The Changeling

book 1/30  The Changeling by Victor Lavalle
First book of 2023 is complete! The Changeling is a story of, as the title suggests, ancient magic that brings changelings to our world. The story starts off a little slow, but picks up FAST about halfway through. I finished the last half of the story in a few hours (including into the wee hours of the morning today)
I really enjoyed this novel! I love magic and folklore in books and this novel had the right mix of it all for me. 

This novel was a refreshing read; it wasn't full of shocking plot twists, but it kept me wondering where the story would take us next. A fairytale for adults, it had many horror elements without being scary. It has more tense and creepy scenarios. I had no intention of reading it because I am a Halloweenie, but then I saw the trailer for the TV show adaptation and became more interested. And then someone said it's not scary, so I gave it a shot, and I am happy I did. Except for one slow moment in the book where I was impatient for the plot to pick up. This book was a solid, good read, and I'll check out Victor Lavelle's other works.

“A bad fairy tale has some simple goddamn moral. A great fairy tale tells the truth.”
― Victor LaValle, The Changeling

I loved this book's blend of supernatural monster/fantasy/horror/fairy tale as an analogy to the real-life terror that accompanies parenthood. It taps into the primal fear that we're inadequate to another life into this big, bad world. A missing child is every parent's worst nightmare. One prominent theme of this story is LaValle's examination of technology and how it causes us to both ignore our children as well as invite predators to get a good look at them. The story takes you on a father's dark and dangerous adventure to find the monsters that have completely shattered his young family.

I enjoyed LaValle's use and knowledge of New York City. The scene where Emma gives birth on the subway really works. There's a disturbing and paranoid atmosphere throughout the book that suits the story well. Who's watching you and who can you trust? There's also a good amount of gore and violence to satisfy the horror buff in me.

The downside of the story is that it was very slow to build. It didn't get “weird” until over halfway through. A lot of time is spent setting up Apollo's childhood and background as well as his motivation to become a father. It does require patience. Also the characters, Apollo and Emma were not as vivid as the characters in LaValle's previous work. I don't have a strong sense of Emma despite the occasional shift to her POV. Though we spend a lot of time with Apollo, little is revealed about his personality.

There is also an anti-father message. The book assumes that only mothers have the wisdom to recognize when their baby is not their baby anymore. Apollo himself is only able to see the changeling once he has physical proof. Only then is he “worthy” to join Emma in the fight against the monsters to get their son back. The major villain of the piece is a father who voluntarily sacrifices his own daughter for economic gain and then proceeds to stalk and harass his ex wife. Apollo's father was a deeply disturbed individual, while his mother is a heroic, hardworking, single mom.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and look forward to reading more of LaValle's work in the future.

The first half of this book is amazing - slow and beautifully written, with a delicious sense of foreboding doom. Then everything starts to happen at once, magical elements are popping up all over the place with no consistency or reason, there's graphic violence and stomach wrenching child abuse for what often feels like no purpose at all, and the book takes a moralistic anti-technology tone that I hated. So overall three stars, I guess?

This is a fantastic book. It's a modern day fairy tale about a black family living in New York City. After calamity strikes, the father, Apollo Kagwa, goes on a quest to find his wife and child again. I won't say more about the plot so as to avoid spoilers. Suffice to say, it is a gripping tale.

One of the many things I loved about this book is its deliberate challenge to the reader to think about the purpose and message of fairy tales. Fairy tales come up often in the course of the story, in the conversations between characters and in allusions to classic fairy tales. Maurice Sendak's story Outside Over There is a touchstone for the main character, Apollo. At one point in the story (I'm trying to find it again in the book, but so far no luck) someone tells Apollo that only a bad fairy tale has an easily discernible moral. There is also a discussion of the familiar “happily ever after” ending.

There isn't an easily discernable moral in The Changeling–or, there might be one, but it's by no means the only thing going on in this book. And the life it shows is complicated enough that even if it did end with, “and they lived happily ever after” you'd know better than to believe it.

The Changeling by Victor LaValle is an awesome work of dark fantasy. Fairytale and myth with chilling and profoundly disturbing scenes dark enough to appeal to horror fans, this book has it all. It's hard for me to give a synopsis without spoiling this book, and since someone spoiled one of the major reveals of this book for me I think it's better to simply omit the synopsis, that's what Goodreads is for. I'm just going to say that this is a magical story that follows a Black family in NYC while incorporating various elements of fairytale and myth, especially that of the changeling. LaValle hits on a lot of very deep ideas about family, tradition, culture, generational trauma, and love. Throughout much of the book LaValle proved to be a masterful storyteller. There were a few loose ends I didn't totally understand, and it could be argued that the novel is too long, but overall I really enjoyed it. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I think I might have liked this a bit more if I had read it rather than listening to the Audible audiobook, which doubled down on the author's very simple, matter-of-fact writing style with a very simple, matter-of-fact narrator. It really stripped the magic from the telling. But the story it told was interesting and generally unlike a lot of the other books I've been reading—not sure how much of that is how unique this book is and how much of it is that I just don't read a ton of magical realism.

So, holy frikken cow. There is so much I could say about this book. My biggest comments for those thinking about picking this up are about the pacing of the fantasy. For the first fourth of the book it reads just like a contemporary intergenerational family story with no fantasy, but the atmosphere is mildly creepy. I didn't hate this because Victor LaValle could tell me about mundane tasks like making toast or taking the train and about the journey to and of parenthood all day long. Just wow, what a writer. So if you're thinking of DNFing for that reason but aren't hating the writing I'd say don't give up. THEN, at the quarter mark something freakin' happens and holy holy cow. Then, at the half way mark it really gets into the fantasy elements. If you're someone who pays attention to trigger warnings, particularly regarding children, specifically >!violent loss of a child!< you will want to evaluate if you want to read this book or not. I think this book has a lot of powerful themes, but this is already too long to comment more, just check it out. Overall, I thought this was fantastic and there is more LaValle in my future for sure. Excellent as an audiobook.

It's a lovely New York tale that starts back in 1968 when we're introduced to Lillian Kagwa and Brian West. They would marry and eventually have a boy named Apollo. By Apollo's fourth birthday Brian West had disappeared. It's a familiar story simply told with only the slightest hint of magic.

Apollo grows up, meets his wife and they have a son they name Brian. He's your typical father in this connected age, uploading dozens of photos of his boy to Facebook, looking for the flurry of likes. A doting father trying to make it work.

And then we wake up in an entirely different world that's violent and seething just under the surface. This in an old world fairy tale where horrifying things happen and happily ever after has no place in the world. LaValle slips effortlessly between the world we know and then past the glamour that hides the world we don't see. And like Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country it's a fairy tale that's made all the more unique when instead of Aryan boys and girls traipsing through Germanic pastoral landscapes it is centred around a black man in modern day New York contending with ancient forces while being hyper conscious of what the stakes are as a black man circling a tony suburban block in the middle of the night.

Being a parent is a harrowing, tooth and nail struggle against the forces of your own personal history, the baggage that the world is intent on foisting on you and the realization that your partner may not exactly agree on how best to navigate this unfamiliar territory. And everyday it only grows in scope and potential terror. Good luck.

This novel touches upon many different fears that parents have, but I think it is the above that I think really bothers parents the most. To be sure, they will articulate other kinds of fears, but deep down it is the fact that they ???are making all this shit up as they go along??? that they find most troubling. They cannot, or will not, turn to their own parents, out of fear that they will perpetrate their own parents??? mistakes; but in turning to other sources ??? especially the Internet ??? they open themselves up to making other kinds of mistakes. Their fear of making one single misstep in the raising of their child, of being unable to protect said child from any and all sources of harm ??? up to and including themselves ??? leads them in a downward spiral of even more mistakes, which breed even more fears. It is these fears, in the end, that lie at the heart this novel ??? that, indeed, lie at the heart of some of the oldest stories that we tell ourselves, and to our children...

Full review here: http://wp.me/p21txV-E4

I am finally getting to this. I've read almost everything else by LaValle (I'm a big fan). I do believe I only have [b:Big Machine 6488057 Big Machine Victor LaValle https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348774112l/6488057.SY75.jpg 6679435] and [b:The Ecstatic 849696 The Ecstatic Victor LaValle https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320495521l/849696.SY75.jpg 835208] to go. I started watching the show on Apple + and it leaves off on a giant cliffhanger, so here we are. This is tough story. No one wants to read about bad things happening to babies, but this is a fairy tale that takes place in a world very similar to our own. It's on the same level as Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (London) or NK Jemisin's The City We Became (also New York City). Fantastic.