...the Soul of Wit - Short Reviews

Hey all! It's been quite a while since I actually reviewed books here, but I have finally read enough to make some short reviews out of them. In fact, I have been reading a lot but I have been reading all over, especially in different genres, genres that don't really fit in here, but now I have enough freaky books. Make use of the nice weather to read outside and I hope you enjoy my reviews!

Edenville by Sam Rebelein

So starting to read Edenville I wasn't very optimistic – a horror author (how original -not!) and his girlfriend moving into a creepy town, spooky things happening connected to his book, being a horror fan she seeing warning signs everywhere and wanting to move back, an urban legend, yada yada yada...

I was ready to give this book the verdict of a perfectly standard, ordinary horror story, but then started the passages from the book within the book, aka of The Shattered Man, which are... quite something. A quasi science fantasy saga where the mind and intellect hold the highest rank, a quirky protagonist, a cruel deity, a seriously weird universe... This element and the gradual dovetailing of it into the main plot brought the oomph necessary to give this story an interesting touch, elevating it from being a cheklist of tropes.

There's a detail in this book which makes one of the main characters very dear to me: Quinn (the horror author's girlfriend) has the habit of putting her music on shuffle and then pretending the songs that randomly come are some sort of message from the universe, she calls it the Shuffle God. I do this to a certain point too, I don't call it "god" though, but I sometimes give in to a magical thinking pattern in which the songs I listen to are trying to say something to me. I'm sorry for us, but it's all algorithms, folks, Quinn. But I feel with you and it's details like this that make or break our connection to fictional characters, just wanted to add that.

Finally, the somewhat hectic writing and multiple points of view merging may confuse some readers. Still, the creativeness of it all and the increasing complexity of the storyline made this a worthwhile read for me.

The Invisible Hotel by Yeji Y. Ham

Yewon is a young woman in a life crisis – she has opportunities but doesn’t really know what to do with her life; Go to school? Get a job? Move from her little town Dalbitsori to Seoul? While all these thoughts weigh on her mind and a sort of flu dampens her appetite and humor, she is asked to drive Ms. Han, an older woman from North Korea, to the border prison where Ms. Han’s brother is being held. Yewon too has a brother who has left home to become a soldier. As the two women ride together, their connection is rather cautious and distant, but nevertheless allows space for a little intimacy. At night, she dreams of a hotel where things get spooky, and an atmosphere of foreboding reigns. She discovers she’s not alone there.

The most striking aspects of this slow-burner are the bones people keep in their bathrooms, bones which belong to their ancestors and which need some care, daily washing and polishing otherwise they will smell and rot. Yewon feels outright panic when going to the bathroom and she longs for a world where she can go and freely clean up, freely take a bath. Not sure about the symbolic meaning here, but considering ancestors stand for the past, this certainly indicates a collective war trauma.

The writing didn’t really appeal to me, it was cluttering without enough fluency at times. The expressions and events get more and more obscure and unintelligible towards the end and I don’t really recognize horror or even gothic horror in this work, but it’s an interesting and weird enough book all in all, which makes you find out about all kinds of stuff about two Koreas.

The Angel of Indian Lake (The Indian Lake Trilogy #3) by Stephen Graham Jones

Well, as all things come to an end, so does every horror reader's favorite trilogy, The Indian Lake series. Yep. It's over, folks. We now need to take in and accept the fact that we'll never again read a main character as unique, horror-nerdy, lovable and loathable as JD again, and move on.

As hard as this goodbye feels, Jones makes it easier on us by giving us JD in all her glory for one last time. A ticking bomb which waited to go off from the first book, Rexall, finally explodes in this final installment and thanks to some supernatural enforcement he hits where it hurts. Meanwhile, JD, having come to her own quirky, nerdy self she was trying to hide in the second book, shines for a final time and ties all loose ends and question marks that might have been left.

Having said that, the book is not more spectacular or better by any means than its predecessors – in terms of style, mystery, humor (well, JD's sarcasm might be maybe just a little bit funnier than in the first two installments) and complexity Jones continues the same line throughout all three books. Is that a bad thing? Not at all. The reader has come to know and love the folks in Proofrock with all its facets and quirks and that's what we get. I just don't know if it is saying goodbye to JD or what happens in the last fifty pages, but there's added sadness and emotions here. Worthy for an ending.

Thank you, Stephen, for the ride.

PS. On a personal note, as a former smoker who used to live on Fugazi's music, I never felt more represented than when JD starts quoting “Life and Limb”. That made my day and thank you for that too. I dug out the old albums that I'm relistening to now.

The Golem by Gustav Meyrink

The Golem describes a mystical, miasmic, atmospheric, obscure Prague ghetto from the turn of the century through the words of a narrator with a broken memory, which reflects on his narration. Broken passages, descriptions of the Prague ghetto, of the fantastical people living in it and a Golem that emerges every 33 years from a room without a door and walks the streets - all glued together to form a barely coherent body of text, not unlike a golem itself. Quite fascinating, weird.

I just wish I had read the German original instead of the English and Turkish translations.

Don't Read This Book After Dark, Vol. 3, ed. by Emily S Hurricane

Confession: I did read this book after dark. And it was marvelous, as the quiet and solitude of the night magnifies the creepiness of scary stories. And I was delighted to have discovered this absolute gem of an anthology to read in the dark, it’s also great to know this is the third anthology published in this series, so I can go back and read the first two, plus anticipate others to come. The range of these stories was insane – from ghost revenges, to cosmic hot dog eaters, to corn gods, to eerie slasher crushes to dystopic world building – there’s something for every kind of horror fan here, so highly recommended from my end.

My highlights;

Corn Worm by Berengaria Di Rossi
I don’t think I am being biased in my review, but I have been told that if I review a writing of someone I know, I should state that, so here we go. B. is a Goodreads friend of mine with whom I like discussing books, but that didn’t affect my reception of this story, which takes us to a sort of alternate South America. Indigenous people are being visited by gods but things go unexpectedly and turn sour for especially the narrator, who was given a special role by these gods. The story, in the tiny space it occupies, plays with big concepts like colonialism or motherhood, and I would actually like to read this written out as a book.

Marshmallows by Dee Rasha
Veeery very scary plot of a girl finding a certain someone in her house and a scene developing in which she oscillates between sympathy, flirty and terrified. I can imagine watching this as a short film, that would work really well.

Parted by Joey Huff
“Are you ok? Is there any change? Describe what you’re feeling now.”
Bitch, my skin is rotting right in front of your face.

I love it when a story starts off as something but turns into something completely different, completely bigger than the initial situation itself. Here we start with a mystery illness, and go to how the medical and social system cope with it, turning into a dystopic story about our exploitative nature. Love how quirky this is and the idea behind it.

Apartment 2A by Paola F. Caravasso
I'm all about the kind of thriller/crime that revolves around people serially (and cleverly) killing their spouses and the solving of that mystery. This is the story of an insidious little murderer getting what’s coming at him, in an extremely satisfactory way.

I received an advanced review copy of this book and am leaving this review voluntarily. Thank you Berengaria and Emily S Hurricane!