Review: I Am My Country: and Other Stories by Kenan Orhan

Posted on June 3, 2023 by ghostvillehero

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Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A fiercely imaginative debut story collection by “a startling talent who can seemingly do anything” (Anthony Marra) explores the lives of ordinary people in Turkey to reveal how even individual acts of resistance have extraordinary repercussions.

“No recent collection has captivated me as much as I Am My Country. You must read it!”—Andrew Sean Greer

Spanning decades and landscapes, from the forests along the Black Sea to the streets of Istanbul, Kenan Orhan’s ​playful stories ​conjure dreamlike worlds—of talking animals, flying houses, and omniscient prayer-callers—to ​examine humanity’s unfaltering pursuit of hope in even the darkest circumstances.

A determined florist trains a neighborhood stray dog to blow up a corrupt president. A garbage collector finds banned instruments—and later, musicians—in the trash and takes them home to form a clandestine orchestra in her attic. A smuggler risks his life to bring a young woman claiming to be pregnant via immaculate conception across the border with Syria. A poor cage-maker tries to use his ability to talk to birds to woo his childhood love just before the 1955 Istanbul pogrom. These characters are united by a desperate yearning to break free from the volatile realities they face: rising authoritarianism, cultural and political turmoil, and staggering violence.

Ranging from the absurd to the tenderhearted, the stories in I Am My Country illuminate the constant force amid one country’s history of rampant oppression and revolutionary progress: the impulse to survive.

Review:

I Am My Country, the debut short story collection by Kenan Orhan, has ten stories with common theme of war and government oppression. All of the stories are centered around a tumultuous Turkish political climate, and the way that the citizens adjust to their new circumstances. I do not know anything about this, the government of Turkey or the wars and coups that the Turkish people have endured. I only have these stories as a reference. With a mixture of stories that use elements of fables and magical realism, and some taunt and fantastic writing, I understand how the citizens feel. These stories do in a short period of time what many novels take hundreds of pages to do: draw us into the world, make us understand, and make us feel empathy for the characters. 

All of these stories are good in their own ways. A few that I like best:

“The Beyoğlu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra” opens the collection with a woman who works as a trash collector. She starts to find musical instruments then musicians in the garbage on her route. She collects them and has an orchestra in her attic, something that is banned with the new government.

“Mule Brigade” A story where mostly reluctant soldiers drive into a village to round up and kill the work animals so that the villagers are not using them to smuggle contraband across the border.

“The Birdkeeper’s Moral”  A man who catches birds in homemade cages to make a living runs into a girl whom he loved decades earlier. He tries to find a way to impress her, with the help from an owl who is giving him advice. 

Many of these stories are set up like fables, but most of them end as cautionary tales. Orhan’s ability to paint a picture of the world that is crumbling around the character’s feet, while the characters mostly remain hopeful for the future, makes I Am My Country really stick out. It has been a long time since I have read a collection quite as powerful and moving as this one. 

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk

Posted on May 20, 2023 by ghostvillehero

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Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

The Manchurian Candidate meets South Park—Chuck Palahniuk’s finest novel since the generation-defining Fight Club.

“Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival Midwestern American airport greater _____ area. Flight _____. Date _____. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name: Operation Havoc.”

Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the United States, disguised as exchange students, to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism. Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of this thoroughly indoctrinated little killer, who hates us with a passion, in this cunning double-edged satire of an American xenophobia that might, in fact, be completely justified. For Pygmy and his fellow operatives are cooking up something big, something truly awful, that will bring this big dumb country and its fat dumb inhabitants to their knees.

It’s a comedy. And a romance.

Review:

Pygmy is not one of Chuck Palahniuk’s great novels. He has several novels that I consider influential and/or worthy of wide readership like Fight Club, Survivor, and Choke. Pygmy is one only the diehard fans can love. Credit can be given because Palahniuk really tries to do something different, trying a disjointed narrative style, and even though the story is decent and some of the scenes are funny, the writing gets in the way. The entire novel as a whole is just painful to complete.

The story is about Pygmy, a foreign exchange student which is given this racially insensitive name by the character’s host family gives him when he comes to their midwestern town. Why does he come to this particular town and this particular family? Because he is part of a group of kid terrorists who are going to create a massive terrorist attack on the United States with the help of secrets they steal from the government job where the host family’s father works. Along the way, Pygmy has to navigate high school, bullies, and his love interest for the daughter of the host family.  

The book was probably pretty fun to write, but it is not fun to read. The typical chapter is written in short sentences, with words mixed up and made up, names and jargon that are odd, quirky, or nonsense, and stories that are more frustrating to parse out than they are worth. Every “dispatch” also has pattern where the story starts, there is a quote from some famous, often times horrible, person, usually a leader or philosopher like Hitler, Mussolini, Karl Marx, etc. The story continues and then the quote returns to wrap up the action in the chapter, like the quotes are metaphors for the story. Pygmy is able to drop all of the quotes but then returns to the broken sentences of his dispatches to make the story. Over two hundred and fifty pages, this grows irritating. I can use some mental gymnastics to solve why the narrator is so poor at writing the story when he is also able to quote so many famous people (and spell every word during a spelling bee), and how the education that he has should be enough to be able to follow basic sentence structure, but it is not worth it. Having stuck it out to the end, after such a long journey to get there, I can say that everything about this book is disappointing. The idea is fun, but the execution does not work for me.  

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Review: The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James

Posted on May 11, 2023 by ghostvillehero

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Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

In 1977, Claire Lake, Oregon, was shaken by the Lady Killer Murders: Two men, seemingly randomly, were murdered with the same gun, with strange notes left behind. Beth Greer was the perfect suspect–a rich, eccentric twenty-three-year-old woman, seen fleeing one of the crimes. But she was acquitted, and she retreated to the isolation of her mansion.

Oregon, 2017. Shea Collins is a receptionist, but by night, she runs a true crime website, the Book of Cold Cases–a passion fueled by the attempted abduction she escaped as a child. When she meets Beth by chance, Shea asks her for an interview. To Shea’s surprise, Beth says yes.

They meet regularly at Beth’s mansion, though Shea is never comfortable there. Items move when she’s not looking, and she could swear she’s seen a girl outside the window. The allure of learning the truth about the case from the smart, charming Beth is too much to resist, but even as they grow closer, Shea senses something isn’t right. Is she making friends with a manipulative murderer, or are there other dangers lurking in the darkness of the Greer house?

A true crime blogger gets more than she bargained for while interviewing the woman acquitted of two cold case slayings in this chilling new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Sun Down Motel.

Review:

Shea Collins spends most of her home life locked in her apartment, researching and writing true crime articles for her own blog called “The Book of Cold Cases.” Her blog is moderately successful, with a group of readers who are as interested in unsolved crimes and she is. One of these crimes happened in 1977, in Shea’s hometown, Claire Lake, Oregon. Shea had written about the Lady Killer Murders, where two men are anonymously shot, and how the main suspect in the case is a rich girl named Beth Greer. Forty years later, the same Beth Greer that just came into her life by walking into the doctor’s office where she is a receptionist. Beth had never told her side of the story before, but Shea convinced her that her story needs to be told and that the Lady Killer Murders need to be solved.

This is another Simone St. James novel, and there is so much similarity between The Book of Cold Cases and her previous novel The Sun Down Motel that it feels like they are very easy to compare. I like the setup, and I like that we are instantly given a paranormal vibe from the Greer house. The major difference between these two books is the The Book of Cold Cases is more of a mystery where as The Sun Down Motel leans more toward it’s paranormal aspects. Other than that, they feel like the same characters in different books. Simone St. James writes a good novel, but it does not work as well as her previous book. The Book of Cold Cases feels like the first plot idea that St. James had was the one that she wrote. There could have been more of the exploration into the activities of the house. There could have been a little more cat and mouse with Beth Greer. There were moments when the tension could have been stronger but the decisions that St. James makes this novel feel a very safe. 

This is not to say that The Book of Cold Cases is a bad book. I like the characters and I like the house. I do wish that she would have done more with the house because it is pretty interesting as another character in the plot, but the focus is off of the house most of the novel. I wish that St. James would have taken more chances in The Book of Cold Cases. Instead we get a follow-up to a superior book.

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Review: Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri

Posted on April 30, 2023 by ghostvillehero

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Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

In Friend of My Youth, a novelist named Amit Chaudhuri visits his childhood home of Bombay. The city, reeling from the impact of the 2008 terrorist attacks, weighs heavily on his mind, as does the unexpected absence of his childhood friend Ramu, a drifting, opaque figure who is Amit’s last remaining connection to the city he once called home.

Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel is about geographical, historical and personal change. It asks a question we all grapple with in our lives: what does it mean to exist in both the past and the present? It is a striking reminder that, as the Guardian has said, ‘Chaudhuri has been pushing away at form, trying to make something new of the novel.’

Review:

Amit Chaudhuri’s novel Friend of My Youth is narrated by a character named Amit Chaudhuri, who is explicitly described as a work of fiction who just happens to have the same name as the author. Amit Chaudhuri (the character) is a novelist who has returned to the city of his youth to give readings of his new novel, which might or might not be in stock in any of the bookstores. He wants to spend time with his friend, Ramu, but Ramu is in rehab for a heroin addiction, so Amit is forced to explore the city on his own. The loneliness of seeing the old hotels and eating at the old restaurants by himself seeps through the narrative, making the journey through Bombay sad and dreary. Because, like everywhere, the city has changed, the hotel that he has stayed at his whole life has subtle but disheartening differences, and he wishes he could talk about these things to someone, particularly Ramu, because he would understand the way that Amit feels. 

This is a short book, but it seems like such a long journey. Not much happens throughout the story, and Amit Chaudhuri (the writer) has made the journey as emotional as possible. The reader feels the state of mind that Amit Chaudhuri (the character) is in, the disappointment of reminiscing by himself about a city that is no longer the same as when he was young. This story is really a parallel narrative about all of his youth changing, his literal friend, Ramu, dealing with addiction and struggling to stay clean, and a metaphorical friend, Bombay, dealing with constant changes and struggling to stay clean. Both of them have changed for Amit, and these changes makes him wonder what has changed inside of him. The actual reaction past the nostalgia of a place he used to know is pretty neutral. 


In the end, Friend of My Youth feels like a meditation on growing older and how everything changes. Whether it be a city, a friendship, or himself, the changes will never stop. Sometimes it is nice to go back and reminisce about youth, but the truth is that the present is more a more important subject of focus. 

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Review: The Merry Dredgers by Jeremy C. Shipp

Posted on April 23, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Meerkat Press, Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Seraphina Ramon will stop at nothing to find out the truth about why her sister Eff is in a coma after a very suspicious “accident.” Even if it means infiltrating the last place Seraphina knows Eff was alive: a once-abandoned amusement park now populated by a community of cultists.

Follow Seraphina through the mouth of the Goblin: To the left, a wolf-themed roller coaster rests on the blackened earth, curled up like a dead snake. To the right, an animatronic Humpty Dumpty falls off a concrete castle and shatters on the ground, only to reform itself moments later. Up ahead, cultists giggle as they meditate in a hall of mirrors. This is the last place in the world Seraphina wants to be, but the best way to investigate this bizarre cult, is to join them.

Review:

I am a little obsessed with Jeremy C. Shipp. If anyone were to ask me the most underread author I know, their name would be the first on my list. I have enjoyed everything I have read by them, and I have been reading them since the short story collection, Sheep and Wolves from 2008. It is no surprise that I came into reading The Merry Dredgers with a slanted viewpoint, but I will still stand behind my opinions, even as a Jeremy Shipp stan.

The Merry Dredgers is narrated by Seraphina Ramon, a person who dresses like a princess for children’s parties, lives with her cat, Heracles, has a car that is falling apart, and has a sister Eff, who has joined what is obviously a cult. When Eff has an accident, Phina does what any sister would do: go investigate the cult because they are obviously at fault. The Merry Dredgers live in an old amusement park, Goblintropolis. This amusement park would be a frightening place on any day, but now that a group of people that Phina does not trust lives there, the entire experience feels like there is danger around every corner.

There are a few different layers to The Merry Dredgers. Besides having the mystery of whether or not the cult is at fault for Eff’s accident, we are also given Phina’s journey of self-discovery. The mission of the Merry Dredgers are to dig into themselves to find the core of their beings through meditation, vegetarianism, and a little hallucinogenic drug use. The whole idea is the explore your inner-self until you find the merriment at your core. But like any group of people that is too happy, can this happiness be trusted?

Shipp writes stories that feel like a fever dream narrated by a sleep paralysis demon. There is a large focus on the settings and the scenery of the goblin-themed amusement park, and for Seraphina to actually stay after going on some of the amusements makes her braver than I would have been. Shipp likes the creepiness of spiders and tentacles and goblin wars. Many of the scenes has to start with a reminder of how terribly weird the amusement park is. The creations are outlandish, but so are the stories that Phina tells. I love the stories that she makes up as she goes along, and the conversations between her and her love interest Nichelle are very funny.

This book feels like Shipp is writing the book that they want to write. This book is far weirder than their two novellas released by tor.com (Atrocities and Bedfellow). Many sections of this book remind me of Jeremy Shipp’s Twitter account. The tweets that they post are just as creepy and amusing as the construction of this story and this amusement park. I enjoy every aspect of this book, and I am excited to buy extra copies to share with my unsuspecting friends. Maybe one day Jeremy Shipp will get the readership that they deserve. The Merry Dredgers is another step on this path. 

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem

Posted on April 21, 2023 by ghostvillehero

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Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer in the desert outside of Los Angeles. She’s on a quest to find her friend’s missing daughter, Arabella, and hears that Heist is preternaturally good at finding people who don’t want to be found. A loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer, Heist has a laconic, enigmatic nature that intrigues the sarcastic and garrulous Phoebe. It takes some convincing, but he agrees to help.

The unlikely pair traverse California’s stunning Inland Empire, navigating the enclaves of hippies and vagabonds who aim to live off the grid. They learn that these outcasts exist in warring tribes–the Rabbits and the Bears–and that Arabella is likely caught in the middle. As Phoebe tries to delicately extricate her, she realizes that Heist has a complicated history with these strange groups and that they’re all in grave danger.

Jonathan Lethem’s first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn delivers the same memorable delights: ecstatic wordplay, warm and deeply felt characters, and an offbeat sense of humor. Combined with a vision of California that is at once scruffy and magnificent, The Feral Detective emerges as a transporting, comic, and absolutely unforgettable novel.

Review:

The Feral Detective starts with Phoebe traveling from New York City to the Inland Empire to find her friend’s daughter, Arabella, who is obsessed with Leonard Cohen and always talked about going to Mt. Baldy because this is where Cohen lived at a Buddhist monastery for five years. Phoebe employs a detective, Charles Heist, to help her navigate the situation and find her friend. The adventure Phoebe takes to find Arabella also opens her eyes to another completely different America that she knows nothing about. 

This seems like a reactionary novel, one that starts with the election of Donald Trump and the fallout many people feared. Phoebe walks into Heist’s office three days before Trump’s inauguration, and throughout the entire novel, this changing of the presidency is on the back of Phoebe’s mind. While she searches for Arabella, she runs into several different communities of desert dwellers, people who are living their lives in communities away from the things that she worried about, like politics and the country. They have their own politics and country to live with without worrying about the president. One of the biggest threats to their home is people like Phoebe. There is a juxtapose between the Phoebe being in New York City, a place crowded with people and feeling pretty alone, and Phoebe being in the California desert, a place that is supposed to be desolate but is crowded with people who welcome her, even though she is a stranger. 

Jonathan Lethem’s novel spends most of it’s time off the grid, where there is no internet or cellphone signal. You can feel this in the writing. Phoebe’s narration is thoughtful but also prickly and sometimes a little bored, like she wants to interject herself into the situation even though she does not know the danger she has become entangled with. She tries to tell people what to do and gets upset and offended when she is told no. There are times when she comes off as a person who is looking down on Charles Heist and all of his acquaintances because they are not doing what she says or are letting her into their loop of understanding. This reflects back onto an entitlement some people feel when they meet another group of people they do not completely understand, and it also swings back around to her feelings of the election. She comes out of her bubble and sees people who elected President Trump, pretty much people she did not have to interact with in her New York bubble. She has the world pegged in her mind a certain way, through the lens of a New Yorker, but it is the people she meets in her journey into the desert that changes her worldview. Living on the internet is much easier than talking to people in real life. Phoebe is forced to be with people she does not understand, and without the internet, all she has is people to talk to and rely on. There are rewards in the difficult practice. 


The Feral Detective has given me many things to think about, and I do know that this is the point. At the core the message is to get out of our comfort zone, our bubble, and learn about people we know nothing about. Finding things in common is much easier when we actually try. This can be seen as Jonathan Lethem’s own optimistic reaction to the elections in 2016, one where people need to get away from the limits of the day to day world in which they live and try to creates bonds with new people.

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Review: Collage Macabre: An Exhibition of Art Horror

Posted on April 19, 2023 by ghostvillehero

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Amazon

Synopsis:

Your work will betray your secrets. Obsessions, hidden desires, and desperate wishes all woven into the fabric of what we make. A sculpture crafted with longing, a painting of a dream just barely articulated, the craving that cannot speak its name buried in a short film’s score. Old want only spoken aloud through someone else’s voice. Need etched on someone else’s lips for all the world to see. A false self created for the audience to claim as its own, still hiding what it knows.

Through these eighteen stories, dread is the medium of choice, winding its way through each unsettling and terrifying tale about human creation, the artistic follies and triumphs we imbue with so much meaning. You will find artists and audiences alike grappling with confrontations beyond their comprehension, works that require more than careful consideration—sometimes a little bit of blood is necessary. Art is alive if you are. Inside these pages you will be asked to open yourself up like a wound and expose your mind to the darker side of our oeuvre.

Review:

I was given a review copy of Collage Macabre in exchange for an honest review.

Many anthologies have a theme but good anthologies have stories that do interesting things with the theme. The theme for Collage Macabre:An Exhibition of Art Horror is that each story has art as a central part of the plot, and every one of these 18 stories does a good job of stretching that theme as much as possible. We have painters and writers, but we also have stories about graffiti, crocheting, sugar blowing, theater, and moviemaking. None of the authors are household names (except for Gemma Amor who writes the introduction), but this is a collection of authors that will be on your bookshelves in the future. Many of these stories are just that good.

Not only are there huge variations on the theme, but there are so many different types of stories. We are given gothic horror, college horror, horror about grief, obsession, and loss, and of course people who receive strange gifts, people who are haunted, and sacrificial rites. All of these stories are so unique to one another that there is no doubt a reader will enjoy some but not others. This is a normal thing in a good anthology. That means there is something for everyone. 

Another thing about horror anthologies is that it is easy to forget the stories as soon as I read them. Most of the time when I pull up the table of contents after finishing a collection, I have to go back to certain stories to remind me of what it was about. In this case, I am able to recall these stories without doing this, just by the table of contents. There are so many memorable and impactful stories that I can look at the lists of contents and pick out the stories just by the title. A few of my favorites:

 “A Study in Umber” by Jessica Peter. Some rich guys who decide to grind up and drink a lady mummy for inspiration in their artistic endeavors, which of course does not end well for them. 

“Lack” by TJ Price. A girl who’s boyfriend paints a picture that is black, and this blackness unsettles everything in their life. 

“Breath, Blow, Burn” by Ai Jaing. A sugar blower who becomes part of a statue displayed in a home of a family that is falling apart. They watch it all happen, helpless to stop.

“Station 42” by Erik McHatton. A guy who is gifted an old television, that is either a performance piece or a message to drastically change his life.

“Take it from the Top” by Timothy Lanz. A play is being rehearsed, possibly forever.

There are so many other stories that are great, and the writing and editing in every story is strong. Most of these authors do not have many other stories published. This might be off-putting to some readers, but trust me, there are some future stars here. Many of these stories are ready to be adapted into episodes of Creepshow and Blumhouse films. This collection is impressive, and it should be read by anyone who enjoys good horror and/or good short stories. 

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Review: Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Posted on April 14, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

The English language debut of the bestselling Dutch novel, Hex, from Thomas Olde Heuvelt–a Hugo and World Fantasy award nominated talent to watch

Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay ’til death. Whoever settles, never leaves.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children’s bed for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear.

The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town’s teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into dark, medieval practices of the distant past.

This chilling novel heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice in mainstream horror and dark fantasy.

Review:

I have had a copy of Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt on my Kindle for a long time, but it was not until the Tor Nightfire reissue that I finally picked it to read. I did not know much about it when I first started, and I did not realize I was in for such a treat. 

The novel is about Black Springs, New York, a small town that is haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a woman who was killed by the town in the 1600s. The Black Rock Witch is the town’s dirty secret, a manifestation that they keep track of through a surveillance team, CCTV cameras, and clever ways to hide her during festivals and occasions where out-of-towners are visiting. Unfortunately those who live in town can only leave for short periods of time before they get depressed and suicidal and need to come back home. This has kept the town populated, and the town has worked with the Black Rock Witch for years. Now that there is a group of curious teenage boys and that the internet is largely available, the security is threatened by kids who are technologically smarter than the adults. 

The first part of this novel is fun and surprisingly convincing. We are introduced to the town and the way that the town deals with their curse, and there it is pretty entertaining. The problem is that the kids are going to get the town in trouble with the witch because they keep poking her with experiments and a little bit of bullying. What happens to Black Springs is shocking and well deserved. 

The writing in places is a little odd, and I do not know how much it is Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s original writing and the translation. The original book is set in Beek, a village in south-eastern Netherlands. It is rare for a book translation to change the location for Europe to America, and I do not know how well it is executed. This also makes me question what else has has been changed from the original text. I just know that there are moments when the writing feels a little off. Now that I know that the location has been changed from the original text, I can assume that any other questions that I have might be answered in the original versus the translation.


There were a few moments when I was not engaged in Hex, but most of it really had my attention. This translation was released originally in 2016, so there are a few moments that seem a little dated, but as a whole this stands up as a really great town horror novel. Black Springs has a curse and only a few people bring the entire town into danger. The execution of this is strong and gripping, and I enjoyed every page.

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Review: The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

Posted on April 10, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

From USA Today bestselling author Cassandra Khaw comes The Salt Grows Heavy, a razor-sharp and bewitching fairytale of discovering the darkness in the world, and the darkness within oneself.

You may think you know how the fairytale goes: a mermaid comes to shore and weds the prince. But what the fables forget is that mermaids have teeth. And now, her daughters have devoured the kingdom and burned it to ashes.

On the run, the mermaid is joined by a mysterious plague doctor with a darkness of their own. Deep in the eerie, snow-crusted forest, the pair stumble upon a village of ageless children who thirst for blood, and the three ‘saints’ who control them.

The mermaid and her doctor must embrace the cruelest parts of their true nature if they hope to survive.

Review:

With The Salt Grows Heavy, Cassandra Khaw has written a novella that feels like my worst nightmare. The story starts with the main character, the mermaid who has comes to the sea to marry a prince, sitting in the charred remains of a kingdom that she and her daughters have destroyed. A person dressed as a plague doctor accompanies her out of the desolation and into the world. Make no mistakes. This is not a fairytale even though the main character is a fairytale mermaid. This kingdom is razed. This land is dark. This is a scourge. 

Cassandra Khaw writes deep and beautiful prose. There were times when I could feel everything that the characters felt. I could taste the things that they ate. The pain that they felt seeped from the page and into my own flesh. This denseness is off putting to some. Her sentences are sometimes complex and filled with tough phrasing and unknown words. The likelihood of any reader going through this novella and not having to look up a single word will be rare. However the concentration that the story demands, for us to delve into new language and writing, attaches us to the story, makes us dive deep into a world that is just as new and just as brutal to live through. This is purposeful. For a story that is only a little over 100 pages, this is not a casual read. The reader has to be completely engaged in the story from the very beginning. If we have to work to get into this story, through the writing, the more vivid and horrifying the world becomes. Admittedly, this will turn off quite a few readers, those who are looking for an easy book, but those who stick with The Salt Grows Heavy receive a story that displays great depths in agony and pain. 

This is a very short book, and I love the story and the characters. The mermaid and the plague doctor are compelling and unforgettable. I feel this is a setup book, like The Salt Grows Heavy is just a chapter in their story. This could be the beginning of a series of novellas. If this is a standalone and we never hear from these two characters again, The Salt Grows Heavy is a big treasure in a small package. Even though it takes some effort, the reward is worth it. I hope that it is just the beginning.

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

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Review: The Haunting of Alejandra by V. Castro

Posted on April 7, 2023 by ghostvillehero

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Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A woman is haunted by the Mexican folk demon La Llorona as she unravels the dark secrets of her family history in this ravishing and provocative horror novel.

Alejandra no longer knows who she is. To her husband, she is a wife, and to her children, a mother. To her own adoptive mother, she is a daughter. But they cannot see who Alejandra has become: a woman struggling with a darkness that threatens to consume her.

Nor can they see what Alejandra sees. In times of despair, a ghostly vision appears to her, the apparition of a crying woman in a ragged white gown.

When Alejandra visits a therapist, she begins exploring her family’s history, starting with the biological mother she never knew. As she goes deeper into the lives of the women in her family, she learns that heartbreak and tragedy are not the only things she has in common with her ancestors.

Because the crying woman was with them, too. She is La Llorona, the vengeful and murderous mother of Mexican legend. And she will not leave until Alejandra follows her mother, her grandmother, and all the women who came before her into the darkness.

But Alejandra has inherited more than just pain. She has inherited the strength and the courage of her foremothers—and she will have to summon everything they have given her to banish La Llorona forever.

Review:

Alejandra, the main character in V. Castro’s newest novel The Haunting of Alejandra, is dissatisfied with her life. With three kids and a husband who makes enough money and has the mindset that she can be a stay-at-home mother, she feels like her life is a prison. Her husband is gone for work for long periods of time, and she is in a small box that is closing in on her and make her wish that she was anyone else. When she starts to be haunted by a woman dripping with water and wearing a white dress that looks like a patchwork of rotting flesh, she starts to search for the answers, not only for why this woman is haunting her but also the answers about her heritage, her family, and who she really is.

This is my fourth V. Castro book, and there is a pattern to her stories that is emerging. Castro writes strong female characters who either have fierce independence or are looking for it. Whether it be Leticia Vasquez in Aliens: Vasquez, Belinda Alverez in Queen of the Cicadas, or Alejandra in this novel, Castro’s main characters are either women you do not want to cross or women growing into their roles as strong, fierce, and proud women. With Castro’s work, you also receive the spirits of ancestors, women who came before them to pave the way for their success. In the case of Alejandra, these women manifest as the females in her entire ancestral line, a line that she does not know at the beginning of the story but relies on by the end.

Castro also uses Mexican history and folklore to tell her stories. This weaving of old traditions with new fiction makes her work stand out. Not only does she write a good plot, but she places enough history throughout to where the reader feels like they understand Latinx culture just a little more. Castro has so many important groups of people that she represents. With her crosshatching of stories that represent Latinx culture, strong female protagonists, and great horror, V. Castro has solidly placed her in the middle of a list of who’s who in strong voices in this new golden age of horror. 

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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