#Review - Starling House by Alix E Harrow

Starling House

Alix E Harrow

Macmillan, 31 October 2023

Available as: HB, 320pp, e, audio

Source: Advance copy

ISBN(HB): 9781529061123

I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me with an advance e-copy of Starling House via Netgalley to consider for review.

Starling House is the creepy story you were looking for - or that you should have been looking for - this Hallowe'en. But it's much much more than that. In the hardscrabble town of Eden, Kentucky, where bad luck seems more common than in the rest of the country, stands a peeling, decaying mansion surrounded by a garden run wild. Sometimes, a single lit window shows at night. 

In the house lives Arthur Starling, a recluse, cloistered among vines and surrounded by stories...

Also living in Eden - a less apt name it would be hard to find - is young Opal, a woman orphaned by her mother's car accident who has devoted herself to racing her younger bother Jasper. The siblings live in a motel room - Room 12 - which her mum somehow managed to secure for them from testy landlady Bev. Everything about Opal's life seems tenuous, from her place in Eden's society (she's widely held, correctly, to be a thief) to her hold on her job, to her right to be her bother's guardian, even to her romantic relationships (dismissed as 'mutual groping'). Opal's overriding project - the one item on her list - is her quest to get Jasper out of the town, where coal dust and asthma are destroying his lungs to a place at a posh college. Jasper is bright and hardworking has been accepted (though he hasn't informed him that she applied...) but how can Opal possibly afford to pay?

Luckily, she manages to blag a job as caretaker at the Scary Old House (don't go near the scary old house, Opal!) and Arthur seems to have cash to spare. Apparently a haughty, antisocial man who gets up to who knows what in the darkness and whose parents also came to a Bad End, he and Opal seem bound to run each other up the wrong way. As they meet - and clash - we learn the origin story, or stories, (we are told several versions) for Starling House, which concern a 19th century writer, Eleanor Starling, whose husband died on her wedding day and whose dark take on the fantastic is still in print 150 years later. Distrusted in her home town, and always daggers drawn with Gravely, the local mine-owners whose fortune was built on enslavement and exploitation, Eleanor lived a lonely life in the house that she built.

It turns out that Arthur is more than just the latest of the Starlings, but that he is a Warden of sorts, fulfilling Eleanor's design but also keeping her supernatural legacy in check. What's going on under Eden is complicated, a delicate balance established by the Gravelys' cruelty and exploitation, Eleanor's determination to make her own stories, and the subsequent decades of conflict. It's a balance that is now threatened by Opal's trespassing on Starling land, for she, too, has secrets - even if she doesn't know them.

This was a powerful and effecting story. There is a strong romantic subplot, which absolutely feels right here but creates great jeopardy. Opal has poured her life and energy into protecting her brother rather than herself which has left her unknowingly vulnerable. Similarly, Arthur, driven by guilt and notions of duty, has turned inwards, determined to do what it takes to be the last Warden. Almost from the first meeting something smoulders between the two, but Harrow delicately draws out the subsequent ignition, raising questions about whether it could result in a fire that burns the town to the ground.

Something Eden does, perhaps, deserve, for all those averted eyes, that tolerance of injustice, that profiting from misery and injustice. Starling House embodies questions about history and about the ability of powerful men to bend reality, to get their way. Eden's chemical pollution - filthy air, filthy river, tainted groundwater - is accompanied by a kind of supernatural wrongness, leading to that aforementioned bad luck. It's a wrongness that has come to the attention of the power-hungry, who will do whatever they need to to grasp at and use it, even if they break Opal and Arthur in the process - another way in which they are vulnerable.

Consequences. Guilt. Original Sin - this version of Eden embodies all of them. The town is built from  that sort of crooked timber of which nothing straight can be made - and everyone seems to know it's and not know it. Against this, what use can Opal's small efforts achieve?

A totally riveting read from Alix E Harrow, possibly her best book yet, you really need to read this.

For more information about Starling House, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - All the Names Given by Raymond Antrobus

Artwork and design by
Phoebe Boswell

All the Names Given 
Raymond Antrobus
Picador, 2 September 2021
Available as: PB, 96pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy 
ISBN(PB): 9781529059502

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of All the Names Given to consider for review.

Raymond Antrobus's new collection of poems follows up on The Perseverance, which I reviewed a couple of years ago when it was nominated for The Times Young Writer of the Year award (I was one of the judges for the award's Shadow Panel).

Some of the themes explored in All the Names Given - identity, (dis)ability, family - are similar, but there are also big differences. I felt that in reading All the Names Given, I wasn't actually experiencing a collection so much as a single whole work. A structural feature here underlies that - the separate poems are integrated by their own [Caption Poems], material which serves to comment on and support the transitions between the poems and sometimes even to invade them, introducing another voice alongside the poem itself. This idea, which Antrobus explains is inspired by the work of Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, both adds to the effect of the poems and calls attention to aspects of the collection, either setting up the reader for what is to come ('[sound of mirrors breaking inside mirrors]') or providing some formal space to absorb and reflect on what has just gone ('[             ]'). 

For me, it made reading the collection resemble the experience of a piece of classical music, with various themes and emotions evolving on different levels and different timescales both within single poems and through the book as a whole.

More important, perhaps, is that the themes and the form of the poems maps a sort of journey. The book opens with a welcome in the form of a caption '[sound of mouth and arms opening]' setting us up for a beginning, a thankful beginning 

'Give thanks to the wheels touching tarmac at JFK

Give thanks to the latches, handles, what we squeeze...

Give thanks to your name, Antrobus, to landings

and beginnings, your soul needs time to arrive.'

This untitled opening poem is one of several touching on the poet's name (from his English mother, referring to a village in Cheshire, actually not far from where I grew up). It's immediately paired in the book with respects paid to his Jamaican father in a dream conversation, 'The Acceptance', which calls to mind the title of the earlier collection 'The Perseverance'). There follows an account of visiting Antrobus itself - the pub, the Big House - in 'Antrobus or Land of Angels', a poem with so many gloriously quotable lines from it opening

'I can be fiendish, I can't be English, say ghosts'

to the wary response of the landlord in the pub

'The barman's eyes in the Antrobus Arms

become sharp gates when I claim to to be English'

To a defiant assertion of belonging - or at least origin

'My mother, born here

My grandfather, the local preacher'

to an immediate confusion

'Oh, well then, welcome, he says, or land your angels

(There are enigmas in my deafness).'

continuing to a joining-up of the two sides of Antrobus's heritage (the poet and the place

'Sir Edmund Antrobus, (3rd baronet)

slaver, beloved father

over-seer, owner of plantations

in Jamaica, British Guiana and St Kitts.'

(In a later poem we learn that the 4th baronet literally owned Stonehenge, this in a poem about Antrobus's grandmother ending with the moving lines

'how lasting their voices

inside us. How deeply known.')

I think that to get the best effect (or perhaps I should say the complete effect) from this book, you should read it through in one sitting, experiencing the poems as set out with their commentary, rather than dipping into it, the poems are still, read singly, starkly moving experiences and 'Antrobus or Land of Angels' is a gorgeous example, balancing or at least presenting so many contradictions. It's followed immediately by 'Language Signs' with further thoughts on that grandfather, that father ('How do I bring back men who couldn't speak, men lost in books, drinks, graves?') 

The closeness of these two poems is emphasised by another caption '[sound of connection across time]' leading into another praise poem 'On Touch'

'Salute the touches of teachers

dentists and therapists who untangle us...'

followed in succession by 'Her taste' (a nice association!) pondering Antrobus's mother's preference in men and then, in 'Text and image' the first introduction of Tabitha, who plays a greater and greater part in these poems. 'Text and Image' (the first one, on p14) is a sweet (in a good way) and slightly desperate love poem

'Tabitha; y haven't u told me u luv me

Raymond; I'm literally writing you love poems...'

(There is another 'Text and Image' (p33) which picks up the theme of being in a cinema - this time, in a dream, Raymond speaking - possibly answered by Tabitha ('Text and Image', p53) the visual element not being the painting she's working on.)

The story (is it a story? I think it's a story) then has a kind of back and to between thoughts own Antrobus's mother and his grandmother, his mother's comments on her scrapbook giving scenes form what sounds like a very full life, the thoughts on his grandmother taking a darker turn as it seems she and his father didn't get on: Tabitha's horrified reaction while 'sitting by the Mississippi', Antrobus's wondering where the story really starts - with which of the ancestors or trains of circumstance leading to now?

I am, I think, in danger of giving a running commentary on All the Names Given, or displaying a collection of bits and pieces, either of which would do a read disservice to this remarkable book and the lucid, taut language in which Antrobus expresses himself. Partly that's because having read, and re-read it, and reading it again as I write this review, I keep discovering marvellous new things and wanting to say "look!" 

Tabitha, art conservator, viewing with Antrobus an 1860 painting (by another Antrobus) 'Plantation Burial' and explaining the 'several kinds of black' used in it. His father's 'heartless sense of humour' which he believes he has inherited. Very personal episodes, when Antrobus comments on the risky and marginal lives of other Black and Deaf people, and a close escape with the police (he couldn't hear what they wanted).

The book is full of gems, moments of realisation, moments when Antrobus so skilfully makes us see (hear) - those captions used so subtly to set the mood or, in a couple of places, defiantly seize the page like protesters storming a stage ('The Royal Opera House (with Stage Captions)' is a wonderful poem whether as a standalone or as part of the wider story, as is the poem that follows it 'Horror Scenes as Black English Royal (Captioned)')

More, behind this, there is so much life here. Mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, explorations of what it is to be a son, courtship, a wedding, all seen with clarity, the book's captioning and story-ness allowing the same things to be on view from many different directions, complementing the complicated, contested and wonderfully human identities being examined and experienced. 

I think All the Names Given is even better than The Perseverance (which is itself very, very good) and I'd strongly recommend it.

For more information about All the Names Given, see the publisher's website here.

About Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus was born in London, Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father, he is the author of To Sweeten Bitter and The Perseverance. In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre.

He is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, The Complete Works 3 and Jerwood

Compton. He is also one of the world's first recipients of an MA in Spoken Word education from Goldsmiths University. 

Other accolades include the Ted Hughes award, PBS Winter Choice, A Sunday Times Young Writer of the year award, The Guardian Poetry Book Of The Year 2018, as well as a shortlist for the Griffin Prize and Forward Prize. In 2018 he was awarded The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize (Judged by Ocean Vuong) for his poem 'Sound Machine'. Also in 2019, his poem ‘Jamaican British’ was added to the GCSE syllabus.

Review - Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Dread Nation
Justina Ireland
Titan Books, 26 February 2019
PB, e 444pp

I'm grateful to Titan for a free advance copy of Dread Nation to read and review.

Sometimes when you're considering what to read, the description of the book can be its own worst enemy. Looking at Dread Nation, the phrase "walking dead" very nearly put me off - I've never really got the zombie thing (not that you'll find that world in this book) - but fortunately, on this occasion the cover came to the rescue, that depiction of a young Black woman in formal 19th century dress about to wield a sickle against... what? We may be told not to judge a book by its cover but in this case it really does represent the story very well.

This is Jane's story, Jane McKeene that is, a young women born in what are clearly very irregular circumstances on a planation in Kentucky during the American Civil War. As if that wasn't dramatic enough, history is about to take a swerve as the dead rise - Union dead, Confederate dead, any dead - and set about the living. (Ireland uses the term "shambles" for these revenants). The Civil War is soon put on hold as the country struggles to keep the dead at bay (yes, I do feel there's a metaphor going on here) and one result is combat schools for Native Americans and people of colour who are to bear the burden of the combat. (Odd, that...) Jane is one such, the star of Miss Preston's School of Combat. Needless to say, she's a headstrong, wilful girl who gets into a lot of trouble and is soon heading off on an adventure...

Despite my coolness towards zombies, I really loved this book. First, I enjoyed the way Ireland integrates her story fully with the politics and culture of the time, so it arises from the reality of people who were previously enslaved but now are barely free, and certainly bear the burden of prejudice. Having them co-opted by the authorities to the front line in the war with the shamblers encapsulates this brilliantly.

As Jane soon finds out, it's actually worse than that. The rules she thinks govern her life turn out to be worth little, with political machinations, criminal gangs and mad scientists rampant. Such stability as Jane enjoyed is blown to bits and she's left with little to rely on but her courage, her skill at fighting and an inner strength that derives, ultimately from her sufferings and her desire to be reunited with her mother.

In chapters punctuated by a somewhat Jane Austenesque correspondence between Jane and her mother, which contrasts with the grim and violent world Jane now inhabits, we see the consequence of that. It's pretty much nonstop action, some parts of which are very grim, but leavened by Jane's opinions on life, her narration of her earlier life (she's already survived at least three attempts to kill her) and - which I found quite moving - her solidarity with her friends, even those who've hurt her in the past. There are also insights into issues such as people of colour who can "pass" as White, and the cost of doing that and the maintenance of authority by perverted religion.

Besides the political/ cultural resonances of the story, I  also loved that Ireland takes an idea - zombies - which is often done in a modern, post-apocalyptic kind of way, and locates it instead in a different setting - but one which appeals strongly to the imagination, for example allowing the panoply of the Western (the bad Sheriff, the besieged town) to appear.

Add in the mystery of how the shamblers began, the equivocal role of several of the characters here, and the wider - and perilous - situation of humanity, and you get a roller-coaster of a book with plenty to grab the attention. Jane is heroic, the villains are satisfyingly villainous, behaving like brutes and spouting a vile everyone-should-know-their-place philosophy to justify their own privilege, and the threat of the shamblers is ever present.

Looking forward to reading the next instalment of these adventures!

Review - The Changeling by Victor LaValle

The Changeling
Victor LaValle
Canongate Books, 5 July 2018
PB, 448pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book via NetGalley.

Like LaValle's last book, The Ballad of Black Tom (my review here) The Changeling brings the fantastical and magical to New York, but whereas Ballad was very much a riposte to the racial (indeed racist) subtext of HP Lovecraft's cosmic horror,  Changeling is more of a riff on a classic trope of fairy stories, the baby stolen away (and replaced) by the Other. In locating this in the modern US and having it happen to people of colour one can't but reflect on a history of racism, but LaValle's focus is more on what has happened - or not happened - and on its effect on a family: where the earlier book addressed matters of race head on, this one is perhaps more focussed on gender, looking at the impact of a new baby on a family, the roles of mothers and fathers, the precariousness of womens' place in this world - and, ultimately, the steps they may go to for security.

That said, with the main protagonists being people of colour, race issues are never far away. There is its effect on Apollo's career as a dealer in rare books - often refused access to house sales. There is a scene where Emma and her sister wander into a park where some (White) mothers are with their children. Who are these Black women? Nannies perhaps? And so on. A litany of little differences, leading up to the moment when two cops find Apollo, late at night, in the determinedly White neighbourhood of Little Norway.

Lavalle takes his time establishing what is going on, describing in detail the background of Apollo and Emma, especially how Apollo's mother Lillian fled Uganda, came to New York and met Brian - who subsequently fades from the picture, so that she brings up her son alone. A sense of mystery about this chimes with the theme of the book, of vanishings and parenthood. Similarly, Emma  and her sister are orphans and the details aren't clear until later in the book. I like the fact that Lavalle doesn't rush - these stories are interesting in themselves, especially how Apollo builds up his rare books business. This lead up - and the subsequent very tender, story of Emma and Apollo's courtship, marriage and of her pregnancy - really grounds the book in the world of New York, and in a sense of realism: there is nothing 'weird' going on or at least nothing weirder than the early 21st century generally has to offer (which is perhaps not quite the same thing).

All this is, though, only the build up to a shocking, shattering event. It would absolutely be a spoiler to say what this is, beyond the fact that it concerns that central family, and that they'll never be the same again. LaValle really plays with your (the reader's) sympathies here (a good thing!) and the book left me questioning  everything I thought I'd understood so far . It then places the reader, with one of the main characters, in some pretty unsavoury company as they (the character) try to come to terms with what's happened. The book raises questions about trust, truth and commitment. It's desperate, heartwrenching stuff which moves the story on at pace much more than in the first part and creates a compelling situation. I did wonder whether - after that patient, early work - Lavalle hadn't, still, skipped something here. Basically a storm blows up in the family: but while we are given some early hints of trouble, a great deal of the development seems to be covered when the story skips several months, resuming with things about to reach a crisis. At the risk of making for a very long story, I'd like to have seen more filled in here.

That's only a small reservation, because once the crisis hits, it really hits and the fallout from what is a truly devastating event tales a long time to settle.

We watch, in shock, as things go on, meeting those unsavoury characters and caring about the path our protagonist seems to taking. Things seem to lurch from bad to worse, until Lavalle pivots the book and makes it into something rather different from what one assumed, showing everyone's actions in a very different light. I apologise if that seems cryptic, but I don't want to spoil the story.

A book about women and men, parenthood, trust, and secrets, The Changeling provides a great deal to think about. Inspired by fairytales it may be, but this is a gritty, contemporary fantasy-romance which grips in every page.

Review - Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

Image from www.harpercollins.com

Lovecraft Country
Matt Ruff
US: Harper, 2016
UK: Picador, 25 January 2018
HB, 372pp
Source: Bought

This book could be regarded as a series of interlinked short stories/ novellas, or as a longer narrative in chapters. The difference isn't perhaps very important but the choice of form does explicitly emulate the way the Lovecraft mythos was constructed - as does the content: As Atticus, George, Montrose and their family go live their lives and go about their business they encounter the same looming theme of ancient evil from beyond time as Lovecraft's protagonists.

It's in the "daily lives" though that the differences start to arrive. There is a counterpoint theme, also of ancient evil but a much less alien, more recognisable and, yes, more frightening evil: racism. Specifically, racism in the United States in the mid twentieth century. Atticus, George, Montrose, Ruby, Hippolyta, Horace and the other central characters in this book are black. The story(ies) are told from their point of view: when a character appears who's white, we're told that: the issue of whether or not they're a particularly hostile, dangerous white is never far away, whether implicitly or explicitly; daily life is an endless matter of calculating safety and danger; the family history is full of the fruits of slavery, and everyone is living with its consequences.

The very chapter (or story) headings, for the most part, reflect this, giving accounts of pogroms or escapes, murders, legally sanctioned discrimination (for example, restrictive covenants preventing property sales to black people) and other horrors.

And these are true horrors. Towards the end of the book, we read this account:

'We were on the grass in front of someone's house. The people inside heard me yelling and the porch lights came on. I saw my father had been shot in the side and there was blood coming out of his mouth. He has this look on his face. Horror. Horror at the universe. I was too young to understand it. I thought he was afraid because he was dying, but that wasn't it at all. It wasn't until I had a son of my own - a son who wouldn't listen - that I understood what he felt. 

He wasn't afraid for himself. He was afraid for me. He wanted to protect me. He had: he saved my life, getting me away from that gunfight. But the night wasn't over and he knew he wasn't going to be there to see me through it. That's the horror, the most awful thing: to have a child the world wants to destroy and know that you're helpless to help him.'

If you want a real description of awful, cosmic horror, isn't that it? The burbling, sanity blasting Lovecraftian things-from-beyond-time really come down to this: powers that will come and destroy those you love. Powers that would brush you aside like a gnat. But we don't have to wait till for an alignment in the heavens for these to manifest - they are here and around us already.

In this book, we see relatively little of the classic horror tropes - and those we do see have generally been summoned or conjured by white cultists in their white robes. We see far more casual prejudice, malice, hatred - the sort of hatred that will shoot a father, burn his son, rob and lie. The Turners, the Dandridges, the Berrys aren't surprised when these powerful white men (they are mostly men) grasp magical power too, just as they hold sway in day to day life. It's only to be expected, and all part of the real horror.

The reader soon learns to beware of every random encounter with a figure of (white) authority. These can easily end up with the protagonist dead, arrested, fired, or driven away. Hence those endless calculations of risk and options: hence the book which George publishes, The Safe Negro Travel Guide, which gives advice on where to go and where to avoid, which restaurants will serve his readers, where one can stop to use the toilet even. It's a book that has to be constantly updated.

In a world where this is the mundane reality, is there really much additional horror from a thing with many tentacles that lives beyond the stars?

I feel that Ruff has brought off a brilliant conjunction here - the stars must be right! - between reality and fantasy horror and moreover to do so he's repurposed writings from an author who is - as Montrose points out early on - deeply problematic in his racial views, views that also seeped into his works. I would say it turns Lovecraft's writing on its head, but it's more a drawing out of what is already there to make them, in effect, challenge themselves.

I realise all the foregoing may make this book sound like the driest of  polemics, but it's really not. The stories explore and in some cases parody or reconstruct a variety of genres from outright horror to fantasy and even Golden Age SF. They are peopled by a gallery of characters - the whites who mess up the lives of Ruff's protagonists aren't, for the most part, cardboard racists (a few are). We have a shrewd magician who sees the advantage of treating well those who are, in an ironic twist, his distant relatives, descended from a fleeing slave of his family. There is an irate ghost who comes to an accommodation with the new occupants of his house, to everyone's advantage - while the (living) neighbours are still (literally) throwing shit at the house. It's a complex world where there are opportunities as well as risks, but, unsurprisingly, the dice are loaded against you (if you're black).

The book also has moments of great humour, particularly in the stories that involve Ruby who has some truly strange experiences that give her, perhaps, a perspective not available to the other characters, alongside the terror. But it ends on an ironic and - in light of recent events - rather sad note, quoting from the 1955 edition of George's Guide which looks forward to '...the time, not far off now, when all travellers are treated as equals'.

We still wait for that time. May it be with us soon.

For more information on the book see here.