...the Soul of Wit - Recent Short Reviews

I have a much better reading month behind me, luckily, so this time the short reviews won't be as grumpy and peppery as my last ones. Having read really all over the place these last few weeks, the reviews are a bit mixed too in terms of genre but the emphasis is, as always, on a bunch of horror books, mostly because all the Halloween-related reading challenges I took part in. But I actually read an unusual amount of good thrillers and crime novels too and I'll be reviewing them separately because they're so many.

Hope you're enjoying the cooler reading weather!

Cunning Folk by Adam Nevill

After the catastrophe that The Ritual was for me (I absolutely adore the movie so was really crushed to discover the book is not my thing), I’m glad that the second chance I gave Adam Nevill paid off and Cunning Folks became my favorite one of the books I have read by him so far. It took a little time for me to get engaged and warm up to especially the main character Tom, who moves into a secluded house in the woods with his wife and daughter, because it is all he can afford with his tight budget, but soon realizes that he has some seriously creepy neighbors.
I even was considering dnf’ing at around the 30% mark when Nevill grabbed me with a genuinely frightening chase-in-the-forest scene involving a child and a dog.

I think the monsters he creates are his absolute strength, they are described beautifully and extremely creepily, so I decided to stick around and don’t regret it - I would recommend this book over his more popular work. I have, on my book shelf, a physical copy of The Reddening I need to read yet, hope it will keep up with this one.

One Of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde

Leave it to Jasper Fforde to lift you up from any bad mood – war at our doors, inflation, pandemic…
There’s always Thursday Next. Or maybe not? In this installment we follow not her, but the written Thursday who is somewhat milder in character than her real-life counterpart, trying to find the latter who went missing. If you know you know, this one is pretty much as perfect as the previous books in the series and I have to admit that I slightly prefer the written Thursday to real Thursday. My other two favorite characters were the Mediocre Gatsby and Sprocket the android butler. There’s one more book left to complete the series and when I'm done, I’ll start re-reading and trying to catch all the references I missed on my first read!

Hide by Kiersten White

Fourteen competitors are invited to participate in a sort of hide and seek game in an old amusement park where the prize is enough money to change all their lives for the better. Needless to say they are all dirt poor and blood young. While the game itself goes pretty easy the first couple of days they soon realize something's not quite right here - there are no cameras and the losers quite unceremoniously disappear into thin air. So what's the deal here?

I was initially totally intrigued despite whopping 14 points of view, and the start unfortunately remains the best part of this book, along with the setting maybe. I was all excited about the Squid Game or The Hunger Game vibes but nothing good developed from there, and then nothing happens again and until the very end nothing happens but characters finding a spot to hide and either sleep or think about how badly their generation has been fucked over by evil boomers, go back to camp, eat, fight each other and sleep. When the monster finaly appears, it is literally nothing... which was enraging.

So there's lots that's wrong here - from an uninteresting plot, to two main characters with the same name (what was that all about?), to too much generational angst in a book that's marketed as adult horror, to abruptly ending chapters... Not a lot of fun to read.

You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts by M. John Harrison 

M. John Harrison – perfect writing as usual. 

The way I discovered him is very verbatim per chance. As a quirk, my book club had decided to choose our next read by rolling dice instead of voting and the dices chose his SF novel Light, which in itself is an eerie thing if you know what the book is about. After that, I was impressed by his Brexit-horror The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again and now through his short story collection You Should Come With Me Now. The latter consists of 42 short stories arranged in the way that two shorter stories, sometimes as short as one paragraph, follow one which is longer. Some stories are loosely connected to each other in that they take place in a fictional, weird sort of England called Autotelia, in which some sort of invasion has taken place and left its marks, but also in that some terms and words are repeated.

Whether they are classical stories with protagonists and plots or just passages, lists even, like the list of places the author never would think he'd look for himself or even reviews of fictional books: these pieces of writing that often leave blanks for the reader to fill, with their subtle humor, but also their realness that can hide so well weirdness, have a sort of specific gravity that is hard to resist.

Rosebud by Paul Cornell

Five AI's which have been living for centuries on a survey ship in the service of the all powerful “Company” encounter a mysterious black sphere. In their attempt at communicating with and eventually capturing it, they go through a quite particular experience, which will lead them back to their own roots and the nature of things in general.

Don't be fooled by numbers – astonishingly, this small novella is heavy food for thought. I thought I'd fly through this small book but found myself pondering and re-reading many parts and generally enjoyed this quiet, subtly humorous but also partly sad and scary story. Peter Watts has blurbed it as "A scream disguised as a giggle" and there's never been a truer word said.

Ghostly: A Collection of Ghost Stories, ed. by Audrey Niffenegger

Our traditional Shine&Shadow Halloween read! Every year in October my Shine&Shadow reading group selects an eerie short story book and we read a story a day until Halloween arrives. This year we chose this collection of author Audrey Niffenegger's favorite ghost stories - because there were only 15 stories we had a little more time per story and read a story every second day.

Unfortunately I can't say that Niffenegger's and my taste in ghost stories match very much - but still there have been a couple of stories (a couple in the truest sense of the word) I liked; "Mezzotint" by M.R. James which is about moving paintings, they always creep me out, and "Honeysuckle Cottage" by P.G. Wodehouse, a hilarious story about a man stuck in a novel of his most despised genre - romance!
It was fun reading with my book friends but I don't think I would have enjoyed the read on my own. I gave it three halloween pumpkins out of five.

B&B by Amy Cross

Another group read with my Cross group where we read the absurd and fun trash horror works of a very hard working author - Amy Cross! I love her, but not this book.

Never has there been a book whose popularity curve sank for me so abruptly and absolutely. Until about the halfway mark everything was fine – a young woman on a snowy night looking for a place to stay, a mysterious B&B, even more mysterious, half fun half scary tenants doing spooky stuff... Then came a twist and it all went downhill.

Even though the events in this book were consistent in themselves, and that deserves praise, it made a very frustrating reading and as a reader I felt a little cheated by excessive repetitions. The second half of the book is a hodgepodge of unnecessary repetitions, stale characters, story lines bordering on the ridiculous. I even think the concept could have been fun, but it wasn't really executed in an interesting way. 

I hope the next Amy Cross book will be better because this one didn't really cut it.

Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison

Rory leaves her glamorous life in New York City behind to join her twin sister Scarlett in their hometown and to help her through her pregnancy. On her way there she is attacked by something bear-y, which pretty quickly turns out to be a werewolf and suddenly she's a lycan too. On top of all past pains, heartaches and traumas she needs to deal with, she now also carries the burden of transforming once a month and smells like a wet dog. It's not all bad, though, she has amazing hair now, and her senses are sharpened.

While she confronts past conflicts one after the other and even finds love, one question remains – who bit her and why?

Rachel Harrison does it again: another feel-good novel about complex human relationships which can be as destructive as heart warming, hand in hand with the supernatural monstrous, featuring awesome characters, a unique humor and a kick-ass final battle. I only wish there had been a little more werewolf scenes, because after a certain point this book is heavy on romance and I want horror! I want werewolf horror!

Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen

Always a nice surprise when the library accepts my recommendation to purchase a book - it happened twice in the past and recently for the third time with Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen – it's a great feeling, makes you feel so acknowledged, lol. But what surprised me even more was how much I ended up liking this book!

We're following a bunch of contestants in the reality show “The Catch” - influencers, religious freaks, you name it, trying to seemingly win the heart of bachelor Jeremy, who by all measures, is a sleazy asshole. The setting of the show is a remote island in the Pacific Northwest where the participants need to endure quite a lot for such meager a prize, but they're not alone. As they quickly diminish in numbers, and not because they are eliminated but because they disappear, they make the discovery of a very unlikely … person in the deeper parts of the woods? Rumor has it somewhere in the mountains there is a secret lesbian cult hiding and there's that...

A sarcastic satire on today's standards turns into an uncanny but somewhat touching story about finding love and yourself. It was extremely kooky, original, super engaging and the audiobook was a fantastic production as different characters had different and suitable voices. Definitely one of the better books I've read this year that combines humor and horror elements.

Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology, Ed. by Vince A. Liaguno, Rena Mason

Honestly, this was a read I very much anticipated but the majority of the stories just didn't cut it that
much. I ended up finding three stories in total that were absolutely stellar, but the ones remaining either were average at best, missed the point of otherness, or missed the terror that I'm looking for, or some were unfortunately just unoriginal and blandly written.

My highlights in this anthology;

“What Blood Hath Wrought” by S.A. Cosby: Absolutely amazing story which, from the first line to the last, completely captivated me. A quiet night in a diner turns awry when an eerie unexpected guest comes in. Great suspense building, a dreadful monster with motives that were completely understandable, characters you root for – it's all here.

“Miss Infection USA” by Shanna Heath: Some people have a knack for building an entire new universe within just a handful of pages, a knack that deserves respect. Shanna Heath shows she definitely deserves that respect here – a world where young kids can be revived after death and under certain circumstances be preserved, a class society in which revenants are used for entertainment purposes and two sisters trying to find their way and survive in this hostile universe. Comes with a shock finale!

“Incident at Bear Creek Lounge” by Tananarive Due: The last time Johnny meets his grandmother is also the first time he saw her in his conscious life. She used to be a Hollywood actress in her youth and is now living in a remote cabin up in the mountains in Colorado. During his visit, he finds a very interesting, but also thoroughly scary woman who has fits of anger and a very own style – is it that she is just scary or is it her way of getting along as a black woman in the film industry? Johnny makes a discovery.

Even though to me this anthology seems like a missed opportunity, I very much support the intent, maybe that's why I'm kind of disappointed. The good ones were so good though, that they definitely made it worth the read and to be fair, there are a lot of stories, so the chances are high you may find some that speak to you.