Luci LaBang, a beloved drag artist, has mesmerised audiences for years with her performances. When her co-star meets with a mysterious accident, a new starlet named Luda enters the scene. As Luci imparts her knowledge to the young protégée, mysterious deaths begin to befall their fellow actors and crew members.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and I would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

3.5

Luda is an absolute ride from start to finish - I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that felt more like going through a themed rollercoaster, gripping onto the sides, as I was hurtled through an almost cosmic, pantomime filled, horror of a ride.

We centre around Luci LaBang (aka Graeme Mott) an aging drag superstar who’s been playing Widow Twankey in a popular version of the Aladdin pantomime - one that comes with a Phantom of the Opera style twist, that’s been wildly successful, and has returned to Glasgow on its sixth anniversary. The lead role of Aladdin ends up having to be recast, and in struts Luda - stunning, younger, and gender-ambiguous.

Luci takes Luda under their wing, to teach them about the ‘glamour’ - an almost occult melding of worlds, a way to twist things, to become the vision of what you want to portray, in the quest to make the show the best it can be….it’s a shame other cast members keep having such unfortunate accidents….

There’s such a sharp, satirical, wit to the writing style, that kept me bound to its pages. However, it is also just fully unhinged. Like, some things happen that just had me cringing away from the book, and if I wasn’t so curious as to what was actually happening, nor loving the writing style, it might of scared me off. It does NOT shy away from things.

There’s a lot of commentary around aging within this book, which I actually found quite moving. Finding their self past fifty, Luci talks often about papering over the cracks, knowing it won’t get better without intervention from things like injections, and longing for the youth they once so easily had.

The twists in the third act are….frankly unexplainable, and would prevent me from recommending it to most people. However, if you like a bit of an unexpected, fast paced, ‘what the heck is actually happening’ romp - then this is for you. It also feels like quite an alternative festive read, due to the pantomime aspect, despite it being centred around the rehearsal and lead up to the shows opening - if you don’t want to read another festive small town romance this Christmas, maybe take a peek behind this curtain instead. Maybe.

I would recommend looking into trigger warnings before picking this up, especially for the latter half of the novel which goes into quite a psychologically torturous place.

Thank you to the publishers, and Netgalley, for the copy to review!

A book that is, in its own words, all about "deception, simulation, artifice". I loved Morrison's dense, linguistic flourishes, but while it might be the point that its mixture of magical realism and high camp might be a bit much at times, that doesn't mean it isn't also a very difficult book to keep a handle on. Although, if any book is going to make a point out of disappearing into self-referentiality, it's this one.

LUDA is the most original and strange book I've read in a long time. This book is not for everyone. The plot is around Luci LaBang, a drag queen who also performs live in the arts, and her tenure as her career begins to decline. Luci is cast in a pantomime Aladdin production and meets her enigmatic co-star, Luda. Luda is immediately captivated by Luci and wishes Luci would take them in and teach them how to be as successful as Luci. As Luda grows more involved in Luci's life, the cast and staff of the show are all inexplicably targeted. Luda, who exactly is she?

I'm not sure if I liked this book or not. It's overblown and overly wordy, and it also felt like Luci was sitting at her make-up station telling you the narrative instead of you experiencing it in the voyeuristic way I wish the story was presented. Having said that, the book is distinct and intriguing in the sense that Luci is a character you want to learn more and more about. I wish the tale was told differently since I believe the complex language style hindered me from feeling entirely interested. Luda is an innovative character-driven tale with a protagonist that will be with me for a long time, with aspects of terror and mystery.

Grant Morrison's first novel* was trailed as being about an ageing drag queen and her ruthless replacement, a notion that left me cold - reheated Lord Fanny doing All About Eve by way of Ru Paul. Which isn't entirely inaccurate, but if only someone had used the magic word 'panto', I'd have been on it much quicker. The narrator, Luci LaBang, is the dame in an even more meta than usual specimen of the form, Phantom Of The Pantomime, which then gains yet another layer as members of the cast start falling victim to freak accidents. Is her protégé Luda to blame?

I don't like invoking British comics' wizard war too often, but compare that description to either of Alan Moore's acknowledged novels and you start to see the problem. It's a bit basic, isn't it? Yes, Morrison is clearly excited at getting to play with tricks that work better in prose, like unreliable narrators, but it's the excitement of a litfic writer's first blundering into what they insist isn't science fiction, not Moore's pushing at the boundaries of the form. There is some lovely writing here (I'm not sure I've ever seen a better description of the crushing existential guilt which attends a certain flavour of hangover; the anxiety of the decaying former beauty is captured perfectly), but there's also just too damn much of it, details which would have worked fine as panel description for an artist slowing things down more than the substance merits when passed directly to the reader. Before long, one sympathises with Luda's impatience at Luci's leisurely pace while initiating her into the mysteries of the Glamour - and all the more so if you're already familiar with the underlying principles from earlier, better Morrison. Which is clearly part of the problem here; he's been in a lull for a decade or so, and trying to get out of that by trying another medium is a high-risk strategy for a jumpstart (see also: Brave New World. Or rather, don't). Occasionally there are glimpses of that brilliant strangeness of yore - the Flat Police would have been right at home in Doom Patrol. But as such, they mainly made me wish I were reading Doom Patrol. And set against them, you get really dubious bits, like Luda's story about being adopted as the replacement for a missing child by a couple who are very clearly positioned as the McCanns right down to the lost girl's distinctive eye. Which I would have understood more if it had gone into full-on Big Dave shock value, but as is feels more pointless than tasteless, the sort of thing I'd expect to find in one of those paperbacks with a nocturnal suburban scene on the cover and a sentence fragment for a title. I think I'm making the book sound worse than I found it; plenty of novels I'd like less are critical and/or commercial hits. But that may be precisely because an outright car-crash would have felt more like the Morrison I used to love than this baggy but basically competent literary thriller. As is, I'm left knowing that there might be avenues worth following (the treatment of gender and its intersection with Morrison's own inadvertent re-pronouning; the way the malleability of identity that felt like potential in nineties Morrison stories has darkened along with the times; the late appearance of the least showy of the recurrent Morrison tropes), but I can't summon the enthusiasm to pursue any of them.

*First published novel, anyway - whatever happened to The If?

(Netgalley ARC)

I really enjoyed this, I did find it a little hard to get into but the book is well worth a read.

I really enjoyed the narration and although at times it felt like things were added in pointlessly to shock it was good fun.

Luda - review

I really tried with this book, but it was just exhausting.

At first, I really appreciated how wordy it was, and how much of a different experience it felt to read this book, but at the end, I was just frustrated. There were so many things that were so brilliant, but so much gibberish in between the made me feel like maybe I didn't enjoy this book as much as I thought.

It was too self-aware, which was cute at first, but then it just felt like going in circles with a character who just doesn't know how to tell a story. at first, I thought I was gonna enjoy the characters, introspective world, the most, even more so than the story itself, but at the end, I realized it just wasn't enough.

Even so, if Garrison wants to write another prose book, I would still give it a shot. Let's see.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC to review

2 stars!

Now hold up. LOOK AT THAT COVER! READ THAT SUMMARY! MY GOD! Perfection!!!!

BUT I wanted to like this SOOOOO BADLY I was so ready for this and excited but it's so wordy that I just could not get into the story at all. I just kept thinking about how wordy it was and I was just sadly reading just to finish it. The story seems so so so so good but it's overshadowed by dense words.

Luda is a sprawling novel about a drag star working in a new pantomime who becomes obsessed with their mysterious new co-star. Luci LaBang has had a varied career, but now she's appearing in a meta-pantomime in her hometown of Gasglow, an alternate version of Glasgow. When the Principal Boy playing Aladdin has an accident, the mysterious Luda appears to take the part, and with it, capture Luci's interest, wanting to know the secrets of the Glamour to be able to transform yourself, but as might be expected, things means not everything is as it seems.

I really wanted to enjoy this book more than I did, as it has a great concept and some really fun elements woven in. The thing that I—and I think many people—found difficult was the narration style, which is very purposefully too verbose and full of digressions as Luci's style. I appreciated what it was doing, but even with this, it felt like it still needed more cutting down or honing, so that the style didn't actually become a barrier to wanting to keep reading. It is all about obfuscating, both the style and the book, and I like that, but it wasn't always enjoyable to read.

In terms of the plot, it's fairly simple, with a lot of bits of backstory (that may or may not be true, as the whole book is fashioned with layers of lies and ambiguity) thrown in as well: obsession, mirroring, and people mysteriously dying. A lot of the twists are very obvious, and it was hard to tell if this is purposeful or not, which might in itself be intentional. The setting of Gasglow is a whole thing, though for me I found there wasn't actually as much of it as a setting as I might've expected, and I felt like the speculative element (which isn't so much my thing anyway) often got lost amongst the narration. I did like the way you slowly learnt things about Luci's history and these felt like they could've been whole books in themselves, which is a testament to the messy ambiguity that was conjured around them.

One of the themes that really comes across when reading is the idea of being who you are without worrying if it's what people expect or problematic or anything else, and it's interesting how it addresses this, with Luci's narration often focusing on weird details and comparisons to be edgy and shocking, but at other times being very nuanced about who people are and what is expected of them. If nothing else, it gets across the complexity of a person's inner self, whether or not it is actually authentic, but hilariously, at the same time, the book argues that pantomime shouldn't be politically correct or change, maybe because it's too much of a mess to actually be offensive (and 'messy' definitely describes Luci and Luda, too).

I like that Luda is bold and, yes, messy, playing around with what is appropriate and the reliability of anything you are told in a book. It also takes a very British look at queerness and drag, filtered through the eyes of a very specific character. At first, I could handle the narrative style, but the further I read, the more it grated on me, and by the end I was lost in the swirling references and digressions. I don't know Morrison's other work though I'm aware of them, so maybe fans of their work will enjoy this more, but for me, I would've maybe liked the same vibe but just more cut down.

I was really excited for this because of drag queens and mystery, but I found it to be overly wordy. I know that is kind of the point, but it took away from the story. When that happens, I think it's a problem. It had promise, but probably needed to be pared down some.