...the Soul of Wit - Short Reviews

Hello everyone! I hope you're enjoying the autumn weather - the weather to withdraw and read books in candlelight... (And I can feel that in the high number of books we have been selling at the Hammett currently, crazy!) Enjoy my short reviews - in the buildup phase to Halloween I traditionally read horror only and did that in the past month. For the next month I want to shift towards reading more short stories and I'm looking for good anthologies for that, stay tuned! 

Splasher by Billie Host

A ghost story in a swimming pool? Original!

Set in 2006, Splasher follows a university's swim team and notably its new assistant coach Spencer Brown who has some skeletons in his closet. You see, ten years ago something happened in the university's pool that basically turned it into a cursed place and Spencer was there. Now, by and by, team swimmers are dying in the wellness-center by freak accidents, and Spencer must face what has happened back then in a bloody, splashy way in order to stop the killings.

This book is fun. But I feel like it could have been funner if written a little more light-heartedly and if the humor was a little more prominent and recognizable. For anyone who enjoys slashers or splashers with nostalgic elements, like playlists from the past to create a certain mood, (it's a dual timeline story that oscillates between the mid 90s and mid aughts) this is a must-read for sure.

Rooted by Leopoldo Gout

We're following Aurora who has returned to her home in Mexico after having studied and worked in the USA for a big chunk of her life. She wants to join a group of archeologists and various people from the art world who will be tasked with the examination of some historical artifacts that were stolen but are now returned. Especially of interest is a particular statue of an Aztec god, The Flayed One.

Aurora has some kind of disorder, and even though she is now with her family, her health is deteriorating constantly. Things that happened to her in her past and even beyond that, things that happened before she was even born need to be revealed parallel to the unveiling of the stolen artifacts. 

Gout is an author I have read before (Ghost Radio) and although the setup and the cosmic horror in that work were exemplary, I hated the main characters back then. I think Aurora is doing better in that sense and the parallel unfolding of the buried colonial horrors and the buried secrets in the history of a family is nicely done. Plus, the god Xipe Totec and the ghost pipes terrifying.

So, when it comes to Gout's books, it's 1-1 as of now and I'll need to read one more book by Gout to decide whether to continue reading his work or not.

Raw Blood and Nerve: For Freakish Frights on Feverish Nights, edited by Alex Grass

In a sense, most of the short stories that Alex Grass curated for his anthology, Raw Blood and Nerve: For Freakish Frights on Feverish Nights, are about lonely victims of extreme circumstances, even if their tales seem pretty mundane at first glance; a bible seller confronted with an extreme understanding of religion, a radically commercialized healthcare system that leaves no chance for the feeble, two women living and maybe surviving in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of few remaining people as strange as themselves… And despite the occasional appearance of the supernatural here and there, the social commentary is ever present; a dystopia (or is it?) in which gas is literally unaffordable and traffic and climate change have reached alarming dimensions, recession (that cornered animal), dying dark industrial towns, young women under pressure to keep their figures through childbirth and more. My absolute highlights were Alex’s From the Horse’s Mouth which is super dreamy yet ends in a foreboding nightmare, as well as Euphemia, which was written by Christina Mîrzoi and literally stopped time for me while reading.

Two last mentions: the formatting and the self-made illustrations are perfect, some of the pictures are so awesome that I would hang them on my flat's walls as poster. And finally, there is a bonus story by Guy de Maupassant, in what it seems like a series to introduce classic horror short stories beside contemporary works. I have read lots of Maupassant when I was in school, but I never knew that he a) got syphilis and died of it, and b) wrote horror. Raw Blood and Nerve closes with a non-fiction piece about him.

All in all, this was really a refreshing read, with all the illustrations and varied range, it feels like a zine rather than an anthology and I’m all here for it!

My sincere thanks to Alex Grass for sending me a review copy. 

Back for Blood: Never Whistle at Night Part II: An Indigenous Horror Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk (Editor/Contributor), Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

I (still🙄) haven’t read the first installment of Never Whistle at Night, but I really enjoyed this second volume, Back for Blood, the title also being the keynote idea of the short stories in the anthology.

My highlight was definitely the opening piece Miss Cherokee Princess 1996 by Jessica Doe which is a commentary on beauty standards and fetishization of ethnicity, but I also enjoyed reading various mythological animal-man-cross kind of monsters, like in Goat Eyes by Jake Arrowtop (Goat/Sator), Party at the Alvarez Ranch by Matthew RudeWalker (Bigfoot), and Found Footage by Shaawan Francis Keahna (Skinwalker). Some stories dealt with real life social ills like the abuse in those horrible Catholic boarding schools and exclusion from society.

All in all, a banger of an anthology, gave me every reason to finally read the first book. 

She Waits Where Shadows Gather by Michelle Tang

Newlywed couple Avery and Carlos Tam move to Carlos' family home in the Philippines, but they don't know that the house is spooked.

Not only that, so is their new life. As Avery struggles to get pregnant (something she wants more than anything) Carlos avoids the subject like the plague and doesn't really seem wanting a child at all. He changes and acts more distant, more asshole-ish. During a drunken night out with his new friends from work he is severely injured in a car crash and is locked into his own body from then on.

Needing to adjust to all this, Avery keeps tending to him. But there are things brooding - in the house, in the family, and in their relationship that come out with a big explosion and one can only hope the outcome isn't all that destructive.

This books wasn't really on my radar, just peripherally maybe, but I ended up really enjoying it. The Philippines-setting, the vivid characters, the demon... Granted, it's not very terrifying, but it's a solid dark fantasy tale that I would recommend.

Meat Bees by Dane Erbach

Anyone who has spent only one summer in Germany will know how pesty and annoying wasps are and how they don't leave you be at all. Now imagine that they were able to eat meat, like start nibbling your arm, your cheek, your eye...

That's the kind of trouble young Scarlett has when she and her dad arrive at their cabin in the Smoky Mountains. Her mom has checked herself into a mental health hospital and she and her father need to spend the summer here somehow. She starts working at a kind of outdoors touristic agency (I didn't really get the place she starts working at, they do spend a lot of time outdoors and help tourists hiking and camping and doing outsdoorsy stuff) and soon stumbles upon a corpse beneath the zip-line during one of her shifts. When one of her colleagues disappear, a group of them go out investigating. And find out that the murder bees are only the symptom of something much much bigger.

So yeah, there's definitely a gross-out factor here, and to predict the way this story would go is nearly impossible. I can maybe let you guys know that this too ends up in a local myth. Looking at my reading this past month, I think it's now very in to tie horror stories into local or folkloric myths, and I kind of like that, but I also see a risk of it becoming stale and old quickly.

All in all a decent creature-feature with indigenous elements. Not for people afraid of or allergic to yellow-jackets.