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Book Review: The Fervor by Alma Katsu

Cover art for The Fervor by Alma Katsu

The Fervor by Alma Katsu

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2022

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593328330

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

( Amazon.com | Bookshop.org )

 

 

The Fervor takes place during World War 2 and alternates between five points of view. Meiko Briggs is a Japanese immigrant married to a white man, Jamie Briggs, a pilot in the army. She and their daughter Meiko are living in the Japanese internment camp Camp Minidoka, where residents are becoming infected with an illness that makes them violent and murderous. Archie Mitchell is a pastor who saw his pregnant wife and several children killed in an explosion thought to have been a Japanese bomb, who was friends with Jamie and has now gotten entangled with local white nationalists. Fran Gurstwold is a Jewish woman reporter who witnessed a similar explosion and decides to investigate locations where she suspects other explosions have happened. These alternate with journal entries from 1927 by Mieko’s father, Japanese scientist Wasaburo Oishi, who discovered poisonous spiders related to the yokai jorogumo, that cause the illness now spreading through the camps and nearby towns. The story follows Mieko, Aiko, Archie, and Fran as their stories intersect and begin to make sense in the context of Oisho’s writings, while dealing with a coverup by the government.

 

Katsu notes that this book differs from her previous ones because rather than portraying a specific historical event she was using a wider lens to explore the bigotry and violence against Asian-Americans in the past as a way to deal with it in the present, so while period details are correct , events and places may have been moved around for plot purposes.

 

This was a fascinating book, and better than The Deep. I am a fan of yokai whenever I see them, and I enjoyed the way Katsu incorporated this into the book. The portrayal of Archie as a person who is drawn into a white nationalist group due to weak character rather than malice, was accurate and well-written. Unfortunately, there continue to be too many people like him today.

 

Contains: racial slurs and violence

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Posted on January 26, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror edited by Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith, foreward by Lisa Kroger

Cover art for Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror edited by Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith

Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror edited by Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith, with a foreword by Lisa Kroger.

Black Spot Books Nonfiction, 2023

ISBN-13: 978-1645481300

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

I read an uncorrected ARC of this book.

 

Unquiet Spirits is a collection of 24 personal essays by women across the Asian diaspora, grounded in the authors’ family history, relationship to their culture, and the supernatural.

 

One of the takeaways from reading this is that the Asian diaspora is far from monolithic. Each of the authors has a distinct background and set of circumstances: one certainly cannot speak for all.

 

Some of the authors include Nadia Bulkin, who is Javanese-American, Geneve Flynn, who is a Chinese-Australian born in Malaysia, Rena Mason, who is a first-generation immigrant to America of Thai-Chinese descent, and Tori Eldridge. who was born in Hawaii and is of Hawaiian, Korean, and Norwegian descent, all of whom approached their essays differently.

 

The diversity of the authors and their choices of what each individual focused on is what really drew me in. That I read almost 300 pages in tiny print on a PDF is a testament to the quality of the writing.

 

I learned a lot from these essays: in Lee Murray’s essay on displaced spirits I learned that Chinese immigrants to Australia expected to be returned to China for burial, or become hungry ghosts, and from Nadia Bulkin’s essay that the terms “amok” and “latah” originated in Indonesia, to name just a few. The authors wrote about growing up feeling out of place, feeling unwilling or unable to meet expectations about filial duty, marriage, and motherhood. They wrote about hungry ghosts, fox demons, and yokai
They wrote about finding and using their voices.

 

I read this a few essays at a time. There’s a lot to think about in each one, so I think that’s a good way to approach this book. I highly recommend taking the time to do so.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on January 7, 2023 by , Reply

Booklist: Wedding Horror Stories

A lot of wedding proposals happen on Valentine’s Day. A typical online search for “wedding horror stories” turns up stories of terrible things that happened at actual weddings, so it’s not that outlandish to discover that a number of recent horror novels have revolved around weddings.

 

cover art for When The Reckoning Comes by LaTanya McQueen

 

When The Reckoning Comes by LaTanya McQueen

Harper Perennial, 2021

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0063035041

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

( Bookshop.org  | Amazon.com )

 

Mira’s high school friend Celine invites Mira to her wedding, which will be held at the recently restored plantation where Mira’s ancestor Marceline was enslaved. The ghosts of the enslaved who were murdered during an unsuccessful rebellion return to haunt the wedding, with brutal, bloody results. McQueen does an amazing job recreating Mira’s memories of her childhood friendship with Celine, who is white, and Jesse, a Black boy arrested for murder who is released after Celine intervenes, and of describing the horrific things that were visited on the enslaved people on the plantation. The racism, brutality, and hopelessness are reminders that horror isn’t limited to the supernatural.

 

cover art for Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw 

Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

Tor Nightfire, 2021

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250759412

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

 

When you are ridiculously wealthy and well-connected, and your fianceé wants her wedding at a Heian-era haunted mansion, with the bones of a bride buried beneath, you make it happen. Wedding guest Cassie, our unreliable narrator, is disconnected and depressed, attending at the request of the groom, who is also her ex. Cassie is one of five people at the wedding: they all have the kind of entangled relationships that emerge from a small group dynamic formed in college, and attempting to summon a spirit in a haunted house the night before the wedding is not going to make it easier to get along. It’s been criticized for purple prose and lack of character development, but it is a wild, and vivid, ride.

 

cover art for The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling

 

The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling

St. Martin’s Press, 2021

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250272584

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook  ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

Jane approaches Dr. Augustine Lawrence with a proposal of marriage. She wants security and is willing to work hard. They plan for it to be just a business deal: no questions, no love, and never a night spent in Lindridge Hall, his family manor. The best-laid plans can go awry, though: the two of them fall in love. Set in an alternate version of England that has elements of both the Victorian era and post-World War II, this starts out structured as a rather predictable gothic romance and ventured into the territory of occultism, as Jane, trapped in the house with the increasingly paranoid Augustine, is abruptly awakened into a world of magical ritual by occultist friends of Augustine’s. They then leave her to deal with Augustine and whatever is causing the disturbances in the house, untethered to reality. The narrative, which was relatively straightforward until then, became mazelike and hallucinatory.  There’s significant body horror as well as blood and gore, so be warned. Readers who enjoy the version of occultism in this book might also appreciate Polly Schattel’s The Occultists.

 

Posted on February 15, 2022 by , Reply
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