Review (sample): Isabelle Quilty, Siphon Break

Isabelle Quilty’s Siphon Break comes with the following description at Amazon:

‘Because Siphon are never taught to feel guilty about eating mermaids.’

The first thing young Siphon are taught is to relinquish all guilt at the consumption of the beautiful, dazzling scaled mer-eople [sic].

The second is that you will never drown, but to never walk to into the ocean.

The third, your prey will always be wearing a green-blue necklace to allow them to walk on land.

Rey knows these rules like the back of his hand. But these rules start to look a whole lot different one Summer when that hand begins to hold the hand of the soft-spoken yet wise mer-man Finn.

It’s a novella, only 57 pages, and from the brief sample, it’s got some good qualities. Shame about the proofreading.

I mean, honestly: your little description is the first impression you make, and you misspell “mer-people” (kind of an important term in this book)? The other first impression comes from the book’s cover, which seems attractive enough (not that I’m any judge of visual art), but it has that same tag-line: “Because Siphon are never taught to feel guilty about eating mermaids.” Er, yes. But they’re often taught to feel guilty about eating something else? Surely you mean that siphon (why the capital letter, if mer-people isn’t capitalized?) are taught never to feel guilty?

Okay, enough. Yes, it’s a problem. Yes, the sample is littered with this kind of thing. Yes, I wish the author would learn to use a possessive apostrophe accurately and consistently. And above all, yes, I wish this author would hand the manuscript around to sharp-eyed friends before publishing—because actually, the text isn’t bad at all.

In very short order, we get the gist of the thing. The narrator, Rey, is a teenaged siphon living with his dad (also a siphon: apparently siphon and mer-person are species) somewhere along the coast, probably in England. He’s old enough to do his own hunting, so he wanders down to the pier to pick up crunchy, munchy mer-people. Where he meets a pretty boy with the distinctive necklace of a mer-man.

Uh oh.

You can see how this is going to go, right? In a sense, it’s a spin on the typical post-Anne Rice vampire-queer thing, done YA and (assuming the piece is complete) with admirable brevity. And you have to admit, mer-people and some sort of demi-human predators is an unusual way of doing it.

One bit I wonder about: is this supposed to be funny at all? I can’t tell. There’s that old English cliché about “hanging out down by the pier where the men dress as ladies,” as Monty Python used put it, or “hello, sailor.” With that in mind, this whole setup starts to seem like a rather knowing joke lightening a potentially ugly story (young gay cannibal love). But the sample is so short that one can’t tell if Quilty intends the joke. I hope so.

I wish the author would proofread this thing rigorously and re-release it, because I for one would have a heck of a time reading it in its current, unfinished state. (Raw, like bloody chunks of mer-person flesh….) But I do think there is real potential here.

If you read Siphon Break, do let me know what you thought, and whether my read was accurate at all!