THE FEAST MAKERS (Erewhon, 412 pp., $18.95), by H.A. Clarke, concludes a trilogy that began with “The Scapegracers,” a brutal and vivid evocation of the bonds between queer teenagers and the magic they can make together.
A witch is anyone with a “specter,” a lump of magic light that reflects the color of one’s soul. Witchfinders can steal these, condemning specterless witches to a slow and painful death. In the first book, Sideways Pike forms the Scapegracers coven with three others, but loses a specter. In the second novel, “Scratch Daughters,” the Scapegracers liberate dozens of stolen specters, including Sideways’s, from a Witchfinder hoard.
“The Feast Makers” follows the Scapegracers into a wider witch society, as many covens show up to search the recovered specters for those that belonged to their members.
Sideways also faces a dilemma: Madeline Kline, a former crush who stole Sideways’s specter to replace her own lost magic, has been condemned to death by her coven and is seeking help from the Scapegracers, who have a reputation for aiding others on principle. As they navigate intrawitch politics, Daisy, Yates, Jing and Sideways are courted by different covens that suit their individual temperaments and ambitions, but at the cost of their unity.
If you loved the first two volumes of this series, the third will not disappoint; it’s as fierce and funny as its predecessors, which I’ve loudly praised. Even if it’s a little more chaotic and slapdash, it’s still a worthy conclusion to an exciting series.
The phrase “stand-alone with series potential” has come up a lot in publishing circles lately, signaling a shift away from the fantasy trilogies and longer series of yesteryear. While this strategy can result in frustratingly unresolved stories with uncertain futures, Robert Jackson Bennett manages to thread the needle beautifully with THE TAINTED CUP (Del Rey, 410 pp., $28.99). This fantasy mystery novel introduces two dynamic detectives in a strange and frightening world, as if Nero Wolfe were solving mysteries in Area X.
Several rings of walls protect the empire of Khanum from leviathans, ocean creatures so vast that they’re less like animals than like chunks of wayward geography. Everything from people to architecture is bioengineered: Plant-fiber houses can withstand earthquakes, while humans can be altered to have enhanced memories or reflexes. Dinios Kol is an “engraver,” able to remember crime scenes in perfect detail, to the benefit of his employer, Ana Dolabra, an ostracized investigator whose sensory sensitivity often requires her to wear a blindfold. When a wealthy and unscrupulous man is spectacularly murdered in a powerful aristocrat’s summer house, Ana and Din are called in to solve the crime, while Din struggles to keep his own secrets from coming to light.
“The Tainted Cup” is a thoroughly satisfying delight from start to finish. If you, like me, enjoy an animating nonsexual relationship between a brilliant, eccentric woman and a devoted and highly competent man, this book is a cornucopia. Bennett pulls off his own feat of engineering in splicing genres together so effectively, marrying the imaginative abundance of a fantasy world to the structure, pace and character dynamics of detective fiction.
Micaiah Johnson’s sophomore novel, THOSE BEYOND THE WALL (Del Rey, 371 pp., $28.99), meanwhile, could reasonably be called a stand-alone sequel. It returns to the postapocalyptic setting of Johnson’s debut, “The Space Between Worlds,” where multiversal travel exists, with a catch: People can survive the crossing only if no version of them exists in their destination world. Otherwise the traveler, or “traverser,” risks an extraordinary death from “backlash,” a force that can turn a body inside out.
The man who created the transport technology lives in Wiley City, a walled compound whose citizens enjoy artificial sunlight and a controlled atmosphere. But in order to travel the multiverse effectively, he needs the dispossessed and exploited people of Ashtown, a desert community outside the city walls.
“Those Beyond the Wall” is narrated by a woman named Mr. Scales, who carries a nesting doll’s worth of family secrets while working as an enforcer for Ashtown’s Blood Emperor, Nik Nik. After she witnesses a dear friend being torn apart in a way that can only be backlash, it becomes clear that someone has figured out how to shift the risk of death from the traverser to the inhabitants of the destination world. Preventing an invasion of these infiltrators will require old nemeses and unlikely friends to unite against a common enemy.
Where “The Space Between Worlds” was a structured book, unfolding its plot the way a scene would on a painted fan, “Those Beyond the Wall” is more tightly focused on character and voice, revolutionary ethics and practice. It’s about apartheid as a violent premise that requires violent resistance, not as a parade of suffering to be solved with pity and charity by those who profit from it. It’s a book that forces its characters and its readers to reckon with two questions: What side of the wall are you on, and what side of the wall do you want to be on?
