Review: Chalk by N.R. LaPoint
This Rabbit hole ends in Dante's Inferno.
I’d seen N.R. LaPoint’s Chalk making the rounds all over superversive Twitter, but never felt particularly led to crack it open. It’s YA designation and the undeniable weirdness of its premise kept me at bay, but eventually the cumulative exultations of its readers led to me grudgingly buying a copy.
All I can say is buckle up. Because Chalk is a strange, fantastic trip indeed, and it’s a long way down.
The story
We kick things off with Raven Mistcreek, tween Catholic school student who returns home one day to find her house and family missing as if they had never occupied the now-empty lot they once sat in. In fact, her neighbor’s house is empty and the entire cul-de-sac seems oddly, eerily quiet. Before she can really ponder this strange turn of events, a voice prods her to fish a hidden box of chalk out from a nearby tuft of clover and run to her neighbor’s house as if her very life depends upon it, because it does. A pack of drooling, gorilla-sized demonic hounds are about to descend upon her.
It’s soon revealed that the voice was coming from a— stay with me— invisible floating cuttlefish, and one of high station, at that. This is Lord Blackwood, an emissary from a reality beyond ours sent to try to steer Raven to safety. The aforementioned dogs are in service to the apocalyptic horseman War and making quick work of the neighbor’s front door. With no time to spare or places to hide, Blackwood instructs Raven to draw a weapon with the chalk on a nearby wall, which she does in frantic tears, well aware of just how foolish it all seems. A moment after completing her crude rendering of a pistol, she discovers she can pull it into her reality, and uses it to blast her pursuer’s head clean off. After hastily drawing a trap door on the floor, they escape to the downstairs of the house and out the back door.
It’s after this pulse-pounding opening that LaPoint’s wonderful weirdness really kicks in. In a previous review, Declan Finn described the book as “Alice in Wonderland if the rabbit hole went all the way down to hell.” While it seemed hyperbolic to me at the time, LaPoint’s work lives up to the claim. After eluding her pursuers, Raven walks around her town, finding that the familiar and comfortable have been replaced with alien structures and objects:
”Once we left the park, everything familiar about my city gradually disappeared. Landmarks I expected were either not present, or they were replaced by something alien. An old World War II monument was missing. In its place was a large black rock that flashed like glitter in starlight. Approximately where the post office should have been was a dark mound and a hole that led deep into the earth. Lord Blackwood warned me not to get to close. The owner of the burrow might be nearby.”
It turns out our reality is being dragged into deeper levels of The Continuum, a layered series of realms which, like Dante’s Hell, get worse the farther down one goes. And things do get very weird, very quickly. Further along the pair arrive in Gnimaolg Village. The place is a clash of time periods, with quaint cottagelike houses and brutalistic concrete buildings with modern office furniture sharing the same space. Its streets are patrolled by police cars and filled with roaming bands of carnivorous jelly blobs. Oh, and a shapeshifting fox ninja has also joined our hero’s ranks.
What exactly is going on here? The Mistcreek family are actually a highborn clan, overseers of a realm teeming with fantastical life and places. In its capital of Veridian City, churches with towering spires and rose windows look out over bustling streets lined with idyllic Old World architecture, where shops sell modern day clothing. Knights of revered religious orders protect the populace with swords of pure light and ride War Unicorns whose hooves are alight with rainbow-colored flames.
But a secret plot laid long ago is finally coming to its diabolical fruition; the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, seeking to take over the realm, have been slowly incurring on what was once a place of prosperity and peace. Sensing danger long ago, Raven’s father smuggled his family to our world, where Raven enjoyed a relatively normal childhood and was shielded from most of the schemes unfolding elsewhere. Unable to avoid the conflict between realms any longer as monsters began to prowl our world (her house was eaten by reality-devouring fiends, it turns out), her family has retreated further down into the Continuum to marshal forces against the machinations of the horsemen.
In the absence of the Mistcreeks’ noble and restrained custody, an oppressive reality has taken its place. Faceless monsters roam the streets, looking for any reason they can to drag people off to the dreaded Black Church, the home of a sleeping red-eyed cyclopean horror whom the horsemen want to awaken. The story is a journey to reunite Raven with the rest of her family and, once reunited, stop the horsemen from summoning an ancient malevolent all-devouring being.
The characters
The cast of characters is tremendous, but somehow never feels overcrowded. The core of the story revolves around a party of four people who are assembled by the end of the first act:
Raven Mistreek, our heroine, is perhaps one of the more refreshing female protagonists I’ve read in recent years. She’s pleasantly plain looking, a superintroverted jumble of anxieties ever on the verge of overstimulation. While she does possess her magic chalk, she seems to have no innate special ability, unlike her little sister Ariadne who can pass between shadows, or her brother Damian, a knight. All she’s got is a brain that thinks things through differently, and a ton of heart and faith. Despair is never in her vocabulary. However dire the circumstances, she’s willing to pick up her chainsaw (she draws herself a chainsaw, too) and charge forward into battle, even if it means getting battered in the process. She’s humble, readily admitting and admiring the superior fighting abilities of her friends, as well as modest, at one point complaining that an outfit she’s changed into doesn’t cover enough. All of this makes her the antithesis to what passes for your average YA femme protag, which alone should have every parent with an eighth grader buying this book.
The other members of the party are the aforementioned Lord Blackwood, whose gentle counsel and charming Irish accent make him a standout as a side character; if Chalk ever goes big, I can definitely see plushies of him selling like hotcakes. A kimono-clad fox maiden named Kasumi offers swift bladework that carries the bulk of the fighting early on. She’s bubbly if a bit scatterbrained, and she and Raven become fast friends. Lastly there is Percy, a handsome paladin sent to find and escort Raven to her family. While he certainly seems capable in battle, wielding his light sword in some truly gripping scenes, he also has a checkered past that got him banned from his knightly order. This doesn’t set well with Raven’s protective brother Damian when it becomes clear his attention for Raven goes deeper than his mission.
And I didn’t even get to the giant orange chalk golem!
The world
LaPoint’s worldbuilding is truly a remarkable kind of strange; at several points I wanted to put the book down, thinking “alright I’m done, this is just too out there,” but my eyes wouldn’t have it; you couldn’t have pried this book out of my hands, even if the clashing aesthetics and bizarre alien everything was in danger of giving me a headache at times. Still, what is there is beyond immersive, as LaPoint’s world slowly slides from the mundane to the eldritch. His knack for describing landscapes, buildings and creatures is wonderful; his Horsemen range from a Pestilence armored in hideous vermin hordes to a Death that rides an ebony skeletoned undead dragon while dressed in a smart black suit and tie. Boys (dudes in general) will probably be more impressed by War’s armored dactyl-raptor outfitted with miniguns under the wings. Because I mean come on.
What eventually convinced me to write this review was the fact that there was so much about this book that shouldn’t have worked -- it’s a blend of almost a half-dozen genres, I avoid YA like the plague it is, the protagonists’ dialogue is purposefully halting and clumsy at times and the arrival of a single anthropomorphic being in a book usually results in me catapulting said book into the sun -- and yet here I am. By all rights this should have been a buffet of self-indulgent literary gorging. LaPoint manages to not only tame the chaos but craft a world from it as wide and sprawling as it is deep and treacherous.
“N.R. LaPoint’s fantasy makes Neil Gaiman look like a poser,” Finn wrote in his June 2021 review of the book. Consider my voice added to the chorus.
The politics
None.
Content warning
Blessedly, much of the raw sewerage that most mainstream YA lit is marinated in is absent from Chalk. This is LaPoint’s face-punch to the subversive, nihilistic poison that permeates so much of postmodern culture. The romance that is teased between Raven and Percy throughout the book is sweet and demure, but the book is up to the skirt hem of it’s catholic school uniform in monster blood and guts. The fighting comes fast and often brutal; people and monsters are clawed, seared, katana’d and outright cut in half with a chainsaw. The exact detail of the gore is left largely to the reader’s imagination for the most part, which keeps it safely within PG-13 violence.
Who is it for?
While I’m a forty-something year old living testament that this book has the potential to win just about anyone over, I think the audience it should most critically reach is young teens. One of the more noble goals of the Superversive literary movement is to create heroes and legends for a generation without them. Raven Mistcreek is this. Loyal, grounded, relatable, able to draw hope and strength out of her own human limitations; she is a worthy heroine for any girl coming of age to spend time with. For boys, they’ll find a classic reluctant hero archetype whose love of family manages to conquer their fear of the unknown, finding within themselves the bravery to help fight the forces of evil. The hallmarks of a great adventure tale are all here, if at times a tad chaotic and rushed, but always exciting and enjoyable, and that is what made finishing Chalk my YA Road to Damascus moment.
Why read it?
Chalk is something to be experienced, especially by younger teen readers. Kids eager to grow up are targeted by major publishers who often introduce adult levels of violence and sexuality to an audience ill prepared for them. And the slime is even dripping down into the Middle Grade genre. A trip to your library’s Children’s or Young Adult section will have a wide variety of hagiographies for corrupt politicians like Joey (allegedly) by First Lady Jill Biden, a plethora of titles uncritically lauding the virtues of transgenderism such as Meredith Russo’s If I Was Your Girl or He’s My Mom! by Sarah Savage, and ultraviolent vile garbage like Adam Rapp’s The Children and the Wolves. It is a cadre of the entertainment industry which can be as morally bankrupt as Hollywood, but twice as pernicious, since its agenda is often not as obvious when hidden within the printed page.
As I’ve said, the book stands on its own for nearly any audience. But kids need a lot more characters like Raven Mistcreek, and books like Chalk, to help redirect the imaginations and minds of impressionable readers upward again. And that’s the best reason there ever could be.