Amy Goldschlager Reviews Audiobooks: Not Your Average Hot Guy and You Feel It Just Below the Ribs
Not Your Average Hot Guy, Gwenda Bond; Graham Halstead, Karissa Vacker & Joel Froomkin, narrators (Random House Audio 978-0-59350992-0, $20.00, digital download, 9 hr., unabridged) October 2021.
There is such a thin line between a fantasy novel with a great deal of romance shelved in the SF/F section, and a romance novel with fantasy/paranormal elements that gets shelved in the romance section. Sometimes I find it fun to cross that line over to the romance area.
Callie assures her mother that she will have no trouble running the escape room business one weekend while her mother attends a convention. But that’s before a Satanic cult visits the occult-themed room, kidnaps Callie and her friend Mag, and grabs a grimoire which proves to be authentic. The cult uses a spell in the book to summon up Lucifuge Rofocale, a powerful demon, and seek his help in starting the apocalypse. Instead, they get Luke Morningstar, Rofocale’s slacker intern and the son of Lucifer Morningstar himself. The Crown Prince of Hell actually has a poor track record when it comes to gathering souls, and getting the cult to sign a classic damnation contract is Luke’s last chance to avoid getting in serious trouble with his father. It should be easy, but of course, Luke not only doesn’t score the souls, he accidentally manages to tip the world toward apocalypse, years ahead of schedule. Can Luke and Callie forestall the ultimate battle between good and evil… and find romance, despite the many obstacles and lies standing in their way?
The novel is mainly told in alternating first-person narratives between Callie and Luke, with the occasional pompous interjection by Luke’s demonic tutor; cleverly, this production has a separate narrator for each of them. Callie’s narrator is Southern, sweet, smart, and, well, spunky; Luke’s narrator bounces appropriately between cockiness and insecurity; the tutor has a prim, spidery, but ultimately kind quality, despite his past history as a deadly scourge.
The story is predictable, but fun for all that. I also enjoyed the romance between the beta couple, Callie’s brother Jason and her non-binary best friend, Mag. If you’re looking for impending doom as charming escapism, this is it.
You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, Jeffrey Cranor & Janina Matthewson; Kirsten Potter & Adepero Oduye, narrators (HarperAudio 978-0-06306664-9, $26.99, digital download, 9.5 hr., unabridged) November 2021.
I have spent several years rhapsodizing in this magazine about Within the Wires, an alternate-history podcast that uses found audio to tell stories from a world that diverged from ours in the early 20th century. A catastrophic series of events collectively known as the Great Reckoning led to the formation of the Society, a global government that has made national and familial ties illegal, believing that such allegiances are the main cause of war and violence.
This novel, in the form of a found manuscript discovered near the body of psychologist Dr. Miriam Gregory, takes us through the Great Reckoning, the founding of the Society, and her role in some of the sinister underpinnings that make the Society work. The Great Reckoning was essentially WWI with no break between it and WWII, punctuated by a number of civil disturbances, epidemics, and natural disasters. Dr. Gregory loses her parents at an early age, wandering and scavenging her way through Europe, until she’s put in prison for speaking to a man who she didn’t know was a spy. There she meets a girl who teaches her an active meditative practice Miriam calls the ‘‘watercolor quiet,’’ which will ultimately serve as the foundation for her psychological practice. It will also serve as a cornerstone for the Society, as they employ the ‘‘watercolor quiet’’ to assist people in forgetting their familial relationships, which are now illegal past the age of ten. Dr. Gregory will later come to regret that participation, particularly when she is asked to join an Institute that has secretly developed stronger brainwashing methods for when her technique fails.
Kirsten Potter is an intense narrator, voicing all of Dr. Gregory’s first-person memoirs, really making you hear and feel Miriam’s emotions, even crying when the prose calls for it. In contrast, Adepero Oduye is the dispassionate reader of the footnotes provided by the fictional, much younger editor of this memoir, always ready to point out what she sees as discrepancies with the history she’s learned as a product of Society education.
I have seen this book described elsewhere as being about an unreliable narrator. But who is the unreliable narrator: Dr. Gregory, with her descriptions of a frightening Institute which attempts to erase memories by torture, or the memoir’s editor, who too vehemently denies that the Institute exists and that the Society would ever condone such a thing? The foreword and afterword of the book proclaim that the publisher is only interested in freedom of speech and preventing censorship, while disavowing the book as fact. But the book also has protocols in place to vet the reader/listener and burn the manuscript after reading (an adjuration that makes sense for paper but not an audio recording, unless you have one of those Mission: Impossible explosive tape decks, I think) which suggests the publisher might think this is more than controversial fiction. (Although the Society does censor a lot of fiction, as we learned in the 2020 season of the podcast.) I do wonder what someone who hasn’t listened to the podcast thinks of Dr. Gregory’s veracity, because this matter was settled in season one, which concerns a woman imprisoned and tortured by that same Institute.
Co-author Cranor’s previous book was as co-author of the Welcome to Night Vale novel, The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home, which was also the regret-riddled autobiography of a woman who lost her childhood in tragic circumstances, and how the damage she suffered led her to make some unfortunate choices as an adult. A great deal less absurd and considerably less darkly humorous, I think this is by far the more successful work.
Amy Goldschlager, Contributing Editor, is an editor, proofreader, and book/audiobook reviewer who has worked for several major publishers. She is a former curator of the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series. In addition to her Locus column, she has contributed to the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, AudioFile magazine, and ComicMix. She lives in Brooklyn and exists virtually at www.amygoldschlager.com.
This review and more like it in the January 2022 issue of Locus.
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