Category: Books

In two mesmerizing marathon sessions, I read Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians (Saga Press) over the July 4th weekend. There could have been no better atmosphere for Jones’ literary horror novel of revenge, cultural identity, and tradition on a Blackfoot reservation. Amid nationwide calls to address racial inequities, President Donald Trump gathered a crowd of mostly white Americans at a once-sacred site to the Lakota Sioux, one that was promised to them in perpetuity, to deliver a pro-nationalist, jingoistic tirade against cancel culture.

“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,” the president claimed, seemingly without realizing the irony of making that statement on that land. Erasure and indoctrination were exactly the fates of Native Americans. So perhaps I was primed to be rattled by Jones’ heartbreakingly powerful novel. Or maybe The Only Good Indians is just that damn good.

Courtesy Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones

The novel takes its name from what folklorist Wolfgang Mieder calls “particularly hateful invective” directed at the United States’ indigenous population, and that wry, dark humor informs the perspectives of the novel’s protagonists — four young members of the Blackfoot tribe. The men are irrefutably aware of the terrifying statistics that characterize the lives of so many like them. Their inner monologues are rife with remembered and imagined arrests, friends’ suicides, car crashes, and addiction. They know what society expects from them.

Still, for all the social commentary and supernatural fright deftly woven into The Only Good Indians, it’s in the honest portrayal of his characters that Jones truly shines. Ten years ago, Ricky Bibs, Lewis A. Clarke, Gabriel Cross Guns, and Cassidy Thinks Twice went on an illegal elk hunt in the elders’ lands, what the quartet called the “Thanksgiving Classic.” Now they find they must pay the price for their casually unleashed carnage.

The young men feel real enough to reach out from the page and shake the reader. Jones’ horror is rooted in humanity, in the author’s surfeit of heart. His characters are flawed and unerringly human, defined by or in denial of their guilt, which is why it hurts so much to read their stories.

“We’re from where we’re from,” Shaney, one of Lewis’ coworkers, tells him early in the novel. “Scars are part of the deal, aren’t they?” The line serves as a warning to the reader as well. Keep reading, if you dare, but be warned — in these pages, even the triumphs are tinged with tragedy.

Denorah Cross Guns, Gabe’s driven, basketball ace of a daughter, gives the reader someone to root for — and some serious stakes. For the monsters in The Only Good Indians play by the old rules, and punishments are heaped upon innocent children as much as on their parents, the transgressors.

Of late, Jones has been labeled the “Jordan Peele of horror literature,” and the moniker is earned as much for the overall strength of the work as for the social commentary within. If Peele’s Get Out was a masterwork — funny, frightening in ways both immediately visceral and creeping and intellectual, brilliantly composed — so is Jones’ most recent novel. His characters are natural. The book’s plot is a furious page-turner; its message, timely and potent. And The Only Good Indians works as well as a work of environmental horror, warning that to harm our home is to invite its revenge.

Jones’ The Only Good Indians is heartbreaking, exciting, and terrifying in equal measure. It’s the clear frontrunner for my favorite book of the year — for its masterful execution, for its humanity and honesty, and because it has haunted me since I turned the last page.

One of my earliest memories is of my dad sitting at the kitchen table in the weeks leading up to a Halloween, telling me about mass hysteria. He used to love talking about the famous Mercury Theatre on the Air’s radio adaptation — starring and directed by Orson Welles — of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. “People really flipped,” I remember him saying. “They actually thought Martians were invading.”

A year or two later, I stayed up all night reading The War of the Worlds for myself. I read until the sun rose because I was too afraid to go to sleep. (Cut me a break — I was like 8 years old.) All this is a long way to say that a few of my earliest memories as a fan of popular fiction involve Martians. The same is probably true for anyone who soaked up vintage sci-fi as a kid.

But still, it wasn’t until I read Marc Hartzman’s new encyclopedic account of Mars in history and pop culture that I realized just how much our planet’s little red neighbor has infiltrated my consciousness. Marvin the Martian, Mars Attacks!, David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?,” Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles — Mars is everywhere*, and Marc Hartzman’s The Big Book of Mars (Quirk Books) is a full catalogue of our encounters, in fact and fiction, with the red planet.

Subtitled From Ancient Egypt to The Martian, a Deep-Space Dive into Our Obsession with the Red Planet, Hartzman’s new book does make a case that humans’ interest with Mars surpasses that of any of our other planetary neighbors. But it’s only in the sheer volume of material collected in The Big Book of Mars that Hartzman makes his case. There’s no argument, rather just an overview of a collective fascination.

Though I immediately flipped to the “Mars Invades Pop Culture” section looking for (and finding) references to Bradbury and Bowie, Hartzman doesn’t neglect humanity’s real-world interactions with its neighbor. From early astronomy to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL), the Mariner and Viking missions, and the rovers spelling out “J-P-L” in the oxidized sand in Morse Code, The Big Book of Mars presents the history of Mars observation and exploration in easily digestible segments. It’s particularly delightful to read about our changing opinions about the possibility of life on Mars — and what that life might resemble.

In 1930, Hartzman writes, one journalist reporting for Popular Science Monthly hypothesized that Mars was populated by “herds of beaver-creatures.” He explained their halted evolution by saying, “There seems no reason to believe that Martian life has gone farther than that.” Earlier writers speculated Martian society would be far more advanced than anything yet seen on Earth. Then, of course, there are the theories that humans are actually descended from ancient refugees from a dying Mars.

This is one book readers can judge by its cover. The Big Book of Mars sports a gorgeously painted, vintage pulp-inspired cover. A lone astronaut stands astride the cratered surface of the red planet as comets and stars shine in the background. The book hints at adventure, danger, and mysteries not yet imagined, let alone confronted, by Earth-bound humans. Especially in a year when I have hardly left my apartment, the promise of adventure and the unknown is particularly powerful.

Hartzman’s The Big Book of Mars is a wildly entertaining and comprehensive look at Earth’s obsession with its planetary neighbor. This book is recommended for NASA nerds, sci-fi devotees, and anyone feeling a little too cooped up at the moment.

* But wait, there’s more! Gustav Holtz’ “Mars,” Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars, the centaurs won’t shut up about Mars when Harry Potter first meets them in The Sorcerer’s Stone, everyone emigrates to Mars in Blade Runner, Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time Slip, Doctor Manhattan moves to Mars after getting some bad news in Watchmen — I had never stopped to think about it, but Mars is almost omnipresent in pop culture.

Sometimes the story of a book’s publication can be as exciting as the thing itself. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the Maunsel edition of James Joyce’s Dubliners was disposed of by guillotine. Whether or not censors were so affronted as to slice the offending manuscript in half, Ulysses was absolutely shredded, smuggled, and seized. Similarly, Zarrar Said’s Pureland (Global Collective Publishers), recently released in the U.S. and U.K., met with opposition on its original publication in 2018, by HarperCollins, in India and Pakistan.

“The book itself has similarly gone through what the protagonist goes through, a kind of cultural shunning,” says Zarrar Said, the novel’s well-traveled author, who was born in Pakistan, grew up in Dubai, and now makes his home in New York. “It’s been banned by most retailers in India. It’s been taken off the shelves in Pakistan. … My books have been taken off the shelves in India for no reason other than I was born across the border.”

Zarrar Said

Said, a quantitative mathematician who has written for science publications, was inspired to write his first novel when he came across the story of Pakistan’s only Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Abdus Salam, who was also the first Muslim to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. “Salam was a very enigmatic character,” Said says, explaining why his proposed nonfiction biography of Salam became a work of fiction. Salam’s life, Said says, was prophesied by a saint — and that’s just the beginning. “He was born in a small town that didn’t have electricity. He actually never saw a lightbulb until the age of 15, but he went on to revolutionize the way we look at energy.

“He faced extreme racism,” Said continues. “But the irony is he loved his country so much, so I turned it into a love story. It was just too magical otherwise.”

And Pureland is magical — it has the prophecy, for starters, though this time delivered by a levitating saint. Narrated by the assassin who kills Salim Agha, the protagonist based on Salam, the novel follows Agha from his birth in a feudal village in the fictional nation of Pureland through political upheaval, unlucky love, exile, and scientific success. All the while, Agha is motivated by love — his love for the beautiful Laila and for Pureland, the country that refuses to accept him.

For a novel completed before 2016 and initially published in 2018, it’s remarkable how much Pureland resonates today. From the Hindu supremacy movement in India to the resurgence of white supremacy in America, the dangers Said warns of in Pureland are as menacing as ever in 2020. “I didn’t know that we would be facing these kinds of hatred-driven movements that we are experiencing right now,” Said says.

“My objective is to tell the story that societies will suffer from the prejudices they keep,” Said explains. “Look at the Nazi party, who rose through the ballot box and [went] on to destroy the very institutions that put it in power.

“You cannot be culturally monogamous,” Said continues. Such a uniformity of culture punishes the persecutors along with the persecuted. It costs Pureland the genius of Salim Agha — just as surely as it denies Agha the sanctuary of his beloved homeland.

But for all the time spent in the fictional Pureland, Said’s debut is also set in its protagonist’s adopted land of the United States, in New York. “At the end of the day, this is an American novel,” Said says. “We come from everywhere in this country, and we bring with us the luggage of our past.”

That thought makes some of the narrator’s parting words all the more foreboding. “The people here, too, have begun to accentuate the elements that make us different from one another,” Pureland‘s narrator warns. “There’s a destructive branding underway.”

Traditionally, fantasy sequels take an excruciatingly long time to hit the shelves. Fans of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series have waited almost a decade for The Winds of Winter. Devotees of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Kingkiller Chronicle series have waited just as long for the follow-up to that series’ second installment. Maybe it’s the page count, since they usually clock in well past the 600 mark. Or maybe it’s a delicate task making sure not to contradict the mythos of the previous novels. Fantasy fans are, after all, notoriously eagle-eyed when it comes to spotting inconsistencies.

Whatever it is prolonging the process, author S. A. Chakraborty seems not to have gotten the memo. The Empire of Gold (Harper Collins), the third and final installment in the Daevabad Trilogy, is due to be released June 30th, just three years after Chakraborty’s debut with The City of Brass. And for all the speed with which the young author has completed her story, its conclusion is no less satisfying.

Melissa C. Beckman

S. A. Chakraborty

Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy follows the Egyptian con artist and amateur healer Nahri, who learns, much to her surprise, that she is the long-lost heir of the magical city of Daevabad’s original rulers. In the trilogy’s first two installments, Nahri goes from a hustling healer to royal physician, straining against the ancient customs and royal and religious expectations of Daevabad all the while.

The Empire of Gold picks up immediately after the events of the second instalment in the Daevabad series. Nahri and Ali, the second son of King Ghassan al Qahtani, have halfway succeeded in thwarting Manizheh’s attempted coup of Daevabad. Manizheh has control of the city, true, but Nahri and Ali have stolen Suleiman’s seal, the magical ring and symbol by which the ancient prophet-king Suleiman controlled the djinn, and whisked it away to Egypt. Unfortunately, Ali is injured in the process, and by removing the seal ring from Daevabad, it appears the two unlikely heroes have somehow broken magic.

As in Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind, much of the Daevabad Trilogy’s intrigue is fueled by the hidden history of the djinn world. Daevabad’s citizens are still acting out feuds and alliances dating back to the magical city’s earliest days. A misinterpretation of Suleiman’s prophecy is the primary argument in support of the cruel but legal segregation of the half-djinn Shafit. It’s a plot device that syncs nicely with the current moment, when information is increasingly politicized and there exists a growing call to address centuries-old systems of inequity. As in the real world, the thorny social ills of Daevabad have deep and tangled roots.

“You and I are not the worst of our ancestors. They don’t own us. They don’t own our heritage,” Nahri tells Ali. The Empire of Gold finds them on a voyage of discovery, untangling their families’ histories, and at last learning more about the ancient magical beings that have previously existed primarily in the margins of Chakraborty’s magical lands.

It seems a tricky proposition to keep much of the mythos of a fantasy world occluded until the final installment of a trilogy, but Chakraborty makes it work — and work for her. The tension between what Nahri and Ali know and what they suspect about their ancestors — and the ancient god-like elementals with which they made pacts — works as a substitute mystery to the politics and palace intrigue that drove The Kingdom of Copper.

The Empire of Gold pays off all the promises made in the trilogy’s first two novels. Where The City of Brass introduces readers to the world of djinn and The Kingdom of Copper complicates the morality and gives the characters greater depth, the final installment of the Daevabad Trilogy is a nonstop rollercoaster of reveals, magical action, and long-awaited reunions.