protean depravity

It is not very often that an epigraph reflects the overall atmosphere and mood of a particular book ideally, but Samanta Schweblin's latest short story collection Good and Evil and Other Stories opening with Silvina Ocampo's words "strange is always truer" is a great example. It is an atmospheric, quite unique, strange work about seemingly everyday situations and people that are just a little bit eerie, but never openly horrifying, yet always slightly terrifying.

In the same way that it is not unusual to return to the same music one used to listen in their teens and twenties, I lately feel the need to return to books that I've read in my early youth and that have left a mark on me. It is interesting to observe how you perceive them now compared to back then, and what feelings those same books awake in you today. As a fan of short stories and a lifelong reader of Stephen King, it thus occurred to me to take a closer look at his best work, his short stories, and to launch off the series " The Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King ". We will take the chronological path from his first short story collection, Night Shift to his most recent You Like It Darker . Having finished Night Shift , we now move on to Skeleton Crew , I hope you actively follow the series and join me in (re)reading King's best. 

Finally did I collect enough short reviews to post here... I have been reading a lot of non-speculative fiction and the birthday week of the Hammett bookstore plus my regular day job finished my energy off, resulting in me not being able to read everything I wanted. But I'm still happy there were a couple of really good books amongst the ones I managed to read. So, here are the short reviews, I hope you enjoy them!

From aquatic to cosmic horror to zombie apocalypse to science fictional catastrophes, to top tier weird – Tom Over's writing definitely has a wide range and it's outright scary how effortless and at home he can write in each one of those directions.

Thinking about where to start with Black City Skyline and Darker Horizons , my thoughts keep on going in circles which always end in the same one word: Providence. "I can't tell you what's going on in this city, Detective. Maybe it's a combination of gentrification, global warming, and crime, with a hefty dose of lockdown anxiety. Maybe it's something else." Courting ground to Edgar Allan Poe as well as home to H.P. Lovecraft, Cormac Mc Carthy and yes, Barry Lee Dejasu, Providence has a substantial claim to fame when it comes to North American literature. In the tradition of other evil small towns like King's Salem, Levin's Stepford, or the more recent examples of Baxter's Gulpepper, Jones' Proofrock, Junji Ito's Kurouzu-cho, Dejasu's Providence too plays a crucial, almost characterlike part in his debut short story collection. So much so that this horrible place, of which characters often complain but never do or even can leave, is th...

Probably nothing to worry about ninety-nine percent of the time. Yeah, ninety-nine percent secure. What could possibly go wrong handling an extinct virus, right? The quotation above could have been a sentence that sealed the fate of real life Earth in 2019 just before that cursed lung infection took us by storm. The madness that ensued has now, almost three years later, become almost normal, almost a part of our lives. And things have changed... Our language has been undergoing massive changes with tons of new terms and names for things we didn't know existed. Certain industries flourished during lockdowns while others quickly became obsolete and died. Working conditions have been revolutionized. The value we attribute to certain objects has been radically altered. We witnessed mass dying - certain age and health groups have suffered enormous losses, faced a lonely death in cold hospital rooms and many of us have lost loved ones we could not say goodbye to. We have changed a lot. S...