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October Daye / Inheritance - Essay Series Part Five: Long Series and How to Read Them

Hello Patrons and general audience members! Welcome to another Books That Burn essay by Robin. Thank you to Case Aiken, who receives a monthly Patron shoutout. [Full Audio Available Here] This is the fifth and final entry in a five-part essay series discussing two long-running book series by queer authors: October Daye by Seanan McGuire, and Inheritance by A.K. Faulkner. I chose these series because I love them both, they were intended from the start to be long series, neither of them are finished yet, and the authors have different structural approaches to developing each series across so many volumes. Purely coincidentally, they are both long-running contemporary fantasy series mainly set in California in or near the 2010's, with major characters named Quentin, and whose fast-healing protagonists have a tendency to quasi-adopt a gaggle of magical teenagers. After a brief moment in the 1990's, October Daye begins in earnest in 2009 and has reached 2015 as of the eighteenth boo...
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Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

Go Tell It On The Mountain is about hypocrisy, loss, death, abuse, piety, pretense, denial, and self-delusion in a Pentecostal preacher’s household in 1930’s Harlem. The main story takes place in a day, with several vignettes reaching back.‬

John is navigating his sense of himself and his sexuality as a black teen in 1930’s Harlem. Because of when this was written there’s a lot that remains heavily implied, couched behind religious language and “holy” kisses. Some passages are shocking in their language, because the rest of the book is so carefully phrased, the few explicit sections have an impact that they might not have had otherwise.
John’s father (Gabriel) is a pastor whose religious devotion seems to have been unable to put a dent in his capacity to bring grief and pain to those around him. Indeed, the book seems to argue that it’s that very search for piety which created the ground for his abuses to flourish. I came to this book as an atheist and an ex-christian, and the depictions of the oscillating nature of Gabriel’s faith were familiar to me. He demanded reverence and piety from the women in his life, even while he was complicit with them (or was doing things they weren’t).

I read this book in under a day (today, in fact), and it’ll probably be one I read again.

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