(Not everybody's cup of tea...)
Title: Hekate’s Tea
Author: Anthony Ciulla
Date: 2021
Publisher: Amazon Kindle
Length: 188 e-pages
Illustrations: color pictures
Quote: “I didn’t know what happened or how it
happened, but I was teleporting...I JUST DID IT TWICE!”
“Young adult, noir” doesn’t even come close. If
you’re looking for a book to feed into a biochemical cycle of angst, seek no
further.
Only well into the story does Hellana Hoggelmaier
explain that she is a German teenager who uses English as a second language.
There are clues: if she were American the angst would probably start with her
name, but in Germany her friends don't seem to blink at calling her Hell.
The story begins with little Hell sharing fantasy adventure stories with her beloved father, before his murder. Mourning melodramatically, she considers suicide as a way to be with her father again, but stays alive for the sake of her mother, who does seem a bit shellshocked, or perhaps she’s taking drugs to help her cope with the grief. Then the bookseller, who’s always been her and her father’s friend, hands her a book about the Greek goddess Hekate, another netherworld goddess sometimes considered to embody the same concept as Mother Holda or Hölle. From the book flutters a fragrant dry leaf that’s been pressed between pages at a point where the text promises that “who drinks the tea, a goddess will be.” Now suffering from a broken heart as well as grief, Hell tells herself that if the leaf is poison at least it’ll put her out of her misery.
(Auntly Interruption: The Aunts’ Union requires me
to mention, although I’m quite sure The Nephews already know, that most natural
toxins are more likely to add to people’s misery than put them out of it. Very
few plants are deadly. Many plants are indigestible.)
Hell drinks the tea, and right away she starts
seeing visions of Hekate, who calls her “my lovely” and encourages her to use
the new powers Hekate has give her, but gives her little guidance as to what
those powers are or how to use them. Even the bookseller, Mrs. Freeman, who
seems to have a similar relationship with a stronger supernatural being, can’t
tell her much except that her relationship with Hekate is private; Mrs. Freeman
doesn’t want to know. So, on her first adventure, Hell takes delicious revenge
on her ex and a couple of street bullies, all at once. Hekate seems to be
encouraging her at first. Then Hell finds out that Hekate’s power feeds on
human suffering and, because Hell not only used her power but used it
selfishly, now Hell’s mother has to die and suffer in you-know-where, the
theological concept, where the mother who called her baby Hell is tormented by
a demon in the shape of a giant baby. Hell doesn’t have much of a comment on
this image. Her immediate concern is to use the power to teleport her mother to
the more pleasant afterlife where Mother and Father can be together, watching
their daughter careen through the rest of her mortal life with helpless love.
Hekate seems to understand. Hell’s punishment for this act of love is intense
but short-lived.
Hekate spurs her on, sending her back to the
bookseller, who keeps giving her books about large-scale human suffering.
(After all, Hell read Harry Potter and
Twilight long ago.) Each book rouses
Hell to an adolescent energy surge of fierce compassion, but what does a
teenager know about using fierce compassion? Hell can snap herself right into
the body of a slave trafficker and burst out, leaving him in a gory mess, or
stay in the body of a doctor doing a ritual child mutilation and make him
mutilate himself, but how much does that accomplish? Forced to leave her next
lover lest using Hekate’s power destroy her too, Hell instead uses
enough power to destroy one of the slaves she’s managed to rescue. (She wasn’t
in love with him, but in a vague, child-of-a-broken-home sort of way she loved
his relationship with his wife.) Moving on to bigger targets, Hell
bashes her way to the current dictator of North Korea, supernaturally slapping him around
enough to make him carry out a few reforms.
But she’s failed to maintain a low profile during
her adventure. Before she’s even old enough to buy a jug of wine, legally, in
the United States, Hell finds out who murdered her father. Yes, because he was
another servant of Hekate. So was a grandmother she never knew. And now
Hekate’s enemies are after her, and their powers are a match for hers, and
there are more of them.
In short, Hell’s life is...well...you-know-what.
Her fantasy adventure seems like a nightmare and ends with a real
Perils-of-Pauline cliffhanger. (Yes, a sequel is in the works.) The more anxious kind of Christians can easily
read this novel as a story of how the Evil Principle exploits a teenager’s
idealism to enmesh her in eternal torment. From the writer’s Twitter page I
wouldn’t think that was his
intention, but who knows.
A part of me enjoyed this book’s energy and
audacity. The e-book version I received looked like a draft that may have been
corrected by the publisher. It’s written in good English, in a very simple, direct, translatable style. (Though written in Germany, it's still waiting to be translated into German.) Almost every action is summarized in one sentence, as are the movements of
people while they’re making conversation. Conversations read almost like stage
directions. Hell narrates her story in the artless way teenagers write, when
they have something to write about.
“
Hekate elegantly crossed her legs and shifted in
her chair:
“Yes. These are the same men. What do you think
should happen to them?”
With no hesitation, I yelled:
“They should be turned into the maggots that they
are and then fed to a dog!”
Hekate laughed and stood up with me:
“A wonderful solution to this problem, my dear.
Let’s go, I will show you how.”
Instantly, we were back in the alley...
“
It’s not an easy story to fall asleep over. And
the maggot episode made me cackle out loud, though the men seem to be turned
into awfully large maggots.
Some booksellers and librarians seem to be in the
confidence of readers who live with high levels of angst, grief, and guilt, who
specifically ask for books that will make them cry. Hekate’s Tea is for them if any book is.
And in the end, it made me want to cry—old as I am, and laugh at the crazy teen energy and simplistic teen solutions as I did. My guess is that Hell will survive, probably at the expense of another friend or friends, just because—“You CAN’T end a book for teenagers this way! There HAVE TO be sequels—plural! I want to see this character grow in the direction of not just ‘helling around’ but picking a cause and actually working for it.”
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