Category: Literacy 2025

Book
Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Synopsis
Montserrat is a film buff working as a sound editor in the struggling film industry of early 1990s Mexico City. Tristán is her best friend since childhood, a former telenovela star whose fame was ended by a car crash that killed his girlfriend. A chance meeting starts their friendship with a director who’d made several beloved horror movies in the 1960s, before his career ended with an infamous unfinished film titled Beyond the Yellow Door. He reveals that the film had been made in conjunction with a Nazi sorcerer, who’d planned it to be the incantation of a dark, powerful spell….

Notes
I picked this one up for spooky season in 2023, based on how much I enjoyed Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, and of course Silver Nitrate‘s fantastic cover. I’d assumed that this would be for the horror B-movies of the 50s and 60s what Mexican Gothic had been for gothic horror: a modern take on genre fiction that wasn’t a deconstruction, but an actual recreation with modern sensibilities.

Silver Nitrate is not that. Since it’s got a Nazi warlock casting black magic spells in Mexico City, it’s obviously got some of the trappings of classic horror movies. But its protagonists aren’t just living inside a genre story; they’re aware of the genre and are able to comment on it. But the two books do share an assertion of Mexico as a vibrant culture that defies attempts by Europeans to colonize it and Americans to outshine it.

The other thing it has in common with Mexican Gothic is that I wasn’t crazy about the pacing. My main criticism of the former book is that I felt like the climax came way too early; the last half was just an extended case of reacting to the villains revealing themselves and their entire plot. With Silver Nitrate, I felt the opposite: it spends so much time in the build-up that we don’t really get to enjoy the payoff. The story felt like it really got interesting once magic was revealed and we got to see the manifestations of it, but by that point, it was already rushing towards its conclusion.

A more minor criticism is that a lot of the dialogue felt like recounting the author’s knowledge of film history and Mexican film history in particular, and it didn’t seem natural as a result. I’m well aware that nerds talking about their favorite subjects can go on at length, but it still usually manages to feel more conversational and less like a well-researched article.

Verdict
A fantastic premise, a fun story, and an interesting look at movie history from the viewpoint of Mexican filmmakers, which I almost never see.

Book
How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin

Series
Book 1 in the “Castle Knoll Files” series

Synopsis
When she was a teenager, Frances received a cryptic reading from a fortune teller, predicting her betrayal and murder. Sixty years later, her prediction comes true, and the now-wealthy widow is found murdered in her own home. Now it’s up to her great niece Annie to piece together the decades’ worth of evidence her estranged and increasingly-paranoid relative collected over the years, since Frances’s will stipulates that the first to solve her murder will inherit her entire estate.

Notes
This book makes its ambitions clear in the first chapter: it aspires to be a popular, cozy murder mystery. There’s a fabulous manor house in the English countryside, a close-knit village full of history and secrets, rivals, love interests, and it even forces a scene where everyone is assembled to hear the solution to the mystery. Because of its premise, it’s also got stories taking place across two timelines, and a present in which the protagonist can make self-aware commentary on the story she’s in.

And it also really works. This book is extremely entertaining. The characters are pretty fun, the mysteries are well-paced, there are a few “a-ha!” moments of varying success, and the book makes sure that its readers are operating at the same pace as its characters, with frequent recaps and “did you notice the clue?” type moments. I was pleased with myself for solving part of the murder before the protagonist, and while I didn’t love the rest of the solution, it was fine and didn’t seem to come completely out of nowhere.

The book does veer a little too far into Lifetime Television for Women for my taste, with its love triangles and drama and sexy detective. I’m wondering now whether I should’ve started wearing aftershave when I was younger, since it’s apparently the first and most significant thing anyone notices about a man. And towards the end of the book, it becomes really blatant that it’s being set up for a sequel if not an indefinitely ongoing series. The acknowledgements of my copy include thanks to the people who sold the film rights. It’s entirely possible I’m hopelessly naive about the book business, but this struck me as putting the cart before the horse to a degree that left a bad taste in my mouth.

I don’t mind formula when it’s a single fan trying to recreate something they love, but I’m more suspicious of it when it feels as if it’s been mass-produced in a lab. In retrospect, even my own experience reading it felt as if it had been scientifically tuned to match the desired standard for these books: having fun reading off and on for the first day or two, and then suddenly getting engrossed at the halfway point and staying up way too late to finish it in one night.

There’s undoubtedly some level of sexism to that criticism, since I don’t seem to have as much problem with openly commercial literature when it’s about boy stuff instead of girl stuff. Michael Crichton famously wrote Jurassic Park specifically to be “the most expensive film ever made.” And Anthony Horowitz does this kind of thing all the time; commercial writing is practically the entire basis for my two favorite series of his mysteries.

But with How to Solve Your Own Murder, it made me go back and reconsider all of the affectations that were piled onto its protagonist: all the scenes where she’s biting her lower lip, her repeated insistence that she lacks confidence even as everyone around her just assumes she’s not just competent and qualified but uniquely gifted, her unassuming style that has her in old band T-shirts or sundresses that hide her figure, the way that she seems to be blithely ignorant of her own attractiveness. It seemed sincere — although disingenuously self-deprecating — when I thought that the character was supposed to be a surrogate for the author. But it feels a little false and chemically when I see that the protagonist is supposed to be a surrogate for the target audience. Not a manic pixie dream girl, but a just-as-artificial awkward, self-effacing, and somehow irresistibly attractive archetype that’s made by women, for women.

Verdict
Fun and extremely readable, with a solid mystery, an interesting double-timeline gimmick, and a great hook. I just wish I’d discovered it more organically, and it hadn’t been carefully and specifically constructed to be an “instant bestseller.”

Book
Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

Synopsis
Four people in their early 20s, all from disparate backgrounds and living in Cape Town in the near-futuristic dystopia of 2018, are trying to establish themselves in a society over-dependent on technology, with strict societal divisions between corporate employees and “civilians,” a government more beholden to the corporations than to its citizens, and an oppressive police force with ubiquitous shock devices and genetically modified police dogs. Their lives intersect in various ways until a catastrophic incident slams them together.

Notes
This was one of the first books that my now-husband recommended to me and loaned me his copy, not long after we started dating. I’m embarrassed that it’s taken me this long to read it! It’s darkly ironic that the main reason I never read it at the time was because it was a physical copy; I’d recently converted to reading ebooks exclusively because the digital version was so much more convenient.

The story is told in the first person of each of the four main characters — a photographer who’s agreed to have herself injected with nanotechnology that gives her a permanent, glowing tattoo of the logo of an energy drink; a spoiled live-streamer who’s become desensitized to everything except playing to his audience; a hot-tempered and naively idealistic activist; and a ruthless software engineer who was raised in a corporate-owned orphanage — and it gives each their own voice and their own perspective. But more significantly, it lets us become gradually aware of the self-delusions that each of them has been operating under, suppressing their own key desires — human connection, a sense of worth, social justice, or safety and stability — in an attempt just to survive.

As a result, Beukes accomplishes the remarkable feat of taking these characters that I so thoroughly disliked (or was frustrated by, in Kendra’s case) at the beginning, and making me sympathetic towards them by the end. I gradually began to appreciate how their flaws are the result of a society that’s stopped valuing them as human beings. I went from hating these characters and dreading having to read more about them, to being extremely invested in what happens to them and rushing through the entire last half of the book.

You could devote an entire essay just to exploring what Beukes does on a literary level, ignoring all of the themes about culture and technology and instead focusing on how she deftly intercuts between four somewhat-unreliable narrators in a long slow burn that builds to a horrific climax and a relentlessly desperate conclusion. All while establishing not only the world they live in, but the core of their characters.

I’ve got a big cultural blind spot when it comes to cyberpunk, since I made a half-effort to read Snow Crash when I was in my early twenties, immediately hated it and gave up, and pretty much ignored the genre outside of video games ever since. So I don’t know how this book would be classified exactly, and I feel unqualified to call it “post-cyberpunk.” But it feels less concerned with science fiction, and more as if it were written from within a society that had already embraced some of the main ideas of classic cyberpunk, and extrapolated from there. Of all the media that I’ve read and seen, it felt more similar in tone to the movie Her, and how it was not about the technology itself so much as how it affects us as people.

Beukes wrote an essay in 2018 that was included in the afterward of my copy of the book, in which she describes the “stem cells” of ideas that made it into Moxyland. She makes it explicit that the rigid stratification of her version of Cape Town isn’t a speculative invention, but is instead a reflection of the very real class divisions that still exist post-apartheid, the same structures but lightly modified to be along urban/rural and corporate/“civilian” lines instead of strictly race and ethnicity. She goes on to list all of the other news stories from the early 2000s that demonstrate how the most dystopian elements of the book were actually just short-term extrapolations from stuff that’s already happening.

And she has a great conclusion, mostly referencing the book’s version of cell phones as being more about punishment and control than about communication:

If we’re willing to trade away our rights for convenience, for the illusion of security, our very own bright and shiny dystopia is only ever one totalitarian government away.

Verdict
Brilliant and effective in ways that took me by surprise. The magic trick of the book — in that I didn’t even realize it was happening until it had already worked — is that Beukes avoids letting the book completely collapse into cynicism or nihilism. There is an undercurrent of compassion and sympathy, and we’re left with the idea that even if these characters have lost it, we haven’t.

(Cover image taken from the Tor/Forge Books blog, used without permission)

Book
Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Synopsis
Charlie Fitzer is a divorced former journalist who’s working as a substitute teacher in suburban Chicago, trying to figure out how to get back on his feet, when he gets news that his estranged uncle Jake — who’d become a billionaire in the parking garage business — has died. Charlie soon discovers that his uncle had not just left him with a simple inheritance, but with the responsibility of taking over the business: his real business, which was being a supervillain, complete with remote lair inside an active volcano.

Notes
I immediately put this book on the to-read list because of its outstanding cover and its clever premise. The next thing I knew, I was already a quarter of the way through it. It is a fun and engaging read, and it keeps you wanting to come back for the next chapter.

I’ve got to admit I’m not the biggest fan of Scalzi’s books, mostly because it’s difficult to get lost in the book instead of hearing every observation and every line of dialogue in the same extremely-online writing voice. Here, the premise isn’t so much a parody of James Bond supervillainy as it is a satire of techbro billionaires and venture capitalists, so the more fantastic elements are tempered with the mundane, with an author more eager to take the piss out of the greedy elite than to indulge in escapist adventure. But there are definitely fantastic elements, which are easily the best part of the book.

My main criticism of the book is a vague spoiler: the protagonist doesn’t have enough agency. He spends the majority of the book going from location to location having things explained to him by characters he acknowledges are smarter or more accomplished than he is. He’s never given an opportunity to prove himself indispensable, so the story ends up feeling very passive.

Verdict
A quick, fun, and often clever read.

Book
Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Genius and Mysterious Life of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery

Synopsis
A rigorously-researched and documented biography of writer and illustrator Edward Gorey, who was known for his macabre and darkly comic books, book covers, design of the animated introductory sequences for PBS’s Mystery! series, set and costume design for a Broadway production of Dracula, and as inspirational hero to weirdos everywhere.

Notes
It’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive biography than this book, as Dery establishes his bona fides in the introduction and then goes on to exhaustively cover every key event in Gorey’s life from birth to death, with extensive footnotes referencing personal interviews, letters, and excerpts from just about everything ever written about the man. It’s both an academic work of biography and of art criticism, as he gives an insightful synopsis of Gorey’s “little books,” occasionally offering a summation but often sticking to the author’s desire to leave plenty of room for ambiguity.

My main complaint is that it’s often tedious and dry reading, feeling more like an academic assignment instead of an attempt to bring a reclusive artist to life. But this is tempered as much as possible by personal accounts from friends and family, or by descriptions of Gorey’s works that show a thorough appreciation of how they work and why they resonate. It is undeniable that Dery gets Gorey. At least as much as is possible for anyone to.

But that leads to the other criticism that’s inherent to this book and its subject, which is that Gorey actively dismissed any attempts to define him or his work, and he insisted that the books, like himself, remain ambiguous. Dery not only acknowledges this dichotomy in the introduction, but he makes it a recurring theme of the entire book. He repeats Gorey’s quote “I’m neither one thing nor the other particularly.”

I have a couple of minor quibbles with the book, mainly that it, like its subject, is so entrenched in the New York art scene that it sometimes comes across as eye-rollingly pretentious. It left me with a sense of “never meet your heroes,” since I got the impression I’d probably have found Gorey insufferable if I’d met him in person.

And I think it leaned a little too heavily on the premise that Gorey’s repressed or denied homosexuality is evident in every aspect of his life and his work, even though Gorey himself refused to define himself as gay or straight. As Dery acknowledges, with a modern understanding of identity politics, gender, and sexuality, it’s likely that Gorey might’ve fit more closely with the identity of “asexual” (and homoromantic). Regardless, Dery does make a convincing case that camp and themes of sublimated homosexuality run throughout Gorey’s work, even if it still seems a bit reductive to me. I think I prefer the idea that Dery presents in the conclusion, which is that Gorey was so thoroughly queer throughout his life that he defied any attempts to put a label on any aspect of himself.

Personally, I can remember “discovering” Gorey’s work while digging through Oxford Books in Atlanta with my mother, and being immediately obsessed with the little books they had on display. They were already too expensive for me to buy them individually, but I did get a copy of Amphigorey that had an enormous impact on me. I’d forgotten exactly how much impact, until I was reading this biography and reminded of pages and images that stuck with me, even if I was never able to explain exactly why. I consider The Willowdale Handcar and the gleefully suggestive absurdity of The Curious Sofa as being as much a part of defining my sense of humor as Monty Python and Mystery Science Theater 3000 were.

Verdict
I can’t imagine a better biography of Edward Gorey in terms of showing a real insight into his work, the influences on his work, and as much of his personal life as he’d allow anyone to know. It’s not always fun to read, but it was fantastic for helping me better understand the “little books” that were so influential to me.

Book
A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh

Series
First book in the Roderick Alleyn series of detective stories

Synopsis
A wealthy Englishman has assembled a group of friends and associates to his mansion in the countryside for a party in which they’ll all take part in a mock murder. When someone takes advantage of the game to actually murder one of the guests with a ceremonial Mongolian dagger, it falls to Detective Chief-Inspector Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard to sort through the personal motives of the guests and the crime’s ties to a Russian secret society.

Notes
While I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot of Agatha Christie mysteries lately, I keep hearing the name Ngaio Marsh mentioned as one of Christie’s contemporaries. I was completely unfamiliar with her work, so I started with her first detective novel.

The Wikipedia entry mentions that Marsh was unhappy with her first novel as being implausible and shallow, but there’s a lot to like here. It’s odd reading it in 2025, though: it feels simultaneously modern and impenetrably of its time. I frequently found myself with no idea what was going on, because the idioms and the very behavior of the characters seemed so foreign to me. Not just as an American born 40 years after the book was published, but as somebody who’s always assumed I have a rough idea of how human beings act.

These characters alternate between being earnest and melodramatic (which I’d expected) and being bafflingly arch. They’re often casually cruel or rude to each other, and I felt like an alien trying to figure out if they were being wry or sincere. It seemed like the book was too modern. As a result, I was even less equipped to solve the mystery, since I was too baffled by the basics of what was actually happen to also be looking for obscure clues.

My other big criticism of this book is that it felt self-aware to the point of self-consciousness; characters frequently commented on the events as being well-worn tropes of detective stories, as if Marsh were a little too eager to establish to readers that she was in on the joke. All that said, I still enjoyed it a lot.

Verdict
Surprisingly modern, at times to a fault, but fun and engaging. It feels more sophisticated than what I’m used to for the genre, at least in its writing if not its central mystery. This is my first exposure to a book written by someone considered to be a master of the genre, so I’m looking forward to reading more of Marsh’s detective stories.