...the Soul of Wit - Short Reviews

Here they are, the first short reviews of 2024, for you to enjoy!

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

First, a little background – apparently in the early twentieth century the US Congress considered hippopotamus ranching (in all seriousness) with hippos imported from Africa to the bayous of Louisiana as a solution for the national meat shortage and the growing ecological crisis. Sarah Gailey bases her Western-alternate history River of Teeth on a universe where this consideration had been realized and we have cowboys sitting in a bar discussing who that black hippo outside belongs to which just ate the poor dog Petunia.

This universe is quirky and truly original, and the characters fun – Houndstooth, Archie and Hero, alongside with a couple of others form a group to avenge Houndstooth's burned down ranch (with all the hippos!) and hunt down those who are behind it. The hippos are characters of their own too! My only critique would be that the characters were all too binary, like the baddies were exaggeratedly so and you knew who's good and just right away, but I guess that is a Western thing.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Arthur Less is a quasi successful author about to turn fifty. When he receives the wedding invitation of his ex-boyfriend of nine years he decides to run, like any good escapist, and accepts a bunch of invitations to literary events around the world; his destinations are New York, Italy, Germany, France, Morocco and India.

"Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, LESS is, above all, a love story."

As a person who loves both traveling and running away when feeling emotionally overwhelmed, the story of Arthur Less is predestined to be among my favorites. Unbelievably, I even enjoyed the romance aspect, which isn't really prevalent in the beginning, but slowly creeps in with the switch of point of view, making this, in the end, a love story.

Although the love part always being somewhere in the back of Less' head, the other existential crises weighing on his mind, like getting older, searching for a place among his peers, finishing with his past were all struggles that made him very relatable and dear to me.

In the end, as the narrator says, it was not a bad life Less had, and reading it was anything but bad.

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

It is wonderful to see Tananarive Due quickly becoming a household name for the horror reader – being around for decades, writing wonderful books, she deserves it.

The Reformatory, which is based on the events of the Dozier School for Boys and follows little Robert Stephens unjustly landing in this hell, as well as his sister Gloria's sturdy efforts to get him out of there, is just further proof of her writing talent and narrative aptitude. She based the adventure of little Robert in this cruel, injust and violent place to the imagined fate of her own uncle who shares the same name and sadly didn't survive the school re-education. The fictional little Robert has an ability which determines the development of his time in the Reformatory; he can see ghosts, which he calls heins. And in a place where lots of kids died under dubious circumstances, there are a lot of those. They're not always nice either and Robert soon finds himself in a position where he needs to balance the requirements of the Reformatory personnel and the demands of the hein children. 

I often got goosebumps while reading this utterly moving book, I was scared and moved. Due does everything right here.

My Work Is Not Yet Done by Thomas Ligotti

In a world where even the most focused writers feel the pressure to “build a brand” with glamorous photos, clever and flashy social media (and being present on them 24/7), interviews, talks and whatnot, Ligotti's notorious reclusiveness, his absence is distinctly congenial. That he wrote these short stories which perfectly capture the horror of office life and corporate worlds, makes him all the more likable.

[...]because the presence of these living ghosts, these ambulatory spirits, was simply too haunting to be tolerated, provoking a dismal reminder of something that must be ignored at all costs … for these specters were not merely human detritus that the rest of us had left behind, but also citizens of a future that awaits all the empires infesting this earth, not to mention the imminent fall of those fragile homelands of flesh which we each inhabit.

We all know the feeling (at least I hope we all do) ... Surviving the corporate day only thanks to powerful escapist tendencies and daydreams of manifold ways of dramatically slamming your notice into the faces of line managers or even better, of HR managers, seeking the satisfaction lacking in those soulless places in fantasies. Handing in your notice is never satisfying in real life though, it's just the daydreaming which is.

Junior manager Frank Dominio doesn't leave it at daydreaming, he's determined to make his violent dream come true after being wronged by seven of his colleagues in a particularly nasty way. He prepares well to hunt the seven down, but there is something else at work too - a pitch black. And of course he's not the only one who is aware of this thing. This first titular novelette is followed by two shorter stories; “I Have a Special Plan For This World”, set in Murder City, in the headquarters of a company in which all high level managers tend to die or disappear and “The Nightmare Network”, which makes use of the multimedia technique and in various video extracts conveys the feeling also known as corporate dread.

I have read Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe some years ago, and most of those stories worked well for me, I like Ligotti's take on cosmic horror and these three tales backed that first impression. I was recommended this book by a friend of mine, Dorothy Scarecrow, who was totally smitten back when it was first published and it's easy to see why. Thomas Ligotti is another brilliant author worth further exploring. But his writing is really dark, I will need to read cheery things too to balance that out.

Hospital by Han Song

Yang Wei travels to C City for a business trip, drinks a bottle of mineral water from his hotel minibar and is knocked out. He wakes up at the Hospital with a terrible stomach pain which is getting worse by the day without any prospect of betterment. Here, Yang Wei's kafkaesque voyage into the deeper workings of the Hospital begins and the established system is more corrupt and confusing than he ever could have guessed. And the worst is, the longer he lives in this weirdness, the more it starts changing him and his views.

"The hospital is here to eradicate genes and bring an end to the traditional meaning of life. Without life, there will be no sickness or disease. Once we do away with brains, failures of understanding will no longer be a problem. The same rationale that led to the formation of the hospital will also lead to its destruction. This is the real art."

This was a truly original, crazy, dystopic, horrific, satiric kind of experience. The titular hospital standing for as a metaphor for a whole existing system, it is a critique on that system, its bureaucracy and inner workings.

This book also has the worst Goodreads rating I saw in my life, mainly because it was badly rated by many people who partly didn't understand it or even didn't even bother reading it. What sucks is that publishers won't give space for translations to authors from these countries because of these ratings, because people felt offended by something completely metaphorical. Grrr... Why rate when you haven't read it?