Writer and software engineer in the US Midwest. I enjoy poetry, horror, some f/sf, some mystery, some literary fiction (but not the kind where the main character is a professor and nothing happens).
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Choking Back the Devil by Donna Lynch is an invocation, an ancient invitation that summons …
Supernatural horror and everyday horror, psychological horror and body horror, horrors suffered and horrors committed, all effectively depicted. The range here is impressive.
"Let sleeping murder lie": this is the proverb (a variation on "Let sleeping dogs lie") …
Not Christie’s A game, but her B game is still quite good. And Miss Marple kind of (only kind of) takes a stand against slut shaming.
Norris Black • Amber Blaeser-Wardzala • Phoenix Boudreau • Cherie Dimaline • Carson Faust • …
This is billed as a “dark fiction anthology,” and that’s apt. Not every story is horror fiction, but they all contain darkness. Of the horror stories, not all are supernatural horror. All are worth reading.
Still making my way through this very dense book. Seldom has a collection of an author’s work made me despise the author more. A brilliant but awful person. Reading about Picabia’s and André Breton’s attempts to sabotage one another in their artistic community is what it would be like to watch Kid Rock and Ted Nugent in a barroom brawl: you hope there’s a way they can both lose, and you lament the damage to the bar.
Revelations (2013)
Explores the New Testament book of Revelation in a historical first-century context, reinterpreting the book as a scathing attack on …
Soft Places is a hybrid prose/graphic novella. The transitions between the two formats is integral to the telling, not a gimmick. The story itself blends cosmic and very personal horror.
To quote from the foreword by Sam Richard: “This book is full of queer representation that is messy and ugly and uncomfortable and painful. It’s a book full of queer characters who are cruel and conflicted and complex and interesting. Yes, queer joy, but also: queer rage, queer hostility, queer panic, queer madness, queer violence, queer horror.”
It’s an anthology, so of course I connected with some stories more than others, but all are well-written, imaginative, and (like all the best monster stories) ruthlessly human.
An observation, not a judgment: of the 13 stories here, only one is in third person POV. One is in second person, and one mixes first and second person. The other ten are first person narratives.
I don’t know how that compares with contemporary horror literature in general, and it’s probably just a random statistic without larger meaning.
From Amazon.com:
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave …
