...the Soul of Wit - Short Reviews

So I can't believe this wonderfully warm summer is almost over, I only realized from the amount of books I have collected for the Soul of Wit that it's been quite a while, and I'm a little sad about it. I hope you enjoy the short reviews and find something that speaks to you!

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck

The idea of this book is amazing: construe a hell that is based on Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Library of Babel, which describes a universe made out of a library, only consisting of books, every possible book, of 410 pages.

A Short Stay in Hell follows the Mormon Soren Johansson and a group of people surrounding him finding out they landed in hell, and it's Borges' Labyrinth/Library. In order to finish their stay in this hell (because the real natural religion is apparently Zoroastrianism which doesn't preach a definitive Hell) they have to find the one book that tells their own life story.

As I mentioned before, the idea of the book is awesome but unfortunately, and maybe it is me who didn't completely understand what the author wanted to do, it doesn't really deliver on its premise. Yes it is existential and slightly interesting, but maybe not every classic short story/idea should be elaborated upon. Borges' The Library of Babel is better off the way it is. 

Patternist #4 Patternmaster by Octavia E. Butler

The final book of the Patternist series, which is ironically the first book that Octavia E. Butler has ever written, is now finally a book I've finished reading and so I also finished the whole series, which was my goal. (I own a copy of Seed to Harvest which comprises the whole Patternist series, and I wanted to cross Seed to Harvest out of my TBR for my yearly Mount TBR challenge.)

Everything that has been building up in the series somewhat comes together here: the two groups of humans that will survive into the future, Patternists and Clayraks, and the Patternmaster who rules above all. Power struggles, slavery, social orders, free will... The final tome takes a lot on its plate to depict a very complex and frankly fascinating dystopia.  

The Dorians by Nick Cutter

Following the Flowers for Algernon pattern, Nick Cutter brings us The Dorians - five older volunteers who otherwise would have resorted to assisted suicide taking part in an experiment on longevity. The experiment takes place on a remote Canadian island and aims at reversing their biological clocks and making them young again.

The study even works to a certain degree, but you know what they say about science without conscience ruining the soul. And the person leading this study is someone who has not much conscience, so you know this will not turn out to be a good thing. Interestingly I really liked the characters when they were old and didn't care much for them when they became younger, but it was still interesting to see how they preserved a core personality throughout the reverse-years.

This was my first Nick Cutter book and I found it well written and interesting, though not really extraordinarily so. I maybe should try his earlier, more revered work like The Troop.  

Athos 2643 by Nils Westerboer

Athos 2643 - available in German only, and winner of the 2023 German Science-Fiction Award.

We're following Rüd, inquisitor and AI specialist, and his assistant Zack, a hologram of a sexy, beautiful, and obedient woman going to Athos to inquire the death of a monk who is suspected to have been murdered by the AI of the monastery. And while they are there, a second person is murdered, hardening their suspicions. 

There are some discussions about the misogyny of the main character (he really is kind of insufferable) and the dumb blonde bimbo persona of his assistant and I have to say I kind of agree. Not only that, the author, for some reason, makes use of a lot of Turkish elements, and to me this sounded like someone who doesn't really know Türkiye very well, but wants to be inclusive so uses motives from this culture cursorily? It is weird, because I have attended an author's event with Westerboer and he actually makes the impression of a decent, smart person. My copy of Athos was even signed to my name, so I must have even talked to him at some point, though I don't really remember that, lol.

So I'm thinking he wanted to just use that noir cliché of the virile detective and the way he sees women and the world, and that can be a playful, but is it necessary?

A Plagued Sea by Kim Bo-young

I love the fact that there are stories about the Mythos from all over the world now. Though its home will ever be New England, I love the Lovecraftian stories from elsewhere too, because it's only logical there would be, say in South Korea or Hungary or Nigeria or Spain or Chile cosmic phenomena too. I recently went to Nord Holland on vacation and the sea there (even the name of the place I went to - Alkmaar) left such a "dark seaside town and deities sleeping in the dark blue/grey water"vibes.

Kim Bo-Young imagines a society where an earthquake unleashes an ancient plague, and Cthulhu spreading its evil through a virus, an epidemic that turns the people of the small town Haewon Village into fishy Zombies.

We're following security guard Mu-young who was having a day out with her little niece when the cataclysm broke out, and the way she deals with the new reality, the horrors that surround her hometown which is under permanent lockdown. A new official from Seoul arrives to Haewon to stir up some trouble, and when we see how the "monsters" see the world, a moral dilemma occurs.

Though quite short, this is for me one of the better horror books published this year, the depictions of a new order, the main character's agony, the all too familiar reality of pandemic countermeasures... It all comes together to form an impressive tale.  

Sauúti Terrors by Eugen Bacon (Editor), Cheryl S. Ntumy (Editor), Stephen Embleton (Editor)

A couple of years ago a group of editors and authors came together to create a fictional Afro-Centrist shared world, The Sauútiverse, a five-planet system orbiting around a binary star. This universe is deeply rooted in African mythology, language, and culture and features a magic system based mainly sound and music.

I didn't know all of this until I have read Sauúti Terrors, a counterpart to the science fiction anthology previously published, but this time it's about the horror and darkness in this fascinating fictional place.  

This is an amazing collection of short works, including short stories, poems, and novelettes that sometimes left the impression of a mythology, or sometimes fairy tales. Especially intriguing is the important place that sound occupies in this universe. Although the pieces of writing are all set in the same universe, they were all insanely diverse too and can't really be described as one (yeah, like imagine someone curating short stories from the planet Earth, or better yet, from the Milky Way). The horror burns slow and is based on mainly atmospheric descriptions and leaving much to the imagination.

A fascinating work that I'll definitely return to.

Your Body Will Never Be Found by Jeff Strand

However they manage it, a family of four somehow gets lost in the woods in the Southern Appalachian region with no GPS and no phone signal. They end up in the front yard of an unwelcoming redneck with a shotgun who nevertheless agrees to let them use the bathroom for the little daughter who needs to pee really bad, but it takes no genius to find out this was a very bad idea.

 

They of course go through hell after that. Luckily it's written by Strand, who always mixes a large amount of humor into his extreme horror so that there were islands of relief for the reader all throughout this dark story. And yet, in the large body of Strand's excellent work, I found this to be merely "good". He wrote better, but it could have been worse too. A splatterfest for seasoned readers of extreme horror, and I even think this could be a good extreme horror for beginners.

Audrey Rose by Frank De Felitta

Just imagine you're leading a normal life, a normal family of three, father, mother and daughter, but you realize there's someone stalking you when you take your daughter to school and back. Police can't do anything unless there's an assault, so you accept the person's offer to talk. And what this person says is beyond the scope of any logical thinking... You would think! Maybe there is a logic after all?

I'm talking about Elliot Hoover who, after losing his wife and daughter in a car crash, becomes convinced that the Templeton's young daughter Ivy is his own daughter Audrey Rose's reincarnation. His request is to be able to have a visitation right for Ivy/Audrey, and he even goes to court for that.

Partly quite philosophical, Audrey Rose is very much a book of its time - a little bit of family drama, a little bit of courtroom suspense, and of course some supernatural horror. It somewhat reminded me of works like The Auctioneer, Amity Horror or The Omen. The moral dilemma surrounding the case, meditations about incarnation, and the line of argument of the case in court were quite interesting, but also a little jarring.