Author: JL

We Are A Haunting: A Novel by Tyriek White

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We Are A Haunting: A Novel by Tyriek White

We Are A Haunting is a poetic song, like a siren that lured me into its world. Through the eyes of three generations of a black family living in New York City: Colly, Key, and Audrey, and the unraveling of their lives in a world rife with systemic racism, poverty, violence, grief, loss, readers are treated to a story that flows seamlessly between decades and generations.

White’s novel toggles forward and back in time. Characters float — as ghosts — between the past and the present. As the space between these three generations contracts and expands, the reader’s construction of time and history is reshaped, no longer a linear thing but a fluid matrix in which they live, all together, simultaneously at once. As a historian, We Are A Haunting reminds me that the past is never past, the present is merely a locus in history’s path.

The language which binds all these moments and spirits together is history, emotion, and experience: suffering and longing, obligations and promises kept or broken, strength and compromise, the ability to survive and a sense of defeat under the unwavering boot of poverty and racism. This is a complicated world in which awful events — such as getting fired and losing one’s income — is a nonevent warranting no reaction because of how useless it is to express emotion over it. This is just how life is. But, at the same time, such events are also gateways, paths that lead elsewhere, to better futures.

The interactions of the main characters with others in their lives: friends, fathers, husbands, children, and the dead or dying create the bonds which constitute the community and are the paths along which history travels. Each generation seeks to identify for themselves who they are and what they want, but they are also inevitably bound to the previous generation. Just as the living and the dead move seamlessly between their worlds in this novel, birth and death are a window that lets light in and keeps out the wind. Key, in her community, serves as a kind of gateway for life, possessing the ability to see things others cannot and in the capacity of a doula.

We Are A Haunting is not just about the black community itself, as an insular, discrete object in a vacuum. Then novel situates these black histories and experiences within the context of American material culture and history. Colly, Key, and Audrey and those around them are embedded in a world that has and continues to be assaulted by colonial institutions and racist systems. The deaths — those both metaphorical and physical — in We Are A Haunting are caused by this abuse and indifference. Casual micro-aggressions are tiny cuts and death is caused by a thousand of them.

This is a complex novel. For all its historical meaning, this is not a historical fiction in an informative sense; the time-bending, paranormal elements and the focus on characters’ and their emotional lives make this a more literary work than a historical narrative. This is not a novel that brings all its narrative arcs to happy, organic closures; un-repaired relationships, unfulfilled desires, and falsehoods are part of its characters’ lives. Morose, resentful endings are, after all, part of the colonial experience (at least from the perspective of the colonized.) In no way is this a detraction; this honest harshness is an authentic portrayal of racialized America.

The prose is literary. It is singularly focused on its characters more than its plot, though the unfolding of events lead to the characters’ interactions that shape their experiences. The characters are tangible, flawed, and powerfully written in each their own voices. Readers will have access to their interiority, but this is not an easy read in that the characters are — as real people are — guarded, afraid, unwilling to be vulnerable. Readers should not expect to be told what to think; this reader had to work to understand the motives and meanings of their conversation, their actions. The work, however, is worth it.

Someday Mija, You’ll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman: A Memoir by Yvonne Martinez

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Someday Mija, You’ll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman: A Memoir
by Yvonne Martinez

This is an intensely powerful memoir; Martinez’s life is a scar tissue of intergenerational wounds. Someday Mija, You’ll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman is a serious treatment of what the traumas of racial violence, poverty, and sexual exploitation can do to a child and a family, and how Yvonne was able to weave these histories — her own, her mother’s, her grandmother’s, her family’s and her community’s — into a lifetime of “doing better.” This is not a memoir to be undertaken lightly.

Celebrate Hispanic Heritage, September 15th to October 15th — but also, whenever and always!

Someday Mija, You’ll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman is divided into two halves, the first reads like a novel and documents Martinez’s experiences as a child and growing up in a dysfunctional family. The second half addresses Yvonne’s life afterward, as an adult and specifically as an activist in the service of her community, as an organizer, and educator.

The two halves are intertwined: it is Martinez’s experiences growing up in an abusive and violent home that shapes her ability to understand the traumas that envelop her community. This shared experience is one not easily addressed by public health programs or the simple piling on of more and more education. Oppressive systems stemming from cultures steeped in patriarchy, sexual violence, and colonization cannot be wiped away, even replaced that easily. These cultures exist within even larger systems of oppression.

In Martinez’s case, however, these experiences also spurred them to take on systemic racism, sexism, violence, and poverty as institutions to be dismantled. This is a case of an individual working from within, for one’s own community (and for all communities). Change must be internal as well as external for it to sustain; Martinez’s life is proof of that.

A profound and consuming memoir that is in equal parts disturbing, sad, and inspiring.

Love and War in the Jewish Quarter: A Novel by Dora Levy Mossanen

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Love and War in the Jewish Quarter: A Novel by Dora Levy Mossanen

Set in Iran in the 1940s, Love and War in the Jewish Quarter captures Jewish life and culture as it existed in tense contest and precarious harmony with and within the majority, ruling Islamic community. On the fringes of World War II, but dangerously within the political reach of the Nazi regime and Soviet pressures, Iranian Jews must balance their interactions with Muslims even more carefully than they always had. The Allies are a distant factor; they are not a guarantee of safety as news of Hitler’s internment of Jews creeps ever closer.

[For those interested in the Jewish experience of WWII in this region of the world, One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and a search for a Lost World by Michael Frank is about Rhodes and its Jewish community before and during WWII.]

It is in this tension that Jewish dentist, Dr Soleiman Yaran, finds himself. He is trapped in the conflicting intersection between his Jewish community and roots, the powerful Iranian royal family and governors of the land, his family, and his personal desires. The novel revolves around his attempt to unravel and reconcile his responsibilities and his personal happiness. Embedded in these tensions are deeper, more global undercurrents: as a medical professional schooled in Paris, Yaran also finds himself — as an agent of a Westernized modernity — at odds with ethnic, religious traditions, Jewish and Muslim alike. The war is not the only conflict highlighted in this novel; friction also exists in culture between the traditional past and the modern present. There is a shedding of superstition and tradition in favor of new technologies and practices, beliefs about the roles of men and women in their communities. Gendered expectations, visible through the performances of wife, husband, child, lover, parent, elder, and filial piety, duty to one’s community, and duty to one’s self are strong themes throughout.

Mossanen delivers this internal and historical drama through a romantic storyline, but readers will be disappointed if they expect a historical romance, for a romance it is not. This is a love story about love in the real and brutal world, where individuals are buffeted by cultural and community expectations and traditions. Its realistic setting and story are the novel’s appeal; the unpredictability of life will keep you, Reader, on your toes throughout.

The characters too, are fascinating — multi-faceted and tangible — because they are reflections of real internal conflicts. They are flawed and spurred on to their actions by subjective logics, some which make little sense, except when viewed within the larger landscape of this history and cultural context. The villains in this novel are human in their cruelties. The heroes and heroines are human, unable to manifest impossible archetypes.

A worthy read for all fans of historical fiction of the 20th century.

I Am Oum Ry: A Champion Kickboxer’s Story of Surviving the Cambodian Genocide and Discovering Peace by Oum Ry, told to Zochada Tat and Addi Somekh

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Afterward by Michael G. Vann, PhD.

I Am Oum Ry: A Champion Kickboxer’s Story of Surviving the Cambodian Genocide and Discovering Peace by Oum Ry

This memoir strikes hard on multiple levels. It is a reflection of contemporary America and the transnational, transcultural, immigrant experience that many Americans live, whether themselves or vicariously (as Zochada Tat did), as the children of immigrants. Migration is a traumatic event, (sometimes positive, sometimes not, but always) one that reaches across several generations. Oum Ry’s memoir toggles forward and back in time, threading a connection in time between father (Oum Ry) and daughter (Zochada Tat). From this perspective, I Am Oum Ry is an emotional read, a subjective vacuum in which the characters are the primary focus, separate from the context of their world in a way. Tat and Somekh portray Oum Ry, his many lovers, his wife, his children, and the myriad of people who came, left, or stayed in his orbit, in all their flawed perfection; the logics behind his and their behavior as consequences of individualized trauma: parental abandonment, grief of loved ones lost or killed, sexual desire and exploitation.

But people do not exist in vacuum. The individuals in these pages are not ahistorical; they are deeply embedded in histories of patriarchy, Colonialism, the Cold War, the Khmer Rouge genocide, the American/Vietnam War, Cambodian traditions, and collective desires for modernity, belonging, and security.

The memoir takes the reader to Cambodia in the mid-twentieth century, beginning just after WWII. The French stubbornly cling to Indochina. Then ahead to the American War in Vietnam a decade later. It lingers on the five golden years of the 20th century when Cambodia perched on the edge of modernity, part of a larger Southeast Asian moment of revivalism and decolonization and prosperity in the early 1970s. After that the reader follows Oum Ry into the dark age of the Khmer Rouge genocide, and the suffering that followed as Oum Ry, like so many thousands of other Cambodians fled to Thailand to seek asylum elsewhere, anywhere. Oum Ry, like many other fortunate refugees makes his way to the United States where he finds both happiness and deep disappointment. The life of a migrant is bittersweet, filled with hope and longing.

The histories I Am Oum Ry excavates are powerful, a fisted punch to the gut. Oum Ry holds nothing back. The currents of forced migration, war, genocide, and racism that underpin Oum Ry’s words and experiences will knock the wind out of readers. This is an important memoir, not because it is unique — it isn’t, there are many Cambodian-American/Cambodian memoirs written by survivors of the Khmer Rouge — but because it neither indicts or glorifies the past or the present. The Khmer Rouge are not the sole villains of the genocide, though they are largely responsible for the horrors Oum Ry and other Cambodians experience; the Vietnamese and ordinary, fellow Cambodians are part of the horrific milieu of that moment too. America is not hailed as the land of milk and honey; it too is a dark land of racism, crime, poverty, and disappointment. But it isn’t all bad either; Oum Ry and his family find a place in California and become new Americans.

It is also significant in that it highlights pradal serey/muay thai, and centers around this sport. It is unique in this aspect. Oum Ry occupies a unique cultural position as a fighter, a sports icon in Cambodian history and 20th century Cambodian culture; his memoir gives us a rare glimpse into a world of sport and celebrity that was exclusive before the war and certainly much more so afterwards as a result of the loss of so many Cambodian stars.

For me, as a Southeast Asian scholar and a historian of Southeast Asian sport, I Am Oum Ry possesses academic significance. Sport is an often overlooked aspect of history and culture, seen as purely recreational. I Am Oum Ry proves how wrong this assumption is; pradal serey deserves attention as a historical artifact of a lost moment and in the present as a vital element of Cambodian-American identity and Cambodian cultural revival.

For almost every reader, I Am Oum Ry will evoke a multitude of emotions ranging from sad to inspired. Oum Ry’s life has been a rollercoaster in and out of the fighter’s ring. It has been dramatic in positive and negative ways. His is a life worth the reading.

Daughters of the New Year: A Novel by E.M. Tran

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Daughters of the New Year: A Novel by E.M. Tran

I am a sucker for a slow, immersive, multi-generational historical fiction. I love the unwinding of family secrets and histories. Families are spaces of ordinary and extraordinary trauma; intense love also breeds intense regret, jealousies, animosities. Tragedy binds and creates familial bonds stronger than blood. And, of course, as a historian I love getting a glimpse into a past where the reasons and logics behind piety, duty, and love are complex, sometimes contradictory, colored with personal suffering, traditions, and the institutions of humanity-at-large — as in this case, French colonialism and Confucian patriarchy.

That is the hinge around which Daughters of the New Year swivels. This novel is an honest portrait of the brutal historical and cultural complexities that shape familial love.

The reader is given a privileged view into the minds, hearts, and philosophies of several generations of Vietnamese women. It is a novel about why and how mothering, motherhood, and filial duty are never straightforward, why these acts of love are volatile constructions of history and culture. Time and place alter the modes by which we care for one another, show each other love. What is an expression of affection for one generation is manipulation to the next. What is piety to one generation is an empty gesture for another. The reasons why mothers do what they do, why sometimes their love crushes their daughters, are molded by forces beyond their control: war, racism, patriarchy. Yet, for all those differences, there is one motivation behind these acts: the desire to provide the next generation with more than what the previous had. This is the love embedded in families.

The reader is given a privileged view of an excavation of familial love through Vietnamese and American history. Through chapters narrated by a daughter of this family, daughters descended through a matriarchal bloodline, the reader gets an interior view of the characters’ minds. Each of them has a different voice in this novel. EM. Tran’s prose is a beautiful thread throughout, binding their stories together, but each of the characters speak with their own, unique voice. Each chapter reveals its narrator’s logic, their historical context; explains why they did the things they did — even perhaps knowing that those acts would somehow traumatize the next generation.

There is Nhi and her sisters, the American generation. There is their mother, Xuan; their aunt, Xuan’s sister; there is their grandmother; a line of women, as if holding hands, unbroken, their spirits resiliently swaying in the winds of change and time going all the way back to the epic and legendary Trung sisters. Daughters of the New Year is about these women.

Fans of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club, or Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko will enjoy Tran’s Daughters of the New Year.

Peach Blossom Spring: A Novel by Melissa Fu

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Peach Blossom Spring: A Novel by Melissa Fu

I’ll be honest; the first 60 pages of this novel did not impress me. There was nothing wrong specifically, it’s just that nothing stood out to me in terms of character development or plot. But persistence paid off and by the end of the book I was in tears, ugly crying over the lifetime of grief, loss, and intergenerational trauma that history forced on the characters. This is a book I will never part with; I want my children and grand children to read this book.

The novel begins in the 1930s when China has been ravaged by European encroachments on its sovereignty; internal fractures between peasants, warlords, and the rising middle class; and the Japanese, who are gaining ground and support for their own imperializing campaigns. The Dao family are much like many others of their class: they own an antiques business, they are merchants living prosperous urban lives. Then the Japanese arrive and they are forced to flee. Meilin and her young, suddenly fatherless son, Renshu escape with her brother-in-law, her husband’s brother, Dao Longwei and his wife, Wenling and their two daughters. But the war continues and despite Longwei’s protection, Meilin and Renshu are separated from the other Dao family members.

The war with the Japanese slides into World War II and then into China’s Civil War. The seams between these conflicts are invisible to those like Meilin and Renshu who survive in the semi-peaceful interstices and spaces between them. The novel traces their journey across space and time, from China to the United States, and is marked by the people and things they lose along the way. This sense of loss — particularly of the loss of family, identity, and belonging — is the fulcrum around which the novel revolves.

Meilin, Renshu, and eventually Renshu’s daughter, Lily narrate their own and the Dao family story across several decades, three generations who experience the their subjective transnational, migration history and the larger, tragic events of Chinese history very differently. The reader is given a glimpse into living wounds of war, the kind that fester long after the battle has been lost, a world in which those who bear the brunt of war are not the combatants but the bystanders, even the truly innocent, those as yet unborn at the time of war. Like Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (which I read, but did not review here), Mother of Strangers by Suad Amiry, and Moth by Melody Razak this is a story of the effects of war and politics on those who had little to do with battle.

Loss and the grief of never being able to “go back” to be again what you once were, to have what you once had, and the especially painful suffering of being a transnational person, an immigrant belonging to two places at once and never fully to any one of them is a key theme in the novel. This is embedded in the title of the novel, which is premised on a scroll that Meilin inherits from her husband and a story she draws from it and tells to her son. In each their own ways, Meilin, Renshu, and Lily can never truly be whole in the way they want. History imposes on them, forces them to be split, to grieve for something or some part of them they cannot have, cannot be.

In comparison to Moth and Mother of Strangers, Peach Blossom Spring is less literary in prose and style, but no less powerful or profound. Fu’s style and language is more accessible to the casual reader of historical fiction; it is succinct, but deeply emotionally evocative. Indeed, the emotional build up is slow and steady. I didn’t realize how attached I’d become to the characters until the end, when events forced me to confront the idea of losing them. Fu is a shrewd and talented writer, and the emotional cuts her words make leave tender scars.

Although those first 60 pages did leave me wondering where exactly events were heading… I now wonder if that lull was deliberate. Perhaps the explosion of my interest performative of the dramatic effect of war on the characters. The lull before the storm…

Two Houses, Two Kingdoms: A History of France and England, 1100-1300 by Catherine Hanley

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Two Houses, Two Kingdoms: A History of France and England, 1100-1300
by Catherine Hanley

Of the books I’ve read lately, this is by the far the most academic and “historical” in subject, language, and depth of detail. Yet, at the same time, this is not strictly for an academic audience. Readers will find that Two Houses, Two Kingdoms is suitable and accessible for all adults interested in the Medieval age, the ins and outs of politicking and the martial exploits of kings, queens, and the nobility in Western Europe. (I say “adult readers” because this is really not accessible for a younger, less mature reader. Its audience is a small sliver of the total general reading population; children, juvenile, and young adult readers will likely find this plodding.)

The structure of the book follows a traditional, chronological form, moving from the 1100s to end at the beginning of the 14th century, allowing readers unfamiliar with the dynasties and generations of these royal houses to follow along with who was whom’s son, daughter, niece, cousin, and so on. It was a tangled mess of consanguineous relationships. This is a historical monograph in the traditional sense of the word.

The prose however, is refreshingly modern, flowing with an ease that many older monographs lack. In many ways, Hanley’s narrow focus on the royal and noble houses attached to them is what keeps the reader’s attention: the chapters read like episodes of a family drama. There is a soap opera like quality to the mechanics of politics in this age; there are kidnappings of maidens and children, sordid adult-minor affairs and marriages, betrayals of the deepest cuts, adulterous liaisons leading, The men and women Hanley depicts in these pages could achieve viral fame on The Jerry Springer Show or feature on a highlight of Judge Judy. No joke.

What the reader should not expect is a cultural or social history of the Medieval period; the ordinary, non-royal, non-noble classes do not make an appearance in this text, nor does it dwell on cultural norms or landscapes of the time. This is a political history focused on the highest classes of society at the time. Hanley is clear from the beginning this is what the book centers on.

As a text for the classroom then, this is potentially useful and not. For a course on Medieval history, say, a graduate level seminar, Hanley’s monograph would be perfect — except that by that stage in students’ careers, they are liable to be already familiar with its content. And Hanley does not delves into the historiographical literature or methodology. This is far less suitable for an undergraduate seminar. It is too long and dives too deeply into the nitty gritty for an introductory course. This is better suited to a general adult non-fiction audience than the classroom.

As a historian reading for pleasure, I found it enjoyable. The prose was smooth, flowing, logical, and concise. Hanley did not waste words; this economy delivered what was necessary to understand the course of events, the personalities involved, their ambitions and motivations. The depth of detail warrants praise; Hanley is an expert in this period and the level of research and analysis they invested in this scholarship is apparent, even if their methodologies were not. An excellent monograph well worth any interested reader’s attention and time.

The Picture Bride: A Novel by Lee Geum-Yi

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The Picture Bride: A Novel by Lee Geum-Yi

The Picture Bride is a historical novel that transcends its unique historical moment to touch on experiences and themes the reader will find familiar: the significance of family, the trials of marriage and love, loss and grief of loved ones lost to death or distance. The novel revolves around the migration of picture brides from East Asia to Hawai’i and the Western United States, a practice that was rampant in the early few decades of the twentieth century. Japanese and Korean men left their homelands to find work on Hawai’ian plantations, and as they accrued a little bit of wealth they found themselves in a primarily homosocial world, absent of East Asian women. To find love and fulfill their duty to wed, they would engage the services of a matchmaker and seek out a bride from their home country. The technology of the day limited the contact between potential bride and groom to correspondence and a photograph, hence the name given to this marital transaction: both the bride and groom would have nothing to more than a photograph to base their physical attraction on.

Many men who sought wives in this way were long past the typical marriage age of men in their home countries. Aware of their advanced age and how this might deter a young woman from wanting to marry them, they often used a fake photograph of someone else or a photograph from their youth. Picture brides discovered the deception on their arrival, too late to turn back — if they had the money to do so — without suffering humiliation or possible repudiation by their families.

Of course, such arrangements also resulted in personality mismatches and other deceptions of character, on both sides. In the end, all the migrants have no choice but to set those differences and loyalties aside; the people on the plantation and scattered across the islands become the only family they can have.

This is a story of the pain and joy of being an immigrant, of what lengths we have to go through to find our place in the world. The novel focuses on loss of family and the gaining of new ones. How these young women adapted, thrived, or wilted in their new homes so far away from their homelands is what unfolds in the novel. I won’t spoil it for you so I will stop my review here.

The Picture Bride is a novel about what it takes to live one’s life as best they can, with what they have and what they have lost.

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai

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The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories
by Jamil Jan Kochai

Living in the United States, the word “Afghanistan” crackles in the air when uttered. There is no escaping the politics of the word and, more often than not, insulting Orientalist and racist language in the larger context of that conversation (malicious or unintentional).

For that reason alone, Kochai’s collection of stories set in contemporary Afghanistan is powerful and worth any reader’s time and attention. The narratives and characters in this collection humanize a subject that has too long been objectified and rendered inferior. The tales bring Afghans to life, force the reader — in the best of ways — to see and think of them as living, feeling, bleeding individuals, as tangible and as intimate with ourselves as our sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, parents, friends, lovers, husbands, wives, children. In these character’s voices we can hear our own. Our own desires and fears are mirrors of theirs.

The stories are embedded in Central Asian Islamic and Colonial culture and history, but they also revolve around universal principles: love, marriage, ambition, identity, belonging. Afghans in these stories are college students sharing the same interests and experiences of growing up and out like all college students — not merely tokenized international students who live on the periphery of campus life, transient and alien. In some of these stories there are young women seeking to understand their roles in society, in their families. They, like all of us, are torn by expectations imposed on us from within and without. The women in these stories are not foils to men or cutouts of the flattened, Orientalist idea of Islam; they are also not mindlessly rebellious, mimics of Western feminism. These women are accurate reflections of women everywhere and yet also unique in their Afghani-ness: contradictory, full of internal and external conflict, desirous and aware of obligation, selfish and selfless. The characters in Kochai’s fiction — women and men alike — do not need to trade their Afghani selves for a Western one or a vice versa, even if there is tension between these identities. It is a tension that enhances, rather than subverts the narratives here. Tradition and modernity are not at odds in the real, lived world anywhere; that false binary is the fiction here! Kochai’s nuanced depictions of women, youth, men, childhood, marriage, love, sex, and life-at-large made this a very satisfying read.

I also deeply appreciated that many stories depicted Afghans outside of Afghanistan in an authentic diasporic perspective. So frequently are Afghans (and other Asians and people of color in general) fixed into some faraway, non-Western, exotic location. In several of the stories Afghans are cosmopolitan, worldly figures, part of the global community in material ways beyond being an image on the television news. They are American, British, European in as much as they are Afghan. As with many other OwnVoice fiction, these stories make the poignant point that the hyphenated identity is true but simultaneously too simplistic of a label; national boundaries are not only porous, in cultural context they are fiction. (Of course, borders do exist in a material, political sense; passports are not obsolete artifacts!)

At the same time, there is a thread of distinctly Afghan experience threading through these tales, one that is grounded in global politics, colonial histories, Islam in its present forms, migration. That is its cohesion and its strength. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories is a must-read collection, especially for those who seek to understand a misunderstood community and want to excavate their identities beyond its contemporary political history and presence.

Opium and Other Stories by Géza Csath

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Opium and Other Stories by Géza Csath

Opium and Other Stories is a mirror of Csath’s deranged interior and exterior lives, as if they clashed together and the broken shards became the pieces of these stories and characters. Originally published in 1908, these tales of murder, death, desire, lust, and loss possess a darkness that is characteristic of this period of European history, a moment marked by Imperial ambitions and imperial defeats, war, chaos, and revolution. Nations seemed to be forged and dismantled in the course of an evening’s drunken revelries in these decades. Kings. princes, and the bourgeoisie fed their greed on the fruits of exploitation: child laborers, colonial taxes, the broken backs of men and women worked to death in factories. What was proposed in metaphor became someone’s reality; everything was possible — then World War ensued — and despair came like a wave over Europe.

World War I was an incalculable loss, in Europe and for the rest of the world. Millions of European soldiers perished on the battlefields, suffocated on mustard gas and wasted by gangrene before slow, agonizing deaths. Colonial armies were crushed. France sacrificed hundreds of thousands of Indochinese lives; millions of Asians served as laborers; brown and yellow men died for white men’s ambitions. Men like Csath did not escape; his PTSD is a biography of the death that came after those who survived.

There is no escaping the profound sense of fracture that seems to have broken Csath as a human being. Opium and Other Stories are the pieces of what was left of him. I do not mean that in a sad, negative way; no, indeed, Csath’s life is the stuff of his imagination. His life is a wreckage you can’t tear your eyes off of and his stories are the same.

On the whole, these stories are short, snippets of lives at their strangest, at their ends, at the moment things unravel. Many of them end just as the reader notices that something is really, really, really wrong. “Paul and Virginia” was one that caught me; Csath reveals and revels in a side of love and sex that is unsavory, but not so perverse as to disgust — it attracts, causes pause, intrigues. “The Surgeon” frightened. That tale made my skin goose a bit, as did “Matricide” and “The Black Silence.” “Toad” made me smile wistfully; there was something magical in the way the animal came to life and something ugly in the way it did too.

These stories are Franz Kafka and Anna Kavan and Chuck Palahniuk — but of course, before all of them existed. They are weird and creepy and I am a little too intrigued by their gore for my comfort. Perfect for Halloween.