The trend of retellings of famous stories through a feminist and/or queer lenses has been hugely popular over the past few years, and while I have greThe trend of retellings of famous stories through a feminist and/or queer lenses has been hugely popular over the past few years, and while I have greatly enjoyed some books that belong under that umbrella, a few also left me perplexed. Is it a feminist retelling if you just tell the same story again, but from a female character’s perspective? Arguably yes, because you give the character a voice, which is often something the original authors neglected to do. But sometimes, I find that a little too simple.
Now a work like "Our Hideous Progeny" is not quite a retelling of (my beloved) "Frankenstein" per se: this story concerns itself with Victor’s grand-niece Mary (obviously, wink wink) and her experience as a woman, a wife, an aspiring scientist, a grieving mother and as a woman who realizes she is attracted to other women – at the turn of the 20th century, in England.
Mary is married to a well-meaning but quite flawed naturalist named Henry. About a year before the beginning of the story, they lost a child, who only lived a few hours, and Mary can’t quite shake off the pain of this loss. But she is shaken out of her funk when an exhibit showing reproduction of dinosaurs opens at the Crystal Palace. From her own work, she knows the models to be inaccurate, but no one will truly listen to her, and her husband has done such a good job of antagonizing other people in their field that he has also lost a lot of credibility. That’s around the time she discovers documents, passed down to her family by her great uncle, a Dr. Victor Frankenstein, and based on his work, she and Henry begin to plan to bring to life a creation of their own.
I am not sure how this was done, but this book gutted me. I don’t want, and have never wanted, children, but everything about Mary’s grief, her attachment to her creation, her concern for it and heartbreak at it’s suffering made me so upset I had to curl up in bed with the book because all I wanted was squeeze my pillow. A visceral part of me understood her love, her care, and her pain. I did not see that coming. Middle-age hormones are a terrible thing, people.
But that was not the only thing that made this book such a successful use of the feminist retelling trend: it was also rich with Mary’s direct experience of the double-standards held against her, the frustrations she must constantly deal with having no money or resources of her own and being at the mercy of her generally inept husband and other members of his profession. Her confusion at her feelings towards a childhood friend and eventually towards her sister-in-law are also a very sensibly (not to mention historically realistically) expressed queer awakening and doesn’t slide into presentism or political statement: it just is. The whole thing with the creature was gutting, but Mary’s difficulties being an ambitious woman who is more intelligent than most of the men she is surrounded by and the restrictions imposed on her solely because of her gender are just as heartbreakingly rendered by McGill.
This is a fantastic work of speculative fiction, written with great skill, insight and sensitivity. I cannot recommend it enough, whether or not you love Mary Shelley’s masterpiece. I’d like to believe that if she had chosen to write her story with a female character front and center, this is what it would have been like. Superb....more
Edgar Allan Poe retelling involving a lot of mushrooms? Well, of course I’ll read that! I had never read anything by T. Kingfisher before, but her namEdgar Allan Poe retelling involving a lot of mushrooms? Well, of course I’ll read that! I had never read anything by T. Kingfisher before, but her name pops up on my GR feed constantly, and I figured this short novel was the perfect way to dip my toes in her work.
While I enjoy “The Fall of the House of Usher” in its own right, it’s about 15 pages, so while it’s a wonderful taste of Poe’s talent with creating ominous atmospheres and weird scenarios that still haunt our nightmares, there isn’t much room there for an explanation or character development. Add to that the current trendiness of mushroom and fungus related plagues and contagions and you get not only an explanation for Poe’s weird tale, but wonderfully creepy way to enrich his original story.
The fungal horror was a little reminiscent of “Mexican Gothic”, but that is really all the books have in common: Moreno Garcia and Kingfisher’s styles are so different that it would be unfair to compare the two. Kingfisher has a levity in her writing, a whimsy that I was not really expecting but that delighted me. Her characters are witty and fun to get to know, which is not something that could be said of Poe’s characters, who tend to be rather flat.
If you love creepy mushrooms and old school horror stories, this one is a little delight....more
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