Fabulous Bodies

Chuck Tingle
Completed 9/24/2026, Reviewed 9/24/2026
4 stars

Tingle writes terrific horror.  This is another great horror novel by him, though not as life changing as Camp Damascus or Lucky Day.  It’s pretty grizzly body horror featuring a body thief named Poppy Stringer and the zombified corpse of her queer musical idol, Eddie Michaels.  But it’s not another zombie apocalypse story.  There’s more than meets the eye to Eddie’s reanimation and it entangles Poppy, her daughter Marlo, and her gay best friend Noah who babysits Marlo.  If you can get past all the gore, you’ll be rewarded with Poppy’s metanoia (a profound change of heart, a transformative shift in one's way of thinking, or a spiritual conversion) amidst the blood and guts.   

By day, Poppy tries to be a social media influencer, focusing on fashion.  But her real means of making ends meet is stealing dead bodies for a variety of clients.  She doesn’t care about the reason; she does it because she’s good at it and it pays enough to support herself and Marlo.  She tells no one, not even Noah, quipping, “…I can only assume [Noah] thinks I’m a part-time stripper, as little else would require my late night babysitting needs and a code of silence.  Black-market corpse dealer is probably low on his list.”  (Cringy chuckle).  When her all-time favorite musician Eddie Michaels is killed in a car crash, she’s assigned to pick up the body (apparently, it’s already been stolen).  In the back of her van, he comes to life and commandeers her to run some gruesome errands for him; she obeys.  As the night progresses, she begins to realize he’s leaving a string of bodies, many of whom have been flayed alive, and to her horror, the victims’ torture was self-inflicted.  She realizes he has some kind of mind control over his victims, and her.  But he’s so powerful, physically and mentally, she doesn’t know how she can stop him.  

At the book’s start, Poppy is terribly self-absorbed, thinking she’s doing this for Marlo.  The reality is she’s a performer.  She likes being the object of applause, boosting her ego, and writing off Marlo’s disdain for the amount of time Poppy spends making videos.  But as her nightmare with Eddie unfolds, she grows on you as she comes to realize what he’s doing with his victims, and more terrifyingly, why.  That’s what triggers Poppy’s metanoia.  But it’s not a simple journey.  It’s filled with horrors and failed attempts at escaping from Eddie’s clutches.  It was tough for me to accept her character development, though.  The opening makes her relatively unlikeable, and I resisted her changing until I was caught up in the action.  Lots of driving, chasing, flaying, and murders of witnesses.  Tingle does an excellent job of combining the action with Poppy’s character development.  He keeps the story moving yet gives Poppy copious time for self-reflection.  This is what got me to warm up to her. 

In terms of other characters, I liked Marlo and Noah right off the bat, even though they didn’t get much page time.  Both have several good quips, a few providing some comic relief.  But the relief comes fewer and farther between as the story goes on.  Eddie, who at first seems kind of okay, quickly becomes a sadistic killer.  Even though Tingle is known for his witty prose, there’s little of it here.  Or at least, I didn’t notice it amidst the brutality.  

This book is definitely NOT for the squeamish.  If you don’t like horror, you will detest this.  But this book was right up my alley.  I only read a few horror novels a year and most are milder than this.  I actually wondered if the character’s name, Poppy, was an homage to Poppy Z Brite, a body horror author who had a couple of excellent but highly disturbing novels about thirty years ago.  If you’re so inclined, check out my reviews for her Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, and Exquisite Corpse.  I give Tingle’s book four stars out of five.  It didn’t affect me as deeply as his previous books, but it was still highly engrossing and, well, gross.  

The City and the Stars

Arthur C. Clarke
Completed 9/21/2026, Reviewed 9/24/2026
3 stars

Of the books I’ve read by Clarke, I have found most are tales of wonder, not plot.  He spends most of his time describing the awe of something extraterrestrial as we saw in Rendezvous with Rama or “2001: A Space Odyssey” (which I read in high school and in my mid-twenties).  The same holds true here for futuristic living.  The plot is more detailed than usual, but not enough to fill all the holes.  This book was an online book club read.  Most people were on the positive side of meh, I was on the negative side.  Despite an interesting dystopian future, I quickly became bored with the descriptions of everything.  Most others in the club liked them.  But I think we all agreed that despite Clarke’s usual attention to detail, there were quite a few holes throughout the book.

For a billion years, Diaspar has protected its 10 million inhabitants from the horrors of the outside world and the mysterious Invaders with a biodome.  People live to be a thousand-years-old.  They don’t reproduce; their minds are stored when the body is recycled.  At some point in the near or distant future, they are put into a new body.  They never leave the dome.  One day, Alvin arrives.  However, he does not have a past life; he seems to be a new person.  He has an insatiable fascination with what’s outside the dome.  Everyone one else fears the outside, but Alvin wants to prove them wrong.

There are a good number of characters in this book, but little character development.  Alvin has the best arc, as he should being the main character, but it is a little thin.  He’s intensely curious and often iconoclastic.  He kind of has a girlfriend who he’s just not into, though she’s obsessed with him.  He has a cordial relationship with the people known as his parents.  They received him when he was incarnated and he lived with them until the age of twenty, which is about when previous life memories usually begin to return.  He also has a generally good relationship with his tutor.  But it’s not until he meets “Joker” that things liven up.  Joker is a person created by the city’s designers to throw monkey wrenches around to shake up the status quo.  The Joker confirms that Alvin is a new being and he was also created by the designers to shake people up when society needs a strong kick in the butt. 

Alvin really begins to grow when he finds out what’s on the outside.  He also finds someone with whom he forms an intimate relationship.  To me, and everyone in book club, this appeared to be typical 1950’s queer coding for the masses.  Clarke was not openly gay but was honest with people when they asked.  Alvin’s relationship with Hilvar seems to reflect Clarke’s own long-term relationship with a local Sri Lankan man, Leslie Ekanayake.  In the book, one big hole in the story was that the girlfriend from the beginning never gets closure on her obsession with Alvin.  We all thought that was because it would have been a coming out scene, which would have been illegal in Britain in the 50s.

A bigger plot hole to me was that the people in Diaspar understood people from the outside.  Considering their billion-year isolation, I couldn’t believe the language didn’t drift until they became separate, distince languages. Even if you argue that Diaspar’s language didn’t drift because of technology and recordings, the language of the more rural outsiders would surely have evolved over time.  

As for the world building, of course, it’s tremendous.  I had highly vivid images of Diaspar and Alvin’s journeys.  The problem for me with wonder-novels is that the sparkle of the prose and world building begin to wear off.  It’s like the ending scene in the very first Star Trek movie where everyone sat there with mouths agape for way too long.  It gets tedious.  Sure, the plot moved a bit in this book, but not enough to make up for how easy it was to put the book down in the middle of reading when I was distracted by just about anything else.  No matter how interestingly this dystopia was crafted, I still suffered from awe-fatigue.  Three stars out of five.

I Who Have Never Known Men

Jacqueline Harpman
Completed 9/17/2026, Reviewed 9/17/2026
4 stars

My predisposition was against liking this novella.  It was last month’s online book club selection, but didn’t get a chance to read it before now.  The general feeling of the book was negative with a few dissenters.  If I had read it in time, I would have been a dissenter.  I thought this book was tremendous.  The author is Belgian and this is a new translation that has been achieving a cult following.  I found it highly readable, though dense.  When I got into the zone, I read one hundred pages in a night, the rest the following morning.    It’s post-apocalyptic from the point of view of a teenage girl who has no memory of the previous life, being just a toddler when the event occurred.  It follows her for the next forty-some-odd years.  And it’s not a happy book but it is an exploration of what it means to be human and a woman in a world turned upside down.

The book opens with an older woman writing about her experiences in this post-apocalyptic world.  She goes back to her earliest memories.  She was kept in a cage with thirty-nine women, all adults of various ages.  They do not know why they are caged, carefully monitored, and brutally beaten for infractions.  The thirty-nine have been in the cage so long that they don’t remember much of life before.  Their focus is on survival today.  The young girl is an outsider because of the age gap.  She has no name that she remembers.  One day, something akin to an air raid siren goes off and the guards run out.  It just so happens that they leave the key in the cage’s lock.  The women escape only to find a barren deserted landscape that might not even be Earth.

The unnamed narrator, having been kept separate from the rest of the women her whole time in the cage, thinks very differently than the women.  They have context, she has none.  She doesn’t understand anything, even her own body as we discover her puberty was stunted and she doesn’t menstruate.  It’s not until their escape that the eldest women begin teaching her about life, as well as math, reading, and some history.  As they journey looking for other survivors and a place to live, the narrator begins matching ideas and words with real things.  But still doesn’t feel as human as she perceives the other women.  But because of this, she finds herself capable of thinking outside the box enough to solve the problems they face in this empty world.  

There’s an afterward to this book which has some terrific statements about it.  The best is the summary, which I’ll quote here: ”It’s a philosophical treatise as much as a story about an alien world, one that prizes the humanity of its characters and places this humanity square, front and center, even in a disorientating landscape of total strangeness.  The prose is cool water.  Its images are lonely, weird, sometimes horrific, and always arresting.”

I couldn’t have said that better myself.  In the end, it’s about acknowledging the humanity in all of us, no matter how different we feel.  The narrator always felt different, like a new species of human.  It was her greatest asset but learning that she is human was her greatest lesson.  I give this book four stars out of five.

The Prisoner of Limnos

Lois McMaster Bujold
Completed 9/13/2026, Reviewed 9/17/2026
3 stars

This is a sort of sequel to Mira’s Last Dance in that Nikys is involved and the hesitant romance continues.  I found it to be a good solid story, but not quite as riveting as Mira’s.  I did really like several new side characters that Bujold introduced, including Nikys’ possible future sister-in-law Tanar, Tanar’s albino eunuch guardian Bosha, and Nikys’ younger brother Ikos.  All three infuse a little levity and differing temperaments after the stranger danger wears off.  

The story picks up shortly after the trio have settled in Orbas.  Nikys gets a note from Bosha that cryptically says that her mother has been kidnapped.  They decide not to tell Adelis since he’s been stationed with Orbas’ military.  They get funding from the Duke of Orbas and head to talk with Bosha and his ward Tanar.  After a successful and cautious journey, they get the lowdown from Tanar and Bosha that her mother was exiled to the temple of the Daughter on the forbidding island of Limnos.  They attempt to rescue Nikys’ mother, with Pen again dressing up as one of the demon’s previous female hosts and taking Bosha with them to help with conveyance and security.

The story felt more like a standalone featuring these characters than a true sequel.  However, it’s a good story.  I liked Bosha, after the initial suspicion of his intentions and motivations.  He has a very dry sense of humor when he warms up to Pen, which happens slowly.  Like in many of these books, Pen takes time revealing his true talents to avoid possible apprehension, frustrating the other characters like Bosha.  Tanar was also interesting.  She starts off as kind of an airhead, though she’s determined to fend off suitors while waiting for Adelis to return.  She doesn’t know if she loves him but likes the person he is and thinks he’s worth the effort.  The relationship between Bosha and Tanar is odd.  It seems more intimate than just a guardian, making Pen and Nikys confused about Tanner’s commitment to Adelis.  But after some talking, even that concern dissipates.  

I liked the character of Ikos, Nikys’ younger brother, a shipbuilder who she hasn’t seen in years.  He pops up in the form of a deus ex machina to (reluctantly) help Pen in the rescue mission.  I won’t go into more detail than that to avoid spoilers.  But in this case, he really seems to be sent by the god known as the Daughter, the patron of the temple, a true “deus ex machina.”  

The story is a pretty good rescue mission tale.  It’s suspenseful at all the right times and continues to have a good amount of snarky commentary by Des, Pen’s demon.  She’s especially good at calling out the absurdity of both Nikys’ and Pen’s hesitancy in making the first move.  At one point she says, “Marry the sorcerer, dear…and put me out of his misery.”😄I give the book three stars out of five.

Mira’s Last Dance

Lois McMaster Bujold
Completed 9/11/2026, Reviewed 9/14/2026
4 stars

It can be tough writing a review for a novella sequel.  The story is short, so the plot is not usually as complex.  Plus, the character development is already in place.  And of course, there are SPOILERS for the last installment.  That’s the struggle I had while writing this review.    I loved this book as much as Penric’s Mission, mostly because it continues the story of characters I’ve come to really enjoy.

The story picks up as Penric, Adelis, and Nikys continue their trek to the duchy of Orbas, a safe haven for the general and his sister.  Penric was critically hurt and Des needs time to heal him completely.  They end up staying in a brothel.  In repayment, he cleans the place of vermin.  Des alerts him to the madame’s breast cancer, which they try to heal, though it takes away from Pen’s own healing.  They decide he must remain undercover and poses as a woman.  While disguised, he meets a general, Chadro, who wants to buy Pen’s services, being he is in a brothel.  The personality of Mira comes to the forefront to help him pass as a courtesan, as she once was.

This is a reminder that Desdemona is a chaos demon who retains the personality imprints of her past hosts.  Pen can draw on this experience in his daily life.  That is why he was able to heal Adelis’ eyes in the last book, as one of the past hosts was a physician.  In this case, Mira the courtesan comes forward to help Pen pose as a woman and to deal with General Chadro.  It’s really a cute sequence, reminiscent of the film “Victor/Victoria.”  She helps Pen make interesting choices in their quest to get to Orbas.  

The sexual tension between Penric and Nikys is still high, and Adelis and Nikys still bicker about it.  Nickys is pretty resistant to marriage to Penric.  She has quite the realization about him: “Most men kept to their assigned parts in life.  If you knew the part, you could reliably guess how they would behave.  She had no script for demon-ridden sorcerer.”  I like this sardonic thought.  As a counter to this, the sexual tension between Penric as Mira and Chadro is pure comedy with an underlying tension of Mira getting too deep into the acting.  

These story lines made the book a very enjoyable read, very tight and humorous.  There is a third novella in this subseries that continues the story of Adelis, Nikys, and Penric, even though this one doesn’t end in a cliffhanger.  I already jumped into that one just because I love the dynamic between the main characters.  I give this book four stars out of five.    

Penric’s Mission

Lois McMaster Bujold
Completed 9/9/2026, Reviewed 9/9/2026
4 stars

This third novella in publication order is the fourth in internal chronology.  Unlike its three predecessors, the last of which is Penric’s Fox, I really got into the plot of this one.  I thought it was the most intriguing since the first, but also I found it more readable.  Penric’s demon Desdemona is back to her witty banter.  And now I’m used to, and really enjoy, Penric’s word choices and speaking style.  

In this book, he is on a mission to convince a Cedonian general to conscript with the duke of Adria.  However, on the way, he is arrested in thrown in a deep dungeon.  He escapes, only to find out the general, commonly known as Adelis, has been blinded by the man Velka and is now in the care of Adelis’ sister Nikys.  So his mission appears to have been a setup.  He tries to find Adelis and Nikys to get them safely out of the region.  However, they don’t know if the duke of Adria can be trusted or if they should go somewhere else.  

I think my favorite part of the book is the banter between Adelis and Nikys as they try to figure out who and what Penric is.  Adelis is distrustful, but Nikys comes to believe his story.  It’s also a nice refresher on Penric’s origins.  I also enjoyed the sexual tension between Nikys and Penric, which her brother is not too keen on.  There’s a great comeback by Nikys after Adelis accuses her of being jealous of a fellow prettier than she.  She hits him back with, “Why, are you?  Really, Adelis!”  

Another great quote towards the beginning where Penric confronts Velka with, “You’re worse than evil.  You’re inefficient.”  As I noted above, I love how he has uses words in his style of speech.  I always imagine him calm while he prattles on about anything and everything, especially when he’s tired.  His perspective is unique and he’s good at confusing people with what he says and what he withholds.  I guess I’ve really come to like Penric.

And of course, I can’t leave Desdemona out.  She does not mince words and so when Penric beats around the bush at his feelings for Nikys, Des blurts out, “…you’re the one who’s been mooning after her hips for the past fortnight.  So do something about it.”  It’s the type of banter that was so endearing in the first book but seemed to be missing in the next two.  

I’m reading this book in conjunction with the next one chronologically.  This book sort of ends with a cliffhanger and I’d like to see if Bujold keeps the momentum going in the next one.  I give this four stars out of five.  

(Note: this novella is available on Bookshop.org in the collection "Penric's Travels")

American Hippo

Sarah Gailey
Completed 9/6/2026, Reviewed 9/8/2026
3 stars

This is a collection of novellas set in an alternative America where feral hippos rule the bayou.  It’s based on an actual bill presented to Congress to bring the African hippo to the US as an alternative meat source.  The novellas read a little like wild west tales but with antiheroes; no one is simply a good guy or a bad guy.  Even the hippos are morally grey; some are good and domesticated; others are feral and fierce.  It makes for a fun and interesting read.  

The first novella introduces us to a motley crew of people on the edge of the law, led by Winslow Houndstooth, a “hopper” hired to round up the feral hippos in the Louisiana delta area and gather them into a large lake.  This would keep them from spreading along the Mississippi and disrupting trade and transportation.  In this alt-America, Congress and the president passed the bill to import the hippos for meat and domestication but failed to take into account how feral and dangerous they can get.  So Houndstooth gathers together a team of rough folks, a nod to the Seven Samurai, to undertake this mission.  There are several other subplots going on amidst this.  A US Marshall is looking for one of the hippo hunters who is wanted for murder.  He also has a long-standing relationship with one of the other hunters.  They’ve kept it secret since they are basically on opposite sides of the law.  Between this hunt and the not so random hippo attacks, Houndstooth’s team struggles to complete their mission.  The second novella continues the story where more is revealed.  There are also two short stories and a timeline of hippos in America which add some background color to the novellas.  

I didn’t get a tight connection with any of the characters.  There were just too many of them for lengths of the stories.  I also had issues with the names of the characters.  There were two women on the team, one named Adelia and the other Archie, violating the unwritten rule of giving your characters names that begin with different letters of the alphabet to help keep them from being confused.  They both have accents, Adelia being Latina and Archie being French.  Her full name is Regina Archambault.  At least Adelia is pregnant which helps differentiate them a bit.  In addition, there was a domesticated hippo named Abagail.  So there’s three A names.  Then there’s Houndstooth and Hero, the latter being a non-binary love interest of Houndstooth.  Lastly there are two hippos named Rosa and Ruby.  Yeah, it gets confusing quickly.

Houndstooth is almost likable.  He’s a native Brit, transplanted here to wrangle hippos.  I had to smile when he hooked up with the blue-eyed federal agent who hired him.  As he tells his hippo Ruby, he can’t say no to those blue-eyed boys.  But he’s clearly fluid in that he later develops feelings for his non-binary associate, Hero.  Even though I liked him in the first novella, he goes a bit crazy in the second when the team is split.  I didn’t feel the slow transformation into crazed desperation to get Hero back.  It felt out of character for him.  

The world building in this collection is pretty good.  I did feel like I was awkwardly riding hippos in the swampy marshes in the bayou.  And I really liked the short story about the cost of getting Ruby’s cracked horns (long, protruding teeth) fixed.  There is some humor sprinkled throughout.  Overall, I’d say it’s a fun book, even if it’s a little more serious than your standard fluff.  What stood out for me was the conviction with which the author wrote.  I could almost believe this was an historical novel versus alt-history.  But I give this book a middlin’ three stars out of five because I felt immersed in the stories’ details, but not the main characters.  I think I would also have enjoyed a little more focus on the hippos, rather than being just the background plot for the human interaction.