Book Review: FIRST, BECOME ASHES

TITLE: First, Become Ashes

AUTHOR: K.M. Szpara

304 pages, Publisher, ISBN 9781250216182 (hardcover, also available in e-book and audio)

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): The Fellowship raised Lark to kill monsters. His partner betrayed them to the Feds. But Lark knows his magic is real, and he’ll do anything to complete his quest.

For thirty years, the Fellowship of the Anointed isolated its members, conditioning them to believe that pain is power. That magic is suffering. That the world beyond the fence has fallen prey to monsters. But when their leader is arrested, all her teachings come into question. Those touched by the Fellowship face a choice: how will they adjust to the world they were taught to fear, and how will they relate to the cult's last crusader, Lark? For Kane, survival means rejecting the magic he and his lover suffered for. For Deryn, the cult's collapse is an opportunity to prove they are worth as much as their Anointed brother. For Calvin, Lark is the alluring embodiment of the magic he's been seeking his entire life. But for Lark, the Fellowship isn’t over. Before he can begin to discover himself and heal a lifetime of traumas, he has a monster to slay. First, Become Ashes contains explicit sadomasochism and sexual content, as well as abuse and consent violations, including rape.

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: In First, Become Ashes, K.M. Szpara asks some heavy questions about belief and identity, filtered through the first-person narration of four quite different voices: a true believer, a former believer, a skeptical believer, and an outsider who wants to believe. Any one of these characters could have narrated the entire book and the story would have been compelling enough. Splitting the narration between the four allows readers to read between the lines of their individual stories to see a bigger picture. Multiple narrators also allow the author to show some of the breadth and depth of how different people process trauma and abandonment.

At its heart, First, Become Ashes is about how belief shapes identity, and how loss of belief can sometimes shatter that sense of self (unless something equally worth believing in replaces it). In this regard, lovers Lark and Kane are a study in contrasts. When we first meet Lark, he is resolute in his belief in the teachings of Nova and the Fellowship. Nova can do no wrong, anything she requires of him must be for the good of the community no matter how painful or unpalatable it might be. Lark is willing to be used and abused if it means he’s really as special as Nova claims; he’s willing to abuse others if it means he gets to fulfill the destiny laid out for him in whatever passes for the Fellowship’s scriptures. When we finally read chapters from Kane’s perspective, we see a man who has lost all faith in the tradition in which he was raised. He recognizes Nova’s abuses for what they are; he realizes that in believing her lies he’s been forced to hurt the man he loves and be hurt in turn. Lark’s total devotion to the cause empowers his magic – Kane’s departure from the faith destroys his. As Lark goes on his quest to hunt a monster, to fulfill what he’s been trained and raised to do, questions about whether Kane and others might be right in their assessment of Nova’s rituals and intent lead to Lark’s magic seeming to fail him in certain situations. Wanting to bring Lark home safely, to rescue the man he loves from their former life, Kane’s magic seems to work in certain situations despite his lack of belief. Both men wonder if they can survive in a world without the control and structure the Fellowship demanded, as do the few other “Anointed” we meet.

As a Fellow rather than an Anointed, Deryn provides yet another point-of-view to be considered: what if the magic is real, even if the mission is false and the structure of the Fellowship is abusive? Anointed and then demoted, they question everything: their place in the Fellowship, their role as Lark’s sibling, their worth to the society outside the Fellowship. But they never really question the magic itself, and in fact encourage others to believe in it, including FBI Agent Miller who has been investigating the Fellowship her entire career. Deryn and Miller are characters whose separate experiences explicate how abandonment also shapes sense-of-self. Without spoiling anything, what they have in common is that they were both told they were something special, only to be told that they weren’t special enough. Everything Deryn and Miller do is motivated by needing to understand why things changed, why they were cast aside for others. There are no chapters from Miller’s perspective, so we never really get to see her own take on being abandoned, but her experiences are mirrored in Deryn and over time they become kindred spirits.

And then there’s Calvin: a cosplayer and social media “influencer” who is as aware of the Fellowship as anyone who lives near their compound in Baltimore but has no idea how deep the teachings go. Calvin would have been the target audience if someone had filmed a documentary or reality show about the Fellowship; he might even have been one of those folks who becomes obsessed with the subjects of such a show. Calvin combines aspects of the other characters in his “outsider” perspective. He has been abandoned by his family for not being what they wanted him to be (like Deryn and Miller), he desperately wants magic to be real (like Lark) but is appalled at the cost once he becomes aware of it (like Kane).

Readers should be warned that Szpara does not go light on the emotional or physical abuse these four characters have experienced. Most of it is revealed in flashback but some of it is current, and there’s no “fade to black / let the reader infer” when these events happen. I leave it up to survivors of abuse to discuss how accurate/realistic the characters’ reactions are. Likewise, I leave analysis of the consensual BDSM scenes to members of that community to weigh in on.

First, Become Ashes is not an easy read, with all of the raw emotional and physical trauma the four main characters experience. But it is an engrossing read with characters I came to deeply care about.

(NOTE: I read an e-ARC of First, Become Ashes which I received from NetGalley. I completed reading the book well before publication date but this review was delayed for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with the book itself.)

SUNDAY SHORTS: Two From Tor.Com

Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.

Even promising myself to read a short story per day (or at least to hit that average by the end of each calendar year), there’s still way more short genre fiction being published than I can keep up with. Occasionally, it will occur to me that I haven’t read an issue of a particular magazine in ages, or that a particular anthology has been sitting on one of my shelves for far longer than I’d realized, or that I haven’t popped over to a particular website in a while to read anything. So today – two recent reads from Tor.com! If you follow me on Twitter (I’m @talekyn over there, if you’re interested), you already know these two pieces (one a short story, one a novella or perhaps novelette) moved me greatly. Now, let’s talk about why.

K.M. Szpara’s “We’re Here, We’re Here” delves into our endless fascination with “boy bands” – all-male vocal groups – and I think the group at the center of this story is loosely inspired by One Direction. The guys in the band sing – but they don’t do over-stuffed choreography (the way earlier boy-bands like ‘NSync and the Backstreet Boys did so famously). In fact, they don’t do much choreography at all around their planned on-stage interactions. For Back 2 Back, and for our narrator Tyler, it’s all about the vocals. Tyler is the wholesome “good boy” in a four-man group that also includes the unpredictable boy (Zeke, who silly-strings his bandmates and the audience), the brooding boy (Jasper) and the guitar-playing boy (Aiden). When Tyler and Jasper share a deep, romantic kiss on stage, their management goes crazy – the boys are supposed to appear attainable to their female fans, not into each other. Their manager will do just about anything to prevent Tyler, previously the tow-the-line reliable one who is just glad to be in the band, from making the situation “worse.” As the story plays out, Szpara gives us an interesting view of the limits of acceptability in pop culture. All of the band’s fans know Tyler is a transgender male, and their management has no problem with it – provided Tyler appears accessible to those all-important fans. With the rise of K-Pop boy and girl vocal groups (and even going back to the halcyon days of ‘NSync, Backstreet Boys), fans have been known to “ship” bandmates regardless of their true sexual identities, and Szpara slyly comments on the real vs. imagined nature of those relationships. Interestingly, we never really get to see what the Back 2 Back fan-base really thinks of a possible “Jasler” relationship. The SFnal element of this near-future tale is that the guys have manager-controlled vocal implants that modulate their voices to make them sound perfect on stage, and the manager uses this to control Tyler in a way contracts and threats alone might not successfully do. This drives the band closer together, leading to a final scene that I am not ashamed to admit made me tear up (but which I’ll leave you to discover on your own).

Sarah Pinkser’s “Two Truths and a Lie” is also a modern-day tale, but fantasy rather than SF. After the death of a childhood friend’s older brother, Stella agrees to help clean out the brother’s house. But she hasn’t seen these friends in a long time, and her adult habit of making up stories about her history is a hard thing to resist. Early in the story, she tells the friend a total lie about her life in Chicago, inventing a divorce and a son … not because she’s ashamed of her true life, but simply because lying is a habit now. A few pages later, Stella asks Mark if he remembers a local access cable television show she is convinced she made up – but he not only remembers it, his brother has the old VHS tapes of episodes the neighborhood kids appeared on. Including his older brother and Stella. The fantasy element builds as Stella tries to track down the truth of the television show, discovering its host had a knack for telling stories about the kids around him that eventually came true. Stella realizes that part of her has been controlled by an outside source for most of her life. The question is: what will she, or what can she, do about it? I love the way Pinsker builds the mysteries of the story: Why did Mark’s older brother become an awkward teenager and then a life-long hoarder? Why doesn’t Stella remember the show when everyone else does? Is what Stella perceives about the host of the show true or is she projecting fantasy onto real life tragedies? Again, I won’t spoil the ending, but like the Szpara story, it hit my heart in just the right way.

I find it interesting that I unintentionally chose two Tor.com stories that share themes of young people losing some amount of control over their own lives thanks to the entertainment industry (the manager in “We’re Here” and the kids-show host in “Two Truths”). We’ve all read the stories about predators in the entertainment world taking advantage of the youth under their care, and both of these stories are clear about the repercussions of that. Tyler and Stella make very different decisions on their way to reclaiming their own identities and regaining control over their own lives, as befits the tone of the stories being told about them. Pinsker’s story also has a trans character in a minor role, strengthening the connection between these two stories in which the genre element takes a secondary role to the very real emotions and internal conflicts of the characters.

Review of DOCILE

TITLE: Docile

AUTHOR: K.M. Szpara

490 pages, Tor.com, ISBN 9781250216151 (hardcover)

DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): There is no consent under Capitalism. To be a Docile is to be kept, body and soul, for the uses of the owner during your contract. To be a Docile is to forget, to disappear, to hide inside your body from the horrors of your service. To be a Docile is to sell yourself to pay your parents’ debts and buy your children’s future.

MY RATING: Five out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: Note: I received an Advance Review Copy from the good folks at Tor.com, but that did not influence my opinion of the book.

K. M. Szpara’s Docile is one of the most harrowing pieces of near-future science fiction I have ever read, taking its deserving place alongside Sabrina Vourvoulias’ Ink in showing us a soon-to-come world that is just one bit of legislation, one tweak of technology, away from where we stand right now. Where Vourvoulias took on immigration and demonizing the Other, Szpara digs in deep on the wealth gap, debt slavery, and sexual consent. It is far from an easy read from every point of view – emotional manipulation and sexual assault abound – but it is a vital read in light of what’s going on in our society right now.

Elisha Wilder’s family is plagued by out-of-control debt in a world where the laws have been changed so that spouses and children inherit their partners/parents debt and are expected to pay it off. Jobs are scarce, food and healthcare are exorbitantly priced, and people are regularly sent to prison because they can’t make regular payments on the money they owe. The city and county of Baltimore have a solution, though, thanks to Bishop Pharmaceutical’s invention of Dociline: people can agree to become Docile servants for the city’s trillionaires to pay off their family’s debt. Dociline erases emotion and free will, enabling debtors to survive the debt-slavery experience without developing mental illness … or remorse, since the drug also comes with an inherent memory-wipe of anything that happened while under the influence. The drug is guaranteed to flush out of a person’s system within a few weeks of the last dose without lasting harmful effects. Except that Elisha’s mother Abigail came home after ten years on Dociline and has never been the same. Still, someone has to alleviate the family’s crushing debt, so Elisha submits himself to the Office of Debt Resolution, where he ends up being purchased for life (his family’s debt erased and a stipend offered to help them survive) by none other than Alexander Bishop the Third, scion and soon-to-be CEO of the pharmaceutical empire that erased Elisha’s mother’s personality.

Dociles have seven unalienable rights according to the law: to vote in public elections; to adequate care, including food, water, shelter, and medical care; to anonymity of surname; to keep one personal item with them; to personal physical safety; to sexual health and protection from pregnancy; and to refuse or demand Dociline, and change your mind at any time. Elisha plans, long before knowing who his Patron will be, to refuse Dociline so that he doesn’t turn into his mother.

Alex is looking for the ideal Docile on which to test the newest iteration of the drug. He’s recently broken off a lucrative engagement (trillionaires don’t marry for love in this future) and his future CEO position is in jeopardy unless he marries or proves he can handle Dociles under his control. He’s attracted to Elisha and becomes Patron before learning, very publicly, that Elisha refuses to take Dociline.

From there it’s a battle of wills: Elisha trying to retain his free will while Alex tries to prove he can gain control over a person even without Dociline in their system. Not surprising and not really spoilery, Elisha spends most of the book losing that battle. It is painful to watch, especially as the book is narrated in first person by both main characters. You can see Elisha’s personality change and diminish; his internal justifications for letting himself be bent to Alex’s will, to be the perfect companion, becoming more desperate and less convincing (to the reader) as the novel progresses. The expression of this total change in Elisha, from head-strong family-oriented individualist to a man unable to make simple decisions about clothing without being directed, shows what a masterful writer Szpara is. The changes are incremental: slight alterations in how Elisha tells his story, for example which sensory and physical details he chooses to include or omit, are the growing indication that he is losing himself. At the same time, in the chapters narrated by Alex we see a cocky young rich kid start to understand not only the power he wields but the ways in which it can be abused. Alex comes to see his own complicity in the way the rich take advantage of the poor and questions what he’s done to Elisha in the name of staying comfortable and in power; Alex’s justifications for his actions ring just as desperate and hollow as Elisha’s.

The numerous explicit sex scenes between Alex and Elisha are another spotlight on the dark side of this supposedly harmless method of removing debt. Elisha justifies his first sexual experience (not just with Alex, but ever) as somewhat consensual within the “master/submissive” relationship the Docile program fosters. He thinks the Docile’s right to sexual health should give him the right to say “no,” even though he chooses not to exercise it. It quickly becomes apparent to the reader, and eventually to Elisha, that Dociles don’t really have a choice once they sign a contract with a Patron and that those on the drug can’t say “no” because Dociline removes their decision-making capabilities and free will. Thanks to Alex’s brainwashing efforts, Elisha also eventually loses the ability to say “no” even sans Dociline. There’s one scene in particular, early on, between Elisha, a patron named Dutch, and another Docile named Onyx, that is slightly less explicit in sexual detail but far more brutal emotionally, and it drives the point home that the Rich don’t really care about the well-being of the Poor under their control unless or until it renders the Dociles unusable. The fact that Alex falls in love with his slave doesn’t mitigate the horrible things he does in the name of research and science and appeasement of his family and Board of Directors; it’s still painful to watch him realize he’s virtually destroyed the man he’s come to love.

The supporting cast is filled out by the main characters’ biological and extended families. Elisha’s father, sister, and sort-of step-mother and step-sister see the changes in him long before he’s able to see them himself and they don’t like what they see, concerned for his mental and physical health. Alex’s family likewise see and don’t like the changes wrought by his connection to Elisha, but their concerns are about how it will affect his future as the face of the company and ultimately stock shares and societal cache. It’s almost a stereotype, that the Rich are heartless while the Poor are paragons, but Szpara subverts the cliché at every turn: people in Alex’s circle are not who or what he thinks, Elisha’s father’s anger threatens to destroy any possible relationship with his son. This adds even more depth to the novel as Alex and Elisha’s interactions with their own and each other’s families gives Szpara the opportunity to showcase the clear wealth gap and the ways loved ones are affected by an individual’s decisions.

Ultimately, as hard to handle as the emotional and sexual abuse are, Docile is a story of hope: that the actions of one person might inspire a societal shift away from abuse and towards compassion, away from selfishness and towards community. It’s also an exploration of identity: of how who we are is informed not only by our own actions but by the past actions of those we love, and how we can lose ourselves without realizing it’s happening. Docile is a must-read. And probably a must-re-read.