Home » Posts tagged "supernatural fiction"

Book Review: Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints by Teffi, edited by Robert Chandler, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler

cover art for Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints by Teffi

Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints by Teffi, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler

New York Review Book Classics 2021

ISBN 978-1681375397

Available: Paperback, Kindle Bookshop.orgAmazon.com )

 

Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya (1872-1952), known as Teffi, wrote distinctively Russian short stories drawing on her culture and its folklore and legends. These intriguing stories demonstrate Teffi’s ability to show how the supernatural coexists with the commonplace in the lives of ordinary country folk struggling to deal with the deprivation, superstition, dangers, and evils of their place and time.

 

Teffi’s characters are people who have seen it all and expect the unexplainable to happen. They are deeply spiritual but not necessarily religious. They have an eerie insight into the ways that supernatural good and evil touch human life. They are also preternaturally aware of the strange and frightening signs that tell them certain human beings are not what they seem and that unusual incidents are not random and harmless but are warnings, and even evidence, of hazards that must be confronted or at least recognized. Teffi’s characters do not live in a relatively stable world that is knocked out of shape by horror; they live in the midst of it – so much so, that its existence is chillingly normalized.

 

The stories in this collection, except for the first few, are built around characters and settings that feel sinister and menacing. In “Shapeshifter,” a doctor is thought to be “some sort of were-creature” whose “big stone house” was the site where a girl had previously been confined alive in a wall, and ten banknote forgers had been suffocated in the cellar to keep them from being found by the authorities. A woman experiencing a “Wild Evening” takes shelter at an old monastery that local children’s nannies use as a threat to keep their little charges in line.

 

In “Witch,” a couple struggles to be free of a servant who is said to have secured her job indefinitely by ritually burning scraps of paper and “blowing smoke” up the chimney. A priest’s vampire child threatens people’s safety in “Vurdalak,” and the “House Spirit” is up to its traditional tricks that might have to be taken as a serious warning against evil this time. In “Leshachikha” we hear “a kind of story that simply doesn’t happen anymore” about a widowed count with a “hard, yellowish nail of extraordinary length” who has a “malevolent” daughter with very odd ways. Several other tales focus on traditional Russian characters and their familiar stories:  the house spirit, the water spirit, the bathhouse devil, the rusalka, and shapeshifters of all sorts, including those in the form of dogs, cats, and “she-wolves” (who are actually women who have been confined for far too long by controlling husbands). Even the famous Baba Yaga makes an appearance.

 

The Foreword, Afterward, and additional notes on Russian names and translation methods are helpful to readers who are unfamiliar with Russian folklore and tradition. However, some of the translation choices, such as mirroring period dialect in English, are distracting and negatively affect the mood and tone of the stories. Nevertheless, this collection is a blast from the Russian past that suggests, in an unsettling way, that perhaps these old stories are the best, because they come closer to revealing the often discounted darker truths of life we dismiss as old fashioned ways of perceiving reality. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Women in Horror Month: Book Review: Dying With Her Cheer Pants On: Stories of the Fighting Pumpkins by Seanan McGuire

cover art for Dying With Her Cheer Pants On: Tales of the Fighting Pumpkins

( Amazon.com  |  Subterranean Press  limited edition hardcover  | Subterranean Press ebook edition )

Dying With Her Cheer Pants On: Stories of the Fighting Pumpkins by Seanan McGuire

Subterranean Press, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-1596069978

Available: Direct from Subterranean Press (limited edition hardcover, ebook edition), and Kindle edition

 

Into every high school class a cheerleading squad must come to fight against the forces of darkness: aliens, mud monsters, and eldritch creatures.  Squads that don’t survive until graduation are forgotten, and a mysterious force chooses a new cheer captain to recruit a new squad. This tight-knit group of cheerleaders, who may or may not be supernatural themselves, are the Fighting Pumpkins of Johnson’s Crossing, California. These are their stories.

The stories have been published over time, in different places: I first encountered them in the story “Away Game”, a clever, if predictable, story that appears in A Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods, edited by Jennifer Brozek, and have been seeking out their stories since then. I’m so glad they have now been collected together. Originally a limited edition published by Subterranean Press, the collection is now available as an ebook.

Because there have been many cheerleading squads over a long period of time, the stories can be set in a variety of time periods, with different characters. While the majority of the Fighting Pumpkins stories are linked stories about the same varsity squad, with half-vampire cheer captain Jude, squad historian Colleen, Laurie, who has a command voice, supernaturally strong Marti, and undead Heather, a few take place in other time periods and with other squads, such as the titular “Dying With Her Cheer Pants On”, in which the team dies calling Bloody Mary from a mirror during an alien invasion to exterminate the aliens, and “Switchblade Smile”, which features Jude’s mother Andrea, a vampire, as a cheerleader in the 1930s.

Character development is strong, and there is a lot of humor (how can there not be with a team called the Fighting Pumpkins?). McGuire draws from a kitchen-sink universe where any creature of the imagination can be real,  and remixes tropes to create her stories, but the sisterhood of the girls on the cheer squad is what makes the stories of the Fighting Pumpkins really enjoyable. Although a story might center on a specific character, these stories aren’t about a single individual or chosen one bound to save the world on her own. The girls are a team, and they stick together even when things are scary, or dangerous, or one of them turns out to be a monster. Two related stories that involve cheerleader Heather Monroe stood out as favorites, “Gimme a Z”, in which she rises from the grave and defends her sister Pumpkins from an undead mob, and “Turn the World Around”,  an often poetic story in which she helps a girl who mysteriously shows up in a Fighting Pumpkins uniform make a life-and-death decision that will affect the entire community. “School Colors” covers a cheerleading competition between the Fighting Pumpkins and an alien cheerleading squad that could decide the fate of the planet.

The stories of the Fighting Pumpkins are a little scary, but mostly a lot of fun. Those looking for a break from heavy or intense reading will find a lot to like, as will Buffy lovers.  YA readers may enjoy this collection as well.

 

Contains : strong language, violence, some gore. The story “Fiber” received some criticism from First Nations people regarding McGuire’s interpretation of the wendigo.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Book Review: Amari and the Night Brothers (Supernatural Investigations #1) by B.B. Alston

cover art for Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. AlstonBookshop.org  |  Amazon.com )

Amari and the Night Brothers (Supernatural Investigations #1)  by B.B. Alston

Balzer + Bray, 2021

ISBN-13 : 978-0062975164

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Thirteen year old Amari Peters has some big footsteps to fill: her older brother Quinton was the highest performing student at ritzy Jefferson Academy. Since his disappearance (or possibly death) six months ago, Amari’s grades, and behavior, are slipping, and on the last day of school, she shoves a mean girl who makes a dig about her brother and loses her scholarship, her best opportunity to get out of the Rosewood Projects and go to college. Grounded indefinitely, Amari hasn’t been home long when the doorbell rings and she’s asked to sign for a package that, oddly, has been delivered to Quinton’s closet. Opening the package, Amari discovers she has been nominated by her missing brother for a scholarship to the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs training camp. The Bureau of Supernatural Affairs keeps supernatural creatures secret while also protecting innocent humans. Quinton and his partner, “special agents” for the Bureau, have gone missing from the Bureau as well, and Amari decides to attend the camp in hopes of discovering what happened to her brother.

Early on, Amari is discovered to have tremendous magical potential, but this turns out to be a major problem when her supernatural power is discovered to be magic, as magicians are universally considered bad and magic is illegal. Among a throng of privileged “legacy” trainees, Amari’s race, socioeconomic status, and illegal magic make her a pariah among the other trainees, and more determined than ever to qualify to become a Junior Agent and find the answers that will lead to her brother.

While individual elements of the story may sound familiar (a mysterious letter, a summer camp for teenage legacies, mythical and supernatural creatures hidden in plain view, and evil magicians all show up in either Harry Potter or Percy Jackson) B.B. Alston has mixed them up to create something very different. A big piece of that is that Amari, a smart and determined Black girl who already has to prove herself in the outside world, is the point of view character, so we get to see a resourceful character working hard who keeps going even when she’s discouraged by hostility and racism. Nobody hands her a destiny or quest to fulfil, does her homework for her, or makes decisions for her, although she occasionally gets a boost of encouragment from a friend. Alston is also incredibly creative in his world-building (talking elevators with individual personalites, delightful and spooky departmental names and descriptions, gorgeously described magical illusions, magic that can manipulate technology, gossip rags that give you juicy tidbits only when you ask the right questions, and so much more).

Although there are some terrifying creatures and spells, the scariest parts of the book really involve the people who interact with Amari: spoiled mean girl Lara van Helsing, who spreads nasty rumors; evil magician Raoul Moreau, one of the “Night Brothers”; racist kids who draw malicious graffiti on the walls of Amari’s bedroom; Bureau directors certain Amari is a danger to the supernatural world. Amari and the Night Brothers is more of a dark urban fantasy and coming-of-age story than it is a horror story, but it is a great #OwnVoices title that provides a fresh point of view in a genre that seems to be telling the same story over again and again. I’m looking forward to book #2. Highly recommended for grades 4-8