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| B078HL6JJH
| 4.17
| 3,615
| Jul 31, 2013
| Jan 23, 2018
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it was ok
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**spoiler alert** Like most of my reviews for shorter form literature, where I tend to clump them together somewhat logically, this is actually a coll
**spoiler alert** Like most of my reviews for shorter form literature, where I tend to clump them together somewhat logically, this is actually a collective review for the first three-ish volumes (currently "abandoned" around the 90% mark on the third volume but I'm sure I will pick this up again...sometime. Maybe. For reasons.). Before I begin, keep in mind that this series (and by extension this review) needs a trigger warning of child abuse and some of the abuse is definitely on the edge of sexual. You will see naked children (in the manga, not in this review) and the nudity is part of the "punishment" (as in, not just kids naked because of more innocent elements though there is also some of that). There are some odd comments. Discussions of genitalia. Whipping. Et cetera. This is not a drill. I feel like there are three layers (pun 100% intended) to Made in Abyss and I am 100% on board for layer one, maybe 60% on board for layer 2, and -100% on board for layer 3 which makes me effectively want to just bail on the rest. The first layer, the Doug-approved layer, is that there is an abyss. A large pit. It is a tower-climbing style story where some "god" thing is at the top and you must go through ordeals and struggles to climb only here the tower is inverted. The deeper you go the weirder it gets. The creatures are more dangerous. The terrain gets stranger. Why are they climbing it, besides the sense of "because it's there!"? There are relics buried in the walls of the abyss that must be mined. The deeper you go, the better the relics. Many of the relics are unknown in origin and are useful in odd ways. It is extremely Roadside Picnic if the Zone was more and more intense the deeper the Stalkers went. All this I love. I love the inherent horror. I love the "tower of god" trope. I love how the further you go down, the worse the impact is when you try leaving the pit. Simple nausea becomes bleeding from all the holes to an utter loss of humanity. The more pressure you endure, the more you are forever changed. I love digging out relics from some lost era. The weird beyond-the-ken of humanity vibe of history. I want to know how it ends and if the series had already concluded I might by the last couple of volumes and just spoil it for myself. Except it hasn't, so I have to wade into the in-between. The second layer, where I am more middlin' on, is that a lot of the focus characters are children. I kind of dig the Oliver Twist with a twist variation of there being a class of children who are orphans due to losing parents to the Abyss and the predatorial nature of this society that requires relics to drive its economy means that these children are forced to pay back the society that essentially put the children in that position to begin with. You can feel the power of that as an allegory: you create socio-economic pockets for people and then you punish them for being in those pockets. Considering the main characters are not really meant to go as deep as they go helps to forgive the sense of exploitation while also placing this right in the bosom of the long history of exploitation fiction. In other words, the author is exploiting the fact that these are children but also giving a sense that this is a bit out-of-norm. Which it is not. In later volumes, this theme is visited time and time again. Children keep getting chewed up in this world. Literally, sometimes. Completely unnecessarily. The characters could have been 20+ and bleeding out their eyes would have been a thing, you know? It shortcuts some of the horror to make people so innocent and vulnerable the on-page targets and I find that cheap. I can get some of the power of such a story: here are people who have no choice against an entity so powerful that no-one can truly overcome it and yet they must. I can dig it. But I don't. Not really. And then there is the third layer. By the end of the third volume we have two different scenes of children tied up nude and left to dangle on display and these are very much drawn in fetish style (one being a boy forced to dress like a girl by someone who is ostensibly a hero). We have multiple discussion of a young (robot) boy's genitals by other children and adults. We have things inserted into people. A scene with a character being whipped is drawn to make clear she is nude and the layout of the scene is very...itself. Some deus ex machina medicine is in suppository form. It is only a minor part of the story and it is always treated as a throw away line but it is there and maybe once or twice you will think "Oh, that's over with...that was weird right?" and then it will return. You could 100% lose 100% of them without even slightly slowing the plot down. They are all in excess. And for now I think I'm done. I should have likely bailed but the promise of a really cool Tower of God style story kept me going. I just think the steam has gone out the sails. Reading about the story ahead of time made me feel like I was going crazy because there were YouTube videos and various write ups (mostly about the anime, which I guess tones this latter element down) and none of them were like "HOPE YOU LIKE NAKED CHILDREN!" I was wondering if I was taking things out of context and no...no, I don't think I am. Once the final volume is released I'll spoil it for myself. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 2024
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Sep 02, 2024
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Sep 04, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| B0CW1BQC5D
| 3.80
| 333
| Jun 18, 2024
| Jun 18, 2024
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liked it
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There is a lot going on in this short novel and most of it works fairly well when deconstructed from the whole. There are elements of liminal spaces,
There is a lot going on in this short novel and most of it works fairly well when deconstructed from the whole. There are elements of liminal spaces, nostalgia, fears of growing old, fears of separation, anxiety about losing yourself, and also (I'd say) a broad middle-aged push back against AI imagery. This last one takes some explanation, perhaps, and I will get to it. However, while no single page is truly a problem and most of the pages are quite good there is a sense as a whole that these themes repeat and echo and get tangled up until they become kind of a chore. Which is surprising. A book that taps not only (1) the Gen X + Millennial nostalgia for the loss of the mall as a sort of cultural watershed, (2) the Millennial + Gen Z exploration of liminal space as a form of horror, (3) Boomer + Gen X handling of growing older and the change of the family dynamic, but also (4) how creepy mannequins can be FEELS like the sort of book that would have too much going on to have any time to proper loop back and linger. Except linger it does. Even when the latter portions of book introduces something else, something (5) *other*, those threads keep snapping taut into the same notes that started the book. The notes sing and dance but the scent lingers. Muddies. The "being sent away from the world" portion would have likely hit harder if not tied by the neck to mannequins. I would love a novel about people having to survive in a giant "mall world" and all of its nightmare logic. The weird unexplored sections of the mall with *things* inside would possibly have been enough that a much longer novel could have grown from that instead of being backseated by that point by everything else. The elderly main characters seeing their own identity so long tied into the mall that is now dying could have been a full novel, horror or otherwise. The weird fiction elements towards the end could have swung so hard had they been more the point from earlier on, perhaps, instead of an added plot 80% into a novel that takes up 80 pages. Much like the mall-in-miniature menagerie imagery towards the end of this book: things are too compressed and the visuals are too cluttered to make sense. As for my AI jab, there is a bit towards the end (but also before that) where the mall inside the mall is described as things being fused together and store brands become nonspecific nonsense that feels exactly like an image you might see if you went to Dall-E and typed "A typical American mall scene" and just let it roll. I actually tried it out myself and got an image with store names like "SamoGocok" and "Sbarlo" and people are sort of compressed together and the store merchandise is nonsense on the verge of making sense: a scene I have never seen but also have, a badly remembered memory. Back to the book at hand, I Found a Lost Hallway in a Dying Mall [a title so close to a Chuck Tingle title that I feel almost compelled to add "...and Fell In Love with a Gay Perfume Kiosk"], my overall review is that is maybe two great short stories with a couple of interestingly odd vignettes occupying a space where none can quite function fully as they were. Which is perhaps a metaphor. A fairly early 2000s style of bizarro writing meeting a fairly 1990s style of suburban horror crammed too tightly together like that last heyday of the mall ecosystem itself. Cutting any two elements and expanding more on the remaining would no doubt have made it flow much more strongly. Maybe just lose the mannequins. It is like clowns in the recent decade of horror or the Necronomicon. Too pat. Too self-contained. Too much weight on their own to not substitute elements that are actually more novel (pun!). I appreciate that horror novels about nostalgia and liminal spaces can very quickly get too maudlin and too technical (or too empty) without having some monster to haunt your labyrinth but all the same very nearly everything I loved about this novel was hidden away in between the moments where the obvious scary thing was trying to snag my attention. All said, I like what Farthing is getting at here and will definitely read more. 3.5 stars, rounded down. ...more |
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1
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Jul 24, 2024
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Jul 25, 2024
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Jul 25, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| B00DT9TFIW
| 3.60
| 107
| 1934
| Jul 06, 2013
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it was amazing
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[Doug's Note: As always, 3-star reviews are me being honest while 5-star reviews are me embracing the sheer joy of a book like this. In fact, this is
[Doug's Note: As always, 3-star reviews are me being honest while 5-star reviews are me embracing the sheer joy of a book like this. In fact, this is the first book I have read in some time that I feel I might just straight up make a hobby recommending to people without context, referencing it madly and stochastically.] "Crime was one thing, and a duchess was another." This is a weird, broken little book. For maybe a fifth of the read-time there is a quite decent if not groundbreaking horror story (most prominently towards the end in which it goes full horror for a few pages). The kind of stuff that E. F. Benson or Arthur Machen might have written when in a mood. Structure-wise, "The Great God Pan" is in evidence. It namechecks Jekyll and Hyde. It calls upon the classics but makes them a bit rougher, a bit queer-er, a lot more sexual. It openly confronts its sexuality and baseness rather than hiding it in metaphor. Take that chunk of horror and then it embed it inside a deeply satirical, fairly loud, and possibly quite angry comical novel about a slightly alternate history Britain; only bringing out the horror aspects when the jokes run out. Prior to that, jokes on top of jokes. Mock people for not reading enough. Mock the fascists. Mock the communists. Mock the prejudices. Mock the foreigners. Waves and waves of very nearly incessant jabs and jibes and taunts and wordplays. There are so many asides it is hard to tell how many of the jokes are even funny. Some are. Some are maybe more of a "had to be there to see it" variety. For instance! It was no doubt this fine nose that had steered him so comfortably through the sedentary life of a successful soldier, for in England it is wisely recognised that to a Staff Officer good looks must matter very much more than they should to a mere actor with a painted face. It was of General Prest-Olive that Maréchal Foch was reported to have said: “It is soldiers like Prest-Olive who almost unite the English and French armies in affection for the Belgians.” His wife was one of the Leicestershire ffox-Vermins, and he had to like it. What do you do with such a joke? Hug it? Cherish it? Raise as your own? Pages and pages of it. How about... “If you say so. Though one has heard of a queen having a rough-and-tumble with corporals.”More, you say?! The man,” said Crust indignantly, “was a sapphist and a nymphomaniac.”It does go on. Imagine reading ninety pages of that just to read a better-than-fair horror story across the other twenty? This is not a critique, per se. There are lots of better-than-fair horror stories. I have written a few of them, myself. I just mean, literally imagine reading quote after quote like that and then every few pages having a check-in to remind you that this is a book about brutal murders? That's how this book rolls. There is almost nothing else like it. Now we have lots of horror comedies who lampoon society while taking jabs at being serious horror. At least a few. But for that to also involve such a high brow smarmy smearing of British fascism and wastrel nobility? To just breathlessly hammer home every trope on loop so that people like Douglas Adams end up looking restrained? No, this is something unique to itself. A Jekyll/Hyde satire/horror book that is a Jekyll/Hyde style whodunit where the actual Jekyll and Hyde mostly concerned was Britain's own love of fascism. Or something to that effect. OH! Almost forgot this bit. The entire reason I found this novel was because I was researching the anecdote that Agatha Christie gives us at the start of The Murder on the Links, the one about "Hell, said the Duchess" (the eagle-eyed amongst you might realize where this is going). It looks like that was some sort of running in-joke about up-and-coming writers trying to get attention. That Arlen, who had unfortunately written a very successful novel and then been on a downward slope by this time, took that joke and just ran with it is kind of amazing to me. Is this ultimately an angry attack on the reading public? I have no idea. I am glad he wrote it, though. And I am glad it stopped at this one. By the way, the duchess never says, "Hell" in the whole novel. A web of lies, I tell you. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 04, 2024
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May 02, 2024
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Apr 04, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 1801102155
| 9781801102155
| B097F6W88Z
| 3.93
| 25,188
| Oct 14, 2021
| Oct 14, 2021
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really liked it
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I give this novel four stars for the fact that at the end I had four-stars-worth of enjoyment out of it. I could just as well as give it three- or two
I give this novel four stars for the fact that at the end I had four-stars-worth of enjoyment out of it. I could just as well as give it three- or two-stars had I finished it in different sittings or moods. It contains multitudes, good and bad, which has its charms. It is very much the sort of novel that will fit uneasily in the broad collective shelf but will fit quite snugly into some reader's dear hearts. On a technical level, the book's weakest aspect, the first two-thirds is in that category of ad hoc family trapped in some limiting space by a horror-themed situation. There are numerous examples — King's The Mist and Romero's Night of the Living Dead being two really prominent ones — and most, including this book, follow the general lead of the whole. There will be clashes of personalities. There will be limited resources and despite some nod being given to the concept of "survival horror" very little actual time will be spent making the survival make sense.* Someone will act a fool. Someone will take charge. Eventually, when something like stability is reached, something will show up to destabilize it. People will be forced to leave the room with some pocket of the family. Etc. etc. It is a story that has been told. Which is a shame particularly in this case because the situation is so primed for uniqueness. The limited space is a extremely well lit room where outside are things that watch. You spend a lot of the novel in the dark about what these watchers are but in principle this set-up is rife for metaphor. The main POV character sketches people. Everyone is described as being essentially that sort of person that people overlook. The old bossy woman. The young plain kid. The immature housewife. The artist with perfectly normal features. Trapped in a room where every night they must live out their starved, trapped existence on display. Is this a story about reality TV? About the internet and social media? About the way people are strangers to each other? They way we long to be seen? The way we fear it? No. It is a story about people trapped in a small place with no means to survive and yet they survive. Almost nothing is really said about the mechanics of their situation. Which is shocking in a book so prone to elaborate prose full to the brim with similes: "Her bones unfolded like broken patio furniture as she stretched her legs between the two front seats. She had never felt so old in all her thirty-three years. The bird, with its head quizzically atilt, seemed almost surprised by Mina’s unveiling." Much of the book is written like that. Impressionistic writing telling a fairly straight-forward tale. Even the contrast could have been something but it does not really meet in the middle. I will leave discussions about how much distance folks can travel in one day to other reviewers. They are right, but also it is never the point. The point is always survival in this tiny mock society and how entertaining that survival can be made to the reader. To the watcher, if you will. I'll see myself out. All these complaints should be understand to be an explanation about how I liked the novel, by the way. It excites me to see a relatively new writer like Shine show up with an idea so big and different. Even if this early novel sort of follows the established paths it gives me hope that future stories will find that voice and shout it loudly, because there is a lot of promise in that book. Also, as far as the found family core of this book goes, Shine has probably written the one most tolerable in the history of this genre. Which is worth something. ==== * Three years in an apartment building with no contact with the outside world? Sure...why not just assume folks have some source of water! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 19, 2024
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Mar 24, 2024
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Feb 28, 2024
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ebook
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| 1250797071
| 9781250797070
| B09C4GFCT9
| 3.67
| 549
| Jun 07, 2022
| Jun 07, 2022
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really liked it
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There are two broad things you need to know about this book in lieu of any precise/in-depth review. First, 29 stories (especially when some of the sto
There are two broad things you need to know about this book in lieu of any precise/in-depth review. First, 29 stories (especially when some of the stories are quite long and one of the "stories" is actually a novella*) is a lot. We are talking about "Complete Fiction of..." a lot. "Big Book of..." a lot. It is not an unreasonable word count or page length for a novel but properly breaking down this book requires a lot of simultaneous mental models of some quite varied (and quite good) writers and writing styles. More than a reasonably sized review can properly contain. Second, if you are someone who reads my reviews or someone who looks up reviews of horror anthologies or Datlow anthologies: you will have something in this collection you will enjoy. Quite a few somethings, even. It is quality. Datlow knows the craft. The theme — examining the concept of "monster" from pretty much all angles — is great, the variety of writers is great, several of the individual stories (falling, as they were, into some protoplasmic soup of being read over a period of a couple of months) — believe or not — great. My only real complaint is this should have been a volume 1 and volume 2 sort of deal. Maybe a three book set. Having stories like Priya Sharma's historical (almost Reggie Oliver-esque) tale of William Blake in the same collection as Indrapramit Das's story of the threat of sexual violence in the same collection as Nathan Ballingrud's folksy story about local witches in the same collection as Livia Llewellyn's high fantasy horror in the same collection as Jeffrey Ford's cheeky creature feature**...it very nearly fails to resolve into a shape. It is not a matter of highs and lows but more like a geometrical pattern of very many peaks stretching out for different horizons. I cannot really remember a story I disliked (some fell flatter, but I still tended to like them there). However, trying to read this all-at-once will likely tire you out, stretch the vibe too thin. Try three or four stories a week and spend a couple of months getting through it. Give each story its space. The value per page is pretty dang exceptional but most readers will eventually need a few blank pages in between. ==== * Not only a novella, but a novella about a person hearing a story second-hand, and there is a story in that story. Turtles all the way down. ** The very cheeky ending of which is probably my favorite thing in the whole collection and one of my favorite horror story endings in some time. The story stumbled a bit getting there but it knocked the last few paragraphs way out of the park. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 08, 2023
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Mar 10, 2024
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Dec 08, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B0087GJ5WI
| 4.14
| 72,568
| 1972
| May 01, 2012
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it was amazing
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I would generally consider this a must read if you are into mid-20th century science fiction and its myriad takes on philosophy, the human condition,
I would generally consider this a must read if you are into mid-20th century science fiction and its myriad takes on philosophy, the human condition, the social construct, and alien contact. It is an hard-to-solve novel, broken into four parts, that denies precise explanation and often clashes against itself. It is ripe for the kind of analysis that seeks to explain its tropes using one or two elements, only for other elements to completely shatter that approach. It is a Soviet novel heavily influenced by American science fiction (Vonnegut is namechecked, Philip K Dick is apparent) and yet critical of the western world, it is a anti-intellectual novel about the need to explore, an anti-capitalist novel about the need for individual happiness, and a visitation/first-contact novel with no aliens. At the core of its genius is the way it handles alien contact like an utterly inhuman, cosmological event. Early, we are given a kind of frame (six spots along a smooth curve, from a particular point in space) and we are told about a few effects—"traps" of high gravity, hell slime, "empties"—which gives a false illusion that we are on the edge of a solution. The reader finds a lot of toys to play with in these moments. Sound that drove people blind. The moral difference between the good scientists and the bad stalkers. Things are being cataloged. Dangers are space-cowboy affairs with a tinge of something else. People are mostly stereotypes familiar to readers of other science fiction novels. And then part one gives way to part two (part two does very little besides gives us more tech and more grit, feeling more noir than part one) and that gives away to part three and the novel wakes up. We see the story from a different angle. We are introduced to the "roadside picnic" metaphor [which, in actuality, is just a another analogy to explain something so beyond the kin of mankind that the we-of-the-novel cannot help but try to explain it as something]. We learn more about how the utter greed of people, the utter tragedy of the commons, drives forth a fast trade for trinkets that do little to help anything. The living dead show up and act out slow, stumbling imitations of who they once were. The children of stalkers are changing into something else. People push on, try to continue to be human despite the universe giving just a small taste of how inhuman it truly is. And finally part four shows up and is the most typical quest story the book has to offer while also tossing out essentially any stability and development experienced before it. This part—about a quest into the Zone to try and find an object that grants wishes while also finally showing us more of a first hand account of how terrible the zone truly is—is going to feel the most familiar to those who who expected the book to be more about the stalker side of the equation [coming from the movie or the video games loosely based upon it]. However, this is again a false front, another luring towards explanation. Because deep down the Zone is a bastard and everyone attached to it is a bastard. Is it all just a metaphor for human happiness in a world where selfish choices have to be made (and are rewarded)? Sure. Is it a story of dark sorceries and how true power comes from self destruction? Sure. Is it about how the utopian future of many science fiction novels is a pipe dream that ignores that human toil and many years of suffering? Why not? Deep down, I feel the genius of this novel is that it is an anti-science-fiction tale rooted in science-fiction constructs and the human need to assign labels and explanations as machinations of our own escapism. Our drive towards lore and canon in our fandom. By giving Red a quest, by giving Red fallibilities, by giving Red a few choices between moral choices we can briefly live in this cool world where alien technology exceeds our expectations so much that it destroys our concept of science and society. He becomes another Hero archetype and the Zone (and especially the wish granting sphere) become another quest, another march through trials to confront the goddess. There are any number of quests that could have matched Red's own travails but this very act of seeing him in this more universal, literary light denies just how much the authors embodied him with pettiness, hunger, greed, and a sad unfulfilled need to help his family survive from one Monday night to the next Tuesday morning. The future is damned, here, just like it is every day we have to put our eyes down and focus on just getting back home so we can do it all over again. Even as the final lines of the novel are this grand sort of Dostoevskian shout to the Russian spirit, they are also the kind of nonsense that we the reader bring to such a novel: one man's swimming through shit elevated to a kind of latent desire to escape our own cubicles and dreary Thursday afternoons. I truly adored it. The addition of an author (singular, one of the brothers having passed, I believe, before this translation/edition) afterword makes for a kind of even more bittersweet ending. The rambling, dissatisfied story about a long-gone Soviet printing and censorship machine and all the ways that ideas are changed and shaped to appease the great wheel only for additional sacrifices to be made is exactly the vibe that I felt the novel was trying to portray: that we humans simply do as we can because we must, no matter what big news event or great social revolution tries to claim our attention. ...more |
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1
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Oct 05, 2023
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Oct 13, 2023
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Oct 13, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1954321996
| 9781954321991
| 1954321996
| 3.81
| 21
| Jan 01, 1992
| Jul 2023
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really liked it
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One initial caveat out of the way: despite the subtitle on the cover, this is not really a book of ghost stories. There are ghost stories in it. Many
One initial caveat out of the way: despite the subtitle on the cover, this is not really a book of ghost stories. There are ghost stories in it. Many of the stories do have some degree of supernatural elements or oddness. Essentially all have some sort of "haunting" though odds linger around 50/50 that the term is about grief and loss than anything spooky. While I am not trying to lump A.L. Barker into some broad umbrella of Aickman-esque*, I think you could possibly best mentally frame what you are about to read by considering this collection in similar terms to how Robert Aickman framed his own stories: "strange". Barker is playing some fairly similar games as Aickman by using a wryly understated satirist's brush to make these vaguely dark comedic asides which are also poignant and sad. Ghosts and spooks occasionally intersect but in only a couple of cases are they (a) obvious or (b) central to the plot as a ghost/spook. Some are much more subtle or mostly something like a background element. Barker (who would have been in her 70s when this was initial published) could be thought to be cataloging something of an end-of-life stack of observations. The just-in-time of "Just in Time," for instance — a story about being plagued by other people's opinions of your marriage and how they think it is perfect and incessantly tell you so while you know it is really falling apart — is about how a sudden death of a spouse might have saved the appearance and expectations of a marriage for everyone else. In real life, Barker left her marriage because she "couldn't be bothered". The longest story, and opener, "Romney," is about grief and how it completely overshadows everything else. While there is no deep conspiracy at the heart of the tale (spoilers, I guess), the fact that it posits itself into certain gothic and cozy mystery modes means you feel it might have something deeper inside than a family still unable to process their own emotional scars. Or, in a more minor example, the final story, "I'll Never Know," is perhaps a take (or a jab) on the sort of ghost story that drives solutions through implications**, but the most haunting bit is when the POV character and a young girl/ghost is look at a carved panel. Initially the art is seen as exquisite and beautiful. As the young girl "puts her thumb upon it," it is described as explicit and tawdry and a "bacchanal of nymphs and satyrs". Later, as the girl is forgotten and gone, the piece again is beautiful and worth saving. While Barker could be talking about the value of art being caught up in the person experiencing it (and I think she is), it feels like another part of it is about how the people we know have an underneath we somewhat ignore in order to appreciate their beauty, especially in a long-enough life. A similar game is played in "The Dress," where a dumpy little young woman becomes the object of desire for an older confirmed bachelor who judges her for wearing a particular dress that he feels does not suit her. Later, as he remarries, someone else wears the same dress (what counts as this story's haunting) only now he finds its beautiful and well suited. Recommended. Outside of the opening story, most of the others are short and quick. A few have actual monsters of a sort. Many (even some with monsters) are more about the ruminating. It is the kind of collection I wish there was more of... but it was probably just the right amount in hindsight. ===== * for one, she often gives you plenty of explanation. ** In this case, it is explicitly obvious what the twist is though some of the language pretends as thought it is not. ...more |
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1
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Sep 28, 2023
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Oct 03, 2023
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Oct 04, 2023
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Paperback
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| B07BMR1WRZ
| 3.92
| 12
| unknown
| Mar 21, 2018
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it was amazing
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An effective collection of four quite good shortish novellas (while longer than your average short story, there are some authors who would have probab
An effective collection of four quite good shortish novellas (while longer than your average short story, there are some authors who would have probably just considered these as "warming up" length). In general theme and flavor, they read a bit like a transition from Bradbury/Twilight Zone-era of speculative horror into a more general "paperback horror of the 70s and 80s". They are better than average but also definitely of their type: a bit suburban, a bit weird, a bit gory, a bit wry, a bit horny. Each of these novellas features a different main character (with some characters crisscrossing a bit, most obvious in the last story that is a sequel to the third) and each is set in a different decade. The biggest misstep of the collection is that Grant does very little to make each time period feel distinct. An automobile of the time period is named. Maybe a song or popular TV show. There is exactly one brief discussion per story about the current president or current war. Then the rest is the same. People make phone calls. They jump in cars and drive over some place. They feel lonely and out of place. There are probably subtler changes and pressure shifts but these did not register to me. It does not kill the collection it just sort of makes its theme more a mechanical device than a living one. The first and last novella are both about women with some authority (a business lead and a professor) and the way that certain men manipulate and try to feed off them. In the second novella, a group of lonely men get entangled in chasing after a strange woman and her young child. While the third one is less centered around the male-female dynamic it at least has a moment or two dedicated to it. Loneliness and the failure of the romantic ideal are the heavy central themes. The third novella is also about loneliness but the "romantic ideal" is more about the social dynamic and contentment with coworkers and your job [and, you know, how that fails]. My favorite is the second novella where the strange woman and her child becomes the focus of a group of mostly male friends who feel the need to compete over her. Its positioning of the horror as a intractable mystery that belies the weirdness of its core works well, especially since the POV stops us from truly grasping all the facts. The third novella, about a group of postal workers trapped inside by a strange group of bikers, is the most ambitious and the one that lets its high concept down the most but has perhaps the best set-up of all of them. The other two I find to be effective and interesting, but less so. The first is about a woman whose suitors keep showing up partially chewed and how it mentally impacts her as she tries to solve the mystery (decent little oddity by the end instead of the more obvious choices) while the last is about a woman who is hit upon by her creepy boss and who makes the other wives jealous. This ending is much more cliche. At least now. Maybe not then, when it was written. Oh, and there is a wrap around story which adds only a little but the final few bits of it do kind of recast this book's vibe just slightly, maybe something weirder. A strong four-star collection with an above-four-star enjoyment factor for some of the little details and quotes, so I will give it a bonus golden star. NOTE: I wrote the original review while having to take a pretty big dose of Benadryl and it showed. Stupid poison ivy. Anyhow, have touched it a bit and made it flow more. ...more |
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1
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Sep 19, 2023
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Sep 20, 2023
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Sep 19, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B00KAEXWLU
| 4.09
| 1,522
| Jan 01, 1975
| May 29, 2014
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really liked it
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In terms of broad plot structure, Bloodstone is a straight up classic. You start with a few vignettes building up to the introduction of Kane himself:
In terms of broad plot structure, Bloodstone is a straight up classic. You start with a few vignettes building up to the introduction of Kane himself: the hulking epitome of the violence of his world. He is large, strong, capable, well-read, and intelligent. He speaks little (at least to start) and when he does he means it. He knows the world of old and yet functions just fine in the current timeline. The immortal wanderer out of myth. In contrast, the other two main characters - Teres and Dribeck - are treated humorous imitators to this masculine ideal. A woman and a scholar in the shadow of Kane's hulking form and biting intellect. Early on, we get many classic fantasy tropes. Ancient cities. Swamp crawls. Terrible alien races and their degenerate offspring. Scholars from centuries prior and their grimoires. Dangerous flights through enemy strongholds. Clashes between armies and wheels turning within wheels. Then, Wagner stops waits for us to cotton on to what he is been writing this whole time. Kane's questionable actions are not the actions of a hero nor even anti-hero. Kane is acting as the villain of his story and those two secondary, lesser characters are exactly the sort of heroes that would have inhabited the majority of other paperback fantasy novels [the plucky young scholar lord and butch-but-deep-down-reallllly feminine woman with daddy issues]. Wagner shows us that protagonist is a powerful force, but not necessarily a force for good. Wagner is not the only author to make this kind of twist but most opt instead for deeply-flawed anti-hero. Kane does not have time for that. He has a singular goal and that singular goal is Kane, the rest of the world be damned (quite literally). If anything, you might wonder why the notion of the hero is so easily assumed in genre fiction while literary fiction feels more ok in having villains as point-of-view characters. If only the book did not feel the need to explain everything through the medium of multi-paragraph dialogues. Characters often "speak" for a page, uninterrupted, only to have folks respond in kind. It feels in contrast to the overall vibe of the novel. Still, there is more to love here by far than there is for me to bitch about, so four stars it is. Bonus shout out to Wagner's fanboyism drifting up. I'll spoiler tag it but it is more flavor than important plot point: (view spoiler)[The Bloodstone is clearly an analog of Cthulhu, with its waiting until the stars are right and the passage about how it waits dreaming for death to die, basically. (hide spoiler)] ...more |
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1
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Aug 31, 2023
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Sep 11, 2023
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Aug 31, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B00KXAQ7NQ
| 4.01
| 19,587
| Oct 1981
| Jun 10, 2014
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it was amazing
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There is a sense of a game being played in this book, potentially deep enough below the surface that authorial-and-editorial revisions and updates bur
There is a sense of a game being played in this book, potentially deep enough below the surface that authorial-and-editorial revisions and updates buried it a bit too much [much like a house buried in the sand]. A coyness, perhaps. A tribute, maybe. A love letter written as a one-star review. A diatribe written as a vacation recommendation. To Alabama along the Gulf Coast, to the isolation of summer vacations among the scrub pines, to ghost stories, and definitely to sand. The madness and the macabre darkness every night brought along as families tell incessant stories of themselves, on loop. Majestic and mindbreaking. Take just the title. Borrowing "elementals" from old spiritualist literature and, I suspect, from another queer author of pop ghost fiction - E. F. Benson - McDowell gives these forces of spiritual energy domain over sand, heat, dead moms, abandoned babies, missing girls of color, old furniture that should have long been discarded, and rooms full up of old junk waiting for some unknown day when it might be sorted. How damned Alabama can you get? About all he was missing was the smell of fish and broken glass bottles cutting swimmer's feet and he would have completely nailed the Gulf Shores beach experience. These elementals mostly want to act nasty to the folks around them and pile sand up as high as they get it. I think I met some of them back in the day. Tongue-in-cheek-ness aside, you also find elements of McDowell's game in what I can only describe as making an unreliable narrator out of a omniscient third person voice. Some of it is just folks telling their side of a story — the official story of India's mom and some of the details that later come about from it are at odds, though not the sort of odds that make it wrong per se — and other it is the way a group dynamic might ignore an entire stack of wrongness, giving it lip service and complaint but little in the way of action. The corrupt politics. The forced friendliness. The giving up of grief to maintain appearance. Returning joyously as a family to a haunting that has been encroaching for years, accepted and proudly owned despite being linked to several tragedies. One character, Luker, says that removed from the experiences of Beldame you just sort of forget and think it could not be that bad, only to be reminded later when you return. That is possibly it. I think another part of it is that the elementals and their machinations just represent something of a missing puzzle piece (several, actually) in a puzzle box already missing plenty of other pieces. When you are dealing with the sort of folks who live in the sort of place where people of money and influence have done various things to keep that money and influence, being haunted just feels like part of the Alabama Thing, you know? The most poignant aspect of McDowell's game is found in the the character Odessa. She is very much so the trope of the Magical Person of Color but she's also just an old tired black woman who has been with the family for years, thick and thin. Goaded a bit by India, the possibly too precocious young New York teenager, Odessa continuously confronts the spirits that it is assumed that wise old black women would be most fit to confront. And in every outing her plans do have a sense of magic but you realize soon enough that she's guessing and gassing like everyone else. Nothing she does really works except when it does. Eventually she herself admits this in a rant when she's asked even more questions and she says, basically, "I don't know. Why do you keep coming to me with questions?" That she is both the Magical Old Black Lady but also just play acting at the role — in the way that India is the too sassy city kid but also just play acting in her role — is the flat out core of this novel. Even more so than the same old sad stories the family tells each other on loop: the old ghost stories that should have long been a warning to never return to those sands. There is a sense of magic and wonder in that dirty gulf water, choked with sand. I swam in it a lot. A lot a lot. There was something going back year and after to those sandbars and sand islands and long beaches that shift and move and change shape all the time. McDowell finds that magic, that ghost story, within in it and in fairly sublime Alabama fashion tells it as a joke, a complaint, a spooky tale, and an excuse to hear the sound of his own voice all the exact same time. ...more |
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1
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Sep 25, 2023
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Oct 06, 2023
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Aug 27, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B07HM43HZP
| 3.75
| 899
| Sep 20, 2018
| Sep 23, 2018
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it was amazing
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Review Summary: Solid collection that takes a look at a variety of angles of "folk horror" and tries a few new elements. First half is great and only
Review Summary: Solid collection that takes a look at a variety of angles of "folk horror" and tries a few new elements. First half is great and only wanes a bit towards the end when the themes start overtly repeating. Recommended for those who like short, effective horror and who might want to branch out from some of the oft-anthologized, bigger-name writers. === Review === I do not remember when I got this book but at some point I read the first story and then put it down (well, figuratively, it is an ebook). After the slug through of The Lords of Salem I wanted something else that might have an old-timey, witchy vibe with new sensibilities and picked this one. I went ahead and it read from the beginning so it would be fresh. The fact that I knew essentially none of the authors was a bonus. I am not 100% sure I could (or would) define the line where folk horror starts and rural or backwoods or swamp, etc horror ends. The introduction does not really nail it for me. "Weird fiction firmly rooted in the European Pagan tradition," definitely describes some things that feel folk horror to me, but also describe things that do not. It also leaves out a number of things are very folk, but not very EuroPagan. I just want things that bring up that strange vibe of local legends, the way old shadows sometimes cling to out-of-the-way places. Horror that triggers the same sort of vibe that growing up around folks that considered the devil and demons and bigfoot and ghosts all to be very real with very real considerations. This collection mostly hits that vibe. I had a great time. The opening story "Sire of the Hatchet" feels right on for blending that "folk" vibe with some new-Weird salt while still managing to reach out and touch older stories like "Randall's Round" in its genetic code. And then the next story, "Back Along the Old Track," shifts into the modern era with the conflict being the witnessing of an old traditional funeral where socially awkward set-pieces give away to a twist. "The Fruit," then goes for a more timeless, surreal approach that hits a similar vein as Eric LaRocca about a community that is bound to a ritual of harvesting fruit that has many rules and dangers. "The Jaws of Ouroboros" is a brilliantly bonkers high concept story of standing stone circles being teeth from dormant mouths that wake up and begin to eat the land around them and how they produce a substance that is worked into a new drug trade. Finishing out the strong and varied opening we get "The First Order of Whaleyville's Divine Basilisk Handlers" which adds a mythical edge to the rural American South trope of snake handling. These opening five are varied, each doing something new and different while still playing off something that feels "folk". The latter half did wane a bit but not right away. "Pumpkin Dear," has some top notch visuals (a wife back from the dead and wearing a pumpkin as a head) and some twee connections to the "history of Halloween" but it felt less punchy than the ones that proceeded it. "The Way of the Mother," gives a snippet of a larger mythology and the ending is definitely brutal and memorable but there's a bit of confusion to be had before you get to it (and the isolated community full of rules has been done before). The first proper misstep is somewhere in the longer-than-the-others "Leave the Night" which misses some beats with pacing and language and ends up feeling like Thomas Ligotti redux. Finally, "Revival," could have been fine but it's another story about snake handling and in a collection this size, that is too many. Strong opening. Decently strong second third. Last third feels like it drains the momentum. Still, it scratched the itch I had. ...more |
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1
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Jul 15, 2023
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Jul 21, 2023
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Jul 21, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1787582027
| 9781787582026
| B07QJX9NCV
| 3.58
| 1,953
| Jul 16, 1986
| Apr 11, 2019
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it was amazing
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Review Summary: A more classic Campbell from a slightly different time. He manages to tell an interesting "wide-scope in a small village" story that t
Review Summary: A more classic Campbell from a slightly different time. He manages to tell an interesting "wide-scope in a small village" story that takes its time building up and delivering. For fans of the thicker, more doorstop-esque, horror novels of the late-70s and through the 80s. Just do not go in looking for any sort of innovation to the genre (outside of a few slight tweaks to the gender roles). Doug note: I am a small stack of reviews behind so I am going to go into quick-fire mode for today and catch-up. === Review Summary === There is a part of me that misses this flavor of horror novel. Something Campbell, in the afterword, calls, "An extravagant supernatural novel splashed on a large canvas". The playground of 80s King and Koontz and Straub and others. Where as much as a 100 pages might be invested in simple world building before the horror even woke up (outside of a couple of snippets to let the reader know that something was afoot). Where the cast of characters tended to number into the dozens so there were plenty of people to kill off in the final acts. Where the sensibility was entirely suburban. Of course, there were always issues. That suburban sensibility tended to mostly mean White Men Who Are Beset. Plenty had paper thin romance plots wedged right into the center of the tale. Subtlety was short lived. Big tropes about the breakdown in the family and neighborhood unit were looped and re-used. Very few of them knew how to end. Final showdowns were often the very model of Author Caveat: usually the fight ends because the protagonists really, really do their very best and the Big Bads erupt into light or sounds or what have you. Despite this, a lot of these novels also liked to end on a bittersweet note. Hungry Moon has several of these good aspects and several of these bad aspects and the five stars are about 80% just from sheer nostalgia for a particular medium of doorstopper books. I really like the new modes of horror but it is sometimes nice to go back, especially in the case of someone like Campbell who has honed their craft with an entire toolkit of tricks and traps. This is before his novels became tighter (and more ephemerous) explorations of social awkwardness and the weird hiding outside of our simple grasp inside a sensation very nearly like paranoia. Parts of that are here, but so faint you might not really notice unless you knew where his style of writing was going. Props, by the way, to Campbell's every impressive growth of insightful commentary on his own work and the works of others. His forewords and afterwords are a joy to read. ...more |
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1
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Jul 15, 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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Jul 15, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1250830915
| 9781250830913
| 1250830915
| 3.59
| 18,797
| May 02, 2023
| May 02, 2023
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really liked it
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Review Summary: A pitch-black fairy-tale that attempts to get back to the teeth of old fairy stories — and why we might have once feared mermaids desp
Review Summary: A pitch-black fairy-tale that attempts to get back to the teeth of old fairy stories — and why we might have once feared mermaids despite contemporary versions tending to lean towards love and friendship. Goes hard and then harder and washes up a shore so darkly sharp that it is practically surreal. Probably for people who have dressed as Brom artwork for Halloween, consider Mork Borg to be the right level of edgy RPG for beginners, or have a deep fondness of their well-worn Tanith Lee paperbacks from back in the day. Maybe that's you. Read and find out. Content Warning: Lots of biting, chewing, and vivisection...including of children. Most other horrors are brief. === Review === There was a time in my youth (which seems less ironic to say now that my beard is nearly all white) where there a certain fancy towards dark renditions of classic fairy tales. Snow White with axes and guts and lots of teeth-filled — and toothsome — fairies (and various reminders that Sleeping Beauty was a story about sexual assault). It was an punching up towards the Disney motif of happily ever after and commercialization, but somewhat misguided in that historically fairy tales are themselves largely dark. The pied piper does not take the kids out for ice cream and sodas. When Thomas Ligotti reconfigured the Peter Pan story with "Frolic," he was merely tapping into the standard story of fairy abduction: beyond the ken of mortal men lies madness and the loss of self, sometimes bloodily and maddeningly. Whether the traditional story of "The Little Mermaid" can be understood as happy depends a lot on to what degree you consider dying of grief (or suicide) is happy. This is not to detract from Cassandra Khaw's The Salt Grows Heavy, a novella very much in the 80s & 90s tradition of revisisting classic stories with a paint brush full of viscera and a wordplay towards reevaluation. It is a quite good take upon those themes, reminding the reader that mermaids would not have been hunted and feared if they were merely busty lasses waiting to fall in love with any manner of sailors at first sight. The old mermaid stories (see also: sirens, sealwives, etc etc) are just another version of that strange, inexplicable truth: stories about sea creatures and humans interacting seem to invariably be about sex and death. Not even the ultimately sexless author H. P. Lovecraft* avoided it. It feels inevitable. Partially this book is good because it is too short to ever slow down and Khaw can write the story exactly as expansive as it needs to be without spending to long tying any threads back together. Starting with the devouring of a kingdom's people by a clutch of the Mermaid's daughters, it then shifts to a short, aimless drift by the Mermaid and her companion, a Plague Doctor who is also another creature from literary legend. Shortly thereafter they come across a village of tortured but seemingly immortal children whose simple price to pay for their ability to deny death is a systematic series of surgeries, deaths, and allegiances to a trio called "The Saints". Doctors pushing the edge of science by carving life into, and out of, the children's painful existences. Here it becomes, basically, a story about revenge until it is a story about love and there is no good way to rectify the events that occur besides to simply let them flow over you like a room full of blacklight posters and dragon skull kitsch. There are times where Khaw seems to slightly backtrack from established reality to tweak a detail or two as necessary for the next story point. Whether or not this is on purpose it barely matters. The book is one extended literary present. All the matters is the spectacle on display at any given time. Rough, painful, occasionally heroic, ultimately the understated romance becomes the core. This is a novel about outcasts and found family. You could analyze it for queer themes. You could suggest it is a story about serving up empty dreams of the future to youth so that the current status quo could maintain profit margins off the backs (and eyes, and entrails) of their young bodies. It is this. It is not this. It is a type of revenge fantasy where consequences are for the norms. Escapism that smells of road kill. The kind of book you are sure your grandmother could never fathom (never count granny out, though, she read the fairy tales before Disney stole them). It made me feel somewhat young again. I liked it. I do not necessarily want the trope of bloody fairy tales to return but in a world where Redditors consider themselves smart for trying to talk some madness about why mermaids, little or otherwise, could never be black it is good to remember that most of them would have been covered in kelp and blood. No one owns these stories. To think otherwise is a weird collective egoism. ====================== * Apparently he was a perfectly adequate lover for the short time he was married, so not entirely sexless in the flesh, just the page. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 26, 2023
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Jun 30, 2023
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Jul 02, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 9798988128601
| B0C26BQ6VG
| 4.30
| 352
| May 16, 2023
| May 16, 2023
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it was amazing
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Review Summary: Laird Barron continues to improve the Coleridge series with each outing and this one feels like the author is having fun with the seri
Review Summary: Laird Barron continues to improve the Coleridge series with each outing and this one feels like the author is having fun with the series. While you would partially need to know the series to understand every little thing that happens, this is actually a pretty good jump-in spot. For those readers who like mystery with a little bit of technical mystery, a lot of machismo, and a nice dash of odd mystery. === Review === I said that Worse Angels was my favorite Coleridge novel at the time of that review and now I would say that The Wind Began to Howl is the new contender (that's always a pleasant surprise since most series lose steam at some point). Why is this one my favorite? Well, it is pretty short and to the point and that is always nice nowadays where work and family make it harder to spend too long reading without regularly giving up sleep (I usually stay up to midnight or 1am just to read what I can and have to be awake again by 6am). I also really adore the theme of cursed music and movies in fiction. One of my favorite tropes. Mostly, this novel feels a lot like Barron having fun. Coleridge is fairly fallible throughout but still punching. There's shout outs to music and movies and books. Folks like Howard and Lovecraft and Smith get direct references. Side characters are mostly entertaining. The band at the core of the mystery sounds exactly the the right sort of weird. By the end, things get weird and then get Weird and nothing really makes sense and you have to do a lot of guess work and assumptions but people reading Barron for years should be used to that. If you hate odd out-of-the-box endings that drift into full on strange, you will likely hate the ending of this novel (novella? I don't know...) but even then you might still want to read it because weird-tinged hardcase crime novels are not that common and this is a good one. Here's to the next one being my new favorite, as well. ...more |
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Jun 24, 2023
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Jun 26, 2023
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Jun 27, 2023
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Paperback
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| B0C4HKKFWY
| 4.22
| 9
| unknown
| May 05, 2023
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really liked it
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Review Summary: One good, one decent, and one just-there short story where all three combine music and sound with the Weird and Other. Quick read with
Review Summary: One good, one decent, and one just-there short story where all three combine music and sound with the Weird and Other. Quick read with a fairly extensive about-the-author bit in the back if you wanted to know more. === Review === I actually went back and reread Miekle's The Keeper of the Gate right before this. That collection I still find to be mostly adequate Lovecraftian pastiche with a single proper-good story [about the end of the solar system and the way the dark wants inside the human mind]. That meant that reading this later chapbook with three more "Lovecraftian stories" was a nice surprise because here Miekle is writing something not so constrained to Lovecraft's nouns and adverbs and finding a nice little cove on his own prolific* shore. Partially it is because these stories are more bound by a theme and partially its because the actual spook-and-awe feels better in his grasp. Like, Keeper, this chapbook has one story that I would consider truly-plus-good. The final story, "The Unfinished Basement," has an abandoned house bought by a realtor for a quick-flip lead to an unsettling series of events involving music and resonance with a basement underneath. It makes some nice tweaks to the "they read from the book!" trope and puts most of the full understanding just slightly outside the reader's grasp. If anything is against the story, I would say that it could have stood to be a chunk longer to take its time to build upon itself. All three of these stories use music and sound to some degree as a gateway to the unknown ("Basement" does it the best). Considering some of Lovecraft's own approach to combining the dark Other with modern math and science (which is depicted as just being on the precipice of understanding), it seems like more authors could examine this in the form of music and other constrained-communication patterns. One of the best of Lovecraft's original was "The Music of Erich Zann" and besides that there were a few other mad pipings associated with the eldritch. It's actually strange that there hasn't been more stories to take this, especially considering we live in a world with approximately a million stories involving the Necronomicon and old bookshops. On the other side of quality from "Basement" is a middling middle-of-three story that attempts to very slightly update "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" story to be a bit more Weird.** There are a couple of little elements that are fun but nowhere near enough was done with the story. At least the first story in the collection is decent enough that it makes a nice companion to the final one. In it, an abused youth begins tapping into the primal beat to escape the suffering of his overworked life and is punished thoroughly for his discovery. With a hint towards the Dunsanian Skarl, it has a nice little Lovecraftian-adjacent jazz to it. It stays right at the edge of its welcome and checks out when it is time to go. This stops it from being able to develop anything deeper with the reader but it is likely deep enough. Note that while this chapbook is clocked at 59 pages, it is actually about 35 or so story with the rest being an extensive Q&A type thing. Miekle's chapooks are meant to be cheaper-to-purchase short forays into his fiction and this does a good job of poking the reader to want more. Not groundbreaking but decent. Probably would be considered roughly 3.5 stars but that final story is an easy 5 stars for me. Middle story barely scrapes 2-stars and the first one is more like 3.5. Maybe "Basement" will eventually find its way into a more solid best-of-collection. ==== * Note that Miekle has over 14 pages of books on Goodreads. Even if several are anthologies that he showed up in, that's still a lot. He's the kind of author you go to check up on after a couple of years and find he wrote a 12-volume series in the meantime. ** Does it need it? A man able to lead rats and children off into the unknown through the power of music is easily proto-weird on its own. ...more |
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1
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Jun 04, 2023
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Jun 04, 2023
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Jun 04, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B00UA1KO82
| 3.80
| 7,418
| Mar 20, 2015
| Sep 2021
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it was amazing
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In my recent review of the Stephen Jones edited A Book of Horrors, I mentioned this short novel* floating around my to be read pile but never quite ma
In my recent review of the Stephen Jones edited A Book of Horrors, I mentioned this short novel* floating around my to be read pile but never quite making it to the top. Thanks to strength of Hand's "Near Zennor" in that collection, and my own admittance in my review, I felt it was time to go ahead and swap it up to immediate top billing and dive in. It is good I did because it is thoroughly entertaining and an overall excellent example of its type. What type is it? Well... Structurally, it is the transcript of a fictional documentary about a 70s British folk band and the weird thing(s) that happened to them. About eight seconds of searching on Google turned up no good name for this format, so I am prone to consider it an extension of the epistolary form despite that being also technically incorrect. Hand does a good job, though not a perfect one, of finding voices for the various interview subjects. There are times with the folks blend together a bit, but it works. There are also a few lines where the British-person-being-interviewed-by-an-American sounds an American author writing as a British person, but it rarely detracts unless you have a pet peeve about this sort of thing. Hand plays a bit at the unreliable narrator with some interviewees mildly contradicting each other and this is largely subtle enough to help add to the sense of unease though not structured enough to offer any real doubt to the story itself. Plot- and sub-genre-wise, it has elements of folk horror, the gothic story, a bad-place novel, and something very nearly but not really a haunted house. That latter statement is probably a spoiler but it is important to note that your traditional ghost story is a story of accumulation where the internal fact that ghosts tend to be toothless is excused by a sense of increasing dread and louder noises until the characters (and the reader) find things a bit too intense to endure. While Hand uses a slow-burn variation of this structure and does broadly increase the intensity of things throughout the final climax is understated and told in bursts with only a couple of descriptions actually approaching outright horror. This is ultimately a novel of hints and speculations, a shallow dive into the depths that sleep underneath. I would use the word Weird to describe it best, as that term is understood to apply to modern stories, but I think Aickman's "Strange" also works. Hand does a quite fine job of blending elements of folk/rural legends and the history/vibe of folk music. I was never quite sure when she was making stuff up whole cloth or when she was referring to stuff that actually happened, and that is often the sweet spot. By the way, when I say "slow-burn," this is not a test. If you were to condense every truly-horror story passage down, you might be looking at ten or so pages. Most of the horror is little things like a voice singing in the night, feathers stuck to a semi-naked teenaged groupie's feet, dead birds, and rooms and corridors that possibly change shape and layout or possibly a bunch of stoned and drunk folk singers reliving four decades ago have issues with recalling exactly what went down. If you were being truly stingy, the only scene of proper horror—as opposed to mood pieces—is from looking back at a photograph, giving the whole thing the book a Lake Mungo vibe.** While this is a book about a documentary about a music album and that is prone to lead to some disjoints in presentations, it is only looking back now that I realize it is perhaps an odd choice to have the central horror weirdness not evident in the fictional audio recordings. Even in the fiction, the visual proof of weirdness is largely non-extant media. The reader can no more see the photograph than they can hear the songs being sung, both are bridged by the imagination. It worked for me. Will it work for you? I would like to think I've given enough hints about the form and flow of the book for you to have a broad idea. Generally, if you need horror to keep you constantly on your toes to be entertained, then probably not. If you like old English houses and folk music and a simmering sense of dread with no good conclusion (and the final passage or two is something almost bordering on anti-conclusion and possibly greatly unnecessary), then maybe. Perhaps. I would say it is worth getting your toes wet in the prose. One final aside, if you have somehow read "Near Zennor" but not this one, there are a few passages and ideas that clearly drift from the earlier long short story and this slightly later short novel. It is not a one for one, but you can see the percolation. ====== * In its length, I have heard it described as a short novel, a novella, and "a book for kids". The semantics of the first two are pointless and the description of the third is unnecessary. It is a book of around 150 pages, but not quite. That should suffice. ** Being a collection of interviews, some years after the fact, describing a bad event and then piecing together some of the details while exploring the horror building up to it, having a single scene of proper scary horror: this book is very, very Lake Mungo . ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 10, 2023
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May 14, 2023
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May 10, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1848637330
| 9781848637337
| 1848637330
| 3.81
| 11,921
| Apr 1929
| Jun 2014
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really liked it
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I have been vaguely aware of PS Publishing's Illustrated Lovecraft series for a goodly minute. In fact, it was this volume that really got my attentio
I have been vaguely aware of PS Publishing's Illustrated Lovecraft series for a goodly minute. In fact, it was this volume that really got my attention. The late Wilum Pugmire posted a video to their Youtube channel discussing how they had intended for another essay to show up in this volume instead of "Lustcraft" (said video gives you a short reading for the intended essay). I do not know what went awry with the editorial choice there, but while "Lustcraft" is the weakest of the three essays I would say it is also the most personable. To clarify, the Illustrated Lovecraft series has one (or more) stories per volume with illustrations by Pete Von Sholly and various essays (that seem to be reprints of older materials, though some might be original to the series). In this volume, there is around a dozen or so illustrations. It must be said that the art is definitely of a type. Faces are often leering with mouths agape. Colors pop from the page. For illustrations like Lavinia and Wilbur running towards the stones on Sentinel Hill or the scene of the Dunwich villagers overlooking the destruction left by the horror, this effect is evocative. For some others, such as the picture of Lavinia holding a young Wilbur, it is too much, making her more akin to the The Cryptkeeper than to a haunted, mad albino woman. For the most part it works and even when it does not, it is still interesting to see Von Shelly's take on these iconic Lovecraftian scenes. I will not spend too long discussing the text of the main story in that it has been discussed quite a bit and has shown up more than once in other volumes I have read and reviewed. I will say that for Lovecraft, this "one story at a time" style works for his writings. It is easy to get caught up in the big hulking anthologies of HPL and lose the tiny little details squeezed between such....cyclopean and eldritchly-hyphenated words.* On its own, "The Dunwich Horror" is ripe with these hidden moments and asides. Here are just a few I noticed: --The early depictions of Wilbur [before his more monstrous aspect is exposed] are written to play off fears of racial mixing with stereotypes linked to Mediterranean and African people. In general, Lovecraft has a few weak attempts to try and hide the mystery and it is not hard to imagine people being completely blind to the story not quite clocking all the hints and winks being thrown at the reader. --The initial description of Dunwich is one of Lovecraft's strongest. That being said, its depiction of an area with many rounded hills and multiple sets of standing stones and walls close to the road feels like a fanboy fever dream trying to mash multiple miles of fictional English country-side into one rural New England place. --The standing stones are (somehow) linked to Caucasian people implying that some European types have been active in that region for centuries or millennia, something never really developed elsewhere in Lovecraft's writings, at least not the good ones. --Though this story clearly references "The Call of Cthulhu" in a couple of places, it technically hits at odds with the mythos. In this story, the Earth came from some other place and the general plan is to drag it back [as an explanation of why a tiny blue speck might have so much...otherworldly presence]. --Wilbur's full description around the middle of the story is strong weird horror writing. Ironically, the description is preceded by the Lovecraftian cliche about the difficulties of describing it in writing. I like to think that was HPL engaging in humor. His otherworldly appearance is definitely satyr-like (though with hints of elephant and sauropod), backing up my theory that Lovecraft intends Yog-Sothoth as a variation on Pan. The story "The Great God Pan" gets a direct, in-text mention, even. Overall the story is a beautiful imperfection. Besides the "The Great God Pan", you can see Blackwood's "The Willows" and maybe even Bram Stroker's Van Helsing in the mix. As Donald Burleson points out in the included essay, 'The Mythic Hero Archetype in "The Dunwich Horror,"' there is a degree of mythical inversion in the story's telling. The first half has Wilbur being a brilliant outsider, the cast-off son of a god, physically and mentally above his peers. He goes off on a quest to fulfill his heavenly destiny. However, around the middle mark, Wilbur's death occurs at the failure of his task (a task aligned somewhat in the monomyth with a descent into Hell checked by a ferocious hound). After this, a new hero arises. Burleson connects this to the Horror but I think it is best to see the inversion passing the mantle to Armitage. The story shows the descent of a precocious outsider youth into hell and a quiet and somewhat fearful scholar rising instead. A literal transfiguration of characters with the task no longer being to uphold the god's wishes but instead to oppose the heavenly presence. Such construction makes you almost forgive that the story's climax is seen from a distance and is probably only a temporary set-back to The Old Ones great plans, but so it goes. We are merely human, after all. ====== * I do not remember who or where but a reviewer some twenty-plus years ago made the comment that the new tendency to anthologize Lovecraft in all-in-one type volumes had the unfortunate aspect of asking readers to stumble through a lot of badly crafted early writings to get to the increasingly better and more important stories later in his life. You could easily cut out half of HPL's stories and lose very little while generally improving the flow and saving a few trees. ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 2023
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May 02, 2023
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May 04, 2023
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Hardcover
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| B09SGN5QF5
| 3.64
| 252
| Sep 13, 2022
| Sep 13, 2022
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it was amazing
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Review Summary: Fellstones is very much a Ramsey Campbell novel 'of his type' with a blend of folk- and cosmic-horror [and just a touch of sex and gor
Review Summary: Fellstones is very much a Ramsey Campbell novel 'of his type' with a blend of folk- and cosmic-horror [and just a touch of sex and gore] wrapped inside a shell of socially awkward and disjointed conversations and modern-meets-ancient expectations. Largely for pre-existing fans of Campbell, the story's initial premise of a person torn between two worlds has promise but ultimately it becomes a story about the old ways more so than the new world. Lots of music references with a dash of sassiness about working in modern day bookstores. Ramsey Campbell is an absolute master of bridging the gap between weird fiction and weird social interactions. The master, really. Fellstones is basically Campbell just showing off his skills in this light. Paul Dunstan is a somewhat lackluster bookstore clerk who specializes in music — unfortunately music people do not seem too keen to buy. He is also Michael, a brilliant musician with a heavenly voice and the ability to tap into the vital sounds around him. Having fled his foster family for their overbearing and strange ways (even his name being forced upon him by the foster family who refuses to call him Paul), he tries to create a new identity afloat in the modern world, seeking mostly just a way to live and enjoy his life. The Staverlies, however, know that Paul/Michael is destined for something more and want him back and part of their world. For those keeping score, this means Campbell has set up a story where social weirdness shows up from two different fronts. For Paul, the days working the bookstore are fair but somewhat fruitless* and his relationship with a fellow clerk is adequate but never exactly satisfying. For Michael, the return to his old family life is fraught with innumerable strange encounters and a loss of personal control as memories — which he has largely buried — start returning to explain why he left and stayed so desperately away in the first place. Paul/Michael does not exist well in either place and yet finds himself beholden in both cases to other people's whims and expectations, with little room for himself to be himself. Structurally, this is a "Innsmouth" story: the outsider brushing against a tightknit community that actually holds connections to themselves. You might even see this as doubly so such a story since the bookstore is another community full of strange ways and rituals that Paul cannot truly fathom. This form embraces a twisted helix of a hero myth: a descent into hell followed by transcendence brought about by the dissolution of self. The best variation on this theme is Fred Chappell's Dagon, a southern gothic rewrite of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". There, like here, the elements of romance and awe are mutated and distorted, outside of the protagonist's ability to grasp (and the reader's ability to approach) until the shutters fall away. The window to the great Other is open and the hero continuously balances upon the ledge precariously. To fall forward or backward is loss, but neither can they stay in the center. Eventually the choice is made by them or for them, and either way a transmutation must be endured. Campbell is not so much concerned with balance — Fellstones is a novel about Michael and his music with Paul's own attempt to flee the gravity of an parasitic familial relationship treated more as a Rumspringa than a true identity — but stories grow a bit more organically than a writer can properly control and you feel Campbell trying to tug the slowburn and sometimes adrift-in-rural-England narrative into a path that might allow for Paul/Michael to have their own space. I am personally a sucker for Innsmouth stories where the hero gives into the pull of the Other but it would be no fun if they all were so clear cut and this one is never quite ready to give either side of the window an easy time of it. Perhaps this novel is best thought of as a metaphor for abusive relationships: toxic families that consider their demands justified. The great music of yesteryear, the harmony of the spheres, the attempt to understand transmutations and what they mean — all are just ways of dealing with a family that considers Paul to be their own property and consider their use and abuse and control of Paul-int0-Michael to be an expression of love. Mostly love of themselves, sure, but narcissists rarely understand the difference. The novel ultimately needs Paul/Michael to love himself (bonus if the reader loves him) and I think it finds a path that makes that almost work. Not necessarily during the course of the novel's text, but in the sense of us seeing a doorway towards it. Overcoming a lifetime of abuse, control, and neglect is never pat nor trite. Even without all the folksy, otherworldly stuff going on. I am a fan of the story and for me it is easily five-stars. If you are not a fan of Campbell, I do not think it will sway you. If you like Campbell but want something radically different from him, this is probably not it. But if you like Campbell and the way he turns paranoia and anxiety into a gateway of awe towards the Other, this one is awfully nice. 1-week-later-BONUS: I forgot to mention.... there is a Howard the Duck reference just given pretty baldly at one point. Not, like, someone mentions Howard the Duck. No, a character hallucinates seeing a giant duck coming towards him and then finds out it is a guy named Howard. What a strange thing. I hope Campbell has been waiting for years to slap that in where he could. ===== * Those who have read The Overnight know of Campbell's time working in a bookstore himself and how he is quite able to channel that sort of fruitless modernity into frustration and anxiety. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 13, 2023
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May 16, 2023
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Nov 19, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 1974726444
| 9781974726448
| 1974726444
| 3.98
| 9,691
| Nov 29, 2022
| Jul 26, 2022
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liked it
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I have no idea if I am better and proper back (see footnote "!!!" for explanation) but Junji Ito is a good place to jump back in and get my review-toe
I have no idea if I am better and proper back (see footnote "!!!" for explanation) but Junji Ito is a good place to jump back in and get my review-toes re-wet. My lovely partner got me several books as an anniversary gift (18 years!, Space Pilgrim, the mind boggles) and one of them was this one: Ito's The Liminal Zone. Just to clarify, while you could argue liminality does actually exist in this novel (it do) the title is almost definitely just to grab the eyes of folks who are hopped up on Youtube videos about the Backrooms and "Liminal Spaces in Minecraft." It's in the DNA of the genre. You will score no points on your essay by trying to "gotcha" horror marketing. ALAS. Reading through it, I have to say that many of my old critiques of Ito kept resurfacing in the back of my mind. His tendency of depriving many female characters of any proper autonomy, his re-use of the same character-types over and over likes he recasting actors into the role (and said actors mostly just play themselves), the use of certain visual short-hands that can be really effective but also can be confusing if they are stand-ins for different things (is it the stink of rotted corpses....or is it ghosts....or is it just...bad moods? All three is probably the answer...). I got through them being mildly entertained ("mild" Ito is still better than a lot of alternatives, mind) and got to his afterword and it was a little surprising to see how much Ito himself slags off the collection a bit: "Still, perhaps I'm tired after drawing manga for years on end. I'm out of good ideas." Turns out these are stories specifically written to be featured in the LINE serial manga app and were written in the context of the COVID-19 lockdown. A time that was (and still is) rough on a lot of us mentally. So, no judgement there if a person whose job it is to write darker stories felt a bit dark while doing so. And really, while I would not recommend this as a starting spot to anyone for Ito, it generally works ok. It does not let the brand down. The first story, about weeping women who cry incessantly for the dead, has a fairly universal folklore vibe to it. The visuals of one character's face being destroyed by tears is top notch design. The third story, about a flow of spirit energy, is my favorite and I love the way it ties into a similar vibe as "The Enigma of Amigara Fault": the human body-and-therefore-the-soul transfigured by the landscape itself. The final story is maybe a bit weaker than these two, but I think works well as a tidbit. Only the second story, about a cultish school and its lascivious leader (and malicious-but-with-cause leader's wife) feels truly underperforming while still being a fine, perfectly adequate horror story. Which is probably the most damning praise this book can receive. It is "perfectly adequate". It tells good stories in an effective way. There are few stand-out moments (only the third story and then snippets of the others will probably stick with me) and this is an author known for shaking up the collective horror psyche. That being said, the rating I am going for here, 3-stars, is in the context of it being a Junji Ito "novel". It is 3-stars compared to greats like Uzumaki and Gyo. It is 3-stars compared to beautifully flawed attempts like Remina. It is fair by Ito's standards, and those standards are high. Note: The read dates are just....those are nonsense. I read this sometime in the last few weeks. Not sure when. ===== !!! Briefly to fill in some gaps. I disappeared off of Goodreads for a while because I was hiking with my family and fell down and slammed my leg into some rocks and...did bad things to it. The past several months have involved a lot of physical therapy, re-growing muscles, allowing tendons to reattach, getting use to my new knee which is similar to my old knee but definitely not the same, more physical therapy, and just coming to terms with facts like....it might be some time before I am able to put socks on by myself (as in, without assistance). And shoes....man. Also, stairs suck. During the long process of healing, the various painkillers, therapy needs, and such meant that my headscape was largely foggy and old trees. My ability to recall things I had just read or watched was pretty rough. That part, at least, feels about 90% better. ...more |
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Nov 03, 2022
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Nov 03, 2022
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Nov 03, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 5.00
| 1
| Dec 20, 2021
| Dec 28, 2021
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it was amazing
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[Disclaimer: I backed this book on Kickstarter. In fact, I want to make a section for other books that I backed on Kickstarter (I back almost entirely
[Disclaimer: I backed this book on Kickstarter. In fact, I want to make a section for other books that I backed on Kickstarter (I back almost entirely books) since it can be easy to overlook all except the biggest of those. This is the first one to enter into my "kickstartered" tag.] This book is ostensibly an expansion of an older edition of Protocol #10: Eons. Which is true in the same way that Macbeth is an expansion of the first three or so scenes of Macbeth, Act One. The original Protocol edition (nearly a decade old now) was 12ish pages enabling you to play broad "fringecraft" stories about a group of folks exploring...something. Something weird. It was interesting and had some potential but was also a little formless. The right gaming group could get a number of stories out of it but players were generally responsible for creating their own amateur episodes of X-Files* and fitting them into a Protocol framework. What is the Protocol framework? It is a GM-less [aka, no central Game Master] RPG-lite where players take turn directing different types of scenes based on prompts (for locations and for scene types/themes) generated by drawing from a standard deck of cards (plus jokers). Scene types range from vignettes (short little descriptions of what is happening) to ensembles (scenes with all the characters together again) and prompts vary based on the playset but can be things like: "Interlude: A Clue in Plain Sight" with a location of "Abandoned: Office Complex". In principle, it acts as an engine to drive a game forward by forcing a kind of random arc to which players have to respond and adapt. In practical play, it often gets fudged a bit. It is noticeable that in the post-Fiasco, post-Microscope era of rules-lite storygame RPGs, Protocol is one of the only prominent systems to come down more Fiasco than Microscope. Now, what the Protocol Squared: Eons** version does is just adds more. Lots more. The brief paragraph of background and the handful of tables of "fringe-centric" content are greatly expanded and rewritten. There are now multiple modes of play including the original "fringecraft" but also including such flavors as "cults", "transcendental horror", "ghastly murders", and "giallo" [and others]. You can expand your options somewhat by mixing-and-matching elements: transcendental horror + ghastly murders, let's go! Each mode gets its own set of starting questions/world-building, table of scenes to give it a more unique feel, and other elements to help them to stand out a bit so subsequent games of Eons can be enjoyed returning players without requiring greater and greater amounts of imagination to really stick with it. There are multiple location charts to choose from depending on how you want to run it. Better prompts to kick off an adventure (if players need). Some new optional rules. An expanded discussion about setting up the GM-less/Protocol-type style of gameplay. More background/role information for players. A better set of resolutions to the stories.*** While the initial edition essentially required people to take the words "fringecraft" and run it with entirely, this new edition feels more like a Complete Role Playing Experience(tm). For weird-and-horror roleplayers like me, this represents a singular product that can enable many forays into its weird mechanics. Despite the five stars, though, it is not 100% perfect. Some of the table options are a bit odd and feel slightly out of whack. Backgrounds, for instance, includes such options as "Art History", "High School Drop Out", "G.E.D. Equivalency", and "Truck Driver". It's trying to build in a degree of "here are some starting conflicts" that match some horror/fringe tropes but I feel like more than most anything else this one will be fudged and ignored. [I might end up making my own custom version of this table]. And while this improves in every way upon the initial edition (and then some), it does mean you go from being able to print out a couple of pages so everyone can see a couple of charts to needing to flip back and forth through several different sections over the course of a game. It's a lot harder to see at a glance. So, ironically, you might be better served, essentially, playing the original edition first to get the hang of the system and then using this expanded version for later stories. I would like to see Post World Games continue to expand on some of their older systems like this. It's my favorite part of this type of "Kickstarter"...when they toss in a dozen bonus playsets that add variety and hooks to the game. ==== * Just like the writers of the later seasons of X-Files, amirite!? BOOM! [I kid, I kid...sort of...] ** Don't worry too much about the nomenclature, it basically means "A Protocol game that still plays mostly like a Protocol game but now has a bit more and a lot of tweaks/updates/edits/etc". *** Since Protocol & Protocol Squared are basically "16 scenes + introduction + conclusion...going around the table and fitting choices to cards"...story arcs can shift and end in odd places. The expanded epilogue mechanic helps to balance this a bit. ...more |
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Apr 08, 2022
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| 4.17
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it was ok
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Sep 02, 2024
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Sep 04, 2024
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| 3.80
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liked it
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Jul 25, 2024
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Jul 25, 2024
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| 3.60
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it was amazing
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May 02, 2024
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Apr 04, 2024
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| 3.93
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really liked it
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Mar 24, 2024
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Feb 28, 2024
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| 3.67
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really liked it
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Mar 10, 2024
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Dec 08, 2023
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| 4.14
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it was amazing
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Oct 13, 2023
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Oct 13, 2023
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| 3.81
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really liked it
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Oct 03, 2023
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Oct 04, 2023
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| 3.92
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it was amazing
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Sep 20, 2023
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Sep 19, 2023
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| 4.09
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really liked it
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Sep 11, 2023
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Aug 31, 2023
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| 4.01
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it was amazing
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Oct 06, 2023
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Aug 27, 2023
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| 3.75
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it was amazing
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Jul 21, 2023
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Jul 21, 2023
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| 3.58
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it was amazing
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Jul 31, 2023
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Jul 15, 2023
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| 3.59
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really liked it
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Jun 30, 2023
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Jul 02, 2023
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| 4.30
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it was amazing
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Jun 26, 2023
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Jun 27, 2023
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| 4.22
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really liked it
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Jun 04, 2023
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Jun 04, 2023
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| 3.80
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it was amazing
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May 14, 2023
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May 10, 2023
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| 3.81
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really liked it
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May 02, 2023
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May 04, 2023
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| 3.64
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it was amazing
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May 16, 2023
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Nov 19, 2022
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| 3.98
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liked it
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Nov 03, 2022
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Nov 03, 2022
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| 5.00
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it was amazing
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Apr 08, 2022
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Apr 14, 2022
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