Home » Posts tagged "supernatural fiction"

Book Review: Dear Mothman by Robin Gow

It’s the first day of the #TransRightsReadathon, so to start it out right here’s a review of a recent favorite middle-grade novel I really enjoyed. You can’t go wrong with cryptids!

 

cover art for Dear Mothman by Robin Gow

Dear Mothman by Robin Gow.

Harry N. Abrams, 2023

ISBN: 9781419764400

Available: Hardcover

Buy:  Bookshop.org

 

 

This middle grade verse novel dealing with grief, identity, and monstrosity is lyrical and vivid. Sixth graders Lewis and Noah (closeted trans boys) have been best friends for years. Lewis has a great imagination and Noah is pulled along in his wake in exploring all kinds of strange things. In the time just before Lewis was killed in a car crash, he had been obsessed with cryptids, especially Mothman. Noah deals with the loss by writing journal entries to Mothman in a journal he leaves in the woods each night. He wants to believe that Mothman is real even if he can’t see him, and decides to do his science fair project on whether Mothman exists.

 

Noah also begins to make friends with Molly, Hanna, and Alice, and develop feelings for Hanna, while slowly coming out and deciding how much of himself, and Mothman, he wants to share.

 

Although he is outed to his classmates before he’s ready, the people around him accept the news pretty quickly, even if they don’t entirely understand. Unfortunately, they are not as accepting of the existence of Mothman, which leads him to run away to do a solitary search in the woods that changes him, helps him deal with his grief over Lewis, and move forward.

 

Noah is autistic and that comes through clearly and is written with respect and sensitivity, as is the bisexuality of two of the characters.

 

Noah’s grappling with monstrosity, magic, and the unknown isn’t subtle, but Gow gets the kinds of thoughts on paper that you would expect a journal of private thoughts (or written to a cryptid of dubious existence) to contain. In the acknowledgements. Gow credits a childhood fascination with monsters with his ability to understand his own identity. Recommended for grades 5-8.

 

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

 

 

 

Posted on March 22, 2024 by , Reply

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.org | Amazon.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

Posted on July 8, 2021 by , Reply

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

Posted on February 21, 2021 by , Reply
12345 » Last