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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
dark
dark
hopeful
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
At age 4, Apollo Kagwa’s father disappears without a trace. Shortly thereafter — and on and off for years later — he’s plagued by nightmares of a blue-faced version of his dad returning for him. At times he wonders if that’s actually something he would hate.
In his thirties, Apollo is now married to Emma Valentine, who shares his love of books and the pair soon have a child, Brian, named for Apollo’s father. Apollo swears to his new son and to himself he’ll be the kind of father he should have had.
As many new parents could tell you, things aren’t easy with a newborn and it doesn’t change for a bit. Emma in particular struggles having to return to work so soon after giving birth, but has to so they can keep the health insurance that Apollo’s self-employed wages can’t match.
Things get even worse as mysterious photos of Brian keep appearing and disappearing on Emma’s phone and she soon finds herself buckling under the pressure of it all. She forgets to eat, becomes erratic and is almost unrecognisable to her husband.
Apollo’s world then turns on its head and becomes this mix of nightmarish fairy tales with harsh reality and the main story kicks in as he must navigate this borderland of New York and Fae to understand what has happened and to right whatever wrongs he can.
Parenthood is the most obvious theme and is handled with some dexterity. For a reasonable portion of the story we are slowly introduced to the joys and fears of pregnancy and being new parents. LaValle does a wonderful job letting his characters be the vehicles of these emotions
And in doing so, lets us get to know the crazy normality of their lives, only to pull the rug out from under our new, oh so tired friends in a far more vicious way than anyone could deserve.
The other one is stories and their magic. What kinds of stories and who we tell them to. How they reach inside of us and change the way we approach the real world. And the consequences of not listening to the stories told to us.
LaValle’s prose is warm and descriptive, a wonderful way to weave Apollo’s and Emma’s expanding world and to calm moments of fear or leave us with a rising tension that won’t settle for many chapters.
It would be too easy to spoil this book in an effort to sell it, but what makes it so great is how personal it is. To its characters, probably to LaValle himself, and definitely to its reader. Your thoughts on parents, children and stories will absolutely affect your experience.
For anyone who wants to dip their toes into Horror as a genre this would be an excellent start. It mostly reads as urban Fantasy using folklore and fairy tales as its basis, only twisting into darker territory in notable places. Even then, it doesn’t rely on gore for its scares.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Child abuse, Child death
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Oh wow, after a string of several middling reads, this book is giving me a book hangover! It’s the best from Lavalle that I’ve read yet! The book was slow getting started. I kept wondering where the horror was. But I really liked Apollo and hearing how he got his start as a book dealer, meeting Emma, his fatherhood. Then events started moving along. There were twists and turns, and I was constantly kept guessing: what is the meaning of these events, who can be trusted, what is really going on? Lavalle is so genre-bending, I can see why some readers might find this frustrating. But he kept me engaged through all these twists and turns, and as the book progresses, it gets deeper and deeper into the realm of fairy tales: the unbowdlerized Grimm kind. In the end it delivered a payoff that horror fans will enjoy, although it probably seems over the top for non-horror fans. Overall it was masterfully done. Victor Lavalle keeps delivering genre-bending, mind-bending tales of deep humanity and eerie inhumanity.
dark
funny
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Decent until the last 1/3rd, then it got frustratingly dumb. Probably a book more for parents as it seems to focus on fantasy horrors around parental fears.