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The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet Of Curiosities (2011)

by Ann VanderMeer(Favorite Author)

3.67 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0062004751 (ISBN13: 9780062004758)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Harper Voyager

review 1: Maybe a cute gimmick: a book of short "stories" (or pieces, or whatever) by various name authors, each purporting to be about some weird curio from the collection of a demented collector. Most of it is unreadable garbage, hopelessly twee, or pretentious bullshit, but there were a couple of stories that caught my interest. Unfortunately, being short stories, they ended before anything much really happened and I was disappointed. If you are a bigger fan of short stories than I, you might enjoy this more, or you could track down one of those "America's best short stories" books and probably come out ahead.
review 2: Like the previous Lambshead book, this collection playfully blurs the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, in this case by inviting contributo... morers to present outlandish, fantastic ideas and tales as if they were grave scientific accounts, or sober memoirs, or terse entries in a museum catalogue. The weird, or a sense of the uncanny, are difficult to evoke where abstraction and cleverness have displaced atmosphere and narrative drama, but Tad Williams and China Mieville manage to invent artifacts which are memorably strange; other contributions can be dry and self-indulgent, and are forgotten as soon as one has turned to the next item. Jeffrey Ford offers an excellent story which blithely ignores the constrictions of the editors' premise almost completely. But my highest praise goes to Caitlin R. Kiernan for adhering to the rules while also creating a literally nightmarish narrative. less

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