Reviews and Comments

Many excellent parts that, for me, did not add up to a satisfying whole.

I wasn’t very far into this book before I started a spreadsheet to track the titles described. I categorized them as: - Probably not for me - Maybe for me - Probably for me - Must read - Have read

(I could have just left the books I’ve already read off the spreadsheet, except no I couldn’t.)

This is a very useful book for any fan of horror writing. I would have enjoyed it more without the plugs for Amazon.

I was promised a novel and I got a narrative prose poem. I was promised horror and I got a love story. I’m not complaining. It’s a tale about a mermaid, but Hans Christian Andersen, it ain’t. It’s bloody and bleak and cruel. But I already said it’s a love story, didn’t I?

I might start seeking out graphic novel versions of Macbeth. I’ve read a bad one. Now, with the Gareth Hinds adaptation, I’ve read a good one. This book brings Shakespeare’s play to life, and makes me feel things. I appreciate the notes at the end, where Hinds talks about his historical research and explains some of his artistic and editorial decisions. If someone were asking for a graphic novelization of Macbeth, I’d gladly point them to this. However… I feel like there must be bolder interpretations out there.

Folktales of monsters and gods and weirdness from Tono in Japan, originally collected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, presented here in a graphic novel adaptation. The art is wonderful and the stories are delightful, even (maybe especially) when they seem unfinished. I enjoy the way the creator inserts himself into the framing narrative.

In this surrealist novel, full of images from alchemy and astrology and occult lore, two people try to find each other, but sometimes they can’t even find themselves. The stone door of the title is both a barrier and an opening. Very different in tone from Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet, and not a light read. Stories within dreams within manuscripts within stories, with characters slipping across boundaries and transforming into others. Carrington challenges conventional notions of narrative, language, gender, and the self. This is a book I could read many times and get something new from it each time. It has a werewolf, which is always a plus.

Weber spends a lot of time trying to tie fascism and socialism together. He disapproves of fascism; he disapproves of socialism; therefore, they are at least in sympathy with one another, if not the same thing viewed from different angles. (Maybe later parts of the book modify this stance, but I’m old and have limited time to read.)

A psychedelic/cult/folk/spatterpunk horror novel, full of mushrooms and gore and horniness. Every character is some degree of broken, and every character is at least a little, now and then, sympathetic. (Every human character, that is.) Trying to get back home to a needy cat is a worthy goal for the protagonist. Too bad tricky earth deities and a murderous cult and hallucinations and a mansplaining park ranger get in the way. I enjoyed the chapter epigraphs from a fictional mushroom guide and the diary of a bygone incompetent entrepreneur. A trippy ride.

Wonderful stories in here, some moving, some thought-provoking, a seasoning of wit and humor.

It’s easy to be amused by sentences such as "Chicken Run is different from Toy Story in that the Oedipal falls away as a point of reference in favor of a Gramscian structure of counterhegemony engineered by organic (chicken) intellectuals." But sometimes those academic phrases cut deep, like "the renaturalization of heterosexuality."

A partial biography of a life still in progress, following William Blake’s continuing influence on writers and artists (many of them queer), as well as Blake’s role in the author’s own life. Hoare gives some love and appreciation to William Blake’s artistic collaborator and wife Catherine Blake, and the book includes photos of her three known solo works of art: an illustration for the gothic novel The Monk, a surreal face Catherine saw while looking into a fire, and a portrait of William. After reading Hoare’s book, now I have to read Billy Budd and seek out the films of Derek Jarman and the art of Paul Nash and the writings of Nancy Cunard and…

Moby-Dick in an alternate world, but the whalers are the ones being hunted. Body horror, eroticism, mutiny, nature taking revenge, gods of the deep, bigotry, capitalism at its harshest, a main character with a secret (and then another, and another), a steadily mounting sense of dread—this book has it all.

So far (a little past halfway thru) I’d say this is Herman Melville meets Castle Rock. I’m enjoying it.

None of the writers in this collection came to play nice with the Nazgûl. Plenty of anger and pain and body fluids in these stories, and fantasies of revenge and fantasies of justice and tenderness and hope that even if the forces of good don’t prevail they’ll go on fighting. A couple of stories even feature repentance and attempts at making amends. Strong stomach required.

Similar in concept to the movie Inception, but this novel came first and is more firmly in the surrealist tradition. You don’t think things can get more absurd than the opening chapters, but they do. A riot of Freudian and Jungian psychology, folklore, occultism, sex, violence, and—most savagely irrational of all—the internal politics of organizations.