2022 Reading Pleasures
by Holly Wade Matter
2022 was another year when I read selectively in between knitting projects. I thoroughly enjoyed all of the fiction below, and look forward to becoming better acquainted with other works from these authors.
Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection, by Tara Campbell, is a story collection about the inner (and outer) lives of discarded dolls, a marionette, and a body-snatching skull-and-crossbones ring. The stories range from spooky, to bizarre, to fiction of the absurd. You may not look at your childhood toys in the same way.
For the Good of the Realm, by Nancy Jane Moore, follows the adventures of two swordswomen of the Queen’s Guard as they navigate forbidden magic, political intrigue, and a growing affinity for two members of the rival King’s Guard.
Wishlist by Amanda Pampuro comprises a novella and two short stories, featuring a time-traveling trapeze artist, a pair of childhood enemies who grow into love on a space colony, and the refining of the personality of an AI in its years-long relationship to a young shopper.
In Hastur’s Canvass by Remco van Straten, H. P. Lovecraft ‘s mythos meets Vincent van Gogh. The story skirts the line between truth and fiction, even including an episode in the life of the author. The novella is illustrated richly by van Straten in the styles of Aubrey Beardsley, van Gogh, and more.
On Silent Wings, a chapbook by Remco van Straten and Angeline Adams, (available free with a subscription to their Turnip Lanterns newsletter) includes five stories about the characters first met in The Red Man and Others. One story, written in calligraphy, includes illustrations by van Straten.
A Stream to Follow by Jess Wright, is part thriller, part love story, about a WWII battlefront surgeon with PTSD who returns to his home town in Pennsylvania. Things in the town and in his family are not quite right, and he misses his lover, a British aristocrat who shares his passion for fly fishing.
I also did some comfort reading, losing myself in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Wives and Daughters – twice each! and rereading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.
Holly Wade Matter's debut novel, Damned Pretty Things, was released in 2020 by Aqueduct Press. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Century, and the Bending the Landscape anthology series. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She has twice been awarded literary funding from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and in 1998 she received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Seattle with her husband Brad and two house rabbits.
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