Norylska Groans…
with the weight of her crimes. In a city where winter reigns amid the fires of industry and war, soot and snow conspire to conceal centuries of death and deception.
Norylska Groans…
and the weight of a leaden sky threatens to crush her people. Katyushka Leonova, desperate to restore her family name, takes a job with Norylska’s brutal police force. To support his family, Genndy Antonov finds bloody work with a local crime syndicate.
Norylska Groans…
with the weight of her dead. As bodies fall, the two discover a foul truth hidden beneath layers of deception and violence: Come the thaw, what was buried will be revealed.
Devin
Well, this book was a lot… As with many of the other finalists, this one is going to be tough to both review and score so bear with me as I try to articulate thoughts through my COVID brainfog.
Right, so Norlyska Groans is a bleak, grim book with added grim and bleak. It doesn’t want you to ever forget that, either, or risk you thinking for even a moment that any of the characters are good people or ever have moments of happiness or human empathy. This extreme and heavy-handed degree of grimdark is not, I have to admit, at all to my general reading taste. I tend to find that without moments of light and good, the grim darkness ceases having weight or meaning. That is, however, obviously a very personal thing.
With that out of the way, let’s look a bit deeper. This story is told through two POV characters, Kat and Gen. Neither side of the story starts with a bang, but that’s pretty normal when there are two POV characters and a detailed world to build up around them. And it is a very detailed world, well fleshed out and full of small details to make it feel present and lived in even when you’re not looking. Some of the world building choices do seem to have been made for maximum grim impact (grimpact! Dibs on a new word!) however, which occasionally took me out of the story and had me glaring at my kobo like “really? REALLY?”
(A side note here that I wish to flag though it’s not having a bearing on my score for SPFBO, is that I was deeply uncomfortable in the choice of alternate history Russia as a setting, since it seemed to stem less from any particular history or figures specific to Russia and more from the question of grimpact—which setting to choose to maximise grimness. Despite my feelings about the current conflict in Ukraine, I don’t think Russia=Grim and bleak is a stereotype we need to keep reinforcing.)
Back to Kat and Gen! Both of these characters tie quite neatly into the one tale despite starting at very different places, which I really enjoyed, but unfortunately one was a much stronger character than the other. Kat’s journey from meek and unhappy housewife to badass street killer, though utterly lacking in any concept of even a vague moral compass, was carried along via a number of interesting questions about memory and identity and I loved this. The whole concept of the stones, this world’s magic, seems to have been made for perfectly thorny philosophical problems and complexity. Gen also has them in his side of the story, but I was often left wondering why he needed them. Having been some kind of mad berserker killer during the war, he didn’t need stones to become a berserker killer for a crime family, or in order to protect himself from their reprisals. And this, I feel, is the main issue I had with Gen—there’s no growth or change. He starts out as an angry ex-military killer who constantly repeats thoughts about how much of a failure he is and how awful he is, and that’s how he ends the story too. Arguably the only change is that, by the end, I agreed with his inner monologue. His total lack of redeeming characteristics can be summed up by one scene in which he finds a collection of bodies that are alive but essentially empty, having been drained of all personality and drive. They appear to be asleep. Rather than dealing with the one person he came to kill, he calmly just walks around the room slaughtering them all and never once wonders if getting the stones back that were made from them could wake them from their coma-like state, or thinks to just like… leave them alone? (He also decides to test they are definitely in a coma by pinching one woman’s nipple really hard, which I’d say is unnecessary sexual assault, but when he’s spent the whole book talking about everyone’s boobs it’s probably a choice made for grimpact again).
While on the topic of grimpact, no review of Norlyska Groans is complete without mentioning the torture. And the torture. And the more torture. Some of the torture scenes are undertaken in order to attain information, especially the ones Kat remembers rather than personally experiences, but many of the others are… look, I hate to say anything is gratuitous or that you need a reason to put things in to a book, but like how people who include lots of sex scenes get thought of as horny authors, this book leaves you with the feeling the authors really really really like pain and blood and gore and suffering and it’s… kinda really unpleasant unless that’s also your id. Sadly in this case it’s not mine, and the only way I could get through the book without DNFing quite early in was to skim those sections. And there’s a lot. That I didn’t struggle to follow the story without the details of those scenes tells me all I need to know about their importance to the actual narrative.
And what about that narrative? As I mentioned back when talking about Kat’s journey, there are some really interesting concepts and directions this book takes. There’s a mystery at the heart of the story that pulls you along, and I wanted to know how it ended and why all the way through the story. The change of POV helps with this too, for while scenes are occasionally recounted from both sides, slowing everything down, the constant shift from one side of the story to the other generally works to keep things interesting and well-paced. Despite this I did end up with about 1000 questions I shouted into our judge chat once I’d finished, many of which didn’t seem like hangovers for a second book. I wonder if the answers will be there on a second reading when I know what I’m looking for, but some quite critical motivations and decision making by the characters was not well-enough signposted or communicated for me to get them on a single read. (That’s another one of those personal things since everyone brings different expectations and presumptions to their reading, though since none of my fellow judges could answer my questions I don’t think I’m alone in my confusion.)
Apologies that this has been quite a rambling final review from me (look, either reading SPFBO books was protecting me from COVID and I got it the moment I finished up, or reading this book gave me COVID, take your pick!) and I’ll try to bring it all together into some sort of coherent conclusion here. While Norlyska Groans is a book of only one shade (bleak), reading it was very much an experience of light and dark for me. When I enjoyed it, I really enjoyed it. In places the writing was subtle and wry, poking at all the sore spots in our sense of identity and humanism, and there were plenty of places I laughed out loud. Maks was an absolutely fascinating character and by far my favourite in the whole book, but others I feel if they’d had a bit more space to breathe in (or in future books) could be equally so. But these pros were equally weighted with cons for me—the sense of grim for grim’s sake, the confusion, the lack of direction or interest in Gen’s character arc, and the enormous amount of what felt increasingly like torture porn. (Sadly, I’m a very squeamish human who cannot watch horror movies, nor have anything medical done without fainting so trust me when I say reading this book was rough in places!). This makes it probably the most difficult finalist for me to score this year and I can understand both why it has received high scores and why it has received low scores. I’ve gone back and forth on this a number of times and have, as with a couple of the other finalists, decided to weight my enjoyment stronger than my criticisms, especially since some of them in this case are based on personal taste. So for SPFBO I’m giving Norlyska Groans a 6.
Jared
There’s an irony here. In an earlier SPFBO review, I floated my desire that the competition be more devoted to books that could never be traditionally published. Books that ignored conventions rather than simply mimicking mainstream trends. To its credit, Norylska Groans rises to the challenge: it certainly seems impossible that this could ever come from a traditional publisher. However, it is also impossible for me to recommend.
This book opens with a shitty person doing a shitty job in the most shitty part of the most shitty city in a shitty world. While he thinks about how shitty his life is, someone else – an even shittier person – has something shitty happen to him. Our protagonist watches the shitty thing happen while simultaneously having a flashback to another, even shittier, thing, effectively ensuring that we have as much shittiness as possible crammed in. It is meta-shitty. A shittycake. A note – I don’t often use words like ‘shitty’ in a review. However, if something as mild as foul language offends you, this won’t be the book for you anyway.
I’d like to say it gets better, but it does not. This is a book about shitty people who do shitty things to other shitty people, and in excruciating detail. There is no reason – thematic or otherwise – for everything to be this shitty, other than it can be. Even when there’s something interesting (say, a magic system based on memories), it is immediately steered towards the outcome of maximum shittiness. Norylska Groans displays the breadth and depth of the human imagination when it comes to what shitty things are possible, and how, precisely they can be enacted. The emotional climax of this book is a moment where the protagonists come together to torture someone as a team.
I have more challenges, ranging from the badly stereotyped “Russian” setting to the completely random use of a monologue made famous in Apocalypse Now. (Delivered by an evil colonel, no less!). But at a certain point, I’m just piling on. In case you’ve missed the dominant theme here: I did not like this book very much.
SPFBO has always skewed grimdark. This trend may be due to the dominant taste from when the competition was founded or to the genre profile of its founder. Or simply down to the authorial direction of the writers that loyally patronise it year after year. Grimdark, I believe, is important. Adding moral ambiguity to fantasy tropes and challenging the traditions of the genre is, I would argue (and have argued) a necessity for the genre and its ability to ‘be in conversation with’ the reality of its readers. Grimdark has had a meaningful impact on fantasy, and continues to do so. However, there’s a big fucking gap between ‘subverting fantasy’ and ‘misery-porn’. This is firmly the latter. (2/10)
Hiu
Well. Fuck me. How the shit do you review a book like this?
I’ll be up front from the beginning here and say that this review is going to contain a fair bit of criticism. But despite that my score isn’t going to be low. I’m going to weight my enjoyment heavier than my critique.
I’ll start off by saying that I adored the premise of this one. Wearable magical stones that adjust your personality/memories? Given out during working hours such that your employer can basically control you for your working day? Leaving you with no memory of it afterwards?
That’s… Fascinating. And coupled with a setting of an alternative world Russia, I’d hoped we’d see some in-depth criticism of corporations, work-to-live culture, capitalism… All of that.
Did I get any of that? Eh… Maybe? Not really.
Norylska Groans is a book that fits the original warhammer-style definition of the term “grimdark”. This isn’t the kind of grimdark that has a shit world but with good people trying to make it better. There are no good people here. Or if there are, they are simply in the process of becoming shit people.
Norylska Groans is absurdly, unrelentingly, grim.
And as a result of that, it falls into a strange no-man’s land for me. Because, especially in the beginning portions, it depends a lot on your empathy to actually make you give a fuck. We aren’t really given much of a reason to care about our POV characters other than that bad things are happening to them. So, to some degree, it requires a reader that is empathetic enough to want something better for these characters.
But then, y’know, as happens in novels… Things get worse. But they get a lot worse. And they keep getting worse. And at no point are there really any respites or silver linings.
The whole Vibe of the book is basically “everything is terrible”. And it doubles down on that repeatedly. Chase scene? A dog gets kicked on the way. A piano has fallen on granny? The piano is out of tune.
The level of commitment to the Vibe comes down to the visceral word choice. Rending. Belching. Stripping. Exposing. All of the old favourites are here. Honestly, they’re used to the point where they start to lose impact.
And really, that’s my main problem with this book. It’s flat. In terms of tonal contrast, I mean. It has only one mood, and that mood is “everything is hopeless”. And my problem here is that I got to the point where I was like… “Yeah, fuck it, you’re right. Why should I care?”. Particularly with Gen’s chapters, where I found myself wishing his inner monologue had carried a little more colour, humour, or personality, and a little less repetitive worrying about “Irina and the baby”.
By the time the fourth or fifth torture scene or war flashback hit, I had already long since emotionally checked out. So my enjoyment was always going to have a ceiling. And while there is perhaps only one scene that actually features on-screen sexual assault (as Devin has mentioned), the spectre of it sort of hangs over a lot of the book via crude lechery or, in one instance, a rape metaphor/joke. Because why wouldn’t it use every tool in the box to remind you just how grim everything is?
It’s my opinion that Norylska Groans is a book that’s crying out for a bit more light. I mean, look, it’s impossible to see a monster in a pitch black room. It’s the light that casts the shadows, and all of that other cheesy bullshit. But seriously, throw a little Happy in there, and I would have cared so much more. The darker moments would have meant so much more.
As it is, it felt so… I don’t want to use the phrase “one-dimensional”, as that would be unfair to the great ideas that this book tries to play with, but it felt so… Samey.
Even down to the POV characters. Gen and Kat’s problems and positioning in the story were very similar. Fair enough. Loads of books do this. But here I felt like it bordered on destructive interference. The premise of the personality/memory stones is so genuinely interesting that I would’ve loved to have seen it explored from more diverse perspectives. Both characters dramatically lacked any agency in their lives (which is the point, thematically, I get it), and I got the feeling that if one of them had been slightly more “in the know”, this story could have opened up a whole lot more.
(As a complete sidenote, if ever a setting was suited for an unreliable narrator, it’s this one.)
With all of that said, there were moments in Kat’s story that I really loved. Her growth, and the ambiguity over whether that stemmed from within or without… That was the heart of the book for me. There could maybe have been a little more exploration or complexity, but I loved it.
Although… Her name… Katyushka. I grew up with a Russian step-mother, and I’m pretty sure that suffixes like “yushka” usually indicate diminutives, or pet names used by very close loved ones. A bit like how a wife or a granny might call you “Mikey-Wikey” or “Jim Bobby Bob”. So to have this as Kat’s full name, used in super formal contexts? Extra star for making me laugh.
There’s a lot about Norylska Groans that I wish was different. But 100 other reviewers would want to change it in 100 different ways. I don’t want to be the kind of reviewer that judges a book for what it isn’t. The fact that my brain is engaged in imagining all those wished-for differences? That tells me that there’s some good bones here. So I want to focus on that. Regardless of how much I hated all the grimey, fleshy bits.
My score is a 7 out of 10. Read at your own peril.
