RFBC #9: The Ballad of Perilous Graves
Ghosts. Haints. Three-dimensional graffiti. Sky trolleys. Zombie language translation devices. Songs that walk down the street. Nutrias in three-piece suits. An underwater bar in an abandoned flying saucer.
A clackin’ sack? Huh?
Believe it or not, these may not be the weirdest elements we encountered in Alex Jennings’s debut novel The Ballad of Perilous Graves, the book we selected for our March 2023 meeting of Radio Free Book Club. It’s set in New Orleans…and in Nola, an alternate-world New Orleans where most (but not all) of the crazy stuff happens…and in other alternate worlds where the dead may or may not be dead and the living may or may not be dead, either.
And if all that sounds more than a little confusing, we’re happy to sort (some of) it out for you. You can stream this episode of Radio Free Book Club on Mixcloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Note that there will be spoilers ahead, in this review and on the show. But, honestly, this is such an insanely inventive book that you might want to listen to the show before you read it.
Show notes:
The RFBC crew for our March 2023 show was Indianapolis writer Ken Honeywell; Afrofuturist, author, and teacher Maurice Broaddus; writer, digital strategist, and Goodreads superstar Christine Hudson; and writer Alex Mattingly. Our show was recorded at Listen Hear in Indianapolis and produced by the one-and-only Oreo Jones for 99.1 WQRT-LP.
Confused? Blame Maurice. Sure, we were all a little confused—not necessarily in a bad way. This was Maurice’s favorite novel of 2022 and his choice for the club. He first heard about it at a writer’s conference when it was cited, along with his own Sweep of Stars, by the author Sheree Renée Thomas as books their authors really put their foot into. (Ken’s read both, and Sheree is right.) Maybe blame Sheree, then?
So what’s it about? What a good question. It’s about a lot. There’s a ton of plot and nary a break in the action over the 450 pages of The Ballad of Perilous Graves, and Jennings plunks you right down in the middle of it without explanation. Whether you love that kind of thing or hate it will tell you a lot about whether this is the book for you.
But can you give it a try? Sure. The ghost of Professor Longhair, also known as Doctor Professor, also known as Fess, appears to some kids—Perry Graves, his sister Brendy, and their pal Peaches—in Nola—which is not New Orleans—and asks their help in capturing a bunch of runaway songs, which have escaped from his piano. Meanwhile, in some semblance of the New Orleans we know, a trans man and his cousin have somehow created graffiti that moves and eventually comes to life. Trust us: These stories do come together, and some of the above are spoilers. At some point, legless ghost of Lafcadio Hearn gets involved. It’s all mixed up with a plan that could destroy the city—and only our heroes, at great peril, can save the day. It’s actually a lot more complicated than that.
It’s not an easy read. Christine plunged in and hit the pause button. It took her reading a review and reorienting herself to the book to get into it. Alex, a more experienced fantasy reader than Christine, loved getting dropped into the book cold—but he, too, consulted some reviews, among them Matt Holder’s review in Strange Horizons—for help at a point where he got confused. Even Maurice, a very experience fantasy reader and writer, false-started a couple of times. Ken just lived with the confusion. The glossary—that seemed to be available only in Christine’s soft cover copy—was not helpful. The illustrated map wasn’t too helpful, either. But it was cool.
Lafadio Whonow? Lafcadio Hearn, 1850–1904, also known as Koizumi Yakumo, was the writer who more or less seeded the idea of New Orleans as a place full of magic and mystery in the American imagination, and more or less introduced Japanese culture to the West. At least two of our crew had no idea, after reading the book, that such a person actually existed. (It’s enough of a mind-bender to grasp that Lafcadio and Yakumo and Mr. Larry are all the same entity in the book). It in no way spoils the story if you don’t know the history. But if you do, it’s another one of those super weird elements.
Apparently, there are lots of superhero and comic book allusions in the book. Alex and Maurice brought up a bunch of them. Apparently, Stagger Lee might be the Silver Surfer. Ken and Christine had no idea what they were talking about.
Is Peaches a song? Is Perry? Yes? Maybe? We think so? Peaches is maybe, probably? Perry might be? The book, after all, is The Ballad of Perilous Graves.
Would we recommend it? We all enjoyed reading The Ballad of Perilous Graves. Christine shocked us by saying she “wouldn’t recommend it to anyone,” by which she meant she wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone. Ken agreed. Alex would recommend it, keeping in mind the reader’s willingness to just go along for the ride. Maurice said all his friends were nerds, so yes, he’d recommend it generally.
Bonus recommendations: Christine recommended Kindred by Octavia Butler. Alex recommended Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Maurice recommended The Lies of the Ojungo by Moses Ose Utomi. Ken recommended John Crowley’s Little, Big.
Next month: We’ll be book clubbing Hernan Diaz’s best-selling, much-lauded Trust. We hope you’ll come along.
