A novella at 42 pages, I had needed to get my hands on this as I adore Silvia Moreno-Garcia and, as you can imagine, I have a reading problem. This is a wonderful fairy tale, absolutely perfect from start to finish; it’s just what I like in fantasy. The world building is rapid paced and engrossing, the characters likeable and believable, and the callbacks to fairytale story telling and monsters are seamless.
I feel I’ve been saying this a lot, but I look forward to seeing what is next from Moreno-Garcia
Dorian Grey often falls into philosophical and what’s called ‘decadent literature’. Decadence, broadly, refers literally to decay and so in that sense, The Picture of Dorian Grey is a perfectly decadent book. The decadence movement boasted the superiority of aesthetics over logic and naturalism. Decadence, as a term, referring to the decay of societies as a result of the loss of cultural standard–Case in point, the over expansion of the Roman Empire. French writers such as Baudelaire exalted in being decadent writers, romanticizing the decline of Rome and scoffing at progressive cultural agendas. This is where that slipperly slope to Ayn Rand makes itself available. In the Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde challenges and stylizes decadence. Oscar Wilde is of course extremely famous as a satirist, my favorite of Wilde’s is actually The Importance of Being Earnest, and I feel he can’t help but be silly with Lord Henry’s character. Lord Henry can, in fact, only make me think of Graham Chapman’s Oscar Wilde sketch. But I digress. Dorian listens to Lord Henry’s hedonistic philosophy and determines that the only important quality in life is beauty, priding beauty over all things. Wilde tells us just what he really thinks of this in what he has happen to Dorian, the lives Dorian destroys, and the hideousness of Dorian’s aging portrait. Beauty is a mask and fleeting, and the hideousness of your actions will always catch up to you.
I may someday have to write an essay, perhaps create a video essay, about what a bad person I think Bram Stoker was and the unintentional cinematic phenomena of Dracula.
Like all Vampire stories, Dracula was about fear mongering and the zeitgeist of the time. In Dracula, Stoker tells a reverse colonialism story. Here is a person who comes from, by the estimations of Johnathan Harker, a backwards land. Harker is meant to introduce you to the character and culture of Dracula; Harker’s frequent disparaging tut-tuting of the eastern Europeans he encounters is meant to be the prevailing opinions of the time. And then, here, this cloaked and despicable figure who pretends to want to meld within British society and become a part of the western European culture –turns out he is actually an infiltration of backward eastern myth come to feed upon those most vulnerable Victorian White Ladies™ that minorities cannot get enough of. But don’t worry, white guys, we have a slightly better eastern European who’s more integrated into our society, Van Helsing, who can hopefully bridge the gap by killing the embodiment of eastern European mythos. and the … Does it not make sense that vampires have become so much more a sympathetic figure since 1897? Does it not make sense that so many retellings of vampire stories now within western culture focus on the suffering of the vampire? And is that not, still, pretty fucking condescending?
I like Dracula, he who has ruled so long that he would rule still. I hope he gets to eat everybody.
I could write essays on Frankenstein. I could likely write books on Frankenstein. For February I’ve decided to talk about some classic horror novels and where better to begin than Frankenstein.
Here is my most recent take after my most recent reading of Frankenstein:
I feel bad for Captain Robert Walton. Here he is, lonely, an innocent, just doing some minor vanity expedition-ing to the North Pole. He’s a scientist, probably not a colonizer even if he is British, and he’s lonely. He’s real, real lonely. He’s been on this ship a while. His men are losing faith. His sister probably thinks he’s a loser. He just wanted to be a writer. He just wanted a friend. He just wanted to go to the North Pole so he could say he did something worthwhile with his life. And then there he is! A friend appears! Walton’s prayers for companionship at the edge of nowhere miraculously —oh wait, It’s Victor Frankenstein.
Victor Frankenstein then spends, like, forever telling Walton all of the minutia of his life and crimes with such a minimal level of empathy or remorse except for the consequences Victor has received that you just want to quietly slip Walton a book on narcissistic abuse. Just as a head’s up.
Victor Frankenstein, who isn’t a doctor. He’s a med student who fucks around and finds out, yet somehow still thinks the world is unfair to him specifically.
And then! He dies! And Walton is just sitting there, having had the ultimate vicarious trauma experience, alone once again. And he thinks to himself, well, that was something. Ravings of a mad man I hope —oh, nope, there’s Adam burning Victor’s body that he stole. It was all real. Well damn.
It Waits in the Woods Josh Malerman From the Creature Feature collection for Amazon available free through Prime as a member
From the same collection as The Pram by Joe Hill, at 51 pages this novella follows a young woman as she seeks answers about her sister’s disappearance three years before. A budding documentarian, Brenda goes into the wilderness with a theory about a creature there that may be responsible for her sister’s disappearance and death; a death which Brenda has already accepted and which her parents have openly blamed her for. I had initially been reading this story them stopped myself and started over because I felt I was reading it too quickly. It’s definitely a story to be savored so that the build is satisfying. It follows traditional horror novel plotting and slow, crawling progress buffered by world building. On my second reading, I really enjoyed the way the world was plotted. It’s not something to listen to idly as an audio book or skim over. It also featured a first If seen in quite a while—an actual goddamn monster. Harkening to creature features it’s a wonderful homage to horror stories of 70s film when much of mainstream horror transitioned from Universal Monsters to the unknown, human, and perverse.
You Feel it Just Below the Ribs Jeffrey Cranor, Janina Matthewson
Wheewwww I loved it. I struggled with it a bit because it feels at times too unreal and at other times too close to home, which I imagine is exactly the sliver of reality is seeks to exist between. I have realized something very crucial in reading this book; I would follow Jeffrey Cranor into the ocean. Which I imagine would be terrifying for him, but I love the biting realism in this dystopian thriller. Typically, I am not a fan of books told in journal format, it’s just not my preference, but this was excellently written, sci-fi horror. I absolutely recommend it for people who like darker, more realistic portrayals in their fiction.
A copy paste disclaimer! :There are several stories available for free download if you are already subscribed to amazon prime, and I took advantage of that recently and thought I’d spend November telling you about the short stories and novellas I picked up that I liked best and thought was worth the read.
These tend to be stories commissioned by Amazon and put into collections by Amazon
Okay, back to review:
From the first line I knew I would like this one; a horror story wrapped in a failed marriage and the other way around.
At 58 pages, it’s a very quick read. The pacing and characterization is a lovely build to the end of the story; the twists are both obvious and not, telescoped well but always leaving the reader with doubts.
It’s another of those stories that is difficult to talk about without spoiling the whole of it, so very worth the read.
I honestly started to say more but am not sure how to without giving it away haha
The characters are extremely well done and feel organic, even under their bizarre circumstances.
A copy paste disclaimer! :There are several stories available for free download if you are already subscribed to amazon prime, and I took advantage of that recently and thought I’d spend November telling you about the short stories and novellas I picked up that I liked best and thought was worth the read.
These tend to be stories commissioned by Amazon and put into collections by Amazon
Okay, back to review:
Of the stories I read, this one has stuck with me a long time. The narrative is immediately engaging, the characters relatable and enjoyable. It’s one of those stories difficult to talk about without spoiling it because you want to pull others into this same world that you were pulled into. The gimmick of two con artists, one being utilized for and also taking advantage of the ignorance of those around them because of their race; the communication with spirits and motif of revenge all check very important boxes to me. Of the ghosts stories I’ve read, which is not a small number, several of the images in this story are so evocative that they’re well stuck in my craw. I absolutely would recommend this story to anyone and at 30 pages it leaves you both wanting more and satisfied.
There are several stories available for free download if you are already subscribed to amazon prime, and I took advantage of that recently and thought I’d spend November telling you about the short stories and novellas I picked up that I liked best and thought was worth the read.
These tend to be stories commissioned by Amazon and put into collections by Amazon
The Pram is a short story about miscarriage and grief, particularly the grief of the protagonist Willy who feels overshadowed and pressured to resolve grief for his wife Marianne, only to realize he hasn’t resolved anything for himself.
I thought it was an honest treatment of a difficult topic, one I’ve dealt with personally and which I normally immediately stop reading once child or fetus death is involved.
At 57 pages, it’s a quick read and satisfying as a horror short story. Too often horror short stories are so focused on the twist that they fail to embrace the heart of their topic, particularly when they’re commissioned short stories on demand.
I was thinking about what I could do for my last review of the spooky season and I thought “Did I talk about ‘Yellowface’ yet?” I went back and checked. I haven’t. I need to.
Yellowface by RF Kuang is not billed as a horror story exactly.
It is horror, I would argue. The ‘satirical novel’ (read:horror) takes a deep dive into the publishing industry, white privilege, racism, the persecution complex of white authors, the dismissive attitudes toward Asian voices, the tokenism and more in a way that is so educational, so detailed, as to be exhaustive.
It follows a white woman who, deeply jealous and entitled, steals her successful Asian friend’s manuscript after her death and publishes it. It examines the lengths to which this white woman goes, publishing under a misleadingly Asian sounding name, claiming that anyone can write any topic with her own touch of persecution, justifying her theft by claiming her research into being able to edit the novel makes her an expert, having a sensitivity reader fired, dealing with the deceased’s family and friends, destroying evidence, and turning up in Asian cultural centers trying to promote “her” writing.
As it all unravels, the novel is full of suspense and agitation. And I just have to say….have you ever read a novel and thought, ‘The author thinks about this all of the time.’ Not ‘the author thinks about this all of the time because obviously she wrote a book about it’ but ‘the author has had this fear and idea curling in the back of her skull for at least a decade, and it is a privilege I have not to have thought about it’? That’s the tone of Yellowface.
Aliactast 
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