It is Autumn in New England. It is Autumn all over the country, but in New England we feel these things rather keenly. There are mums and pumpkins on all the front steps. There are apples in bags in all the kitchens. We are the land of Gilmore Girls and Stephen King, of fields of pumpkins and Christmas trees. And even those who don’t crack a book on a daily basis, feel the urge to wrap up in a blanket, listen to the leaves rustle, and read a good book. In my mind it’s a good time of year for short story collections. A good time of year for something slightly spooky. And this year, it’s a good time of year for the latest book from novelist Olivie Blake, the pen name of Alexene Farol Follmuth.
Januaries: Stories of Love, Magic, and Betrayal is a lengthy and delightfully varied collection of short stories and novellas. Some read like modern retellings of familiar fairy tales, others read like pages from newspapers summoned from our immediate future. Some of the stories read like Edmund Spenser has re-written parts of The Faerie Queene in a modern day American setting, others give the feeling that Isaac Asimov is imagining the next few years, in a post-AI world. It is a multi-faceted collection that twists and turns with each new tale.
While most of the stories follow a traditional narrative pattern, Blake uses the short story format to experiment with style and structure. So we read a witchy love story in verse, and a dystopian future in diary form. At the moment my tastes lean towards linear narrative, but that’s where the short story lends itself to the seasonal inclination to read on a whim, I don’t have to lock myself into something structured otherwise, because the story is soon over, and you are moving on to the next style and story. You can read them through them all, you can pick and choose by title or length, you can seek out something that you are in want of and find it all within the one collection. Like the tapestry of leaves that is beginning to burst out my window, a collection of short stories promises much, and can deliver a whole lot more.
You could build this house on your own, but I think we all know it wouldn’t be as interesting, It wouldn’t be as weird, and I mean that in the truest sense – that real, awe-inspiring, greatness only comes from divergences, from the weirdness that intervention brings.
I have been a short story aficionado since reading Stephen Kings’ Nightmares and Dreamscapes as a teenager, and while I am not a fan of horror as a whole, looking over my bookshelves I can see a tendency towards the macabre, the dark, the twisted in my short story interests. Be it Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allen Poe, or Melissa Albert, I seem to like short snaps of dark and twisty. A wonderfully lyrical dark and twisty is exactly what Blake delivers in Januaries wrapping you around her finger and up in a blanket with each new tale. While some of them were a little too grotesque for me, I’m looking at you lady with the teeth everywhere, most of the work lies in the realm of the psychologically dark and twisty rather than the physical.
These stories are mostly centered around the themes of life, death, love, and revenge, and how the four play out against each other. It is in the oppositional relationships that Blake thrives, a pair of lovers thrown together where one is accidentally killed. A prince of dreams haunted at night by the pursuit of someone who flips his narrative. The relationships are complicated, the love is deep and deeper still.
You turned me into a rooster
I’ve only just turned back
And I have to tell youI like that you are not a liar
You’re clearly different
And I’ll be back.
My youthful love of James Woods’ portray of Hades in Disney’s Hercules has continued into adulthood, with the wonderful Broadway show Hadestown. And the dark fantasy romance from Scarlett St Clair which explores the romance of Hades and Persephone in a modern world where Olympus came back to earth with a bang. So inevitably one of my favorite pieces from this collection features the character Hades and Perspehone, with a delightful cameo from the fates. Within this, the presentation of Hades carries some of the Woods mannerisms with a nod to Al Pacino’s evil in The Devils Advocate! I love the way Blake plays with these familiar characters and settings.
“Is this a PowerPoint presentation?” Guy cut in.
“Hm?” Hades paused to glance over his shoulder. “Oh, that! Yes.” He faced Guy again with a shrug, “I mean… this is hell.”
With or without familiar faces, Blake is able to create and establish characters in a very short amount of time within each story, but is able to provide a satisfying ending with most of the tales. So that you are left wanting more but not staring into the abyss of an unfinished plot. It reads like a master class in the short form, and I hope it is one that she chooses to pursue. I did not like every story, but found many of them to be stunning. As a lover of rewritten fairy tales, I am bewitched by this addition to the Angela Carter wing in my library.
Olivie Blake is the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six, Alone with You in the Ether, One for My Enemy, and Masters of Death. Under her real life name Alexene Farol Follmuth, she is also the author of the young adult rom-coms My Mechanical Romance and Twelfth Knight. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and toddler.
Januaries: Stories of Love, Magic and Betrayal is released on October 15, 2024. GeekMom received an ARC for review purposes.
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