Bell Weather by Dennis Mahoney

 

So I read something else by Mahoney almost a year ago, and it was a really good horror novel. This is not a horror novel, but it also is really good--he seems to have written fantasy before he drifted toward horror, which is a reasonable thing to happen: a novelist writes the novels they happen to have. This is a weird fantastical 18th century, with stand-ins for England and France and America and Native Americans, but also lots of like ambient magic (mostly in plants that have no real-world parallels, but not exclusively). The prose here leans crisp and crackling, the characters are mostly well-realized and distinct, the storylines all ring reasonably true; there are probably thematic concerns with power and privilege and ambition and love (both familial and romantic); many of the textual and subtextual elements here put me in mind of Alix Harrow--no arrows of causality or influence, here, just noting the similarities--and someone who enjoys her novels might enjoy this.