Cranberries, Love, Lies, and Obsession. Perfect Recipe for a Valentine's Day? - Reviews

I saw an opportunity and took it. Let me be me.

Ah, Valetine's Day...another convenient distraction from the absolute unfathomable atrocities consistently committed in Palestine, but most recently, Rafah. It's hard to find anything to be excited or happy about when we're forced to contend with the complete apathy of the United States as hundreds of thousands of people are brutally and senselessly murdered–However, there are books releasing this week and soon, from wildly talented authors that at least do their darndest to engage with the horrific systems that lead to this form of apathy. I will do my darndest to talk about them today.

I Can See Your Lies by Izzy Lee, Dark Hart Collection & Dark Matter Books

Back in the summer of 2023, we received bookmarks and a letter from a writer named Izzy Lee, introducing herself to the bookshop and informing us that she would have a novella coming out from the Dark Hart Collection, curated by our darling Sadie Hartmann (@mother.horror). Izzy was incredibly sweet, and knowing that she was coming from the Dark Hart family made me all the more excited to eventually read the novella.

I would have to patiently wait, but in the time between our initial correspondence and the receiving of the eventual e-ARCs for I Can See Your Lies, I got to know Izzy a little more, as well as witness her stunning skills as a filmmaker. I'm someone who loves to get to know the authors I engage with. I know, I know, there's the age-old adage of "never meet your heroes," but there is something truly special about the independent horror scene that is so warm and wonderful. I feel as though knowing the bright minds behind these books helps in my enjoyment of their work even more. It provides further context to the power inherent in their words.

This is definitely the case for Izzy, whose debut is much more like a powder keg than your average novella. Yet again affirming the brutal efficiency of a shorter work, I Can See Your Lies is a taut, propulsive novel following a mother's attempts to not only learn the truth behind her actress mother's bizarre disappearance, but also make sense of a strange ability she and her young daughter exhibit. They witness bubbles of oily, black substance appear on the faces and chins of those who lie to them. Sounds like it would be helpful, right? Well, when you're already contending with generational trauma, emotional abuse, and the intrusive thoughts of motherhood within a system that refuses to grant you any form of resources or support, it can be tough to view an ability as anything but a curse.

After her daughter begins exhibiting even more concerning behavior than her own, Finley decides to take advantage of her POS husband's seeming abandonment to finally get to the bottom of what happened to her mother all those years ago. What follows is a surreal, complex, and visceral execution of justifiable rage, revenge, and the contradictions of womanhood in this continued nightmare of late-stage capitalism.

Lee pulls absolutely zero punches in her portrayal of Fin, showing her character in all of her desperate, searching, hopeful complexity. Her anger and exasperation as she tries to protect herself and her daughter is clear as a bell whose pitch only intensifies as she finds herself pulled deeper and deeper into the town that seemingly claimed her mother before her time.

With twists and action galore, this mystery box of a novella is perfect for folks who love cinematic horror stories, but with the added bite of social critique. It is a genuinely unnerving read.

The Book of Love by Kelly Link, Penguin Random House

Celebrated fabulist Kelly Link has finally released a full-length novel!

My initial engagements with Link's work were around the time I first read Carmen Maria Machado's spellbindingly fantastic story collection debut, Her Body & Other Parties, shortly after its release in 2017. Machado's stories were the first time I came upon short fiction that prompted similar feelings to my early readings of Neil Gaiman's work. I hungered for further stories similar to Machado's and was happy to find a piece she wrote for Electric Literature, discussing several books that inspired her collection. This piece not only introduced me to Link through the author's own 2004 story collection, Stranger Things Happen, but also to the work of Joanna Russ as well.

Within the peculiar and charming stories of Stranger Things Happen, I could see why Machado was inspired by Link's work. While it would take me until reading The Book of Love to commit myself to an even deeper dive of her other collections, I was drawn to Link's initial series of fabulist tales that straddled the line between fantasy, horror, magical realism, and pure uncanny all at once. Hence why the announcement of her first novel arriving this month was exciting to me.

Following in the footsteps of contemporary, Mariana Enriquez, Link's The Book of Love is a 600+ page behemoth of fantasy and humanity. A fear often present with debut novels of this length is whether or not the author can sustain so many pages without "unnecessary" filler. This is not the case with Book of Love, or even Enriquez's Our Share of Night, as both tell epic and sprawling tales of the lightest and darkest aspects of humanity.

The Book of Love introduces us to three teenagers: Laura, Daniel, and Mo. The trio find themselves suddenly in their enigmatic music teachers' classroom following a seeming gap in their memory, along with a stranger they don't even recognize. Where were they? Why are they now in Mr. Anabin's room? What they come to learn is they have been dead for the last several years, having spent time in a strange interstitial space ruled by a sinisterly charming individual named Bogomil. It's revealed that a deal has been put in place to bring the youngsters back so that they may help find a key–or maybe it's a cup, or a shard. Why either entity needs this key is beyond the scope of their understanding or memory, but they must quickly solve the mystery as strange and dark happenings begin to befall their small town of Lovesend, Massachusetts.

Link sets the stage with a colorful cast of characters both human and not-quite-so, with many of the themes leading back to love–how it blooms, withers, saves, destroys, clouds judgement, and ultimately saves us in ways we could never expect. Fans of Link, as well as Machado and the most fabulist works of Neil Gaiman will find so much comfortably familiar in this story, yet its specifically Linkian wit and sarcasm flips the script in such unexpected and contemporary ways.

The central three of Mo, Laura, and Daniel are arguably selfish, entitled little goblins. They're teenagers! I found myself cracking up at their earliest scenes, as classic fantasy has taught readers to expect the heroes of the tale to be virtuous or selfless or above reproach. Link has no interest in this, instead presenting characters that are every bit as flawed as the entities working to upend their reality. Daniel wants nothing to do with the magic these young adults suddenly find themselves endowed with, rather wanting to pass off the responsibility to his other friends. He'd rather sacrifice himself than give in to what Anabin and Bogomil seem to be doing.

Mo heartbreakingly returns to find that his loving grandmother, Maryanne, has passed in the time he's been gone, leaving behind a legacy as one of the most popular romance novelists in the game. He finds himself searching for ways to bring her back, ultimately finding connection in Thomas, one of the supernatural players in this larger game. Their relationship serves as a sense of levity and friction throughout the novel.

Laura is probably the most reckless of the three, finding herself at odds with her sister Susannah as they both attempt to unlock the mysteries of everything that has happened, despite the reality of their disappearance being altered to erase their deaths. While it sounds like I may be dunking on these kids for being flawed human beings, it is their inconsistency and bad choices that make the novel so grounded. Link provides us characters we can relate to, as opposed to monoliths we've come to expect in this genre. It sets up some of the most heartbreaking moments to hit with all their painful might.

Twisty, triumphant, devastating, and most importantly, empathetic, The Book of Love serves as an operatic rebirth for an author at the continued height of her powerful career.

Cranberry Cove by Hailey Piper, Bad Hand Books

A new year means at least two or three new Hailey Piper books. The first of Piper's 2024 releases is the mysterious novella Cranberry Cove, which will release April 2nd, tells the story of two detectives (? it's complicated) who are brought in by their employer to investigate the assault of his son at a bizarre abandoned hotel where the man was hiding from rival institutions. Emberly Hale, the central of our two characters experiences her own incident when they go to scope out the building. The spiral that follows leads readers down a twisty and uncomfortable road, allowing audiences to have one of Piper's most nuanced conversations yet.

Described as a supernatural crime story, this is a unique genre with which to tackle subjects of assault, trauma, and accountability. Taking loving cues from the supernatural crime dramas of Cynthia Pelayo, we find Piper at some of her most restrained, withholding the clues as a means of further disorienting the characters and audience alike. We're lead to question the validity of each of the stories we hear, despite the evidence that is presented before us, while attempting to understand and untangle the mystery of just what is happening inside the eponymous Cranberry Cove.

Transness is intrinsic to the narrative as well, with much of Emberly's actions and reactions facing both scrutiny and introspection. She deals with her own forms of misogyny and trans-misogyny throughout the novella, when she's taken off the case following her experience. The decision is posited as a way of "protecting" her from another incident, but leads Emberly to seeking her own answers. The concept of how a trans body is read and treated becomes intertwined with the assault conversation, prompting some extremely hard questions and truths.

A perhaps heavier read conceptually than some of Piper's most recent books, Cranberry Cove nevertheless carries Piper's signature humanity and deftness in discussing these kinds of issues and how they effect marginalized bodies. Its darkness is not a deterrent, rather an invitation to a necessary, albeit challenging conversation. A virtuoso only growing in her strength as a writer.

Violent Faculties by Charlene Elsby, CLASH Books

Ahhhhhh...it wouldn't be a new year without some depraved fiction from Canada's rising extreme horror star, Charlene Elsby. Coming as the perfect birthday present alongside Chloe Spencer and the like, Violent Faculties will arrive in all its blood-soaked glory in just a couple of weeks on February 27th. Charting the meteor-shower of a decline into madness of a philosophy professor, Violent Faculties explores the lengths with which the human body (and soul) can stretch before embracing or rejecting oblivion.

The perfect marriage between "The Russian Sleep Experiment" and Martyrs, this brilliant and delightfully unhinged novella is one of Elsby's most depraved, showing us just how far one can take theory. It's like that person you knew who saw Hellraiser and never stopped obsessing over the philosophy of the Cenobites. Now give them the means to conduct experiments to fully test those philosophies.

A hilarious indictment of both Academia and those who control it, this book feels as though it goes to some of the places American Psycho may have been hesitant to go to, similarly to last year's Maeve Fly. This is what I absolutely adore about much of the work coming from women within this subgenre of horror. Elsby is utilizing class as a vehicle for the larger themes of obsession and depravity. The victims whom our central narrator goes after represent different aspects of Western cultural strata. This develops gruesome answers to some of the darker ethical questions throughout the history of philosophy, even playing into the absurdities of movements such as eugenics and the like.

This being an "academic" text, there are tons of footnotes throughout the chapters that provide further fun clues to the narrator's ideologies and practices. It's a style that has been gaining ground in fiction: Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg, The Pallbearer's Club by Paul Tremblay, and A History of Fear by Luke Dumas, to name a few. The use of annotations and footnotes provides such fun forms of intertextual world building/character development/exposition and should totally be utilized more. In the case of The Pallbearer's Club, the annotations made by Mercy deliver the book's final stinger. In this story, it works as a means of denoting the narrator's further descent into madness.

Hilarious and utterly horrific, Violent Faculties once again asserts why Charlene Elsby is a name you need to pay attention to in extreme and transgressive horror. Also, if you thought the ending to The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty was wild...oh, just you wait until the end of this one. All I'm gonna say.

Lies That Bind by April Yates & Rae Knowles, Brigids Gate Press

Nothing screams Valentine's Day like an erotic horror starring a messy lesbian couple whose relationship is tested by alluring strangers that seem to have undeniable power over the two women.

If you ever find me trying to downplay my appreciation for the work of Rae Knowles, you'll know I've become body snatched. As a graysexual person, there are not many authors that can write erotic or sexual fiction that will actually illicit any sort of reaction in me. Rae is one of those exceptions. She achieves both romantic and lustful sex scenes seamlessly, injecting just enough spice that I could see any lover of erotic fiction able to get excited from the words and tone alone.

April Yates is additionally heaped in accolades, having written the beloved novel Ashthorne, which is currently perched upon my bookshelf and crying for me to read it. Yates is completely adept at writing chilling historical horror, and its in sparring with Rae Knowles on this novel that both authors shine in their respective strengths.

Adele and Lorelei are shop-keeps that specialize in the spiritualism game. Their lives are comfortable, with Adele's skills lending to the supernatural aspects of seance and the like. However, no relationship is perfect, for the time period that they inhabit is one where they cannot be openly queer, so much of their affection is behind closed doors. Lorelei also experiences sexual trauma and body dysmorphia that Adele struggles to reconcile with her own desires. When an ethereal and charming stranger comes to their shop and begins seducing Adele, their comfortability is thrown in flux and what follows is a transgressive and heartbreaking tale of the pressures queer women often face, then and now, as well as the ways in which queer desire can be manipulated to harm those seeking connection and love.

This is one of those novels where you absolutely must read the content warnings before reading. There is a lot of awful and uncomfortable things that befall Adele and Lorelei, with many of the most horrifying revelations left for the final quarter of the action. Despite communication breakdowns and actions made under spells, you witness the love and connection between these two, leaving you rooting for them the entire time. The antagonist, Viola, is a real piece of work, and the level of machinations working against Adele and Lorelei are INTENSE. Sticking with the book is incredibly rewarding, however, because there are important and nuanced discussions of emotional and physical abuse, SA, manipulation, and more that reveal just expertly these authors flex their craft.

Much like the other books discussed in this piece, Lies That Bind not only obliterates conventions, but rewrites them as well. While transgressive on its surface, Knowles and Yates are providing something wholly unique. You simply need to listen.

Man, I was super mad when I wrote that intro. I still stand by what I said, so don't you dare interpret this sentence as regret. End this goddamn genocide.

Anywhoozers. All four of these books involve love in varying ways, executions, and displays, which is probably why this particular piece is themed for the holiday. But it's the kaleidoscopic examples of love and its messiness that make these stories so compelling. Love can be beautiful, horrific, toxic, healthy, obsessive, vindictive, arresting–so many gosh darn adjectives. But it is an experience that is both affirming and destructive, and no matter how we explore it as a theme, there is always a writer who will find inventive means of causing our reassessment of it.

And in case you forgot...Free Palestine.

Izzy Lee can be found on Instagram @nihilnoctem. I Can See Your Lies is available now through @dark_matter_magazine.

Kelly Link is currently not on socials, but The Book of Love is available now through Penguin Random House.

Hailey Piper is on Instagram @haileypiperfights. Cranberry Cove will release on 04/03/24 through @badhandbooks.

Charlene Elsby is on Instagram @charlene_elsby. Violent Faculties will release on 02/27/24 through @clashbooks.

Rae Knowles is on Instagram @_rae_knowles & April Yates @aprilryates. Lies That Bind will release on 02/20/24 through @brigidsgatepress.