A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Darby, a transmasc guy from a small town in Illinois, has been living in NYC for ten years, since he turned eighteen. He's acquired queer/trans friend group, but just got fired and is about to lose his apartment. He decides to temporarily move back in with his mom in Illinois. But things have changed in his town. Michael, his old bestie/crush, who he had a terrible breakup with ten years ago, has come out as gay. And the old bookstore Darby used to work at is still there... and his pre-transition teenage self is still working there.

Isn't that a great premise? The central conceit of meeting your own younger self when you return to the town you grew up in is such a perfect metaphor, made even more powerful by the split between pre- and post-transition.

Unfortunately, most of the book is not actually about that. It's mostly about Darby just kind of hanging around and feeling repetitively guilty about having been totally out of touch with his extremely supportive mom, and crushing on Michael while they both either fail to or refuse to actually communicate about either their present feelings or what went down between them as teenagers. (Darby literally can't even remember what their fight was about, but when he tells Michael this, Michael gets mad and stomps off without telling him.) When Darby finally does actually talk to his teenage self, he's mostly interested in trying to stop his teenage self from getting in that fight with teenage Michael.

This would be kind of okay if the book was a romance, where things are centered around the romantic relationship, but it isn't. It's a coming of age story, but it's only in the last two chapters that any actual character growth happens. Up until that point, Darby is kind of maddening. He's 28 but acts at least eight years younger. That's the point - he's a case of arrested development - but it was so annoying to read. It doesn't help that Michael acts way more mature than Darby except when it's necessary to keep them from communicating about anything important, and then he just refuses to talk like an adult.

I found this book frustrating. The author is obviously talented but the book needed at least another draft. Also, the bookstore itself isn't important, it's just the place where young Darby works.

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I feel like I'm saying this a lot recently, but this book would have been so much better if the entire book had been about the supposed premise which in fact only got about 10% of the total page time.

ANOTHER bait-and-switch! Though this time, not the author's fault. My edition has this on the back cover:

Winter gripped the city. Terror gripped it, too. In a city paralyzed by a blizzard, something watches, something stalks.

There's plenty of watching and stalking, but I would not have even registered that it was snowing if the back cover hadn't told me; the only times the weather comes into play is when there's spooky cold drafts. I was expecting winter survival horror, and that is not an element.

It is, in fact, a mostly terrible horror novel about voodoo. (Almost all horror novels about voodoo are mostly or entirely terrible). If I'd known there was voodoo, I would not have picked this up.

(Spelling used to indicate the trashy horror use, not the actual religion.)

Members of the Mafia are found bitten to death in locked rooms; two cops investigate and find a trail leading to a bocor with a grudge. There's a houngan who helps the cops. You can tell Koontz is vaguely gesturing in the direction of sensitivity but it doesn't really help. I skimmed rather than DNF'd, which meant that I got to the ending where the hero hurls holy water into a pit, then closes it with his own blood which is holy because he's a good guy, yes really.

The best part is the first chapter, in which the hero's daughter hears a creepy noise in her bedroom at night. I kept reading way past when I should have given up on the strength of that first chapter. I'm not saying it's well-written, or even good, really. But it's got that grabby, compelling quality that makes you read on.

That first chapter shows the power of two techniques: having something that's scary but unknown and unseen (once we see the voodoo critters, they're no longer scary), and moment-to-moment writing. The latter is something used a lot in horror and also in romance - two genres which depend largely on evoking emotion. You follow the character in real time, getting every moment, every detail, every thought, every feeling. It's extremely granular. You might spend a paragraph describing them reaching for a light switch: every fumble, every texture, every worry that it won't turn on.

This can be done badly, but it's incredibly effective when done well. You can wring more suspense out of someone trying to reach a glass of water with their hands tied than from fifty giant explosions. Dick Francis and Stephen King are masters of this technique. And this one chapter in a pretty crummy book, in which a girl hears rustling noises and pokes at them with a plastic baseball bat, is an example of how effective it can be even when it's nowhere near that level.

If you want to take a look, here's the link to the Kindle edition which has a Look Inside: Darkfall: A remorselessly terrifying and powerful thriller

Literally every single one of you who took the Lesbihens poll was wrong about what this book was about. And so was I, and I DID read the blurb before making this regrettable purchase.



Despite the title and cover, The Lesbihens has nothing to do with chickens. It is not about lesbian chicken shifters, lesbian chicken farmers, lesbian chickens, human lesbians with pet chickens, or lesbian chickens with pet humans. It does not even involve chicken metaphors.

The Lesbihens, inexplicably, is about the romance between a lesbian yoga teacher and a lesbian lighting designer. That's it, that's the book.

The blurb is highly misleading given the context of the cover and title:

When she moved to the city from the great rolling farmlands, Natasha never dared to bring hopes of romance along with her.

But everything changes when Peach, a gorgeous woman full of confidence and sunshine struts into her life and builds her nest right next to her, and Natasha knows that she has found something truly extraordinary.

I misread this as Natasha moving from the city to the great rolling farmlands. It's actually the other way around. I GUESS, as her coming from the farmlands is never mentioned at all in the first half of the book and if it comes up later (I started skimming) I blinked and missed it.

Also, the girlfriend's name is not Peach. Her name is Sawyer Martinez. Her nickname is not Peach. She is never called Peach. I did a search of the book to check this.

Not only is this book an amazing example of wildly misleading marketing, it's also an example of the power of word usage in making characters seem appealing or not. Sawyer whines, squeals, shrieks, screeches, screech-laughs, yell-laughs, and generally makes the kinds of sounds that make her exhausting just to read about. She's also an annoying hipster generally, but the words used to describe her really don't help.

Too much screeching girlfriend, not enough peeping poultry.