Pagan Books

"#WritingQThursday Let's talk your characters' names. What do they mean? Do they signify anything special? Does your character have any nicknames, and if so, what's the story behind those?"

I usually put a lot of thought into my characters' names. Everyone but the minor side characters has thought out names. "Random extra #47" gets a random name from a list of most popular names, if they get a name at all. Dalia, her name means "a strong branch," for instance. It's also a pun, because she's black and her name is usually pronounced the same as the flower, 'dahlia.' (Sometimes it's pronounced "Doll-yah.") Her middle name is Delphinium, which is the name of a genus of poisonous flowers because Morgana's family has a history of at least one of their names being named after poisonous flowers. (It's a goth thing for them.) Like Morgana's middle name is Belladonna (AKA deadly nightshade). Morgana's mother's first name is also Belladonna. (Her middle name is Hemlock.) Morgana also has a brother named Oleander. (Dalia canonically chooses her own first and middle name, after having her parents read a lot of possible names for her out of a baby names book. Chooli also chooses zeer own name, naming zemself after one of Nizoni's cousins, Chooli Peshlakai. Said cousin was the first person Nizoni came out as trans to.)

( Rest is VERY long )

I just finished a book by T. Kingfisher called "Snake-Eater," which is a horror story in which Selena, the protagonist, runs away from her life after her mom's death to unwind in the American Southwest, and in the process runs afoul of Snake Eater, who is basically the god of roadrunners.

Now, if your only knowledge of roadrunners is from the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons, well... apparently real roadrunners are fucking terrifying. They're basically evil little feathered dinosaurs that are wicked smart predators with enormous talons and a beak like a shiv. They apparently have zero fear of human beings, since they know they can outrun us (but cannot, IRL, outrun coyotes; real coyotes are twice as fast as real roadrunners). If one decides to attack you, they will fuck up your shit, leaving you with great talon gouges and pecking the back of your skull in an effort to kill you the same way they do to the rattlesnakes that are one of their favorite prey animals. (Yes, these feathered fuckers hunt venomous snakes!) And because they're so fast, they can attack you faster than your brain can process that they've started moving.

And she faces the GOD of these things. (Or a very powerful spirit. Either way...)

Anyway, that's not my review of the book. This is my review, from Goodreads:

This book is in a sub-genre I would call "cozy horror," because it's mostly a sedate book about a neurotic (and possibly autistic) woman and the series of toxic relationships she gets away from, and how she grows a spine to stand up for herself with the help of some friends she makes at the tiny town her aunt lived in. Most of the book is a slow burn, with a few sprinkles of foreshadowing here and there, and a couple bursts of supernatural action before reaching the very satisfying ending. It took like 70 pages to get to the first burst of action, and another hundred for the second burst. But it's the rest of the story that's the star of the novel: the characters, their connections with each other, Selena's thoughts as she disentangles her mind from her toxic relationships, and the new bonds of friendship and community she makes. The horror elements serve mostly to move the character development along.

Over the course of this book, I fell so in love with the setting, the characters, and the vibe of the book that I could easily read a sequel that had even less supernatural or horror elements. Which is saying a lot, for me, because I very rarely read anything that could be considered conventional fiction.

My only remaining question is why it seems to take place in the year 2051 or later. It was very subtle, little odd things here and there that finally came together with a single sentence spoken before the second major burst of action. It was extremely subtle until that point, though I did learn a new word ("arcology") and then saw that word show up like five times in the book. I got the impression maybe humanity was finally wising up and fixing climate change somehow, but honestly I'm still not sure why that was included. It doesn't take anything away from the story, it's just a minor mystery that was never really given a satisfying resolution because at no point in the book (not even the afterword) was this directly addressed. It's like we were just dropped into the story and left to pick up on those subtle clues on our own and draw our own conclusions. Again, not complaining exactly, just... I'd like to know what that was all about. Nothing about the story struck me as needing to be set in any particular year. I thought it took place in 2025 or so until I started picking up on those occasional breadcrumbs.

Anyway, excellent book, and I would give it seven stars if I could.