Bulgarian folklore, murder mysteries, the great hunt, and more suffuse this new debut titled Foul Days by Genoveva Dimova. Today’s story follows a powerful witch named Kosara in the walled city of Chernograd. Chernograd is a cage of nightmares that exists to trap all sorts of evil and mischievous spirits on the far side of the wall. Rusalkas, kikimoras, and lycanthropes are just a few of the terrors that roam the streets, and no time is worse than the New Year celebration called The Foul Days. Kosara uses her wits and magic to evade all of it, but there is one beast she can’t escape: her ex the Zmey, known as the Tsar of Monsters. She’s defied him one too many times, and now he’s hunting her. Betrayed to him by someone close to her, Kosara’s only hope is to trade her shadow―the source of her powers―for illegal passage across the Wall to Belograd, the idyllic and peaceful opposite of Chernograd’s twisted streets.
Life in Belograd should be a comfortable lazy river, but Kosara begins to wonder if there is a hidden cost to this monster-free urban center. On top of this, Kosara soon develops a fast-acting version of the deadly wasting sickness that stalks shadowless witches―and only reclaiming her magic can cure her. To trace her shadow, she’ll have to team up with a cop love interest in 2024, which is a bold move to say the least.
Much like how Foul Days is a story about mirrors and opposites, my feelings on this book are of two minds. Subject, lore, and setting wise this book is an enormous gust of fresh air. The Slavic folklore is well married to the dark urban setting in a way that enhances both. The world appears lived in, with all the magical bits and pieces informing character experiences and perspectives and meaningfully driving the plot forward. Truthfully, this is one of the best books that uses its premise to tell a story that I have read in recent years. On top of just a plethora of interesting lesser-known monsters in the book, the use of Slavic folklore, myth, and fables wonderfully fleshes out the book and actually feels relevant to the plot without ever feeling contrived.
The thematic execution of the clash of nightmare/utopia cities is fabulously well done. It gives the setting a ton of character, and I would argue that the cities themselves have more personality than the leads (which we will get to in a minute). The privileged dump all the world’s horrors onto marginalized and underprivileged individuals and then shove it behind a wall. The poor then get to spend their existence adapting to the refuse and whims of the rich, while the rich cosplay as poor for fun and vilify the character of the impoverished for not being born rich. It’s great commentary, very well integrated into the world, and I love the themes. Unfortunately, this all is undercut by the fact that the characters feel substantively empty.
Kosara is an empty glass filled with romance tropes for the reader to project themselves onto, and she bored me to pieces. Her story takes place in such an interesting world, that she feels completely unmoored from, and she drifts through the narrative like a window floating in a bay. The pacing of her personal narrative is a nightmare. We constantly stop the story progression for backstory bits that feel like they add nothing while dashing through the more interesting elements of the city to race to their narrative payoff. The things I want to sit with and think about disappear before I can even finish a page, and Kosara’s generic struggles never seem to wrap up.
This is paired with a super weird choice to make her love interest in the book a cop in a world where it is pretty thematically established that everyone is ACAB. There is nothing wrong with the cop from a personality standpoint, he is cute and funny. But, the choice to make him a cop feels bizarre. Nothing about him being a cop feels relevant to the story, he goes AWOL from his duties almost immediately and then does exactly zero police work for the rest of the tale. I feel like Dimova wanted to imply he was Sherlock-esque, but this is a world where the cops are established as enforcers of the rich much like our real world. I don’t know, making him a cop just seemed to muddle the otherwise really clear message I was vibing with and I didn’t love it.
Foul Days in every sense is a story of opposites and mirrors. Dimova has spent a lot of effort to craft a world that feels effortless. It’s alive with atmosphere and personality that just breeds clever commentary. I just wish it was populated by people who were slightly more interesting than a piece of paper with every romance trope of the last five years written on it.
Rating: Foul Days – 7.0/10
-Andrew
An ARC of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The thoughts on this book are my own.
