Adrian Collins's Blog, page 94

REVIEW: Life Beyond Us by the European Astrobiology Institute

Life Beyond Us is an anthology of fifty-four original science fiction stories and science essays compiled by the European Astrobiology Institute, a consortium of European institutions devoted to research, education, and outreach activities in the field of astrobiology, i.e., the study of life in the universe. This anthology is the brainchild of over sixty contributors from across the globe, including some of the world’s top authorities in astrobiology, astrophysics, and aeronautical engineering, as well as experts in science philosophy and linguistics.

Life Beyond Us features twenty-seven short stories, each followed by a professional essay explaining the scientific underpinnings of the story. Over its nearly 600 pages, Life Beyond Us covers a wide range of topics in astrobiology, including the environmental conditions that could foster life, the possible forms of microscopic and macroscopic organisms, and the social consequences of humans making first contact with alien life.

Currently, the only known life in the universe is on our home planet of Earth. How do we extrapolate this knowledge from a single data point to address the potential of life elsewhere in the cosmos? If extraterrestrial life exists, what forms could it take? And how can we study life on another world without contaminating it with organisms from our own planet? If we do discover life elsewhere, what are the ethical implications of engaging with it? How can we even communicate with extraterrestrial life if it does not use the same medium for communication as humans, viz., sound and visual cues. These questions are made especially difficult since there is no universally agreed upon definition of life itself. Life Beyond Us does an admirable job of addressing all these questions and many others.

Life Beyond Us is compiled by a trio of prolific science fiction editors: Julie Nováková, Lucas K. Law, and Susan Forest. The short stories are written by a diverse range of contributors from around the globe, including both amateur authors and well-established writers such as World Fantasy Award winner Tobias S. Buckell and Julie E. Czerneda, a science fiction veteran with twenty-three published novels already under her belt.

Each short story is followed by a companion science essay. The essays are all accessible and authoritative, complete with citations to relevant papers published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. The references are up-to-date, including articles published as recently as last year. The science essays are all written in an approachable fashion, similar in style to articles published in Scientific American, clearly explaining the scientific principles of the preceding story for a general audience. I found the essays to be of uniformly excellent quality across the anthology.

The short stories themselves are more inconsistent. Some are five-star quality, with engaging characters and well-constructed storylines, including many unexpected plot twists. But several of the other stories serve as thinly veiled vehicles for discussing aspects of science. Nevertheless, a common feature among all the short stories is that they are rooted in realistic science, making them both believable and instructive.

Overall, Life Beyond Us is an outstanding collection emphasizing the hard science behind science fiction. The authors clearly recognize the importance of science fiction in stimulating readers’ imagination and fostering an interest in scientific disciplines. This is important for both the field of astrobiology and more broadly for recruiting the next generation of students across STEM disciplines. Personally, I would love to see more anthologies in a similar vein as Life Beyond Us focusing on other areas of science such as quantum physics or artificial intelligence.

The team at the European Astrobiology Institute is to be commended for this comprehensive anthology, which was clearly a labor of love for everyone involved. While the stories focus on life beyond Earth, they also help us to gain an appreciation for the beauty and complexity of life on this pale blue dot we call home.

4/5

Read Life Beyond Us by the European Astrobiology Institute

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An Interview with Richard Swan

Fans of fantasy are unlikely to have escaped the deluge of rave reviews of Richard Swan’s Empire of the Wolf series. With the magnificent The Justice of Kings and The Tyranny of Faith being marketed as his debut fantasy trilogy, what his new legion of fans may not know is that he has a completed space opera trilogy called The Art of War (with prequels and short stories building off it) which, for this interviewer, read like a glorious mixture of The Expanse and Warhammer 40,000.

Book one, Reclamation, and I think you could argue the entire The Art of War series, is the story of the escalation of political conflict driven in a hundred directions by a range of competing factions. The series is a mixture of political intrigue, espionage, and brutal military conflict. It is a story about biting off more than you can chew, and of the large and powerful becoming rather small and weak. The galaxy is colonised, other species have been met and treated with, but even as humanity has grown into the stars, the things that make humans brilliant to write about because of the conflicts created by our arrogance, greed, and stupidity, remain.

Richard was kind enough to spend some time with me talking about one of the best sci-fi series I’ve read—and, conversely, the first trilogy I’ve back-to-back read and reviewed in a long, long time.

[GdM] When I reviewed The Art of War trilogy, I could think of no better comparison than The Expanse and the Warhammer 40,000 universes. The incredible layers of worldbuilding, history, politics, war, character arcs and the sheer awe-inspiring speed and scale of your battle scenes deserve no less comparison, in my eyes. While you have spoken about Warhammer 40k’s impacts on you, I know Reclamation was written before you had heard of Leviathan Wakes, and in my eyes that is the closest comparison. Can you describe the themes and influences for this series?

[RS] Well, first off thank you very much for the kind words! In terms of direct inspiration, as with many things it was the culmination of a lifetime of media consumption. I must have put pen to paper on Reclamation around 2012/13 and at that point I was very heavily influenced by a lot of videogames I was playing. Games like the Halo franchise (and especially Reach / ODST), Mass Effect (the third instalment of which I had only really just got round to playing) and StarCraft 2. I’ve also had a lifelong love of the Star Wars prequels which I think will always feed into my writing in one way or another. In terms of literary inspirations, I was very heavily influenced by the epic space operas of Peter Hamilton growing up (I’ve always been a Night’s Dawn / Confederation man, though I think the Commonwealth Saga is probably his more popular work), that sort of multiple POV, slightly martial, high-tech, breathless, galaxy-spanning hurtling-towards-war kind of narrative. And I was completely obsessed with Iain M Banks’ Culture series for the longest time, too. The themes Banks explores I think are writ large in the Art of War Trilogy; this idea of covert operatives, willing to take the low road, willing to get their hands dirty and do dreadful things in order that the majority can sleep easy at night, I’ve always been very drawn to the moral quandaries that that idea presents. And I think certainly during my formative years the Global War on Terror was in full swing, so this idea of liberal democracies compromising their own values so readily and comprehensively—values which they have fought and died and killed to defend—in order to defeat an enemy who does not play by those rules, that was a fascinating and rich seam of inspiration for me. I think in all of my fiction there is this exploration of the tension between societies with liberal secular systems and values, and what happens when those societies are faced with an existential threat which plays by completely different set of rules. It always comes back to the same moral dichotomy, consequentialism versus deontologism.

[GdM] The story spans the breadth of the galaxy, and features a united humanity addicted to connectivity and manipulating every aspect of the galaxy, the downtrodden Kaygryn trying to survive and claw their way out from under the Ascendancy’s direct bootheel and humanity’s indirect one, and the Provar Ascendancy as the dominant species in the Milky Way sending most of their military strength off to crusade beyond the boundaries of the galaxy against an unknown foe. What inspired each of these species and their drivers?

[RS] Certainly I think the United Nations as it exists within the Art of War Trilogy is a fairly naked allegory of modern Western society. In fact, probably some of it and the epigraphs are a little heavy-handed; I’d be a bit subtler if I was to write the same trilogy these days. In a lot of my science-fiction I have humanity as existing in a pseudo post-scarcity society in which much of the manufacturing base is completely automated and everybody is entitled to housing and subsistence. So, I have the vast majority of society existing in these hyperconnected digital playgrounds which most of them are hopelessly addicted to and who spend their days doing nothing but indulging their desires. But I also like the idea of having a sort of confected labour market / economy, so that people who still want to have jobs and work (and these mostly exist around the civic infrastructure—legal, administrative, political, military) can do in order to earn more than their subsistence entitles them to, and these people tend to be the more motivated and driven as a result. Generally I think the UN in the books is the ‘good guy’ and wants to impose its way of life and values on the other races of the galaxy, but also whilst maintaining its own position of self-congratulatory superiority. It’s essentially addicted to intervention, and the series is about what happens when you meddle in something you really ought not to have—or perhaps, you ought not to have intervened in unless you could be assured of victory.

The Provar Ascendancy is your sort of classic theocratic fascist autocracy, whilst the Kaygryn are a race of aliens as you say just coming out of centuries of servitude (and that itself has been engineered by the UN in one of its back patting interventionist episodes—though they are also perfectly content to hang them out to dry as well). I think the Provar originally were inspired by the elites from Halo and certainly have that same aggressive honour-based warrior society. I also drew inspiration from real-world parallels, for sadly there are plenty of modern totalitarian regimes to take ideas from. The interplay between these societies is really just a reflection of the interplay between modern super states with different ideologies, and how political missteps and cultural misunderstandings can fan the embers of a conflict into outright war. In fact, now I cast my mind back to it, the very first kernel of inspiration for Reclamation was the Falklands War.

[GdM] Throughout the trilogy, you really get deep into expanding on some of the problems in today’s current human society. Things like our addiction to technology and the internet (and what happens when it’s taken away from the addicted, or introduced to the uninitiated), the impact on society of the removal of jobs and the introduction of a universal wage system, and our penchant for just straight up thinking we’re smarter than everyone and can manipulate everything with little-to-no consequence for those not experiencing the front lines. How did you choose which societal concerns to focus on, what was your approach to extrapolating them out, and at what point do you need to draw a boundary when you write about them?

[RS] That’s a very good summary of the UN as portrayed in the novels. I think you are absolutely right when you say that you kind of have to pick and choose which areas you’re going to focus on when writing a science-fiction novel, as of course everything as we know it will change in the future, and it is not clear now what any given invention could have on society as we know it. For example, I had one idea which basically extrapolated on the idea of memeing to the point where writing became practically obsolete and was instead replaced by very dense pictograms which were able to convey information much more effectively than sentences of text. Even something as simple as the idea of windows—as in physical, glass windows in a house—can be completely reframed (pun intended) in the future. I think it’s perfectly possible that one day houses will be completely sealed units because replicating a pleasant view with appropriate lighting and ambient sounds will be perfectly achievable using UHD screens. Even the idea of something like offices in their present form still existing hundreds of years in the future is probably ludicrous; it’s probably more likely that workspaces will be entirely virtual reality because the definition and interface will be so advanced. Replacing a physical workplace will have profound implications on labour-as-socialisation.

When it comes to societal issues, certainly there’s a fear at the moment of hyper-connectivity and addiction to the internet, smartphones, et cetera. My personal prediction (which is nothing unique or ground breaking) is that eventually technology will be fully integrated into our bodies—permanent HUDs grafted into our eyes, implanted computers in our brain that are controlled by our thoughts, sensors in our fingertips, et cetera. Whilst I think some people would find this horrifying, I also think that one of the corollaries of this absolute ubiquity of technology would be a huge drop in crime to the point where the incidence of certain crimes would fade almost into nothingness (e.g. it would be practically impossible to commit any sort of assault whilst the victim is able to record every part of it and upload it to a remote substrate in real time).

Things like this small morsel and other similar ideas I explored briefly in the Art of War book 3, when a character from a “Tier 2” world (a world that is technologically advanced but does not have faster than light travel capability) joins the UN and so is exposed to the UN way of life. It’s something which she quickly finds completely overwhelming to the point where she becomes depressed and alcoholic. However, the sociological impacts of ubiquitous technology are better suited for (and abundantly explored in) the cyberpunk subgenre so I did not set out to get into the guts of it in this space opera trilogy.

[GdM] The first book has been out for a decade, now. With ten years of hindsight alongside ten wild years of pandemics, wars, technology evolution, etc, if you could go back and insert one more societal theme into these books, what would it be?

[RS] It’s a really good question. When The Justice of Kings was published I actually did go back to the original word files of the Art of War trilogy with a view to editing them and bringing them up to my current writing standard. I didn’t want readers going through my back-catalogue to think that they were necessarily reflective of my current ability. But apart from a few excisions, I was actually fairly happy with the Art of War trilogy (I didn’t reread the whole thing, I got about halfway through book 1 before stopping). I certainly wouldn’t write it in the same way now, but it absolutely was not worth the time and energy investment in editing half a million words because the qualitative gains would have been fairly minimal.

Given unlimited time, inspiration, and inclination, I think certainly I would have explored the characters in a little more depth, which is something I was at pains to do in the Empire of the Wolf trilogy. The Art of War is a very plot focused story and the characters I think are probably a little archetypal and, really, vehicles to carry the plot forward rather than necessarily beguiling or intriguing people to read about.

In terms of themes, as I said earlier I think I’d have been a little more subtle in my examination of modern Western societies. Some of the left-wing handwringing is a bit overdone, especially in the epigraphs—some of which make me wince to reread. But generally speaking, I think I covered the thematic ground I wanted to; I have just done it in a more nuanced and interesting way.

[GdM] There is no doubt in my mind that sci-fi fans are going to absolutely love the sheer range of technologies integrated into your character’s experiences: from the mantix combat suits, to impact gel, to the IHDs in every UN citizen’s head that enable you to perceive time differently. What are your favourite bits of Swan-tech you’ve invented, and how much of those were pure cool factor, or required for parts of the story?

[RS] I think I enjoyed the technology around space combat the most. A lot of science-fiction in popular culture has these sort of pseudo aircraft-carriers-in-space type combat ships—and I actually love that aesthetic—but what I love less is the idea of having all of your officers standing on a bridge with windows out to space, ordering guns being fired at an enemy a few kilometres away. To my mind these engagements would be three things: they would be very quick, because most of it would be dictated by computers; they would be conducted over huge distances, many hundreds of thousands of kilometres apart; and they would be very violent.

In order to contrive to have humans in this process, I had to do a number of things. The first was to get them as far away from the outer hull of the ship as possible. So the officers are in an armoured core in the very centre of the ship. As well as armour plating made of various fictional alloys, I also encase them in a sphere of ‘nanogel’, which is a non-Newtonian ballistic impact fluid, like a womb. Each officer is in a capsule like this, with their brains then linked to a virtual reality command sphere, which visually would be like standing in a bubble of glass in space surrounded by HUD graphics. And then as you have already alluded to, their implanted computers are able to alter their time perception, so that they can make decisions in the space of picoseconds and keep up with the computers who are doing the heavy lifting during the engagement.

So, I think I had a lot of fun in coming up with ways of including humans within the combat and maintaining their agency in what should really be the preserve of computers and machines.

[GdM] When I first read this brilliant, un-put-downable trilogy, one of the things that blew me away the most was when I found out they had been self-published. The quality of these books is so good, I actually had to pick my jaw up off the floor when you told me you hadn’t pitched them to publishers. Can you talk me through what the journey for these books has been like, from when you first published them, to now, when your fantasy trilogy is on everyone’s TBRs?

[RS] I think I probably first started conceiving of the idea of Reclamation after university. I finished university in 2010, and from about 2007 I had been heavily involved in the official black library fanfiction forums. For the uninitiated, Black Library is the publishing wing of Games Workshop and is responsible for producing novels set within the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. Over the course of three years I must’ve written about five novels of fanfiction plus innumerable short stories, novellas and group stories. And then those forums were disbanded to be replaced by a very early prototype of what is now the modern-day Warhammer community website.

So, after they went down I was feeling a bit listless with my fiction writing. The fanfiction forum had consumed me and my writing for years and almost overnight that community was completely dismantled. So, I didn’t write anything for a little while, until probably a year or two later when I was getting really into Mass Effect and wanted to write a novel that was reminiscent of that. By the time I finished Reclamation it must have been 2015, and the idea of pitching it to publishers (I didn’t know what agents were at that time) didn’t really occur to me. I definitely thought that the book was much too generic, just a fairly run-of-the-mill space opera, to be suitable for traditional publication. So, I never actually attempted to get it published in that way. Around the same time I became aware of KDP, the Kindle self-publishing platform, and that was extremely attractive to me. I could completely control the direction of the novel, and most excitingly the cover art (the first piece of artwork for reclamation was a John Harris piece which I had licensed), and I became completely consumed with the self-publishing process. Looking back, I actually had much more success than I really should have done. I did almost no marketing beyond a bit of amateurish social media stuff, expecting readers simply to seek me out and find me (ha!) and expecting the book to simply just begin selling. The Art of War Trilogy actually did moderately well over the course of three years or so, but it was when I self-published a MilSF novel (Earth Remembers), which I expected to succeed simply because my previous space opera had, I had a much more classic self-publishing experience—which was that absolutely nothing happened. In fact, I de-published that novel recently because to date it had still only sold about twenty copies.

At the same time sales for the Art of War Trilogy were drying up to a trickle and I decided to turn my back on independent publishing in about 2018. My goal in life had always been to get one book in print with a Big Five publisher, and so I turned my mind back to that task (and started writing what would become The Justice of Kings). One of the very welcome corollaries of the publication of The Justice of Kings and The Tyranny of Faith is that people have now been going back to the Art of War trilogy, and so after several years of zero sales I’m shifting a couple of hundred copies a month—and that number keeps going up. So, these books are finally getting their moment in the sun!

[GdM] I remember those Warhammer forums! Do you remember your name on there, and what some of your favourite works were about?

[RS] I do indeed! My handle was Firefox and I used to write about a military investigator called Vandemarr. The books were Auxiliary, The Source, Last Testament, Fallen City, and Deathwatch. It is difficult to overstate how much of my brainpower and creative energy those novels monopolised. I was completely consumed by them. Those three years were absolutely formative for me in honing my craft.

[GdM] I also find it very interesting that The Earth Remembers did not reach the light over the last year-and-a-bit through people finding it in much the same way as they did The Art of War trilogy. Do you have any thoughts on why it might have remained in the sales hall of darkness?

[RS] I never really pushed it or marketed it and I think even in the three or four years it took me to write and publish the Art of War trilogy, the nature of KDP changed fairly drastically in terms of how the algorithm was structured. I don’t think Earth Remembers was (is) a bad book, but it was just completely invisible, which is the default state of any self-published novel (and indeed published novel). It was also very different from my ‘UN-iverse’ (the Art of War Trilogy, Hadan’s Reach and the two Ascendancy War novellas); it’s a much pulpier, dieselpunk World War II in space novel, pure MilSF, and yet I was publishing it as an indie space opera author, so I don’t think there was much pull through for my audience. It’s something I do intend to revisit at some point as I have always loved military science-fiction, but I think it needs a new cover and a bit of a rebrand!

[GdM] You once told me you were a science fiction author masquerading as a fantasy author. Can you elaborate a bit on that, and let me know what aspects of your authorial skillset built in science fiction helped you deliver the absolutely magnificent The Justice of Kings?

[RS] Essentially, I’ve always written science-fiction. The Justice of Kings was the first fantasy novel I ever wrote. The first stories I wrote when I was twelve were military science-fiction, and then I wrote a very long novel with a friend which was more military space opera. My first crack at a proper multiple POV space opera solo project was when I was about seventeen, and that formed the blueprint of how I approached fiction ever since. From there it was 40K fanfiction, then the Art of War trilogy. Even now I have science-fiction trilogy idea I’m 50k words into writing, and a sci fi standalone called Prophet about a space fighter pilot which I really must do something with (that could well be my favourite ever book I’ve written). So, for as long as I’ve been writing, fantasy is very much an aberration for me.

I saw a reviewer once compare The Justice of Kings to the Star Wars prequel trilogy and the collapse of the Republic (with Justices being a bit like Jedi), and, whilst that was certainly not my intention, I really love that comparison—the idea that The Justice of Kings is a secret science fiction novel masquerading as a fantasy trilogy. But I think for me the authorial skillset wasn’t necessarily built by writing science fiction per se; rather it was built just by writing so much. Ultimately the only way any of us get good at anything is by practising, and so all the books I wrote prior to The Justice of Kings all helped to hone that narrative voice.

[GdM] With The Empire of the Wolf soon coming to its society-collapsing conclusion, can you tell me what you’re writing next?

[RS] I have three projects on the go at the moment. The first is a flintlock fantasy trilogy set several centuries after the Empire of the Wolf Trilogy and centres around a diplomatic mission to an enigmatic and violent race of sea dwellers. The second is a short post-apocalyptic novel set in London; and the third is a contemporary crime novel set in Sydney which revolves around a sequence of shark attacks. So, fingers crossed something happens with these in the near future!

Read The Art of War Trilogy by Richard Swan

This interview was originally published in our Sci-fi / cyberpunk special issue: Grimdark Magazine Issue #34.

The post An Interview with Richard Swan appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.

REVIEW: The Book That Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence

Reading Mark Lawrence’s latest novel, The Book that Wouldn’t Burn, feels like having your mind blown in slow motion. This first volume of his new Library Trilogy is a blend of science fiction and fantasy but at the same time transcends conventional genre labels.

The novel alternates perspectives between two protagonists. Livira Page is a lively and precocious girl from the Dust, the poverty-stricken land outside the city where people barely have enough food and water to survive. As the novel opens, Livira’s village is attacked by a group of vicious doglike soldiers known as sabbers.

The other lead character, Evar Eventari, is a young man in his early 20s who has spent his entire life trapped in a chamber of an enormous library, together with his four adopted siblings and endless towers of books. Evar has been raised by one of the library’s Assistants, a porcelain-looking android-type figure.

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn takes place in and around Crath City. The city is ruled by King Oanold, son of Dubya, a megalomaniac Trump-like figure who embraces nepotism and xenophobia, and who values affirmation rather than knowledge. If there are a hundred books on a topic but only one of those supports Oanold’s preconceived biases, that single volume is the only one he will trust.

Within the city, the focal point of The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is the Athenaeum, the legendary library founded by Irad, the great-grandson of Adam and Eve and the grandson of Cain, the inventor of fratricide. Like his grandfather, Irad fought with his own brother, Jaspeth, who considered the Athenaeum to be a temple to the sin of knowledge. Jaspeth was determined to tear down the library as atonement for the original sin of Adam and Eve, i.e., disobeying God by eating fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The struggle between Irad and Jaspeth has been passed down from generation to generation, with Jaspeth, the enemy of knowledge, reflected in figures such as King Oanold, casting the epic struggles of humankind as a battle between knowledge and ignorance.

The library, hence, becomes a battleground in both the literal and figurative sense. This is a struggle we see play out in our own society, where politicians and religious leaders seek to ban books, censor dissenting views, and manipulate classroom curriculum, believing themselves to have a monopoly on truth.

In The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, the Athenaeum is an infinitely large labyrinth of knowledge housing the collective memory of humankind. This represents our legacy as a civilization and is all that will remain after humanity satisfies its thirst for self-destruction.

Mark Lawrence also poignantly addresses memory at the personal level:

“What does nostalgia mean to a child? An abstraction. A standing stone waiting for them in the mist. Walk a path across some decades, any path you like, and the word will gather weight. It will come to you trailing maybes and might-have-beens. Nostalgia is a drug, a knife. Against young skin it carries a dull edge, but time will teach you that nostalgia cuts—and that it’s a blade we cannot keep from applying to our own flesh.”

The themes of The Book That Wouldn’t Burn extend well beyond the nature of knowledge and memory. Lawrence also contemplates how society develops the notion of a collective enemy, the dehumanization of “the other,” and the associated xenophobia. Ultimately, we may discover that we are our own worst enemy.

At the end of Lawrence’s previous novel, The Girl and the Moon, the author tells us that it’s time for something new. Indeed, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn delivers a wholly original tale that is difficult to compare to other recent fantasy or science fiction novels. The Book That Wouldn’t Burn reminds me more closely of the work of Haruki Murakami, the master of Japanese magical realism. The basic structure of The Book That Wouldn’t Burn mirrors that of Murakami’s opus, 1Q84, which also alternates points of view between male and female leads, whose paths ultimately cross in a strange alternate reality. Murakami’s delightfully weird novella, The Strange Library, also features a lonely boy and wise girl lost in a labyrinthine library. Moreover, the Athenaeum’s warping of space and time recalls the settings of both Piranesi by Susanna Clarke and The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. But perhaps the closest parallel can be drawn to the work of Argentine short story author Jorge Luis Borges, especially “The Library of Babel,” in which Borges introduces the concept of an infinite library containing all possible books that could be written with a given alphabet.

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is undoubtedly the most theme-driven of Mark Lawrence’s work, but it also features a great cast of characters. Livira and Evar are both outstanding leads, especially the tenacious Livira who, like the weed she is named after, can’t be kept down. Another breakout character is Malar, a grizzled veteran whose gruff exterior masks a heart of gold. The Book That Wouldn’t Burn also features a trio of scene-stealing animal friends, including a guide dog named Volente (Latin for “willingly”) and Wentworth, a feline of unusual size who bears a distinct resemblance to the author’s own oversized cat, Wobble. The library is also home to a raven, whose name I shall not reveal. Always the ravens, eh, Dr. Lawrence?

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is Mark Lawrence’s longest novel to date. As a lengthy book about a library, I was expecting this to be a slow-paced story. However, Lawrence defied my expectations, maintaining a surprisingly rapid pace throughout the novel. I’d argue that The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is Lawrence’s fastest paced novel since Prince of Thorns.

The Athenaeum houses all books that have ever been written, and Lawrence leverages this infinite expanse of knowledge to compile some of the best epigraphs I’ve seen anywhere. Long-time Mark Lawrence fans will be delighted by the large number of connections to his previous work. In the ultimate author flex, Lawrence quotes passages both from his own novels and from books written by characters appearing in those novels, creating a head-spinning level of recursion.

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is the work of a veteran author at the peak of his powers. Mark Lawrence has taken his craft to the next level yet again. His writing is witty and heartfelt, with several laugh out loud moments and many more that pulled at the heartstrings. The Book That Wouldn’t Burn somehow encapsulates all of Lawrence’s previous work while also being wholly unique. There are also a number of shocking plot twists that reveal themselves in the final third of the book and left a big emotional impact on me as a reader.

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn covers a lot of ground, offering a meditation on human society in the information age, the seductive nature of lies, and the intrinsic danger of knowledge in the absence of wisdom. But at its core, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is Lawrence’s self-described love letter to books and the buildings where they live. The vastness of the library makes the reader feel like a young child, staring in awe at the tall bookshelves and the unopened books waiting to be read. I am pleased to give my highest rating to this latest masterpiece from Mark Lawrence and am excited to continue the story with the next volume of The Library Trilogy.

5/5

Read The Book That Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence

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REVIEW: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Ninth House is author Leigh Bardugo’s debut adult fantasy novel and the first instalment of her Alex Stern series. Readers may also know her from her many young adult novels set in ‘the Grishaverse’ such as Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows, which have been adapted into an original series by Netflix. Ninth House is a novel I had been meaning to pick up for ages, but I was not sure what to expect; I am always a little wary of fantasy novels set in a present speculative universe. I should not have worried; Ninth House was a great read and is perfect for fans of dark fantasy, especially if they also like their dark fantasy mixed in with magical detective fiction.

Ninth House is set in and around Yale University. Luckily, Bardugo has added a map showing the locations of the different colleges and various other university buildings to help us get our bearings. The ‘ninth house’ of the title refers to a magical secret society called Lethe House whose role is to monitor the behaviours of the other occult secret societies at Yale, ‘the ancient eight.’ Hence why Lethe is the ‘ninth house’. Lethe House’s unlikely newest recruit is our main character Galaxy ‘Alex’ Stern. Unlike most people she is tasked with keeping an eye on, Alex is not from privilege or exceptionally academic. She’s had a harrowing upbringing and possesses an innate arcane ability that makes her valuable to Lethe, even if said ability has haunted her for most of her life.

There is a split timeline to the narrative structure of Ninth House, which eventually converges. Alex’s chapters focus on the present, with her role of supervising the other societies and her slightly slapdash investigation of the murder of a local woman, which she believes has more to it than a domestic dispute getting out of hand. There are also the chapters of Darlington, the Virgil to Alex’s Dante, which take place slightly earlier, and the timelines eventually converge. It was not immediately clear to me that this was happening, so if you do pick up Ninth House, the key to the ‘when’ you are in the story is under each chapter number, where it gives a season. The jumping around did feel a bit jarring at first, but a split narrative was essential for the world-building of Ninth House. Darlington’s character is the more experienced member of Lethe House, and it is through his training of Alex we both learn the history and roles of the other houses and how the magic of this world works. The first part of Ninth House did have a lot of information in a short time, but unless readers already possess knowledge of both classical history and the geography of New Haven, it needed to be there.

Bardugo goes quite dark in the content of Ninth House. Some of this is dark humour that I found appealing, like the idea that Jodie Foster and Anderson Cooper are alumni of the same magical secret society or that one of the houses rigged a presidential election. But there is also a heck of a lot of violence. In an early chapter, there is a gruesome magical ritual involving vivisection. The murder Alex Stern investigates is brutal. Magically supercharged marijuana is one thing, but a magical date rape drug is quite another. In Ninth House, Bardugo unflinchingly shows two opposite ends of society’s spectrum. The harsh realities of Alex’s earlier life with drug use and a seedy criminal underworld juxtapose the abuses of power by the privileged few who are part of the top tier. I have a feeling people may jump into Ninth House if they recognise Bardugo’s name and not be prepared for how dark it is, and it needs to be said that this is not a gateway into the adult fantasy shelves.

However, Ninth House is a well-written dark fantasy. The academic elements and setting were appealing, and I found the magical structure of the different houses interesting. I am glad this is the start of a series and will certainly be picking in the next instalment, Hell Bent, which is out now from Gollancz. 4/5

Read Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

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An Interview WIth Emily Tesh

Emily Tesh, World Fantasy Award Winner for her Greenhollow Duology, sat down with Grimdark Magazine and discussed her newest novel, Some Desperate Glory. The story follows Kyr, one of her generation’s best warriors, and the choices she is forced to make. It is “a thrillingly told queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you.” 

Emily was kind enough to answer questions about this novel, her writing, and much more.

[GdM] What is Some Desperate Glory about?

Some Desperate Glory is a story about a young woman who discovers everything she believes in is a lie. It’s about propaganda, radicalisation, deprogramming, and transformation. It imagines a world where humanity went to war against the alien threat and lost. Our protagonist, Valkyr, has grown up as part of the last resistance – or so she thinks. She has trained since childhood to avenge the murder of the Earth; but the people in power on Gaea Station, where she grew up, have other uses for her.

[GdM] What was the impetus of Some Desperate Glory, and how did it develop over time? Did you write it in the last few politically tumultuous years?

SDG is, among other things, a book about a culture so completely unable to accept that they have no right to rule the universe that they cut themselves off from the wider galaxy in order to become ever more inward-looking and obsessed with what they believe is a noble and glorious past. I am English. Frankly, I worried I was getting too close to clanging Brexit allegory, but so far not many people seem to have noticed. And then it’s a story about the ways in which authoritarian populism allows for a certain kind of man—and it is almost always a man—to claim power and use it for his own selfish satisfaction, through a combination of personal charisma and the valorisation of violence. This too is something you can see happening all around the world at the moment, if you follow the news. And it’s a story about how incredibly easy it is to manipulate and lie, to take advantage of very natural human desires—the hunger to belong somewhere, to do good in the world, and to be loved and respected—and use them to radicalize and then exploit people for your own goals. If you want to see this one happening in real time, look on the Internet.

The world worries me. I have read in recent years some beautiful utopian visions of what the future could be, and instead of comforting me, they made me more worried. It is possible to take progress for granted. 1920s Berlin was, for early 20th century Europe, a pretty good place to be a queer person. It’s been said often that dystopian fiction is about the present, not the future. SDG is a book that extrapolates—I hope logically, and without undue alarmism—from things that are already happening.

[GdM] Who is Kyr?

Kyr is the worst protagonist I could think of. She thinks she’s a leader, when in fact she’s a bully. She thinks she’s a hero, when in fact she’s a terrorist. She is desperate to be good, and she causes devastation wherever she goes. I didn’t want to write a story without hope in it. Kyr is capable of change, and she does change. But her journey is not an easy one.

[GdM] Who was the most challenging character to write?

It depends on what you mean by challenge! On a technical level, I cursed every scene where Kyr is with her squadron on Gaea Station, but that’s only because blocking group scenes is hard work in prose fiction – things that would take a single establishing shot in a TV show take two pages of writing to explain, and then you have to cut it all out again because it spoils the pace of the scene.

On the level of putting thought into it, the biggest challenge was the alien character, Yiso. They are a complex person with their own story which Kyr does not really understand or appreciate until the last third of the book. I did not want them to come across as simply a human being in an alien costume; they needed to be alien in their mannerisms, motivations, choices. But not completely alien, because Kyr’s slow realisation of Yiso’s undeniable personhood is key to her journey. In many ways their life story parallels Kyr’s, and insofar as there is a romance at all in this story, it lies in the unspoken, undefined relationship that develops between Kyr and Yiso.

On top of that, I was very aware of the trope—the trap—of the alien as nonbinary character. The culture Kyr grows up in is horrifically transphobic, and Yiso is the only member of the core cast of the story who is outside the gender binary. I did not want that choice to feel thoughtless or ill-considered to nonbinary readers.

[GdM] How did you approach writing an alien culture? Did you draw on any inspirations?

Honestly, I think alien culture hardly appears in this book. Although the idea of an alien threat is constantly present, there are very few non-human characters, and we never visit a non-human world. Ultimately the story is about human relationships and human power. I am a story-first writer, and so the two substantial alien characters—Yiso and their progenitor Leru—were developed largely in terms of their role in the story: what would be most effective, and most interesting, in challenging Kyr’s understanding of the universe?

[GdM] Silver in the Wood is based on the Green Man’s mythos. Kyr’s name, as well as Cleo, call back to famous characters in history. Do you enjoy reading myths and find them to be a source of inspiration?

I have a degree in Classics and I have spent many years teaching Latin, Greek, and ancient history. SDG more than anything else I have written draws heavily on my academic background. Particularly in my thoughts was the ancient city-state of Sparta. If you have only come across Sparta via popular depictions, you might not realise what a strange society it was. For example, the movie 300—which tells the story of the Spartan last stand against the Persian invasion of Greece at Thermopylae—presents them on their own terms, as defenders of freedom, and does not mention that the attacking Persian Empire is actually a historical example of a fairly liberal and religiously tolerant style of despotism, while the defending Spartans were the elite aristocrats of a militarised imperial ethnostate which enslaved fellow Greeks and practised a primitive form of eugenics. In ancient Sparta, newborn children were inspected by state officials, and those considered sickly or weak were exposed in the wilderness to die.

One element of Spartan society which fascinated ancient commentators was the state education system—non-existent in other Greek states—which they called agoge, cattle-raising. This system took young Spartiate boys and put them through a punishing regime of physical and moral education, all ultimately aimed at producing perfect soldiers. In doing so, they sought to break down the loyalty to the oikos—home and family—and replace it with perfect loyalty to the polis, the city, which was to say your fellow citizen-soldiers and the rulers who commanded you all in battle. Adult Spartan men were expected to visit their wives in the middle of the night, sneaking in and out of the house like criminals.

Sparta needed these perfect soldiers because it was a state caught in a perpetual war. The city’s wealth and power rested on the incident early in her history when she enslaved the entire population of the neighbouring city of of Messene. The Spartiates could afford to be professional soldiers because they had an enslaved nation doing the hard labour of subsistence farming for them; and they needed to be soldiers, because the enslaved nation might rebel at any time (and often did—eventually successfully.) They called their slaves Helots – captives – and ritually declared war against them every year. All the Ancient Greek states were slave-holding societies, of course, but only in Sparta was slavery so explicitly racialised.

I borrowed many elements of this for SDG: the perpetual, inescapable war that demands perfect soldiers; the determination to diminish and weaken any human relationship that does not serve the requirements of the state; the obsession with physical strength, expressed through population politics; and above all the essential insecurity of a regime which is fundamentally shaped by fear of rebellion and a hunger for control. The nice thing about writing science fiction is that one can assume at least some of the characters know about Earth’s history too. The education system on Gaea Station is called the agoge. The station’s leaders know exactly what they are trying to do to the young people in their society.

[GdM] More than any book I have read in years, Some Desperate Glory constantly begs readers and challenges their beliefs about these characters. Is the binary of good and evil a real thing with these characters? Or are we all shades of gray? Was this the idea of the story from the start?

I do think there is no such thing as a good person. We are all products of chance and circumstance and environment. I find this comforting, personally: chances, circumstances, and environments can change, so perhaps people can change too. Perhaps they can become better. That is the hope I wanted to explore in Kyr’s story.

[GdM] While very different in story content, your novels, Some Desperate Glory, Silver in the Wood, and Drowned Country, have a similar overall feel to me as a reader. Look closer. The expression “still waters runs deep” comes to mind. Is the prevailing theme of characters having fathoms of depth something you gravitate towards as a writer?

I enjoy character work. I think it’s one of the few places where a novel has a real advantage over a film or TV show; you can do deep dives into individual perspectives and motivations in prose narrative that you really can’t do on a screen. This works in reverse too, of course: few writers can hope to achieve the emotional impact that a perfect confluence of audio and visual can create. Anyway, I always write for character, and I usually read for character too.

[GdM] Family dynamics, in its many forms, found or otherwise, come into play in the novel. What was it like writing the tension between the family members or the love? Did you have to step away from the computer and take a breather at any scene?

The protagonist witnesses the suicide of someone dear to her at a key moment in the book. The scene seemed to write itself. I set down the laptop and stared into the middle distance for a long time when it was done.

[GdM] What is next?

I am incapable of sticking to one subgenre. I love the broad sweep of speculative fiction and I want to play with all of it. So I went from tender fantasy romance to dark space opera and now I am going from dark space opera to something much lighter and funnier, back in the realm of fantasy, with wizards and demons and competent career-focused thirtysomethings making good choices. I just wrote a book about a teenager who is repeatedly failed by every single adult she trusted, and it made me want to write the opposite – a fantasy story where no one lets the teenagers anywhere near the burden or the agony of saving the world. Imagine: what if the grown-ups behaved like grown-ups?

Read Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

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Exclusive Cover Reveal: Buzzard’s Bowl by John Palladino

Today we have a special treat for Grimdark Magazine readers: an exclusive cover reveal for Buzzard’s Bowl by John Palladino, the second book in his Tragedy of Cedain series and the follow-up to his grimdark debut, The Trials of Ashmount. Our complete review of the first book can be found here.

Buzzard’s Bowl is the name of Cedain’s gladiator arena, which becomes a major focus in the second book of Palladino’s series. Astute readers will recognize this cover scene from one of the final chapters in The Trials of Ashmount. The plot of Buzzard’s Bowl picks right up from there. According to Palladino, “With the events and action ramping up a lot more in Buzzard’s Bowl, I wanted a more active scene to convey the excitement of the book – really show readers things are about to get interesting.”

The cover art was designed by Dusan Markovic, a graduate of the University of Art in Belgrade who specializes in epic fantasy, sci-fi, and horror genres.

Buzzard’s Bowl will be released on June 1, 2023.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Cedain continues to collapse.

Ashmount’s destruction shatters the Magicai while the culprits responsible continue sabotaging the world. All the while, the next season of Buzzard’s Bowl begins and Edelbrock, in his constant fight for survival, desires a vengeance he can only find in the arena.

Seradal and Villic find themselves in the middle of a war between Remeria and the Camel Clans, and may end up on opposing sides, while the threat of Calrym looms over all of them.

At the behest of the woman he loves, Demri finds himself thrown into the Elkavich, a not-so-secret order of Magicai who are intent upon fixing the world.

Ashen, a former urchin rescued by a noble with selfish aspirations, works to dismantle the nobility of Calrym.

Death is assured to all who walk the world, the only unknown is when they will perish.

Read Buzzard’s Bowl by John Palladino

 

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REVIEW: The Judas Blossom by Stephen Aryan

The Judas Blossom is an ambitious, majestic and brutal historical fantasy read that impresses throughout. The novel skilfully covers an era, areas, and cultures that are not typical with fantasy novels or historical retellings.

Set in the 13th century, we follow four main point of view perspectives: Hulagu (a warlord), Kokochin (one of his many wives), Temujin (a son he is ashamed of), and Kaivon (a Persian General). All of these characters are major influences on whether the Mongol empire’s plans to encompass the whole world come to fruition or are derailed. Honestly, there is not a subpar viewpoint in The Judas Blossom. Each individual presents their agendas, ideals, weaknesses, and plans, so the drama and stakes are significantly heightened as the novel progresses. I felt engaged and active as a reader, becoming quite smug seeing events and problems certain players were not privy to. In addition, it was a rewarding experience predicting how affairs could play out, with the many webs of influence and deceit in play.

My advanced review copy of The Judas Blossom was approximately 450 pages long and was brimming with excellent action scenes, sieges, confrontations, barbed verbal exchanges, political intrigue, deception, and cleverness. It is often a violent and unforgiving tale, especially when viewing the action that surrounds Hulagu. There are assassins, political factions, secret societies, and a magic scheme similar to R.R. Virdi’s The First Binding. As The Judas Blossom is the first in a series, we learn about how the magic works as the users figure it out themselves, with the true potential and possibilities more likely to appear in the follow-up entries. The magic seems intriguing though and I look forward to witnessing the capabilities further down the line in this epic story.

I picked up The Judas Blossom knowing little about the historical period that it presents. I have no doubt that this is a well-researched and carefully crafted project, that I envisage will delight historians and aficionados who focus on this time period. A couple of nuggets from history such as mentions of Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan made me smile when I acknowledged them and I fell down the Google rabbit hole a couple of times, intrigued to see if certain members of Aryan’s dramatis personae are based on fact or are fictional.

As a work of fiction though, The Judas Blossom is a riveting tale, set in a dynamic world that is equally beautiful and terrifying. It is gripping, the characters are great and there are no filler chapters (which is surprising for epic fantasy and especially the first books in a series). Also, the novel ends in a compelling manner and this has guaranteed that I will read the next release as soon as I can.

I have very little criticism regarding my reading experience. If I had to say something along those lines, occasionally the flow of some passages seemed a little awkward, perhaps ending abruptly where the rhythm didn’t quite resonate with me. Even with that considered, The Judas Blossom is an excellent first entry into an exciting new epic fantasy series. The characters, action scenes, political intrigue, and trickery present here will make many grimdark readers extremely happy. – 8.5/10

Review copy from Angry Robot Books and Stephen Aryan in exchange for an honest review. 

Read The Judas Blossom by Stephen Aryan

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REVIEW: The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday by Saad Z. Hossain

If one were to describe The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, perhaps a way of doing so would be to call it a fish-out-of-water story, sprinkled with a certain irreverent humor that has become Saad Z. Hossain’s hallmark, except that the fish out of water is in fact, a world-conquering djinn awoken from a long imprisonment spanning millennia.

Like its preceding work Cyber Mage, The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday is set within a post-apocalyptic Earth where humans secrete nanotech to create suitable climes enabling them to live. But instead of the urban centers of Bangladesh, it’s the remote mountains of Nepal where Melek Ahmar, the Lord of Tuesday finds himself, along with the Gurkha Bhan Gurung, the knife-wielding Vergil to his Dante.

It’s an incongruous, but remarkably compelling character duo—Melek Ahmar’s sardonic observations about the new world he finds himself in, mixed with Gurung’s bland statements, peppered with a barely concealed thirst for violence that alarms even the Lord of Tuesday whose ultimate goal is just to have a good time, form some remarkable moments of grim hilarity.

“We cannot brook this kind of dishonor.”

“Look, I mean, I appreciate it, but really, no need to go out of your way . . .”

“There are other ways to skin a cat,” Gurung said. “A king you are, noble lord of Tuesday, and a kingdom you shall have, this I have sworn, when you took me into your service.”

“Eh? You did? I did? I mean, did I take you into service? I don’t exactly recall . . .”

“I have sworn!”

“Ahem, yes, of course, if you’ve sworn.” Melek Ahmar looked helplessly at ReGi for support, and only got a roll of her goth-black eyes. That was the problem with djinn. They never stepped up. “Irrevocable blood oath, was it?”

“Is there any other kind?”

Speaking of incongruity, playing off contradictions is a recurring theme when it comes to The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday. A futuristic, science fiction setting meets djinn existing outside known natural laws. Nearby Kathmandu has become a utopia, a karmic-based society ran under the AI aptly-named Karma, where its citizens want for nothing, yet crave meaning and purpose (perhaps exemplified best by another character Hamilcar Pande, the ‘Sheriff’ of Kathmandu), and the very concept of a perfect utopia ruled by an AI is contradicted by the existence of Kathmandu’s elite, and how they’ve corralled resources to rise up the karmic ranks.

While the flavor of South Asian cyberpunk doesn’t quite percolate as thickly in The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday compared to its predecessor, it’s not entirely lacking; there’s a momo place where Kathmandu’s residents go to for their authentic, non-machine printed dumpling needs. There’s an awkward conversation between Hamilcar and an uncle of his love interest about marriage, something all-too-familiar to those of Asian descent, all of which serve to root utopian Kathmandu and the story into a world that feels like it’s genuinely lived in.

All in all, The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday has a lot going for it. If you’re into narratives that examine societal issues, interspersed with quirky, memorable characters and incredibly irreverent humor that almost seems to be delivered with a cheeky wink from the author, casually delivering darker concepts and themes without going overboard, this is certainly a book to pick up.

Read The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday by Saad Z. Hossain

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REVIEW: You Know Her by Meagan Jennett

Meagan Jennett’s You Know Her is a gem of a debut. A tense, psychological thriller that makes you root for the murderer rather than for the victims or those chasing her, it is smart and unique – and rather unsettling. This is the sort of story that you can’t put down, that makes you question your own morality. I don’t often read non-speculative crime, and few manage to capture my heart fully. This did. I am convinced I’ll be thinking and talking about You Know Her for a long time to come. I have been raving about this book to anyone who would listen ever since I finished it, and I can’t wait for Sophie to capture reader’s hearts and imaginations on release.

It is rare that a thriller sticks with you not because of plot and pacing, but because of its characters and atmosphere. And You Know Her does so brilliantly. In her debut, Meagan Jennett creates a cast that in turn captivates you, scares you and charms you. As you read more, you get to know the actors in this particular drama, and as you begin to care for them, you need to know how their story goes. There is one particular moment, about halfway through the book – if you read it, you’ll know exactly what I mean – that had me yelling out loud at the book because it was just so brilliantly done, such a great moment for the characters that just made sense with who they are.

That isn’t to say that the writing and pacing isn’t immaculate – because it is. You Know Her is all the better for it. Evoking a thick Southern Gothic atmosphere and making sure the tension never dips helps the novel go from strength to strength. This is a novel about feminine rage, at its centre, about being a woman in an industry where women are often considered commodities and Sophie is done. Hit on too many times. Groped too many times. Meagan Jennett’s clean prose helps bring the sentiments across without making You Know Her read like a polemic, but still resonate with a whole generation of readers who know. We may not have been bartenders, we may not have murdered, but we’ve certainly been Sophie in other ways. This is a novel for all of us – a thriller about what it would be like to follow those darkest urges and thoughts when we just need a break from society. And it’s a damn good one, well written, impeccably paced and dripping with Southern Gothic atmosphere.

Read You Know Her by Meagan Jennett

The post REVIEW: You Know Her by Meagan Jennett appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.

REVIEW: You Know Her by Megan Jennett

Megan Jennett’s You Know Her is a gem of a debut. A tense, psychological thriller that makes you root for the murderer rather than for the victims or those chasing her, it is smart and unique – and rather unsettling. This is the sort of story that you can’t put down, that makes you question your own morality. I don’t often read non-speculative crime, and few manage to capture my heart fully. This did. I am convinced I’ll be thinking and talking about You Know Her for a long time to come. I have been raving about this book to anyone who would listen ever since I finished it, and I can’t wait for Sophie to capture reader’s hearts and imaginations on release.

It is rare that a thriller sticks with you not because of plot and pacing, but because of its characters and atmosphere. And You Know Her does so brilliantly. In her debut, Megan Jennett creates a cast that in turn captivates you, scares you and charms you. As you read more, you get to know the actors in this particular drama, and as you begin to care for them, you need to know how their story goes. There is one particular moment, about halfway through the book – if you read it, you’ll know exactly what I mean – that had me yelling out loud at the book because it was just so brilliantly done, such a great moment for the characters that just made sense with who they are.

That isn’t to say that the writing and pacing isn’t immaculate – because it is. You Know Her is all the better for it. Evoking a thick Southern Gothic atmosphere and making sure the tension never dips helps the novel go from strength to strength. This is a novel about feminine rage, at its centre, about being a woman in an industry where women are often considered commodities and Sophie is done. Hit on too many times. Groped too many times. Megan Jennett’s clean prose helps bring the sentiments across without making You Know Her read like a polemic, but still resonate with a whole generation of readers who know. We may not have been bartenders, we may not have murdered, but we’ve certainly been Sophie in other ways. This is a novel for all of us – a thriller about what it would be like to follow those darkest urges and thoughts when we just need a break from society. And it’s a damn good one, well written, impeccably paced and dripping with Southern Gothic atmosphere.

Read You Know Her by Megan Jennett

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