(Penguin Random House/Vintage 978-0-593-08115-0, $17, 272pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, June 1, 2021)
Fantasy novel, inspired in part on the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, about mercenaries transporting a sacred oracle in 16th-century Netherlands.
With lush, erudite prose and a large cast of darkly eccentric humans and monsters, this spellbinding slipstream novel from Catling (the Vorrh trilogy) feels like stepping into one of Hieronymus Bosch’s playfully macabre paintings works which are aptly referenced in the novel’s second act. In a fantasy revisionist’s version of early 16th-century Netherlands, a troupe of ruffians transporting a malformed oracle and led by the fearsome Barry Follett travel across the wilderness and over Das Kagel, a mountain rumored to be the ruins of the Tower of Babel. Meanwhile, a young monk, Dominic, and his curmudgeonly mentor, Benedict, investigate the mysterious emergence of small demonic creatures called Filthlings and Woebegots, a
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Naomi Kritzer’s
Chaos on Catnet is a direct sequel to her Lodestar Award winner
Catfishing on Catnet, and it does exactly what a sequel should do: expand the stakes, introduce a few important new characters, reveal some secrets and puzzles left over from the first novel, and deepen the tone a bit. The trick is to manage all this without retreading familiar plot points or losing the authentically breezy YA tone of the first novel.
Catfishing on Catnet managed to keep that almost sunny tone intact while developing some pretty dark plotlines: the teenage Steph and her computer-genius mom moved from town to town in an effort to avoid being tracked down by her abusive and even homicidal father, never settling anywhere for long and never giving Steph a chance to develop friendships. Her social life took place almost entirely with a group of mostly geeky friends on a website called Catnet, which is actually managed by one of those friends, who (we learn) turns out to be a powerful
Rights Report: Week of May 24, 2021
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