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Book Review: Bent Heavens by Daniel Kraus

cover art for Bent Heavens by Daniel Kraus

Bent Heavens by Daniel Kraus

Henry Holt & Co., 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-1250151674

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook (  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

Liv’s father disappeared for four days and returned with vague memories of alien abduction. Becoming more and more erratic, he lost his job and retreated to the shed in his backyard where he built weapons and vicious traps around his house in case the aliens returned. Liv’s childhood friend Doug, neglected by his own parents and ostracized by other kids, adopted Liv’s father as a mentor, helping him with designing and building the traps, with Liv reluctantly along for the ride.  After Liv’s father disappears a second time, Liv and Doug make a ritual out of testing the traps every Sunday to make sure they still work. And at the beginning of her senior year of high school, Liv finds an alien in one of the traps, and she and Doug are determined to find out from the alien what happened to her dad.

Liv has worked to distance herself from her father’s bizarre behavior, making new friends and the cross-country team, but she is a hot mess, with grief and anger balled up inside her without a healthy outlet. Doug has no one holding him back. Having the alien in their power, hidden in the shed, leads to violence, and, as Liv begins to have doubts, complicity. There are explicit scenes of body horror and torture in the book. Seeing her inability to escape participation once it has begun is horrifying.

This is a painful book to read. Kraus shows how human monsters are made in visceral and grotesque detail. Kraus refers to a CIA report on “enhanced interrogation techniques” at the end that I am sure informed the events of the book. The book is made even more painful and heartbreaking by the reveals at the end.

While Kraus does a superior job with the plot focused on Liv, Doug, and the alien, other parts aren’t as strong. The book takes awhile to get going, secondary characters’ motivations are unclear, and parts of the plot don’t make sense.  Still, he has written a powerful and deeply disturbing horror story and condemnation of government secrecy, torture, and complicity.

 

Contains: explicit body horror and torture, violence, sex, alcohol abuse, bullying

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Editor’s note: Bent Heavens is a nominee on the final ballot for this year’s Bram Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel. 

Posted on May 11, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Dispossessed by Piper Mejia

Cover image for Dispossessed by Piper Mejia

Dispossessed by Piper Mejia

IFWG Publishing Australia (2021)

ISBN: 978-1-925956-83-2

Available:  Paperback, Kindle edition ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

Dispossessed is a character-driven debut YA novel from New Zealand author Piper Mejia.

With unusual traits and a rapidly changing physical presence, sixteen-year–old foster child Slate is a perpetual loner who is used to rejection. When Malice, a woman claiming to be from social services, picks him up to take him to another home he isn’t surprised. But when she reveals she is taking him to his grandfather in New Zealand, he is introduced to a band of strangers living a nomadic lifestyle, and possibilities for a life he never imagined. There Slate finds a diverse group of people with unique traits and surprising abilities: people who are supposedly his kin.

Like Slate, no one understands Warnner, an institutionalized boy with a history of abandonment. When Warnner finds the community Slate has recently joined, he is intrigued and drawn to the people running it, because of the uncanny traits they appear to share with him. Unlike Slate’s restless distrust, Warnner’s interest in joining is almost immediate, and conflict brews between the two. The community’s world and way of life is soon pitted against a group of fanatics out to hunt, violate, and destroy them, forcing rivalries into the background as tense and tentative cooperation among the dispossessed becomes required for the community’s survival.

At times poignant, this tale is driven by rich cast of characters and a strong sense of place.  Mejia centers otherness and relies on the surreal in this carefully constructed society, using some Māori terminology, but with a minimal presence of the indigenous population. Instead, Mejia addresses marginalization as experienced by this community of outsiders, the dispossessed, and builds an intricate world where misfits find community and individual variances do not impose limits so much as they open doors to alternatives. A vividly imagined YA fantasy about kinship, community, and the differences that make people who they are, Dispossessed may resonate with readers of varied backgrounds who have felt alienated or misunderstood. Recommended for ages 13-18 who enjoyed the work of Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper and The Stars Never Rise by Rachel Vincent.

 

Contains: violence, torture, violence directed at the dispossessed, a marginalized group.

 

Reviewed by E.F. Schraeder

 

 

 

 

Key words New Zealand. YA. Urban Fantasy. Fantasy.

Posted on April 8, 2021 by , Reply

Women in Horror Month: Book Review: Fractured Tide by Leslie Lutz

cover art for Fractured Tide by Leslie Lutz

( Bookshop.com | Amazon.com )

Fractured Tide by Leslie Lutz

Blink, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-0310770107

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Seventeen-year-old Sia is essential in her mother’s business of chartering trips for tourists wanting to scuba dive. A newbie scuba diver she has been assigned to help navigate a shipwreck is lost, and in her search for him, she senses an underwater threat. When she finds and retrieves her charge, it is too late.  Her mother calls another charter boat, full of high school students, to take Sia, her brother Felix, and the other passengers back.  Just as they’re moving to the second boat, the engines of both boats die, and they are cut off from any radio or cell phone contact, unable to contact the Coast Guard, and running out of water in the middle of the ocean. Then the creature Sia sensed in the shipwreck rises and uses its deadly appendages to sweep everyone over the side and destroy the boats. Sia, Felix and two of the students from the second charter, the only survivors, wash up on a desolate island with almost no food or water, trapped there by the giant sea monster blocking their escape. Sia and the other survivors are pretty well-developed, but not especially likable or cooperative given that if they can’t work together they are probably all going to die.

At first this looked like a straightforward killer animal story, but then it morphed into a survival narrative with science-fictional elements as well (it’s been compared to Lost). Yet there were a lot of things that didn’t make sense for any of those kinds of stories. The creature didn’t discriminate in its destruction of the boats, so it’s odd that the few people Sia has some kind of relationship with (her brother, the boy she thinks is cute, and his ex-girlfriend) are the only survivors. Sia is telling the story in a series of diary entries that she starts writing to her father, who is in prison, in a notebook she discovers shortly after washing up on the island (the story occasionally switches from first to second person as she directly addresses him, which can be confusing) and, in addition to being trapped on the island geographically, and by a killer sea monster, the survivors also seem to be trapped in time. Is this all going on in Sia’s head, or some of it, or is it all really happening? It was confusing, and not at all what I expected.

The parts with the sea creature were terrifying, as were the descriptions of running out of water or getting lost in the dark while scuba diving, and the effects of time repeating on all the characters and their actions took the story into the realm of the bizarre and hallucinatory by the end, but the story didn’t flow naturally– it really was a fractured narrative– and that detracted from my ability to really sink into the story. I’m not sure what I really think of how it worked, but I did love the author’s vivid imagination and description of the thrill and exhiliration Sia felt scuba diving, even in the most dangerous places, under the sea, and the author’s examination of what the thoughts might be of a teen in a tricky family situation with an incarcerated parent. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Posted on February 5, 2021 by , Reply
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