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Utopian Sci-Fi, Bamboo Vampires, and a Bosch Nightmare: The Pajiba November 2023 Book Recommendation Superpost!

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | November 29, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | November 29, 2023 |

Books Getty Images 1.jpg

The end of the year is in sight, and I finally achieved my annual goal of reading 100 books. Not gonna lie, it took me longer to do it in 2023 than it has in previous years. Hey, I’ve been busy. And tired. And there were concerts to go to. Still, there have also been some good reads, so here are the highlights of this past November in terms of books.

January Fifteenth by Rachel Swirsky

In the near future, America has implemented a policy of Universal Basic Income. Every year, on January 15th, citizens must turn up in person to collect their money for the rest of the year. How they spend it depends on their circumstances. Hannah uses the money to help her family flee her abusive ex-wife. Janelle is a journalist who spends the day interviewing passersby about the very policy she once opposed. Sarah is a heavily pregnant teen stuck in a hyper-religious sect where the money offers little freedom for her or her unborn child. Olivia is rich, so she and her friends find increasingly elaborate ways to waste the money.

You can’t blame me for wanting to find modern sci-fi that isn’t hopelessly dystopian in its worldview. Discovering a novella with an enticing set-up that many of us progressives have supported for years couldn’t help but grab my interest. There’s a lot going on here. There are hints of the wider world that led to UBI being implemented, revealed through what is ultimately a slice-of-life story. Speculative details are otherwise minimal, with a focus on social change over technological. Money offers liberation, but it has not brought instant change to centuries’ of entrenched bigotries or hierarchies. It did not give Sarah the chance to flee a cult, nor has it allowed Olivia’s less wealthy classmates the chance to be on equal footing with the rich kids.

Rachel Swirsky certainly has plenty of ideas to populate this slim read, but the overall experience left me wanting. There are four perspectives to cover so our attachment to each woman feels limited. We hear Janelle struggle with placing her activism after the cold hard work of providing for her sister, but don’t see much of her issues with UBI in action. I’ve seen some reviews decry the book as propaganda against the concept of a universal basic income but I don’t think that’s fair. Showing a policy’s issues is not a blanket condemnation of a good policy. But I do wish we’d seen Swirsky truly delve into this world she’d created. As it stands, January Fifteenth feels like a proof of concept for an unfinished novel.

A Small Charred Face by Kazuki Sakubari

The bamboo are vampires. Originating in China, they look and act just like humans, but live by night and drink human blood. After around 120 years of life, they bloom into flowers and pass on. The bamboo are forbidden to fraternize with humans. Kyo, a young boy, is saved from death by a Bamboo and raised as their child. He soon connects to a childlike bamboo who has rejected her coven’s rules. Kyo has been told that his life is meaningless to the Bamboo, but his new family proves differently.

As someone who reads a lot of vampire books, I’m always excited to find one that isn’t focused on white characters or a ‘Western’ mythos (it’s actually fare rarer than you’d think it’d be in this genre, alas.) This mythology is certainly new to me, with the Bamboo being carnivorous monsters born from the tall grasses with their own system of morals that tolerate humans but do not embrace them. There are implications in one story — the book is made up of three connected novellas — that the Cultural Revolution greatly changed relations between humans and the Bamboo.

The mythos is intriguing but often feels slapdash in execution, lacking an internal logic that would keep the reader from being distracted by such unevenness. The real heart of the story is of a human boy and the Bamboo he adores as a father figure but also possibly with romantic fantasies (also the boy spends most of his adolescence disguised as a girl for reasons.) I think this book was intended for young adults in Japan but marketed as adult horror here (if the cover and its placement in Waterstones is anything to go by.) It certainly feels very youthful in its wide-eyed worldview. Much like January Fifteenth, there are ideas here but it feels like a draft for something grander we simply never got. At least this has real heart, especially when exploring the conundrum of loving someone who will outlive you.

Hollow by B. Catling

A group of violent rogues with criminal pasts are tasked with a secret mission. They must transport an ancient oracle to the sacred Monastery of the Eastern Gate, located on a crumbling structure rumoured to be the Tower of Babel. To keep this grotesque creature alive, they must feed it marrow, imbued with the sins they have confessed into the bones. If they don’t get the oracle to its new home, the world could fracture. It’s already showing signs of decay as curious creatures stumble through the nearby town and the local monks confront the very face of Hell itself.

It’s no wonder that the work of the late great Brian Catling comes highly recommended by the likes of Terry Gilliam and Alan Moore. The set-up itself is so juicy that I’m surprised nobody got there before him: Imagine if the worlds detailed in the paintings of Bosch and Brueghel began to engulf our own. The experience is, of course, trippy and nightmarish but also impishly funny and extremely bleak in its worldview. There are moments where it just feels like Catling is describing paintings and quietly encouraging us to google them to get the full picture. Overall, however, his melding of Bosch and Brueghel with his demented godless landscape is extremely effective, even if sturdy plotting often takes a backseat to his commitment to the weird.

One can forgive a looser approach to narrative when the scope is as striking as this. This world is one where God indisputably exists but has essentially abandoned humanity because life is meaningless and any person fully confronted with that reality (as vocalized by looking into Bosch’s Hell) will never recover. I couldn’t help but be gripped by Catling’s blending of two things I dearly love: art history revolving around f*cked-up paintings and low fantasy with dark humour and little hope for mankind.