Waiting for the Flood

Waiting for the Flood (2015/2024) Alexis Hall (Spires)

This is both a reissue and a revision, with Marius’ story–Chasing the Light–added, along with bonus material and an epilogue short story.

I wanted (and this is straying perilously close to analysing my own work so please take this with a mine full of salt) to explore the idea that love sometimes doesn’t work out, but that this is okay and that the time you have with somebody you move away from isn’t wasted or lost, nor does it lessen or diminish the time you have with others after them.

It took me several months to read this, despite starting it almost immediately after it came out.

Waiting for the Flood is probably my favorite Alexis Hall story, a comfort read, and I’ve reread it repeatedly.

(F)or most people history is a few loud voices declaiming art and making war across the centuries, for me it’s a whispering chorus of laundry day and grocer’s bills, dress patterns and crop rotations. The price of tallow.

I utterly adore Edwin.

This is the story of my life: standing on the edges of things and worrying, when I’m supposed to just walk through them.

So I was not well-disposed to like Marius.

And the start of the story didn’t help.

Fixing me once again with those beautiful eyes—eyes I’d sketched and painted so many times, trying to capture their light-entrancing depths—he offered a patently inadequate, “I’m s-sorry.” Followed by, “I d-didn’t know how to say no.”

“Well,” I told him, “you should have fucking figured it out.”

I’d just meant he should have come up with an excuse. But it carried different implications with bitterness in my voice and Edwin’s stammer worse than I’d heard it in a while. I didn’t want to be someone his words fled from.

However.

There was this footnote:

Alexis: Slightly concerned that opening Marius’s book with him being a dick to Edwin is sort of like DS9 opening with Sisko being a dick to Picard. Like, it’s a lot. But it also felt right.

But it still took me a long time to finish it.

I still love Edwin, and I still don’t much like Marius. But I don’t dislike him the way I did at the start.

Characters: Edwin Tully, Adam Dacre, Marius Chankseliani, Mrs. Peaberry, Clementine Chankseliani, Leo, Krzysztof Chankseliani

Cover design and illustration by Elizabeth Turner Stokes

Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca

Rating: 9/10

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