Dobes Zone

       I realized, to my slight shame, that I never finished writing this review for The Island of Dr. Moreau, a book that I read months ago for the first ever assignment for the book club I'm running. So far we've also read Watership Down , Under the Skin, The Lives of the Monster Dogs, and now Cycle of the Werewolf! I'll have to write my reviews for the other books as well, but one step at a time I suppose.     I'd read a fair bit of H. G. Wells as a kid, being a huge sci-fi fiend and also a precocious early reader that got into a lot of heavier adult books while my peers were still on middle grade or YA books. I'd dug into War of the Worlds and The Time Machine but somehow had missed The Island of Doctor Moreau the first time around. If you've seen any of the movie adaptations, you might be lulled into the idea that you already know the story, but the book offers a lot more complexity and nuance than a lot of film adaptations are able to accommodate...

      I'm dusting the cobwebs off my blog, realizing that I had a couple unfinished book reviews waiting for me, I still have a couple on the backburner and yet here I am working on a new review. I'd previously reread A Clockwork Orange and also read Phantom of the Opera as well as The Island of Doctor Moreau for the first time. For the book club I'm running myself, we just wrapped up Watership Down by Richard Adams. This was a reread for me and also was a childhood favorite. It's the kind of book that a kid with a certain type of brain gets sucked into. Admittedly Watership Down was an obsession for me for a while. I read this wonderful illustrated edition of Watership Down which includes paintings by Aldo Galli in glossy inserts. Good stuff.       Revisiting as an adult, I can really appreciate why this particular book has had such staying power. Along with being just a fantastic and epic tale, Watership Down is also impeccably researched both f...

     I read The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek for the fab book club hosted by Annie Rose of the podcast Girls Guts Giallo and it was definitely one of the more challenging books. Stylistically, the text is quite dense and layered, flowing from one metaphor to another and shifting seamlessly between perspectives of omniscient narrator and different characters. Structurally it takes a very different approach to story-telling, though the events are all quite linear and easy to follow. Aside from its dense and descriptive nature, I actually found the actual content of the book more challenging than the style, which is used to intensify the emotional experience of the text.     Erika Kohut is a talented pianist in Vienna who never made it big in her field. Instead she teaches piano for a living and has a repressed and very controlled homelife with her domineering mother. The relationship between mother and mid-30s daughter is a very toxic and codependent one...

 Kindred by Octavia E Butler is an incredibly heavy book and perhaps the one that the author is best known for. It's the kind of book that definitely is important while being unpleasant, gripping and utterly terrifying. If you want to read sci-fi/fantasy that's socially relevant, it's something I'd consider essential reading. Not my own copy, just the first edition cover which I like better than the edition from the library. Laughing at the Harlan Ellison quote though, cruel yes, sensual? No.       In Kindred, Dana, a black woman living in 1976, finds herself spontaneously traveling back through time to rescue a white boy from drowning in the river, and then again to save the boy from a fire he'd started in his room. On this second visit she pieces together that this boy is her ancestor and he is somehow calling her to him in times of danger. Dana has to protect Rufus, her ancestor, in order to assure that her own family and existence is preserved. Most horrifyi...

       My choice to read Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner started with my desire to re-read The Fall of the Kings, a book that I happened to pick up randomly at a book outlet when I was maybe 12 or 13. At this same outlet I'd also picked up Katie Waitman's The Merro Tree as well as The Essential Bordertown: A Traveler's Guide to the Edge of Faerie- a collection of short stories about the human world and the elfin world connecting. At this age I was totally rabid for anything SF/F and often brought home huge hauls of books from library book sales, where you could fill a bag for a couple dollars on the final days of the sale. It should probably surprise no one that a lot of my experiences with these books were formative and were some of my earliest experiences with queerness. Generally I was reading books that were only aimed at adults for the most part since I didn't really *do* YA except when I was quite little- barring some obvious furry bait choices like Redwall. The F...

     Mild spoilers ahead. More focused on themes than plot beats or infodumps about the characters though.        It's been too long since I've written a book review and I wanted to get in depth about an interesting book from a contemporary author. Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin is a book that takes on the tired trope of "what if only women survived an apocalyptic event" and revitalizes it with a transgender perspective. Considering that there were recent attempts to make a TV series out of Y The Last Man , a story which trots out this premise about "biological" sex that's been fucking tired since the 70s, it feels very necessary to have a trans take on the subject. I find too with a lot of SF/F (which is often adjacent or overlapping with horror) that a lot has absolutely regressed in the contemporary despite claiming some very by-the-numbers elements of progressiveness.      And I should note, regarding the 70's, James Tiptree Jr...

 It's been a moment since I updated and also a moment since I finished reading a book- having been side-tracked with projects and other life matters. But as promised, I'm writing up a little review of Michael Peak's Catamount- a loose sequel to his first novel Cat House which I wrote about previously .                       My copy of Catamount, with another lovely cover illustrated by Dan Craig       Catamount picks up with Sarena, the mountain lion from Cat House who allied herself with the housecat protagonists of the first novel, and with reporter Laura Kay. The book follows Sarena and Laura as they both follow independent but interconnected paths. Sarena is looking for more mountain lions and befriends an equally lonely bald eagle. Laura is following both a story on a proposed mountain lion hunt put forth by the game commission and a story about some vicious guard dogs that escaped. It is also...

 I've been carrying around far too many science fiction and fantasy paperbacks for decades and that's a problem I'm not aiming to change any time soon. As usual, I'm also a sucker for talking animal fiction, especially when it's aimed at adult audiences. Not too long ago I learned about the novel Cat House (1989) from a friend, who mentioned the plot and it sounded weird enough to compel me to dig up a copy for myself. I also grabbed its sequel Catamount. More about that later. My copy of Cat House. Beautiful cover by illustrator Dan Craig     The hook of Cat House is a plot about bored spayed house-cats starting a cat brothel so they can mate with tomcats who aren't interested in having kittens. The females take prey animals as payment but that's more for fun than anything else, since they're all well-fed house-cats. This ends up angering some of the unfixed cats, who consider the whole thing unnatural. The broader story is about the conflict of human d...