The Arrival of Missives is set in a rural village in the early 20th century, but it feels like it could be much earlier than that; this is a traditionThe Arrival of Missives is set in a rural village in the early 20th century, but it feels like it could be much earlier than that; this is a traditional place, where old customs not only persist but define the community (the celebration of May Day, and the crowning of a new ‘May Queen’, form the story’s climax). Shirley Fearn, a naive 16-year-old, is infatuated with her young teacher, Mr Tiller. But she gets more than she bargained for when she spies on him and discovers something inexplicable. This leads Tiller to confide his secret: he believes he is receiving ‘missives’ from the future, and wants Shirley’s help to ensure a terrifying threat is neutralised. Is he telling the truth, or a fantasist? Shirley herself is delusional and not entirely reliable – but is Tiller dangerous?
Whiteley weaves together a coming-of-age story with science fiction, an examination of rural British life in the age of encroaching modernity, and even a bit of romance, and it’s all balanced very well. Shirley’s voice is believable as that of a pretentious yet ultimately likeable teenager. There’s a richness to the portrait of the unnamed village that adds depth to an offbeat plot and helps smooth the edges off its more outlandish aspects. My favourite of the author’s since Greensmith, and another win from the now sadly defunct Unsung Stories....more
(3.5) The Fisherman is indeed a horror story about fishing, but honestly, it’s much better than that makes it sound. Split into two narratives – a con(3.5) The Fisherman is indeed a horror story about fishing, but honestly, it’s much better than that makes it sound. Split into two narratives – a contemporary one and a historical story-within-a-story – it’s well-written, creepy, with some great moments of atmosphere and suspense. It directly references Lovecraft, M.R. James and Moby-Dick; in its best moments, it reminded me of certain books by F.G. Cottam: The Colony, Brodmaw Bay, The Memory of Trees. I loved the protagonist being spellbound by a long, strange tale told in a rain-lashed diner, and I loved the backstory of Dutchman’s Creek, the haunted place at the story’s heart. Ultimately it falls down in a couple of places: the pacing could be better – there are parts of the central narrative that really do not need to drag on for as long as they do – and the portrayal of the narrator’s wife is... well, it leaves something to be desired, let’s just say that. On a personal note, the book also strays just a bit too far into fantasy/cosmic horror terrain for me. Still more good than bad, though; anything widely described as literary horror will usually have something to interest me.
I’m not quite a convert to audiobooks. Compared to my typical reading speedAttempting to get into audiobooks #1
32 HOURS OF BREXIT. That was a journey.
I’m not quite a convert to audiobooks. Compared to my typical reading speed, they’re just so painfully slow. Then again, I can’t read a physical book or ebook while working, walking or cooking, so they have that going for them. An audiobook seemed like the perfect format for something like this, an unwieldy, highly detailed non-fiction tome about politics that I probably would never have got around to reading otherwise.
This is an exhaustive account, very well researched and put together. The four stars are for that, and not for the often completely infuriating content. On top of the 32-hour runtime, I also recommend ensuring you schedule regular breaks in order to scream, especially whenever Dominic Cummings is mentioned.
This is the sort of book I would never have picked up or even heard of had I not come across it by chance – I found it in a secondhand bookshop, whereThis is the sort of book I would never have picked up or even heard of had I not come across it by chance – I found it in a secondhand bookshop, where it had been incorrectly shelved as fiction. I read the first couple of pages and found I couldn’t bring myself to leave it behind. It’s gripping from the very beginning.
It’s hard not to be captivated by the premise. A friend of the author’s finds several boxes of books in a skip and rescues them. They turn out to be a series of diaries chronicling decades of someone’s life, from childhood to late middle age. Over a period of years, Masters reads the diaries and tries to puzzle out the identity of their creator – which proves very difficult since, of course, a person doesn’t tend to include identifying details in their own private journals. This is ‘a biography in which the biographer doesn’t know who his subject is’.
The story of the diarist is fascinating. They write with passion and literary flair; they draw amusing and disturbing comic strips; in the later diaries, they mysteriously allude to being held captive. I won’t give anything more away here; suffice it to say that, ultimately, I a) shed a few tears and b) felt I wanted to meet, to know, the diarist. No matter how banal the material, they write in such an engaging style – intelligent, funny, astute, painfully frank. I wanted to know everything about them. Of course, Masters’ choice of extracts and ability to structure the ‘plot’ are also factors in this.
The one thing I didn’t like about A Life Discarded is that it seems to assume the reader is already familiar with Masters, has read his previous book(s) and wants to hear about his friends (and it doesn’t help that they’re all the kind of posh that makes me feel like I’m a completely different species). From a... human? empathetic? perspective I can kind of understand why he felt compelled to include, for example, the details of one friend’s battle with terminal illness, but with my editor/critic hat on, this whole strand is irrelevant to the story of the diaries.
On the one hand, I would have liked to read more of the diarist’s own words; on the other, I appreciate the work Masters has done in editing so much raw material and constructing a compelling narrative. Information is disclosed bit by bit, making this feel more like a detective novel than a biography. It has an irresistible drive, and the diarist’s charming voice makes it very much worth reading.
The horror stories in The Parts We Play are both haunting and grotesque. ‘Celebrity Frankenstein’ particularly left a mark on me: gory and grim, but dThe horror stories in The Parts We Play are both haunting and grotesque. ‘Celebrity Frankenstein’ particularly left a mark on me: gory and grim, but disturbing mostly because of its psychological insight, its horrible plausibility. This – a combination of emotional realism and the abject – is a sort of loose theme that connects the best stories in the collection. In ‘Bless’, the reader knows exactly what’s happening, but the extent of the narrator’s delusion is unknown. Does she believe her own excuses? ‘Wrong’ is the perfect title for a story in which something happens that is just... wrong, even if it can be seen from sympathetic angles. ‘Newspaper Heart’, which might be the best in the book, is similarly plausible: an anxious mother, a son’s imaginary friend, a buried secret, a tragic conclusion.
Despite this, The Parts We Play altered my perception of Volk as a writer who only does stories like ‘Newspaper Heart’. ‘A Whisper to a Grey’ may be the first horror story I’ve read that is mainly about horses, and it’s surprisingly effective. Meanwhile, the bizarro, disgusting ‘The Arse-Licker’ feels like an exercise in taking a title as literally – and to as much of an extreme – as possible. At the other end of the scale, ‘The Magician Kelso Dennett’ is perhaps the most conventional thing here, a downbeat yet witty tale of dangerous liaisons in a seaside town – but with a twist ending. A couple, like ‘Certain Faces’, I didn’t feel I’d quite grasped. This is a strong collection overall, though: 12 stories is a great number; it’s enough to demonstrate Volk’s range, not so many that you end up with filler....more
This collection – the last to be assembled before the author's death in 2013 – is harsher and more brutal than anything else I have read by Lane. I'd This collection – the last to be assembled before the author's death in 2013 – is harsher and more brutal than anything else I have read by Lane. I'd also say it is less thematically coherent, though the style remains very distinctive due to Lane's frequent use of motifs.
Scar City was reissued this year by Influx Press, along with Lane's debut collection, The Earth Wire, from 1994. There's something uncanny about jumping from one to the other: the writing is familiar, the stories' concepts and concerns persist, but the landscape is altered. What's more, the first story, 'Those Who Remember', seems to have been written with this in mind, like it's speaking to someone who's arrived in the present day straight from the 90s. 'Everything had changed except the people... Local industry was dying then; it was dead now.' It's replete with violence and filled with the usual quotable lines ('the death of religion has left us all to create our own rituals'). While it's made up of a cruel, menacing set of scenes, I thought it was excellent.
I also loved 'This Night Last Woman' (dark tale of a one night stand with much unspoken, again the undercurrent of violence); 'Keep the Night' (powerful nighttime ambience, funny in parts, very true); 'The Long Shift' (eerie, effective, great atmosphere, reminded me of how Christopher Priest's 'The Sorting Out' made me feel); and 'Among the Leaves' (enigmatic, beautiful descriptions, redolent of autumn).
There are softer moments to be found in stories like 'This Blue Shade', though the endings are often unforgiving. Some feature untypical characters: a well-off Chelsea couple in 'A Faraway City' (the plot, which ends up being about the brutalisation of trafficked sex workers, is odd, perhaps slightly misjudged); a man and woman having an affair at a work conference in 'Feels Like Underground'. 'Upon a Granite Wind' is a step into full-on fantasy fiction. 'Internal Colonies' is so horrible it just left me feeling dirty.
Sometimes, it's necessary to know the provenance of the story to understand its context: for example, the uncharacteristically plot-driven 'By Night He Could Not See' was originally published in a crime fiction magazine, and the baffling (to me) 'My Voice is Dead' was part of A Season in Carcosa, an anthology inspired by Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow.
Like everything else by Lane, Scar City is worth reading. I don't think it's the best introduction to his work, though – newcomers might be put off by the sheer brutality and coldness of the stories collected here – and I'd suggest starting with The Earth Wire.
Starts well, not least because it throws you straight into the action: a music blogger discovers a wildly addictive song by an unknown band and becomeStarts well, not least because it throws you straight into the action: a music blogger discovers a wildly addictive song by an unknown band and becomes obsessed with their music, which is, unsurprisingly, not exactly natural in origin. At first this concept seems like great fun. The narrator's an annoying little shit, but I can live with that, to an extent. (The tone is very reminiscent of John Dies at the End, which wasn't my bag but clearly works well for lots of people.) What really threw me off, though, was the very slapdash approach to increasingly horrifying events. There's a scene in which a guy knifes himself in the throat on a live video stream and... nobody really reacts? Later, a significant character dies effectively 'off the page', and we only find out about it via one sentence in an email. It felt like the author had lost interest in wrapping up the plot properly. Turns out, the premise is by far the most interesting thing about the story.
I've always felt I should be reading Paul Tremblay's books – since he's one of the biggest names in modern horror, and so many writers I love admire hI've always felt I should be reading Paul Tremblay's books – since he's one of the biggest names in modern horror, and so many writers I love admire him – but his style doesn't really seem to work for me. I must have started and abandoned A Head Full of Ghosts at least 3 times. Disappearance at Devil's Rock was the one to finally stick, but (for the most part) it's more mystery than horror; it has a similar vibe to Gillian Flynn's pre-Gone Girl novels, especially Dark Places.
It begins with the disappearance of a 13-year-old boy from Split Rock, a landmark in the town of Ames, Massachusetts. In the aftermath, the narrative bounces between Tommy's family (mother Elizabeth and sister Kate) and his two best friends (Josh and Luis) as they try to figure out what might have happened. Elizabeth finds pages from Tommy's journal, illustrated with disturbing drawings, that talk about meetings with someone called Arnold. The local kids whisper about a shadowy figure peering through windows at night. We hear the folk tale that led to the boys coming up with the name 'Devil's Rock'.
Tremblay writes the younger characters really well. With their private injokes and slang, Minecraft and Snapchat obsessions, Tommy, Josh and Luis feel plausible as 13-year-olds in the current decade. The creepy aspects of the mystery are initially fascinating, but almost everything is ultimately given a rational explanation; by the end, Disappearance at Devil's Rock seems like a conventional crime novel, which wasn't what I'd been looking for. There are also numerous subplots that don't really go anywhere. It's compelling enough, but I wasn't wowed.
(NB: it's not a coincidence that I read this straight after Picnic at Hanging Rock – with that title, there must be a connection, right? Well, not really, aside from the fact that both involve people disappearing at a scenic spot with 'Rock' in its name. Oh well.)
Hmm, I thought I would enjoy this more than I did – or at least that I would be more stimulated by it than I was. It takes balls to title your book AgHmm, I thought I would enjoy this more than I did – or at least that I would be more stimulated by it than I was. It takes balls to title your book Against Empathy, but that's somewhat undermined by the fact that the author spends so much time reiterating a) what he means by empathy and b) that he is in fact very much pro-kindness and compassion. Bloom's definition of 'empathy' is the practice of feeling for a person/group by trying to feel their pain, i.e. putting yourself 'in someone else's shoes'. This is absolutely fine, but it's repeated so often that it sometimes feels like it's being mentioned every three or four pages, especially in the first half of the book. It could have been defined in the introduction and left at that.
Against Empathy is, imo, not so much an argument against empathy as it is a meticulous separation of the specific concept of empathy from the other values it is often conflated with, such as kindness, compassion, generosity, etc. Bloom believes that empathy can be a poor moral guide. This is most apparent in cases where too much empathy might hinder a person's judgement. For example, an extremely empathic doctor might not be best placed to help a patient; an extremely empathic parent would likely be overprotective to a suffocating degree; charitable acts that centre empathy often do more to assuage the giver's guilt than to help the greatest number of people in the most efficient way. Instead, a combination of rational decision-making and diffused compassion should replace empathy in our process of moral reasoning.
There's a decent and persuasive argument at the heart of Against Empathy, but as a book it is repetitive and feels very padded out. Having read it, I feel like I have a much clearer idea of what Bloom thinks is good and useful about being rational, kind and compassionate than what he finds bad and harmful about empathy. I originally put the word 'ironically' at the beginning of that sentence, but I wonder if that was the point after all.
Reread December 2019, December 2023. Original review (June 2018): The below is taken from my review of Five Stories High. I didn't finish the whole boReread December 2019, December 2023. Original review (June 2018): The below is taken from my review of Five Stories High. I didn't finish the whole book, which is unfortunately very uneven, but I loved 'Maggots'.
Five Stories High is a little like David Mitchell's Slade House, if each chapter was written by a different author. The central figure is 'the dwelling (entity?) known as Irongrove Lodge'. This form-shifting house seems to exist outside time and space; capable of choosing who it appears to, changing location, resurrecting itself after being burnt down, and being much bigger on the inside than the five stories you see on the outside.
The first story, 'Maggots' by Nina Allan, is nothing short of brilliant. (It's because of Allan that I rescued Five Stories from the depths of my to-read list in the first place, having loved her story in the anthology New Fears.) It follows Willy, who's doing alright in life – he has good relationships with his family and girlfriend, he's doing well at university – until he becomes convinced that his Aunt Claire has been abducted and replaced with an imposter. Despite the pleas of his loved ones, Willy can't let go of this obsession, and it takes him down a dark path that will eventually lead to a dealer in murder memorabilia whose business is based out of Irongrove.
This is an ingenious way to approach the theme, so much more imaginative than anything else in the book. The protagonist is fully realised. The story is replete with literary and pop-culture references and a deep knowledge and understanding of what makes horror work. It's very subtle and deceptively ordinary, yet there is a scene, and a particular piece of description, here that has stuck with me vividly and still makes me cringe when I think about it.
The more of Allan's short stories I read, the more I am convinced she is an absolute master of the genre....more
Emily is head of housekeeping at a prestigious London hotel, soon to play host to two astronauts who will be part of a manned mission to Mars. The preEmily is head of housekeeping at a prestigious London hotel, soon to play host to two astronauts who will be part of a manned mission to Mars. The previous attempt – thirty years earlier – ended disastrously, killing the crew. Emily's mum, whom she calls Moolie, was also the victim of a disaster. She was a physicist, hired to analyse materials found in the aftermath of an aeroplane crash. Among them were radioactive substances which have left Moolie's system, as Emily puts it, 'riddled with wrongness'; at 52, she has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's and a host of physical ailments.
The title of the story is also the title of a book. When I came to that detail, I knew I was really going to like this story. The Art of Space Travel (the in-story book) has been in the family since Emily was a child; she used to enjoy folding out the elaborate star maps. Then, one Tuesday, Moolie tells her that not only did the book belong to Emily's father, but that he was also an astronaut, part of the failed, fatal Mars mission.
This is a typically great short story from Nina Allan, and as ever, her focus is firmly on the characters and their relationships, with the science-fiction element merely acting as a backdrop. The narrative concentrates on Emily's bond with Moolie, and her efforts to identify her father. Perhaps the resolution is a little glib, but I didn't mind because I loved Emily's voice so much.
Partway through reading Problems I started sketching out a review that talked about how it was part of the first wave of Fucked-Up Millennial Woman noPartway through reading Problems I started sketching out a review that talked about how it was part of the first wave of Fucked-Up Millennial Woman novels – a trend which has since seen a swift, arguably more sophisticated renaissance, with ever-more irreverent and abstract permutations, so that a straightforward 'I'm a mess' story now seems lacking in nuance – and how I probably would've liked it more a few years ago. But then the story began to turn into something else, and I changed my mind.
It starts like this: on the surface, Maya's life looks fine – good, even. She's married to sweet Peter, but she's hiding two big things from him: the first is an obsessive affair with a much older man, her former professor; the second is the fact that she is totally dependent on heroin. When she attempts to go cold turkey while at Peter's family's house for Thanksgiving, things really begin to fall apart.
This sequence, which is both amusing and horrifying, is just the start of Maya's degeneration. The worse things get, the rawer the narrative becomes, the more (it seems) authentic and true, and while I know it's now considered infra dig to assume any young female writer is writing about herself, it's impossible to read/know anything about Sharma and not think you are reading an autobiographical story. It stops being a fun series of pithy lines about what it is to be a self-confessed fuck-up and starts being a really honest account of addiction and recovery. Obviously, reading this now – after the author's death in 2019 – gives it an extra layer of poignancy.
Problems is sharp, it's funny, it's quotable. But don't mistake it for some quirky life-affirming tale of mild failure and self-discovery. It's a real story about real 'problems', with a conclusion that's both hopeful and unbearably sad.
And I think about those women on Facebook who are always posting pictures of themselves with husbands or children, and I think how for so long, that's what I had wanted. But anyone can find others to hide behind. Being alone, figuring out how to make the hours go, satiating your own wrestling human heart, means you never have to hide or be numb again.
When I plucked this off my to-read pile, I didn’t really remember what it was; as it’s composed of four collected parts of a previously serialised stoWhen I plucked this off my to-read pile, I didn’t really remember what it was; as it’s composed of four collected parts of a previously serialised story, I assumed it’d be pretty substantial, but in fact it’s little more than a short story. It gets off to a good start: the concept of Normal Head, a rehabilitation facility for strategists who’ve done too much ‘staring into the abyss of the future’, was fascinating to me, and I was interested enough in the protagonist to be gripped by the details of the incident that brought him there. (It’s also very cute that the final phase of treatment before release is called Staging.) There’s just very little space for the story to go anywhere – and it ends even sooner than I thought, since the last 15% of the book is an interview with the author.
With most of the action taking place during a painfully middle-class sojourn on a Greek island, this is an enjoyable psychological thriller built arouWith most of the action taking place during a painfully middle-class sojourn on a Greek island, this is an enjoyable psychological thriller built around a jealous, scheming outsider – like a low-calorie version of Elizabeth Day's The Party or James Lasdun's The Fall Guy. Paul, the protagonist, is an irredeemable arsehole, and I do prefer my antiheroes to possess at least a modicum of charm, but there's undeniably pleasure to be had in watching him get his just deserts. I wanted something light and readable to round off the year, and this was just the ticket.
It was as a child that I first became infatuated with horror stories, and horror stories for kids are still among my very favourites. Tales like the oIt was as a child that I first became infatuated with horror stories, and horror stories for kids are still among my very favourites. Tales like the ones in The Wrong Train must be so difficult to write: aimed at (I presume) a teenage audience, they have to be incredibly scary without resorting to excessive blood and gore. Jeremy de Quidt pulls this off wonderfully, creating a collection that will please readers of any age as long as they have a healthy taste for the macabre.
Like Chris Priestley's Tales of Terror series, this book has an overarching narrative which links together a series of creepy tales. A boy gets on – you guessed it – the wrong train, panics, and gets off at the first stop, which turns out to be a 'permanent way post', meant for use by railway workers. It's in the middle of nowhere and it's pitch dark, but there's an elderly man and his dog waiting there too. And to pass the time, the old man starts telling the boy stories, each with a horrible twist...
It's hard to pick a favourite, but I think it might have to be 'Picture Me': I read it at night with a candle flickering in the corner and honestly felt I was going to jump out of my skin if I heard so much as a pin drop – the image of the girl with the frightened expression staring into the camera was just so haunting. I also loved 'Dead Molly', which becomes ever more surreal and disorientating, echoing its protagonist's experience. But every single story is great. The sinister red Cadillac, the babysitter's terrifying charges, the greasy, sooty candles: characters, scenes and objects jump vividly out of the book; I could have read several hundred pages more. And the way it's all tied up at the end is so clever!
All in all, Ioved this – it's creepy, atmospheric, suspenseful and a lot of fun. I shall eagerly look forward to more stories from this author.
It's hard to believe it's been three years since I first read Things We Lost in the Fire. I don't have much to add to my original rPandemic rereads #6
It's hard to believe it's been three years since I first read Things We Lost in the Fire. I don't have much to add to my original review below, but this reread has made me bump it up to the full five stars, so I thought I ought to say a bit about why. Most of all, it's that this book has stayed with me. I think about it all the time. I recommend it often. I remember the way certain stories made me feel, and I remember specific details from others. All surefire signs of a favourite.
My few original criticisms still stand: some stories end prematurely and/or glibly, and others (the title story in particular) are centred on rather unwieldy concepts. But the collection as a whole rises above these flaws. 'Adela's House' deserves to be regarded as one of the great modern horror stories. 'The Neighbour's Courtyard', 'The Dirty Kid', 'Under the Black Water' and 'Spiderweb' are excellent. A few I didn't love initially, including 'End of Term' and 'An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt', gained power on a second reading. If you enjoy short stories, and particularly if you like them on the dark side, you must read Enríquez.
'Argentine gothic' is a fitting label for Things We Lost in the Fire. Ghosts, haunted houses and unexplained events appear throughout these stories, but they aren't necessarily horror as much as they are simply dark. Often suffused with the threat of real violence as well as supernatural terror, they touch on the hidden tensions and agonies of a country with a turbulent past roiling just beneath the visible surface. In this book, Argentina itself is haunted, a country haunted by history.
In 'The Inn', a character is sacked because he has been telling tourists the true history of the town's inn, something its owner is keen to conceal. In 'Spiderweb', a burning house is seen from a plane, and minutes later there is only scorched earth; a woman runs out in front of a car and disappears, and the driver later learns a nearby bridge is rumoured to contain the skeletons of those murdered and hidden by the military. In 'Under the Black Water', the Riachuelo river is made monstrous by years of pollution, tradesmen dumping waste and police dumping bodies. Several of the stories contain sudden disappearances that remain unresolved – uncanny echoes of the phenomenon of 'the disappeared' caused by the Dirty War.
My only complaint about Things We Lost in the Fire is that it suffers repeatedly from Premature Ending Syndrome. Time and time again, the stories cut off in what seems to be the middle of the most intriguing part, and end without explaining what has happened. In the best cases, as with 'Adela's House', this lack of explanation is itself a resolution, the absence of an answer being the most terrifying possible conclusion. In the worst cases, it feels like the stories have been erroneously published with bits missing. However, the quality of description and storytelling are so high that 'the worst' are still more than worth your time.
Beautifully translated, with a crisp style that makes it difficult to believe these stories weren't originally written in English, Things We Lost in the Fire is a powerful, memorable collection. Every story seems to have multiple layers, making them perfect for critical analysis and discussion. My favourites were 'Adela's House', 'Dirty Kid' and 'The Neighbour's Courtyard'.
Dirty Kid A young woman, who we infer is middle-class, lives in her family's old home in what has become an unpleasant and dangerous neighbourhood. She often sees a woman who lives on the street with her young son. One day, the boy knocks on her door alone, and the narrator – reluctant to let him into her house – takes him to get ice cream. She later manages to reunite him with his mother, who reacts with rabid fury. The next day, a little boy is found raped, murdered and dismembered. The sheer horrifying violence of his death is a shock, and it heightens the narrator's sense of terrible guilt, her conviction (irrational in others' eyes) that the murdered boy is the 'dirty kid', as well as making a mockery of her romantic image of the neighbourhood. A startling opener to the collection.
The Inn Florencia, a strait-laced teen, reunites with her friend Rocío; they plot to humiliate Elena, owner of the local inn, who has fired Rocío's father from his job as a tour guide. Part of the reason is that he's been telling tourists about the inn's dubious history as a police training academy during the dictatorship. When the girls sneak into the inn at night, they get more than they bargained for. As well as the menacing spectre of history, the terrifying experience they (and only they) endure works as a metaphor for Florencia's own fear of her burgeoning attraction to Rocío.
The Intoxicated Years Scenes from the lives of three girls (children? teenagers? their ages aren't clear) between the late 1980s and early 1990s. The most interesting stuff seems to be happening in the background, just out of reach. Maybe that's the point, but I found this one a bit of a dud.
Adela's House Little Carla and her 11-year-old brother Pablo befriend Adela, a girl in their neighbourhood who was born with one arm and is an object of disgust and mockery for other kids at school. After getting obsessed with gory movies, Pablo and Adela decide to explore a nearby abandoned house, bringing Carla along with them. This is a superb tale of weirdness, dread and nameless horror. Like Tomás Eloy Martínez in his novel Purgatory, Enríquez uses magical realism to elucidate the experience of losing someone without explanation, reason or conclusion.
An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt The protagonist works as a tour guide in Buenos Aires, telling tourists about the city's most famous serial killers (but not its dictators, though they are the most prolific murderers of all). Corporeal visions of a child killer become caught up with his resentment of his wife and newborn son.
Spiderweb An unhappily married woman visits family in the 'humid north'. Over the course of the trip, she becomes more and more convinced that she must leave her husband. Throughout the story, characters tell tales of strange things that have happened to them: disappearing figures, disappearing houses, dreams and visions of disaster. In the end, one of these strange incidents seems to befall the abhorred husband. Or is there a more ordinary, if just as horrifying, explanation? What is the 'misunderstanding' spoken of at the end?
End of Term When Marcela, a previously unremarkable girl, starts to harm herself in gruesome and very public ways, her entire class is transfixed. The narrator is particularly fascinated – especially when Marcela tells her she sees and hears a man telling her to do these things. This feels like it could be a spooky story for children. It's macabre and has an effective jump-scare moment, but is a little thin.
No Flesh Over Our Bones This story somehow feels distinct from the others; it's less gritty and has a stronger sense of detachment from reality, while still retaining the darkness that pervades the whole collection. To the disgust of her boyfriend and mother, the narrator brings home a toothless skull she finds in a pile of rubbish, naming it 'Vera', and becomes obsessed with it. Perhaps the most important line comes close to the end: 'We all walk over bones in this city, it's just a question of making holes deep enough to reach the buried dead.'
The Neighbour's Courtyard Paula and Miguel move into a new house, one the owner is suspiciously anxious to let quickly. Paula is battling depression, exacerbated by Miguel's prejudice against the idea of medication and/or psychiatric treatment, and is haunted by memories of her former job as a social worker, from which she was fired after a lapse of judgement. So there are multiple horrors here: mental illness; the anguish of not being seen or understood by someone who's supposed to love you; guilt; and the expected macabre twist – Paula sees a naked, filthy child chained up in the neighbour's courtyard, but when she tries to show Miguel, there's nothing to see.
Similar to 'The Inn', where the source of dread is emblematic of history but also stands for Florencia's fear of her sexuality, here the figure of the boy seems like a physical manifestation of Paula's depression. Yet the ending subverts this. It's the opposite of 'Adela's House' – here the conclusive answer is the ultimate terror.
Under the Black Water Marina is a district attorney investigating what she suspects is a police cover-up. She's visited by a girl from the Villa Moreno slum who tells her Emanuel, presumed drowned, actually crawled out of the heavily polluted Riachuelo river alive, but 'changed'. Chasing the truth behind this strange story, Marina goes to Villa Moreno herself, finding it oddly silent and watchful. I'd have liked this to be longer, but it has a fantastic atmosphere and is so vivid. Of all the stories, this would make the best film.
Green Red Orange One of the weaker stories, this is the tale of a young man who locks himself in his room and refuses to come out. It's told from the perspective of a woman he talks to online – the only way he communicates with the outside world. This itself is not particularly interesting, though there are some standout passages, particularly the episode of the teacher who invents a daughter.
Things We Lost in the Fire This could have come straight out of Camilla Grudova's The Doll's Alphabet, and it reminded me of her story 'Unstitching', in which women begin to shed their skins, and the act, performed en masse, comes to signify a sort of feminist revolution. Here, the women of an unidentified city are seized by a craze for self-immolation, aiming to make themselves grotesque and undesirable – a subversion of an earlier spate of attacks on women by abusive partners. The imagery is strong, but I found the message a bit heavy-handed, especially when compared with the more subtle symbolism of many of the preceding stories....more
I've never really been drawn to stand-up comedy, so it's unlikely this book would have appeared on my radar if not for its Man Booker International loI've never really been drawn to stand-up comedy, so it's unlikely this book would have appeared on my radar if not for its Man Booker International longlisting. It's essentially one long scene in which an obnoxious comedian takes the stage in the Israeli city of Netanya. Dovaleh G, as he styles himself, is a short, malnourished figure, a diminutive man whose humour is crude and erratic, veering from slapstick to tragedy. As his routine progresses, it takes an increasingly confessional direction. Punctuating his monologue with the occasional terrible joke, Dovaleh tells a story about a traumatic incident from his childhood. ('Can you believe how he’s using us to work out his hang-ups?' asks one heckler – but don't all stand-up comics do that?) The whole thing is narrated from among the audience by former Supreme Court Justice Avishai Lazar, who was briefly friends with the comedian in his youth. Beyond that, the retired judge has no idea why he's been invited, let alone how to interpret what Dovaleh has asked of him: 'I want you to see me, really see me, and then afterwards tell me... what you saw.'
A Horse Walks Into a Bar is thoroughly tied to its setting, a book about Israel as much as it is a book about these specific characters, and I did have to google quite a few things to understand all the political references. (That, in case it isn't clear, is a good thing.) At its heart it is about loss. The emotional core is composed of grief: Lazar's for his late wife Tamara, Dovaleh's for his mother. It is definitely a book about a comedian rather than a comic book – it's not that funny: Dovaleh's jokes are either broad and offensive or specific and dark; we wince alongside Lazar as audience member after audience member walks out. As well as that, there was something I found seriously, memorably disturbing about the young Dovaleh's trick of walking on his hands, and his habit of reverting to this act at times of emotional distress.
You know when you're not really enjoying something that much, but can't tear yourself away from it? That was my experience of this book. 'Compulsive' is the perfect word for it, in that it encourages swift reading but not necessarily because it's irresistibly entertaining. I needed to see it through to the final pages, which are at once crushing and anticlimactic.
I received an advance review copy of A Horse Walks Into a Bar from the publisher through NetGalley.
Well-written and interesting, of course, but sadly didn't work for me in the same way as Fisher's excellent Ghosts of My Life. Where Ghosts felt persoWell-written and interesting, of course, but sadly didn't work for me in the same way as Fisher's excellent Ghosts of My Life. Where Ghosts felt personal and discursive, The Weird and the Eerie is clearly written as a starting point for studying its title subjects. The book posits that the weird is characterised by 'the presence of that which does not belong', while the eerie is 'constituted by a failure of absence or a failure of presence'. Which is fine, and the short essays herein – about fiction, music, film and TV – make a good case for each definition. But I feel no closer to understanding why the weird and the eerie need to be separated. The distinction may make sense, but is it important? I had hoped for more obscure examples, too, but the essays cover familiar ground: H.P. Lovecraft, David Lynch, Nigel Kneale, etc. I very much enjoyed the essay about The Fall – one of the only parts where Fisher's style, and passion for the source material, properly comes through. Much of the rest feels pared back to the point of dullness.
It's the story of FantasticLand, a theme park built by its eccentric creator as a rival to the Disney and Universal resortThis book was SO. MUCH. FUN.
It's the story of FantasticLand, a theme park built by its eccentric creator as a rival to the Disney and Universal resorts. When a hurricane hits Florida in late 2017, the area around the park is completely flooded, and FantasticLand ends up being cut off from the mainland for more than a month. After reassurances from its board of directors that the hundreds of employees stranded there have everything they need to survive comfortably, it's bumped down the list of priorities for rescue efforts. But when the National Guard finally reach the park, they are faced with an unbelievably grisly scene: bodies hung from rides, decapitated heads on spikes, blood and bones spattered and strewn everywhere. It emerges that, having banded into tribes, the remaining survivors have been waging an intense, bloody battle with each other. Through interviews with subjects ranging from a 'FantasticLand historian' to the notorious leader of the Pirate tribe, journalist Adam Jakes assembles a loosely chronological account of what went so horribly wrong.
This is, ultimately, horror, but it's the 'violence ordinary people are capable of in desperate circumstances' type of horror, not the ghosts/vampires/demons kind. It's fascinating getting to know the background of this place, and I actually think the exposition was my favourite part. The worldbuilding is just so thorough: if the premise sounds stupidly far-fetched, it doesn't feel like it by the time you've taken in the history of FantasticLand and understand its company culture. The 'battle of the tribes' itself is less enjoyable, or at least it was for me: I'm not fond of long, complicated action scenes, which appear frequently in the final third of the book. I'd also have loved to know more about what the deal was with the Warthogs, although thinking about it, I'm glad a bit of ambiguity was left in. It makes the story scarier.
I've just read the whole description on the Goodreads page, and I think the idea of this being a novel which 'probes the consequences of a social civilisation built online' is overemphasised. The idea that these young people are used to constant stimulation, and the sudden absence of that is what makes them turn so rapidly to violence, is mentioned a few times as a theory, but it's definitely not what the story is about. This paragraph is a bit apropos-of-nothing, but I'm putting it in because I think the blurb makes FantasticLand sound a bit like a tedious anti-social-media parable. It isn't that.
If you liked Sarah Lotz's The Three, I'd recommend this. The different voices and the fact that it's framed as a book about a real-life event make the parallel obvious, and there's a similar sense of dread hanging over the whole thing. It's also equally engaging and readable.
(Incidentally, I'd love to read more books like this. I'm aware of World War Z, which I would consider, but I'm just not really interested in zombies; and I've read Six Stories, which presents its story through transcripts of a fictional podcast. If you know of any other (ideally non-zombie) horror novels that take the 'oral history' approach, tell me!)
Loading...
