Some recommended recent novels
Texan crime, literary theft, depraved science, London underwater, homunculi, and an unexpected hero.
In Hard Rain Samantha Jayne Allen gives us a young woman protagonist who is an authentic person, with skills and smarts yet still not fully formed and prone to making the wrong judgement call. She's likeable and easy to empathize with.
The world she lives in is fleshed out well, a region of Texas struggling to make its way through a minefield of threatening weather events, a drug crisis, and an insidious religious group. These are presented as part of the landscape - community challenges in that time and place. All of elements are handled deftly by the author, who has written a very good set of character studies masquerading as a page-turner mystery.
This is one of those books that lives up to Raymond Chandler’s point that a good mystery story should be one you would read even if the end was missing. When the end comes it isn’t much of a surprise, but it also doesn’t much matter any longer, since by then the book has painted a group portrait of a cluster of people struggling to do right against the odds and their own choices, or struggling to get away with the wrong things they are doing in order to make something of themselves. No one is a victim so much as a consequence of actions, mostly their own.
But there is smart craft here, too; Allen lays down a couple of long-game red herrings that are impressive. This is her second book with this protagonist in this location and the series should have legs.
Find Hard Rain by Samantha Jayne Allen here.
R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface is in a satirical tale of publishing shenanigans full of meta-critiques of exploitation, authenticity, appropriation, access, DEI, and representation in the contemporary literary world. She does a great job in fleshing out the main character, June Hayward, a white young writer who steals a manuscript from her friend, a successful Chinese-American novelist after the friend dies suddenly. June convinces herself that it is permissible – even noble! – for her to rewrite, and publish the manuscript about the abuse of Chinese laborers in WWI and build a career on it. And she gets away with it – for a while.
June does many unethical and dishonest things, but she works as a protagonist because Kuang lets us see how June is the hero of her own story, how her rationalizations and justifications are just convincing enough (at least to her, if not everyone else). Especially because in this satire of the publishing world nearly everyone is selfish and manipulative. These young writers and writer-wanna-be's are smart and ambitious but so isolated, self-absorbed, and lacking in genuine life experiences (outside literary cliques) that they have little to write about and less to say. Kuang worked hard to make an opportunistic plagiarist someone we could identify with!
That’s not to say there are no clear ethical and moral lines drawn – there are, built piece by piece – but the book has more resonance and depth because no one is a caricature. Everyone here is human, with both admirable and flawed behavior. The most scathing observations are reserved for the publishing industry and social media. This novel is funny, insightful, and thought-provoking.
Find Yellowface by R.F. Kuang here.
I read The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells when I was a kid, and the suffering of the animals disturbed me. But the book lived on in my psyche, for reasons I didn't understand at the time, though I imagine it had a lot to do with what (supposedly) makes people human and animals not-human, and how much difference actually exists.
In The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia re-imagines the original story in a dreamy, almost languorous retelling through the alternating perspectives of the doctor's smart, headstrong daughter Carlota, and his fatalistic, alcoholic right-hand man Montgomery. Moreau's lab is now a hacienda in the Yucatán, and far beyond the walls there's a battle of wills and power between the Mexican government and wealthy landowners against the Maya people. Moreau is still using vaguely-described genetic shenanigans and vivisection to create animal-human hybrids, but this time it is funded by a wealthy patron eager to put the creatures to work as laborers.
The relationship Carlota and Montgomery have with the hybrids is the heart of the story, and at no time do we trust the doctor or believe in his mission. Yet we fear for all their safety when their routine is broken by the arrival of a smug, privileged son of Moreau’s patron, who spurs Carlota's burgeoning sexuality while annoying the heck out of Montgomery.
Carlota is, of course, an invention of the author – she doesn’t exist in the Wells book – but interestingly the seeds for the character can be found in several of the movie versions going back to the 1932 adaptation. She's a protagonist who sets everything in the story in motion just by being who she is, and is a heroine who is easy to cheer on. Where Wells made the story a tragedy, Moreno-Garcia is much more optimistic, and there is something satisfying and uplifting by the end, embracing alternatives.
Find The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia here.
The End We Start From by Megan Hunter is a dystopian adventure novel set in an unspecified near future in the wake of a cataclysmic climate event that engulfs London in flood waters. We follow a young woman who becomes a mother at the worst possible time, who must flee the city with her child and find the start of a new life somewhere, somehow, perhaps without the baby's father.
The writing is extremely spare, yet evocative. There is an urgency and immediacy in this style, particularly because the book is short. And plenty of room for the reader to project and imagine. It is part science fiction, part character study, part prose poetry.
It is a thrilling journey she takes, but her travels through hardship and the making of new friends and allies is also an elaborate metaphor for motherhood in an often hostile world. Her resilience and strength are compelling, but at no time do we feel the dangers are anything less than mortal.
Find The End We Start From by Megan Hunter here.
Saturnalia by Stephanie Feldman begins as a thriller in a decimated Philadelphia sometime after a climate apocalypse, its citizens trying to carve out a living in a greatly altered landscape. Of course, the poor are still poor in this new normal, and the wealthy upper crust is still finding ways to celebrate their specialness and keep everyone else away, gawking in envy. This being Philadelphia, the privileged have a few centuries of practice in this, and their current strategy is a familiar one: the establishment of exclusive membership clubs with arcane rites and hedonistic events.
The main character, Nina, was entering this level of society until some ugliness reminded her that because of her background and her gender she really didn't belong, and people weren't who she thought they were. She's given a chance to step back into that world for a little revenge and to make a little money. As the story unfolds over a single night, the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia, we begin to think the society club's interest in alchemy isn't just for the robes and showy ritual, and that the dangers surrounding Nina may be more than just theatre. There's a creature in a jar, and killings, and a city where nowhere feels safe.
As you can imagine, a lot of this functions as metaphor, which is why the book resonates beyond its tense storytelling and fantastic elements. For all that happens, the main character is a real person, a woman trying to find her place in a world that is often hostile when it isn't deeply disappointing. Her family wants her to come home and be safe with them, but she sees that as a retreat, a failure, even if embracing the alternatives would mean compromising her values and giving up important parts of herself. This could be any of us, today, if you just take away the ruined city and golem-like creature tracking us.
Find Saturnalia by Stephanie Feldman here.
Finally, I can’t recommend Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan enough. At a mere 128 pages it is an excellent example of how the short novel can carry a huge impact. It is a gem, winning the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio and Booker prizes.
It takes place in 1985 in a town in Ireland, and concerns a man named Bill Furlong who is a coal merchant and devoted family man with daughters. It is a time of economic challenges but Bill does okay, though it feels a little precarious nonetheless. For reasons related to his childhood and his upbringing he is keenly aware of moral choices and how one person’s small act of generosity can be seen a form of heroism in the right circumstance, and before the book is finished he has the opportunity to put that into action for himself.
The specificity of the prose is riveting, with nuance and depth of meaning that are layered throughout the polite conversations of the characters. And there is so much that is unsaid, hovering just outside the page, understated but powerful.