...the Soul of Wit - Short Reviews

Heyo! Finally some short reviews before the spring, the academic semester and Easter holidays begin - hope you enjoy!

Scary Stories for Bananaphobes, by Bruce McBruce

Our banana in heaven, Yellow be thy name.

Bananas have many faces, and not all of them are friendly. In fact, they're much more insidious than you may think. They hunt people in dark alleys, disguise as yellow dolphins in the water, take gigantic forms and destroy civilizations, haunt the minds of formerly productive members of society, become pirates to fulfill their nasty desires, terrorize people in road rage incidents, demoralize swimmers by whispering in their ears that they will never make it and cause them to drown, they even became gods and have followers... The range of banana horror is wide.

For me, the winner of this anthology is The Melonphone 3000 in which a farmer and his son visit a fruit and vegetable fair in the US, where they see the titular phone which allows communication with fruits, and witness a demo call with a banana, who explains the full scope of the hate bananas feel against humans and apes, and you had no clue how sinister this is.

I wasn't a bananaphobe before reading this book, but now I have my doubts.

Strange Stones by Edward Lee, Mary SanGiovanni

Sometimes what you see (for example on a random cover description) is exactly what you get, and what you get is just right, as is the case with Edward Lee and Mary SanGiovanni’s Strange Stones.

Meet Professor Robert Everhard – the ultimate weird fiction scholar, a welcome guest at conventions, biggest expert but also critic of H.P. Lovecraft. At yet another convention, where he's usually the star of the evening, he angers one too many person with his presentation on the triteness, racism and melodrama of Lovecraft's work, and her name is Asenath (yes, like the one character in The Thing on the Doorstep). It doesn't take long for this gorgeous witch to bedazzle the philanderer Everhard and a cast is easily spelled to send him into the real Lovecraft country – a parallel plane of existence in which he actually is inside Lovecraft's work, included all its eldritch dangers, visiting Dunwich and Innsmouth and the like, encountering characters he knew only from the written word. Meanwhile he is to collect a certain set of stones and is in constant communication with Asenath, if you want to call it that, through his mobile phone, which miraculously works.

Strange Stones is a sweet little story for especially fans and connaisseurs of good old Howard, but it's not imperative you know his work to enjoy it, and it's readable and enjoyable without knowing any of his creations. You just laugh a little more if you're in on the jokes. I can't say I know both authors of this novella well, I think I've read Mary SanGiovanni's asylum book ages ago and only ever a handful of short stories by Edward Lee, so I'm no expert of none of both their works. Still, if you combine a classical horror author and an extreme horror author, I'd expect the distribution a little more even. What I'm trying to say is that Lee's part in this book could/should have been a bit bigger, I can only think of two things that Lee might have contributed, so I was in for a little more "extreme" fun. It was still good though.

Their Monstrous Hearts by Yiğit Turhan

It must be a wink of fate… That’s what penniless and writer’s-blocked author Ricardo thinks after a mysterious stranger informs him that his grandmother Perihan has died, and he’s the lucky heir. All he has to do is leave Paris, attend her funeral in Milan, and he can have her villa, which includes a famed butterfly collection. His hopes of finding a story to inspire him, and inheriting anything of real value vanish though, and everything seems kind of off. When he stumbles upon Perihan’s diary, the book divides into two storylines, Perihan, her childhood in Turkey and her way to Milan, parallel to Ricardo and his life, his trying to make sense, to solve the puzzle before him.

The story holds the overall suspense of a 90’s or early 00’s TV-thriller like Dragonfly, The Secret Window or Skeleton Key, and I can imagine it turned into a movie, it’s so visual, with the butterflies and a strange mythology at its core. Some scenes were genuinely creepy and although it did drag a little in the middle, the ending was actually really good. I loved Perihan’s transformation! So, it was a solid read for me.

I did listen to the audiobook version, and I have a critique point that’s specifically about the audio production, something that bothered me, although I don’t really have a solution for the problem. Maybe I’m missing something here, but for a book set in Italy, I would have preferred they just left out the Italian accent and just spoke in accent-free English to each other. Normally these people would be speaking Italian, which is obviously not possible unless it’s the Italian edition, but if they are to speak English to each other, we can just pretend without the distraction of Super-Mario-like fake Italian accent, I guess. I’m speaking specifically about Ricardo and his scenes here, because the narrator switched between his American accent during auctorial narration and English with Italian accent in dialogues/ Ricardo POV. I have listened to enough books that are set in non-English-speaking countries and sometimes it happens in books set in SE Asian countries but there are others where the accent is left out completely, an example would be Journey in Moon Light where the characters weren’t given Hungarian accents at all. It is normal Perihan would have an accent because she’s not from there and will have an accent no matter what language, except Turkish, but Ricardo not really.
As I said, maybe I’m missing something, but it distracted me a lot while listening.

 

The Night Doctor and Other Tales by Steve Rasnic Tem 

 

With a reading time of approximately three months, I possibly used up the maximum acceptable reading duration for a short story collection for Steve Rasnic Tem’s The Night Doctor, but I feel like it was necessary for the type of stories he writes. Generally of cumbersome, serious nature with a slightly melancholy or even sad undertone, Tem’s short stories firmly pull his reader into his unique literary world, in which the daily life quickly slips into darker channels and end flowing into catastrophic, claustrophobic oceans. Hence, these stories aren’t easily consumable and need time to show effect.

If you have a collection of equally weighty stories, I feel like the arrangement plays a big role in making the reading experience easier and that’s right where this collection might have failed. There are big chunks of stories revolving around a similar set of characters – especially married couples and older men – set in similar kinds of places – some sort of accommodation or a house –, dealing with similar troubles such as aging, mental problems, unwanted or shocking transformations leaving the same kind of impressions, it might be better to arrange these in a more varied way, in order to prevent monotony. This book fails there in that the first half of the collection feels like a repetition of the same story with only minimal differences. If it’s intentional, I missed that point and it considerably slowed my reading. It is only about the halfway mark, in which the stories gain some momentum, become more animated, more entertaining if you want to, that’s where we can say the book truly establishes a connection to its reader.

That said, there were more than enough stories offering a very original, sort of cagey, sort of isolated but always very interesting, even entertaining atmosphere very reminiscent of Brian Evenson. My highlights: Red Rabbit is about a married couple who repeatedly finds skinned rabbits on their porch and ends in a nice shock ending; Lost in the Gardens of Earthly Delights a strange piece of writing told from the point of view of a social worker for the homeless who claims to wander in different worlds at night, but then experiences weird stuff in her actual real life too; Blattidae Wine in which a guy needs to deal with his wife turning into an insect, and no, they’re not the Samsas; Domestic Magic, co-written with Melanie Tem, deals with child neglect among people with very witchy skills; in The Secret Laws of the Universe a man’s urge to kill his wife is strengthened by the conversations he’s having with everyday objects like the coffee carafe or his car; the titular Night Doctor a sad and scary tale of a lifelong companionship fading into old age; Between the Pilings, a piece of cosmic scare set in Innsmouth at the sea, and finally The Weight Loss which is enough to trigger anyone who ever has had to diet in their life.

A very worthwhile collection I’d recommend for slow, intense reading.

Goth by Otsuichi

This Japanese light mystery orbits around two edgelord high school students; the unnamed boy and the girl Yoru Morino, both fascinated by murder, gore and grotesque. In the first story Goth, Morino finds the diary of a serial killer and the two of them try to locate him; Wristcut is about yet another serial killer who cuts the hands and paws of his human and animal victims; Dog is a rather sad story about dog kidnappings and lead boy's sister finding their bodies in a pit; Twin takes a look at Morino's past, as she used to have an identical twin sister who dies while trying to pull a prank; Grave is about Saeki who spends his time gardening, but secretly digs a grave to bury someone alive, and finally Voice, which is about a killing in an abandoned hospital and the victim's younger sister receiving tapes with her sister's last words, and it closes the main short story part. This block is followed by two epilogues by the author and one bonus story, which I passed.

I know I myself was possibly something of a similar sort, but the two lead characters in Goth were so incredibly unlikeable and unrelatable that I have been rolling my eyes at them most of the time while reading. Both display a boring lack of emotions and while the girl Morino can only relate to her only one friend unnamed boy, he, on the other hand, is obsessed with the idea of seeing her die.

The stories usually don't provide much build-up, play with points of view, and have a twist. An annoying point was that because the stories were originally published separately, the male character explains in the beginning of each and every story a detailed description of Morino from the male gaze, her long black hair, how pretty and desirable she is but cannot feel etc, and that sucked, really. Those part could have been edited out.

So, if you feel like a simply written, not too complex, bad, but bloody and mildly shocking mysteries with unsurprizing twists, annoying teenage main characters included- then this is your call.