2024 books: 9-11

[the_siobhan]

Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle Chuck Tingle made himself famous by writing highly improbably queer porn and selling it on Amazon. Camp Damascus is his first foray into novel-length writing and into horror. Main character Rose is a teenager who lives in an extremely controlling Christian community. The Camp Damascus of the title is the most successful conversion therapy camp in the world, run by her church. The horror starts when she starts having horrible experiences like vomiting up flies and seeing visions of demons. Her parents and therapist try to convince her she just needs to pray harder but events keep getting more and more disturbing and she resolves to find out what the hell is going on. Her investigations lead her to Camp Damascus. There is a lot to love about this book. The horror aspect is done really well and of course it features queer and autistic characters. I did find the writing a little simplistic and I really want a real-world explanation for the "demons". It also feels like there should be some repercussions for at least one very public death but in the real world really powerful churches probably get away with that too.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell by Susanna Clarke At one point I had some Kobo points to use up and I picked up a handful of books based on somebody's "best of" list. This was one of those books. The story is set around the time of the Napoleonic wars. England has an abandoned magical history that is studied by theoretical magicians but is not practised. Mr Norell changes that by practising actual magic and becomes somewhat of a celebrity in London as a result. Jonathan Strange is a talented amateur who becomes Norell's student. The story follows the development of their relationship, their fame in London, and their eventual falling out and competition. Wikipedia says this book took 10 years to write and I believe it. There is so much detail and careful description that it feels like the action moves quite slowly.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon Another of my Kobo purchases. The story takes place on a generation ship named The Matilda. The people who live on Matilda are stratified by class, with the wealthy and powerful - and white - living on the upper decks where there is comfort and freedom of movement. Astrid, the main character, is brown and poor and lives on one of the lower decks where her movements are tightly controlled by the abusive and capricious guards. The lower decks are further segregated by background, so people from different decks eat different food and may not share a language. Jobs are also assigned by deck, so Astrid is a "field" worker. At one point in the story she meets some of the women from Q deck where the job is maintaining of "Baby Sun" the fission reactor that powers the ship. All of the workers on Q deck die of cancer before they're 40. Matilda is of course, a mirror held up to view all our current ills. Racism, colonialism, evangelicals, gender policing - it's all there. There is a line that sticks in my head - an upper-decker talking about how everybody has to make sacrifices for the good of the ship. The lower-deckers have no such illusions about "we're all in this together" speeches, they talk about killing every last one of the upper-deckers without any hesitation or guilt.

 

Another very short list this year.

And just for the heck of it I decided to add the (very short) list of webcomics I've read this year.

Questionable Content I don't think there's too many people who haven't heard of QC. It's been going for 20+ years and I've been reading it for so long I honestly don't remember where I first encountered it. A group of people living in a town that is loosely around Boston somewhere. Along with a large number of human characters, the singularity has already happened and some of the characters are robots or other types of AI. They have jobs, they have moral quandaries, they fuck up and go to robot jail. The most realistic part is where it goes from one character having one roommate in the early '00s to five people sharing the same two-bedroom apartment in the current day.

Exorcism Academy by Asmoeus I think maybe I saw a panel from this on tumblr and came to have a look. EA is an "adult" comic which means graphic sex scenes so take that under advisement. The concept is that demons are real and there is an ongoing battle to keep them away from humans. Exorcism Academy had developed a defensive system where capture and bind demons to a human who can then use their strength and senses to fight back. It's an interesting concept mostly because the demons are literally created by Lucifer to fuck with humans, but also they are individuals and you get to know them as people. The story is also starting to gradually broach the idea that what the humans are doing is essentially slavery and kind of fucked up on it's own so I'm interested to see where he goes with that.

I Roved Out In Search of Truth and Love by Alexis Flower I came across this one because Flower is on bluesky and posted a very graphic image with some really amazing art and so I followed her home out of pure curiosity. So to be clear, this series is straight up porn. The main characters are Maeryll, who was once the best assassin in the world and now spends all her time day-drinking and chasing large-breasted women, and Cinder, who is in both the scout's guild and the harlot's guild and spends all her time trying to avoid doing any work for the former or paying any dues to the latter. There is a multi-layered world-building, an elaborate backstory, a cast of weird and intriguing characters and some really gorgeous artwork - and throughout it all these two unserious assholes are just... sucking and fucking their way through all of it. It's hilarious. Do Not Read if you are squicked out by jizz. You were warned.

 

Comments

[greylock]

Damn. I miss QC. I think I read the fist 10 years or so and then lost track of it.