Review: Mushroom Blues by Adrian M. Gibson

Blurb:

ENTER THE FUNGALVERSE. BEAT THE WINTER BLUES. Blade Runner, True Detective and District 9 meld with the weird worlds of Jeff VanderMeer, Philip K. Dick and China Miéville in Adrian M. Gibson’s hallucinatory, fungalpunk noir debut.

Two years after a devastating defeat in the decade-long Spore War, the island nation of Hōppon and its capital city of Neo Kinoko are occupied by invading Coprinian forces. Its fungal citizens are in dire straits, wracked by food shortages, poverty and an influx of war refugees. Even worse, the corrupt occupiers exploit their power, hounding the native population.

As a winter storm looms over the metropolis, NKPD homicide detective Henrietta Hofmann begrudgingly partners up with mushroom-headed patrol officer Koji Nameko to investigate the mysterious murders of fungal and half-breed children. Their investigation drags them deep into the seedy underbelly of a war-torn city, one brimming with colonizers, criminal gangs, racial division and moral decay.

In order to solve the case and unravel the truth, Hofmann must challenge her past and embrace fungal ways. What she and Nameko uncover in the midst of this frigid wasteland will chill them to the core, but will they make it through the storm alive?

Review:

I kept seeing this book placed all over social media and so, a while back, I ordered “Mushroom Blues” and once I got it, I placed it on my shelf and then read it during the last full week of April. From beginning to end, I had an absolute blast reading this novel and until the next book comes out, I’ll sit around in the corner singing Mushroom blues. 

Why do I say this? If I had to pitch this novel with a few sentences, I’d say “Coffee and revenge are all that are on Detective Hoffman's mind. Until she’s on a case that’ll change her life. Want to help solve it? Grab a notepad, join in!”. But that’s only to get you into this review and hopefully this book. But there is so much more to it. So much more. First of all, from the language of the Shrooms being inspired by the Japanese and Chinese language to the culture being reminiscent of that as well, it decides to hit the ground running and doesn’t stop until everything has been pieced together.

Grab some coffee before it’s too late and sit back as I slowly take “Mushroom Blues” apart and point out what it does amazingly, with a few remarks on what could’ve been done better.

First of all, the first puzzle piece of “Mushroom Blues”, if you will, are the characters of the book. Henrietta Hoffman is a Coprinian detective who has gone through some things and a deeply engraved loathing of her husband due to him practically forcing her banishment to Neo Koniko, Hōppon. The book starts off from her perspective and it shows her disdain of the buttons (the mushroom people). And over the course of the book, her focus of ire shifts from the buttons to others. Her character progression works wonderfully and compliments the plot well. More on the plot later. Then we have Koji Nameko, a button who works for the police and gets put on the case with Henrietta. And I think this is where things character wise go from just another detective solving an almost typical detective novel murder case to a detective dealing with a foreign, alien, thinking being who is able to sense things she cannot while trying to solve a murder case. Koji and other buttons add a new spin to everything.

And this is where we get to the magic. Well, less of a magic, more of the biology behind regular mushrooms. Regular mushrooms grow roots. And those roots are able to communicate with other mushroom roots. Adding to that, some mushrooms release spores to the world, hoping to procreate, to keep that mushroom alive, in a sense. Now, take a continent, plop sentient mushrooms onto it that look human, are able to communicate with spores and have everything they use be some sort of mushroom or something that’s able to work with mushrooms. And that is Neo Koniko and the nation of Hōppon. Does this work, in terms of how the rest of the novel is built? Yes, yes, it does. I’d say it doesn’t just work, it was one of two things that took what was to me just another simple murder mystery plot to something far more complex, far more intricate and intriguing and, at least with what books I’ve read so far, unique even with notable influences from the Ambergris series by Jeff Vandermeer (luckily without the footnote hell).

Now  this is where I’ll get into the plot. I’ve compared it to a murder mystery earlier. And in a way, “Mushroom Blues” is just your typical “find the murderer” detective thriller. But that is only if you factor in the first 300ish pages and ignore the subplots. Adrian Gibson has taken that and combined it with political suspense, with some of the Shrooms wanting to overthrow the Copronian colonialist rule. Yet even that part of the plot isn’t as simple as it seems. Overall, Gibson has written a book that has both a very simple plot and a very complex plot at the same time, with the main character slowly coming to terms with being stuck with a Shroom looking for a murderer, before finally understanding the full scale of what she’s landed in the middle of.

If I had to say anything else about this book, I’d have to say that the art at the transition phase from part to part fits the story well. With that, the overall format, the way it’s presented to us readers, also fits perfectly with what’s happening on the pages. “Mushroom Blues” presents us readers with a main character who’s practically typed up a report on her computer and then turned that into a book without change to the original. 

Now, I have to say that due to reading the physical book before an update to the format, I had a small bit of a chapter cut off, but via the Kindle app I was able to read that missing snippet from the chapter. Aside from that, only a few parts felt off or didn’t sit right with the overall story, which is just how I view it.

Overall, if you want to read a detective thriller that decides to take you on an almost unforgettable trip through a mirror world that paints the colonial era as it was in a new light, I’d hand you this book.

As always, thank you for reading until the end of this review and I hope I’ve helped nudge you towards your next read. If you’re looking for something that’s less of a mystery solving book, there are many more reviews out on this site for far more genres written by amazing people and reviewers. There’s a review for books of almost any science fiction or fantasy genre here. 

Wherever you are reading this, have a good morning, good afternoon, good evening or good night!