The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories

By Joan Aiken, Lizza Aiken and Kelly Link

Praise for Joan Aiken's stories:

"Wildly inventive, darkly lyrical, and always surprising . . . should be cherished."—Publishers Weekly

"Darkly whimsical stories. . . . Aiken writes with surpassing spirit and alertness, her elegant restraint and dry wit never fail to leave their mark."—Kirkus Reviews

"Will appeal to readers of short stories and literary fiction. Highly recommended."—Library Journal

"Aiken's pastoral meadows and circus chaos, gothic grotesques and quirky romances . . . have a dream-like quality executed with a brevity and wit that is a testament to her skill as a story-teller."—California Literary Review

"Fantasy is combined with magic, myth and adventure to form weird, wonderful and immersive tales."—For Book's Sake

Here is the whisper in the night, the dog whose loyalty outlasted death, the creak upstairs, that half-remembered ghost story that won't let you sleep, the sound that raises gooseflesh, the wish you'd checked the lock on the door before dark fell. Here are tales of suspense and the supernatural that will chill, amuse, and exhilarate. Features a new introduction by the late author's daughter, Lizza Aiken.

Best known for The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Joan Aiken (1924–2004) wrote over a hundred books and won the Guardian and Edgar Allan Poe awards. After her first husband's death, she supported her family by copyediting at Argosy magazine and an advertising agency before turning to fiction. She went on to write for Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, Argosy, Women's Own, and many others. Visit her online at joanaiken.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Small Beer Press
• Release date: Apr 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781618731135

Joan Aiken

<P>Joan Aiken, daughter of the American writer Conrad Aiken, was born in Rye, Sussex, England, and has written more than sixty books for children, including <I>The Wolves of Willoughby Chase</I>.

Book preview

Introduction by Kelly Link

In 1924, Joan Aiken was born in a haunted house on Mermaid Street in Rye, England. Her father was the poet Conrad Aiken, perhaps most famous now for his short story Silent Snow, Secret Snow and her mother was Jessie MacDonald, who homeschooled Joan and filled her earliest years with Pinocchio, the Brontës, and the stories of Walter de la Mare, and much more. (Her stepfather Martin Armstrong was, as well, a poet; Joan Aiken’s sister and brother, Jane Aiken Hodge and John Aiken, like Joan, became writers.) Aiken wrote her first novel at the age of sixteen (more about that later) and sold her first story to the BBC around the same time. In the fifties and sixties, she worked on the short story magazine Argosy and from 1964 on, she wrote two books a year or more, roughly one hundred in all. She wrote gothics, mysteries, children’s novels, Jane Austen pastiches, and an excellent book for would-be authors, The Way to Write for Children. Her first book was the collection All You’ve Ever Wanted and Other Stories, followed by a second book of short stories More Than You Bargained For—stories from these collections were published in a kind of omnibus in the U.S., Not What You Expected, which was the first book by Aiken that I ever read. Her series of alternate history novels for children, a Dickensian sequence that starts with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, has stayed in print, I believe, almost continuously since she began writing it, although I still remember being told by her agent, Charles Schlessiger, that when he delivered The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to her publisher, her editor asked if Aiken would consider sending them another collection instead. (Well: the world is a different place now.) The Wolves sequence is bursting to the seams with exiled royalty, sinister governesses, spies, a goose boy, and plucky orphans—and, of course, the eponymous wolves. The Telegraph said of Aiken that her prose style drew heavily on fairy tales and oral traditions in which plots are fast-moving and horror is matter-of-fact but never grotesque.

Many many years ago, I had a part-time job at a children’s bookstore, which mostly—and happily—entailed reading the stock that we carried so we could make recommendations to adults who came in looking to buy books for their children. (Our customers were almost never children.) I reread the still ongoing Wolves novels and then began to track down the Aiken collections that I had checked out of the Coral Gables library to read as a child—collections whose titles still enticed: The Far Forests, The Faithless Lollybird, A Harp of Fishbones. When, eventually, I moved to Boston, I got a job at another bookstore, this one a secondhand shop on Newbury Street—in part so that I had a firsthand shot at hunting down out-of-print books for myself. I can still remember the moment at which, standing at the top of a platform ladder on wheels to reach the uppermost shelf to find something for a customer, I found Joan Aiken’s first novel The Kingdom and the Cave as if it had only just appeared there (which it probably had. The Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop’s owner, Vincent McCaffrey, bought dozens of books each day).

And now, of course, it’s quite possible to find almost any book that you might want online. (The world is a different place now.)

I recently spent a long weekend in Key West at a literary festival where the organizing theme was short stories. How delightful for me! There was much discussion on panels of the challenges that short stories present to their readers. The general feeling was that short stories could be difficult because their subject matter was so often grim; tragic. A novel you had time to settle into—novels wanted you to like them, it was agreed, whereas short stories were like Tuesday’s child, full of woe, and required a certain kind of moral fortitude to properly digest. And yet it has always seemed to me that short stories have a kind of wild delight to them even when their subject is grim. They come at you in a rush and spin you about in an unsettling way and then go rushing off again. There is a kind of joy in the speed and compression necessary to make something very large happen in a small space. In contemporary short fiction, sometimes it’s the language of the story that transmits the live-wire shock. Sometimes the structure of the story itself—the container—the way it unfolds—is the thing that startles or energizes or joyfully dislodges the reader. But: it does sometimes seem to me that for maybe the last quarter of the previous century, the subject matter of literary short fiction was somewhat sedate: marriage, affairs, the loss of love, personal tragedies, moments of self-realization. The weird and the gothic and the fanciful mostly existed in pockets of genre (science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, children’s literature) as if literature were a series of walled gardens and not all the same forest. We had almost nothing in the vein of Joan Aiken’s short stories, which practically spill over with mythological creatures and strange incident and mordant humor. And yet at the time when she began to write them, in the 1950s, when Aiken was an editor at Argosy as well as a featured author, there were any number of popular fiction magazines publishing writers like John Collier, O’Henry, Elizabeth Bowen, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl. Magazines have smaller circulations now; there are fewer magazines with circulations quite so broad; and yet there are, once again, many established and critically acclaimed—as well as new and startlingly brilliant—writers working in the fantastic mode. The jolt that this kind of writing gives its reader is the pleasure of the unreal in the real; the joyful, collaborative effort that imagining an impossible thing requires of such a story’s reader as well as its writer. It seems the right moment to introduce the stories of Joan Aiken to a new audience.

The particular joys of a Joan Aiken story have always been her capacity for this kind of brisk invention; her ear for dialect; her characters and their idiosyncrasies. Among the stories collected in this omnibus, are some of the very first Joan Aiken stories that I ever fell in love with, starting with the title story The People in the Castle, which is a variation on the classic tales of fairy wives. The Cold Flame is a ghost story as is, I suppose, Humblepuppy, but one involves a volcano, a poet, and a magic-wielding, rather Freudian mother—while the other is likely to make some readers cry. In order to put together this omnibus, we went through every single one of Aiken’s collections, talked over our choices with her daughter Lizza, reworked the table of contents, and then I sat down and over the course of six months, typed out every single one. I’m sorry that we couldn’t include more—for example, two childhood favorites, More Than You Bargained For and A Harp of Fishbones, but there was a great pleasure in reading and then rereading and then transcribing stories like Hope in which a harp teacher goes down the wrong alley and encounters the devil. And A Leg Full of Rubies may be, in its wealth of invention, the quintessential Joan Aiken short story: a man named Theseus O’Brien comes into a small town with an owl on his shoulder, and unwillingly inherits a veterinary practice, a collection of caged birds including a malignant phoenix, and a prosthetic leg full of rubies which is being used to hold up the corner of a table. Joan Aiken is the heir of writers like Saki, Guy de Maupassant and all the masters of the ghost story—M. R. James, E. F. Benson, Marjorie Bowen—I can’t help but imagine that some readers will encounter these stories and come away with the desire to write stories as wild and astonishing and fertile as these.

In 2002, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts invited Joan Aiken to be its guest. I went in order to hear her speak. She was so small that when it was time for her to give her lecture, she could not be seen over the podium—and so finally someone went and found a phone book and she stood on that. She talked about how her stepfather, Martin Armstrong, had been impatient in the morning at the breakfast table when the children wanted to tell their dreams. Other people’s dreams are, he said, boring. And then Joan Aiken proceeded, in her lecture, to tell the audience about a city that she visited in a series of recurring dreams. She said that it was not a city that existed in the real world, but that after walking its streets for so many years in dreams, she knew it as well as she knew London or New York. In this city, she said, was everyone she had ever loved, both the living and the dead. We all listened, riveted. Did she talk about anything else? I don’t remember. All I recall is her dream and the telephone book.

The Power of Storytelling: Joan Aiken’s Strange Stories

Joan Aiken once described a moment during a talk she was giving at a conference, when to illustrate a point she began to tell a story. At that moment, she said, the quality of attention in the room subtly changed. The audience, as if hypnotised, seemed to fall under her control.

Everyone was listening, to hear what was going to happen next.

From her own experience, whether as an addictive reader from early childhood or as a storyteller herself, learning to amuse a younger brother growing up in a remote village, by the time she was writing for a living to support her family, she had learned a great respect for the power of stories.

Like a sorcerer addressing her apprentice, in her heartfelt guide, The Way to Write for Children, she advises careful use of the storyteller’s power:

From the beginning of the human race stories have been used—by priests, by bards, by medicine men—as magic instruments of healing, of teaching, as a means of helping people come to terms with the fact that they continually have to face insoluble problems and unbearable realities.

Clearly this informed her desire to bring to her own stories as much richness, as many layers of meaning, and as much of herself, her extensive reading, and her own experience of life as she possibly could. Stories, she said, give us a sense of our own inner existence and the archetypal links that connect us to the past . . . they show us patterns that extend beyond ordinary reality.

Although she repudiated the idea that her writing contained any overt moral, nevertheless many of Joan Aiken’s stories do convey a powerful sense of the fine line between good and evil. She habitually made use of the traditional conventions of folk tales and myths, in which right is rewarded and any kind of inhumanity gets its just deserts. Her particular gift, though, was to transfer these myths into richly detailed everyday settings that we would recognise, and then add a dash of magic; a doctor holds his surgery in a haunted castle, and so a ghost comes to be healed.

What Aiken brings to her stories is her own voice—and the assurance that these stories are for you. By reading them, taking part in them, not unlike the beleaguered protagonists she portrays as her heroes—struggling doctors, impatient teachers or lonely children—you too can learn to take charge of your own experience. It is possible, she seems to say, that just around the corner is an alternative version of the day to day, and by choosing to unloose your imagination and share some of her leaps into fantasy you may find—as the titles of some of her early story collections put it—More than You Bargained For and almost certainly Not What You Expected . . .

One of the most poignant, hopeful, and uplifting stories in this collection—and hope, Aiken believed, was the most transforming force—is Watkyn, Comma. Here she uses the idea of a comma—in itself almost a metaphor for a short story—to express a sudden opening up of experience: a pause, a break between two thoughts, when you take breath, reconsider . . . and can seize the opportunity to discover something hitherto unimaginable.

In the course of one short story our expectations are confounded by the surprising ability with which Aiken generously endows her central character—to see something we would not have expected. By gently offering the possibility of previously unknown forces—our ability to develop new capacities, the will for empathy between the many creatures of our universe, our real will to learn to communicate—she leaves us feeling like the characters in the story—brought forward.

Aiken draws us into a moment of listening—gives an example of how a story works its magic—and invites us to join in the process of creative sharing, believing, asking:

Could I do this?

And hearing her answer:

Oh, never doubt it.

Aiken is perfectly capable of showing the dark side of the coin, of sharing our dangerous propensity to give in to nightmares and conjure monsters from the deep, but at her best and most powerful she allows her protagonists to summon their deepest strengths to confront their devils. In the story of this name, born from one of her own nightmares, even Old Nick is frustrated by a feline familiar called Hope.

This collection of stories, taken from her entire writing career, some of which I have known and been told since I was born, form a magical medicine chest of remedies for all kinds of human trials, and every form of unhappiness. The remedies are hope, generosity, empathy, humour, imagination, love, memory, dreams . . . Yes, sometimes she shows that it takes courage to face down the more hair-raising fantasies, and conquer our unworthy instincts, but in the end the reward is in the possibility of transformation. The Fairy Godmother is within us all.

Lizza Aiken 2015

A Leg Full of Rubies

Night, now. And a young man, Theseus O’Brien, coming down the main street of Killinch with an owl seated upon his shoulder—perhaps the strangest sight that small town ever witnessed. The high moors brooded around the town, all up the wide street came the sighing of the river, and the August night was as gentle and full as a bucket of new milk.

Theseus turned into Tom Mahone’s snug, where the men of the town were gathered peaceably together, breathing smoke and drinking mountain dew. Wild, he seemed, coming into the lamplit circle, with a look of the night on him, and a smell of loneliness about him, and his eyes had an inward glimmer from looking into the dark. The owl on his shoulder sat quiet as a coffee-pot.

Well, now, God be good to ye, said Tom Mahone. What can we do for ye at all?

And he poured a strong drop, to warm the four bones of him.

Is there a veterinary surgeon in this town? Theseus inquired.

Then they saw that the owl had a hurt wing, the ruffled feathers all at odds with one another. Is there a man in this town can mend him? he said.

Ah, sure Dr. Kilvaney’s the man for ye, said they all. No less than a magician with the sick beasts, he is. And can throw a boulder farther than any man in the land. ’Tis the same one has a wooden leg stuffed full of rubies. And keeps a phoenix in a cage. And has all the minutes of his life numbered to the final grain of sand—ah, he’s the man to aid ye."

And all the while the owl staring at them from great round eyes.

No more than a step it was to the doctor’s surgery, with half Tom Mahone’s customers pointing the way. The doctor, sitting late to his supper by a small black fire, heard the knock and opened the door, candle in hand.

Hoo? said the owl at sight of him, who, whoo? And who indeed may this strange man be, thought Theseus, following him down the stone passageway, with his long white hair and his burning eyes of grief?

Not a word was said between them till the owl’s wing was set, and then the doctor, seeing O’Brien was weary, made him sit and drink a glass of wine.

Sit, said he, there’s words to be spoken between us. How long has the owl belonged to you?

To me? said Theseus. He’s no owl of mine. I found him up on the high moor. Can you mend him?

He’ll be well in three days, said Kilvaney. I see you are a man after my heart, with a love of wild creatures. Are you not a doctor, too?

I am, answered Theseus. Or I was, he added sadly, until the troubles of my patients became too great a grief for me to bear, and I took to walking the roads to rid me of it.

Come into my surgery, said the doctor, for I’ve things to show you. You’re the man I’ve been looking for.

They passed through the kitchen, where a girl was washing the dishes. Lake-blue eyes, she had, and black hair; she was small, and fierce, and beautiful, like a falcon.

My daughter, the doctor said absently. Go to bed, Maggie.

When the birds are fed, not before, she snapped.

Cage after cage of birds, Theseus saw, all down one wall of the room, finches and thrushes, starlings and blackbirds, with sleepy stirring and twittering coming from them.

In the surgery there was only one cage, but that one big enough to house a man. And inside it was such a bird as Theseus had never seen before—every feather on it pure gold, and eyes like candle-flames.

My phoenix, the doctor said, but don’t go too near him, for he’s vicious.

The phoenix sidled near the end of the cage, with his eyes full of malice and his wicked beak sideways, ready to strike. Theseus stepped away from the cage and saw, at the other end of the room, a mighty hour-glass that held in its twin globes enough sand to boil all the eggs in Leghorn. But most of the sand had run through, and only a thin stream remained, silting down so swiftly on the pyramid below that every minute Theseus expected to see the last grain whirl through and vanish.

You are only just in time, Dr. Kilvaney said. My hour has come. I hereby appoint you my heir and successor. To you I bequeath my birds. Feed them well, treat them kindly, and they will sing to you. But never, never let the phoenix out of his cage, for his nature is evil.

No, no! Dr. Kilvaney! Theseus cried. You are in the wrong of it! You are putting a terrible thing on me! I don’t want your birds, not a feather of them. I can’t abide creatures in cages!

You must have them, said the doctor coldly. Who else can I trust? And to you I leave also my wooden leg full of rubies—look, I will show you how it unscrews.

No! cried Theseus. I don’t want to see!

He shut his eyes, but he heard a creaking, like a wooden pump-handle.

And I will give you, too, said the doctor presently, this hour-glass. See, my last grain of sand has run through. Now it will be your turn. Calmly he reversed the hour-glass, and started the sand once more on its silent, hurrying journey. Then he said,

Surgery hours are on the board outside. The medicines are in the cupboard yonder. Bridget Hanlon is the midwife. My daughter feeds the birds and attends to the cooking. You can sleep tonight on the bed in there. Never let the phoenix out of its cage. You must promise that.

I promise, said Theseus, like a dazed man.

Now I will say good-bye to you. The doctor took out his false teeth, put them on the table, glanced round the room to see that nothing was overlooked, and then went up the stairs as if he were late for an appointment.

All night Theseus, uneasy on the surgery couch, could hear the whisper of the sand running, and the phoenix rustling, and the whet of its beak on the bars; with the first light he could see its mad eye glaring at him.

In the morning Dr. Kilvaney was dead.

It was a grand funeral. All the town gathered to pay him respect, for he had dosed and drenched and bandaged them all, and brought most of them into the world, too.

’Tis a sad loss, said Tom Mahone, and he with the grandest collection of cage-birds this side of Dublin city. ’Twas in a happy hour for us the young doctor turned up to take his place.

But there was no happiness in the heart of Theseus O’Brien. Like a wild thing caged himself he felt, among the rustling birds, and with the hating eye of the phoenix fixing him from its corner, and, worst of all, the steady fall of sand from the hour-glass to drive him half mad with its whispering threat.

And, to add to his troubles, no sooner were they home from the funeral than Maggie packed up her clothes in a carpet-bag and moved to the other end of the town to live with her aunt Rose, who owned the hay and feed store.

It wouldn’t be decent, said she, to keep house for you, and you a single man. And the more Thomas pleaded, the firmer and fiercer she grew. Besides, she said, I wouldn’t live another day among all those poor birds behind bars. I can’t stand the sight nor sound of them.

I’ll let them go, Maggie! I’ll let every one of them go.

But then he remembered, with a falling heart, the doctor’s last command. That is, all except the phoenix.

Maggie turned away. All down the village street he watched her small, proud back, until she crossed the bridge and was out of sight. And it seemed as if his heart went with her.

The very next day he let loose all the doctor’s birds—the finches and thrushes, the starlings and blackbirds, the woodpecker and the wild heron. He thought Maggie looked at him with a kinder eye when he walked up to the hay and feed store to tell her what he had done.

The people of the town grew fond of their new doctor, but they lamented his sad and downcast look. What ails him at all? they asked one another, and Tom Mahone said, He’s as mournful as old Dr. Kilvaney was before him. Sure there’s something insalubrious about carrying on the profession of medicine in this town.

But indeed, it was not his calling that troubled the poor young man, for here his patients were as carefree a set of citizens as he could wish. It was the ceaseless running of the sand.

Although there was a whole roomful of sand to run through the glass, he couldn’t stop thinking of the day when that roomful would be dwindled to a mere basketful, and then to nothing but a bowlful. And the thought dwelt on his mind like a blight, since it is not wholesome for a man to be advised when his latter end will come, no matter what the burial service may say.

Not only the sand haunted him, but also the phoenix, with its unrelenting stare of hate. No matter what delicacies he brought it, in the way of bird-seed and kibbled corn, dry mash and the very best granite grit (for his visits to the hay and feed store were the high spots of his days), the phoenix was waiting with its razor-sharp beak ready to lay him open to the bone should he venture too near. None of the food would it more than nibble at. And a thing he began to notice, as the days went past, was that its savage brooding eye was always focused on one part of his anatomy—on his left leg. It sometimes seemed to him as if the bird had a particular stake or claim to that leg, and meant to keep watch and see that its property was maintained in good condition.

One night Theseus had need of a splint for a patient. He reached up to a high shelf, where he kept the mastoid mallets, and the crutches, and surgical chisels. He was standing on a chair to do it, and suddenly his foot slipped and he fell, bringing down with him a mighty bone-saw that came to the ground beside him with a clang and a twang, missing his left knee-cap by something less than a feather’s breadth. Pale and shaken, he got up, and turning, saw the phoenix watching him as usual, but with such an intent and disappointed look, like the housewife

Reviews for The People in the Castle

[voodooyeager · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Archivist Wasp is an interesting read. If you are into paranormal books, this is a good fit. It is a slow build, but halfway through, I couldn't put the book down. I read it in about 2 days. Some of the characters could be described better. I would have liked to have a name to one of the characters instead of simply "the ghost". It was confusing at times. This book was slightly different than most YA dystopian novels. It still depicted a female "warrior-of-the-wasteland" style character, chock full of self-doubt and flaws, with an evil "overlord" style protagonist. Most protagonists were male, and were crudely described. The storyline and arc, however, were refreshingly new. The idea of "ghosts" constantly disrupting the general life of the town and the fact that there are deep down secrets from these ghosts leads to quite the turn of events.

[herenya_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wasp’s position is an isolated and difficult one. As Archivist, she captures, studies and destroys ghosts for the Catchkeep-priest, and each year has to kill her would-be successors in order to keep her job -- and stay alive. But then she meets a ghost unlike all the others. A ghost who not only can talk to her but wants her help to find another ghost, Foster. This post-apocalyptic mystery was not what I was expecting -- it spends more time focusing on the ghost and Foster’s past than on Wasp in her role as Archivist. And it was probably not a good choice for an audiobook, not for me and especially not for me on long car trips. (It’s harder to skip back or skim ahead with audiobook, and much harder to do those things when I’m driving.) The story is darker and more violent than I’d prefer and I think if I had been able to read it at my own pace I would have been less uneasy, and would have found some of the transitions between Wasp’s present and the past less confusing too.But that’s me.This is an intense, sharply-written story about about trust and teamwork and being caught in a terrible world. I was intrigued as well as horrified by the details about Foster’s life. I liked the connections, both thematic and physical, between Wasp and Foster. By the end, I was much more invested in the story’s few characters.I am curious about the sequel.“We’re going to find her. And when we do, if she wants me to walk away, I’ll walk away. But first I need to talk to her. One last time.”Of course you do, Wasp thought. You’re a ghost. You need answers. You need closure. You need them like the living need air to breathe. You think it’s just you, but from what I’ve seen, most of us die without getting either.And maybe that’s all a ghost is, in the end. Regret, grown legs, gone walking.

[erinclark_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Intriguing. I really liked it and decided to read it as I have won the second book in the series as an Early Reviewer Snag. Now I can go ahead and start 'Latchkey'. Yeah:)

[jdifelice-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.5 stars

This was a very unique book. It was definitely not what I was expecting. The premise was really cool, a ghost hunter who helps a ghost find someone in exchange for a peek into how the world used to be. I enjoyed the characters and how they developed and this book really showcases strong friendships and what it really means to care. I enjoyed Wasp's struggles with her occupation and finding out more about herself. The writing was pretty good, and there was some world building, but for the most part it was pretty vague. By the end of the book it becomes clear why this was, but it was a little confusing at the beginning.
Overall, I was immersed in the story and was interested in where it was going (I read most of this in one day) and I liked it :)

[gretchening · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book was such an entertaining trip! I'm not completely sure I got the nuance of everything, but it was excellent fun to be on this bizarre ride. The protagonist is wonderfully sensible and worldweary, and her friendship with the ghost soldier is engaging. The worldbuilding is really cool, too. This reminded me in a lot of ways of Sabriel, of Tombs of Atuan, of the show Dark Angel, and dealt interestingly with power, control, violence, memory and history through an otherworldly quest narrative.

[zjakkelien · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was very good. If I could, I would give it half a star more. The story is quite intriguing, combining ghosts with ancient (but futuristic) technology. The main character is likeable, even if she is a bit dour at first. She is persistent, kind, and insightful. The ghost characters are likeable as well, and the more their story becomes clear, the more links there are to Wasp's world, and the more both Wasp and the ghosts evolve. This was highly charming, with a show of great loyalty,and I have to admit, I'm a sucker for loyalty in any story. It was also gratifyingly romance-free.

[adamwolf_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really liked this book.

[glitzandshadows · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

honestly spectacular.

[ladycato · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is currently nominated for the Norton Award, and I read it as part of my Nebula nominee packet.Archivist Wasp is a trippy distant-post-apocalyptic What-Dreams-May-Come journey into realms of ghosts and memories. It's one of those rare books where I really wasn't sure how it would end, even when I was right at the end. The read, while a bit on the edge of weird for my personal taste, is suspenseful all the way through: Wasp is an Archivist, a role both revered and despised in her wretched society. She hunts ghosts and feels like she understands them pretty well... until she is confronted by an oddly talkative ghost who asks for her help in finding his long-dead comrade. They strike an uneasy alliance as they take on the quest together.As I said before, I liked how this book surprised me. It's not a romance in the slightest. It defies any traditional ideas of genre--it's set four-hundred years after the apocalypse, in the ruins of society, but also delves into science fiction and superheroes, and it's staunchly young adult by the ages of the protagonists. I did feel like the worldbuilding was off at a few points; it mentions plastics being used, and I also expected language to evolve more over that time. Still, it made for an intriguing read. I can see why it made the finalist list.

[helena81_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Seriously strange. Highly ambitious and not entirely successful. It certainly isn't boring (at least, not after Wasp meets The Ghost), but it is rather joyless. I also wasn't compelled by the geography and world-building, and there are plotholes that simply don't make sense. I didn't love the writing, which I found rather glib at times. But, there is a ton going on, and the book certainly felt original. I also found Wasp engaging enough and rather liked The Ghost. But overall, a very strange and oddly unsatisfying read.

[liviania_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

ARCHIVIST WASP has been showing up on a number of Best of lists, so I had very high hopes. It has a great name, a striking cover, and comes from the imminently cool Small Beer Press (founded by Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link). The opening certainly caught my attention. Wasp, in a fight to the death, decides to stop the cycle of violence and spare her opponent.In the end, however, I didn't really like ARCHIVIST WASP. I thought it meandered too much and combined two stories that didn't really fit together. I kept waiting for an ah-ha moment to bring the story together, but it didn't happen. Wasp shows a lot of personal growth over the novel, but it was hard to connect the event happening to the changes in her character. The prose of the novel flowed smoothly, but how the characters decided to move from point A to point B often seemed more a function of what Nicole Kornher-Stace wanted to happen next than anything to do with actual motive. The two main characters are Wasp and a ghost who convinces her to go on a journey to the underworld with him, to find a companion he left behind in life and needs to find in death. The ghost is driven to find her for closure. Wasp is driven to find her because once the quest gets going she's invested, mostly. (She helps him at first for medical attention.)Wasp eventually returns home for her big triumph. ARCHIVIST WASP is yet another novel where a man uses religion to keep a bunch of dangerous girls down. It's a familiar story in feminist science fiction, and one not given enough space to breathe. Too much of the novel is about the quest that has nothing to do with the religion or how people are treated in Wasp's present and it only coincidentally gives her the key to fighting back.Meanwhile, how did this world get from the ghost's day to Wasp's? In the ghost's day, the big issue was the ethics of human experimentation, not the ways religion is used to oppress. There is a huge commonality about people being used as weapons, and yet that thread never seems to get teased out.ARCHIVIST WASP is stylish, with an underworld that requires you to travel by means of the things that aren't quite right. For me, it needed another draft to really help the disparate elements cohere. As it is, I think ARCHIVIST WASP is a case of style over substance. If only the characters were as fleshed out as some of the nightmare landscapes.

[melonbrawl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Archivist Wasp is becoming something of a phenomenon in library-people circles. Being an archivist myself, I was immediately curious when I saw this title, and others I know have made wry quips about fighting for tenure. (But not like this, I hope. My god.) It's a story set in a rough, uncompromising world that feels very much like a lot of other recent dystopian novels, but what Nicole Kornher-Stace does differently is to make the pre-collapse civilization just a little further in the future than usual. I liked not having a one-to-one correlation between the world I know and the world that Wasp's people have lost. There were just enough points of contact to be eerie, but not so many that it felt too familiar.The archives that Wasp and her predecessors care for is made up of the tiniest shreds of memory harvested from those who no longer remember much, or perhaps anything at all. In my profession, we spend a lot of time thinking about the ramifications of our collecting decisions. How do those decisions shape what gets considered "real" history? But what if there was so little information that it didn't even make sense to choose what to keep? How does that change what we think we know? Wasp ultimately finds she's in a similar position. There's a lot of good stuff in here about memory, societal power, and whose version of the truth gets to "win". It's really worth a read.

[gwendydd · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I don't get what all the hype is about. Archivist Wasp takes place in a very strange world without much internal consistency or logic. It is implied that this world is a distant future of a world much like ours, but the presence of ghosts is never explained, nor is it explained why ghosts are such a salient feature of Wasp's present, but apparently absent in the past.The thing that bothered me the most about this book was the unrelenting violence and abuse. The book opens with teenage girls murdering each other in a blood ritual. Wasp has had to murder several of her fellow teenage girls to get the position of Archivist. On top of that, she is emotionally and physically abused by the priest who oversees her activities. Throughout the book, she is involved in battle after battle. I don't see any reason for this unrelenting violence. Even worse, the violence doesn't seem to have much effect on Wasp or the other girls in the book. Sure, she's tired of the violence and wants to end the cycle, but she doesn't seem to suffer from any type of PTSD or anxiety or other emotional effects from the violence and abuse she has suffered her whole life.I might be able to stomach the violence if there seemed to be a point to it. But there doesn't seem to be a point, or maybe the problem is that the whole book doesn't seem to have a point. I can't tell what Kornher-Stace was trying to say with this story. There is almost a theme about friendship, but it falls very flat at the end.

[wosret · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this book!GREAT world building, fantastic characters, and a wonderful magic system. Engrossing, intriguing, and wonderful. I'd love to learn more about the world and its inhabitants.I'm very happy to hear that a sequel is in the works.

[hngoodlett · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book with a very intriguing setting/world. I sometimes get into a dystopian slump, but this was very different than anything else I've read.

[bluesalamanders · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In a post-apocalyptic world, Wasp is the Archivist, whose responsibility is to capture and destroy ghosts. Then one day, one of the ghosts talks back.I like stories that dump the reader in the middle of a new world and explain things in bits and pieces as the story progresses, which is exactly what happens here. The story starts in the middle of a duel and we learn slowly who Wasp is fighting and why, who Wasp even is, and what her role as Archivist means.There is a grand sense of worldbuilding and time despite the short length of the novel, bold characters, and a plot that seems to be constantly twisting and changing as Wasp learns new things about her world, her companion, and herself.A quick read but a satisfying one. Recommended.

[mermaidatheart · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm always a little leery of books that come in PDF format, especially in this genre, but I found myself pretty quickly invested in this short, wild thrill of a novel. It wasn't technically perfect--it almost seemed unedited in fact--but there was something really captivating about it. It was unusual yet quite refreshing to read a YA novel without any romance, and with splatters of violence that weren't wantonly graphic. Wasp is an endearingly bitter little nut of a protagonist, but the underworld that Kornher-Stace imagines for us is the real star.

[stacypilot · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Original, unpredictable, unable to single categorize, this short novel will be highly satisfying to readers who like magic, dystopias, myth, quests, and a strong female character. In an interesting future when our culture is barely remembered Wasp, a young girl is an Archivist whose job is to cull and keep ghosts in line. She sets off on a quest to find a particular ghost, Catherine Foster, who is stuck in-between. Without giving away the imaginative plot, the ending was very satisfying to this reader as Wasp finds resolution for her internal conflicts as well as the external conflicts of her society. I am a voracious reader and some books fade in my memory but this one will not! I received a copy for review from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program.

[chris.bulin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm not sure I've ever read something quite like this. The last fifty pages or so pushed it from a strong 3.5 stars to 4 stars for me.

[allison_s-802575 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

GAH. This is exactly what a dystopian novel should be. I was in the mood for something bittersweet and I guess this really hit the spot. Also, the imagery is amazing. I especially loved the early description of the painting of Catchkeep, with hammered-in nails serving as the stars of the constellation.

Not FUN, per se, but so so so good.

[jennybeast · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent writing, and a harsh, abusive, survival story. Wasp is a ghost hunter (sort of) and a tormented shaman figure to her people, desperately seeking a way out of her life and also the history of her apocalypse. Not an easy book, but an intense adventure through death and dreamlands, to find one ghost's past. Some superhero actions (peripherally), some Mad Max dystopia. Mostly just an excellently told tale.

[pwaites_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In a way, Archivist Wasp reminds me of Mad Max: Fury Road. In a post apocalyptic world, Wasp is the Archivist, hunter of ghosts. She has to kill to keep her position or be killed herself. When she meets a ghost stronger than the rest, that of a dead solider, she sees a way out. The ghost is looking for the ghost of another solider, a woman named Foster. In returning for going down into the underworld, she may receive the key to her freedom. That is, if she’s able to come back out.Archivist Wasp is a short but striking novel. It’s classified as YA and has a sixteen year old protagonist, but it feels nothing like most YA books. It avoids the normal tropes and is entirely without romance. Seriously, no romance at all. Not even between secondary characters. The most important relationships in the book are Wasp’s tenuous friendship with the ghost, and the ghost’s relationship with Foster, which is highly important but never depicted as romantic.“She could still see the face of every upstart she’d killed. Still woke from dreams in which they died all over again, woke nauseous and sweaty and scrubbing invisible blood from her hands.She was sick of it. She was beyond sick of it. There had to be another way.”The reason I compared Archivist Wasp to Fury Road is that both stories are about dehumanization. Wasp started out as an upstart, a girl whose scars on her face mark her as a servant to the goddess Catchkeep. Every year the upstarts have to draw straws to fight the Archivist. Wasp won the position by killing her predecessor, and for the three years following she’s had to kill or be killed. She’s treated as a tool, not a person, and she’s at least partly internalized that mindset in regards to herself. While their lives were very different, there’s some clear parallels between Wasp and the two ghosts. The two ghosts (the unnamed solider and Foster) were super soldiers, created in a lab to win a war. Yet somehow, Foster was able to retain her humanity. It is this that draws the ghost and through his descriptions and memories, Wasp, to her. Archivist Wasp is the story of people who’ve been used and dehumanized regaining their sense of self.There’s few to no explanations regarding the world of Archivist Wasp. What led to the apocalypse four hundred years ago? Why are there only now ghosts? What is going on with the strange and often nonsensical realm of the underworld? However, none of these questions ever bothered me, for that’s not what the story is about. Archivist Wasp is not a large story, and the cast is highly limited. It is a story about one girl and her journey, both emotional and physical.Archivist Wasp deserves far more attention than it’s received. It’s powerful and moving story that I would highly recommend.Originally posted on The Illustrated Page.

[nbmars · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When I begin a fantasy novel, the plot has to pull me in pretty much immediately, because I need incentive to begin the hard work of figuring out what the rules are for the alternate world of the story. To be honest, if it doesn’t grab me at once, you probably wouldn’t see it reviewed by me, because I would have abandoned it.This gripping story, set in a time far into the future, is about the latest girl to be marked as “Archivist” by the Catchkeep Priest. The Archivist is someone whose job is trapping the many ghosts that wander through the area, and trying to get information from them on who they were and what happened to the old world. After she is done interrogating them, she is supposed to “dispatch” them. She is trained to be brutal; she becomes Archivist only after killing other “upstarts” wanting the job. But this is not at all a “ghost story.” The ghosts provide a frame for the picture of life in this post-apocalyptic world, and eventually, answers about how it came about.Wasp, as the current Archivist is called, has been Archivist for three years, but she is not like the girls who came before her, over a time period extending at least four hundred years, according to the archival records. She doesn’t like all the killing, and she hates the cruel, abusive, and corrupt Catchkeep Priest who controls her life. She knows that while the Catchkeep Priest is full of hate, the ghosts were not similarly evil:“[They] were just hungry, lonely, lost. Desperate and confused. These were all things she could relate to.” She is ruefully aware that her compassion is a weakness in her world; she wouldn’t mind if another would-be archivist killed her for the job, except that she isn’t the type to give up so easily. But she hates what she does and has done, and wants to earn redemption, somehow.That opportunity comes to her with the appeal of the strongest ghost she ever encountered, one who not only speaks to her, but asks her help in finding another ghost. He offers something she wants in return. Thus they make a bargain, and she and the ghost set off on an epic quest on a journey to the Underworld, from which she might not make it back. Note that in myth, a trip to the Underworld, or “katabasis,” means not only a journey into the depths of the world, but into the depths of oneself. Unlike a “normal” bildungsroman focusing on a character’s spiritual education, a katabasis takes you into a world which has its own geography and rules but which reflects the world of the living in a way you would not have seen otherwise. The protagonist undergoes tests and trials, and meets both allies and enemies, always with survival uncertain. But the reward is enlightenment, and maybe more, from transformation to liberation. In this case, Wasp learns the truth about her world, and the world that came before hers. The cost may be her life.Evaluation: This is not at all a YA romance. The ghost and the Archivist have a partnership, built on not only need but mutual respect. And yet as you will see, it does contain a love story. And it is also a story about friendship that lasts through eternity, with a bit of existential flavor added about the meaning of existence. There is a wholly different route for this brave and prickly protagonist to find fulfillment than the usual romantic encounters or "saving the world," and it is outstandingly unique in this genre. Most gratifyingly, the ending is pretty spectacular. This book has garnered a number of awards.

[mcdenis-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Archivist, chosen from birth by the goddess Catchkeep, is compelled to capture ghosts and to take notes about them before she disposes of them. To maintain her role as Archivist she must fight to the death up and coming upstarts once a year. But she is tiring of her job and joins a ghost soldier to tour the underworld to find his mate. No path is straight. Doors suddenly appear but not where you expect them. Memories are key and can be lost in an instant. In the end, she completes her search, returns to her village and routes the Catchkeep priest. This is a most unusual piece of science fiction. Once you enter into the rhythm of the story, the author captures your emotions and flashes strident ghostly unrealities. A very creative read…well worth the effort.