...the Soul of Wit - New Short Reviews

The spring books are here!

Here's the wrap-up of my April reads which were actually a lot because I joined lots of group reads. The most spectacular one was the Easter Bunny horror read and it was a blast - you'd be surprised by how many Easter bunny themed horror books there are!

After my disappointment with the latest mystery and crime books I have read, I decided to go back to the roots and read from the pen of the Queens of the genre; Agatha Christie and Patricia Highsmith. Nothing close to disappointed this time.

So I hope you enjoy the short reviews and find some reads that may interest you!

North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud

Nathan Ballingrud's Shirley Jackson Award winning debut collection was one of those books I had just cursorily and partly read and never finished, but now I did.

I like Ballingrud's short stories; they're grounded, solid horror, often metaphoric, reflecting social ills and real pain and more often nauseating and dreadful, but always meaningful.
In this collection my absolute favorite story is “Monsters of Heaven”, a rare enough pre-apocalyptic story set in a world marked by a sense of foreboding and impending doom and in which angels start to fall from the sky. I'll admit it here for the first time, I have always felt freaked out by angels. They just have something... creature-like, something between humane and celestial, not real neither unreal. They just scare me shitless and I can't even look at paintings of them without a shiver running down my spine. This story captures this dread of mine so perfectly that I can't thank Ballingrud enough for putting it into words!
There are also stories about face severing serial killers, arctic horror, vampires, emotional ghosts hurricane Katrina left behind and even a zombie wife. Something for every taste. Two thumbs up, this is a good collection, a classic.

Finna (LitenVerse #1) by Nino Cipri

I'm trying to get back into reading more books for the Otherland Book Club which went virtual since the pandemic started and I somehow lost track of all my online activities lately. So they have read Finna in March, in which an elderly lady gets lost in an Ikea-like department store. The problem is that you can jump into different dimensions from different showrooms and she probably got lost in one of them. It's now up to two low-rank, minimum-wage employees who just happened to have recently broken up to track her across the multiverse and bring her back.

I guesss this was on OK book for me. I did kind of enjoy the half-assed capitalism critique and the bickering between the two main characters but I just did not particularly love reading this. Just a regular book that helped me fall asleep, Finna is.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter

Very difficult one to review because everybody will hate me when I say it.

I.did.not.like.reading.this.book. I know Carter is THE woman horror author that set the way for many, the first to modernize fairy tales, a master of intricate prose, lush writing and this is her masterpiece, but I still didn't like reading this.

I may have found one or two stories slightly pleasant, namely "The Tiger's Bride", a reversed Beauty and the Beast and "The Lady of the House of Love" which criticizes the patriarchal order in a little vampire tale. But by the time I reached the latter I was already bored asleep by the very boring take on "Puss in Boots" and was shock-revived by "Snow Child", in which a man rapes... snow. It is interesting to say the least and if you like lush language and rich Gothic elements clashing with more modern concepts, please go ahead but me, no thanks, I just can't with this author anymore.

A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan

Remy and Alicia are a very peculiar couple who spend their time and relationship obsessing over Jen, a former co-worker of Remy’s who is in fact a basic influencer trying to glamorize her life in social media. Their whole relationship orbits around fantasies of Jen and her fabulous social media life.
One fine day they run into Jen and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons with her boyfriend and their group of friends, which makes everything even more confusing and awkward and full of moments you will feel ashamed for them, because they won't do it for themselves.

I really can't decide whether "A Touch of Jen" is genius or just terrible. Maybe it's both. What starts as a really enjoyable relationship story with non-relatable but interesting to watch characters then turns into some kind of psychedelic nightmare after a certain deadly twist. Both parts have their moments but are equally inaccessible and sometimes boring. I did like Jake Gyllenhaal as a book character.

Bunny by Mona Awad

She shivers at the view of the grand trees, as if they're not trees at all but something truly vile, like all the rosy-blond light that seems to forever bathe the campus is about to punch her in the face like a terrible fist of rich.

There is no way that summarizing Bunny 's plot or that any review I write can do justice to what is really going on in this book. Yes, it is about a group of young women in a grad school creative writing program. Yes, things get crazy and strange. Yes, the plot is blurry and sometimes confusing. BUT what matters here is Mona Awad's awesome writing, which is genuinely something else entirely. It is hypnotizing, it is hilarious, it is sad, it is beautiful and interesting and can convey a wide range of impressions and feelings, including horror. Even if you don't like the characters, even if you can't follow the plot, even if it drags from time to time, it is a thoroughly original voice and it.keeps.you.reading. By the way, I personally loved every single character, every single game Awad plays with them, every bit of karma coming back at them, every snarky remark, every sarcastic observation, every single Bunny.
As of now I have read everything Awad has written and I want more! I immediately need more of her writing... The pink pony inside me weeps softly.

Winterset Hollow by Jonathan Edward Durham

A group of friends visit the place that inspired their favorite book about a tribe of animals preparing for their yearly end-of-summer festival. When they get there, they discover that this is an actual place and they're just meeting their favorite book characters! They also discover that their beloved tale is in fact a murderous horror story!

This is in fact a story that ticks all my boxes, it is dark, it is original, it has many twists and has great characters but I have no idea why, I did not like reading this book and I'm pretty sad about it. I absolutely loved how everything came together in the end, but couldn't really feel the book. So I am actually recommending this to anyone who thinks it might be their thing, and I will try again reading it at a later point, maybe the time just was not right.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Agatha really is the absolute queen!

(Few people know that she is the reason I started reading books in the first place, I was so mad about her little mysteries when I was eleven, twelve years old that I remember reading them even in the bathtub and them being all swollen and crispy because they fell into the water so much!)

So it is obvious that I have read And Then There Were None before, but that before lies so far behind that I forgot the plot already - one of the few positive side effects of growing old, or however you want to look at it. I also forgot how intricately, how masterly the story of the ten strangers is written, who are invited as guests to a little private island by an eccentric millionaire unknown to them and who are being killed one by one described as in the titular rhyme.

This is so much fun! Christie keeps you guessing until the very end without using cheap omission tricks or the like. I can seriously recommend this one, a masterpiece indeed.

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

Another masterpiece that I had not read before. Strangers on a Train was among the eight perfect literary murders that Peter Swanson described in his novel with the same title. Having recently read it, I decided to give this a go and wasn't disappointed at all. 

Guy Haines, an architect on the rising, meets the rich and powerful Charles Anthony Bruno on a train ride and after a shared lunch and a short period of small talk Bruno comes with a shocking proposal: he’ll murder Haines’ wife if Haines will murder Bruno’s father. Repulsed, Haines protests and rejects the plan but when Bruno carries out his part of the "deal", he finds himself trapped in a really messed up situation.

And the moral of the story is... stick to your headphones or your book when you're on a train. Don't talk to that rich frat boy who tries to entice you with pricey steak meals in first class wagons, just don't! 

I'll be reading more crime classics, the modern ones were kind of a let down but these two ladies, Christie and Highsmith, know how to do it right!