Liz Bourke Reviews Foul Days by Genoveva Dimova

Foul Days, Genoveva Dimova (Tor 978-1-250-87731-4, $17.99, 368pp, tp) June 2024. Cover by Rovina Cai.

Foul Days is Scotland-based Genoveva Dimova’s debut novel. It mixes folklore and modernity, setting itself between the walled ghetto-city of Chernograd – where monsters roam the streets, magic is as commonplace as poverty, and in order to leave you have to pay people-smugglers to get you across the wall – and the prosperous city of Belograd on the far side of the wall, rich where Chernograd is poor, safe where Chernograd is dangerous.

Kosara is a witch in Chernograd, familiar with the day-to-day dangers of lycanthropes, kikimoras, upirs, and with the dangers of the Foul Days at the New Year, when many other kinds of monster pour into the streets of Chernograd after dark and the geography changes to bring the palace of the Zmey, the Tsar of Monsters, close to the human world. Of all monsters, the Zmey is the worst. Humanlike in his appearance, he preys on teenage girls, tricking them into a relationship, abusing them, and using them up: the paradigmatic abusive older boyfriend. Kosara was once swayed by his blandishments, but escaped him. Ever since, he’s pursued her when the Foul Days let him reach the streets of Chernograd, hunting her to get her back.

This Foul Days, he finds her too early. Kosara leaps at the chance of escape to Belograd, but she trades away her shadow – the source of her powers as a witch – in order to do so. But far sooner than she imagined possible, she develops the fatal illness that inevitably afflicts witches who give up their shadows. Only getting it back can cure her, but she stumbles into the middle of a violent magical conspiracy. Her one ally is the police detective Asen Bakharov, a strangely honourable man with secrets of his own. Kosara knows better than to trust a cop, especially one suspiciously resistant to enchantments, but after they return to Chernograd together, they have no real choice but to work as a team.

Kosara’s shadow is in the hands of the Zmey. In order to retrieve it, she’ll have to face the worst monster of her nightmares before the Foul Days are over – and before he can use it in his plan to bring down the wall that keeps the Zmey and his monsters confined to Chernograd.

This is a lively and accomplished debut, with an engaging voice and a deft touch with characterisation. Kosara makes ill-advised choices in a believable fashion: She’s still young, with a youthful combination of cynicism and naivety, and rushes from decision to decision with understandable urgency. Asen is on the surface a more staid and sensible person, but it turns out that he, too, has a habit of throwing himself into ill-advised situations. They make interesting foils for each other.

Dimova’s setting recalls both the dark, wild atmosphere of Slavic fairytale and the quasi-dystopian urban divide between East and West in Cold War era (and even post-Soviet 1990s) Europe. Berlin seems like a straightforward touchstone for the divided city: Belograd surrounds and borders Chernograd, the (as the names will make plain to anyone even slightly familiar with the Slavic language family) Black City encysted with the White City. Though Dimova’s cities, while perhaps possessing the economic and social divide of Cold War Europe, lack the clash of ideologies that animated its political scene. I can think of few works that engage in comparable fashion with an urban setting (and with the trappings of modernity) in the subgenre of “fantasy with a strong and direct Slavic influence”: most of those with which I’m familiar prefer a village setting, or one drawing on a medieval or early modern world. The difference makes Dimova’s debut feel fresh, a reaction rather than an imitation.

For all that it’s a promising debut, and a solidly accomplished novel, Foul Days didn’t thrill me. I’m not, it transpires, the target audience for a novel whose thematic thrust is about facing down and outwitting your monstrous and abusive ex, while forming (perhaps) a healthier bond with an honourable cop out to bring the demons of his past to justice. But if you are that audience? This is one for you.

This review and more like it in the June 2024 issue of Locus.

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