Review:
A Little Vice, by Erin E. Elkin
| Publisher: |
Erin Elkin |
| Copyright: |
June 2024 |
| ASIN: |
B0CTHRK61X |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
398 |
A Little Vice is a stand-alone self-published
magical girl novel. It
is the author's first novel.
C is a high school student and frequent near-victim of monster attacks.
Due to the nefarious work of Avaritia Wolf and her allies, his high school
is constantly attacked by Beasts, who are magical corruptions of some
internal desire taken to absurd extremes. Standing in their way are the
Angelic Saints: magical girls who transform into Saint Castitas, Saint
Diligentia, and Saint Temperantia and fight the monsters. The monsters for
some reason seem disposed to pick C as their victim for hostage-taking,
mind control, use as a human shield, and other rather traumatic
activities. He's always rescued by the Saints before any great harm is
done, but in some ways this makes the situation worse.
It is obvious to C that the Saints are his three friends Inessa, Ida, and
Temperance, even though no one else seems able to figure this out despite
the blatant clues. Inessa has been his best friend since childhood when
she was awkward and needed his support. Now, she and his other friends
have become literal heroes, beautiful and powerful and capable, constantly
protecting the school and innocent people, and C is little more than a
helpless burden to be rescued. More than anything else, he wishes he could
be an Angelic Saint like them, but of course the whole idea is impossible.
Boys don't get to be magical girls.
(I'm using he/him pronouns for C in this review because C uses them for
himself for most of the book.)
This is a difficult book to review because it is deeply focused on
portraying a specific internal emotional battle in all of its
sometimes-ugly complexity, and to some extent it prioritizes that
portrayal over conventional story-telling. You have probably already
guessed that this is a transgender coming-out story Elkin's choice of
the magical girl genre was done with deep understanding of its role in
transgender narratives but more than that, it is a transgender
coming-out story of a very specific and closely-observed type. C knows who
he wishes he was, but he is certain that this transformation is absolutely
impossible. He is very deep in a cycle of self-loathing for wanting
something so manifestly absurd and insulting to people who have the
virtues that C does not.
A Little Vice is told in the first person from C's perspective, and
most of this book is a relentless observation of C's anxiety and shame
spiral and reflexive deflection of any possibility of a way out. This is
very well-written: Elkin knows the reader is going to disagree with C's
internalized disgust and hopelessness, knows the reader desperately wants
C to break out of that mindset, and clearly signals in a myriad of adroit
ways that Elkin is on the reader's side and does not agree with C's
analysis. C's friends are sympathetic, good-hearted people, and while
sometimes oblivious, it is obvious to the reader that they're also on the
reader's side and would help C in a heartbeat if they saw an opening. But
much of the point of the book is that it's not that easy, that breaking
out of the internal anxiety spiral is nearly impossible, and that C is
very good at rejecting help, both because he cannot imagine what form it
could take but also because he is certain that he does not deserve it.
In other words, much of the reading experience of this book involves
watching C torture and insult himself. It's all the more effective because
it isn't gratuitous. C's internal monologue sounds exactly like how an
anxiety spiral feels, complete with the sort of half-effective coping
mechanisms, deflections, and emotional suppression one develops to blunt
that type of emotional turmoil.
I normally hate this kind of book. I am a happy ending and competence porn
reader by default. The world is full of enough pain that I don't turn to
fiction to read about more pain. It says a lot about how well-constructed
this book is that I stuck with it. Elkin is going somewhere with the
story, C gets moments of joy and delight along the way to keep the reader
from bogging down completely, and the best parts of the book feel like a
prolonged musical crescendo with suspended chords. There
is a
climax coming, but Elkin is going to make you wait for it for far longer
than you want to.
The main element that protects
A Little Vice from being too grim is
that it is a genre novel that is very playful about both magical girls and
superhero tropes in general. I've already alluded to one of those
elements: Elkin plays with the Mask Principle (the inability of people to
see through entirely obvious secret identities) in knowing and
entertaining ways. But there are also villains, and that leads me to the
absolutely delightful Avaritia Wolf, who for me was the best character in
this book.
The Angelic Saints are not the only possible approach to magical girl
powers in this universe. There are villains who can perform a similar
transformation, except they embrace a vice rather than a virtue. Avaritia
Wolf embraces the vice of greed. They (Avaritia's pronouns change over the
course of the book) also have a secret identity, which I suspect will be
blindingly obvious to most readers but which I'll avoid mentioning since
it's still arguably a spoiler.
The primary plot arc of this book is an attempt to recruit C to the side
of the villains. The Beasts are drawn to him because he has magical
potential, and the villains are less picky about gender. This initially
involves some creepy and disturbing mind control, but it also brings C
into contact with Avaritia and Avaritia's very specific understanding of
greed. As far as Avaritia is concerned, greed means wanting whatever they
want, for whatever reason they feel like wanting it, and there is
absolutely no reason why that shouldn't include being greedy for their
friends to be happy. Or doing whatever they can to make their friends
happy, whether or not that looks like villainy.
Elkin does two things with this plot that I thought were remarkably
skillful. The first is that she directly examines and then undermines the
"easy" transgender magical girl ending. In a world of transformation
magic, someone who wants to be a girl could simply turn into a girl and
thus apparently resolve the conflict in a way that makes everyone happy. I
think there is an important place for that story (I am a vigorous defender
of escapist fantasy and happy endings), but that is not the story that
Elkin is telling. I won't go into the details of why and how the story
complicates and undermines this easy ending, but it's a lot of why this
book feels both painful and honest to a specific, and very not easy,
transgender experience, even though it takes place in an utterly
unrealistic world.
But the second, which is more happy and joyful, is that Avaritia gleefully
uses a wholehearted embrace of every implication of the vice of greed to
bulldoze the binary morality of the story and question the classification
of human emotions into virtues and vices. They are not a hero, or even all
that good; they have some serious flaws and a very anarchic attitude
towards society. But Avaritia provides the compelling, infectious thrill
of the character who looks at the social construction of morality that is
constraining the story and decides that it's all bullshit and refuses to
comply. This is almost the exact opposite of C's default emotional
position at the start of the book, and watching the two characters play
off of each other in a complex friendship is an absolute delight.
The ending of this book is complicated, messy, and incomplete. It is the
sort of ending that I think could be incredibly powerful if it hits
precisely the right chords with the reader, but if you're not that reader,
it can also be a little heartbreaking because Elkin refuses to provide an
easy resolution. The ending also drops some threads that I wish Elkin
hadn't dropped; there are some characters who I thought deserved a
resolution that they don't get. But this is one of those books where the
author knows exactly what story they're trying to tell and tells it
whether or not that fits what the reader wants. Those books are often not
easy reading, but I think there's something special about them.
This is not the novel for people who want detailed world-building that
puts a solid explanation under events. I thought Elkin did a great job
playing with the conventions of an episodic anime, including starting the
book on Episode 12 to imply C's backstory with monster attacks and hinting
at a parallel light anime story by providing TV-trailer-style plot
summaries and teasers at the start and end of each chapter. There is a
fascinating interplay between the story in which the Angelic Saints are
the protagonists, which the reader can partly extrapolate, and the novel
about C that one is actually reading. But the details of the
world-building are kept at the anime plot level: There's an arch-villain,
a World Tree, and a bit of backstory, but none of it makes that much sense
or turns into a coherent set of rules. This is a psychological novel; the
background and rules exist to support C's story.
If you do want that psychological novel... well, I'm not sure whether to
recommend this book or not. I admire the construction of this book a great
deal, but I don't think appealing to the broadest possible audience was
the goal. C's anxiety spiral is very repetitive, because anxiety spirals
are very repetitive, and you have to be willing to read for the grace
notes on the doom loop if you're going to enjoy this book. The
sentence-by-sentence writing quality is fine but nothing remarkable, and
is a bit shy of the average traditionally-published novel. The main appeal
of
A Little Vice is in the deep and unflinching portrayal of a
specific emotional journey. I think this book is going to work if you're
sufficiently invested in that journey that you are willing to read the
brutal and repetitive parts. If you're not, there's a chance you will
bounce off this hard.
I was invested, and I'm glad I read this, but
caveat emptor. You
may want to try a sample first.
One final note: If you're deep in the book world, you may wonder, like I
did, if the title is a reference to Hanya Yanagihara's (in)famous
A
Little Life. I do not know for certain I have not read that book
because I am not interested in being emotionally brutalized but if it
is, I don't think there is much similarity. Both books are to some extent
about four friends, but I couldn't find any other obvious connections from
some Wikipedia reading, and
A Little Vice, despite C's emotional
turmoil, seems to be considerably more upbeat.
Content notes: Emotionally abusive parent, some thoughts of self-harm,
mind control, body dysmorphia, and a lot (a
lot) of shame and
self-loathing.
Rating: 7 out of 10
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