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Warning: Full spoilers for the book follow.

Willie Carver’s Tore All to Pieces is one of those books that I’ve been waiting to read for months. I’m fortunate enough to call Carver a friend and a sister in the struggle to get queer Appalachians–and, really, Appalachians generally–the respect they so richly deserve, and I knew this book was going to be everything I wanted and then a little bit more. What I did not expect, though I probably should have, was that it would totally wreck and ruin me. Reader, I am not okay, and I can think of no higher praise for a book than that.

I’ve seen the book described as a novel in fragments, and I think there’s a lot to that description. Though there are several themes that run like a coal seam through the narrative, each story within these pages is largely self-contained, focusing on different characters as they navigate life, love, death, and everything in between, all in the small town of Mosely, Kentucky. There are young folk and old, those on their way out of town and those who will stay there forever, there are folks working at McDonald’s and those who work in Lexington. In short, this is a novel that aims to capture all the vibrant, contradictory, and beautiful complexity of a small Appalachian town nestled in the hills of Kentucky.

This is one of those books that you can tell come straight from the soul. There’s an honesty and a deep, rich, haunting humanity to each chapter, each poem–hell, each sentence–and you can’t help but find yourself drawn into this world. Mosley might not be a real place in our world, but by God you feel like it is, such is Carver’s skill with both place and people. As I read this book, I kept finding myself nodding along in recognition, for though I come from northern West Virginia, there are many similarities between Mosely and the towns I grew up in. That, I think, is one of Carver’s great skills as a writer; he knows how to dive deep into not just the psychology of a place and its people, but their very souls.

Labor is an important thread in Tore All to Pieces. Moseley, like so many other small towns in Appalachia, is the kind of place that’s been largely left behind by the vicissitudes of the 20th and 21st centuries, and its many residents–young and adult alike–have to find their own ways of making do. Some work at the McDonald’s, and others at the Dollar General, but they all manage to find their own form of dignity in the work they do. Carver has the remarkable ability to capture the grinding nature of retail and food service work, even as he also shows the extent to which these forms of labor have their own quiet dignity to them.

I’ll admit I felt an ache in my breastbone reading many of these chapters. Whether it was the young man doing everything in his power to help his ailing parents with their healthcare, the elderly woman desperate to save her cabbages before her trailer is washed away, or the young gay man who gets his heart broken by the boy he’s started to fall in love with and see as a friend, I kept thinking: I know these people. I could be these people. It was a bit disorienting at times, and that was, strangely enough, one of the things I loved most about this book.

While Carver doesn’t shy away from the grit and the seaminess that marks so much of small town life in Appalachia, he also makes sure to show us how the folks in those hollers, even the queer ones, still have ways of making do. If there’s one thing you can say for Appalachians of any persuasion or kind, it’s that they’re survivors. They’re forged in a landscape that’s often hard and unforgiving, and they’re often the bearers of tremendous intergenerational trauma. And yet, somehow, they keep going, they keep making do. They are stubborn, and we love them for it.

I’ll admit that some parts of the book cut too close to the bone. The poem “The Water Don’t Know” in particular wrecked me in ways that very few works of queer literature manage to do. I don’t mean that as an insult; far from it. Like the narrator of the poem, there’s someone in my life I’ve loved for years, even as I’ve also watched him struggle with addiction and mental illness. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve lived with the fear of getting the phone call telling me he didn’t make it. I don’t think I was really able or ready to grapple with the enormity of what it meant for my friend to be an addict with mental illness before I’d read this poem, and I thank Carver for giving me the gift of catharsis.

As other reviews have noted, Carver manages to convey the ugly truths of Appalachia while not resorting to simplistic depictions. There’s no facile moralizing here, no condemnation of these people for their choices. Instead, there’s a raw humanity, and one can tell that Carver not only knows this world; he’s of it. What’s more, he loves it with a fierce and passionate devotion, and this much is evident in every word and every story and every verse. This is a book straight from the soul, and I devoured every bit of it.

Indeed, to say that I absolutely adored this book would be a grave understatement. This novel did, indeed, tear me all to pieces but, just as importantly, it put me back together again. This was the kind of book that allowed me to see my home region of Appalachia through new eyes, through eyes of grace rather than condemnation, love rather than hatred. It’s the kind of novel that embraces complexity and contradiction, messiness and frustration, love and despair and joy and everything in-between. I invite you to lose yourself in its pages, to save each and every word, to get to know these characters and this place.

Come in and sit a spell. You’ll be glad you did.

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Warning: Full spoilers for the book follow.

When I read Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra, I knew that I was reading someone who just got the ancient world, who knew how to transform the threads and bones of the old myths into something that was both familiar and yet brutally new and honest. When I saw that Casati’s next book was going to be about the ancient Near East, I knew this was going to be one of those books that immediately made its way to the top of my TBR list. In another life I even thought about being an Assyriologist–yes, there really is such a thing–and I continue to find Assyria and the other ancient empires and kingdoms of Mesopotamia to be a source of enduring fascination.

With Babylonia, Casati takes us to the world of ancient Assyria, shining new light on Semiramis, arguably the most formidable figure of the ancient Near East. When the book begins she’s something of an outcast, for her mother had an affair with a priest before taking her own life by drowning. When the governor, Onnes, arrives, however, Semiramis sees an opportunity, and soon enough the two are married. Things quickly become even more complicated when she starts to develop feelings for his best friend/half-brother/quasi-lover Ninus, and thus the stage is set for a truly heartbreaking tragedy.

If you know anything about ancient Assyria, you’ll no doubt know that it was a culture of both great beauty and great brutality, one in which mighty rulers set out to conquer their enemies both near and far, impaling those who resisted and deporting the rest into slavery and servitude. Casati crafts the battle scenes with a keen eye, immersing us in the grittiness of the action, particularly once Semiramis journeys to the east and partakes in the siege and conquest of the mighty city of Balkh. The aftermath is, if anything, even more terrifying, but Semiramis shows that she is a woman of quality by intervening and ensuring that a number of Bactrian women are sent into exile rather than slavery.

Semiramis is very much a product of this culture, and she is both bound and unbound by its expectations and its constrictions. Though born an outcast, she quickly realizes that the key to safety is power, that if she wants to survive in this brutal, cold world she is going to have to seize every opportunity as it presents itself. This she most certainly does, first when Onnes arrives and holds out the promise of being married to one of the most powerful men in the empire and then, later, once she sees a further opportunity with Ninus. Through it all, she holds fast to the most important principle: survival at any cost.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Semiramis is cynical, but she is definitely someone who understands the way power works in this world, particularly for women. Her decision to leave her village takes a great deal of bravery, as does her willingness to go head-to-head with the queen-mother, Nisat, a formidable power behind the throne. Indeed, some of my very favorite parts of the novel were those in which we get to see these two powerful women strive with one another for supremacy. The irony, of course, is that there’s far more uniting them than dividing them, though it takes Nisat in particular quite a while to see this.

Like Clytemnestra, the subject of Casati’s first novel, Semiramis is a bit of a distant figure, and while we’re immersed in her point of view quite a lot, there’s always something she keeps from us as readers. Nevertheless, the immediacy of the present tense ensures we find ourselves gripped by her story as she navigates the halls of power, her life growing both safer and more vulnerable the higher she climbs.

While Semiramis is obviously the heart and soul of this novel, Casati also gives us insight into two other vital characters, one of whom is at the very apex of Assyrian society and the other of whom is at the bottom. King Ninus is a tortured and tragic figure in his own right, someone who labors under the shadow cast by his father and who is hopelessly in love with his half-brother/best friend Onnes (it’s not revealed until somewhat late in the novel that Onnes is in fact his half-brother). Through his eyes, we learn that just being a king isn’t always a guarantee of having agency or even a lot of power. On the other side of the coin we have Ribat, a slave who ultimately becomes a scribe. Thanks to his perspective we come to see just how difficult it is to be a slave in such a culture but also how those who occupy the position of the subaltern can sometimes use their masters’ blindnesses to assert their own power.

We also periodically get insight into Onees and, though these are brief, such is Casati’s skill as an author that we nevertheless feel like we know him, or at least as much as it’s possible to know someone who is an enigma to even his closest associates. He is a very tragic figure, much like Enkidu from The Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem that casts a long shadow in this novel and which always lurks in the background as the narrative pattern that Ninus and Onnes are meant to follow, just as, in her own way, Semiramis is following in the path of the goddess Ishtar.

It’s also worth pointing out that Casati is simply a master when it comes to the craft of beautiful and engaging prose. I could spend all day just re-reading her lines, and there are times when her writing practically sings. It’s only the rare ancient myth reteller who really gives you a sense that you’re truly in the past, and Casati is without a doubt one of those.

In short, I adored Babylonia. It is beautiful and heartbreaking and brutal, just like the Assyrian culture it depicts. Its heroine is a marvel, and you can’t help but admire and be frightened of her in equal measure.

I’m sure she wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Jonathan Corcoran’s memoir No Son of Mine has been on my to-read list for a long time. I mean, it’s a memoir about a gay man from West Virginia who has a fractured relationship with his mother and his family and his origins, which is the kind of story that I live to read. While my own biography is far less traumatic than Corcoran’s, the two of us do share a lot in common (we’re even the same age, oddly enough), and so I knew I was going to find myself drawn into this book, that I was probably going to end up seeing more than a little of myself reflected in its pages.

No Son of Mine is both one of the best and also one of the most devastating things I’ve read this year. I give Corcoran so much credit for being willing to dig deep into his own history and his own memories to unearth the pain that he’s endured so that he can finally find healing and, to an extent at least, some closure. This is a tremendous emotional labor to undertake, particularly when doing so also involves putting words on the page, and he really does deserve all the praise for being so honest and so forthright, both with us and with himself.

Corcoran’s book, however, begins not in the distant past of his childhood, but instead in the dark days of COVID, when both Corcoran and his husband come down with the disease. As they struggle to breathe and as New York City seems to fall apart around them, he gets word that his mother’s health has begun to precipitately decline and then, shortly thereafter, he gets the word she’s died. This is a truly terrible position to be in–losing a parent in the midst of a raging pandemic, unable to go home to grieve–but it’s made all the more acute by the fact that his relationship with his mother has long been characterized by rejection, pain, and cyclical reconciliation.

Though raised in poverty, in the small town of Elkins, Corcoran eventually makes his way to Brown University, where he meets Sam, the man who’ll become his husband. Then, one fateful holiday, his life is changed forever when his mother disowns him because of his homosexuality. From that point on their relationship will be one of reconciliations and betrayals, as his mother battles her demons and lashes out, only to come begging her estranged son to let her back into his life. The book is, in large part, about Corcoran’s attempt to find his love and grace for his mother while also making sure she doesn’t suck him into the swirling vortex of her own terrible darkness.

It’s always difficult to be ostracized and cut off by a parent, but I think that rejection feels different–not more acute, perhaps, but different, nevertheless–when it takes place in the context of both queerness and Appalachia. We Appalachian folk put a lot of stock in our families, a legacy, perhaps, of the Scotch-Irish clans who were some of the region’s first full-time White inhabitants. Your kin are the folks you can rely on when everyone else abandons you, and to be cast out from that charmed circle is doubly devastating. It’s not just that you’re cut off from the people that raised you; it’s that you’re cut off from an entire home and hearth.

Exacerbating all of this darkness is the fact that Corcoran’s father is, to put it bluntly, a piece of shit, a man who never wanted to be–and probably never should have been–a father and so acted accordingly. And on top of that there’s also the fact that Corcoran’s mother never knew her father, a glaring absence in her life that, in some ways, paved her own perilous road to perdition. This doesn’t excuse her actions and behavior, of course, and No Son of Mine makes it clear she bears the lion’s share of the blame, but it does at least offer an explanation of sorts as to how a woman could become such a victim of her own demons that she would then perpetuate that cycle on her own son, one of the few people in her life who seemed to actually see her.

While his relationship with his mother and his father is one of trauma and never-ending horror and sadness, Corcoran’s relationship with his boyfriend–and later husband–Sam is a point of light and grace in both his life and in the book as a whole. Theirs is truly a meeting of two kindred souls, and I loved getting to see these glimpses into their life together, because it’s clear they’re partners in every sense of the word. They’ve managed to forge their own little idyll, and this relationship proves to be an anchor for Corcoran when things get really bad with his family. Even in the darkness, then, there is light.

Indeed, for all that the book can make for grim reading, there are many moments of joy and of hope. I was struck in particular by the moment when, late in the book, they go back to Elkins and, to their surprise, happen to stumble upon the local Pride festival. For Corcoran, this is a jarring moment, as it is a reminder of how far things have come in places like West Virginia, and how far they have yet to go. To be sure, the Mountain State has made some strides forward, but after Trump’s return to the White House it remains unclear whether this forward momentum will continue or whether the state’s queer youth, like Corcoran (and like myself, for that matter) may have to move away, leaving behind a part of themselves in the process.

No Son of Mine is a powerful piece of healing literature and, though there is pain here–pain at being abandoned by a mother, pain at having to leave behind a deep-rooted place like Appalachia–pain at having to acknowledge the trauma of our own histories–there is love too, so much love. This book, like the best Appalachian memoirs, shows how so many queer folks from the region still carry that love and grace in their hearts, even if they have also left those hills and hollers behind. It’s a book of empathy and of grace, of heartache and of longing and of joy. I loved it, and I think you will, too.

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Warning: Full spoilers for the book follow.

A Song of War, like so many other books, has been on my to-be-read pile for quite a while now. After all, it’s exactly the kind of thing I love: historical fiction set in the ancient world, with several different points of view, and lots and lots of queer folks and powerful women in leading roles. It’s also filled with tragedy and longing and a dozen other rich emotions. In other words, it’s just what you’d want from a modern reimagining of the ancient world’s most famous conflict: the Trojan War.

Split into seven chapters, the book gives us a new spin on the characters that we only thought we knew. Though self-contained, each vignette connects to the others, creating a vibrant, beautiful, and heartbreaking tapestry. Though we’ve seen all these characters before, the authors, one and all, manage to breathe new life into these legends, allowing us to see these individuals anew. Though not every character is particularly likeable–in fact, some of them are downright reprehensible–they all nevertheless manage to cast their spell. Even when you find yourself recoiling from their actions you still can’t help but find them fascinating and understandable.

Tragedy runs like a throughline in this book. One expects this, of course, given the very nature of the Trojan War–no one really emerges from this conflict with anything resembling a true happy ending–and I give each of the authors credit for bringing out the many shades of tragedy. There are, of course, the moments of high drama, but what really hits you in the feels are the quieter moments: Philoctetes sharing an intimate moment with Achilles, recalling the burning desire he’s always felt for the hero; Cassandra pining away her days in prison; Odysseus encountering a young boy desperate for his slain father to return. These moments add a poignant and deeply affecting human dimension to a conflict often more characterized by its big set pieces. (Though it’s also worth noting that there are many such tender and intimate moments in The Iliad, so this collection is definitely working nicely within the Homeric tradition).

To me, the mark of an effective retelling of the Trojan War is an ability to allow the reader to sympathize and cheer for both sides of the conflict, and the mark of a truly great one is its ability to want both sides to somehow manage to come out on top. Many of the chapters accomplish this task with remarkable power, reminding us that all wars often have two sides, that morality isn’t always as clear-cut and neatly cleaved as we might wish.

Take, for example, the chapter focusing on Philoctetes and Penthesilea (Libbie Hawker’s “The Bow”). Throughout the story it’s clear how both characters are guided by their own sense of honor, but the momentum of the narrative drives them both toward tragedy: Penthesilea, haunted by her own demons, goes after Achilles in order to assuage her honor and yet perishes, just as Achilles goes out into the field and is killed by Paris’ treachery. Neither character can escape the fate that waits for them, for all we might wish it might be so. And, since Philoctetes survives, and since we know just how much he loved Achilles, the fact the war drags on even after these momentous events is a reminder of the grinding horrors of war.

I also give this book a lot of credit for giving us a portrait of Agamemnon that is remarkably textured, complex, and nuanced. To be sure, he can be a brute, but Russell Whitfield’s chapter, “The Sacrifice” gives us some remarkable insight into his character. We see the extent to which his actions haunt his every waking moment, how he seems to be aware of the fact his life and his future have been indelibly marred by his sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis. Even if he manages to win this war, even if he returns to Mycenae in victory, he will never again truly know happiness.

A Song of War also excels at showing us the beginning, middle, and end of the conflict. Kate Quinn’s “The Apple,” for example, paints a fascinating portrait of Hellenus and Andromache, two people who share a powerful bond but know they can never be anything more than friends. At the same time, they also can only bear witness as Paris and Helen abscond from Sparta, setting in motion the dreadful war to come. Quinn perfectly captures the sense of anger and powerlessness these two people feel as they both stand on the precipice of disaster, thrown into the midst of war by two selfish people who care for nothing beyond themselves.

On the other side of the spectrum we have Aeneas, who is the subject of SJA Turney’s “The Fall.” For most of the book Aeneas is painted as something of a prig, but this chapter fleshes him out, and through his eyes we once again bear witness to a man having to make terrible choices: to separate from his wife (inadvertently sending her to her death); to turn away from those he might be able to help because he’s cursed to fail; to leave Priam and Hecuba behind so he can bear the spirits of the city to safety while his king and queen are butchered and enslaved by the Greeks. It’s a devastating chapter, and it’s the one which really brings home the extent to which the Trojans were always doomed, even if Aeneas is poised to take their spirit to lands unknown.

In short, A Song of War was exactly what I wanted and so much more. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to savor it, even as it makes for such gripping reading that you find yourself tearing through the pages. The fact that this extraordinary group of authors has managed to create a book that is both cohesive and also sparking and flashing with new ideas and originality is a testament to their combined brilliance. If you love antiquity and enjoy seeing it brought to life in ways that resonate with and inspire the present, then I can’t recommend A Song of War highly enough.

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Here lately I’ve been making a more concerted effort to read more works by Appalachian writers, particularly those from marginalized communities. Neema Avashia’s Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place is one of those books I’ve been looking at for a while now but, for one reason or another, just haven’t had a chance to read. However, this past weekend I picked up a copy from Four Seasons Books in Shepherdstown, West Virginia and, from the very first page, I knew this was going to be a book I wasn’t going to be able to put down.

In a series of interconnected stories and essays, Avashia relates her upbringing in Cross Lanes, West Virginia, a suburb of our capital, Charleston that was essentially a community meant to serve the managerial class of the Union Carbide company. While deeply personal, the book also addresses many of the issues affecting West Virginia as a whole, from a declining population to the impact of industrial pollution on the state’s people and natural beauty, from conflicted identities to the vexed feeling of being an Appalachian expat.

One of the most refreshing things about Another Appalachia is Avashia’s blunt honesty about every aspect of her life and upbringing. She speaks, often in raw and authentic ways, about her being one of the very few Hindus/Indians/non-White people not just in her particular town but in the entire state of West Virginia (without doubt one of the Whitest states in the country). Writing in this way is inherently risky–and Avashia doesn’t shy away from talking about that, either, particularly when it comes to her family’s responses to her writing about them–but it’s also tremendously empowering. To read such work is, at times, a transformative experience, even when, like me, you also grew up in West Virginia feeling like something of an outsider.

One of the most remarkable things about this book is the extent to which Avashia doesn’t attempt to separate her various identities: as a queer and gender nonconforming person; as the daughter of Indian immigrants; as a West Virginian now living in Boston; as a progressive person who grew up in a conservative state. Intersectionality might sometimes be little more than a buzzword, but Avashia shows the raw power that comes from really grappling with the ways in which one’s various identities conflict and intertwine and entangle with one another.

Indeed, there are few states quite as contradictory as West Virginia, and Avashia’s awareness of this fundamental reality runs like a throughline through the book. In one of the book’s most powerful–and haunting–essays she has to contend with the fact that a former neighbor, a man who was her grandfather in all but name, has now fallen down the Trump rabbit hole, sharing terrible anti-immigrant messages on Facebook. She still loves him, obviously, but as the essay makes clear this kind of love comes at a cost. As a queer Indian Appalachian you have to learn how to compartmentalize, to divorce the person from the politics, or else risk sacrificing the things you love most. This is a bit of mental and emotional gymnastics with which I am unfortunately very familiar.

Just as importantly, though, the book is also so damn filled with love that I couldn’t help but get this warm and fuzzy feeling with every chapter. There’s love in the way Avashia writes about her neighbors and friends growing up; there’s love in the way she writes about the unexpected acceptance she received from her West Virginia neighbors and aunties–both White and Indian–when she brought her wife home; there’s love in the way she writes about how the folks of Cross Lanes did everything they could to welcome their new Indian neighbors (including attempting to cook vegetarian). You see, that’s the thing about coming from someplace like West Virginia: no matter what happens, no matter where you go, and no matter how much you might think you’ve come to hate where you come from, you can’t get away from the love. It’ll break your heart, and it’ll build you up. It’s a contradiction, plain and simple.

Yes, West Virginia is a frustrating place where the people sometimes behave in irrational ways. Yes, they sometimes (often) vote against their own best interests. And yes, sometimes they can be downright shitty to the marginalized. At the same time, as Avashia points out again and again, if you’re from there, there’s simply no other place that you’d rather be. You could move across the country–hell, you could move across the ocean–and you’d still find yourself tearing up at Bob Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” (and yes, I know that many of the landmarks he sings about are more in Virginia than they are in West Virginia). Whether your family has been there for umpteen generations or whether, like Avashia’s family, they’ve been there only a few decades, it’s the kind of place that’s truly, deeply, madly home, and nothing can change that.

I’ve written here many times about my own complicated and often fraught relationship with my home state. Like Avashia I’ve departed for other regions, but there’s always a part of me that will always be there, and it’s no exaggeration to say that I only ever really feel whole until I cross the state line and once again am in the wild and wonderful state where I was born and raised. In fact, just thinking about Thanksgiving in West Virginia next week is enough to bring a tear to my eye and a lump to my throat. Reading Another Appalachia made me fall in love with West Virginia–in all of its faded, contradictory, ridiculous, mountainous glory–all over again.

When I finished this book I just sat in my chair thinking: goddamn that was a good read. I count myself fortunate to be writing in an age in which Appalachian work, both fiction and nonfiction, is at last getting its due, and I’m so proud to share a home state with someone like Avashia. Whether you’re from Appalachia or somewhere else, I guarantee this is a book that will touch you and make you think. It’s full of love and compassion and honesty. Like West Virginia it will break your heart and build you up.

Go read it. I promise you won’t regret it.

Hello, dear reader! Do you like what you read here at Omnivorous? Do you like reading fun but insightful takes on all things pop culture? Do you like supporting indie writers? If so, then please consider becoming a subscriber and get the newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. There are a number of paid options, but you can also sign up for free! Every little bit helps. Thanks for reading and now, on with the show!

Given that I grew up in West Virginia, it’ll probably come as no surprise that religion, Christianity to be specific, played a pretty major role in my upbringing. My parents and most of the paternal side of my family were staunch members of the Church of Christ, i.e. the denomination that aims to create a church that is supposedly closer to that of biblical times and thus doesn’t allow instrumental accompaniment during singing (among many other oddities). My maternal side, on the other side, were mostly Methodists, with a few forays into American Baptist. While I largely stopped attending church regularly as a teenager, Christianity was still a major part of everyday life.

As one might imagine, neither side of my family have been thrilled with the revelation–if you can call it that, since I’m not exactly subtle about my queer presentation–that I was gay. And, much though I hate to admit it, neither of my grandmothers ever knew this about me explicitly, though I’m sure they both had their suspicions. I like to think that both Grandma (maternal) and Nan (paternal) would have loved me just as fiercely if they’d known that I was a raging homosexual. They might have been devout, but they weren’t annoying about it, certainly not to the extent that their children have been and, in the case of Grandma in particular, ours was a bond that nothing could break.

My late grandmothers were much on my mind as I sat down to read Queer Communion: Religion in Appalachia, a new collection out this fall from the University Press of Kentucky. Edited by Davis Shoulders, this collection highlights the many complex, complicated, and often fraught ways that queer Appalachians grapple with their faith and their upbringings. Indeed, the first several chapters deal with matriarchs and mamaws, and I had to put the book down at points, so powerful was my emotional reaction. It’s no secret that many queer folks, gay boys in particular, share close bonds with their grandmas and mee-maws and nannies, and that’s true for these writers, too. When I read Savannah Sipple’s essay I felt truly seen, and his part truly stood out to me. “As much as it had hurt to leave home to come out, it hurt more that I’d left Granny, that I hadn’t been able to share this one part of me with her. The one thing. And it felt like the biggest.” Ugh. Even typing those words out has my throat closing with tears.

Thus is the power of faith, of grandmas, of queer love, and of Appalachian bonds.

Indeed, the volume’s wrenching heart is clear from its opening pages, written by Willie Carver, arguably the patron saint of queer Appalachia. The issues that Carver raises–of feeling alienated from the faith in which one was raised but of yearning for some sort of connection; of finding a way back to spirituality by his own path; of standing betwixt and between tradition and something new, run through the book like a deep seam of coal.

As the various chapters in this book make clear, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to queer Appalachians and their faith. Some of those in these pages end up leaving Christianity to pursue other paths, religious traditions that are more fulfilling. Others, like Matthew Jacobson, remain devout, rightly understanding that there doesn’t have to be a contradiction between being a person of faith and being an openly queer person. As he puts it so bluntly and powerfully at the very beginning, “My Catholicism is everything to me.”

While there is joy, there’s pain here, too. How could it be otherwise, when so many of us grew up in faith traditions that made us feel as if we could never be close to God if we lived our authentic lives and embraced queer selves? But, while some essays, like Mack Rogers’ “The father, the son, and the I.D.I. spirit” don’t shy away from the anguish caused by Appalachian religious faith, they also don’t let it define them. Like so many other queers who’ve come from those hills and hollers–and like the ones who still call those places home–they find a way to thrive and to find joy in the sorrow.

Indeed, what may come as a surprise to some is just how joyful this book is. These are writers who have embraced their queer Appalachian religious roots in one way or another, finding solace and happiness and transcendence in the traditions that gave birth to them. In their poetry and their prose, their honesty and their confessions, they show us a way out of the darkness that so often afflicts those of us who grew up in Appalachian Christian traditions.

Two years ago my dad’s eldest sister essentially disowned me as a result of my sexuality. For all that she had told my mom that she didn’t judge others and left that up to God, when it came down to it, when it seemed as if my partner and I might step foot in her house, she made it clear to me in no uncertain terms that neither of us were welcome. While I haven’t been close to my aunt in years, that whole incident left a deep wound on my heart and in my soul that has yet to fully heal. On the whole I’ve been very fortunate that my family hasn’t disowned me, and my parents–both of whom hold their faith in God quite dear, by the way–have always made it clear that both myself and my partners are welcome in their home, that who I am and how I live my life is a matter between me and God.

As I continue to grapple with my Appalachian identity in a long-overdue process of (re)discovery, and as I continue to find my way back to Christianity (though a kinder, more accepting one than the one in which I was raised), I know that Queer Communion will be one of those texts that I return to again and again. There’s a power in these pages that cannot be denied, and there is a strength too. This book is filled with so many beautiful passages that I could spend all day just talking about them, but I’ll close, appropriately enough, with one from Carver’s introduction.

Love, he writes, “is the lens the spirit needs to witness truth lurking behind the brokenness of this world. Love is found in an unwelcoming home, in grandmothers who never knew all the parts of us, in taking back symbols and rediscovering them in new contexts, in art, in dancing with someone, in song, in the present moment, and in growing in ourselves a glorious and expanding truth that cannot be stifled.”

Love can save us and bring us out of despair, and I thank God for Queer Communion and for all of my queer siblings with whom I share this flawed but beautiful heritage we call Appalachian.

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For the last year or so I’ve sworn off reading about politics. The trauma of 2024 was still too fresh, and I felt no desire to relive that through the work of journalists, particularly since so many of them were largely content to just act as if everything was normal and that we’re not hurtling toward living in a dictatorship. However, when I saw Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress by Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater, however, I thought: well, why not? Maybe there’ll be something useful here. As it turns out, yes, it is a very good and worthwhile book, one that is a timely reminder of just how dysfunctional Republicans

The book begins, appropriately enough, with Kevin McCarthy’s ignominious ascent to the position of Speaker of the House, followed by his equally embarrassing fall, a deposition orchestrated and celebrated by Matt Gaetz and his other rabblerousers. From there it follows the various ill-fated efforts of others, including Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise, to ascend to the position, only to fail for one reason or another. Even though I remember this whole embarrassing affair quite well–I was still addicted to reading about politics on the daily back then–Mad House was a helpful reminder of just how ridiculous it all was. Even though the House of Representatives has always been the more raucous part of Congress, it’s still remarkable just how crazy things got there for a while.

The book is filled with the clown car of Republican politicians with which we’re all familiar. There’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, of course, who never met a controversy she didn’t court, and Lauren Boebert, who somehow emerges from these pages as being somewhat less batshit than some of her colleagues (as strange as that sounds). Gaetz is also a major player, though he fades from the picture after his successful ouster of McCarthy. Other characters both major and minor have their part to play in the grand farce of the last couple of years.

The book also gives fascinating insight into the rise of current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson from the backbencher that almost nobody knew to one of the most powerful positions in the US government. Karni and Broadwater make it clear that, McCarthy, he’s a bit of a chameleon, changing his shape to suit his political ambitions and, while he is neither an abject failure like McCarthy nor a true success like Nancy Pelosi–arguably the most effective Speaker of the House in the last 30 years–one can’t help but admire Johnson’s ability to weather the chaos enveloping his party in order to secure the most coveted position in the House of Representatives. (Though as I write this it’s becoming increasingly clear that he’s nothing but a lapdog for Trump, who views him as little more than a rubber stamp and a nonentity).

The whole time I was reading this book, I felt like I was reading some sort of dark satire about the dysfunction and rot at the heart of the American political system. It’s nothing short of bananas that we have one political party who is more than happy to just…burn the whole country to the ground just so long as they get their fifteen minutes of fame. As the antics of Gaetz and Greene demonstrate, the only thing that matters today is carving out your own lane and making sure that you show enough fealty to Trump and the more rabid members of the MAGA base.

Indeed, while much of the focus of the book is on the various members of the House, we also get brief forays into the careers of such right-wing “luminaries” as Russel Vought and Steve Bannon, both of whom played their own part in making sure that the House remained as dysfunctional as ever. The authors treat them with the contempt and bemusement that they so richly deserve, even as they also make clear that these two people wield significant and terrifying influence over politics and politicians.

Mad House makes for compelling and page-turning reading, and Karni and Broadwater have a clear, firm sense of what makes for gripping narrative. At the same time, one can’t shake the feeling that we are well and truly fucked as a country, precisely because there are just far too many people willing to vote for these clowns, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that they’ve shown, time and again, that they have neither the will nor the ability to govern. Time after time, we see the extent to which members of the House are willing to say and do things they don’t believe, simply because it draws them closer to Trump or earns them some brownie points with the base (or both). The result is the absence of anything even remotely resembling responsible governance.

One of the more refreshing aspects of this book is that it didn’t treat Democrats and Republicans as if they are equally responsible for the decline of the House of Representatives into little more than a human zoo. The blame for our current state of legislative dysfunction has been and remains squarely with the GOP, who’ve made it clear that they are the party not of small government, but of no government. Democrats might certainly have their flaws–and the book doesn’t shy away from showing them–but the truth is they are a party, by and large, that truly believes in the power of the government to make people’s lives better. They might showboat, but they do end up getting the job done.

It’s hard to emerge from Mad House with anything other than a sense of despair and anger and frustration that this is where we’ve found ourselves. It’s even more discouraging to realize that in 2024 voters not only didn’t punish the Republicans for their nonsense but actually rewarded them, giving them control of both chambers of Congress and the White House. This book is a powerful, devastating reminder that, if the US does enter a period of inevitable and spectacular decline–as seems more likely each and every day–we have only ourselves to blame.

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If you spend any time reading this newsletter, or just if you know anything about me and my own emotional journey over the past couple of years, you’ll know that I’ve been spending a lot of time learning to fall back in love with West Virginia, the state I was born and raised in and that has continued to exert a very powerful hold over me. As part of that, I’ve been making a point of searching out writers whose work speaks to the complex feeling that those of us who hail from the Mountain State often experience. While we love our home, it can sometimes be difficult, particularly if, like me, you’ve been dismayed by the state’s rightward lurch over the past couple of decades.

This is where Laura Jackson’s Deep & Wild: On Mountains, Opossums, & Finding Your Way in West Virginia comes in. From the moment I started reading I fell in love with Jackson’s prose and her voice, her knack for being both side-splittingly hilarious and richly poignant. This is the type of book that will immediately cast a spell on you, and when I say that I devoured it, I am not exaggerating. It’s not every nonfiction book that can keep me up well past my bedtime night after night, but that’s just what this book managed to do.

I first became aware of Deep & Wild a couple of weeks ago when I was attending the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia Conference, and while it looked interesting enough, I just didn’t feel the need to buy it right then. Something about the book continued to call to me, though, and when I stopped at an indie bookstore in Charleston (West Virginia, not South Carolina), I finally decided to take the plunge and buy it. I started reading it that very day, and Jackson immediately hooked me, making me laugh and making me think in equal measure. It’s a book that touched me in ways that I’m still grappling with, particularly when it comes to the complicated feelings that West Virginia continues to arouse in me (but more than that in a moment).

The book is a collection of essays detailing both life and living in West Virginia. There are anecdotes about fishing for crawdads, ruminations about a stump in the backyard, and several essays about the enduring love that West Virginians have for John Denver’s “Country Roads,” for all that the physical features the song mentions are only present in the very eastern corner of the state. I’ve rarely read someone with such a knack for capturing the intricacies and quirks of living and loving West Virginia, and I lost count of the number of times that I sat up right and thought, “I thought I was the only one who’d experienced this!”

As other reviewers have noted, Jackson is particularly adept at moving between the personal and the general, of using her own experience as someone born and raised in the Mountain State to speak of the unique bond that West Virginians–both those who currently live there and those who’ve become expats–share. We can’t but be aware of the many negative stereotypes about our state, just as we can’t but be aware of the fact that some of them are true. And yet we persist, we continue to love and to hold out hope for our home and for the hills and hollers that gave birth to us.

In that sense, as Jackson astutely observes, we’re more than a little like the homely opossum, arguably one of the most widely misunderstood and vilified of backyard beasts (though that is thankfully beginning to change, at least if social media is any indication). Like the opossum, West Virginians are the butt of every joke, dismissed if not condemned by those in power, even by those who are supposed to represent our interests. And yet, also like the opossum, we persist, and while we might not be immune to rabies, we still perform important and vital functions for the nation as a whole. You can look down on us, you can exploit us, but you’ll never break us.

There is, I think, something almost spiritual about the way that Jackson writes, capturing the exquisite beauty and pain and joy of being from the Mountain State. West Virginia, as anyone who is from there will tell you, is the type of place that will break your heart over and over, and yet there’s nowhere in the world quite like it. Some of this is about physical beauty. The only place that has filled me with the same sense of melancholy awe as West Virginia has been the Highlands of Scotland, a region that has also been on the receiving end of exploitation more than once during its long and storied history.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Deep & Wild made me fall in love with my home state all over again. It made me want to load up the car and coerce my partner into coming with me to see those parts of the state that I’ve yet to explore as much as I’d like. It made me want to see those rugged hills and mountains again, made me want to stand and breathe in the rich, clean Appalachian air. The mark of a truly great book, in my opinion, is a power to move you, to make you feel something deep in your bones and blood and sinew. That’s what this book did for me. It reminded me of why West Virginia is truly unlike anywhere else in the world and why the state and its people are still worth fighting for. It reminded me of the unique joy of seeing that blue and gold trimmed license plate while far away from home. It made me realize that, whether I like it or not, I’ll always be a West Virginian.

I think the thing I appreciated most about this book, however, was the fact that it didn’t try to give any easy answers. This is because, when it comes down to it, there simply isn’t one. There never has been in West Virginia, and there never will be. And that, I think, is precisely what makes it so beautiful.

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Warning: Full spoilers for the book follow.

When I say that The Pretender is one of the best books–of any genre–that I’ve read this year, you can rest assured that I’m not exaggerating. More accessible than Wolf Hall, a novel to which it’s often compared, it still manages to capture the mix of strangeness and familiarity of the late medieval past. The heart and soul of the book is the man who would become known to history as Lambert Simnel, one of the two most notable Yorkist pretenders that sought to topple Henry VII from his ill-gotten throne and set themselves up in his place.

When the novel begins our hero, John Collan, is, so it seems, a son of a humble farmer near Oxford. Soon enough, however, he’s caught up in a game of thrones that’s not of his own making and that will slowly but surely strip him of his good nature, leaving behind a man determined to get vengeance for those who have ill-used him and those he loves. To history he will become known simply as Lambert Simnel, but during the course of the novel he goes by many names as he passes through different hands on his way to the battle that will see his royal pretensions dashed on the rocks of failure.

The Pretender makes for grim reading at times, precisely because so many of the people in this young man’s life are really only out for the main chance. They don’t really care about John, not even when he is pushed into the position of Edward, Duke of Clarence (the supposed son of George, brother of Edward IV, who allegedly sent his son into hiding, while his fake son was the one eventually imprisoned in the Tower of London). The fact that they are willing to change his name depending on the circumstances says a great deal about how they view him.

There are a few islands of calm amid all the chaos, in particular once young John/Edward goes to Burgundy, where he is taken in and sheltered by Margaret, his “aunt.” Margaret is a fascinatingly enigmatic figure–I’ve always found her so–but it’s really Philip the Handsome who becomes the English pretender’s one true friend. The two boys forge an extraordinary friendship, and one of the most achingly tragic things about the young John/Edward’s life is that all of his friendships are doomed to be ephemeral, whether because he has to leave them behind or because, as is the case with the altruistic John de la Pole.

It’s only after he arrives in Ireland that he gets a bit of stability, and this is largely due to the fact that he falls in love with the young and sharp-tongued Joan, the daughter of Lord Kildare (yet another conspirator). Joan may be spoiled and more than a little malicious, but she seems to harbor some genuine fondness for the pretender in her home, a young man who, after all, is really just a pawn in the games that those with more power and wealth than he does like to play. Their love becomes one of the guiding lights of John/Edward’s life, made all the more poignant because it is clearly doomed. It’s a relationship that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Once his rebellion fails and he is taken captive by the surprisingly enduring Henry VII, Edward/John/Lambert begins a sinister downward spiral that sees our hero confronting the cankerous darkness in his own soul. At first he’s nothing more than a spit-turner in Henry’s kitchens but, as he proves surprisingly adept at leading Yorkists into betraying themselves, he becomes a master spy. One light in the darkness is the maid Beatrice, who sees a goodness in him that he can’t see in himself. Harkin ably captures the sense of paranoia and ever-present danger that was a key aspect of the early Tudor court, allowing us to feel with Lambert as he tries to survive in a court where everyone is always scheming against or for the king.

When Lambert discovers that his beloved Joan has died, it marks a further turning point for him. For better or for worse, she gave him something to hope for, a future in which he wasn’t just a pawn in other people’s games, a spy bringing misery and death to those foolish enough to trust him, or just another appendage to a usurper’s sprawling household. Learning that she perished seems to take something out of him and, though he manages to secure his freedom and forge a little home for himself, Beatrice, and her lover but, though he attains revenge, he remains a wanderer at heart. (Speaking of which: I love the little queer family they manage to establish, before John/Edward/Lambert decides to go wandering).

This is the kind of novel that breaks your heart and puts it back together, over and over again. Lambert is, as his friend Beatrice reminds him, an essentially good man, which is precisely what makes his slow decline into hatred and anger all the more wrenching. Since we alone have been with him from the beginning, we know just how apt her description is. We know better than anyone else that it didn’t have to be this way, that he could have been something different, could even have led a rather quaint and uneventful life as a farmer. Had destiny and history and those seeking their own power not intervened, he could have even been happy.

Much of the novel’s narrative energy stems from its grappling with the central enigma of its central character. While at first he has a strong sense of identity, this is slowly stripped away as those who take custody of him force him to adopt new names as he draws closer to power. This poses the question: Who are you, when everyone around you is always trying to manipulate you for their own ends? No one seems interested in really giving him the love and support a boy needs and, in the end, it’s up to him to discover his own sense of self and his own happiness, if indeed such a thing is ever possible after the eventful and tragic life he’s led.

To say that I loved The Pretender is to probably understate the case. It’s not every historical fiction novel that can so powerfully bring the past to life and give us a fascinating character study at the same time, but that’s exactly what Jo Harkin has managed to achieve. This is the kind of book that really does stay with you long after you’ve finished it. If, as the saying goes, history is written by the victors, it’s high time that those who were left behind in the annals get the chance to tell at least some variant of their own story. Lambert Simnel is someone who has long been regarded as nothing more than an appendage to the larger Tudor story, the innocent peasant boy who got caught up in matters beyond his understanding. Harkin has rescued Simnel from the dustbin of history and given him a tale that’s as beautiful, and as tragic, as anything in the Tudor era.

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If you weren’t alive in the 1990s and the aughts, it’s sometimes hard to understand just how rampantly and unapologetically sexist and misogynist that era was. This was the era, remember, when Pamela Anderson was said to have deserved it when her sex tape was stolen and distributed without her consent, all because she had once posed for Playboy. This was the era, it’s worth remembering, when scandal-mongers and entitled queens like Perez Hilton made their entire livelihoods on being truly awful toward famous women and their bodies and often tragic meltdowns. This is also the era when porn became ever easier to access, slowly blossoming until it became the internet titan that it is today, with consequences for human relationships and human sexuality that we are only now beginning to fully understand.

All of this is the subject of Girl on Girl, the new book from Sophie Gilbert of The Atlantic. I knew as soon as I saw this volume in the new release section of my local library that I was going to have to read it, both as someone who loves a good piece of cultural commentary and as someone who came of age during exactly the period that Gilbert describes. I was not at all disappointed. If you’re on the lookout for a piece of cultural criticism that will have you staying awake way past your bedtime, then Girl on Girl is the book for you.

While the 1980s was, at least in part, marked by rebellious figures–at the very least in music–the ‘90s saw the abandonment of those figures and their replacement by more girlish figures who were much more amenable to being manipulated and being seen as vulnerable (e.g. Britney Spears). The longer the decade wore on, the uglier things became for women, and the higher one rose in the echelons of fame in popular culture,the more perilous life became, thanks in no small part to figures like Perez Hilton who, as I mentioned above, made it his entire brand to be truly horrible to famous women.

Undergirding all of this is, Gilbert argues, the rise and subsequent ubiquitousness of porn during the 1990s and 2000s. In large part, the exploding presence of porn is attributable to the internet, which suddenly made it possible to access an entire world of erotic content with the click of a button. The more extreme that porn became, the more the rest of pop culture ran to catch up, encouraging an entire generation of women to see themselves as both commodities and as worthy of derision.

Just as importantly, this was also the age of postfeminism, when the hard work of organizing and attempting to achieve equality in all spheres of life was understood to have been largely accomplished or, at the very least, no longer nearly as relevant or as necessary as it had once been. Instead, women were encouraged to find liberation through consumption (and through rendering oneself as a commodity).

As Gilbert demonstrates throughout her book, this noxious attitude toward women permeated almost all aspects of American popular culture. It was there in films like American Pie; it was certainly there in the reality series that began to take over TV throughout the ‘90s and into the aughts; and it was there in the world of music, too. Everywhere you looked there was a sense that women were encouraged to be objects of desire for men and objects of contempt for one another.

Given the extent to which two decades of American culture consistently devalued women, is it any wonder that such a culture gave birth to not one but two Trump administrations? When women are seen as little more than commodities, when they are presented with numerous double binds so that they can never really get ahead in any meaningful way–whether in politics, business, or popular culture–is it any wonder that many people saw a misogynist and his enablers and thought, “yeah, I’m okay with that?” Culture shapes us and how we think about ourselves and others, for better and for worse, and we are now reaping what we sowed in the 1990s and into the 2000s.

As someone who grew up in that era as a White, cisgendered man, I’ll admit that I wasn’t always as conscious of the way that famous women (and not-so-famous ones) were not just exploited but roundly and cruelly mocked. Looking back on it now, though, it’s hard not to feel a powerful sense of revulsion and disgust at just how accepted casual misogyny was in all elements of culture.

There is a lot to enjoy about Gilbert’s book. She has a keen eye for how to shape a narrative so that you see the bigger picture, while also making sure that she drills down into the details. It makes for depressing reading, at times, but that’s the thing about insightful feminist criticism. It holds up an often unflattering light to the world in which we live, showing how it is that we got here. In the age in which we now find ourselves, when any history that makes anyone uncomfortable is under constant fire and assault from the right, it seems to me that books like this one are more important than ever.

In the end, Girl on Girl reminds us that it doesn’t have to be this way, that we can make demands for popular culture that doesn’t demean women. Just as importantly, we can also do our part not to feed the beast, to demand better of those who create the culture in which we all indulge. Indeed, there’s something remarkably powerful, perhaps even a little optimistic, about the conclusion of this book. It is something of a call to action, a reminder that it’s possible to envision a better cultural world than the one that millennials lived through (and helped to create). It’s not going to be easy, but few things in this fallen world of ours ever are. That doesn’t mean, however, that they’re not worth doing.

Hello, dear reader! Do you like what you read here at Omnivorous? Do you like reading fun but insightful takes on all things pop culture? Do you like supporting indie writers? If so, then please consider becoming a subscriber and get the newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. There are a number of paid options, but you can also sign up for free! Every little bit helps. Thanks for reading and now, on with the show!

Warning: Full spoilers for the book follow.

I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Allison Gunn during a book signing that we both did a couple of months ago in Shepherdstown, West Virginia (it was at Four Seasons Books, a truly splendid indie bookshop, by the way). Gunn was signing copies of her debut horror novel, Nowhere, a haunting piece of Appalachian gothic focusing on a woman living in western Virginia who has to contend with both implosion of her marriage as well as a sinister force that dwells in the forest nearby and abducts children.

Of course, me being me, I knew that I was going to have to read it. I’m a sucker for Appalachian horror, the more eldritch the better, and I knew as soon as I sat down to start reading Nowhere that this was going to be a novel that was going to stick with me. Indeed, this was a book that I literally could not devour it. I read the entire thing in just a few days, and each night when I’d finish I’d have to make sure that all of my lights were turned on so that I could get to sleep.

I’m telling you, it’s that scary.

The book moves through several different points of view, but the most notable and consistent are those of the central family: Rachel, her husband Finn, and their children Charlie and Lucy. They’re all haunted by the death of Aiden, who perished after Finn crashed the family car while driving drunk. Compounding all of this trauma is the fact that strange things have been happening in the woods near the small Virginia town where they all live and, as the mystery deepens, Rachel and her family find themselves having to contend not just with the animus of their fellow townspeople but also with sinister beings that might just be from another world.

What’s particularly surprising, and refreshing, about Nowhere, is the extent to which it plumbs the dark depths of the human psyche. It’s my belief that horror is the most effective when it isn’t just about the jump scares or the supernatural, though those are obviously crucial elements in any scary story. Both Rachel and Finn–and, to a lesser extent, Lucy and Charlie–are broken people contending with the darknesses in their own souls. Trauma and addiction have left deep scars on all of the characters, and some of the most terrifying and unsettling moments are those in which they have to face up to what’s going on inside of their own heads.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t some genuine supernatural horror moments, because there are. For example, we get a ringside seat to the moment when Charlie, having ventured into the woods with her friends, is taken over by the mysterious beings that inhabit areas where the boundaries between our world and theirs are perilously thin. Though we don’t know it at the time, this will be the last time that we get to spend time with the real Charlie. Thereafter, she will be known as the “Charlie Thing,” which is a brilliantly terrifying way to refer to a point of view character.

Gunn doesn’t shy away from her characters’ flaws and shortcomings. Indeed, Rachel is not the most likable heroine, but the novel makes it clear that there are some very good reasons for the way that she acts and thinks. This is a woman, after all, who found herself trapped in a marriage with a man she didn’t particularly love, a man whose substance abuse led to the death of their son, arguably the only bright spot in their marriage. This is also a woman who has had to push down her queer desires in order to both make her marriage work and to fit in in a town that is notable for its frowning disapproval of queer existence and queer love.

Finn, for his part, is an even more tortured character, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he’s likeable or entirely redeemed, Nowhere does at least show that he wasn’t as responsible for Aiden’s death as it seemed at first. The beings that haunt the woods, it turns out, are remarkably cunning, and Rachel and her family are but pawns in a game for which they don’t even know the rules. The further the novel goes on, the more it becomes clear that all of Rachel’s moral authority and her understanding of the world and how it works–to say nothing of her skills as a member of law enforcement–haven’t prepared her for the scale of what she’s facing. Even when it’s clear that Charlie is no longer what she wants was, she sees this as the effects of drugs rather than the truth: that her daughter has been replaced by a sinister doppelganger.

In the end, both Rachel and Finn meet a fate that is rather tragic yet also fitting. Once the entire town is taken over by the sinister beings, and once the townsfolk have essentially destroyed themselves in their madness, they ultimately see no other future but to embrace their own death. It’s really quite a chilling moment, and a sign that Gunn is an author who takes no prisoners.

It’s really the very ending of the book, though, that has the most devastating stinger, since the Lucy Thing is picked up by the police, who interpret her rather strange behavior as the result of trauma rather than the fact that she’s a demon masquerading as a human. There’s something particularly chilling about the fact that it’s a child–and one that we got to spend so much time with–that now has the potential to spread this terrible affliction to the wider world. By this point we know there’s very little these beings can’t and won’t do. After all, they care nothing for human life and in fact seem to have it in mind to invade our world. In other words: what an ending!

Nowhere is one of those novels that manages to be so disturbing because so much remains unexplained. The sinister others who have taken over the town may be creatures akin to the Fairy Folk of so much folklore, or they may be something else. Who’s to say? Gunn’s skill lies in leaving so much to our own tortured imaginations. We can never really know what lurks in those hills and hollers of isolated Appalachia.

One thing’s for sure, though. I’ll definitely be keeping the lights on the next time I visit my folks in West Virginia.

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Warning: Full spoilers for the book follow.

A few months ago I was totally blown away by Conn Iggulden’s novel, Nero, which focused on the life of its title character and his mother, Agrippina the Younger, arguably one of the most formidable and ruthless women of ancient Rome. Now, with Tyrant, he returns us to the uncertain and deeply dangerous world of 1st century Rome, as Agrippina and her son Nero have to navigate the fraught and perilous halls of the Palatine. 

As she was in the first book, Agrippina is a source of much of the narrative energy, mostly because she’s a much more interesting character than Nero. She’s the one, after all, who has the real mastery of politics and power, of how to use her gender in ways that get her what she wants. Nothing illustrates this better than her subtle manipulation of her husband/uncle Claudius, whom she convinces to name Nero his heir rather than his own son Brittanicus. Ultimately, as we all know, she had to have her husband poisoned in order to keep him from changing his mind about Nero, and it’s this event, more than perhaps any other event in the book, that shows just how willing she is to maintain power. Though it’s clear that she never really loved Claudius in the first place, it’s still rather shocking to see her be so willing to dispense with him once he becomes a threat to her even though, at the same time, one can hardly be surprised that a woman reared among the other Julio-Claudians would have a hard-hearted approach to matters of the heart.

Agrippina, much to her dismay, finds that her son isn’t nearly as compliant as she might like. Indeed, the young man is coming into his own, and he has begun to chafe at his mother’s dominance of his life. Iggulden convincingly paints Nero as a bit of a spoiled brat, a young man who, devoid of real fatherly influence in his life, is prone to self-indulgence and to wanting to get his own way, no matter what it might cost others. And, while he may not be the cruel despot that history often paints him as being–not yet, anyway–there’s no doubt that he does have a bit of a cruel streak. However, Iggulden is also at pains to make it clear that this is a result as much from growing up in a family notorious for its in-fighting and its poisonings of one another. 

Nero, moreover, proves that he’s a very dangerous foe indeed, particularly once Agrippina begins to conspire against him. Even though she is his mother, this doesn’t mean that she is blind to her son’s flaws and, once it becomes clear to her that he is a danger to both her and to the two children left behind by Claudius, she realizes that it’s a fatal game in which only one of them can survive. Iggulden has an expert grasp of his narrative, and he keeps on the edge of our seats as we watch this redoubtable woman try to cling to power, even though we know how this ends: with a Praetorian’s blade ending her life.One can’t help but wish that it were otherwise.

By the time the novel ends Nero is at the height of his powers, freed from his mother’s influence and ready to become the emperor that he knows that he can be. As he’s sure to discover in the third volume, however, being the most powerful man in Rome might seem like a dream come true, but it’s also a very lonely position to occupy. His tendency to indulge in his own ego will be something that will come back to haunt him, as will his desire for his friend Otho’s wife, Poppaea.

Iggulden is one of those historical fiction writers who has a keen eye for detail, and he does an excellent job of immersing us in the world of 1st century Rome, whether it’s in the halls of the Palatine or on the sands (and waters) of the arena. However, he doesn’t let historical detail bog down the story or overshadow character development, and all of the individuals we meet have their own depth, their own arcs, and their own personality quirks. As a result, we 

It’s also worth pointing out that he also draws our attention to several side characters whose lives and actions have a profound impact on the unfolding of history. There’s Seneca, for example, the asthmatic statesman whose tutoring of Nero bears some (but not enough) fruit,  and there’s Burrus, the Praetorian ally of Agrippina who, alerted to her efforts to assassinate her son, ends up betraying her to her doom. Though these characters aren’t always the center of the story, they do nevertheless add layers of complexity and depth to the story, allowing us to see how Nero’s life and his reign impacted both those in positions of power and those who occupied the lower rungs of the social ladder.

As I so often conclude these reviews: Suffice it to say that I loved this book. I mean, I’m a sucker for historical fiction set in ancient Rome but, even so, Conn Iggulden has given us something special. There are precious few books–let alone fiction ones–that give Agrippina her due, and this one more than delivers. She might be dead by the end of the book, but that doesn’t mean that her influence isn’t still going to be felt by her son and those she has left behind. Burrus, Seneca, and all of those who think that they will be able to control the new young emperor are soon going to find that his paranoia and his ruthlessness can be turned just as easily against them as against his mother. 

I just have two problems. One, how on Earth am I going to be able to wait for the third volume in this series? Two, what am I going to do after I finish it? 

Time enough to answer those questions, and in the meantime, go out and treat yourself to this fantastic book.

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When it comes to popular histories of the Renaissance, there’s no one who can hold a candle to Stephen Greenblatt. He’s one of those writers who wears his prodigious learning lightly, and I’ve yet to read a book of his that wasn’t anything less than brilliant. In his newest book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival he gives us a fascinating portrait of Christopher Marlowe. In this accessible but deeply researched and eloquently argued book, Greenblatt immerses us in the world of Elizabethan England, a time that was very different than our own but, thanks to his incisive prose, comes to feel almost as familiar as the one in which we now live.

It’s Marlowe’s misfortune that he happened to be writing at almost exactly the same time as Shakespeare, and while the glover’s son from Stratford-Upon-Avon became the most famous playwright and writer in the world, Marlowe has always played second fiddle. As Greenblatt makes clear, however, this is truly unfortunate, because Marlowe was an undoubted genius. He was one of those literary figures who was both very much a product of his own era and yet, thanks to his risky behavior and his even riskier artistic endeavors, pushed drama into new and exciting forms, even as he did the same for the culture at large.

As he has in his previous works, Greenblatt excels at immersing us in the heady, dangerous, beautiful, and cruel world of Elizabethan England. The 16th century was without a doubt a period of significant ferment, one in which Protestantism and Catholicism were still vying for supremacy, and one in which established truths were in constant danger of being overthrown by new ways of thinking and seeing the world. This gave the authorities, including Queen Elizabeth I and her various courtiers, many headaches, and they often resorted to desperate efforts in order to keep people and ideas in their appointed places. For all that they sought to control what people could read and what they could see, however, there were ways of thwarting them, and few were as adept, or as committed, to pushing the boundaries and flirting with disaster as Christopher Marlowe.

Marlowe, arguably even more than Shakespeare, was uniquely positioned to take advantage of the brave new world that was slowly opening up. In part this stemmed from the fact that, unlike Shakespeare, he managed to procure a very good education, even going so far as to earn a Master of Arts degree from Cambridge. Throughout his career as a playwright Marlowe would put this education to magnificent use, and in some important ways he paved the way for Shakespeare, including in his use of blank verse.

He also moved among some very rarefied company. In addition to Shakespeare–with whom he probably collaborated on several works–Marlowe also rubbed shoulders with some very powerful (and very dangerous) men, among whom two of the most notable were Francis Walsingham and Sir Walter Raleigh. Both of these men were very prominent parts of Elizabeth’s court, with Walsingham serving as her chief spymaster and a true maestro when it comes to the arts of spycraft. Greenblatt firmly aligns himself with those who believe that Marlowe was on Walsingham’s payroll, and he is quite convincing in his argument. There’s quite a lot of evidence to point in this direction, not the least of which is the fact that the government intervened to ensure that he got his Master of Arts degree.

While Greenblatt is keen to situate Marlowe in his historical circumstances–he remains, as he has always been, one of the finest practitioners of new historicism working today–he also offers rich, textured, and compelling readings of Marlowe’s poetry and plays. These range from Tamburlaine the Great and Edward II, both with their reflections on leadership and conquest (and, in the latter’s case, with the specter of same-sex eroticism) to The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and its engagement with the limitations and weariness of knowledge and its toying with atheism The Jew of Malta and its themes of revenge and bloodshed. In his art as in his life, Marlowe was always willing to go where others feared to tread, and it’s easy to see why his works became so popular, even as they tended to earn the opprobrium of those in authority (after all, flirting with atheism and same-sex relations was always a recipe for condemnation in a place like Elizabethan England).

Marlowe, in other words, was brilliant precisely because he managed to take what was around him and turn it into sublime stage and poetic art. The flip side of this was that Marlowe was often playing with fire when it came to his life, his beliefs, and his drama. As Greenblatt demonstrates time and again, he was always putting his toe right on what was deemed acceptable and, very often, he was putting it over it. After all, you don’t play around with controversial figures like Walter Raliegh and Henry Percy–the latter of whom was known as the Wizard Earl for his dalliances in the occult–without putting yourself in danger. The same was even more true of someone like Walsingham, who played very dangerous games when it came to politics.

To be sure, as Greenblatt himself acknowledges, much of what we know about Marlowe’s life is a matter of speculation. This includes the circumstances of his death, which are just as cloudy now as they were in the 16th century when he perished in a brawl with several other men. Here too Greenblatt draws on all of the evidence at his command, and the later portions of the book are as compulsively readable as any spy novel.

I emerged from Dark Renaissance having learned a great deal about both Marlowe and the world that produced him. This is a rich and fascinating book that combines the best of literary criticism with rigorous historical knowledge. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Be sure to buy it or check it out from your local library when it releases in September!

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me an ARC to review.

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If, like me, you grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, you’ll recall that it was impossible to escape from Princess Diana in those years. The tabloids were filled with her image and with details of her various marital and romantic entanglements and woes, and her death sent shockwaves around the world. To this day she continues to exert a remarkably strong hold on the popular imagination, as the final several seasons of The Crown demonstrate. One could be forgiven for thinking that the show was always meant to be about her, given how much attention she receives and how central she is to the story.

As it turns out, The Crown is but one example of the phenomenon of Diana worship, which emerged during her life and has only become more potent and enduring after her untimely death in 1997.. In Dianaworld: An Obsession, author Edward White takes a deep dive into the fascinating, and sometimes unsettling, world of those who have made the late Princess Diana the center of their world. As he memorably and aptly argues, few royal figures–except for perhaps Queen Elizabeth II herself–have managed to exert such a powerful hold on the public imagination.

The book is less a traditional biography and more a cultural study of the icon that Diana became from the moment that she entered the public eye. Some of this was due to the tabloid culture of the UK and their fascination with the Royal Family and all of its various foibles. At the same time, it was because Diana herself was such a master at publicity. This isn’t to say that she was a total cynic, though she was quite adept at presenting to the world whatever part of herself she thought the public needed to see.

Indeed, the thing about Diana, White argues, is that she was something of a tabula rasa, a blank slate onto which her adoring public could project itself. There are, of course, some peeks behind the curtain throughout the book, as White draws on the many, many books written by those who were intimate with the Princess of Wales, before, during, and after her time as the wife of Prince Charles. Even those who were most intimate with her, however, tended to view her through the lens of what she meant to them, rather than seeing her as an individual person with her own identity and subjectivity.

Dianaworld makes for a quick and fascinating read. White takes us to some very strange corners of both the internet and print worlds. It’s no exaggeration to say that everyone who had a platform in the 1980s and 1990s had something to say about every aspect of Diana: what she wore, what she ate, what she said, and what she did. There were those who were on her side and those who hated her and what she represented. There were republicans that strangely enough found her appealing, and there were Tories who loathed her for the damage she did to Prince Charles’ reputation. Even Tony Blair got in on the act, and he apparently saw her as something akin to a kindred spirit.

There are, of course, those who continue to believe that Diana was killed by some sort of nefarious cabal (this theory has been espoused by some very high-profile people, including Dodi Fayed’s father). There are also those who have amassed a significant amount of Diana memorabilia, and those who followed her around while she was alive. There are even those who continue to insist that she be given the memorialization that they feel she deserves (though, as White points out, the two statues that have been produced have been…of questionable quality, when they were completed at all).

Though White does sometimes seem a bit bemused by the phenomena that he’s writing about, I don’t think he ever goes so far as to view Diana fans with outright condescension or contempt. Indeed, some parts of the book are strikingly poignant and resonant, particularly those dealing with the queer community and its deep connection to Diana. In part, White argues, this connection sprang from her willingness to hold the hands of AIDS patients without gloves. While she might not have been the first public figure to do so, there’s no question that Diana’s decision to do so helped to shift the conversation about HIV and AIDS, and it solidified her place as a saint for gay men.

Yet her connection to queer folks also sprang out of her own status–whether perceived or real–as an outsider, as someone who had never really been accepted by the establishment. It certainly helped that, throughout her life, Diana was also more than a little androgynous, her appearance always straddling the line between male and female. She was also not above going out on the town in men’s clothing. It’s thus no wonder that many queer men continue to idolize and to remember her fondly, even if she wasn’t what one might call a queer activist.

Perhaps no event brings out the contradictions of the Diana icon quite like her death and funeral. It was, White asserts, something akin to a collective experience of grief and emotion, one that brought out some latent emotion in the British people that had lain dormant since the 19th century, buried beneath the relatively recent phenomenon of the “stiff upper lip.” Even those who were bemused or disgusted or opposed to such outpourings of grief sometimes found themselves connecting to this whole mass experience, something that has never quite been replicated, even upon Queen Elizabeth II’s passing.

In the end, though, White reminds us that, for all of Diana’s ubiquity in the world of popular culture, there still remains something more than a little enigmatic about her. He closes the book with an anecdote of a group of tourists at Althorp who, when all is said and done, find themselves a bit frustrated that there’s so little of Diana in her ancestral home. That is precisely what makes her so compelling and enticing and enthralling and enchanting. Like another royal who entered into the realm of the iconic, she makes hungry where most she seeks to satisfy. Dianaworld brilliantly shows us why this is the case, even if, like its subject, it leaves us wanting more.

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Peter Heather’s Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion: 300-1300, is one of those books that’s been sitting on my TBR list for a long time. As I’ve slowly eased myself back into the faith in which I was raised, I’ve also been reading a lot about the history of Christianity and how it has changed and grown over the centuries. Peter Heather has written a truly magisterial volume that sheds some much-needed light on the various forces that allowed the faith to become ever more dominant in Europe until, by 1300, it could truly be said to be one of the dominant forces on the continent.

Heather argues that the key to Christianity’s survival over its first millennium of true dominance was its adaptability. From the moment that Constantine took the faith under his wing and began to take a more active role in its doctrinal controversies, it managed to change to take advantage of the various apparatuses of the Roman state. In that sense, Heather reverses the typical understanding, which tends to see the Roman Empire becoming Christian when, in fact, it might be more accurate to say that Christianity became Roman. This allowed it to become more theologically, institutionally, and doctrinally coherent which, in turn, made it much easier to convert others to the faith.

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Just a reminder that I’m running a special promotion here at Omnivorous for the whole month of May. If you join as a paid subscriber, you’ll be entered into a raffle to win a gift card to The Buzzed Word, a great indie bookshop in Ocean City, MD. Check out this post for the full details!

In Republican Rome, few women were quite as (in)famous as Clodia. In part this was due to the behavior of her brother, Clodius, who earned a reputation for being a bit of a rabble-rouser and for flouting the various expectations and social niceties of polite Republican society. Among other things, he aroused quite a scandal when, dressed as a woman, he invaded the sacred Bona Dea, a sacred gathering at which only women were supposed to be present. Indeed, the scandal rocked all of Rome, and it even led to Julius Caesar divorcing his wife (leading to the saying that “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.”) Thanks in no small part to Cicero, who pilloried Clodia while her former lover was on trial, history has largely regarded her as a temptress and an infamous Jezebel-like figure.

Now, Clodia is at last getting her due in Clodia of Rome: Champion of the Republic, the new biography by Douglas Boin. As he has done in his other books, Boin draws out the complexities of the real story. In his energetic and unsparing voice we learn about her ancestry, her life, and the world around her. As a result, we get a much more nuanced appreciation of Clodia and the role that she played in the last few decades of the Republic. Far from being a simple Jezebel and a maneater, Boin illustrates that she was a woman ahead of her time who, as a result, was looked at with suspicion by the powerful men who surrounded her and ruled over Rome.

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Just a reminder that I’m running a special promotion here at Omnivorous for the whole month of May. If you join as a paid subscriber, you’ll be entered into a raffle to win a gift card to The Buzzed Word, a great indie bookshop in Ocean City, MD. Check out this post for the full details!

I remember being blown away a few years ago by Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar: Why We Went Out. It was one of those queer books that wasn’t afraid to be raw and deeply personal, that didn’t shy away from some of the more prurient and earthy details of gay sex and gay desire. Now Lin is back with an even more deeply personal and political book, one which further chronicles his relationship with his then-boyfriend (and now husband) Famous, particularly as their relationship intersected with the movement for marriage equality and the rights, including immigration, that come with it.

As he did with Gay Bar, Lin combines autobiography and memoir with a larger look at the world of the 1990s and 2000s, when gay marriage was a hotly-contested topic in both the US and in Famous’ home country of the UK. As a result, we get a rich and deep sense of the way that these debates were not merely academic. They had real-world impacts on couples like Lin and Famous and for many others like them, who desperately need its protections in order to avoid deportation. At the same time, Lin also discusses many of the key cases that shaped gay rights activism and advocacy from the 1970s and into the 2010s, including such landmark cases as Lawrence v. Texas (which was even messier than the news would have us believe, as Lin makes abundantly clear).

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Hello, dear reader! Do you like what you read here at Omnivorous? Do you like reading fun but insightful takes on all things pop culture? Do you like supporting indie writers? If so, then please consider becoming a subscriber and get the newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. There are a number of paid options, but you can also sign up for free! Every little bit helps. Thanks for reading and now, on with the show!

Just a reminder that I’m running a special promotion here at Omnivorous for the whole month of May. If you join as a paid subscriber, you’ll be entered into a raffle to win a gift card to The Buzzed Word, a great indie bookshop in Ocean City, MD. Check out this post for the full details!

I remember being impressed–if at times frustrated–by Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age, her scathing screed against early Christianity and its determination to destroy the pagan past. It was clear from that book that Nixey was someone who was very skilled at writing a certain polemically-inflected sort of popular history and, if she took some notable liberties with the historical evidence (cherry picking is a term that’s usually used to describe her work in that book), she did at least draw some much-needed popular attention to Christianity’s tendency to dispense with those elements of the pagan past that they didn’t find useful.

Now, Nixey has returned to the same period with Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God. Here, her focus is on the various other sects and figures that emerged in the first few centuries of the Common Era, as those who found themselves captivated by the nascent Christian faith and its various writings did battle with one another in an attempt to win converts and establish whose version of the faith would ultimately earn the honor of being declared orthodoxy. It’s a lively and fast read that, like its predecessor, draws important public attention to a key moment in the history of Christianity even if, also like The Darkening Age, it tends to be rather slight and reductive in its analysis.

Nixey’s helpfully situates early Christianity in all of its strangeness against the larger Greco-Roman world and, as she demonstrates, many of the thinkers of antiquity were quite perplexed about the nature of Christian doctrine and belief. Not only that; they were determined to demolish what intellectual credentials the Christians had attempted to build for themselves. The Greek philosopher Celsus, for example, frequently waxed eloquent on what he saw as the grievous shortcomings of this new faith springing up in the Roman Empire, as did the emperor Julian, the last pagan emperor to rule. It must be said, however, that Nixey is curiously reticent about paying attention to what Christians had to say about such attacks.

Nixey really hits her stride when it comes to discussing the various texts that, for one reason or another, didn’t make it into the Bible itself. Those of us raised in a Protestant tradition are, as Nixey assumes, probably largely unaware of some of the more bizarre iterations of Jesus that appear in such texts as The Infancy Gospel of Thomas. This Jesus is far from the figure that we meet in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and is, it has to be said, quite an unholy terror. Many of these books were, unfortunately, lost to subsequent generations, meaning that contemporary scholars often have to rely on their enemies for an indication of what they actually contained. As Nixey observes, they are both signifiers of roads not taken as well as illustrations of just how complex Christianity was in its early days (and remains, despite the eventual triumph of orthodox belief).

Moreover, Jesus wasn’t the only wandering philosopher performing miracles during the first couple centuries of the Common Era. One of his likely contemporaries was Apollonius of Tyana, who raised people from the dead and performed various miracles. And, like Jesus, he was ultimately put on trial, though rather than being executed he simply vanished. Though there are obviously some key differences between these two figures, the parallels between them are quite surprising, particularly if you have never heard of Apollonius of Tyana. By bringing such figures into the light, Nixey usefully demonstrates the extent to which Jesus, and the religion that sprang up around him, was very much a key part of its world rather than, as some Christian exceptionalists would argue, something entirely new. Indeed, it is perhaps because Christianity so adeptly tapped into the desires and yearnings of the first decades and centuries of our era that it became as successful as it did. There was clearly something in the air in the Mediterranean during this period of history that called for a faith promising some form of escape from the trials of the present reality.

Overall, I found Heretic to be a fun and lively read, if at times a bit frustrating. Nixey tends to mistake her premise for her conclusion, by which I mean she tends to go into an analysis of early Christianity expecting to find evidence of the powers-that-be destroying those texts so that the way can be cleared for orthodoxy. While it is certainly the case that many early Christian thinkers made an effort to distinguish the rightness of their point of view from that of those with whom they were contending, and while there were certainly official efforts to suppress such mistaken belief, there were always complications. Contrary to what Nixey–and popular historians writing in her style seem to think–history is rarely as clear-cut as we might like. Though Heretic isn’t nearly as didactic as The Darkening Age, it does sometimes become as preachy, and as determined to enforce its view of how things happened, as the very pedantic early Christians that it criticizes.

In terms of style…may just be me, but I’m not a huge fan of the tendency among many popular historians to lard their prose with bons mots and witticisms. These have their place, obviously, and I don't mean to be prissy about such things, but in books like Heretic they can become quite distracting and end up undercutting the seriousness of the argument that Nixey is trying to make. In that regard I was reminded more than a little of Tom Holland’s style, which similarly leans too much on cleverness instead of sound argumentation and scholarly rigor. Humor and clever remarks have their place, but they can quickly become cloying and distracting.

More concerningly, she claims early on in the book that it remains unusual for academics from different disciplines to engage with the New Testament and Early Christianity as matters of history rather than simply faith. Nixey frames this as a sort of gentlemen’s agreement between theology and classics, and I’m just not convinced that this is the case. In fact, I’m fairly certain that it is not and that it hasn’t been for quite some time. Indeed, there has long been a fruitful collaboration between these two fields of study, particularly in the last fifty years. To claim otherwise is to be deliberately misleading, and I can’t help but suspect that this was an effort on Nixey’s part, or perhaps her publisher’s, to make the case that this book is doing something new when, in fact, it is largely hoeing the same row that has been explored by such equally popular historians of religion as Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman (both of whom, for my money, are more rigorous than Nixey and just as accessible).

For all of that, Nixey deserves credit for drawing our attention to the fertile period of early Christianity, one in which it was far from clear what version of the faith would emerge as the dominant one. While her arguments are at times clumsy and while, as some have pointed out, the book can sometimes feel a bit slight, I think in the aggregate it’s a good thing if more people grapple with the complexities attendant on understanding early Christian history. Nixey might be a bit of a flawed vessel for bringing these issues to light but, at the very least, she is also a very entertaining one.

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Warning: Spoilers for the novel follow.

I’m a sucker for a good historical romance, and if it’s set in antiquity, then I’m going to dive right in and devour it. Thus, I was immediately drawn to Jenny Williamson’s debut romance, Enemy of My Dreams, which immerses readers in the world of Late Antiquity, when the Western Roman Empire hangs on by a thread and the Huns, led by Alaric, are led to bring pillage and rapine to what remains.

Having finished it, I’m of two minds. On the one hand, there’s no denying that it’s first-rate romance storytelling, with a feisty but flawed heroine and a muscle-head barbarian who are evenly matched. On the other hand, however, I have some deep misgivings about the way that Williamson tries to thread the needle between romance storytelling and historical authenticity, with the latter being repeatedly sacrificed in ways that raise more questions than they answer. So, because I was so sharply divided on my impressions, I’ve also split this review into two parts. The first will talk about how I think ultimately falls short as a work of historical fiction–which it is, for all that it tries to dodge this by invoking the narrative trappings of romance–and the second will focus on why it’s actually a very good and fun and sexy romance novel.

As a Historical Novel

Let me be clear: it’s not that I have an issue with a novelist taking some liberties with historical fact. That’s just a part of the historical novelist’s profession, and I’ve done it myself in my own work. What’s less defensible, though, is taking several notable Roman women and mashing them together, as Williamson seems to have done here. By her own admission she was inspired by three women: Julia the Elder (daughter of Augustus), Galla Placidia (daughter of Theodosius I), and Galla’s daughter Justa Grata Honoria (infamous for having supposedly offered her hand in marriage to Atilla, leading him to invade Italy to take up her offer).

To begin with, why combine the lives of three very different Roman women into one composite character, particularly when one of those, Julia, lived centuries before the others, in a very different historical and cultural milieu? This is especially frustrating given that each of them were very different types of Roman women who faced different pressures. Julia was the daughter of Rome’s first emperor and ended up exiled because of her bad behavior–which may have included an attempted coup–while Galla Placidia and Honoria lived during the last days of the Western Roman Empire. You can’t just flatten out roughly four centuries of history as if they don’t exist.

Alaric is just as troubling in his own way. One of the key aspects of the historical Alaric is that he was an Arian Christian, which marked him out as doubly othered in the eyes of the Nicenes, who tended to be the majority in Roman Italy. Likewise, it probably goes without saying, but Williamson plays fast and loose with all kinds of dates and happenings. This is of course not a problem if you’re not an expert on the period or just looking for a little bit of old-fashioned historical escapism, but it does make me wonder why one would choose to set a romance in a very specific time period and use very specific historical personages when you’re just going to jettison most of what we know about them and their milieu.

Lastly, I have to question this characterization of Honorius, which owes, I daresay, much more to Gladiator than it does to any historical documentation that we have. The historical Honorius was one of the weakest and most feckless of all of the unfortunate men who sat on the throne in the Roman West. (On a slightly related note, it’s worth pointing out that Ravenna only became the capital during Honorius’ reign, whereas this novel seems to suggest that it has been such for quite some time before the book begins). In the novel, however, he’s a capricious tyrant quite willing to throw Julia’s lover and conspirator into the arena to be torn apart by wolves and torture an attendant.

In many ways, this book reminded me of Solomon’s Crown, which likewise took some pretty significant liberties, both with the established facts of the relationship between King Richard I of England and King Philip of France. In both cases the novelist has taken some of the bare bones of history and given them a sort of fantastic spin. It’s appealing, in its own way, even if it’s also a little frustrating.

As a Romance Novel

Now, on to the more positive part of this review. As a romance, I unequivocally loved Enemy of My Dreams. Williamson has a keen eye for how to construct a romance plot, and the sex scenes are so scorchingly hot that I could swear the pages were going to combust in my fingers. There’s no doubt that there’s a bond between Julia and Alaric, and its fire is so intense that it could very well burn down their world even if, at times, it also threatens to destroy them both in the conflagration.

There’s also more than a little political plotting and scheming going on. Julia, as we learn, is not content to just be an accessory to her brother’s reign of a pawn in his hands. Nor, for that matter, is she willing to just be a hostage for Alaric to use against her brother and the Roman state. Instead, she wants to rule in her own right, and it’s here that we can see the way in which she is clearly meant to evoke Galla Placidia and her daughter, both of whom proved to be quite formidable women when it came to the game of politics (particularly the former).

Indeed, this is why I love Julia as a character. Yes, she manages to get into some pretty tight scrapes that lead to Alaric rescuing her, but she also has agency of her own. She schemes and learns to fight, and she even manages to kill a few men during the course of the novel. And, perhaps most notably, she manages to survive a surprising amount of time in a marble quarry, despite the fact that many of her fellow slaves end up succumbing to the terrible circumstances. This isn’t a woman who is going to ever be content to be helpmeet. She is going to be by Alaric’s side through thick and through thin and everything in-between, and we love her for it.

For his part, Alaric makes for the perfect kind of broody romantic hero that we love to swoon for. From the moment that he spots Julia in her brother’s court it’s clear he has the hots for her and will not rest until they are together. He is undoubtedly ruthless–as he shows repeatedly throughout the novel–but he also genuinely loves Julia and wants to both protect her and to be with her. There might be something a little bit old-fashioned about his form of masculinity and his approach to their love but, strangely enough, this is one of the aspects of the novel that, to me at least, felt the most historically authentic.

While Enemy of My Dreams does take some very profound liberties with history, it does at least capture a bit of the feeling of what it must have been like to live in Late Antiquity, when all of the world seemed on the verge of collapse. This is a world of cities fallen into ruin and aqueducts falling into dust, of barbarian invasions and bloodshed. It all makes for a very compelling and riveting backdrop to a historical romance like this one.

So, all in all, I would say that Enemy of My Dreams is a bit of a mixed bag for me. I loved it as a romance, but I was left cold by its numerous deviations from the historical record. At a certain point, if you’re willing to just throw all semblance of historical authenticity to the wind, why not just go whole-hog and make it into a fantasy? I’ve seen some of the marketing for this book say that it’s a bit of romantasy, but I’d say it’s more accurately a bit of alternate history. If you’re willing to take it that way, then I think you’re likely to enjoy it. If not, then you might want to look elsewhere.

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Warning: Spoilers for the novel follow.

If Henry VIII could be said to have had one courtier who loved him more than all others, it would have to be Cardinal Wolsey. Portrayed by such memorable actors as David Suchet (in the ITV drama Henry VIII), Sam Neill (in The Tudors), and Jonathan Pryce (in Wolf Hall), he was a true statesman and a remarkable example of someone who in no way let his humble origins stand in the way of his desire for power. Now, he at last gets a historical novel that tells of his life from childhood to death, and Alison Weir’s The Cardinal is a fitting testament to one of the most extraordinary figures of the Renaissance.

Weir makes no bones about the fact that Wolsey was a remarkably ambitious man, someone who yearned for the finer things and life and wasn’t shy about reaching out for them when the opportunity presented itself. One can hardly blame the man. Who among us wouldn’t have done as he did, if we were unfortunate enough to be born among the lower classes of Tudor England? Once it becomes clear that he has a sharp mind and is suited for a life in the church, he goes from success to success, rising through the ranks and becoming cozy with first Henry VII and then his son, Henry VIII (who we will refer to as Harry, as this is how the novel talks about him). Time and again we see that Tom Wolsey is the type of man who has his eye on the main chance, and we can’t help but cheer for him.

At the same time, he’s so much more than just a scheming social climber. Weir makes it clear time and again that Wolsey really does care about and loves Harry, for all that the latter is a monarch who is far more interested in himself than in anyone else, including the man who has made so many of his creature comforts possible in the first place. The higher Tom rises, the more aware he becomes that Harry is like the sun; when you fly too close to him, you run the risk of being burned, perhaps beyond repair. This, though, was the nature of life in the Tudor court, in which all blessings essentially flowed from the king.

And, of course, it’s all made that much worse by the fact that Wolsey is surrounded by people who resent him for his low-born origins, particularly Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. As would be true of Thomas Cromwell somewhat later, the members of the nobility could never bring themselves to forgive someone who had managed to break free of the tight bonds of the Tudor social hierarchy. The fact that he plays a key role in keeping Brandon from being accused of treason after he marries Harry’s sister Mary just gives him that much more reason to hate the Cardinal.

There’s no question that the most important emotional relationship in Wolsey’s life is that which he shares with his mistress, Joan. Even though he knows that pursuing a relationship with her entails breaking his vows, such is the powerful bond between them that he’s willing to put his soul at risk in order to be with her. One of the great heartbreaks of his life comes when Harry, never someone to give his nobility and clergy the benefit of the doubt when it came to issues of sexual morality–despite his many well-known and very public affairs with women not his wife–essentially forces him to give her up. For the rest of his life he will continue to pine after her and attempt to find a way to be with her, even though doing so ends up causing her more pain than pleasure. His relationship with Joan really helps to humanize him, and Weir wisely shows us how Wolsey, like so many of his, contains multitudes.

Ultimately, of course, Wolsey falls victim to Harry’s capriciousness and willingness to turn on those who don’t give him what he wants when he wants it. Once Harry sets his sights on dissolving his marriage to Katherine so that he can marry Anne Boleyn, Wolsey’s fate is also sealed, since he finds that it is not as easy to enact the king’s will as he might like. Adding to his difficulty is the fact that Anne refuses to let go of her enmity of him, which he earned when he undercut her efforts to marry Henry Percy. The fact that Harry gave his approval to Wolsey’s actions in the Percy affair matters little and, along with her father and uncle, the powerful and resentful Duke of Norfolk, she becomes one of Wolsey’s most implacable enemies.

The last part of the novel chronicles Wolsey’s calamitous fall from grace as Harry turns fully against his former favorite. Tom’s fate is a brilliant illustration of the vicissitudes of fate and fortune, for as much as fortune’s wheel could bring a person to such power and prestige, it could also bring them to ruin. Thanks to Weir, however, we are invited to see this is a very human tragedy rather than as an example of just desserts. It’s impossible not to feel sorry for Wolsey as his world falls apart around him and all of the power and privileges he’s accrued are slowly stripped away from him as his enemies gain more influence over Harry and the king, ever willing to punish those who fail him, talks out of both sides of his mouth.

Many of Weir’s biographical novels take us right up to the moment of their protagonist’s death, and The Cardinal is no exception. As the novel closes, Tom shuffles off of this mortal coil, and it’s really rather wrenching, depressing even, to know that all of his accomplishments have essentially been for naught. He’s left behind a reprobate son and a daughter who is sent to the cloister–as well as Joan and perhaps a few other children–but since he wasn’t able to acknowledge them, they aren’t truly part of his legacy. Even his college at Oxford would end up being taken over by Harry. It’s a rather dismal fate for someone who gave so much of himself for an ungrateful and selfish sovereign.

The Cardinal makes for an immersive read and, as she has shown time and again, Weir is truly an expert on the daily life of the Tudor era. She brings her formidable knowledge of the period, its costumes, and its people to bear as she shows us what daily life was like for those of the time. As she does in her biographies, she makes sure that we know more than we ever thought we needed to know about the material culture of the time which, while sometimes dryly delivered, nevertheless gives the reader an appreciation for just how much wealth Wolsey was able to accrue. Her prose is workmanlike rather than inspired. This is obviously not a criticism, but if you’re looking for something with the lyricism and evocativeness of Hilary Mantel or the luscious indulgence of Philippa Gregory, then you’re likely to be disappointed.

All in all, I would say that The Cardinal is a lovely addition to Weir’s voluminous output. She has repeatedly shown that she has the ability to be as compelling a fiction writer as she is as a popular historian. It’s also just fun to spend time with Wolsey, who I’ve always found to be as fascinating as Henry VIII himself. At last, he finally gets his due.

My thanks to NetGalley for an advance review copy of this book.