Writer Unboxed - The "Connect Kitty" Approves

Opening scene- Introduction of protagonist, secondary character and antagonist. Reveals major conflict and also depicts how the protagonist copes with the abuse of her sister by dissociating. Amber covered her ears and hummed the tune to her favorite song, ‘Lean on me”, that she had learned from the bus that took her to and from church on Wednesday nights. She could still hear her sister screaming. She hummed louder. Amber's chest tightened and she sat herself upright when she heard her father walking towards her bedroom. She could hear his belt sliding through the loops of his jeans as he opened the door. He seemed calm as he looked down on Amber, who was hiding in her closet, holding her knees close to her chest. Sweat beaded up on his forehead, his bare chest retracting as he paused to catch his breath. After a few seconds, he bent down on one knee, so to look Amber in the eye. His belt clenched in his hands as he did. “Amber, it’s very important that you tell daddy the truth, okay? I already know the truth, but I need to hear it from you. If you lie to me, I’m gonna whip you with this belt. You hear me?” Amber nodded. “Look at me” Joe demanded. “Did your sister have a boy in this house?” Amber studied her dad’s face for a moment, trying to decide what the answer was that he wanted. She then shook her head “No” . The belt seemed to whistle through the air before it stung the skin on the tops of her thighs. The pain was instant and breathtaking. She tried to cry in pain but no sound would come out. “I told you, I already know the truth. Now, I’m going to ask you one more time. Did Catherine have a boy in this house? Yes or no?” Amber was now sobbing, but managed to nod her head in the affirmative and mouth the word “Yes”. An evil grin crept across the face of her father as his eyes darkened. Joe switched the radio on and turned up the volume as loud as it would go, shutting the door behind him as he left the room. Amber waited a moment to emerge from her hiding spot in the closet, then she pressed her ear against the door to make sure her father wasn't waiting for her on the other side. She could only hear the muffled cry of her sister Catherine. “No please Joe I swear I didn’t! NO PLEASE STOP!” Shaking and with tears blurring her vision, Amber Turned the knob on the door slowly, careful to not make too much noise. Crawling on her hands and knees, Amber peeked through the crack in the door to her fathers room. Catherine was naked and bent over the bed, her head was turned so that Amber couldn't see her face but she could hear her sobbing, no words now, just sobs. Behind Catherine was Joe, using his belt as a makeshift whip on her bare, adolescent skin. Amber wanted to scream at her father to leave her sister alone, but doing so would only make it worse for both of them. Instead, Amber crawled back to her hiding spot in the closet and stared at the wall as she created a setting in her mind to distract from the sounds coming from the next room. Amber fantasized that she was an elegant ice skater, delivering a stunning routine to Celine Dion. Her entire family is there, all of her friends, her teachers. They all cheer and throw roses at her skates as the judges give her a perfect score. Amber had many elaborate visions of different versions of her life, in some she’s singing on stage, in others she is in a casket being mourned over by everyone she knows. The only common theme in all these made up scenes is that she is loved.

Photograph by Sheila Sund. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 2.0. Four weeks sharing a room in San Francisco, four weeks since I decided not to go back to England. Gabe wasn’t sleeping. A quarter tab of acid for his breakfast. Spliffs throughout the day, booze and blue raspberry C4 preworkout all through the night. He was recording an album, working on his set, making a website, building a 24-7 open-source radio live-stream at a free hackers’ space, and not finishing anything. I was trying to write but spending a lot of time crying on the hot roof of the apartment building when he wasn’t around. He found me up there one afternoon at the end of one of his twelve-hour stints at the hackers’ space. Two straw hats, a beer, two cups. “I know you like to drink out of little cups!” He smiled and the inside of his mouth was blue from the raspberry preworkout. How do you hate someone as much as you love them? He said he’d been looking for me because he had a great plan. A childhood friend in the city was driving down to their hometown and we could get a ride. I could meet Gabe’s parents; go to the beach; see the fields, wildflowers, and back roads. So beautiful this time of year. I wondered if it might save us. “It’s God’s country,” he said. We arrived at his parents’ the following morning, after a four-hour drive south. A low ranch-style house on a wide road of low ranch-style houses. Gabe said it was too nice a day to be stuck inside, so he took me around the side and we climbed straight up onto the roof: “I know you like roofs in California!” I did like roofs in California. The front and back yards of gravel, wood chip and pebbles, interspersed with the occasional palm tree or redwood. At the end of the road was the main street, a couple of stores, a steak house, and a taqueria. Beyond, fields of lemon trees and mustard grass and farmland that stretched a few miles inland, up to a range of golden hills. Above us, the sun shone like the grill of a new truck. The house was full of knickknacks and shells and crystals and string lights. A “Be Grateful” sign by the coffee maker. A “Be Grateful” mat by the front door. A canvas in the kitchen printed with a picture of three fluffy ducklings and the words “I have joy down in the bottom of my heart.” It was hard to make out how many cats there were. And then Birdie, the overweight chihuahua, waddled in from the hallway and charged at Gabe, baring his red gums and gnashing tiny, pointed teeth. Gabe told me the dog was the spawn of the devil and the root cause of all the issues that existed between him and his parents. I already knew that the issues between Gabe and his family had begun when Gabe had gone to college in Santa Cruz five years before, found drugs, wouldn’t get a real job, and kept having to move back home when he ran out of money. His parents were musicians who’d met in Santa Barbara in the seventies. She’d sung in one band and he’d played guitar in another. They’d both worked in the same hippie jewelry store downtown before marrying and moving to a smaller town up the coast. I met them that morning when they followed the pets into the kitchen. Lou was short and round with a kind face, freshly shaved with a peaked cap on his bald head and a smart cowboy shirt tucked into chinos. He gave me a warm hug that smelled of Irish Spring. He picked up Birdie and fed him some bratwurst from the fridge. Julie went straight to the coffeepot. She wore a blue shirt with cropped leggings and had her blond hair put up neatly in a clip. She had the same unblinking stare as Gabe. Lou left to work his shift at a music shop in the next town over and Julie said she needed more coffee before her pain medication kicked in and she could talk properly. She had arthritis and had pain from a series of botched surgeries. The pain was the worst in the morning, but she was managing it with physical therapy, swimming, and half a pill on the bad days. She spent the next hour pacing around the house, telling me about all the things she needed to do—pay the bills, fill out paperwork, physical therapy, feed the dog, feed the cats—only to be derailed from doing any of it by the pets, or the phone ringing. She kept apologizing for being so busy, but she couldn’t seem to get anything done. The bills stayed untouched in a pile that took up most of the kitchen table, the phone rang and rang. There were Post-its all over the house: “Put coffee out,” “Tell Dad to clean sink,” “Ask Gabe where he is living in SF,” “Be Grateful.” Gabe derailed her the most, as he tried to make breakfast and clean up after himself. Mother and son knocked around the place, from the coffeepot to the piano to the back door, to the front door to the coffeepot again. They both had the habit of getting lost mid-action and the same strange sweetness. At one point, just after getting at him about putting the dishes away in the wrong place, she went into the living room and sang out with joy. When she came back into the kitchen she was smiling. She put her arms around her son. He rested his cheek on the top of her head and closed his eyes. Gabe and I spent the afternoon walking around town. Not a place built for walking but it had its charm, the slanting golden light making even the Vons supermarket look beautiful. We bought three beers for five dollars at the Stop and Shop and watched the sun go down as we sat against a fence by a dusty, abandoned lot. He told me that the most famous thing about this town was a Dorothea Langue photograph of Migrants from the thirties. For dinner Gabe made sandwiches and, to his mom’s exasperation, moved the bills off the dinner table and told everyone we were going to sit down. They were very good sandwiches, pastrami and banana peppers and mayo with a steak seasoning, on thick slices of bread. He made a sandwich each for his parents, and two types for me and him to share. “Me and Helen share everything,” he announced. “We’re in love.” After a few bites, Julie started talking about how hard it was, living with her husband, how she loved him but needed him to leave. “I keep telling him, but he won’t go. He does nothing around the house, just eats and spends and plays his guitars.” She said that when she married him, he was already deep in debt. He’d never told her how bad it was. Then she said to me, “I love my son, but I’d understand if you wanted to leave him. Don’t make the same mistake I made.” Lou didn’t say anything in response, just happily ate his sandwich and seemed to be somewhere else. Gabe went to the fridge and popped a Corona. The next day was a Saturday. We borrowed Lou’s car and spent the day in the ice-plant dunes of Grover Beach. When the sun set, we snuck into a motel jacuzzi. Crouched in the bubbles, Gabe said he’d told his dad that he’d marry me if he had a dollar. “I dunno about marriage,” I told him. Lou was in the kitchen when we got back, enjoying a Corona Familiar in a frosted glass. He was in a good mood from playing a gig at a wedding where he’d devoured a seafood-platter buffet. “I tell you … those crabs. All that fish. Mountains of it.” We sat at the counter with him. Over more Coronas, Julie cackling along to Scrubs on the TV, he told me about his first love. At one point he made the mistake of asking Gabe what his plans were. Gabe said he was going to start an open-source 24-7 radio station that spread empathy across the world and freed a billion people. He already knew his mission on Earth, God had told him. His parents didn’t need to worry. Lou turned to me with a smirk. “I told Gabe to experiment with LSD. I didn’t realize he’d be experimenting every day for five years.” They drove us to the train station in San Luis Obisbo the next afternoon. Another sunny day but things felt different. Now I knew that this impossible person had a mother and father and that he made some kind of sense beside them. When his parents hugged us goodbye his dad whispered something in Gabe’s ear. “If I had a dollar,” Gabe said. We found a booth with a table in the train’s observation car, beside a window. Lou and Julie spotted us as they were driving out of the parking lot and circled back through three or four times, waving as the train left the station. Leaving San Luis Obispo, the train wound around and between the Pacific Coast Ranges. The slopes reached up on either side, rolling above the windows. Gabe leaned on my shoulder while I read him a story I’d written about my alcoholic dad. It made him cry. I told him not to move yet—a girl in another booth was painting a picture of us. I could see it in the corner of my eye, strokes of yellow and green and gold. *** Six months later, Lou was diagnosed with stage four cancer. A melanoma that had not been removed properly in the spring had spread to his organs by September. Gabe and I were living in Chicago by the time Lou began chemo, sleeping on a futon at an event studio that my sister ran and earning a bit of money setting up and cleaning up after baby showers and photoshoots during the day and parties and music videos at night. The family told Gabe not to come back yet. So we stayed in Chicago for September and into October. Gabe’s desperate restlessness and acid-fueled benders had subsided, and the deranged passion that had brought us together had calmed to a more dependable, if rocky, companionship. We kept our clothes in a cupboard and pretended to the people who rented the space that we didn’t live there. When the studio was in use, we visited my sister and her son, or wandered around Lincoln Park, or walked along Lake Michigan, waiting for the call from his family to say that he needed to come home. Sometimes Gabe brought his guitar and I brought my notebook and we’d sit playing and writing, cooling our feet in the lake. Other times we had long, agonizing arguments walking around the humid parks. He said I was unloving and spiritually dead inside. I said he was cruel and overbearing, that we were two very different people from different worlds and it would never work anyway, it was doomed. He said that only proved how godless and unloving I was. What was cruel was how little I believed in us. All that needed to happen was for me to find faith. We were twenty-seven. We could move off the grid, have lots of children, and raise chickens. I wanted to get on a plane and go home. Whenever we had an especially bad argument, he stormed off to the hot-dog place around the corner from the studio, where the staff was famous for insulting its customers. He made friends with the people who worked there. “The only real people in this city,” he said. Baby Jesus Ted Bundy was one of the names they called him. He would come back in the best of moods. He was on one of those hot-dog runs when his sister called and told him the doctor said it was a matter of days. He spent his entire savings, four hundred dollars, on a flight for the next morning. I packed up the futon and moved into my sister’s apartment. He called after two weeks at home. His dad really was dying now and he needed to see me. Please could I come? My sister found me a flight from Chicago to LA for fifty dollars for the following week. *** The Amtrak train from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo goes up the Pacific coast, at times along the beach and at others high in the cliffs. Gabe was waiting for me on the platform, wearing a black hoodie and a black cap with a small red-and-white mushroom on the front. He called it his mourning costume. In the car he gave me a paper bag. Inside was a bar of chocolate wrapped neatly in tissue paper. As he drove out of the lot a full moon appeared over the trees. We arrived at the house to find Lou sitting on a red La-Z-Boy, watching Blazing Saddles, Birdie on his lap. The dog jumped off when he saw us coming and charged at Gabe’s ankles. Gabe picked him up, thrashing, and plopped him outside, slamming the screen door. Lou had almost halved in size, his face completely sunken, his arms and legs, bluish and pale, poking out of a baggy T-shirt and shorts. I tried to hide my shock but it must have been apparent. People had been coming over all week to say their goodbyes. When Gabe had first told me they’d put Lou on home hospice, I’d assumed it meant he would be home under regular medical care. What it really meant on his low-cost insurance was a hospital bed in their house, medication, and thirty-minute visits from a nurse twice a week. The rest of the time it was up to Gabe, his mother, and his sister to look after Lou. By the time I arrived, the home hospice had been going on for two weeks and they’d stumbled into a rhythm. Lou slept in the Blue Room (blue walls and carpet), which had once been Gabe’s bedroom, then the bedroom of a series of lodgers, then a room for Julie to stretch in. Now it was the room where Lou was going to die. There was the hospital bed in the center and a folding table against one wall, covered in a red paper tablecloth, pieces of hospital equipment, dozens of pill pots, and Gabe’s junk. Gabe and his mother took turns administering a regimen of medication every few hours: liquid morphine, vitamins, blood pressure pills, pills to help his organs deal with all the pills. There was a mattress in the corner covered with a Lion King quilt where Gabe had been sleeping. Lou had a little bell by his bedside that he rang when he needed something. I was tired from the travel, so Gabe set me up a bed in the Green Room next door. It had a single bed, another folding table, and a few blankets laid out for the cats to sleep on. Gabe gave me his pillow and the Lion King duvet and put on another hoodie over the hoodie he was already wearing. We sat down on the bed for a moment and he rested his head on my shoulder. From the next room the little bell rang and he shot up. I curled up and drifted off. The next morning Gabe woke me up at nine o’clock with a mug of creamy coffee. “Get up! We’re going to the store!” His dad wanted egg bagels. They’d already given Lou his medicine, taken him for a shower, and rustled up a small first breakfast of eggnog and toast. It was only a quick drive to Vons but Gabe drove very slowly, all the windows open, lighting one cigarette after another. We returned to the sound of the little bell ringing. Lou wanted to sit out on the lounger. He wanted a coffee. Gabe helped his dad outside and made the bagels. I did the dishes and Julie put on another pot of coffee while telling me how much pain she was in, her arthritis, her hip —she was falling apart. I soon discovered that the most demanding part of the home hospice was Lou’s appetite. Over the next week we went out three or four times a day to find whatever thing he craved. The bell would ring and Gabe would go running. “My dad wants a steak dinner!” We’d jump into the car to go pick up a steak, then sushi, then burritos. Julie was paying for these elaborate requests with envelopes of cash she’d saved over the years, each one labeled with a particular purpose. Every time she pulled out a new one from the back of a drawer, my heart sank: forty dollars for Gabe’s birthday, a hundred dollars for a plumbing emergency, a hundred for yard work—all gone. As the morphine doses got larger and Gabe more sleep-deprived, nights and meals and dreams collapsed into hallucinations. Lou would wake up, feel hungry, and ring his bell. Gabe would help him into the kitchen and cook whatever Lou instructed. I’d hear all about it in the morning. Clam chowder from a can with packet noodles. Chickensoup with pork gyoza and taquitos. Gabe told me that sometimes he’d drift off in the middle of cooking, laying his double-hooded head on the kitchen counter. I slipped by the Blue Room one morning, sheepishly hoping I could just make a coffee and bring my book out into the backyard. “The English Muffin!” Lou called out. “I want an English pot roast. Can you do that ?” I returned to the doorway. Birdie, who was more or less living on Lou’s chest by this point, greeted me with a growl. “Yes!” I said. “I think I can.” Waiting for the coffee to brew, I googled English pot roast. It seemed to be something to do with potatoes and meat, a stew. I couldn’t find Gabe anywhere. “Lou …” I said, eventually going back into his room. “What do you mean by English pot roast?” “I mean Henry VIII creamy banquet pot roast. Pig’s blood! Potatoes! Lots of meat. Don’t forget the meat!” I called for Gabe all over the house, in the front yard, the backyard, down by the shed. Finally his voice came down from the sky. “I’m up here!” he said. I couldn’t see him, but some branches moved at the very top of the thirty-foot redwood. “He wants me to make a medieval pot roast,” I told Gabe when he came down. “He’ll go back to sleep. I need to give him some more morphine now anyway. He’ll forget all about it.” Gabe was right. While Birdie barked and tore at his fingers, he fed his father the liquid morphine, and Lou fell back to sleep. Gabe took a nap. An hour later the little bell rang again. “Blueberry pancakes!” I heard. “Can she do blueberry pancakes?” I found a mix for blueberry muffins in the cupboard. It was the middle of the day by the time they were done. One came out with a funny face. Two freeze-dried blueberries for wonky eyes and a crease below them like a sideways smile. I thought it looked a bit like Gabe. I showed his mother and she agreed. Excited, we woke Gabe up with the muffin doppelgänger on a plate. Hold it up to your face, we told him. Do your wonky eyes. Smile sideways a bit. See? Julie brought a muffin cut up in four with a pile of butter to Lou on a little plate. He put the whole lump of butter on one quarter, had a bite, and put the plate down on his lap, exhausted. “Do you like your muffin, Dad?” Gabe said. Lou didn’t respond. I felt that in some great way I had failed. *** Gabe’s sister, Joni, lived in the next town over. She had a two-year-old girl, Sofia, and was heavily pregnant with her second. She’d bring a meal or some shopping over every few days and spend a few hours with her dad. When she and the little girl spilled in through the front door, the whole house seemed to calm. One afternoon, Lou and Joni were stretched out on the sofa, the patio doors letting in a warm breeze. Sofia was running around, looking for the cats. Julie was out in the hammock. I was sitting next to Gabe on the piano bench . He started playing a peaceful , sweet song. I asked Joni what Sofia’s birth had been like. She said it had been an amazing experience. She said she went full wild woman. At the moment of the birth, she’d been on all fours and felt her whole heart open wide to God. There was no pain, no body, no one else, just her baby and God. Lou said that was the way he felt about death. When the moment came, he was going to go into it with arms open to God. He held his arms out wide as he said it. Later, Joni’s husband, Joe, came over. They got out some guitars from the garage, brought them into the Blue Room, and sang songs around Lou’s bed. Nineties folk —The Moldy Peaches, Bright Eyes—and then an amazing rendition of O Holy Night, Joe on the harmonica, Gabe on the guitar, and Joni singing. I sat on the mattress and watched them. I wanted them to keep playing—no more talking, talking, talking. O night divine, o night … At the end of the song, Julie came in. She said it was late, Dad was tired, she was tired, we were all tiring him out. Gabe said, “Wow Mom, you even managed to ruin this.” Joni snapped at Gabe, “Don’t talk to her like that.” Gabe said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s all my fault.” Joni’s husband asked no one in particular if they’d noticed that the moon’s face had changed. “They’ve done something to the moon’s face,” he said. “I swear …” “He’s tired,” Julie said, turning to Lou. “Are you tired, sweetie? Tell them you’re tired. No one believes me. Someone’s gotta look after him. He needs his rest. Tell them for once. I know how tired you are. He’ll never say it himself …” “All right, Julie. I’m tired.” I followed Gabe out to the backyard with a beer and a cigarette and found him up in the redwood again. I coaxed him down with my offerings and convinced him not to climb all the way up the tree in the dark. *** Lou’s body was shutting down. His legs and arms were swelling and leaking fluid. He had to carry paper towels around with him to mop up the mess, but he never complained. We took turns massaging his legs to ease the pain. When it was my turn, I made a bit of conversation, asked him about his life. He didn’t want to go into any of that. He just smiled and told me to massage with all the strength my skin and bones could muster. Amid all this, Gabe wanted to have sex whenever he had a minute free. When his dad was sleeping he’d usher me into the Green Room or drive us out to the back-road fields and pull over on the side of the road. At night, with the hills behind us, the hum of cars in the distance, a light breeze through the grass, it was kind of spectacular. But I was never in the mood. So often we would go all the way out there for me to freeze over. “You’re removed,” he told me. “Checked out. A sandbag.” “Well, sorry,” I said. “But I massaged your dying dad’s legs earlier. I’ve come all the way here. I’m doing what I can do. Right now all I can be is a sandbag.” “I’m exhausted and I need love.” “We just had sex.” “Oh yeah. ‘We just did this, we just did that. I gave you a blowjob last week …’ ” “I know you’re sad but you’re being a dick. How can you not see that?” “I don’t want to talk.” “You were the one who started the conversation. I was just lying here.” “Exactly.” *** The days went on and Lou held on. One evening I noticed a slice of a moon through the kitchen window and realized it had been two weeks since I’d arrived. Despite the pain, Lou still wanted to move around, take a stroll with his walker, barbecue pork, play guitar on the patio with his son. “This is not how normal hospice patients behave,” Julie said. We were standing in the kitchen, looking at family pictures. In many of them the whole family and some friends were sitting around jamming, having a good time. Not that long ago—five years, maybe. “Most people just lie in bed. But my husband—he’s on his feet demanding fine dining! I don’t want to complain, but it makes me think—miracles can happen. And if he does get better, things would have to change around here. There’s no money. We can’t live like this. Steak-dinner takeout! We’d lose the house.” I nodded and made to say something, but she carried on. “Sometimes I think I might be an alien,” she said. “I’m not like other people. Like lying—people lie so easily but I can never lie. Neither can Gabe. We’re both like that. I can see how hard it is for him in the world. We just don’t make sense here! He needs to get a job, get a car. Get going with his life. You’re so good for him. He listens to you. I always told him, If you wanna just do what you want, then find a groupie. You’re no groupie. You’re like an angel sent here. I mean it. I prayed to God for you and you came. But you’ve got your life ahead of you.” Gabe must have been listening because he ran out of the Blue Room at that point. He took my hand and peeled me away. “We’re going on a walk now, Mom. She doesn’t wanna talk anymore.” “See,” Julie said. “He’ll do anything for you.” *** Lou was still ringing his bell on his sixty-fifth birthday, November 16, a milestone that had seemed unthinkable a month before. We arranged a small party for his family and a few of his music buddies. Gabe spent the morning setting up the backyard with microphones and guitars. He even put a TV and VCR on a cart on wheels to play home videos. We drove out to the Mexican supermarket and bought carnitas and a case of mini Corona bottles. On the way out he impulse-bought a ceramic Day of the Dead guitar to give his dad. When the friends arrived at the house, Julie took the opportunity to go have some time alone and run errands at Vons and CVS. The men barbecued pork, and I made pico de gallo, according to Joni’s instructions. It was a hit. The men in their cowboy getups were shocked that the English girl had prepared it. The sun was shining, people were sitting out, eating the barbecue. Gabe tried his best to get people to play music but it wasn’t happening. How do you celebrate the birthday of a dying man? I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself. At one point, Gabe gave his dad the ceramic guitar wrapped up in Christmas wrapping paper. “Día de los Muertos,” said his dad. He held the guitar in his palms, disgusted. The men got it together and started playing “The Cowboy Who Started the Fight.” Lou watched on in his wheelchair. He closed his eyes as they sang “screamed through the veins of the street.” They sang a few more songs. Gabe and I took a break to catch the sun go down over a field of tomato vines. In the ten minutes that we were out, Lou stood up with a guitar to play a song with them. He was just sitting back down as we came in the door. Soon after, the guys all left. “Man plans, God laughs,” Gabe said. Julie was gone for most of the day. She returned from her errands with a gift for Gabe. She was so excited about it, she wanted to give it to him straight away. Out of a green and white paper bag, Gabe pulled a fluffy llama with wonky eyes. He squeezed it and the llama squeaked. “It’s a dog toy,” he said, sounding like his father when he held the Day of the Dead guitar. Julie laughed and laughed. She said it reminded her of Gabe and the blueberry muffin. I laughed too. Gabe grimaced. “Oh no … I think he’s angry,” Julie said. “Here,” I told Gabe. “Don’t be angry. Squeeze your dog toy.” He took the llama in both hands, crossed his eyes, stuck his tongue out, and let it rip. *** November 18 was the eighth anniversary of my own father’s death. I woke up feeling sad and drained. At this point, I thought to myself, Lou needed to die or someone else would. I spent the morning swinging in the hammock by the redwood at the bottom of the garden, hiding from everyone. I heard Gabe and Julie calling for me from the house. Lou wanted a massage, they said. His legs were hurting. I couldn’t face it. Gabe called my phone. I ignored it. When I went back inside, the two of them were maneuvering Lou into the living room. Gabe almost dropped him and he fell back on the sofa with a cry of pain. “You’re not helping!” Julie screamed at Gabe. “Mom. I am mid-helping. You’re brain-dead from your painkillers.” “Enough!” Lou’s voice boomed from the sofa, where he was half-collapsed, falling off the side of it. “Stop it! Both of you!” Julie and Gabe stopped, ashamed. “Now, son.” Lou took in a quiet, pained breath. “Can you help me off this damn sofa and take me back to bed?” Gabe pulled him up by the armpits. That night Lou could only manage a spoonful of canned tomato bisque. “I think he’s going to die today. The same day as your dad. If our dads die on the same day that’s God talking. We’ll have to get married.” Later, Gabe slept next to me in the Green Room while his mom was with Lou. I dozed while I listened to Julie talk to Lou, telling him about their life together. “We’re good people,” she told him. “Weird people.” She could have been saying anything really, the hum was so soothing. “There’s no one around here like us.” It kept sending me back to sleep. I woke up to Lou’s voice crying out: “Help! I can’t breathe!” I pushed Gabe and he bolted into the Blue Room. Julie woke up too. “I’m coming!” She called out. I stayed in bed, listening. They were arguing about how much morphine to give Lou. Julie said Gabe was giving him too much. Gabe said it wasn’t enough. She ran to get the phone to call the nurse. Lou was desperately trying to get words out. He couldn’t breathe. And then a desperate gargling, drowning on thin air. Gabe was saying, “It’s okay Dad. I’m right here.I’m right here,” all through the gargling until Lou was no longer making any sound. When I walked in, Lou’s skin had already yellowed. I realized I’d seen three dead bodies now. My dad, my granddad, and Lou. They all looked the same, laid out on a hospital bed. It was five minutes to midnight. An hour later a nurse came. Another hour, and a man and a woman arrived from the mortuary. At the door, their long, gray, thinning hair obscuring half their faces, they told me they were here for the body. Never have I seen more ghoulish-looking people. They wore baggy suits with sleeves that came down over their hands, and round, shiny shoes that also seemed a few sizes too big. They moved slowly. “Was he in the military?” they asked. “No,” we said. “He was not in the military.” “Okay, thank you.” They put a sheet over Lou’s body and wheeled him through the house, out the front door. Juliefollowed him out, holding Birdie. She wanted to show the dog that Dad was leaving. Dad was being wheeled onto the van. “See, it’s okay, Birdie. There he goes. They’re wheeling him in now. He’s going …” Gabe didn’t want to watch his dad go into the back of a van. I found him in the backyard with a tall glass of vodka, smoking a cigarette. He joked that he’d been praying to his dad as he was dying. “Come on, five more minutes. If you make it five more minutes I won’t have to marry her.” Then he said that he was plotting to steal morphine to kill the dog. All the lights were on. It was three in the morning. Gabe pulled out a crate of home videos and Julie and I told him to put them away. I made us some tea. We had some more vodka. Julie went to bed and I put Gabe in the shower. I washed his hair and cried, but he was like a stone. I could tell he was still obsessing about killing Birdie. After the shower, I put him in a clean T-shirt and underwear, tucked him in to bed, and held him tight until he fell asleep. I woke up in the morning to Gabe sleeping soundly next to me. He looked so at peace I didn’t want to wake him up. It made me cry. His eyes opened. “Dad?” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. Soon after, we heard Julie howling. Long, slow howls. One of the saddest, strangest noises I’ve ever heard. “My life!” she called out between the howls. “My life!” It was almost like singing. After that first day Julie said she needed to mourn alone. We needed to leave so she could scream and cry and talk to God. We went to Joni’s for a night but then Joni said she was too sad and stressed to have us there, with the baby coming soon. A little desperate, we decided to go camping. For the next week we drove between beaches along the central coast, walked, wrote, drank beer. Gabe wrote a list of plans for the future, plans that involved him getting paid to travel, recording his album, singing at a body of water every day, building the 24-7 radio live-stream, moving every three months. He was going to give this list to his family, to prove to them that he had a plan. “You two need to move on with your own life now,” Julie had told me before we left. I couldn’t understand how his family could abandon him at a time like this. I’d had to remind her that Gabe had come home to look after Lou, that we’d been living and working in Chicago. At the same time, I got what she was saying and why they didn’t want him hanging around. Gabe was a liability, and now he was my liability. *** Lou didn’t have a funeral. They were going to take his ashes out to the ocean in the spring. After the week of camping Julie got lonely and wanted Gabe back again. I decided to leave, to stay with a friend in Brooklyn for a while. I found a flight from San Francisco and booked a train from San Luis Obispo up the coast. Before I left, I found Gabe a job doing yard work for a neighbor. He would save some money and leave in January. We said we might travel around. I tried to believe it could happen but I knew that it would not. As we left for the train station, a commode arrived for Lou, more than a month late. Julie couldn’t bear to look at it, so we said we’d give it to Goodwill on the way to the station. She gave us a trash bag of old blankets to donate, too. I said a tearful goodbye to Julie and she gave me an envelope with a hundred-dollar bill in it. She thanked me for all the help and told me to get something nice for myself. “Gabriel doesn’t want you to go,” she said. I hugged her again and got in the car. “I never say goodbye,” she said. “I only say see you later.” We drove up to the back of Goodwill and waved down a man who seemed to be accepting donations. “Is that a commode?” he asked. “Yep. My dad just died. He never used it.” He shook his head and tutted. “Nah. We can’t take that. That’s nasty.” “How about these blankets?” Gabe said, pointing to the trash bag. “This bag? Those blankets?” The man took a quick sideways look. “Nah, we can’t take that either. That’s nasty, too.” We were in a silly mood, driving to San Luis Obispo with the commode rattling in the back. It was a fresh December day. You could feel a change in the air. We stopped off at Ben Franklin’s Deli and I ordered three Californiansandwiches from the cashier, one for me, one for him, and one for him to bring home to his mom. “My dad just passed away and my girlfriend is leaving for New York!” Gabe announced out of nowhere. There was still some time before the train. At the station we ran up over the footbridge to get a good view of the tracks and the hills. I took a few pictures of Gabe. He took a few of me. The train came, we said goodbye, and I found a spot with a table at the back of the second-floor observation car, the same booth we’d sat in after that first trip. My bags stowed away, I looked down and saw Gabe on the platform below, dancing to get my attention. He was trying to say something, but I couldn’t understand him. He mimed and danced around a bit more. Got on his knees. Drew a picture of a house with his finger in the air. A man sitting a few seats ahead of me watched the scene in awe. All of a sudden he began narrating it to the rest of the car. “Marry me,” the man said. “We’ll have a house by the sea.” Gabe mimed writing in a notebook, then swimming, then playing guitar. “You can write poetry. I’ll swim. Play music,” said the man. By this time everyone in the observation car was watching. The narrator turned to me. “Does he have a phone number? I want to tell him something.” “He doesn’t have a phone,” I said. “But you can leave a message on his mother’s answering machine.” So the man dialed Julie’s number, and Gabe, feeding off the audience, mimed a phone in response. I thought of Julie at home alone, rattled by the phone ringing. The man spoke to Gabe through the glass and Gabe nodded along, though he definitely couldn’t hear. Neither of them broke eye contact. The man said he was a preacher. He’d married about ahundred couples by now. Each time it had been uniquely special. “Why wait?” he told the future Gabe, who would be listening to his mother’s answering machine if he ever got around to it. The preacher ended his message with his number, saying to call him if we wanted to get married. The train started moving and Gabe ran along the platform. I waved until I could no longer see him. Soon I was coasting inland. A rush of green-gold on either side. Pesticide farmland, trees, bushes thick with leaves, sunlight gracing the tip of everything. I stared out the window the whole journey. No sign of December anywhere, no sign of time passing. So much talk of marriage in God’s country. No doubt He had it all planned out for me. Helen Longstreth is a writer currently living in Brooklyn, New York after growing up in Bath, England. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, Touchstone Literary Magazine and others. She is currently working on a collection of stories and essays. View the full article

Not long ago, during a spring clean, I came across one of the dozen or so notebooks in which I’d been keeping a diary back in 2020, and found myself sitting on the floor to read. I was expecting the writing to be disappointing (it was) and that I’d feel a mixture of embarrassment and exasperation at my repetitive thought patterns (I did). I was more surprised to realize that, having faithfully kept a near-daily record of my life during one of the most eventful periods in recent American history, what I’d written was almost exclusively about cars, and my monthslong efforts to buy one. “B. offered to drive me to see the Yaris,” a typical passage begins. “I brought water, pears, chocolate, cigs. Talked about cars all the way. He seemed subdued.” Another entry, in an apparently unconscious tribute to Daphne du Maurier, opens: “Last night I got into Volvo C30s again.” There are accounts of test drives: “Driving the automatic: never quite being able to tell if it is off or just v. quiet.” And moments of reflection: “S. sent me a picture of his pickup and many planks of wood. Jealous of male agency.” And then, in the middle of one September entry: “Mum asked if I had spoken to shrink about the car issue.” We at the Review take an especial pleasure, as readers, in the diary form: that peculiar mixture of performance and unwitting self-revelation, of shapelessness and obsessive (occasionally deranged) selectivity; that sense of a narrative unfolding in real time, almost without the author’s permission. And while the Review doesn’t do themes, as we were putting together our new Summer issue, no. 244, it was hard not to notice our partiality peeking through. In the issue, Lydia Davis shares selections from her 1996 journal, and they often read like warm-up scales for her exquisitely off-kilter stories. (“For lunch—a huge potato and a glass of milk.”) You’ll also find masterful uses of the diary as a fictional device. The Brazilian writer Juliana Leite’s “My Good Friend,” translated by Zoë Perry, is an elderly widow’s apparently unremarkable Sunday-evening entry—“About the roof repair, I have nothing new to report”—that turns into a story of mostly unspoken decadeslong love. And James Lasdun’s “Helen” features excerpts from the journal of a woman who lives in what the narrator describes as a “state of incandescent, almost spiritual horror,” and whose crippling self-consciousness doesn’t protect her from humiliations the reader can see coming. Also in issue no. 244, John Keene, in an Art of Fiction interview with Aaron Robertson, describes how blogging heralded his recovery as a writer after losing drafts of several of the stories that eventually became Counternarratives. And Sharon Olds, in an Art of Poetry interview, tells Jessica Laser about the need to keep one’s art and biography separate, especially when they are clearly not. Keeping a diary might be therapeutic, Olds explains, but “writing a poem to understand yourself better would be like making a cup with no clay, or maybe like having the clay but not making the cup.” She concludes, “If I had to choose between a poem being therapeutic and it being a better poem, I’d want it to be a better poem.” View the full article

Start of Chapter One - Establishes Primary and tertiary protagonists, their relationship, and the nature of their lives before the plot comes along and throws it to chaos. Establishes setting and tone, introducing a world of low magic and grounded fantasy. It was the height of summer and chill choked the wild grasses. Unnatural stillness gripped the wind, fouling it with the bitterness of death, and Vivica Harrow tracked a monster. Farmers in these parts told tales of a beast as large as a house stalking their fields by night. The beast would appear by way of the ground and pull cattle to a clamorous fate with long, bony fingers before terrible howling of gluttonous delights lullabied crying babes back to sleep. Children claimed to have glimpsed a demon with yellow eyes and black fur sneaking outside their windows in the moonlight, and local skalds sang tales of the great monstrosity that rumbled the earth with its footsteps and sent men mad with its ethereal snarl. But for Vivica’s money, it was just a mujina. “And what’s a mujina then?” Ari Traust, Vivica’s partner, had not mastered the art of silently stalking prey. On the contrary, he swung his axe through the untamed grass as though tempting something to leap out at him. No doubt he would have been happy to start the fight sooner, and quickly return to the comforts of an inn. “It’s like a giant badger,” sighed Vivica. “Since when do badgers make the ground turn to mush and snack on cows?” Vivica rolled her eyes. “I said it’s like a badger, not actually a badger. Have you never read a book?” “Why would I when I have you to read for me? Go on then, tell me about this mujina thing. I know how much you love to school me.” “Do I? Here I was thinking how nice it would be to have a partner with even half a brain for once.” Ari blushed sarcastically. “You flirt.” “Fine,” she sighed, desperate to stop his teasing before it once again became relentless. “Mujinas, like badgers, are intelligent and surprisingly vicious beasts with an extremely keen sense of smell. They tend to live underground, but occasionally make their way to the surface in grasslands like these drawn by the smell of fresh meat. Some people have called them shapeshifters-” “Wait!” yelled Ari, giving away the mischievous intent of his interruption with a profoundly stupid grin. “If it can change shape, then how do we know my axe hasn’t already felled it in the grass? I’m certain I’ve hit at least two rats so far this morning.” “You’re an idiot.” He smiled proudly. “I prefer charming dimwit.” “Do you want to know what we’re up against or not?” Vivica managed to burn away Ari’s smile with narrowed eyes. “Mujinas don’t change their own form, they alter the area around where they nest.” “You want me to ask you how, don’t you?” “I never want you to ask me anything,” she countered. “How?” Vivica tried not to smile as she continued her lecture. “Well, no one’s entirely sure. People have said they eat magic gems or magic worms beneath the earth that give them powers over the land. But my guess is that they’ve developed some sort of natural ability to cool their surroundings. Seeing as they’re typically subterranean, it makes sense that they would adapt to make their nests on the surface cooler. Probably achieved by some form of flatulence, which would explain why they prefer to eat animals with high fat content like cows and pigs.” “So, your theory is they fart… so violently… the earth changes around their nests?” “It makes just as much sense as eating magic worms,” she countered. “And their nests.” Ari’s voice became serious. “How many would be inside?” “It varies, why?” “Because I think I just found it.” Vivica investigated where Ari’s axe was pointed and found a large opening in the earth marked with deep claw marks and splatters of blood. “You said it burrows?” asked Ari, “How do we know it’s down there? “Mujinas are nocturnal,” she shrugged, “it has to sleep somewhere.” Ari considered the hole for a moment, but only a moment. Vivica could see he was ready to jump into the lightless pit and start swinging blind. She grabbed him by the collar before he could be so stupid. “You can’t see in the dark. It can.” Ari nodded slowly. Clearly this thought had only occurred to him now. “Traps then?” he suggested. “Indeed,” she confirmed. “I’ll set them.” “You always set them.” “Because you’re awful at anything that requires even the slightest amount of finesse.” He frowned playfully, “I can be useful if you let me.” “I know. I intend to let you be bait.” Ari dangled his legs above the pit entrance as Vivica gave him the signal to begin. He checked the rope tied to his belt would hold as he whispered a prayer to his god. He kissed the holy sign carved into his axe’s hilt and jumped, cheering, into the darkness. Vivica waited. She nestled down flat in the tall grass, eye pressed against the scope of her custom-made Branca Crossbow and started to count backwards. Fifteen. She heard shouting, or cheering, escaping the pit. Ten. The earth reverberated in her bones. Five. Ari scrambled from the pit, axe covered in blood and waving frantically for Vivica to be ready. Three. Two. One. The mujina shot out of the earth like a geyser of black fur, gnashing teeth, and claws. The ground cracked beneath its weight as it landed, and it lunged blindly for Ari while he egged it on. The beast was fast, but Ari stood firm, leaning on his axe with an exaggerated confidence that Vivica knew was just for her sake. Maw open, the mujina looked ready to swallow Ari whole, but its jaws were shut by the sprung traps. Pressurized steam burst beneath the beast, searing its belly while timed snares grabbed it and pulled it into the ground. Ari called out something he no doubt thought was funny as he split the creature’s skull with his greataxe, but Vivica could neither discern his words, nor had time to revel in anything humorous. Another mujina clawed its way from the pit. It was larger and more feral than the first, and it did not appear so blinded by the morning sun. It ran for Ari, nimbly avoiding the traps below it with precise footing it’s size shouldn’t have allowed for. Ari panicked, retreating without retrieving his axe from the first mujina’s skull. Through the scope Vivica saw his lips moving, no doubt he was asking his god for intervention, but his constant movement made it difficult for Vivica to get a clean shot. “Stop panicking,” she muttered, adjusting her position slightly while she loaded in a special, red-tipped bolt. Ari’s god finally answered his call as the beast was about to make a meal of him. He clutched his holy symbol and golden light pierced the sky, parting the clouds and incinerating the beast’s back leg. But the mujina was not so easily smote. It screamed in pain, lashing out at Ari with a determined fury, pinning him to the ground beneath its claws and lowering gnarly teeth to his face. “Vivica!” he screamed before the air could be pushed from his lungs, “Anytime you’re ready!” “Bite me,” she said, squeezing the trigger. The Branca Bow hissed with steam as pistons rapidly fired, propelling her bolt across the field like a shooting star. The mujina was blown away from Ari, a gape in its hide, and set ablaze with white-hot flames. “I think that went very well, all things considered,” said Ari as Vivica helped him back to his feet. “Are we not considering the second one, that you missed, that nearly killed you then?” she countered. “Two things,” he smiled, “first, I had faith that you’d get it off me, and secondly, it’s very dark down there.” “Then I suggest you give your eyes time to adjust this time.” “This time? I’m half dead.” “You have a few scratches,” she shrugged. “I’ll make you a counteroffer. I’ll go collect the cart and horses, and you go down there.” “I would rather ride ahead and get the stench of burning badger off me.” Ari laughed, “I distinctly remember telling you that I have to report for reassignment today. So, if anyone’s leaving early, it’s me.” “Reassignment?” Vivica hid her displeasure poorly, “To where?” “Prim.” Her displeasure deepened, mixing with envy. “You can’t help me take these things back to the village first?” “Afraid not,” he shrugged, “but I can help you get the cart and horses.” Vivica huffed, “It’s been months since I went to Prim. All Newton’s got is sailors and farmers harassing everyone they can find until they knock each other unconscious.” “Nonsense. Sometimes, the booze knocks them out first.” Ari laughed again. It was an infectious kind of laugh, and Vivica despised how well it worked on her. “Come on, Newton’s got character. And, later today, it will have your brother too.” Vivica could have kicked herself. “Shit.” “By the gods woman, other than what you read in your books, information goes in one ear and out the other.” She scowled at him. “Fine. I’ll check the nest; you fetch the horses. Quickly.” “I’m going to miss how bossy you are,” sighed Ari. “I wonder if I can even survive the next three months without you telling me how to wipe my arse.” “Three months?” Vivica didn’t like how stroppy she was sounding. “It’s okay to admit you’ll miss me, Viv.” Ari’s smugness was enough to snap Vivica back to her usual scathe. “On the contrary, I was hoping you’d gone for much longer.” She pushed past him, making ready to enter the nest before he could inevitably win their game of taunts. “What, no goodbye kiss?” he called after her. “Fuck off, Ari.”

Janice drove slowly to avoid jostling the plastic containers of food on the floor behind her seat. She had better ones at home, but her father was likely to use them for storing nuts and bolts. She brought him food twice a week and resented it—the cooking, the drive, the awkward struggle for a topic other than weather or his cars. It was a matter of proximity. Janice was the oldest of his four adult kids and the only one who lived close. She often wished he’d died before her mother. With his wife gone he’d turned useless and low. Nothing engaged him but working on cars and taking care of his chickens. At the turnoff for his holler, she tried to straddle the mud holes, an impossible task given their width. They were dry, which made her tires bounce harder. She had a choice with the last one—go through it at the rate of a drugged turtle, or crowd the edge and risk sliding through horseweed into the ditch. Janice never cursed out loud, but her mind flew with blue language. Eff it, she thought and pressed the accelerator, the old shocks scraping metal as the tires dropped into a four-inch hole. The driveway piddled out into the hard-packed yard filled with five cars—three for parts, one he drove, and one he was working on. He hadn’t been to a store in six months. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d visited her. Maybe it was for the best, she thought. He smelled of sweat, cigarette smoke, and engine oil. His hands were black with grease embedded deep in the pores from decades of mechanical work. She honked to let him know she was there, got out of the car, and opened the rear door. Sure enough, there was a pool of spaghetti sauce on the cardboard she’d placed beneath the containers. A second one had spilled lettuce onto the carpet, a salad she’d dutifully made, despite knowing he wouldn’t eat it. The lid to the pasta had slid under the seat and she decided to get it later. He wouldn’t care. He’d probably eat it with his fingers over the sink. She carried the food onto the porch, pulled the screen door with a finger, kicked it open, and entered. The familiar smell of her mother’s hand soap and lotion drifted under the thicker layer of a man alone. The twined scents always reminded her of better days in the past. “Daddy,” she said. “I brought you some supper.” She heard nothing, which meant nothing. He often napped in the spare room, her mother’s old sewing room. He hadn’t slept in his own bed since his wife died. Janice set the food on the counter and shook her head at the dirty dishes in the sink. She’d be the one to wash them. She called to him again, softer, in case he was sleeping, but the spare room was empty except for the narrow single bed and stacks of her mother’s fabric. Bolt ends she’d gotten on sale were leaning in a corner. Janice opened the curtains and lifted the window to relieve the room of stale air. Through the screen she saw her father lying on the ground. She rushed through the house to the backyard, thinking that he’d had a stroke or a heart attack. She could feel her own heart pounding in her chest. He lay on his back as if taking a rest, a heavy crescent wrench near the curled fingers of his grease-blackened hand. The front of his shirt was matted with dried blood from a gunshot wound. She called the police and began washing the dishes. Nine-one-one was on its way, cops and EMTs and fire trucks. She felt bad for the previous way she’d thought about her father. It was too late now, she knew, but the guilt would live inside her for a long while, like a loose belt on one of the cars in his yard. * Mick Hardin took his standard two-minute shower, toweled off in one minute, and spent two more getting dressed. His T-shirt was damp against the wet splotches on his torso but he didn’t care. He ran his hand over his head to comb his hair, which was already getting longer. He didn’t care about that, either. As of 2400 hours last night, he’d ended his status as a serving member of the United States military. He was no longer duty bound to care about anything. He studied his freshly shaven reflection in the misty mirror. He was thirty-nine years old, still fit, with all his teeth and hair. Not much to brag on, but it was more than a lot of people. If he didn’t get too spendy, he could live on his pension for decades. Prior to resignation, he’d agreed to train new CID investigators in exchange for promotion and a commensurate raise. He’d done that for a year. Mick had been surprised to enjoy working with young soldiers but not enough to extend enlistment. He wasn’t a teacher, he was an investigator, and now he was unemployed. Every action seemed significant on his final day in the army—the last shower, the last bed made, the last breakfast of runny eggs, hard toast, and dry potatoes. His final walk from the mess hall to the barracks. His last withdrawal from the bank on base—twenty thousand dollars in cash. Activity on Fort Leonard Wood continued as if nothing important was occurring. To all the other soldiers, nothing was, just another dull day in the service. He carried a suitcase and a duffel bag to his truck. A corporal gave Mick his final salute, sloppy and quick, the perfunctory gesture indicating a hangover. At the main gate he nodded to the guards and drove north past the ubiquitous enterprises near all garrisons—pawn shop, pizza place, tattoo shop, strip club, and gaming center. Fast food and cheap motels. Fort Leonard Wood was in the Missouri Ozarks, pretty country that reminded Mick of home. He drove northeast to Saint Louis, where he got on I-64 for the long drive east to Rocksalt, Kentucky. The old truck ran well, a 1963 stepside that had belonged to his grandfather, the man who’d raised Mick deep in the Daniel Boone National Forest. Like all soldiers, he’d dreamed of this day since boot camp. Now it was anticlimactic and depressing. He was grateful to be spared a formal and tedious ceremony requiring stoic endurance. His career had ended with his signature on multiple forms. It was similar to divorce. In both cases, a significant portion of his life stopped abruptly with legal documents in a bland office. He underwent a quick sensation of doubt that he swept aside. After serving four tours as a combat paratrooper he’d transferred to CID and spent twelve more years tracking down soldiers who’d committed violent felonies. Now he was free, truly free. Free from orders, war, and pressure. Free from emotional responses of victims and their families. Free from making an error with colossal repercussions—the wrong person arrested and a killer still at large. Mick had a plan for his future, at least the first six months, but he was flexible, ready to shift with any circumstance. No plan survived first contact with the enemy, even if the enemy was civilian life. Affairs had not unfolded the way he’d previously imagined at his retirement—opening a boat rental business on Cave Run Lake and running it with his wife. Now Peggy was living with her new husband and their child. His mother and father were long dead, and the house he’d grown up in had burned to the ground. Mick was going home to a place that was no longer home. He stopped for gas three times and made it to Rocksalt in ten hours, his speed hampered by the old truck. He’d been gone two years and the town appeared the same—few cars, no pedestrians, the traffic lights blinking both ways at the four intersections. He drove straight to his sister’s house. Calling ahead was not a habit with him, a problem at times for his CO, his ex-wife, and his sister. He’d grown up with no telephone and never embraced the widespread use of cell phones. His own was in the glove compartment, turned off. Arriving unannounced had its benefits, especially when taking into custody a young man trained to kill. He no longer needed to think that way but it was deeply ingrained, the same as vigilance toward suspicious objects by the road, a vehicle that followed for too long, or the quick motion of a furtive figure in the shade. The intensity of the habit had kept him alive in war zones. But he understood that it had severely undermined his marriage and he wondered if he was capable of maintaining a close relationship. Neither he nor his sister had ever been very good at it. Linda lived in their mother’s house at the end of Lyons Avenue. It was tidier than his last visit two years ago, freshly painted with new gutters and downspouts. The setting sun glinted off the roof in a steady sheen that suggested new shingles. Maybe she’d gotten a bump in pay after winning the election to sheriff. He went to the side door, but his key wouldn’t open the lock. He walked to the front, used only by preachers, politicians, and kids on Halloween. That key didn’t work either. He double-checked both doors, then used a penlight to study the locks. They were shiny and new. He drove to the sheriff’s office and parked beside his sister’s county-issued SUV. Hand on his door handle, he hesitated. He’d been locked into mission mode so severely that he’d overlooked a detail with negative potential. Two years ago he’d spent his last night in Eldridge County with Sandra Caldwell, who worked as a dispatcher for the sheriff’s department. He wondered if she’d been miffed by his sudden departure and subsequent lack of contact. The prospect of seeing her scared him more than facing a barred entry to a village in Afghanistan, knowing it was booby-trapped. Mick considered calling the office to see if she answered, or calling his sister directly and asking Linda to come outside. Both smacked of cowardice, which he couldn’t tolerate. Sandra was probably married by now, or with any luck had quit her job. He left the truck and went to the sheriff’s office door, which was locked. He felt a quick sense of gratitude that the staff was gone. He banged on the glass until his sister emerged from her office and let him in. “Lord love a duck,” Linda said, “look what the dogs drug in.” “Hidy, Sis.” “I saw you sitting out there. Getting up the nerve to come in, I bet.” “Something like that.” “Afraid of facing the music on how you treated Sandra?” “What do you know about that?” “You leave your truck in front of her house overnight and the whole town knows. Two years is nothing in Eldridge County. Same as two minutes anywhere else.” “Is she mad?” Linda laughed, a rarity in general, and led him into her office. It was as Spartan as ever—state and national flag, photograph of the governor, desk, filing cabinet, and guest chair. The wall held new adornments—an honorary commission as Kentucky Colonel, an award from the state for meritorious accomplishment, and a special commendation from the FBI. “Two years,” she said. “You look pretty much the same.” “You lost weight.” “A little,” she said. “Bought a couple of new uniforms that’re supposed to streamline my verticals, whatever that means.” “Well, it works.” “Yeah, until I put on the vest.” They sat looking at each other, not so much an evaluation as a willingness to accept. Each was the only family the other had. Despite their differences—many and extreme—they were loyal in the way of the hills. “I went by your house,” he said. “Keys didn’t work.” “I changed the locks.” “Mommy’s old ones finally give out?” “No, they worked.” “Somebody start bothering you over the job?” “Not your business,” she said. “Nothing to do with the job.” “Wrong choice of man?” “Again,” she said. “As usual.” Linda shifted in her chair and stared out the window at a small maple. Nothing was happening out there. The humidity draped the leaves with weight that made them droop. Mick knew the topic was over. “Thanks for taking care of my truck,” he said. “I thought I’d see you when you picked it up.” “I couldn’t get away from work. That’s why I hired Albin to haul it to base for me. Cost a pretty penny.” “Albin’s mixed up in a murder case.” “Albin? That boy wouldn’t hit a lick at a snake.” “He’s not a suspect. Got a hell of an alibi, too. He was racing at the dirt track in Bluestone. Couple of hundred witnesses.” “How’d he do?” Mick said. “Took second. Johnny Boy said he’d have won if Pete Lowe was in the pit.” “Don’t know him.” “You won’t get a chance to. He’s the victim. Somebody shot him down in his yard. Daughter found him.” “Well,” Mick said. “I’m off the clock now. But if it was me, I’d look at family and friends. Then any woman he was involved with.” “Yep, then neighbors.” Mick nodded. “You’re getting good at sheriffing,” he said. “A regular Nancy Drew.” “When are you due back?” “I’m not. I’m out.” “I don’t believe it.” “Yep. Terminated. Retired. Separated from service. It’s a complicated process with all kinds of steps. Right now I’m in a period the army calls ‘transition to civilian life.’ Supposed to be difficult.” Linda leaned back in her chair, swiveled it one way, braced her feet against the floor, then spun all the way around. She had a big smile at the end of the chair’s rotation, as if the spin had obliterated the years. Mick hadn’t seen the joyous side of her in a long time. It was worth the trip. “Damn!” she said. “Twenty years went fast. You here for good?” “I’d like to stay with you for a few days, if you ain’t caring.” “Okay.” “Then I’m moving to France. Got a six-month lease.” “What? Why France?” “I speak enough of it to get by. Can’t talk to a banker or understand a word on the phone, but I can order food and go to stores.” “Do they talk English?” “They say they don’t, but a lot do. When they hear how bad my accent is, most folks switch to English.” “Do they sound like Pepé Le Pew?” “Oh, yeah,” he said. “The whole country is filled with cartoon skunks. You know what I never understood? Why a French skunk had a Spanish first name.” “Reckon you’ll have plenty of time to figure that out.” Mick nodded. He’d missed talking to his sister, to someone who knew him well. The only others were dead or no longer in his life. There was plenty of precedent in the hills for brother and sister to live together in the family home, but it wouldn’t suit him—or her. Both were too fixed in their ways. On the other hand, his presence might prevent her from changing the locks to keep a man out of her house. But it was none of his business. “Seriously,” she said, “why are you here?” “To say goodbye to you, Sis.” “Nothing else?” “I’ll put my truck in storage somewhere so it doesn’t sit in front of your house. It might not go with your new locks.” Linda snatched a sheet of paper from her desk, crumpled it quickly into a ball, and threw it at him. Mick shifted his head and it flew over his shoulder. “Used to,” he said, “you’d have thrown a paperweight.” “Yeah, well, time affects everybody different. We’re getting mature.” “I’ve never known you to be philosophical.” “It’s the job,” she said. “I used to think everything was simple, black and white, legal and illegal. Now it’s a lot more complicated. What’s lawful, what’s justice, and what’s best for the community. Sometimes they overlap but not often enough.” Mick nodded. Two years was the longest period he’d gone without seeing his sister. He wondered if it had been a crucial time for her. When change happened, it was incremental. Then the results appeared suddenly like the overnight success of a musician who’d been playing gigs for fifteen years. Mick gestured to the framed certificates on the wall. “What’s all that?” he said. “The usual bullshit.” “Then why put them up?” “Politics, Big Bro. Never know who might walk in here.” “You’re learning.” “Yeah, the hard way. Made some enemies, too.” “As long as your friends have more juice than your enemies, you’re doing good.” “Sometimes it’s hard to know who’s who in that book.” “It’s more like an Etch A Sketch than a book,” Mick said. “Remember those? Turn it upside down and shake it and the screen goes blank. That’s politics.” Linda took a set of keys from her purse, removed one, and slid it across the desk. “I’ll meet you there later. I’ve got to wait for the night dispatcher and do paperwork. There’s half a sub in the fridge.” “Maybe I’ll eat with Johnny Boy,” he said. “He’s at the Bluestone Speedway talking to people who knew the victim. It’s race night and they’ll all be there. Easier than traipsing around four counties hunting them down.” He picked up the key. “Thanks,” he said. “Don’t be messing with my stuff.” He nodded, grinned, and left. __________________________________ Excerpted from Code of the Hills © 2023 by Chris Offutt. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved. View the full article

This HaBO comes from Isabella, who wants to find this historical romance: The details are hazy but I remember the hero was some kind of gardener but also maybe nobility? And he was rebuilding something akin to Covent Garden or Vaxhall Gardens after a fire. It might even have explicitly been Covent Garden… There was a scene of him in the garden doing gardenery stuff with his shirt getting soaked through from the rain. I think there was some discussion in the text over the kinds of trees being selecgted for the garden. I think at the end the theatre gets set on fire again. I don’t remember much about the heroine but, I think she was either a singer/theatre person or a lady or something along those lines. Any help would be appreciated! It’s likely to be from the last 20 years, but probably not earlier than that and it’s definitely a historical romance. Sound familiar? View the full article

Act of Story Statement: Evie must navigate a fantastical new world while battling with her awakening inner demon at every turn. The Antagonist: There are three prominent antagonists in my story, but the main antagonistic force would be the Spirit. Evie, my teen-aged protagonist, discovers one day that there is a being living within her, and is fairly certain that this being is a demon. This is unfortunate for many reasons, one of the main being that she’s newly started attending a school where the students are doggedly taught to hunt and kill demons. The Spirit is a force that has lived in the ether since the beginning of time. But one fateful day it was forcibly pulled from the heavens and sent crashing down to Earth where it split into two. To stay hidden from those that would use it to do harm, both sides of the broken Spirit entered human vessels, remaining within their souls for as long as the vessels lived. Their possession of the vessels guaranteed that there would now always be a target on the humans' backs as those in pursuit of the Spirit went in search of their human companions. What’s more, a catastrophic event takes place that causes the Spirit and the vessels they live in to stop hiding, and instead fight on opposite ends of a great battle that involves opening the gates of hell. In this battle both vessels ultimately end up dead. Now, hundreds of years later the Spirit has awoken yet again in two new vessels. And the one living within Evie will do anything, at risk to Evie herself, to accomplish the task it started hundreds of years ago. Breakout Title: Volume One The Other World The Legend of the Scintillant The Vessel and the Spirit Genre: Young Adult Fantasy Core Wound and Primary Conflict: A teenage girl, imprisoned and betrayed by the woman she thought was her grandmother, takes a Door to a fantastical new world where she finds a new family and friends, only to discover a terrible secret that could ruin the life she’s created forever. Other Matters of Conflict: Evie isn’t a normal girl. Muma (her grandmother) aka Helena Eveningstar (the Fey) made sure of that when she stole her as a baby and made her live as a hermit in a cottage in the woods. Now that she’s free, Evie has a new lease on life. Sure, there are things she has trouble swallowing, like the fact that she’s not of the world she’s lived in for all of her life. But her new world really isn’t that different from her old one (apart from the fact that in the Other the folk once existed, the Fey (part folk/part human) being their progeny. And, also, demons roam the Earth. But Evie is determined to create her own identity and finally live the life she wants to live. She is making friends in a school of demon hunters (Mab and George) and she’s kindly been adopted by Senior Harinder Ranaday, a demon hunter himself, and member of a secret society. But, of course, Evie has issues. Her inner turmoil stems from several different factors. For one, there’s a part of her that misses Muma, even though she knows that she’s a deceitful creature that kept her as a prisoner and constantly glamored her with Fey dust. Her second inner conflict is a very relatable one. She’s a teenage girl going to a new school and she’s desperate to fit in. Most teenagers are conflicted when it comes to finding out who they really are, but with most of her memories being falsehoods, and her one friend before she landed in the Other, a middle aged housewife she was glamored into believing was a teenaged girl, Evie has double the amount of insecurities. She knows nothing of her new world. She doesn’t know what shows everyone is watching. What books are they reading? What’s hot? What’s not? Will every word out of her mouth sound stupid? Will she ever make up for what her faux grandmother did to her? Evie greatest inner turmoil happens to be the voice in her head. When she’s first aware of its existence she’s reasonably alarmed. Nothing good could come from one who hears voices. However, Evie soon learns that the voice not only speaks to her, but can control her actions too. Her lessons at the infamous Mab and George taught her most plainly what that means. Evie is possessed! And a soul that’s been taken by a demon cannot be salvaged. What will happen to her once her new family and friends learn what lurks within her? What will she do to make sure they don't? In the background, there is both a political and demonic issue brewing. Let’s start with the political. No one knows for sure where the now gone continent/country of Elphind was located, but commoners (humans) lives were thrown upside down once the folk survivors made an "exodus" from their battered country, and lived amongst commoners in the outside world. Most especially when they made it known that they both existed and that a lot of the elves amongst them were secretly in rule. A power struggle has brewed ever since, and when the Industrial Revolution took place, and commoners officially got the upper hand, they decided that they would never again lose it. (Fe)y Air was created to keep the descendants of the folk – the Fey – dormant (meaning that their folk side wasn’t active). Now, hundreds of years later, there has been an uptick of Fey showing signs of activity, and the Home Secretary of Englande thinks the only way to prevent a surge is to spread more (Fe)y Air throughout Englande and crack down on Fey showing signs of activity. The WIS (government controlled wise people, or witches) are visiting homes, and workplaces, at the behest of “concerned neighbors”, to take Fey who have been accused of activity and imprison them at Wexley Royal– a hospital that specializes in patients that were either attacked with conjury, or show signs of conjury themselves. Now onto the demonic issue. Dust was something organically created by elves and faeries in centuries past. And while the folk are now extinct there are still some Fey that have the ability to create dust. Those that do are usually outed for being active, and sent to Wexley Royal, where they are then cleansed, and their dust sold to the Dark Market in Sub City. But a "dusthead" by the name of Thom Jones came to learn about the the Old One (demon)– Bacchus; the god that comes. He then went on a soul searching journey where he found a rare thyrsus plant and mixed it with animal blood and dust. This laced concoction came to be known as Bacchic dust and when Thom used it he went into a state of manic ecstasy. It was in this state that he heard the voice of the god that comes who implored him to build a cult of followers to follow his will. Evie arrives at Norminster, New London the same day that a terrorist attacked. The government believes this group is a fanatic Fey religious order. But the secret society that created the school that Evie attends believes it is the demonic cult of Bacchic dustheads that are currently terrorizing Englande. Evie isn’t aware of any of this, but from the outside looking in she is starting to notice that New London, which is known for its lack of demonic activity, is slowly yet surely becoming more and more dangerous to live. The students of Mab and George are noticing the changes in their city too, and while they are excited, Evie is terrified. The students think this is an opportunity for them to take their studies into action, but Evie can’t help but wonder why an originally quiet city is now teeming with demons not long after she arrives? And furthermore, how did she wind up being possessed herself? Once her friends and society learn who she is will she be hunted down like the members of the demonic cult? Setting: The story takes place primarily in New London, Englande. Evie goes through a Door that she later finds is the entrance to another world– Other. In Other, the faerie folk are not just characters in bedtime stories, but magical beings that once existed, but have since gone extinct. Now all that remains of the folk are their predecessors, the Fey (part human/part folk). Norminster, New London is where Tanner House is located. Tanner House is the headquarters for the New London chapter of the Scintillant Society, a secret community of demon hunters. And the head of Tanner House takes on Evie as his new ward when she accidentally Travels to the Other one fateful night. Amongst the four chapters in the UK, New London is deemed quite boring due to their lack of demonic activity. Not as boring as the Trau-Wicklow chapter (set on a sheep farm in the middle of nowhere) but boring all the same. Norminster is a beautiful borough in the city of New London, known for its quaint cafes, historical buildings, gleaming statues, and housing the Parliamentary. But across the river is Stepney Tower, which has a neighborhood called “Sub City”. Stepney Tower is the night to Norminster’s day. It’s a congested borough, polluted with (Fe)y Air (synthesized gaseous iron meant to keep the Fey’s folk side dormant) and terrorized by cycops (cyclopean Fey police officers). And the city block of Sub City is somehow even worse. Evie has a particularly life changing moment that takes place at a rave over there. The idea of Norminster, Stepney Tower, New London, and Other itself is that at first sight these are places that one recognizes. The fashion may not be exactly the same, but not so outlandish that you couldn’t see it coming into trend on this side of the Door. The entertainment runs in more or less the same vein, with tweaks made to represent how the folk culture influences their society. Most Fey look like commoners (100% human), the only thing making them stand out being the black code tattooed on their left wrist for identification purposes. The Other is recognizable, which very often poses a problem for Evie. For in the off chance that she forgets that she is no longer in the world she’s grown up in she’s reminded of this by happening upon a terrifying cycop, wearing a full face gas mask to protect himself from (Fe)y Air (aka the cure) as he hauls a Fey (showing signs of activity) into his massive police van. So, to paraphrase what the High Elder Hildimar Travers tells Evie after she steps through the Door, “It’s a world like your own, but…Other”

“Helena’s investigations had made her realise how so often women’s safety, the difference between being sent to the madhouse or not, depended on how men interpreted them, read them. It wasn’t so much about losing one’s reputation as about losing one’s freedom, and, in the most extreme cases, one’s life. The zealous work of the Society for Psychical Research was clearly at fault here, with their insistence on the unreliability of female experience. But who was telling the truth, and who wasn’t? Many times, it was a matter of interpretation, of who decided to look at you, of the preconceptions they used, of how they decided to frame the narrative that explained what they were seeing.” Marian Womack’s On the Nature of Magic (2023) is the welcome sequel to her wonderful English language debut novel The Golden Key (2020). Like the previous book, the novel follows the adventures of Helena Walton-Cisneros and Eliza Waltraud, Womack’s two female investigators, who after the events of The Golden Key have set up Walton & Waltraud, their own detective agency specialising in helping women. Once again they find themselves investigating the slippery boundaries between the real and the magical. But whereas The Golden Key drew on the fairy tales of George MacDonald to create an early 20th century mystery with surprisingly modern resonances about climate change, On the Nature of Magic gives us a Parisian mystery that engages with the films of pioneering French film maker Georges Méliès in order to dissect our relationship with films and mass media. Beautifully written and artfully constructed, On the Nature of Magic is just as compelling and thought-provoking as its predecessor, and shows Womack continuing to move from strength to strength as a writer. On the Nature of Magic is set in 1902, a year after the events of The Golden Key. The case Helena and Eliza solved together on the Norfolk fens has made the women firm friends, and together they have decided to form a detective agency with the purpose of helping women, who are frequently disbelieved by male detectives. But tensions have risen between the two – Helena’s experiences with the supernatural, as well as an understanding of her own gifts, have led her to move from being a strict rationalist who was using her work as a medium as a cover to an understanding that the world is vastly more complex and strange than she can explain, whereas Eliza still very much believes everything can be explained by the scientific method. But all their attention is soon consumed by their first case. Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain, two English women who are the principal and deputy of St Hugh’s College, claim to have travelled in time whilst visiting the gardens of Versailles and seen Marie Antoinette. No sooner have Helena and Eliza started investigating, when they are given a second case, also in Paris, by Eliza’s ex-lover Mina Lowry, whose friend Emily was working at the Méliès Star Films studio when she was kidnapped in broad daylight by forces unknown. Helena and Eliza’s investigation leads them to Paris, the Palace of Versailles, and the catacombs beneath the city, as they uncover a sinister conspiracy linking pioneering film maker Georges Méliès with Nikola Tesla and the London and Parisian chapters of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Womack once again creates a detailed and well-researched historical fantasy with which to explore surprisingly modern themes. This time round, Helena and Eliza tangle with figures from the early days of film making such as Méliès and pioneer of narrative film Alice Guy, as well as famous inventers Tesla and Thomas Eddison, and rival leaders of the Golden Dawn William Woodman and Sam Mathers. The new setting of Paris gives the book a distinct flavour from its predecessor, and Womack wonderfully evokes both the frightening Catacombs and the sinister whimsy of Méliès’s Star Films studio. And Womack gives both Helena and Eliza interesting character development – it’s clear that this is not a series where the detective remains a static character, and Helena and Eliza’s personal development and conflict with each other takes both of them to interesting new ground. Also joining Walton & Waltraud is Jocasta Webster, an African-American queer librarian who has come to London to escape her abusive step father with her brilliant anarchist brother. Jocasta is a wonderful character and a welcome addition to the team, and I hope we get more of her in later instalments of the series. The central mysteries of On the Nature of Magic are set around the dawn of cinema as a medium, a new technology that straddles the lines between magic and science, and one which Helena and Eliza immediately grasp just how disruptive it will be for the century to come. Womack is always concerned with stories and the nature of storytelling, and film is a powerful medium of storytelling which will demonstrate just how crucial narratives are in shaping public opinion, as Alice and Eliza anticipate: ‘Why do you think his movies make you sick?’ Alice sighed. ‘All his star-women, celestial-women, fairies, butterflies, even planets Millie was talking about. They are immobile, docile, decorative, always at the mercy of the men. It is perverse. He once – I remember this movie. I was utterly disgusted.’ ‘What happened?’ Alice was now speaking perhaps more reluctantly than Eliza had expected. ‘He wanted to show a magician creating a human doll by taking dolls’ parts out of a box, and then, using substitution splicing – it is a technique, I shall explain later what it is – turn it into a woman. And then back again into a doll, and put the pieces away. I said no way, I was not going to help with this. Living dolls! Doll women!’ Eliza did not understand. What was Alice talking about? ‘I’m sorry Alice, I’m not sure I follow.’ ‘Don’t you?’ Alice stopped, looked left and right before she spoke again: ‘He is spreading these ideas about women, normalising them. He is creating stories that a woman is a disposable thing.’ This made Eliza shiver. Cinema offers a unique opportunity to mould the consensus narrative to the view of the person holding the camera, in much the same way that the members of the Golden Dawn seek power to remake the world in their image. But here the crucial issue is who gets to tell the story and from what perspective. Just as Helena and Eliza feel obliged to take the cases of the two English schoolteachers because they are key figures in the young field of women’s formal education in England, and the attempts by the SPR to discredit them will inevitably shape public opinion on women’s ability to access education, so the power of Méliès’ brilliant special effects work allied to his misogynistic worldview will spread unhealthy ideas about women as objects. In this light, Tesla’s dreams of a wirelessly connected future are less than utopian, anticipating the ways in which the internet and social media provide terrifying power for social control. On the Nature of Magic is a brilliant sequel, one that reminds the reader how much they loved The Golden Key whilst expanding the ideas and characters in new and intriguing directions. Womack continues to write haunting and thought-provoking novels like no one else in the field, and I very much hope that Helena and Eliza will return for more adventures soon. On the Nature of Magic is available now from Titan Books, you can order your copy HERE The post ON THE NATURE OF MAGIC by Marian Womack (BOOK REVIEW) appeared first on The Fantasy Hive. View the full article

Hello, my partners in pedantry, my picayune peers. Welcome to another installment of morphological minutiae, aka “Wait, that means what?” (If we’re going to keep meeting like this for these etymological explorations, these terminology tête-à-têtes, these bacchanalias of linguistic douchebaggery, we should probably come up with a better title for this series—I welcome suggestions.) For those just joining us, over my early career years as a copyeditor I worked on literally hundreds of manuscripts and spent countless hours with my nitpicking little nose buried in resource books at the library (yes, actual books, because that’s how long ago this was, kids: pre-internet). And because I have the soul of a zealot where language is concerned, I made lists. Long lists of the common misuses of words and grammar and spelling and all the other obsessive bits of dry, tedious syntax and semantics that make editors such fun and welcome guests at parties. And now that I have found my people, judging by the enthusiastic pile-ons of my fellow fanatics in the comments section of the Writer Unboxed universe, I share these communication cock-ups with you. So let’s plunge in with this very special episode of “That’s Not What That Means.” I’m Begging You to Stop Begging the Question Let’s start with one I’m betting most of you know, even if you use it wrong nonetheless: Begging the question. So many misuse this phrase, in fact, that this incorrect usage has now become accepted into the vernacular, and we all have to live with people being able to righteously justify an egregiously wrong use of this inordinately popular phrase—THANKS A LOT. You knew, of course, that the original meaning of this phrase isn’t—as it’s currently used—to suggest an assertion that raises a specific question, as if it’s one of those irritating folks who drop intentionally cryptic or leading comments into their conversations in a bid to force their listeners’ engagement. “Please, please ask me more!” this annoying conversational sortie wheedles, tugging on your metaphorical coattails for attention. No, this phrase was never so obvious and crass in the past. Originally it oh-so-classily referred to a fallacy of one’s logic: assuming the truth of one’s argument with no established basis or proof, like, “America is a trash fire and I alone can fix it,” which begs the question that America is in a crisis without proving it, or “Many people say that I am a very stable genius,” which asserts a conclusion about people’s personal beliefs as completely unsupported “fact.” I mean, you see how silly using this fallacy makes one appear. “Begging the question” in cases like this is a very elegant way of pointing out what might otherwise be termed “ridiculously unsubstantiated assertions.” If you must use this phrase at least adjust it to accuracy. Try something like, “a question that begs an answer”—but why not give your prose a bit more assertiveness instead and relieve it of the need to supplicate the reader? Even in its bastardized usage this is a bit of a pretentious circumlocution: “Here is a point that might be made, but have you considered, my friend, this more complex additional point I shall now bequeath upon you?” Just say it in the first place, for the love of line editing—make your point directly. More Morphological Misuses Here’s one I was recently incorrectly corrected on: “home in on.” I know you want to say “hone in on.” Frankly I do too—it makes a sort of intuitive sense that one might whittle an ever-sharper point until you get down to the pinpoint-accurate thrust of the matter. And yet. You would be wrong, and so would I. As you approach that fine point you’re making, you are actually homing in on it like a well-trained pigeon hitting its mark. Once you’ve made that fine and eloquent point, the fact might seem cut and dried—not cut and dry, which could arguably be the verb form of making something incontrovertible and clear…and yet it isn’t. (But if we can now “beg the question” wrong, then maybe one day we shall get this logical verb incorporated into the lexicon too: “Your point is far from established; let me cut and dry it for you.”) This one seems obvious to me, but I see it often enough that I feel it needs addressing: You walk hand in hand with your beloved—your hand in their hand, of course. Not “hand and hand,” which makes no logical sense I can ferret out—like it’s now your hand as well as their hand going through life together, not just your poor solitary hand living life all alone and exposed? No. Same with “once in a while”—not, as I have seen it more than should be allowed without penalty, “once and a while.” These are not two passages of time layered upon each other; the first word modifies the rest: meaning this event happens a single time within the vague span of time known as “a while” (and not “awhile,” which is actually an adverb meaning “for a while,” i.e., over an indeterminate span of time). Just to mess with you, though, as English is wont to do, the correct phrase is not “one in the same,” where “one” is somehow simultaneously sharing the identical spot in the space-time continuum with “the same.” No, in this case you are stating in two different ways the inseparability of two items: they are both one thing, and the same thing—one and the same. (Not great writing, perhaps, given that redundancy, but hey, if you’re going to resort to clichés what do you expect?) Same with “time and again,” a fancier way to say something happens over and over, related to the longer “time and time again.” Obviously it’s not “time in again,” because how does that even make sense? If you escape something by the narrowest of margins, it’s a hairbreadth—the span or width (breadth) of a single strand of hair, which may also be a hairsbreadth if you like. But never, I beg you, what I have actually encountered in more than one author’s manuscript—perhaps one of my all-time favorite malapropisms: “a hare’s breath”…apparently the tiny space occupied by the shallow respiration of a small mammal. Which, if you think about it, actually makes a strange kind of literary sense. You know the drill, my lovely logophiles: CONFESS YOUR SINS if you’ve ever committed any of these, and share your favorite misuses in the comments below so we can all learn a little something if we didn’t know the correct forms…or bask in our obnoxious superiority if we do. [url={url}]View the full article[/url]

I was born into a second-floor flat on the Lagos mainland. It was the kind of flat with a living room that blurred into pale muslins of smoke whenever we forgot to shut the kitchen door before turning on the cooker. Outside the flat’s door, stray dogs and cocks bathed in the afternoon heat and rangy cats maundered through refuse for abandoned ponmo. In the mornings, I would rush out the flat to buy powdered milk and butter mints on credit from far mallam, a tall smiling Hausa man whose corrugated metal kiosk flanked our building. In the evenings, I would stand by my bedroom’s louvers to watch the neighbors perform ablution outside the estate’s mosque, a sea of plastic kettles scattered at their feet. It has been years since I set foot in the flat on the Lagos mainland. Still, it runs in a loop on my mind—a melancholic ad for a simple life of tumid dogs sunbathing in afternoon heat. At eleven, I left the flat for an all-girls boarding school in the heart of Lagos. My parents loved the boarding school for its airless classrooms and their rare flair for churning out graduates who would go on to become household names. But the school’s dusty brochures left out its less chaste bits, like the hordes of girls packed into hostels like cold storage inventory. Girls who slept to the tingle of mosquitoes and the rhythmic thrum of rats scurrying across the ceiling. That we were quick learners in more ways than one—chemistry, and geography, and waking up in the dead of the night to catch midnight thieves and lovers. That we learnt to wash our pinafores in foamless water, to avoid the hideouts of brutish older students and the war path of middle-aged matrons who walked barefoot on damp earth and demanded reverence with their whips. But the hardest lessons are the ones that stayed with me the longest. Like the violence that permeated our daily lives until we no longer flinched in its presence. The scathing words and fists we flung at each other with practiced deftness. The IT teacher with a thing for flogging girls on their ankles. The biology teacher with a thing for flirting with his teenage students. We swallowed each new violence like the well-behaved girls we were taught to emulate. We assumed the shock therapy would sharpen our blunted ends, toughen us up like prized bulls at the rodeo. Instead, the boarding school altered my relationship to violence for the worse—my earliest revulsion thawing into a stoic acceptance of violence’s ubiquity. Some lessons came to me in hindsight, wearing the faces of girls I would never see again. Girls who disappeared into thin air or perfunctory marriages in the hazy years after our high school graduation. Girls who died on operating tables or tweeted their last words from the floor of a bombed train. Each girl, a bitter lesson about the human capacity to compartmentalize everything—but especially the unimaginable. I would trade the boarding school for a shiny house on the Lagos island, complete with a carpet of foliage, a thatched gazebo, and a detached guesthouse that doubled as a gym. The shiny house would be one of many shiny houses in a gated estate of jogging neighbors who shuttled between Lagos and London to recharge their waning British accents. I would become a jogging neighbor as I followed my mother on long estate runs, matching each empty plot of land to its famed music producer or retired soccer player owner. At night, I would wrap myself in folds of duvet as I wrestled with memories of a different bed—thin and sagging in a sauna of sweating girls. The shiny house was a makeshift classroom. Within its walls, I learnt of Igbo customary practices that once barred women from inheriting their late father’s property, and of landmark Nigerian cases like Mojewku vs. Mojekwu that outlawed such practices. I learnt too, of the cunning tactics employed by greedy kinsmen to circumvent the law as I watched my mother successfully challenge her disinheritance. Years later, I would draw parallels between my mother’s grueling battle for her late father’s house in Enugu and the institutionalized obstacles American women––and especially women of color––face in their quest for homeownership, a turnstile of manufactured injustices that run the gamut from gender pay gaps to discriminatory lending practices that keep homeownership beyond the reach of many American women. At sixteen and freshly arrived on Texan soil, I spent my weekends camouflaged between Forever 21 clothing racks and the butter-scented back rows of the local AMC. That is, until I learnt that assimilation would not save me from the long arm of American immigration. That I was doomed to my nomadic life of gathering I-20 forms and EAD cards like infinity stones and begging America to love me back. The transience of my F-1 visa manifested in the structures I called home, a portmanteau of mid-range apartments that were no more than holding cells selected for their affordability. My parents handpicked my first American home, a minimalist multi-level apartment in Houston’s medical center, for its proximity to the train. The apartment’s stark white walls remained untouched from the day I signed the lease until my inevitable departure. Our arrangement was purely a marriage of convenience. Rent for a roof. Fridge for a 52 oz. bottle of orange juice and cardboard pizza from the strip mall across the street from the complex. It was a master class in frugality, in assessing thrifted furniture for bugs before dragging them into my lair. For the first time, I was acutely aware of bills. Of the tumbling naira to dollar exchange rate. Of daylight robbery in the guise of international student tuition—a taxation of sorts for foreign born dreamers. I dealt with my ennui by bonding with other Nigerian international students over our shared diasporic disenchantment and moving into a bigger apartment in the same complex. Three bedrooms. A revolving door of roommates. Nigerian girls who needed affordable housing and the promise of a roommate who won’t turn her nose up at efo riro. Peruvian postdocs sourced from the Craigslist haystack. A Korean transfer student who fed me Tteokbokki and Japchae, and swore I looked like Beyonce. Girls who brought with them achiote and wall art and lovers whose unannounced visits caused me to scurry into my bedroom for a pullover and a scarf. Girls who taught me to tiptoe across the apartment’s carpeted floors because my footsteps rang in their bedrooms. Who posted reminders on the fridge that dirty dishes were meant to be washed, not stacked in the sink as conceptual art. When law school happened, I ditched the Houston apartment for a furnished apartment in North Philly. Its furniture was a muted grey, handpicked by my anonymous landlord for its soulless practicality. In the mornings, I grabbed my casebooks and rushed out the door and towards the SEPTA. At night, I dove beneath my sheets to shield my dreams from the mice behind the wall. The North Philly apartment taught me that home is still home even when the elevator is out, and packages in the hallway are stolen for fun. That a neighborhood stroll is still a neighborhood stroll when you clench your fists and train your eyes on muddied snow to avoid the unfiltered thirst of the men who linger outside the Rite Aid. I learnt too, that the American dream is still the American dream when America makes you wait on it, because the Nigerian dream is to leave Nigeria for anything foreign. That to be Nigerian is to be born with one foot out the door. By the time I graduated law school, I was sick to death of the monotony of liminal spaces. So I fled North Philly for a no-name studio apartment in University City where the view from my skylight was populated by preppy Ivy league students traipsing the Schuylkill river trail, and young professionals hurtling in and out of 30th Street Station. There, I basked in the simple pleasure of renting a space without roommates, a quiet joy that was swiftly snatched from my grasp when an acquaintance asked to visit my place. I learnt that renting a studio is only cute if one is a broke college student, a New Yorker, or a troubled artist. Still, my studio allowed me to build a nest egg with the spoils of my law firm paycheck. It taught me that money can be a blanket, a weapon, a drug. That even if the radiator in a studio apartment refuses to heat up, money can buy me a hotel room and keep me warm at night. When Biden won the election, I entertained the possibility of permanence. After all, elections have consequences for people whose homes are lessons. Elections mean a permanent residency petition may pick up steam, that on an otherwise unremarkable day in March, an envelope with a green card may arrive a mailbox. The green card—compact and cool to the touch—would be the hard fruit of years spent paying international student tuition and abominable rent to landlords who recognized my dollars but were threatened by anything foreign. I rang in my freedom by moving to a Fairmount apartment in a high rise with floor-to-ceiling windows and Rococo trappings of western ostentation. If I stand by my living room windows and strain my neck just right, I catch glimpses of the art museum, a park, a storybook blue sky. Slowly, then all at once, I fill my new space with impressionist art, West African figurines from a Lagos art market, a larger-than-life Serax vase, and a blue tabby cat that demands my subservience. On weekends, I look up houses on Zillow and allow myself the fantasy of permanence. I argue with old friends about the best neighborhoods. I make grand plans with the women in me who want a suburban house and neighbors that jog at the break of dawn. I have a different itch—a condo with 360 views of the city, a balcony with a hammock. We compare notes, the women and I. Philly or Houston. DC or Chicago. We flesh out the pros and cons, and I calculate the exact number of avocado toasts I must give up for my dream of homeownership. The avocado toasts are never enough, and neither are my paychecks, each one slipping beneath the tide of mounting bills—rent hikes, and credit card fees, and that one health scare from last year. I course correct by working longer hours, a gilded smile stretching across my lips as I cavort around my umpteenth networking event of the month. I would give anything for a pay raise. Anything to lengthen the distance between me and my past—the stray dogs, the hostels with insomniac rats, a flurry of sticky notes tacked to a fridge housing expired fruit. Still, the houses of my past inch closer to me at every stop, their crimped fingers brushing against my nape. There it is—the familiar clink of a key in its lock. The scrape of metal on metal. A hot blast of air on my face. A hundred limbs pulling me under as I shut my eyes and wait, bated breath between teeth, for the houses of my past to tumble down on me. *** View the full article

I wish I was the kind of person who could live happily in all kinds of places. Don’t get me wrong; I love to travel, and I’ve lived in most regions of the country at one time or another, from Washington, DC to the Central Coast of California, to Missouri and northern Michigan. There were things I liked about each of the cities and small towns I briefly called home, but I couldn’t see myself settling permanently in any of them, and after a while I figured out why: I’m a Southerner. This is partly background, partly temperament. My father’s family settled in Virginia in the mid-nineteenth century, and I feel in a way that’s hard to put into words that the Blue Ridge Mountains are in my DNA, woven into the essential fabric of my being. I don’t think there’s anything more beautiful in the world than the line of those mountains on the horizon. As far as my Southern bona fides go, I also make my own jam and a pretty decent chess pie, wear pearls, know where to get moonshine, say y’all, and listen to country music (not always ironically). I like it here, and I’m planning on staying for the duration. Still, a Southerner is not always a comfortable thing to be. Politically, my home state seems to be in a permanent pattern of two steps forward, one step back. In the small-town South, the pressure to conform can be stultifying, and as the mother of a special needs child and the stepmother of a non-gender-conforming child, I worry that a place where I feel accepted may feel exclusionary and oppressive to others. I wanted to unpack some of these tensions in my debut thriller, The Good Ones, where the main character Nicola moves back to her small Virginia hometown after the death of her mother. Sixteen years earlier, Nicola’s friend Lauren Ballard disappeared suddenly, leaving her husband and young daughter behind. At first Nicola resists the idea of settling back into old patterns and renewing old friendships, not just because of the trauma of Lauren’s disappearance, but also because her identity as a queer woman makes her feel like a permanent outsider in her own home. What I love most about Southern crime fiction is the way it explores what it means to love a place that may not always love you back. Here are seven great novels that celebrate the beauty and the magic of this region, while also acknowledging it’s not always an easy place to call home. Ace Atkins, The Ranger When I find a series I like, I binge it like it’s the new season of a reality show, and that’s exactly what I did with Atkins’s Quinn Colson novels. In this first novel, Colson returns to Tibbehah County, Mississippi after leaving the Army and gets sucked into the atmosphere of lawlessness and disorder that he thought he’d left behind. In later novels, he settles into his role as county sheriff, but I especially love his uncertainty in this first book, when he’s discovering how bad things really are but hasn’t yet figured out what to do about it. I’ve learned so much from Atkins about writing action scenes, and his writing is full of evocative detail that brings the landscape of north Mississippi alive on the page. He also writes great women: Quinn’s friend and righthand woman Lillie Virgil and his sister Caddy are complicated and fully realized characters who develop from book to book. James Lee Burke, The Neon Rain I’ve read every one of the Dave Robicheaux novels, but in my opinion they don’t get any better than the first in the series, The Neon Rain. Just listen to this opening: “The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary.” Burke’s writing is masterful, and the action doesn’t let up from the moment that Dave is given a mysterious warning by the convict he’s gone to visit until the (surprisingly upbeat) ending. Though this novel is set in New Orleans, the rest of the series takes place mostly in Cajun country, where Burke chronicles the environmental devastation of the Louisiana Gulf Coast as the backdrop to Dave’s crime-solving. The twenty-fourth in the series, Clete Purcel, is due out next year, and I can’t wait. S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland I’m not sure this is my favorite of Cosby’s novels (seriously, how do you choose?), but it’s the one that first made me fall in love with his work, in the killer opening scene where Beauregard (Bug) Montage smokes the competition at an illegal drag race, gets shaken down by dirty cops, finds he’s been double-crossed, and then wreaks his own revenge. As a child I spent a lot of time in the part of southern Virginia, known as Southside, where this novel is set, and Cosby writes in such a way that I could smell the honeysuckle and red dirt coming off the page. I’ll never drive through Newport News again without thinking about the scene where Bug jumps an overpass on Interstate 64 and then calmly drives away. Pure magic. Amy Greene, Long Man I don’t think anybody writes Appalachia better than Amy Greene. When I was thinking about this list, it was a toss-up for me whether to include Long Man or her debut, Bloodroot, but I had to go with Long Man because the story at its center—the disappearance of a three-year-old girl from a town about to be flooded by a government-built dam—is so compelling and so terrifying. I’ve always been fascinated by the real-life stories of the towns flooded by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930’s, and Greene makes powerful use of that history of betrayal and longing. This is one of those novels that I remember with such clarity that I feel like I lived through them, and I can’t wait for Greene’s next book. Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird I don’t know Locke’s East Texas the way I know the settings of some of the other novels on this list, but her writing is so vivid and immersive that I feel like I’ve been there. Bluebird, Bluebird is the story of Darren Matthews, a Black Texas Ranger investigating two murders in the small town of Lark. Locke captures the ambivalence of feeling tied to a place known mostly in the outside world for a tragic history of violence, as in this scene when Darren remembers his law school classmates talking about the lynching of James Byrd: “he felt a hot rage at the students and professors around him, most of them white northerners, clucking their tongues and whispering Texas in a way that suggested both pity and disdain for a land that Darren loved, a state that had made him a gentleman and a fighter in equal measure.” Locke asks crucial questions about who gets to claim a Southern identity, and what that identity might mean in a more equitable future. James McLaughlin, Bearskin I’ve been told that McLaughlin spends part of the year living a few towns over from me, and I’ve had to resist the urge to show up on his doorstep just to tell him how much I love this book. Rice Moore is working as a caretaker on protected land in the Virginia wilderness, but he’s also hiding out from the Mexican cartels that want to kill him. McLaughlin has a way of using the details of country life to create an atmosphere of incipient violence, as in an early scene when Rice is attacked by bees while trying to fix up his cabin. Later, after finding that someone has been hunting bears illegally in the preserve, he makes his own ghillie suit as he lies in wait for the culprit. This novel is a page-turner for sure, but high stakes and high tension aren’t all it has to offer—it’s also a deeply-felt evocation of the strange and eerie beauty of the Southern Appalachians. Donna Tartt, The Little Friend If I thought I could get away with it, I’d probably include The Secret History on this list, though I know a novel set in Vermont with a main character from California would be an odd fit for a roundup of Southern crime novels. Still, anyone who has listened to the audiobook, narrated by Tartt herself, would have to admit that the novel has an unmistakable Southern vibe. The Little Friend is the only of Tartt’s novels to be set in her native Mississippi, and it’s rich with the nightmare details of Southern gothic, in which the beautiful seamlessly metamorphoses into the uncanny. I first read it when it came out in 2002 and found some aspects of the plot frustrating, but I’ve returned to it in recent years, and I’ve come to think that the frustration might be part of the point. What we read for in crime fiction, after all, isn’t always the resolution of a mystery; it’s also to understand what it’s like to construct a life in the aftermath of trauma and tragedy. In a region where the past is never past, these novels teach us something about what it’s like to pick up the pieces and keep going. *** View the full article

The success of Thomas Harris’s “Silence of the Lambs” unleashed a tide of serial killer novels throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s. You couldn’t walk through the front door of a bookstore or past an airport book kiosk without spying at least three or four titles dedicated to a mad butcher with a pun-y nickname and an inventive (or derivative) modus operandi. While many authors of those books succeeded wildly (including Harris himself, who followed up “Silence” with two sequels), the genre’s omnipresence put it at risk of exhaustion. How many ways can a diabolical genius kill the undeserving or hold a city hostage? How many different psychologists and cops can you set against them before the entire exercise tumbles into a thicket of clichés? Crime author S.A. Cosby, coming off the wild success of “Blacktop Wasteland” and “Razorblade Tears,” decided to tap into what others might’ve thought was a stripped-out vein—and found rich ore. The result is “All the Sinners Bleed,” which combines a serial-killer procedural with the rural noir that made Cosby famous, while also touching on some of the day’s most live-wire social issues. The result is probably the most gripping (and gothic) country-set slaughterfest since the first season of “True Detective.” “All the Sinners Bleed” centers on Titus Crown, a former FBI agent turned the first Black sheriff of Charon County, Virginia. When the novel begins, Titus is having the mother of all bad days: a school shooting has rocked the county. But even that horrific event pales in comparison to what comes next: Titus’s investigation into the shooting reveals a serial killer stalking the county, butchering Black children. Titus is a brilliant detective but he’s as much a product of blood-soaked Charon County as anyone else in the novel, and he must wrestle down his own demons if he wants to find the killer. As the title suggests, “All the Sinners Bleed” also tackles religion. A church can bind a community together, but someone armed with the wrong kind of faith can cause incalculable harm. S.A. Cosby answered some questions about his inspiration for the book and Charon County’s spooky killer, as well as how he writes: “All the Sinners Bleed” covers a lot of thematic territory and touches on a host of hot-button issues, from the South’s complicated (and blood-soaked) history to school shootings. When you started writing the book, what themes did you want to explore, and how was this particular narrative—a vicious serial killer stalking a county—the best way to do that? Actually, the original idea was to use the county as a microcosm to talk about police brutality, but I realized pretty quickly I didn’t have enough emotional distance to write about it objectively. So, I switched gears and decided to write about my usual topics plus religion and sex, and honestly, that microcosm still worked. Serial killer investigations are particularly interesting territory in terms of crime fiction. For a long time, it seemed like the genre was oversaturated; all through the ‘90s, for example, it seemed like we had a dozen-plus Thomas Harris rip-offs on New Release shelves at any given time. But it also gained some new life thanks to shows like “True Detective” that played with some of the classic tropes. What inspired you when you were crafting the story, and what’s your philosophy when it comes to serial killer narratives? I think every crime writer has at least one serial killer book in them. For me, I’m fascinated by the person or persons who stand up and face the killer or killers more than I’m fascinated with the killer. I’m interested how standing in the gap against the darkness affects characters. And ‘True Detective’ was a huge inspiration in that respect. But I also think serial killers are our modern boogeymen and I wanted to explore that sort of shared miasma. I think for a serial killer plot to work, you have to ground it in reality. For instance, the victims can’t be from the same small town the killer is, because it is gonna be real noticeable if seven people go missing from a town of 8,000 people. The book’s fictional Charon County is a character unto itself in this book. What was your approach to worldbuilding, and how much time did that take before you actually began the writing process? I really wanted Charon to have a hint of the mythic, of the legendary. I read books and watched documentaries about small towns that dealt with a serial murder. Places like Texarkana and the Moonlight Murders. I wanted to articulate that particular sense of dread that arises when the place you love is corrupted. When it comes to plot, are you a plotter or a pantser? That is, do you write extensive outlines, or do you just see where the muse takes you? I’m an in-between. I write a short synopsis and use it as a road map. I’m too cowardly to be a pantser [laughter]. What’s next after “All the Sinners Bleed”? I’m working on a novel now about three siblings who run a crematory who find themselves in debt to vicious criminals while harboring a deep dark family secret. You know, more of my lighthearted family fare. View the full article

I’ve often, in my mind, likened the perfect reading experience to sitting in a bar and finding myself drawn—at first reluctantly, then less so all the time—into a stranger’s story. There’s something unique and compelling in that narrative space, and it’s an effect Jon Michaud conjures up masterfully in his new book, Last Call at Coogan’s: The Life and Death of a Neighborhood Bar. For a span of about thirty-five years, until its 2020 closure, Coogan’s was an uptown institution: an Irish bar in a Dominican stronghold, marrying the saloon ideals of a bygone New York with the practical, workaday concerns of a neighborhood in need of meeting spaces. Michaud, a talented novelist with longtime connections to the area, brought to the project a deep appreciation for the bar’s place in civic life. The result is a profound story of a community in flux—a timeless New York story, that is, and one that has room for the sweeping forces at play in the city as well as the deeply personal stories that mix and mingle in any saloon worth its taps. I caught up with Michaud before the book’s release to discuss how the project began, how Coogan’s captured his imagination, and the qualities that define a neighborhood bar. Dwyer Murphy: You obviously spent a great deal of time with the owners of Coogan’s and were given tremendous access to the life of this bar. How did they first respond when you approached them about this? Were they at all wary? Jon Michaud: It all started with this New Yorker piece I wrote, when Lin-Manuel Miranda and Adriano Espaillat and Lin-Manuel’s dad essentially led the effort to save Coogan’s from going out of business due to an extreme rent hike. That was in January 2018. I called up Coogan’s and asked to talk to the owners. I had met one of them, but I didn’t really know them, and they didn’t know me. It was Peter Walsh who answered the phone and he said, ‘oh you’re writing for the New Yorker? I love the New Yorker. When do you want to come?’ I thought I was going to get ten minutes with them, because they had just come out of this huge wave of publicity and I figured they would be exhausted, but I ended up talking with all three of them—David Hunt, Peter Walsh, and Tess O’Connor McDade—for two hours in the back of the bar. It was an amazing conversation, and I walked out of there thinking how much there was to that place, and how it would have all been lost if they had closed. So I wrote my article, but I just couldn’t stop thinking about Coogan’s. They were very pleased with the article and the response to it. Finally, I pitched the idea of a book to them, because as I say, this huge legacy, all these stories, all the lore about the bar would have been lost. They are a naturally collaborative group of people. Throughout their careers, they’ve worked with artists and writers, so collaboration is a natural state of them. It’s one of the reasons they’ve been so successful in the hospitality business. So, they said yes. They were completely open with me for the entire process. We never had any kind of adversarial interaction in the five years I was working on the book. Murphy: I got the impression the owners had an appreciation for the spirit of a good bar and what it could mean to a neighborhood. It almost seemed like they were waiting for someone to come along to tell the story. Michaud: All three of them are terrific storytellers. And, of course, that’s part of owning a bar. A bar is a venue for storytelling. Peter himself wrote a musical about a bar. He spent decades working on this shadow chronicle of Coogan’s. So, he had been thinking about it as a narrative, and he understood how bars work within their communities. They all had very clear ideas about that. But I do think they were waiting for someone to come along and ask to write about it. Murphy: Can we talk about Washington Heights and about the specific block where Coogan’s is located? The terrain, this distinct part of New York City, is so important to the bigger story. Michaud: The bar sat at the crossroads of Washington Heights, which is a neighborhood in the northern part of Manhattan, north of Central Park, north of Harlem. It’s the part of New York that often isn’t shown on maps of Manhattan. It’s historically significant: a culturally rich and diverse section of the city. It developed later than the rest of Manhattan, in the late 19th to early 20th century. A lot of the original landscape of the island is still visible there. Washington Heights is a neighborhood many immigrants went to. Immigrants on the Lower East Side, Irish and Jewish, once they got out of tenements housing, went there for a little more air, more space. That was abetted by the construction of subways at the end of the 19th century. So, it was a neighborhood that underwent waves of immigration. The Irish were strong there for a long time. You had African-Americans in the southern part of the neighborhood who had moved in during the Great Migration. Then later you had Greek and German-Jewish immigrants. And then, ultimately many, many Dominican immigrants who started arriving in the late 60s and early 70s. For a while, Washington Heights was the second largest Dominican settlement in the world, after Santo Domingo. And that’s about where the story beings: in this transition from being an Irish and Jewish neighborhood to a primarily Dominican neighborhood. At that time, crime was increasing, and opportunities were decreasing. Washington Heights was under-serviced by the city. It suffered badly during the financial crisis in the 1970s. Coogan’s opened in 1985, when crime was on the increase. The murder rate crested, I think, 1989 or 1990. You had the crack epidemic, and Washington Heights was the epicenter for the drug trade, not just in New York but on the whole east coast of the United States. It was a complex, rich neighborhood to write about. Murphy: You have an interesting quote in the book, somebody who reflects on the affinities between the Irish-American and Dominican-American experiences in New York City, and how those communities grew. Michaud: That was a priest at one of the local parishes who was bilingual. An Irish priest. He commented on the similarities between the Irish and the Dominicans: both countries that were once dominated by nearby colonial powers, both majority Catholic nations with a love of dancing and drinking and storytelling. I think these Irish owners of this bar felt perfectly comfortable with their Dominican clientele. Murphy: And they chose the location very carefully. Michaud: Location was definitely part of their success. They’re on top of a major subway station. A few blocks from the George Washington Bridge and the bus station. A few blocks from the New York Presbyterian Emergency Room. So that’s a major crossroads. A lot of people come in and out of there and many of them needed a bite to eat or something to drink, and Coogan’s was there to welcome them all. Murphy: Let’s talk about the role of a good bar in a community. That’s a subject that occupied your attention during the process of writing this book, I take it: the question of the “moral pub.” Michaud: One of my touchstones was this essay that George Orwell wrote about this fictional bar in London that he described as the ideal London bar. He delineated the qualities of the bar and what it should have and what it shouldn’t have. I took that idea and transposed it to New York. I thought about how, if I was writing about the ideal New York City saloon and I arrived at a list of qualities, many of those qualities would be shared by institutions that are vital to New York City as a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic place. I’m thinking of the subways, the parks, and the libraries. They’re open to all. There’s an egalitarian element to the way people are treated when they’re there. Status doesn’t really matter. A lot of those qualities were qualities that Coogan’s had and strove to maintain. The owners loved the idea that they could have a surgeon sitting next to a transit worker at their bar and they would be treated the same way. I think that’s fundamental to New York’s neighborhood bars. There are of course the kind of clannish places where everyone turns their heads when you walk in, and outsiders are shunned. But Coogan’s was very much the opposite kind of place. They were looking to welcome people, to bring them into the fold. All of those qualities were essential to Coogan’s success. Also, they had a deeply rooted sense of the history of pubs, both Irish and American. David Hunt had worked in bars in Greenwich Village before opening Coogan’s, and he had grown up in Inwood, which is famous for its many Irish saloons. And Peter Walsh had spent a lot of time in Ireland and talked about the role Irish country pubs played in society in rural Ireland. He wanted Coogan’s to have many of those same functions. Murphy: Irish pubs were the setting for your own formative bar experiences, as well. Michaud: Indeed, I spent my teenager years in Northern Ireland. From the age of fifteen, I was drinking in Belfast bars, in a wet cold city. This was during the Troubles, so bombs were going off, and there was the ring of steel around the center, where cars were checked for bombs, and everyone got frisked. But at the same time, you had a number of very welcoming Irish bars, and that’s where I spent a great deal of time in Belfast. When I first got to New York, I went looking for places that reminded me of the bars I remembered from Belfast. Murphy: I worry about the future of bars in New York, neighborhood bars especially. Obviously, the pandemic impacted those places tremendously. But before that, I think the experience had changed. People in bars—and I’ve been as guilty as anyone—spend time on their phones. The social aspect of the space is completely different. Michaud: The owners of Coogan’s fretted about that. Peter Walsh had a line: ‘social media is anti-social.’ They liked to recall when Monday Night Football was launched, and how everyone would go into the bar on Monday nights to watch games. But now you have high-definition TV in your home; you can watch any sporting event from the world on demand and have food from every restaurant in the city brought to your door. Why would you go out to a bar? The reason you might go to a bar is to meet other people—to interact with people you don’t normally interact with. This goes to the very roots of the problems the country is facing. We’re self-selecting our social circles. We’re no longer putting ourselves in positions where we have to converse with people who are not like us. That was one of the great functions of a bar. You would go and, lubricated by a beer or two, you would discuss the issues of the day, often with people who disagreed with you, but it would be civil and healthy. I’m concerned that’s happening a lot less. There are still a number of neighborhood bars in New York. An Beal Bocht, for example: an Irish bar in the Bronx, which still has that neighborhood vibe to it and people still go to hang out with their neighbors and to talk to people. Those saloons, they’re still there, but the demand is shrinking, and I worry about what that means for the country. Murphy: What kind of bar literature were you looking to, for this project? Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel came to mind as I was reading. Michaud: I’ve long been a fan of Joseph Mitchell’s work. When I was working as a bookseller at Rizzoli in the 90s, I got to meet him. He came in to sign copies of Up in the Old Hotel. They had just reissued The Bottom of the Harbor in Everyman edition. So, I have signed copies of those. They’re treasured items in my library. I acknowledge a debt to Mitchell, not just to the McSorley’s story, but the “Up in the Old Hotel” story, which is about Sloppy Louie’s, of course. And he had another great piece about the tradition of beefsteak dinners at the New York social clubs, “All You Can Hold for Five Bucks.” When I was starting out on this project, I didn’t find too many books like the one I wanted to write: narrative nonfiction about a bar. There were a couple. I loved Rosie Schaap’s memoir, Drinking with Men, and there was another book called Sunny’s Nights, by Tim Sultan which is about a bar in Red Hook. And a gorgeous book called The Last Fine Time, by Verlyn Klinkenborg, which is about a Polish saloon in Buffalo. And then of course there’s J.M. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar, which is a memoir and, with the exception of Mitchell, might be the greatest ever rendering of a bar in a work of nonfiction. But I liked that weren’t too many books on the subject. It gave me some latitude. Murphy: You were bringing a novelist’s eye to the subject, too. The book has these wonderful character studies that break out of the main narrative. Were there figures you met along the way that you immediately recognized would need to have their piece of the story? Michaud: Some of them, I knew in advance. The owners had tipped me off about who I had to talk to. Other people, I would just meet in the course of doing my interviews, and stories would mushroom up and I would think, ‘I have to give you a chapter.’ One of them is the story of Darren Ferguson and Taz Davis. Darren was an aspiring singer who grew up in Washington Heights. He became addicted to cocaine and was living with his grandfather at the time. He got behind on the rent and had a moment of crisis where he decided that, to make all his problems go away, he was going to set a fire in his grandfather’s apartment. He set the fire and walked out. Later, he learned that an older woman who lived above the apartment died in the fire. He was arrested and served a number of years in prison. While he was in prison, he discovered his faith and became an ordained minister. He came out and his choir sang at the first Coogan’s 5K race, and Peter Walsh invited him to participate—to sing—in the production of his play about this Irish bar. During rehearsals, Peter introduced Darren to this guy named Taz. It was Taz’s surrogate grandmother who had died in the fire. And while Darren was in prison, Taz had been sending him messages that said, basically, ‘if I see you, what happens happens, and I’m not going to be held responsible for how I respond.’ But in that moment in Coogan’s, when Peter introduced him, Taz grabbed Darren and said, ‘God forgives you and so do I.’ Then the two of them went on stage and performed together. When I heard that, I knew I would write about them, not only because it’s a remarkable story on its own, but because it shows the power of a place like Coogan’s to bring people together. Murphy: People come together differently in a bar. Michaud: The importance of having a space like that in the neighborhood can’t be overstated. It was a neighborhood that for much of Coogan’s history was a very tense place, a neighborhood where people from different ethnicities distrusted one another. So, to have a place—and there weren’t many of them—where these different groups could meet and talk to one another was essential to the functioning of that society and the pulling together of the community during those difficult years. Coogan’s didn’t do that on its own. But they collaborated with many of the community figures who were stiving to improve life in the neighborhood. They collaborated with non-profit organizations, the police, politicians, sports coaches, all of these people who were working together to make life better. Coogan’s was a place they could interact and collaborate and work together. View the full article

In case you have forgotten, I received a DIY dollhouse kit for my birthday last December. Aside from waiting on a wire to connect the lighting (after which I will glue my roof), it's complete. This adorable project took me about six months to finish. And it taught me powerful lessons on writing I can't wait to share with you all: Slow progress is progress. Since getting this kit, I spent a little bit of time each weekend completing one of the small little pieces that would encompass my DIY bakeshop. Sometimes it was a shelf. Other times it was gluing together pieces of furniture. Sometimes I would use tweezers to balance a tiny little bead on top of a metal object that would look like a part of the coffeehouse equipment. It wasn't fast because it couldn't be. Things needed time to glue and paint needed to dry. And if I rushed it, I know I would have lost patience in the entire process. If all you can do is a little bit at a time in your writing work, that is still progress. All the time I took to complete my bakeshop did lead to finished work, even if it took a long time. The same can be said for your writing. There is a finish line, even if it's slow getting there. Perfection is impossible. I truly believe every writer needs a creative outlet that has nothing to do with writing. One that doesn't include big aspirations. For a while, I used to love creating collages. Well, when I stopped getting magazines, that hobby stopped too. Now it's DIY dollhouses. I love the little furniture pieces and tiny items. And best of all, I get to put it together myself. Many times when completing this craft, I thought to myself: well, I did the best I could. I didn't beat myself over the head with it and wrack my brain on how to make it perfect. The creative process can't be like that. There isn't perfection in creativity. The same can be said of writing. As hard as I try, no short story is perfect. I can do my best, but eventually, I need to send it out there in the world. Attempting to achieve perfection isn't possible, in dollhouses or stories. Turns out, there is time for creativity. I spent a little bit of time each weekend working on this dollhouse. I would normally spend about an hour or an hour and a half on the tiny craft. It wasn't every day. In fact, it wasn't always every weekend. But it was consistent. What I realized is that there is time for creative endeavors, no matter how busy you are in life. If I made room for writing the same way I made room for this craft, I would have made a lot of progress. If you don't have time to write, really take a look at what you are leaving time for during your day. It may surprise you how much time you do have to write. Somewhere in the dollhouse universe, there is a bakeshop put together by yours truly. The chairs are wobbly, and the decor is slightly uneven and misshapen. The shop is kind of cramped, and there's only one table to sit at. But the coffee is strong, the baked goods are fresh, and everyone is welcome. When I remember, I go there in my mind as I write. Imagining myself balancing my notebook on a table that isn't very big and sitting in a seat that is sort of uncomfortable. But what happens there is the most important thing: I write. Nicole Pyles is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. When she's not hunting down the right word, she's talking to God, reviewing books on her writing blog, watching movies, hanging out with family, and daydreaming. Her work has been featured in Ripley's Believe it or Not, WOW! Women on Writing, The Voices Project, Sky Island Journal, and Arlington Literary Journal. Her poetry was also featured in the anthology, Dear Leader Tales. Read her musings at WorldofMyImagination.com. (C) Copyright wow-womenonwriting.com Visit WOW! Women On Writing for lively interviews and how-tos. Check out WOW!'s Classroom and learn something new. Enter the Quarterly Writing Contests. Open Now![url={url}]View the full article[/url]

http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/themes/smartbitches/images/posts/hide-your-wallet.jpg June has kicked off with a pretty exciting release day! Lots of books by SBTB favorite authors are making the cut. One book is already rumored to have a Netflix deal! We’ll see you again next Tuesday! What books are you waiting to arrive on your e-reader today? Tell us below! Charm City Rocks Author: Matthew Norman Released: June 6, 2023 by Dell Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance When a single dad meets the former rock star crush of his youth, everything they thought they knew about happiness and love is thrown into chaos in this hopeful, heartwarming romantic comedy Billy Perkins is happy. No, for real. It’s kind of his thing, actually. And why wouldn’t he be? He loves his job as an independent music teacher and his apartment in Baltimore above a record shop called Charm City Rocks. Most of all, he loves his brainy teenage son, Caleb. Although not the world’s most traditional parent, Billy has plenty to teach his son about art and manhood before Caleb goes off to college. Margot Hammer, on the other hand, is far from happy. The former drummer of the once-famous rock band Burnt Flowers, she’s now a rock and roll recluse living alone in New York City. When a new music documentary suddenly puts Margot back in the spotlight, she begins to realize how much she misses her old band and the music that gave her life meaning. Billy has always had a crush on Margot. But she’s a legitimate rock star—or at least, she was—so he never thought he’d actually meet her. Until Caleb, worried that his easygoing dad might actually be lonely, cooks up a scheme to get Margot to perform at Charm City Rocks. It’s the longest of long shots, but Margot’s label has made it clear that any publicity is an opportunity she can’t afford to miss. When their paths collide, Billy realizes that he maybe wasn’t as happy as he thought—and Margot learns that sometimes the sweetest music is a duet. Sarah: Two podcast guests so far have mentioned this book, and I’m very curious. A single dad meets the former rock star who he had a MAD crush on as a teen. Also Charm City! Add to Goodreads To-Read List → Want this book? We can help: buy links ahoy!. Mickey Chambers Shakes It Up Author: Charish Reid Released: June 6, 2023 by Canary Street Press Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance “A heartfelt opposites-attract romance…” — Publishers Weekly Total opposites. Totally irresistible. Mickey Chambers is an expert at analyzing modern literature. But when it comes to figuring out her own story, she’s feeling a little lost. At thirty-three, she’s an adjunct instructor with a meager summer class schedule and too many medical bills, courtesy of her chronic illness. Picking up a bartending gig seems perfect. Sure, Mickey’s never done this before, but the gorgeous, grumpy bar owner, Diego Acosta, might be the perfect man to teach the teacher…if he wasn’t so stressed. Diego is worried he’s running his late wife’s bar into the ground. Add the pressures of returning to college part-time at forty-two, and it’s no wonder he’s making rash decisions. Like hiring the sunny, sexy woman who looks more at home in a library than slinging beers to rowdy barflies, and who turns out to be teaching his online writing course, a complication neither was expecting… It’s not long before Mickey starts reenergizing The Saloon with cocktails, karaoke and an optimism even Diego can’t ignore. They need to fight their feelings if they want to keep things professional, but all it takes is one sip, one kiss, to shake both their worlds forever… Lara: Someone on TikTok told me to read this book and based on the blurb, I’m sold! Add to Goodreads To-Read List → Want to order this one? We’ve got the links you need!. The Moon Represents My Heart Author: Pim Wangtechawat Released: June 6, 2023 by Blackstone Publishing Genre: Historical: European, Historical: Other, Literary Fiction, Time Travel, Science Fiction/Fantasy A lush, buoyant novel for fans of The Immortalists and Everything I Never Told You, The Moon Represents My Heart follows a Chinese-British family of time travelers as they seek connections over borders―both national borders and those created by time. A love lost in time. An eternity to find it. The Wang family are hiding a secret―they all have the ability to time travel. When parents Joshua and Lily depart for the past and never return, their children Tommy and Eva are forced to deal with their grief alone. Eva might be trying to find her place in the present, but Tommy is pulled further and further into a past that he hopes holds the truth. When he falls in love with a woman from 1930s London Chinatown, his inability to confront his own history has serious ramifications for the people who can truly bring him happiness. Heartfelt and hopeful, weaving through decades and across continents and told through incredible prose, The Moon Represents My Heart is an unforgettable debut about the bond between one extraordinary family and the strength it takes to move forward. Shana: This already has a Netflix deal, and it sounds amazing. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → Want to order this one? We’ve got the links you need!. Mortal Follies Author: Alexis Hall Released: June 6, 2023 by Del Rey Genre: Historical: European, LGBTQIA, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy A young noblewoman must join forces with a rumoured witch to conquer an ancient curse in this devilishly funny and heartwarming sapphic Regency romantasy from TikTok titan and bestselling author of Boyfriend Material Alexis Hall. It is the year 1814 and Miss Maelys Mitchelmore finds her entry into the highest society of Bath hindered by an irritating curse. It begins innocuously enough, with her dress slowly unmaking itself over the course of an evening at the ball of the season, a scandal she only narrowly manages to escape. However, as the curse progresses to more fatal proportions, she realises she must seek out urgent assistance, even if that means mixing with the most undesirable company-and there are few less desirable allies than the brooding Lady Georgiana Landrake-who may or may not have murdered her own father and brothers to inherit their fortune. If one is to believe the gossip, she might be some kind of malign enchantress. Then again, a malign enchantress might be exactly what Miss Mitchelmore needs. Sarah: This book has a gorgeous cover, and…a f/f romance between a noblewoman and a supposed witch? Okay! Elyse: I’ve never read a book from Hall that I haven’t loved. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → Find buy links for this book here.. Pageboy Author: Elliot Page Released: June 6, 2023 by Flatiron Books Genre: Memoir, LGBTQIA, Nonfiction The Oscar-nominated star who captivated the world with his performance in Juno finally shares his truth. “Can I kiss you?” It was two months before the world premiere of Juno, and Elliot Page was in his first ever queer bar. The hot summer air hung heavy around him as he looked at her. And then it happened. In front of everyone. A previously unfathomable experience. Here he was on the precipice of discovering himself as a queer person, as a trans person. Getting closer to his desires, his dreams, himself, without the repression he’d carried for so long. But for Elliot, two steps forward had always come with one step back. With Juno’s massive success, Elliot became one of the world’s most beloved actors. His dreams were coming true, but the pressure to perform suffocated him. He was forced to play the part of the glossy young starlet, a role that made his skin crawl, on and off set. The career that had been an escape out of his reality and into a world of imagination was suddenly a nightmare. As he navigated criticism and abuse from some of the most powerful people in Hollywood, a past that snapped at his heels, and a society dead set on forcing him into a binary, Elliot often stayed silent, unsure of what to do, until enough was enough. Full of behind the scenes details and intimate interrogations on sex, love, trauma, and Hollywood, Pageboy is the story of a life pushed to the brink. But at its core, this beautifully written, winding journey of what it means to untangle ourselves from the expectations of others is an ode to stepping into who we truly are with defiance, strength, and joy. Elliot Page’s memoir hits shelves! Add to Goodreads To-Read List → Want to order this one? We’ve got the links you need!. The Single Dads Club Author: Therese Beharrie Released: June 6, 2023 by Montlake Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance In this warmly funny romance about finding your way, opposites attract when an ex-heiress and a single dad cross paths, only to find that their separate roads may lead them to the same destination. Rowan Quinn knows fatherhood is a role he doesn’t want to take on—until he unexpectedly finds himself a single dad. He uproots his perfectly constructed life to move to a tight-knit coastal community in South Africa where, with the help of his grandmother, Rowan has a shot at giving his son the family he never had. Once footloose and fancy-free, former heiress Delilah Huntington is now a waitress in Sugarbush Bay determined to build a better life and a better self. So when she meets introverted Rowan, she makes it her personal mission to induct him into the town’s circle of single dads to give him the support he needs. The more Delilah lends her help to an out-of-his-depth Rowan, the more Rowan begins to realize that family is what you make it…and, just maybe, Delilah could be part of his. Aarya: The premise is adorable. I’ve always enjoyed Beharrie’s South African-set categories. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → Want this book? We can help: buy links ahoy!. The Sorceress Transcendent Author: Casey Blair Released: June 6, 2023 Genre: Fantasy/Fairy Tale Romance, Novella, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy When Varius, the greatest general of the Aurelian Empire, is forced to flee his homeland, there’s only one person he can turn to. A powerful sorceress and once his most deadly enemy, Theira is the only combatant who’s ever escaped the war between their peoples. But with the memories of how they kept each other going from opposite sides of a battlefield, when a bleeding Varius knocks on her door, she lets him in, even knowing what will follow. Theira may have gotten away, but as long as the war goes on, she’ll never really be free. Now with both their peoples actively hunting them, the two most dangerous fighters in a never-ending war will have to join forces to do the end it once and for all, on their terms. And if they can dare to dream boldly enough, maybe find happiness for themselves, too. The Sorceress Transcendent is a stand-alone enemies-to-lovers epic fantasy romance novella about badasses who enjoy a cozy cup of tea after a long day wreaking epic destruction, because why choose? This story is for everyone who knows what’s coming when your former mortal enemy and best rival knocks on the door in the middle of the night and says, “I had nowhere else to go.” Aarya: The early rave reviews have me intrigued. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → Want to order this one? We’ve got the links you need!. We Could Be So Good Author: Cat Sebastian Released: June 6, 2023 by Avon Genre: Historical: American, LGBTQIA, Romance Nick Russo has worked his way from a rough Brooklyn neighborhood to a reporting job at one of the city’s biggest newspapers. But the late 1950s are a hostile time for gay men, and Nick knows that he can’t let anyone into his life. He just never counted on meeting someone as impossible to say no to as Andy. Andy Fleming’s newspaper-tycoon father wants him to take over the family business. Andy, though, has no intention of running the paper. He’s barely able to run his life—he’s never paid a bill on time, routinely gets lost on the way to work, and would rather gouge out his own eyes than deal with office politics. Andy agrees to work for a year in the newsroom, knowing he’ll make an ass of himself and hate every second of it. Except, Nick Russo keeps rescuing Andy: showing him the ropes, tracking down his keys, freeing his tie when it gets stuck in the ancient filing cabinets. Their unlikely friendship soon sharpens into feelings they can’t deny. But what feels possible in secret—this fragile, tender thing between them—seems doomed in the light of day. Now Nick and Andy have to decide if, for the first time, they’re willing to fight. Sarah: June 6 is going to decimate some book budgets – a new Cat Sebastian? Excellent! Lara: Cat Sebastian is an auto-read for me. Fastest finger first to get that library hold! Add to Goodreads To-Read List → Want to order this one? We’ve got the links you need!. Reckless Author: Elsie Silver Released: June 9, 2023 Genre: Contemporary Romance, Western, Romance Series: Chestnut Springs #4 Theo Silva. Rowdy bull rider. Notorious ladies’ man. Scorching hot trouble wrapped up in a drool-worthy package. And he’s looking at me like I might be his next meal. But I’m almost free of my toxic marriage and have sworn off men entirely. So all I see when I look back is temptation served up with a heaping side of heartbreak. The man is hard to trust—and even harder to resist. Make that impossible. Because Theo is persistent. And no matter how hard I try to freeze him out, he melts my icy exterior and pulls apart all my defenses. Over a drink in a small town bar, I blurt out my deepest, darkest secrets. Then I spend the singular hottest night of my life with him. He worships my body. He makes me blush. I come alive beneath his hands. Then I tell him to forget it ever happened. I want simple, and with him it all feels complicated. It was supposed to be a one-time thing. A secret. But that little plus sign is going to make this secret impossible to keep. Aarya: The thing about this author is that there’s always some ridiculous conflict that decreases my rating, but the writing is compelling enough for me to keep returning to the series. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → Want this book? We can help: buy links ahoy!. View the full article

The Last Tale of the Flower Bride The Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi is $1.99! I believe this is Chokshi’s full-length adult debut. It’s a Gothic fantasy and boy, do I love that cover. A sumptuous, gothic-infused story about a marriage that is unraveled by dark secrets, a friendship cursed to end in tragedy, and the danger of believing in fairy tales—the breathtaking adult debut from New York Times bestselling author Roshani Chokshi. Once upon a time, a man who believed in fairy tales married a beautiful, mysterious woman named Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada. He was a scholar of myths. She was heiress to a fortune. They exchanged gifts and stories and believed they would live happily ever after—and in exchange for her love, Indigo extracted a promise: that her bridegroom would never pry into her past. But when Indigo learns that her estranged aunt is dying and the couple is forced to return to her childhood home, the House of Dreams, the bridegroom will soon find himself unable to resist. For within the crumbling manor’s extravagant rooms and musty halls, there lurks the shadow of another girl: Azure, Indigo’s dearest childhood friend who suddenly disappeared. As the house slowly reveals his wife’s secrets, the bridegroom will be forced to choose between reality and fantasy, even if doing so threatens to destroy their marriage . . . or their lives. Combining the lush, haunting atmosphere of Mexican Gothic with the dreamy enchantment of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, The Last Tale of the Flower Bride is a spellbinding and darkly romantic page-turner about love and lies, secrets and betrayal, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Hang the Moon RECOMMENDED: Hang the Moon by Alexandria Bellefleur is $1.99! Tara read this one and gave it an A-: This book is important for women like me, showing that we can absolutely have our HEA with a man and still proudly claim our queerness. Plus, it’s such a joyful celebration of love that it’s like a warm hug. I thoroughly enjoyed it and will read it again. In a delightful follow-up to Written in the Stars, Alexandria Bellefleur delivers another #ownvoices queer rom-com about a hopeless romantic who vows to show his childhood crush that romance isn’t dead by recreating iconic dates from his favorite films… Brendon Lowell loves love. It’s why he created a dating app to help people find their one true pairing and why he’s convinced “the one” is out there, even if he hasn’t met her yet. Or… has he? When his sister’s best friend turns up in Seattle unexpectedly, Brendon jumps at the chance to hang out with her. He’s crushed on Annie since they were kids, and the stars have finally aligned, putting them in the same city at the same time. Annie booked a spur-of-the-moment trip to Seattle to spend time with friends before moving across the globe. She’s not looking for love, especially with her best friend’s brother. Annie remembers Brendon as a sweet, dorky kid. Except, the 6-foot-4 man who shows up at her door is a certified Hot Nerd and Annie… wants him? Oh yes. Getting involved would be a terrible idea—her stay is temporary and he wants forever—but when Brendon learns Annie has given up on dating, he’s determined to prove that romance is real. Taking cues from his favorite rom-coms, Brendon plans to woo her with elaborate dates straight out of Nora Ephron’s playbook. The clock is ticking on Annie’s time in Seattle, and Brendon’s starting to realize romance isn’t just flowers and chocolate. But maybe real love doesn’t need to be as perfect as the movies… as long as you think your partner hung the moon. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Dinner for One RECOMMENDED: Dinner for One by Sutanya Dacres is $3.99! Sarah had Sutanya on the podcast and this is what she has to say about the book: Sutanya’s book is really moving, and I love memoirs about people who uproot their lives and think about how the place they’ve moved to changes and affects them – and a lot happened in this memoir. I love how much of the book centered around food and there are recipes (one is in my podcast show notes) that I am very eager to try. From podcast host Sutanya Dacres comes Dinner for One, an unforgettable memoir of how she rebuilt her life after her American-in-Paris fairy tale shattered, starting with cooking dinner for herself in her Montmartre kitchen When Sutanya Dacres married her French boyfriend and moved to Paris at twenty-seven, she felt like she was living out her very own Nora Ephron romantic comedy. Jamaican-born and Bronx-raised, she had never dreamed she herself could be one of those American women in Paris she admired from afar via their blogs, until she met the man of her dreams one night in Manhattan. A couple of years later, she married her Frenchman and moved to Paris, embarking on her own “happily-ever-after.” But when her marriage abruptly ended, the fairy tale came crashing down around her. Reeling from her sudden divorce and the cracked facade of that picture-perfect expat life, Sutanya grew determined to mend her broken heart and learn to love herself again. She began by cooking dinner for one in her Montmartre kitchen. Along the way, she builds Parisienne friendships, learns how to date in French, and examines what it means to be a Black American woman in Paris—all while adopting the French principle of pleasure, especially when it comes to good food, and exploring what the concept of self-care really means. Brimming with charm, humor, and hard-won wisdom, Sutanya’s story takes you on an adventure through love, loss, and finding where you truly belong, even when it doesn’t look quite how you expected. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits by Jason Pargin is $1.99! This is book one in the Zoey Ashe series, which I’d say is a mix of thriller, absurdist humor, and sci-fi. I mentioned this one on a previous Hide Your Wallet. In a prosperous yet gruesomely violent near-future, superhero vigilantes battle thugs whose heads are full of supervillain fantasies. The peace is kept by a team of smooth, well-dressed negotiators called The Men in Fancy Suits. Meanwhile a young girl is caught in the middle, and thinks the whole thing is ridiculous. Zoey, a recent college graduate with a worthless degree, makes a reluctant trip into the city after hearing that her estranged con artist father had died in a mysterious yet spectacular way. There she finds that her scumbag dad had actually, in the final years of his life, put his amazing talent for hustling to good use: He was one of the founding members of the Fancy Suits, and died in the course of his duties. Zoey is quickly entangled in the city’s surreal mob war when she is taken hostage by a particularly crazy villain who imagines himself to be a Dr. Doom-level mastermind. The villain is demanding information about Zoe’s father when she is rescued by The Fancy Suits. She reluctantly joins their cause and help finish what her old man started, tapping into her innate talent for bullshit that she inherited from her hated father. And along the way, she might just have to learn how to trust people again. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article