...the Soul of Wit - Short Reviews

Enjoy the latest short reviews!

A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw

It's not only the titular places that are wild here - the turns this book takes range from wild to wildest and I like it.
Starting as a noir story in which medium Travis Wren who has an intuition for finding missing people is hired by the family of the lost author Maggie St. James, one of those turns mentioned above later takes the reader to Pastoral, a reclusive commune or even cult-like community who cannot leave the place for fear of an illness they call “the rot” and that befalls them as soon as they try to leave.  

I was sold from the beginning - a thoroughly detestable cult leader, a mysterious illness, nice and atmospheric, beautiful writing... It ticks so many of my boxes. A delight to read.

Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar

The devastating discovery of the bodies of missing young girls shakes a small town in Maryland in the summer of 1988. Written in the style of true crime but still a fiction story, metafiction to be precise, Chasing the Boogeyman features Richard Chizmar, luminary of horror publishing and author, who returns to his hometown and finds himself writing about this real-life horror story.

So sorry to say this wasn't the book for me. I didn't quite manage to get invested in the story or develop an interest for the narrator because the book uses many true crime elements and memories from the author/narrator's life. I didn't know who Richard Chizmar is (the founder of Cemetery Dance Publications) and apparently for other readers to whom he is a celebrity it was a fun game to try and guess how much of the book is fiction and how much memoir. I just found out surprisingly that it's not my thing.

Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li

Powered by a mysterious Chinese benefactor, American artist Will Chen finds himself in the middle of a big heist: he wants to steal back five Chinese art works displayed in Western museums which were looted from Beijing centuries ago. So he gathers a crew consisting of a thief, a hacker, a getaway driver, and a con artist in order to make history and lots of money.

Recently there are more and more reviews expressing disappointment and down rating books because of them being marketed/listed in the wrong genre. Flipping through Portrait of a Thief's reviews I see that this book suffers a great deal from this phenomenon and that's a shame because it has so much to give.
Yes, the starting point of this story is students from the Chinese diaspora deciding to take Chinese art back to China, but this isn't a book bout heisting, nor is it really a mystery or a thriller. So if you go into this with the right expectations, if you don't focus as much on the plot as you do on its core message, you will find first and foremost a book that explores identity – in various facets; national, cultural, generational – specifically of the Chinese-American identity, one that I personally appreciated for its realistic representation of the inner turmoils that come with being an immigrant second generation.
For me this was a highly worthwhile read.

Preternatural Evolution by my awesome Goodreads friend Peter Topside

Picking up the baton from the first installment of the Preternatural trilogy, Preternatural Evolution: A Psychological Horror Book focuses on the aftermath and on the survivors of the Blackheart vampire carnage in the fictional small town Meadowsville. Beside familiar characters such as the messed up anti-hero Christian, who vanquished the abuser Blackheart in the first book and Alexandra, the preacher's daughter, we get to meet some new faces like Adam, Christian's son who was a baby in the first book, and who turned out to be my favorite character here.

Even though the events of the first book are fifteen years past, the obtrusive impact they had on Meadowsville is still tangible and especially in the everyday lives of the people something is brewing – is it possible that Blackheart is behind it all, or is it even the town that's conjuring him?

Despite the obvious parallels to its predecessor like the intense Christian aspects and the extremely compelling antagonist, Preternatural Evolution strongly zooms in on the inner worlds, the thoughts and feelings of its characters and that is the main strength of this book. Topside's Meadowsville and its various inhabitants constitute a very successfully drawn picture of post-traumatic coping mechanisms. So clearly understandable and relatable are their reactions that even the most bonafide agnostics will have sympathy and understanding for the heavy religious undertones the book conveys.

This would also be the one critique point I have - I totally understand that especially with the vampire trope religion is indispensable and in order to end Preternatural Evolution the way it does even more so here. I don't mean to be judgy in any way, however, I'm not the kind of person who enjoys religious undertones in fiction very much and it took away a little from the joy I had reading this book.

My absolute highlight, on the other hand, is the baddie Blackheart and his development in this second installment! The second book left me asking for more and I'm so happy there already is a third book to end the trilogy and I don't have to wait!

Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak

Former drug addict and devote Christian Mallory Quinn believes to have found the chance of her life in a job in the suburbs of New Jersey as a babysitter for the five year old son of the wealthy Maxwell family. She immediately loves her new life - she lives in their pool house, jogs at night and plays a lot with little Teddy by day. Creepily, Teddy has an imaginary friend named Anya and she makes him draw pictures which progressively get darker, more elaborate and even sinister: They tell a highly unpleasant story about the murder of a woman.

This novel opens with a really promising scene in which Mallory takes part in an eerie medical experiment to finance her drug habit. Reading it really raised my hopes that this just might be the horror book of the year, but unluckily the rest of the book just doesn't hold up with that scene and to be honest, it's not woven in very good into the later happenings. In fact, after a certain point everything becomes too far-fetched for my taste. It was nevertheless an OK book, an average YA thriller that keeps you turning the pages.

The Devil and the Deep, Ed. by Ellen Datlow

These stories cover all horrors set in the sea and the shores around it, from obvious monsters to the more subtle threats; shipwrecks, haunts, sea monsters, imagination or illness. My highlights? Here we go!

"Fodder's Jig" by Lee Thomas– It all starts with a disorder that escalates quickly into a strange dance, then proceeds to neurological decay and ends in being summoned by horrible sea creatures to be devoured by them.

"What My Mother Left Me" by Alyssa Wong – A young woman travels to a North Carolina beach house after the death of her mother. She has recently broken up with her aggressive boyfriend and has a kind of suspect girlfriend now. The threat in this story, though, will come from an unexpected place and is seriously nauseating.

"Broken Record" by Stephen Graham Jones – Story of a man stranded on a desert island and the list of the ten things he would take with him on that exact island start psychedelically melting into each other in his mind. Are they real hallucinations, though? Is that a werewolf? An absurd, maybe a little melancholy but very beautiful hallucination of a story to get caught in. The absolute winner of this collection.

"The Deep Sea Swell" by John Langan – Lovecraftian undertones as an archaeologist who has been trapped at the bottom of the ocean for decades resurfaces and you, my friend, are going to feel his WRATH!

"Shit Happens" by Michael Marshall Smith – I had customers when I was a book seller who were absolutely crazy about Michael Marshall Smith, they'd always come in asking about his books and strongly urged me to read his works. I have never read a full novel by him, but I am discovering his writing in short stories first and although I tried a few it was not until “Shit Happens” that I truly saw the appeal. This story is about marine beings invading human bodies in, well... shitty ways, and it was funny, gross and awesome!

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

Did you ever have one of those moments where you wish you could turn into the Hulk, a werewolf, Mr. Hyde or even a bug to give expression of your deepest, most intimate emotions? Well, if you are a woman in this alternate history novel set in 50s USA you can. During The Mass Dragoning of 1955 hundreds of thousands of ordinary but angry wives and mothers grew wings, scales and talons, turned into dragons and flew away.

We follow Alex, whose aunt transformed and who lives through a crazy time period that spans from the shock and taboo surrounding dragoning to the dragon women becoming slowly part of society, becoming an inherent part of it. Her journey includes loss, rage, and self-discovery and is a delight to read.

Three Act Tragedy by Agatha Christie

“I simply cannot bare artists. Their bodies are always such a curious shape.”

I absolutely, positively, manifestly LOVE dinner party murder mysteries and was unsurprisingly smitten with Queen Agatha's Three Act Tragedy or Murder in Three Acts as previously published.

Sir Charles Cartwright, the aging heart throb and charismatic actor, throws one of his dinner parties and before the evening even starts one of them dies by choking on his cocktail. Luckily another one of the guests is the ingenious detective Hercule Poirot, who already has a hunch of what's happening.

Although Three Act Tragedy is a treasure trove for absurd gems like the quote above, I'm genuinely happy I'm not a character in this book because Christie literally annihilates everyone over the age of thirty with spiteful, mean comments! Agatha, you cheeky little ageist!
It was a pleasure to listen this audiobook narrated by Hugh Fraser, quite the surprising outcome too.