An odd novel that shouldn't work but somehow does.
A police officer connects with a mysterious race of aquatic humans in this inventive debut.
Cara Gray, the protagonist of visual artist Musgrave’s debut novel, took an unlikely route to becoming a cop. She joined an activist camp after school but soon ditched it to join the police force, where she’s initially assigned to work in data surveillance. While she’s good at her job, she fails to prevent a school bombing that kills more than 1,400 people and is demoted, becoming a police liaison to the community of lambdas, a race of small humans that have adapted to living in water. The lambdas “keep a very low profile,” making their homes in flooded basements and working low-income jobs. They’re also the target of increasing harassment and violence from hateful people who believe that a splinter group of militant lambdas were behind the school bombing; they endure beatings and graffiti saying things like “fuck off fishman scum.” Cara becomes increasingly fascinated with the lambdas; meanwhile, the police experiment with a mysterious data processing entity; Cara’s mother interacts with an avatar of her missing husband; and Cara finds herself frustrated at the relationship between her boyfriend and her sentient toothbrush. The novel has an inventive structure, with narrative chapters interspersed with various documents; it can be exhausting, but the reader gets the feeling that’s by design. As weird as the novel sounds, it’s even more so, but Musgrave manages to hold all the threads together, although he does offer readers a healthy number of red herrings and blind alleys. The book is cinematic in an almost Cronenberg-ian way, and even at its most confusing, it’s still a fast-paced (though unsettling) read. Novels like this don’t work unless the author fully commits, and Musgrave does. This isn’t for everybody, but science-fiction readers who favor the bizarre will likely be confused and charmed in equal parts.
An odd novel that shouldn't work but somehow does.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60945-764-8
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
Spanning centuries and continents, this is a darkly romantic and suspenseful tale by a writer at the top of her game.
When you deal with the darkness, everything has a price.
“Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.” Adeline tried to heed this warning, but she was desperate to escape a wedding she didn’t want and a life spent trapped in a small town. So desperate that she didn’t notice the sun going down. And so she made a deal: For freedom, and time, she will surrender her soul when she no longer wants to live. But freedom came at a cost. Adeline didn’t want to belong to anyone; now she is forgotten every time she slips out of sight. She has spent 300 years living like a ghost, unable even to speak her own name. She has affairs with both men and women, but she can never have a comfortable intimacy built over time—only the giddy rush of a first meeting, over and over again. So when she meets a boy who, impossibly, remembers her, she can’t walk away. What Addie doesn’t know is why Henry is the first person in 300 years who can remember her. Or why Henry finds her as compelling as she finds him. And, of course, she doesn’t know how the devil she made a deal with will react if he learns that the rules of their 300-year-long game have changed. This spellbinding story unspools in multiple timelines as Addie moves through history, learning the rules of her curse and the whims of her captor. Meanwhile, both Addie and the reader get to know Henry and understand what sets him apart. This is the kind of book you stay up all night reading—rich and satisfying and strange and impeccably crafted.
Spanning centuries and continents, this is a darkly romantic and suspenseful tale by a writer at the top of her game.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8756-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A secret history that toys with the mythos of dark academia while reveling in its excesses.
What happens when students at a school for the paranormal decide that enough is enough?
Best known for video games, queer horror, and a collaboration with Richard Kadrey (The Dead Take the A Train, 2023), Khaw detours to visit an elite school and the damaged young adults it serves. At 21, Alessa Li wakes up with a start to find she’s been kidnapped from home in Montreal and apparently enrolled in college, simply because she’s incredibly dangerous. In fact, the Hellebore Technical Institute for the Ambitiously Gifted is less an homage to Hogwarts than a gory rebuttal dressed in wizard’s robes. The story moves between two timelines; the first offers Alessa’s introduction to her creepy classmates, while the second finds them all under siege later in the titular library. “Appendage to the main campus, it acted only in the faculty’s interest, which seemed to revolve exclusively around fucking us students over,” Alessa explains. Among the 20-odd students, cult member Portia transmogrifies into some kind of insectoid critter every now and then; Eoan sacrifices himself by feeding his own body to the school’s ravenous hosts in order to protect his friends; Delilah is an “immortal sacrifice,” dying over and over again in the service of the gods; while Rowan is a “deathworker” whose destiny is foretold by prophecy. There are some intriguing elements—and it’s often hard to take. Like other postmodern antiheroines, among them Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black (Blackbirds, 2015, etc.) and Julie Crews from The Dead Take the A Train, Alessa’s primary operating mode is pretty much caustic bitch, and her classmates don’t temper it much. Whether the deadpan violence and body horror is excessive is a matter of personal taste, but there’s no denying that the whole thing is pretty squelchy and it’s not always easy to follow. Proceed with caution.
A secret history that toys with the mythos of dark academia while reveling in its excesses.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781250877819
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nightfire
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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