protean depravity

A place changes you – a city, a neighborhood, a hotel. A story. You arrived to each with your own fear, your own hunger, and you found yourself taking on the cast and the appetite of where you were. You couldn’t help it. About one third into Extended Stay I was confused and not sure what Martinez was trying to do here. The half-hypnotic, half-psychedelic narration. The dream-like atmosphere. Confusion. A main character as detached from his reality as he was from his readers. Helpless, directionless, sometimes mean, sometimes aggressive, sometimes opportunistic, sometimes indifferent. An environment teeming with, literally leaking hostility. It really felt like reading a dream, or rather a nightmare-diary. And I didn't like how it affected me, it didn't feel like a kind of fiction I enjoy reading.

Spring and summer time are also awards time and it is exciting to watch the ballots of all major horror and SFF awards slowly trickling in. A couple of weeks ago the first Bram Stoker preliminary ballots and later the final lineup were announced and that lineup is, together with the Shirley Jackson lineup as well as recommendations from my network of fellow horror fans and friends, one of the major sources from which I make my tbr-list. So naturally I wanted to take a closer look at the nominees and the books who got "so close": the books that will be competing for the titles of superior achievement in bold and below them the other shortlisted books that haven't made it into the top five. In my experience these titles are almost always just as good and if you ever wonder what to read next you can without hesitation grab one of them. There are quite a few titles I have already read and reviewed here, so I'll just link those to the corresponding Protean Depravity review...

It's time for my latest reads again, yay! I felt a little weary of horror in the abiding February darkness and have been reading lots of world literature, books on nature and even one self-help book instead. I was feeling a little guilty that I neglected horror in this time but while writing these reviews I just realized that's not the case at all - luckily I have enough material for my wrap-up. That being said, here they are, I hope you enjoy the short reviews!

Last month was a pretty crazy reading month. I joined many reading groups where I read books out of my comfort zone I wouldn't normally have chosen, but also re-read books from years ago I had almost forgotten about. But in the end it feels good to stray from the plan every now and then and rediscover old stuff. Enjoy the wrap up!

Well played, Catherine Cavendish, very well played… You had me fooled throughout the bigger part of this book, had me thinking I had figured it out, rolling my eyes at the ostensible Victorian banality of it all... And then you speed up toward the end and come up with that bombshell in the last quarter that I can only applaud. The Garden of Bewitchment is an exquisitely crafted, wonderfully astonishing, plain fantastic book! Forget all you know about cozy Gothic fiction because Cavendish is here to push the boundaries of convention and rewrite it all in letters of dread!

Silvia Moreno-Garcia's latest novel Mexican Gothic is every bit Mexican and every bit Gothic as the title makes it sound! An old British family with a funky secret living in a very creepy mansion built in the middle of nowhere in Mexico... A rich and young Mexican girl, Noemí Taboada, sent there by her father to check on her cousin Catalina who married into this peculiar family and who, in a letter for help, indicates that someone might be poisoning her... During her stay in this gloomy place, the lighthearted and carefree Noemí experiences increasingly creepy, unsettling and outright invasive illusions/dreams which only solidify Catalina's suspicions. And oh, how right she is. The first half of Mexican Gothic heavily builds up tension that leads to a deeply disgusting turning point (slight spoiler - a scene reminiscent of another very uncomfortable scene from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" 1974), from where on the story line quickly finds a direction, certainly di...