Sleeps With Monsters hasn’t brought you a Q&A piece in a while. But as a special winter treat, K.A. Doore (author of The Perfect Assassin and The Impossible Contract) agreed to answer some prying questions.
I didn’t anticipate reading two novels about queer teenage girls back-to-back. I especially didn’t anticipate finding that, though they are set in very different worlds, both of these books are about kindness, friendship, and doing right by your friends—family found and built, as it were.
And as a bonus, neither of them are about (a) the realisation of same-gender attraction or (b) coming out. (Coming-out stories have their place, but from my current vantage, they all seem a little bit too alike.)
Background photo: NASA
Down Among the Dead is K.B. Wagers’ fifth novel, the middle book of their second trilogy. I should confess up front that I’m a fan: Wagers’ first trilogy is one of the most entertaining and engaging space operas that I’ve ever read, and the second bids fair to build on that—while digging deep into the nature of trauma, trust, and recovery.
You could theoretically have started reading There Before the Chaos, the opening volume of this “Farian War” trilogy, without having read Wagers’ first trilogy in this setting. But fair warning: don’t start with Down Among the Dead if you haven’t read There Before the Chaos. Because Down Among the Dead takes the cliffhanger at the end of There Before the Chaos and runs with it, creating a novel that is as much exploration of grief and trauma as it is a novel of action and space-adventure.
I’ve been reading less in the last few months. Forced to take things more slowly, I’ve found myself more aware of my choices. I continue to gravitate towards books that both star women and are comfortably queer (as opposed to the queer relationship being a point of high stakes, high drama, and high tension). It’s reassuring that these days, there’s actually options, so that I can leave the high stakes/high drama queerness for a point at which I feel capable of enjoying it. I mean, I’ve been looking forward to Natasha Ngan’s Girls of Storm and Shadow and K. Arsenault Rivera’s The Warrior Moon since this time last year, but damn those characters are stressful.
Fortunately, I have K.A. Doore’s The Impossible Contract to keep me company. Assassins making poor life choices are more entertaining than stressful.
When I first heard about L.X. Beckett’s debut novel, the near-future science fiction sprawling cross between espionage thriller, family saga and romance that is Gamechanger, I wasn’t that excited. The cover copy is decidedly bland compared to the contents—so I found myself surprised and delighted when I started reading Gamechanger and couldn’t put it down.
Tasha Suri’s debut novel, Empire of Sand, proved her talent for epic fantasy and skill with characterisation. Two very different (but yet alike) people fought together to escape magical slavery and strike at the heart of centuries-old sorcery that smoothed the path of an empire. Suri’s worldbuilding evoked a richly detailed landscape—both in terms of the physical world and the socio-political one—and she balanced action and emotion with a deft hand. With Realm of Ash, Suri demonstrates not only talent, but consistency. This second novel is even more accomplished than the first.
Realm of Ash takes place in the same world as Empire of Sand, but the better part of a decade later. I believe it could be read as a standalone, but it benefits from the context of Empire of Sand.
I’m seeing a lot of love for award-winning author Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January. I understand why it must be grabbing some people so hard, for its quiet, lonely, trapped protagonist, the titular January, feels like someone a lot of us might recognise a little too closely, a little too intimately, from our childhoods, and her journey of growth and discovery of other worlds reflects the metaphorical discovery made by many readers that they, too, can find portals to very different places if they look hard enough—and the discovery by many children that adulthood opens different doors.
Theodora Goss has won both the World Fantasy Award and the Locus Award, and been a finalist for several more. Her initial (and enduring) success has been as a writer of short stories and poetry, with three collections to her name: it’s only in the last three years that she’s begun to publish novels. The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl is her latest, third in the sequence of 19th-century-pulp-inspired volumes that began with 2017’s The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter and continued in 2018’s European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman.
The strangest thing about talking about Helen Corcoran’s debut novel is that it’s actually kind of weird that I only met her recently. We’re both from Ireland and we’re both queer women—and we attended the same alma mater—and honestly, this country’s not that big. By that rubric, it’d turn out to be dead awkward if I hated Queen of Coin and Whispers, said debut (coming in April 2020 from Irish publisher O’Brien Press): I’m nearly certain that this is the first queer fantasy with a love story featuring young women to be published from a traditional outfit here, and I have just enough local pride to want the best for it.
Fortunately, Corcoran has written a novel that could have been tailor-made to satisfy my particular narrative kinks.
The two books I want to tell you about today are tonally very different to each other. One’s light and open and generally about people who mean well; the other is dark and claustrophobic and has a cast of people who’re largely trapped by circumstance into hurting each other.
A difficulty haunts me, now, when I’m reviewing or otherwise critiquing books: am I judging the book I in fact read, or the one I wanted to read? Sometimes they’re the same thing. Often they’re not, and the question of how much I resent the novel in front of me for not being different in these specific ways becomes a live and pressing issue.
Part of that’s because I need to reconcile myself to living with my brain on some degree of burnout for the foreseeable future. (It’s dreadfully frustrating to feel duller and more stupid than one used to be all the time.) Part of it, though, is that I’ve been spoiled in the past while by the number of books I’ve read in which queerness was both present (prominent) and unremarkable. It seems I’ve come to expect an acknowledgement that people like me can (do more than merely) exist with the pages of a narrative. When I don’t find that in the books I’m reading, it’s a constant nagging disappointment. Like I said, I got spoiled.
Last column out, I mentioned that I woke up one day to discover I hated every book I read. Shortly afterwards, I made a resolution, at least for now, to only read books that—to borrow a phrase—”sparked joy” and left me feeling delighted with my experience of the narrative. (Or at the very least, pleased.) This has had the beneficial effect of removing a significant number of volumes from my to-be-read shelf.
And increasing my pleasure in reading significantly.
A little while has passed since my last column, and I hope you’ll excuse my absence: These things rather happen, when you’re arranging your wedding (August! So soon!), applying to go back to college, and wake up one morning to the discovery that you hate everything you read.
It took news of Vonda McIntyre’s death to spur me to read Dreamsnake, which had been sitting on my shelf above two years before I cracked it open. I deeply regret that, because it means I’m far too late to be able to write her a fan email telling her how much I appreciated this novel.
This week I want to talk about books by three different authors—all very different to each other, but all very good.
