Review: The Colony by Annika Norlin

Posted on March 24, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

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Synopsis:

A mega best-seller in Sweden, with rights sold to over a dozen countries and a TV adaptation underway, Annika Norlin’s debut novel The Colony is the biggest Swedish literary phenomenon since Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove.  

Winner of the Vi Literature Award and Swedish Radio’s Novel Prize, two of Sweden’s biggest literary awards, The Colony is a gripping portrayal of contemporary society and its alternatives. 

Burnt-out from a demanding job and a bustling life in the city, Emelie has left town to spend a few days in the country. Once there, in the peaceful, verdant hills, down by the river she encounters a mysterious group of seven people, each with personal stories full of pain, alienation, and the longing to live differently. They are misfits, each in their own way, and all led by the enigmatic and charismatic Sara. 

How did they end up there? Are they content with the rigid roles they’ve been assigned? And what happens when an outsider appears and is initially drawn to their alternative lifestyle but cannot help but stir things up? 

A masterful blend of humor, emotion, unforgettable characters, and sharp social commentary, The Colony is a magnetic and deeply touching story about love, community, and the unfathomable power we other others and that others have over us. 

Review:

The Colony is the debut novel by songwriter and artist Anika Norlin. This is her first novel, originally published in Sweden in 2023 and going on to win the Vi Literature Award and Swedish Radio’s Novel Prize. The English translation by Alice E. Olsson is published by Europa Editions. 

The story starts with Emile, burned out with living in the city and her job. She learns that camping and being in nature is more appealing than sleeping in an apartment and answering her phone. Before long, she spends more and more time in the woods and less time answering the queries of those worried about her. While in the woods, she starts to observe a group of people who seem to be living in the woods as well. This group are doing strange things like singing and dancing to no music, saying “Thank you” to every fish they catch and eat, and spending long times not saying a single word to one another. She watches them for a while and is particularly interested in the youngest one, a teenager whom she dubs “Poor Bastard” because of the way that he is part of the group but not exactly included. Eventually she runs into “Poor Bastard” and grow a friendship. This friendship turns into meeting the whole group, having dinner, drinking moonshine, and being part of the colony. The novel is long, over 400 pages, and a great deal of the time is going through the histories of the members of the community, but the whole time, I was engrossed in the story and wanted to keep reading. 

I read this novel faster than I expected. Even though there seems to only be a small amount of things happening in the real story, the development of the characters and the stories of how they came together and why they choose to live away from society are all compelling. We are able to make sense as to why someone would want to live in this group, away from society, being almost completely self-reliant. If this twenty-first century argument on whether or not living in a city with an apartment or the internet is better or living in the country where you do not see anyone for months at a time but you can live off of the land and ignore the poison that society brings, then Annika Norlin shows the pros and cons to both in an even handed way. There is not once where we feel like any of these characters are making the wrong decisions, even when they are not always the most beneficial. The crux of the biggest argument in the novel comes with Låke or “Poor Bastard”, the teenager who had grown up in the Colony and what they owe him as far as education and interaction with people his own age. 

The Colony is an interesting study in societies, not only the society outside of the group but the social constructs that happen within any group of people. Even though they say they are all equal, everyone still plays different roles within the smaller society. The Colony is just another society that has those with more and less influence. We are treated to an deep exploration of this concept, and Annika Norlin has written a compelling study on how even when bigger social constructs are left behind, a new social constructs with organically appear.

I have received an ARC of The Colony from Europa Editions in exchange for an honest review. 

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Review: Crash by J.G. Ballard

Posted on March 21, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

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Synopsis:

In Ballard’s hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a “TV scientist” turned “nightmare angel of the highways,” experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an intentionally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting edge fiction, Crash explores the disturbing potentialities of contemporary society’s increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.

Review:

I have wanted to read Crash by J.G. Ballard for a long time. Since seeing the David Cronenberg film in the late 90s, I have been looking for a copy of the novel. It is not one that I wanted to buy online or in a digital format. I wanted to find a physical copy in a physical bookstore. I found a new copy late last summer, and I tried to start reading it right off. After three restarts, I finally was able to get through the short novel. My copy is now beat up, with covers creased, pages folded and torn, aged from being in the trunk of my car, and now it is much more distressed that normal. For some reason, the more beat up became, the more I felt like it is how any copy of Crash should appear. 

Crash starts with the narrator, James Ballard in a car wreck where he kills the husband of a doctor. During this event, he meets Vaughan, a strange man who chases car crashes to take photos of them. He also recreates historic car crashes and is completely sexually aroused by crashes, injuries, and deaths. Shortly after meeting Ballard, they become friends looking for crashes and sexual partners. They drive around, getting prostitutes at the airport, sharing partners and each other, while planning the greatest car crash of all time, the one that will kill Elizabeth Taylor. 

When Ballard (the character) gets into a wreck that actually kills someone, he becomes a member of this group who find car crashes erotic. This could be because he is face to face with death, not his own but one he causes, and with the help of Vaughan and his small group of friends, this horror turns into something that he finds as a catalyst to a new life of cars and sexual obsession. The thing that could have been better, to make this more appealing, is to have Ballard as someone who is not already having extramarital affairs, who did not already seem like he was obsessed with sex. He is in the car crash on the way home from seeing his secretary, with whom he had been having an affair for a long time. He also knows that his wife is having affairs. If they were more of monogamous before the crash, and then Vaughan got him (and his wife) into the lifestyle that they ultimately finds, I would be more interested in what happens to Ballard. In the end, Ballard is not very different than he was before his crash, except that he and his wife are more honest about taking other lovers, and this makes me not really care much for what happens to him. He is not the most interesting character because we have Vaughan, the scarred and deranged man who has started this group of car crash lovers, but there is not enough backstory on him except he used to be handsome and famous until a car crash scarred him and now he was doing this, hanging around crashes, getting chased off by the police, and being a nuisance. We do not learn enough about him because Ballad (the character) is more interested in having sex with everyone than in finding out why he is acting the way that he is acting.


I understand the point of this novel. I know that it is about the glamorization of violence and the way society likes to obsess about tragedy, to the point where it is almost a sexual obsession. It may not be car crashes, but we definitely have an attraction to crime and criminals, especially if they are attractive. Ballard (the novelist) turns this into a over the top reaction, one where the characters cannot see a car crash with having orgasm, and need more and more. In the end, I am glad that I read this, but it is probably not a book I will read again. To put it bluntly, Ballard (the character) is not someone who can see anything passed his penis, and so this really puts a damper on the way that Crash develops and the impact that is could have made.

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Review: Hungerstone by Kat Dunn

Posted on March 7, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Bookshop, Amazon

Synopsis:

Hungerstone is a thrillingly seductive sapphic romance for fans of S.T. Gibson’s A Dowry of Blood and Emilia Hart’s Weyward.

For what do you hunger, Lenore?

Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage, the relationship has soured and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry’s ambitions take them out of London and to the imposing Nethershaw manor in the countryside, where Henry aims to host a hunt with society’s finest. Lenore keeps a terrible secret from the last time her husband hunted, and though they never speak of it, it haunts their marriage to this day.

The preparations for the event take a turn when a carriage accident near their remote home brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore’s life. Carmilla who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night; Carmilla who stirs up a hunger deep within Lenore. Soon girls from local villages begin to fall sick before being consumed by a bloody hunger.

Torn between regaining her husband’s affection and Carmilla’s ever-growing presence, Lenore begins to unravel her past and in doing so, uncovers a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk . . .

Set against the violent wilderness of the moors and the uncontrolled appetite of the industrial revolution, Hungerstone is a compulsive feminist reworking of Carmilla, the book that inspired Dracula: a captivating story of appetite and desire.

Review:

Lenora is an orphan raised by her aunt until she marries steel baron, Henry. After they get married, Henry buys a crumbling estate and moves them from London to Nethershaw manor. On their way to the manor, they ride up on a wrecked carriage and a ghostly woman, Carmilla, distraught from the wreck and in need of time at the manor to mend. What they do not expect is that Carmilla is going to change Lenora’s outlook, open her eyes to the state of her life, and give her the strength to do something about it.

The novel starts with the expected pace of a gothic novel. We expect them to be a little slow and broody, foggy and mucky. and filled with mold and isolation. Nethershaw manor is in complete disrepair, and it is up to Lenora to get it into shape before Henry hosted an influential list of visitors for a hunting party. The first half of the novel is rife with the stress of getting the house put together, but also learning about Henry and how he might not be the person that she thought she was marrying. This is a pretty typical of a gothic novel: someone marries into a situation where she did not know what she is getting into. 

The wildcard with Hungerstone is Carmilla. She comes and goes as she pleases, and things start to happen to the women in the neighboring village to the Nethershaw. Lenora gives her attention because she is stressed and lonely. Carmilla is interesting and a mystery, and before long Lernora’s feelings for her cannot be ignored. The attention Carmilla gives her is eventually enough to allow Lenora to figure out what is going on in her marriage and her life. In the end, Carmilla could be anything. She could be a ghost. She could be a vampire. She could be a manifestation brought on by Lenora. The final truth is that Carmilla is the catalyst to the changing in Lenora and her life. 

The first two thirds of Hungerstone are slow and moody, and when the action does start to speed up toward the last third, there are some pacing issues. The truth is coming out, the consequences are happening, and the house of Nethershaw is about to crumble down, but Kat Dunn stops the momentum a few times for more flashbacks that are unnecessary. This kills the momentum, and an ending that could have felt like a carriage flying off of a cliff becomes very controlled. This does not stop Hungerstone from being a novel I would recommend, but I wish that the final third of the novel was structured a little more reckless.


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

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Review: The Witcher The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

Posted on January 24, 2025 by ghostvillehero

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Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Geralt the Witcher—revered and hated—is a man whose magic powers, enhanced by long training and a mysterious elixir, have made him a brilliant fighter and a merciless assassin. Yet he is no ordinary murderer: his targets are the multifarious monsters and vile fiends that ravage the land and attack the innocent.

But not everything monstrous-looking is evil and not everything fair is good… and in every fairy tale there is a grain of truth.

Review:

Andrezej Sapkowski published the first Witcher book The Last Wish in 1993. Since then, he has written eight Witcher books, comics, a video game series (with The Witcher 3 being one of the best games in recent years), a Netflix series that has three seasons, and an animated movie. The property is still expanding and it does not seem to be slowing down. The premise is pretty simple. Geralt of Rivia is a witcher, someone who slays monsters with a combination of fighting training, magical powers, and vials of elixirs. He travels the countryside to slay monsters and solve problems for people for a bounty. He is not respected for the job he does, and many times as soon as his job is finished, he is ran out of the village. 

The overall premise of the Witcher series is pretty simple, but the Witcher series draws people in because of the mix of fantasy, swords and sorcery, action and adventure. The first book, The Last Wish, is a pretty simple introduction to Geralt and the lifestyle that he lives. The book is an anthology of Witcher adventures, each of the stories putting him in different scenarios where he has to use his skills and logic. Up until the last story, Geralt is portrayed as someone a little cold, a person who does not have much interest in getting tangled with the people whom he works for, that the missions are mostly for money and nothing more. He also seems confident and wise in everything that he does. He has enough sense to not get himself into any sort of real trouble, but if he is in trouble he has enough wits to escape. The last story, “The Last Wish”, seems to turn this on it’s head a bit. In this story, he and his bard friend Dandelion are fishing when they pull up a bottle with a djinn inside that quickly hurts Dandelion. Geralt takes him to a village where Yennefer, a powerful witch, is being tolerated. The interactions between Yennefer and Geralt shows a different side of Geralt. Instead of the confident monster slayer, he is exposed as a person bumbling through things and living more on luck than on talent. In this story our perspective on the Witcher changes, and I think this is Sapkowski still trying to figure out who Geralt is.


This definitely reads like a first book in a series, and there is definitely some growth between the first story and the last story. Not only in the writing but in the storytelling. As the book progresses, the stories get better, and you get a sense that The Last Wish includes some of the earlier ideas of what the Witcher will become, and he is figuring it out while he is writing the story. It is not the best book, but it is a book that shows promise in the series getting better.

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Review: Death in the Downline by Maria Abrams

Posted on January 14, 2025 by ghostvillehero

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Synopsis:

It’s multi-level murder in this darkly funny mystery novel about the glamorous world of MLM “huns”—and the dangerous secrets at the top of the pyramid.

Drew thought she was destined to rise above her small New Jersey hometown and make it as a serious journalist in New York City. But now she’s back in Clearfield, pushing thirty, newly single, and living with her father.

After a chance encounter at the grocery store, she reconnects with her former best friend, Steph, who married young and never left their hometown. But Steph looks . . . good. She’s tanned, clear skinned, and glowing. She drives an expensive car and wears only name brands. What’s her secret? A multi-level marketing scheme called LuminUS that’s taken the ladies of Clearfield by storm. With nothing left to lose, Drew gets sucked into this glamorous world of downlines, sales parties, and girls’ trips.

But when a LuminUS distributor dies under mysterious circumstances, can Drew uncover the dark secret at the heart of the organization—and save her best friend—before it’s too late?

Laugh-out-loud funny and a pitch-perfect skewering of pyramid schemes, Death in the Downline is a page-turner that will have readers nodding in recognition and cheering for Drew until the cathartic conclusion.

Review:

I have been a fan of Maria Abrams since her first novella, She Who Rules the Dead, was published by Weirdpunk Books. When I learned through her Instagram that she is releasing her new novel through Quirk Books, I preordered it before I was offered an ARC through NetGalley. I could not have been more excited to get the ARC and read it in less than two days.

The novel centers around Drew, a woman down on her luck. She just broke up with her boyfriend, lost her job at Buzzfeed due to budget cuts, and is now returning from New York back to her childhood home in Clearfield to live with her father. She has no money, and even though she applies for jobs on her phone all of the time, she has no prospects. One day she is shopping at the store when she runs into Sarah, her high school friend, whom she had lost touch with in college. Sarah seems to have the perfect life, marriage, kids and money. Sarah has convinced Drew to join LuminUS, a multilevel marketing company selling beauty supplements. Before long, Drew spends money she does not have and is trying to keep up with the selling strategies set by Sarah and those up the chain of command. She is not the type of person who completely buys into the business of LuminUS, and it does not take long for her to question the entire company. The women dying around her does not help.

Death in the Downline is a fast paced, fun book. Drew is an empathetic character, and we are on her side the entire time, having the same questions that she has. While Drew starts to investigate the deaths around LuminUS, she does not really have a hard time getting information. We also do not get much sense of risk in Drew poking around in shady dealings of a multimillion dollar business. I feel like this lack of peril that Drew feels, like there will be nobody to kill her even though they are killing those around her, makes the novel, especially the latter third where she is really getting information and pushing for more, feel soft. Most of the people involved want to talk to her, tell her everything going on, even if they know that they are in danger as well for telling their story. Drew getting information seems a little easy, and this keeps the final scenes from being too tense. I enjoyed Death in the Downline, and I had a good time reading it. Getting into the world of MLM and knowing that none of them really are anything more than ploys to milk desperate people from their money, is an interesting topic to think about. I like Drew and Sarah as friends, and even some of the other ladies selling LuminUS are good people in a bad situation. In the end, the fall of LuminUS does not cause enough danger for Drew, the biggest whistleblower.  

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

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Review: North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud

Posted on January 11, 2025 by ghostvillehero

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Synopsis:

Nathan Ballingrud’s Shirley Jackson Award winning debut collection is a shattering and luminous experience not to be missed by those who love to explore the darker parts of the human psyche. Monsters, real and imagined, external and internal, are the subject. They are us and we are them and Ballingrud’s intense focus makes these stories incredibly intense and irresistible.

These are love stories. And also monster stories. Sometimes these are monsters in their traditional guises, sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, or ourselves. The often working-class people in these stories are driven to extremes by love. Sometimes, they are ruined; sometimes redeemed. All are faced with the loneliest corners of themselves and strive to find an escape.

Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts but has spent most of his life in the South. He worked as a bartender in New Orleans and New York City and a cook on offshore oil rigs. His story “The Monsters of Heaven” won the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his daughter.

Review:

Short stories are a much different reading experience than novels and novellas. In a short story, the author only has a few pages to build the world, the characters, and the conflict before either the story ends or people lose interest and move on to the next story. Each short story should be designed to stand alone, even if it is part of a collection of linked stories that tell a bigger story. Short stories are only a moment in time, and this time needs to be used wisely. In a collection like North American Lake Monsters, these characters are each put in a time where they are dealing with a difficult situation, whether financially, romantically, emotionally, or morally, and the collection is filled with every type of monster.

Many of these ten stories have the same type of main character– a person who is struggling at the moment with being a decent human being. This is not to say they have not been decent at some point, just not at the moment. Many of them are abusive to their partners and children, some are racist, and all of them are dealing with the grief of being at a low point in their lives. All of these stories add some sort of new element to these feelings, whether it is a feeling of hope or even deeper despair. This stands out all of these stories, but a few of the stronger examples are “Wild Acre”, “The Monsters From Heaven,” and “The Way Station.” “Wide Acre” starts with a bankrupt building contractor witnessing his friends getting attacked by a monster. He runs away, and by being the lone survivor, his depression pushes everyone away from him, and he eventually loses control. In “The Monsters from Heaven” a father is struggling with being the parent responsible for his son disappearance. His wife has animosity, and the only thing that helps them get over this loss is nursing an injured alien back to health to treat as their son. “The Way Station” is about the grief of a homeless man who is displaced by Hurricane Katrina, finds himself in Florida looking for his adult daughter, and waking up with a literal hole in his chest shaped like his memories from New Orleans. 

None of the characters in these stories are very good people. The men fight with their wives and call them names. The women are sick of their lives, their husbands and children, and are trying to find an escape. One of the stories, “S.S.” is about a young kid who is blatantly racist and is getting introduced to a white supremacy group by a girl he has a crush on. Nathan Ballingrud does not shy away from controversial language in this or any of his other stories, and in the end, it is obvious that his world is filled with monsters, but the most dangerous monsters are the humans. This theme is reflected in every single story, and it creates a collection of stories that is sometimes hard to read.

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Review: Playworld by Adam Ross

Posted on January 7, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A big and big-hearted novel—one enthralling, transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan, from the critically acclaimed author of Mr. Peanut (“A brilliant, powerful, and memorable book” —The New York Times)

“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.”

Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York’s elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he’s teetering on the edge of collapse.

Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.

Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era—with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age’s excesses—and who seem to care little about what their children are up to—Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.

Review:

When I was given the opportunity by the publisher to recieve an ARC of Playworld by Adam Ross for an honest review, I jumped at the opportunity. The name Adam Ross reminded me of the joy of reading Mr. Peanut when it came out in 2010, and I could not wait to dive into Playworld. The synopsis is interesting, if not a little disturbing. The story follows Griffin Hurt, a fourteen year old who has an affair with his mother’s friend, Naomi. She is thirty-six with two kids and a rich husband. His own father is struggling to make it as an actor, singer, and teacher, while Griffin lucks into a starring role in a television show, The Nuclear Family, as well as multiple film offers. Griffin struggles to balance acting, school work, wrestling, friends, and his budding interest in girls. 

Close to the end of the novel, Griffin says that he is spending his life swimming in an ocean that is made by adults. There are things that he does, things that he is exposed to, things that he is unaware of that get thrown onto him, and when he reacts slow or surprised, the adults around him have poor reactions. Not only do his mother and father do this, while battling their own demons of infidelity and the prospect that their fourteen year old son is already outpacing their success, but the poor reactions to his behavior by his school teachers, his acting costars, his wrestling coach, and even his friends’ parents. He wants so much to understand the world around him, yet the world does not seem to have easy access for him. People see him has a grown adult when he is still a hormone driven kid. He is successful, paying for his own private school, and in demand. His father looks at him like a peer and as the promise that he could not fulfill. His brother looks at him like the golden child who can do no wrong. His mother see him as an extension of his father, and Naomi, the grown woman who wants to have an affair with him, sees him as someone who can fulfill the desire she is not receiving in her marriage. The adults in his life see him as the solution to something they are missing in their lives, and Griffin struggles to do the things that he loves versus the things that are expected of him. This draws him inward, makes him introspective and lonely in a city where possibilities are endless, where friendships come and go, and where Griffin is trying to figure out what is best for him. 

The backdrop of this novel is the end of the Carter Administration and beginning of the Reagan Administration. This change of president, along with other events happening in this time, like everyone getting up early to watch Princess Diana and Prince Charles wedding, the shooting of John Lennon, the FAA strike, and the Iran hostage crisis, not only serve as markers in the year, but heightens the feelings that Griffin is going through. Looking back at this time frame with thirty years of hindsight, the narrative of these events can be shaped to fit Griffin’s life but also reflect some of the things that we are experiencing right now.

Adam Ross worked on this semi-biographical novel for over a decade. He has taken time to submerge us into a world where kids are doing whatever they want, with little to no supervision. Griffin drinks at parties and with a fake ID, drives cars, and has affairs with rich women. This freedom does not come with feelings of joy but with a huge burden. Ross spends 500 pages showing us this world, creating it piece by piece, and it does not feel like a place that we can ever leave, like it becomes our burden too. In the end, Ross does an wonderful job giving us a large coming-of-age novel where we are satisfied at the ending even if it seems like Griffin’s life is just beginning. 

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Review: Zola by D.E. McCluskey

Posted on January 3, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

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Synopsis:

Gordon’s name was a joke.

It was given to him by Anthony Zola, a controlling, and abusive father, to taunt his wife over her love of cheese, and the fact that she had been steadily gaining weight since their marriage.

Andrea was a doting mother, and maybe a little overprotective of her boy, but she didn’t see that as a bad thing.

On discovering a secret, one the child had been told to keep to himself, everything changes. Now she must do whatever she needs to keep her, and her boy, alive.

Needs must.

Gordon is going to find that his love of cheese, handed down to him by his mother, and his love for the only woman in his life, is about to be taken to a whole new level.

From the dark mind of D E McCluskey, author of The Twelve, CRACK, and Cravings, Comes another addition to his limited ‘Extreme Horror Series’.

Zola is about to take you into a whole new level darkness, and depravity.

Review:

I like many different types of horror novel, but I am always looking for horror books that involve things like the mall, the gym, professional wrestling, and food. When I saw that Zola is an extreme horror novel with cheese, I knew that I had to read it. The outcome is that Zola is one of the most disgusting and depraved books that I have ever read.

The story starts with Anthony and Andrea Zola. Anthony is an abusive husband and father, and when Andrea is pregnant with their son, she craves all types of cheese. Anthony thinks this is so funny that he names their son Gordon Zola, as a cruel joke for his wife’s love of cheese. When their son is born, Anthony’s abuse move to both of them. This causes a final showdown between Anthony and Andrea, one in which afterward Andrea does not know how her and her son will survive. They make it by, with their wits, some cannibalism, and a great amount of cheese. The first half of the novella is about the extremes a mother will go to help her child. The second half is what happens when a child is not given the life skills to live on his own. Between the two parts, we get a novella filled with disgusting scenes, horrible muck, and tastes that cannot be masked by the stink of cheese. 

The novella is only for those with a strong stomach. The depravity of these characters meets no boundaries, and some of their ideas for survival are not good ideas at all. In the end, the story is about protecting your child, but sometimes you also need to let them learn on their own. I have no desire to read this novella again, and I probably should take a break from food horror.

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Review Dogs & Wolves by Herve Le Corre

Posted on December 31, 2024 by ghostvillehero

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Synopsis:

When Franck gets out after five years in jail, he expects to find the brother he protected with his silence. Instead, waiting for him is his brother Fabien’s girlfriend. Jessica takes him to the gloomy country house where she lives with her cantankerous, hard-drinking parents, her eight-year old daughter – who doesn’t speak, hardly eats, and seems to be carrying a secret much bigger than herself – and a large mastiff dog they all seem to fear.  

Time passes, Fabien doesn’t return, and Franck is increasingly mystified by Jessica’s behaviour, seductive at times, hostile at others. Nonetheless, Franck follows her around on her crazy nocturnal rounds until he finds himself with a gun pointed at his head. It’s the beginning of a crescendo of retaliation in a gang war in which Franck believes he is participating, only to realize he’s merely a sacrificial pawn. 

In the scorching heat of the summer, love and violence, sweetness and blood, will result into an unpredictable ending, one that perhaps only the little girl knew from the start.

Review:

Dogs & Wolves, the newest crime novel by Herve Le Corre to be translated by Howard Curtis and published by Europa Editions, is a story about betrayal, secrets, and murder. Franck spent five years in jail for a robbery that he committed with his brother Fabien. When he is released, he is met by Fabien’s girlfriend Jessica, who says that Fabien is on a job in Spain and for him to come stay with her, her parents, and her neglected young daughter. Before long, Franck starts to learn that Jessica is not always honest (or faithful), and it does not take long before Franck is fully involved in her underworld activities. 

This novel is a slow burn, and the story takes much too long to develop. Franck spends a great deal of the novel drinking beer in the heat, spending time with Jessica’s daughter, Rachel, and lusting after Jessica, following her around like a puppy. The deeper we get into the story, the more we see that none of these characters are good people. In fact all of these characters are people you would never want to associate with in real life. The way that they treat one another, throw around sexist and homophobic slurs, and use violence as a way to get their point across, makes it difficult to feel sorry for the fate of any of them. The main character Franck is the worst human of them all, and though their is a small amount of redemption in the way that he cares about Rachel, Jessica’s daughter, this is such a thin veil of humanity that you know Franck does not have a personality that will allow for him to be any sort of role model to the child. Rachel is the only person we feel any sort of sympathy for because she is neglected, abused, and born into a world that is filled with adults that are nothing but horrible people. 

The writing and translation are good even though there is more time spent on feelings and setting than plot. We are brought along with Franck while he waits for his brother. The wait is long and impatient. We wait with him. The days are long and hot, and we can feel the misery Franck is feeling. Dogs & Wolves suffers from a slow pace for a crime novel, with pages and pages of nothing happening. The characters are strongly written, and even though none of them have a redeeming quality, they are definitely written in a way that evokes strong emotion. I was glad when this novel was finished, and I never want to meet these people again. 

I received this novel as an ARC through Europa Editions in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: Coup de Grace by Sofia Ajram

Posted on October 22, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A mindbending and visceral experimental horror about a young man trapped in an infinite Montreal subway station, perfect for readers of Mark Z. Danielewski and Susanna Clarke.

Vicken has a plan: throw himself into the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal and end it all for good, believing it to be the only way out for him after a lifetime of depression and pain. But, stepping off the subway, he finds himself in an endless, looping station.

Determined to find a way out again, he starts to explore the rooms and corridors ahead of him. But no matter how many claustrophobic hallways or vast cathedral-esque rooms he passes through, the exit is nowhere in sight.

The more he explores his strange new prison, the more he becomes convinced that he hasn’t been trapped there accidentally, and amongst the shadows and concrete, he comes to realise that he almost certainly is not alone.

A terrifying psychological nightmare from a powerful new voice in horror.

Review:

Coup de Grace by Sofia Ajram is a slim novella that does many things. The main character Vicken is riding the subway in Montreal on his way to drown himself in the Saint Lawrence River. He has been clinically depressed for years, and this is the day that he is going to end it all. After a quick encounter with a stranger, Felix, Vicken finds himself stuck in an underground station. A station with no exit, no trains coming or going, and no other people. Time, the station, and Vicken’s actions continue to expand and grow, and as the story continues, the things that Vicken encounters get stranger and clarity becomes something that nobody receives. 

Vicken is brought to this place on his last day, on his last journey, but the journey is just starting for him. Arjam writes a novella that really does not have an obvious direction but instead relies on building a feeling of dread and desperation. Vicken is at the end of his rope throughout the whole story, and by the end of the story, we can feel this too. There is a feeling that we kind of hope something (or someone) comes along and either saves Vicken or puts him out of his misery. This is really the point of the story. Journeying to the very end of your nerves before you are able to take that last, final push over the edge seems to be the real reason behind this story. The writing and language is a manipulation, a way that Arjam tries to prepare the reader for the coup de grace that might or might not be coming. Either way, Vicken is a wounded person desperate for an end, and the readers feel these wounds as well. 

This will not go well for many readers. Like the latest Chuck Palahniuk novel, Coup de Grace, is an interactive novella, one that is trying to bring out strong emotions in the reader. And honestly the strong emotions are supposed to be negative. This novella is supposed to make you feel bad, feel depressed after reading, so that we empathize with Vicken (which is pretty close to “victim” when you think about it), and that we understand him and his actions. The novella even has parts where it breaks the fourth wall, makes us choose the next steps, and punishes us for any decision that does not match the bleakness that the book has already displayed. This makes Coup de Grace a difficult book that does not end with a good feeling but makes you think about the different ways that literature can be pushed beyond its normal boundaries. 

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