reading log #2
Maybe this is a dangerous thing for a romance author to admit, but I’m getting a little tired of books with sex scenes in them. Not because there’s anything wrong with the genre, per se, but because the rise of romance has made literary fucking feel, sometimes, perfunctory: a bow to audience expectations instead of an organic or necessary piece of the story a particular author is trying to tell.
I don’t mean that in some shitty sex has to advance the plot kind of way. Or maybe I do? I’m not trying to be puritanical, this isn’t a moral issue, everyone should write characters fucking if they want to. I think what I’m saying is, sometimes I read these books and don’t think the author really wants to. They think they have to, either because readers expect it or because they’re not sure how else to create chemistry between their characters, and make sure it pays off.
I hadn’t quite put all of that together until I read Maiga Doocy’s Sorcery and Other Small Magics. In general, I am not someone who enjoys “cozy” anything, but this one really hit for me, I think in part because, despite being sold that way, it’s not actually entirely cozy. How could it be, when it spends so much time investigating the destabilizing, dehumanizing consequences of being under a love spell?
I’m obsessed with work that looks directly at how horrifying love spells are, and have been ever since Skeet Ulrich as Chris got emptied out by one in The Craft. It’s a big topic of my first book, A SONG TO TAKE THE WORLD APART, I think in part because I am so familiar with the particular quicksand of not being able to trust one’s own mind. (Related: my favorite book not about a love spell but about being afraid of your brain is Maggie Stiefvater’s CALL DOWN THE HAWK.)
Anyway, I love the way Doocy does romance and desire in SORCERY. It’s tentative and careful and extremely finely wrought. She doesn’t have the blunt instrument of physicality at her disposal— these characters basically don’t kiss! The whole book!— and she doesn’t need it. Like, don’t get me wrong; I want these characters to kiss, and to fuck, and I hope someday they do. But it was a relief to read something that trusted itself enough to withhold those pleasures for the time being. To ask me to wait, and also, to make the wait feel like it would be more than worth my while.
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Other books, more briefly noted:
I recently finished Hiron Ennes’ LEECH, which Bookpage correctly diagnosed as being for people who wish that “WUTHERING HEIGHTS had been just a little more like Jeff VanderMeer’s ANNIHILATION.” Tamsyn Muir also gave it a WUTHERING HEIGHTS comp. (Also, Tamsyn, I respect your process so much, and I’m not rushing you, I swear, but I think about reading ALECTO every day of my life. Part of all of this speculative fiction reading is just me eternally chasing the high of experiencing GIDEON THE NINTH for the first time.)
LEECH plays with POV in a way I can’t really talk about without spoiling some late plot developments, and it was funny to read it just after Emily St. James’ WOODWORKING, which does the same. They are in so many ways completely different books— WOODWORKING is contemporary realism about gender and LEECH is, well, a gothic fantasy about parasites— but also maybe not, because fundamentally, they’re both about the things that estrange us from ourselves. Just, you know, one has a lot more worms in it.
& last but not least, I sent a broken link for SQUARE WAVES last week! You can actually find it here.