Buy it here:
Synopsis:
Nahanni National Park is one of last truly wild places on earth. Accessible only by plane, and only when the weather cooperates, it’s the perfect place for estranged brothers Joseph and Oscar to have an adventure following the death of their mother. Gillian, Joseph’s first love, invites herself along in the spirit of friendship. The park is much more than beautiful. It’s mysterious, with legends of giants and hidden, prehistoric animals. And among its few visitors, an outsized number of violent deaths inspire its second, more seductive name. While dreaming of the future, the group finds themselves confronted by the past. Far from home and far from help. In the Valley of the Headless Men.” LP Hernandez is one of the most entertaining and much needed voices in horror fiction’s new vanguard.” – Brian Keene
Review:
Nahanni National Park is one of the last unexplored places in Canada, due to it’s remote location in the Northwest Territories. There is a large oral tradition about that area, stories that involve giants, mammoths, vanishing native tribes, and men found decapitated in the valley. This backdrop lends to the story of In the Valley of the Headless Men by L.P. Hernandez. The story starts with Joseph and his half-brother Oscar cleaning out their mother’s house after their mother’s death. Oscar finds a cache of letters from Joseph’s father. The last of the letters tells Joseph to go to Nahanni National Park because this is where he is. Joseph, Oscar, and Joseph’s ex-love Gillian, set out for this strange valley to find Joseph’s father.
This is not the real reason for the journey. The real reason is that all three of the characters are pulled to this remote valley is because they have something in their lives that they have lost. Joseph is dealing with the loss of his mother and his estranged father. Oscar also has lost his mother but is a recovering addict that starts to show new signs of withdrawal as soon as they enter the forest. Gillian is still thinking about the baby that she and Joseph lost while they were together. In the valley, these lost things become powerful influences, and all three lose their own sense of reality. The cyclical concepts of finding what has been lost while getting lost further and further into the mystery and horror of a place makes all three of them question reality, themselves, and whether they are going to get out alive.
When I first started reading In the Valley of the Headless Men, I thought that this is a pretty simple setup, a grown man finds out his dad might be waiting for him in a remote forest. The truth is Joseph, Oscar, and Gillian are all looking for something deeper, something to console the grief, and it really takes them going to Nahanni National Park and feeling like they are going to die there to make them understand the truth. I did not expect the impact that L.P. Hernandez has in writing this story, the story of exploration, not only of a strange land but of the inner turmoil that has caused all three of them to take the directions in their lives that they have taken. Weird cosmic horror, nature horror, and psychological horror collide in a story that has much more depth than I initially expected. This story and this region will stick with me for longer than I ever anticipated.
Other reviews of books by L.P. Hernandez:
Review: The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Buy it here:
Amazon, Bookshop
Synopsis:
A gripping historical novel about a spirited young girl who joins a sisterhood of Black women working together to undermine the Confederates—from the award-winning author of We Cast a Shadow
The American Daughters follows Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl who is enslaved alongside her mother, Sanite to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Sanite and her mother Ady are an inseparable duo—taking walks along the river, working together in the fields and spending nights looking up at the stars, dreaming. Ady’s favorite pastime is listening to Sanite’s stories of her families’ origins, their fierce and rebellious nature, and the everlasting love that strengthens their bond.
When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and unmoored, until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called The Daughters. With the courage instilled in her by Sanite—and help from these strong women—Ady learns how to choose herself. So begins her journey toward liberation and imagining a new future. The American Daughters is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their right to live free.
Review:
The American Daughters, the second novel and third book by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, is a historical novel about Ady, a slave girl, who lives in a New Orleans and eventually finds kindred spirits in the women who work at The Mockingbird, a club ran by a free woman, Lenore. Ady is introduced by Lenore to a group of women spies who do things to undermine and sabotage the confederacy. Their actions do not stop the confederacy and slave owners from punishing them, but the war that the women wage against the oppressive men and government is one that makes them feel vindicated. Their work is justified for their work, regardless of the consequences.
Ady (sort for Adebimpe) is an easy character to like and cheer for. She is intelligent, strong, and defiant in the face of ugliness and hatefulness. In books about slavery, readers are hard pressed to ever find any sort of compassion toward a slave owner, so it is easy to want Ady and to succeed in everything that she does, whether it be running away into the woods with her mother, Sanite, while as a little girl, or plotting with her spy friends to undermine the confederacy and her owner. We want her to be successful. The danger that she finds herself in does lead to parts of the novel where the tension increases, but most of the time, the things that she is doing feel like things that she should get away with. She is doing the right thing, even with the dangers that it brings.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin has written a novel that is more serious than most of his other stories, but slave stories come with a natural tone of seriousness. He does find the ability to add a bigger story to this novel, one that brings home the social commentary at the center of this book. There are a few parts written in the far future, from historians and family members generations removed, who are using the text of The American Daughters as the true records of what slavery is like. Ruffin is saying that at this moment, we are still close enough to American slavery that there is a strong narrative, but in one hundred and fifty years, the only record we might have left is the stories that have been passed along from the actual slaves themselves. The official narrative will eventually diminish the centuries of slavery in America into a footnote, so it is up to personal stories, memoirs and biographies, and even some fiction, to continue the true narrative of slavery in America. I would have liked more of these cuts to the future throughout the novel and how this story has turned into an important historical document, because this idea is subtle, and it takes the epilogue for this idea to really be solidified. The American Daughters is another great story by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and even though it is a little more serious in tone than his previous works, his social commentary is just as strong.
I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.