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Month: September 2020

Review: Surrender Your Sons

Published by Simeon on September 18, 2020

As a gay man, I didn’t grow up suffering. Sure, I was in denial, I repressed a lot of shit, and I missed on my entire teenagehood. That sucked. But I didn’t get disowned. I was never bullied. I have rarely been discriminated against.

I was never sent to conversion therapy…

A part of me feels the need for vicarious trauma. For personal outrage, despite the lack of personal experience. It is a profoundly disturbing mixture of perverted FOMO and guilt. As a Queer person, do I really own myself if I didn’t suffer? Do I have a right to my identity? The answer is, naturally, yes, of course I do. But the feeling is still there, and it makes books like Adam Sass’ Surrender Your Sons a near-cathartic experience.

At the age of 17, Connor Major is a skinny 5’6 gay kid in rural Illinois, who just came out to his church-zombie single mom. His life is, as a result, not awesome. His phone has been confiscated, so he is isolated from his few friends. His two-towns-over boyfriend is unable to fully comprehend what he is dealing with at home. And his mom and the town preacher insist that he admit to the paternity of his ex-girlfriend’s newborn (he didn’t do it!).

The best, however, is yet to come, as Connor finds himself literally kidnapped and carted off to a remote island off the coast of Costa Rica (no dinosaurs though). There, at Nightlight Ministries, boys and girls like him are sent by overzealous parents to get “fixed”. Except, everything is off, even by conversion therapy standards. And Connor was warned about this place back home.

By someone who is now dead.

When I first read the blurb for this YA thriller, I was both immediately on board, and a bit skeptical. Conversion therapy? In 2020? In this economy? But Sass navigates the anachronistic core of his premise with elegance. By hanging a lantern on the absurdity of such a place in present day, he gets to place it in an exotic location. What’s more, he gets to have his characters have a near-meta understanding of their surroundings, as they navigate not only the camp itself, but its cultural context as well.

Surrender Your Sons is a brilliantly written debut. The book exudes the kind of easy sass (pun forever intended) and colloquial flexibility that always make me ugly-jealous. Connor himself is beautifully portrayed as a neurotic kid who has the capacity for both courage, and complete emotional collapse. The rest of the cast are just as well depicted, if in less detail. There is raw vulnerability and innocence coming out of the intimate first person narrative, even when the circumstances around Connor are anything but innocent.

As I said before, this is a thriller. The back cover suggests more of a mystery than the story actually ends up being. But to me, the mismatch between my expectations and the reality were in favor of the book. Surrender Your Sons is a story about tragedy, both past and present. About violence and the desolation that bigotry and self-loathing can heap upon the world. One sentence in particular stuck with me long after the end:

‘That’s what a hate crime does: it reaches out, through space and time, and touches you with a greasy hand.’

The book begins with a content warning. There are themes in there. Suicide, abuse, and surprisingly hot depictions of sex that must have barely passed the YA standard. Despite the effortless prose, Surrender Your Sons is certainly not an easy read on an emotional level.

Sass ends up weaving a story both more mundane, and more personal than the blurb implies. And far stronger for it. I read the last 50 pages with perma-lump in my throat, as one of the best denouements I have ever seen in a book meticulously takes us through the lives harmed or ruined by Nightlight. In the end, Surrender Your Sons was an exciting adventure with a powerful emotional charge. Dealing with serious darkness, but ultimately hopeful. And I thoroughly loved it.

Review: Piranesi

Published by Simeon on September 14, 2020

There is something to be said about artists who only want to tell a few select stories, and take their time crafting them. Something profoundly Not-of-This-Time. Dare I say, something fey. Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell took over a decade to create. It inevitably became a literary phenomenon when it came out. A lush, meticulously crafted Regency epic, mimicking the language and sensibilities of the time, while adding a dose of Faerie magic to the Napoleonic Wars, it was one of the great novels of its decade.

That it should take Clarke 16 more years before she gave us a new book, feels almost correct. But Piranesi is nothing like what I personally expected that book to be.

The House is the world. Or perhaps the world is encompassed by the House. Its endless Halls and Vestibules span for thousands of miles. The highest floors are obscured by clouds, while the lowest drown in oceans. Only celestial bodies can be seen through its windows. Grand, empty atriums sprawl eternal, populated with countless statues.

There are only fifteen humans that have ever lived in the world, and only two of them live still. One is Piranesi, though that is not his name. He is an explorer and an acolyte of the House. He has learned the arcane calendar of its oceanic tides, and the meaning of its many statues. He has walked hundreds of Halls in each direction, and knows their geography intimately. The House speaks to him through symbolism and circumstance. It feeds and loves him.

The Other is a scientist. He is Piranesi’s only friend, though he is seldom seen, and where he goes when they are apart, no one knows. The rest of the humans of the world are but skeletons. Piranesi takes care of them for the House, has named them, and loves them as if they were alive.

Then there is the sixteenth person. The invisible reader for whom Piranesi keeps his journals. And if the numbers on these journals make no sense, or feature entries he does not recall writing, on subjects he does not recall knowing, well the sixteenth will have to do deal with that.

Piranesi is a melancholic and introspective mythology of loneliness. In a strange and — I am certain — unintended way, it is almost commentary on the times we live in. As its titular character roams the empty Halls and interprets the House’s will and meaning through signs that mean nothing to anyone else, the reader is hypnotized by the near-religious irrationality of the narrative. There is infinite kindness and innocence in the way Piranesi sees the world, and even as we try to understand the mystical rules of the House, we are tempted to accept his childlike interpretation of them.

This is a book about magic, but in no way remotely similar to Clarke’s previous epic. For one thing, it is barely a quarter of the size, but that is only the beginning. Where Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was plot-driven, Piranesi is an intimate exploration of one man’s inner world. Even if much of what transpires in the story is real, it still symbolizes the intangible universe within a lonely yet endlessly optimistic individual. The quiet serenity of the House is a search for meaning where none might exist. But for Piranesi it is the search that creates that meaning. And for the reader, it is going through this journey with him that makes the book a masterpiece.

Review: Lovecraft Country

Published by Simeon on September 11, 2020

I am unable to consume speculative fiction TV/movies if they’re based on a book I haven’t read. Such was, naturally, the case with HBO’s Lovecraft Country. When the book first came out, I filed it under “Huh, seems fun”, and moved onto the other three billion books I wanted to read. But once the trailer for the show dropped, it no longer seemed like a matter of choice.

Lovecraft Country bills itself as self-aware pulp. It takes place in 1950s ultra-segregated Chicago, where a Black family deals not only with racist white folks, but also the machinations of a sorcerous coven. The book is actually episodic. I was quite taken aback when the story just ended after the first 100 pages, and a new one started. But after a while it became clear that the vignettes added up to a complete picture. They all tie back together by the end, forming a somewhat coherent narrative.

It felt like Matt Ruff set out to create an alternative “mythos”, in which his Black cast seeks to reclaim agency from the racist era they live in. But on a more meta level, they are reclaiming it from the even more racist Howard Lovecraft. While the story does not take place within his world, he is referred to often, and there are moments throughout that resonate with his works. If I am being entirely honest, I don’t know how comfortable I felt about it. A white author “saving” Black people in this way is already iffy enough. But more than that — I am not sure the experiment was all that successful.

Lovecraft Country reads like tongue-in-cheek romp, but it is filled with contradictions. The first story especially has some truly chilling examples of real world Jim Crow horror. But then the actual supernatural stakes never quite amount to feeling like a real threat. The main villain is not only charming, but also quite friendly, despite his villainy. The characters are all smart and resourceful, yet they are constantly outsmarted by him, which devalues their intelligence. The villain’s main fault, meanwhile, is that he is entitled, obnoxious, and white. Which — don’t get me wrong — is enough, but again confuses the stakes.

Overall, I enjoyed the book up to a point. The writing is solid, the characters are fun, if not terribly deep or memorable. The overall conceit is quite charming too. But the execution left me… uh… whelmed. Not over, not under, just kind of whelmed. I can tell that Matt Ruff is capable of a lot. But here it felt like he got scared of the underlying seriousness of his chosen subject matter, and kept himself from going all the way. That said, Lovecraft Country has all that it needs to make a spectacular TV show. Which I am now free to watch!