...the Soul of Wit

It is finally time for the shorties of my recent reads and here they are for you to enjoy!

Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco

I guess in the time of Corona many people don't even remember what a vacation is. Not so the unfortunate family Rolf who will never forget their very last vacation rental. Never ever...

It all started so blissfully happy when The Rolfs were being afforded the capital opportunity to spend the summer months in a magnificent mansion for a perversely low rent, but of course there is a catch: they need to take care of the owner’s mother who lives in the attic and provide her meals. When unsettling things start to happen - and some of them are genuinely creepy - will the family be able to stand together? What is the secret of this house?

To set things clear - I don't want authors to ever stop writing about haunted houses and I don't even care which authors. Evil houses, good houses, avenging houses, revenging houses, rejuvenating houses, possessing houses, cursed houses, sentient houses, Southern houses, Nordic cabins, houses that eat people, houses that smoke people, that make you write sinister books, that mess with your psyche, mess with your relationship - I love them all and can't get enough of them. As happy as I am to find fresher interpretations with clever twists, unexpected solutions to the mysteries hidden within walls, I also thoroughly enjoy a classic, quintessential haunted house story and Burnt Offerings ranks among the latter. Gradually increasing creepiness ending in pure dread that shivers down your spine. Wonderful.

A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hammitt

Naaaah, this one didn't do it for me. Unfortunately. Initially I was very excited for this book, because I'm a sucker for that cover and the concept of a family building and running a spook house for a living and at the same time fighting their own monsters really appealed to me, but regrettably there's not much horror here. Even though it has been marketed as a horror book and there's lots of allusions to Lovecraft, the past family dramas and the tragicly metaphoric nature of the monsters supersede the horror by far. The narrated events and their backgrounds are considerably more dramatic than horrific and after the introduction and making of the house, the story starts to sag a little and that's where the read became a true slog for me. Basically this is a fine book, and I'm sure there are lots of people that it will speak to, just not what I'm looking for.

The Listener by Robert McCammon

Although McCammon is primarily known for his beautifully written post-apocalyptic saga Swan Song in the SF community, he is, in fact, the grandmaster of poetic Southern Gothic and crime fiction from Southern USA. The Listener follows the tradition of the latter: set in the depression era in New Orleans, the story revolves around a case of kidnapping-for-ransom which in turn involves a devilishly evil couple and a young man with the special gift of "listening", that is, hearing things that aren't spoken. Just like every single work Robert McCammon has written, The Listener too is an engagingly and masterly crafted book with a frightening mystery at its heart, with slight supernatural elements and with very elaborately created characters that you instantly connect to. It might fall a little short on the fantastical side for readers more used to that kind of elements, so it's more suitable if you actually really enjoy crime fiction.

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

A big meteorite destroys part of Earth in 1952 and the resulting climate cataclysm will render our planet uninhabitable in the near future. So humanity really needs to rush to find alternative home planets and all humanity needs to pitch in. All humanity includes women and that is a problem in the 50s, especially when it comes to sorely needed, purely "male" jobs like mathematicians, pilots, scientists, and yes, even astronauts. This is the alternate history of a group of women (pejoratively called "Lady Astronauts" by the press) struggling to assert themselves against an imperious mentality that insists on not giving in, even under the most urgent and imminently dangerous circumstances.

Seriously, I had no idea what I was getting into when starting this book: I had not read any reviews and did not read a physical copy but listened to the audiobook, so there was no cover description either. Having missed the initial clue what year the story was set in I was first baffled why everybody acts like jerks towards women (even themselves!), which kind of intensified my reading and perception of the message of the book. I finally figured out what is going on when I realized that Eisenhower is still in service at the time the story is set. Even though I found the characters a tiny little flat, but totally reckon that that might be a trick to fit them into the shiny happy 50s stereotype, I think Kowal did a great job with this book, especially in conveying a fictional Zeitgeist of overall fear and frustration and doesn't neglect fans of hard science fiction either, if that's your thing. She also has Sabiha Gökçen (first Turkish female aviator and the world's first female fighter pilot) as a real-life character, so there's extra sympathy points from me! This first book of the Lady Astronaut series was awarded with the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards for best novel in the year 2019, which could give you a better idea of the dimension of Mary Robinette Kowal's achievement!

Tiny Nightmares ed. by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto

I had this book on my radar since its publication was first announced - very nice cover, very original concept and very great authors. With whopping 42 very short stories (each under 1500 words) within 259 pages, you are bound to get a mixed bag rather than an unanimously great or bad work, and a mixed bag Tiny Nightmares is. The horror treated in the stories cover a truly wide range including folkloric horror, body horror, vampires, werewolves and social ills such as racism or environmental catastrophes. Before jumping to my personal highlights, it would be useful to mention that editors Michel and Nieto chose an interesting way to arrange the stories and loosely divided them into four categories, each named after body parts: Heads, Hearts, Limbs, Viscera.

Reading short story anthologies usually bears the great opportunity to discover new authors, to get a taste of their work and decide which ones you want to read more of. That's what I did here too and to me, the indisputable winner of Tiny Nightmares is Iván Parra Garcia and his short story "The Resplendence of Disappearing" which is about supernatural beings besieging a small town in Texarkana and people disappearing. The perfection of the story is mostly due to the buildup of ambience and the prose (kudos to translator Allana C. Noyes also, since the story was originally written in Spanish), which totally impressed me.

But there are quite a few other stories that I immensely enjoyed reading too; like Michele Zimmerman's "Family Dinner" which features some seriously creepy witches; "Leg" by Brian Evenson, where you can read about a sentient leg, wandering about and killing people on a spaceship; Rion Amilcar Scott's spot-on satire on police brutality "Jane Death Theory #13"; and the profoundly spine chilling crime stories "Lone" by Jac Jemc; "Candy Boii" by Sam J. Miller and finally "The Mask, the Ride, the Bag" by Chase Burke. I had a favorite chapter too and that was definitely Viscera! Each and every story in this section is perfect - biting, timely critique, powerful images, perfect atmosphere, wonderfully literary. From the deprecation of oil politics, over lamentation of refugee politics, to sentient paintings that scare your pants off, it's all here!

So, as you see, there are many reasons to grab this book. Although I think that there still are some stories that don't live up to the potential the concept of the book bears, the good ones form an especially exquisite pleasure which Carmen Maria Machado describes as "macabre, hellish little literary bonbons" and these bonbons are especially enjoyable in the dark season.