Book of the Day Roundup: December 9-13, 2024
Making Skeletons Dance
Peter Macsovszky
John Minahane, translator
Seagull Books
Hardcover $29.00 (385pp)
978-1-80309-414-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Peter Macsovszky’s philosophical novel Making Skeletons Dance, a barfly takes on Amsterdam.
As a struggling writer and relative newcomer to the Netherlands, Simon’s perspective on the place is different than most people’s. He spends a restless day traversing Amsterdam with only his notebook and his personal failures for company, reflecting on the circumstances that brought him there and what will happen when—or if—his wife joins him in this city of contrasts and change. He dissects the city’s landmarks and diverse population with equal parts insensitivity and insight, spinning intricate fantasies about his fellow bar patrons. He also embellishes reminiscences of his past and his family’s history. A cat becomes a vessel for an alien researcher; a brief encounter with a bartender flares into furious recollections of a soul-searching trip to Cairo. These musings often blossom into larger contemplations of mortality, religion, society, and foreignness, both his own and other people’s.
Rambling yet often poetic prose is used to relate the jumble of Simon’s thoughts and, later, his soliloquy to a patient bartender who is the only person in the city he feels comfortable spilling his troubles to. Amsterdam is a lively place with a bevy of potential distractions, but Simon, nervous and uncharitable, finds little to love outside of the alcohol and the occasional remembrance of his wife, whose imminent arrival inspires visceral downward spirals of anxiety in her devoted yet flawed husband. An ambiguous ending leaves the fate of both Simon and his relationship with his wife a mystery. He ends as he began, adrift in a world that he has never been able to find a place in.
Making Skeletons Dance is an introspective novel about a man who can only confront his demons through the lens of fiction.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (October 14, 2024)
How We Know Our Time Travelers
Anita Felicelli
WTAW Press
Softcover $18.95 (216pp)
979-898771977-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Anita Felicelli’s stunning short story collection How We Know Our Time Travelers, technology and the supernatural are rival routes to understanding time, loss, and memory.
These speculative stories are set in California in the near future and are marked by environmental anxiety. Many of their characters have South Asian backgrounds. A nascent queer romance between co-op grocery colleagues defies an impending tsunami. A painter welcomes a studio visitor who could be her estranged husband traveling from the past or his double. A study-abroad student boards a plane to the future and is aghast to find her boyfriend a staid family man. A scientist incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital for seeking an immortality elixir exchanges letters with a former love interest.
Mysterious “fog catchers” recur in multiple stories. Other subtle links appear; a sense of the uncanny weaves throughout. Sometimes, realistic situations are upended by paranormal activity: In “The Moment,” Valentine disappears while test-driving Ezekiel’s car on their first date; she’s no common thief, but a time traveler. Other times, magical experiences have logical explanations: Amrita’s vision of movers absconding with her belongings is a sign of dementia.
Memory bridges the human and the artificial, as in “The Glitch,” wherein a coder, bereaved by wildfires, lives alongside holograms of her wife and children. But technology, though a potential means of connecting with the dead, is not an unmitigated good. In the outstanding, Bluebeard-inspired “Assembly Line,” a man preserves his late girlfriend via automata. Other creative reinterpretations of traditional stories and figures involve urban legends, a locked room mystery, a poltergeist, and a golem.
In the grief- and regret-tinged speculative stories of How We Know Our Time Travelers, heartbroken people can’t alter their pasts, so they’ll mold the future instead.
REBECCA FOSTER (October 14, 2024)
Ageless
Renée Schaeffer
CamCat Books
Softcover $18.99 (336pp)
978-0-7443-1002-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Renée Schaeffer’s distinctive novel Ageless, an immortal woman struggles through centuries of tremendous social, scientific, and political changes.
Naissa is born into a loving family in 1850, but she loses them to shellfish poisoning at a family dinner. The poison doesn’t affect her, and once she becomes a woman, she realizes that her body doesn’t age either. This anomaly becomes dangerous when others grow old and notice that she does not. Forced to change identities every few decades, she suffers serial losses of loved ones, demonstrating immortality’s cruel monotony. Naissa vows to stop loving to avoid being hurt—unless she can find other ageless people.
Naissa narrates most of the novel; the chapters are assigned a date range and are prefaced by summaries of each era’s major events, helping to contextualize Naissa’s long personal history. Brief interludes from other perspectives are scattered throughout; these breaks from the immortality dilemma include notes on scientific experiments and missives from Rys, a person shrouded in mystery. Questions about how these outside interludes connect to Naissa’s story drive the plot forward, as do questions about the value of eternal life.
The prose changes with the centuries, moving from ornate, upper-class Victorian diction to idioms from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and then to technology jargon that reflects Naissa’s scientific accomplishments. By the time she becomes a part of space travel, Naissa is in worldwide demand as a genetics expert; exposure could place her body and soul in peril, and this realization builds intrigue, as does the fact that aberrant but lasting love seems within her grasp.
Ageless transforms from a Gothic orphan tale to a gripping story centering women’s power.
MICHELE SHARPE (October 14, 2024)
Ten-Word Tiny Tales of Love
Joseph Coelho
Candlewick
Hardcover $18.99 (56pp)
978-1-5362-4129-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
From one author and twenty-one illustrators comes this collection of ten-word stories that are, at turns, humorous, touching, and fantastical. The variety of art styles is enchanting: each artist approaches their prompt in a different way. Some are literal, while others make a meal of ambiguity. Though there is delight in the differences, the book rests on a single unifying theme: whether for a sister, a dog, the planet, or a bicycle, every story is brimming with love.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (October 14, 2024)
Skinship
James Reich
Anti-Oedipus Press
Softcover $18.95 (192pp)
979-898654796-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In James Reich’s science fiction novel Skinship, a generation ship containing the last human beings endures a ponderous journey whilst combating a mutiny.
Applewhite is the first navigator of The Charcot, a living ship carrying the last people from dying Earth. His job is to handle the improbable nature of space travel while keeping the ship pointed in the right direction. This job is made near impossible by a mutiny championed by the Printers, the secretive sect responsible for the production of physical goods.
The Printers want to redirect the ship toward a more hostile planet. Countering the mutiny is Archivist Monamy, a nonhuman keeper of collective human memories. Monamy keeps Applewhite’s stored consciousness safe every time the crew turns on him. The taut cat-and-mouse chase builds to a harrowing moment when the crew must decide to which planet The Charcot will divert.
Life aboard the skinship—named for the exotic material that contains and expands it during the travels—is shown through the eyes of Monamy, Applewhite, and a handful of human passengers. The nonhuman crew are responsible for the humans but are detached from their charges by their very nature, resulting in an unsettling relationship. The prose becomes almost eerie in its depictions of the inhuman crew and their ultimate goal of “a planet overgrown with white plastic, the inhabitants of the skinship drowning, reaching from the wax-like figurines from Dante, trapped in the apocalypse of artifice.” It is intimate, too, as when it focuses on Applewhite or Monamy’s thoughts to explain the surreal ship setting, the Printers, and to consider whether humans can thrive among the stars.
Skinship combines body horror with ecological horror as human beings attempt to survive in an unforgiving universe aboard an ever-evolving ship crewed by automatons.
JOHN M. MURRAY (December 4, 2024)
Kathy Young
