Mystery

The Outcast Hours by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin

The Outcast Hours is the latest anthology by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin, following The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories from last year. I love stories set at night; a lack of action forces the characters to face their inner troubles, in turn making the story more introspective. That combined with me thoroughly enjoying Djinn a few months ago made this an instant request.

Anthologies, by design, have some similar theme or genre and The Outcast Hours is no different. As can be deduced from the title, it focuses on the night, on those who live and work and thrive in the midnight hours. It’s quite an open-ended theme (especially compared with Djinn’s relative rigidity of requiring a specific supernatural creature) and as a result features a vast array of genres – fantasy, horror, contemporary, slice of life, light science fiction – ranging from the darker aspects of humanity (portrayed both realistically and fantastically) to the hopeful. There are 26 stories, so I will just quickly highlight some that I particularly enjoyed.

This Book Will Find You – Sam Beckbessinger, Lauren Beukes & Dale Halvorsen
This story makes for an excellent start to the collection. It’s an intense, depressing reflection of woman’s recently ended relationship with a spooky framework pushing the story along. The reader follows a heavily self-loathing character trying to atone for the mistakes she made in said relationship and goes about it in a way that only gets more disturbing. Very creepy and entirely engrossing.

Blind Eye – Frances Hardinge
This one has a pretty original concept – it’s about a babysitter who watches children of some unsavoury types. She must take care of a little girl overnight and spooky things ensue. It’s hard to discuss it any further without delving into spoilers so just know that it’s a fast paced, exciting supernatural tale that covers more than expected with an emotional depth that’s often not seen in shorter stories.

Patron Saint of Night Puppers – Indrapramit Das
Despite the title, this was a great little tale – an anecdote almost. It sits firmly in the slice of life category following a night shift caretaker at a dog pound. In sharp contrast to almost every other story in the anthology it’s just another night taking care of dogs. Das sets up easy horror slam dunk tropes then happily subverts them repeatedly.

Tilt – Karen Onojaife
Follows a woman spending her nights at a casino trying to deal with an awful loss and given the option to fix it at a terrible price. I’m a sucker for impossible choices and Tilt delivers in spades with a simple but wonderfully executed premise. Short stories sometimes have a problem with endings, they can feel rushed or just stop arbitrarily. Mostly they end just fine but rarely are they particularly great. Onojaife leaves it on a great hook, revealing nothing but just enough all at once.

Welcome to the Haunted House – Yukimi Ogawa
What a weird story. In a good way of course, but just so odd. I’m not sure if it’s based on some folklore that I’m unaware of but wow it’s just so uniquely interesting. There’s this group of animated household objects à la Beauty and the Beast but they work in a haunted house scaring humans and can’t quite remember why or how they got there. That doesn’t really do it justice, look, read it and you’ll get me.

Lock In – William Boyle
Okay so I love The Catcher in the Rye so Lock In was an easy pick as a favourite. It’s another slice of life style book and is mildly reminiscent of Catcher in its latter half. Betsy is a young teenager who sneaks out of catholic school at night to wander the streets and find a cinema after being disillusioned with her authority figures. The story finishes fittingly but I would like an extension just to see what she gets up to for the rest of the night.

A Partial Beginner’s Guide to the Lucy Temerlin Home for Broken Shapeshifters – Kuzhail Manickavel
First of all, what a fantastic title; I love long, detailed titles like this. Secondly, if only one of these stories should be expanded, it must be this one. It’s a sort of epistolary novel that acts as a welcome guide for an orphanage that brings up a hundred questions despite being one of the shortest stories in the anthology. There’s so much potential here, I need more!

After reading The Djinn Falls in Love, I had an interesting chat with Shurin on /r/fantasy about how he and Murad grapple with their anthologies’ structures for ‘probably too long’ (his words not mine!) so I would be remiss to not quickly give some thoughts on it in this instance. Generally speaking, the stories were well organised. Each tale was very different to its predecessor with shifts in either genre, setting or tone almost every time. In fact, it was so well done that there were two adjacent stories that happened to stick out just by nature of being mildly similar. There were also interludes scattered in every few stories that were an interesting addition. They provided a nice breather every so often, but I don’t think they were really necessary. They were very short pieces of flash fiction that were unrelated and seemed more experimental than anything else.

Ask any book blogger and they’ll say the same thing: anthologies are hard to review. There will always be some great stories, some bad and a lot that fit somewhere in between. Ultimately, I read anthologies to force myself to explore new genres, discover new authors, and see how wildly people’s perspectives interpret a common theme. If the job of the editors is to accomplish these goals, The Outcast Hours is nothing short of a resounding success.

The Traitor God by Cameron Johnston

The Traitor God is a noir murder mystery wrapped up in a fantasy setting. It’s a violent, adrenaline-filled adventure through a heavily segregated city split into the upper- and lower-class areas. I enjoyed the book as a whole but there were some issues I had. Unfortunately for a first person single POV book, the main character was one of the biggest. Edrin Walker is, by design, not a particularly likeable protagonist. It’s not necessary for the main character to be heroic or even just mostly good – Mark Lawrence pulls this off excellently in The Broken Empire. Jorg is a despicable person but he embraces it and it’s clear how his personality was formed. Edrin, however, just repeatedly tells himself how horrible he is in a self-loathing manner that is incredibly difficult to sympathise with especially at times when it’s at odds with his actions. I think perhaps the book would have benefitted from being written in third person or at least a less personal first person – just seeing Edrin’s actions would have been enough to show he’s meant to be this nuanced, troubled character. Instead, the reader is treated to constant internal monologues that forcibly remind them how tortured Edrin is which just gets a bit excessive.

Fortunately, however, I felt that Edrin was the only weak link in an otherwise strong cast of characters. The story is very much about Edrin but there are many supporting characters that subtly flesh out the city in a not too exposition-heavy way. My favourite is Charra with whom Edrin has a refreshingly platonic relationship. Johnson carefully balances her character by showing how the city guards and Edrin respect her enough not to pick fights and contrasts that with how she raises her daughter (who is badass in her own right) in the quite dangerous slums. There’s also Eva, a powerful paladin who defies the old Warrior Woman In Impractical Armour trope and the wizened leader of the Mages who Johnson manages to flesh out far more than expected with such little ‘screen time’.

The plot itself was a bit of a let-down by and large. Generally, in fantasy I’m more interested in the characters and world building but since this was a murder mystery novel, the mystery is the whole point. I’m usually completely dense when it comes to mysteries – in City of Lies I didn’t figure who the villain was until moments before it was revealed. In The Traitor God, the villain’s identity is honestly easy to figure out beforehand. The book is very-paced which is fine for the most part but waiting a little longer for the reveal or masking it more thoroughly would have gone a long way. It also relies on one of my least favourite storytelling mechanics – memories being blocked that slowly resurface. They always reappear at conveniently appropriate times and each memory is just important enough to be interesting or relevant in the moment.

At the end of the day, I did enjoy reading The Traitor God. It does some interesting things – the magic system is compelling, and I have a tendency to prefer standalone novels – but ultimately there wasn’t much to stand out as particularly amazing. It wasn’t bad by any stretch it just wasn’t something exciting or innovative. The Traitor God is definitely worth a read if you’re interested in murder mysteries or morally dubious protagonists.

City of Lies by Sam Hawke

City of Lies is an incredible fantasy whodunnit novel by debut author Sam Hawke. It’s the kind of book that starts off with a simple premise – the Chancellor has been poisoned in a closed room – then gradually picks up, with problems and mysteries stacking up until you hit a critical mass of questions and everything starts to fall into place.

City of Lies is hugely character driven throughout and would have suffered if not for it’s refreshing main characters. Jovan is the Chancellor’s secret food proofer and chemist. His, and his family’s, job is to check any food the Chancellor is to eat and detect possible poisons within. He is devout in his duties and takes great honour (a central tenet of their culture) in putting himself in harm’s way for his friend. Jovan also suffers from quite serious OCD that requires him to move and act, such as counting steps, in groups of eight and can debilitate him when he loses control over his impulses.

“The longer this situation went on, the more the compulsions built up…there were five different patterns: pacing, hands squeezing, toes scrunching, thighs tensing and teeth clicking. Counting sets of eight for each muscle group took all my concentration”

Kalina is Jovan’s elder sister and would have originally been the proofer in the family if it wasn’t for her chronic weakness. She tires very quickly and cannot stand up to gentle poisons. Throughout her chapters, it’s clear that this affects her mentally and along with Jovan’s well meaning but sometimes overbearing nature, she is always pushing herself to do more and proving her worth. Both characters have these serious illnesses and it could have been so easy to write them in a shallow way, as if just adding flavour, but Hawke pulled off the representation with aplomb. Being inside both characters’ heads lets us see that they are always affected by these conditions which are manifesting repeatedly and often at quite inopportune times. It becomes clear that Kalina and Jovan have some level of control over their illnesses and will never stop pushing against their limitations.

Interestingly while the Chancellor, Tain, doesn’t have any POV chapters he’s still very much an equally main character. It’s a testament to the authors skill that the reader can be as attached to him as the other two while only seeing a third-person view of him. All three characters work excellently together – none have a secret agenda and they’re all genuinely good people who want the best for everyone (going to great lengths to achieve peace, with patience to rival monks).

I have a couple of minor issues with the book, the pace suffers a bit just over half way through. There’s an army on their doorstep and everyone keeps reminding each other that they could crash through at any time but fortunately the army just chills outside for days. It’s never fully explained why they sat back for about five days but it was awfully convenient for the main characters as they had some serious in-house problems at the time.

There’s also some romance angst that’s just not needed. The romance in general is done well and the platonic friendships between the siblings and between them and Tain are excellent. It could have been easy to add some romance subplot between Tain and Kalina but keeping them as close friends was a breath of fresh air. However, there’s this angsty section that feels so unnecessary, it didn’t add anything to the relationship and made my eyes roll out their sockets.

Regardless, these issues are hardly worth worrying about since City of Lies is sublime in every other respect. It touches on some real-world issues like xenophobia and us-versus-them mentalities without getting preachy. The book highlights how easy it is to ignore the suffering of people not in your vicinity then just shut them down as lesser once they’re forced to turn violent.

“They had looked healthy enough, and had waved back so, nothing had challenged my basic assumption that an oppressed people would look thing and cowed and starving”

Throughout the book, the main characters are trying to find an explanation to the mysterious death of the Chancellor. Right off the bat, there’s only so many suspects but with barely anything to go on, the three characters are baffled. With occasional poisonings and red herrings, and despite some solid deductions made by the three, the mystery kept me guessing up until all was revealed. I’m not too versed in the mystery genre but that plus the mysterious is-it-real-maybe lore and the good, honourable characters made City of Lies a thrilling read. A sequel to this book isn’t strictly necessary but if there is one, I’ll be first in line.