David Wellington has written some fine horror novels: Monster Island, Thirteen Bullets, Frostbite. He’s also published some excellent science fiction: Forbidden Skies and its sequels (written as D. Nolan Clark) and The Last Astronaut. In his new novel Paradise-1 (Orbit, 688 pages, $24), he combines the genres.
What begins as a science fiction story — Alexandra Petrova, an agent for a policing group called Firewatch, is sent on a mission to the deep-space Colony Paradise-1, which has mysteriously gone silent — shades into horror when, unexpectedly, her ship comes under attack from a vessel that appears to have been stripped of human life.
But the situation is much worse than that.
It takes guts to put a monster story inside a science-fiction novel, and Wellington pulls it off spectacularly.
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Speaking of horror, here’s The Marigold (ECW Press, 352 pages, $25) by Ontario’s Andrew F. Sullivan. Set in an unspecified but very near future, it’s a legitimately terrifying story of a city (Toronto) besieged by a black ooze that comes from… well, somewhere, nobody’s really sure, and is steadily invading the city, rotting its buildings and tearing apart its community.
Told from the points of view of a handful of characters, including a government worker who’s determined to fight back against the Wet (as the sludge is informally known), The Marigold is a deeply unsettling novel. Sullivan’s writing is crisp, vivid and occasionally stomach-turning, but also elegant and even, in certain moments, beautiful.
It’s a horror story that pulls you in and won’t let go.
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You might know R.F. Kuang as the author of the 2018 fantasy novel The Poppy War and its two sequels, or perhaps you’ve read Babel, her alternate-history novel from last year. Well, in her new novel, Yellowface (Morrow, 336 pages, $25), she’s doing something entirely new.
Athena Liu is a young literary sensation whose new novel is sure to be a spectacular success. Tragedy strikes: Athena dies suddenly. The only witness to her death is her friend and fellow writer, June Hayward — who, let’s be honest, has not had the same sort of success as Athena.
But that’s about to change: she takes Athena’s manuscript, adopts a vaguely Asian-sounding pseudonym and passes the book off as her own. Let’s just say: this does not go exactly as planned.
Yellowface is a contemporary story set in our familiar world, but in terms of its themes and the richness of its writing, it’s a natural followup to Kuang’s earlier, more fantasy-oriented fiction. A wonderful novel.
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Greek mythology is a rich subject for fiction. Madeline Miller’s 2011 novel The Song of Achilles is still a big seller, and several other writers have recently published their own takes on the ancient Greek myths.
Is there room, you ask, for yet another book? If the book is Ithaca (Redhook, 416 pages, $24) by the incandescently talented Claire North, then the answer is yes.
Ithaca tells the story of Penelope, the wife of King Odysseus who, as you might recall, sailed off to fight in the Trojan War and never came home. Now facing a power struggle to claim the throne of the missing king, Penelope knows she has but one chance to avert a civil war that could tear her world apart.
North, who burst onto the scene with 2014’s magnificent The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, has the remarkable ability to change her literary voice: no two of her novels sound the same. “Rosy-fingered dawn crawled its way across Ithaca’s back like an awkward lover fumbling at long skirts” — the whole book sounds like this: elegant, poetic, with crystal-clear imagery. You must read it.
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Halifax freelancer David Pitt’s column appears the first weekend of every month. You can follow him on Twitter at @bookfella.
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