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Book Review: Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Balzer + Bray, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0062570604

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, MP3 CD

 

 

Editor’s note: Due to its topic and content, Dread Nation contains racial slurs and outdated language. I’m using “Negro” in this review as it is the term used throughout the book.

 

In this alternate history, the Civil War ended after the dead rose at Gettysburg, forcing the Union and the Confederacy into a truce while they fought off cannibalistic “shamblers.” A law passed shortly after required all Negro and Native children, starting at age 12, to be trained to fight the shamblers in single-sex combat schools, for the protection of white Americans (Ireland writes in an author’s note that she got the idea for the schools after reading about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a boarding school intended to erase Native American culture and language and assimilate the children). Just as before the war, there are opposing movements regarding the treatment of Negroes: the Egalitarians, who believe they should be treated equally, and the Survivalists, who believe they are naturally inferior to white people.

Sixteen-year-old Jane McKeene, the biracial, dark-skinned daughter of a white woman married to an absent Kentucky plantation owner, has been training at an exclusive combat school that trains girls as Attendants, bodyguard companions for wealthy white women and girls who are trained not just in combat but in social skills and etiquette. Intelligent and talented in combat, Jane is rebellious when it comes to conforming to society’s demands and has more interest in helping others survive than in good manners, good looks, and appropriate conduct. Her frenemy, Kate, is not only talented in combat but attractive, well-dressed, well-mannered, and light-skinned enough to pass for white– enough to earn Jane’s enmity– and stubborn enough to eventually earn her respect. Jane’s insistent ex, Jackson, comes to her in secret to ask for help in discovering what happened to his younger sister, Lily, who lives with the Spencers, a prosperous white farming family of Egalitarians, passing for white. The family has disappeared, and he’s afraid they’ve been taken by shamblers. Jane, Kate, and Jackson sneak out to the family’s farm to discover that the family has disappeared, and that the mayor, a Survivalist, is covering it up.

In the meantime, Jane and Kate save the lives of the attendees of a lecture about a vaccine to inoculate people from becoming shamblers when bitten, including the mayor’s wife, and are invited to attend a dinner party at his house. They use the opportunity to sneak Jackson in so he can search for evidence about the mayor’s involvement with the disappearance of his sister and the Spencer family. but are caught and sent to a remote Survivalist utopian communty, Summerland, where white people live in relative luxury, protected from shamblers by cruelly treated and poorly armed Negroes. Jane is able to convince the authority figures of Summerland that Kate is actually white, saving her from the deadly labor of protecting Summerland from shamblers, and giving her a set of opportunities and problems that come along with attempting to pass as an attractive white girl in a community built on unabashed white supremacy.

I suppose what technically qualifies Dread Nation as a horror novel are the “shamblers,” who, while we aren’t certain by the end of the book, are probably carriers of an infectious plague that turns them into mindless, uncoordinated, cannibals with an endless urge to feed. But the zombies merely illuminate the true horrors that take place in the book, those grounded in arrogance and vicious white supremacy. The sheriff and the preacher are truly cruel men who use every opportunity to punish the Negro characters and establish their superiority, but even the overseers are casually brutal, and the white townspeople are willfully blind. Even before the girls are sent to Summerland, it turns out that characters who are supposed to care for them are absolutely horrible under their genteel surfaces. Every time Jane attempts to save lives by stepping in between another person and a shambler, she is punished for overstepping her place.  Ireland demonstrates that even sympathetic white characters are complicit in the preservation of what they know is an unfair and cruel system.  Mr. Gideon, a white scientist and engineer who wanted to provide electricity to frontier communities using natural resources, is an ally in many ways, but is trapped in Summerland, forced to use shamblers’ “manpower” to run the town’s generator, which preserves the image that all is going as it should and perpetuates the racist system the town is built on.  Jane and Kate are both aware of how they can use negative stereotypes to manipulate white characters, and Kate is very conscious of how she can use her “whiteness” to her advantage, as well as how vulnerable she is.

In this #OwnVoices novel, Ireland portrays shifting vulnerabilities and loyalties as marginalized individuals attempt to navigate the racist system they are forced to function within are evident here in a way they might not have been if a different person had written this book. The Lenape character Daniel Redfern is somewhat of a mystery. One might think he and Jane would be natural allies, but while he saves her life early in the book, he is also responsible for her getting caught and sent to Summerland. Jane’s relationship with her mother, told in flashbacks and in bits and pieces, ends up putting a surprising light on what you think her story actually is. Jane’s relationships with both her mother and Kate contribute to a nuanced portrait of the damage, as well as the advantage, of colorism and “passing.” The other Negroes Jane works with in Summerland are more than a mass of victims– Ireland gives those that Jane interacts with names and personalities, and their agendas and fears sometimes set them against each other. The way the difficulty of being female intersects with the difficulty of surviving as a Negro is amply illustrated, not just through one set of eyes but through the experiences and stories Jane shares with many of the other characters. In addition to race and gender, while it isn’t an emphasis of the story, Jane expresses interest in both women and men, and Kate is pretty solid that she has no interest in romance or a relationship with either sex. As this is the first book in a series, it will be interesting to see how (or if) Ireland develops that further.

Dread Nation is a great read as a YA horror novel, and if that’s all you want from it, you can certainly read it that way. But it’s also a really intelligent, well-plotted book with great characters that has the ability to appeal to a widespread audience (including people who do not traditionally read either YA literature or horror) due to its nuanced exploration of race and white supremacy, character development, world building, approach to the past, relevance to the present, and its just generally fantastic writing. I have sold so many people on trying this book who would never in a million years have picked up a straight zombie novel. It’s not short, so I don’t know that reluctant readers will jump on it, but for the YA reader who likes independent-minded female protagonists, alternate histories, doesn’t mind a little gore, and can handle the racial slurs, this is an outstanding choice that more than deserves its place on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Award. Highly, highly recommended.

Contains: Gore, violence, murder, torture, slavery, racial slurs, references to sexual violence.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Editor’s note: Dread Nation is on the final ballot of the 2018 Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel. 

 

 

Posted on April 25, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: The Night Weaver (Shadow Grove, Vol. 1) by Monique Snyman

The Night Weaver (Shadow Grove, Vol. 1) by Monique Snyman

Gigi Publishing, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1643163031

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Seventeen-year-old Rachel Cleary lives in the isolated community of Shadow Grove (it’s unclear how isolated, or how large, it actually is, as it has suburbs, a trendy downtown, three grocery stores, multiple chain stores, and a rundown nine-story apartment building, but also wooded areas and farms)  next to a mysterious wood that people know better than to explore. Disappearances and strange deaths, especially of children, go without investigation by the sheriff’s department and are apparently unnoticed by the town’s population… except for the local high schoolers, who have organized to protect younger children and impose a curfew, and Rachel’s eccentric neighbor, Mrs. Crenshaw.

Mrs. Crenshaw’s delinquent nephew, a good-looking Scot with an impenetrable accent, happens to be in town. While he and Rachel are driving home from a party, they are attacked by a creature he recognizes from Scottish folklore, a Black Annis (also known as the Night Weaver), which steals and eats children. Although Mrs. Crenshaw tells Rachel the town council has conspired to eliminate all records of past incidents, it turns out that Rachel’s deceased father, a historian who didn’t believe in computers, has boxes of handwritten journals on the history and legends of Shadow Grove that are stored in her attic. They discover a pattern: the disappearances have happened before.

Then Rachel notices that her mother, and a number of other women in town, are behaving oddly: they have all emptied their closets and dressed in gray. She decides to consult her estranged friend Greg, whose family has strong roots in the town, and see if together they can find additional information about the Night Weaver and, possibly, what both of them have been calling the “moms’ club.” Greg realizes the factor all the women have in common is that they participated in the same grief support group, and after Rachel witnesses what appears to be a nighttime visitation to her mother of her father, they discover together that the Night Weaver feeds on grief and despair. Rachel and Greg realize that the Night Weaver is manipulating the members of the “moms’ club” into taking and delivering children to it, in order to have visitations from their deceased loved ones. And then a drug-dealing fairy prince named Orion gets involved, and things start to get REALLY convoluted.

Before I ever started this book, I knew the author, Monique Snyman, was from South Africa, and I was curious to see what she would come up with. Interestingly, she chose to set her book in the United States (I’m guessing Michigan, although she never actually says where it is located). Her premise is original– I hadn’t heard of the Black Annis, and the idea of a creature that plays on the feelings of members of a grief support group is interesting to me (although on a personal level, I have difficulty suspending my disbelief that grieving parents would intentionally cause the same kind of grief to others) I also liked that the high school students were portrayed as independent and resourceful (for the most part). There is also some very impressive full-color artwork representing the Black Annis in different places in the book, which definitely added to the creepiness factor.

However, I also found some real issues with the book. The first noticeable issue was that the book is written in present tense, which is jarring at times, especially at the beginning. The second is Dougal’s nearly impenetrable Scottish accent. I understand this is supposed to reinforce his background, but it really disrupted the flow of the story for me to have to translate in my head before I could move the story forward.

Outside of these two issues, the setting is problematic. Snyman refers to Shadow Grove as an isolated small town– to me, that evokes a setting like Twin Peaks. And the story itself seems intimate. The town has a single law enforcement official (a sheriff) and a relatively small group of people are involved in the actual story– my mental picture was maybe a few thousand at most. But what she is describing is more like a small city, which can’t be terribly isolated if it has multiple grocery and chain stores and most certainly would have federal agents on the ground with so many missing children.

Snyman also seemed to leave her various male supporting characters at loose ends. I like that Rachel is the leading character, and that the supporting male characters aren’t all necessarily love interests, but when Rachel moved on from working with Dougal (whose bad-boy persona dropped pretty quickly) to Greg (who she had a history with) they just kind of stopped whatever it was they were doing until the next time they were needed for a plot point. It’s still sort of unclear to me why Snyman had Greg lead Rachel to Orion and then leave her alone with him.

There were also a few comments and incidents that rubbed me the wrong way. Early in the book, Dougal makes a reference to spoiled American girls and Rachel says. “Well, that’s mildly racist.” I’m surprised an editor didn’t catch that, as “American” is not a race.  Shortly after meeting Rachel, Orion, the drug-dealing fairy prince, pins her up against a wall, against her will, drugs her, and takes her cell phone.  Afterwards, he claims it’s because he needs to do this in order to share essential memories, but starting these two out with a nonconsensual assault made it hard to believe they could be equal partners in defeating the Black Annis.

Despite these problems, I found Rachel’s relationships with Dougal, Greg, and Mrs. Crenshaw interesting enough to want to learn more about these characters. As this is the first book in a series, I expect that Shadow Grove and its denizens will be fleshed out and smoothed over more successfully in future volumes, and it will be interesting to see where Snyman goes with it.

Editor’s note: The Night Weaver is on the final ballot for the 2018 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.

Posted on April 12, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand

Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand

Katherine Tegen Books, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0062696601

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, MP3 CD

 

My previous experience with Claire Legrand’s work was with her extremely creepy middle-grade book The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls. I could see just from the cover and inside flap of this book that her YA work would be completely different, so I started it without any expectations except for great writing (it is, after all, on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Award). The story’s bones quickly took on a predictable shape: strangers move to an isolated community where someone (usually a woman) has made a deal with an evil supernatural creature to provide human sacrifices in exchange for power, beauty, and prosperity.  The three primary characters are described on the inside cover flap in stereotypical phrases: Marion is the “new girl; Zoey is the “pariah”; and Val is the “queen bee”.  The girls as portrayed by Legrand, however, can’t be summed up so easily.

Marion’s family is moving to Sawkill Island, an exclusive community of wealthy people uninterested in anything that doesn’t directly affect them, and where her mother has taken a job as full-time housekeeper to the prominent Mortimer family. She has put her grief for her father’s sudden death on hold so she can protect her risk-taking older sister Charlotte and her suicidally depressed mother.  I must say I was impressed with how, in a few brief pages, Legrand distills the essence of what it’s like to wade through that first year after the death of a loved one. Legrand describes her as plain and awkward, in contrast to her sister, who is extroverted and social.

Shortly after she arrives, Marion starts feeling strange. She is thrown from a skittish horse and hurt badly enough that she ends up in the hospital (I was really unhappy with this part of the book, because her behavior afterwards is characterized as a “freakish” seizure, and the police chief reacts by pushing her down, straddling her, and pinning her hands to the ground. He should know better. DON’T DO THIS. Overall, I was not happy with the portrayal of seizures in this story, but this actually has the possibility of leading to real physical harm). Zoey, the police chief’s daughter, our “pariah”, is first on the scene. She’s biracial, geeky, a lower socioeconomic bracket than most of the other kids at her school, and her recent breakup with her boyfriend Grayson is the cause of much rumor and speculation (It’s an interesting reversal to have an African-American police chief, even if he is characterized by some members of the community as lazy and incompetent). Zoey is grieving the loss of her best friend, Thora, the most recent in a long string of girls who have mysteriously disappeared on Sawkill Island. The disappearances area are attributed to a local legend, a supernatural monster called the Collector. Zoey suspects that Val Mortimer, the island’s “queen bee” is behind the disappearances, but can’t prove it. We as readers know pretty quickly, though, because Val shows up at the scene after the monster that pulls her strings pushes her to make  Charlotte the next victim. Val, beautiful and charismatic, quickly claims Charlotte as a friend. I thought that Zoey and Marion would end up teaming up to protect Charlotte and take down Val and the Collector, but that’s not what happens at all.  Instead, the gruesome “deal with the devil” plot takes a left turn, and the story becomes more about relationships than fighting a “big bad”.

In an interview, Claire Legrand described Sawkill Girls as her “angry, queer, feminist novel”, and a response to slasher movie tropes like the “final girl”. I think that summary doesn’t really do the book justice. One thing that’s really great about this book is how smoothly it integrates relationships and examines the way teens navigate identities that aren’t often represented. Both Val and Marion have either had relationships or fantasies with people of both sexes, and Legrand writes them into a beautiful lesbian love story(I loathed the fact that Val and Marion specifically were in a relationship, but it was very well done). Zoey is trying to deal with the discover that she is asexual, and what that means about her relationship with her former boyfriend/best friend, Grayson, a great example of healthy masculinity.  Legrand blows up the stereotypes she assigned her primary characters by making them into prickly, angry, grieving, loving, lonely, confused girls determined to keep each other alive and save the world.  They fight, they say and do terrible and sometimes unforgivable things, but when it comes down to it they do not allow themselves to be turned against one another. This is especially clear with Zoey and Val, who have a long and difficult history. It’s a really complicated, messy way to look at girls’ relationships, and I think the horror genre gave Legrand space to work with some of these difficult and intense feelings at a heightened level.

Legrand’s challenge to the “final girls” trope is less obvious, because the initial plot doesn’t follow the pattern of a typical slasher film. The characters are better developed, and the killer isn’t a maniac in a mask. Among the three girls, none of them fits the type exactly– Zoey probably comes closest, but she isn’t conventionally attractive– and none of them dies. The plot of the book is a mess, and the relatively simple plot structure of a slasher film gets buried with the addition of patriarchal cults, tessering (a la A Wrinkle in Time), doppelgangers, a sentient island, and nightmare alternate worlds. While Legrand does a great job establishing setting and atmosphere and creating her primary characters, she has simply too much going on. There is no doubt that she can write creepy, compelling, and horrific scenes, but the pieces don’t all hang together.

While Sawkill Girls is being marketed as a YA book, and is under consideration for the Stoker Award in the Young Adult category,  I’m not sure if the audience that will appreciate it is actually a teen audience, although there are few well-written asexual or bisexual characters in the YA genre, so it’s worth reading. “New adult” readers, with enough experience to recognize and critique the tropes, will really enjoy the characters and the challenge to genre norms about girls and women. I found many parts compelling or enjoyable, but in the end, I was frustrated because the story failed to hold together. However, despite its flaws, there is much to like, or even love, in Sawkill Girls. Recommended.

Contains: body horror, murder, gore, violent and abusive behavior, gaslighting, sexual situations.

Editor’s note: Sawkill Girls is on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel. 

Posted on March 27, 2019 by , Reply
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