Premee MohamedRezensionen

I really enjoyed this quick read. In a fairytale-like setting, our main character, Veris Thorn, the only person to have ever gone into the magical woods known as Elmever and was able to return with a child that had gone missing many years ago. The "Tyrant" who rules over these lands forces Veris to return to these woods when it is discovered his two children have gone missing. Veris must use the knowledge and cunning she has to navigate the woods and find the children in one day, for after that time, you are never able to leave the woods.
The world building was phenomenal and I found it easy to get completely immersed in the story. If you enjoy fairytales and folklorist type characters you will definitely enjoy this book.
For fans of Naiomi Novik and Katherine Arden.
Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this lovey dark story.½

The only woman who’s ever managed to come out of the forest alive is forced by the Tyrant (who killed her parents) to search for his children, who’ve gone missing in the same forest. It’s an interesting novella about survival and trying not to blame children for the crimes of a parent—even when you can see they’re being raised by that same parent. I think I would’ve liked it more with more story, but that’s the novella form for you.

Alefret is a pacifist in a fascist nation at war. It’s kind of biocyberpunk—there are tanks that are like pillbugs, curling around their drivers, and worms that light cigarettes, and flying cities. After long torture, he is offered a chance to end the war with less suffering, by connecting with pacifists in the enemy’s citadel. This never makes any more sense as a motivation, although perhaps he is just broken and won’t admit it; he clearly doesn’t believe that the plan will reduce suffering but just kind of goes along anyway in hopes that it might, trying not to do individual harm even as his kill-happy minder gets closer to success. It’s not surprising that the enemy turns out to be only arguably preferable to the fascists, and it’s not a hopeful story½

3/5 Below The Kirk, Below The Hill
4/5 Instructions
4/5 The Evaluator
2/5 At The Hand Of Every Beast
2/5 The Adventures Wife
4/5 The Generals Turn
5/5 Sixteen Minutes
4/5 Fortunato
4/5 The Honeymakers
5/5 Four Hours of A Revolution
4/5 For Each Of These Miseries - Fun spin-off sort of of lovecraft's the temple in a sci-fi setting complete with unfathomable horrors. Might have been a fun one in first person a la Lovecraft.
3/5 Everything As Part Of Its Infinite Place - I was honestly a little disappointed by this one. Cosmic horror by way of quantum suicide? Yes please. It just didn't land.
3/5 No One Will Come Back For Us - First person cosmic horror, with a vaguely sci-fi twist. Main character is a journalist on assignment in a town in Africa where a strange new illness is ravaging the people, animals and landscape. Pretty good but an (unfortunately) unsatisfying ending.
4/5 Willing
3/5 Us and Ours
2/5 The Redoubtables
4/5 Quietus

Average 3.52 stars, rounds up to 4

this was okay, but just kind of desultory for a topic circling war vs pacifism. it coulda/shoulda been more.

The brothel at the end of the world. In an endless city the beautiful resourceless are saved from culling to be courtesans, trapped in interminable debt to their owners and at the mercy of the clients, deadly in itself. One returns from death seeking revenge and the narrator's ambivalent connection to the returnee and to her own life is a tale not of a heart of gold, but of a heart, as stained and tattered as her world, but still beating. It is a bit softer really than it should be, this conclusion a bit less pitted than the body of the story.½

Sometime in the future, society has devolved to the point where the rich have all the power and it's clearly coded in the law to stay that way. Jewel, our narrator, is a courtesan who is making the best of her situation, but she knows that her keepers have all the power and resources. Her friend, Winfield, dies and comes back to life, determined to visit revenge on her murderer.

This powerful, award-winning novella stretched my brain cells reading. You're dropped right in, and Jewel's stream of consciousness thought process is elliptical, not explaining a lot of the things she already knows. The writing style was tough for me, and the characters are not quite as important the idea of the story and exploring what the end result of a corrupt capitalistic society could look like. It's not exactly an enjoyable read, but it's the kind of story you want to talk about once you've read, and it'll stick with me for awhile.

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the 2022 Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

In a far future city, where you can fall to a government cull for a single mistake, And What Can We Offer You Tonight tells the story of Jewel, established courtesan in a luxurious House. Jewel’s world is shaken when her friend is murdered by a client, but somehow comes back to life. To get revenge, they will both have to confront the limits of loyalty, guilt, and justice.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Self-esteem, self-love, class solidarity, friendship, Love...big, big themes to tackle in under a hundred pages. Yet as one expects from Premee Mohamed, tackled they are, and indeed pinned to the mat of argument.

There are those who say they have no patience for future-set stories, yet who will gobble the stories that center amateur sleuths who are not arrested and abused by police and courts who do not approve of this behavior...inconsistent much? Each is unbelievable in its own way, and this story’s amateur sleuths have some *very* powerful motives for their far higher stakes poking around. I know others whose taste in storytelling excludes tales that begin in medias res. That being a taste that can not be argued with, I warn those folk that this is not one for them.

The authorial voice here, Jewel’s stream of consciouness and self-aware of its floridity, would wear on my nerve if it lasted more than the eightyish pages that it does. In this size of a dose, it counterpoints the horrifying, bleak dystopia that these young people are...existing is a better fit than living...within. The brothel where they work is a reputable one, yet a client murders one of them and no one in power cares, or pursues justice.

Sound familiar, y’all?

Unlike boring old twenty-first century reality, though, the murdered party returns for revenge, not as a zombie or vampire but simply undead. Go with it. As the co-sex-worker Winfield sets about getting the revenge that I myownself feel is richly deserved, the story meditates on the larger, darker themes of living in a hypercapitalist hellscape. The ending is, as expected, satisfying. The truths Author Mohamed tells us in the course of this bleak vision of a future where money = justice, where might = rights, where even the meagerest of existences is contingent on selling one’s own body for the gratification of others, are readily applicable to the world around us.

That horrifying truth is how this very short, sharp shock to the reader’s system won the very high-powered awards that it did. Very highly recommended.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunning meditation on war, nationalism, violence and courage by a rising star of the genre.

The Empires of Varkal and Med’ariz have always been at war.

Alefret, the founder of Varkal’s pacifist resistance, was bombed and maimed by his own government, locked up in a secret prison and tortured by a ‘visionary’ scientist. But now they’re offering him a chance of freedom.

Ordered to infiltrate one of Med’ariz’s flying cities, obeying the bloodthirsty zealot Qhudur, he must find fellow anti-war activists in the enemy’s population and provoke them into an uprising against their rulers.

He should refuse to serve the warmongers, but what if he could end this pointless war once and for all? Is that worth compromising his own morals and the principles of his fellow resistance members?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: As you would expect from Premee Mohamed, this is a carefully constructed secondary world, with a deeply tendentious story playing out inside its rules. Moral greyness and relativistic morality are always welcome sights in the secondary-world fantasy genre. Meditating on what makes a villain villainous, what makes it possible to fight and kill in service of peace (as George Carlin famously observed, "Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity"), all the while still feeling Very Certain of one's own cause's Rightness. No one in one of Author Mohamed's worlds is Right. That being the reality of life on the Earth I like seeing it shown this way in very appealing fiction.

Bioengineering plays a very significant role in this fantasy world. (Including a use of wasps that absolutely *never* would've occurred to me!) I think it is best to leave the whats and hows of that fact alone, as there are surprises in store that hang on those hooks. If I am transparent about it, I would have been five-star warbling my fool head off had some of those fascinating facets found even greater, and sooner, uses in the story.

While I comprehend the metaphorical use of a flying city, I am deeply skeptical of any use of them because they use unrealistic tech to solve...nothing. There is no actual, practical benefit to a flying city that is not outweighed by real, unaddressed increases in the complexity of urban living. I guess the metaphorical "coolth" and visual appeal is just too much to resist, and the people with the flying city in this story definitely seem like the sort of culture that would develop one. Still...just no. Resist the pointed contrast of tech "coolth" to natural development and augmentation!

The absolute joy of the read is the very carefully natural debate between the competing moral certainties of pacifism and Security Über Alles from the alleged same side of the war. This is, to me, the best use of fiction: Don't give one side the monopoly on the good stuff or the bad stuff. Humankind doesn't, hasn't, and won't ever work like that. As you are telling this story, albeit set on a different world, to Humankind, follow our rules when it most counts. This being one of Author Mohamed's storytelling's strong points, I always enjoy her stories.

So, while not a masterpiece, this story of pacifism and its moral greyness, warmongering and its honest, if misguided, aims, and what men will do to WIN, is one fine read, indeed.

Originally posted on Just Geeking by.

Content warnings:
This book contains scenes of violence, the threat of violence, blackmail, animal death, animal abuse (whipping), decaying animals, blood, body horror, oppression, colonisation,

Topics discussed on page, although the events happen off page are; child death, death of a parent, child abuse (sexual), and parental neglect.

This book features a tyrant who rules through oppression, fear and brutality. Some scenes discuss what he has done to people (events off page), and this includes sexual assault, forced pregnancy, torture, executions, war, and mass murder.

Full disclosure, this was not a book that I requested and was sent to me by the publisher on Edelweiss. It sounded interesting, and I decided to give it a try, however, I wasn’t aware that it was a novella until I had finished it. I’m mentioning both of these facts as I feel they do affect my review of this book.

Lured in by the cover and the promise of a forbidden forest filled with unknown dangers, I have to admit that The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed was an interesting and thought-provoking read.

Veris is the only woman who has ever ventured into the north forest and returned alive. When the children of the Tyrant, the man who rules with fear and oppression, go missing, she is given an ultimatum; return to the forest and find them or her family will die. Unlike the children of the village, the Tyrant’s children have grown up sheltered and unaware of the dangers of the north forest. The chances of even finding them alive are slim, but Veris has to at least try.

Mohamed creates a haunting visual as Veris’ journeys through the otherworldly forest, a place that constantly changes as it tries to prevent her from finding the two children. Information about Veris and her world is woven through the journey, and it works with the dark world that Mohamed has built.

While I enjoyed The Butcher of the Forest, I didn’t feel that the story was concluded at the end of the book. Part of this could be attributed to me not realising this was a novella while reading it, however, I think that it’s also the way it ended. A few days before picking up The Butcher of the Forest, I read a review for another novella by Mohamed, where the reviewer mentioned that the novella had the feeling of a prequel. Incidentally, it turned out that it was a prequel, and a full novel is out later this year. I have no idea if that is the case for this novella, obviously, it just has that feeling to me.

This especially comes from The Butcher of the Forest not feeling like it is telling Veris’ story, despite being from her perspective and telling her journey. For me, it feels as though we’re being shown the impact that one person can have on someone’s early life. But at the same time, I almost feel as though that is Mohamed’s point. In another story, Veris would have a bit part to play. She wouldn’t be the hero, she would be one of many minor characters who were part of the main character’s backstory.

As I said, this is a thought-provoking read. I just like my stories to have a more satisfying ending and if they leave me hanging with more questions they are about the story or world-building, not whether the story has been completed. I’ve only read short stories by Mohamed before now so I don’t know whether this is her style or just the style used in this novella.

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Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A world-weary woman races against the clock to rescue the children of a wrathful tyrant from a dangerous, otherworldly forest.

At the northern edge of a land ruled by a monstrous, foreign tyrant lies the wild forest known as the Elmever. The villagers know better than to let their children go near—once someone goes in, they never come back out.

No one knows the strange and terrifying traps of the Elmever better than Veris Thorn, the only person to ever rescue a child from the forest many years ago. When the Tyrant’s two young children go missing, Veris is commanded to enter the forest once more and bring them home safe. If Veris fails, the Tyrant will kill her; if she remains in the forest for longer than a day, she will be trapped forevermore.

So Veris will travel deep into the Elmever to face traps, riddles, and monsters at the behest of another monster. One misstep will cost everything.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Being one who really internalized the truism "No good deed goes unpunished" and its corollary "Never reveal how competent you are because then you will always get the job," I was all set to like this iteration of these aperçus. I am happy to say, nothing in the read convinced me otherwise.

Veris, whose shocking, likely unique ability to survive a trip into Elmever forest has landed her the unenviable and possibly lethal job of rescuing kids lost in there, is a good person. Her exploit in Elmever was not last year, or even last decade...she is solidly in her middle years now. She would also like to enter cronehood, thank you very much, and that might not happen unless she gets the stupid kids out of this haunted, evil forest. The stupid kids that belong to the local wicked overlord. The foreign, wicked overlord.

Of course this woman of middle years and possessed of close loving ties to her community of friends and family will drop everything and rush off to rescue this awful man's kids at risk of disappearing into the horrors she overcame before. You just need to ask!

And threaten everyone she loves with horrible deaths.

Thus are the stakes established. This is going to be a Quest with a difference in dramatis personae. Since Quests are about inner discovery through outer-world problem-solving, we are accustomed to seeing them feature young people. This time Verity, who has already solved the puzzle of surviving a day in accursed Elmever forest, must return to figure out the mystery of the place. The difference? A puzzle has one correct answer, a mystery has many possible solutions, varying shades of Rightness.

Part fairy tale with its lessons quietly taught, part adventure horror story with its body horror lightly sprinkled in, part cosmic horror with its universal stakes salted on...this novella packs a lot into its one-sitting length. Enough that it might repay breaking the read into two sessions.

While the ending fits with the story, and concludes the stakes satisfyingly, I do not think the usual audience for Quests will be all that pleased with this iteration of the storyverse because its stakes are...mutable. Veris faces down lots in this tight package. She makes her peace with the past, as all of us around her age must; she does the right thing by her lights, as we all hope to do in life; she learns that her life of answering puzzles and solving mysteries can not prepare her for anything to come except in habits of mind. The answers are, maddeningly, never the same.

Sound like my forties. Yours too, I wager.½

I received an advance copy via NetGalley.

Butcher of the Forest isn't a tromp through your typical fairyland--no, it's a hardscrabble scramble through a nightmare. Veris is a middle-aged woman summoned to the court of the Tyrant, the man whose ruthless rule cost Veris the lives of her own parents and thousands more across the realm. He tasks her with an impossible quest into the nearby woods, where his two curious children have gone exploring, and where no one but Veris has returned. These woods are a place where undead animals hunger, games are deadly, and the food anchors people there forever. If Veris doesn't return with the Tyrant's children within the day, her own surviving family and friends will be slaughtered.

Hooo boy. This book is dark. Dark, dark, dark. Mohamed can sure write, as the prose is eloquent, the tension high, and the mission feels impossible. It's a novella, at least, so I wasn't kept in suspense through a never-ending tome. The end feels... right yet not right at the same time.

Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got an eGalley for this for review through NetGalley.

Thoughts: I enjoyed this, it's a well done dark fairy tale read. The story follows Veris, the only woman to enter the forbidden forest and return. When the tyrant ruler's children go missing, he forces Veris back into the forest to find them, else her family's life is forfeit.

I enjoyed the dark and twisting secrets of the forest which intersects with the fae realm. This has a very traditional dark fairy tale feel with it. Dangerous bargains are made and deals sealed in order for Veris to navigate the forest safely.

This ended up being a bit darker than I expected. Veris has some very dark secrets of her own in her past and these are unveiled as she tries to survive the forest.

The writing was easy to read and flowed well. There is some adventure and a lot of dark fae in here. I enjoyed Veris as a character and liked her resourcefulness. The story wraps up nicely with a bit of a mystery still unanswered at the end.

My Summary (4/5): Overall this was a quick read that I enjoyed. I think if you are a fan of traditional dark fairy tales you will enjoy this. It was engaging and well written and I look forward to future books the Mohamed writes.

I'm finding one of my favorite "genres" is a good underappreciated Speculative Short Story Collection. I just love the bite sizes of weird. This is one of those and I'm happy to have found it! It's a mix of horror and sci-fi, with slight hints of fantasy elements. All good stuff. It definitely is influenced by Lovecraft at times. The author describes some of these stories as "kids vs. Eldritch monsters". I haven't watched it, but if your thing is the show Stranger Things, these stories are probably for you. Otherwise, the stories seem to mostly feature journalists and the ethics of scientific research, when a story isn't about children battling Eldritch. The scientist angle is fun though, as Mohamed's bio says she is also a scientist. Occasionally, I would feel like part of a story was too jumpy, as if I lost my place on the page or skipped a few sentences. But overall, this is a very solid collection of stories! Then the stories also remind me of Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke, Jeff VanderMeer and many sci-fi films. It's hard to pick favorites in this collection. I was going to try, but I would end up listing most of the stories. I love when that happens. And that cover! I already have a few books with 'tiny astronaut' covers in mind to be reading quite soon.

A book that leaves you with a sense of having visited a different world, a haunting memory, and a longing to return is certainly one in which I can say the author accomplished their goal of telling a damn good story. And this book by Premee Mohamad does that. With lyrical, flourishing prose it paints a picture, sometimes one as cloying as the perfumes I imagine which linger in the hall of the capital-h House. A woman who doesn't stay dead, and upon realizing the power she holds by being outside of the societal structures, it could be an allegory for the lives of those today who choose to operate outside of the bounds of our capitalist, patriarchal society. Especially since the world of this book, the world outside of the House, definitely could be considered our own should things be allowed to continue unchecked and the people disposed of, uncared for.

I'm not sure we cheer for any of the characters, but their journeys certainly are intriguing. Their motivations sometimes fully on display and other times elusive and chameleon-like. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but it can also taste sweet, and sometimes as heady as a rich, whiskey.

If there's one complaint I have about this title, it's that the writing with it's reliance on over-long sentences combined with the flowery prose almost becomes too much at points. And to my editor's eye, it took a couple of chapters before I quit looking at just...how...long... the sentences were and became swept up in the story. This book won a Nebula award for best novella, and I can see why, if nothing else than for the fact that it had a very literary feel to it, more atmosphere and mood, and not so much a play-by-play of the action. Which, to be fair, in this story, I'm not sure a play-by-play would be warranted.

In the end, this is a book which kept me reading and drew me into its strange and twisty world that I'm still thinking about the morning after. So while I may still be having extensional thoughts about sentence length and grammar rules, I have to say, that if the story pulls in the reader and leaves a hunting memory, do the mechanics really matter that much? The story worked.

For those of you who are like me and see Science Fiction and it scares you away…let me introduce you to this novella that has left me more curious now than ever before of a genre that I typically don’t read!

Checking in at only 168 pages, I did a combo reading and listening to this one and yes the story was told in the future. However, the meaning behind it was very relatable and moving.

A young woman struggles and contemplates her thoughts about staying at home or going to a place no one has ever been or seen before in her town. She has duties and responsibilities at home, but imagines how much knowledge and wisdom she could gain by doing something that only 1 and a million get a chance of being able to accomplish!

When Jewel's best friend and fellow courtesan dies at the hands of a client, the last thing they expect is for Win to come back from the dead and take revenge.

To me, this felt like Fight Club crashing into The Past is Red – but with courtesans.

The language employed in the story is poetic and floral. It's beautiful. In my head, it was narrated by Marla from Fight Club, which is part of why it reminded me so strongly of that book. But poetic and flowery language is difficult for me to connect with, so I end up feeling outside the story. But because of my inability to engage, I couldn't even picture the world on the page.

Fantastic. Great prose and dialogue. Great characters, terrifying horrors, actions and scary consequences, past and present slamming together for the MC (Nick) over and over as the girl genius and our MC try to right wrongs and confront mistakes and do the right thing.

The end is at once satisfying and terrifying; the sequel drops March 2, 2021.

I've read The Collected Works of H.P. Lovecraft, so let me tell you definitively; THIS is the eldritch horror you are looking for.

Bonus, this author is a delight to follow on Twitter, weird and funny and genuine.

Oh-ho-ho that ending!

This story takes place in alternate history European wartime, something like WWI but not, and centers on a veteran returned home wounded inside.

The ghost of his commander complicates everything. Or so Ben thinks at first.

Highly recommended.

This novella or short novel is set not long after civilization has crumbled under the effects of both runaway climate change and an aggressive fungal infection, told in the author's up close and personal prose via a teen/adult presented with a choice both hopeful and terrifying. It's rich in detail and thoughtful, harsh but not without hope, and asks some tough questions. I am never quite ready for Premee Mohamed stories; they are always an experience you have to live through to appreciate. I have this urge to keep an eye on my fingernails now...

This is a bit of an odd story. It's set in a dystopian world where (it seems) the water has risen but also gotten contaminated, and lots of animals have mutated. (Though we see very little of that.) The main noticeable change is that society is even more money-focused than it is now, and the laws have changed so that only those with money get any kind of justice.

The main premise of a murdered courtesan coming back to life to take revenge on her murderer has probably been done before; in this particular case our narrator is not the dead girl herself, but one of her friends. The question of how she comes back to life is never answered, nor is it clear if or when she will ever die again. Instead, the focus of the story is what "morality" means in this society where money is literally everything, where those without money or jobs can be killed in a "cull" without any other reason at all.

While I liked the way this was told (a kind of blend of dialogue and almost stream-of-consciousness monologue) it took a little while for me to figure out much about the characters. I'm still not sure what most of them looked like... but that's okay. Other than some obvious parts—like one character who has wing implants, or the dead girl's skin being white and bloodless—it doesn't really matter what these characters look like.

This would probably not be a book for everyone; some people won't be able to get into the writing style, or will want more answers than this book provides. It's a neat story, however, and it's a nice change to see a narrator who isn't the brave hero but instead is someone who's just trying to find a way to get by.½

"I died," she says. "He killed me."
"Who?"
"I don't remember."
Well.

A 2022 Aurora Best Novella nominee, this story explores the difficult choices a teenage girl must make in an apocalyptic world ravaged by a climate disaster and a mind-altering parasite. I liked Mohamed's writing. However, there were a several aspects about this futuristic world that were not well explained, so I would not mind if she were to revisit it in a future work.

These are the few notes I made while reading These Lifeless Things:

— the Setback lasted 3 yrs, only 6 verifiable documents survive from that period. But now there’s the notebook (journal? diary?)
— it was some kind of invasion, worldwide—a weird invasion though, not alien spaceships [is this like the Cthulhu mythos?]
— switches back and forth between excerpts from the journal and the scientist (anthropologist) who found and is now reading it
— anti-science tone running thru the book
— almost ¾ thru and this is v. repetitive, getting a bit boring—first ¼ is quite subtle and intriguing, but the next two ¼s author doesn’t add much, just more of the same
— it’s the content I don’t think much of, writing style itself very good
— ¾ way thru suddenly Kyiv mentioned—first and only place-name in book
— underwhelmed

I like “subtle”, like “strange” very much too—and also like unreliable narrators, at least one of which we may have here, but in the end still found this pretty uninteresting anyway.

A short novel about a character with a congenital (and possibly in time fatal) fungal parasite, growing up in a post-apocalyptic community who now gets invited to travel through the wilderness to the Big University City to study and Do Big Things.

The point of the book is mostly a character/society study about her current life and what she's leaving behind. And I get that and respect it but also I really really wanted to see her journey and what she'd find at Big Uni City. I think maybe just not quite what I was looking for at this moment in time? It's very good but just yeah.