Tag: historical-fiction

Vicki Regan, The Children of Copperhead Road, (2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/244648404-the-children-of-copperhead-road

Appalachian horror folktale novella

The Compton boy is lost in the mountains; the dogs lost the scent. But something’s been found, just past the Calhoun place. Multiple children, and they ‘aren’t right’. Earl says, ‘Don’t put this on the radio.’

He’s decided one thing—they’re not going up there at night.

Kelly says, ‘My daddy told me to stay off Copperhead Road.’

The reek hits them as they climb, animal musk, weathered animal bones. ‘Kids don’t do this,’ says Kelly.

The children are all ‘wrong’ in bizarre ways, and they’re all humming—the same note. They take the sheriff and his deputy to see ‘Mama’, a vision of horror, yet she has none. She’s blind. A helicopter comes to take them to the hospital, but their condition defies the doctors. They have ‘anomalies’. Dr Wallace takes over.

They’re taking the children back to Mama, sending a young teacher up the mountain to homeschool them—Miss Dorothy. Dorothy sends weekly reports, but they cease. The last one says, ‘Caleb won’t take no for an answer.’

Over and over, Earl does nothing. He watches the treeline.

2024, there’ve been four disappearances in five years. There’s a new sheriff now. Something moves through the trees.

We begin to understand that the law enforcement people are related to some of the children. I thought this might have been done as more of a Big Reveal.

Skilful at the building of suspense, Regan knows how to write horror. This echoes the ‘inbred hillbillies’ stereotype, but Mama and the ‘wrong’ children are more horrific than Banjo Boy in Deliverance.

I chose this book after enjoying Regan’s sci-fi trilogy Midnight Frequency series. She seems to be a versatile author, writing sci-fi, backwoods horror and vampire fantasy.

Joan Smith, Unfortunately, She was a Nymphomaniac, (William Collins, 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211051402-unfortunately-she-was-a-nymphomaniac

The durability of ancient Roman misogyny

A misogynist myth about women has been going round for millennia. That some women are infected with a psychological madness, an evil insatiable appetite for sex called furor uterinus, a disease which was supposed to originate in the womb.Accusations of sexual promiscuity, true or not, were used as justifications for femicide (the killing of women because they are women).

Girls were often forced to marry as early as age 12, even before menarche, and death in childbirth was common. The husbands could be in their 30s, 40s or 50s. Divorce was easy, and the children remained with the father.

The brilliant title of this book came from the mouth of a tour guide at the Palazzo Massimo museum in Rome. He was talking about Julia, the only child of Augustus, whom the all-authoritative ‘sources’ so maligned and who is the main subject of the first few chapters of this book. Augustus exiled his ‘nymphomaniac’ daughter Julia to Pandateria, then her ex-husband Tiberius locked her in a room and starved her to death, while her mother Scribonia had to listen through the walls to her anguished cries.

We’ve taken so many of our assumptions about this dynasty from Robert Graves’ highly fictionalised and sensationalised I, Claudius (who can forget the terrifying G-g-grandmother?), which Smith calls ‘a misogynist’s fever dream’.

But the real history is not much nicer. If the Julio-Claudians weren’t poisoning their women or stabbing them to death in the uterus, they were exiling them to distant rocky islands and starving them to death. Smith comments, ‘It’s impossible to overestimate the durability of Roman misogyny.’[1]

From Nero to Henry VIII, all a ruler had to do to justify bumping off a wife or a mother was to accuse her of infidelity. The empress Messalina, according to the satirist Juvenal, had a second career as a brothel madam, about as credible as Anne Boleyn’s incest with her brother.

The final chapter, outlining the violence against women that is still going on today, is harrowing.

We’re all somewhat familiar with the history of these people, but Smith exposes the shocking prejudices of the ‘sources’ and rights some of the myths. Contains copious footnotes, from the author’s own researching Latin sources, and includes many choice exactly translated phrases. Scrupulous scholarship, with the ability eloquently to cut to the gist of things. This is especially appreciated with ancient Roman history, with its plethora of names, dates and complex and inter-related family trees.

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[1] p. 224.

B T McCusker, Short Stories from a Tall Man, (TN Traynor Publishing, 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243790755-short-stories-from-a-tall-man

Innovative stories of ‘quiet humour’

A couple goes on holiday to France, their first holiday since the kids had all grown up. She used to crush on her French teacher, who would greet her with, ‘Bonjour, mademoiselle’.

On the beach, on the tip of a peninsula is a red house with a white gate. The man at the door invites her in, ‘Bonjour, mademoiselle’.

***

Archbishop De Grey tells Tom, ‘it’s a very big job.’ 524½ ft x 222 ft with a tower 235 ft tall, and 36 bells. ‘Can you build it?’ Tom says his guys can handle it.

In 250 years’ time, York Minster would be considered an architectural masterpiece.

***

Three coachloads of elderly ladies visit a hotel on the northwest coast. A explosives engineer, discharged from wartime service, sees enemies all around him. On the beach, a genuine emergency, one of the ladies has drowned, and it’s up to him to get the others all ashore safely.

‘That’s what I like about coach trips,’ he says, ‘every day is new.’

***

Grandad Wilson shows George and Oliver about magnets and about knots. ‘It’s not magic, boys; it’s science,’ he says.

Years later, their daughters hold a box tied with a double fisherman. It’s so old, the knot crumbles in their hands.

‘Magic,’ says George.

***

These mini-synopses give a flavour of the excellent stories in this anthology.

Many of the stories are short, two pages or shorter. They tend to have low-key endings, no big punchlines or dramatic twists, quite artful. The subtitle boasts ‘quiet humour’, and I found that description quite apt. Little vignettes–quirky encounters by the seaside, elders reflecting on their youth, the Shrubs family debating Greek philosophy and geometry, an umbrella hooked on a peg in the hallway. Wonderful, innovative ideas, beautiful writing.

I’m looking at anthologies of short stories at the moment, as our writers’ group has just published one.[1] Short stories can be hard to get your teeth into for the first few paragraphs, as the reader has to suspend disbelief to become hooked into a new world, but their restricted length allows for a concentration of the writer’s skill.

Each story has an adorable colour illustration in pen and crayon.

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[1] All Points Imagination.

Jonathan T Jefferson, The Outhouse, (Kindle, 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223853636-the-outhouse

Not a wardrobe, it’s an outhouse, a magical door into other worlds

Milton’s great-grandfather built the farmhouse in the late 1800s. There was no plumbing. Over the decades, a kitchenette and bathroom was added, and the well was sealed up. They had almost forgotten the old outhouse was still there. Until Milton’s son Madison sought a place of privacy to kiss his girl Katie.

He opened the outhouse door, suspecting this would be no place to kiss a girl, and couldn’t believe his eyes. No lavatory, there was instead a grand vista, the Grand Canyon, a winding river with red rock cliffs. Madison enters the magical world. Coming down the river is a native girl in a canoe. ‘Gam’yu,’ she greets him, and he finds he can speak Hualapai.

When he next opens the magical door, it’s a different place, a lush jungle. A trekking couple informs him they’re on the Inca Trail, on their way to Machu Picchu. At the Sun Gate, he runs to keep up with the tour guide, but the stones are wet and he slips, falling into the abyss. But – he’s back in the outhouse.

The next time, it’s Egypt.

Madison’s brother Harry is squirting water on the outhouse. Madison says, ‘Want to build a cover for the snake pit?’

The snake pit behind the barn. Could it, too, be a magical portal?

It’s probably involved enough for a children’s story, but I really wanted a bit more of a character arc, and I wanted Madison to go into the magical worlds a bit deeper. CS Lewis wrote whole volumes on Narnia, complete with the spiritual development of the children. We weren’t clear on what time period the worlds were. Is he travelling in time as well as space?

Thomas Holt, A Song for Nero, (Abacus, 2009)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1852372.A_Song_for_Nero

What if—just for a laugh—Nero didn’t die and lived on to pursue his dream career as a musician?

Lucius Domitius (Nero) and Galen are in a prison cell in Damascus, waiting to be crucified. ‘Is it true you murdered your mother?’ Galen wants to know. ‘What about your wives?’ And what happens after a person dies? Nero should know; ‘half your rotten family are gods’.

Galen, our narrator, regales us with tales of his and his brother Callistus’ youth as thieves in the streets of Athens and how Lucius Domitius showed up. It had to do with a hilarious mishap, a cart and a chain of slaves nearly going over a cliff edge.

According to ancient Roman sentiment, any sort of corruption or debauchery, fratricide, patricide, matricide, kicking your pregnant wife to death, was par for the course when done in private, but standing up in the amphitheatre alongside a bunch of riffraff singing songs about the fall of Troy was a bridge too far. The ‘purple-stripe boys’ senator class have it in for Nero, and when push comes to shove, Galen and Callistus pull a switcheroo.

Now Galen and Lucius Domitius traipse around the Empire, pulling petty confidence tricks—Nero’s an actor, after all—getting into scrapes and blagging their way out of trouble. And then, some Sicilian and this rabbit-faced bloke are following them, and one of them’s a music fan. The plot gets complicated, and there’s a buried treasure up for grabs.

A rattling tongue-in-cheek yarn in the entertaining Voice of Galen. Our Nero listens to some funny retellings of funny stories about himself that went down at the time—eg punishing people for falling asleep during his concerts. Now, he complains, ‘I’m not even as good as the lies they tell about me’.

The tone and the gags are to tickle a modern funnybone, yet culturally referencing the olden Roman days, which is especially funny (eg ‘beats me why we aren’t all speaking Carthaginian’; ‘playing… pass the hemlock soufflé with [his] ghastly mother’; f*** a goat six ways to Nicomedia’).

The editor tended not to put spaces after full stops and commas, which was distracting.

Anil Nijhawan, The Pickpocket’s Letter, (‎Blue Horizon Publishing, 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243252262-the-pickpocket-s-letter

A young pickpocket becomes a champion of love

Young Deenu dictates into his Sanyo tape recorder an impassioned letter to PM Modi. ‘You must look deeper into why there are so many abandoned children in this country’, he says. Sanju types the transcripts for him, on the promise of ‘more juicy bits to come’.

Deenu has experienced it all—raised in an orphanage, kidnapped and beaten by gangsters at age 14, forced to steal for his daily bread, s**ually ab**ed by staff members in return for chocolate bars, slapped for speaking out, in thrall to people with ‘different agendas’. He doesn’t know his real name—Deenu is a nickname. He lives in Kolkata, but he used to live in Bengaluru, where he ‘had a steady job working as a pickpocket’.

There is a villain, the evil trafficker Vikram, who ‘wants to make keema out of’ Deenu, and a mission—a pocket-picked wallet sets Deenu on a journey to reunite two separated lovers. If only he could be reunited himself with his lost mother. In a world full of hate, Deenu is loving.

The Voice of the narration is that of the child Deenu, which is charming. We see the streets of Bengaluru and Kolkata through his eyes. His good-heartedness takes for granted the poor conditions and care, the poverty, the abuse; fleeing from ‘the RTP’ (robbers, thieves and pickpockets); the children suffering ‘like the crunching of cockroaches under… feet’. The police are no help with his problems—they only try to extort money from the victims.

This makes it all the more heart-breaking to us. If not for this relative degree of separation, we’d not be able to bear reading it. All the little stories about life on the streets—tragic stories they are, but Deenu makes them humorous. Each little scene is colourful. The details are wonderful, tragi-comic and heart-warming. There is an intricate climax to the story, where everything seems disastrous for everybody, but Nijhawan manages to give us a hopeful ‘triumph over tragedy’ happy ending. I almost cried.

There is liberal use of Hindi words, which I had to look up in Google, but I didn’t mind as they lend familiarity to the foreign (to me) setting and paint the scenes as through the characters’ eyes.

Like PM Modi, we must learn of the sufferings of children like Deenu. It is our responsibility to fight for a world where every child grows up in love and security.

Yvonne Singh, INK!: From the Age of Empire to Black Power, the Journalists who Transformed Britain, (The History Press, 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/238765832-ink?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=bn6gZKybpO&rank=3

Giving a voice to forgotten black voices

Black journalism in the UK has been scandalously undervalued. Black voices have died unlauded, unrecorded, unpreserved. A poem by Una Marson was read on the radio as ‘by a Jamaican poet’, without listing her name or her credentials as the BBC’s first Black presenter. Claudia Jones’ grave in Highgate Cemetery went unmarked for two decades.

Journalist and daughter of Windrush, Singh tells the tales of seven heroes of history whose writings need to be read and whose stories need to be heard.

These heroes had to overcome heart-wrenching ordeals to become strong voices of history. Darcus Howe’s Black Dimension was closed under accusations of libel over its frank reportage on police brutality. Jones’ West Indian Gazette was threatened by Nazis.

Claude McKay, George Padmore and Claudia Jones were Communists. Having received sponsorship for his trip to revolutionary Moscow, McKay was pickpocketed and his tickets stolen. Claudia Jones’ youth was blighted by poverty and illness, and she was deported from the US in 1955 during Hoover’s ‘Red Scare’.

Singh’s account contradicts other sources as to Howe’s familial relationship to CLR James (correctly, he was his great-nephew).[1] She also includes some questionable speculation, which is fun. Did similar CVs mean Dusé Mohamed Ali was an alias created by Rev. William Rand?[2]

The style is straightforward, respecting the journalistic who-what-when-where format.

These seven journalists were instrumental in, as Darcus Howe’s biographer put it, bringing ‘reason to race’.[3] Have we learned, yet? We owe it to the cause of human liberation to make sure these stories are remembered.

This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

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[1] She says CLR James was Darcus Howe’s second cousin; Wikipedia says his uncle. Genealogy sites say great-uncle.

[2] This source, Jacob S Dorman, also claims Ali was not Egyptian, an origin attested everywhere else.

[3] Bunce, Robin, and Field, Paul, Darcus Howe: A Political Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie, (Oneworld Publications, 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/136335272-edenglassie

The worlds of Goories and whitefellas surround Granny Eddie’s hospital bed

Granny Eddie has a fall, knocked cold. Everything has ‘gorn skewiff’, whitefellas avoiding looking at an old Goorie woman. In the crisp hospital bed, she thinks of dirt, all her life being ‘a dirty Blak’. She feeds the journalist tall tales about the old days. Her granddaughter Winona is an angry woman. Dr Johnny is smitten.

1840. Dawalbin espies the Ancestors’ arrival, a ‘great white curve coming upriver’. The dagai (I guess, foreigners) are leaving; will the people now have peace? Mulanyin, a Yugambeh youth, catches a big mulloway, but has to return it since it’s a female bearing eggs. Soon he will be ready for the bora ceremony, and he dreams of owning his own whaleboat and marrying Nita, the Petries’ housemaid.

He and Murree compete in the regatta, only to find the prize for the blackfellas is less than for the whites. Young Tom Petrie, the first white child born in Brisbane, who ‘speaks Yagara like a Goorie’, catches a river turtle.

Meanwhile, the whitefellas in the government town struggle to ‘build a Christian civilisation in the wilderness’.

The story is based on the colonial history of Queensland. Edenglassie was a name briefly used for the penal colony near Brisbane.

The voices of Eddie and young Mulanyin are brilliant; one offering history, the other vitality. Young Tom’s familarity with the Goories allows us to see their world through sympathetic white eyes and see the whites’ world through their eyes—alien concepts like ‘Work, Fences, Debt and Jesus’.

A masterpiece, and a model of Showing not Telling. However, the unfamiliar vocabulary and culture obscured some of the major plot points. E.g. I didn’t understand the ‘statue disaster’. I could have used a Glossary.

At the end the stories of the modern-day and 19^th century Goories connect beautifully.

This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

Anthony Glavin, Way Out West, (New Island Books, 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205796187-way-out-west

A thoroughly human story about Ireland and America, and everything in between.

Picture Fintan growing up in Donegal, a three-room whitewashed cottage still thatched in 1955, in Glenbay, where ‘the wide world washed in from time to time’, where praying against fairies only stopped with Father Boyle’s arrival. His uncle Condy and other returned émigrés ‘swap lies about America’, filling an emotional gap after his mother dies.

This creates a wanderlust in him, and he never stops, London, Paris, Hanover, Ohio, St Louis, Wisconsin, San Francisco, Boston, a ‘self missing in motion’. He voraciously reads books which he gets from libraries. He searches for a painting of his mother by an American artist, which becomes a metaphor for his unrestful soul, which shies from the ‘overblown excesses’ of America, yet hunts for ‘the bleed between a storied past and the here and now’.

‘To be here now is more about consciousness than locale.’

It begins slowly, as we meet Fintan’s parents Packy and Mary and all the characters in the village. The novel’s structure roves like Fintan, its storytelling style, while wholly appropriate, is hard to sink one’s teeth into at first. He moves from town to town ‘like a dart thrown on a map’, from job to job, observing America, the people, the ‘earnestness’. The stories aren’t tall tales, just little vignettes of humanity.

Author Glavin is an émigré from the other direction, from Boston to Donegal, yet his work has an Irish feel, with pathos, subtlety and vivid storytelling. His portraits of Glenbay folk seem so authentic, I’d bet he himself has heard some of those stories. He sees America through Irish eyes.

There’s an understated loneliness pervading this novel, all the more poignant as the language is beautiful, the people, their stories and the little vignettes wondrous.

This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

A. Rushby, Slashed Beauties, (Verve Books, 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222925674-slashed-beauties

Anatomical models? Or Bewitched seductresses?

Three bewitched 18^th century wax models are expressly designed to entice in medical students eagerness to slash and dig into their beautiful bodies. These ‘Anatomical Venuses’ are objects to be desired, automatons of pleasure; men—like Geon Yoon—will ‘scratch at the walls to get to them’.

In one of the models, the face and groin are interchangeable parts—a gruesome metaphor.

Eleanor, abandoned in 1769 London by her cad of a lover, has two choices—the new factories or the bawdy house. She meets Elizabeth and Emily in the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens and enters into a Faustian pact. She is offered a life of luxury but warned that ‘only the exterior is gilded in this world’. When the brothel comes upon hard times, the three beauties are paid handsomely to sit for the anatomist.

Antiques dealer Alys, who has a macabre specialty, is given a large amount of money to transport one of the models from Seoul to London. The legend goes: when the three Venuses reunite, they will rise…

The Venuses, debauched for their beauty by men, want revenge, and there is a coven of witches who have the magic to make everything right.

The modern players involved in the scramble for the Venuses ‘have skin in the game’, occupationally or genealogically. Halfway through the plot—which is equally engaging in the modern timeline as in the 18^th century one—we learn just how interested they are. There are dark and dangerous secrets in everyone’s history. Alys admits, ‘I’m hiding everything.’

I loved wondering just how real the Venuses are—we are kept guessing. Is ‘Elizabeth’ the anatomical mannequin or a sentient power-hungry brothel madam with magic powers and her own evil agenda?

Rich, intricate, full of surprises and everything ties up wonderfully at the end.

This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.