Book Review: A Country of Ghosts

Image: The cover of the book is a stormy illustrated landscape of a fantastical city nestled on the edge of a cliff ending in a massive waterfall. Most of the foreground is of the waterfall and the trees surrounding its edges. The background is a mountain of buildings, stacked over every bit of space all the way up to its peak. The sky is a mixture of grey stormclouds which color the area in muted colors and shadow. Cross the top in white lettering is the author- Margaret Killjoy. Beneath that, in larger black letters is the book title. Across the bottom in small white letters is a quote from Laurie Penny that is too small to read. In the bottom right corner is the logo of a circle A anarchist symbol with another smaller circle whose bottom cuts through the center of the A. In white letters it states "Black Dawn Series."

Margaret Killjoy is a Jane of all trades including but not limited to podcasting, multiple music projects, leftist prepping how-tos, and writing fiction and nonfiction. I was "first" introduced to her work through finding my way to some of these ventures separately and then discovering the same person was involved. Needless to say, I am a fan. The first thing I read of hers was urban fantasy/horror book, "The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion," that originally landed itself in a long to-read list of mine after tor.com released as part of a free pride LGBT novella pack. I enjoyed it a ton and the next in the series has been sitting almost read in that same thousands-long to-read list of mine. Some day! Until then, I got a chance to read the new edition of "A Country of Ghosts," which was originally written by Killjoy in 2014 and is being republished by AK Press as part of their exciting Black Dawn series. In the afterword for this edition, she goes into detail about all of the reasons this book is more personal for her including the state of her life and health when it was originally written and how the content applies to her worldviews.

One thing she mentions is how it can be more challenging to put out a story that is utopian rather than dystopian in the realm of fiction, particularly in fantasy or science fiction. It's easier to orchestrate a collapse than it is to imagine a functioning non-hierarchical society in all of its guts and glory. "A Country of Ghosts" is about a journalist from a very hierarchical state who becomes embedded within an anarchist refugee community- Hron. The members help him understand why and how they are the way they are. As one can imagine, he begins this venture full of disbelief, having come from somewhere quite different. But, as the story moves forward, he and many other characters grow and learn from one another. This allows the novel to become what I only half jokingly referred to as, "An Anarchist FAQ, only actually entertaining." As Killjoy herself states, this is not the only way to imagine a functioning anarchist society, but it is a way she could imagine it in a fantastical era around 150 years ago.

I'm not a huge classic fantasy person, so for me to enjoy it, it has to really hit home with something very personal the way this did. The fact that most mainstream fantasy is xyz kingdoms at war from hundreds of years ago only with dragons, but no Black and/or LGBTQ people because that's "unrealistic," is what often keeps me away. But, I love science fiction and plenty of mainstream scifi falls into the same trap only you replace dragons with aliens or whatever. ACoG does not fall into most of those tropes, which is part of the draw. Perhaps I just like looking into the future. This book felt like it was looking into the future even though it existed in a fictional past. 

My favorite elements were the juxtaposition of freedom vs freedom + responsibility, redemption and moving past rigidity in times of crisis, assimilation of cultures rather than colonization and/or appropriation, how very non-utopian the utopia was (meaning people were still messy as ever and allowed to be,) and the ways that Hron dealt with conflict and extremes without giving up their commitment to anarchism and cooperation. This book is immersed in war, but does not result in an action packed bloodbath. We get to see more of what happens when people are talking and taking care of one another. That said, I would have liked to see the book drawn out a bit more. I think that there are certain areas that feel rushed, but perhaps that is on purpose so that the focus remains on the margins. 

I would love to see Margaret Killjoy write a utopian futuristic science fiction novel. It would be interesting to see how she could craft a society and how-to in a world with unavoidable advanced technology and industrialization or how to have a cooperative society composed of multiple species- local and alien. I know that 150 years in the past, a great many people were hunting as part of survival and nonhuman animals did not have a part much in ACoG. In the future, could other animals be introduced in ways aside from as products of sustenance? I am confident that a vegan writer could make that happen. There are so many avenues of creativity that I have seen Killjoy excel at and I look forward to what comes from her future- including the possibility of a prequel to ACoG mentioned in her afterword.

This was also posted to my goodreads.