Kali Wallace

The two genres of fiction that I love most are science fiction and mystery. So when you have a book that combines both, especially when the mystery is like a space version of all those classic English manor house mysteries, you know it is going to appeal to me.

In a far distant future mankind has expanded into the universe but the main driver for the conquest of space is corporate greed. Hester Marley thought she had escaped the corporate world to work on a project to explore Titan with a show more group of like-minded scientists. Hester's contribution was as an artificial intelligence (AI) expert. She trained an AI which would land on Titan and independently explore the moon, reporting back to the project. On the way to Titan a group of terrorists exploded the ship. Hester and a few others survived the explosion thanks to a ship sent by the corporation Parthenope. Hester was badly injured and required extensive surgery which she now has to repay to Parthenope. To do this she is working as a security expert on Hygeia, a Parthenope space construct. Unexpectedly she hears from one of the other survivors, David Prussenko. He's been working on an asteroid that is being mined by Parthenope using his robotics skills to maintain the artificial mind that basically runs everything on the asteroid. Just after she receives this communication from David she learns that he has been murdered. Since a security team from Hygeia is going to investigate the murder she asks to be assigned. The other members of the team are her supervisor, a forensics specialist (with whom Hester had a relationship when she first got to Hygeia) and a lawyer. There were only 12 humans on the asteroid when David was killed so the pool of suspects is fairly small. Surely with security camera footage and forensic evidence the team can find the guilty party and wrap up the investigation fairly quickly. Except, there is no security camera footage for an hour surrounding the time of David's death, nor any other recording. The team has a fairly difficult task ahead of them. Then the bodies start to pile up!

Several times I thought I had figured out what was going on only to be surprised by another revelation. I was very impressed with Wallace's plotting and Hester is a very interesting character. Wonder if there will be more Hester Marley investigations? show less

I started Shallow Graves hoping for something original and dark but ready to be disappointed because I’m decades away from the target audience for YA novels. Kali Wallace exceeded my hopes and gave me a book that was original, thoughtful, beautifully written and where the darkness was laced with the possibility of a kind of happiness.

The first thing that struck me about Shallow Graves was the strength of the writing. I'm going to go through the first few paragraphs to show you what I mean. show more

The opening line is a classic:

"The first time I killed a man it was an accident."

That grabbed my attention both because it made me wonder how you kill a man by accident and because it sounded like there was a next time and that the next time wasn't accidental.

Then I learned about the man she killed:

"He didn't have any identification on him. He was white, probably in his mid-fifties. Average build, average height. Smoker. No tattoos or distinguishing scars. His fingerprints matched those found at a thirty-year-old crime scene in North Dakota; a family murder, both parents, son and two daughters, all killed one night at the dinner table. No one was ever arrested."

I loved the disappassionate way the man's true nature was revealed. He's the first monster in a book full of monsters. His low-key introduction was the first indication that, once your eyes are opened to them, you'll find monsters everywhere.

By the end of the next three paragraphs, I was hooked.

The first describes how the dead man was found:

"A real estate agent with the unfortunate name of Poppy Treasure found him three days after I killed him. She opened the back door of an empty house to air it out before her clients arrived and there he was, facedown, on the lawn, dead. The police released a description and pleaded for information, but nobody came forward. Nobody admitted to seeing him. They didn't even know how he had gotten to Evanston, much less how or why he had ended up dead in the yard of a foreclosed house in the Backlot. There wasn't a mark on him. The Medical Examiner blamed the death on a heart attack but the "unusual circumstances" of where he was found made them suspicious."

I admired the way this paragraphbuilds the tension and the weirdness factor while starting to establish an intimacy between the reader on the narrator, That "There wasn't a mark on him" showed me that this was no simple accidental killing and the "unusual circumstances" told me that I didn't have all the facts yet, while making me keen to learn them. The remark about the real estate agent's name adds a dash of personality and humour that made me want to like the narrator rather than think of them as a killer.

The next paragraph increased my empathy and again pushed up the weirdness.

"They meant my grave. There was a hole in the backyard of that empty house, about five feet long and eighteen inches deep. and in that hole they found hair, blood, fibres. Everything I left behind was too degraded for identification purposes. That's what you become when you die but you don't manage to do it properly: too degraded."

I love how that paragraph confirms that the narrator is dead, which is strange enough, and also suggests that they feel some blame for not dying "properly" and ending up in a "degraded" state.

The next paragraph established the relationship I, the reader, was going to have with the narrator and made me keen to learn more:

"This is how I killed him."

This sentence told me that I would be Breezy's confessor/confidant and that she was telling me her story so that she could understand it better.

I admired Kali Wallace's ability to write intriguing, thoughtful prose that was convincingly the voice of a seventeen-year-old girl. It was the quality of that voice that kept Breezy Lin's humanity at the heart of the story.

One of the things that makes Shallow Graves work so well is that Breezy's main challenge is to work out not just what she has become but who she is going to be. When she rises from her grave, a year after her death, she makes her first kill on instinct. She doesn't understand how or why she does what she does. She doesn't know what she's become.

The traditional horror route would have been to cast Breezy as a revenant version of an Onryō, rising from her grave driven by a hunger for vengeance against men who murder women. Breezy has the power to do this. She can feel the urge to use that power growing inside her. What made Shallow Graves powerful for me was that Breezy resists this urge, not because it's wrong but because she's mourning the life that her murderer ripped away from her. She knows she can't go back to her family but she aches to be with them. She knows that her long-held dream of being an astronaut, which she's trained for her whole life, is now out of her reach. She knows she can't be the woman she would have become and the loss devastates her.

Her first thought is to seek a cure for what happened to her so she can find a way back to being the girl her murderer destroyed. This leads her on a journey to find people who are or who understand the supernatural. She falls into the clutches of a cult that promises to cure her. She finds allies in unlikely places. She goes through an ordeal finally to meet with a supernatural being who can tell her what she is and how she can be cured.

Some of this journey worked well, especially the early contact with the cult but I felt that the plot meandered a little too much in the middle section of the book. I loved the ending and the choices that Breezy made.

Shallow Graves isn't horrifying in the slasher/gorefest kind of way. Its horror comes from understanding how much destruction men cause when they kill women and girls and how often they do it and that so many of them get away with it. For me, Breezy's sense of loss, even after she rises from her grave into a second life, had the biggest emotional impact. show less

This book was an exciting, engrossing space murder mystery, like an updated version of a sci-fi classic by Isaac Asimov or Frederik Pohl. Sadly the thing that required no updates was the concept of dangerous and not-exactly-voluntary indentured space servitude to unscrupulous interglobal corporations—just as relevant a social and cultural commentary today as it was when Pohl put his characters through it in 1977! A depressing thought, but fantastic, plausible future world building and a show more truly twisty mystery. show less

Horror With a Heart

(Full disclosure: I received a free electronic copy of this book for review through Edelweiss. Trigger warning for violence, including rape culture.)

Mom and Dad would be so disappointed. They had always told us there was no such thing as ghosts.

###

There's something Karen Garrow once said about the fate of the universe. It was on one of her television shows, an episode I watched a dozen times on the basement TV. All of us, she said, all of us and all of everything that had show more ever existed and ever would exist, it was all made up of matter that formed in the very first moments of the universe, and it would all last until the very end. The atoms would decay, the particles would break apart, everything would disintegrate and shatter until it was unrecognizable - too degraded - but that would take so many billions and billions of years we didn't even have words for time scales that large. Everything had come from the same hot explosion and everything would end in the same empty darkness. It had nothing to do with what we believed or what we wanted or how desperately we needed to reassure ourselves that the brief moment in which we lived meant anything at all. None of it would matter in the end.

And Karen smiled her playful smile, and she said, "But it isn't the end yet. It matters now, everything we have, for as long as we can hold onto it."

###

I was so fucking tired of men deciding whether or not I got to go on existing for another day.

###

One minute, seventeen-year-old Breezy Lin is at a high school party; the next, she wakes up in a shallow grave, in a vacant house just a few blocks from her house, a creepy man haunted by a creepier shadow eagerly digging her free. She reaches for him, pulls...and something in him snaps. The coroner's report will list the cause of death as a heart attack, but Breezy killed him. Just like he killed that family of four, gathered around a dinner table, so many years ago.

A year has passed since her death, and during this time Breezy has morphed into something unnatural. Raised by magic - and the deaths of thousands of birds, every single one within a two-mile radius of her grave - Breezy is a revenant. An animated corpse, resurrected from death to hunt the living. Breezy can spot killers, who wear their guilt like a cloak; their sin calls to hear, awakens her hunger, and after she eats, she will carry their ghoulish memories with her, always. Unable to go home, Breezy starts hitchhiking across the country, seeking vengeance for other murdered souls.

But not for her. Never for her, because Breezy has no memories of her death. Her murder remains a mystery.

Shallow Graves starts out a lot like The Girl From the Well, with Breezy as a younger, Americanized version of the three-hundred-year old yuurei Okiku (who I absolutely adored). But Breezy only gets two bodies under her belt before she's kidnapped by a evangelical cult that hunts monsters. Well, "hunts" isn't exactly right: Pastor Willow's father hunted them, while he finds, kidnaps (if necessary), and "cures" them - all with the help of the biggest, baddest, most ancient monster of them all, a cloven-hoofed beast they affectionately call Mother and keep imprisoned in an abandoned mine.

Desperate to be "normal" again, Breezy is torn between hope and realism. A newbie to the world of vamps and ghouls (and werewolves, and banshees, and nightmares, and ghosts, and maybe even mermaids; the monsters in this world are varied and imaginative and if there's a sequel, I really hope we'll meet more of them!), she doesn't know down from up, let alone who to trust. With the help of a fellow captive named Rain; Ingrid the witch; brothers Zeke and Jake; and Violet, one of Pastor Willow's success stories, Breezy must learn to discern the guilty from the innocent; the monstrous from the mundane. (Pro tip: species membership is largely irrelevant.)

Shallow Graves is a near-perfect mix of horror, fantasy, dark comedy, science geekiness, and feminist fiction. While horror is definitely the dominant genre, Wallace suffuses the story - Breezy's observations in particular - with a wry, morbid sense of humor. (To wit: “The first rule of cannibal mermaid fight club is don’t talk about cannibal mermaid fight club.”) Though she's obviously a smart, witty kid, her voice still sounds eminently believable. I pretty much fell in love with Breezy; she's wonderfully nerdy, yet confident and comfortable in her own skin, brimming with ambition and confidence. When she wakes up undead, she adopts a rational approach to understanding her condition, complete with neat little lists of ways she cannot die laid out in her stolen NASA notebook. As a fellow list-maker, I can relate.

Breezy is also refreshingly socially aware, which is what gives the story its feminist/social justice bent. A biracial kid - Irish on her mom's side, Chinese on her dad's - Breezy is no stranger to racist microagressions. She's also sexually active in a society that labels girls who enjoy sex "sluts" - and denigrates them as "prudes" should they abstain. Shortly before she's killed, Breezy is the victim of slut-shaming rumors...rumors that would have been overshadowed by later summer events, had she not gone missing (including one of her classmates coming out as trans). Plus she's bisexual, and totally cool with it.

There are so many wonderful feminist details in this book, I can't even (!). They're subtle enough that readers are apt to overlook many of them if they're not paying attention. For example, Breezy's mom has a different last name from her kids, suggesting that she kept her name when she married. Breezy is delightfully geeky; she dreams of being an astronaut, went to space camp as a kid, and reads Scientific American for funsies. Breezy waxes poetic on the nature of the cosmos - much to my joy - in what are some of the loveliest passages in the book; some I even set aside to add to my not-a-religion religion cannon. (Think: Octavia Butler's Parables duology.)

And Breezy isn't alone: Breezy's mother studied neuroscience at MIT, and her mom's best friend Karen Garrow (also biracial, and Breezy's first girl crush) is a physicist who often appears on television shows about physics and astronomy. "She was the one they interviewed when they wanted to prove that science was for minorities and young women as much as old white men." Breezy is not wanting for badass female role models.

I also love that Wallace set Breezy up with a prophecy, a fate, a destiny - one which Breezy obstinately decided to ignore, at least for the time being. She will not be a slave to your predictions, yo! The ending is pretty much perfect, though I do hope Breezy crosses paths with her killer again. An annual pants-wetting is the least she owes him/her, methinks.

Wallace frequently references pop culture, and the various elements of the story remind me of some of my favorite books and television shows: Being Human; Supernatural (especially the Winchesters' evolving concept of good and evil, human vs. monstrous); Rachel Vincent's Menagerie (the cryptids!); Rin Chupeco's The Girl From the Well, which I already mentioned, and its follow-up, The Suffering; there are even shades of Buffy here, from Pastor Willow's name to the sly humor and its celebration of smart women. I haven't read any of Holly Black's stuff yet, but the story is definitely in the same wheelhouse as Nova Ren Suma's The Walls Around Us.

A strong 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5 where necessary. I had hoped to see more righteous vengeance (and monsters!), but the story's pretty great anyway.

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