Gwendolyn Kiste

As someone who came of age in 1979/1980 when the industrial (and mining and agricultural) belt of the United States was bleeding out and dying at the hands of the big gods, this book hit me hard. I had a good cry at the end. The Rust Maidens were all of us who just couldn't leave. They were also those of us who got into our POS cars and drove away.

IN A NUTSHELL
'The Rust Maidens' is powered by rage. Rage at how young girls are treated. Rage at how the cycle of poverty and despair repeats itself. Rage at the lies people tell themselves in an effort not to be overwhelmed by helplessness. The story is an amalgam of gritty realism and metaphor-made-flesh. The prose is mesmerising. The emotions are raw. Told in two timelines by a woman in her middle age looking back on her teens, it reads not so much as a thriller but as an apology or a show more penance for things done or not done, that cannot be changed.

When I read the description of 'The Rust Maidens' and saw that it had won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel (2018), I assumed that the horror at the heart of this book would at the transformation of teenage girls into monsters made of flesh and bone and rusted steel and broken glass but it's not. The horror comes from seeing the cycle of recession and loss and anger and helplessness that created the Rust Belt failed these girls, and destroyed the communities they were raised in and in knowing that the cycle will repeat and that working people are unable to stop it..

This is a very accessible book. The suburbs of Cleveland, both in the 1980s and today, are vividly drawn and easy to relate to. It's a very personal story, told by Pheobe Shaw who has returned, for the first time in decades to her childhood home, days before it and the rest of the neighbourhood she grew up in are scheduled for demolition. It's told in two timelines, Pheobe's present-day return to the wreckage of a life she's been trying to forget and her memories of 1980, the summer of the Rust Maidens, and the guilt she still feels about what she did and what she didn't do.

Although most of the narrative is firmly based in a gritty realism, the Rust Maidens push the envelope of the story and the reader's imagination. They are both a horrifying reality and a metsphor made of flesh and steel. To me, it felt like they were there to force me not to settle too easily into a story of poverty caused by the cycles of capitalism but to be sensitive to the grief and loss and helplessness of the people trapped by those cycles. They are the product of taken-for-granted misogyny, communal pressures to conform and pretend that nothing is wrong and the normalisation of the girls having no choice over what happens to them.

I often struggle with novels that combine realism with metaphor.Hrre it was so well done that I accepted the metaphor as an expression of reality, a distillation of the truth of the experience.

Gwendolyn Kiste's writing is deeply compelling. She tells the story with barbed-wire sentences, bloodied with mundane but bitter truths, that lacerated my emotions as I read. Her prose mesmerised me, holding my imagination still while I waited for the narrative to strike.

I loved how the rage beneath the skin of the story pushed to the surface from time to time, like the glass and metal pushing through the Rust Maidens' flesh. It's a rage at the unfairness of life, at the girls' lack of choice and at the abundance of blame. The Rust Maidens are the product of this rage. They embody its pain and perhaps offer the only possible escape route. I think that what the Rust Maidens ultimately show Pheobe, after years of guilt and grief, is that hope may not take the shape you expect. show less

Bleakly stunning elegy to the rust belt, and very effective in that aspect. It's not perfect, and in particular I found the use of the main character/narrator as both a foil to the Town and a plural voice for the Town frustrating. She's representing too much to ring true, and it gives her a self-indulgent wishy-washy childishness that's a little annoying. Still, overall I'm very taken by the idea and imagery.

Reluctant Immortals‘ was my second book by Gwendolyn Kiste. It was just as strange and just as compelling as ‘The Rust Maidens‘ (2019). Like ‘The Rust Maidens’, this book was powered by rage at how men treat women, but this time that rage was shaped and focused through the strength of friendship and mutual support between two women who had (almost) freed themselves from abusive men.

The premise threw me a little at first: Lucy Westenra from ‘Dracula‘ and Bertha Mason, the wife show more in the attic from 'Jane Eyre‘, immortal and living together in Los Angeles in 1967. They are still living in the shadow of the men they've tried to free themselves from. Lucy is guarding the urns holding Dracula’s ashes. Keeping them intact and separated is the only way to prevent Dracula's return. Bertha is still hiding from Rochester, who has never stopped hunting her. Somehow (and the explanation is original and a bit of a stretch), Rochester and Bertha are as immortal as Lucy and Dracula. Lucy feels her vampirism as a curse that she has to control every day and which brings rot and decay to any place she spends time in. Thanks to her years locked in an attic, Bertha cannot bear to be in a confined space. The pair of them seek solace by escaping into the movies showing at one of the last remaining Drive-in movie lots. It's not just Lucy and Dracula who are immortal,

I learned all this in the first quarter of the book. I was still struggling to swallow it all when Jane Eyre, who is also immortal and somehow bound to Bertha, turned up. That felt like too much to take in. I almost stopped reading.

Instead, I took a deep breath, reminded myself that this was speculative fiction and that I should cut it some slack.

I'm glad I did because, once I relaxed and accepted the story on its own terms, it became a compelling tale that I had to learn the end of. The pace of the story picked up as Lucy and Bertha's life in L.A. turned to ash and they headed to San Francisco during the ‘Summer Of Love’ to find Jane, who seemed to have gone back to Rochester.

I loved the unromantic but non-judgmental depiction of hippies. The dirt, the desperation and the self-delusion of the lifestyle were clearly shown, but so was the hope that drove these lost young people to search for something better than the fractured lives they'd lived.

The anarchic, a-summer-outside-of-time atmosphere of San Francisco provided the perfect setting for Lucy and Bertha to confront the malignant masculinity and insatiable hunger of Dracula and Rochester. I was glad that this wasn't a Marvel Universe Good Guys versus Bad Guys kind of confrontation, but rather an opportunity for Lucy and Bertha to stand their ground.

Lucy was the driving force of the book. I loved how she saw the world and the courage and discipline she showed in shaping her own life and refusing to be ruled by the expectations and constraints powerful men tried to impose on her.

I hope that, sometime soon, one of the new wave of women directors in Hollywood picks this novel up and turns it into an extraordinary film. show less