Blog Archives
Weird Fantasy – The January 2025 Bibliofiles edition
I leaned toward fantasy reads this month — the weirder the better. And there were some real weird reads in this edition of the Bibliofiles.
Fiction
Sycamore by Ian Rogers
I’ve always loved Ian Rogers’ tales of The Black Lands, an eerie and deadly realm that intersects with our own and provides PI Felix Renn with supernatural creatures to investigate. So I was delighted to read Sycamore, which follows Renn to small-town Ontario and a mystery involving a string of murders, a missing man, a mysterious librarian, an eerie child — and a hidden portal to the Black Lands. Weird lit at its finest. You’ll be afraid of the dark all over again.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/220978924-sycamore
We Are the Dead by Mike Shackle
What happens when the bad guys win in a fantasy novel and take over the world? The resistance fights back, of course. This is the premise of We Are the Dead by Mike Shackle. The land of Jia is overrun by the Egril hordes, which have united under a mysterious leader with powerful magic. Jia falls instantly to the Egril forces, which rule the land through a puppet government. But not everyone is willing to accept their rule. Brutal, bloody and action-packed, this is a nice twist of the blade for the fantasy genre.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42602296-we-are-the-dead
Kaiju Agonistes by Scott Lynch
A well-meaning but increasingly monstrous kaiju goes head to head with politicians in this blackly comic and delightful tale.
Link: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/kaiju-agonistes/
Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett
Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett presents one of the most original worlds to ever hit the fantasy genre. The city of Tevanne is ruled by merchant houses that use a hybrid of magic and technology to maintain their power and live a near godlike existence. The entire society is built upon the practice of scriving — altering reality by inscribing objects with enchanted sigils to convince them to act in ways contrary to their nature. Scrived pieces of wood can be hard as stone, swords can hit much harder than they should be capable of, lights can burn forever and so on.
The only problem is no one truly understands how it works. The technology comes from an ancient race long gone who had attained the power of godhood, and the people of Tevanne are trying to understand it as they slowly piece the remains together.
But Foundryside is not just an impressive piece of worldbuilding. It’s also a clever heist tale, as the thief Sancia steals an artifact that turns out to be from that ancient race — and is itself sentient. Sancia is a unique character herself, as she is a scrived human being that can essentially hear the thoughts of inanimate objects — the result of unthinkable experiments by the rulers of Tevanne.
It’s also very much a political novel as it depicts deep divides between the wealthy and the poor, between those who aspire to godhood and those who are trapped in the worst gutters of humanity. There are more than a few parallels to our own society here.
There’s even a philosophical element, as Foundryside explores what is to be human — and what it is to be a god. And there’s an interesting angle in our AI age of what it means to be a sentient object.
All of these things come together over the course of the book, as the secrets of the dead race are discovered and the story shifts from being a clever fantasy novel to a near existential horror. If you’re looking for a truly different reading experience unlike anything else in the genre, then Foundryside is the book for you.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37173847-foundryside
The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant by Jeffery Ford
The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant is one of the weirdest and best collections I’ve ever experienced. Humans on a strange planet dress as old movie stars for celebrity-obsessed aliens. An interviewer has tea with a very odd Jules Verne. A writer obsessed with a mysterious Kafka story finds himself at odds with the writer Jeffrey Ford. And many more tales straight out of Twilight Zone episodes written by Borges.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39748.The_Fantasy_Writer_s_Assistant_and_Other_Stories
The Wish Doctor by Arlen Feldman
A charming tale about an expert in contracts for binding djinn who finds himself summoned to the royal palace to study the most important contract of his life and find the hidden trap.
Link: https://www.baen.com/wish_doctor
Non-fiction
The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction by Elizabeth Kaye Cook and Melanie Jennings
Is consolidation among the big publishers slowly killing off literary fiction? And can the small presses save it?
Link: https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-have-killed
New Star Pushed Over the Ledge
The world of CanLit was shocked and puzzled when publisher New Star suddenly announced it was shutting down. Now it seems a dispute with the BC Arts Council may have led to the closure.
Link: https://shush.substack.com/p/new-star-pushed-over-the-ledge
On the Bookshelf: Happinesswise by Jonathan Bennett
Happinesswise by Jonathan Bennett could just as easily have been called Intimatewise or Intimacywise or some such thing. While the poems are all over the map when it comes to style and subject matter, at their core they are glimpses into the secret lives we all carry within us.
The book opens with a series of poems called Palliative Care Reflective Portfolio, which yes, are about death, but in that are also about entire lives lived. The poems feature notes about end-of-life care and the mundane minutia of death, or at least of putting off death for a few more ragged heartbeats: “the machine drone, the urine sting, the sour C. diff smell, the pump throb, the infection control, latex-free signage.” But the clinical language of the palliative care experience are countered in the same poems with the beautiful, transcendent moments of life, the memories that actually make us what we are: “tinkling wind chimes, your still-beautiful clavicle” and “My son’s first steps – across the lichen at the lake.” In an interview, Bennett states these poems are inspired by his own experiences working in a hospital and reading doctors’ portfolios: “Somewhere in the fog of pain meds and held hands, of DNR’s and oncoming grief, people retell stories that have bound them to one another over the course of a lifetime. Or else they sit in silence and just know, together. Is this happiness? Is it the end of happiness? These are the things the poem pursues.”
While the Palliative Care Reflective Portfolio is not specifically about Bennett, other poems do provide more intimate glimpses into his life. The poems found in Neurotypical Sketches offer insights into Bennett’s relationship with his autistic son – and insights perhaps into his relationship with autism, or at least autism as he has experienced it. There’s a map drawn by his son, Thomas, and moment after moment of a life transformed by something ultimately unknowable:
“He asks: Do cyclops blink or wink?
We laugh and and I ask him to tell me
the riddle of Theseus’s ship again
because I can’t get enough of him
charting his way through a paradox.
And to hear him argue the case
for Bigfoot is to doubt everything
you thought was true in the universe.”
There are other examples of this intimacy throughout the book – the series Concession Line Signs uses signs in Bennett’s region for inspiration, and as a vegetarian I certainly found a connection with his poem “Vegetarians Use the Back Door.” But really, it’s one of those collections best read and not talked about too much, because its true power is in how you will find yourself in the poems. How are you doing, happinesswise?
peter darbyshire 