tamaranth | 2025/198: Snake-Eater

2025/198: Snake-Eater — T Kingfisher

Walter would . . . Her thoughts stopped there, because Walter would already have dropped dead of shock weeks ago. She was in a world where Walter no longer applied. [loc. 3355]

Selena is down on her luck when she heads, with her beloved dog Copper, to the remote desert town of Quartz Creek. She has $27 to her name, and has left behind a job in a deli and a gaslighting ex who's destroyed Selena's self-confidence. She's searching for her Aunt Amelia -- but Amelia, says the nice lady at the post office, died last year. No reason why Selena shouldn't stay in town for a couple of days, though...

The folk of Quartz Creek are odd but friendly, and Selena's new neighbour Grandma Billy is keen for Selena to move into her aunt's abandoned house. Grandma Billy is splendidly competent, despite some unsettling observations about Selena's glimpse of a man in green in her garden: a squash god, apparently, quite normal for Quartz Creek. And it turns out that Aunt Amelia had some connection with another god: a roadrunner spirit. As a Brit, I have no direct experience of roadrunners apart from the Loony Tunes cartoons. Apparently they are not at all cute, and they kill rattlesnakes. Selena is also ignorant of the species, which causes Plot.

Snake-Eater may have a setup reminiscent of The Twisted Ones (dead relative, abandoned house, faithful hound, increasing weirdness) but it's a much kinder novel, more about Selena regaining her strength and self-esteem and finding a different sort of family. It's also set in a lightly-sketched future, probably about fifty years from now: there's a moon colony, and rural depopulation means there's more space in the desert for non-human people. (That said, there's still the internet and mobile phones -- though Selena never switches on her phone in case the ex tracks her down, and she avoids the internet connection at the library because she can barely manage her own issues, never mind the world's.) And there's more humour than in Kingfisher's horror-oriented novels: I found myself laughing out loud more than once, not least at the perils of reading Clan of the Cave Bear at an impressionable age.

Love (but no romance), loyalty, an excellent Jesuit priest, and the importance of kindness to animals, plus some truly likeable characters: may we all land as softly as Selena, when we fall.