Book Review: A SCOUT IS BRAVE

TITLE: A Scout is Brave

AUTHOR: Will Ludwigsen

155 pages, Lethe Press, ISBN 9781590216606 (softcover, e-book)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Will Ludwigsen’s new novella A Scout is Brave is almost too many things at once: young adult coming of age story (the narrator and main character is thirteen-year-old Bud Castillo), nostalgic historical (the time is 1963), a paean to the glory days of Scouting … and Lovecraftian eldritch horror. It almost shouldn’t work. In Ludwigsen’s deft hands, all the elements mesh for a story I couldn’t put down. I wasn’t surprised, of course. Ludwigsen’s Acres of Perhaps: Stories and Episodes is one of my favorite genre short story collections, and I will take any chance to tout it, including at the top of a review about a completely different book by the same author.

But let’s speak of A Scout Is Brave.

In the summer of 1963, Bud Castillo’s father loses his construction job in Queens NY. Just as the family is starting to worry about whether he’ll find work again, Bud’s father is offered an incredibly lucrative job: to help install and make operational an oil rig … off the coast of Massachusetts, near the small town of Innsmouth. Of course, weirdness is going to ensue. Bud finds he is the only kid in a town full of mostly elderly folks descended from the town’s original inhabitants … except for one other boy, Aubrey Marsh.

Readers of cosmic horror are well familiar with the history of Innsmouth, and with the Marsh family, as detailed in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” There have been countless pastiches, prequels, and sequels over the years, and yes, this is a sequel. One of the better ones, since Ludwigsen doesn’t try to imitate Lovecraft’s style, as so many of the writers who have visited Innsmouth in Lovecraft’s wake have. He tells the story in the simpler, less purple-prose, style of a man reminiscing about a year that changed his life. There’s no doubt, from the very first pages, that Bud and his family are walking into something they can’t imagine. The reader knows it, and the narrator, from his decades-later vantage point, knows it. Ludwigsen expertly portrays the language of someone whose fondest memories (of a friendship he’ll never experience again, of the time he came to understand his parents, and himself, better) are tinged with unimaginable horror.

The cosmic horror builds slowly: the little hints at the start, with descriptions of the odd behavior of the few returning residents of Innsmouth, slowly grow into scenes that are both rife with jump-scares (a visit to an abandoned hospital on the outskirts of town) and eerie cultish religious ceremony (when Bud’s family finally agrees to attend a service led by Reverand Pritchett at the Evangelical Progress Temple, the only church in town), which eventually lead to the story’s action-packed, frightening dénouement on ice-packed seas. The slow ratcheting up of the eeriness and the tension is perfectly paced. And what I find particularly brilliant is that the story feels Lovecraftian without ever actually teetering over into full on cosmic/eldritch horror.

These moments that teeter on, but never full embrace, the cosmic horror are interspersed with what I can only call a “skewed Rockwellian normalcy.” Bud meets Aubrey, introduces him to the concept of the Boy Scouts, they form a troop. They roam the town looking for good works to do, and through Bud’s eyes we get to meet the town’s denizens, most of whom have endearing, if odd, personalities, and who become the boys’ de facto teachers in whatever subjects they are expert it, since Innsmouth doesn’t have a school. I was a Cub Scout, a Webelo, and made it through a couple of years of Boy Scouts before the unexpected passing of a favorite Scoutmaster. I recognize Bud’s idealized attitude of “what Scouts should be,” and his joy at finding someone who embraced it in the same way. I also recognized the tint of nostalgia in older Bud’s narration – a tint that doesn’t quite cover up the things he’s learned since leaving Innsmouth, the scars that belie some of the nostalgia.

There’s also some insightful commentary about the negative aspects of nostalgia (through the citizens of Innsmouth who cannot move on even though they were left behind) and charismatic leaders who will say anything and do to get their way.

A Scout Is Brave is a perfect mix of nostalgia, horror, coming-of-age, and social commentary. It is going to be on my list of favorite reads of 2024.

Sunday Shorts: Alex Jeffers' YOU WILL MEET A STRANGER FAR FROM HOME

TITLE: You Will Meet A Stranger Far from Home: wonder stories

AUTHOR: Alex Jeffers

196 pages, Lethe Press, paperback and e-book formats, ISBN 9781590211038

DESCRIPTION: (from Amazon): From the acclaimed author of Safe as Houses and The Abode of Bliss, ten wondrous tales of yesterday, today, and tomorrow--of our familiar world and others. An American teenager meets Adonis on a sailing cruise off the coast of Turkey. A merchant of the Silk Road encounters an odd dog--and a brother--from another world. An old lady on a distant planet attempts to help her great-grandson grow up in a world that will soon forget women ever existed. A Massachusetts boy refuses an offer to visit fairyland. Another American teenager on vacation encounters three fallen angels and is transformed. Alex Jeffers's first collection of fantastical stories is a treacherous box of delights.

MY RATING: Four out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: The stories in Jeffers’ 2012 collection run the gamut from full-on fantasy to stories that feel like they have almost no speculative element at all. Some take place in our recognizable “real” world and some in realms of purest imagination. Some have concrete resolutions and some leave the reader, and characters, wondering what just happened or what comes next. What the stories have in common is Jeffers’ style – a style that explicates the commonalities of the lived gay experience across national and religious borders even while keying in on the individual differences that make each of our stories unique. We’ve all felt the thrill of first interest, the sting of unrequited love and first rejection, the fear that our families will not accept who we are, the wish that we could literally and permanently alter the world around us to be (or escape to a world that already is) safer for us than the one we know. Jeffers melds these commonalities, in a number of these stories, to specifically middle-eastern mythology and history, and he wrote these stories just long enough ago that he might have been on the leading edge of the current push to expand fantasy outside of the traditional Western European trappings and tropes.

“Wheat, Barley, Lettuce, Fennel, Salt for Sorrow, Blood for Joy” is one of the stories in the book that has a fantasy aspect so subtle I’m still not sure the author even intended it.  An American teenage boy is on a sailboat cruise where he encounters a startingly beautiful Turkish young man among the small crew. It’s a story of infatuation and the struggle to know whether the man you’re attracted to is also gay, it’s a story about coming of age, about navigating other cultures’ norms, about communication. All of these strands weave together to make a wonderful story. There are some dream sequences implied to be more than just dreams, and there’s the possibility the Turkish man is a literal “living legend” from the past, but those hints of the fantastic neither added to nor detracted from the story. “Turning,” about a cast-out young middle eastern man who turns tricks to survive but also gets swept up in the feverish turns of a Dervish dance performance, hinges more on the broken relationships of the protagonists’ past than it does on any possibility that the Dervishes’ dance is in any way actually magical. “The Arab’s Prayer” likewise felt lacking in a speculative element (other than the speculation that eventually same-sex marriage will be legal everywhere in the world).

“Firouz and His Brother” and “Haider and His Dog” are inter-connected stories with a clear narrative through-line that starts with trader Firouz’s discovery of a baby in the wilderness, the titular brother (Haider), defended by an obviously special dog. The action in the first story is clearly in our own world’s past, while the latter moves into a fantasy world that may, if I picked up the clues correctly, also be the world featured in “Then We Went There,” but even in the real-world story the fantasy element is fully realized and key to the story. Gender fluidity is at the core of two of these three stories, as are themes of love and sacrifice. I found myself hoping that neither Firouz’s nor Haider’s stories are really over but have no idea if the author has ever returned to these characters either in the real-world setting or in the fantasy world. “Tattooed Love Boys,” about a girl’s visit to a mysterious tattoo parlor of behalf of her shy older brother, also hinges on changing genders through magical means. It’s the final story in the book and perhaps the strongest in terms of feeling complete and satisfying for both the reader and the characters.

"Jannicke’s Cat" is the one science fiction tale in the collection, dealing with life on a colony planet where something has happened to prevent the birth of female children. Women are dying out, and one of the last few remaining is dealing with family loss and cultural shift. Jannicke is in a situation that mirrors how drastically life has changed for people born in the early 1900s who lived to see the early 2000s, feeling left behind, anachronistic, but still wanting to contribute something to the future of her world. “Liam and the Wild Fairy” is the only story in the collection I had previously read, and this revisit in the context of the rest of the connection really brought out the themes of found family and being comfortable with who we are versus who we were born as.

One note that did not affect the number of stars I gave the book. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Simon Relph. I loved Relph’s voice; smooth and warm (and sensual when appropriate), inviting you into each story and into each new character. But there were some editing choices that stuck out to me – the primary one being in the story “Turning,” where distinct breaks between scenes of the present, recent past, and legend needed to be clearer that they were. I had a hard time following the story because the clear breaks indicated by the story were not present in the audio format.

Review of Mary Anne Mohanraj's PERENNIAL

TITLE: Perennial: A Garden Romance

AUTHOR: Mary Anne Mohanraj

87 pages, Lethe Press (Tincture imprint), paperback and e-book formats, ISBN 978-1590216408

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): Perennial tells the story of Kate Smith, an aspiring artist facing a difficult cancer diagnosis, and Devan McLeod, a flower shop owner. It draws on the experiences of the author, Mary Anne Mohanraj, who was diagnosed with breast cancer and treated (successfully) with chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation. This little book intercuts poems she wrote over the course of that year with a garden romance. Mohanraj is an enthusiastic Chicagoland amateur gardener, and during treatment, she took great solace in her garden. She hopes this book bring solace and joy to its readers.

MY RATING: Five out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: Let’s get the disclaimer out of the way: this was one of several Advanced Reading Copies / Free Copies sent to me by Lethe Press with the understanding that I’d provide an honest review via various platforms online.

My honest review is: I loved this short, emotional, oh-so-real book.

It’s clear that Mary Anne Mohanraj poured her soul into this one, plugged in so many of the details of her own real-life experiences and coping mechanisms. She brought me to tears several times in these less-than-100 pages, and I’ve re-read it twice this month (although, for organization’s sake, I’m only counting it once in my Reading Challenge and Goodreads counts). The only other novellas featuring a main character fighting cancer that have affected me this way are Jay Lake’s “The Specific Gravity of Grief” and ‘Nathan Burgoine’s “In Memoriam,” both of which I highly recommend.

I should also say I’m not a regular reader of present-day straight romance (what romance I do read tends to be m/m and either historical or supernatural or both), nor am I a frequent reader of poetry (what poetry I do read tends to be written by friends, or a recent return to the epics of the classical age). So this book really falls pretty much completely outside of my wheelhouse in terms of reviewing: I don’t know how to “grade” the poetry, I don’t know how the development of the Kate-Declan romance compares to other books of similar length in this genre. And because I’m not well-versed in those forms/genres, I’m not going to try to review the book from those angles. I will say I found the poetry easy to read and full of emotion and lyricism and raw honesty, but I’ll leave analysis of structure and style to those more scholarly.

I love the novella’s alternating points of view, showing us the blush of first interest on Declan’s part and then Kate’s, and the growing concern for each other’s health and confusion over what they’re feeling in the midst of such life-changing physical and mental trauma. Not being limited to either’s POV for the whole book expands the story’s range of emotion for me. I recognized parts of myself and my own cancer journey in Kate: in her not wanting help, not wanting life to change too drastically, and her eventually realization that it has – cancer treatment leaves no-one unscathed.

 I also love that Declan has his own subplot going on, and I recognized parts of him in myself as well: the anniversaries of certain events throw me into a dark funk as deep as the one Declan finds himself in in the second half of the book, although I’ve never experienced what Declan has. I think the subplot is also important to show that Declan is not simply Kate’s knight in shining armor. These two rescue each other, and that really made the story as a whole work for me. (As a side note: I’d fall for Declan if I met him in real life; Scots blood calls to Scots blood, and all that, but that’s neither here nor there.)

If it’s so outside my regular reading zone, why did I pick Perennial up first from the small pile of books Lethe Press sent me? Plain and simple: I trust Mary Anne Mohanraj as a writer. I’ve enjoyed every short story I’ve read by her in recent years, and her name on the cover told me I would be in good hands regardless the genre. Awareness of her as a fellow cancer survivor (colon cancer in 2005 for me, breast cancer in 2016 for Mohanraj) also made me want to read the story sooner rather than later. I wanted it to feel as recent and raw as it could. Not that I think the book will lose its effect over me with time – I still cry every time I pick up the Jay Lake or ‘Nathan Burgoine novellas mentioned above – but with each reread comes a different perspective. I look forward to exploring those new perspectives, and letting more tears flow, on subsequent re-reads of Perennial as well.