Roseville Beach Reads in July
So July didn't have as many total titles as May or June, but including Delany's dense, surrealistic 900-page magnum opus alongside an often forgotten best-selling fantasy series and two classics of gothic and suspense literature made it a great month.
First the fantasy trilogy!
I kicked off the month of July binging Katherine Kurtz's debut series (and the first trilogy in her long Deryni series). Kurtz is a historical fantasy writer, bishop of a breakaway feminist Catholic Church, and founder of an interfaith "third order" semi-monastic group called The Order of St. Michael. Her books might have been published today as YA fantasy. They're fun to read (if thematically heavy-handed) and foreground personal relationships and negotiating loyalties to family, community, friends, faith, and state. Set in a quasi-historical setting in a fictional area of medieval Europe, her approach to psi and magic feels on point for much of what we'll see in fantasy fiction in the 1970s, and the way she presents the marginalization that Deryni face during this first trilogy will seem familiar to queer readers (and I don't know enough of Kurtz's biography to know if that was intentional at the time of publication), including King Wincet, who's invading from a neighboring kingdom, as a bad Deryni/bad gay.
I'd dipped my toes into the Deryni-verse at one point, but had started in the series internal order, picking up the second trilogy first. I don't remember much about it now, but it was good to come back to the series again, if only because it was once so influential and now so often forgotten.
Finishing Kurtz, I wanted something more gothic, so I returned to reread Jackson's classic about the remnant members of the Blackwood family: Merrikat, Constance, and poor Uncle Julian. I'll need a full blog post, but I know I first read this when I was young, repressed, and deeply closeted, and my brain hadn't fully processed the disturbing queer subtexts then, and I definitely was not nearly as familiar with the gothic then.
After re-reading it this time, I think I called it the best introduction to the gothic novel.
I may need a couple of blog posts and a little big of post-book therapy to process everything that went on here. It's an SF novel (you know because it was sold in the SF section); it's post-apocalyptic (though outside the city, the world's still running perfectly fine); it's a meta-narrative that never forgets it's also a narrative (though you'll forget at times whether it's narrative or meta-narrative that you're reading); it's Delany's bestselling novel (which should fuck with all the data-free assertions that you have decide whether you're writing literary fiction or commercial fiction). Delany never lets you get comfortable with the city, the characters, the action, or the sex. When I started re-reading other Delany novels for this series, @aaronmfking was right to steer me back to this one. I'd picked up several times over the past 20 years, and this time I didn't bounce off.
Finally, the novel that put horror back on the best-seller lists (the last gothic or horror novel to make it the Publisher's Weekly list had been Rebecca). I'd not read this (or any Levin) before, and am only 1/3 of the way through, but it's a short book, so I'm expecting to finish today or tomorrow before heading to Gen Con.
In August, it's on to The Exorcist.
