B. Catling - "Hollow"

Amazing story, again taking place in the Lowlands, with Dutch names and references, in a sort of fantastic medieval time.

An Oracle in a monastery.  A band of thieves delivering a new one...

Lastly, there had been Scriven, who proved to be a grievous mistake. He had come highly recommended for his skill as a tracker and a bowman. Follett had taken him without suspecting that he was an avid practitioner of the worst form of blasphemy that the old warrior could image, and one that he would never tolerate in his company. But nobody saw Scriven's demise coming, especially the man himself. Better that such errors are exposed early before they run inward and slyly contaminate the pack. Scriven had been found spying on the other men and making written copies of their confessional Steepings. He had been caught listening and scribing Follett's own gnarled words. Pearlbinder grabbed him and held him against a tree by his long hair. He pushed his sharp knife against the man's jugular vein, allowing just enough space for his larynx to work and for him to attempt to talk his way out of his fate. He was midway through when Follett unsheathed his lance and pushed three feet of it through Scriven's abdomen. Written words had condemned Follett before. Words written by others that he could not read. Ink keys that had locked him in a Spanish cell for three years. He had always distrusted written words, and now he despised them.

So Follett explained. "Writing is the shame of man. It dilutes the guts of meaning. If thou be not man enough to hold great learning and the saying of events in your memory, then thou should not attempt to keep them imprisoned. The world weas turned by scrolls and books. The making of those brikcs of paper even contaminated the tower of language itself, making it less than a woodpile or an old maid's collection of rags. Words are power, and writing is only a pissed shadow."

Cassandra Khaw - "The Salt Grows Heavy"

amazing adult fairy tale - for lack of a better word - of a protagonist a mermaid, dragged from the sea by a prince who she led her daughters devour, and her plague-doctor.

Body horror, similar sometimes to B. Catling. Fairytale like Katherine Arden. 

There. I could go there, perhaps. Find another sovereign, who'd fish a mute from the waters, who'd marry her, bed her, murder her sisters for a superstition, and then pry the teeth from her gums for the sake of caution. I could find one of those again, maybe, and wait until my daughters come to gnaw his country down to its bones.

    "Do you not care that they are children?"
    "No." I think of the lynx beneath teh river, its veins crystallizing. Of Luke on his bier, newborn and screaming, the wet pink of his lungs like the ruined stub of a tongue hidden behind a smile. Of my daughters, suckling the marrow from their father's kingdom, growing stronger by the hour. "Like everything else, they are only meat."

    It is always interesting to see how often women are described as ravenous when it is the men who, without exception, take without thought of compensation.
    I smile at the girl and stoop so that we are eye-to-eye. "Why would she want a harvest of bones?"

    "Your eyes were green before." And they'd tasted of lime and sweat and ice, had dissolved on my tongue like crème. I had eaten those like I'd eaten the heart, the hand.
    "I'm certain," says the surgeon, fingers threading together. His new eyes are silver, like starlight strained and sieved, stainless save for the pinholes of his pupils. "That you believed they were green. Green is a very beautiful color."

I allow myself, for the gash of a moment, to remember what I once possessed: the abyssal ocean, the song in those depths like swimming down the black throat of a god; the searing colors moting my sisters' coils, sapphire and quartz crushed into constellations, patterns and prisms of incandescence spiraling through the dark, our tails in endless, restless motion; our mother's eyes colossal, phosphorescent; our father's ribs, still studded with our egg sacs, his heartbeat in our veins. I'd been happy there. I could have been happy there forever.

A drag of vermillion across the trampled snow. Bloodied palmprints clawed into the white. Countless footprints, but only one set suggests that its owner might have staggered, might have fallen, weighted down by their robes, before they wrestled equilibrium from the cold and shambled onwards, blades between their knuckles and wolves at their heels. No bile or piss, however, no pus or reek of infection. No vomit. Only red blood blackening to ice. They bled my plague doctor, but not with the intention to kill.
    To hobble, yes. To slow, to ensure against the risk of a fair game. When some children play at slaughtering, the pig must always die, or else what point is there in pursuing the squealing hog through the woods and the wild? 

B. Catling - "The Vorrh" / "Erstwhile" / "The Cloven"

Strange but good story about a mythical forest (where Adam still roams, less and less human like?) that takes people's memories.

The cyclops Ishmael, who is raised by the Kin (unknown what's behind this) and then escapes.

Tsungali, a hunter and killer.

Ghertrude Tulp, originally Ishmael's carer of sorts, and Cyrena, who got her sight back after spending a night with Ishmael.

The Bowman, oneofthewilliams, who made a bow out of (Irrinep)este. The Erstwhile that hunt them. He has forgotten his original travel through the Vorrh and encountered a letter written by himself.

This is only book one of three....

Reminds me a bit of Ægypt by John Crowley in how it uses real people, the photographer Muybridge, the Winchester heiress and her strange Winchester Mystery House...

There are so many things I learned about my world from this book yet it is fiction. Authors should be applauded for that.

-- The Vorrh ---

"It's from the Highlands. The fleyber is the spirit of one that died in childbirth; they say its soul wanders the moors as a ghost light, a will-o'-the-wisp."

"These are beyond my wildest hopes. You are obviously a man of significant talents."
    Emotion swept over her again, and the elder touched her sleeve. She rose and turned to leave the room, the prints pressed hard against her bosom. Muybridge rose with her, watching as she tottered slightly, robustly supported by the anxious elder. At the door, she turned to look at Muybridge once more, to thank him silently before leaving him alone in the cavernous space of her departure.
    He stood awkwardly in the odd room at the centre of the winding, empty mansion, in a state of total bewilderment, awash with flows of contradiction. He glowed at her words but turned to ash at their meaning.

 

 --- The Erstwhile ---

 

He was unfazed by it, until he realised that it was its binding agent that was so different. The gooey charm that held all of Nicholas's contradictions together had saturated into the very meaning of each. So that held all of Nicholas's contradictions together had saturated into the very meaning of each. So that the hard kernels of consequence and implication had been dissolved like teeth insyrup. But there were hard gums driving his words and Hector had the ghastly image of Nicholas sitting with the older patients, chewing at the pale stringy parts of their being, while they winsomely rambled and drifted away, unaware of his purposeful gnashing.

Ghertrude fainted in a slurred S, as if her string had been cut.

   "What was her message?" asked Cyrena calmly. Ishmael was a rat in a wheel, running hard in the spinning cage of lies.

    The guillotine had existed in mainland Europe and the British Isles for centuries. The sharpened head axe or crushing weight had scuttled downd between its very long verticals to messily separate life in all manner of different forms and variations. Its distictive profiel reached into many dark and gloomy skies long before it obtained the lasting nomenclature of the good Dr. Guillotine, who, seeking a fast and humane method of dispatch, unwittingly signed his name in blood forever to laws allowing the use of an instrument of fearsome horror. Its dramatic simplicity came to represent the revolution's repetitive slaughter, turning it into the dripping icon of the Terror. Germany had a part in the French prototype -a highly skilled harpsichord makernamed Tobias Schmidt crafted the pencilled designs into fundamental reality. Some say the gleaming, oblique, forty-five-degree angle of the blade was his own personal refinement. The speed and efficiency of the new "gin" or engine was infamous. With its endless supply o clients, a new manner of operation was needed. An almost industrial, conveyor belt mentality that kept it overstocked. These earnest labours of the rational matter-opf-fact instigated evengreated performances of bizarre fact and elaborate fiction to dance around the djuddering leaky basket, which Duymas tells us had to be changed or mended every three days because the wicker bottom would be chewed out by tghe growing number of furiously chattering heads that thrashed in their narrow contgainment. Better documented but equally weird accounts tell of numerous  experiments carried out to ascertain the consciousness of the severed minds. The most elaborate being conducted by two young doctors who waited at the foot of the engine, ready to receive the falling head. Once grabbed it was rushed to their nearby carriage and attached via its arteries and gutta-percha pipes to a pump that, in turn, was connected via more tubes to a living dog, strapped to the carriage floor.  The horses were geared up and sped towards their laboratory, the cobbled streets sending loud shock waves through the passengers, who swayed  and steadied themselves while frantically hand-pumping the dog's hot blood into the flushing head. All the while shouting the victim's name aloud and slapping his cheeks over the deafening noise of the hard wheels and the whimpering dog. Some success was recorded, a partial opening of the eyes, a shudder of the lips. Even "some slight agitation" one hour and a fresh dog later, when the head was decanted to an attic laboratory.

 

    "Sometimes you are very childish," said an infuriated Ghertrude.
    "A condition that we have never ourselves experienced," said Luluwa.
    Gertrude listened for sarcasm in the clicking rattle of her speech but realised that none existed.

--------------------------

"The Cloven"

Behind each moment of acute sensing lay solidification, each blind nuzzle dying back into the terse density of colourless fibre, the water squeezed through the now-inert roots and passing upwards. If the mass of the forest that lived in light was alien to humans, then the mass that lived in night was positively hostile in its indifference. Even the burrowing Erstwhile would not be tolerated. Even though their supposed purpose was a form of protecting the forest. When they dug down they never snapped or cut a root. The simply pushed them aside and squirmed in between their languid violence. But as the sleepers hid, the roots turned, often trapping them in fearful embraces. Or sent out more tendril extensions of themselves to penetrate the mothlike bodies, digging into heir ribs and hooking through their faces. Those that eventually awoke often bore the scars of these intrusions, looking like ill-formed knotted arteries wandering under their jaws, cheeks, and eyes. Some no longer had eyes. Teh tips of the roots had found their moisture and sucked it into all the others, sugars to sprite the distant, frivolous leaves that jiggled and danced in the warm sunlit air.

    "This is really difficult for me to understand. Is Blake saying that all of humanity was a mistake?"
    "Not God's mistake in making it. The mistake was that it escaped from the garden and grew abnormal in one direction. Those clever thumbs were given for the tending of plants, not making cities, machines, and endless ideas of how things work, most of which are wrong."

Then, before the cyclops had time to scream of beat him, the beetles arrived. The first heavy black dot landed on Seth's face like an uncertain inkblot; then the air darkened in a clicking dry thunder of them.

B. Catling - "Earwig"

Strange but wonderful story of a girl with frozen saliva teeth, a man to look after her, a bar in Belgium... it's hard to describe this story, but highly recommend, although the moment where he tries to kill the cat but fails is haunting.

When God gave the first human consciousness, as they shivered their way out of Eden, he whispered advice under his celestial breath: 'obscure thyselves.' Every tribe of the sons of Adam and every half-simian with ingenuity has since learnt to brew or distil fluids, vapours and powders in order to relieve themselves of the intolerable jabber of thought occasionally; to numb their senses just enough to sensually smugde judement and nerve. A good bar is a sanctum to this need. Au Metro was a cathedral.

The catch found her fingers and the cage opened and she put her hands inside to touch something entirely new, like an unfound cleft or ripple in her own body. The cat moved into her hands, and a shape bigger than that brought on by the boy filled her from her toes to her optic nerves. She brought it out and held it to her once bony chest. It squirmed in against her warmth and a tiny part of her leaked out. The cat purred, and the change in its sound astonished her. There was only one thing to do, so she did, and purred back. This was the beginning of a profound an irrational friendship. She quickly took the little beast to her room and curled up on her bed with it tucked close to her chest. It did something extraordinary, and again Mia felt arousal. It gently pummelled her belly with its stuff, hard little paws, and pushed its scrawny head into the scrawny parts of her body. This odd person showed love in a physical and direct way, as if it wanted to burrow inside her and become one. The delight she felt was overwhelming.