chrisbiss's reviews
596 reviews

This is another book that I really wanted to love but ended up thinking was just okay. It's a little too 'slice of life' for my tastes. It's well written and all of the characters are well-drawn, and many of the situations that are set up are compelling and I'd love to know how they're resolved. Unfortunately we never get a satisfying conclusion to any of them.

The final chapter serves as a little bit of a time skip, showing the fallout from all of the little dramas we've been watching, but it's all related to a new character with no investment in the situations as things that have already happened. I found it quite frustrating. The book almost seems to acknowledge this rug pull, too:

The stories we were hearing about perfect strangers were interesting and we wanted to hear them, and it's annoying that they were cut off before they ended. Maybe this is the point, and we're being asked to reflect on why we're so invested in the petty squabbles and dramas of other people? Maybe the book is telling us to mind our own business. But if that's the case it doesn't land, and I almost feel like I would have preferred everything to simply end unresolved rather than attempting to wrap things up with this loose, half-formed, unsatisfying denouement.



That said, I still enjoyed reading this, I just wish there had been a little more to it.

An old favourite from childhood that I was in the mood to revisit.

I received an advanced reading copy of this book via Netgalley.
 

I went into this one with high expectations but ultimately was disappointed. The Witcher meets Squid Game is an interesting pitch, and The Serpent Called Mercy does attempt to deliver a fantasy full of monsters, ambition, and the grit of urban underworlds. Unfortunately, what sounds like an exciting blend of intrigue and violence instead becomes a frustratingly uneven read, where ambitious themes and promising ideas are undermined by poor execution, thin world-building, and a central message that I found frustrating at best and naive and short-sighted at worst. 

The story alternates between cozy, domestic moments in tearooms around the city of Setgad and arena combat against horrible monsters brought in from outside the city, a juxtaposition that could have been compelling if handled deftly. The problem is that neither aspect fully lands. The action sequences especially fell very flat for me. These should be the beating heart of the novel but most of them consist of the protagonists sitting on platforms above the monsters they're meant to be fighting, talking through their plans in complete calm until Lythlet puzzles out the solution - usually by making use of something she's learned about said monster from a book. It put me in mind of someone reading a Dungeons & Dragons monster manual entry about a bear and then expecting to be able to win a fight against one. 

The cozy elements of the book fare a little better, but even then they're undermined by tonal inconsistencies. One fairly major subplot revolves around child sex trafficking and the sexual abuse of children, and the references to it are introduced with the subtlety of a brick. Characters mention it in passing without ever really reflecting on the true horror of it, and it's incredibly jarring when set against the cozier, warmer moments. And even those cozy moments are set against a backdrop of abject poverty and spiralling debt that's never really explored. The result is a story that feels unsure of what it wants to be - soft, comforting wish fulfillment fantasy or dark, gritty drama that explores the evils of unchecked capitalism. 

The book also struggles with charaterisation. Lythlet, our protagonist, is positioned as an intelligent, capable heroine, but her immediate mastery of every skill and situation robs the story of tension and her character of any sense of growth. In her first arena battle she manages to do something that hasn't been done by anybody in decades, unlocking a well of ancient magic that grants her the power to rewrite time itself for 8 seconds. This is barely ever mentioned again, and it feels like this should have been the climax of her time in the arena rather than something that happens casually once or twice and is then forgotten. Her only flaws seem to be that she struggles to understand social cues, and that she has a stutter - but the stutter is mentioned a handful of times in the opening chapters and then forgotten entirely. 

This is a symptom of a common problem in the book. Things are mentioned and plotlines are seeded only to never turn up again. A major subplot throughout the novel is the existence of a shady vigilante character called the Phantom, who has been stealing from the rich of the city and is a wanted criminal. Lythlet starts to be drawn into a web of conspiracy theories about the Phantom's existence, and it seems clear that this will be an important element in the final act. Then it's forgotten entirely, with no payoff whatsoever. 

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the book is its political naivety. The story’s central message seems to be that oppressive systems, whether they involve abusive employers, mob bosses, or the structural corruption of the city, can be defeated just as easily with a stern talking-to as with violent action or revolution. It places a strange and uncritical faith in the rule of law, despite its depiction of a city riddled with crime and inequality. In the current political climate, where systemic injustice often demands more than polite appeals to decency, this message feels incredibly naive. There's certainly a place for this sort of soft wish fulfilment, but perhaps not in a novel dealing with violent mob bosses and child sex slaves. 

This is a long list of complaints, but it's not all bad. Every time I felt like abandoning the book something would come along that kept me gripped - some revelation about the world, or a detail that I thought was interesting and wanted to see explored more. When it works well the juxtaposition of cozy fantasy and gritty underworld violence is really good. It's just a shame that the focus of the novel seems misplaced, and that it's so inconsistent. I'm also unsure who this is for. It's pitched as an adult fantasy novel but it reads much more like YA or NA, and I think that had I known that were the case I likely would have skipped it. As it is, I think it's too inconsistent for me to be able to recommend it. 

My ultimate takeaway from this novel is that it was just fine. And that's a shame, because it's a really strong pitch and I really wanted to like it more than I did.

My main problem here is that it's simply oo fast.  The story has no time to breathe, rattling along from scene to scene with very little connective tissue. Time jumps forward weeks and months with no indication that this has happened, and I found myself going back to reread sections to try and get myself situated in the narrative again. Characters make decisions and come to conclusions in the blink of an eye. One of the main characters, and FBI agent named Sloane, learns that vampires are real and is immediately fine with it and mentally prepared to deal with it, without any sense that this is a shock to him. A medical intern who's roped in to help the protagonists harvest organs from vampires witnesses her friends cutting open a live vampire and pulling out its insides in the back of a car and doesn't even flinch before she's asking if she can get wrist-deep in the much. And while all of this is going on the point of view jumps between characters without warning, sometimes in the middle of a paragraph, in a way that's very jarring.

Something I find that happens in books like this, where I really wanted to love it and end up just thinking it's okay, is that I grow increasingly critical of tiny, trivial details that don't really matter on their own but that add up to a growing sense of disillusionment with the work. One is the aforementioned speed with which characters react to their world being turned upside down. Others were small things about the world and the 'rules' of vampirism that didn't really add up. A big plot point is that characters throw things for vampires to count as a distraction - bags of rice, tongue depressers, etc. But on multiple occasions vampires break through windows to attack people or gain access to locations. Why are they not compelled to stop and count the shards of broken glass on the floor before continuining? Why does this counting thing only work some of the time? Another peeve - a couple of our protagonists are vampires, and they're capable of resisting the urge to feed. Why are they able to retain their humanity but none of the "bad" vampires are - even those who, we're told, are freshly turned, just like our protagonists? They're not really important issues but they jumped out at me and bothered me while I was reading.

Because of the quick pace the ending just doesn't really land, unfortunately. It builds to a climax but it nevers feels earned. It's just chaos and blood and violence because that's how a vampire story needs to end, right? I feel like this had the potential to reinvent the genre in the same way as something like 30 Days of Night or Blade but it's so rushed that it just falls flat, and that's a shame.

I'm not mad that I read it, but I wanted more from it.

My first DNF of the year. Because of the structure I don't actually know how much of the book I read (especially as I was reading digitally and so couldn't see physical pages) but I'd guess I got to about the 30% point. This is a really disappointing one, because I really loved The Cartographers and have been looking forward to this for a while.

I've always considered myself a fan of Choose Your Own Adventure style books, but it turns out I only like them when they're a gamebook and not a novel. With a gamebook I feel like I'm playing and making choices to try and win, and it doesn't matter that I'm going to miss bits of the book because the point isn't to see everything but to find the correct route through the thing. With a novel, on the other hand, I don't want to miss anything, and so making a choice feels like being asked "which bits of this book don't you want to read?"

It's been a while since I read it but I remember liking the prose in The Cartographers. That's not the case here. This has the cadence of the worst kind of trashy, highly commercial thrillers. The characters are paper thin, the situations are contrived, and every page just screams "this is a plot-driven novel". I never connected with or liked Marsh, and I found every other character she interacts with to be deeply annoying - especially Talia, who I think we're meant to like but I have no idea why. The constant intrusion of the viewers in their chat window was incredibly annoying, too, and pulled me out of the book every time they appeared.

What a shame.

I'm currently working on a dark academia TTRPG and wanted to read some lesser-known (and shorter) works in the genre, so I picked up this anthology. Subterranean Press have a track record of putting out good work, so I was hopeful.

I should have realised what I was getting into when the marketing blurb talks about "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" with an implied (derogatory) behind it. There's a common thread in this anthology of the stories being reactionary, tinged with right-wing rhetoric about "snowflakes" (one literally uses the phrase "Snowflake Generation" to describe Millenials) and a fear of anything resembling social justice or equity, and are deeply misogynistic. I think it's obvious that the majority of these stories were written by white American men in their 60s and 70s (an observation that Jane Hamilton's "Writing Maeve Dubinsky" would likely take issue with, as it examines identity politics through a lens of "straight white women should be able to write about whatever they want, and are probably better at telling the stories of queer and Black people than they are themselves, even when they have to steal them to make it possible").

Alongside the aforementioned plagiarism story we have tales about a professor who murders her students for being too woke (after seducing them); a man with a PhD in Medieval Studies who can't get a job and so shoots down a plane full of tenured professors with an RPG to create openings in the job market; a school where they learn to murder non-white and disabled people; a story that introduced its female main character as being "smarter than most of the male students [...] and damn near all the women" but who isn't, it turns out, smarter than the male characters who fuck her over and have her killed; and a woman who is raped by her boyfriend's PhD supervisor but says nothing because everyone knows she's slept with other men before and so it was basically her fault, if it was even rape. That last one might be trying to make a point about why women don't report these things, but if it is it does it clumsily and in a way that seems to point the finger at the victim.

It's not all terrible. Ian Rankin's story of a man investigating an historic murder in a secret society is gripping and genuinely very good right up until its slightly clumsy ending. Owen King's "That Golden Way" takes a step sideways into weird otherspaces horror and was really fun, even if it wasn't quite what I was looking for from "dark academia". Seanan McGuire's tale of a girl with a dark past and a darker future in her first days at university was a really nice fish out of water story right up until the very surprising twist into supernatural territory and I wish it had been longer.

Normally in anthologies I find that one or two stories strike me as being great, and that the rest are just fine aside from a couple of stinkers. Here I spent most of my time wondering if there was going to be a single story in the book that I liked even a little bit. Out of the 18 stories here there were only 3 that I actually thought were good, with the rest veering from bad to actively offensive. But, based on the thesis of most of these stories, maybe I've just spent too much time in these soft leftist halls of learning and need to toughen myself up.

This was a massive disappointment. 

Stories about 'otherspaces' and weird liminal places are among my favourites, whether that's *House of Leaves* or Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. The fact that this also promised some choose your own adventure/branching path stuff made it doubly interesting to me. Unfortunately it's a complete failure to launch.

The main problem here is entirely in the tone of the thing. The main character's narration is abrasive in a really off-putting way, and he's supremely unlikeable. He's edgy and cocky without ever being funny, talking in a very disaffected, jaded way as though he thinks he's super cool. Both the narrator and the one other speaking character - a woman who is never actually named, identified only by the clothes she wears despite spending days with the main character - sound the same, and it reminds me of the way Redditors imagine cool people speak. It's like the worst parts of Johnny Truant's narration in *House of Leaves* but without any of the humour.

This would be a problem on its own, but it's compounded by the fact that this is a horror novel and we're meant to believe that this narrator is both suicidally depressed and scared out of his mind. He certainly spends a lot of time telling us that both of those things are true, but I never believed it for a second. I think fear can be hard to convey well in a first person narrative anyway, perhaps intuitively. First person promises to get us closer to the thoughts and feelings of a character, but fear creates irrationality and narration largely requires a rational mind. So by the time a character can tell us about the fear they're feeling its been diluted and muted, and it doesn't land. People like to laud "show don't tell" as a truth of writing when it isn't, but I think it's true of writing fear - and first person perspectives are largely "tell". Especially this one, which never spends any time to delve into the interiority of its character. Despite being firmly in his head for the whole novel I never got a sense of who he was as a person. There's no emotional core to this novella about suicide.

The horror itself is also very Reddit, to the extent that at one point the character plays the Elevator Game (a daft urban legend about haunted lifts that was turned into a film in 2023 and that very much reads like something posted to r/nosleep). This section is a massive tonal shift into absurdism that simply doesn't land.

By the time the narrator gives up and hands control over to the reader and it turns into a CYOA book I was ready to check out, and if the book had been longer than it is I would have DNFd. O didn't care about the character or the events being depicted enough to want to pick the direction the narrative goes in, I just wanted it to be done. And then when I chose the "you decide your own fate" option I was met with this:

This is so off-putting. I actively hate this. 

This begins the choose your own adventure section and I'm just glad it was short. It's not well done, lurching from section to section without them feeling like they connect properly, and when the path I'd chosen finally ended it felt completely meaningless. I'm also mildly annoyed that after deciding to persevere with the book I don't feel like I've actually finished it, because I haven't read all of the choices at the end. But I'm not going to go back and choose other options, because I hated this so much that now that I'm done with it I absolutely don't have any desire to go back and spend more time inside it just to find out what the other endings are.

I'll have forgotten about this book by tomorrow.

I received an advanced reading copy of this novel from Penguin via NetGalley.

I didn't know what to expect going into We Do Not Part, because I never actually read the blurb before starting it. I just knew that I love Human Acts and the few pieces of Han Kang's short fiction that I've read, as well as the story "Heavy Snow" that appeared in The New Yorker late last year as an excerpt from this novel. I'd liked that piece a lot, and I really wanted to see the longer work that it came from. 

It turns out that "Heavy Snow" is only sort of an excerpt from We Do Not Part. It takes pieces from a longer sequence - the majority of Part 1 of the novel, as it turns out - and abridges them, re-ordering and recontextualising them and adding new material to make the ellisions work. It's a seamless piece of work, and though "Heavy Snow" is a piece of this novel I think it's different enough that it stands alone. In its extended form here, that story takes on much more weight. 

The first act, following Kyungha's journey from the hospital in Seoul into the forests of Jeju Island in the grip of an unending snow storm, is simply beautiful. It's quiet and contemplative but at the same time urgent and scary, and even though the stakes are on their face quite small - will Kyungha arrive at Inseon's house in time to prevent her pet bird from dying? - they're no less meaningful, underpinned as they are by the weight of years of friendship and obligation, by a history between these two characters that's shown to us only in small pieces. 

The quiet beauty and escalating tension of Part 1 do an incredible job of priming us for the emotional impact of the rest of the novel. Once Kyungha reaches Inseon's home the story shifts into something that feels like a companion piece to Human Acts, as she is haunted by Inseon's past and discovers records around the Jeju uprising and massacre of 1948, in which the Korean government slaughtered thousands of civilians. I admittedly know very little about Korean history but, as with Human Acts, Han Kang presents the events she's concerned about in such a stark, unflinching way that it doesn't matter. 

We Do Not Part's narrator is, herself, a writer who has previously written a novel about the massacre following the Gwangju uprising in 1980 - the same subject matter as Human Acts. Here Kyungha laments that she didn't tell the whole story in her book, that she allowed some of the atrocities to go unremembered. The final act of We Do Not Part grapples with ideas around forgetting and how we remember the dead, and how the past haunts the future. 

This is a book with pain on every page, from Inseon's horrific injury at the beginning, to the frozen pain of Kyungha's journey and the uncovering of the terrible history in the back end of the novel. Kyungha, too, suffers with debilitating migraines, one of which grips her for most of the opening section of the novel. Both of the characters spend the entire book in pain that's exacerbated by their attempts to keep the past alive, and it would be easy to ask whether it's worth it. But the book closes with images that remind us that no matter how painful it may be, remembering is always an act of love. 

We Do Not Part won the Prix Médicis étranger for its French translation, and I'll be very surprised if this English rendering doesn't appear on the International Booker Prize shortlist later this year.