October is gone and so is the intense race to read as many horrific stories as possible until the scariest night of the year...
Here I am emptying my bag of horror goodies I collected during this dark time of the year, and hope you enjoy!
The Queen of Teeth by Hailey Piper
What starts as a simple case of vagina dentata develops into
inconceivable dimensions, leading to the ruin of a city and more. But Yaya
Betancourt never would have guessed what her “condition” would turn into when
she wakes up one morning in her one-night-stand’s apartment, wrongly thinking
she got her period and instead finds out she has grown teeth down there. Yaya is a
so-called chimera, a genetic condition caused by AlphaBeta Pharmaceutical, but
even for her condition this is weird. What is going on? As she tries to get her
head around of what the magenta goddess is going on, a hide and seek game
between the pharmaceuticals, her crush and the thing between her thighs begins.
And that thing is hungry… for peanut butter.
As everything the author has ever written, this book too isn’t only about a
striking premise and action galore; Hailey Piper created a very consummate
universe here in which she criticizes an evil and rotten health system, a
universe with very well developed, deep characters, partly touching human and
non-human interactions and in which David Fincher retires after Fight Club 2 is
a flop at the box office.
Humor, captivation, dragons with pink tentacles - it's all you ever wanted to
read!
This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno
favorite books; The Fisherman by John Langan and The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein!
Thiago and Vera, newlyweds in love, move into a new condo and to make things a little more fun, buy Itza, the "world's most advanced smart speaker!" But instead of providing the much needed entertainment Itza makes things worse; cold spots and scratchings in the walls are now accompanied by peculiar packages ordered by Itza, eerie music playing in the middle of the night, spontaneous light shows... When Vera dies in a freak accident, Thiago's world falls apart and he decides to just go away, to leave for a remote cabin in Colorado. Will he be able to escape the evil that has been on his heels, though?
I
liked the way cosmic evil is depicted/characterized here but I was
irritated by the book being written in the second person singular and I just
can't get past that (Just to give an example it is written like this: you did blablabla, you were so blablabla, I didn't think you were blablabla). Did I ever mention that I hate that? Probably in
every review for every book that uses this narrative device... I just
can't concentrate on reading when books do that and can't warm up to it.
So, needless to say, it destroyed a big part of the pleasure I would
have had reading this book.
What I enjoyed: there were some truly
scary moments and unsettling scenes here. Even though it is a short
book, it felt very full, not one scene was wasted and everything had a
meaning, is worth pondering. So, it was more a book that blew great
potential away, but is nevertheless very much worth reading if books
addressed to the "you" don't bother.
The Queen of the Cicadas by V. Castro
I really needed to fight my way through different passages that without any kind of marker or structure jump from one narrator or point of view to another. Just when you thought you have the hang of it, brand-new storylines are being introduced whereas the initial buildup feels like ages. I would have preferred it if this was either a much shorter book which concentrates on one aspect, or a much bigger book, maybe a series so that the story could have had the time to ripen. 220 pages were just not enough for such a big project.
Except for the past storyline, which was really nicely done, the focus was mainly on one character, Belinda, whilst the others weren’t really well-developed. Take the main character’s best friend Hector for instance; he is being mainly described through the eyes of Belinda and doesn’t have enough dialogue ace to express himself or even to give him a trace of a personality. He feels blank. On the other hand, other characters were emphasized excessively, like the Goddess of Death, Mictecacíhuatl, who, every time she enters a new scene, introduces herself; a whopping five times does she specify her name and function. I have pondered this a lot, but still don’t understand why it was the author’s choice to do so, since it also takes away from the scariness.
I doubt I will ever pick up another book by the author.
The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories ed. by Stephen Jones
My absolute favorite was Joe R. Landsdale's story "The Folding Man" in which so-called anti-nuns followed frat boys in car chases and killed them.
But for the rest, I don't know... This anthology definitely left a bad taste in my mouth and I may try reading other Mammoth Book collections in the future, but never again this one.
Superstar Izzy Stark discovers an even more genius trick - combined with a certain mystery drug he can make dreams and nightmares come true. And he intends to use that power to give his fans the performance of their lives. Or of their death??
This book is obviously not the best; the dialogues are pretty poor, it's partly seriously tacky and not very original. But it is plain gory, slimy Halloween fun and the cover makes up for many a fault.
Comments
Post a Comment