Title: Mushroom Blues
Author: Adrian M. Gibson
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Fantasy / Science Fiction
Format: Paperback / Hardcover / Ebook / Audio
Release Date: March 19, 2024
Star Rating: 8/10
*Disclaimer*
Everyone is different and likes and dislikes different things. Reading is no exception. One person’s all-time favorite might seem too bland or too high stakes for another. That being said, the opinions of our judges in this contest are just that, opinions. Just because we let a book go, doesn’t mean it isn’t good. It could be your next favorite, who knows?
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can learn more about the contest here.
Today we are reviewing Mushroom Blues by Adrian M. Gibson, which was Fantasy Book Critic’s pick for this year’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off.
You can see the finalist spreadsheet here.
Blurb:
ENTER THE FUNGALVERSE. Blade Runner, True Detective and District 9 meld with the weird worlds of Jeff VanderMeer, Philip K. Dick and China Miéville in Adrian M. Gibson’s hallucinatory, fungalpunk noir debut.
Two years after a devastating defeat in the decade-long Spore War, the island nation of H?ppon and its capital city of Neo Kinoko are occupied by invading Coprinian forces. Its fungal citizens are in dire straits, wracked by food shortages, poverty and an influx of war refugees. Even worse, the corrupt occupiers exploit their power, hounding the native population.
As a winter storm looms over the metropolis, NKPD homicide detective Henrietta Hofmann begrudgingly partners up with mushroom-headed patrol officer Koji Nameko to investigate the mysterious murders of fungal and half-breed children. Their investigation drags them deep into the seedy underbelly of a war-torn city, one brimming with colonizers, criminal gangs, racial division and moral decay.
In order to solve the case and unravel the truth, Hofmann must challenge her past and embrace fungal ways. What she and Nameko uncover in the midst of this frigid wasteland will chill them to the core, but will they make it through the storm alive?
Our Thoughts
Adawia:
Firstly, if you decide to read this book, don’t be snacking when you start. The fungal descriptions are rather vividly detailed and quite visceral at times, and not always in an entirely pleasant way ?
But don’t let that put you off. This is an immersive police procedural fantasy that has pronounced detective noir vibes with obligatory angry police boss and complex murder-mystery. It’s main point of difference is that most of the characters are not exactly human, they’re Fungals – a race of humanoid mushroom people from the Island of Hoppon which has been recently colonised, by humans. Naturally, after any colonisation, you end up with a powerful, corrupt minority ruling over the justifiably disgruntled masses. The tension and anger this causes is more or less the theme of this story where the privileged demean and dehumanise the ‘other’ to breaking point.
While I found some of the fungi descriptions to be a little excessive (if the author uses the word “mycelium” one more time …) I thoroughly enjoyed the mushroom people. Their world, while kinda creepy at times, is fascinating, and very well crafted. It’s obvious a lot of work has gone into creating it and I actually preferred reading about the Hopponese and their stories compared to the human characters (spores and mould notwithstanding). This is probably (at least partly) due to most of the humans being some level of xenophobic.
Though I appreciate (FMC) Hoffmann’s redemption arc – she experienced a lot in the few days this story is set across – her transition from xenophobe to empathetic crusader happens just a little too quickly, especially given the harm done to her by the people she grossly disliked. Yes, she did have a very little empathy toward the mistreated Fungals from the beginning, but that mostly only manifested in relation to her own tragic memories and experiences.
This is, overall, a very well written and thought-out, dark story. Even though I didn’t have a lot of love for the main character and her ways – even by the end – I do love the world, and the other characters made up for deficiencies I felt in Hoffman’s character.
I love how Gibson pays homage to various other indie authors with cheeky mentions of them, their books, or their characters throughout this book – it made me smile.
There are a few aspects of this story that are reminiscent of Krystle Matar’s Legacy of the Brightwash, if you like that story I think you’ll also enjoy this one.
Julia:
This is a blend of urban fantasy and science which I found very catching.
The main character starts with a very strong personality flaw, as she’s living in a “mushroom city” but hating the mushroom people.
Mushroom people you say? Yes! Pretty much everything is mushroom in this part of the world, and it all seemed pretty sciency, rather than magic.
For me it still felt like an urban fantasy, set in a world where mushrooms have blended with mostly everything, and I found it super interesting to find out more about this concept.
But back to the main character, she is really rather racist at the start, and overcoming her inherent hatred is a main part of her journey. In parts I felt this could have been handled a bit more depth to it, as she seemed to change it whole leaps instead of adjusting with her job, circumstances and lived experience.
For me this wasn’t too big a deal, as I found the murder mystery, the world, the cultures and the little bits to discover everywhere way more engaging than the character herself. Very often the tone and voice carries a story for me, here it was definitely the mystery and setting that kept me glued to the pages.
So despite the characters not being as great as they could be, I still enjoyed the whole book and devoured it in just two days.
Kerry:
I’m a great fan of Detective mysteries so a SFF/mystery hybrid is definitely one book I looked forward to reading. It was good too, in the sense that when you get a new take on a world a crime is set in, some intriguing characters get tossed in then a common plot becomes a compelling read.
The setting of the novel is set 10 years after the “Spore War” in which Human invaders from a place called Coppria(I got very Western/USA military vibes) had invaded H?pponese (Japan?) and the city in which the crime and the inhabitants of Neo Kinoko are all different fungal types with differing fungal caps and gills; even housing and buildings are made from various fungal varieties. While I loved this “fungalverse“ I did find the repetition of some words did get annoying.
They kept jumping out at me which did pull me from the story more than it should have and this made the flow and my enjoyment pall somewhat.
The main pair of detectives were the usual mismatched couple, a H?ppenese fungal male called Koji and a Copprian female called Hoffman and the story starts with Hoffman finding the body of a fungal child.
I did prefer Koji out of the pairing though why he would work in a job where he is hated by both his own people as well as the Invaders – this gets explained later but also he “joined the NKPD because I thought I could help my people from the inside.” “You are right—I wear this uniform and carry the weight of betrayal,” he said. I caught a glimpse of regret in his expression. “But this investigation is an opportunity to do good for my people in a way I could not without it.”
Hoffman though just got under my skin. She’s been sent to Neo Kinoko as a form of punishment. She’s an ex-alcoholic who has lost her child in a tragic but preventable accident but her constant self victimhood and her EXTREME racism “The thought of a dead kid chilled me. But deep down, I was more disgusted by the fact that the victim was a fungal. I could hardly stand to see mushrooms on a dinner plate, let alone be in the presence of mushroom people— even when they were a corpse.” “How did this backwards species manage such a feat of engineering?” just went on for too long for me personally. Through their journey of solving the crime Hoffman does become more sympathetic towards the Fungal people but this reverse racism comes about too quickly to feel real “Enough, Hofmann! A couple of days with the molder and now you’re the morality police? And with your background—I know everything you did to land your ass here.”
I did enjoy this book overall even with my critiques. Gibson wrote the world and its people well and I easily read this over a day.
Patrick:
My first review of this year’s SPFBO finalists is for a detective story that might be fantasy, might be science fiction, or might be something else entirely. What it is, though, undoubtedly is a well-written noir story in an original setting. We’re in the aftermath of the “spore war”, where an invading power, which may be coded as North American or possibly European, has colonised a country of ‘mushroom people’, referred to by a variety of slurs, but most often as fungals, who are coded as Japanese in a period that is probably equivalent to the second half of the twentieth century. Somewhere around the 1970s or 1980s would be my guess. This is a colonisation as brutal as many in real history, and we start the story with our protagonist, Detective Hoffman, being called to the discovery of a murdered fungal child. She is forced to team up with the only fungal cop in the service to solve the killing.
The story is a fairly standard detective story, but in a setting that is in some ways quite original. I thought the strongest aspect of the book was the writing. After the first chapter, the prose was smooth and engaging. It is, arguably, the best written of this year’s SPFBO finalists.
Where it struggles more, I think, is in the character of Hoffman. She starts out so viciously, even violently racist towards the fungals that I found it hard to believe that she would be willing to throw herself so wholeheartedly and at such risk to herself and her career to solve the murder of a fungal child, despite her own personal backstory. She clearly does not, at the start, see fungals as human or as worthy of respect. It also meant that her arc, set over just a couple of days, to becoming a champion of the fungals seemed unconvincing and unjustified by the story. Starting with her being less extremely racist would have, in my opinion, made the whole thing more convincing. I don’t mind an unlikeable character – in fact, I probably prefer them – but I have to believe in their redemption story if they’re going to have one.
I was also slightly disappointed by the worldbuilding. There were many good things about it, but we discover that the fungals are able to communicate almost psychically (it’s not psychic; the book explains it well), sharing thoughts, emotions and so on. I would have liked to have seen this have more affect on the society that the fungals had built, but the society seemed no different from the kind of human societies that we’re used to seeing in noir detective stories. The same gangsters, criminals, the same hierarchical structures, and so on. Perhaps this will be explored more in future books when I suspect we’ll find out more about the culture the fungals built before the invasion. At this stage, we haven’t dipped that deep, although there are a few hints.
Gibson has a lot of fun dropping in references to friends’ books. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it’s very satisfying to pick up those references. On the other, each time I did, it took me out of the story. On balance, I think I’m not a fan, but I recognise that is entirely subjective.
Finally, because this is a contest for fantasy novels, I should probably address the question of whether this is actually a fantasy book. I know it’s also been entered for the science fiction equivalent of the contest. Let’s start by saying that there isn’t (yet) any magic in the book. The seemingly-psychic abilities are explained scientifically, if with a bit of handwaving, and in any case, psychic abilities are traditionally classified as science fiction, for no obvious reason. But fantasy doesn’t actually have to have magic. I think it comes down to feel. To me, this felt more like science fiction than fantasy. The author has called it ‘weird fiction’, and I think that’s the fairest categorisation, even though it’s not particularly weird. I haven’t removed any marks despite thinking it leans more towards SF than fantasy because the judging group who nominated it clearly saw it as fantasy, and outside of the contest, it really doesn’t matter how a book is shelved.
Overall, this is very well-written, compelling detective story in an original SFF setting, and despite a few flaws, I thoroughly recommend it. If it wins the contest, it would be hard to argue that it doesn’t deserve it.
Calvin:
I don’t have a great deal to add beyond what others have already said. Like the other reviewers here, I found Hoffman to be difficult to like. She is so incredibly prejudiced against the fungals that I took an immediate dislike to her. Convincing stories of characters becoming less prejudiced is probably something we need more of in our society. But I didn’t find Hoffman’s arc to be particularly convincing. Mostly this is because I think changing deeply seated–even unexamined–prejudices takes time. It doesn’t happen in a day, or even a few days.
The worldbuilding, on the other hand, was something I felt Gibson handled very well. The fungal culture and society feels alien in interesting ways. Detective stories and urban fantasy aren’t my preferred subgenres of fantasy, but this one was enjoyable.
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Our judges are Adawia Asad, Julia Kitvaria Sarene, Kerry Smith, Robert Max Freeman and Patrick Samphire. If you’d like to learn more about us, including our likes and dislikes, you can read about them here.
T. O. Munro