brnineworms's reviews
188 reviews

Dagger Dagger by Al Gofa, Sloane Leong, Matt Emmons

adventurous dark emotional inspiring fast-paced

3.0

Dagger Dagger is not a cohesive anthology. The cover promises “dark fantasy and sci-fi” and editor Al Gofa coins the term “blood-fi” to describe these works. “Blood-fi” to me invokes those manga where characters explode with more blood than could possibly be contained within a human body, and enemies are viscerally torn apart (something like Berserk or Fist of the North Star). By comparison, the comics in this anthology really seem to be holding back; in fact, there are many comics which barely feature blood, or don’t at all. They do all touch on grisly subject matter like slavery and warfare, but these are major themes throughout science fiction and fantasy literature, so I don’t think this book is especially “dark.”

The individual comics are fine, largely mediocre. I did like the art of The Monastery by Goran Gligović, Angelic Missile by Linnea Sterte, and Yesaul by Artyom Trakhanov and Artem Dumov. I’ve been a fan of Sterte’s work for a while but I’ll make sure to check out those other artists as well.

I think that’s ultimately the main goal of this anthology – to highlight some comic creators and give them exposure. The book literally ends with the Evil Wizard following all the featured creators on social media and being inspired to create their own comics. If that’s what Dagger Dagger was aiming for, it did succeed.

CONTENT WARNINGS: war, violence, execution, slavery, injury, fire 

A Guest in the House by E.M. Carroll

dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

5.0

 “...and I, beneath... would find stillness in the hot viscera.”

CONTENT WARNINGS:

death, murder, mentions of terminal illness and suicide, mental illness (dissociation, dereality, hallucinations, nightmares, paranoia), blood and gore, toxic relationships, constant lies/manipulation, sexism

Masters of Death by Olivie Blake
Did not finish book. Stopped at 9%.

The writing is sardonic and meandering – that’ll take some getting used to. And there’s a lot that’s making me kind of uncomfortable, from cringey one-note characters to objectionable politics. Maybe this improves as the book goes on, but I’m just not in the mood right now.

I might come back to it eventually. We’ll see.

Flavor Girls by Loïc Locatelli-Kournwsky, Eros De Santiago

adventurous fast-paced

4.0

Love the artwork. I can see the French and Japanese stylistic influences – a little bit of bande dessinée, a little bit of manga... And Locatelli-Kournwsky’s knack for shape and silhouette is uplifted by de Santiago’s vibrant colours.

The fight scenes are slightly hard to follow, but that moment where

Troezen yeets a makeshift weapon and it flies out of the confines of the panel, seemingly towards the reader...

that was very cool.

There are some interesting concepts, like

magical girls being coopted by the state; the image of Naoko in her leotard and tights being deployed from a military aircraft

– ugh! So good.

It’s really promising! This volume is only the introduction, laying the groundwork for (hopefully many) future instalments. I’m hungry for more.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

invasion, injury (amputation, blood), trauma, alcoholism

 

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

dark reflective fast-paced

2.5

Fruity

Nettleblack by Nat Reeve

adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

3.5

“Plums. Well. I did it. I – oh, sweet nectarines, I don’t entirely know what it is I’ve done – but I have most thoroughly and irrevocably done it nonetheless.”

Farcical, for better or for worse. Hijinks, lots of secrets and misunderstandings, everyone gasping and gaping and stammering in disbelief. Fun if you’re into that.

The main focus is Henry fumbling through life and figuring herself out –

her gender, her crush on Septimus, and her place in the world.

This coming-of-age narrative, along with the preoccupation with eloquence and grace (Henry struggles to find the words to express herself; she’s very aware of how clumsily she speaks so she overcompensates in her writing with verbosity, a very self-conscious performance of intelligence and charisma, modelled after the competent characters she looks up to) made me think she was maybe fourteen? I was surprised to find out she’s twenty-one. The quirky “figs!” exclamations and the “my wretched self” angst feel more befitting of a teenager than a full grown adult. It’s just a bit odd.

The other character I was drawn to was Pip Property, the eccentric and vaguely sinister cravat designer.

Except their villainous role was disappointingly undercut by the reveal that they’re simply “under coercion” (in their own words), and dampened by a humanising moment before then where we see them chilling in their home and even learn their deadname. It does feel like Reeve struggled with the whole queer-coded villain thing, toying with the idea of this enigmatic and transgressive figure stalking our protagonists, but also not wanting to demonise them and cast their queerness as evidence of evil. I say go all in and commit to writing a genderfucky pervert. Seriously, just do it. If the rest of the story is going to boil down to relationship drama with a veneer of quirky macabre, you may as well lean in and write a suitably flamboyant villain.

But maybe that’s the point. Septimus was fixated on Pip because... actually, I’m not sure why. Some bad blood. They’re exes. But ultimately, while Pip was involved with the Sweetings, they were also a victim. And they were a victim not only of the Sweetings’ coercion, but also Septimus’s harassment.

I dunno. I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s not for me, but there were aspects I enjoyed.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

sexism, transphobia, allusions to racism and antisemitism, anxiety and panic attacks, self-loathing, some drunken incestuous flirting, outing, blackmail, kidnap, gun violence, nonconsensual cutting of hair, injury, death, a severed head

 

Babel by R.F. Kuang

adventurous dark emotional informative reflective tense medium-paced

4.0

My greatest criticism of Babel is how didactic it is. You can get away with a few exposition dumps in academic settings, but the overexplaining is something else. An example: Ramy and Robin have very different personalities, partially informed by their different experiences of racism. Robin can (sometimes) pass as white, so his MO is to keep his head down and try to blend in for his own safety. Ramy doesn’t have that option so he instead adopts extravagant personas, pretending to be an Indian prince if it means white people will be more courteous to him. The reader should be able to recognise these different approaches and infer the reasoning without being prompted, but Kuang opts to make it explicit through dialogue as Ramy explains all this to Robin. Okay, fine. But then that’s immediately followed by another paragraph explaining the exact same thing again, this time through narration. It felt a little patronising to have it spelled out in such a way.

On the topic of telling instead of showing, I saw another review which said the main characters didn’t have much chemistry and we only know they’re friends who would die for each other because we’re told as much, not because we’re actually shown it and made to believe it. I don’t disagree, but I think it makes sense that these four traumatised and alienated bookworms would form weirdly intense clingy-yet-detached relationships with one another. Not speaking from experience at all, haha...

Likewise, the pacing is odd in a way that does make sense. The first half was slow and lecturey and kind of felt like a chore to read, and it was difficult to track the passage of time because the narrative would hover on a particular day or week or term then jump forward a few months seemingly at random. It threw me off at first, but it was effective in conveying the feeling of university passing in a blur, of it existing as a liminal period before adulthood.

After that there was a lot of action and fraught emotion, then the last few chapters trudged towards tragedy.

One aspect I thought was really cool was the way the narrative would get kind of unmoored from chronology when emotion was heightened; we’d be told how a character looks back on this event rather than being walked through how they experienced it in the moment.

I thought that was particularly effective in the Lovell murder scene, where we’re told the outcome before the scene can reach that point. We have the argument preceding the attack, but before the attack itself is described we have this interjection: “He would try desperately to justify what he’d done as self-defence, but such justification would rely on details he could hardly remember, details he wasn’t sure whether he’d made up to convince himself he had not really murdered his father in cold blood. // Over and over again he would ask himself who had moved first, and this would torture him for the rest of his days, for he truly did not know. // This he knew:” How great is that?

The scene that had me hooked –

when Robin confronted and ultimately killed Lovell

– didn’t happen until around the 60% mark; everything up until that point felt like backstory setting up the actual story. Which is fine when you do eventually get that payoff, but while reading it I got bored and impatient. I think Babel might be better suited to people who read quicker than I do.

All in all, it does (mostly) come together. There’s an inventive and interesting magic system with a lot of thought put into its implementation and implications. Kuang is obviously building on real world history and sociology but that’s not a bad thing. The book is maybe a little on the nose with some of its messaging but it’s a good read once it gets going.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

imperialism/colonialism, classism, misogyny, racism, child abuse (verbal and physical), a brief scene involving sexual harassment, emotional manipulation, drug use and addiction, anxiety/panic, suicide, death, some gore, torture, police brutality, gun violence, impending war, terrorism, slavery, white fragility

 

Mr. Boop by Alec Robbins

dark emotional funny lighthearted fast-paced

4.5

“Something’s screwy...”

Alec Robbins, as the author/artist, gets to decide what everyone else thinks, feels, and does. Existing as a character within the fiction means he can not only conjure and control the other characters, but he can also control the relationships they have with him.

I think fans often overstate the commentary on intellectual property – it’s gestured at, but I don’t think the blurb is quite accurate when it describes the comic as giving “a middle finger to corporate IP.” I mean, sure, it makes you think; how can a character be owned the same way a logo is owned without being reduced to a lifeless and unchanging image, an icon? But Mr Boop doesn’t really go down that philosophical route, at least not primarily. Alec being sued is more threatening to him than it is to Betty, because he realises he can’t control her any more and he starts to spiral. I suppose you could interpret this as some commentary on fan entitlement but I think that would be too literal, taking the pop culture imagery at face value. It’s not about copyright, it’s about controlling relationships. At least, that’s how I read it.

“You’re living in a fantasy world, Alec.”

When Alec meets the ostensibly real Liz, he turns her into what he wants.

I also want to note how his solution to almost every problem is sex. It’s comedic, yes, but it’s also quite revealing. If all you have is a hammer, everyone gets nailed – that’s the level Alec is operating on. It’s like he simply cannot imagine a different mode. All he cares about, all he wants, is sex with Betty Boop.

But is this all imaginary? To what extent do the non-Alec characters in this comic have agency (within the fiction)? To what extent are they people? Maybe this is just a comic about a guy writing a comic. Layers!

Surprisingly complex postmodern comedy/tragedy/horror depending on how you want to look at it.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

sexual content, abuse, obsessiveness, depression, suicidality, death threats, gun violence, dereality

Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Revelation by Paul Cornell

dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

2.5

So concludes the Timewyrm arc.

I don’t actually have much to say because so much of Timewyrm: Revelation is inconsequential, seemingly designed to be clever or interesting then discarded as soon as the point has been made, rendering it pointless.

Saul is an interesting idea: a disembodied consciousness appropriated by the Christians who couldn’t exorcise him. Cool. But once that backstory is explained, Saul’s kind of just there. He isn’t given much to do, and he isn’t given much characterisation. Cornell simply presents the reader with a sentient church then moves on to the next thing.

Like Apocalypse, Revelation is a big pile of ideas. Yes, the ideas here are more innovative, but in a way that makes the lack of development even more frustrating. Apocalypse’s tropes were well-worn and familiar. Contrast that with Revelation, whose concepts require more explaining, and are intriguing enough to make me wonder what happens next. But there’s nothing. It’s just stuff, bouncing between half a dozen POVs like a DVD logo.

How does this arc end? Specifically, what is the Timewyrm’s fate at the end of this story? Well,

after two hundred pages of surreal mindscape nonsense, the Doctor is able to implant the Timewyrm into a human baby, which he names Ishtar. Except it isn’t really the Timewyrm any more since he removed all memory and personality and left only “bare life.” Okay. I get that this rebirth, as it were, is symbolically the opposite of the death she fled from and the destruction she wrought. Is this supposed to be a second chance for Ishtar, parallel to Boyle’s chance at a normal life? That worked well in the Ninth Doctor episode “Boom Town,” where Blon/Margaret was shown to be capable of kindness and mercy, but couldn’t undo the harm she’d done or let go of her killer instincts – the Doctor gave her a fresh start and a chance to “live her life from scratch.” But in the Timewyrm’s case the return to infancy seems to be purely symbolic, not representing any real opportunity for redemption. If her entire self has been erased, is she not functionally dead? Why not just kill her off? That would follow on from Apocalypse’s message that death is inevitable and ought to be accepted.

At least the Timewyrm actually does something in this novel,

even if she mostly acts through Boyle. Though that blue dragon form with steel claws just makes me think of Dragoon from Beyblade lmao

I do want to shout out the queerness baked into Ace’s characterisation in this book. It resonated with me quite a bit. Her caginess when asked about crushes, the awkwardness of her stereotypically feminine persona as a teen, the emphasis on her chosen name representing her true self and the way she’d become “used to fighting for her name.” I liked these quotes: “She could suffer pain and rejection and guilt as Ace, or she could slip away into the crowd of words and become nothing, floating loved in nowhere.” and “There were words you couldn’t say. There were films you couldn’t see, there were people you couldn’t know, there were ideas you couldn’t think. Not if you wanted to fit in, not if you wanted to be part of the world.”

I really wanted to like this book because there are some great elements. Until now, the Timewyrm books have more or matched their reputations; Genesys was bad, Exodus was fairly good, and Apocalypse was forgettable. Timewyrm: Revelation is well liked in the fandom, but I don’t think it lives up to the hype at all.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

dereality/surreality, existentialism, death, murder, violence, lots of blood, some body horror, child abuse, racism

Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Apocalypse by Nigel Robinson

adventurous mysterious medium-paced

2.5

I wanted to like this one but it really does lack substance. There are a lot of tropes just thrown together. For example:

Soylent Green zavát is people! And it’s also a drug which keeps people placid. And it’s also able to wipe specific memories. Somehow. The Second Doctor appears as a force ghost to solve the mystery which he shouldn’t know the answer to or be aware of in the first place. There are too many characters now so uhhh here comes a sea serpent!

It very much feels as though the author was making it up as he went along.

Despite all this stuff, there’s actually very little to connect these ideas together, and not a lot of momentum to drive the story forwards. Things just kind of happen. The Doctor in particular doesn’t do much. The villains mostly stand around being sinister while monsters chase the protagonists until they’re killed or scared away. The Timewyrm is sidelined yet again,

concealed within the mind of another villain (the Grand Matriarch this time) until she’s released at the very end. Only this time she isn’t mentioned during the story and when she is eventually present she doesn’t even get a line.

I’m starting to feel bad for her.

While I’m talking about the Grand Matriarch, I have to ask... why is she evil?

Rather, is she Lilith or is she the Timewyrm? Lilith is described as a “reluctant host” but it’s unclear to what degree she was being influenced or controlled. Terrance Dicks made a point of telling us Hitler was a fascist before the Timewyrm entered his mind, and she only amplified his psychic powers (I love Doctor Who) but here? Robinson presents us with a sweet little girl and a Matriarch intent on creating and controlling God and I suppose ascending to godhood by proxy – are they the same person, or is the Timewyrm merely puppeteering that body?

The Doctor blames himself for unwittingly infecting Lilith with the Timewyrm when he met her as a child. There’s also some emphasis on the contrast between the Second Doctor saying “Everything gets old and falls apart in time [...] But most things can be fixed” and the Seventh Doctor saying “Everything must at some time die. It’s part of the natural order of things.” Am I supposed to think the Second Doctor was wrong to fix Lilith’s broken doll and that he should have instead used it as an opportunity to teach her to accept death as inevitable? Is the implication that this small act of kindness was directly responsible for the millennia of subjugation which followed? Or is that irrelevant and it’s all the Timewyrm’s doing?

The politics of this story are a bit naff.

The novel’s answer to propaganda-fueled authoritarian rule seems to be rugged individualism; after calling the Kirithons “wimps!” for being oppressed, the Doctor offers them “the chance to be dependent on no one but [themselves]” and later reiterates that they’ll “have to fend for themselves” from now on. Coupled with the message that acts of kindness create dictators, it suggests that thinking for yourself is good (I agree), but moreover you should trust no one and help no one. I don’t like that.

Am I expecting too much from a 200-page Doctor Who novel? Maybe. But if Robinson wants to get political enough to say wake up sheeple, he might as well go all the way and write something actually radical.

Not that any of this matters even within the fiction. As soon as the God machine is introduced, what happens on Kirith is immaterial. Who gives a shit?

In the end, Timewyrm: Apocalypse is just weak. I really did want to like this book, but as the story went on and the clichés piled up I started to lose interest. I can only hope Revelation will give the Timewyrm arc a satisfying conclusion.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

human experiments, torture, body horror (with some ableism tangled up in there), racism, cannibalism, violence (including gun violence), death, dissociation