Nov 08 2024

A Christmas Ghost Story by Kim Newman

I don’t know if this is the perfect complement or counterprogramming to my eldest child and I watching and really enjoying Agatha All Along together. Probably a little of both — tho my kid will likely have little interest in this book, alas.

That might be for the best tho, as it’s A Chilling Tale for Dark Days and Long Nights, and I think my kids consume too much horror content as it is (even if the YouTube stuff they gobble down is hilariously terrible, with absurd special effects and wooden acting.) In this horror novella, a bestselling self-published suspense author and her teenage son live in a fairly remote cottage in the Somerset Levels. Angie is a single mom with a penchant for wordplay and a devotion to Christmas passed down through her family, but in a wry sort of manner. She and her son Rust put up offbeat DIY ornaments, change the words in Christmas carols to turn them into Christmas “cruels”, and engage in inexplicable but harmless rituals, like stuffing their mince pies with too much mince and putting broken biscuits in a long-disused pet bowl for Santa’s reindeer.

In the manner of countless teenage boys of the 21st century, Rust has a podcast. His focus is on local paranormal phenomena. Angie hates the idea but tries to be supportive, tho Rust can’t help but notice that some of her jokes are meaner than others. Still, they’re pretty close for a mother and son, and look forward to engaging in the usual Christmastime customs.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/08/a-christmas-ghost-story-by-kim-newman/

Nov 07 2024

The Department of Truth: Wild Fictions by James Tynion IV & Martin Simmonds

with a host of incredibly talented guest artists!

So I went into this book assuming it was a graphic novel, like the rest of the series. Readers, it is not! While it is 100% based on The Department Of Truth comic book series — and there are two issues from the main series at the very end of this volume — the bulk of this book is an illustrated primer to supernatural phenomena the world over. It does, however, mainly focus on America, as that’s where the series’ namesake department is located.

Roughly divided into three parts, the book covers first, intangibles such as ghosts; second, close encounters such as aliens, and third, the cryptids that make up the bulk of what the Department Of Truth deems the most dangerous Wild Fictions. These Wild Fictions are essentially the coalition of so much willpower and belief in a creature that the cryptid in question becomes not only real but deadly to those who cross its path (tho interestingly, the concept of the tulpa on which this is clearly based is only mentioned briefly and never actually explained in these pages.) The conceit is that cryptids are far more likely to manifest and pose a threat than the other categories because of humanity’s often difficult relationship with the wild. The write-ups are written from the acerbic point of view of DoT agents who break down the history of each phenomenon, with a brief risk assessment and occasional redactions of material still too classified to share with the general public.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/07/the-department-of-truth-wild-fictions-by-james-tynion-iv-martin-simmonds/

Nov 05 2024

Esma Farouk, Lost in the Souk by Lisa Boersen, Hasna Elbaamrani & Annelies Vandenbosch

As a third culture kid, this book really hit home, perfectly depicting not only fairly commonplace events (travelling to see family, getting separated from a parent while shopping) but also the existential angst of feeling lost and disoriented in a place of wonders that, one feels at one’s core, should feel more intimately familiar.

Plenty of readers will wonder what I’m going on about and that’s okay! Because you don’t have to be a third culture kid to delight in this picture book on either its face or at that deeper level. Esma Farouk is a young girl who lives in The Netherlands with her family. Every summer they head back to Morocco to visit her grandparents, and engage in the gift-giving dance known to so many cultures worldwide. Expatriates’ suitcases always come to their native lands full, empty out, then miraculously manage to fill themselves up again for the return trip. And it isn’t just the reciprocal generosity of family that helps stuff their bags. There must, ofc, be shopping!

Esma goes with her mom and her Aunt Fatima to the souk, the big open-air market filled with strange and enticing sights and fragrances. As is the way of all expats, Mom swiftly finds things she absolutely must bring home with her. Esma is distracted by the snake charmer, and when she hurries to catch up with Mom again, discovers that she’s been following the wrong person! Will she be able to find her mom, with the help and ingenuity of a bunch of souk regulars?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/05/esma-farouk-lost-in-the-souk-by-lisa-boersen-hasna-elbaamrani-annelies-vandenbosch/

Nov 04 2024

Afterlife: The Boy Next Realm by Gina Chew & Nadhir Nor

If you enjoyed Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, then you will probably also be swept away by the romance of this sepia-toned graphic novel, as a teenage girl fights Death itself to bring her little brother back to life.

If, however, you found TNC as wildly mid as I did, then you’ll probably feel the same way about this book. But, y’know, TNC was a publishing phenomenon, so clearly I am in the minority here.

Much like its predecessor, Afterlife: The Boy Next Realm is one of those books that’s great in theory. There’s a plucky young heroine on a quest, metaphysical questions on what happens after we die, and a love interest who’s genuinely self-sacrificing without being a simp (archaic usage.) The book even opens on two young lovers whose romance is forbidden, sneaking away on a night train and trying to escape the actual circus they work in. Alas, things go poorly. The boy, Eric, subsequently makes a bargain with Death to forever be able to watch over his beloved Kyralee.

Fast forward a century and a teenaged girl named Kyra is in a hospital at her beloved brother’s bedside. She’s exhorting him to keep living. He doesn’t. She spots a cloaked figure by the doorway and takes off in pursuit, much to the consternation of their parents. When she finally catches the cloaked figure, she discovers that he’s a Soul Keeper named Eric, who was sent to guide her brother Major to the Afterlife. Kyra decides that she’s going to get Eric to help her bring Major back to the realm of the living instead. As Kyra is the latest reincarnation of his lost Kyralee, Eric finds it difficult to say no, even when her actions grow increasingly rash and dangerous.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/04/afterlife-the-boy-next-realm-by-gina-chew-nadhir-nor/

Nov 03 2024

A Famine of Horses by P.F. Chisholm

The same friend who, ages ago, recommended I read Dorothy Dunnett suggested I pick up books by P.F. Chisholm, and this is how bookish friendships are sustained over decades. We don’t always like the same things — Little, Big left her cold — but she seldom goes astray when she says she thinks I will like something. I hope the recommendations I have made in return have been similarly rewarding, because A Famine of Horses was a bang-up winner. I started it while waiting for a flight out of Larnaca and had finished it by the time I landed in Berlin

A Famine of Horses by P.F. Chisholm

Sir Robert Carey has accumulated debts and probably enemies at the court of Elizabeth I, and he says more than once that his appointment as Deputy Warden of the Marches has saved his life. Given the violence and uncertainty of the Marches — the parts of England bordering Scotland — that is quite a statement about his situation in London. Why Carey was so keen to leave London is never completely explained, though there are hints about problems with both money and women. The novel never slows down enough to explore Carey’s past, for he has not so much been thrown in at the deep end as dived in with rolls and twists that nobody in those parts has seen before.

Even before he arrives in Carlisle he has an enemy in Sir Richard Lowther, who believes that the office had been promised to him, and who is the beneficiary of much of the corruption across the whole of the Western Marches. As Carey is approaching, the man who will be his sergeant and a small troupe discover a dead body hidden in a grouse stand. Dead men are common enough in the Marches, but this particular corpse was that of Sweetmilk Graham, youngest son and favorite of the powerful Graham patriarch, Jock of the Peartree. Worse luck, Sergeant Dodd and his men are soon surrounded by Grahams interested in the shrouded body carried by one of the horses. Dodd is economical with the truth, and insists that he’s on the Warden’s business and will brook no interference. The semi-bluff works, but sets up repercussions that will echo throughout the novel as connections and loyalties flow back and forth, and the law proves a most malleable ideal.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/03/a-famine-of-horses-by-p-f-chisholm/

Nov 01 2024

Tantalizing Tales — November 2024 — Part One

Happy November, friends! I’ve been so overwhelmed with work that I had to take yesterday off from posting, though Halloween always feels like a good reason to work less and celebrate more. While I originally thought that I’d just be reading last night between bouts of handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, I ended up sharing hot toddies and maple cream pie with my neighbors outdoors in the gloriously mild weather. I hope you had a brilliant evening of it as well, dear readers, whether you spent it reading or otherwise.

We’ve got some great recommendations for the continuation of spooky season into November, starting with CJ Reede’s American Rapture, an apocalyptic horror novel that I’m desperately trying to cram into my own reading schedule right now. A virus is spreading across the country, transforming the infected and making them feral with lust. Sophie, a good Catholic girl, must traverse this hellscape to find her family. Along the way, she discovers that there are far worse fates than dying a virgin.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/01/tantalizing-tales-november-2024-part-one/

Oct 30 2024

Sitting On A Rock by Gary L Brinderson

Oh poetry, thou fickle siren, luring thousands of writers into your gentle-seeming embrace only to let them flounder on the sharp rocks of skill that underpin you.

So here’s the deal, dear readers. Poetry is about image and emotion. Back in the day, it also used to be about form and rhyme. For better or worse, blank verse changed the landscape irrevocably: I personally think it’s for the better, even as I fear that aspiring poets forget that meter is still just as crucial as meaning in modern verse. There’s a reason that spoken word is different from singing is different from anything written down on the page. With written poetry, it’s important that the words are capable of cohering by themselves into a rhythm that the reader can recognize.

I appreciate Gary L Brinderson’s intent in writing this collection of poetry. Only one of these poems is longer than a page, and fittingly it’s on the topic of mentoring, which seems to be the point of the book. In nearly a hundred poems, readers are exhorted to be better versions of themselves — tho there is the occasional welcome aside into the poet’s personal life, with pieces directed to people he loves. There is wisdom and humor and a whole lot of heart in this book, which I genuinely believe should have been written as a work of creative non-fiction instead of poetry.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/30/sitting-on-a-rock-by-gary-l-brinderson/

Oct 29 2024

Clay Footed Giants by Alain Chevarier & Mark McGuire

Extremely well-meaning but — and I hate to use this word because of the way it’s morphed so far from its more neutral original meaning — problematic.

Pat is a 40-something American academic living in Montreal. His wife Ester has an important job, so he does his fair share of housework while they raise their two children. He’s recently started dreaming again about being a basketball star as he was in college, even as his good friend Mathieu tries to get him to join Mathieu’s own far less competitive sports league.

Because the nature of her job requires travel, Ester has to go away for a few days for work. As he’s minding the kids solo, Pat loses his temper at his youngest, Sam, for going through a box of slides Pat’s dad recently sent him. In order to make up for turning into a grizzly bear, Pat shows the slides to his kids, and finds himself drawn into their portrayal of his father as a decorated young soldier home from Vietnam. His dad has never wanted to talk about that time in his life, preferring to drink instead of engage in meaningful conversation. His mother isn’t much better, weighed down as she is by a burden of shame around her failed marriage to his dad and the circumstances surrounding it.

But when Sam gets into a fight at kindergarten one day, Pat begins to wonder whether the anger he and his father both carry around in them is perhaps hereditary via epigenetics. Soon, his interest in finding out what really happened to his dad in Vietnam turns into an obsession that threatens to destroy the very family he claims to be trying to protect. Will Pat be able to reconcile his past with his present in order to save his and his children’s futures?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/29/clay-footed-giants-by-alain-chevarier-mark-mcguire/

Oct 28 2024

Twinkle, Twinkle, Nighttime Sky by Elizabeth Everett & Beatriz Castro

This is 100% the book you should buy for any astronomy-minded young readers you have!

Throughout the pages of this picture book, a diverse set of children look at and learn about the nighttime sky, with accompanying text set roughly to the cadence of the Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star nursery rhyme. Whether they’re outdoor campers appreciating the crisp beauty of the stars overhead, budding astronomers with telescopes or young scholars gathered around books indoors, kids are shown not only appreciating but also investigating the marvels and mysteries of outer space.

Elizabeth Everett briefly discusses the two chief occupants of Earth’s night sky — the stars and moon — before talking about all the other wonderful things beyond our atmosphere. Planets and galaxies and black holes are all touched upon, as are our human endeavors to find and catalog these wonders. The book ends not only with a gentle exhortation for readers to keep wondering and exploring, but also several pages on the science and history of space exploration.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/28/twinkle-twinkle-nighttime-sky-by-elizabeth-everett-beatriz-castro/

Oct 25 2024

Monster Locker Vol 1 by Jorge Aguirre & Andrés Vera Martínez

Coatlicue help me, I’m pretty sure my kids have infected me with their brainrot, because as soon as I realized that this story was set in Ohio, I began chortling to the tune of Swag In Ohio.

But that Midwestern state (and Gen Alpha shorthand for weirdness) is honestly the perfect setting for this tale of strange hijinks revolving around a middle school locker that’s really a portal to the monster realm. Even better: it’s set in Columbus, which is a city I particularly enjoy from years of visiting for the Origins Gaming Convention (which nearly always coincided with Pride!)

Our young hero Pablo Ortiz would certainly fit in with the crowds of nerds I’m used to hanging out with. A figurine-painting, druid-larping sixth grader, he’s hoping to make friends at his new middle school, since most of his old ones from elementary school have been zoned to a different institution. Unfortunately, the two guys who did come with him from his old school seem to have no inclination of not being jerks to him anymore. One of them, his former best friend Dylan, even steals his assigned locker, forcing him to take a new one in the allegedly haunted basement.

Pablo isn’t thrilled by any of this, especially when he learns that his locker really is haunted. A ghost named Obie wants Pablo to use the portal in his new locker to summon monsters onto the earthly plane. Pablo is smart enough to decline but when he’s tricked into accidentally releasing Coatlicue, the Goddess of Earth, from the monster realm, he’ll have to figure out how to stop her before she can exact her vengeance on an ungrateful humanity.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/25/monster-locker-vol-1-by-jorge-aguirre-andres-vera-martinez/