...the Soul of Wit - Short Reviews

These are the warm up days for Halloween, guys! I have two Halloween-group reads scheduled for next month: first one is The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories, edited by Stephen Jones, from which I'll be reading one story on each day of October and second one is House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski that has been sitting in my bookshelves for way too long! Until I get to finish those, you have to be content with my smaller reads here, but since I'm a little late this month with my wrap up, you will find that there are more books than usual. Hope you enjoy!

Tales from the Gas Station 1 by Jack Townsend

Anyone who ever worked in retail knows how weird customers can sometimes be. I was lucky enough that in all the time I worked as a bookseller I always had very cool customers and having had the chance to chat with people about books and being surrounded by books all the time, I can’t complain at all. But I know that in other places things can go very eerie and awry. In a gas station in the middle of nowhere, for instance, positioned above an eldritch god living underground.

Poor Jack needs to put up with that exactly. Moreover, he suffers from a mysterious illness that will eventually kill him and attends therapy sessions that are included in his treatment package. From his psychiatrist to the local police, to his bosses, everyone is convinced that Jack is going insane, and maybe the reader thinks so too? Whether invented or not, Jack’s tales of his gas station shifts are a little bit creepy but always hilarious; plants that grow into human hands and organs, garden gnomes equipped with steak knives, a former death cult member moving in, online communities on the wildest conspiracy theories, a spy on the hunt for an animal that doesn't even exist, and and and...

I loved reading this book, it was a breath of fresh air amidst all the doom and gloom I usually read.

The Deep by Alma Katsu

The Deep is the story of a young woman, Annie, who having survived the Titanic catastrophe, joins the crew of its sister ship Britannic as a nurse in WW1. Yes, THE Britannic that will unfortunately but eventually sink too. Talk about bad decisions... She is traumatized and bruised from not only the sinking of the former ship, but also from various supernatural phenomenon that went unexplained in the ship's wreckage. And now those things start occurring on Britannic too...

Ugh... I have said this before and will not tire of repeating: I'm sick of dual time lines in horror books! Titanic, Britannic, Titanic... The back and forth between the time lines make it all the more confusing here, because they both are set in about the same time period on similar ships.

I could have maybe turned a blind eye on the time problem if there were other redeeming qualities to this book, but alas... You know how sometimes you just want all the fictional characters in a book to die because they annoy you? This is that book for me. The twist was somewhat weak too, and the only positive thing I can say about it is that it was really well researched. Didn't really increase my joy of reading though.

The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig

A married couple who both have their demons and hauntings from the past move back to their hometown in the hope that their empathic son Oliver copes better than he does in the big city. When Oliver meets a mysterious kid with whom he inexplicably feels connected, this connection will turn out to be an interestingly supernatural, but also a possibly malignant one.

Based on this one book I have read of him, I honestly don't understand the hype about Wendig right now. This was a good versus evil story, an average one at best, which uses lots of standard Christian-religious allusions mixed with elements of "magic". It is actually reminiscent of King at his worst, sorry to say.

The Bank by Bentley Little

Contrary to the previous one, Bentley Little shows how reminiscent of King at his best goes. The Bank is a hilarious, biting, sarcastic, FANTASTIC book, in which Needful Things meets the United States subprime mortgage crisis!

A specter is haunting the small town of Montgomery, Arizona - the specter of The First People's Bank! And workers of The Bank are haunting in the truest sense of the word, working with equally mysterious as disgusting methods. Although the promises and premises of The Bank may sound enticing to some, not everybody is readily lured and they will soon unite!

Seriously though, what horrified me most in this book was that I could actually imagine banks doing some of the things The Bank does (like financing a school shooting), I didn't find anything in the book too far-fetched.

A great book this is, I will be looking for more by Bentley Little.

Mudcat by John Quick

To be honest, the only reason I picked up Mudcat is because I need an author whose last name starts with a q for the a-to-z reading challenge, thus I didn't really have any expectations whatsoever (the a-to-z challenge is a reading challenge where you need to read 26 books whose authors' names start with each letter of the alphabet). And still I feel a little disappointed as the premise of a mutant giant cat fish could have been shaped into something much more fun than Mudcat ever did.

This is basically a book about various couples in a small town in Tennessee being interrupted having sex by a giant catfish who gives his best to form words like humans do, but subsequently eats them. Frankly the premise isn't that scary after all, I eat fish so it is only fair that fish eat me.

I listened to this story on audiobook and the narrator was an extra hurdle for me since he really sounded like a heavy smoking cowboy, mumbling things to himself and that's how I ended up imagining all characters; even the female characters and the fish thing.

Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica

Thriller time!

And boy what a thriller this was... This book gives the term "compulsively readable" a whole new meaning - I listened to this one on audiobook too and having started some time shortly before lunch last Saturday, I couldn't stop until the story was over at midnight... So captivating! 

Local Woman Missing follows the story of three women going missing - three women living in the same neighborhood and all connected to each other. After the shocking return of the child Delilah eleven years later, the case heats up again, revealing twist after shocking twist in what was supposed to be a simple missing case. 

This book was great until the ending which seriously feels forced and rushed for shock-value and required me to suspend my belief as high as no belief should be. As a horror fan, I loved the beginning but really felt let down later in the book. What disappointed me was that we start reading the story of someone who in the end completely disappears, becomes a sort of sideshow. And because I was heavily rooting for that person and hoping for redemption, I was genuinely dismayed by that. I don't know why we followed the story of a person throughout the whole book just so I could read the story ending with someone I wasn't emotionally invested in at all. It seemed a little unfair to that character that someone else stole that from them... Yeah I know they're all fictional, but still changed the way I see the book.

Gone to See the River Man by Kristopher Triana

Possibly the best horror book I have read this year! Brutal, but in the best way possible, this is the kind of gem I am looking for as a horror fan.

First, Triana carries us readers off into the sick, obsessed world of groupies and super fans of sadistic serial killers. Edmund Cox is such a killer who butchered many women and Lori is such a fan who seeks a relationship with him. During one of her visits in jail, he asks her to complete a task for him; she is to go to a cabin in the woods in a place called Killen, take an object and bring that object to the person / mythic entity called the River Man.

Next, Triana takes us on the quest journey with Lori and her handicapped older sister Abbie, who is anxiously looking forward to the adventure with her sister. Their journey will lead them to dark places where Lori will need to face her own demons and her past; bringing things to the surface that will change the course of the story and the way you see each character of the book.

Gone to See the River Man is the kind of powerful story, which offers devastation and a strangely cathartic redemption at once, in a shocking but satisfying way. If that makes sense.