January ScaredyKIT: Diverse Perspectives

The new year is a good time to get a new perspective! The January ScaredyKIT is about diverse perspectives. We’ll be reading horror or thrillers whose authors or main characters are BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color), LGBTQIA+, people with disabilities, or anyone you consider outside the mainstream.

Please share what you’re reading, and don’t forget to update the ScaredyKIT wiki!

If you need some help finding a book, here are some lists with ideas:

• LT Diverse Horror list
  
• Diversity in Horror blogspot
  
• Seattle Public Library list of BIPOC and LGBTQIA horror
  
• LT BIPOC horror tagmash
  
• BIPOC horror & dark fiction list at Bookshop.org
  
• LT LGBTQIA Horror list
  
• LT Differently Abled Horror list
  
• Horror list from the Disability Book Archive
  
• LT indigenous horror tagmash

I think I will choose Witches by Brenda Lozano.

I'm not sure what I'll choose, but I've got tons to choose from in my TBR, at least! I wish Noah Medlock had another book out--for anyone who hasn't heard of it, I read his A Botanical Daughter last month, and it was simply wonderful and would fit perfectly! Lee Mandelo is another favorite, so maybe I'll pick up the one unread book of his I've got...

I am planning on reading Lone Women by black author Victor LaValle.

>4 DeltaQueen50:, I've heard such good things about Lavalle's novels, he's one I keep meaning to try!

I plan on reading Wormwood by Poppy Z. Brite. Wow, there are lots of books/publications with this title.

>5 whitewavedarling: I am looking forward to this one as it will be my first by this author!

Thank you for the wealth of resources! I'm not sure yet how many books I'll be able to get through in January, but right now my tentative choices if I get to ScardeyKIT are either Harrow the Ninth (as I just started the first in the series) or Rock, Paper, Scissors, a thriller about a man with prosopagnosia (face blindness).

I have a few options for this.

Oh! >8 GraceCollection: I hadn't come across this one (or just didn't notice it), but I'm planning to read Rock, Paper, Scissors for the MysteryKIT; if it fits both, that would be great!

Other options for me:
- The Scratch Daughters / H.A. Clarke
- Moon of the Crusted Snow / Waubgeshig Rice
- All the Sinners Bleed / S.A. Cosby

>9 LibraryCin: I didn't find it in the lists (although I didn't check all of them), I just remembered because I had logged it recently that the main character was face blind and that the cover was wintry!

I think I'm gonna go with Lone women by Victor LaValle for this one.

I’m excited that my hold on White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi came in today, so that’s what I’ll be reading!

I will be reading Rock, Paper, Scissors by Alice Feeney. Hopefully I will get it in time.

I finished White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi. It was excellent and will probably haunt me for a while.

I read Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice and I'm still in a bookish hangover because I was so fascinated by it.

>15 MissBrangwen: I have the audio "on deck". Hopefully the audio will keep my attention!

I finished Sundown in San Ojuela by M. M. Olivas. First novel, a bit all over the place, but an interesting monster story drawing on indigenous Latin American folklore and mythology and told through a queer perspective.

Adam has "prosopagnosia" (he can't see faces)

Rock Paper Scissors / Alice Feeney
4 stars

Amelia and Adam have been having trouble in their marriage. When Amelia wins a trip at work to head to Scotland to stay in an old isolated church, she jumps at the chance, hoping the two of them can start to repair their marriage. They drive through a snowstorm to get there and the church is locked. It’s cold, and dark, and they were lucky to not be killed on the drive, due to the road conditions. There are creepy things happening all around. Meanwhile, Robin lives in a small cottage nearby. Robin is a hermit and rarely goes into town. Amelia and Adam don’t know she’s there, but she is keeping a very close eye on the two of them.

We read the story from the viewpoints of all three characters. In addition, we back up in time to read letters written to Adam on their anniversary every year and we can see where things have been going wrong. There were definitely creepy bits and there were a few twists at the end; I don’t think I saw any of them coming.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead ★★★★

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.
In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly recreates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.

I immediately was drawn into Cora's story and the substories that are in this book. I have read alot of books on the slavery era but this one is one of the most realistic and believable ones.

The book read more like historical fiction than a horror book for me, but it is on several tagmashes of African-American, horror so I am counting it.

Moon of the Crusted Snow / Waubgeshig Rice
3.5 stars

When a remote northern Indigenous community loses all power and cell service, no one is quite sure why, but this happens sometimes, just not usually at the same time. But when this continues for a while, the community decides they need to figure out what to do to make it through the winter in case is doesn’t come back. When two young boys from the community return from the city in the south on snowmobiles, they learn that things are just as bad in the city and it’s getting worse. At least many of the Indigenous peoples can hunt and fish. Soon, a large white man appears asking for a place to stay; he has followed the tracks of the boys’ skidoos to get there. People aren’t sure if they can trust this guy, but they allow him to stay.

I listened to the audio. It occurred to me that Indigenous people (at least those who learned to hunt and fish and to do other traditional things might be in a better position than many (certainly us city folk) to withstand hardships like this). Of course, even so, not everyone fares well. It was actually a pretty slow moving book, but there were moments of tension. I am willing to give the sequel a try, as well.

Harrow the Ninth

Wow. I LOVED this book. What to say about it that doesn't spoil the ending of the last one? There was necromancy, bone magic, space travel, ghosts, action, horror, mystery (although this is not a 'traditional' mystery series where it opens on a murder or discovery of a body and then progresses as the detective(s) try to solve the murder, there still very much is mystery in this series to be had!), and very intriguing characters & character interactions. The main characters of this series are lesbians, if that sweetens the pot for anyone. If this description interests you, check out the first book (Gideon the Ninth) and be careful for spoilers!

I read The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones, the conclusion to his Indian Lake trilogy.

Finished The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo, and it was absolutely fantastic. Full review below, but in short, I'll read anything Mandelo writes. Three books out, and each one has been totally different than the others and just as fantastic.

Full Review:

Mandelo is a powerful writer, and although this book is totally different than his others, it's just as queer, just as thoughtful, just as beautifully written, and every bit as fantastic as his others, with so much nuance to the world and characters, there's no denying the reality of it, even at its most horrific.

Part historical fiction, part creature feature, part small-town religious cult (though there's not a cult here, per se), The Woods All Black starts off as a quiet, queer read that doesn't feel at all like horror (or, at least, not like non-real-life horror), but sucks in the reader through character and an incredibly nuanced job of world-building when it comes to 1929, Kentucky. (It's also worth noting here that Mandelo includes a list of resources he used as research in his acknowledgements within the book, and for anyone interested in queer history, they're worth looking into.) Yet, while I at first wondered whether this was going to be a horror novella after all, that quickly became clear, to the extent that I think any horror lover will be more than satisfied by what's within these pages.

I absolutely recommend this book, and you can count me in for anything Mandelo writes in the future.

>23 whitewavedarling: Awesome, I literally checked it out of the library yesterday! I really enjoyed Summer Sons and looking forward to this even more now.

>24 sturlington:, I'm so glad to hear it! I wasn't sure what to expect since Feed Them Silence (his second book, also short like this one) was so different from Summer Sons and more on a sci-fi level, but at this point, I don't care if he switches genres on me every time, I'm enjoying his work so much :)

January is wrapping up, but anyone who finishes late is still welcome to share their selection here and in the wiki. The February ScaredyKIT thread is here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/367665.

I have one more to share tonight (likely within the next hour or two!). Just finished today.

All the Sinners Bleed / S. A. Cosby
4 stars

It started as a school shooting in a small town in Virginia. A white teacher was shot and killed by a black man. The black man came out of the school to confront the black sheriff and was shot by two white officers. Then they found the pictures and videos on the teacher’s phone and it gets messy in this religious Virginia town with religion and racism all mixed together.

Titus is the black sheriff. He once worked for the FBI and something happened there. He came home to help out his elderly father, and ran to be sheriff, hoping he could make some changes from the inside to this racist area.

This was very good. Definitely some tense moments. The book is very dark and some awful things happen. On the personal side (Titus’ personal side) of the book, I have to agree with his girlfriend – what did he ever see in his ex!?

>28 LibraryCin: I read that last year and then Cosby gave an informal talk at our library. It was very entertaining. He has a lot of great stories.

>29 sturlington: Oh, cool! Someone over at GR mentioned a couple of other books they liked that he's written so I've also added Razorblade Tears to my tbr. "All the Sinners Bleed" was the first I've read by him.

>26 Charon07: Thanks for that, I did forget to link here.

I just finished The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo. Good, creepy, queer horror. Still formulating my thoughts so I can write a review, but I liked it.

>32 sturlington:, I'm glad to hear it! Now I just need him to hurry up and write another book already....

I read Rock, Paper, Scissors by Alice Feeney.