This is a weird and unusual tale about twins in a strange, dystopian world. A very short read but something a bit different and thought provoking.

Poetic horror dystopian short novel.
It took me a while to get into it, there are several narrators and points of view. What is the redness, who is Koan, is it a cult or is it reality?
Unsettling read altogether.

A story built on shifting sands and incomplete facts, in a confusing world of unreliable narrators. A dystopia where nothing is ever fully clear - but beautifully written.

Redder Days is a strange and powerful novel that I really enjoyed. It is a story about twins Anna and Adam who live in an abandoned commune. The landscape is volatile, their commune prepares for the world-ending event they believe is imminent. Adam keeps watching by day, Anna by night. They meet at dawn and dusk. Their only companion is Koan, the commune's former leader, who still exerts a malignant control over their daily rituals. But when one of the previous inhabitants' returns, everything Anna and Adam thought they knew to be true is thrown into question.

The story is set in a dystopian world that has been even more twisted by a corrupt leader. One of the key elements of the novel is the idea of a disease called redness, which is imbued in all elements, including people and nature. Rainsford uses all her writing powers to really get under your skin with the visual descriptions of the redness set in stark contrast to the landscape is very powerful and emotive. The leader Koan twists this idea so the people of his community believe everything they’re told. Koan is a leader who is manipulative, quite possibly self-delusional but carries all the power. Not an original idea but written very effectively.

The story is told through the first-person narrative, which at times felt very stark, unsettling and uncomfortable, but that is the author's intention. The prose is very lyrical and beautiful, the story is moving in places with an emotional impact towards the end.

The themes explored are about abandonment, the endurance of the human spirit in the most desperate of times. An interesting and engrossing novel.

2.5 stars (coming out March 11, 2021)

**ARC provided by NetGalley for an honest review.**
#RedderDays #NetGalley

Pros: Rainsford's uniquely weird word choices where everything feels a bit off (great for a dystopian setting), red plague/infection dystopian, cult vibes

Cons: too many POVs (5+), 80% talk/reminiscing with only 20% action/current plot, incest between the brother-sister twins (which was NOT needed at all), confusion due to vague/subtle writing style (which I usually love--as in her previous book, Follow Me to Ground--but it didn't work for me here at all), flatlining of almost all character arcs

TW: incest, murder, child death, parental abandonment, physical abuse, mental abuse

Similar vibes: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

Video link: Jan WU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRCG2b-QLxg&t=11s)

I tried really hard to like this, but the poetic voice that never really changed between narrators and only served to confuse the reader (this reader, anyway). Plus, Anna's orgasm the very first time we meet her just seemed over the top to me, like it was put in there intentionally to be 'edgy'. Sorry, not for me.

I was stunned while reading this entire book, underlining whole paragraphs to pick apart later. Sue Rainsford returns to the viscera in this compelling and uncomfortable piece of magic realism, using language so primitive and raw that I couldn't take my eyes away.

Twins Adam and Anna are living in a derelict commune, a commune they had been born into. They are alone there except for the commune's former leader, Koan. They live there waiting for Storm, what they presume to be the apocalypse. They are taught to fear 'redness,' an infection where the body's animalistic desires seem to manifest itself outwardly. At least, that's what I think redness is - Rainsford doesn't spoon feed but instead she places a lot of trust in the reader, dropping you in to her world with precision and care.

This book is easy to speed through, but I had to take my time because of the absolute poetry of it. This read was disturbing, shocking and beyond heartbreaking. The characters were all brilliantly portrayed and Rainsford paints images so instinctually

I adored this read and was so honoured to be given this advance copy by Netgalley and Penguin Books Ireland. Out on March 4th and I can't recommend it enough!

I haven't been able to concentrate on a book since finishing Redder Days a few nights ago, ages past my bedtime, and I was wide awake for so long turning over the ending in my mind. I had been a little slow to get into the novel first, though I liked the premise and had heard brilliant things about Sue Rainsford's first novel, Follow Me to Ground, but once I got going with this one I really sped through it.

The book is about a pair of young adult twins, Anna and Adam, who are living in an abandoned commune where their mother and other people like them waited for Storm, which they believe to be the end of the world that they will be saved during if they continue to make their devotions and live in the "right" way. Anna and Adam take turns to sleep; Anna is the more forceful, independent twin and lives by night, and her vulnerable, strange brother Adam lives by day. They try to behave as Koan, the now old and frail scientist who led the commune has taught them, even after the whole group, including their mother, had left.

Right before they were born, a seemingly fatal illness had spread through humans and animals that could be recognised by a spreading red colour near the afflicted area. It isn't totally clear what causes this, and the only person we really learn from is Koan, who certainly has his own ideas and agenda, but it seems to be caused by malicious greed or lust, and even more interesting, on a societal level it is perhaps tied to the extinction of the planet.

This book was really disturbing, not just in terms of content but more so in how it is written. Rainsford doesn't tell the story in a linear way and makes you work to piece together the story yourself, almost dreading what you might uncover. Her prose is nothing short of incredible, and while it takes you a while to get used to the strange, mesmerising rhythm of her words, reading it becomes addictive. I underlined so many passages in my kindle copy, because I knew I would have to race on with the book to find out more, but would want to return to savour so many haunting passages and beautiful turns of phrase. She has managed to create the world anew in Anna and Adam, who have never known a "normal" life, and uses their fresh eyes as a way to break free of the constraints of ordinary language.

What a poetic, surreal, dreamscape of a novel. Maybe more nightmare than dream, but how else to properly capture the way those beautiful words flowed, painting scenes like pictures. I could almost literally see the images this book built in my head.

As beautiful as it was, Sue Rainsford has written a book that's not afraid to make you work for an understanding. The reader is an active participant in the narrative - I don't believe it would be possible to make it through with any kind of understanding without doing the work of linking the threads you're handed. But it doesn't feel like work, or not the kind that's an obligation, anyway. Reading Redder Days felt like making a breakthrough.

I've deliberately mentioned as little of the plot itself as possible. For one, there's a summary available to point readers in the direction of genre signposts, if they want them; for two, I think it pays to go into this book as unaware as possible, and simply read. Sue Rainsford has managed something incredibly special here - Redder Days will be sitting in my brain, weaving it's magic in my memory, for quite some time.

Sue Rainsford is a Dublin based writer and researcher concerned with “hybrid, lyric and embodied texts, explicit fusions of critical and corporeal enquiry, as well as with experiences that alter our understanding of flesh”

Her first novel – Follow Me To Ground – was first published in 2018 by the small Irish press New Island – and longlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize, before being republished in the UK in 2019.

It was a memorable and latently haunting book – one inspired by the author’s research interests and her interest in art (in that case - the installation art of Jenny Keane and her lick drawings) – effectively taking artistic, written and metaphorical ideas around women’s bodies and imagining a world in which those idea serve as a reality for the novel’s protagonists.

And the same concept implies here.

Here the artwork is Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series where she left imprints of her body in nature using a variety of substances including blood to mark the silhouette, and the author’s wider research has also researched stains which (in an essay) she describes as “an unintended mark that, once made, resists removal. Inadvertent remnant and by-product, it is something made while we were looking elsewhere; evidence that our attention faltered, or that some vessel failed to function”.

And that leads us to the world of the book – one where the world appears to have been struck by various manifestations of some form of blooming corporeal redness (of various shades), associated in nature as well as humanity with a kind of ecstatic self-absorption leading to a breakdown in both natural processes and society.

Koan – some form of researcher seems to spot the signs before many others and as disaster begins to strike a group of his colleagues and their friends follow him to set up a form of sanctuary on top of a disused but still burning mine. Given Koan’s seeming ability to predict what had happened (although in a rather nice analogy to both climate change and catastrophic pandemics, he admits in his journal that “Of course, of course, of course it was coming. It was inevitable. It had always been inevitable, but it had never seemed that “inevitable” would pertain to our lifetime”), the others initially acquiesce to a cult-lie religion he establishes involving elements such as the ruthless eradication of red (including exposing infants – most of whom are born exhibiting it), salt cleansing, the believe in an apocalyptical Storm and devotional worship to it.

But at the time of the book – almost all his followers have left (dissillusioned when the Storm did not come and then starting to see signs – via jellyfish – of nature starting to right itself) except for two twins – Anna and Adam. Anna and Adam were born in the commune - to one of his most independent followers who openly challenges his leadership as sexist and controlling. As twins (like it seems litters in animals) they are not born with redness and so allowed to live – but Koan siezes his chance to indoctrinate them (particularly Adam) in his worldview. Now Koan is sick and his ex-followers are feeling guilty about having left the twins with him.

The novel is told through various voices – Anna and Adam (who have a complex relationship) in the present day, Matthew (one of the ex-followers now returning), Matthew’s wife (who lost a child), the twins mother and in the journals of Koan.

As with Rainsford’s other book – the world in which the protagonist lives is their reality – and although it is one whose origins and underlying truths and patriarchal assumptions Ada (in “Follow Me To The Ground”) and Anne here explore – it is not one where either the narrator or characters provide detailed and artificial expositionary explanation – rather Rainsford relies on her readers imagination.

Overall I found this another memorable and latently haunting book. It is already clear to me that the author is carving out a distinctive niche for herself in literature.

Perhaps it’s because red is the colour of blood, the colour of infection, rashes and inflammations. Perhaps it’s because it represents danger. Or because it is so often a symbol for passions which some consider too risky, or too dirty, akin to a malady. The fact is that since Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, different authors have referenced the colour in the context of pandemic fiction – be it Jack London in The Scarlet Plague or Niccolo Ammaniti in the post-apocalyptic Anna.

Redder Days by Sue Rainsford taps into this tradition, even while it’s smashing it to smithereens. Yes, Redder Days is a post-apocalyptic, (post- ) pandemic novel with strong horror undertones, but it’s certainly not your typical run-of-the-mill scary bonanza. This is immediately clear from Rainsford’s narrative approach, which is purposely challenging to the reader. She does not provide us with a linear story but, rather, invites us to piece the plot together through short chapters told from different characters’ viewpoints, alternating with journal entries describing the advent of a mysterious pandemic which disrupts normal life. The journal entries, however, place us in medias res and are quite cryptic, with Rainsford avoiding the short-cut of simply using them to provide us with the context of her tale. The result is that we readers, much like the protagonists of the novel, are often unsure of what exactly is happening.

So what are the bare bones of the story? A new malady afflicts both the human and animal world, with symptoms which are shocking and fatal. A group of survivors decide to set up a remote commune where they can be safe from the pandemic. They appoint as their leader Koan – a doctor who manages to keep a cool head when everything is falling apart. Koan “knows things”, he seems to understand the illness better than the others, and he is therefore the natural choice to head the fledgling community. But Koan is also manipulative and, in the declared interest of protecting his clan, starts to imbue this physical illness with “moral” and “spiritual” implications, essentially changing the community of survivors into a misogynistic cult. And then, the real horror begins.

Revealing any further details of the plot would undermine the whole point of the novel, which invites the readers to reach their own understanding about the strange events portrayed. A word of warning though. Redder Days raises more questions than it answers and is not a book for those who expect the final chapter to tie up all the loose ends. There are also several details in the novel which appear to have a symbolic rather than literal meaning, making the narrative dense but lyrical and poetic. This is certainly an unusual and thought-provoking read.

Review: Redder Days by Sue Rainsford

As the UK entered its third lockdown due to the ongoing threat posed by the global Covid-19 pandemic, I was busy reading Sue Rainsford’s daring second novel, Redder Days, which will be published in March of this year. Set in a seemingly post-apocalyptic, virus ravaged landscape, it feels like a timely, if not uncannily prophetic read.

Your companions in this nightmarish world are twins, Adam and Anna, who are living, or rather surviving, in the decrepit remains of a commune with their shadowy and diminished former leader, Koan. Their Mother has seemingly abandoned them two years before, but still they stay put and carry out their daily rituals in what feels like an outpost at the end of the world.

Adam and Anna both believe that Storm, a world-ending event, is imminent, though they have lived in the commune since their birth twenty-one years before. Their days are spent in preparation for it - Adam watches by day and Anna by night. They watch for signs of a mysterious ‘red’ plague, which infects and distorts humans, wildlife and the environment, all the while maintaining some extreme social distancing and hygiene practices.

Rainsford drops you straight into a strange and sensual world, without fanfare or apology, and a few pages in you realise that there’s no tidy explanation for the way this world is, and no one is coming to help you out of it. You have to figure this novel out for yourself - and in a world of endless debate and analysis, I found that to be completely refreshing.

The story is told through first person narratives and the journal entries of Koan as read by Anna, which flick back and forth through time. It’s very ‘show, don’t tell’ which can be challenging - this isn’t a relaxing read by any means. There’s no real exposition in the journal entries or accounts from other, former members of the commune either. The situation is also further complicated by the arrival of a previous inhabitant - something which calls a lot of the information you have gleaned into question.

What there is plenty of in Redder Days is sumptuously rich imagery and prose. I have never read fiction like this. It is dreamlike. With high praise from one of my current favourite authors, Daisy Johnson, I was excited to read this book - and it didn’t disappoint. It made me think, it made me feel, and it is unapologetically original.

4/5

Mirror twins Anna and Adam keep vigil for the apocalypse in a commune abandoned by all but its former leader, Koan.

At times, the twins run so feral they no longer seem human. Elsewhere, Anna and Adam appear to be two sides of the same coin.

A mother’s stain lies at the heart of Redder Days. The stain and other apparent portents, including hawks and wolves, cast light (albeit shadowy) on the characters who interpret them. The novel addresses the oppression of women and those without a voice, and the transgression of boundaries.

In this follow up to debut ‘Follow Me To Ground’, Rainsford returns to her fascination with viscera, delving deep inside the human to reveal our primal nature. Her writing is poetic and profound, and cryptic. Even at the most basic level (a few more dialogue tags would be helpful), the author challenges the reader.

I intend to come back to this book and would love to discuss it with others who have read it.

My thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House UK for the ARC.

I'm so glad I discovered Sue Rainsford! I loved Follow Me to the Ground an her new book Redder Days is almost as good. Redder Days deals with the abuse of power in a very scary way and it can be read as a very topical book as well when you think of corona. Rainsford is a wonderfully imaginative writer. She creates a world that at first look resembles ours, but appears to be quite different, stranger. She also leaves you guessing what exactly is happening and leaves lots of loose ends, so as a reader you must be willing to invest a bit. Personally I like that in a novel, but I can imagine readers wanting an easier read. Recommended!
Thank you Random House UK and Netgalley for the ARC.

"Redder Days" would instantly appeal to an audience that does not back away from the strange and unusual, as it’s certainly not your run-of-the-mill read.

Undoubtedly this is a book without boundaries, a place where surrealness shines down upon every page. Events explore the hidden wants, needs and demands of a new, malignant normal and appear to direct the story everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

During alternating chapters time is gifted to each character and their unrestrained voices to share this perplexing story in a relatively primitive way. Through the crumbling grip of Koan, Anna and Adam clinging to the remnants of their mother, whose presence remains strong despite her being physically absent, and the enigma that is Matthew, the tension and expectancy of the reverential “Storm” gradually magnifies.

There is a level of sacrifice, commitment, and concealment within their community, which would feel unfamiliar and even incomprehensible to the average reader. It’s almost dystopian, with something ‘otherly’ thrown in.

Are they caught in the grip of hysteria, an affliction, or an inventive fictional reality? Well, considering the ending was more of a beginning raising more questions than answers, I guess I’ll never know for sure. Left me thinking about it for a while though.

I found Redder Days both interesting and hard going - and never quite reached enjoyable. The shifting character viewpoint is helpful to frame the variety of characters and perspectives (both pre and post sickness), and the perspective of the younger characters who have grown up only knowing the post sickness world works well, but doesn’t feel particularly original. There may be an element of bringing expectations here that weren’t ever intended to be met, but if I’m going to read a book like this in the midst of an actual pandemic i think i was looking for something more., which isn’t the fault of the author as such!

Anyway, i’m Sure others will get more out of it but it’s been four days since I finished it and there’s been limited emotional capture for me - i say this as I felt there would be more! Again, I shouldn’t criticise for the book not being what i thought it might be..

I have to admit I didn't understand this book. It's way too more sci fi than I thought and since I never understand sci-fi then that's probably the reason. I can't really review it then as I'm missing the point of it. I do know it's dystopian and creepy. I felt though I had to decide what was happening as the author liked to be vague. Probably just me though so apologies in advance.

It is just SO WEIRD. Spooky, creepy, dystopian and messed up. Just what I needed to effectively erase everything else from my overworked brain and just feel the sweet surreal suspense.

I was so incredibly excited for this book because of this author's first novel, Follow Me to Ground, which swept me off my feet with is spookiness. Turns out I loved Redder Days just as much.

Redder Days is a short, lyrical novel which you will want to read not just for the story, but also to devour the writing. It begins with twins Anna and Adam preparing for the end of the world, totally isolated in a commune - how fitting with the pandemic mood. They alternate times when they keep watch and barely see other people.... which is when things get even weirder. It's a short novel already, so I don't want to ruin it for the readers by making any spoilers. I just feel that it's one of those books which you need to experience entirely on your own.

Memorable, spooky and confusing, this book is simply brilliant. The only thing I didn't like was the dang ending, which left me hanging confused and mad. I want answers, where they at?! Perhaps that was just the point.

*Thank you to the Publisher for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Follow Me to Ground, Sue Rainsford’s debut novel, published in 2018 by the small, independent press New Ireland, was a striking inclusion on the longlist of the Republic of Consciousness Prize. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2673418068

Redder Days is her second novel, and will be published in March 2021.

It is set in an area where a disease of “redness” has struck nature including people, or at least as believed by a commune under the leadership of Koan:

"A glimmer of puce in a woman’s eyes, a child’s back with its fuzz of copper fur. Biological ripples that spoke to an interior horror, to a particular kind of damage – that signalled we were now vessels for a very particular kind of rupture.

We knew it was entwined, somehow, with the abbreviated timeframe – perhaps, a kind of cleansing. The planet, thus distressed, had found a new way to purge. But we did not know why every body it moved through it moved through like a storm. Why it turned a person to rough hands and probing tongues, why it landed in the body as an unrelenting fever. But this is the cruelty of any storm; irrespective of its size and point of origin, it is without motivation or vendetta. No storm is subject to reason. If you are destroyed by a storm, it is simply because of where you were standing at the time.

In short, there was nothing to do but accept it. Let our fears and beliefs settle around it.

Red wind, red sun, red hurricane.
That’s when we start running.
But block your ears and stuff your mouth,
when you see the red man coming."

This last one of the simple rhyming couplets (seemingly having invented a whole religion out of red rhyming with dead) uttered by the rather misnamed Koan, as he certainly doesn’t use Kōans. Indeed as the backstory emerges Koan appears to be misogynistic, manipulative and possibly delusional.

The story centres on two twins, Anna and Adam, born in the community and now the only two left, with the now rather feeble, Koan, after the others left, including their mother, her only remaining trace a stain in their cabin:

"Two years without our mother, with only the stain she left behind that Anna every so often rubs her foot over.
A stain made by our mother.
The stain Mother made.
Mother’s stain.

Sometimes I pretend it’s her mucus and blood, a mark she made while birthing. I picture her overcome by our birth and not making it to the farrow room, not even making it to her own bed.

Or: simply deciding she didn’t want the later trouble of cleaning the sheets in the stream and so lying down on the floor. Not even a pillow for her back, her head.

Our strong, strong mother. Mostly woman but also iron, also stone."

Rainsford has acknowledged (https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/a-luminous-index-erotic-phenomenology-of-a-stain) the influence of Ana Mendieta’s Untitled (Silueta Series) on the novel.

see e.g. https://i.ibb.co/gWNjjCy/GP-0420-2-Silueta-Works-in-Mexico.jpg

The novel’s world includes many seemingly key elements – the complex manifestations of redness, the 'Devotion' those in the community undertake (which for the twins seems to verge on the incestuous), the approaching Storm, personified as female but seemingly the end of the world, hawks, whales, jellyfish, and, particularly interesting for me as a twin, the importance of twins as perhaps the only ones able to fight off redness – but the novel gives no explanations or framework for any of this [which in a first-person narration can be a little off as presumably the characters have some idea of the world in which they live], and the reader ends the novel with even less understanding than they began.

But that is to set the book expectations it has no intention of meeting – this is poetic not dystopian fiction. A novel perhaps to revisit post publication when it is more widely read and discussed, including by the author, as I suspect, from her previous novel, there is much more symbolism here than Mendieta’s artwork.

For now 3 stars.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

All credit to Sue Rainsford: she does not spoon feed her readers. Rather, she drops you into her world and leaves you to work out what is going on by piecing together the clues that emerge from the action and from the dialogue. There’s enough there to make this a perfectly manageable task, but don’t expect to be given all the answers. In fact, it’s not just the context that is left to the reader’s imagination: if you are the kind of person who likes books to tie up loose ends and draw stories to a close, this probably isn’t the book for you. This is the kind of book that you may well finish with more questions than answers.

Rainsford’s first novel (Follow Me To Ground) was one of the spookiest books I have read and this second novel has some similarities to that one. It is a kind of horror story and it is written in an illusive style that works by feeding the reader’s imagination rather than explaining everything. But it wasn’t that previous novel to which my mind kept turning as I read this one. I found myself rather thinking about the COVID pandemic and about the novels of Emily St John Mandel.

Imagine a world where something strange and new starts to affect the lives of all the people around you and even kills many of them. It’s something that means you have to learn to live in a different way and you have to ensure you always keep your distance from others until you know it is safe (there’s even a paragraph that explains the social distancing rules). Like me, you probably find that world far easier to imagine in November 2020 than you did in November 2019. This is the world of Redder Days, although I am not going to go into details about exactly what is happening because putting it all together (as much of it as Rainsford sees fit to tell us) and then imagining some more is key to the reader’s enjoyment. In truth, it’s nothing like COVID, but there are a lot of things that happen and observations that are made that seem spookily relevant.

I mentioned Emily St John Mandel. What she does remarkably well in her novels is straddle a major event giving us both before and after (perhaps Station Eleven is her best and most well known example of this) jumping from one to the other in a way that allows each part of the narrative to feed the other. Here, Rainsford does a similar thing. Part of what we read is in the form of documents written by one character when everything was just kicking off. Another strand of the narrative tells us about what is happening to them in the book’s “now”. This second strand also includes a number of flashbacks which fill in details.

I enjoyed reading this book. But I think that’s because I like books that leave loose ends and that leave a lot to the reader’s imagination. I can see that the style might frustrate readers with different tastes. This novel is not as spooky as the author’s first, but it does leave the reader with a lot of unanswered questions about exactly what was going on and how some of the things that are mentioned but don’t happen might play out. You might even decide that some things do play out to completion in the novel but just in ways that are not what you were expecting. I’m not sure that happens, but it’s a possible interpretation (I think).

Motherhood, abandonment, power in the wrong hands. These are all key themes set in a world where something strange is happening to the population. It’s a heady mixture.

My thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley.

3.5 stars rounded up for atmosphere and for stirring the imagination.