What Feasts At Night
May. 17th, 2024 01:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraWhat Feasts At Night, T Kingfisher, 2024 novella. Not quite as cool as What Moves the Dead, to which it is a sequel, but still very satisfying. I like Easton and will read any number of novellas about them (their in-world pronoun is actually "kan", but since we don't have that one I think they/them is the best English equivalent).
Cut for spoilers: Re the coolness, I feel like we've switched genres a little bit from speculative biology to the supernatural, which is of course something Vernon is allowed to do, if that's where it seems like the best story will be, but has less of an ooh-wow factor for me. (Sometimes I have gotten very annoyed with authors for doing this - I seem to recall finding out about some time-travel spinoffs of the McGurk mysteries, which were always entirely non-speculative, and being annoyed with Hildick for breaking genre trust - but given that Vernon is primarily a fantasy/fantastical horror writer anyways, and this series could plausibly be described as "takes on classic Gothic tales" which would naturally include some supernatural elements, it seems like a fair enough move.) I believe there are going to be more of these and I feel like the natural twist for the third one would be the intrusion of the Gothic into Easton's normal life in Paris. (Phantom of the Opera? Back to Poe and the problematic orangutan?) Of course Vernon may not want to do a bunch of research to deal with the Paris setting - one of the nice things about Ruritanian settings is not being able to get them wrong - so perhaps we'll keep visiting isolated manors in fictional places. (Ha, maybe Easton could visit Orsinia, an Ursula-Ursula crossover event.)
On another topic, I can't remember if there's something secretly ableist about narratives where people's disabilities turn out to be useful to them, but I really like them and find them deeply satisfying. It's a sort of "text adventure using every item in the inventory in unexpected ways" thing, plus a "turning your assumption that this was only a weakness on their head" thing. Blind adventurer immune to basilisk, deaf adventurers immune to sirens, wheelchair user can cross the ground where no one can set foot. (Clark just did a bit of this in Abeni's Song with a partially-blind character who can't be tricked with magical visions, one of the more interesting things in that book.) Anyways, I really liked that Easton was able to use their tinnitus to resist the silence attack and their PTSD flashbacks to create a context where they could believably fight. I have definitely had the thing in dreams where I am supposed to fight something/someone but my personal brain doesn't have any relevant memories/experience and can only just sort of ineffectively slap at them, or where the battle/fighting bits of a fantastical dream are suddenly a LARP. So I liked Vernon finding this answer to the problem of effective violence in dreams. :)
Cut for spoilers: Re the coolness, I feel like we've switched genres a little bit from speculative biology to the supernatural, which is of course something Vernon is allowed to do, if that's where it seems like the best story will be, but has less of an ooh-wow factor for me. (Sometimes I have gotten very annoyed with authors for doing this - I seem to recall finding out about some time-travel spinoffs of the McGurk mysteries, which were always entirely non-speculative, and being annoyed with Hildick for breaking genre trust - but given that Vernon is primarily a fantasy/fantastical horror writer anyways, and this series could plausibly be described as "takes on classic Gothic tales" which would naturally include some supernatural elements, it seems like a fair enough move.) I believe there are going to be more of these and I feel like the natural twist for the third one would be the intrusion of the Gothic into Easton's normal life in Paris. (Phantom of the Opera? Back to Poe and the problematic orangutan?) Of course Vernon may not want to do a bunch of research to deal with the Paris setting - one of the nice things about Ruritanian settings is not being able to get them wrong - so perhaps we'll keep visiting isolated manors in fictional places. (Ha, maybe Easton could visit Orsinia, an Ursula-Ursula crossover event.)
On another topic, I can't remember if there's something secretly ableist about narratives where people's disabilities turn out to be useful to them, but I really like them and find them deeply satisfying. It's a sort of "text adventure using every item in the inventory in unexpected ways" thing, plus a "turning your assumption that this was only a weakness on their head" thing. Blind adventurer immune to basilisk, deaf adventurers immune to sirens, wheelchair user can cross the ground where no one can set foot. (Clark just did a bit of this in Abeni's Song with a partially-blind character who can't be tricked with magical visions, one of the more interesting things in that book.) Anyways, I really liked that Easton was able to use their tinnitus to resist the silence attack and their PTSD flashbacks to create a context where they could believably fight. I have definitely had the thing in dreams where I am supposed to fight something/someone but my personal brain doesn't have any relevant memories/experience and can only just sort of ineffectively slap at them, or where the battle/fighting bits of a fantastical dream are suddenly a LARP. So I liked Vernon finding this answer to the problem of effective violence in dreams. :)
