What if horror games are actually driven by banality? Is Call of Cthulhu best when it’s mostly full of the everyday?
Continue readingTag Archives: investigation
Amari and the Night Brothers, by B. B. Alston
Some books reshape their genre. Others expand it to include a wider range of voices. Some do both. I often like books that do the first. I believe we as a society and community need books that do the second. For examples of books that reshape their genres, I’d offer up The Ballad Of Black Tom and The Fifth Season. For books that expand their genre, those two still work… but I can also add A Dead Djinn In Cairo, and now B. B. Alston’s Amari and the Night Brothers.
Amari and the Night Brothers feels like another step in the same chain as A Dead Djinn In Cairo. It doesn’t, in my eyes, revolutionize the underlying components of the genre (yet), but it’s solid and has a refreshingly different perspective from the usual run of Middle Grade supernatural school protagonists. Amari—the main character—is black (as is B. B. Alston) and in a genre so dominated by white writers and white characters that’s pretty dramatic. It feels sad to say that’s enough, but I think it’s true.
As I said, this book didn’t fundamentally change or subvert anything I expected from the genre. I was able to plot out the tropes and most of the twists pretty well beforehand. But it’s good. Those tropes I saw coming felt right, and their resolutions felt rewarding. This story does everything I’d want a solid book in the MG supernatural school genre to do (with allowance for a little bit of deus ex machina), and it does it with heart and with a different set of assumptions about the world than so many other stories I’ve seen and read. That’s what I love and admire about it, why I’d recommend it.
And unlike A Dead Djinn In Cairo, I’ve seen enough of B. B. Alston’s work here to believe that there are other interesting things coming down the pipe, ways in which this story is going to grow, and tell its story differently. Amari and the Night Brothers already had my interest standing on its own. And I look forward to seeing what new paths B. B. Alston adds to this well-trodden genre.
A Dead Djinn In Cairo, by P. Djèlí Clark
Short, fast, fun. A Dead Djinn In Cairo is a good read, with a marvelous setting. It’s also my first time reading any of P. Djèlí Clark’s work.
As a veteran fan of investigative mystery horror, adventure, and Mythos stories, the tropes here feel familiar. That seems intentional. These character and plot tropes are called on to lend the story its structure and familiarity, and they make the story quick and tight when it might otherwise require more explanation and exposition. This works well; it’s an expert’s use of the existing genre shorthand to sketch in structure and conventions, and it lets Clark explore ideas and settings that rarely make it into these genres. It’s skillfully done, and worth admiration.
That exploration is part of why I don’t mind P. Djèlí Clark’s reliance on tropes for narrative stability. He lavishes his attention on novelty elsewhere, with quick splashes of set dressing that seep slowly out of the scenery. The combination of elements is delicious (a turn-of-the-1900s ascendant Egypt, women’s increasing independence, religious turmoil, fantastical creatures and beings in our world following the removal of some of reality’s barriers…). It’s all very good. I love the world he’s created here and will happily read more of it.
But that reliance means I don’t yet have a sense of whether I’ll like P. Djèlí Clark’s other narratives. At some point I’ll want more than my enthusiasm for this cool setting; I’d love for the narrative and its tropes to feel exciting without feeling like they hew so closely to the genre’s conventions, and I’d love for Clark to take the standard tropes and twist them a little more firmly into his own setting’s image. That said, I’d certainly recommend this story over any number of other genre stories. He delivers the expected tropes at least as well as any of the older examples I have to hand, and the trappings of P. Djèlí Clark’s story are more appealing to me. Based on this, I hope he’ll find other ways to exceed those stories as well.
Fistful of Wits 