Not a self-improvement book for MRAs (Design: Tina Tiller)

BooksSeptember 18, 2022

Reader, there are tentacles: A review of the paranormal queer novella set at Otago Uni

Guest writer

Not a self-improvement book for MRAs (Design: Tina Tiller)

A fragment of the void falls in love and absconds to Dunedin. So begins Marie Cardno’s How to Get a Girlfriend (When You’re a Terrifying Monster).

I don’t normally review romance, and I didn’t know what to make of How To Get a Girlfriend (When You’re a Terrifying Monster) when it showed up in my inbox. I asked a friend more familiar with the genre whether she wanted to take a look at it instead, and she responded “nah babes it’s yours, you have” then sent me a photoshopped picture of a can of Monster Energy that read

big

MONSTER

FUCKER

ENERGY

I, uh … f—I mean I guess?! OK, well, how do we handle HTGAGWYATM? Let’s start with an elevator pitch: what happens when a stray fragment of the void realises it’s really into butches? Specifically one butch, who’s just stepped through a portal and started biffing fireballs around.

I don’t know whether it’s professional for a review to contain phrases like “Fem!Nyarlathotep/Otago Uni!Warlock!Gideon Nav” but here we are. I don’t know what else to tell you: the group chat is teaching me a lot of new terminology today, and it’s a book where a writhing, boundless protean fragment of the crawling chaos meets a tall, funny, broad-shouldered Kiwi lesbian and reifies out of sheer desire.

This causes a few problems. Namely that the void (aka the Endless) doesn’t like bits of it gaining sentience and buggering off to Dunedin of all places (could it not bugger off to Timaru? It seems like the howling cosmic void could handle Timaru – more familiar), but also that being a horrible monster with very little understanding of humankind can make flirting pretty hard. Sian – our Lovecraftian investigator/serial pisstaker – is pretty hard to rattle, but even she finds her new paramour Trillin a lot.

The small part of Sian that still existed behind the fear wondered if she could get a paper out of what the being’s eyes looked like. No, not a paper. A poem.

Shattered crystals, each piece reflecting a different horror. Distant galaxies collapsing into one another, heralding the deaths of millions. Long, pale, many-jointed limbs reaching from the ocean floor and crick-crackle wrapping themselves around anchor chains. Flickering somethings at the corner of your eye, the edge of the mirror, slipping sidelong from reflection to reflection. Sian’s throat was hoarse from screaming.

But very quickly, after scaring Trillin off, she starts to realise that she’s actually super into that. However, her colleagues at Otago hold a staunch anti-apocalypse position which presents a few problems to her newfound desire to engage in some more intimate fieldwork, so she works in secret to help Trillin form a human body, until the Endless arrives and forces things to a head, leading into a final confrontation.

And that’s … it. It’s a novella, and short for a novella (around the 25,000 word mark), and the immensely readable prose means it blows by rather quickly. It feels like the opening act of a bigger story, a really good appetiser that I wish had been a main instead.

The novella is a powerful form, but this felt at times like it should’ve been a novel, there’s so much depth to its paranormal Ōtepoti, and an obvious love for the city that I would’ve liked to see explored more, particularly from Cardno’s warm and witty lens. Still, it’s a fun book, and especially considering the tight confines it manages to have a lot of depth. A lot of it hinges on Cardno’s prose, which performs an impressive balancing act between fun flirty quirkiness and muscular and toothsome cosmic horror description; flesh is malleable, identity is tenuous and liminal, everybody’s having a gay old time.

Jokes aside, I don’t want to give the wrong impression: it’s relatively tame (on this extremely instructive day I’ve also been educated on the line between romance and smut and told it is the former) – there’s a lot of very excellent flirting, lots of confusion and miscommunication and a nonzero amount of yearning, tentacles gripping wrists in order to gently lead a lover onwards instead of, well … gripping them for other purposes.

But also it’s an oddly touching book about the boundaries of the world and the self: Trillin is a rogue fragment of a greater being, that is a landscape in-and-of-itself, trying to establish an independent mind. She has become a self for love. It’s a fun little tension – to explore another’s boundaries she first has to figure out her own. There is something deeply queer about the struggle to reclaim one’s own body, to cleave oneself from a hostile system, to experiment with new shapes, new identities, the terror and exhilaration of the unmoored self.

There wasn’t anything else to be part of here. Nothing to shape herself out of. Just what she’d brought with her from the Endless.

Her body started to unravel.

Back in the Endless, this would be a good time for her to stop being herself for a while. To slip back into the totality of unbeing that non-individuality offered. Not the part-her part-other-fragment with its hungering want, but the nothingness of the Endless, a nothing she had not been for so long. Even when she was still experimenting with her edges and had sometimes lost pieces of her body, she’d never let go of that core tangle of memories and thoughts that was her.

Like Trillin, it’s a hard book to pin down as just one shape, but maybe that’s OK? Queer stories are so rarely just one thing; it’s short, silly, fun, funny, toothy, grotesque, tender, a book about outsiders trying to find each other when they barely know themselves.

Also there are tentacles, which I’m informed some of you reprobates are into. Do with this information what you will.

How to Get a Girlfriend (When You’re a Terrifying Monster) (Paper Road Press, $20) can be ordered from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.

Keep going!

Nick Bollinger’s Jumping Sundays, number one in Wellington (Image: Tina Tiller)

BooksSeptember 16, 2022

The Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending 16 September

The Spinoff Review of Books

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Nick Bollinger’s Jumping Sundays, number one in Wellington (Image: Tina Tiller)

The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.

AUCKLAND

1 Kāwai: For Such a Time As This by Monty Soutar (Bateman, $40)

The first novel in a new trilogy from historian Monty Soutar (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki, Ngāti Kahungunu), traversing nine generations of one Māori family from the 1700s until the present day. Soutar says, “It’s like a history of New Zealand through Māori eyes.” Incredible concept. It also has a truly incredible cover.

2 The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith (Sphere UK, $38)

The newest Strike detective novel from JK Rowling, rocking the boat – and the bestsellers list.

3 Before Your Memory Fades by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Picador, $25)

The third novel about strangers time travelling in a cafe…

4 Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Picador, $20)

…and the original from back in 2015. Sam Brooks gave this bestseller two thumbs sideways for being “somewhere between ‘just fine’ and ‘not very good’.”

But what do the readers of Goodreads say of the new novel? Yep, we’re skipping back up to Before Your Memory Fades at number 3 – just call it time travel. Kate says: “With each new book, I have liked them less and less.” Rae comes out with: “Same concept, barely different ideas for the third book of the series.” Naya is more positive: “I preferred the first two books but I still loved this one.”

All burns aside – if you’re looking for something charming, heartfelt and easy to read, Kawaguchi’s got you. Not just once, but three times.

5 The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher (Bridget Williams Books, $70)

An important new book about the English Treaty of Waitangi text. The Herald explains: “Fletcher’s deep dive into the archives suggests the motives of the British who drafted the Treaty were honourable, that they sought to protect Māori and, importantly, they envisaged British sovereignty co-existing with Māori self-government. In essence, Fletcher concludes that the English language text of the Treaty, in which Māori cede sovereignty to the British, can be reconciled to the Māori language text which promises that Māori chiefs can retain rangatiratanga – self-government.”

6 Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber & Faber, $23)

One of our favourite doses of dystopia from 2021.

7 Return to Harikoa Bay by Owen Marshall (Vintage, $37)

New short stories from one of New Zealand’s absolute greats. We offer this excerpt as evidence of said greatness:

‘Yes, quite a lot of people do ask me how I lost the little finger of my left hand. It’s not a large appendage, or a crucial one; people have prostates and kidneys out, wombs, whole lengths of bowel, and aren’t asked for explanation by casual companions at a café table. But a finger’s absence is markedly obvious and enquiry as to the cause seems less a personal intrusion. The outcome of momentary carelessness perhaps, rather than concession to some grim disease.

My own case is, I suppose, more unusual than most, for I lost my finger as the consequence of a dream.”

Told you.

8 The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf, $38)

A description, both tidy and evocative, from the Guardian: “Here is a novel inspired by a poem describing a painting portraying a young woman who actually lived. Art and artifice are intrinsic to it. In Maggie O’Farrell’s imagining of 16th-century Italian courtly life, manners make the man, clothes make the woman, and an image is more durable than a person.”

9 Better the Blood by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster, $35)

The best local thriller of 2022. Michael Bennett wrote for the Spinoff about what inspired his debut.

10 Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada (Granta, $33)

New fiction by the author of The Emissary and Memoirs of a Polar Bear. An extract from the entrancing publisher’s blurb: “Welcome to the not-too-distant future. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as ‘the land of sushi’. Hiruko, a former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian) … All these characters take turns narrating chapters, which feature an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra- nationalist named Breivik; Kakuzo robots; uranium; and an Andalusian bull fight. Episodic, vividly imagined and mesmerising, Scattered All Over the Earth is another sui generis masterwork by Yoko Tawada.”

WELLINGTON

1 Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand by Nick Bollinger (Auckland University Press, $50)

A new book about Aotearoa’s 1960s and 70s protest generation. Music writer Nick Bollinger puts the era of radicals and hippies, anti-Vietnam and anti-nuke, dancing and protesting in the park back in the spotlight.

2 Kawai: For Such a Time As This by Monty Soutar (Bateman, $40)

3 Democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand: A Survival Guide by Geoffrey Palmer & Gwen Palmer Steeds (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $40)

A practical and helpful nutshell guide which “aims to unravel the mysteries of our political system”. It includes interviews with key political figures, a concise history of government, an introduction to our key institutions, plus advice on making complaints, campaigning, and obtaining information. How to become a full political citizen, 101.

4 Farm: The Making of a Climate Activist by Nicola Harvey (Scribe, $37)

Journalist Nicola Harvey wrote an essay for us recently which puts her debut book in context – here’s an excerpt:

“I’ve lived on a beef farm north of Taupō for more than four years. But I am not a farmer. I make a living from the fattening and selling of cattle but I don’t see the world as my father does. He remains wedded to an identity that stems from the image of hard men in black singlets clearing land during a time when the government incentivised, through grants and subsidies, the draining of wetlands and back burning of mānuka to create productive farmland.

“For most of my adult life, I’ve lived and worked in big cities: Melbourne, London and Sydney. I built a career as a journalist and media executive and then I burned out and moved home to Aotearoa with my Australian husband. A vision of earning a living from the land and growing good food loomed large.

“But the decision to quit city life in 2018 to become a cattle farmer dropped us amid a cluster of arguments about food and farming and its role in causing and combating climate change and the degradation of land, fresh water, air. And, like so many others, I went looking for someone to blame for our collective woes. Someone who looks a lot like my dad.”

5 The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher (Bridget Williams Books, $70)

6 Imagining Decolonisation by Rebecca Kiddle, Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Ocean Ripeka Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton and Amanda Thomas (Bridget Williams Books, $15)

Still imagining.

7 Regenesis: How to Feed the World Without Devouring the Planet by George Monbiot (Allen Lane, $37)

Perfect companion reading for Nicola Harvey’s Farm.

8 Yes, Minister: An Insider’s Account of the John Key Years by Chris Finlayson (Allen & Unwin, $37)

It’s been a bestsellers list full of political writing, hasn’t it? Those local elections must be approaching.

9 Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (Tor, $38)

We love seeing a rare fantasy novel in the bestsellers! Also, very satisfying to see Nona the Ninth at number nine. Here’s a summary of the third book in the Locked Tomb series from the publisher:

“Her city is under siege.

“The zombies are coming back.

“And all Nona wants is a birthday party.

“In many ways, Nona is like other people. She lives with her family, has a job at her local school, and loves walks on the beach and meeting new dogs. But Nona’s not like other people. Six months ago she woke up in a stranger’s body, and she’s afraid she might have to give it back.”

10 The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf, $38)