...the Soul of Wit - Short Reviews

Hello everyone, I hope you are doing well and the stormy summer doesn't frustrate you much - it does me. Here's something to read when the rain floods the city again (incidentally my first short review is about exactly a book about that), enjoy!

Private Rites by Julia Armfield

Private Rites follows the story of three queer sisters after their father's death, a strange architect who helped re-shape the world after constant rains started eroding geography. In what I assume (having read her debut Our Wives, Under the Sea) is her signature style of beautiful prose, a focus on character study and water as a literary motif Armfield delicately handles themes such as estrangement, coping with grief and the complexity of family dynamics, especially between siblings.

As a background for her story loosely based on Shakespeare's King Lear, Armfield chose an interesting setting – a quasi apocalyptic world about to go under water, about to drown. An apt analogy for the three sisters', or their whole family's, state, described in little interlude-chapters titled “City”.

The horror, the disturbing in this story is nothing explicit, it merely creeps in and out of the maybe a little monotonous story, but not being able to hide at the very harrowing ending, plops out of the water.

I can't say the ending makes up for the lengthy but gorgeous writing from the point of view of a horror enthusiast, it probably does not to the extend this was the case in her previous book, where the foreboding, the uncanny was much more present and resulted in a horrific explosion. This was similar but different. Still, for the reader who can put those expectations aside, a very worthwhile read nevertheless.

Changes in the Land by Matthew Cheney

Nothing short of amazing.

Cheney starts off with a plot conventional enough: a family and its land, the search for a long lost successor, and him coming back to this land which is almost a character on its own; angry, selfish and mean. The narration consists of the rotation between the journal entries of lost son Dr. Steven Baird and the recounting of the story of the land and its owners, the Adams Family, from the point of view of Elias Thornton, whose family has been in the service of the Adams for many years. Slowly do these two storylines merge into each other, madness and evil only slowly creeping in, leading to an absolutely terrifying finale.

Love this, love the afterword.

I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

It has been only a couple of months that I expressed in my review for The Angel of Indian Lake, the final installment of the Lake Witch series, how sad it is not being able to read from the pov of its unique main character JD anymore. Fast forward a couple of months and I find myself reading Tolly Driver and Amber, characters who, if not as striking and dear as JD, still bear traces of her, giving I Was A Teenage Slasher a slight Indian Lake feeling. But they're not JD, and this is not Proofrock, Idaho, it's worse; it's Lamesa, Texas, in 1989. We follow the growing pains, the not fitting-in, the friendship, the bullying, in short, the high-school life of Tolly, who, after a concussion, starts experiencing changes in his perception and in his body he initially attributes to the accident he had, but which may have more sinister roots.

Up front; this is a typical SGJ book in that it bears his signature style, colloquial, strewn-in contradictions hinting at unreliability, deep emotional understanding hidden behind informal language, a slow unfolding of events leading to a delightful realization, a touching tie up... I think only mannequins are lacking at this party. So, if you haven't enjoyed or weren't into that in his previous work, this might not be your cup.

I was thankful for the similar feel of the characters to JD, as I'm still pining for her a little, and there were enough differences to make this its own, original work. The underlying idea of portraying a final girl/slasher unit from the inside, their interactions and even feelings for each other, if you want to put it that way, the parallels to werewolves, the transformation scenes, thus throwing in some supernatural into a genre grim and problematic, making it enjoyable even for readers not drawn to it – all this is ingenuity only SGJ can offer.

On a funny sidenote, although it wasn't funny at the moment: While reading this, my books decided to turn on me (only cook books and books about plants though) and a shelf full of them fell on my head in a freak accident and I had a concussion and didn't feel very well for a week. Luckily I didn't have Tolly's symptoms and I got off lightly with nothing but a fright, two holes in my living room wall and a big bump on my head.

Woodworm by Layla Martínez

Living in an utterly peculiar house built on women’s pain and men’s bones, our nameless protagonist and her grandmother are out for revenge. The chapters, in which two points of view rotate, transcend time and mutate from ramblings and doings of the two women, not quite clear to what end, to a captivating revenge story involving helpful saints, shadows from beyond, wobbling wardrobes and women dubbed witches because they knew how to help themselves and those religion has betrayed.

A wonderful little novella that explores themes such as toxic class differences in Spain, the exploitation of women over history, religion, poverty and generational conflicts as well as generational cooperation. Interesting the author states in her afterword that the idea of the book materialized when she found out her great-grandfather was a procurer.

Personally, I favored the point of view and the story of the grandma, even though both main characters were well fleshed out and interesting. I think it’s just a personal thing, I just like grandmas in general and she here spoke to me.