Book Review: American Rapture by CJ Leede

 

 American Rapture by CJ Leede 

 384 pages, Hardcover
Published October, 2024 by Tor Nightfire

Full Podcast interview coming in November...

I have an unfair relationship with CJ Leede’s first novel Mave Fly. It was a massive success, and I saw plenty of excitement about it. Before I read it, I was selling books at the San Diego Book Festival and my fellow tabling authors were Chad Stroup (Secrets of the Weird) and Brian Asman (Good Dogs). They talked about Mave Fly for a solid twenty minutes singing its praises. They hyped it so much, and I respect their opinions that I think the novel could not possibly meet the hype. I might have been unfair to that book, I thought it was good but didn’t love it as much as my friends. You should probably trust them.

That said, American Rapture is right up my alley, in the weird apocalypse subgenre.  Any person following my reviews should know that is my absolute favorite. This novel appears to be a 300-page response to the inherent sexual repression issues that Catholics grow up with. As such the lust pandemic here is more social science fiction than this concept might suggest. You might think you are getting an exploitive violent fest, and there are intense moments for sure.  This is a hard read, brutal at times with as many trigger warnings as the most hardcore of horror novels.

To an outsider who is not Catholic and has not had direct interaction with the religion - the church has always seemed to have issues. The repression that children feel is one aspect, the sex abuse of the priests is another. This novel appears to be an angry reaction to that Catholic upbringing. I love novels that feel like the author has a rage inside they need to get out.

Sophie is our POV character, as always with first-person perspective I have to point out that it is not my favorite tool for narrative construction. That said, I quickly forgot about it as I got involved with the events of this weird apocalyptic tale. There are several characters like the young police officer Maro, a young friend named Ben, and very importantly the dog Barghest. Both Maro and Barghest take on the role of Sophie’s protector, but without spoiling the characters unspool in the story with interesting complications.

 This take on a subgenre with a lust plague makes American Rapture a slightly more frightening version of the 28 Days Later rage virus that includes a sexual component. An interesting component of the political subtext in this novel is the constant threat of sexual violence and fear creates for the reader that seemed to be a statement the feeling being in a hypersexualized rape culture. This is a message of great value for the men reading this story who have never experienced this and need something like this to contextualize what rape culture is.

The novel is about the sexual repression that many Catholics feel exploding into the wider culture.  This to me is a powerful hinge of the novel, but also a reason for those serious trigger warnings I already mentioned.

Forget about those heavy issues for a moment. The characters in this novel are also a strong aspect of the overall piece. Sophie as our narrator comes of age in the events of the novel. She starts off sheltered, hidden from experiences, deeply concerned for her brother Nick who has recently come out as gay. The brother is mostly off-screen, but his presence is felt throughout.  Maro is still a young man, but old enough to make his relationship with Sophie uncomfortable for readers. Very interesting. Sophie and the reader essentially have to suspect everyone as the whole thing spreads across the country…

“I am out the front door I don't feel my legs. They don't feel anything. My head is spinning, and nausea threatens to overwhelm me. They are possessed, they have to be it wasn't them possession would be preferable, anything would be to … that.”

“It doesn't kill everyone, does it?"

I feel desperation in my voice. He must hear it too, see it on my face. It gives me the most terrible look of all. Pity.

“I'm sorry, kid. I don't know About your family, or … it's…” he clears his throat and takes a deep breath “What we know is if they get to the comma you know, sexual stage ellipse they die. People aren't surviving. It's why there's a quarantine, I mean do you know how much it takes for the government to step in like they're doing? And this fast? This is massive.”

The chapter 'infection' is about her parents being infected and attacking her and it is a disturbing chapter, especially in the context of the Catholic nature of the main character. This moment of horror and tension only works because of the character work throughout.  That said CJ Leede did great with the action details…

“Try to push up onto 1 elbow, but it too slides out from under me. The same substance I slipped in. I've fallen in something wet and sticky. Globs of it. On one of my legs, under my arm, seeping into wet my side through my shirt. The room smells heavily of chlorine and a little of human waste. Bile rises in my throat, and I will myself to breathe. Probably soap. It's just soap. I press myself up with one hand and feel the substance there as well vicious, that tangy acidic smell.”

I got the feeling this was a work long in process. But there are smart twists inspired by the events we all went through in the pandemic.

“St. Michael’s crusaders,” Helen says.

Headache subsiding, the world still spins by. We’ve been driving for only five or ten minutes, the smoke just starting to lesson;

“The Reverend Ansel people?” Ben asks

“Yeah.”

“What are they doing? Why do they look like that?”

“It’s like I said before. They’re burning all the vax centers down. Don’t want anyone impeding God’s work to rid the world of sinners.”

American Rapture is a fantastic sophomore effort, one that I personally enjoyed a lot more than Leede’s debut. You’ll hear that this novel is not as transgressive as Mave Fly, but that is not true. It is more subtext, but this novel is a smart live wire of political speculative horror. I am all about it.

Book Review: Skinship by James Reich

 

Skinship by James Reich

192 pages, Paperback

Published by Anti-Oedipus Press

 Expected publication December 15, 2024

 

Some books and authors challenge me to write about without using hyperbole. James Reich is an author who I respect both personally and professionally. As a reader I have yet to read a novel by JR that didn’t impress me, honestly, they have blown me away. I worry that I will come off sounding like his mother telling you how fantastic he is.  I mean every word and it is not spoken lightly. 

James Reich is an author who defies most standard genre conventions. While he doesn’t have the literary reputation of Brian Evenson or Margaret Atwood, James Reich is writing some of the best Science Fiction in the underground indie movement. Skinship is a classic generation ship well written enough to hook those snobs who think they are above genre if they give it a chance. 

 I am beyond excited that James Reich has entered into the realm of writing a Generation Ship novel, a staple subgenre of the canon. From Heinlein’s Universe in the 40s to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora in this century there are many classic examples. It is still a modern staple even getting mainstream saccharine movies like Passengers. In recent novels, the approaches have been diverse. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora (which I consider to be a masterpiece) takes the hard science approach and River Solomon’s Unkindness of Ghosts is a surreal metaphorical fantasy. Skinship is about halfway between those two modern styles in that it borders on surrealism but doesn’t go fully into metaphor. The length of the novel and ideas seem to fit thematically with one of my other favorite 21^st-century generation ship novels The Freezeframe Revolution by Peter Watts.

Reich doing this is nothing new to me. In 2019 Reich wrote a similar work of genius with the underrated “The Song My Enemies Sing.” challenged the entire genre of Science Fiction and the many modern realistic depictions of Mars by setting his novel on the red plant preserved in the amber of the science fictional imagination. Creating a novel both modern and retro. In 2017 the short but powerful novel Soft Invasions mixed meta-old timey Hollywood with counterfactual Japanese bombing air raids of California, UFO abductions, and the battle of the Midway. In 140 short pages of elegantly surreal prose James Reich gets wibbley wobbly with space-time and reality and creates a one-of-a-kind reading experience. It is perfect for anyone looking for something that gets on the level of weird.

Now Skinship packs an epic journey into 188 pages, the atmosphere of the novel feels a bit like the 70s Silent Running if it had been re-written and directed by a young well funded David Cronenberg. The point of view character is Applewhite the First Navigator, who is several generations into being engineered to replace his clones and pilot the ship. The Skinship left the dying long ago and the novel opens as they have reached a crossroads. Two planets are in reach and the factions are in conflict. If that is enough to sell you on this book which is still in the pre-order phase you can avoid spoilers in the rest of this review and come back if you want to go in totally cold.

Let's get into this book…

The book opens with subtle but powerful world-building for both the ship and the dying Earth that highlights the strength of Reich’s prose.

“Now, the tommy studied the skinship hanging above it. This was the last vessel that would leave the hyperstation that cast its shadow on the dead planet. Entangled and the conspiracy of machinery that attended it, an Aurora of blue light shifted along the skin ship's massive tubular hull, suffusing the dermis with a strange energy. Calmly, the tommy observed the swarms of robots with their welders and sealants. The vessel was already miles long, a leviathan suspended in space. Whether the skinship’s dominant form was organic or mechanical, but Tommy could not have said.”

The skinship is technological sure, and it is also biological throughout the novel the nature of the is revealed and hinted at. The ship is a genetically living ark, giving the ship itself a gooey body horror feeling. The ship is often a character in the generation ship tale, but often through AI pilots but there is a subtle subtext here of the ship being soft and as fragile as skin. The novel hints at this on the first page, but it doesn’t knock you over the head.

As for the earth while the tommy is still at the dockland they look from the ship to earth and the contrast is beautifully expressed.

“On earth, great dunes of ash shrugged towards stiff oceans, glaciers of acid foregathered, glittering as they wiped the cities from the surface of the world. London dissolved. Berlin perished. Sydney earned. Abjua drowned. Poison washed over the tundra. It wove through red forests, sinister and final. The oceans were possessed by slicks of noxious algae clinging to the gyres of plastic, forming artificial islands of trash. Staring down through the mesh of the gantry between its feet the tommy watched the sublime and red relentless white curved of accretion and erosion, a deathly brine overcoming the final thin green tint of the land. Some of the dying must have been watching the sky and the hulk of dockland, black against the sun, or illuminated in the night.”

The interior of the ship lives in a zone of classical SF imagination with autotrams and the like. The ship got bigger as the journey continued with civilization and a style.

“The printers had fashioned the interior, and now it was a series of nostalgic districts, vertebrae along the spine where the railways of the autotrams ran. There was a concourse beneath the navigation bridge that was like an airport tournament terminal with boutiques and restaurants. There were more like this throughout the ship.”

 

Life on the Skinship is populated by a growing culture as you would expect. We see this through the eyes of many interesting characters. The Archivist, and the First Navigator play traditional roles, but they are effectively written.  Applewhite the first navigator is like a classic PKD character born without a traditional relationship to reality or understanding for his creation. Sure Applewhite is the First Navigator, he pilots the ship like many Applewhites printed before him. As he is born into the job There is a conspiracy to kill and replace him.

“You understand,” he had said, crouching beside her, “that all of this will come to nothing if Applewhite remains First Navigator? You heard the rumors that he's hysteric, a neurotic, I'm sure.”

They believe they are saving the ship and want to take it to a planet named Snapdragon, while Applewhite maintains the original plan to go to the planet Wormwood. part of the deal when the three skinships left the passenagers were promised to be reconstituted on a new world, saved like biological data in the skinship. The conflict of course threatens all of it.

“The Skinships did not abduct. They were sanctuaries, made by humanity and its automatons, for humanity. Now she surrendered to the violence of space, like plain dead in a river current, drifting heavy with pollen and dreams under a bright sun, the heat on her face the sky blue and clean..”

The role the generation ship novel plays in the genre is to create micro-cultures that are divorced from the clear destruction we are heading toward. There is almost never a happy ending or a perfect new planet we call home. James Reich is focused on the traumatic damage this dying world left on the people clinging to an island of biology in the vast lifelessness of space. This is highlighted in the 20^th-century design of the interior of the ship.

“The skinship had its roots, as it were, or its cellular origins in the greatest and hardest of all centuries. If -- as the dermis moved out from the dockland, extending into space towards the destination -- it had taken the 20th century with it, it had done so because Monamy had accepted that the 20th century had been the last century not overwhelmed with helplessness and mediocrity. This he shared with the printers. Ohh, yes, he recalled it had been terrible, but it had been the last century of beauty, the last where there had been hope of avoiding environmental collapse, in the last century of art and nature.”

I found this powerful. If this were a film I would say they designed the interior this way to save money on designing an alien environment.  But Reich has the unlimited budget of his imagination and still he turned the 20^th century design into a powerfully expressed message. I don’t know if that is the mission statement of the novel, but it could serve as one. The printers detached from any natural ecology represent an artificial future.

“Smiling contentedly, Katazome envisioned Snapdragon as a planet overgrown with white plastic, the inhabitants of the skin ship drowning, reaching from the wax-like figurines from Dante, trapped in the apocalypse of artifice.”

Skinship is the best new novel, I read this year. It is a deep ecological novel that combines genuine body horror with beautifully written prose. A story that mines the trauma everyone with open eyes should feel when facing a warming dying ecosystem. It deserves a place in the great canon of Generation novels. Pre-order Skinship now.

Book Review: Not a Speck of Light by Laird Barron

 

Not a Speck of Light by Laird Barron

372 pages, Paperback

Published September, 2024 by Bad Hand Books, LLC

 

Audio of my interview with Laird on this book! 

 

Video of the interview 

 I don’t know Laird Barron as well as some authors, we have had nice interactions with the podcast, but most of my relationship with Laird is as a reader, and a Twitter follow. I felt so deeply for his close family and friends when he was sick in 2022/23 I nervously followed the news like most of the horror fiction community. So, I don’t want anyone to think I am making light of this situation.  It was scary for us fans too, we didn’t want to lose one of the best writers of cosmic horror, the writer behind the amazing Ishiah Coleridge trilogy. 

I understand how scary this would be for Laird, who has written about near-death experiences he had earlier in life. When Laird worked his way back to health I had a feeling that this man with his fingers on the pulse of the dark beating heart of the cosmos would come back with power. When I heard there was a new collection, I knew I had to read it. A Laird Barron book is always a cause for celebration, a collection is even more reason as LB is one of the best short story writers on the planet. Now add the weight of his recent brush with death and I knew this was going to be the most powerful collection in a career of strong work. 

Not a Speck of Light is Barron’s 5th collection, and it appears most of the stories from before LB’s latest brush with death but two of the most powerful tales in the collection, ‘Mobility’ and the title story both seem influenced by the events in his life. Strangely it predated the illness. That said I don’t think it is possible to come that close and not experience a new relationship with the cosmos. The first story Laird wrote in recovery was the title story, Not a Speck of Light is a bit of a dark painful dog love story, it is a powerful heart-pounding story that I wish never existed as it does. It took a recovering man turning his pain into a beautifully dark art for it to happen.

The prose as always is poetic, lyrical, and fine-tuned to paint a picture in your mind’s eye. Barron blends noir, cosmic, and moments of humor with a sense of grand literature. The quality of the word-to-word prose is hard to describe with hyperbole, and I feel it is getting better. Having written a trilogy of street-level noir modern Barron has clarity enough in the fantasy stories that his early stories didn’t excel in. 

The collection is divided into four stylistically unified parts. Part one is called Blood Red Samaritans. My guess is these stories were more character based stories Part two being Wandering Stars which was more cosmic horror, section three has the most informative name. “Alan Smithee is Dead,” Smithee is the pen name directors put on movies they are embarrassed by. I don’t think Barron is saying these are bad, they are not. I think he is admitting to their pulpy nature.  The last sections are called Fear Sun and Lake Terror.

 

‘Soul of Me’ was my favorite story of the collection It has the wild fantasy feel of Jack Vance Dying Earth novels, and in a way has the far future pastoral feel of Clifford Simak. It is a short piece, but worth every penny I spent on the book. “In your final incarnation on this miserable, blood-soaked world, you are Rex. Spot, Fido, Roscoe, yellow, ramp, rusty, Rin Tin Tin, Buck, and the others, the ever-popular others, yes, those two. But always and forever Rex. The last of your kind and the kinds that came before.”  

Rex is a character that I love. This universe and character need a novel or novella. PLEASE Laird.

This collection shows how playful the author is with titles, but also how he grounds his tales in the living breathing landscapes of Upstate New York and of course Alaska, his childhood home state.

“Alaska is a damned big, empty place bordered by nowhere. Between frigid temperatures and snowfalls as deep to a giraffe, it has weapons to kill anything more complex than Iraq. Civilization exists in tiny, disenfranchised pockets surrounded by a howling void. Basically, it's the universe and microcosm.

There's always plenty of tinfoil hat theories and superstitious legends to go along with all that frozen tundra lost radar sites fronting for secret nuclear launch silos aimed at Russia; FEMA concentration camps for the inevitable apocalypse, UFO observation bases; etc, etc..”

Not a Speck of Light is the best collection of stories by an author who has excelled at the powerful short story. Every story is powerful. Every page drips with dark energy. All in a beautiful package with amazing black and white art to open every story. Get it now.