Title: The Scorpion Rules (Prisoners of Peace book 1)
Author: Erin Bow
Narrator: Madeleine Maby
Published: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2015
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 390
Total Page Count: 555,850
Text Number: 2085
Read Because: ambyr's post, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The children of peace are hostages of the world nations, held by the governing AI, doomed to die if their home nation goes to war. Our protagonist is prepared to face that death with dignity—until the newest hostage, from a rival nation, bucks all convention. I don't get on with YA as a rule, and so avoid it; I don't want to spend this review bitching about a genre that's just not for me, but when a book so perfectly executes what I wish the genre would do, my success with it speaks equally to text and its relationship with genre conventions.

The tropes are still here: snarky antagonist, love triangle, dystopia. But it's quality writing, and those tropes are balanced in, grounded by, a thoughtful consideration of worldbuilding and an unrelenting commitment to character and psychology. The scale is horrifying, the specificities localized and intimate; the romance(s) both indicative of and wholly overshadowed by the world; the depiction of torture, trauma, and PTSD thoughtful and realized with a fantastic use of repetition. This remains as iddy as the genre can & should be, but frankly it's better quality than most of the genre is, and so takes a great premise and actually does something with it.


Title: The Swan Riders (Prisoners of Peace book 2)
Author: Erin Bow
Narrator: Madeleine Maby
Published: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2016
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 380
Total Page Count: 556,230
Text Number: 2086
Read Because: ambyr's post, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Despite that this is a different book than the first—changed setting, much-changed protagonist—my reactions are quite similar, finding and appreciating the same strengths. High-concept, speculative premise, and in the background-moving-foreground is an inconceivable scale; and, in the foreground, a focus on intimate social bonds, symbolic of and felt in the larger cultural context, grounded in a minute, exhausting focus on physical and mental trauma. It's iddy, with hurt/comfort vibes, but consistently well-written. I read these on audio, and look forward to revisiting them in print for a more considered experience. What a pleasant surprise it was to give this series a try.

Title: The Complete Web of Horror
Editor: Dana Marie Andra
Published: 2024
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 295
Total Page Count: 555,460
Text Number: 2084
Read Because: seduced by the new books section, hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: Web of Horror was a short-running horror fiction comic anthology, published in 1969-70, collected here in its entirety, including prospective issues that went unpublished when it folded.

"Strangers!" by Syd Shores (volume three, page thirty) is about a twink and a bear struggling to survive after crashlanding on a desert island. The twink is useless, and growing weaker every day, but the bear looks after him, feeding him wild game. Because! the bear is a vampire! and preserving the twink as a food source, feeding on him each night! After the twink finally fights back, rescue comes—but it's too late, the twink has become a bear/vampire, himself! (You can find this here on Archive.org.)

I highlight this story because it's delightful; the subtext really is that close to the text, the art reflects the innuendo, and it's well-paced and -plotted. But it's telling that I'd rather talk about one piece than the mammoth collection. The other standout is "Eye of Newt, Toe of Frog" by Frank Brunner (art) and Gerald Conway (story), unpublished in the original run, here in Volume 4, about a rebellious wife reverse psychology'd into dark magic invocations. And that's it. Plenty of the pieces are fine, most are tolerable, but this is more interesting as an artifact of its time than in the individual stories; a forerunner in horror comics, it has all the prejudices expected from the time period and speculative plots that are more spectacle than psychological, a Twilight Zone-y "wouldn't it be fucked if...?". I'm grateful for archival efforts like this one, but would only recommend this to ultra fans; I appreciate genre history but not Western comics, and I think you need to be big into both to get much from this.