Book Review: The Moth for the Star by James Reich

 

The Moth for the Star by James Reich

192 pages, Paperback

Published September, 2023 by 7.13 Books

 

One of the weird things about social media is becoming friends and feeling connected to folks you never met in the real world. The first time I recorded a podcast with James Reich we were talking about Barry Malzberg’s genius and his underrated science fiction novel Beyond Apollo. We share a love for very niche writers and styles of storytelling. I have always felt connected to James. His novel Song My Enemies Sing for one example is a very strange book that seems almost designed for my sensibilities. For one thing, it takes place on a very real and still unreal Mars. By real I mean one that exists two hundred percent in the imagination of readers of bygone pulp fiction Mars envisioned by Burroughs, Bradbury, Bradbury, Brackett, and of course Philip K. Dick. In our real universe, this Mars doesn’t exist but whatever.

 

Reich’s Mars is not too different from the lyrical surreal New York of the Great Depression in this novel. James Reich is a writer I greatly admire and as of a couple of weeks ago, I got to hang out with him in person and pick up a signed copy of this. Spending time with James was a highlight of the weekend but I assure you if I didn’t honestly like this novel, I would have just not finished it. I found this novel to be further proof that James Reich is a super underrated writer. You need to listen to me on this point.

 

 I am overdue to read this one, which I went into super blind. I trusted James and didn’t read the back cover, or ask him about it.  I knew the title was a reference to Poe, and that it was a quote from Fall of the House of Usher. I did need to google it to remember.

 

“It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us – but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above…”

― Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher

 

Is it about the attraction to beautiful things that hurt us? I am not sure I want to try to answer something the novel makes us ponder. 

 

The Moth for the Star is part paranormal mystery, romance, and in subtle ways an alternate history that will fly over most heads, as nothing that happens is major global events. The story of Varmas and Campbell is globe-trotting, but in a way I didn’t see this happening in our past, I pictured a stylized slightly off-beat dark version of our past. The two main characters drink heavily to forget something, and for most of the novel, we don’t know what mystery they are trying to out run.

 

What makes this novel sing is the fine-tuned lyrical prose here I selected a paragraph at random as an example.

 

“If he could get up he might crawl to the living room and find a telephone to call Campbell, but his flesh held him down his blood let in his remorse would toil at him in the night. For now it floated threateningly across the surface of his being. Varmas dreamed of something like a dark star. Too late saw it plunging into the earth. Now he slid into that coffin of his unconscious where Campbell slept, his image of her waxwork warm from the cast her throat was lifted and dreaming, her mouth was open, as if to rainfall.”

 

This novel is filled with passages like this. If I can be critical of anything, it is the beauty of the prose distracted me from the story at times. That is a good problem to have in the same way that Liggotti for example builds such beautiful paragraphs that I can lose the narrative thread. This of course adds to the surreal feeling of the overall book. Feature not a bug. The characters are hiding from darkness and that is the mystery at the core, the answer is heartbreaking.

 

“The wasteland has found the city it always does I imagine.” he thought of the marionettes broken like eggshells, masonry falling like clotted blood, ancient scaffolding breaking away, and a vast column of dust rising over the yellow earth. “I'm sorry I don't want to be bleak I thought I might be distracting to talk, but when I opened my mouth, all that came out.

 “I don't mind,” Campbell said.

“One dark thing brings the rest of the darkness with it.”

 

The rest of the darkness in this story is buried in a vibe that contrasts some of the gothic beauty. The bottom line is Moth for the Star is a darkly beautiful book. It is a vibe and experience you should have if you like elevated dark fantasy and horror. The ending will surprise some but the source of the darkness is so very close to Campbell and Varmas that the tragedy drips off every page.