This Sam Richardson Finalist is a Beekeeping Murder Mystery

Reviewing Will Caverly's HERE, THE BEES STING

NOTE: This essay is part of the Sam Richardson Prize competition, an award for the best self-published literary novels. Many thanks to Naomi Kanakia for welcoming my participation as a judge. (EDIT: you can read Will Caverly on Substack at Mercenary Pen)

Will Caverly’s HERE, THE BEES STING is many things: a clash between a city-dwelling government bureaucrat and rural life, a fight between industry and nature, a murder mystery, a thriller, a romance, a series of lessons on beekeeping, and an epic drama starring bees. It really has it all.

Of course, it’s one thing to throw a bunch of genres into a blender, and another to make it good.

The narrative centers around Billy Sincobine, deputy apiarist¹ for the State of Pennsylvania. When several residents of the tiny, unincorporated community of Shinckshinny are found dead, covered head-to-toe in bee stings, Billy is called in from the city to inspect the local bees and figure out why they’ve become aggressive. Billy doesn’t know (the reader does, thanks to a quick prologue) that this was not a freak accident. The bees are a murder weapon.

Caverly deftly throws a handful of endearing characters and complicating threads into the narrative. Billy falls in love with a woman who is married to a psychotic doomsday prepper. More people wind up dead, and the sheriff goes missing. Bee hives are dying, falling prey to a dangerous infestation. State budget cuts threaten Billy’s job. These conflicts propel the story forward, and there’s always something to keep you reading.

Through most of the novel, the prose is clear and direct, appropriate for the crime thriller genre. There are a few awkward lines of dialogue, but for the most part, it’s engaging and well paced. You can’t tell that this book didn’t go through a traditional press’ editing process. At times, the text goes beyond engaging crime thriller; in one particularly harrowing passage, Billy is hunting a coyote when he’s attacked by a swarm of the murderous bees.

A wild, untamed fright overtook Billy, building from somewhere deep inside. He sprinted and cursed, slid on pine needles and mud and stone. A sting on his shoulder made his arm twitch. He lost his bow. He didn’t stop. Instead, he took the greasy hide of the coyote and wrapped it around his shoulders and head. The roar of the bees was dulled. He could hear bees landing on the hide, murmuring anger with their tiny wings.

A silver flash out of the corner of his eye. Coyote. She led him there. Nature wants me dead.

Individual stings began to lose their quality. A dangerous sign. It meant that his body couldn’t react fast enough to the venom. As he ran, half lunching, half tripping over stones, Billy realized, This is how those poor bastards died. Running, screaming, chased by thousands of angry insects . . . Stingers lanced through his pants, finding flesh beneath when they couldn’t get to his face. The venom seared him. Bees spent generations fighting mammals off from their golden stores of honey. They knew how to drive off an animal.

This is tense and well-plotted, real edge-of-your-seat writing. Caverly could put out more thrillers, and I’d read them. But Caverly’s real literary skill comes through a clever twist: Billy’s story, it turns out, is only about 70% of the book. The other 30%² follows a parallel narrative, taking place inside a bee hive and starring the bees themselves.

Here, we meet Queen Ouarzazaata, leader of the Commonwealth of Sijilmassa. Queen Ouarzazaata oversees the hive’s work and is responsible for its wellbeing, as well as the birthing of new worker bees. But there’s trouble brewing, a potential coup d’etat, as some members of the colony do not believe Queen Ouarzazaata has what it takes to lead.

In these chapters, the tone shifts and enters a more mythic register. In place of the close, single point-of-view narration we get in the Billy chapters, there’s a strange storybook tone to Ouarzazaata’s narrative. There’s less action and the dialogue becomes more sparse, giving the sense of routines more than scenes and exploring every part of the hive at once. We get a history of the hive and hives before it, straight from the narrator without the need for a character to relate it to our protagonist. There are chants and refrains to “COMMUNE,” and all the proper nouns sound like they belong on the SFF shelf. It reads much more like a myth or legend.

She shook her body in the raqaa dance, waggling her chitinous abdomen and providing direction based on the position of their Goddess, Shamzaa, the sun. Creating a circle, then bisecting it, the length of the raqaa dance indicated the ephemerals were not so far, perhaps close enough to reach before the next squall.

“A taste of the bounty,” she said, her glossa emerging with a bead of nectar atop it.

Her sisters rushed forth, tasting with their long tongues, smelling with their antennae. Murmurs of satisfaction passed around. One by one, the foraging gang followed the young one on her raqaa dance, memorizing the route.

This is GAME OF THRONES, starring bees. The Sijilmassa plot is engaging, and in some ways it has a more shocking twist than anything seen in Billy’s story, shocking enough that I’ll put the spoiler in the footnotes.³

These bees are not anthropomorphized. They speak English dialogue, it’s true, but it reads as if Caverly is merely translating the true bee experience into English for us readers; I can imagine David Attenborough narrating this whole plot, with few – if any – changes.

This sort of thing, telling a story from the perspective of bees, is risky. It’s easy to imagine a version where this is a big miscalculation, a risk that doesn’t pay off, and I’ll admit I rolled my eyes a bit when I first realized what was happening. Within a few pages, though, I was sold. Caverly commits so fully to his epic bee drama that I found myself pulled into the hive mind. These chapters worked, and they really elevated the novel.

The book’s conclusion, when all these many threads (bee and human alike) collide, doesn’t fully satisfy, though my issues here are more plot-based than thematic. A few mysteries wrap a bit abruptly, and several plot threads ought to have been introduced earlier, to give them more time to breathe. Ultimately, these are small issues, common to a lot of genre books (particularly fantasy, science fiction, and crime), and they don’t detract too much from the book as a whole.⁴

I hesitated a bit before selecting HERE, THE BEES STING as my finalist for the Sam Richardson Prize, because the award is for best literary novel. Does HERE, THE BEES STING really qualify? Other books on my list were straightforward literary novels. I am not a genre snob – I loved genre literature before I loved literary fiction, and I still love it. But they’re different categories, and this book is clearly a crime thriller.

Back when I was teaching literature to middle schoolers, I would draw a horizontal line across the board, then write “commercial” at one end and “literary” at another. This isn’t a binary distinction, but a spectrum, and we would spend a class session arguing about where the various books on our curriculum (as well as whatever was popular at the time, such as THE HUNGER GAMES) sat on the line. It seemed like a good way to get students to think about what literature does, about its purpose. Commercial fiction is meant to entertain, while literary fiction strives to say something, though of course most books fall somewhere in the middle.⁵ It’s not a perfect definition, but I think it’s better than most, because it focuses on the book’s intention and effect, rather than any genre trappings.

The other books in my Sam Richardson stack did sit further towards the “literary” pole, but they also had significant flaws. As a purely qualitative judgement, HERE, THE BEES STING was the best book. My question, then, was whether or not it was “literary” enough to qualify, and I felt it was, mostly thanks to the bee chapters. These portions really elevated the book and demonstrated that Caverly had something greater in mind than just a well-paced mystery.

Some light spoilers ahead.

The dual-plotline structure allows Caverly to demonstrate the similarities and differences between Billy’s world and Ouarzazaata’s. These aren’t usually stated directly, and the details are surprising. While Billy lives in a patriarchal world, with bureaucrats and lawmen and industry dictating order and control over the natural world, Ouarzazaata’s “was a fiercely pragmatic and profoundly feminine world. It called for striking a perfect balance of power.” So far, this is what you’d expect, but Caverly complicates this binary. Power in Shinckshinny is often based on understanding and navigating complex relationships and family histories, while the feminine “balance of power” in Sijilmassa can be horrible and cruel to the individual; combat drones sacrifice their lives with each sting, and the queen herself is murdered when the collective deems her unfit. An election seems far preferable to that.

Both worlds are struggling against powerful forces. Sijilmassa is facing an invasion from the “inodorous,” the bees’ name for varroa mites. A type of arachnid, the mites adapt their scent so that they’re invisible to bees, then feed off the hive’s young. Meanwhile, Shinckshinny has its own invasion; the fracking company Protoshale has moved to town and is threatening to level every mountain in the community.

In both cases, the invasion targets the community’s inherent weaknesses. Sijilmassa is a hive-mind commune, with very little individuality, and an invader that can hide from one can hide from all. Shinckshinny is an impoverished rural outpost, dependent on capital derived from the natural resources, and Protoshale has lots of capital. Both communities find their answer by breaking down their built-in constraints. Sijilmassa finally defeats the inodorous after interbreeding with an exotic and aggressive bee population, the same one previously used as the murder weapon, and they become the alpha predators. Billy gains victory over his enemies, not by solving the mystery and turning the culprit in to the authorities, but by facing them in a gunfight and winning; a pile of bodies is left in his wake, and he settles down as the most powerful man in Shinckshinny.

It’s a conclusion I’m not entirely comfortable with. Personally, I like the idea of an equality-minded collective that values cooperation over strength, and I’m also comfortable with the idea of a system of laws that constrain our wilder impulses. But HERE, THE BEES STING suggests that either type of society needs to make room for a bit of aggression. The world is a dangerous place, for bees and humans alike, safety is often a product of strength, of the ability to speak softly and carry a strong stinger. This isn’t a principle I live out in my own life, and it’s not one I want my kids to take on, but throughout most of nature (not to mention human history), it’s been true.

HERE, THE BEES STING is a crime thriller, and it’s certainly literary enough to qualify for the Sam Richardson Prize. Most importantly, it’s the best of the books I was assigned. I enjoyed reading it, and you would too.

1. beekeeper

2. This is a guess. It’s definitely less than half.

3. Halfway through, Ouarzazaata loses the trust of her people and is murdered, then replaced by her daughter. Then new queen then enters a weird dream state in which she first fights, then communes with, the memory of Ouarzazaata. She then becomes the new protagonist of this plotline. It’s crazy!

4. In general, a bad ending in a more commercial story is less a problem than a bad literary ending. The problems with Caverly’s conclusion had to do with pacing -- the rapid fire revelations that didn’t fully land, the too-quick escalation of physical violence, etc. This is different than in literary fiction, where the ending may disappoint on a thematic level.

Part of the reason genre books struggle with endings is because they go for big, flashy action set pieces. These work better in film than on the page. When they do work in literature, it’s often because the author has leaned into different styles of writing, which are not native to the thriller genre.

5. I did not use the term “upmarket,” in part because that’s an industry term that doesn’t belong in the classroom (but also because I didn’t know that term at the time). Upmarket is hard to define, to the point where I think it’s probably not a real thing. Generally, “upmarket” just means “somewhere in the middle third of the literary-commercial spectrum,” and as a result it’s not a particularly useful term.