Finally, book #7 for 2024. Struggling a bit with the reading this month, mostly thanks to a time-consuming other project with my classical music collection and re-organising that, but never mind that, here’s this month’s “classic”. Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood was serialised in a magazine she edited from 1902 to 1903, and it evidently leans somewhat heavily on H. Rider Haggard; it’s kind of a domestic society drama at first, albeit one with a peculiar mesmerism undercurrent, but then it turns into an African exploration adventure as our hero signs on with an expedition to find the lost treasures of ancient Ethiopia… and the romance of the first part of the book is revealed as being rather more gothically fucked up than we might have expected (I was actually genuinely stunned by it and had to reread the scene to make sure I hadn’t just imagined it; I’m still not sure it even makes sense) and our hero is not who he thinks he is on multiple levels. This is fucking preposterous, and not in a particularly entertaining way either; Hopkins may have the first of her particular kind (though the book is more fantasy than horror) but that doesn’t mean she was any good at it… if this is indicative, she was a shabby stylist with a propensity for hitting you over the head with Christianity in a manner that became increasingly aggravating as the book dragged on (which it does mercilessly despite being under 200 pages). I did rather enjoy the thought that the book’s thesis that THEM DARKIES really invented civilisation 6000 years ago would’ve made a bunch of racists’ heads explode back in 1903 (much as it still would now), but those racists wouldn’t be reading this in the first place… Anyway, not a fan.
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