorful side character local to the small town they are in helps them out).  Despite the template feeling similar, the books don't feel super samey with each other, and I think this is because the narrators and side characters are sufficiently fleshed out as different enough people.

As to the less horror readings, Constellation Games is one I have re-read many times.  I really love the world Richardson built, and several of the characters.  In addition to having fondness for it over Situation Normal (his follow up novel) because I read it first, it is also much more...quotable? Or rather it has lots of scenes and things that stick out in my memory which I am frequently reminded of by real life.

Operation Bounce House: If you were wondering whether Dinniman was a two-trick pony, this book will not help settle that for you, because it is more or less the same trick as Dungeon Crawler Carl.  A wacky/disturbing AI takes a special interest in the protagonist amidst a planetary attack/assault that will exterminate everyone (and said assault takes the form of an interstellar entertainment program).  The characters are different than Carl and his crew, but it felt very much same-y with DCC (including things like the presence of sex work/workers that are being treated a bit flippantly in the narrative, but with enough awareness to fuel lots of arguments about whether Dinniman is commenting on societal disdain or is being complicit in it; my answer to which is: por que no los dos?)

Nekropolis is a novel that doesn't entirely work, particularly it fails to stick the landing at the end, but the set up is so intriguing/compelling that I still have fondness for it.  Mission Child and China Mountain Zhang are better, more fully conceived novels, but I find myself thinking a lot about the issues raised in Nekropolis (I haven't finished reading Half the Day is Night, so I don't know where that lands other than the fact that I wasn't propelled through reading it and paused at about the 30% mark, which is a sort of judgment about it).  I think Nekropolis is hurt by the decision to change the perspective character in each chapter; or at least, that decision didn't add much (I think a better choice would have been to just alternate between Hariba and Akhmim, rather than including chapters from the perspective of Hariba's mother and her best friend.

This All Come Back Now was a book we read with our Sci Fi Outside the Spotlight short story book club. It was a frustrating read and that is somewhat by design (the book is focused on Aboriginal/Torres Straight Islander authors and stories, and is not trying to be friendly to outsider audiences), but I also feel comfortable saying that many things about it just didn't work.

Station Eleven is a book I read after having seen the tv series. The tv series doesn't diverge so far that you'd say it isn't an adaptation or anything, but there are some major changes.  I think the tv series worked better for me than the book, though, in some ways they are just trying to do different things.  It's an interesting contrast with The City, Not Long After which is also a post-apocalyptic story about the role of art for humanity. Station Eleven worked better than The City, Not Long After, but there was something nice about the optimistic/bright outlook of The City, Not Long After.

The last book I read this month is Hench, which felt weirdly paced while I was reading it, though when I got to the end the pacing made more sense.  It's set in a world of superheroes and corporatized villains/henchman.  The main character is a freelance henchman who finds her path to a career in villainy.  Unlike Light From Uncommon Stars (where the narrative seemed to be completely unaware of the viciousness/amorality of some of the central characters), the book knows that the protagonist and her team are not *good*, but it is heavily focused on problematizing heroes for the collateral damage they cause, and at times, this seems to be less merely the perspective of the protagonist and more the view of the narrative itself.  It really plays down the villainy of the villains, which would be highly objectionable even if the points against the heroes are all taken as granted.  Nevertheless, it was a good read, and the only real hiccup for me was the pacing (I think I was assuming that the narrative would be shaped around the protagonist's primary relationships, rather than her career, which is part of what threw me).

I am about 40% of the way through Ascension by Nicholas Binge (but I don't expect to finish it today, so it goes on September's list).  It's a horror novel of the "Can the human mind withstand exposure to these Eldritch Abominations" persuasion, and is doing a decent job of that so far, but I am hoping it starts to distinguish itself a bit more as it goes.