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I love my October traditions. The last few years, one of them has been for my wife and I to choose a horror movie theme and watch a bunch of classics. This year's theme is haunted houses, a fact I had no idea would be relevant when I decided to pick up Arkady Martine's latest release.

My only complaint is that I wish it were three or four times as long. There's so much going on here conceptually, architecture (conveyed incredibly well through prose) that creates personhood that creates architecture, the idea of "haunting" as a superposition of power and imprisonment, the gradient of personhood between an individual and an institution. Martine is one of the best to be currently doing it.

I've read so many comic anthologies that come from the anglosphere, I'm fascinated by how different this one is structurally. English anthologies tend to be full of works commissioned for the book itself, which are as a consequence all self-contained. This anthology represents the more common Japanese practice of having multiple manga serialized in the same journal, which then collects a range of issues into a book, which will include only pieces of each story ending (perhaps indefinitely) with a "to be continued...".

For the best comics, it's certainly the case that the more self-contained format works best. But many many authors struggle to fit something that feels compelling and satisfying in such a short space, especially given that comics as a form already have so little room for pure text. I think the hit rate of Galette is substantially higher than most English anthologies of comparable professionalism I've seen, and I think a lot of that comes from not being obligated to try to cram an entire plot arc in six to twelve pages.

I like this shift towards a more politically oriented novel. Not that I didn't like the big science fictional ideas of Perdido Street Station, nor that there are none of them here, but I'm always interested in political maneuverings and this really foregrounds those.

The plot hinges on what you think of Uther Doul, and I'm still parsing that through in my head. I think if I can come up with a clear and satisfying understanding of his motivation, I'll like this more, and if I can't I'll like it a little less. But even with that aside, I definitely had fun all the way through.

This is sweet! Functionally a DTWOF finale with Mo transmuted into an even-more-lightly fictionalized Alison Bechdel. There's a bit of "kids these days" here, but then again there was more than a little of that in DTWOF as well, and as before it's wrapped in a self-critique of Bechdel's own tendency to be a bit of a stick in the mud. As with the comic that this draws on, this book makes me feel proud to be part of a longstanding and never boring queer community.

I was kind of with this for the first half, but it felt like the plot never really coalesced. The ambiguous nonlinear collage thing is clearly inspired by Evangelion, but it relies on a clarity of vision and thesis that I don't think this book possesses at the end of the day.

The trans character in here also feels kinda off. Why doesn't she have breasts? I get that he's doing a "she's trans but it's not the point" thing but it's weird that we do get to see a bunch of her interiority and gender isn't a part of it AT ALL, even in her childhood (which is set in a time when transitioning in high school was EXTREMELY unusual). I didn't even know that Brandon Graham was apparently heavily involved in this book behind the scenes when I was first starting to feel squirrely about it, but learning that from the endmatter makes me extra uncomfortable with the whole thing. And again: where are her tits???

Huh! Kind of not much actually here, is there. I know it's just one trade, but this is really just "look how different we're doing the origin story" with nothing else to chew on. The digs at LLMs are appreciated ideologically but kind of ham-fisted in practice.

What should I laud first? Taylor Robin's excellent use of the visual medium to convey emotion, meaning, and momentum? The stridently proletarian perspective in a genre and setting that are both dominated by a fascination with aristocracy? A truly world-class homoerotic vampire/neck moment in a book that isn't even really about that? It's all so excellent I don't even know where to start. This is an impressive work by any measure, and as a first full graphic novel the level of craft on display here in combination with the raw engagement of the story is downright incredible.

I'll admit: I found this one a bit less the-juice-y than Oathbringer! To be sure it absolutely got its hooks into me and was fun the whole way through, but the real emotional intensity was extremely concentrated in the dense series of climaxes in the last act. I'm not complaining about those—they got me crying more than once!—but the way the whole thing builds to that one moment feels more like a magic trick of the sort Wit muses on in the epilogue than a deeply felt narrative.

I guess I'm just sad because this feels a bit more like Classic Sanderson, fun and good at the structure of the story but lacking a bit in the texture. But I can't complain too much when I'm already checking the library to see how long it'll be before I can borrow Wind and Truth.

Very brief, but good! You can definitely see the sensitivity reader seams here but that's not necessarily a bad thing especially for something with such a wide audience. It's fun to see that dovetail with Sanderson's trademark mechanical-mindedness, too.

This series is as ever a balm to my soul. This volume is a little bit more of a collection of disjoint stories, but now that the world's been established it's a lovely way of just immersing oneself in it. And that is to a large degree the appeal here: the way in which the world is so detailed and the stories such an admixture of the quotidien and the otherworldly makes it feel like a space to exist in and allow to sweep over oneself. Reading it is meditative in a similar sense to revisiting an old favorite, but it has that effect from the first read.