#Premee Mohamed

[wearethekat]

December Book Reviews: The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed

I saw this book on the site formerly known as tordotcom's best books of 2024 list and immediately went to check it out from the library because the premise was so enticing. Alefret has been tortured in prison for months for being a key leader in the pacifist movement against his country's endless unwinnable war. Until a general approaches him and makes him an offer—help a spy enter the enemy's city, and Alefret might be able to end the war and its endless violence.

The Siege of Burning Grass was a bitter, brutal novel, and I loved every bit of it. It immediately reminded me not of anything in the SFF canon, but of Alleg's The Question (the account of a journalist who was kidnapped by the French in Algeria and tortured). From the author's bibliography, it looks like her inspiration comes from farther north—she cites multiple nonfiction works on the siege of Leningrad—but you get the idea. Alefret comes from a city which is devastated to the degree that its people are running out of rats to eat. Alefret himself is in equally rough shape. He spends the entire narrative struggling to focus through excruciating pain, as he had a leg blown off by his own side prior to his capture. In an extra surreal twist, the sadistic prison doctor has experimented on him and burdened him with a cage of genetically modified wasps that sting his leg periodically in an attempt to regrow the limb.

Ultimately, this isn't a book about spies, or about anyone winning the war. It's about Alefret's grim, stubborn conviction that violence is wrong, pitted against the unrelenting machine of war, which follows him around in the form of his fanatically doctrinal prison guard, Qhudur. In a world where both sides explicitly despise him as a freak and a monster for his size and deformities, where there are no good actions, what is the right choice for Alefret to make? Mohamed doesn't offer too many answers, but she asks some excellent questions along the way.

Highly recommended if you're looking for a SFF book about war, but not an easy or a light read.

[godzilla-reads]

🦊 The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟/5

Veris Thorn- the only person who has gone into the North Woods and come out alive- is forced to go back for a second time to retrieve the Tyrant’s missing children. But she is only afforded a single day to do so.

This story is very fae without explicitly saying it, being full of danger, tricks, riddles, and deals. The atmosphere is tense and dark, a threat around each and every corner, and I was addicted to it. An adrenaline rush everytime I picked the book up, even though it was very methodical pacing. I was sitting on the edge of my seat, needing to know what happens next. I also liked the commentary throughout the book about “who is innocent and who is complicit in oppression”, as S. Qiouyi Lu says on the back of the book.

I need more books like this!

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2024: THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST by Premee Mohamed.

Up next! I've enjoyed other books by this author (NO ONE WILL COME BACK FOR US and THE ANNUAL MIGRATION OF CLOUDS), AND one of my other fave authors (Hiron Ennes!) blurbs this one, AND it's Tor (beloved)!! It seems like a good transition out of SOMEONE TO BUILD A NEST IN, too, and I love daisy-chaining what I'm reading for Connection and Flow.

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: Science

Premee Mohamed: [wearing lab coat and goggles] according to my calculations, this story is about the technology of the near future King: wow! are you really a scientist? Mohamed: according to my calculations, yes King: wow! King: hey, as a scientist, you’ll love this King: have you seen margaret Atwood’s writing machine? Mohamed: is this AI

Mohamed: hello girl Mohamed: do you want a biscuit girl huh Margaret Atwood: [under cardboard box, through vocoder] BEEP BOOP RETWEETOTRON NO LONGER NEEDS HUMAN FOOD Mohamed: Mohamed: something’s not right here

Mohamed: wait a minute none of this makes sense King: what do you mean? Mohamed: by my calculations, the technology necessary for retweetotron to work simply does not exist King: what are you saying? Mohamed: i believe shenanigans are afoot

Mohamed: i believe this is no machine! Mohamed: this is just margaret atwood under a cardboard box! King: oh come on premee, that’s ridiculous King: you’re saying that margaret atwood’s just been under that box this whole time? Atwood: [through vocoder] uhhh SYNTAX ERROR! ABORT RETRY FAIL!

Mohamed: I’m telling you, that’s just margaret atwood King: come off it! Poe: i think we’d know if that was margaret Barker: yeah how would that work? She’s just hanging out under a box? King: i thought you were a scientist! King: some scientist! can’t even recognize a robot! Mohamed:

Mohamed: prepare for a future of unrelenting environmental disaster King: surely, though, scientists will help us avoid this mess? Mohamed: Mohamed: sorry pal, that boat’s sailed Mohamed: the only way out is through

[charliejaneanders]

Every month I try to review books that I

A) enjoyed

B) want to geek out about

in my @washingtonpost SFF review column. But please believe me when I say that all five books I review this month are *extraordinary*. I felt so lucky to be able to review them.

Paywall-free link: wapo.st/3IebriZ

[shortstorytournament]

Short Story Tournament

THE HUSBAND STITCH by Carmen Maria Machado (2014) (link) - tw: body horror, medical and sexual abuse

I don’t know what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What magical thing could you want so badly that they take you away from the known world for wanting it?

THE REDOUBTABLES by Premee Mohamed (2020) (link) - tw: death

Still rising, the edge of the thing reveals itself. No chaotic meteor-strike with lacy edges of ejecta but a smooth dinnerplate of a crater, whitely bereft of life, and in the center a darkness so profound that it seems astronomical rather than nautical, a black hole from which no light can escape, nor the grains of sand or stars.

[charasthetics]

The Butcher of the Forest

[pithia]

The day burned on like a match toward the fingertips.

—from The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

[trainofcommand]

Book rec: The Annual Migration of Clouds (by Premee Mohamed, 2021, ECW Press) (link above to buy directly from the press)

Brief summary: In post–climate disaster Alberta, a woman infected with a mysterious parasite must choose whether to pursue a rare opportunity far from home or stay and help rebuild her community.

I read this book in late 2022, and am now reading its sequel (We Speak Through the Mountain), and it's super absorbing and quite lovely. It's short, a novella really, but rich with detail, and though life is tough, it has joys and, and there is hope. If you're looking for an interesting take on a post-climate disaster world, it's definitely worth reading.

The cover art is also lovely:

[kammartinez]

I had seen photos in my parents’ photo albums of the cities back in Guyana, invaded and colonized by country after country that had not intended to come there, plunder, burn, kill, and leave, but to keep doing it while they stayed. They didn’t move in and build structures that looked like what was already there. They wanted it to look like where they had come from. … You sail to a new place, and you make it look like the old place. Because you haven’t come to the new land for it to be a new land. You want more of what you already have.

from A Broken Darkness (The Void #2) by Premee Mohamed

[not-available-for-comment]

*opens Tor Books email when I’m supposed to be working*

PREMEE MOHAMED WROTE A FAIRYTALE AHHHHH

Gotta fuckin. Preorder this when I get home. One of the best new authors out there but afaik up till now has mostly written cosmic horror. HIGHLY recommend Beneath the Rising for a cosmic horror travelogue that is also an examination of the nature of agency in an exploitative world and a portrait of a very close but deeply fucked up friendship. And also just stupid amounts of fun, if you’re into that kinda thing.

[godzilla-reads]

I haven’t been pulled into a book like this in forever so I’m obsessed.

Lately I’ve been trudging through my reading, forcing myself to keep up with it, but last night I picked this up and couldn’t put it down. I will, obviously, be continuing this story.

📕 The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2024: Wrap-Up.

Hello world!! I read sixty-three (63) books in 2024, and here they are! The pages-out books are stand-ins for library books and other borrowed books (which were ADHD for Smartass Women, When Among Crows, Ghost Station, and The Killing Floor). Mostly these are shelved in the order I read them, save for the stack at the end (Ordinary Monsters is Too Tall to fit on my current shelf arrangement, and the borrowed books are out of order).

I posted individual photos (and sometimes reviews!) of everything pictured here, which you can find tagged with their titles or authors, or you can see all of them if you peruse my "books of 2024" tag. Now, for the Highlight Reel, in order of when I read them:

FIVE FAVES

The City We Became by NK Jemisin ★★★★★ Always love Jemisin, but this duology had me laughing more than I remembered for her other books, which I definitely needed! Excellent cast (your honor I love Paolo so much and also literally all of the boroughs), I tore through this by staying up past my bedtime too many nights in a row.

The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed ★★★★★ Perfect tiny little gutpunch of a book MADE FOR ME, I loved it so damn much. Everyone please go read this immediately.

The Actor and the Target by Declan Donnellan ★★★★★ I was not expecting this to rewire my brain, but it DID, over and over and over again. Very dense chewy book, which I read hoping to get inside an actor character's head better, but honestly I think anyone who does any kind of art or creative endeavor should read this, because OOF was it insightful. (I have ordered his second book that came out this year, but it's hugely on backorder apparently.)(Go figure: The first one was SO GOOD.)

Leech by Hiron Ennes ★★★★★ This was a reread for me, and I'm so glad I revisited it--it holds up even better than the first time through, because so much of it falls into place once you know what's really going on. Masterclass in POV, very gothic, very fucked up, very Deep Winter book, I very much think anyone who was An Animorphs Kid would enjoy the hell out of this (but mind the content warnings, of which there are Many).

Self-Portrait with Nothing by Aimee Pokwatka ★★★★½ This one also hit my perfect trifecta of weird-and-funny-and-fucked-up exactly right, which I wasn't expecting? Pleasant surprise there at the end of the year. Come for the family heart crimes, stay for the unhinged overseas texts to your husband about an art heist, what a blast.

TWO TWOS

turns out i didn't actually read any 1-star books this year, so here's the bottom of the barrel, and yes i DID write lengthy salty reviews about both of these, if you're interested in the particulars of My Beef

Ordinary Monsters by JM Miro ★★ This was too damn long and ~Messy™~, and all of that just to end on a cliffhanger because it's a trilogy. Why did I bother with this 600+ page brick (oh, right: because it sounded promising)(it was Not, or at least not Enough).

Ghost Station by SA Barnes ★★ This was TOO DAMN FRUSTRATING (bad science, bad scientists, stupid characters, etc), and there was JUST ENOUGH neat promising worldbuilding in the background that Could Have Been Cool to make this otherwise mediocre experience enraging. Super bummed, because I wanted to read this author's other stuff, but now I don't trust her and therefore shan't.

Overall! Had a great reading year--those Two Twos were the only things I rated that low, and I enjoyed everything else! Looking forward to another fabulous year of books :)

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: Bad News

Premee Mohamed: Submitted for the aproval for the Midnight Society, I call this the tale of the not too distant future Mohamed: in a world ravaged by climate change Mohamed: and covid Mohamed: and microplastics Mohamed: and ocean acidification King: haha the future huh? King: sounds more like the present right haha King:

Mohamed: and insectpocalypse King: oh no Mohamed: and oil pipeline spills King: oh no Mohamed: and giant blood worms King: oh well at least those aren’t real Mohamed: hmm Mohamed: just wait

Mohamed: even in the midst of all that Mohamed: there’s still something that can’t die- Bogleech: cockroaches Bogleech: the answer is cockroaches Mohamed: the human spirit Bogleech: Bogleech: oh that

Mohamed: even in the darkest hours, the human spirit shines through triumphant Thomas Ligotti: what is that Mohamed: the human spirit? Mohamed: it’s, like, a beacon of hope Ligotti: i do not understand Mohamed: perserverence? in the face of adversity? Mohamed: the faith in a brighter future? Ligotti: i do not get it Ligotti: i feel like you are describing concepts

Mohamed: Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I call this the tale of the clean energy device Mohamed: so a teenage super scientist invents a machine that creates clean energy Mohamed: but Lovecraftian monster gods want to stop it Mohamed: what a bunch of dicks!

Mohamed: the green energy device releases a bunch of monster gods Dan Simmons: this is the future greta thunberg wants

[rhetoricandlogic]

Beneath the Rising by Premee Mohamed

By: S. Qiouyi Lu

Issue: 24 February 2020

Nick Prasad has always been Joanna “Johnny” Chambers’s sidekick. Friends since a young age, Johnny has rocketed into an early and brilliant career as a child prodigy scientist, while Nick has lived a quiet, mundane life in which his biggest concerns are work and family. But the two of them still have a regular, teenage friendship, one filled with banter and misadventures. So when Johnny comes up with a new invention that could change the world, Nick doesn’t think much of it at first: after all, this is the seventeen-year-old girl who has already fitted the world with solar panels, created lifesaving medications, and perfected tools that assist millions of people’s lives—to name just a few of her accomplishments.

When strange things start to happen, Nick soon realizes that this invention isn’t like the others. An aurora borealis that shouldn’t be visible from their latitude heralds the coming of monstrous creatures, relentless in their pursuit of Johnny and her new invention. Bit by bit, the scale of what’s happ­­ening comes together: there are other realms beyond ours where terrible evil lurks and waits for its opportunity to trigger the next apocalypse. Those beings, “The Ancient Ones,” are responsible for the annihilation of civilizations ranging from Carthage to Cahuachi to Çatal Hüyük to Atlantis. And now, they’re after Johnny’s invention and the power it can unleash to destroy the world again.

But that’s not all. Suspicious of how much Johnny knows about the origin of these monsters, Nick pries the truth out of her and discovers that she’s made a covenant with the Ancient Ones. One of their terrifying pursuers, Drozanoth, is here to uphold that covenant, and will do anything to make Johnny hand over the invention responsible for calling the Ancient Ones back to Earth. Now, only she has any idea how to close the gates that are opening between realms. Determined to help stop the apocalypse, Nick embarks on a wild scavenger hunt with Johnny across the Maghreb and the Middle East to gather the items they need to put an end to the invasion.

Beneath the Rising, Indo-Guyanese author Premee Mohamed’s debut novel, is a rollercoaster of an experience. Although Mohamed draws from cosmic horror tropes as classic as Lovecraft’s, she challenges the oppressive foundations on which Lovecraft built his career. The novel is set in an alternate history shortly after a failed terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The impact of September 11 doesn’t go unnoticed: instead, it, and the period setting of the early 2000s, deeply inform the characters’ every movement through the world and the global context around them. Nick, who is Indo-Caribbean and often refers to himself as “brown,” details the various ways in which his racial and class background affect how he sees the world, and how the world sees him. Unlike Nick, Johnny, the wonder-kid know-it-all seemingly blessed with endless genius, is White and rich. Although the sexism she faces is made clear, her privilege on other axes is called out in a way that feels natural to the characters and important to the narrative.

Lovecraft’s work often relies on racism to fuel its narrative and to lend horror and dread to cosmic horror elements. Mohamed, on the other hand, lays out the intersecting foundations of that marginalization and shows how those systems of oppression are the all-too-mundane backdrop against which otherworldly cosmic horror can play out. On top of that, Mohamed brings a genuinely global scope to her doomsday narrative. It is not just the West that faces an imminent catastrophe in Beneath the Rising. Rather, most of the main events occur in the Maghreb and across the Middle East. The rise and fall of civilizations across a broad set of cultures at the hands of the Ancient Ones feels like a smooth integration of all parts of the world, creating a truly global and historically linear scope of events that adds urgency to the narrative.

When it comes to the technical details of craft, Beneath the Rising shows Mohamed’s masterful command of description, pace, and emotion that renders powerful characters and settings. The prose is lean and deliberate, a short story writer’s novel. Mohamed, who also has several short fiction publications to her name, makes sure that every sentence, every paragraph, every simile serves multiple purposes. A sentence can reveal period- and character-appropriate details while also being embedded in an unusual, yet apt, metaphor that vividly describes and furthers the events of the story:

[Johnny] was trembling so hard she was almost flickering, like a poorly-tracked VHS tape. […] This [fear] felt more like something from outside of me, like secondhand smoke, greasily invisible, sinking into my pores, blown from someone unseen. (pp. 56–58)

Mohamed’s command of the rhythm of a sentence shows through in her control over the pace of the story as well. When Nick and Johnny have room to breathe, the prose is denser and slower as it lingers on fuller descriptions.

In the moment of relative safety I craned my head to try to take it all in, wishing I had sunglasses or a hat—it was so bright it just seemed like a spangled kaleidoscope of car windows, men in suits, tiny booths hawking electronics, sunglasses, clothing, CDs, food, tiles, everyone gabbling around me in languages I didn’t know, plus blessedly recognizable if not actually comprehensible French and English. People bumped and buffeted me apparently without even noticing. I had been picturing … I don’t even know what. Some mud-brick city from Raiders of the Lost Ark? Flowing white robes? Tintin books, for absolute sure. (p. 144)

But when Nick and Johnny are on the run, Mohamed’s prose goes into fight-or-flight mode, highlighting only the barest of actions, reactions, and sensory details. The reader barrels along, breathless, with the characters.

I shut the closet door, hearing first a bang, and then—oh shit—the musical tinkle of falling glass from the living room. A multilegged shadow, all spikes and floppy appendages and translucent nodules, firmly struck the hallway wall, like an ink stamp. I cast about, left, right, left, right. Kids. Bedroom. Two quick steps: empty. (p. 103)

At the same time, Beneath the Rising isn’t just an action-adventure chase after a string of McGuffins against a backdrop of tentacles, shadows, uncanny eldritch pawns, and imminent apocalypse. It’s also a slow tale about a different kind of unrequited love between two teenagers who were forced to grow up too early, and who have never had the space to address their lingering PTSD after surviving a shooting during a hostage crisis. Woven between the multidimensional chaos of the Ancient Ones’ return is a poignant, melancholy tale of what growing out of childhood ideals means and feels like. As Nick confronts the codependent nature of his love for Johnny, who turns out not to be the person he thought she was, he shores up memories and emotions that illustrate the processing he’s doing internally while also showing his growth as a character. The vindication of his fury and betrayal feels both earned and deserved.

The biggest strength of the novel, however, comes from the shocking reveal toward the end of the book that explains the true nature of Nick’s “friendship” with Johnny, and why he was even dragged along on such a dangerous journey he had no hand in creating. I’ll be including spoilers from here on in order to fully discuss the impact of the ending.

Instead of being a magnanimous scientist who simply wants to help the world, Johnny practices “altruism” as a reflection of her own need for power and worth. She may be doing good with her work, but that doesn’t mean that she can’t channel great evil and also be a villainous mad scientist. Her prodigal power and inhuman brilliance stem from a covenant she struck with the Ancient Ones. In exchange for time off of her life, Johnny can speed up her mind, like a supercomputer’s processing power getting a boost, to do what she does. But with that covenant came another clause that Johnny only reveals to Nick when she can no longer hide it. Afraid that her unbelievable talent would alienate her from the rest of the world, leaving her alone forever, Johnny bargained for Nick to be forever by her side as a companion. Nick’s true relationship to Johnny is as a slave.

This Faustian covenant, however, didn’t have to take place. Johnny admits that, if she’d refused the covenant, she would have still lived a comfortable, successful life, and would have still been a great scientist. But, lured in by power and the opportunity to influence the world, saving millions of lives in the process, Johnny agreed to a deal with the Ancient Ones. She justifies her actions with all the good she’s done—but Beneath the Rising is, at its heart, a novel about the true cost of power, and whether the ends can justify appalling means. After all, the Ancient Ones would never have been attracted to the world if Johnny had refused the covenant in the first place. The millions of lives potentially lost in a global apocalypse don’t factor into Johnny’s calculations of how much good she does and her positive impact on the world.

Therein lies the extended metaphor that forms the secret crux of Mohamed’s narrative: Johnny’s covenant, and Nick’s role as her “companion,” are tools to critique the legacy of colonialism; in particular, slavery. In a key character turning point, Nick reminds Johnny that his family, of Indian descent and from Guyana, descends from indentured servants who were exploited for the sake of the British Empire. Nick takes deep offense at the way Johnny doles out money, as if to buy people and solutions to her problems. Johnny’s race is actually the most insignificant reflection of her position as a symbol for colonization and empire. It is her utilitarian attitude toward people and her perceived self-importance as a representative of “the greater good” that motivate the true horrors that Johnny commits. Loyalty can always be bought. Nick’s loss of agency, the loss of his potential livelihood, and the psychic toll of not being a genuinely free individual, never enter into Johnny’s mind. Nick isn’t truly a friend, an equal, or even a person to her. He is a sidekick, a person to be uprooted from place to place so that Johnny can always have someone to carry her when she is weak, provide strength when she has none, and sacrifice his life if she needs him to. Nick is merely a resource she can exploit as an extension of herself. How many families, societies, and whole cultures have similarly been torn apart to support the advancement of Western civilization?

No matter how euphemistically slavery is named, whether as “indentured servitude,” “incarceration,” or “debt bondage,” it is ultimately the real covenant that robs people of their time and life force. The lasting socioeconomic impact of slavery, too, oozes through Beneath the Rising as the gulf in wealth between Nick and Johnny, as well as the gulf in opportunity and attitudes toward self-worth between them. No eldritch covenant needs to be made for oppressors to keep subjugating the oppressed. Through Johnny, the whole empire of colonization is laid bare and exposed: for all the “advancement” purportedly created by colonizers, for all the status colonizers lay claim to, millions of people whom colonizers considered as second-class were sacrificed. When Johnny sets out to “save the world,” what she is truly saving is the status quo of her own world of privilege. Nick’s world, the world of the subjugated and oppressed, has long since been lost.

On a micro scale, Beneath the Rising is the best inversion of the sidekick trope I’ve ever seen. The effect of a reckless superhuman crashing through the world are called out early: who will clean up? Who will pay for property damage? Who will handle witness protection? Insurance? Jobs? How will people recover from the trauma of such a disruptive event? Then, when the true nature of Nick’s slavery is revealed, we see the rare story of a sidekick walking away—of codependency not being romanticized, but called out for the real destruction it can cause. Nick’s anger and betrayal are validated narratively as he sets boundaries at last and recovers from Johnny’s exploitation. The scale of Johnny’s betrayal and the evilness of her act are never downplayed, even as Johnny herself, like many benefitting from the legacy of colonization, remains clueless of her impact, even going so far as to still believe that she is doing good, and that all the devastation behind her can be a footnote to her altruism.

Beneath the Rising is a near-flawless debut novel. While it works well as a standalone, the story and worldbuilding leave room for sequels as well. Multilayered and richly rendered, Beneath the Rising is a darkly humorous romp through unspeakable cosmic horrors that also paints a portrait of two hurt teenagers grappling with their place in the world and their relationship with each other, all while navigating complex inner worlds impacted by the legacies of colonization, slavery, racism, and sexism. Like a doomsday device, Beneath the Rising is compact, powerful, and devastating as it hurls the reader through a brilliantly crafted narrative. Prepare for an epic journey, and don’t forget to bring a barf bag for the turbulent ride.

[shortstorytournament]

Short Story Tournament

THE REDOUBTABLES by Premee Mohamed (2020) (link) - tw: death

No one saw it happen. Scratch that: no witnesses were left. So you end up having to picture it, based on the bone-dry descriptions in what we’ll all just agree to call the Pearce Papers, to avoid any messy litigation and keep me out of trouble with my editor.

THE EGG by Andy Weir (2009) (link) - tw: death, religion

“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you."