A review by lightfoxing
Creatures of Want and Ruin, Volume 2 by Molly Tanzer
4.0
Molly Tanzer's Creatures of Want and Ruin is a loose follow-up to Creatures of Will and Temper, which I read at the beginning of the year and then browbeat every single person I know into reading, or close to. I was worried picking this one up - would it live up to my expectations? Would it live up to its predecessor? In some ways, it doesn't. I found I liked Ellie and Fin just a bit less than Will and Temper's sisters, and main characters can make or break a novel. But Ellie and Fin, and the cast and crew around them (Gabriel, Lester, SJ, Aaron, Jones (oh, Jones)) are wonderful, in their own ways. Tanzer gives us the bored society wife and the tomboyish bootlegger with a great deal of insight into both psyches, playing with tropes in a way that makes both incredibly human to the reader.
What's truly spectacular, though, is that Tanzer has delivered an extremely topical political novel couched in diabolism, occultism, fantasy, and a head-spinning adventure. Creatures of Want and Ruin is set in the 20s in Long Island, in the town of Amityville. It's been mostly a quiet town, where Ellie runs moonshine made by her friend SJ, who lives in a small shack in the woods with her brother, as much because she makes moonshine as because she's one of the few black women in Amityville. Ellie's fiance is Polish, a carpenter, and SJ's brother's boss. It is the rest of Amityville, however, that Tanzer digs into incisively. A preacher has come to Amityville, sowing seeds of unrest and dissatisfaction - how dare men like Ellie's fiance, like SJ's brother, like Officer Jones (half-Cuban on his mother's side) flourish, when men like Ellie's father, wounded in a training accident during World War I, good Long Islanders, true Long Islanders, are forced into genteel poverty? If this rhetoric sounds familiar, it's because it should be. Tanzer gives the hatred we feel seething below the 49th parallel occult legs, but she makes it clear that this takes root only where the seeds have already been sown.
It's an incredibly fun read, if sometimes disorienting because of how close it hits to home politically. Canada is certainly not immune to the hate that has become part and parcel of political discourse in the United States, and to see it exposed under the light of fantasy is unsettling. It is easy to believe oneself immune to it, and easier still to doubt the fact of it in our friends and family. Tanzer shows how easily one can let oneself succumb to it, or flourish under it, but she also exposes our privileges in believing ourselves immune to it, or unaffected by it. She's provided us with a deft statement on how we act when it would be easier not to do so, with scintillating characters, clever humour, and a great deal of fun.
What's truly spectacular, though, is that Tanzer has delivered an extremely topical political novel couched in diabolism, occultism, fantasy, and a head-spinning adventure. Creatures of Want and Ruin is set in the 20s in Long Island, in the town of Amityville. It's been mostly a quiet town, where Ellie runs moonshine made by her friend SJ, who lives in a small shack in the woods with her brother, as much because she makes moonshine as because she's one of the few black women in Amityville. Ellie's fiance is Polish, a carpenter, and SJ's brother's boss. It is the rest of Amityville, however, that Tanzer digs into incisively. A preacher has come to Amityville, sowing seeds of unrest and dissatisfaction - how dare men like Ellie's fiance, like SJ's brother, like Officer Jones (half-Cuban on his mother's side) flourish, when men like Ellie's father, wounded in a training accident during World War I, good Long Islanders, true Long Islanders, are forced into genteel poverty? If this rhetoric sounds familiar, it's because it should be. Tanzer gives the hatred we feel seething below the 49th parallel occult legs, but she makes it clear that this takes root only where the seeds have already been sown.
It's an incredibly fun read, if sometimes disorienting because of how close it hits to home politically. Canada is certainly not immune to the hate that has become part and parcel of political discourse in the United States, and to see it exposed under the light of fantasy is unsettling. It is easy to believe oneself immune to it, and easier still to doubt the fact of it in our friends and family. Tanzer shows how easily one can let oneself succumb to it, or flourish under it, but she also exposes our privileges in believing ourselves immune to it, or unaffected by it. She's provided us with a deft statement on how we act when it would be easier not to do so, with scintillating characters, clever humour, and a great deal of fun.