How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair – read by Elizabeth Kim
“What the tourists couldn’t discern, as they drank and ate dinner while my father sang and flashed his dreadlocks onstage, was his true motivation for singing. Night after night he sang to burn down Babylon, which was them.” Safiya Sinclair is a poet, and this is her memoir about growing up in a strict Rastafarian family, in the shadow of an abusive father who exploits a religious path without standardised framework. Sinclair has spun a mythology from her own life, and tells the story of how she found poetry as a means for distilling life’s hardships into something solid and beautiful. A thread of magic underpins the realism that gives it a sense of the universal. Reading this made me desperately want to write and read more poetry. The writing is beautiful and poetic while being clean—the author is not trying to impress but she does. This book is shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for non-fiction and I wouldn’t be surprised if it wins.
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton – read by Beth Ward
I first read Danielle Dutton's genre-bending collection Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other in a fever. The high heat of some phantom illness swirled in me as I wandered through the experimental prose—and I'm still not sure if it was my own febrile mind, or Dutton's glimmering, foreboding language that kept me in the trance-like state I found myself in for the whole of the book.
In the "Prairie" section, Dutton guides us through an uncanny American Midwest, where campsites exist in the shadows of their past as prehistoric ritual sites, where she incants the names of flora like a spell—"The woods are laced with prairie," she writes. "Sky blue aster. Sideoats grama. Little bluestem. Flowering spurge."—where Dutton finds herself haunted by the ghost of Mina Loy's poems and her own son's retelling of frightful urban legends.
"Would we call the moon a ghost,” she asks in one of the section’s shimmering essays, “or this a ghostly light?"
In “Dresses,” Dutton’s hybrid, nearly-prose poem, Sixty-Six Dresses I Have Read, suspends linearity in favor of the kind of otherworldly time that passes in a fairy tale, revisiting various dresses she’s encountered in works such as Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw, and Leanora Carrington’s White Rabbits.
In one meditation, in dialogue with poet CA Conrad, who created what they called (soma)tic poetry rituals, Dutton writes:
"After Mother
died her red
dress continued baking pies."
In another, written with regard to a play by Joyelle McSweeney:
"When they autopsied me,
I wore a white nightgown of malignant pearls
inside my body, as if I were a Queen that had swallowed my
own crown
or a demented bride with her own cake sewn up inside."
"Art" and "Other" give us more of this kind of experimenting with form and language. She considers art through fiction in a kind of academic ekphrasis, sends us off with a weird and whimsical one-act play.
My fever had broken by the time I finished Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, but I stayed in Dutton's ominous surreality, the sing-song incantatory music of her prose clicking in my head, long after I'd left it. It is a book of high strangeness, uncanny beauty like light falling through leaves.
The Shadow Key by Susan Stokes-Chapman – read by Carly Stevenson
Hot on the heels of her acclaimed debut novel Pandora (2022), Susan Stokes-Chapman returns to the Georgian period in The Shadow Key—a suspenseful Gothic mystery set in a remote mining village on the Welsh coast. In keeping with the Gothic literary tradition, the rugged landscape provides a dramatic backdrop to the plot, which follows disgraced English physician Dr Henry Talbot and Linette Tresilian as they attempt to uncover the dark secrets of Penhelyg. The novel is steeped in Welsh folklore and the structure cleverly echoes the Four Branches of the Mabinogi—a nice touch that is testament to the author’s abiding affection for the country’s rich heritage. This is already one of my favourite books of 2024.
Dead Animals by Phoebe Stuckes – read by Elizabeth kim
“There is something creeping at the edge of your vision, lingering somewhere just out of focus. All it would take is to let your mind wander, to let it come into view.” Late capitalist existentialist literature might be my new favourite genre. I love Sally Rooney, and more recently I binge-read Madeline Gray’s Green Dot (though there wasn’t a grain of mythology, folklore, or the occult in there so I’ll talk about it at some point in a Substack post— subscribe here). Pitched to me as “It follows meets I May Destroy You” I jumped at reading this debut. While quieter than It Follows, and with less dread, Dead Animals is a tale of obsession laced with darkness. I resonated with the unnamed vegetarian woman protagonist’s struggle working in hospitality and the enigmatic shadow at the corner of her eye well summarised the feeling of living with trauma, in her case related to sexual abuse.
Poor Things by Alasdair Gray – read by Elizabeth Kim
I watched Yorgos Lanthimos’ sublimely weird black comedy before reading the book on which it is based. The book is different in feeling. For one thing, it’s set in Gray’s native Glasgow, which locals missed in the film. Controversial, but I’ve never taken to Glasgow (except its exquisite vegan pastries at Honeytrap Bakery and TheDorkyFrench) and I wanted to see it in a different light, through Gray’s dark urban realist lens—Ali Smith described Gray as a “modern-day William Blake.” A Victorian pastiche with echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, this is a postmodernist adventure novel with a female lead; it’s feminist and anti-colonial, satirical and at times a little didactic, but this suits the type of novel it is. It reminded me of Voltaire’s philosophical satire novel, Candide in places: “Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police. Truth, beauty and goodness are not mysterious, they are the commonest, most obvious, most essential facts of life, like sunlight, air and bread. Only folk whose heads are muddled by expensive educations think truth, beauty, goodness are rare private properties. Nature is more liberal. The universe keeps nothing essential from us—it is all present, all gift.”
Threshold: Terminal Lucidity and the Border Between Life and Death by Alexander Batthyány – read by Elizabeth Kim
Threshold examines a phenomenon where people who’ve suffered dementia, Alzheimer’s, progressive brain disease, strokes or other mind-altering diagnoses often regain clarity and energy at the end of their lives, a miraculous return of the self with its memories and personality. Batthyány is a cognitive scientist and the director of the Viktor Frankl Institute and brings to this book Frankl’s existential psychology. This book examines how those who witness terminal lucidity come out changed, believing life is more meaningful, and that there is a core self which survives illness, and maybe even death. I found the stories here, and Batthyány’s insights, fascinating.
Our Share of the Night by Mariana Enríquez – read by Cristina Ferrandez
Juan and his son Gaspar are on the road, Gaspar’s mother’s death hanging over them as they make their way across Argentina. It is a long trip, or it feels that way; the prose is sprawling and painstakingly detailed. The reader feels firmly rooted in the realm of realism, privy to moments of tenderness between father and son as they mourn Rosario’s death. That is, until the supernatural abruptly seeps in, without notice or fanfare, as if it had always naturally been there. That is the power of Enríquez’s prose, the ability to imbue a story of mediums and demonic cults with such ordinariness that the horrors she tells feel ordinary too.
In Our Share of Night, Argentina’s military dictatorship and its many desaparecidos serve as backdrop, while the obscenely rich Bradford-Reyes family seek immortality through the Order, a cult dating back to 18th century Britain. Juan and Gaspar are, in fact, on no ordinary road trip, but on their way to the Bradford-Reyes’ aristocratic home, where Juan, a medium, must preside over the Order’s annual ritual, during which a supernatural entity called the Darkness will be summoned. For the rest of the novel, an increasingly ill Juan will do everything he can to keep Gaspar away from the Order.
Enríquez’s novel doesn’t shy away from classic horror tropes, such as haunted houses, and the monstrous creations of Rosario’s mother Mercedes, who kidnaps people and mutilates them until they resemble imbunches. But the novel also contains some of the most complex characters I’ve ever read. Juan’s trauma has turned him monstrous, and the only way to protect Gaspar is to physically hurt him. Meanwhile, back in the 70s, a young Rosario is torn between her instinct to protect her son and her desire for power within the Order. Our Share of Night is a disturbing yet immensely satisfying read, and a really refreshing take on the horror genre.
Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic by Tabitha Stanmore – read by Elizabeth Kim
I read every book about the service magicians from which we borrow our name. Stanmore’s introduction to this world is accessible and meticulously researched. Cunning-folk helped normal people with everyday problems, such as finding lost things, removing curses, fortunetelling, casting love spells and curing warts. They were, in a sense, practitioners of magic for the working classes. Their magic was not standardised in a formal doctrine. First they took their magic from fairies and animals; later they drew their knowledge from an array of books—grimoires popular around the time. This book is told like a series of narrative stories, far richer and more immersive than many other history books I have read which simply relay facts. Stanmore reminds readers that cunning-folk were not witches, though some met the same fate in the witch trials, a distinction that has been made by scholars such as Owen Davies and Thomas Waters, but which continues to be confused by many modern practitioners and writers of fiction. Professor Ronald Hutton—one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of witchcraft and paganism—called this “the best introduction to late medieval and early modern popular magic ever written.” Dr Stanmore teaches on this topic at the University of Bristol.
The Hemlock Cure by Joanne Burn – read by Sophia Adamowicz
As a child growing up on the outskirts of the Peak District, the history of how the plague came to Eyam, ripping through the quarantined village and killing around one-third of residents, was drummed into me from an early age. The Covid lockdown gave this local tragedy a new resonance, but nothing could prepare me for the power of Burn’s reimagining of Eyam’s history during 1665-66. The Hemlock Cure is a piece of historical literary fiction that feels utterly, painfully, real. Combining speculative elements—the story is narrated by the deceased sibling of the main character—with period detail, The Hemlock Cure explores fear, regret and absolution. It offers an inclusive vision of the family unit that lifts the heart whilst also breaking it.
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill – read by Sophia Adamowicz
Late as always to jump onto the bandwagon, I downloaded the audiobook of Joe Hill’s 2007 novel recently, hoping for a good scare-fest. Heart-Shaped Box is certainly unnerving, a thrill ride of cinematographic sequences that feature one of the vilest ghosts in horror history. The protagonist, who adopts the name Judas Coyne and a lifestyle to match, can never quite be redeemed from his sins, no matter how much the narrative tries to shift culpability from him to the more overtly wicked characters. It makes for an interesting study in how to write unlikeable main characters while maintaining the reader’s interest in their fate. At one point, Jude charms his girlfriend by likening abused woman to vintage furniture, suggesting that distress increases value. While there is some irony in his tone, the story does reinforce this fetishising attitude by conflating female suffering with power. Jude’s saving grace is the love he bears for his dogs, which are presented more respectfully than many of the women in this problematic but nevertheless compelling novel.
The Anchored World by Jasmine Sawers – read by Sophia Adamowicz
Sawers’ collection of flash fiction is not only global in reach, but cosmic. Mining the rich seams of folklore and fairy tales from countries including Thailand, Denmark and Germany, Sawers sculpts her raw materials into delicate works of art. Earth still clings to the resulting creations—they deal with bloody rites of passage, sexual appetite, the rawness loss and failure—and this is what gives the universality which is the hallmark of both folklore and flash. I was particularly struck by the ethereal beauty of ‘The Weight of the Moon,’ a story about taking the time to rest, play and dream before returning to the gravity of everyday responsibilities.
The Camomile by Catherine Carswell – read by Maria Hummer
This novel is a largely forgotten gem from the 1920s about a young woman in Glasgow trying to find the right balance between pursuing her ambitions (she wants more than anything to be a writer) and doing what is expected of her. She faces religious pressure as well as the suffocating assumption from everyone, including her eventual fiancé, that a woman’s only purpose in life is to marry and raise children (which does not include writing and art). It is at once bleak and sublime (and also distressingly relatable for a book that was published over 100 years ago), and contains such passages as: “Today has been magical from the moment I woke. As I dressed I felt an exquisite fire running in my veins, and during breakfast I had to hold myself carefully and quietly in case I should fly to pieces from the sheer extremity of my aliveness to everything.” If you have ever felt overcome by “the marvel of life”, and especially if you have ever desired to put it to paper, you will find much to relate to in this book.