oh! the hero complex

It’s that time again! That time when I start to think I can be a blogger everyone is posting their best-of lists, and who am I to ignore what’s popular?

I mean, aside from my entire history of existence.

Anyways! I read 123 books in 2024, with a goal of 120, so it was a very satisfying reading year. I’ve decided to keep the 120 book goal for 2025, with a focus on paring down my physical TBR stacks (we shall not discuss the unread e-book situation. No, we shall not). I did some bookshelf reorganizing last night — so satisfying! — and now my physical books are visible and accessible, which is half the battle when you’re trying to read down the stacks.

Out of those 120 books, a bunch stood out as the best I read this year. Namely:

1. City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky: I am, loudly and consistently, an Adrian Tchaikovsky superfan; I’ve never read a book by him that isn’t at least thoroughly enjoyable (even if it doesn’t reach the heights of Children of Time, which is the first, and as of now best, book I read of his). There’s something so comforting in reading his work, in knowing that I’m in the hands of a writer who is not just incredibly competent, but compelling, thoughtful, and imaginative.
   
   City of Last Chances is no exception. Most of what I’ve read of Tchaikovsky’s work has been his science fiction, so seeing him at work in fantasy was a rare treat. Here, in the city of Ilmar — a city under occupation, a city under siege — revolution is brewing, but there are dark stirrings in the Anchorwood, a wood that is both forest and portal. That’s a very thin and inadequate blurb about a book that feels, to me, like a delicious mash-up of Dragon Age 2 and Les Misérables. There’s a kaleidoscope of narrators, from the last priest and worshiper of a god, to a warrior displaced from another world searching for his wife, to students fanning the revolutionary fires, and many, many more. It’s creepy, bleak, tense, and full of subtle magic. Is it a happy story? Not particularly, but it is a frightening, satisfying one, with Tchaikovsky’s usual love for invertebrates on display.
   
   This is the first book in a series (trilogy?), though it seems that the sequels are standalones — I plan to devour them all! Along with the rest of Tchaikovsky’s work, but given how the man publishes at least three books a year, I have my work cut out for me.
   
2. The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez: Oh lord. Okay. This book has such a deeply deceptive simplicity of summary (that’s enough alliteration for today, Bethany), and it in no way prepared me for how lush, complex, and ambitious this book is. It can be summed up as “two young men help a goddess escape the shackles of a tyrant emperor, and encounter some trouble along the way” — and while that is, technically, the plot, it leaves out how that story is nested within two others: a play, performed in a theater within a dream, and the family history of a far-future descendant of the characters in the first story.
   
   Each layer of the narrative is in constant dialogue with itself, and with each other layer, often in the same paragraph. It’s a love letter to oral storytelling, a call to rise against oppressors, a love story, a horror story — it’s so many things a review can’t really do them justice. And on top of all of that, gorgeous prose! What more could you ask for?
   
   It’s a novel that rewards patience, and demands a lot of the reader. I suggest reading it in big chunks, then letting them digest before diving back in. Might not be for everyone (it is BRUTAL in places), but you have to appreciate the scope of Jimenez’s ambition as a writer.
   
3. North Woods by Daniel Mason: I admit, I was swayed to read this book by the cover. It’s so striking! And then, once I started reading and realized it took place in my beloved Western Massachusetts, I was sold.
   
   This is a subtle book, more so than pretty much anything else I read this year, so subtle I didn’t realize the crescendo was happening until I was in the middle of it. Each section feels self-contained, circling around the same house in the North Woods, recording the stories of those who lived in and near it — starting with two runaway lovers in the Puritan age of New England. There are artists, there are apples, there is snow and hunger and loss; we see the house and the woods through the eyes of all the inhabitants, even down to the beetles.
   
   As someone whose grandfather lived in a moldering old mansion on the Cape, the descriptions of the crumbling house and its contents struck me, deeply and sometimes painfully. The past is never quite gone, this book seems to say, and it may sometimes even touch the present, but never without grief and wistful regret. North Woods builds to such a beautiful ending, though, that I can only be thankful for the experience, and the reminder.
   
4. The Reformatory by Tananarive Due: This was…oof. I knew it would be rough going in, but this books haunts me, if you’ll excuse the pun. I sometimes feel like, with horror novels, that the quality of the prose suffers in comparison to the plot, but Due managed to write an absolutely beautiful, immersive novel while also scaring the shit out of me.
   
   And the worst part? Like all of the truly horrifying novels, the most vile cruelties are the good old human ones. Yes, there are ghosts, and yes, they are terrifying, but the titular Reformatory and the humans who run it are far, far worse. Due is writing from history, a history that is baked into what America is — a history that still influences America today. There were schools like this, where the white men running it were just as evil and abusive and racist, and Black children suffered just as Robbie did.
   
   But she also writes about Black communities, and how they supported each other and helped each other survive the absolute shit they were forced to endure, and the glimpses of the growing Civil Rights movement shed light on the bleak events of the novel. The ending kicks absolute ass, and I was so sad to leave the characters behind. This was the first of Due’s writing for me, but I’ve already added all her books to my TBR.
   
5. Dark is Better by Gemma Files: I read Experimental Film back in 2022, and immediately fell in love with Files’s writing. I really enjoyed the take on found footage horror (something that’s tough to pull off in a book!), and the way it showed off the depth of Files’s experience as a film critic was deftly done. So, I was really excited to dive into her short fiction!
   
   And let me tell you: every single story in this collection is good. Like, really, really good. They’re not all bangers, but they all do something different and interesting and awful (in the best way) — shifting POVs, changes in narrative tone, a vast range of story subjects — and none of them overstay their welcome. It’s so clear that Files is a master of short fiction, on top of being a TERRIFYING WRITER.
   
   The absolute bangers, for me, were the opening novelette “[Anasazi]” (this one will appeal most to fellow SCP Foundation fans, I think!), “each thing I show you is a piece of my death” (which hits on the film industry again, a recurring theme in Files’s work), and “Slick Black Bones and Soft Black Stars”, which is one of the best riffs on The King in Yellow that I’ve come across.
   
   Just a delicious collection, from beginning to end. My only quibble is that one story mentioned on the back cover seems to be missing, but I haven’t been able to find out for sure.
   
6. Asunder by Kerstin Hall: There’s a very specific pleasure in walking into a book without having any real expectations, and knowing nothing about the author’s previous work, and then discovering that the book was indeed Your Thing. That was my experience with Asunder; I had the blurb to go by, which is an accurate but wholly inadequate description of what goes on. Yes, Carys is bound to a truly horrific god/demon/secret third thing; yes, she commits an altruistic act of magic that gets her into all kind of trouble.
   
   But none of that really gets into the strangeness of this world, into which Hall throws us without much ceremony, trusting that we’ll pick up the borders of the world and its history without having them explicitly laid out for us. It’s not an approach to storytelling — especially in fantasy, where so much of the story often relies on exposition and description — and there are books where it hasn’t worked for me. By keeping the focus quite tight on Carys — miserable, determined, lonely Carys — and letting us see through her eyes, the scope of Asunder feels vast, but never overwhelming. It’s personal, subtle, and terrifying. Gorgeous prose, charming side characters, and a living, vibrant world all cohere into a truly satisfying novel.
   
   It builds to a gloriously disturbing climax, and let me tell you, the scream I screamed when I got to the end!! At least Hall has said a sequel is in the works, and I will happily camp out on her doorstep till it arrives.
   
7. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman: The feel-bad classic!! I think I saw this recommended on r/horrorlit, which is kind of hit or miss for me, but this was a hit. As in an emotional one.
   
   The synopsis is deceptively simple: a group of women are trapped in a cage, guarded by soldiers who never speak to or acknowledge them, and none of them remember how they got there. Simultaneously trapped and on display, the women try to survive. The story is narrated by a nameless girl who was somehow captured (if they were, indeed, captured) with the rest of the women, but she is fundamentally disconnected from them because she lacks any of the touchstones or cultural knowledge from a previous life.
   
   It is…really bleak. There is no answer given for why or how the women were taken, and so the questions turn inward: how can one be human, without ever really knowing them or the world? What comes once the basic problem of survival has been solved?
   
   The prose itself is river-stone smooth, again deceptively so — to the point that the horror of the narrator’s situation arrives at a delay. I really had to sit with this book when I finished it, but it’s earned a place as a hard copy book on my shelves. The highest praise for a book I can muster, really.
   
8. The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams: This series has been on my to-read list for about twenty-five years, in a nebulous sort of way; I always meant to get around to them, but they were never officially on the TBR list. I’m still not sure what inspired me to dive in, but over Thanksgiving, I entered the world of Osten Ard and never wanted to leave.
   
   It may feel ponderous and quaint to fantasy readers today, but for a book written in the 1980s, it avoids a lot of easy, trite plot twists, and rather than whirling us (and the characters) away on a picaresque coming-of-age story, it takes its graceful, patient time to get started. Hints of the larger plot are given early on, but since most of those hints arrive in smaller scenes, we spend the first 100 pages or so deeply involved in Simon’s POV. And Simon is, as the narrative is at great pains to emphasize, a very normal, very un-Chosen teenage boy.
   
   When it kicks off, though? Oh boy, it doesn’t stop. The feel of the story is pure high fantasy, but there are enough nightmarish scenes along the way to satisfy the biggest dark fantasy fans (like me!). Simon goes THROUGH IT, because this is a coming-of-age story, but he is not quite a hero, and has a painful awakening about what a hero has to do as the book develops.
   
   I have the rest of the trilogy on my shelf, but I want to take my time with this novel. It demands your patience and attention, but it’s so beautifully written, so wistful, and so creepy (hey guys? Guys? When you know a Very Bad Guy is called the Storm King, and you see a vast thunderstorm approaching? MAYBE YOU SHOULD START RUNNING), that those demands feel like spun sugar. A pure classic of the genre.
   
9. Diavola by Jennifer Marie Thorne: This is a pretty polarizing read, but I loved it to pieces. I adore my family and get along with them really well, but even so, at times I dread big family vacations. In Diavola, Anna has to deal with a nightmare family (who all treat her as varying kinds of shit) even before the supernatural aspects kick in.
   
   As creepy as certain scenes were (there’s a reveal about a missing night that comes late in the novel that freaked me out), my horror was more along the lines of being AGHAST at Anna’s family. There’s so much nastiness oozing along under the surface, so much selfishness and pointless scapegoating, that we almost don’t NEED the supernatural to come along and cause trouble. What was supposed to be a vacation in the Italian countryside was always bound to turn into a battleground, just because of who everyone is.
   
   Anna is not a blameless heroine; she’s realistically flawed and it’s clear her family has had reasons to be angry with her in the past, but a lot of her worse choices in the novel can be put down to utter mental and emotional strain. She’s haunted on both sides, by the living and the dead.
   
   Couple all that tension with snarky, witty narration, and vivid scene-setting, and you have a joyfully nasty horror novel. Just fantastic.
   
10. The West Passage by Jared Pechaček: My last read of the year, and one that I kept holding out for myself as a reward for other things: for finishing this other book, for finishing a writing project, for after the semester was over. Fie on me for waiting, especially since the synopsis — a country-sized city, brimming over with magic both new and festering, chained by ritual, and ruled over by giant Ladies of huge power and inscrutable motives — is basically my heroin.
    
    It’s medieval fantasy, one which doesn’t shy away from portraying how vibrant and noisy that time period was. Our main characters, Pell and Kew, explore the vast city on two separate missions (though they end up being inextricably linked, by an accident of Pell’s in the first chapter), their experiences colored by their lives as a worker trained to take care of births and the dead, and as the apprentice of the guardian of The West Passage, respectively. There’s accidental baby acquisition, giant frogs, mellified men, traveling merchants who ride enormous, semi-sentient legless men, lullabies…everything. This book has everything.
    
    If you ever wanted to live inside the illuminations in a medieval manuscript, this is the closest you’ll get. I never wanted to leave this world, this messy, embattled, vivid world — it feels like the child of Clive Barker’s Imajica and Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, and I, for one, want to go live in the city of the Ladies. Just not…anywhere near their towers.
    

So! There we have it. There were other books I really loved, like Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall, Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria, and S.E. Wendel’s Halfling — and I could easily have done a top twenty post. Maybe I should? No, let’s keep it simple for now.

And now, it’s off to my 2025 reading goal. I decided to stick with reading 120 books again, but I started off the year with two books that didn’t quite strike me the way I wanted to. I’ll give them a try later in the year, but for now I’m doing a reread of The Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner. Because spending time yelling GEN, both internally and out loud, is never a bad idea.

Happy 2025 to everyone, and may it be an excellent reading year for all of us!