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Book Review: The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter

cover for The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter

The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter  ( Bookshop.orgAmazon.com )

Two Dollar Radio, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1937512811

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

Cassie was born with a knot in her torso, a strange genetic mutation that has been carried on through generations of women in her family. The way she lives in and perceives her body, and the way other people react and interact with her because of her body, are also knotted together, in a way she can’t escape. Although her story is shaped by the grotesque, that is something true of most other women, too: the way they live in and perceive their bodies, and what others expect of them because of their bodies, can leave them trapped as well.

The way Cassie describes the realities of her daily life suggests that she is an unreliable narrator– her father makes money from mining from the meat quarry on their land-  but what she describes– doing chores, shopping with her mother, hanging out with a friend, sitting through school– is banal. She has vivid, poetic visions of body parts: rivers of thighs, fields of throats, bodies sliced through at the torso, and her own stomach, flat instead of knotted.  Her mother, who also has a knot, wants Cassie to disguise it with makeup, new clothes, and diet, feeding her rocks instead of ordinary food. Even the boy she likes doesn’t like her body because of the knot. Despite a painful experimental treatment, Cassie is unable to get rid of the knot that causes her physical and emotional pain. The meat that her father mines is bodiless, a place where she feels good about herself. But even that is taken from her when she is sexually assaulted in the meat quarry.

Cassie escapes to the city, where she can be anonymous. Even though people in the city don’t all know about her knot, they still have expectations. At her job she is expected to always be optimistic and cheerful, with a smiling face. When she takes a man back to her apartment and he sees her knot, he leaves. She is not defined by her knot in the same way that she was when everyone knew about it, but she is still trapped, this time by expectations of what a woman is supposed to appear like publicly as well as privately.

More autonomous that she used to be, she once again visits a doctor, but walks away from a supposed “new” treatment that appears identical to the one she has already gone through. Eventually she does find a doctor willing to do a complicated and painful surgery that would allow her torso to be unknotted, but it doesn’t leave her body, or her attitude, unmarked.  She is still unable to endure the trauma of returning to her hometown, where she would have to see the physical pain her mother’s knot is causing her, revisit the scene of her sexual assault, and witness the “normal” existence of getting married and having a family that her best friend has. Even though the knot is no longer there, Cassie can’t see her body or self as being beautiful or worthy of love, and her self-loathing finally destroys her.

Had Etter taken a different path in telling Cassie’s story it would be bleak but not enthralling or horrific. But the surreal elements of Cassie’s environment (like the knot and the meat quarry), while very real to her, make the reader doubt the reality of the situation, coming back to the words more than once to be certain you understand. The Book of X, while giving us Cassie’s point of view of her own story, also embodies the difficult relationships and sometimes unreal feelings and perceptions that many women experience– and that is what makes it so disturbing and unforgettable. It’s no surprise that this book won the Shirley Jackson Award. Recommended.

Reader’s advisory note: Readers who enjoy the work of Carmen Maria Machado may also appreciate The Book of X. 

 

Book Review: Horror Needs No Passport: 20th Century Horror Literature Outside the U.S. and U.K. by Jess Nevins

Horror Needs No Passport: 20th Century Horror Literature Outside the U.S. and U.K. by Jess Nevins

Self-published, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1717952257

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Jess Nevins is a reference librarian at Lone Star College in Tomball, Texas and author of the World Fantasy Award-nominated Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana. He has written several titles on pulp fiction, Victoriana, and comic books, and annotated much of Alan Moore’s work.  In the introduction to Horror Has No Passport, Nevins explains that the book was born our of his frustration at the difficulty of finding a reference book that contained information on non-Anglophone horror and horror writers, as he attempted to write his own book, A Chilling Age of Horror: How 20th Century Horror Fiction Changed the Genre, to be released in 2020.  Nevins found that existing reference books on horror writers and supernatural literature were mostly focused on American and British writers, making it difficult to find information on authors and their works in non-English speaking and non-Western societies, with reputable sources such as The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers and even the ambitiously-named three-volume Supernatural Literature of the World, edited by S.T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz(which, yowza, took three weeks to acquire through interlibrary loan from an academic library in another state), are limited in their coverage of authors and works from non-English speaking countries.

So, what’s a researcher to do?  While the previously mentioned reference guides are alphabetically organized, generally by author’s last name (although Joshi and Dziemianowicz also include essays on a variety of genre-related topics and some specific works) Nevins’ response was to collate information on authors and styles of writing from countries around the world, and write a capsule narrative of who was writing what at that time in that place, and what their influences were.  Since many of the countries he covers developed their horror traditions outside the context of Western literary traditions or had their own literature buried under the traditions deemed acceptable by Western colonizers, Nevins used the broader term fantastika, promoted by John Clute, which includes a wide variety of genres and subgenres that include fantastic elements. These can be but aren’t always confined solely to the horror genre. In the context of this work, Nevins defines horror as “fiction written to evoke fear and dread… including works in which evoking horror was only the secondary or even tertiary intent of the author”. With such a wide definition, the result is that the appearance of certain authors in this work was somewhat of a surprise to me– for instance, having read Nada by Carmen Laforet in a Spanish literature class, it never occured to me that it could be included in the horror genre. However, as was recently pointed out to me, including titles that induce that feeling of unease and dread but aren’t generally considered horror can add a dimension that allows the carving out a space in an area of writing and publishing that is not generally friendly to the “horror” label.

Horror Has No Passport  is divided into three parts, each covering a different period of time in the 20th century. Part one covers 1901-1939; part two covers 1940-1970; and part three covers 1971-2000. Each part is then divided into chapters: Africa, The Americas, Asia, Europe, and The Middle East. Each chapter is then broken down into capsule narratives on the countries Nevins was able to find information on. The countries covered in each chapter are not necessarily consistent from one time period to another: as time passes there is coverage of the literature of additional countries. Some countries and authors have better coverage than others.

As previously mentioned, this is not an alphabetical listing of authors’ biographical information and bibliographies. Even though Nevins compiled this volume to give researchers a reference to have at hand, it really doesn’t work as a stand-alone title– it just provides a starting place. Something I liked about this book that I didn’t see as much in Supernatural Literature of the World is the way Nevins drew connections between authors and their influences. For instance, index entries on Julio Cortazar point you not just to a paragraph about his work in the entry of Argentina, but to the names of authors who were influenced by him. This makes it easier to trace the threads of the development of the fantastic through time in that area of the world. However, it is disappointing that Nevins does not provide citations for all of his material. For instance, he provides no citation for his entry on Turkey in Chapter 10. he doesn’t provide a source for his information of Turkish authors Adnan Menderes and Kerime Nadir. While they are just briefly mentioned, there were other times when I looked for a citation so I could trace it and didn’t find a footnote. There is an extensive bibliography at the end, but more specificity in the footnotes would have been appreciated.

Horror Has No Passport overall seems to be relatively easy to navigate. The table of contents is accurate, organized and informative, the purpose and scope of the work are laid out in easy-to-understand language, I was able to find what I was looking for when I consulted the index, and it contains a detailed bibliography. I feel that it could have benefited from more accurate and frequent footnotes and/or in-text citations to refer the reader to specific sources, especially because the bibliography is so long, and as Nevins notes, many of the sources he used are not in English. My biggest quibble with this book is its formatting. Perhaps it is because this is self-published, or maybe it’s to reduce page count, but the cover does not have a name or title on it, the margins were practically invisible, spacing between lines was crowded, and the font size was almost to small for me to be able to read it. As readers, writers, and researchers strive to make horror fiction more inclusive, this inexpensive title, while not comprehensive, packs in a lot of information about 20th century horror outside the U.S. and Britain, and is a good starting point for further exploration of horror around the world.  Recommended.

Book Review: The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales edited by Dominick Parisien and Navah Wolfe

The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales by Dominick Parisien and Navah Wolfe
Saga Press, 2016
ISBN-13: 978-1481456128
Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

The editors of The Starlit Wood challenged writers to choose a fairytale and view it through a dark crystal, choosing a new context to hang over the bones of the original story. In some cases, elements of the original stories were removed, and in others, transformed. Seanan McGuire, Catherynne M. Valente, Garth Nix, Karin Tidbeck, Naomi Novik and Stephen Graham Jones, among others, contributed, so I’m not surprised at all by the quality of writing. The originality and unsettled feelings stirred up by these stories will intrigue fairytale lovers, but you don’t have to be familiar with the fairytale behind each story to thoroughly enjoy the collection.

Outstanding stories include Stephen Graham Jones’ “Some Wait”, a tale of disappearing children and parental paranoia and disintegration that has crawled into my brain to take up permanent residence; Seanan McGuire’s “In The Desert Like A Bone”, a supernatural, magical realist Western; Karin Tidbeck’s “Underground”, which lights the way in showing how a person can be literally trapped in an abusive relationship;  Charlie Jane Anders’ “The Super Ultra Duchess of Fedora Forest”, set in a bizarre dystopia of talking animals and breakfast meats; Amal El-Mohtar’s “Seasons of Glass and Iron”, in which two women are able to set each other free; and Kat Howard’s “Reflected”, a science fantasy grounded in mirrors, snow, love, and physics.Every story in the collection plays with the tropes of fairytales from diverse sources and cultures, creating the sense of disquiet and magic that we expect from fairytales, with more darkness and dimension. Highly recommended for lovers of fairytales, short stories, and unsettling, genre-crossing tales. If you enjoy the stories of Kelly Link, you’ll definitely want to try these.

Contains: drug use, violence, abusive behavior and relationships, implied child sexual abuse.