What inspired you to write about Iceland, and specifically Icelandic horses?

I’ve always been interested in Iceland, as a medievalist (though not an Old Norse specialist). It is so impressive that such a tiny subsistence culture could produce this astonishing wealth of saga literature. Its rate of authors per capita today is still pretty astonishing. Books have always been important in Iceland. And I’ve been a horse person since I was a child. The two came together in my head after I attended the Icelandic Writers’ Conference in 2018 and got to ride an Icelandic horse across a lava field. It was pretty thrilling. The idea of the journey to Mongolia came about almost two years later from a chance remark in a documentary about Icelandic horses and their genetic connection to the horses of the steppes.

Which Icelandic saga is your favorite?

Probably Egil’s saga. I love a poet protagonist, especially one who kills his first man at the age of nine. Though for this book, Eyrbyggja saga was important, as being about Eyvind’s home territory of Eyri in western Iceland, and in being full of ghosts.

Was Eyvind based on any particular character from legend?

Not really. He’s the wrong status – a simple trader, not a poet or a Viking. His overall laconic style owes something to Skarp Hedin from Njals saga, though.

Eyvind is a remarkable character in part because he insists that he’s not remarkable at all. What drew you to writing someone who is not a warrior, sorcerer, or lawyer?

I thought of his epithet while I was writing, from time to time, as Eyvind the Unlikely. I wanted at once to be faithful to the saga form – at its ghost story/wonder tale end – and yet still have a protagonist who was unusual. Canny, laconic and practical, as the people in sagas are – but, let’s face it, we’re all a bit tired of Vikings. I think that Eyvind really is a magician, though, insofar as anybody is: he performs as one successfully in that culture. It’s just that magic is a lot less flashy in Old Norse (or pre-classical Mongolia) than in our pop culture. It’s on a smooth gradient of believability that blends it in with everything else.

The wary but ultimately beneficial meeting of cultures comes up again and again, and is certainly a welcome respite from SFF’s penchant for violence. What was it like writing trade and exchange as the central conflict?

Writing about violence bores me to death. Anything but that. Trade is actually where it all happens, real cultural contact that is productive: language and technology exchange, co-operation, legal advances, intermarriages, interesting art in all forms. People who talk about war as an impetus for any of these are full of shit. They just don’t know the history. War is about killing.

A lot of religious traditions are represented in All the Horses of Iceland, and you make a point about how foreigners and outsiders can often be closer to the sacred than people enmeshed in the tradition. What do you think this says about belief across cultures?

Well, it’s obvious in the sagas that those who practice seithr are basically low-status: women, the disabled, the elderly, the insane, foreigners, sometimes slaves like Hebrideans. This is often true of magicians or shamans elsewhere, as well. Magical ability was one reason to keep marginal people alive, part of the social network. It also prevented any given culture from becoming a theocracy, where religious or magical power coincided with social power – in brief, it keeps magic or religion (to me, the two are the same) safely at the edges of society, where it can be called on intermittently but doesn’t become overwhelming. The single god of Judeo-Christian tradition always shifts this dynamic toward the theocratic model, unfortunately. I’m highly interested in cultures that have priests; I just don’t want them to be too important.

You’ve now written two novels about some very remote islands. Do you feel drawn to islands, or just to the more specific cultures (Norse, Celtic) on those islands?

I am teaching a grad class just now on Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. It’s not on a literal island but it’s certainly insular. I am attracted to closed communities and their dynamics. While these dynamics are not always good, they are very different from our contemporary, porous, competitive ones. My first novels with Aqueduct Press (The Stone Boatmen, Two Travelers) were also experiments in closed communities, often on the cusp of branching out into cultural contact and unsure what to do about it. It’s an inventive moment, one I continuously revisit. Even my recent and more historical novel The Little Animals, quite factually about the quiet life of Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek, the 17^th-century microscopist, in small-town Delft, has this quality: it has a kind of magic realist injection in which he meets the Goose Girl from the Brothers Grimm tales. And it turns out that this feral child can hear the microbes he is discovering through his lenses. So the very small, closed world of European natural philosophy is brought up against an alien force or perspective that it can’t quite get to grips with.

You’ve made “Icelandic horse” seem like quite a good option for the afterlife. Is that the location or creature you’d choose, if you could?

The whole reincarnation business is very unsettling to me. But fascinating. It was a big deal in The Stone Boatmen – in the form of transmigration of souls into birds. There’s something about that collocation, human/bird, that seems natural to me. To steppes people, human/horse seems to be a similarly natural collocation, hence the wind horse as an element of the multipartite soul. I can’t decide whether I would want to be reincarnated as an animal or not. It would be infinitely preferable to being another person (or myself yet again, as Christian eternity is imagined — appalling). Yet in our world, animals are so dominated by people that it might just be too depressing. Really not sure. Probably just best to collapse peacefully to atoms. Or rather, dynamically to atoms: decomposition is a pretty active process, if not a conscious one.

Will you be picking up All the Horses of Iceland? Tell us in the comments below!

The post Q&A: Sarah Tolmie, Author of ‘All the Horses of Iceland’ appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

I only studied the Icelandic sagas for a few years, but I do know enough to (a) love them intensely and (b) wish that there had been some about Icelanders venturing further East. We know that certain intrepid seafarers made it to Greenland and Vinland, and we have corresponding stories. We don’t, however, have stories to go with the runes found scored into the stone of the Hagia Sophia. We know Norse traders and fighters ventured very far across the world, Icelanders among them, but we don’t have sagas about the full range of their adventures.

All the Horses of Iceland attempts to fix that in its small but potent way. It tells the tale of Eyvind, who journeys to the steppes of Mongolia as a trader. He wants to enrich himself and do well for his country if he can, and so signs on with David, an experienced merchant who knows the lands and languages. We get insight into the major powers moving in the region without having to delve too much into politics, which I appreciate. It keeps the story focused and moving forward, even when Eyvind spends months more or less sitting still.

Eyvind becomes stuck in the steppes because of a curse, one that can only be broken by a foreigner. He has no reason to suspect he is that foreigner, except that the ghost of a powerful woman won’t leave him alone. Bortë, who died in childbirth, is too strong to be at peace. She will torment her entire clan until someone can find a novel solution, but Eyvind is not a magician. In fact, he hates ghosts. What can he offer?

A lot, as it turns out. Eyvind, steadfast in his traditional paganism, finds that his ways are wildly innovative to Bortë’s clan, and theirs to him. They have much more than goods to offer one another, and All the Horses of Iceland is able to subtly tie this to larger meditations on how strangers and outsiders sometimes have more access to the sacred than members of a tradition do. The world has always been porous, and religions and traditions always more flexible than doctrine suggests.

I love the way that Eyvind doesn’t get terribly excited about his magical ability to connect with Bortë or to fix her problem. He has some suggestions, he makes them known, and then he lets her people decide how to proceed. There is no desperation or drama, just as there was no particular acrimony or fanfare when Eyvind left his former crew and set out on his own. That stoicism is the bedrock of the sagas, and I’m glad that Tolmie was able to access it.

She also manages to walk that very fine line of magic that does not devolve into either spectacle or superstition. Eyvind’s experiences are eerie and astonishing, but always have a certain subtlety. This is true of the horses, and of the written document he receives as well. We forget, I think, in this world in which we read and write more than we farm, ride, fight, or trade, that literacy was so rare as to be inherently powerful. A priest Eyvind encounters fears a document written in an unfamiliar script because it seems more potently pagan to him, more than the pagan man standing in front of him.

Many of the characters remark on the magic of writing, and of literacy. I wish Tolmie had pushed this concept a little more and explored the nature and dangers of this power a little more. Still, it’s nice to consider the accessibility of magic as contrasted with magic that is innate or accidental. Eyvind has magic because he was ill as a child, and is now deaf in one ear. That ear can hear spirits, a power that he does not particularly like or want. But as for the magic of writing, Eyvind has chosen not to be literate because it doesn’t interest him.

SFF tends very often toward characters and plots about people with ultimate power. They have it, or they want it, or they’re trying to stop someone with it. I love that All the Horses of Iceland refuses that narrative. We hear rumour in Eyvind’s travels of a holy king and a vast war, but Eyvind wants no part of that, either. He just wants to avoid a fuss, buy some horses, and then go back home to sell them so he can have a comfortable life. This doesn’t mean his life is easy or unworthy; far from it. His journey is harrowing, filled with danger and death. There is also room in it for curiosity and for exchange.

That’s what the sagas are, in one sense. They’re stories not about kings or conquerors, but about lawyers, traders, fighters, and settlers. All of them come from a lonely, relatively poor island in the middle of nowhere, and they tell us the same thing All the Horses of Iceland is telling us: no story is small. No journey is unworthy. No exchange lacks value. Everything we do has consequences we cannot anticipate, and will survive us in strange ways.

All the Horses of Iceland is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of March 1st 2022.

Will you be picking up All the Horses of Iceland? Tell us in the comments below!

Synopsis | Goodreads

A hypnotic historical fantasy with gorgeous and unusual literary prose, from the captivating author of The Fourth Island.

Everyone knows of the horses of Iceland, wild, and small, and free, but few have heard their story. Sarah Tolmie’s All the Horses of Iceland weaves their mystical origin into a saga for the modern age. Filled with the magic and darkened whispers of a people on the cusp of major cultural change, All the Horses of Iceland tells the tale of a Norse trader, his travels through Central Asia, and the ghostly magic that followed him home to the land of fire, stone, and ice. His search for riches will take him from Helmgard, through Khazaria, to the steppes of Mongolia, where he will barter for horses and return with much, much more.

All the Horses of Iceland is a delve into the secret, imagined history of Iceland’s unusual horses, brought to life by an expert storyteller.

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In this dense historical epic by Polish author Elzbieta Cherezińska, Świętosława is to be many times a queen. History has neglected the stories of women, but Cherezińska has taken this particular woman’s story and set it to rights, making Świętosława’s ferocious intelligence and bold strategising the central focus, brining her and Polish history to the fore.

Or…well, a central focus. The Widow Queen is very deeply concerned with the politics of Scandinavia in particular, detailing the lives of a number of Viking warriors, jarls, and kings in addition to the lives of the Polish siblings Świętosława and Bolesław. I was expecting this to be about Świętosława alone, or at least for there to be a heavier focus on the siblings as POV characters, but there are a number of historical figures who dictate the direction of the story. Their father Mieszko, various Norse kings, would-be kings, or other leaders, his daughters by other women, and so forth also get several chapters. Each become interesting in their own way, but the lack of stronger focal points makes the story feel a bit lacking in narrative authority, a history sometimes more than a novel, and certainly a historical fiction more than a fantasy.

The magic is very light and ambiguous. Vaguely prophetic feelings overtake many characters, and there are a few instances of more overt witchery, but overall this is a historical novel that takes its characters claims of magic seriously—just as it takes their religious convictions and personal desires seriously—rather than an overt fantasy. I admit I’m a bit surprised, given that this was published by Tor, but once I got over the expectation I enjoyed the novel much more on its own terms.

The many characters also share very similar voices. Cherezińska hasn’t made them sufficiently tonally distinct, and so it’s a bit of a struggle to suss out which disaffected son wants which throne or piece of empire. Their motivations and personalities diverge more concretely as the book goes on, but that very singular desire for a crown is a constant for all of them. That sort of motivation is moving in the singular, but a bit exhausting and one-note when all the characters express it. They want power as both means and end, and offer no further justification. I do not think power is a sufficiently universal motivation, or at the least, it is not sufficiently interesting to me when there is little to counterbalance it. Świętosława (and others) may also be spurred on by love, and by duty, but it all comes down to crowns in the end.

I do, however very much enjoy certain specific characters. Świętosława is a firebrand and a dangerously smart woman, and I only ever wanted more when her chapters were finished. She very quickly becomes queen of Sweden and establishes a strong power base through a mixture of cunning and ostentatious will. Her troubled, conflicted half-sister Astrid was also compelling, as was Olav, a complex and passionate warrior. I wished we could have seen more of Bolesław, whose feelings about growing up in his father’s shadow could have been teased out more; as it was, he fought so many of his battles “offscreen” as it were. I honestly wished for more about his first wife and her people—the brief glimpse we got hinted at dire intrigues and a very different way of life that could have made for a good contrast. Alas, the story looks to the North instead, and to several other characters.

The Widow Queen reminded me a bit of Guy Gavriel Kay’s books, especially Under Heaven, which I think is a gold standard to which Cherezińska is aspiring but still falling somewhat short of. The many POV characters, the political intrigue, the geopolitical stage: all of the elements are there, but the emotional resonance isn’t as deep, likely because the book does not ponder the deeper implications of power.

Cherezińska also lacks Kay’s sense of dramatic timing and knack for action. Battles are glossed over, and moments of betrayal or triumph are undercut by not going deeper into the characters’ psyches. As a result, characters feel more sketchily drawn, not fully realised people but also not fully realised archetypes, which could also have been fun. The relentless schemer, the hidden king, the dauntless princess, the secret sorceress—archetypes are just stories we like to hear over and over again, and Cherezińska could have pushed a little harder to embrace that. Instead we have an uneasy compromise between the two, tending toward the personal but not quite intimate enough at times.

I’m critical because I do like this book, quite a lot. I just don’t love it, even though I think I could have. There are truly great moments, scenes that need no further explanation than “the gift of the lynxes” or “the hostage-taking in Jomsborg.” Cherezińska has a gift for scenes, I think. She sets them up well, both the emotional backdrop and the physical settings. But she doesn’t always press her advantage and infuse the rest of the book with that heady sense of meaning, and sometimes there is a perfunctory feeling to the story hitting its beats, checking off historical moments instead of letting them shine.

The history is fascinating, though. The Polish roots of conflicts that cropped up as far away as England are not something I’d considered, and to shift the overall POV from Scandinavia to Eastern Europe is a boon. I’m more familiar with Norse history, and so to see the way it both springs from and feeds into larger conflicts on the European continent feels like an important way to introduce diversity of voice into an older conversation. English-language readers will often have a better grasp of Western European history than Eastern, and that’s a sore lack that this book does well to put to rights.

Since this is the first book in a planned multi-volume epic, I will say that I think the story is trending upward and will hopefully carry its momentum forward into other books. I look forward to further installments most especially to hear more of Świętosława, the Bold One of the series title, whom history has also called the Haughty for reasons we are still to explore.

The Widow Queen is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.

Will you be picking up The Widow Queen? Tell us in the comments below!

Synopsis | Goodreads

Elzbieta Cherezinska’s The Widow Queen is the epic story of a Polish queen whose life and name were all but forgotten until now.

The bold one, they call her—too bold for most.

To her father, the great duke of Poland, Swietoslawa and her two sisters represent three chances for an alliance. Three marriages on which to build his empire.

But Swietoslawa refuses to be simply a pawn in her father’s schemes; she seeks a throne of her own, with no husband by her side.

The gods may grant her wish, but crowns sit heavy, and power is a sword that cuts both ways.

The post Review: The Widow Queen by Elżbieta Cherezińska appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

This is my favourite kind of horror, which is to say, no-frills horror. Much like Stephen King, Henry knows both her story and her writing are good enough to stand on their own, and she doesn’t belabour either the build-up (things get going very quickly) or play coy the mystery. She doesn’t withhold for the sake of withholding—she lays it all as plain as can be, and it’s terrifying.

Mattie lives on the mountain, if you can call what she does “life.” She cooks, cleans, and otherwise serves William, her husband, who does nothing but berate and abuse her in return. She holds fast to what little solace she can eke out, but even that is jeopardised by intruders on the mountain: one, a creature who behaves like no predator she’s ever seen, and the others college students in search of such a creature, bumbling into dangers they can’t even understand. Mattie will have to risk all these dangers, plus the doubts gnawing at her mind and the cold descending on the mountain, to have a chance at an actual life.

What’s always nice about reading Henry’s horror is that every risk and every choice has consequences. Every decision matters, and every character has to make them. There are no passive observers, and no extraneous asides. Everyone drives the plot; the plot doesn’t drive them. Bad things happen to the protagonists and the antagonists in keeping with their choices, which makes every decision meaningful—and dire. And as their situations become increasingly precarious, no one is safe from more and more brutal consequences.

And yes, the book is brutal. It’s not overly gory; just very honest about how unforgiving nature can be, and how men can be even worse. But it has moments of respite and of true goodness, too, and a long, honest look at both how difficult and how rewarding surviving can be. The balance of tones is perfect, never completely overwhelming but never letting up, either.

Henry really leans into what she does best in this novel, which is a brief timeline so dense with plot and suspense that there’s barely room to breathe. The entire book takes place over the course of only a few days, and most of that over the course of a single day and night. Three threads—Mattie’s survival, William’s defense of his territory, and the search for a cryptid by three naïve college students—braid together into a single tight, breathless tale of survival.

Also, if you’re a fan of the podcast My Favorite Murder, this book basically has everything. There’s murder, kidnapping, things hidden in floors, cryptids, insanity, and of course, treasure. And it’s a badass survivor story that warns everyone: don’t go into the forest! I don’t know if Henry is a fan, but I think it’s safe to say she could be.

But you don’t have to know either MFM or Henry to enjoy scaring yourself silly with this novel. It’s a standalone, a complete tale of one woman’s harrowing journey. This does mean that it’s not a full history or profile on either a killer or a cryptid, which may frustrate some readers. I found it refreshing, though, not to have the focus on a killer or a monster, but on a survivor.

Near the Bone is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of April 13th 2021.

Will you be picking up Near the Bone? Tell us in the comments below!

Synopsis | Goodreads

A woman trapped on a mountain attempts to survive more than one kind of monster, in a dread-inducing horror novel from the national bestselling author Christina Henry.

Mattie can’t remember a time before she and William lived alone on a mountain together. She must never make him upset. But when Mattie discovers the mutilated body of a fox in the woods, she realizes that they’re not alone after all.

There’s something in the woods that wasn’t there before, something that makes strange cries in the night, something with sharp teeth and claws.

When three strangers appear on the mountaintop looking for the creature in the woods, Mattie knows their presence will anger William. Terrible things happen when William is angry.

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I have long been curious about Dracula’s brides and I’m so happy to finally get their story. Did you begin this book wondering about them too, or did it evolve from some other source?

Vampires have always had a special place in my heart, and I’ve been fascinated by the mysterious, glamorous brides ever since I saw the Van Helsing movie when I was a little girl. That fascination only grew when I read Dracula in my teens. Whenever the brides are depicted, they always seem to live in Dracula’s shadow, and they don’t get to say much. I wanted to flesh out the mythology of the vampire bride and give them a chance to tell their own stories.

Queer culture talks a lot about “found family,” but what I love about Dowry of Blood is the emphasis on not just found but made family. How did you go about making these characters who make each other?

I feel like these characters have been around forever, but I started by working with classic archetypes from vampire literature that I was interested in: the suffering martyr, the beautiful sadist, the decadent hedonist. I also thought about the different philosophies one might develop for dealing with an immortal life. One of the most fun parts of the writing process was getting to see those embodied archetypes and philosophies interact with each other and fall in love with each other.

The three vampire brides are women in Dracula—so where did Alexi come from? Did he surprise you?

Vampirism is one of my favorite allegories for queerness, bisexuality in particular. I’ve certainly seen myself reflected in these stories of “deviant” desires and immortal hedonism and contemplation, but queerness remains subtextual in a lot of classic vampire lit. I wanted to bring it into the forefront of this story and celebrate it, which is why all the characters are attracted to and capable of loving all genders.

Alexi seemed like a natural addition to the book, and he allowed me to play with imagery from stories of queer male immortals like Dorian Gray. Alexi surprised me in that he was a delight to write, and he turned in to one of the bright spots in a pretty dark book. I think he complements the other personalities in the vampire family well with his sunny disposition and resilience.

Did anything surprise or challenge you in writing about a polycule through centuries of history?

Balancing four different character arcs and multiple intersecting love stories was certainly a tall order! I spent a lot of time balancing out scenes where the brides were alone with each other or with Dracula in order to give everyone’s relationships time to develop independently. In a novella, I didn’t have as much time to do that as I might have in a four-hundred-page book, so I spent a good amount of writing time shuffling around scenes and writing in little exchanges to beef up everyone’s individual entanglements. The book skips through time at a pretty quick pace too, so I was able to do some of that development off the page as well.

Which time and place was your favorite to write?

I don’t really have a favorite! I loved the excuse to learn about different European cities throughout history: Vienna as a medieval mercantile hub, or Renaissance Spain, or Venice during Carnival, or Paris in the 1920s. I think I would love to have been able to visit them all in different times.

The sensuality of Dowry of Blood really turns the gore from something frightful into something darkly delightful. Do you see yourself as a horror writer indulging the sexy side of vampires, a dark romance writer exploring history, or do you embrace some other label—or none at all?

I definitely see myself as a cross-genre author, which is one of the reasons I’m so attracted to the Gothic. The genre is completely unique to itself but also blends some of the best elements of horror, romance, fantasy, and thriller together. I’m most at home with the label of speculative fiction writer because it encapsulates so much of what I do, but two of my favorite genres to blend are horror and romance. I think that falling in love can be a really horrifying thing, and that awe and terror can be deeply romantic, and I enjoy bringing those themes into conversation with each other. Much of my work wrestles with spirituality, which I view as a deeply frightening and erotic thing, so I keep returning to horror and romance.

Do you plan to follow up with any of these characters in future work?

Not at the moment, but never say never!

Which of the vampiric spouses do you most identify with?

I think I’ve got a bit of all of them in me, but if I were a vampire I would probably indulge in Constanta’s religious ennui and existential questioning the most.

You’ve tackled the Snow Queen and Dracula as well as witches, hauntings, and other horrors. What’s next for you?

I’m currently working on a contemporary occult crime romance and a sultry, summery folk gothic. As of right now I don’t have any more reimaginings slated, but I’m sure I’ll return to retellings in the future.

Will you be picking up A Dowry of Blood? Tell us in the comments below!

The post Q&A: S.T. Gibson, Author of ‘A Dowry of Blood’ appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

A lot of writers give endless thought to the logistics of vampirism: the who and where of killing, of moving around, of the laws the limit or enhance the vampiric life. Not so here. Constanta and her lovers never seem to fear discovery or vengeful mortals, or feel hemmed in by their nocturnal lifestyle. They kill with abandon, travel freely, interact easily with whatever humans they so choose. External forces rarely do more than displace them; only forces internal to their shifting relationships challenge and threaten them.

Most vampire novels are extremely grounded in places and times, especially romanticised ones. Anne Rice set a precedent for seduction-by-location with her Parisian revels and New Orleans mansions, growing sensuality from the ground up. Dowry of Blood eschews the heavy historicity in favour of a vague, lovely sweep across Europe, differentiating between Vienna and Venice only in the broadest of terms.

This may have baroque overtones, but it’s essentially an Impressionist book, painting with delicate dabs here and there, and then with sweeping, broad lines elsewhere. Time and place blur, faces emerge from the colourful palette of feeling rather than outward form. It’s a breathlessly emotional book, furious and horny and delighted, and always a bit mad. And anyway, who cares about painstaking detail when there are such bright colours to paint with? Red, of course being primary among them.

Though Gibson can occasionally stray toward the purple with her prose, it’s more in a “first novel” sort of way. She’s just so excited for and by her characters that it’s hard to critique any little instances of faux pas. They’re elegant, savage, and above all, grandiose. She doesn’t tie them to the minutia of time or place because they are so very out of time and place, creatures who defy mortality—and conventional morality.

I think it would be perfectly natural if Constanta were to struggle with polygamy or being in a polycule, but I also think it’s perfectly reasonable that she doesn’t. She slaughters humans like rabbits; even for an erstwhile churchgoer like her, what’s an open marriage to the toll of her dead? Her casual embrace of non-monogamy is refreshing, and I like very much that Gibson did away with the hand-wringing. Rice already did the tormented vampire, and the unrepentant one. We already know—oh, do we know—vampires under threat from hunters or from their own guilt. Here we see the vampire at home, at rest. Their natural habitat is luxury, and it turns out their natural inclination is to form groups, albeit rather dangerous ones.

I’m not only talking about the incestuous undertones of calling lovers “sister” and “father” and so on. This book is also about power dynamics and abuse of those dynamics. The unnamed “father” wields his power with a veneer of elegance, but he’s really a common variety opportunist and manipulator. “We feast on the ruins of empire,” he declares with a grand flourish, forgetting that it makes him a scavenger, not a sovereign.

This definitely seems like a book produced in 2020, not just because of descriptions of plague (they’re not overwhelming, don’t be deterred) but because of descriptions of a megalomaniacal narcissist who wants control at the cost of everyone else’s life and joy. There is a passage late in the book that really hit the nail on the head about the thousand violations of abuse, the ones that go unremarked as they grind you down or make you finally rise up.

In a strange and not-so-strange way this book is ultimately about the queer found family and about the bonds that grow in spite of and because of trauma. Gibson doesn’t belabour the backdrop because it is backdrop: the real drama and gorgeousness comes from the characters and their deadly, deliriously lovely desires.

A Dowry of Blood is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.

Will you be picking up A Dowry of Blood? Tell us in the comments below!

Synopsis | Goodreads

A lyrical and dreamy reimagining of Dracula’s brides, A DOWRY OF BLOOD is a story of desire, obsession, and emancipation.

Saved from the brink of death by a mysterious stranger, Constanta is transformed from a medieval peasant into a bride fit for an undying king. But when Dracula draws a cunning aristocrat and a starving artist into his web of passion and deceit, Constanta realizes that her beloved is capable of terrible things. Finding comfort in the arms of her rival consorts, she begins to unravel their husband’s dark secrets.

With the lives of everyone she loves on the line, Constanta will have to choose between her own freedom and her love for her husband. But bonds forged by blood can only be broken by death.

The post Review: A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Burning Roses by S. L. Huang

The story of Little Red Riding Hood and the legend of Chang-E meet in a marvellously queer mashup, in which the author wonders where characters go when the violence is over and they age out of their stories. Warriors Rosa and Hou Yi are haunted and, in Hou Yi’s case, literally hunted by the past. Hitting targets has never been the problem, but can either of the two fighters hit on the heart of their real issues? This is a brief but beautiful meditation on the battle of forgiveness and redemption, a far greater struggle than any of the beasts either has faced.

Girl in Red by Christina Henry

It may be the apocalypse, but Red is ready. Experienced in outdoor survival and determined to get to safety, she braves a trek through the woods in order to avoid the more dangerous population centres. Some kind of disease is raging—or is it something worse? Red doesn’t know; all she knows is that the woods are plenty full of dangers for a woman alone. Henry writes masterfully tense, terrifying action and doesn’t hesitate to show all the world’s big, bad teeth. But she also doesn’t hesitate to let her heroines fight back.

Crimson Bound by Rosamund Hodge

Little Red Riding Hood meets the story of The Girl with No Hands in this lush, dangerous novel that’s equal parts gore and gothic. Rachelle derives her powers from beastliness, but she clings to the red thread of hope. Whether she consummates her love with darkness or whether she fights it depends on her aunt’s secrets, hidden deep in the forest and in Rachelle’ own heart. 

Scarlet by Marissa Meyer

Futuristic Scarlett has a red hoodie, red hair, and a red-hot temper, and futuristic Wolf is a genetically enhanced supersoldier. And grandma sure knows more than she’s saying. This second instalment of the Lunar Chronicles has cyborg Cinderella meet up with Little Red Riding Hood in a world that’s a cyberpunky Sailor Moon, full of action and awesome.

Red Hood by Elana K. Arnold

This thoughtfully feminist tale is drenched in blood, but not all of it is from violence. A werewolf take on Red Riding Hood that also speaks frankly about domestic violence and sexual assault, this is a dark, heavy-hitting book. But it’s not without hope or action. Red Hood also celebrates female bonds of friendship and family, celebrates menstruation and bodies that menstruate and bear children, and all kinds of loving and supportive relationships that move us toward a safer, more equal future.

Do you have any other recommendations? Tell us in the comments below!

The post My, What Big Books You Have: Little Red Riding Hood Retellings appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

To properly set up the final confrontation, Leti and Atticus are drawn into what they are told is an Ancestral space, a safe place full of their family’s magic where they can speak to their foremothers. Atticus talks to Hanna, the woman who first fled with the Book of Adam, and then with his own mother. Rather than magical knowledge, she wants to share her wisdom. Terrible, no good, very bad wisdom. “If we’re ain’t walking toward an altar to sacrifice ourself for something important, what is our purpose?” she asks Atticus. That’s…that’s a terrible lesson. That’s a terrible lesson. What the hell? Life is meaningless if we’re not sacrificing ourselves?

She follows this bad advice up with worse: that people don’t have a choice. What? She softens this oddly bleak statement by explaining that she never had a choice but to love Montrose and George. I’m all for consenting adults making whatever arrangements make them happy, but let’s not blame it on a lack of choice.

Atticus does push back against this later in the episode, but that just muddles the narrative. Does Lovecraft Country want us to believe in choice, or in inevitability? This is the first sign that the episode isn’t clear on what it wants to say, and sadly, it’s not the last.

Atticus and Leti wake up with the knowledge of how to save Dee, and also how to thwart Christina’s plans. After removing the curse, they get down to business. “Ready or Not” by the Highland Park Collective is maybe the first musical misstep of the series. It’s too triumphal too soon, dissolving tension when it should be building it. It makes the scene especially jarring when the spell goes poorly, allowing Titus to escape briefly. (They’re getting flesh…from a ghost? Oh, well, whatever.) Titus lets Christina know that they have the Book, which is pretty much when the episode falls apart.

Yes—they have the book. They have spells upon spells. Why exactly is Atticus still willingly going to Ardham? Sure, Christina promised to leave them all alone if he does, but does he even need that promise anymore? This is the question I had only after the fact, because the show does its best to rush past all the logic. It throws all kinds of dire circumstances in the way—oh, they need Christina’s flesh and/or blood, too! Why? Because spell. And the Ancestors can’t help anymore! Why? Because reasons. The show never set up very good parameters for the magic, and now they’re breaking down to create whatever scenarios the writers want. This does create a great deal of uncertainty, but that’s not the same as suspense. Suspense is a narrative function, and it arises from only a limited number of predictable possibilities. Uncertainty is just chaos plus ignorance. It’s not satisfying to see chaos play out.

The ending is more chaotic than suspenseful, but before we get there, there’s still the problem of getting some bits and bobs of Christina’s body. Leti begs Ruby to do it, and Ruby’s rebuttal to Leti’s speech about family is cold and sad and perfect. All the character work has set up this conversation to be devastating to both of them, and they both walk away feeling wronged. That’s a tricky thing to pull off, because it relies on us having equal sympathies for each character, and each character having equally valid but subjective points. When Leti pleads for help, we’re on her side. And when Ruby can’t help but see it as Leti only wanting to be family when it’s convenient, we’re on her side too.

It’s particularly unfair, then, that Ruby dies offscreen, punished not so much for her disloyalty to her family or her disloyalty to Christina as for her inability to choose between them. But because her betrayal also happens offscreen, the last we see of her is falling deeper into Christina’s arms, both of them finally embracing in their true bodies. We have no reason to suspect anything, not in the narrative and more importantly, not in the emotional cadences of the story. So while it is shocking to learn of her death, it’s only shocking. It’s a twist for twists’ sake and it doesn’t give Wunmi Mosaku the chance to show us her phenomenal skills for a final time.

HBO, I am begging you: stop with the twists. All your shows seem to have them, and they feel so unsatisfying because they come out of nowhere.

But I’m jumping ahead again. Before all that we have to figure out where the rest of the characters stand before throwing them into the final battle. Hippolyta gives Dee a couple of speeches about how she named herself and how time is an illusion, none of which Dee has any context for. At lease Dee gets to respond like a normal kid, which is to say, confused and upset that her mother has turned into a giant weirdo. What is going on with this writing?

At least Atticus’s meeting with Ji-Ah is back to the kind of thoughtful and smart writing I’ve come to expect. (Although not the clothes: Ji-Ah kind of looks like a displaced Catholic cardinal.) Atticus does give Ji-Ah the apology she deserves, and even takes the time to reassure her of her humanity. He tells he that they can both be monsters or heroes, and while that’s nice, I don’t love the dichotomy. The show has previously shown itself more complex than that, more willing to look at monsters and see humanity, and humanity and see monsters. To reduce it in this final episode feels easy, trite.

More complex and pleasantly surprising is Atticus declaring that Ji-Ah is his family. It sounds like the start of a really interesting series of conversations about the meaning of found family—but this is the last episode, and so it goes nowhere. Atticus may consider Ji-Ah family, but he’s the only one who knows her. She’s now supposed to make a life with her ex-lover’s current lover, his abusive alcoholic father, and his biological father’s wife and daughter? That’s a tall order but not impossible—if we had seen any of it happening. But as far as we know, Ji-Ah never has a conversation with Leti. She never so much as says hello to Montrose, or Hippolyta, or Dee. We see them working together briefly at the end, but how exactly does she see herself fitting into this new family? How do they see her? If this is going to be a chaste relationship, is she okay with that? If this is going to be some kind of polyamorous thing, is everyone okay with that?

No idea. But sure—family. Okay.

This unusual little family does have a very sweet moment in the station wagon, pressed shoulder to shoulder and singing a joyful song. It’s a good start to their dire work—dire and nauseating. Atticus has to eat the bit of flesh he cut off Titus, and ugh. It’s the kind of gross-out horror that I dislike but have to respect, since my reaction was probably what the creators were going for.

When everything inevitably goes south after that, Atticus is strapped down and then lifted aloft in a Christ-like pose, albeit on a sextant and not a cross. With his mother’s talk of sacrifice, and the baptism and the faith stalk earlier, I guess this is meant to feel heavily Jesus-y. But it’s far too late in the show for me to take its sudden Christianity seriously. Religion has been a veneer, a bare-bones mythos to justify the existence of a magic book. Belief has been centred around the belief in magic, not God or grace. And so this final gesture, setting up Atticus as a Christ figure, is hollow: it’s not clear that his sacrifice was necessary at all.

The whole final sequence is another classic HBO twist, a rushed sequence of images that, while visually spectacular, are insufficiently grounded. Leti wakes up, having given herself back her invulnerability—I think? There’s some spell stuff, and some flashbacks that are too fast and vague to really give a good sense of what’s happening, and the gang uses all the power to bar White people from ever using magic again. Atticus dies for this. They almost sacrifice Dee for this.

Yes, let’s not forget Dee: everyone leaves a traumatised little girl alone in the woods that they know are full of racists and monsters, and of course she gets attacked. Atticus’s pet shoggoth saves her which, okay, sure. Then the show randomly has her murder Christina. What—? Christina has hurt her family, yes, but Dee barely has a reason to hate Christina directly. Having her be the one to pull the trigger, so to speak, is emotionally unsatisfying. And to have her commit murder in such a gruesome way is both upsetting and baffling. The shoggoth may have roared its triumph into the night, but I didn’t feel triumphant watching a child break a prone woman’s throat open. Dee is an artist, a child. Is this what the show wants to give children? The power to wreak bloody vengeance, the power to imagine only monstrous victory?

What, really, is the message of any of it? That heroism demands absolute self-sacrifice? That Black men will die, that Black women have to go on carrying bodies, that Black children get to compound their trauma with violence? Atticus tells Montrose not to bring the mistakes of the past upon the next generation, but admonitions don’t magically heal trauma. And speaking of magic, sure, they have it, and now no White person does. But the thing is, White people never need magic to do hideous things. Emmett Till’s murderers and the jury that acquitted them didn’t have any magic. Is magic enough for healing and justice? Or is it just enough for unsatisfying vengeance?

So, what now? The show doesn’t tell us. It just ends in grief and gore. Disjointed and ultimately unable to stick the landing, Lovecraft Country does not come “Full Circle” as the title promised. This is a long, beautiful, complex braid of individual stories that mostly trail off into loose and dead ends instead of coming together. Characters die offscreen, children become killers, other characters inexplicably come back to life, and all the thoughtful messages about trauma, grief, and hope get lost. It’s particularly sad to see Lovecraft Country end so badly after it found its feet so very well in the past few episodes, turning this into a good-but-not-great, ultimately uneven show. It was at its best with particularity and place; it stumbled trying to do everything for everyone.

What did you think of the finale and the series overall? Tell us in the comments below!

The post Lovecraft Country Recap: 1.10 ‘Full Circle’ appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

If you haven’t read it, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue tells the story of a woman cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets, the consequence of a bargain she made in order to live forever. There are no spoilers in the chat.

First, a note on the cover. Schwab chose the cover from a variety of options after she pushed back on the first option. Originally, the cover was “rom-com-y.” I think we’re all happier with this beautiful, more serious cover!

We know you’ve been thinking about the idea for Addie for a decade. How did it originally comes to you?

I was living in Liverpool and working in the shed of an ex-prison warden, literally a shed from Home Depot with no heating and a giant spider I had to name Bob because I needed to anthropomorphize him to be less afraid of him, and I was miserable. I lived in a flat with too many people, probably trying to avoid paying council tax or something, and one of my housemates who traveled for work would drop me off in various cities. I was dropped off in the Lake District in Ambleside, and I went for a hike up this big hill by myself.

At the same time, my grandmother was dying of dementia and was slowly forgetting her daughter; the flip side of that was that my mother was being forgotten. When I got to the top, on the hill overlooking the vista I thought to myself, “I bet this is what immortality feels like.” This loneliness, this existential ennui.

By the time I got down from the hill, I had the beginnings of Addie.

How was the process of writing the book?

Terrible. For eight years, I didn’t write it because I didn’t want to write it wrong. I was afraid of the unfinished story. There’s that saying, “I don’t like writing. I like having written.” That’s very true for me. But I’m also afraid of time running out. Life is so short. And my greatest fear is definitely the fear of being forgotten. There’s a part in Addie—and this is not a spoiler—where Addie and the devil character are talking, and she asks him how he can take artists out of the world. And he replies that life is short and notoriety is forever. The artist burns bright and brief rather than long and low.

Black: I was talking to another writer after he’d had a kid, and he’d come up with a number—a maximum—of things he could create. That’s when I started to think about it. How many books can you actually write, how much time do you have?

So would you make the immortal bargain or the artist’s bargain?

The immortal bargain. For sure. When I got an advance, I didn’t buy objects, I went places. Because I think experience is more valuable than artifact.

What part of the book seemed most challenging?

Every. Single. Part. I’ve used this metaphor before, but I like it a lot: an idea is this beautiful shining orb of light. Writing is taking that beautiful shining orb and smashing it against the nearest wall, and then trying to reassemble the pieces. It will never be perfect, and it will hurt and be bloody. And the process filled her with fear. Writing Addie was a year of pain. Every day I had to fight demons. I was so attached to it unmade; the final product is the closest I have ever come to recreating the orb of light. Ever.

But that fear drives me. I will never be complacent toward my own work. I make very rigid story structures and build up the meat within them. Holly, do you do that? Are you a plotter?

Black: Well, yes but imagine making a skeleton and then rearranging the bones.

Schwab: Nooo! I could never. But I feel like that’s why you’re so good, why people go to you and you can fix things. You can look at a draft and say “oh this goes better here and that goes over there.” I have to stick to my outline. And it’s hard! It’s really really hard. That’s why I like  transparency about craft. I have a math and science brain. Self-examination is important. How you dismantle those impediments and get down to creative work. It’s part of what I talked about on the Writing Excuses podcast and why I listen, too!

Black: I find it very useful to listen to. Sometimes we need someone else to say it!

Schwab: Also it is good procrastination! [laughs] If I’m not excited about where I’m going then I won’t finish. Having a destination makes the process bearable. Also, you need people in your life with receipts who can show you that the process is ALWAYS TERRIBLE.

Note: You can find Schwab’s episodes of Writing Excuses here.

The constellation of stars image/metaphor is very striking. Was it useful to ground characters in physical detail?

Yes—I’m terrible with faces so I tend to give characters a visual shorthand. Addie’s stars render her not just into writing but into art, even abstract art. I wanted to see how artists would render her.

Black: Yes for me, too. It helps me to know the characters to know what they look like

What are you working on now?

• 7 short stories
• 3 comics
• 5 books
• 2 scripts

And that’s just what’s under contract! My brain is a six-burner stove. I need something on high heat and 5 things mulling. Writes one book at a time, but brains are amazing—they can work without your conscious effort. Letting projects steep is key, as is productive procrastination. Addie was that thing for 10 years. Now I need a new secret love. I need a creative side piece. [Laughs]

Note: excitingly, that’s not all: Schwab has more ideas (of course) and a book finished and awaiting edits. She describes it as The Secret Garden meets Crimson Peak! And there’s also Threads of Power, the next in the Shades of Magic world!

What is the weirdest thing that you’ve done/bought during quarantine?

The weirdest thing I’ve bought is a plush plague doctor, Mr. Plush. I also took up doing jigsaw puzzles, accompanied by whisky and NPR, like an old man. The weirdest thing I’ve started doing is playing violin! I’m terrible at it but I love it. It’s not my job, and I don’t have to play for anyone but myself and my teacher, so I don’t have to be good! It’s so joyful.

Who would Addie get along with from your other books?

Kel [from the Darker Shade of Magic series]. Both are obsessed with artifacts, and take a hedonistic joy from objects.

If you had to work in another genre what would it be?

Black: Mystery, probably. Or horror. That’s a short step away.

Schwab: I would probably do poetry. I work it into all my books but I’ve never leaned in, even though it’s where I started.

Would you want Addie to be the one book you’re remembered for, or haven’t you written that book yet?

This is the first time I felt like if I never wrote another book, it would be okay. I hope there will be another but at the moment, yes.

Where do you start with writing characters?

I think of endings first, including for the characters. I want to know where we leave them—and then rewind from there. I build characters backward. I ask what they fear, what they want, and what they’re willing to do to get it. I want my characters to be super flawed, so that people can relate to them, and so the plot can move forward.

Black: I start with a moment or image that gives me a feeling. Then I ask, what happened to them that gives me that feeling? Then I work backward until maybe they’re not that person anymore, and they change, but I have to get back to that feeling.

What has the process been like writing scripts and comics?

Writing comics and scripts is much easier. It’s a living work, the words aren’t as precious because others will interpret them. The director, the actors, and the artists—they get to put their own spin on it. When it’s just writing, every word is so important and I’m so conscious of every word choice that I make.

Black: I’m a better reviser than writer. But unfortunately, we think in stories—and lengths. Sometimes an idea is a book in length. So that’s what it has to be.

Where did you draw inspiration for the devil character, was it just from Judeo-Christian myth or somewhere else?

So I’m a Pagan. I love studying paganism, I love the gods with a little “g.” They don’t have to be everything, and so they can be petty, they can be fickle, they can tell us about humanity. One of my favorite scenes is when Addie and the “devil” are discussing God in a church. Calling him the devil is a marketing term. His name is Luke. And people have asked me, but no—Luke doesn’t stand for Lucifer, it’s not really the devil in a Biblical sense. He’s a deitic concept, a manifestation. He’s not inherently evil. He’s just dangerous AF. The devil is a god of promise.

Where did Addie’s name come from?

Hm, that’s a good question. I don’t know. The LaRue part I got because I wanted her to have a sense of travel and going place, but Addie’s name was always Addie. For me, names can’t change once they’re set. But getting them can sometimes be hard. Characters have to come with their names. If I can’t think of a name? Story won’t work. There’s a part of a book I’m working on now and I have to write this section for this character, but I don’t have his name yet. Every day I write down a few options, but then I go back and they’re not right. So I can’t write that part yet.

What book do you wish you had written?

Schwab: The Secret History by Donna Tartt. It ticks all the boxes of things I want to write about and does it so well. 

Black: Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner. It’s so perfect, and it ends just when you want it to go on a little further. Kushner is so cruel to her characters. Everyone wishes they could be as cruel as she is.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

 “If you stay in this game long enough, everything that can happen will.” Good and bad. There will be failure, and books may underperform, and series might get canceled. That happened to me with my second book. The series got canceled. But amazing things can happen too, huge wonderful things. And wouldn’t I rather it be my second book that got canceled than another book later in my career? So yes, everything that can happen, will. It’s the cost of playing.

Black: I was working on a book and it wasn’t going well, and Jane Yolen told me, “If it’s not done I can’t take it from you.” And yeah, that’s Jane Yolen and she—she’s Jane Yolen. But it’s true. Sometimes you just need time and you can’t force it. 

What is your favorite quarantine read?

Schwab: The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune. It’s just this big gay sweater of a book, it’s so comforting and warm. It’s not   . I finished it and I cried. Not because it was sad but because it was lovely. Then I gave it to my mom and she cried, and then I gave it to my dad, who only became a reader in his 60s and I found him standing over it and he was crying.

Black: The Murderbot series by Martha Wells. If you haven’t read them they’re about this android who all he wants to do is watch media, but he has to be…well, a murderbot. They’re hilarious and there’s another one coming!

What is bringing you defiant joy?

I’m suspicious of “big joy,” the kinds of life-changing joy that can also so easily turn wrong, I’m always afraid they’ll go wrong. I finds more lasting happiness in “little joys.” So, my parents live in the French countryside, and it’s been my job to pick the raspberries. Every day I go out and walk up the hill and pick whatever raspberries were ripe and then we’d have them with yogurt over lunch. So I’d get to take a walk, and I could listen to a podcast and just meticulously pick raspberries, I could stand outside and harvest nourishment. That’s been my joy.

The post More Addie LaRue: A Conversation with V. E. Schwab and Holly Black appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

To do that, we start with a possession: Dee remains comatose, possessed by Bopsy and fading fast. Blame and solutions fly fast, but ultimately, it’s Ruby with the solution. “Christina will help Dee. For me.” It’s a bold revelation, and it’s even partly true: Christina does help. In exchange, Atticus agrees that he’ll go back to Ardham on the Autumnal Equinox, even though he’s pretty sure he’s going to his death. Leti and Ruby have some strong words about this, with Leti convinced that Christina is using everyone (she’s probably not wrong), and Ruby convinced that love has blinded Leti into believing her own situation is any less dangerous. And it’s true: Montrose is ready to hit her after learning she traded the pages for her own invulnerability, and her boarding house is presumably still has smouldering cars on the lawn.

They may have parted in anger, but Ruby still cares for Leti. In fact, she may be the only thing Ruby is still willing to care about: she gets assurances from Christina that Leti will be spared—but when Ruby learns that Christina does plan to kill Atticus, she still chooses to stay with Christina. It’s a dark and daring moment made all the more chilling by Ruby turning off Dell’s life support. “I always saw myself as a redhead,” she says, casual and deadly serious. It’s a beautifully understated moment of horror, and of insidious evil. Ruby’s seduction seems almost complete.

As Ruby goes resolutely down a dark path, Hippolyta returns triumphant from a bright one. She arrives, pauses long enough to power Christina’s spell, and then gets down to business. She’s going to save her daughter, and to do that, she’s going to get the Book of Names from the last place they knew it existed—the past. When Hippolyta is gathering supplies to get to the portal, the rest of the gang pauses their intense family drama to gog at her, which gives us at least a brief respite of humor: “Hippolyta, I don’t know where you disappeared to, but you’re starting to sound crazy,” says Montrose, with absolutely no trace of irony.

We need that dose of lightness, because this episode is heavy. It’s heavy. With the threat of returning to Tulsa on the night of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Montrose’s memories of trauma and of child abuse surface further. To cope, he drinks. And in drinking, he starts letting a lot of things slip. Like the first bombshell of the episode: George, and not Montrose, might be Atticus’s father.

Please, someone give Jonathan Majors every single Emmy for his reactions on this show. Please.

Already reeling from the revelation, Atticus gets upset when Montrose seems out of it and continues finding ways to drink when they’re in Tulsa. He thinks he knows what’s going on, and declares an ultimatum: when they’ve gotten the Book, they won’t be father and son anymore.

But then they watch Montrose get whipped as a child, and the whole neighbourhood seems to walk by with blinders on, carefully ignoring the scene—except for Atticus’s mother, Dora, who puts her body between Montrose and the switch. In any other show, this would have been a pinnacle moment. Here, it’s background. That’s not a criticism; it’s an illustration of how intense this show is and how deep its understanding of human goodness and badness goes.

But even more poignant is the adult Montrose watching, who says perhaps the three most gutting words of the episode: “I deserved it.” His delivery is so terribly fragile and yet so utterly convinced that I had to pause and take a deep breath. Yes, Lovecraft Country understands generational trauma, all right. The intimate kind as well as the historical.

When Montrose absconds a few moments later, there might be a horror first: the characters split up for a good reason. Atticus wants to stop Montrose from warning George about his death in the future, thereby altering the timeline, and Leti absolutely has to get the book. This show is truly an antidote to moronic horror tropes.

Atticus does indeed find Montrose, but he’s not there to warn George, as it turns out. He went to warn Thomas—his first love. But instead, he watches the murder all over again, a traumatised witness who is being asked to see his worst memory as inevitable, as something with purpose. “If you don’t end up with Mama, I won’t exist,” Atticus begs, arguing for his right to exist against Montrose’s right to be a whole person. It’s a hideous position acted with all the broken grace both actors can muster, an unparalleled scene of sacrifice in which we feel the bloody weight of Montrose’s final declaration: “I did it all and I’d do it again because the only thing I ever wanted to be was your father.”

Leti does get into Dora’s house, but the whole family is there, trying to defend it against the White rioters. She’s thrown in with Beulah, Dora’s sister, and is forced to reassure her even though she knows that the whole family will die. “I deserved it” might be the worst sentence of the episode, but Leti saying “Everything’s going to be fine” gives it a run for their money. Oof.

That sequence is heartbreaking, but it’s the scene with Leti and Atticus’s Grandmother that takes the cake. Leti explains her true purpose, and begs for the Book on behalf of her unborn child. Montrose has to be a witness twice, the second time knowing where all of it will lead. And Leti has to give that terrible knowing to another person and ask her to bear it as well: she has to ask Atticus’s Grandmother to stay and die, burned alive, to preserve the future.

And she does. Because she believes in hope. Leti’s child is, to her, “my faith turned flesh.” Leti finally gets to understand the strength of faith not from an uneasy meeting with Christina in a church, but with a brave Black woman in a burning building, holding on with prayer to a future she won’t see.

With “Catch the Fire” by poet Sonia Sanchez playing over the scene, it does feel hopeful: there have been burning crosses and burning buildings, but Leti is being given a different fire, the burning love sufficient to counterbalance generational trauma. The kind of love that bears witness most intimately by experiencing pain and holding grief without flinching, in order to give the next generation a way forward.

The point of witnessing is twofold. It’s to be above—yet be intimate. And it’s to be down in it all—yet keep in some ways untouched. To preserve the self so that the future can proceed, bound to the past but not trapped within it.

Atticus may get to be a hero on a night of villainy, beating up a bunch of thugs with a baseball bat, but it’s only a brief sorbet in a bitter, bitter meal. He even makes it back through the portal, but Hippolyta can’t keep it open, and Montrose has to live his hell from above.  He has to bear witness looking over it all, reciting how they killed women and children, how they killed a doctor who was only ever sworn to do no harm, how they burned everything. Hell indeed. But he also gets to witness Leti walking through the flames, invulnerable, like a goddess of sorrow. She’s carrying their untouchable hopes: the Book and the child. The past and the future.

This episode does not need my conclusions; they would be paltry. This episode speaks and concludes for itself. Watch it.

What did you think of the episode? Tell us in the comments below!

The post Lovecraft Country Recap: 1.09 ‘Rewind 1921’ appeared first on The Nerd Daily.