Will Ludwigsen – Francis Bass

Alright before I get to the main event, I first have an announcement: I have a new zine out! “Map of the Lost City of Uatdan Wuchke” is an interactive fantasy story in which you, the reader, must draw the map. The zine includes a fold-out drawing surface for readers to use while they read. You can order it online on etsy, and I’ve also just added some bike goblin stickers to my etsy shop, if you’re interested in those.

Now, on to the spooky stuff! Every October I like to read a few horror books, and then review them all together in one post. You can see my previous spooktober posts here. This year I read:

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr — I always expect multi-author short story collections to be a mixed bag, with some decent stories, some great ones, and some duds. But this book’s got no duds! The worst stories were just decent, and the best had me wanting to read more by their authors. The pieces encompass a great breadth of styles and genres, from blood-and-guts horror to lyrical ghost stories to gritty crime. It was also really fascinating to see so many takes on storytelling, with several of the pieces containing stories within stories. Here were some of my favorites:

“Hunger” by Phoenix Boudreau—a beautifully lyrical wendigo story which, three quarters of the way through, switches perspectives to become a kind of monster-of-the-week episode. Both parts well executed.
“Scariest. Story. Ever.” by Richard Van Camp—Much like Tenacious D’s “Tribute”, this is not the scariest story ever, but a story about the scariest story ever. The narrator wants to win a scary story contest, so goes to a storyteller to ask him for the scariest story he’s ever heard. The storyteller agrees to pass the story on, but starts by explaining how he came to hear the scariest story ever … wonderfully absorbing, layered, and sticks the landing. This one’s my favorite of the whole collection.
“Collections” by Amber Blaeser-Wardzala—a Native American English major goes to her lit professor’s party so she can schmooze a letter of recommendation out of her, and finds that the professor’s house is decorated with human heads. Real heads. No one else seems concerned. Collections.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s into horror or dark fiction—with any luck, you may find a new favorite author in there.

March by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell – March is a trilogy of graphic novels co-written by Congressman John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, and illustrated by Nate Powell, detailing Lewis’s involvement in the African-American civil rights movement, up to the passing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Powell’s art is gorgeous and expressive. It captures the weight of small interpersonal moments as well as enormous, historical turning points. To borrow a word from Martin Luther King, it dramatizes the movement in a way that is visceral and inspiring.

For the most part, the books do a good job of interweaving narrative and history—partly because John Lewis’s personal narrative is so wrapped up in the historical events of that time. The mixing of scene and summary is effective, not bogging the reader down in prose, nor abandoning the reader without any through-line to grasp onto. Book two may be the weak link of the trilogy, with long sections of historical events in which Lewis didn’t personally play any part. These passages feel a bit dry and distant, without the narrative thrust or intriguing insights that Lewis offers in the other sections. However, I only really noticed this in book two, because the fact is, John Lewis truly was involved in so many important events at the time.

And that’s what’s terrific about these books—they aren’t just a third-person, documentarian presentation of history—they’re the story of a man who was at the heart of the movement, and who ended up straddling the lines of multiple factions within it. What I found most fascinating was not just the external conflict against people like Alabama Governor George Wallace or Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark, but the internal conflict of the civil rights movement. Lewis was one of the earliest members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and over the course of the books, we see it change, growing much larger, becoming more impatient, and we see Lewis pushed further and further out of it. There’s also the internal conflict of the Democratic and Republican parties, as they struggle to reconstruct their agendas around the civil rights movement, and make massive shifts toward becoming the parties we see today.Read More »