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4.11 AVERAGE
4.11 AVERAGE
adventurous
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Loveable characters:
Yes
Went into this completely blind as it was a book club pick and I was blown away with how much I loved it. From Max's raw anger to Erin's bravery and will, this was a great story. I found myself getting so angry for them (and somet mes at them) but also smiling at their funny and friendly moments. I'm going to remember this book for a long time.
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
fast-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
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
challenging
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-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:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
funny
Loveable characters:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Deadnaming, Domestic abuse, Gun violence, Hate crime, Homophobia, Physical abuse, Sexism, Transphobia, Blood, Kidnapping, Death of parent, Murder, Outing, Abandonment, Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Self harm, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Vomit, Stalking, Suicide attempt, Sexual harassment
dark
emotional
hopeful
medium-paced
I’ve been eyeing Old Wounds for some time, now. I’m still coming off of my post-Helene kick of reading books about Appalachia, and a trans YA horror novel set in Ohio and Kentucky seemed to fit the bill. Plus, that cover art is really fucking cool. When I went to check out the book, though, I noticed that in the About the Author, Logan-Ashley Kisner says he’s from Las Vegas and has never left that city. After that realization about Kisner’s probable unfamiliarity with Appalachia, the book’s plot summary set me on edge. Two trans teens driving from suburban Ohio to reach urban California - and therefore safety - are captured by “the locals” of “a small Kentucky town” in “the middle of the woods.” The summary on Goodreads makes this more explicit by describing the setting as “the creepy woods of rural middle-America.” Uninterested in a book that increasingly sounded like it was just about the scary backwoods poors and their transphobia, I put it back on the shelf.
But Kisner just had to go and announce a trans werewolf book, The Transition. My sister and I have gotten really into werewolf fiction over the last few years, especially as queer and disability metaphor, so I knew I’d be reading something by Kisner this year. With that in mind, I decided I’d rather know ahead of time what Old Wounds actually says and does than go into The Transition tinted with a potentially unearned negative opinion of Kisner’s debut. And it turns out I was wrong to write it off so quickly, because Old Wounds is actually a beautifully written, layered, and well-characterized novel about the scary backwoods poors and their transphobia.
Erin and Max are two trans high-schoolers who dated pre-transition but haven’t really spoken since they broke up. Erin’s mother has been supportive of her transition but distant since her father abandoned the family and then died, while Max’s fundamentalist family violently forced him to detransition, causing him to attempt suicide. Desperate to escape his situation, Max reconnects with Erin with a plan to run away to California, where he can transition safely and she can be safer. While Erin has some discomfort with the idea of imitating her father and leaving her already distraught family, she worries that declining would be leaving Max to fend for himself and possibly even push him into another suicide attempt, so she agrees.
When their car is sabotaged in the woods of rural Kentucky, near the tiny town of Lebanon Junction in Bullitt County (a real actual town, btw), the two try to find help. Unfortunately, a group of several men from the area, including the Sherriff, kidnap Erin to feed her to a local monster, the Bullitt Beast (again, a real actual cryptid, though the details around it in the novel differ wildly from real-world accounts). In 1937, Lebanon Junction was hit by a terrible flood that destroyed its railway station and much of its chances at economic growth in the process (the real actual history of the town), and ever since, this beast has appeared every year and trapped the county in an eternal night until it is fed a woman. It will apparently only eat women. So as Max and Erin fight their way out of the clutches of the men who want to feed one of them to a monster, the question is who does the monster want to eat? The trans girl or the trans boy? Is it a gender-affirming monster…or not?
That’s not quite the question at the center of the novel, but obviously it’s the hook for the conflict. The men who annually kidnap a woman and feed her to the monster think it has to do with fear; women, they think, are inherently more easily frightened, and the Bullitt Beast likes the chase, so it goes for the wimpier sex. So, will it eat Erin, thus affirming her gender as it kills her, or will it eat Max, thus adding insult to…uh…injuries? It’s a bit of a contrived hook, obviously, but it still has potential. It reminds me a bit of the card game Women Are Werewolves, in which players must navigate being non-binary in a family where the lycanthropy affects the women.
And it’s a hook that works all right in Old Wounds. Before they encounter the locals or the Beast, Erin and Max have a really forced, shoehorned-in conversation about whether cryptids would recognize their genders, which only makes any sense to the reader who’s read the book’s summary. And since it’s more interesting for both protagonists to be equally scared of the scary monster, the gendered aspect fairly quickly falls to the wayside. But there’s some really well-crafted suspense when the men are trying to decide between themselves which trans kid should be the sacrifice, with intent to kill whichever one doesn’t make the cut.
In fact, much of the book is really well-crafted. Kisner tells the story in present-tense, with chapters alternating between Erin’s and Max’s perspectives, which really sells a sense that either protagonist could die at any time. And the passages concerning the Beast are phenomenal, giving it an air of danger and mystery, and never dipping into territory that explains or shows too much. Erin and Max have distinct voices and conflicting histories and personalities that allow for some enjoyable character moments and development. They play off each other well and react to similar situations in contrasting ways, which sends them on satisfyingly inverse paths across the county. I have criticisms of some of the elements of the characters - the aforementioned cryptic conversation did not take me out of the story nearly as much as a contemporary 17-year-old’s obsession with the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry. Still, everything worked more often than not. I enjoyed my time reading this book.
But.
But. As alluded to earlier, I am frustrated by the metaphor at its core. Lebanon Junction is a real place that was really devastated by a real flood in 1937 from which it really really still hasn’t recovered. In Old Wounds, the Bullitt Beast first appeared just before that flood and has been seen since as a harbinger of further disaster. The handful of men in Bullitt County who kidnap women to feed to the beast are doing so to try to stave off another flood, so they can one day bring economic prosperity back to Lebanon Junction. The situation makes me think of a very 2016 coastal liberal view of “middle America,” which was blamed for the rise of Trump. It’s pretty Hillbilly Elegy-coded (an association that’s finally derogatory outside of Appalachia). Meanwhile, Kisner frames California as entirely safe - a Mecca to which all trans people in less enlightened regions must move.
These men are holding on to Lebanon Junction well after there’s no hope that Lebanon Junction will ever be viable again, and even though it’s very sad that their town is dying, they’re violently killing suburban women and queer people - prospective Californians, even - to try to save it. They shouldn’t have to go through what they are, but they’re dragging others down with them, and it’s really not “our” job to suffer so that “they” might not die. The book accepts an “economic vs social” framing - either they suffer economically or we suffer socially, but there’s nothing we can do for them, and if they are afforded any power, their solutions only impact our social freedoms without improving their economic situations. Erin and Max are fighting for an “either-or,” while the men of Bullitt County are fighting for a “both-and.” The language of liberalism vs. the language of a death cult.
I can’t say definitively that Kisner is wrong to be afraid of The South. There’s plenty for queer people to fear here. But in my experience as an admittedly cishet person who’s traveled extensively with trans people, the South is about as dangerous for queer people as the North, and the rural has much of the same danger as suburbia. There are thriving queer communities dotted all along the rural South, and strong support networks in places that look impenetrable to those who have bought into certain narratives about them. There are those everywhere who have bought into the death cult, as evidenced by the current regime, but there are at least as many - I would be bold enough to guess considerably more - who have not and will not.
Effective horror reflects our anxieties, and Old Wounds absolutely reflects some anxieties that many people really have - that Kisner clearly has. And I don’t begrudge him that. That said, I think we need to be responsible with the anxieties we allow our art to reflect. I don’t think Kisner should have placed the burden of his anxieties on a real place with real people and a real history; a real place that - his author bio suggests - he has not been to. There’s some real demand for trans horror, especially in the YA space, and I think it’s irresponsible to point that potentially huge audience of potentially young people still forming their worldviews at a real town of 1,700 people with a median income of $18k/year.
But with that in mind, I still enjoyed the book. It took me about three months to write this review, partly because I wanted to make my criticisms clear without also selling Kisner’s potential short. Kisner is clearly a fantastic writer with an eye for character and an enviable deftness at crafting an analogy through horror conventions - even when I think the analogy itself is faulty and reckless. So, despite my…frustrations, I am still cautiously optimistic about a werewolf book from Kisner that might deal with some anxieties that are a little less aimed at people I care about and some analogies that don’t set me off.
It was just too real. The horror in that realness was genuinely terrifying, but I think I can't handle this right now.
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
fast-paced