Brimstone, Cherie Priest

Received to review via Netgalley

I’m always willing to try Cherie Priest’s books: I haven’t loved all of them, by any means, but there’s usually been something — an idea, a sense of atmosphere, a character — that just really makes it for me. So it was this time: I got really interested in gentle, tortured Tomas, in good-hearted and lively Alice, and I wanted them to triumph. I hated what was happening to Tomas, and to the community Alice finally found of people like her. I enjoyed Alice’s irreverence, her good intentions, her delight in things like food and drink and the fact that she didn’t care what people thought of that, for the most part.

The solution to the mystery of what’s haunting Tomas didn’t surprise me any, and the way things worked out was pretty much as I expected too. The strength of it was in how badly I wanted things to be okay for Tomas, how much I wanted them all to triumph, and the fact that I was actually afraid that one particular character would die before the end of the book.

The horror here is mostly, for me, in the way Tomas is manipulated which is really what darkened the book for me. Violent and demonic ghost/spirit/things, eh, but those things hiding themselves and using a (relatively) innocent man — that got to me.

Rating: 4/5

Bloodshot, Cherie Priest

There’s a lot to love about Bloodshot. The protagonist is a flapper vampire with obsessive-compulsive disorder, who uses her skills to steal things and sort of looks out for two street urchins who’ve taken up residence in her warehouse. Her client is a blind vampire who may be able to control the weather, having been experimented on by the government, and her eventual sidekick is a crossdressing ex-Navy SEAL who looks fabulous in either male or female clothing, kicks complete ass, and is trying to find out what happened to his sister in the same sort of experiments. The interactions are delightful, and Raylene’s tone is often funny.

There are some quibbles — Raylene tends to ramble, and on a second read it becomes obvious how long it takes for the plot to get off the ground. I’m still immensely fond of the characters and all the ass they kick, despite being tiny and obsessive-compulsive (Raylene), in high heels and a glittery thong part of the time, including during action scenes (Adrian) and blind (Ian). They make for a great team. Raylene’s a little too trigger happy — or rather, I guess, fang-happy; she’s definitely morally ambiguous, for all that I totally rooted for her throughout.

It might possibly work better as a TV show or movie, in that Raylene’s inner monologue is part of what slows things up. Not that I can imagine anyone making something of this and not utterly butchering it in some way — what charms about it is partly that these characters would rarely be allowed to shine in quite this way in mainstream fiction, and it’s possible in another context Adrian would be used as comic relief in some way. (Which he isn’t, which is great.)

Still very fun, but also definitely still flawed on a reread.

Rating: 4/5

Dreadful Skin, Cherie Priest

I’ve been meaning to get round to Dreadful Skin for ages. I mean, the idea of a gun-toting nun chasing an actually scary werewolf across America has got to be fun, right? Particularly given that I enjoyed Those Who Went Remain There Still, which had a similar horror feel. This isn’t creepy, more grotesque, but not gratuitous either. It’s more Dracula in tone than slasher film, I mean. I didn’t realise it was actually three shorter stories collected together, telling the story via three episodes in the nun’s life.

There’s not really enough space — or likeable enough characters — to get emotionally hooked to this. Even with the first person narrators, they switched so frequently and sounded similar-ish, so I didn’t get hold of them. But I loved the Spring-Heeled Jack link, the setting, the way the werewolf acts and the way Priest uses the werewolf lore here. The middle story feels like a bit of an anti-climax; it does reveal a couple of things, but it doesn’t involve the main antagonist, and mostly just sets up the last story.

Interesting construction, etc, but I think I would’ve liked a more cohesive novel more.

Rating: 3/5

Fathom, Cherie Priest

Fathom isn’t my favourite of Cherie Priest’s books (the honour for that goes to Bloodshot and Hellbent, by an awful long way), but it was an interesting read. It felt somewhat… inconclusive, because in the end, nearly all of the actions of the book mean nothing. One character in particular just seemed to be there to be described in a quirky way in the summary (“add in a hapless fire inspector who’s just trying to get his paperwork in order”). It was particularly odd because it wasn’t a quirky sort of book at all; it was more dark and weird, with elementals and a whole supernatural world crawling under the skin of normal life. And then that character exited the plot with almost no impact on it; he was just a convenient way of getting from A to B, and then he’s gone.

Still, that darkness and power, the transformations of the characters who get caught up in it, are fascinating — and the loneliness of Mossfeaster is portrayed well, his half-indifference belied by his interest in his creation, by his desire to keep her close. I wanted to know more about Mossfeaster and his past, and Arahab, and the fire elemental too whose existence was only really touched on…

The weirdest point, though, is the depiction of Berenice. There’s a handwave towards setting her up with motivations (she claims to have been molested by her stepfather), but most of the time she just seems spoilt, petty, and… well, evil. Arahab was more ambiguous, with her genuine love for her ‘children’, her drive. Berenice seemed pretty much just out for herself, and it never really went any deeper than that.

This all sounds very lukewarm, but it was a fascinating read. I’d love to have spent more time exploring the mythology and less on the hapless fire inspector or Berenice’s plotting.

Rating: 3/5

Maplecroft, Cherie Priest

I like Cherie Priest’s ideas a lot, and even the writing when it works for me — Bloodshot and Hellbent being books I totally adore. I like her characters, the way she picks people who other writers might overlook: the working mother of Boneshaker, the neurotic vampire and her found family of Hellbent, and here, Lizzie Borden — yes, that one. She takes the two Bordens and makes them heroines, tries to change your perspective on the murder of the Borden parents, makes them women of learning and resolve, biting back against patriarchal society. And Lizzie’s relationship with Nance O’Neil is explicitly a sexual one here, which… I’m not sure if I think it’s a bit exploitative, using these real people in the service of this story. And yet I don’t flinch if you go back further and use Chaucer or Gower or Shakespeare, speculate about their relationships, so I guess it’s just because they’re that much closer to living memory. Either way, I do enjoy the way Priest chooses characters to weave her stories around.

The format is pretty cool, too: an epistolary novel, basically, very much in the same sort of vein as Dracula — only here, it’s a woman acquitted of murder versus stuff from the Cthulhu mythos. I’m not sure how completely Priest draws on that or whether it’s just nods in that direction, but she does a pretty good job of making the menace felt. One thing I didn’t quite get was the tetanus stuff and how/why that worked, which weakened things for me a bit — I felt like just a bit more explanation on that point would’ve helped, much as it might have gone against the grain of the mystery and the superstition that was wrapped around the scientific aspects.

It is a bit slow at some points — the epistolary format doesn’t help with that, since it gives us very explicit glimpses into how characters are feeling after the events they’re recording, which can slow down the action as they introspect. But overall I thought it was interesting, and I’d definitely read more in the series, where I’m much less bothered about the Eden Moore books or even the Clockwork Century books, which I haven’t read all of.

Rating: 3/5