The Never Tilting World - Rin Chupeco

About the Book

Generations of twin goddesses have long ruled Aeon―until one sister’s betrayal split their world in two. A Great Abyss now divides two realms: one cloaked in eternal night, the other scorched beneath an ever-burning sun.

While one sister rules the frozen fortress of Aranth, her twin rules the sand-locked Golden City―each with a daughter by their side. Now those young goddesses must set out on separate, equally dangerous journeys in hopes of healing their broken world. No matter the sacrifice it demands.

512 pages
Published October 13, 2020

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Set on a world that has ceased spinning after a conflict between 2 ruling goddesses, Chupeco tells this story through the eyes of 4 different characters, whose respective quests coincide and lead them across burning deserts and night-blighted forest, to connect them all in ways they couldn't possibly have foreseen. Daughters of the aforementioned goddesses live in protected luxury, neither of whom know of the other's existence, but both of whom believe wholeheartedly that if they could travel to the place where the cataclysm happened, they can do something to reverse it and return the world to its former, more balanced, glory. Together with their guardians, they make the perilous journey, all of them learning more about themselves and each other along the way.

There were a few things that didn't work well for me in The Never Tilting World, though none of them completely ruined the experience for me. I didn't much care for Arjun, Haidee's guardian, as he felt poorly developed in comparison to the other characters. While Odessa and Lan had their tumultuous relationship, it felt like Arjun's presence served as more of a token convenience, someone who existed largely to give explanation as to how Haidee made it to her destination, and to also give Haidee a romantic interest, though I didn't really feel much between the characters. Not when on the other side of the world, there was a more developed couple (albeit a complicated on-again-off-again couple).

Besides that, there was the fact that the world had stopped spinning at all. It's an interesting set-up, but when it comes to the science, well, there wasn't any, not really. A world that used to rotate and then suddenly stops will have more consequences that just one side being constantly day and the other constantly night. Yes, I know it's fantasy, but I still like realism in my fantasy, and every time I thought about the potential consequences of an un-spinning world, it seemed there was only so far I could suspend my disbelief.

That doesn't mean Chupeco wrote The Never Tilting World badly. It just means there was one area I couldn't reconcile myself to. That's all.

That being said, the story overall was pretty interesting, though I had a clear preference for Lan and Odessa's story and Arjun and Haidee's. I enjoyed seeing their respective journeys across the world's dangers, both known and unknown, and seeing how they rose to the challenge or failed, how they discovered and rediscovered parts of themselves, and how willing the two young goddesses were to throw away everything they had been in favour of everything they might become.

Odessa, in particular, was an absolutely fascinating character. She started as a timid girl, but a determined one, and over the course of her journey and her acquisition of power, she not only became less timid, but more authoritarian, shaping her friends and guardians into something that would serve her interests at all costs. She broke boundaries, she did terrible things for what she felt sure were the right reasons, an exchange of her personality for the power to potentially remake the world and set it back on track, and seeing her transformation was enthralling to me. I've read a number of fantasy novels, but rarely do I see anything written from the perspective of someone who starts off fine and then succumbs to corruption along the way.

In contrast, Haidee's journey was a much less interesting thing to me, as it just involved, well, a pretty typical journey. Go new places, meet new people, learn a bit more about yourself and your world and the past, and then get to your destination. Haidee and Arjun's sections weren't boring, in fact most of the action seemed to be there, but I couldn't quite bring myself to care about them as much as I cared about Lan and Odessa.

For all that there were some aspects that didn't work for me, I did overall enjoy The Never Tilting World, and I'm curious as to how the story continues. The ending was the perfect cliffhanger, and there's clearly a lot more of the story to tell, so at some point in the future I'll probably see if I can see it all through to the end. There was clear creativity at work, in the world-building and the characters, and I'm always down for a good sapphic relationship. Even if this book didn't grab me as much as other books have, it was still pretty good, after all.

The Twisted Ones - T Kingfisher

 

About the Book

When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be?

Answer: pretty bad. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is stuffed with useless rubbish. That would be horrific enough, but there’s more—Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather’s journal, which at first seems to be filled with nonsensical rants…until Mouse encounters some of the terrifying things he described for herself.

Alone in the woods with her dog, Mouse finds herself face to face with a series of impossible terrors—because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real, and they’re looking for you. And if she doesn’t face them head on, she might not survive to tell the tale.

400 pages
Published October 1, 2019

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I spent an afternoon in the library one day, waiting for a ride home after a doctor’s appointment, and to pass the time, I sat reading T Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones. It turned out to be the best decision I’d made all day.

Mouse is tasked with cleaning out her deceased grandmother’s house, discovering not only that grandma was a hoarder in her elder years, but also that there are mysterious and deeply creepy things happening in the area. Things that can’t be explained rationally, and that don’t always have explanations or answers at the end.

The lack of answers made The Twisted Ones even more compelling, in my mind.

I’ve read a couple of things by Kingfisher before, but The Twisted Ones resonated in a way I didn’t expect. Not necessarily with characters I related to or settings I was familiar with, but by plucking a chord of disturbance in me, one which kept me hooked for the whole reading experience. Watching Mouse struggle not only with the relative mundanity of cleaning a house and coping with family issues, but with the supernatural elements that keep forcing their way into her life. A mysterious journal left by her grandfather, a desolate hill in the woods that keeps appearing and disappearing, and what feels an awful lot like dark faerie lore meets Southern gothic. There’s so much to unpack that trying to write this review feels awkward, like I’m not doing a proper job of explaining just how fantastic and dark and creepy The Twisted Ones was.

…and I made faces like the faces in the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones…

Even before all the truly terrifying things happened, Kingfisher builds a tense atmosphere with small explained incidents. The house she’s cleaning, packed with years and years of hoarded items, feels suffocating and oppressive, like wherever you go within it is just going to be as bad as the last room. No escape, no reprieve, and yet it’s where Mouse is stuck. Then you throw in Mouse seeing glimpses of something in the woods, or the figure peeking through the window, or the way voices and urges keep popping into her head, slowly ramps up the terror. The best analogy I can come up with is how you can be in a bath that’s slowly getting warmer, and you don’t always notice how hot it’s gotten until it’s too hot. The horror in The Twisted Ones is a bit like that. The small creeps add up until everything fits together and you find yourself, and the characters, running for their lives, terrified of what they know is behind them, and also what might be behind them.

I mentioned earlier that there are things in this novel that go unexplained by the end, and while that can be a turn-off for some readers (and I absolutely understand why), I think it worked well here. We learned everything that Mouse learned, and in the end she was more interested in fleeing for her life and getting to safety than she was in sticking around and trying to dig up lore about beings that may have originated across the ocean, and who were trying to kill her besides! I wouldn’t stick around either, no matter how curious I was. So while there are a few things I can infer, readers don’t get a concrete explanation of everything that led to the events of The Twisted Ones. I can see how that would leave some people disappointed, but for my part, I thought it fit well.

There was an author note included at the back of the book which talked about Kingfisher’s inspiration, a short story by Welsh author Arthur Machen, titled The White People (which I haven’t read, but now very much want to). It, too, apparently ends without a conclusive explanation for everything that happened, making The Twisted Ones a great reflection of the source material.

Despite the high creep factor and the tense atmosphere, The Twisted Ones is a book I want to reread at some point in the future. Probably after reading The White People, to gain better context. Since it’s a novel that builds its mystery piece by piece, layer by layer, that makes it an excellent candidate for a re-read, to see what ends up having greater significance early on, after knowing how it all ends. Also it was just a damn good book; I have yet to read anything that T Kingfisher has written that I haven’t deeply enjoyed. Even if it scares the pants off me!

The characters were a joy to follow (Mouse’s narrative voice was great, Foxy had a truly wicked sense of humour and personality, and Bongo is a doofy lovable dog who, yes, survives the horrific events he and his human were subjected to), the setting was strange and compelling, and Kingfisher’s writing style made The Twisted Ones a spine-tingling page-turner that deserves a spot on the bookshelves of everyone who loves horror and folklore.

The Memory Police - Yoko Ogawa

 

About the Book

A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.

On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss.

228 pages
Published July 28, 2020

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Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is, on its surface, a story about a novelist living on an island where people’s memories, and thus their connection to and understand of things, disappears. When something from the island disappears – for instance, shoes – people burn or throw away the useless vestiges of items that no longer mean anything. What good is having a shoe around when you don’t know what to do with it, when you can’t remember doing anything with it at all?

This is all facilitated by the Memory Police, who ensure that people properly dispose of their unneeded disappeared-memory items, while also seeking out those few in society who, for whatever reason, are still able to remember.

For most of the book, this character, known only as R, hides out in a small room inside the protagonist’s house, keeping himself safe from the Memory Police, at great risk to the protagonist herself. Nobody knows what will happen if the Memory Police catch them, only that they’ll be taken away and never return. Lack of knowing keeps them both paralysed, stuck in place due to their fear.

It’s not hard to see how this setup makes for some brilliant commentary on society, on language and memory, and on oppressive regimes. The unnamed protagonist (almost nobody has a name in The Memory Police) takes it upon herself to hide a close acquaintance after he reveals that he’s on of those few who can still remember. His ability to retain his memories makes an heartbreaking but fascination juxtaposition, with him trying his best to get the protagonist to remember again, to reform her heart and soul with memories of beloved things from the past, and the disappointment the protagonist feels when she can’t, when at most she gets fleeting feelings that dissipate almost as quickly as they came.

And I do meant heartbreaking. At the beginning of the story, things feel interesting, and it’s easy to get invested in the life of the novelist and those around her. But the more I read, the more it became clear that there was no happy ending here, no way it could all be turned around and everyone could get their memories back and live happily ever after. I read the final page, closed the book, and felt hollow inside.

On one hand, this makes for a delightfully evocative story that draws a reader in and uses that investment to dig the knife in a little deeper. You feel the sorrow of a loss that even the protagonist doesn’t fully understand. It must be something akin to what R felt, seeing the protagonist lose so much of herself to the disappearances, while he remembered and knew exactly what was lost, could see the ripple effects of that loss.

There’s never an explanation for any of this. What causes people to lose their memories like that? Why are animals also affected, like the day birds disappeared? Why did fruit fall from the trees and rot upon the ground the day that fruit itself became a vanished memory? Why do people like R seem incapable of forgetting? If this were a YA dystopian novel, for instance, there would have been sci-fi explanations, a glorious rebellion where people overthrow the Memory Police and reclaim their memories and lives and thus their freedom. But there’s none of that here, making The Memory Police feel like an almost dream-like fairy tale. The point isn’t to explain. The point is to experience.

This all came together to create a powerful allegory for how oppressive regimes destroy themselves from within. Even the Memory Police themselves were subject to the disappearances. They weren’t immune to having novels vanish, to losing the concept of candy, and nor were they immune to losing the use of their bodies, eventually becoming faint wisps of voice like everyone else, to drift away on the breeze and allow all those who escaped, all those who hid, to come out of their hiding places and resume living in the outside world.

But here’s the rub. The regime fell. But the survivors were few in number, and emerged into a world that had been devasted by the actions of the Memory Police and their actions. Could fruit ever grow again? Would birds return, if people remembered them and could recognize them? Or would they have to find a way to leave the island and try to live elsewhere, shouldering their trauma of events that those on the outside couldn’t possible understand?

The effects of oppression don’t just vanish the moment the regime falls. Survivors are still affected by their past. They don’t just forget.

I can’t say for certain that was what the author intended with The Memory Police, but that was how it read to me. Spare on answers, but heavy with meaning, the protagonist’s story resonates with too many events from real-world history, enough to create an unsettling and uncomfortable atmosphere throughout while also making the characters and events compelling enough to keep me reading despite my discomfort. Sometimes books aren’t meant to be comfortable relaxing reads before bed. Sometimes they invite you to think, to reflect, and to confront ideas that you’d normally rather not. So I can’t say I enjoyed it, per se. But I did think it was an amazing piece of speculative literature, and one that was well worth reading.