Once Was Willem by M.R. Carey
“Eleven hundred and some years after the death of Christ, in the kingdom that had but recently begun to call itself England, I, Once Was Willem rose from the dead to defeat a great evil facing the humble village of Cosham. The words enclosed herein are true.”
When Willem dies, too soon, too young, his parents can’t stand the thought of having lost him. They find a sorcerer, quite by accident, and the sorcerer brings Willem back to life (for a fee). But what comes back to life is not really the same old Willem, rather it’s a somewhat confused and confusing assembly of his dead bones and flesh infused with a jumble of his old memories. His parents flee from him in grief and horror and his community rejects him. Eventually, he makes the best of things and makes a new life for himself in the wild. He also takes a new name, Once Was Willem.
Meanwhile, the sorcerer who brought Willem back to life, ends up in cahoots with a local bandit who has taken over a local castle and its fief. While the bandit turned lord covets worldly power and riches, the sorcerer covets the mysterious magical power he can sense beneath the castle. The sorcerer will stop at nothing to tap into this power source, and the new lord will stop at nothing to keep his ill-gotten wealth and power. Their machinations are bad news for the villagers of Cosham, and Once Was Willem, who get caught up and dragged into some terrible shenanigans.
There is a lot of blood and gore, violence and death in this book, yet it also has an oddly wholesome charm that mainly comes from Once Was Willem’s found family of monstrous misfits, a family bound together by friendship rather than blood. Freaks and monsters, as it turns out, make for better company than Willem’s ever had. Once Was Willem is a riot to read. There’s mysterious magic, ghosts, and monsters, and our hero must fight intolerance, fear, and greed as well as evil. Carey’s strength, in this book as in many of his other works, is that he has empathy for (almost) all his characters, capturing their vulnerabilities, and strengths. There’s a beautifully detailed complexity to the relationships between these characters in Once Was Willem, as the humanity of monsters, and the monstrousness of humans, are revealed.
***
The Butcher’s Daughter: The Hitherto Untold Story of Mrs. Lovett by David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh Clark
“London, 1887: At the abandoned apartment of a missing young woman, a dossier of evidence is collected, ordered chronologically, and sent to the Chief Inspector of the London Metropolitan Police. It contains a frightening correspondence between an inquisitive journalist, Miss Emily Gibson, and the woman Gibson thinks may be the infamous Mrs. Lovett—Sweeney Todd’s accomplice…”
Death, often gruesome and gory, stalks the pages of this book which is only right and proper in a story about Mrs. Lovett, the penny-dreadful-famous pie-maker who helped Sweeney Todd conceal his victims in pie dough. Demchuk and Clark grab this story by the guts and turn it into a suspenseful, visceral, and macabre mix of historical fiction, gothic horror, and psychological crime thriller.
The book is set in the early years of Victorian London, and the descriptions of the city, its streets and alleys, its guts and organs, its scents and stench, and of its inhabitants—the wealthy in their silks and perfumes, and the poor in their rags and grime—shape and permeate the tale as it shapes and permeates the main character.
As for her, the woman who reveals her life story, bit by bit, in letters addressed to the inquisitive journalist Miss Gibson, she obfuscates her true identity at first, but it’s not great spoiler to reveal that she is, or was, Mrs. Lovett.
By giving the story completely to Mrs. Lovett herself to tell (we never read Miss Gibson’s letters to her, and only ever see one side of the epistolary conversation with brief interjections from police documents), we are drawn into the story the same way Miss Gibson clearly was. What we find in the letters is a woman who has been stalked by death throughout her life, from her childhood in the bloody butcher shop where she learned how animals are turned to meat, through a nightmarish stint in a rich surgeon’s home, to her days in the pie shop. As disturbing as her story is, it feels like an honest and truthful account of her past. However, as any storyteller or reader should know, telling the truth can be just another way to obfuscate what really happened because even if you tell nothing but the truth, you rarely tell the whole of it. And what is left unsaid is as important as anything else Mrs. Lovett chooses to reveal.
***
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
“A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits.”
Like The Butcher’s Daughter, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is an epistolary novel, told in letters and journal entries, weaving together historical and fictional horrors in a tale that is a fierce and transformative take on vampire lore, a blistering revenge story, and a piercing, ferocious take on the brutal, genocidal violence against native Americans that helped birth the United States. Specifically, Jones’s story is based in part on the 1870 Marias massacre where U.S. troops attacked a camp of nearly 200 Piegan, or Blackfeet, people in what is now Bear Creek, Montana.
Good Stab the man, such as he was with all his hopes and strengths and failings, died in an encounter with soldiers who were transporting a very strange man, or creature, in a cage. He died but comes back, and when he comes back, he is changed. Jones puts his own spin on vampires here, and one of his most interesting twists is that vampires slowly change into whatever creatures they feed on, whether human or animal (or fish, as it turns out).
We see most of Good Stab’s story through the eyes of a Lutheran pastor who lives in a small town where a series of terrible deaths occur, deaths that creep ever closer to the pastor’s own life, and past. Church, crosses, prayers, faith…none of those things protect you from vampires in this tale, especially not from Good Stab who is a vampire with a singular purpose: to exact revenge on those who murdered his people.
“What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.”
There are a lot of gut-wrenching, harrowing, gory deaths in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, but what haunted me throughout the book, and what clearly haunts Good Stab, is that day when his old life ends and his new life begins. That memory, of the everyday life in the community he left, the people he lost, and of a world that will never be again, moves like an ocean of grief and loss and profound sadness beneath the horrors and Blood Stab’s intricately crafted revenge.
***
Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins
“Told entirely through obituaries and ricocheting through time, Remember You Will Die is an innovative, genre-bending epic about the messy tapestry of human history and the threads that connect us, told through the eyes of Peregrine, an AI mother grappling with the unexpected death of her human daughter, Poppy.”
Reading this book actually felt somewhat unsettling at first because when I started reading, I couldn’t see the pattern yet, only the first carefully crafted clippings that make up the beginning of the collage. Soon, though, the bits of lives and deaths, people and places, described and mourned in obits, connect and touch in ways that make the pattern, the story, emerge.
This is one book where I went looking for an interview with the author after reading, and what I found was Robins writing about her book at Scalzi’s The Big Idea, where she describes it as “a nonlinear, fragmentary novel about a nonhuman character,” and as “a story told exclusively through linked (fake!) obituaries, etymologies, and ‘found’ news clippings, told out of order, mixing genres with gleeful abandon, spanning over 300 years and two planets, and having no semblance of typical narrative conventions.”
I love books that play with structure, and Remember You Will Die is a creatively crafted literary experiment that gains emotional weight and heft with every obituary.
***
Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou
“The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord’s baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere….wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost.”
Theodoridou takes on the bloody tale of Bluebeard in this book, dissecting the tale and rearranging its parts into a new, more complicated pattern. The tale does begin with Agnes who arrives at the great manor house after the death of her baby. Caring for the lord’s young son becomes her life and calling. What she doesn’t know when she first arrives, but soon understands, is that there is a darkness, both alluring and devouring, that marks the family she serves. The local lord, and his son, have a power over others, and the world, that seems inescapable. Those drawn into the orbit of these men become trapped:
“If you leave you die. But if you die, you stay.”
Sour Cherry is told as a story within a story. The storyteller, the narrator who flits in and out of view, is telling us the story from a place in the present, but the roots of her story reach into the past, into folklore and myth. Theodoridou’s prose is beautiful, but this is also a dark, tough read because it delves so deep into the reasons (beyond fear and threats) that make some women stay with men who are no good for them or anyone else. Because things die around the men at the heart of Sour Cherry: women die, men die, animals die, crops fail, death permeates the houses they live in and the relationships they have in ways that are both just like a fairytale and like real life. There is a chorus of dead women and girls around these men, a chorus of ghosts, their names mostly forgotten, haunting the women who stay, whispering to them of nightmares and dreams.
Sour Cherry is a complex, conflicted, and sometimes painful read where past and present, fairytale and reality, are woven together so tightly that the weave is impossible to pick apart.
***
Two deathly bonus picks to look forward to:
It Was Her House First by Cherie Priest—coming in July, 2025
“Silent film star Venita Rost’s malevolent spirit lurks spider-like in her cliffside mansion, a once-beautiful home that’s claimed countless unlucky souls. And she’s not alone. Snared in her terrible web, Inspector Bartholomew Sloan—her eternal nemesis—watches her wreak havoc in helpless horror, shackled by his own guilt and Venita’s unrelenting wrath.”
***
Katabasis by R.F. Kuang—coming in August, 2025
“Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.”
