Review: The Handyman Method by Nick Cutter and Andrew F Sullivan

Posted on August 6, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A chilling domestic story of terror for fans of Black Mirror and The Amityville Horror .

When a young family moves into an unfinished development community, cracks begin to emerge in both their new residence and their lives, as a mysterious online DIY instructor delivers dark subliminal suggestions about how to handle any problem around the house. The trials of home improvement, destructive insecurities, and haunted house horror all collide in this thrilling story perfect for fans of Nick Cutter’s bestsellers The Troop and The Deep.

Review:

The Handyman Method is a collaboration between Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan that started as a short story and eventually expanded to a full length novel, one piece at a time. It tells that story of the Saban family, Trent, Rita, and their son Milo, who move into their dream home, only to find nothing but problems. Trent’s personality radically starts to change as soon as they move in after he finds a crack in the drywall closet and decides to fix it himself. He is angry at the housebuilder, but with the help of a handyman channel on YouTube, the job should be fairly easy. It does not take long for his home improvements to become an obsession, his trips to the Home Depot to become a daily occurrence, and Trent turns into a chauvinistic, insufferable prick. This structure and story reminds me so much of The Shining, where a husband, wife, and son are in a building that has wide influence on the father, to the point where the father loses sight of the person he is supposed to be. Trent’s transformation is much more severe than Jack Torrence’s but Rita has an option that Wendy did not have. She can leave.  The novel progresses and the situation grows worse and worse, until the only thing that can happen is for Trent to fight the house.

I loved a large majority of this novel. Even though Trent does things that made me very uncomfortable while reading them, I know that this is him compensating for the insecurities that he feels, that way that he makes mistakes throughout his whole life, and that the house is exploiting these feelings. Trent is purposefully written as a horrible person doing horrible things, and even though we do not necessarily like Trent  at all through this novel, Cutter and Sullivan construct a family that we want to survive this house.

This is sort of a haunted house novel, but the house really psychologically manipulating Trent instead of trying to scare him. Everything that it does to him is upfront and bold. Whether it be a crack in the wall, a leaky outside faucet, or the house sinking and the roof caving in, the house uses it’s forces to draw Trent obsession with home improvements into a mixture of male ego accomplishment and utter destruction beyond Trent’s abilities to fix, thus turning Trent into an increasingly belligerent person. The house does some very weird things, and I liked that the battle between the house and Trent turns into a war.

I enjoyed The Handyman Method much more than I have enjoyed many books I have recently read. However this is one of those rare books that I could have used a bigger information dump in the final quarter to really understand the history behind what was happening. The ambiguity does work, but I would have loved to have a little more a history lesson. Other than that, this is a very good, psychologically frightening novel. If Nick Cutter and Andrew F Sullivan decide to write another novel together, I will be excited to read it.

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

Posted in book review, fiction, horror book reviews, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Posted on August 4, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Bookshop, Amazon

Synopsis:

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and Mexican Gothic comes a fabulous meld of Mexican horror movies and Nazi occultism: a dark thriller about the curse that haunts a legendary lost film–and awakens one woman’s hidden powers.

Montserrat has always been overlooked. She’s a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of the boys’ club running the film industry in ’90s Mexico City. And she’s all but invisible to her best friend, Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, though she’s been in love with him since childhood.

Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he can change their lives—even if his tale of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed.

Now the director wants Montserrat and Tristán to help him shoot the missing scene and lift the curse . . . but Montserrat soon notices a dark presence following her, and Tristán begins seeing the ghost of his ex-girlfriend.

As they work together to unravel the mystery of the film and the obscure occultist who once roamed their city, Montserrat and Tristán may find that sorcerers and magic are not only the stuff of movies.

Review:

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest novel Silver Nitrate starts with two childhood friends, Montserrat and Tristan. Montserrat grew up to work on the sound design for films and Tristan grew up to be a soap opera actor. Their friendship has been on and off (usually off when Tristan has a lover and on again when he is single). When Tristan’s latest relationship fizzles, he moves into a new apartment building, one that also houses Abel Urueta, a cult horror filmmaker they both loved growing up. When Montserrat and Tristan have dinner with Abel, the subject turns to his lost film, Behind the Yellow Wall. There is rumor that the film is lost but it is also cursed, that many of the people around it have died or had bad luck. Abel says that most of the film has been destroyed, except for one roll. He talks them into helping him finish the sound for this section of film, and afterward the world turns upside down.

This novel has many great aspects that make it a tense thriller with horror aspects. The playing of the film unravels the rest of the story around the filming. With cultists, black magic, Nazis, and curses following Montserrat and Tristan, they race against time and death to get to the bottom of the mystery of the film and the filmmakers. The story is interesting, but I did not fall in love with this novel like I have with previous Moreno-Garcia novels. She has written a large variety of novels, and this is a 90s cult horror-thriller. This sounds like a story that could be remarkable, but I felt the final third of the book being a slog. The finale felt a little underwhelming based on the buildup, and a novel that is interesting and starts out great does not end with the same amount of momentum. This could have been because I did not really feel connected to the characters. Tristan and Montserrat were decent but they were not people that I cared about by the time they were in serious trouble. 

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an author that cannot be accused of writing the same book twice. I would much rather read an author that does this than an author that relies on the same troupes and stories that gave them popularity. Even if some of the novels are not as good as others. I respect that she is writing a large scope of stories, and that sometimes it is my fault that I did not connect with this story as much as I did with a different one. Silver Nitrate is one I did not connect with as deeply as Mexican Gothic or Signal to Noise, but this definitely does not discourage me from waiting impatiently for her next novel. 

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

Posted in horror book reviews, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: Everything the Darkness Eats by Eric LaRocca

Posted on July 18, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

An insidious darkness threatens to devastate a rural New England village when occult forces are conjured and when bigotry is left unrestrained.

After a recent string of disappearances in a small Connecticut town, a grieving widower with a grim secret is drawn into a dangerous ritual of dark magic by a powerful and mysterious older gentleman named Heart Crowley. Meanwhile, a member of local law enforcement tasked with uncovering the culprit responsible for the bizarre disappearances soon begins to learn of a current of unbridled hatred simmering beneath the guise of the town’s idyllic community—a hatred that will eventually burst and forever change the lives of those who once found peace in the quiet town of Henley’s Edge.

From the Bram Stoker Award®-nominated author of the viral sensation, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, Everything the Darkness Eats is a haunting supernatural thriller from a new and exciting voice in genre fiction.

Review:

I have been a fan of Eric LaRocca’s work up until this point. Their short story collections and novellas are haunting, interesting, and filled with grotesque and wonderful scenes. There was no way that I was not going to pre order their first novel Everything the Darkness Eats and devour it. 

This is a much more tame and less thrilling incarnation of LaRocca’s writing. The novel takes place in a small town where people are disappearing but nobody notices the Rolls Royce creeping down the street, stalking these people. Inside the Rolls Royce is Heart Crowley, a person who is using dark magic in the basement of his mansion. A parallel story is about Malik, a Muslim-raised police officer in town who is supposed to be investigating these disappearances but is distracted by hate crimes committed against him and his husband Brett. The two stories barely intersect, and in the end, neither of the stories have a very satisfying resolve. There are so many holes in the story, so much that just doesn’t add up that throughout the novel, I could not find myself as engaged as much as I found myself finding the whole thing absurd. When reading horror, the reader has to suspend belief, but in Everything the Darkness Eats, so much has to be overlooked that the novel that it really does not work. 

Of my many questions about this novel, one of my biggest questions is about Malik and his husband Brett. Malik is a police officer, but when someone breaks into his home, the rest of the police force does nothing for him. Even though this might be the unfortunate reality with those in the LGBT+ community, Malik is one of them (i.e. a police officer). The is no doubt that his coworkers on the force had prejudices against him before the hate crime so how was he getting along with the police department before they turned against him? This is not explained. He does leave after the incidents in his home, but you cannot tell me that the language that the officer uses against Malik when investigating is new, that Malik does not receive this kind of reception at his job every day. The interpersonal relationships of every single character in this novel seems so off that it is a distraction. This makes the characters and story unbelievable. 

This whole novel is a disappointment. I wanted to be able to say that LaRocca knocked this story out of the ballpark and that everyone should read it, but honestly, I cannot recommend this. It is a poor execution of a story that could have been so much more. 

Posted in fiction, horror book reviews, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: Zero-Sum: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates

Posted on July 16, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, best-selling author of Blonde

A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as “mother.” In the collection’s longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with “drafts” of his own suicide.

In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.

Review:

Zero-Sum: Stories is the newest collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates. She is getting close to publishing fifty short story collections, and this really shows the two main types of stories that she writes: stories about the interior life that dwell deep into the psyche of the main characters and the stories that are just creepy and strange, filled with killers, predators, and danger. I find that the stories driving with characters who are being introspective on topics like suicide and motherhood, do not keep me as interested as the stories that are weird and dangerous. Fortunately for Zero-Sum, this collection has both. 

Joyce Carol Oates has has a long career of telling stories in her own way. She also tells stories about others in her own way. Blonde is her famous book based on Marilyn Monroe, but this is not her only writing based on famous people and events. My Sister, My Love is based on the JonBenet Ramsey case. Black Water is based on Ted Kennedy and the Chappaquiddick incident. Wild Nights! is a story collection based on the final days of five famous authors. Many of her novels are based on celebrities, unsolved crimes, and serial killers. With this knowledge in the back of my head, I was reading the longest story in the collection, “The Suicide”. This is the story about an award-winning author who is planning to kill himself but cannot get the narrative of his suicide right so he keeps rewriting the story. I I could not stop thinking that this story is based on David Foster Wallace. In this story, as well as some of her others, like “The Baby-Monitor” and “The Cold”, Oates dives deep into her characters, making us understand that there is always so much more below the surface that we should not be quick to judge people, and sometimes helping them is beyond our capacities. These stories really are character studies, and there is not always a good resolution to the events. 

My favorite stories by Joyce Carol Oates are her most absurd ones. I know that she can really explain suicide and post-partum feelings, but these stories are not nearly as interesting to me as stories like “Monstersister” about a girl starts growing something weird on the back of her head, and this growth begins to take over her life, and “Mr. Stickum” about a group of girls who are going to take revenge on someone from the neighborhood whom they think is a sexual predator. These stories of absurdity and crime are much of the reason why I really read Joyce Carol Oates. She does really well with the serious stories, but the not-so-serious stories are the ones that really grab my attention. 

Oates is now 85 years old and has published 160 books. For her to continue to write and publish so many novels and stories is remarkable, and we need to keep reading her books. Zero-Sum is not my favorite collection by her, but there are some really good stories in the mix. For someone who has written so much, it is still a wonder that I get excited to see what she is going to write next. 

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

Posted in fiction, literary book review, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird by Agustina Bazterrica

Posted on July 1, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A collection of nineteen dark, wildly imaginative short stories from the author of the award-winning TikTok sensation Tender Is the Flesh.

From celebrated author Agustina Bazterrica, this collection of nineteen brutal, darkly funny short stories takes into our deepest fears and through our most disturbing fantasies. Through stories about violence, alienation, and dystopia, Bazterrica’s vision of the human experience emerges in complex, unexpected ways—often unsettling, sometimes thrilling, and always profound. In “Roberto,” a girl claims to have a rabbit between her legs. A woman’s neighbor jumps to his death in “A Light, Swift, and Monstrous Sound,” and in “Candy Pink,” a woman fails to contend with a difficult breakup in five easy steps.

Written in Bazterrica’s signature clever, vivid style, these stories question love, friendship, family relationships, and unspeakable desires.

Review:

After reading and loving Tender is the Flesh, I was excited to read Agustina Bazterrica’s follow-up, Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird. This collection is twenty stories, ranging from very short to medium short, none of the stories much more than ten pages long. With the collection being so many stories but the book length being so short, it is easy for me to forget the plots of some of the stories a few hours after reading them. Many of them feel more like scenes, sketches, and character studies than actual stories. 

There are some standout moments in this collection, some moments when I am reminded that Agustina Bazterrica wrote Tender is the Flesh, a nasty, incredible novel about people who eat people because they cannot give up meat. Stories like “Unamuno’s Boxes”, “Elena-Marie Sadoz”, “No Tears” and “The Continuous Equality of the Circumference” remind me that Bazterrica is a great writer, a storytelling with dense, powerful language and strong imagery. These are elements that make Tender is the Flesh such a compelling story. Most of the stories I like in this collection are the stories that are longer, because Bazterrica takes the time to give us more so we can be mesmerized in the language of the story’s world, feel what the characters are feeling, and be attached to the conclusions. Most of these stories have horrible outcomes, many of them end in self-harm and suicide, and when we are given any time with the characters, we can feel their emotions before their final acts. It cannot be understated that by the time I have read a few of the stories, I know that most all of the outcomes are bleak, that all of the stories are being told under a black cloud, and that there are no real happy endings to be seen. 

Bleakness has been Bazterrica’s style so far. There is not much happiness in the worlds that she creates, and I can appreciate this type of storytelling. Unfortunately there are many times during this collection when I just do not have the time to get attached to the story, and it is over before it has even really started. I would like to read another short story collection by her with the same page count but with half the stories. Her power is in worldbuilding and creating a breathing character, building up a tower before knocking it all down. Many of the stories in this collection are too short for this to happen. 

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

Posted in fiction, horror book reviews, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

Posted on June 12, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A virtuosic mashup of Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler by way of Marvel—the story of a detective investigating the murder of a Titan, one of society’s most powerful, medically-enhanced elites

“Cross-genre brilliance from the superbly talented Nick Harkaway.” —William Gibson, New York Times best-selling author of Agency

Cal Sounder is a detective working for the police on certain very sensitive cases. So when he’s called in to investigate a homicide at a local apartment, he’s surprised by the routineness of it all. But when he arrives on scene, Cal soon learns that the victim—Roddy Tebbit, an otherwise milquetoast techie—is well over seven feet tall. And although he doesn’t look a day over thirty, he is ninety-one years old. Tebbit is a Titan—one of this dystopian, near-future society’s genetically altered elites. And this case is definitely Cal’s thing.

There are only a few thousand Titans worldwide, thanks to Stefan Tonfamecasca’s discovery of the controversial T7 genetic therapy, which elevated his family to godlike status. T7 turns average humans into near-immortal distortions of themselves—with immense physical proportions to match their ostentatious, unreachable lifestyles. A dead Titan is big news . . . a murdered Titan is unimaginable. But these modified magnates are Cal’s specialty. In fact, his own ex-girlfriend, Athena, is a Titan. And not just any—she is Stefan’s daughter, heir to the massive Tonfamecasca empire.  

As the murder investigation intensifies, Cal begins to unravel the complicated threads of what should have been a straightforward case, and it becomes clear he’s on the trail of a crime whose roots run deep into the dark heart of the world.

Review:

I have read hardboiled crime novels off and on for most of my life. I think my love for pulp was started with seeing Pulp Fiction in the theater when I was still in high school. It began an obsession with all things pulp. I read the Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction, and this lead me to so many great authors, particularly Jim Thompson. I loved his stories and I read most of his books in the late 90s (when Vintage Black Lizard released his catalog). Hard Case Crime started publishing new and lost crime novels in 2004, and they had a subscription service, so I had years of getting every one of their crime novels. Pulp fiction, crime novels, noir novels, whatever you want to call them usually center around a clever detective that might have a drinking problem but definitely has problems with the police, even when they are on the squad, have been a part of my life for thirty years. Titanium Noir is a new novel by Nick Harkaway that captures the spirit of the long tradition of the crime novel, with his own twist.

The novel starts with the death of a Roddy Tebbit, a pretty nerdy and neat guy who also happens to be a Titan. Titans are those who have grown big and strong after the use of T7 genetic therapy. T7 and being a Titan equates with the fountain of youth, those who will live for hundreds of years. The side effects are growth, stronger, larger bones, height and strength, and they are hard to murder. It is also known as a therapy for the rich. Tebbit does not present as the type of person who was a candidate for T7 therapy so not only is the investigation about Tebbit’s murder, but it is also about how he was a Titan in the first place. 

Cal Sounder is called into this sensitive case. His character is a homage to a long tradition of hard-boiled, quick-witted detectives. Harkaway does a great job with Cal, molding him into the traditional noir detective: a fast thinker, a bit of a smartass, and a lover of women who also gets beaten to a pulp by those people he is trying to track down, usually more than once. Sounder puts his life on the line more than once to solve this case, and like all paperback detectives, the risks and pain pays off.

Titanium Noir is fast paced, action packed, and fun to read. Even with the genetic modifications aspects thrown in, the story really hums along at a pace that makes it easy and satisfying to read. Most of Harkaway’s novels are long and deeply involved, so at 250 pages, Titanium Noir is a nice change of pace, and definitely a novel worthy of being a starting place for anyone interested in Harkaway’s work.

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

Posted in fiction, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: The Night Mother and NightWhere by John Everson

Posted on June 9, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it Here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis for NightWhere:

She yearned to go beyond… but some curtains should never be opened.
When Rae broached the idea of visiting an underground sex club, Mark didn’t blink. He should have. Because NightWhere is not your usual swingers club. Where it’s held on a given night…only those who receive the red invitations know. Soon Rae is indulging in her lust for pain. And Mark is warned by a beautiful stranger to take his wife away before it’s too late.

But it’s already too late. Because Rae hasn’t come home. Now Mark is in a race against time — to find NightWhere again and save his wife from the mysterious Watchers who run the club. To stop her from taking that last step through the degradations of The Red into the ultimate BDSM promise of The Black. More than just their marriage and her life are at stake: Rae is in danger of losing her soul…

Synopsis for The Night Mother:

The sequel to the 2012 Bram Stoker Award finalist NightWhere!

Selena, a fallen angel, knew that once exposed, you could never escape the pull of NightWhere, a mysterious underground sex club run by beings called The Watchers.

Cassie, a driven dominatrix, didn’t.

When both are drawn into the club’s secret rooms that promise an ecstasy of forbidden pain and pleasure, they must somehow try to protect the men they love. Because the club’s Midnight Queen, the Night Mother, has a deadly plan that may break the boundaries of our world and destroy everything and everyone they’ve ever desired…

Review:

NightWhere is a place where all of your most deviant fantasies can come to life A BDSM sex club that moves to a new location in the Chicagoland area every month, but the inside of the club looks the same everywhere. With people watching from the ceiling and the walls, watching everything that happens. With walls dripping with blood. With people who have never escaped. John Everson published the first book, NightWhere in 2012, and received high praise, even a finalist for a Bram Stoker award. Now he has returned to NightWhere for a sequel, The Night Mother, the woman who is in charge of the entirety of NightWhere, a character who does not factor much into the original novel. 

If you have read NightWhere and loved it: You will love The Night Mother even more. This is a direct sequel to NightWhere. The first novel is Mark trying to save Rae from the club. This novel is about Mark trying to save the club from Rae. (Isn’t there a song, “Heaven Doesn’t Want Me and Hell is Afraid I’ll Take Over”?) This sequel has all of the characters that we connected with from the first novel, with a few new ones to help with the readers journey through NightWhere. 

If you have read NightWhere and did not like it: This is a better story, and to be brutally honest, John Everson is a much better writer now than he was a decade ago. The years between the two novels have been spent publishing great books like The House by the Cemetery, Voodoo Heart, and Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds. He has really honed his skills, and The Night Mother is a well crafted and well-written story. NightWhere is also a much more interesting place a decade later. There are rooms that have any sort of fetish that you can imagine, and as we walk through the club again, we are exposed to a much more varied and interesting experience. And The Night Mother. She has a small scene in the first book, but her character in this second book, along with the Rae and how she has changed, really makes for a sequel that is better than the original.

If you have not read NightWhere: This is a direct sequel, but Everson has written it in a way that you can enjoy it without confusion. He introduces Cassie, a dominatrix, and Paul, her slave, to NightWhere, and they do the job of explaining the club and what is going on with each room. I read NightWhere and The Night Mother back to back, and I did enjoy it this way, but I also tried to think of reading The Night Mother without the context of the first. If I was lost. I do think that Everson does a good job of explaining the situation and even expanding on the club, but I also feel like I get more depth from the sequel having read the first because every character from the first returns for the second. 

Someone blurbed NightWhere as “Hellraiser meets Fifty Shades of Grey.” This is not terribly far from the truth. NightWhere is a special place where the deeper a person travels into the depths of the club, the closer they are to the depths of Hell. I always liked Hellraiser because the main purpose of the story was for the characters to find the ultimate pleasure, unfortunately the Cenobites idea of pleasure is through tortuous pain. This is NightWhere. Many of the acts in the club cross the line between pain and pleasure, and this is the line that NightWhere tries to straddle. There is gore and torture, and some of the horrors that are described here are some of the most brutal I have ever read.

Beneath all of the surface horrors, there is a great deal of heart in both of these novels. Ultimately, NightWhere and The Night Mother are love stories, where ordinary people get caught in the playground for otherworldly entities. In NightWhere, Mark is trying to save his marriage and the woman that he loves from a club that he thinks has brainwashed her becuase “Love Will Conquer All”. He is kind of an idiot, but he is also not wrong. The “Love Will Conquer All” aspect in these novels is what keeps everyone reading and the hope of a good outcome is what makes them palatable. Like one of the characters mentions in The Night Mother, NightWhere is a place for pain but also for pleasure. When you lose sight of the pleasure, all you have left is pain. Everson’s best job in these novels is balancing the horrors of NightWhere with the humanity that is fighting the entire time to stay alive. 

I received The Night Mother from John Everson in exchange for an honest review. 

Posted in fiction, horror book reviews, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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

Posted on June 3, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Review: Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk

Posted on May 20, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

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.  

Posted in fiction, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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

Posted on May 11, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

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.

Posted in fiction, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment