I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect from this collection: Modern horror? Literary criticism? Traditional tales of terror? It intrigued me regardless.

What Unquiet Spirits delivers is a combination of all of the above. It is memoir, criticism, history, and ethnography in balanced fusion. Each chapter is written by an Asian female author and in it she discusses both her own writing, the cultural and historical inspiration for her characters, the origins of some feminine demon, ghost, or creepy — a unquiet spirit — which haunts her and the pages she has produced. In some chapters the author draws on a deeper well of literature of the past and ponders the future of the female spirit archetype that is the focus of their chapter.

The books is divided by and devotes its pages equally to feminine spirits across the Asian continent, from East to Southeast to South Asia. I was pleasantly surprised to see such attention given to Southeast Asian spirits and archetypes (my favorite was always the pontianak, the evil spirit of a woman who lurks in the dark under the protection of a banana tree. In my recollection, she can be “pinned” to the tree with a needle or a pin and made to do the pin-holder’s bidding. But, beware to that horrid individual if the offending metal is ever removed!)

While the collection examines different demons and feminine archetypes from across a swath of very diverse cultures, it ultimately makes a singular, united appeal to the reader. Their call to action is unmistakable: Asian women, as a whole, alive or dead, demonic or angelic, monstrous or victimized, are powerful beings. Asian women have been too long overlooked in the literary world and deserve more than the whispered, submissive voice they have been too long assigned by Orientalists; hear them shout, scream, screech!

For that reason alone, Unquiet Spirits is worth reading. But there is more.

The authors reveal facets of the Asian feminine that have rarely been visible, that is to Western audiences. To Asian women, we have always known they were there, even when our patriarchal societies told us to ignore them, to castigate them, to revile these demonic women as ill-influences on ourselves and our communities, yet still, Unquiet Spirits is sure to deliver novelties and new knowledge to Asian/Asian American readers.

Gaskill’s The Ruin of All Witches straddles the worlds of scholarship and fiction, the latter built on the solid foundations of the former. In doing so, this book takes the best of both literary domains to produce a richly detailed landscape of Puritan culture and society in England’s Old and New World. It centers on a Puritan couple, John and Mary, accused and tried for witchcraft in Thomas Pynchon’s New England. It starts long before their relationship begins and carries the reader through to its agonizing disintegration. Along the way, readers are engaged in the lives of a full cast of village denizens; this is a wonderfully immersive read.

Not merely backdrop to the main events, but integral for the reader’s understanding of the whys, whens, and hows of the witch hunts that followed, are the economic and political developments of Pynchon’s New England in the New World and the maneuverings of Royalists and Cromwellian supporters (rebels) in the Old. Gaskill delivers all the necessary context for the reader, leaving them with an almost palpable texture of English life in the 17th century (really, one can’t call this “American” in any sense of the word, though the New World does eventually become that.)

Readers should be prepared for a long read; detail like this does not come short, but the delivery is concise and succinct, leaving off unnecessary descriptions and fictions that do not add to the narrative. The descriptions that remain convey an authenticity, evidence of Gaskill’s skill of drawing out richness from (what is often, dry,) archival text. We can not only envision John and Mary, young and hopeful at the beginning, withered and waning at the end, but the humanity of their shortcomings are recognizable so as to make them and their community as near to us as our own flesh.

History, that remote and abstract object, comes alive in The Ruin of All Witches.

Oh, this was such a fun book to read! This novel plays out like a film. It’s got the panache of Ocean’s Eleven, the humor of Mr and Mrs Smith, and oozes a middle-aged version of the familiar camaraderie of The Golden Girls. It’s perfect.

The story traces the lives of a clannish posse of retirement-aged Charlie’s Angels, assassins who work for a clandestine international organization intended to keep the world’s evil at bay through extralegal and morally questionable means (murder). These women have devoted their lives – professional and personal – to this cause and vocation. They’re ready to throw in the proverbial towel, trade in the excitement and the deception for some much deserved rest and relaxation when they realize they’re the targets of assassination themselves.

Now they’ve got to figure out who, why, and what the hell.

And that’s the rest of the novel. It’s humorous and mysterious. It’s stylish and spy-savvy. It’s Jane Bond, darling. This reader was driven by the desire to find out who had set them up and why. There was no doubt they’d succeed, but the thrill was in reading how these feminine Chuck Norrises were going to get it done.

Like a film, this novel moves swiftly, propelled by witty prose and cutting dialogue between its the sharp-edged characters. The women in this story are nuanced, fleshy, sinful and deliciously flawed, but the reader should not necessarily expect depth; simply put, this novel isn’t about depth as much as it is a much needed op-ed on the awful way in which women are made invisible on account of their age in our patriarchal society. The onset of menopause — no, even just the briefest mention of hot flashes –and women middle-aged (and older) are suddenly recast in a dimmer light. Where once they were all-powerful Women, they suddenly are under-estimated, dismissed, erased. This novel does not seek to redress the issue, but does highlight it. As I said, an excellent comment on what is an on-going problem in our youth obsessed society. It weaves in a feminist commentary in parts, but this is not a serious work of feminist disruption.

This is a fun, entertaining read. And one I recommend.

This title lit up the 8-year old in me when I saw it. I remember loving those DK trivia books and collections of mysterious events. I am still a sucker for a book on sasquatches or sea monsters. The Hardwick’s collection did not disappoint. Each chapter recounts the tale and history of a vessel lost at sea, a spate of sea monster attacks, ghostly ships, and the like. The chapters are short, succinct, and leave the reader wanting to know more — and isn’t that the purpose of a mystery?

The prose is a bit dated — the Hardwicks wrote the original back in the 1967 — but there is nothing wrong with this. Indeed, that kind of syntax adds a little historicity to the collection. There is something familiar about it and nostalgic in a way. But maybe that’s just me remembering my childhood and the long, lovely hours I spent reading books like these that let my imagination fly wild.

This memoir was a bit out of character for me; but, I’ve been reading quite a few memoirs this year and this one caused me to pause. Is it too soon to read about Covid-19? We’re not quite past it yet, are we? Given that Covid-19 remains looming in so many places and may very well make a comeback, I figured it might help my own healing to read about someone else’s pandemic experience. Admittedly, mine was mild, privileged, and uneventful in comparison to so many millions of others on this planet. What did others feel? How did others live through this? We talked amongst each other, but too often we said a lot of nothing to avoid the anxiety that a deeper, more nuanced conversation could too easily trigger.

From a historian’s perspective, memoirs like this — indeed, the millions of posts, tweets, blog posts, articles, stuff — that we produced in the past few years say something poignant about this strange and traumatic moment in our individual and collective lives. What was this moment in our history? Memoirs give us entrée into others’ internal lives, see how others experienced this.

Consky’s account of the past couple of years, encompassing the dying and death of his father and others, delivered on both points. What was living and dying in the pandemic like?

But readers should not expect a litany of statistics or a step-by-step replay of WHO’s or the American CDC’s decisions and policies. This is a memoir, a deeply personal and individualized account of a global experience. Death is always subjective, always individual, always very personal. Readers should not expect this book to discuss everyone’s experience of Covid-19. The deaths in this book are not coronavirus related deaths necessarily; this book is about the non-pandemic deaths that occurred during the past two years. Ordinary life and ordinary death did not pause for the pandemic. Pandemic deaths eclipsed the distress of other kinds of deaths, but only insofar as their appearance in the news, social media, public forums. The trauma of those passings remained, but was invisible in contrast.

That said, this book is about life too. It is about resilience and the ways in which we communicate those important things in life that need to be said and done before death makes it impossible to do so. This memoir is about memory, not only Consky’s but those of his father’s and the surviving friends and family of those who lost loved ones — during the pandemic and at other times too. Life and death during the pandemic of 2020-2022 was unique in our lifetimes, but also… not. Life and death was also familiar… too familiar? Scarily familiar. Comfortingly familiar. I cannot decide. Neither can Consky, I think.

This book is also about memorializing and the ways in which we do this, for ourselves and for the dead. One act struck me in particular: when a group of friends gathered their memories of another among them who had passed away and gave the resultant artifact to the deceased’s family. This book is about how we can commune over death, that common event, that inevitable process that erases (or should) differences and animosities among us.

The end of life care Consky refers to? I think he means us, the surviving family members and friends of the ones who have passed away. For that reason, the book transcends the pandemic. The pandemic is (was?) a great thing, a momentous thing, but life and death will go on with or without it.

T’zee is an action-packed, noir blockbuster in a graphic novel. It has all the makings of a Hollywood or Nollywood film: Post-colonial angst, corruption, family drama, illicit romance, sabotage, political violence. T’zee lacks actual history – it is all fiction — but its premise is grounded in real events of the twentieth century.

The story starts and ends with T’zee, the amoral dictator of an unnamed African nation struggling through its traumatic post-colonial afterbirth, but revolves around his young wife and youngest son, who each are coming to terms living with their larger-than-life husband and father and the roles they are supposed to play in this political drama. The former is a member of the new elite — but the limitations of gender and patriarchy force her into positions she might later regret. The latter is also a member of the new elite, the intellectual elite. During the typical educational sojourn young men of his class make in this era, T’zee’s son finds himself torn between his family and his morals. Politics, power, and ambition rule over both of them, force the wife and the son into decisions that are less of their own making than orders carried out under duress.

In three acts the reader witnesses the ebbs and flows of T’zee’s power, how his family fares in the pressure house of his politics, and the swiftness by which all their fates can change course.

This is an entertaining read. However, elements of its narrative promote a colonial logic which need to be addressed. T’zee is portrayed as a cruel and inept leader, one focused solely on his own aggrandizement and accumulation of wealth, at the expense of his people. His wife too is a woman focused solely on her own selfish advancement and fulfillment. The son is feckless and weak. Scenes of the city and the rural areas of this nation are memes of poverty and crime too often associated with the so-called “developing” or “under-developed” world, what has been classed so disparagingly as the “third world.”

I balk at depictions of African nations as cesspits of corruption, poverty, and crime. The implication that African peoples cannot rule themselves is one grounded so obviously in the so-called Civilizing Mission, that lynchpin of colonial logic; this is wholly inaccurate and stereotyping. I wish that elements of the story had addressed T’zee and his regime with more nuance; I wanted more decolonization in these pages. I cannot help but read as a historian, especially on a subject so close to my heart.

Still, this was a fun read and one I would suggest for casual consumption.

A departure from the more serious novels I’ve been reading lately, and perfect — if a little late — for the Spooky season. Still, if you are a horror fan, any time is a good time for a paranormal mystery, which is exactly what Sign Here is, with a generous injection of humor.

Sign Here is a combination of the television show, “The Good Place” and one of Simone St. James’s paranormal mysteries, the kind which unravels to reveal a multi-generational history. It’s laugh-out-loud funny and also deadly serious at the same time. I couldn’t have asked for a better post-Halloween read than this. It gripped me to very end.

The novel is set in two dimensions: Hell and Earth. The former is a bureaucrat’s heaven, a place where the radio station is constantly on commercial break and the music is every genre you can’t abide. There’s fun to be had in Hell, but no peace, utterly no reprieve from annoyance. Ever. One of the main protagonists of the novel is a demon who long lost his humanity and now deceives or manipulates souls in order to collect them for his hellish quota. His goal is to complete a “full set” of a family, one soul from each generation. And to find some measure of peace in the afterlife. The two objectives are not exclusive.

The family he has targeted is a wealthy and dysfunctional one, a collection of questionable traits has passed down from one generation to the next. They have a long history with this demon, a transactional history of quid pro quo. There is also trauma, murder, abuse, and just downright immorality in the family’s past; one might say, the stuff that Hell is made of. But they are lovable too. Their flawed histories and personalities make them all the more human, all the more recognizable, for all their privilege and wealth. The reader will get the impression there is something not quite right about them though, and as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that several of them have something to hide — even from the demon himself.

The novel is set at the start of the annual family vacation, a dreaded and welcome event. There’s a newcomer to the lake house with them: the new best friend of the daughter. She’s bright and curious — and may just force the family’s dark secrets into the light.

The two storylines intertwine: Will our demon be able to exploit the family to meet his quota? Will he ever escape his Hell? Will the family be able to keep their horrors safely hidden in the past? Someone’s soul is at stake. Will it be the father? The mother? One of the kids?

Sign Here ends explosively and satisfyingly. Everyone gets what they deserve.