...the Soul of Wit - Latest Short Reviews

Here are some short reviews from the past month. Writing this post I realized that I've been reading A LOT OF short stories and I'm in a proper short story fever! If that speaks to you, I hope you find something to your taste, enjoy!

 

Fifteen Eyes by Tyler Downs

 

Sometimes you want to read something fun, rather light-hearted, and Fifteen Eyes is perfect for those times. In the frame story, Solomon Northcutt transcribes the deaths of the owners of fifteen eyeballs for his boss in fifteen short stories with a streak of weird, a sense of off-ness, but always fun.

Though I liked them all, Method, the story of a shape shifter who joins a theater club to learn how to literally “be” someone else, and Seventh House which follows a man who lies about his zodiac sign ending up in an astrology cult were my absolute standouts.

I don't mean to join the "xxx meets xxx" train and set false hopes, but I would place this on par with The Gulp or Tales from the Gas Station, so if you liked those you may enjoy the humor in these stories too.

Daphne du Maurier: The BBC Radio Collection: Including Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, Frenchman’s Creek & more 

I only wanted to listen to some numb adventure stories mindlessly without feeling much in these apocalyptic times, and when I found Daphne du Maurier's BBC Radio Collection it sounded like I might want to give that a try. Having finished the whole 20+ hours of radio dramas by one of Britain's most prolific and versatile authors, my verdict is that she's amazing, but maybe this isn't really my kind of literature, as I'm not that much for historical nor adventure.

Nevertheless, I find some of the pieces here worthy of a mention, namely, naturally the great Rebecca, in which a woman marries a man whose late ex-wife Rebecca is still very much present in their lives, My Cousin Rachel, in which a man is uncannily obsessed with his cousin Rachel, and finally, of course Don’t Look Now which is famously a short story I like a lot, as I already did a comparison between the written story and the film here (but the film won). 

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

 

So, this book wasn't on my radar AT ALL. But Wolf from Otherland said that he has free tickets for the pre-screening at the UCI Luxe East Side Gallery provided by Sony pictures, so I said yes, why not. But before seeing the movie I wanted to read the book, and so I did. Now knowing both the movie and the book, I can safely say that the differences are minimal.

We're following Ryland Grace who is the only astronaut to survive the long sleep during his space mission to locate and extract a substance to help Earth and other planets becoming immune against a parasitic planet-plague. 

When he arrives at his target, he finds out there's already a fellow observer, an alien from another planet there. They start conversing and exchanging info and maybe they start getting along very well, a little too well.

Thing is, Ryland is a loner on Earth - he doesn't have a family, no lover, no partner, no children. He has his job he loves and leads a self-sufficient life, but that's not enough for humanity. He is the type of lead character that I can relate to, and looking at the reactions to this work, so do many other people, apparently.

I ended up really liking this story, I wasn't very aware about the hype and probably wouldn't have read this book on my own, but I'm glad I did. It is not a conventional Hollywood story where the lead ends up happily ever after finding the love of his life marrying and having children, but he receives a happy end on his own terms and I appreciate that. It is a rather light-hearted, heart-warming story with some hard SF elements.

The UCI cinema was gigantic, by the way, and the sound was so powerful it made you vibrate in your seat! To make sure we don't record any part of the movie they made us put our phones in metallic little sacks we were asked to then shut close, lol.

The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

I finally finished The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan's short stories, and I'm now obsessed with Kiernan's writing. If Mephisto came to struck a deal with me, my wish would be to be able to write like her.

My highlights were La Peau Verte, the story of a girl becoming the fairy she was meant to be, Andromeda Among the Stones, a Lovecraftian saga of sorts, of a family tasked with guarding the fine border between our world and a parallel universe of abominations, The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean, in which a reporter interviews the wheelchair-bound muse of a late artist who would only paint mermaids, and finally Fish Bride, which follows a love story of an unusual nature.

This is definitely a book I will keep on my bed side and keep going back to, even if I didn’t understand every story, especially the Steam Punk-y, futuristic stuff was hard to envision for me, but the prose is so sublime I want to keep reading and re-reading.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez

The reason I grabbed this book which was waiting for me on my bookshelf for some years, is that of course Laura Casabé's latest film The Virgin of Lake Quarry is based on two short stories from this collection. Luckily I found a couple of more short stories that I enjoyed.

I genuinely like Mariana Enriquez‘ short stories, I like the combination of mundane social problems mixing and merging with the supernatural in a very Latin American way other regions in this world can't quite compete with. 

Some gems I found are the darkly comedic Where are You, Dear Heart? following a person developing a sexual fetish some might find strange, or Meat which is about the bloodthirsty groupies Espinosas (which I probably would have liked to join in real life) and the socially critical The Cart showcasing poverty and misery and the resulting brutality.