Book Review: A WEB OF OBSIDIAN

TITLE: A Web of Obsidian (Obsidian Sisterhood #1)

AUTHOR: Lydia M. Hawke

231 pages, Michem Publishing, ISBN 9781989457290 (print, also e-book)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

I have been a fan of Lydia M. Hawke since the first book in the Grigori Legacy series (when it was originally published under the author’s real name, Linda Poitevin*), so it’s probably not a surprise that I quite enjoyed A Web of Obsidian, her newest urban fantasy series. Although I’m not sure that “urban fantasy” is the totally correct genre label for this series, as the magic the main character encounters turns out to be the result of an ancient alien visitor to Earth … but “urban science fiction” doesn’t have the same ring, and didn’t Arthur C. Clarke say that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? So maybe I’m overthinking the label …

Web is narrated in the first person by Sister Monica Barrett, sixty-nine years old and the holder of two black belts (continuing from the Crone Wars books Hawke’s penchant for centering older women as series leads). Well, former Sister -- Monica left the church years ago but still lives with a group of nuns while running a shelter for women (abused, abandoned, in need of support). Monica is always ready to stand up for her convictions and for the rights of the women she has decided to protect – including an emaciated, nearly dead woman who shows up on the shelter’s front porch pursued by a mysterious man. Sister Monica is beaten almost to death by the man before the nearly dead woman tosses her a smooth, flat stone that reinvigorates Monica and allows her to defeat the woman’s would-be assailant. This plunges Sister Monica into a world of secret societies at odds with each other.

To clear: Sister Monica kicks ass even before she gains mystical abilities she doesn’t understand. She is a psychologically and physically strong female protagonist. While she shares two traits with Claire Emerson, the lead character in Hawke’s Crone Wars series (both are retirement-age women who are at first overwhelmed by the revelation that magic is real and that they have been chosen to wield it), the two are very different in personality and in non-magical physical ability. I mention this because I would hate anyone to think that Web of Obsidian is just a retread of Becoming Crone. The main character, the way the magic system works, the way the story beats play out as Monica slowly discovers what she’s been drawn into, are all quite different. I liked Claire … I would hang out with Sister Monica.

Bear in mind that this is the first book in a new series, so not every question introduced is answered. There are enough reveals to feel satisfied at the end, and enough lingering questions to leave a reader intrigued to read book two. And a couple of twists along the way to keep things interesting. There are also several supporting characters that I’m interested in seeing developed as the series progresses.

*A few years ago, Poitevin decided to start publishing her urban fantasy series under a different name from her romance and romantic suspense books, hence the Grigori Legacy, Crone Wars, and Obsidian Sisterhood series now being issued under the “Lydia M. Hawke” name.

I received an electronic advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. Web of Obsidian releases in print and e-book form on February 25, 2025.

Book Review: OUR SHARE OF NIGHT

TITLE: Our Share of Night

AUTHOR: Mariana Enriquez   TRANSLATOR: Megan McDowell

588 pages, Hogarth Books, ISBN 9780451495150 (paperback; also hardcover, e-book, audio)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night, translated into English by Megan McDowell, is not an easy book to read. It is close to 600 pages of dense emotive language, shifts in point-of-view, jumps in time, forays into multiple horror sub-genres, history lessons, and a pervading sense of doomed inevitability. But it is a book worth reading and contemplating. I might not have read the book, or at least not now, if it hadn’t been chosen as the January selection for Stanza Books’ Horror Book Club. Weeks after finishing it, scenes are still popping unbidden into my head and the urge to research the 1980s history of Argentina in more detail keeps growing.

Our Share of Night is primarily the story of Juan Peterson and his son Gaspar, who one morning in January 1981 set out on a road trip that will eventually take them to the remote family estate of Juan’s recently deceased wife, Rosario. Rosario’s family is part of a worldwide cult called The Order, and Juan is the Order’s unwilling medium, keeping them in contact with the Darkness they worship and which they believe has promised them immortality of a sort. Juan will do anything to protect his son from being used by the Order – even if it means putting himself, his brother Lius, his best friend Stephen, and his wife’s half-sister Tali in danger. The aftereffects of that initial road trip play out years later, as Juan’s health continues to fail and Gaspar ages into adulthood.

 I say ‘primarily’ because in addition to the large sections of the book told in close third-person from Juan’s and then Gaspar’s POV (with occasional forays into close third from the POVs of various friends and loved ones), there are shorter sections told from other people’s POV: a stream-of-consciousness section from the POV of Juan’s adoptive “father” Doctor Bradford; a short first-person section narrated by a journalist; and a long flashback narrated by the late Rosario. The Doctor Bradford section was the toughest part of the book for me, as stream-of-consciousness is not a form I enjoy, and also one of the more horrific passages as well.

Enriquez smoothly intermixes supernatural/cosmic horror (the scenes with the unknowable Darkness and the way it manifests through Juan),cult horror (The history and machinations of The Order), body horror (very much not easy to read are the passages describing what one of the Order members has done to deform young children), slasher horror (people in a house with a deranged killer), houses that are haunted or connected to supernatural realms (several), medical horror (the AIDS Crisis), generational trauma, and the very real horrors of living under a dictatorship that caused the disappearance of thousands of citizens. I’m hard pressed to think of a sub-genre of horror that isn’t represented in one form or another. There’s even a bit of erotic horror.

The true core of the book is the characters. I can’t say that I particularly like Juan, but I believed, and even admired, his need to protect his son from the horrors that have been inflicted on him. I believed in his need to somehow revenge himself on those who have abused him. I felt for Gaspar even as I yelled at him (yes, I yelled – I didn’t throw the book across the room, but I yelled) for falling into some of the same negative behaviors his exhibited. Enriquez’s handling of this generational inheritance of anger and propensity for physical violence is nuanced and oh so very realistic, as is Gaspar’s awareness that he needs to break the cycle and his struggle to do so. Rosario is equally complex in her love for Juan and her drive to take over (and theoretically change) the Order but at what cost? What, if anything, does she consider unacceptable?

Enriquez also has a lot to say about the perseverance of organizations and orders. She never directly references the legend of the Hydra (cut off one head, and two more grow back) but like that creature, despite generational bulldozing (for lack of a better term), the Order keeps coming back – much like the dictatorships of Argentina (the faces may change; the methodologies of control don’t). And so the horror continues even as the book ends.

As stated earlier, this is not an easy book to read for many reasons. But what it has to say about the history of Argentina, of colonialism, of fanaticism, is too important not to make the effort. It’s not a polemic; it’s not a lecture. It is a fantastic, character driven novel that also holds a mirror up to systems of control (organizational and interpersonal) while also touching on pretty much every type of horror story you can think of.

I’ve had Enriquez’s 2021 short story collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, on my To Be Read bookcase pretty much since it was published, and bought her 2024 collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People, as soon as it came out – both at the recommendation of Mark at Stanza Books in Beacon NY. This novel has convinced me to move both collections up closer to the top of my To Be Read stacks.

Sunday Shorts: SLOW BURN

TITLE: Slow Burn

AUTHOR: Mike Allen

278 pages, Mythic Delirium Books, ISBN 9781956522037 (paperback; also e-book)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Slow Burn, Mike Allen’s latest short story collection, is another tour-de-force mix of body horror, existential dread, and yes, I’ll say it again as I did for his previous collection, mind-fuckery (in the best possible sense of the word). Allen’s stories, even the dark fantasy entries, are grounded in a gritty reality that then veers into increasingly disturbing imagery. Even when his stories start with a sense of dread or an unsettling moment, Allen’s talent for grounding the reader before pulling the rug out from under is on full display.

Allen’s stories are character driven, wherein lies another of his talents: revealing the interiority of a character with sometimes just a sentence or two. Whether the story is set in the small town here-and-now of southwestern Virginia or a fantasy world, the horror is heightened because the characters, or their wants/needs, are recognizable and relatable. The main characters also tend to be common people – middle class or lower – rather than rich or famous, dealing with horrors that encroach on their ability to get a job, keep a job, or get home to a loved one.

In “Falling Is What It Loves,” a daughter tries to come to peace with the complicated relationship she had with her father after his death from cancer with the aid of a supernatural (or possibly alien?) creature called a “roommate.” Is the roommate somehow the main character’s conscience or internal monologue personified? Does every person on Earth have a “roommate”? The story opens up, but does not easily answer, questions about guilt and communication and generational trauma. Generational trauma is also at the core of “The Feather Stitch,” in which a grandmother’s search for her missing grandson leads her to a craft shop with a demonic connection – but generational understanding and familial magic also play their role in a dark story with a (hopefully) hopeful ending.

My two favorite stories in the collection share a theme: how secrets revealed can cause a life, and a person’s sense of self, to fall apart. In “The Butcher, The Baker,” Trukos’ life is simple: kill whoever Auntie Mayya tells him to, in defense of her baking empire. Until the day when Trukos kills someone he wasn’t ordered to and the magic driving him begins to unravel. (Is it spoilery to say this is the darkest take on both the titular fairy tale and “the gingerbread man” that I’ve ever read? Possibly. Sorry.). In “Gherem,” (co-authored with Charles M. Saplak), the titular character, injured in battle, is tasked with carrying an angry witch back to their homeland with the prize that had been battled for before enemy forces catch up to them – but neither Gherem, nor the witch, nor the reason for the battle, are what they at first seem.

The collection also includes horror, or horror-tinged, poems. I feel in no way qualified to review poetry, so all I’ll say is that like the short stories, the poems range from the subtly eerie to full-bore horror.

I love short fiction in all its forms: from novellas to novelettes, short stories, flash fiction, and drabbles. Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it.

Sunday Shorts: Three from Autumn Cthulhu

Editor Mike Davis takes a line from H.P. Lovecraft’s story “Polaris” (“And in the autumn of the year, when the winds from the north curse and whine, and the red-leaved trees of the swamp mutter things to one another in the small hours of the morning under the horned waning moon…”) and uses it as the core principal of the anthology Autumn Cthulhu (Lovecraft ezine Press, 2016). Here are my thoughts on a few of the stories contained therein:

cover image by andreiuc88

“In the Spaces Where You Once Lived” by Damien Angelica Walters

Helena and Jack, a couple in their retirement years, live in a house that backs up onto a beautiful forest. Jack is falling victim to dementia/Alzheimer’s and Helen is struggling to accept the slow loss of her husband and to cope with the changes in his personality. Jack is convinced this house is not his home, that his home is elsewhere: perhaps somewhere in the woods. Walters’ story balances a very real fear (Jack’s health and eventual full loss of memory and cognitive function) with a slow-growing dread that something is very wrong in the woods. Of course, something is, or this wouldn’t be a Lovecraftian story. The relationship between Helena and Jack is drawn so indelibly by Walters, it is easy to see the love that underpins the strangeness and discomfort; scenes with their child and grandchild add to both the poignancy of Jack’s situation and the tension of the mystery of the woods. Helena does eventually learn what’s lurking just out of sight and why it is affecting Jack – but thankfully the author does not use it as an explanation for Jack’s declining mental acuity. That would have been a bit too precious for an otherwise realistic look at the horror of Alzheimer’s and similar diseases.

“The Black Azalea” by Wendy N. Wagner

The protagonist of Wagner’s story is Candace, a recent widow whose marriage to Graham was not a happy one especially in the later years. Before he passed, Graham had planted an azalea bush in the shadow of an elm tree that succumbed to Dutch elm disease, leaving room for sunlight to kill the azalea. The dead azalea blocks Candace’s view of her garden, so she decides on the last nice day of autumn to dig the bush out. Which is when she discovers strange rot at the bush’s core … strange rot that seems to be incredibly contagious to all the other plant life on Candace’s property. And eventually to more than just the plants. Wagner is an expert at moving a story from subtle unease to full out horror, and “The Black Azalea” is yet another example of that skill. The story also does not skimp on characterization in favor of horror; Candace’s life as a widow, and her life before becoming a widow, are just as central to the story as the rot is (and, in fact, I began to consider that this (supernatural? extraterrestrial?) rot is something of a metaphor for the course of Candace and Graham’s marriage.

“A Shadow Passing” by Daniel Mills

“A Shadow Passing” is one of the most fever dream-like short stories I have read in recent memory. A young boy’s mother leaves their house each day, dressed in widow’s black, to track down “them” – winged batlike shadows that speak to her, taunt her, are leading her to something. Something the boy seems tied to, with his strange fevers. Something the boy’s aunts and grandfather don’t seem to want him to be a part of, seeking medical assistance for him while his mother is away. Mills’ prose is perfect for the story’s overall sense of disconnection from logical reality, of a sick child’s inability to understand why the adults in his life seem to be at odds, of the way fevers especially steal time from us and cause us to hallucinate. I might have been reading too much into the story, but it also feels like an investigation of how adults who get caught up in cults will sacrifice everything, potentially even their own children, for the sake of their new beliefs – and how difficult it is for family members outside the cult to save the ones who have been sucked in.

I love short fiction in all its forms: from novellas to novelettes, short stories, flash fiction, and drabbles. Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it.

Theatre Thursday: Kowalski

My first theatrical show of 2025 was Kowalski, at The Duke on 42nd Street in New York City.

In Kowalski, playwright Gregg Ostrin imagines what might have gone on the night Marlon Brando showed up at Tennessee Williams’ Provincetown house to audition for the role of Stanley Kowalski in the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the behest of director Elia Kazan. I am a sucker for tales of backstage/off-screen drama, so I knew I had to see Kowalski even with as little as I know of the personal lives of Williams and Brando (does that make me a bad theatre fan? Should I turn in my gay card?), and no matter how much of the 90-minute encounter is conjecture on Ostrin’s part.

Robin Lord Taylor was mostly known to me previous to this as Oswald Cobblepot, a.k.a. The Penguin, on Gotham, but his turn as Tennessee Williams now supersedes his TV work in my mind. His body language betrays Williams’ combination of insecurity and hubris with almost every gesture, some of it flamboyant enough to be real and real enough to avoid caricature. His whiskey-soaked voice soars when he’s excited and drops gutturally when he’s no longer amused, trying to stay in command of his home despite the overwhelming presence of Brando (and eventually, Brando’s female traveling companion).

Brandon Flynn (also previously known to me mostly from his television work on 13 Reasons Why, where he proved he could handle tough material) captivates from the moment he breaks into Williams’ house (easy, because the front door doesn’t latch properly); he exudes the calm sexuality Brando did at the start of his career mixed with playfulness but underscored with some bitterness. He avoids doing a Brando impersonation, giving his dialogue just enough of a mumbly quality to justify the number of times Williams comments on the way he speaks but otherwise avoiding the cliches.

When Taylor and Flynn are alone on stage together, they have a connection that made the audience the night I saw the show sit still and focus on every word, every gesture. The connection is in turn playful (especially with the misunderstanding of their first meeting), commiseratory (sharing stories of troubled childhoods), and confrontational (as each tries to control the other). Even when the characters are angry with each other, when Williams sulks or Brando rages, the actors are perfectly in synch.

While this is essentially a two-man show, there are three other characters. I estimate two of them have about twenty minutes of stage time each, and the third less than that. Ellie Ricker’s Jo, the young girl who has traveled with Brando to Provincetown from New York only to be left behind at the bus station until she takes matters into her own hands, is effervescent and easily manipulated by both men. I spent the whole time she was on stage wanting to tell her to pay attention to the way they’re using her as a pawn. When she does, Ricker’s transition from sweet to hurt to angry is pitch perfect. Alison Cimmet (who I think I last saw way downtown in a production of Machinal, twenty or more years ago) plays Williams’ long time friend Margo Jones … and man, do I wish the script gave her more to do. She is wonderfully acerbic as the long-supporting friend who is deeply hurt by being passed over as director of Streetcar in favor of the much more in-demand Elia Kazan; acerbic but loving. She and Lord also have solid chemistry in their too-few scenes together. Sebastian Treviño has the least stage time as Pancho, Williams’ live-in lover. He handles what little he’s given to do (sexily smolder, physically threaten, get drunk) very well but the Pancho is there mostly as a possible basis for the role Brando is there to audition for.

If I have any complaint about the show, it’s the way it is structured as a memory play. The first minute or so, with an older Tennessee Williams sitting in a chair talking to an unseen, and unheard, television interviewer, felt awkward and unnecessary, as did the closing narration.

Colin Hanlon’s direction is superb, making full use of the single set (the living room and kitchen of Williams’ home) designed by David Gallo with an eye towards keeping your attention on the actors. Jeff Croiter’s lighting design is subtle and warm and Lisa Zinni’s costumes capture the essence of Williams and Brando with period perfection. The Duke at 42nd Street is an intimate black box space which made it even easier for the audience to be pulled into the drama. I hope the show does well enough to garner a transfer to a Broadway house eventually, but I fear some of the immediacy of being in a smaller house will be lost. So go see Kowalski during this initial limited run. It closes February 23rd.

Kowalski set design by David Gallo, lighting design by Jeff Croiter

I’ve always loved live theater, and in the past couple of years I’ve been making a stronger effort to see more of it. Theater Thursday is a new occasional series where I talk about live theater, both shows I’ve seen recently and shows I’ve loved in the past.

Sunday Shorts: Two From Women in Practical Armor

In 2016, Ed Greenwood and Gabrielle Harbowy edited Women in Practical Armor, an anthology of fantasy short stories focused on female warriors while avoiding the trope of skimpy armor. Here are my thoughts on a couple of the stories contained therein.

cover image by Nneirda, design by Eloise Knapp

“No Better Armor, No Heavier Burden” by Wunji Lau

Rose, an older woman with a mysterious past, has settled quietly in a small town in the shadow of a mountain with strange properties called the Blacktooth, where weather does not work the way it does in the rest of Ara. Only one person in town knows anything of her past at all, including that she has two estranged adult sons. The story begins with Rose running towards the town Inn because she’s heard there’s trouble, and only upon arrival does she discover one of her sons, Zaian, being held at swordpoint by Leian (a nearby country) soldiers. From there, the story gains complexity as an excellently written fight scene reveals what Rose and her opponents are capable of along with some of Rose’s secrets (and her son’s). But it’s not all non-stop fighting; the conflict between Rose and the people who want to take Zaian in for a crime he possibly didn’t commit also becomes something of a battle of personality and will. I loved Rose’s personality (take charge, take no bullshit, take chances). Her first-person narrative voice is personable and irascible; her relationship with Zaian is not smooth but still loving as she struggles with why he’s been estranged and why he’s lying to her now. The world building surrounding the characters is really great: the Blacktooth is home to weird energy fluctuations that affect not just the weather but the way magic works. I really want to know more about Rose, Zaian, and the countries of Ara and Lei and the religion of the Steersman.

“The Bound Man” by Mary Robinette Kowal

In Li Reiko’s society, women are the warriors and leaders, while men are the homemakers and scribes. Li Reiko herself is a noted leader and warrior, with two young children: a daughter who will someday be a warrior as well, and a son whose interest in martial arts needs to be dissuaded because it distracts him from honing the skills he’ll need to keep the Histories. Despite her society’s dictates, Li Reiko plays a version of hide-and-seek with her kids that fosters both children’s abilities and awareness. Elsewhere, Halldór, a warrior-priest, struggles to bring the sword of the Chooser of the Slain back to his people’s Parliament while his Duke and the rest of the party that found the legendary sword fall to a bandit raiding party. Halldór chants a rune of power that will bring the Chooser of the Slain from the realm of the gods to the world of men … and Li Reiko is torn from her children and thrust into a world she doesn’t recognize. “The Bound Man” explores the ideological conflict of matriarchal versus patriarchal societies alongside the notion of destiny. Li Reiko is stuck living out a legend/prophecy she had no hand in creating, and the story explores the effects of that on her children and on Halldór’s society. There are moments of this story that are so heartbreaking, and Kowal doesn’t give her characters an uncomplicated way out (no rewriting history, for example). The heart of the story is Li Reiko’s relationship with her kids (the hide-and-seek scene is genuinely heartwarming) and Halldór’s unerring belief in the legend of the Chooser of the Slain and her ability to rescue his country from the Troll King.

I love short fiction in all its forms: from novellas to novelettes, short stories, flash fiction, and drabbles. Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it.

Sunday Shorts: Two From UPGRADED

In 2014, after the heart attack that he thankfully survived and which resulted in the installation of a pacemaker, Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke put together Upgraded, an anthology of stories about cyborgs. Here are my thoughts on a couple of the stories contained therein.

cover art by Julie Dillon

“Oil of Angels” by Chen Quifan, translated by Ken Liu

This story starts innocuously enough: our unnamed first-person narrator makes her first visit to a highly recommended, difficult-to-get-an-appointment with, massage therapist named Dr. Qing. The doctor, who is blind, works wonders on the main character’s physical and emotional stress via aromatherapy and unusual massage oils. The therapy starts to peel back the layers of the main character’s trauma and troubled relationship with her mother, which she had buried via a device called a MAD (Memory Assistant Device), a common piece of tech everyone in the narrator’s generation (and the one previous) have installed early in life (meaning pretty much everyone in this world below a certain age is a cyborg, unfamiliar with what life would be like without the MAD). The story becomes a treatise on how technology that seems perfect in the moment of adoption often has hidden downsides, and also a moving example of how generational trauma sneaks insidiously into our interior lives. Liu’s translation of Chen’s story is full of beautiful language and sensory detail that put the reader directly in the massage parlor (soothing) but also directly into the narrator’s memories (decidedly not soothing).

“Honeycomb Girls” by Erin Cashier

The future of Cashier’s story is dystopic, with most men living in the squalor of broken-down cities, scraping to make ends meet, while a lucky few get to live in Towers with access to what few women seem to exist. The main character Geo, more cyborg than human, finds himself in a position to see what life in the Towers is like, but at a cost that becomes increasingly hard to pay. Geo clearly has fewer social skills than any of the people around him, reflected in the language of the story; it’s a close third person POV on Geo, combining the stilted syntax of someone who is awkward socially with in-world jargon the reader has to use context clues to understand (which put me in mind of Anthony Burgess’ novella A Clockwork Orange, although Cashier doesn’t make the reader work as hard as Burgess does to understand what’s being said). Richer people taking advantage of poorer people and men taking advantage of women while infrastructure and society collapse are standard issue dystopia, but Cashier brings moments of real human connection into the mix (between Geo and his closest friends among the junk sellers as well as between Geo and the woman he meets in the Tower) that are truly affecting.

I love short fiction in all its forms: from novellas to novelettes, short stories, flash fiction, and drabbles. Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it.

Theatre Thursday: THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA

I’m a bit late when it comes to admiring the work of Jez Butterworth. But after seeing The Ferryman in 2019, the first of his plays I’d ever seen staged, I vowed not to miss whatever came next. (I saw the mostly American replacement cast a month or so after the show won the Tony Award for Best Play, and the show blew me away, even with some not-so-great fake Irish accents in the mix.) So as soon as The Hills of California was announced, I knew I had to see it. We got tickets for what I didn’t realize at the time was the final preview performance, September 28th. The show officially opened the next night. You won’t be surprised to hear that it blew me away.

The Hills of California is set in a family-owned hotel/rooming house in Blackpool, England in 1976, where the estranged Webb sisters are reuniting in their childhood home upon the impending death of their mother. Well, three of them are. Jill has apparently never moved out and been their ailing mother’s caregiver for quite some time. Youngest sister Ruby shows up with her husband Dennis, followed shortly by third sister Gloria with her husband and offspring – but only Jill is convinced that oldest sister Joan will bother to come from America. The play explores, through scenes set in 1976 as well as flashbacks set twenty years earlier, what drove these sisters apart; they were extremely close as kids, with each other and with their single mother Veronica despite her taskmaster-like method of bringing them together as a four-member version of the Andrews Sisters and conflicting stories about what happened to their father. There’s a lot of great four-part harmony singing in the flashbacks; not so much in the 1976 scenes.

As my friend Dave said: “It’s a Jez Butterworth drama. You know from the beginning something bad is coming. It’s just a matter of when it happens and what the fallout is.”

I’m a big fan of stories that alternate present and past to build tension, and Butterworth manages it expertly here, with just enough time spent in each time frame before a switch occurs to move the action forward and reveal something about how each sister has changed, progressing inexorably towards the reveal of the bad thing that happened (which I won’t spoil here) and clarifying what we already know of the fallout in the characters’ present.

As adults, Helena Wilson’s Jill is the people-pleaser, Ophelia Lovibond’s Ruby the most naïve, and Leanne Best’s Gloria the inexplicably bitter one. Each actress was fantastic, and the distance between their character played perfectly. The scenes where they try to confront that distance, without truly getting to the heart of what pushed them apart, were tension-packed and at points heart-breaking. Equally heart-breaking was watching the scenes with their much more joyful, playful, bonded younger selves (Nancy Allsop as Young Gloria, Nicola Turner as Young Jill, Sophia Ally as Young Ruby, and Lara Donnell as Young Joan), knowing where those relationships are headed. Sam Mendes clearly had the younger and older actresses spend time together perfecting matching body language and facial expressions; there was no doubt from the moment the younger versions stepped on stage who was who. The younger actresses are also all wonderful singers, it should be noted.

If there’s a core character the play revolves around (which even in ensemble shows like this there usually is), it’s mother Veronica in the flashbacks. Lara Donnelly was a tour-de-force in the role. Veronica is a strict “stage mother” but also fiercely protective of her daughters, and there are moments when the fight between ambition and protectiveness threatens to overwhelm her. Donnelly’s swings from one to the other, and the internal conflicts that result, were impressive. Donnelly also plays the adult Joan in the play’s final act, and I can honestly say I didn’t realize it was the same actress (obviously, I didn’t read the full cast list in the Playbill before the show, nor did I really pay attention when the adult sisters comment on how much like Mother Joan was…).

If I have any complaint about the show, it’s that Ruby’s husband Dennis (Bryan Dick), and Gloria’s husband Bill (Richard Short) and kids Tony and Patty (Liam Bixby and Nancy Allsop) seem truly extraneous in the 1976 scenes and don’t really add to any understanding of how the sisters are different as adults (particularly the two children, who are in one scene together), whereas the other adults in the flashback scenes (especially Richard Lumsden’s Joe Fogg, Bryan Dick’s Jack Larkin, and David Wilson Barnes’ very skeevy Luther St. John) add to our understanding of Veronica and how far she’ll go to both promote and protect her daughters.

Kudos also must be given to designer Rob Howell and lighting designer Natasha Chivers for creating a set that feels cavernous and claustrophobic at the same time, reflecting the sisters’ closeness and division. Director Sam Mendes uses the rotating stage to move between the present and the past, which further illustrates how the sisters’ relationship has changed: in the past, they are always gathered around the kitchen table, where boarders/guests are not allowed; in the present, they only interact in the hotel’s lobby/common room, as though they are all guests/visitors in what used to be their home.

The Hills of California closed on Broadway in December. I am sure it will be nominated for several Tony Awards this season.

I’ve always loved live theater, and in the past couple of years I’ve been making a stronger effort to see more of it. Theater Thursday is a new occasional series where I talk about live theater, both shows I’ve seen recently and shows I’ve loved in the past.

Book Review: WILD SPACES

TITLE: Wild Spaces

AUTHOR: S.L. Coney

121 pages, TorDotCom, ISBN 9781250866837 (paperback, also e-book and audio)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Puberty is strange and confusing for everyone no matter how much your parents may tell you about what to expect. It’s especially so for the twelve-year-old boy at the center of S.L. Coney’s novella Wild Spaces, who comes to learn that all the things he doesn’t know about his mother’s family are connected to the changes he’s beginning to experience. Generational/hereditary trauma is hard enough when it’s purely emotional; what happens when it’s genetic, and those genes aren’t human?

Wild Spaces takes genres that perhaps shouldn’t work together (Southern Gothic, Eldritch Horror, and Coming of Age) and melds them so seamlessly that not only do they work together, they become something that feels fresh and new (Southern Eldritch Boys Adventure, perhaps?).

The story opens with a classic “boy meets stray dog” scene straight out of a Tommy Kirk/Kevin Corcoran Disney movie that melds a high level of wholesome adorableness (waiting to see if anyone will come to claim the dog before deciding on its new name (which ends up being the boy’s favorite pirate, Teach)) with a fair warning that this is about as light-and-fuzzy as the story gets, and that a monster is on its way. I loved this opening salvo of nostalgia tinged with danger. But from there, the story takes darker and darker turns beginning with the arrival of the boy’s maternal grandfather, who has clearly been estranged from his daughter for a long time. It’s the first time the boy and his father are meeting the grandfather, and the scene is wrought with awkward introductions that more than hint the grandfather is not a good man. Even Teach doesn’t like him. Exactly how the grandfather is not a good man is doled out slowly at first, until his true nature is revealed. These early scenes take place in a two-story house on the Carolina coast during a sweltering summer that builds to a massive storm (a storm that is both a physical danger and a metaphor for the havoc the grandfather is wreaking on their previously calm lives). If “remote house during a hot and stormy summer during which family tensions spill over and secrets are revealed” doesn’t make this book a Southern Gothic, I’m not sure what would. The reveal of the grandfather’s true nature alongside the physical changes the boy is experiencing eventually tip the story into very clearly Eldritch Horror. I don’t want to reveal too much about that aspect of the book. It took me by surprise and a few scenes actually scared me.

Even when I wasn’t outright scared, I was still uncomfortable (in all the right ways), and it took me some time to pinpoint why: the author’s narratorial voice leaves all the characters excepting Teach nameless, and that set me at a remove from them and their situation. They are the Boy, His Father, His Mother, His Grandfather. The physical details given make them real, while the use of titles (for lack of a better term) in place of names makes them a little surreal. I kept thinking “I should know these people at least well enough to know their names … why don’t I know their names?” It’s a really, to me, effective way of keeping the reader slightly off-kilter – which is exactly what the boy is feeling as he learns how much he doesn’t know about his mother, her family, and thus himself.

I highly recommend Wild Spaces. It’s a fast moving, discomfiting novella that will make you consider how family secrets affect a child’s development, and how unconditional love can help a child overcome trauma.

(Side-note: It occurs to me that Wild Spaces and Will Ludwigsen’s A Scout Is Brave make excellent companion pieces, and even though the authors did not intend it they do seem to be in conversation with each other. Both meld coming of age boys adventure and a gothic-style seaside setting with eldritch horror but with vastly different stylistic tones and narratorial voices. I’ve read both books twice now, and I suspect both will be on my “occasional rereads” shelf going forward.)

Tuesday Top Ten(ish): My Trip to London

I recently took my first trip outside the continental United States (barring one short work trip to the Toronto area 15 or so years ago). I journeyed to London the week of Thanksgiving (in the US). Why there and why then? Well, my friend Paul Spiteri has been inviting me to visit (as he invites lots of people) … and my goddaughter Morgyn was spending the fall semester of her senior year of college over there for an internship. So I thought, “maybe it’s time to take Paul up on his offer AND give Morgyn a family visitor a little bit sooner in the semester (her mom and sister spent 10 days surrounding Christmas with her). So I had two wonderful, knowledgeable tour guides to the city, which eased my anxiety about being in a new place for the first time. (Yes, I know: I travel for a living for my full-time job. I should be used to being in unfamiliar places by now. And yet, 18 years in, I still get various levels of anxiety — and my first international travel by plane certainly added to it.)

My tour guides: Paul and my goddaughter

We packed a ton of stuff into 5 short days, to the point where Paul and I had to sit down and have a recap session over tea and a late-night snack so I wouldn’t forget where we’d been and what we’d seen. We prioritized what I wanted to see/do into three groups, and we got to most of the “1s,” several of the “2s,” and a few places that hadn’t been in the plan but occurred naturally as we wandered. I came home with a head cold / ear infection, some souvenirs, a small handful of books, and toooo many photos that I neglected to post daily to my Instagram. So, to make use of at least a few of those photos and to kick off the TOP TEN(ISH) feature for 2025, here are my Top Ten(ish) Experiences from my London trip, in no particular order:

The Wold-Newton Meteor, Natural History Museum

Paul and first met online thanks to our shared interest in the works of science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer. Farmer was the author of biographies of Tarzan (Tarzan Alive) and Doc Savage (Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life), in which he posited that not only were the great heroes and villains of literature actual living people, but also that many of them shared a genetic history that could be tracked back to the first meteor to land in England and be recognized as having come from outer space: the meteor that landed at Wold Cottage in 1795. The village of Wold Newton was too far to make a visit to during my short visit, but the meteor itself is in the Natural History Museum. (But not in the section the guidebook says its in, which was closed for renovations. Thankfully, we found it in a different section.)

Jack the Ripper Tour, Whitechapel

Tour guide MP Priestley in the white hat, pointing.

Can’t go to London and not do a Jack the Ripper tour, especially when your goddaughter’s student flat is in Whitechapel! We had a truly fantastic tour guide by the name of MP Priestly. He was supposed to split the group with a coworker, who called out sick. So he took all 40 (or so) of us, adjusting the tour to stop at places where bigger groups could fit. Along the way, we passed at least a half-dozen other such tours. I think we lucked out. Priestley’s style kept the group involved and interested even as he had to adjust for the larger than normal group size. He had copies of his book One Autumn in Whitechapel with him. So of course I bought it (not pictured). He also carried a small projector with him and showed images of the crime scenes (some pretty gory) on building walls.

Boat Ride Down the Thames

Friday was the one day Morgyn was completely free of work and school obligations, so we spent the day walking along the Thames to Westminster (passing the original and new sites of the Globe Theatre, the National Theatre, the Golden Hind, the Clink Museum, the Anchor Pub where Shakespeare likely drank and wrote, and many other such sites), then we boarded a tour boat down the Thames. We got a lot of architectural history delivered by a very witty man who made it clear he was not a tour guide, just a crewman who happened to know a thing or two. Here’s me with the Tower Bridge in the background.

Greenwich/Royal Naval College/Royal Observatory/Market

“Legs Astride the Meridian!”

One of my favorite movies is Beautiful Thing (from which stems my longtime crush on Ben Daniels), and one of my favorite lines of dialogue (delivered by said Mr. Daniels) is “Anyone fancy a trip to Greenwich? Legs astride the Meridian, as they say? No? Me neither.” So of course, Morgyn made sure we did the Thames boat tour all the way to Greenwich. We saw the Cutty Sark, we did a quick trip through the Royal Naval College, then did the trek up the hill to the Royal Observatory. The view from up there is fantastic, well worth the shortness of breath. The Observatory is now a museum, filled with fascinating history and artifacts – but for me, the big moment was, you guessed it, standing with my feet astride the Prime Meridian, with Morgyn’s feet facing mine. After we made it back down the hill, we ate a late lunch at a wonderful tavern, and then hit the Greenwich Market, in which I found some British editions of Phil Farmer books, along with the novel Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (my father’s favorite Hitchcock film) was based.

Baker Street/Praed Street/Slough House

Go to London and not seek out the digs of The Great Detective, The Great Detective’s Protégé, and the great Jackson Lamb? Perish forbid! Thankfully, there’s an actual Holmes Museum with a front door that claims to be 221 Baker Street (geographically, that number is really a few buildings up the block, but whose quibbling?), and what a fun tour that was. So much great Holmes-connected memorabilia. And a very friendly and photogenic (and maybe a bit flirty?) police bobby out front.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stopped writing Holmes’ adventures (the second time), American author August Derleth asked if he could continue the series. Doyle said no, so Derleth created Solar Pons, a protégé of Holmes and placed his offices at 7 Praed Street. There’s no blue circular plaque denoting the literary importance of the location, but that didn’t stop Paul and I from finding it.

I have become a big fan of Mick Herron’s Slough House books (thanks, like so many, to the very excellent television adaptation starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb). What I thought was just a filming location (126 Aldersgate Street, near the Barbican train station) is actually the building that inspired Herron to write the first book!

Peter Pan, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Paddington too

Trying to hit as many landmarks related to my favorite fiction as I could, we had to stop by the Peter Pan stature in Kensington Gardens.

My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Milne. Until someone proves otherwise, I am content to believe that I am (distantly, at best) related to Christopher Robin. Paul located a house in London where AA Milne lived for a time. No sign of Pooh Bear.

My favorite bear in childhood was Pooh. My sister’s was Paddington. Had to visit Paddington Station and take a photo with the statue (and also buy my sister a Paddington Bear, of course).

Sir Richard Francis Burton’s Tomb (Mortlake)

One of the few trips Paul and I took out of the city proper was to the village of Mortlake to see the ornate tomb of Sir Richard Francis Burton, explorer, translator, and subject of a short biography written by Philip Jose Farmer (a fictional Burton also plays a large role in Farmer’s Riverworld books). There is a plexiglass panel at the back through which you can see the caskets of Burton and his wife. Eerie, but cool.

Bram Stoker’s Ashes (Golder’s Green)

The other trip outside the city proper that Paul and I took was an absolute must for me: the resting place of Bram Stoker (and his son), in Golder’s Green Crematorium. I didn’t realize you needed an appointment because Stoker’s urn is in a locked building but thankfully groundskeeper Dan (Paul’s new best mate!) showed us around. So many people have been cremated there. I could fill a post just with the plaques and urns we saw (including Sigmund Freud and his wife; Anna Pavlova; Keith Moon and Peter Sellers to name a few. I somehow missed Sir Cedric Hardwicke who starred in some of my favorite Universal horror movies).

Abbey Road and the Globe

I mean, again, can you love music, go to London, and not walk the zebra crossing at Abbey Road? And can you be a fan of theatre and not pay a visit to the original site of the Globe Theatre, the current site of the Globe Theatre, and the portrait of William Shakespeare?

Sir John Soane’s Museum

Of all the museums we visited (The British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery), the one I wish we’d had more time in was the less well-known Sir John Soane’s Museum. I’m so glad Paul suggested it, even for the short half-hour we had in there. When Soanes turned his townhouse collection over to the Nation, he stipulated that the building be left as is. Which means nothing in this eclectic collection is labeled, and the basement (where much of the collection is) and certain interior rooms are very dark after the sun goes down … which in London in November is about a half-hour before the Museum closes.

Thanksgiving Dinner

In addition to being a fantastic tour guide, Paul and his wife Claire were veritable saints for hosting me all week, feeding me, and making sure I got on the right trains. On Thursday, while family and friends in the US were celebrating Thanksgiving, Claire cooked a wonderful traditional Thanksgiving dinner and Paul and Claire’s daughters (and soon to be son-in-law) joined us. One of the highlights of a highlight-filled week.