GROUNDSKEEPING by Lee Cole

“Perceptive and endearing, this novel signals the arrival of a talented new voice in fiction.”

groundskeeping

prose and spans of exposition for the chance to spend time with this complicated character with a big laugh and a guarded but vulnerable heart.

An unsparing exploration of the injustices wrought by misogyny and settler colonialism.

GROUNDSKEEPING

Cole, Lee Knopf (336 pp.) $28.00 | March 8, 2022 978-0-593-32050-1

An aspiring writer returns to his home state of Kentucky and meets a woman who will change his perspective— and his trajectory. “I’ve always had the same predicament. When I’m home, in Kentucky, all I want is to leave. When I’m away, I’m homesick for a place that never was,” Owen, the narrator of Cole’s charming debut novel, tells us in the book’s opening lines. This is also what Owen drunkenly tells Alma the night he meets her at a grad-student party in the foothills outside Louisville, where he works as a groundskeeper, tending to trees on the campus of a small private college, and Alma is a visiting writer. Well-read yet rudderless, Owen, too, has literary aspirations, taking copious notes on his life to use in his work; his humble job at the college allows him to take a writing class for free. Having returned to his home state following a stint working dead-end jobs and partying in Colorado and disinclined to move in with either of his divorced parents, whose kindness is eclipsed, in Owen’s mind, by their religious fundamentalism and political conservatism, Owen is living rent-free in his genial grandfather’s basement, watching movies with the old man and butting heads with his unemployed uncle, Cort, who, at 52, has failed to launch. Owen seems in danger of getting equally stuck. Enter Alma, whose background couldn’t be more different from Owen’s rural, working-class upbringing. Alma was raised in a liberal, loving, upper-middle-class home in an affluent Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.; attended Princeton; and, at age 26, has found acclaim as a fiction writer. Yet her childhood was not without its challenges: A Bosnian Muslim, she was born in Sarajevo and came to America with her family to escape the war. Owen and Alma gradually fall in love, and their culture-bridging connection alters Owen, ultimately allowing him to learn and grow. But Cole’s novel is more than a love story or a coming-of-age tale. Written with superb attention to detail and subtle emotional complexities, the book also offers a lovingly nuanced look at America—its longtime residents and recent immigrants; its ramshackle rural beauty, urban revival, and suburban safety; and its generous opportunities for reinvention. In the end, it is a love letter to home.

Perceptive and endearing, this novel signals the arrival of a talented new voice in fiction.

THEY A Sequence of Unease

Dick, Kay McNally Editions (128 pp.) $18.00 | Feb. 1, 2022 978-1-946022-28-8

Told in interconnected vignettes, this novella (originally published in 1977) follows an unnamed narrator who apprehensively treads an uneasy coexistence with a murky, decentralized movement known only as “they.”

Falling somewhere between a haunting and a populist coup, “they” sweep through England, steadily growing their numbers and targeting artists and intellectuals, in particular, as well as those living alone or apart from partners or in otherwise nontraditional arrangements. Emotional expression is likewise discouraged through violence and through containment at reeducation programs in windowless towers that begin to

proliferate like mushrooms after a storm. A tension of glinting malice pervades the narrator’s episodic travels through seashore, town, and countryside, the dread of uncertainty tainting the safety of collective gatherings with friends and highlighting the dangers that lurk in simply conducting one’s work and life in the world. They melt into shadows and steal into homes, unseen but often detected almost as a disturbance in the atmosphere, destroying books, music, paintings, any and all fruits of creative pursuit. Those who resist are made an example of; they mete out biblical-style punishments—blinding painters, amputating or maiming writers’ hands—up to and including execution. They commit random violence against people going about their lives and drive others to madness, self-harm, and suicide in reaction to the strictures placed upon them by this new order, as when the narrator intentionally sprains their ankle to gain a temporary medical dispensation to express pain, allowing them to indulge in “the luxury of going utterly to pieces for forty-eight hours.” Although the narrator’s gender is never made explicit, there is a liberatory current of queer and nonmonogamous love and desire running counter to the increasingly stifling oppression enacted on the populace. (Dick was herself bisexual and, as noted in Lucy Scholes’ afterword to this edition, once declared in a Guardian interview, “Gender is of no bloody account.”) The implication that only professional artists appear to be resistant to “their” coercion and brainwashing tactics or that the only creators of note are professionals may rankle, but Dick’s dreamlike rendering of virulent conformity and a quotidian bloodthirsty anti-intellectualism still resonate.

A timely reissue of English author Dick’s slim dystopian fever dream.

THE MAN WHO SOLD AIR IN THE HOLY LAND

Friedlander, Omer Random House (256 pp.) $27.00 | April 12, 2022 978-0-593-24297-1

A debut short story collection spanning the diverse lives of Israel’s inhabitants. In these stories, Israel is brought to life as much more than a nation constantly making headlines for rockets and airstrikes and boycotts and occupation: It is a nation of individuals. From a teenage girl in love with a Bedouin boy to an activist mother who monitors checkpoints in her spare time to a son of shoemakers who climbs buildings at night to the titular luftmensch who tries to make a living selling air, Friedlander shows that Israel’s inhabitants and their experiences are anything but monolithic. As with most collections, the pieces here are a bit uneven; some are riveting, while others seem to struggle to get off the ground. Occasionally, the stories suffer from an overdose of sentimentality. Overall, however, the care with which Friedlander treats his subjects makes for richly drawn characters, settings, and scenarios. Empathy pervades these stories; one feels it in Friedlander’s attitude toward his characters and cannot help but feel it toward them as well. In addition, Friedlander’s skillfully crafted, imagistic prose captivates and soars. With this collection, Friedlander positions himself as poised to join a formidable cadre that includes writers such as David Grossman and Etgar Keret.

A well-crafted, if occasionally uneven, debut that promises a bright future for Friedlander.

ON THE COVER Anne Rice Remembered

Christopher Rice reflects on his mother’s legacy—and their fiction collaboration

BY MICHAEL SCHAUB

David Livingston/Getty Images

When Anne Rice died on Dec. 11, 2021, something even bigger died with her. At the age of 80, the literary superstar was more than just the author of the bestselling Vampire Chronicles series of gothic novels—she was an integral part of American culture and, for many readers, the first writer they fell in love with, the one who showed them the power of books, who taught them there’s nothing wrong with being weird.

Tributes to Rice would pour in over the next few days, but none were as poignant as the one from her son, novelist Christopher Rice, who announced her death on social media.

“As my mother, her support for me was unconditional— she taught me to embrace my dreams, reject conformity and challenge the dark voices of fear and self-doubt,” he wrote. “As a writer, she taught me to defy genre boundaries and surrender to my obsessive passions.”

In an interview with Kirkus conducted a little more than a month after his mother’s death, Christopher says that his grief comes and goes in waves. It’s hard for him to forget, of course—not only is Anne’s passing still fresh in his mind, but his second collaboration with her, Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris (Anchor, Feb. 1), is hitting bookstore shelves.

“My mother and I were very close,” says Christopher, who is 43. “I’m not married. I don’t have a husband. And so my relationship with her—which continued into adulthood, because we worked together, it wasn’t like we drifted apart. The older I got, the closer we seemed to come together—the extent to which she has threaded through my life and my memories is not something that I was quite prepared for.”

Anne’s readers weren’t prepared for her loss, either. The author made her literary debut in 1976 with Interview With the Vampire, but after the publication of The Queen of the Damned in 1988, she became a citywide superstar in New Orleans, where she and her family lived, and a bona fide literary celebrity all across the country. Christopher remembers witnessing his mother’s sudden rise to fame.

“I would go with her to the book signings, and I would see the people lined up for hours in the rain and in the snow,” Christopher recalls. “The other thing is—I came to learn this later in life as a writer myself—it’s not very often that you see writers on television. So the fact that she was always on television throughout my high school [years], being interviewed on talk shows, that brought home that she was a really big deal. Someone in the house would say, ‘Your mom’s going to be on the Late Show tonight,’ or ‘Your mom’s going to be on Rosie O’Donnell again.’ That was really a reminder that her celebrity had almost transcended the books themselves.”

Her fans were legion, and many of them happened to be LGBTQ+. After her death, readers reflected on the role she assumed as a writer whose novels young queer people identified with, often strongly. (In 2020, Christopher re-

sponded to a prompt on Twitter that read, “tell me you’re gay without telling me you’re gay” with the comment, “I’m Anne Rice’s son.”)

“At the time [the Vampire Chronicles] books came out, somebody told her Interview With the Vampire was the greatest gay allegory he’d ever read,” Christopher recalls. “That was not intentional on her part, but she was writing these outsider perspectives on these subjects that were considered taboo. And she was also writing what it feels like to live with constant guilt and shame. I think anytime a writer is able to go into the point of view of a character who has previously been dismissed as the monster, I think queer people are going to react positively. If you illuminate depth and nuance and emotional intelligence in the monster when you go into their point of view, we’ll react positively, because we’ve all been called monsters by various people.”

Christopher addressed gay themes in his fiction debut, A Density of Souls, published in 2000, which he wrote while taking care of his mother, who was recovering from a bout of diabetic ketoacidosis that nearly killed her. He would go on to write several thrillers and romance novels, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that he decided to collaborate on a book with his mother, who had been urging him for years to write a screenplay based on her 1989 book, The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned. Christopher wasn’t interested, so Anne proposed another idea.

“She basically said, ‘Let’s write a sequel to it,’ ” Christopher recalls. “At the time, she was revisiting old properties. She had left the Catholic Church. She was returning to gothic, supernatural fiction, full bloom. She said, ‘This is a book that I left on a cliffhanger. It’s been hanging out there since 1990. It’s not really a story that’s ended. Let’s pick it up again.’ ”

So they did, hashing ideas out over tea and coffee. The result was Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra, published by Anchor in 2017. The novel was a departure for Christopher, who hadn’t tackled historical fiction before and wasn’t used to writing about villains who weren’t “clearly defined” evildoers.

“Her books don’t really often have villains,” Christopher says. “I softened that instinct in myself in response to working with her. And as a result, Cleopatra, who emerges in almost monstrous form in the first book because she’s brought back in such a brutal way, went from, in my mind, being this howling monster to being this more tragic Anne Rice–ian gothic figure. I think I walked away a better writer because of it.”

The collaboration was fun, Christopher says, but also intimidating. “You have to not fight with her like she’s your mother when you’re working together,” he says. “It has to become a work relationship. And so my tendency to throw a tantrum and storm out of the room like a 9-year-old because she doesn’t agree with me on how a chapter should go—I had to stow that.”

Christopher and Anne’s second collaboration came out at the beginning of the month, but it’s just the first of many books he has scheduled for release this year—there will also be a thriller, Decimate, and two romances, Sapphire Sunset and Sapphire Spring.

He’s also at work on a much more personal project: organizing a memorial for his mother. On Twitter, he promised Anne’s fans that they’ll have a chance to participate, writing that “All the covens of the world shall have ample time to assemble.” Now he has to reflect on what kind of tribute his mother would have wanted.

“I think she would want to be remembered as somebody who tried to fight back against mediocrity, someone who didn’t accept limitations,” he says. “I think she would want to be remembered as someone who refused to hear no when her dreams were on the line.”

In the meantime, tributes continue to pour in on social media from fans of Anne who are still trying to come to terms with her loss and still reflecting on the remarkable career of the author who understood them when nobody else did.

“To see the outpouring of that now, I sort of wish she could see it as well,” Christopher says. “I don’t know. Maybe she can.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR. Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris was reviewed in the Jan. 1, 2022, issue.

PEACH BLOSSOM SPRING

Fu, Melissa Little, Brown (400 pp.) $28.00 | March 15, 2022 978-0-316-28673-2

When Longwei returns to Hunan Province in 1938 after fighting the Japanese, he reports that his younger brother, Xiaowen, husband to Meilin and father to Renshu, has been killed in action, spurring the events in this multigenera-

tional novel.

The first part of the book depicts Meilin’s harrowing struggle to protect and care for her young son while fleeing war, ultimately making a narrow escape to Taiwan. Meilin is written with tremendous appeal. She emerges as a hero, resourceful and clever, personable enough to make friends, smart enough to recognize danger, and capable of making a home, no matter the scarcity. The novel does a good job examining her ongoing relationship with Longwei, which grows increasingly complex over the course of the story. The author effectively transmits the chaos and dislocation of war, from losses that will never heal to chance encounters that save lives. In the second part of the book, Renshu transforms to Henry Dao as he immigrates to America and raises a daughter. Despite having been educated and living the bulk of his life in America, Henry is tenuous in his work and family life. He is haunted by childhood traumas that he cannot or will not share and never overcomes his sense that he and Meilin are under threat from Communist surveillance. His failure to fit in and his daughter’s brushes with racism provoke important questions about how America treats immigrants. Henry and his mother, their relationship frayed by distance and politics, reflect the concerns of generations of people forced by war to maintain family ties across continents. It is a weakness that the plot moves so fast, causing action to take precedence over suspense and nuance.

The author plumbs the immigrant experience, illuminating a key slice of Chinese history from Japan’s invasion to Mao’s rise.

CAPTAIN GREY’S GAMBIT

Gelernter, J.H. Norton (256 pp.) $25.95 | April 5, 2022 978-0-393-86706-0

You thought you knew secret agents, but you may have thought wrong. It’s 1803, and Captain Thomas Grey is on urgent business for His Majesty’s Office of the Admiralty and Marine Affairs. Captain is a courtesy title gained during Grey’s time in the Royal Marines, from which he was recruited to work intelligence. Britain finds itself alone in Western Europe, defying the imperialistic encroachment of Napoleon Bonaparte, and Grey finds himself alone in India, relaying dispatches between diplomats and military officers. Things go smoothly early on, and most of Grey’s first interactions involve the exchanging of pleasantries and niceties (tea first and foremost) that seemingly distinguish an early-19thcentury spy from later counterparts. In the second book of his Captain Grey series, following Hold Fast (2021), Gelernter continues to distinguish his character from his literary influences, chief among them Ian Fleming’s James Bond, with deliberate flourishes like a sense of honor that means Grey must allow his enemies a chance to live, often at risk to his own life, and a penchant for gaming—but in place of Bond’s baccarat, Grey plays chess, which is absolutely central to this volume. Grey is required to travel undercover to Frankfurt to retrieve would-be defector Joseph Leclerc, secretary to Bonaparte and an invaluable prize to the British cause, from a chess tournament. Consequently, multiple chess matches are recorded in their entirety, move by move, in a gambit that risks losing some readers but that’s easy enough to ignore. Pay more attention to the many rich historical details that populate the novel with obvious care.

“What if Percival, one of the Knights of the Round Table, was queer?”

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Sometimes Grey can seem too good to be true, and solutions to problems are presented rather than solved, but such is the way of things with superspies.

A romantic dalliance with the past via an international man of mystery.

SPEAR

Griffith, Nicola Tordotcom (192 pp.) $19.99 | April 19, 2022 978-1-250-81932-1

What if Percival, one of the Knights of the Round Table, was queer? As a young girl, the heroine of this novella lives alone with her mother, isolated from people but familiar with every plant and beast in the valley that is her home. Sometimes her mother calls her a gift. Other days, her mother says her daughter is payment for the abuse she endured. After a chance encounter gives her a taste of battle and a glimpse of the outside world, the girl decides to make her way to the court of Arturus. Before she sets out, she asks her mother for a true name, and her mother calls her Bêrhyddur, “spear enduring”—Peretur. Disguised as a young man, Peretur protects villages from bandits, defeats rebel knights, seduces a barmaid, and brings the Grail to her king. Griffith mines the matter of Britain and Celtic mythology while, at the same time, turning tropes upside down and subverting expectations. Arturus, for example, is a principled ruler but also a man in thrall to his otherworldly sword. Nimuë—who becomes Peretur’s lover and ally—imprisons Myrddyn (elsewhere known as Merlin), not to steal his magic but to stop him from controlling hers. Turning the knight who finds the Grail into a young woman is obviously an innovation, but Griffith also transforms the very nature of the Grail quest. Peretur knows exactly where the Grail is as soon as she understands what the Grail is. And Griffith is participating in a trend toward rediscovering diversity in the pre-modern world in a way that feels entirely organic. Peretur’s journey to prove herself worthy of joining Arturus’ companions moves along briskly without feeling rushed. Her Grail quest is her final test, but it feels like the beginning of a new narrative that ends before it begins. Readers interested in the fate of Arturus’ kingdom will be wholly disappointed. Readers invested in Peretur and Nimuë will get the equivalent of a happily-ever-after that feels more like an abrupt dismissal than a satisfying ending.

A fresh, often lovely, not entirely gratifying take on Arthurian legend.

BAD ACTORS

Herron, Mick Soho Crime (360 pp.) $27.95 | May 10, 2022 978-1-641-29337-2

The screw-ups, has-beens, and neverweres who’ve been shunted off to Slough House are upstaged by incompetent spies at far higher pay grades in this eighth series installment. Swiss native Dr. Sophie de Greer, whom hard-charging bureaucrat Anthony Sparrow brought to the U.K. to work on Rethink#1, his think tank, may be a superforecaster at predicting trends, but one development she doesn’t seem to have anticipated is her own sudden disappearance. When ex–MI5 chief Oliver Nash, acting at Sparrow’s behest, asks his former colleague Claude Whelan to shake a few trees and see if she falls out, Whelan can see nothing but downsides—especially if, he frets, “someone triggered the