Happy Spooky Season! Or, if you’re like me, cozy season. Or maybe voting season??? (And holiday season if that’s what’s floating your boat in these troubled times). I know so many people who appreciate blogs that love spooky season, so I hope this one doesn’t disappoint you. I’m much more “cozy up with a romance by the fire” than “dive into a murder myster in the dark” but I appreciate the season either way! My blog posts have been pretty long lately, and I really wanted to get this one out on time, so it is going to be shorter. But that does not mean the author in question deserves any less attention.
Okay look you guys, I am not a spooky/horror/violence person out of context I’m already comfortable with, i.e. violence in fantasy (and in full disclosure a lot of times I also skim over this, sorry SJM), spooky things that don’t end in death or bloodshed (Practical Magic, Disney level spooky movies), and honestly there are very few horror examples for me. So while I LOVE fall and apple-flavored everything and dressing up with my kids, I feel a little bit like a pretender when I say I love Halloween and the spooky season. But I do! It’s one of the best times in the year, in fact, because it’s also my sister’s birthday and I get to wear sweaters without sweating. Win-win if you ask me.
However, because of my disinterest in reading about death or seriously realistic violence, unless it’s in the context of grieving (Thank you, Tj Klune, for Under the Whispering Door), I have had to find books that are cozy and meet the fall vibe but not scary. It has led me on a path filled with classic fairy tales, cultural myths, all leading up to “cozy mystery” and finally to the “ungenred” fantasy. Alix E. Harrow sidesteps all of that by adding these elements in badass, pro-feminist ways that really just have me disregarding all my usual pickiness. She is a self-proclaimed lover of all things spooky, and it shows in her work, especially her most recent, Starling House. She, like my other fave VE Schwab, writes in her own genre that is simply hers. Her books range from Salem-era witches to deconstructed fairytales and she tops them off with amazing short stories. I will be covering all of her work because I’ve loved each one differently, and they’re worth the time. These include, in order of publication: her short stories, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, The Fractured Fables, and Starling House.
Full honesty upfront: I haven’t gotten a chance to find them, but I will be this month! But people on the internet have said that they’re life changing, and based on the other works I have read, I absolutely believe it. To be clear: this is a mistake on my part, not an indication that short stories, or hers in particular, aren’t worth reading as literature. So look them up!!! And let me know what you think, of course!
- The Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Salvage (uh the most fantastic name for a short story if I ever heard one)
- Patience and Not-Forsaken (I’m hooked already)
- There’s also one in the Tor’s “Some of the Best from Tor.com” but I couldn’t find the name in time. I’m sorry!
The Ten Thousand Doors of January
This book is so good. While it was not my first by Harrow, it was the first that really spoke to her essence, as many of her following books went off the books even for her (which, bravo to her. She tackles the big stories without any boundaries). Now that I have met her and also read the others, especially Starling House, I can see that she is filled with sarcasm and quiet joy, and I love her loud social commentary even more.
Like her author, January Scallor begins her story in the Midwest, but she finds a million worlds at her fingertips when she opens an unknown door to nowhere. These aren’t going to be my best quote transitions, but she speaks a lot on freedom, and how far she has to go to find it. “I ran until my stick-thin legs shook and my chest heaved against the fine seams of my dress. I ran until the street turned to a winding land and the buildings behind me we swallowed up by wisteria and honeysuckle” (8). She’s held captive by people who know about these magical doors, but who tell her they just want to protect her, to keep her and their world “safe” from the dangers of the doors. At one point when she’s trying to figure out what she doesn’t know, what they’re keeping from her, she says to them, “‘No,’ I admitted. ‘But I bet there are more Doors just like it. I bet I could find them and write about them and they’d all open And I don’t care if you don’t believe me.’” (15) She’ll fight to find her dad and her destiny, all the while chased by people who pretend to have her best interests at heart. It’s a heavy commentary on the system we all live in, and who they really serve.
The Once and Future Witches
This is my favorite book of all time, surpassing Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, and Wuthering Heights because of the feminist themes and the way they turned the guilt on the true villains of the Salem Witch Trials (and the Inquisition and all the other witch hunts in white people’s histories): White men who are afraid of women and their power. I read it while I was working with displaced teenagers during Quarantine. The situation was incredibly complicated, but long story short I had several hours where I was supposed to be in one location but trying not to be intrusive, so I brought books. Harrow became my favorite author by accident. The Once and Future Witches took the first two months I was there because I read it slowly. When I was done, I jumped right into the Ten Thousand Doors of January, desperate for more of Harrow’s works, but nothing will ever live in my soul like the three sister witches that Harrow created in The Once and Future Witches.
“Once upon a time there were three sisters,” (3) is the best start to any story, because it’s as simple and engaging as “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” (of course I mean the Mary-Kate and Ashely Olsen crime series). Anyway, these three sisters, Agatha, Bella, and Juniper, use their shared traumatic history to protect themselves and other witches from the Salem Witch Hunts. Oh, and simple spells that are both adorable and effective. Harrow uses them to mark chapters and bring women together. They range from: “Sugar and spice and everything nice. A spell to soothe a bad temper, requiring a pinch of sugar and spring sunshine” (11) to the fantastically rebellious “Ring around the roses, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all rise up” (492). They have their own needs and motivations: Agatha is pregnant but alone, Bella wants to live, and Juniper is angry about everything that’s happened to her and her sisters. They’ll have to mend their own pain, the pain they share, and the pain of an entire population of women in order to fight the system that’s trying to turn society against them.
There’s so much I could say about this book. It’s uplifting in a dark way that I now understand Harrow excels at. The women are powerful but not immortal, and they use that to their advantage. The magic is woven so deep into true history that it’s insane how badly I still wish this is the way it happened. This is top five of the books I wish I could read for the first time again.
The Fractured Fables
A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended are a duo of insane deconstructed fairytale retellings that honestly still capture my thoughts. To think about how Harrow spun a story as dramatic as the original fairytale, only filled with modern feminism, is just so interesting to me. I strive to fill my books with the same amount of sarcastic acknowledgment of the patriarchal rhetoric in almost everything. The main character, Zinnia Gray, is a teenager with a chronic disease. She reads all the different versions of Sleeping Beauty, fascinated by the similarities to her story in an openly morbid way. She gets herself sucked into another Beauty’s story, and her time-and-space traveling begins, leading to romance between princesses, feminism in medieval times, and a fight through the ages.
Starling House
After reading and obsessing over the rest of these books for a few years, Harrow released Starling House and went on her book tour just as I was starting Talents two years ago. I got to meet her in interview with Olivie Blake at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego. She was SO NICE, they both were, really. Olivie Blake is another author I’ll be highlighting because her writing is snappy and dark and DEEP.
Anyway! Harrow spoke about how she pursued other interests before focusing on writing, and it was so inspiring. When it was my turn to have her sign all my books, she listened to me ramble about also being a parent and diving into writing late. They were so nice and wrote encouraging things. It’s something I hold onto, because sometimes I worry that you have to be a certain type of person to make it as a writer. They’re both proof that anyone with the urge can follow their story.
To get on with explaining Starling House, it’s amazing. Obviously. Harrow has included the angry, independent fierceness of January, Juniper, and Zinnia and evolved them into a woman who’s slightly crooked and full of revenge fantasies. Harrow shines a flickering investigative light on the Midwest, rural suspicions, and how it’s all absolutely fucked by the system. It’s both a spooky story, and a mockery of spooky stories AND I AM HERE FOR IT. Another thing she does here that elevates her work from “book” to “literature” is she has designated when people are white the way others mark every other race, and written every other ethnicity respectfully, and it’s perfectly jarring in exactly the right way. Alix E. Harrow has written another masterpiece, and I’m trying to not have too much to say about it so you’ll read it yourself, but it really is that hard.
The main character Opal sees the obvious problems in her life, her town and the storyline. She fights appropriately, until her obvious systemic limitations cause her to step over the line of “legal” to do what she has to for herself and her brother after her mom dies in a suspicious driving accident when Opal was a teenager. She’ll sneak and survive as she dives deeper into her towns biggest secret: Starling House and the mysterious family that’s always lived there but also might be why the town is in perpetual decay.
Each of these books holds its own weight in my head, but together they make up the reasons why she is the GOAT. Her formatting is impeccable – there are headings and new fonts for flashbacks and stories, in every book (I was partial to The Once and Future Witches article headings, but the flashbacks in Starling House are pretty excellent too). The way she makes world-building part of the adventure is another example of this. She does this especially impeccably in Ten Thousand Doors by including “passages” from “The Ten Thousand Doors: Being a Comparative Study of Passages, Portals, and Entryways in World Mythology,” the fictional book January relies on.
Her language is languorous and filled with imagery, and I love diving into it and never leaving. I could’ve lived in the Once and Future Witches version of Massachusetts FOREVER, but, like, without *most of* the men, lol. Which a little bit was the point of the book, I like to think lol The tenacity of her female main characters is unmatched. January fights with everything she has, even though her captors are bigger, stronger, and more informed than she is. Agatha protects her sisters and her baby with more heart than I could imagine, even as a mother of two. Opal gives everything she has to get her brother out of their rotten town, even when she has nothing to offer. All of these things wrap up into books that are heavy in social commentary, full of feminism, and ripe with adventure and intrigue. They are the best kinds of books, because they check off all the boxes.
Alix E. Harrow is amazing in every sense of the word. As a person she’s dedicated to the causes she picks up, she’s kind to her fans, and she’s funny as shit. Her books are unique and outside of genre and I LOVE it. She doesn’t need to stick to rules that would otherwise contain her story; her main characters are loud, deep, and important, and you can’t get that kind of combination in a world where men should always play the role of protector. She is so inspiring, and I will go out of my way to see her speak whenever I can, which I can only say for TJ Klune otherwise. READ HER BOOKS!! I hope you all had a safe and happy Halloween! And for those who honor Dia de los Muertos, may your family members find their ofrendas filled with light, peace, and Conchas. I’m sorry I don’t like spooky things! I still love you!
- Author Pages to Highlight:
- TJ Klune
- Alix E Harrow
- Olivie Blake
- Websites Highlighted:
- Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore:
- Even though I didn’t directly highlight these, it’s important to remember that if you need community, there are places for you!
- The Trevor Project: thetrevorproject.org
- Call, chat, or text
- The Trevor Project: thetrevorproject.org
- Stand in Pride: standinpride.org
- Daniel Blevins, founder: @the_zombie_dan
- The Rainbow Youth Project: https://www.rainbowyouthproject.org/
- Human Rights Campaign: https://www.hrc.org/
- LGBTQ+ Suicide & Crisis Hotlines: https://988lifeline.org/
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