Argentine religious sect delightfully dystopian
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She published her first novel in 2013, but it was 2017’s Tender is the Flesh that put Argentina’s Augustina Bazterrica on most horror/SF readers’ radars. Her new novel, The Unworthy (Scribner, 192 pages, $26), is not a sequel, but it shares some of Tender’s themes.
Set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, it tells the story of a woman who discovers that her religious order might not be what it claims to be — and that her own past and future are not what she believed.
Bazterrica’s writing is rich with description: she immerses us in the narrator’s world, makes us feel as though we can see its colours and feel its textures. The English translation, by Sarah Moses (who also did Tender is the Flesh), is wonderful; it’s not a stiff, literal version of the original Spanish, but an elegant, idiomatic rendition that feels as though it’s exactly what the author intended.
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Hot on the heels of the release of Gillian McAllister’s Wrong Place Wrong Time (2022) in mass-market paperback comes her new novel, Famous Last Words (Morrow, 336 pages, $26), which is so good that you’ll want to read it twice — once for the surprises, the second time to see how the author got away with them.
Here’s the setup: Camilla is shocked to find out that her husband, Luke, is holding a handful of people at gunpoint. The situation quickly goes from bad to worse, Luke escapes, and that’s the last anyone hears of him… until several years later, when Camilla’s new life is turned upside down when she learns the truth about what happened to her husband.
McAllister specializes in stories that force the reader to reconsider pretty much everything they just read. Her intensely realistic characters and neck-wrenching plot twists are legendary in the thriller genre; read this book and find out how good she is.
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David Baldacci was a trial lawyer before he segued to novel-writing. That experience comes in handy in A Calamity of Souls (Grand Central, 512 pages, $26), a legal thriller set in the author’s home state of Virginia in the 1960s.
A Black man is accused of killing two white people; his attorney, a white man, partners with a Black lawyer to find justice for his client. It’s a racially charged story and Baldacci handles it with grace, perception and compassion.
Keep in mind, please, that the book is set in the American south in the ‘60s. The story’s language and the attitudes of some characters are historically accurate, which means the book has some unsettling moments. But you can’t tell a story like this — you can’t tell it well, anyway — unless you put it into an authentic historical context.
This is something a bit different for Baldacci (he’s edging into John Grisham territory) and it is one of his finest recent novels.
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A while back, Disney announced it was launching a new line of novels for adult readers based on popular Marvel characters such as Luke Cage and Daredevil. The first of those novels, Breaking the Dark (Hyperion Avenue, 400 pages, $24), is finally available in paperback.
Written by Lisa Jewell, author of first-rate thrillers such as The Night She Disappeared and None of This is True, Breaking the Dark features superhero-turned-private-eye Jessica Jones, who might be the only investigator in the world who’d believe a woman when she claims her son and daughter have been replaced by doppelgangers.
Jessica winds up in Britain, where she encounters one strange thing after another (including a teenaged girl who seems seriously… off); it’s important to note at this point that this is a legit superhero story, which implies supervillainy and larger-than-life spectacle. But because it’s written by an established author of thrillers, it’s gritty and realistic and set in a world that is very much recognizable as our own.
Stay tuned for Marvel stories from S.A. Cosby, Alex Segura and other top-flight novelists.
Halifax freelancer David Pitt’s column appears the first weekend of every month. You can follow him on X at @bookfella.