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#Horror Book Review
realwomenofgaming · 6 months
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Creepy Classics: Carmilla
This Creepy Classic is one to sink your teeth into. Here is the story of "Carmilla" from @ThiatheBard #creepyclassic #carmilla
Photo curtesy of Thia the Bard. Copyright 2011 Wilder Publications, LLC Vampires have been around, in one form or another, for centuries. In fact almost every group of people have a story that falls under the category of a vampiric creature. Almost everyone having a version of a creature that feeds off of the lifeforce of the living is incredibly interesting to me. They may be slightly different…
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nerdynatreads · 1 year
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☆☆YouTube | Tumblr | Instagram | Storygraph ☆☆
book review || My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
ooookay, we’ve got another odd one here. So, based off the summary, I thought this was going to be a mostly character-focused story, but at the start, I wasn’t so sure. The beginning is shocking and bleak, that’s for sure, but I was so confused as to the significance of the events taking place.
We spend a lot, a lot, of time in Jade’s head, her breaking down the parts of her town that make it the perfect setting for a horror movie— oh, sorry, a slasher. At nearly the halfway point, I finally started to see what the importance of this obsession means. Jade is quirky and odd, but her obsessions and constantly changing appearance hide the real depth I’d only just started to see. However, after this revelation, we’re thrown back into, what Jade believes to be, a developing slasher movie and I was kind of lost all over again. Jade seemed like the only character that had a lot of depth.
The writing style fits perfectly with the mind of a slasher-obsessed teenage girl, but it’s also difficult to follow at times. I listened to the first 10% and realized I had no idea what was happening and restarted the audiobook at a slower speed to acclimate myself. There are so many pop culture references, obviously, many coming from classic 80s slasher movies, but other horror stories and genres as well. Jade loses herself in her mind, and goes off on tangents about different characters and their roles in the slasher that’s developing. It reminds me a lot of the writing style utilized in Night of the Mannequins, which works well for the story, but takes some getting used to. The similarities grew as we hit the climax, because I was so lost in Jade’s mind, trying to figure out what was real and what could be an overactive mind, but then the gore really starts up.
As far as horror goes, this starts with a creepy prologue, but once we enter Jade’s perspective, it seems like most of the horror is simply in her mind. There are plenty of gory references, gross imaging, and historic horror stories in the small town, which I do think makes for an unsettling atmosphere. The final climax definitely delivered on that horror though, but in regards to some of the twists, I did see them coming.
There are also these excerpts of Jade’s papers she’s written for her History teacher, revealing the horrific background of the town and the different factors that make up a slasher movie. On one hand, they’re funky for pacing, but given the confusion I had at the beginning of the book, they also give some explanation as to where the story could be going.
I think the final moments of this book really brought things full circle and reminded me of the gut punches that are delivered in the form of Jade’s background. I’m impressed at how SGJ tied all of these heavy topics into her story, but this was also crazy slow for me and I sometimes had a hard time following the story.
3.5 / 5 stars
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gbhbl · 3 days
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Horror Book Review: Records of the Hightower Massacre (Maeva Wunn/L. Andrew Cooper)
A novella from co-authors L. Andrew Cooper and Maeva Wunn, Records of the Hightower Massacre is a thrilling read that will keep you on the edge of your seat right up to the very last word.
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like there aren’t enough LGBTQ+ horror novels out there, so when Records of the Hightower Massacre came my way, I jumped at the chance to read it and review it. A novella from co-authors L. Andrew Cooper and Maeva Wunn, Records of the Hightower Massacre is a thrilling read that will keep you on the edge of your seat right up to the very last word. A story with…
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kjudgemental · 4 days
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The Southern Book Club's Guide To Slaying Vampires - Horror Novel Review
Author: Grady Hendrix Publisher: Quirk Books Country: USA Year: 2020 The last novel of Hendrix before his move to Titan Books for his next release (which would be The Final Girl Support Group) is, as he states in the introduction, a kind of companion piece for My Best Friend’s Exorcism, taking a look at the adventure of parenthood as opposed to the troubles of the teenage years. Here our…
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esonetwork · 11 months
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'Reliquary' Book Review By Ron Fortier
New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/reliquary-book-review-by-ron-fortier/
'Reliquary' Book Review By Ron Fortier
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RELIQUARY By Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child Forge Fiction 264 Pgs
Way back in 2002 a good friend sent us a copy of the book, “The Cabinet of Curiosities” by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. It was in this book that we first encountered FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast. We didn’t know at the time that it was the character’s third appearance in a book by these two writers. Later we would learn he had first appeared in “Relic,” (1995) a horror thriller that was later adapted into a feature film. Now we hadn’t read “Relic” but we had seen and enjoyed the movie. Sadly, while bringing the story to the screen, the screenwriters opted to trim the large cast of characters and Pendergast was one of the casualties of those cuts.
Buoyed by the success of that first collaboration, Preston and Child wrote a sequel, “Reliquary” (1997), and once again brought back Pendergast as part of the original cast of characters from the previous thriller. Again, at the time, we were totally oblivious to any of this. Or the fact that Pendergast role slowly growing even though he was still part of an ensemble of players. With the arrival of “The Cabinet of Curiosities” he took center stage and quickly gathered a huge fandom. Soon the series became the Pendergast books and each continued to expand his popularity. It remains our personal favorite.
Recently we found a new paperback edition of “Reliquary” and immediately picked it up. We were amused at the sub-title indicating it was “The Second Novel in the Pendergast Series.” How things had changed. Being familiar with the movie version of “Relic” we had no trouble digging into this story and realized quickly that it is most assuredly a follow-up. In fact, one might rightly call it Part Two of the same tale. In “Relic” a scientist returns from a trip to the Amazon infected by an exotic plant. Upon his return to New York City and the Natural History Museum, it transforms him physically into a monstrous beast that then terrorizes and murders lots of people before being vanquished.
In “Reliquary” several of his museum colleagues have discovered the truth behind the monster and begin experimenting with what remains of the alien plant. This secret experiment leads to the creation of as yet another mental and physical altering drug and they begin testing it on the homeless “moles” that live beneath the streets of the city. Soon these poor souls are turned into horrible creatures and begin killing people at random. When a rich young debutant becomes one of their victims and her headless corpse is discovered in the river, the police begin to investigate, and eventually, Lt. Vincent D’Agosta and Dr. Nora Kelly, a museum curator, are once again teaming up to solve the grisly murders. It is no surprise when, a quarter into the book, Agent Pendergast appears we readers are once again enjoying another fast-paced, fantastic thriller like no other.
Being Pendergast fans, we’re happy to have had this chance to read one of his earliest appearances and as ever cannot wait for his newest book.
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liber---monstrorum · 1 year
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2 ⭐ - sorry if the review sounds mean, I got infected with the nightmare vegan evil disease
SUMMARY
Grace isn’t exactly thrilled when her newly widowed mother, Jackie, asks to move in with her. They’ve never had a great relationship, and Grace likes her space—especially now that she’s stuck at home during a pandemic. Then again, she needs help with the mortgage after losing her job. And maybe it’ll be a chance for them to bond—or at least give each other a hand. But living with Mother isn’t for everyone. Good intentions turn bad soon after Jackie moves in. Old wounds fester; new ones open. Grace starts having nightmares about her disabled twin sister, who died when they were kids. And Jackie discovers that Grace secretly catfishes people online—a hobby Jackie thinks is unforgivable. When Jackie makes an earth-shattering accusation against her, Grace sees it as an act of revenge, and it sends her spiraling into a sleep-deprived madness. As the walls close in, the ghosts of Grace’s past collide with a new but familiar threat: Mom. (Source)
Review below the cut. Warning, this review will contain spoilers.
REVIEW
I'm going to be honest: there's not a lot in Mothered that I particularly enjoyed. The pacing, story, prose, and characters were not at all what I want from a horror book. There were exactly two characters I liked seeing on the page (which is stretching it, since one of them is a cat) and one horror moment that I found to be memorably creepy. While it was a fast read, if I hadn't gotten this book through Netgalley I almost certainly would have DNF'd it pretty quickly (and that is if I had picked it up at all, since it would have failed the page 99 test).
STRUCTURE AND PROSE
As it opens and ends the story, I may as well discuss the prologue and epilogue. These two follow a therapist named Silas, who claims he is excited to work with an unnamed patient due to the brutality of the murder she committed. It's obfuscated which of the two women, Jackie or Grace, committed homicide. (Keep a pin in this as we'll be returning to it.) As the prologue concludes, we are told that “[Silas’s] job, as it often was, would be to filter the drop of truth from a waterfall of magical thinking” (13). This setup, with Silas being directly indicated to be a character who would engage with the narrative about to be told, indicates that the main bulk of the narrative would be in a narrative frame. Grace would speak to Silas to confess her life story and convince him of her point of view (a la Frankenstein, the reason why I love a good frame narrative). This is not the case. Rather than being nested, the narrative is delivered by a close third person narrator, with Grace’s story bookended by Silas’s. The prologue and epilogue might as well have not been there; they add little to nothing to the narrative. All that was achieved was disappointment. The completely normal third person narration was. A Choice. Look, I’m a fan of close third person. It works fine, but it was a disappointing choice, espcecially after that prologue setup. Grace as a character does have interesting elements to her that I feel would have been far more interesting to me as a reader had we navigated the narrative directly through her eyes. Speaking of characters, wasted potential is the name of the game in Mothered. Characters have features and traits, but aren’t well-rounded. Part of that issue is with the dialogue; it is middling at best, and stilted, awkward, or shallow at worst. Additionally, there's not as much of it as one would think for a story about a toxic mother-daughter relationship stuck in close quarters.
The standout issue with the characters for me is that they are their role in the story before they are a character. Silas is not a character who is a therapist, he is the therapist character (and, upon a re-read of the prologue, is I think supposed to be some sort of reader stand-in? Which I also am not a fan of). Miguel isn’t a character who is the main character’s best friend; he is the best friend character (worse, he falls into the gay best friend trope). Jackie isn’t a character who is Grace’s mother; she is the mother character. Grace, by virtue of being the protagonist, somewhat escapes this issue, but still is not well-rounded or developed by any means. She’s supposed to be an unreliable narrator, something I normally love, but in her found to be unengaging.
Grace as a protagonist could have been interesting; she has a lot of childhood trauma, but does genuinely try to help those around her. She’s kind towards her friend Miguel and drops everything to help him when he gets sick. While has the bizarre hobby of catfishing women (which she calls damsels) online, she describes it as intentionally trying to help build these women’s self esteem and help them improve their lives. The interesting elements of her, however, aren't really fleshed out enough. The damsels plotline especially had a lot of very interesting potential that’s completely unfulfilled. It really only exists so that Grace has something to feel guilty about and hide from her mother. The pacing. God, the pacing. The pacing was strange, due to the fact that a bulk of the narrative is dream sequences. The narrative jumps forward in time rather suddenly in order to dump the reader into a dream without indication. Not only does this make the pacing feel jerky and inconcistant, it also means that the dream segments are also far less effective. While suddenly jumping from reality to a dream can be a valuable strategy because it puts both the reader and the character into a state of uncertain reality, most of the time it did not work in Mothered. The only time I did find it effective and memorable was the first; after that, since I knew what the author was trying to pull, the strategy was ineffective because I knew it was a dream, even if Grace did not.
The pacing during the non-dream segments was jerky as well. It often felt like the narrative was just trying to hurry to the next dream sequence. For example, chapter fourteen ends with Grace texting her best friend Miguel; chapter fifteen jumps to her having been hired by her old boss and visiting the new salon space. From that first paragraph, it's obvious that it's a dream. As a result, the non-horror section of the dream dragged on for far too long (since the conversation the characters was having was not only not real but also completely banal) while the horror section of it was not horrifying (as the physical danger, social rejection, and reality break Grace was experiencing was obviously just a dream). During most dream sections, especially during the second half of the book, I was bored. For a mystery/thriller novel, Mothered is not very mysterious or thrilling. While there is certainly a hidden past tragedy that is eventually revealed, the actual reveal is... kind of boring. The narrative takes, in my opinion, the most uninteresting route. In the prologue, Silas muses that the case is “a good puzzle… one that look[s] on the surface like the gory movies he still so loved” (13). But this isn’t a puzzle. All the answers are spoonfed to the reader, and if the narrative makes an attempt to hide it, it does a terrible job.
One example of a very unmysterious mystery is the intentional obfuscation of who killed who in the prologue. My thought process during the first half of the novel was this:
A) Because the narrative follows Grace in close third person and
B) never follows Jackie,
that would normally indicate to me that
C) Grace, as the POV character, will be the surviving party.
However, because the identity of the patient in the first chapter is intentionally and carefully obfuscated from the reader, then
A + B might not equal C, but instead equal either
D) an upset of expectations (for example, Jackie killing Grace)
or
E) a third act twist revealing a previously unknown actor or plot element that reveals that the killer, the victim, Grace, and Jackie are in a more complicated configuration than first presented.
As I continued reading, it became clear to me that the narrative was not going to pull anything that interested. Despite this, I held out hope that the final chapters would have some kind of twist. That hope was futile. That setup of not knowing who dies is never cashed out. It just follows the most basic, obvious route: Grace is the protagonist, and because she is a protagonist, she can’t die so she has to be the murderer. Why bother to intentionally hide who kills who and then just not do something interesting? Especially when that problem is directly presented as being a puzzle!
Speaking of basic, the prose in general was boring. It’s all very direct and blunt, which can sometimes be a fantastic way to write a horror/thriller, but it just didn’t work for me here. The prose relies so heavily on telling over showing I felt as though the narrative was spoonfeeding me. Look, I don’t always need purple-literary-Romantic-big-words-long-sentences prose to enjoy a novel, but I do need something to chew on. If I’m not finding that in the structure, characters, horror elements, or central mystery, then by god at least give me some chewy prose.
THE DREAMS
I love dreams in horror. Exploring unreality, watching the line between waking and dreaming blur, having one encroach into the other. I love it all. Therefore, believe me when I say that the premise of incorporating horrible nightmares into a horror story isn't the issue. The issue with Mothered’s dreams was the execution. First off: the horror elements were almost completely restricted to dreams. Although there were one or two moments of horror that I found genuinely intriguing, memorable, or creepy (for example, the "Mona needs a calfskin bag" dream), most of the rest of them were tropey, predictable, or overdone. While I bought that these dreams were upsetting for the character, they were not particularly upsetting to me. At some point it just got old. The use of dream horror is, to me, something that has to be done subtly, carefully, and sparingly, especially when we have a protagonist presented as unreliable. It's none of those things in Mothered. The few horrifying elements outside of dreams are hallucinations. Grace dismisses them as such pretty quickly, and the hallucinations themselves fail to be credible from the get-go because they aren’t believably slotted into Grace’s reality. Horror-wise they aren't even good ones; they're even more tropey than the dreams. Even the horror of Grace and Jackie’s toxic relationship and the childhood trauma was restricted to these dreams as well; while there were some good moments of toxicity, gaslighting, or emotional manipulation in the waking world (such as Jackie letting Coco outside), almost all the detail and nuance we get about their history is dreamed.
Even the dreamed details about their past that do carry over into the real world aren’t fully fleshed. For example, during a dream, we are introduced to the paper dolls that Hope and her sister Grace used to play with. Later, while rummaging through her mother’s things, Grace finds her sister’s doll but not her own. While the doll imagery comes back in later dreams, that doll as a symbol of her mother’s favoritism and her relationship with Grace never beomes a point of conflict between the two. There isn’t ever a conflict about it, even when those dolls get brought up in conversation. I wanted a blow-out fight about those dolls; I wanted those dolls as an element of gaslighting; I wanted those dolls to be something that lead to a direct conflict that further develops Grace and Jackie’s current day relationship. But they don’t, and neither does much else.
The book’s summary claims that moving in together makes “old wounds fester” and “new ones open.” Sure, old wounds get re-opened, but calling what happens “festering” is a bit of a stretch. Grace is reasonably stressed about her mother being a bad roommate at times and Jackie occasionally apologizes for being a bad mother to her (though those conversations are rather surface level and nowhere near as toxic as they could have been). The only “new wounds” that open are are the ones that kill Jackie, with nary a new psychological wound in sight. As a result, the level of intensity between the two never quite reaches the fever pitch needed to make that final snap believable, narratively satisfying, and sharp.
One final complaint about the dreams I couldn’t shoehorn in elsewhere, so I’m shoehorning it in here. Sometimes (typically during dreams where Grace is reliving a childhood memory), Grace calls Jackie “Mommy.” I get why—as a child, she certainly did not call her mother by her first name—but it really did not work for me. Grace was a child forced to grow up too soon; I could buy her calling Jackie mom, maybe, but mommy? I certainly can’t see an overworked, exhausted Jackie referring to herself as “mommy” to her children. It was just weird and off-putting and out of place because it was so infantile, and, to be honest, came off as funny and unserious.
All that said, the dream scenes were far better written than the scenes that took place in reality. If they'd had better connective tissue and were more subtly handled, they could have been very effective. As it is, they're disappointing.
REALITY
From the premise, title, and setup of Mothered, I expected a book about a toxic mother-daughter relationship. I expected the narrative to explore that relationship in-depth and push the tension of it to its very limits. I wanted to watch them try to navigate an enclosed space. I wanted overtures of forgiveness turning nasty. I wanted conversations about Grace's childhood! I wanted them to have small disagreements that balloon out of control! I wanted a slow build of tension and complex hatred! I wanted gaslighting, damn it! There were a few times—for example, the dinner party with Miguel—where there was subtle friction between actions and intention between Grace and her mother. Grace questions who her mother is now and how she relates to the woman who raised her. Jackie is the traditional boomer parent and brings up grandchildren. Miguel and Grace share the occasional bemused glance. It was a good early scene, which I thought would lead into later, complex, more dramatic scenes. For the most part, though, Grace and Jackie’s interactions were not all that complex, did not have subtextual implications, and were so direct and unnuanced it just was never all that interesting. While Grace certainly had reasons to doubt the reality around her, as a reader, I did not have any reason to believe what she was being told by her mother was untrue.
As mentioned earlier, most elements of the novel’s central mystery—what happened to Grace’s twin sister—were introduced in dreams, then (maybe) introdced into the waking world. The only piece evidence that emerged from a direct confrontation between Jackie and Grace was the box. While what it revealed wasn’t particularly funny, I couldn’t take the contents seriously because it just gave me Assassin’s Creed 2 flashbacks.
Anyway. On all accounts, even down to the title, Mothered is supposed to be about a toxic mother-daughter relationship. It's also about:
The pandemic (which didn't really work for me. If it had been a book set during the pandemic, it might have worked. The difference between the two is a bit difficult to explain, but it's something that made a huge difference)
Her career as a hairdresser
Growing up being the primary caretaker to a disabled sibling
A weird disease that causes nightmares and turns you vegan
An ace woman’s relationship with her sexuality and desire to be a mother herself (complete with guilt over telling a teenager to have an abortion so her life wasn’t ruined!)
The close friendship between two queer people
That same woman’s hobby catfishing other women, pretending to be a man so that she can help them improve their self-confidence
The book just tries to juggle too much in the 300-ish pages it has. While a novel of that length certainly can incorporate that many or even more plot points, Mothered just doesn’t pull off weaving them together as cleanly as it could have. As a result, the narrative becomes muddled and shallow, with the titular mother-daughter crowded out by the rest. Before I close out, I just want to complain about the whole mystery illness plot point. It's another unnecessary, underdeveloped plot element that muddies the narrative waters even further. The final hook it provides in the epilogue (the therapist is like "oh no I'm having nightmares... just like Grace did!!!") was so cheesy I actually laughed out loud. It became doubly funny when I realized one of the symptoms of the disease is becoming a vegan. I'm sorry, but I genuinely cannot take the narrative seriously enough to be thrilled or frightened.
FINAL THOUGHTS
In writing this review, I had the opportunity to sit with the novel’s themes and really consider: what are they saying? What do they mean? It’s interesting to me that initially I read this book as (at least attempting to be) feminist. Yet after ruminating on how the book handles themes such as abortion and birth, motherhood, disability, and childhood trauma, it surprised me how shallow and at times contradictory it all ended up being.
While I can see why other folks enjoyed this novel, it's absolutely not to my taste when it comes to horror, thriller, or adult fiction. Further, in my opinion, I think it's ineffective in its exploration of mother-daughter toxcicity and childhood trauma. I requested Mothered because I always heard such great things about Baby Teeth; unfortunately, I think this has indicated she's not an author for me. Thank you again to Thomas & Mercer for providing a digital advance review copy through Netgalley. If you're interested in reading Mothered, it releases March 1, 2023. Find more information about the book here.
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deathbypaperbacks · 2 years
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Kill Hill Carnage by Tim Meyer
Kill Hill Carnage by Tim Meyer
“Kill Hill. A factory of legends. Manufacturer of nightmares. A nexus of terror.” Abandoned campgrounds and bloodshed go together like campfires and marshmallows. You can’t have one without the other, and there is no better time to read a good camp horror then summer. Theres just something about the smell of pine, cedar, and blood that gets me in that nostalgic summer mood. However, if you’re…
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lakecountylibrary · 2 months
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If you liked Camp Damascus, try Hell Followed With Us
and vice versa!
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There's a lot to love in both Camp Damascus by @drchucktingle and Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White. As horror novels about queer youth with, shall we say, complicated relationships with religion, they have a lot in common - if you liked one you very well may like the other. Let's take a closer look.
Characters:
Both books feature queer, autistic youth fighting back. The characters are trying to survive in a world created for them by abusive adults and religious institutions that hold power over them.
In Camp Damascus we follow Rose (autistic, lesbian). In Hell Followed With Us we follow Benji (neurodivergent, trans) and Nick (autistic, gay).
Genre:
Both books are horror, but with two distinct flavors. Camp Damascus has more of a creepy factor, while Hell Followed With Us leans more toward gore. In Camp there is some mystery to the evil, but in Hell the evil has a name, a face, an address - and a to-do list.
Both books deal with Christian cults and the horrors of indoctrination. They deal with the characters' complicated relationships to Christianity as an institution and God as a concept. They also both quote Christian scripture heavily.
Vibes:
While both books are horror, they do feel very different, largely because the primary emotion that drives each story is different. In Camp Damascus, it's love. In Hell Followed With Us, it's rage. You'll certainly find both emotions in certain quantities in either novel, but what they primarily put forward distinctly changes the vibe of both books.
-
So there you have it! Two fantastic reads in close thematic conversation with each other - but still quite distinct. If either sounds good to you, do yourself a favor and check out both today!
See more of Robin's recs
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Kelly Link's "Book of Love"
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/13/the-kissing-song/#wrack-and-roll
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Kelly Link is one of science fiction's most important writers, a master of the short story to rank with the likes of Ted Chiang. For a decade, Kelly's friends have traded whispers that she was working on a novel – a giant novel – and the rumors were true and the novel is glorious and you will love it:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/book-of-love-9781804548455/
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/239722/the-book-of-love-by-kelly-link/
It's called The Book of Love and it's massive – 650 pages! It is glorious. It is tricky.
If you've read Link's short stories (which honestly, you must read), you know her signature move: a bone-dry witty delivery, used to spin tales of deceptive whimsy and quirkiness, disarming you with daffiness while she sets the hook and yanks. That's the unmistakeable, inimitable texture of a Kelly Link story: deft literary brushstrokes, painting a picture so charming and silly that you don't even notice when she cuts you without mercy.
Turns out that she can quite handily do this for hundreds of pages, and the effect only gets better when it's given space to unfold.
Hard to tell you about this one without spoilers! But I'll tell you this much. It's a story about three teenaged friends who return from death and find themselves in the music room at their high school, face to face with their mild-mannered music teacher, Mr Anabin. Anabin explains what's happened in frustratingly cryptic – and very emphatic – terms, but is interrupted when a sinister shape-shifting wolf enters the music room.
This is Bogomil, and whenever he speaks, Mr Anabin turns his back – and vice versa. Anabin and Bogomil appear to be rivals, and Bogomil may or may not have been the keeper of the land of the dead from which the three have escaped. There's also a forth, a tattered shade who's been dead so long they don't remember who they are or anything about themselves. Bogomil would like to take the four back to the deadlands, but Anabin proposes a contest and Bogomil agrees – but no one explains the contest or its rules (or even its stakes) to the four dead teenagers.
That's the wind up. The pitch that follows is flawless, a long and twisting mystery about friendship, love, queerness, rock-and-roll, stardom, parenthood, loyalty, lust and duty. There's a terrifying elder god of Lovecraftian proportions. There are ghosts upon ghosts. There are ancient grudges. There are sudden revelations that come from unexpected angles but are, in retrospect, perfectly set up.
More than anything, there are characters. It's impossible not to love Link's characters, despite (because of) their self-destructive choices and their impossible dilemmas. They are so sweet, but they are also by turns mean and spiteful and resentful, like the pinch of salt that transforms a caramel from inedible spun sugar into something that bites even as it delights.
These characters, so very likable, are often dead or at death's door, and that peril propels the story like an unstoppable locomotive. From the very start, it's clear that some of them can't survive to the end, and Link is merciless in making you root for all of them, even though this means rooting against them all. This, in turn, creates moments of toe-curling, sublime horror.
Link has built a complex machine with more moving parts than anyone has any business being able to keep track of. And yet, each of these parts meshes flawlessly with all the others. The book ends with such triumphant perfection that it lingers long after you put it down. I can't wait to read this one again.
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nedlittle · 1 year
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wow dude do you think oscar wilde may have been gay? should we tell the discord? should we inform rupaul?
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literary-illuminati · 17 days
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2024 Book Review #12 – What Moves The Dead by T. Kingfisher
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I initially meant to read this back last year when it was up for a Hugo nomination, but well – honestly I forgot my copy in an airport waiting room and it’s presumably now living a good life somewhere in a New Jersey compose heap. But a friend had a copy and said they enjoyed it, so! Stole it for a few days, and very glad I did. It’s a quick, fun shot fungal gothic, great for stormy nights.
The basic plot is, well, it’s very explicitly Fall of the House of Usher with a slight admixture of Ruritanian Romance. The Ushers are a genteely impoverished family of minor aristocracy in Ruravia, a less than impressive principality in Eastern Europe. Alex Easton, Roderick Usher’s former commanding officer in some recent war (the Gallacian Army they served in having a habit of getting into these quite habitually) receives a letter from Roderick’s sister Madeline begging company and help, as she is deathly ill. Of course by the time Easton arrives the pair of them look like they’re one stiff wind away from dying, and the estate and the lands around it are both decaying and full of unnerving strangeness. The only person who seems happy to be there is Eugenia Potter, an Englishwoman and amateur mycologist studying the great variety of mushrooms and fungus to be found in the area.
So yes this is very much aiming to be Gothic Classic, at least in aesthetics and trappings. An overgrown and decaying estate several times too large for the last remnants of the family who now occupy it. Genteel madness and disease, hidden behind polite euphemisms and high walls. A deep, atavistic horror at parasitism and the desecration of the human (especially the well-bred, young and female) body by an alien presence. There’s even a cowboy for some reason. It definitely all works for me, but then my exposure to the genre is all a bit second hand.
Speaking of parasitism – mushrooms! The book expresses decay and desecration basically entirely through the idiom of fungal infections, both in terms of metaphor and imagery in descriptions and just in the actual source of the horror here. The lights in the tarn are fungal blooms, Madeline’s disease and her reanimation are both the result of almost drowning and inhaling that fungus into her lungs, and so on. There are two really effective horror beats in the book for me – the image of an infected hare which had just had its head shot off slowly jerking back to its feet as a dozen others placidly stood there and watched it be shot, and the moment of realization that Madeline’s oddly long and wispy body hair is in fact mycelia growing out of her skin – and both play off of this pretty directly.
I very awkwardly didn’t use any pronouns for Easton when giving the plot synopsis because the book actually plays around a bit with gender and pronouns in a way I’ve always loved and wish I saw more of. Easton is Gallacian (unrelated to the actually existing Galicia, I think), and the Gallacian language has a variety of pronoun sets beyond just he and she – one for children, one for God, and one (ka/kan) particularly for soldiers. Which, due to the exigencies of early modern warefare’s manpower requirements, eventually led to both men and women being perfectly eligible to become ‘sworn soldiers’. So y’know, Enlist today! Service guarantees citizen-transition!
(But actually I enjoy the thought and at least superficial sociological plausibility/consideration of what gender means in Gallacian society a lot more than how a lot of modern spec fic just kind of assues that every culture in the world has the perspective on gender of a well-educated 21st century progressive, material conditions be damned).
Anyway yeah, overall very entertaining read. Though Goodreads tells me it’s now the first in the series, which given how cleanly this one ended is not something that fills me with an abundance of faith.
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harringtonfan4 · 8 months
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quirkycatsfatstacks · 9 months
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Review: Unbreakable by Mira Grant
Author: Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire)Publisher: Subterranean PressReleased: March 31, 2023Received: Own Book Summary: Unbreakable Starlight was one of many groups of girl warriors tasked with defending the planet. Unfortunately, their name was not quite accurate, as most of the group fell – alongside every other warrior. Only two survived the massacre. Piper and Yuina. Now the government has…
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gbhbl · 5 days
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Horror Book Review: There's Something Here From Somewhere Else (Jonathon T. Cross)
There’s Something Here from Somewhere Else is the latest novella from author Jonathon T. Cross, a tale with cosmic horror vibes, but one also based within the folk horror genre.
There’s Something Here from Somewhere Else is the latest novella from author Jonathon T. Cross, whose debut horror novella, Madness from the Sea: Cthulhu’s Lure was a hugely enjoyable read (our review of that is here). Now, he brings us another tale with cosmic horror vibes, but one also based within the folk horror genre. The story follows Lydia, a 10-year-old girl whose life has been…
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kjudgemental · 1 month
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The Final Girl Support Group - Horror Novel Review
Author: Grady Hendrix Publisher: Titan Books Country: USA Year: 2021 Anyone who knows me knows I love my Grady Hendrix. He’s the maestro of the self-aware horror homage novel, with titles such as My Best Friend’s Exorcism and Horrorstor making a massive splash when they landed. Giving the supernatural a break for a bit, he turns his hand to the slasher subgenre, which makes one wonder if you…
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baroness-von-poontang · 9 months
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I have just finished this book and oh my days. Let me tell you, I’m not easily weirded out by reading a horror story at 3am but damn this got me!!
The story follows Mouse, a thirty-something woman tasked with clearing out her dead grandmother’s house. Now they did not have a good relationship, but Mouse feels obligated to take on the task due to her father's poor health.
So Mouse, being the good daughter she is, sets off to the butt fuck middle of nowhere to deal with a dead hoarder's home.
Things begin to get a little peculiar and escalate quickly, leaving Mouse in a state of paranoia and fright.
Think - creatures in the woods, inhuman beings, cryptic puzzles that must be solved.
Absolute 10/10 for me, I could NOT put the book down 🖤.
Get it on your TBR list; you won’t regret it!!
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