...the Soul of Wit - Short Reviews

The reading slump... Sooner or later we all fall victim to this unuterrable nuisance and it's hard - all you want to do is escape and find shelter in imaginary worlds, but the real world and its weight interfer with your concentration and don't let you sink into your books. I have been suffering from a major slump in the past month or so, maybe even for longer, so I'm trying to concentrate on fewer and maybe lighter books or audiobooks I want to have finished until the end of the year, but honestly, I'm not sure I'll even be able to reach that goal.

Nevertheless I managed to finish a couple of good titles, and I'm still reading some good ones that I haven't finished yet. So, I hope you enjoy the reviews and have a happy Halloween!

Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction by Grady Hendrix

"Written in dead letters... and covered in blood!"

Who says non-fiction can't be fun? Not Grady Hendrix, for sure! Divided into fun categories like creepy kids, satanic panic, or creature features, Hendrix offers an awesome and entertaining general view of the colorful and crazy world of American horror paperbacks from the 70s and 80s when transgression and over the top-ness weren't only concepts, but everyday pulp fiction reality.

I can't stress enough my dismay at possibly not being able to read ALL of these, so I'll just read Hendrix' hilarious descriptions and look at their insanely kooky cover art.

There are few books that should be part of every horror fan's library and this one is definitely one of them. And I finally fully read it from front cover to back (yet for another challenge). Spectacular.

The Underhistory by Kaaron Warren

Pera Sinclair has spent most of her life reconstructing her family house which was demolished by a plane crash when she was a child, and everyone but she died. Now in her sixties, she offers so-called haunted-house tours for interested people to earn her bread. And it's going pretty good until one night, during the final tour of the season, a group of escaped convicts discover the secluded house and decide to rob Pera, but find out she is not the old frail woman they think she is.

Each chapter is divided into slots of different slices of Pera's life (the plane crash, her sister who was murdered, her marriage etc.), rotating with the present, which is 1993 in the book. While we move from room to room, and the rooms are interesting in this house as they all have their own names and tragic stories, Pera adds a little supernatural haunting into these stories, and readily shares them with her visitors.

A wonderful concept which is unfortunately a little wasted on long, draggy, tragic back stories, during which even Pera herself dozes off.

For the umptieth time this year a book marketed as horror falls victim to the categorization, as it would have been ideal for readers of contemporary/regular books, but falls short in suspense and dread for horror. Admittedly, the story picks up some pace when the focus shifts to the convicts in the last chapter, but even that, unfortunately, didn't do it for me personally.

Still recommendable for readers who enjoy a quieter book and haunted house tours by elderly women who spin a yarn or two.

Mouth: Stories by Puloma Ghosh

Mouth by Puloma Ghosh dovetails the fantastic, the weird into the mundane so skillfully that it is hard not to be enchanted from the very first lines of the first story, Dessication, in which two girls who start hanging out together soon find out weird stuff about each other (and it involves eating!). Tropes that are everywhere nowadays and you may not necessarily care about, like vampires, ghosts, werewolves, or time travel, become something authentic, wondrous from the strange pen of Ghosh.

I performed a facsimile of living for some time before I could figure out how to do it for real again.

While the majority of her stories follow this route of dispersing some Weird into our reality, there’s also quite impressive universe-building going on here, like shimmery tears called "anomalies" opening all over the world when too many particles whip through time at once, or on a planet where few chosen ones are burdened with birth-giving, and it comes with a sacrifice…
My highlight was Nip, which focuses on the addictive quality of lovemaking and starts like the story of two lovers, only to slowly turn into something else, but not quite clear what.

I feel like I’ve been waiting for you all this time so I can be scared with you.

Overall, reading these stories feels like watching a solemn, dream-like indie movie and that spoke to me directly. Also, the writing is simply sublime and I want more of it. 

Chrysalis: A Novel by Anna Metcalfe

The structure of Chrysalis, the description of one nameless woman by three different people's points of view, which struck me as fresh and new, is apparently not at all fresh and new, and it's a structure borrowed from Han Kang's The Vegetarian, reviewers of Goodreads say. Since I haven't read that, it didn't faze me, at all, and it was still fresh and new to me.

The three points of view in question are; Eliot, who meets the woman at the gym she goes to become stronger (and not lose weight, please!), and starts an affair with her; Bella who is the woman's mother and recounts her birth, growing up, being bullied and all the things that led her wish to become stronger and finally Susanne who is a former work colleague and a friend who helped her in her darkest hour. It was interesting to get to know the main character completely through her sidekicks but most of all, I felt incredibly fond of the woman and her quest. The more things from her past are revealed, the more grew my admiration for the lack of a better word. The story is primarily about self-care, self-focus, control of body and mind, solitude - a woman who took some blows in life, turning to herself to heal, to re-built herself and I can fully relate to that.

Imagine my surprise at reading a good book for the Shine and Shadow dark read for once, and I actually nominated this one and it won, how abnormal.