smalltimereads

Little Sister Death by William Gay was published by Dzanc Books.

I think Little Sister Death is successful in creating a myth and how things build up around it, and the impact local legends can have on the places they're set, and in conveying how a haunting can destroy a family. It does a good job at skipping around time periods, and depicting Binder's obsession and how it takes him away from his family. William Gay's prose is solid, and good at conveying the way people speak without getting too into writing out dialect.

Although the haunting is definitely real, as far as the book shows, there was a lot about it that was incredibly frustrating. I don't need everything to be neatly tied up, but the book introduced a number of threads that weren't even revisited again, or seemed to foreshadow things that would never come back. There was also some gender and race stuff I didn't love, but might have been "older dude author" stuff or might have been part of the story. I love folk tales and folk horror and metafiction, and wanted to enjoy this book, but it fell flat for me. The foreword was more interesting.

This book is published by DZANC Books, based in Michigan. I have no idea why it's called Dzanc, but they published a (fiction) book about retellings of Hansel and Gretel, so here I am!

As soon as I saw what this book was about, I wanted to read it. I love Hansel and Gretel, and I love stories about stories, and this book delivered. It's about Hansel and Gretel, and stories, and Halley's Comet, and the spiral nature of things- constantly repeating, but changing with each repetition; it's about queerness, and sickness, and the end of the world, and how information disseminates but also disappears. It's about endings and beginnings. It's about siblings.

Ok, but what is the book about?

I just said.

Ok, but what is the plot?

There isn't one, not a solid one. It bounces back and forth in time, from the "original" children all the way to the future, where Halley's Comet crashes into the planet, obliterating everything that hadn't already been destroyed. I guess, if I had to pick a central thesis, around which the rest of the story is built, it is a particularly rare version of the story, one which may have or may not have existed. I'm trying not to spoil it, because the unfurling of this book is one of the most interesting things about it. Does make it difficult to write about, though.

Although the book is fascinating, and beautifully written, I do wish it had touched more on some of the themes I find most interesting about Hansel and Gretel- consuming, the relationship between Gretel and the Witch, the gingerbread house. But it does a good job at what themes it does set out to explore, so I can't fault it too much for not pandering exactly to my tastes.

As a random note, when I saw the bit in the summary about "in 2211, twin space probes aiming to find earth's sister planet disseminate the narrative in binary code," I thought of T Kingfisher's short story "Metal Like Blood in the Dark" from Uncanny Magazine.