In between films and life I have been able to read a handful of books, but unfortunately none of them felt really great, although all of them worthwhile if you're possibly the right reader, maybe I just wasn't it, and that's fine. Hope you enjoy the short reviews, maybe you find something that speaks to you!
A Feast of Putrid Delights by Valentina Rojas
Antonia who co-owns a hip New York City restaurant suffers from insomnia ever since an attack on an lgbtq-bar by some radical person, and the only thing that helps her is a drug called Cloud - but it has side effects. Still, even those side effects push her towards something the drug is supposed to help her with – it's supposed to help you find your superpower. So by and by it becomes clear that the nausea and perception of malodors has a reason which lead her to an appalling realization about herself.
It took me a while to realize what's going on in this book and that's actually a thing a book of 93 pages can't afford. Other than that I quite liked what this book addresses, and a quick, pleasant enough read.
Die Closer to Me by David Kuhnlein
Die Closer to Me follows a bunch of characters who live on the planet Süskind, which was an experiment of Earth, a sort of forgotten satellite on which disabled people were placed as a (failed) experiment and which has turned into a kind of dystopic ghetto.
The short stories the book consists of are rather episodes, really, in the grim and hostile life of a couple of recurring characters.
Sometimes a book, especially a book who is set in an invented universe can be so strange, so different that it might feel strenuous to even try to imagine it in your head. That's how I felt reading Die Closer to Me, and I actually dnf'ed without rating it in any way, because I don't think my brain did this book justice. I may pick it up again at some point in the future. It happens.
This was a very strange short book with a tragic back story I didn't see coming. It's mostly a sort of YA story of a group of friends using an Ouija board to communicate with the after world and getting in trouble for it. It was OK, but nothing too big.
Murder Ballads and Other Horrific Tales by John Hornor Jacobs
This is a collection of ten short stories by John Hornor Jacobs whose previous book A Lush and Seething Hell I absolutely adore. It was published, I think, some time during the pandemic, and back then I had read a couple of stories out of it but never finished, which I now did.
Well, if anything, Hornor Jacobs proves that he is not at all limited to cosmic horror, but can write in a very wide range reaching from dark fantasy to noir, to Gothic, to even science fiction; uncanny artificial intelligence, ancient vampires, Viking witches, and even a sequel to his acclaimed novel Southern Gods, the final story, the titular Murder Ballads can be found here.
Although I always appreciate this author's writing, this collection was a little scattered all over the place, and I wish they had been a little more thematically consistent with each other, so maybe rather a problem of arrangement than anything else. And the bar he set for himself after his absolutely smashing novella "The Sea Dreams It is the Sky" and the two-novella-collection A Lush and Seething Hell is so high that it is hard even for himself to reach it again. But we readers are ungrateful and greedy - once we taste something delicious like those writings, we want more and better of it. So even if this book didn't reach that bar for me, it is still a good collection.
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