Book Review: Bad Brains, by Kathe Koja

The copy I received in the mail

The Good, the Bad, the Brains

I first encountered Kathe Koja last summer through her debut novel, The Cipher. When I ordered an unassuming used copy of the internet I had no idea what to expect, but the last thing that I thought would happen is that I’d be sucked into a horror story like I’d never before read. The Cipher was a book like no other, a book that permanently changed the way I look at fiction.

Bad Brains is a lot of the same. If you haven't read any Koja before, then you'll probably find the book new and refreshing. However, if, like me, you've read one of her other works, you may be disappointed with how similar this one is. Either way, though, reading it will be a wild ride. Below, I will consider the book's plot, characters, and writing style.

The Plot: A Roller Coaster Ride of Despair

Bad Brains is about a broken-hearted artist named Austen, who gets his brain broken too after an accident in a gas station parking lot. This accident not only damages his head, though, but also causes him to start seeing visions of a liquid silver being that is described in various ways throughout. Trapped in a nightmare where not even the top neurologists are able to help him, Austen must embark on a journey to try and rid himself of these visions before they drive him crazy. Like The Cipher, this book ends abruptly and without resolution, without closure. If you want a read that wraps its narrative up in a pretty conclusion with a neat little bow on top, then look elsewhere.

The plot progresses at the speed of a roller coaster and with the mood of a funeral. Nearly nothing happy happens in this story, and even those few good things that happen tend to be setups for something much worse that is soon to occur. Despite how dreary this may sound, I found the book nearly impossible to put down. The plot is in constant motion, always having you say Just one more page.

The Characters: Darkly Human 

The characters are flawed. At times it feels as if that's all they are--one big ball of flaw. As in The Cipher, Koja's characters come from the fringes of humanity. The protagonist, for example, is a literal starving artist and spends the majority of the book powerless, at the disposal of the wills of others and his own crumbling sanity. It's these pitiful and depraved characters, however, that I would consider the book's greatest strength. You want Austen to win, you want to see him happy. Koja's protagonists touch me more personally than any other author's. They are not powerful, they are not special, they aren't really even that important. They are human. And it's that humanity that makes the characters so real that you think they may jump off the page at any moment.

The Style: A Labyrinth of Words 

Style is really a matter of personal taste, so let me upfront about this: I am in love with Koja's writing style. The words and sentences and paragraphs are like poetry that has been put through a shredder and then messily reassembled. One moment the words are flowing one way, then a rip, a change in direction--down a dark rabbit hole that hadn't been there moments ago. It's jarring to read and it puts your brain to work, but Koja's writing does its job and does it well: of all the author's I have read, her voice is the most unique and memorable.

Normal 1st-edition copy

Conclusion 

All in all, I feel about this book almost exactly as I did about The Cipher. In fact, I'm sure that if I were to review that book then it'd look nearly identical to this review. I would recommend this book to any horror fan with a strong stomach and an affinity for the weird. Be wary, though: this story isn't just a ride. It's full-throttle down an empty road, brakes cut and no way to slow down. And at the end of that road is a brick wall.

Cannibals in the Cave: The Sawney Bean Story

In the latter half of the 18th century there appeared a collection of biographical texts called The Newgate Calendar, named after the Newgate Prison in London. This collection came in five volumes and cataloged the lives of some of the most horrid criminals (existent and nonexistent) in history, while simultaneously presenting harsh critiques against various social issues that were relevant at the time. Many of the criminals presented in the volumes became immortalized and sometimes romanticized, the fact and fiction of their crimes blending together indiscriminately.

One such villain that appeared in the first volume of The Newgate Calendar was a man by the name of Alexander "Sawney" Bean, and his story is one of unimaginable darkness. 

Commonly dismissed as a character of folklore, Sawney Bean was said to have been born in East Lothain in Scotland during the reign of King James I (late 16th to early 17th century). His father was either a hedger or a ditch-digger and raised his son to take up the same job. Not one for honest labor, however, Sawney fled his parents with a woman as idle as he and made his home with her in a cave by the sea. There they lived for over twenty years, cut off from all society. 

In those twenty years Sawney and his wife produced a great number of sons and daughters, who then coupled with one another and produced a great number of grandsons and grandaughters, all who were just as disinclined to do honest work as Sawney himself. It was for this tendency to work that the incestuous clan got along not by laboring, but  by robbing and murdering any people who passed by their lair. After killing an unfortunate traveler they would haul the corpse into the den of the cave, dismember it, eat it, and pickle the leftovers. Sometimes they would discard a limb into the sea instead eating it, and over time the unlucky arms and unlucky legs of dozens of unlucky travelers washed up on shores all across the country. This threw the region into a state of panic, in which many innocent people were mistaken for the perpetrators and executed. The true killers, however, remained in their cave. Still robbing, still butchering, still feasting, still uncaught. 

That is, at least, until an attempt by Sawney's clan to dispatch a married couple heading back from a fair ended in failure. The couple was riding on horseback when the family descended on them. The wife was knocked to the ground and killed, her blood then drunk and her entrails eaten, but before they could reach the husband the rest of the fairgoers, thirty or so in number, came up on the road, causing the Beans to flee back into their cave for fear of being outnumbered. The husband told the band of travelers about Sawney and went with them to Glagow, where they all spread the tale even further. 

News eventually reached the king, who then organized a manhunt of about four hundred men and many bloodhounds. The hounds led the procession to Sawney's cave, which had human remains scattered about it, along with all the treasures that the Bean family had accumulated from the people they'd killed over the years. Sawney and his family was captured, and all sentenced to a gruesome execution (the men had their limbs severed and bled to death, while the women and children were burned alive). None repented before they died, but instead cursed till their last breaths. 

While on the surface this folktale may seem nothing more than a gruesome account of a cannibal family, the story of Sawney Bean also serves as a cautionary tale of sorts about the dangers of idleness, which was considered a heinous sin in era The Newgate Calendar was written in. Sawney's reason for escaping his parents with his wife, for choosing to live on the fringes of society, was to escape that which he dreaded most: work--honest work. In the end, however, the moral to this story is riddled with irony. After all, it's hard to imagine a world where being the head of a cannibalistic clan is easier than a life of trimming hedges.