March 2026 - Reviewed

March is usually a bad reading month for me, as I reach the trough of the wave that crests in January and February, and I thought I would not have that much to recap. However this year, possibly due to a lot of site work and some extensive travel delays, I managed to fit in eight books, several of them long and weighty tomes. This is what I thought of them.

A Fever in the Heartland – Timothy Egan

 I listened to the audio edition of this book, having been unable to chase down an audio version of Egan's account of the American Dust Bowl and settling for this instead. I found it a very interesting account of the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan in Jazz Age America. Egan focuses his story on DC Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of Indiana, and, as it turns out, convicted rapist and murderer. Egan traces the original Klan's rise and fall and astonishingly popular rebirth in the '20s, as millions of American citizens joined this terrorist hate group, before its decline in the '30s. Egan credits this second fall to Madge Oberholtzer, the woman who 'stopped the Klan from taking over America". Madge's deathbed testimony against Stephenson led to his sentencing for murder and the collapse of the Indiana Klan. I really enjoyed this book, but I did think that focusing so much on Madge and giving her all the credit really takes away from all the other people who were resisting this evil instituion, from the prosecution lawyers who went up against the most powerful man in the state, to the newsmen and activists who lost their livelihoods rather than give in, to the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, who threw the Klan out of South Bend and gave them a good kicking. By contrast, though Madge suffered greatly and ultimately took the courageous step of a deathbed confession, she was initially prepared to be friendly to the Klan if it could get her what she wanted. In the end I thought she was merely an excellent example of "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" idiom.

Darker Days – Thomas Olde Heuvelt

I finally got my hands on the english translation of one of my favourite horror writer's latest novels, Darker Days!  This slightly Omelas inspired story tells of an extremely successful community in the Pacific North-West, where all the good luck granted throughout eleven months of the year must be paid for in blood in November. Although not quite as gut-wrenchingly scary as my favourite from this author, Hex, I still found Darker Days creepy and and compelling and will keep an eye out for more.

Midnight in Chernobyl - Adam Higginbotham

Another audiobook, this one focusing on the Chernobyl incident. I struggled a little bit with the quantity of Ukrainian and Russian names, and should have written down a cast list, but overall I did enjoy this rather dense account of nuclear meltdown. I was obviously aware of the event, but I hadn't understood quite how long it took for the USSR system to admit even to itself what had happened and therefore take action about it. Another thing that struck me was that, as all the major scientists and political figures were introduced in the text with a short biography, many if not most of them were listed as sons of farmers, daughters of factory workers. You could really see the social progression available to bright kids who a few generations earlier would have been serfs, even with all of the downsides and disasters of the soviet system.

The Red Winter – Cameron Sullivan

 Mild Disclaimer - I hosted an event with Cameron in Sydney and received a free copy for my troubles. It was on my tbr for this year already, so I would have got round to buying one anyway.

Reader, I absolutely loved this book, probably going to be my best of the year, definitely in the top 5. Immortal professor Sebastian travels back to Gevaudan to lock wits with an old enemy, the Beast of Avene, which he last fought twenty years earlier in the titular Red Winter, but there's more than just his personal feelings on the line, for this is another battle in a war that has been raging across civilisation for centuries. This is the sort of book I want to write essays about, that I want to force all my friends to read and then talk about for hours. Highly recommend!

The Terror – Dan Simmons

 Having entered a creepy cold mood with The Red WInter, I decided to keep going by waving into this absolute doorstop of a book! This 940 page paperback required immense wrist strength to plough through and equally immense capacity to read about how cold it was in the North-West Passage in 1845 (answer? very). However, I did really enjoy this fictionalised account of the two ships Terror and Erebus as they became trapped in the Arctic sea ice for years, battling mutiny and scurvy and gradually becoming aware of something out on the ice that stalks them. I feel that if I ever fall through a wormhole to this expedition I would be very well equipped to blend in with the crew, with Simmons really laying on the well-researched details even as he tightens his narrative grip. Something I thought he did really well was the contrasting descriptions between how the British experience the ice - a brutal, hellish, unsurviveable wasteland - and how the native Inuk do - a strange but beautiful home that they understand and are in balance with.

The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy

I can't remember why I decided to pick this book up again, fifteen years after I read it for the first time, but I'm glad I did. This has always been my favourite Hardy, with it's eponymous Mayor, Henchard, being one of the most well drawn and complex characters in english literature. Henchard starts out as a hay trusser in Wessex, who gets drunk and sells off his wife and daughter to a sailor. The plot really begins twenty years later when they come back to find him. A great and very readable classic if you're looking for an entry point into Victorian fiction.

Centuries of Stories – Various

 I finally managed to track down the name of this book ! Centuries of Stories is an anthology I read in the school library when I was perhaps 9 or 10 and several stories in it made a really big impact on me. I was very pleased to find and reread these stories. They are set throughout history from early Roman to the end of the 20th century mostly in Europe with a handful of Asian and American ones. The ones that really made an impact on me as a child were a Malorie Blackman story called North, clearly influenced by Toni Morrison's Beloved, and the last story in the collection which depicts the 20th century as seen from a metaphysical realm.

Civilisations – Laurent Binet

I didn't enjoy this but quite as much as I had hoped despite my well known love of alternative history. It seemed a very shallow attempt at reversing the Colombian conquests, not really digging into the actual history that it was altering. I liked the ideas but not the execution.