Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle
(Titan Books, 2023)
Reviewed by Kate Onyett
Chuck Tingle is an internet philosopher and a spirit on the electronic winds, best known, perhaps, for his e-novellas of seminal erotic fiction. You know the ones: “Pounded In The Butt By [human, animal, objects, metaphysical concepts]”. He espouses above all love in all its forms and self-determination.
Camp Damascus is his first ‘serious’ novel, about a demonically successful gay conversion camp run by a conservative Christian sect. It is a journey of revelation for Rose, a devout 20-year-old honestly devoted to the teachings of the sect. A clever, sheltered, fact-curious and mildly autistic woman, Rose’s life is complicated with feelings of attraction for girls. We begin at a wholesome social at a local waterfall with her friends and peers under a warm summer sun, but things quickly get weird. She spots a literal demoness on the cliff opposite and later at home coughs up a load of mayflies.
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Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.
The Other Shore by Hoa Pham
(Goldsmiths Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Harry Slater
The Other Shore, by Hoa Pham, winner of the Viva La Novella prize, deals with some of the biggest questions there are. It’s about life and death and legacy, about power and control, colonisation and oppression, ancestry and the price we pay for the future we want. And it’s all told from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old Vietnamese girl, Kim Nguyen. That makes for some interesting stylistic choices; the prose can sometimes feel stilted, lacking in the emotional clout that an older voice might add. At the same time, though, there’s a visceral naivety at play here, the realisations of the state of the world are ever more compelling because they’re wounds delivered fresh, for the first time. In one way, then, The Other Shore is a coming-of-age story, and at the same time a brutal indictment of human cruelty, an examination of the structures of power that bind Vietnam, and the world, and how they’ve come to be.
The Living Stone: Stories of Uncanny Sculpture, 1858–1948 edited by Henry Bartholomew
(Handheld Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Andy Sawyer
Sculpture is inherently uncanny; the creation of simulacra of human (and other) form, enigmatic and often loaded (says Henry Bartholomew in his introduction) with destabilising fears of otherness. Sabine Baring-Gould’s “Master Sacristan Eberhart” (significantly subtitled “not quite a ghost story”) is an interesting start to this selection. The Sacristan’s reflection, after a statue of a monk has foiled a robbery, warns against what we are so often doing—seeing in these stories and their subjects “reflections of our own selves, our feelings and passions” instead of their artistic truth which might cause us to direct attention away from our selves. It might be argued that Eberhart, in his strange “friendship” with the statue he calls Father Simon, has fallen into precisely that trap!
A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid
(Del Rey, 2023)
Reviewed by Ksenia Shcherbino
A Study in Drowning, Ava Reid’s new book has a certain air of neo-Victorian feminist gothic along the lines of Elizabeth Bronfen’s argument in Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992) about the Victorian fascination with dead (or not so dead) female bodies captured by the male gaze. It reminded me of A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990): both novels are poised between a detective story and a textual analysis exercise and infused with mythology and gender studies written in a stunning poetic prose.
Throne of the Fallen by Kerri Maniscalco
(Hodderscape, 2023)
Reviewed by Steven French
This is the first adult offering from YA author Kerri Maniscalco and by ‘adult’, I mean ‘ADULT XXX’ with episodes that are definitely NSFW! The story is constructed around two core protagonists: Miss Camilla Antonius, a talented painter who is petite and buxom, with ‘deep silver’ eyes; and Lord Synton, whose eyes are a ‘unique, lovely shade of emerald’ and who is lean but hard, in all the right places (if you know what I mean…and trust me, you will after just a few pages!), and is actually Prince Envy, one of the seven demon Princes of Hell. He is caught up in The Game, set by the chaos-loving King of the Unseelie fae. As well as some anagrams and a pretty obvious riddle, this involves successfully completing certain magical tasks, the first of which is to persuade Camilla to paint the Hexed Throne.
What The River Knows by Isabel Ibañez
Reviewed by John Dodd
Together We Burn surprised me when I read it, I wasn’t expecting to like it anywhere near as much as I did, particularly with the nature of the story. With that in mind, I took a chance on reading What the River Knows, which turned out to be something else entirely.
Inez Olivera is an adventuress in the making, her mother and father are famous explorers and are missing much of the time because of their ongoing adventures. Until they die, and Inez is left with the mystery of what happened, but more importantly, the same adventurous spirit to journey out to unknown lands and find out what happened to them. Thus begins a twisting tale of death, revenge, and mysterious artifacts. After reading Together We Burn, I was expecting betrayals and complex familial situations, and nothing to be what it had been set up to be by the end of the book, and I was not disappointed.
The Land of Lost Things by John Connolly
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2023)
“Twice upon a time,” as The Land of Lost Things starts, I fell in love with a book. It has all the elements I enjoy: old libraries in abandoned houses opening entries to parallel worlds, ancient woods populated by stranger, darker creatures, primeval gods from the dawn of history, fairy lords rivalling humans, and a deeply moving and emotional story—but there is something more to the book, a quality both rare and precious: its over-arching humanity that stretches through universal (and thus relatable) mythological tropes.
The Double-Edged Sword by Ian Whates
(NewCon Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Susan Speak
Ian Whates is active in British science-fiction in almost every way possible. He is a writer—novels, novellas, short stories—an anthologist, a publisher (NewCon Press), and a BSFA director. Possibly the only thing he doesn’t do is SF art. He has a distinctive writing style which, at its best, has a Gaimanesque quality (e.g. ‘Knowing How to Look’ in his short story collection The Gift of Joy). So I found that reviewing his novella, The Double-Edged Sword, seemed like picking a pebble off a beach—but a rewarding and interesting pebble.
The Judas Blossom by Stephen Aryan
(Angry Robot Books, 2023)
Even without any embellishments thirteenth century Mongol conquest of Persia is as close to fantasy as history can be. Not only this period (and this region) is conspicuously absent from Europocentric historiography and thus allows for certain fantasies and liberties (think Marco Polo), the deeply embedded fear of nomadic invasion seems to run deep in our blood centuries after Genghis Khan’s empire came to end, and Baghdad and Damask are the source of fairy tale ever since A Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights found its way into European imagination. So, Stephen Aryan has very interesting sources for his historical fantasy, and he uses them well.
Dragonfall by L.R. Lam
Everen was the last male dragon, and the chosen one, the one who would right all the wrongs and give back the dragons their place in the world. Except this did not come to pass and he found himself trapped in the form of man, there to wander the world without purpose, hoping for what he had lost.
Across the gulf of universes, the dragons left behind, including his sister and his mother, try to find a way to get through to him, there to give him the purpose and direction that he needs, which will come from befriending a human, and then using that human as a sacrifice to allow the dragons their rightful place in the world.
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