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FictionThrillerSpeculative Fiction

A thriller with a heart of gold

Review by Chris Pickens

“Knowledge is power,” as the saying goes, and bass guitar player Will Dando has a lot of it. Will knows 108 specific things that will happen in the future. In a world like ours, that’s a heck of a lot of power. How would the world react to knowing a person like this exists? Would he be shunned or exalted? Loved or feared? How would he live his life? Charles Soule puts these questions to the literary test in the entertaining and thoughtful The Oracle Year.

Will wakes up one morning with the predictions simply there, in his mind. Driven by this knowledge, he dubs himself the Oracle and launches a website to share his knowledge with the world. With help from his friend Hamza, Will gets rich by auctioning off his predictions to the highest-paying global conglomerate, which causes him to question his own motivations. But when his predictions start to cause riots, investigations from the government and even murders, Will has to chose what matters more: the predictions or the consequences.

A creation infused with empathy and soul, Will Dando shares traits with many modern superheroes. He wants desperately to do the best he can with what he’s given, but even with his knowledge, he’s powerless to stop the forces working to reveal the Oracle. But these antagonists don’t have secret lairs or death rays. They’re the familiar institutions we know—the church, the government, the people in our communities. It’s a revealing and somewhat disturbing estimation of what might happen if a person like Will existed.

When the narrative really gets going, it moves with suspense and well-coordinated attention. The pacing slows during sections in which Will attempts to deal with his knowledge, but these are mostly present in the first two acts. The story maintains momentum as people around the globe first react to the Oracle with wonder, and then fear and anger.

And herein is Soule’s greatest victory: The riots for and against the Oracle, the government operations, the religious sermons and the attempts to prove the predictions wrong all feel grounded and born out of a fully aware, digital world. Soule, a well-loved comic book writer of Daredevil, She-Hulk and Star Wars, has delivered a realistic meditation on the consequences of being different. If The Oracle Year predicts the future, we need more good people like Will Dando leading us there.

“Knowledge is power,” as the saying goes, and bass guitar player Will Dando has a lot of it. Will knows 108 specific things that will happen in the future. In a world like ours, that’s a heck of a lot of power. How would the world react to knowing a person like this exists? Would he be shunned or exalted? Loved or feared? How would he live his life? Charles Soule puts these questions to the literary test in the entertaining and thoughtful The Oracle Year.

FictionSpeculative FictionHistorical Fiction

A daring experiment

Review by Laura Hubbard

John Kessel’s expansion of his award-winning 2008 novella, Pride and Prometheus, is an exercise in the hypothetical. The year is 1815, and Victor Frankenstein has come to England to perform the most odious task of his life. He must construct a mate for his creation, the creature he reanimated. While he is in London, he makes an unexpected friend: Mary Bennet, who has lived with her parents and sister Kitty for 13 years after the events of Pride and Prejudice. Mary has never met a man like Victor Frankenstein. She is immediately infatuated, attracted to both Frankenstein’s intellect and his seeming interest in her. However, as Mary gets to know Frankenstein, she begins to notice his irregularities—and learn his secrets.

Pride and Prometheus is, at its core, a work of speculative fiction, and not just one about how Mary Bennet and Victor Frankenstein might interact. It is an exercise in what could happen to Mary and Kitty Bennet. Rather than just take what we do know about them from Jane Austen’s work, Kessel does something more—he lets the Bennets grow. Mary isn’t just a moralizing social disaster, but rather a lover of science who will turn down a bad match because she would rather be happy than safe. And Kitty isn’t just Lydia’s silly hanger-on. As she approaches old-maid status, she has become someone her sister can respect.

But while Mary has had 13 years to mature, Victor is still in the midst of his struggle. He is still the man horrified by what he has managed to do, and his creature is still the bitter, lonely child trying to figure out what it means to be alive. Both are still occasionally thoughtless and needlessly cruel. The contrast between the more mature Bennet sisters and the increasingly unstable Frankenstein shows that Kessel knows what readers will believe and what they will not. A brief sojourn in England makes for less character development than 13 years, after all.

The way Kessel handles character growth makes the slightly disappointing part of the novel—the portrayal of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet—that much more unfortunate. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet have hardly changed in 13 years. Yes, perhaps Mr. Bennet is more bitter and perhaps Mrs. Bennet is a bit more silly, but they haven’t grown. That is, until partway through the novel, when both characters seem to do an about-face, saying things they should have said 13 years prior but, in the context of Pride and Prometheus, seem forced. However, the disappointment is a short-lived one and is easily overshadowed by Mary’s story.

Beyond the what-could-have-beens, what makes the book interesting is that, for the most part, it reads like a modernized version of a comedy of manners as well as a gothic novel. Far from being forced, the crossover is easy to accept because Kessel uses the formats and textual cues of both genres. In Mary’s chapters, he emulates the third-person narration of Austen without the older style that would dissuade many modern readers. In those of Frankenstein or his creation, his writing reminds readers of Shelley’s work. This alone would make Pride and Prometheus worth the read.

Kessel sets his readers’ expectations and then twists them as far as he can go—and then just a little bit further. His author’s note tells us that he will play within the constraints set by Frankenstein, but he constantly dangles the possibility of something else. We know how it ends, and yet we keep reading anyway because the way Kessel gets us there is just so much fun. And because we want to believe that there is a chance, even a small one, that Kessel might change his mind and that things might turn out differently.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Behind the Book essay by John Kessel on Pride and Prometheus.

John Kessel’s expansion of his award-winning 2008 novella, Pride and Prometheus, is an exercise in the hypothetical. The year is 1815, and Victor Frankenstein has come to England to perform the most odious task of his life. He must construct a mate for his creation, the creature he reanimated. While he is in London, he makes an unexpected friend: Mary Bennet, who has lived with her parents and sister Kitty for 13 years after the events of Pride and Prejudice.

FictionSpeculative Fiction

Chance, fate and the butterfly effect

Review by Stephenie Harrison

If you’ve ever told someone (or been told) that “everything happens for a reason,” you need The Coincidence Makers. In his ambitious and genre-bending debut, Yoav Blum gamely tackles the quandary of fate versus free will, putting his own playful spin on one of humanity’s biggest philosophical conundrums.

In Blum’s re-envisioning of the universe, free will and fate coexist in a delicate dance: We all have the power to make choices, but these choices are orchestrated by an elite team known as the Coincidence Makers. Guy, Emily and Eric are three such Coincidence Makers, and it’s their job to keep everything on track by adjusting circumstances and making sure everyone sticks to their steps and executes their part of the dance. As relatively low-level agents, the three are often tasked with seemingly random tasks like arranging for people to meet and fall in love, convincing someone to change careers or even getting a butterfly to flap one of its wings. However, all this changes when Guy receives the most difficult, dangerous and morally dubious assignment of his career, one that will forever change their understanding of cause and effect.

Already a bestseller in Blum’s home country of Israel, this existential, mind-bending jigsaw puzzle of a novel is supremely satisfying when all the pieces fall into place. Perfect for readers who enjoy a cerebral bent to their fiction, The Coincidence Makers is a unique and unforgettable story about what happens when you try to make life go according to your own script.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If you’ve ever told someone (or been told) that “everything happens for a reason,” you need The Coincidence Makers. In his ambitious and genre-bending debut, Yoav Blum gamely tackles the quandary of fate versus free will, putting his own playful spin on one of humanity’s biggest philosophical conundrums.

FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

Inventory of a life

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

When a father learns his life is nearing its end, he’s left to reckon with what remains. His wife preceded him in death, and he isn’t surprised that his own is imminent. But the couple’s adult son, who has Down syndrome, will outlive him. The father wants to embrace every day he has left with his child, while also ensuring his son will be OK in a world without him.

The father, previously a doctor, signs up for a job as an unusual census taker for a secretive government bureau. The position offers the pair an excuse to do something the father and mother had long discussed: He and his son will travel the country, from municipality A to Z, and meet the country’s citizens along the way.

As the pair travels, novelist Jesse Ball slowly reveals that the trip isn’t about the census so much as the people who fill a life and a place. The unnamed father and son meet people of all sorts, some welcoming and some skeptical of the man who will mark them with a census tattoo.

Ball’s spare prose centers on the father’s inner monologue and in the process offers a glimpse of a person facing his inevitable end. “I was a better doctor for having had my son,” the father reflects, “for it left me with a basic stance—that I should not expect anything in particular from anyone, a humility vested not so much in an appraisal of myself, as in a lack of confidence in valuation and prediction.”

Census is a thoughtful, introspective novel that may leave readers contemplating the value of their own relations and inner lives.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When a father learns his life is nearing its end, he’s left to reckon with what remains. His wife preceded him in death, and he isn’t surprised that his own is imminent. But the couple’s adult son, who has Down syndrome, will outlive him. The father wants to embrace every day he has left with his child, while also ensuring his son will be OK in a world without him.

FictionSpeculative FictionHistorical Fiction

Memento mori

Review by Gerry Paige Smith

The Black Death has draped a cloak of contagion across the landscape of southwest England in 1382. Traveling toward Exeter, where he carves the stone of the cathedral, John and his brother, William, navigate the growing horror of a plague that can touch any person, high or low. Surrounded by the grim proof of mortality, their conversation turns to the merit of good deeds versus faith alone as surety for life everlasting. But when the mounting corpses become too much to bear, John’s desperate attempt to save one life changes the fates of both brothers.

As they begin to suffer symptoms of plague, a disembodied voice offers John and William a choice: The brothers can travel home and chance delivering death to their family, or they can live six more days, awakening each morning in their beloved community, 99 years after each previous day. Choosing to spare their loved ones from the risk of plague, the brothers begin their journey forward through six centuries.

With each morning’s awakening, the community’s profound political and physical changes inspire both a sense of marvel and a growing dismay. In each new century, as the brothers’ home recedes further into the past, evidence of their existence becomes harder to find. Even John’s stone carvings erode and crumble, his physical mark on the world diminishing as time passes. The strides forward in time become a living tour of what follows after we are gone, the future that our present lives may—or may not—touch.

Combining his credentials as a bestselling historian with an intimate knowledge of Exeter and the surrounding landscape, author Ian Mortimer plumbs a dynamic sliver of the world through evolving cultural epochs. Casting a line into a historical moment defined by death, Mortimer reels in a narrative of persistence and hope. Addressing universal questions about our personal impact on the world to come, The Outcasts of Time is an erudite and thoughtful exploration of death that brings history to life.

The Black Death has draped a cloak of contagion across the landscape of southwest England in 1382. Traveling toward Exeter, where he carves the stone of the cathedral, John and his brother, William, navigate the growing horror of a plague that can touch any person, high or low. Surrounded by the grim proof of mortality, their conversation turns to the merit of good deeds versus faith alone as surety for life everlasting. But when the mounting corpses become too much to bear, John’s desperate attempt to save one life changes the fates of both brothers.

FictionSpeculative FictionHorror

Natural selection

Review by Arlene McKanic

Aliya Whiteley’s The Beauty is just the thing for readers who prefer maximum weirdness and body horror in their books. Set in a post-apocalyptic colony where all the women have died of a bizarre fungus and only the men remain, the story transmogrifies, folds, spindles and mutilates gender roles and common expectations.

The narrator is a boy named Nate, who functions as the griot for a colony of bereft and bewildered men. That the women, from the eldest to the newly born, have all died is dreadful and mysterious enough, and then the men start to notice mushrooms growing out of the women’s graves. The mushrooms evolve into yellow, ambulatory beings with heads but no faces. These mushroom-fungus creatures claim a number of the men. They are seemingly irresistible, bringing such pleasure that the men call them the Beauties. The men see in them their lost mothers, wives, lovers, sisters, daughters. But the Beauties’ love, gentleness and subservience are not unconditional, and the changes they wreak in some of the men who love them are freakish. Sometimes, the freakishness is welcome, as a man may be so enraptured by his devoted Beauty that he’ll tolerate anything to be with it. But other men of the colony resist and pay the price.

Also included within The Beauty is a tantalizing novella titled Peace, Pipe, about an astronaut’s relationship with an alien entity that the astronaut calls Pipe. On the other hand, maybe Pipe isn’t an alien at all. Maybe what the astronaut takes as Pipe’s voice is just the sound of water in the plumbing of the space where the astronaut has been quarantined after a disastrous mission.

Despite the Möbius-strip twistiness of her stories, Whiteley imbues them with compassion and—dare I say—humanity. Love and hope punch their way through, despite all obstacles. You’ll be surprised by how moved you are at the end.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Aliya Whiteley’s The Beauty is just the thing for readers who prefer maximum weirdness and body horror in their books. Set in a post-apocalyptic colony where all the women have died of a bizarre fungus and only the men remain, the story transmogrifies, folds, spindles and mutilates gender roles and common expectations.

FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

Red Clocks

Review by Leslie Hinson

The Biographer. The Daughter. The Wife. The Mender. The Explorer. Leni Zumas refers to her protagonists by these descriptors, invoking the reductive distance from which women are viewed in a patriarchal society: “That’s someone’s daughter.” They are also Ro, Mattie, Susan, Gin and Eivør—the dynamic women of Zumas’ magnificent second novel, Red Clocks.

Ro, a high school teacher, works tirelessly on her biography of the 19th-century trailblazing Faroese explorer Eivør Mínervudottír, who shucked societal norms for decades, ultimately freezing to death at age 42 on a polar expedition. Also 42, Ro dreams of having a child, but under the new Personhood Amendment and the “Every Child Needs Two” act, in vitro fertilization is banned, and adoption is reserved for married couples.

Mattie, 15, is Ro’s gifted student. She is pregnant and doesn’t want to be. Susan, a mother of two, is so unhappy with her nuclear family that she contemplates driving off a cliff. Gin, an introverted healer, becomes the subject of a witch-hunt after being accused of conspiring to perform an abortion.

Each woman explores her sense of self and what it means to be selfish or selfless about her desires and ambitions. Why can Eivør watch the gruesome slaughter of pilot whales but not lambs? Why can Mattie conceive an unwanted baby when Ro can’t get pregnant? Zumas plays with extremes, exposing the inner hypocrite in everyone, including the reader.

With spare prose that sets a tone as chilly and bleak as the Oregon coastal setting, Zumas doesn’t shy away from the grotesque while presenting a tale that’s haunting, thought provoking and painfully timely.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Leni Zumas for Red Clocks.

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Biographer. The Daughter. The Wife. The Mender. The Explorer. Leni Zumas refers to her protagonists by these descriptors, invoking the reductive distance from which women are viewed in a patriarchal society: “That’s someone’s daughter.” They are also Ro, Mattie, Susan, Gin and Eivør—the dynamic…
FictionSpeculative FictionDebut Fiction

Beauty and terror, motherhood and climate change

Review by Gerry Paige Smith

In the midst of giving birth to her first baby, a London woman experiences a submergence of two kinds: the complete sensory inundation that follows childbirth, and the catastrophic flood of water that begins to drown her city and nation. She, her newborn and her husband join an exodus of humanity leaving the “Gulp zone” to seek higher ground and safer places. But the illusion of security and safety begins to crumble at each stop along their refugee journey. Family members disappear, allegiances with strangers form and dissolve, government fails, and the waters continue to rise.

With the sparest of prose, debut author Megan Hunter creates a riveting story told by a mother navigating a monumental catastrophe with the most fragile of life carried at her breast. The narrator’s scope of perception is honed to a narrow, singular focus on her child. From the smell of the baby’s ear to his latch on her breast, every aspect is defined with clarity. Her awareness expands to encompass allies, but lightly. The rest of the fumbling, drowning world encroaches only on the filmy edges of her sphere.

Building on our natural fear of the unknown, Hunter leaves unspoken much of what’s truly haunting in the tale—but the rising horrors of civilization’s breakdown are perceived nonetheless. Looting, murder, robbery and abandonment flow just beneath the surface of this spare volume. The observations that remain are beautiful, visceral and fluid. Amniotic waters, flooded streets, breast milk, tears, drool and oceans all flow in and out of the liquid prose within.

In the wake of recent weather crises and flooding around the globe, Hunter’s writing on the human impact of climate change charges this slim poetic work of fiction with powerful dystopian weight. From refuge to redemption, from retreat to recovery, The End We Start From is an exquisite paean to how we come back from the times that challenge us all.

From refuge to redemption, from retreat to recovery, The End We Start From is an exquisite paean to how we come back from the times that challenge us all.

FictionSpeculative Fiction

Future Home of the Living God

Review by Michael Magras

Add Louise Erdrich (LaRose, The Round House) to the growing list of literary authors to dabble in dystopian fiction. Her latest work, Future Home of the Living God, imagines a frightening, not-too-distant time, made all the more terrifying by its plausibility. The U.S. Congress has expanded a set of policies that began as the Patriot Act so that pregnant women can be “sequestered in hospitals in order to give birth under controlled circumstances.”

The reason for this expansion is not made immediately clear, but it becomes apparent through the story of 26-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, “the adopted child of Minneapolis liberals.” Born on an Ojibwe reservation, Cedar has never known her biological parents. As the novel opens, it’s been a year since Cedar’s birth mother sent her a letter asking if they could meet. Cedar ignored the request. But now that Cedar is four months pregnant, her perspective has changed, and she decides to meet her birth parents. But that’s not all that has changed. A biological disaster has occurred, “evolution has reversed,” and pregnant women are sent to detention centers so they can be monitored. Cedar is of particular interest to authorities, as they believe she is carrying one of the few “normal” babies not suffering from abnormalities.

Written as a diary to her unborn child, Future Home of the Living God chronicles Cedar’s experiences and the mysterious personages she encounters, most notably an omnipresent figure named Mother who appears on turned-off computer monitors and coos, “How are you feeling? I care. I’d like to know.”

If parts of this novel are pulpier than Erdrich’s previous work, the result is still a chilling work of speculative fiction and a bracing cautionary tale about environmental deterioration and the importance of women’s control of their own bodies.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Erdrich channels Atwood in our Top Pick in Fiction, November 2017.
FictionSpeculative Fiction

The Power

Review by Lauren Bufferd

If the best speculative fiction offers up new ways to see our culture, then Naomi Alderman’s The Power (winner of the U.K.’s Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction) is destined to be a classic. Imagine a world where women are physically more powerful than men. Then just when you are comfortable with that—or maybe think, hey, it’s about time—imagine everything that could go wrong.

The Power tells the disconcerting story of what occurs after a genetic mutation gives teenage girls the power of electricity. At first, they just shock each other for fun, but they quickly learn to harness it, first to protect themselves, then to maim or even kill. The power is transmitted to older women, and eventually, all baby girls are born with a so-called skein of electricity that runs beneath their collarbones like an extra muscle.

Alderman explores the power’s trajectory through the lives of three women: Roxy, the daughter of a British mobster; Margot, an American mayor with political aspirations; and finally Mother Eve. Raised in a series of foster homes, Eve, born Alison, uses the power to free herself from an abusive stepfather and reinvents herself as the charismatic matriarch of a female-centric religion. A young Nigerian photojournalist, Tunde, follows the power from country to country, risking his life and offering the important perspective of an outsider.

Speculative fiction has long been a genre where gender roles can be explored—think of The Handmaid’s Tale or even back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. But Alderman goes beyond her predecessors with a narrative that wonders how long before absolute power corrupts absolutely. Alderman is both a novelist and a co-creator of a smartphone audio adventure app called Zombies, Run!, and it may be this expertise in the world of gaming that brings such a fearlessly creative approach to her storytelling. Both a page-turning thriller and timely exploration of gender roles, censorship and repressive political regimes, The Power is a must-read for today’s times.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Naomi Alderman for The Power.

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If the best speculative fiction offers up new ways to see our culture, then Naomi Alderman’s The Power (winner of the U.K.’s Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction) is destined to be a classic.

FictionSpeculative Fiction

An eye-opening, heart-pounding adventure

Review by Stephenie Harrison

In her new novel, The Salt Line, Holly Goddard Jones welcomes readers to a horrifying vision of a not-so-distant future in which a virulent species of disease-carrying ticks has divided the United States into factions. The well-off find themselves safe and secure “in zone”—behind a menacing wall known as the Salt Line that is meant to keep people locked in and danger out. Only a few thrill-seekers dare venture outside the protection of the Salt Line, signing up for pricey wilderness expeditions that take those with the courage (and the cash) beyond the walled zones to get a taste of America’s remaining purple mountain majesties. Those who return from the excursions promise that it’s the experience of a lifetime, but for one group of travelers, their trek beyond the Salt Line tests their survival skills in ways they never imagined. And it’s more than just the killer ticks; their voyage causes them to question which side of the wall is truly the most dangerous.

Terrifying and bold, The Salt Line is a character-driven thriller with shocking plot twists, jaw-dropping revelations and splashes of horror, sci-fi and romance. Key characters include a pop star and his girlfriend, the young inventor of a financial app and a housewife with veiled intentions. In beautiful turns of phrase that will make readers’ hearts flutter and skin crawl in equal measure, Jones ratchets up the tension with perfect pacing and vivid descriptions of terrible (and terribly sad) experiences. Jones’ unique riff on dystopian fiction as a platform for examining present-day concerns like climate change, immigration, technology and fundamental human rights offers plenty of surprises, but the most disarming aspect of The Salt Line is the unexpected tenderness expressed by its fully fleshed out, complicated characters who are fighting not just for their lives but for their very humanity.

More than just a high-octane, speculative survivalist tale, The Salt Line is also a powerful meditation on humanity’s fragility and resilience.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

More than just a high-octane, speculative survivalist tale, The Salt Line is also a powerful meditation on humanity’s fragility and resilience.

FictionSpeculative FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

Girls rise up

Review by Stephenie Harrison

For fans of speculative fiction looking for a book that can go toe-to-toe with The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s classic about female oppression and rebellion, look no further: Jennie Melamed’s chilling debut, Gather the Daughters, is the dazzling dystopian narrative you seek.

Spanning a year in the lives of four girls, Gather the Daughters hurls readers deep into the heart of a fringe island community that was founded when modern civilization collapsed and the mainland devolved into a burning wasteland. Theirs is a deeply patriarchal society, where the birth of a daughter is met with tears and girls are taught at a very young age to obey and serve their fathers in preparation for their summer of “fruition,” when they are married off and begin producing children. On the brink of womanhood, our four female protagonists are loath to accept their fate. When one of the girls witnesses an act so horrific it defies comprehension, they decide to challenge the dogma that has ruled for decades. Determined and courageous, the girls begin to question what they have been told, demanding answers and explanations, even if it means ripping asunder the very fabric of their community in the process.

Brutal and bold, Gather the Daughters is beguiling but not for the tenderhearted; its vision of the future is grim, and the realities daughters and wives face are undeniably harsh. For a first-time novelist, Melamed displays remarkable restraint and confidence, masterfully drawing out the mysteries of the island so that the girls’ sense of unease and confusion is perfectly mirrored by readers. The gradual reveal about what is really going is suspenseful and satisfying, and Melamed narrates the tale in dreamy, lyrical prose that provides a heightened contrast to the nightmarish aspects of the girls’ reality. Chilling in tone and fearless in its storytelling, Gather the Daughters is a fierce, feminist battle cry.

For fans of speculative fiction looking for a book that can go toe-to-toe with The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s classic about female oppression and rebellion, look no further: Jennie Melamed’s chilling debut, Gather the Daughters, is the dazzling dystopian narrative you seek.

FictionSpeculative FictionFamily SagaComic Fiction

More powers, more problems

Review by Matthew Jackson

Comic novels about dysfunctional families certainly aren’t new. Neither are novels about grifters bound together by blood and larcenous vice. It’s the personalities that make such stories feel fresh, and with Spoonbenders, Daryl Gregory has created a captivating cast for a hybrid breed of story. Told from multiple points of view and leaping between past and present, it’s a hilarious portrayal of family, schemes and a few superpowers thrown in along the way.

Once upon a time, the Telemachus clan was on the verge of greatness, wowing audiences with claims of clairvoyance and telekinesis. Though the patriarch, Teddy, was merely a very skilled con man, the family had a secret weapon: The matriarch, Maureen, was an actual psychic so powerful that even the government made use of her skills. Then Maureen died, and the family’s dreams seemed to die with her.

In the present day, the Telemachuses are fragmented and defeated. Teddy tries his old moves on new women. His daughter, Irene, looks for excitement in her dull life, while her brother Frankie sells supplements and her other brother, Buddy—who has mysterious gifts of his own—constantly invents new projects as he picks apart the family home. A ray of light enters their lives when, in a moment of pubescent heat, Irene’s son, Matty, learns he has a genuine psychic gift of his own.

Despite its fantastical premise, the real power of Gregory’s novel is in his ability to pivot between several fully realized points of view with each passing chapter. The disappointment at having to leave one fascinating Telemachus behind is exceeded only by the delight in finding the next Telemachus to be just as complex, funny and genuine. These are eccentric people with eccentric lives, but the level of emotional detail at work is astounding, and Gregory’s magic touch makes even their strangest moments relatable.

These characters’ gifts merge with a brisk pace and a subtle, often bittersweet sense of comedy to make Spoonbenders an intensely endearing read. The premise will hook you, the plot will entice you, and then the Telemachuses themselves will make you fall in love.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Comic novels about dysfunctional families certainly aren’t new. Neither are novels about grifters bound together by blood and larcenous vice. It’s the personalities that make such stories feel fresh, and with Spoonbenders, Daryl Gregory has created a captivating cast for a hybrid breed of story. Told from multiple points of view and leaping between past and present, it’s a hilarious portrayal of family, schemes and a few superpowers thrown in along the way.

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