Eileen Tabios Reviews Bombyonder in GALATEA RESURRECTS #23

The latest issue of GALATEA RESURRECTS is out with 69 new reviews including one by Eileen Tabios for Bombyonder where she engages and grapples with the ever present question: what genre is it?

I want to say: the above excerpt (like the rest of the book) strikes me as the kind of stuff that can be written by someone who doesn’t suffer fools well.  But that’s just me having fun.  What I should note is that my focus in genre stems from hearing stuff about the work's genre—what is it?—prior to its release and before I came to read it.  One of the blurbers, Lindsay Hill, even says it is “its own genre.”  But actually, I easily recognize a genre for this book.  It’s the howl. 

I sense the howl because one of the book’s biggest strengths is voice (yep, voice the old-fashioned way).  The strength of the voice is not that it’s a howl but that it stays strong and consistent from beginning to end—indeed, it’s not just consistent but ratchets up in intensity as one goes deeper into the book.  The author was “on”—in that space of the author being the pen rather than the one wielding the pen for words that alchemized their own urgency for existence—as she wrote out this project—but she was on for an entire 343 pages and that’s impressive. 

Howl.  Wilderness.   More actually, wild.