Charles O. Smith

Writer, artist, dog lover, Southern expatriate

photo of Charles

2024: My year in reading "wrapped"

2024-12-31

The days are short and the nights are dark. Spotify is busy reminding everyone of their listening habits. Even though I read embarassingly slow reader, I read so many great things this year. Here are the highlights.

Fantasy Kit by Adam McOmber

This one makes the list since I finished it on Jannuary 5th. For me, the story “Mars 1887” truly put the “fantasy” in the “Fantasy Kit”. Beautifully written, sexy, speculative, scary. Left me wanting more of McOmber’s work.

This was a great way to kick off the reading year. Every single story resonated for me. I’ll return to “The White Cat’s Divorce” and “Prince Hat Underground” over and over.

Vulgarian Rhapsody by Alvin Orloff

A sassy snark-filled romp through end-of-millenium SF. I imagined the narrator as Armistead Maupin’s bitter, self-indulgent doppelgänger. The nested fairy tale “Dougie Doodles and the Enchanged Gay Bar” melted my fabulist’s heart.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

Because it is rife with sexual violence, this book is not everyone. Horrific. Heartbreaking. Brilliantly told. What appears at first to be a rambling style, steadily comes together in intricately woven layers. This book inspired much debate with a good friend about queer voices, authorship, and Mexican literature.

Metamorphica by Zachary Mason

I probably need to read this book again. For the majority of the time I found myself comparing it to Mason’s previous work “The Lost Books of the Oddysey,” which I loved. The final story “Epistolary,” about Ovid writing a letter to Augustus and sending it with a courier, brought everything together in the most satisfying way and made this collection hold up to its predecessor’s standards in my estimation.

My favorite stories in this fine collection were the first and the last. IMHO, “Sundown at the Eternal Staircase” is an instant classic.

Island Rule: Stories by Katie M. Flynn

This collection is a deliciously strange cycle of stories that fit together like a puzzle box. While reading one story you’ll glimpse a character from another in a different context. The same thing happens with events and objects that emerge and reemerge in various settings and plots. Meanwhile, the menace of ecological disaster looms extremely large.

Believe the hype. This is a fantastic book.

Dont Try This at Home by Angela Readman

“When We Were Witches” stood out as my favorite tale in this solid collection.

Pricksongs and Descants: Fictions by Robert Coover

I love Coover’s writing, especially “The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell)”. I reread Pricksongs and Descants for the first time since my postmodern fiction class in college. It is great collection–sly, adept, brimming with stylistic technique; there’s a reason that it’s a classic. But there is something creepy, perhaps intentionally, about the way Coover splays open (manspreads?) the straight male gaze in these stories that leaves me wanting a shower.

Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin trans. [David] Shook

This one was kind of a reread since I had read the Kurt Hollander translation some years ago. I love the utter queerness of this story of a drag queen beautician turned caregiver in a plague-ravaged town. I enjoyed this translation even though the langauge didn’t quite captivate me as much as in the previous version. This may all be in my head and definitely merits investitation on my part.

Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado

This one was a reread even though I think I had previously checked it out from the library and didn’t finish all the stories. “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU” is amazing in its form and its language. It is rich and dense and took/takes me several sittings to read. It’s a story I’ll return to again and again.

Out There by Kate Folk

As advertised, this collection serves up strange, menacing, and creepy tales. Several read as “haunted house” horror to me. I enjoyed the collection as a whole, but “Moist House” stood out as my favorite.

Promiscuous Ruin by Julian Mithra

This chapbook won the 2023 Alcove Press Chapbook Series from WTAW Press. It reads like dark, poetic fever dream of two men navigating natural, political, and psychological frontiers.

The Nightmare Box by Cynthia Gómez

A chilling collection of tales set mostly in Oakland, CA. Gómez expertly knots together various sorts of horror–supernatural, psychological, political, and personal–to great effect.

Shit Cassandra Saw by Gwen E. Kirby

This book has been on the infinite reading list for a couple of years, but I finally checked it out of the library. This collection is playfully innovative, smart, funny, and sad all at the same time. I’ve added “First Woman Hanged for Witchcraft in Wales, 1594” to my favorite stories list. You can find it online at New Delta Review but, if you’re like me, you’re going to want to read the whole collection.

The Changeling by Joy Williams

Confession: I have read shamefully little of Williams’s work even though I have a copy of The Visiting Privilege on my shelf and she wrote one of my favorite fairy tale alerations of all time: “Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child” in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.

I didn’t know what to expect from The Changeling and even now I find the book extremely difficult to describe. Williams’ writing is witty and precise. Masterful.

The protagonist (anti-protagonist?) Pearl is trapped on a New England private island estate surrounded by her dead husband’s controlling family and their somewhat feral children. The action basically unfolds as Pearl navigates this menacing situation while suffering from trauma and booze-fueled twilight madness.

There is dark dark magic at work in this novel.

Other books I read

Home