Everything Is Teeth by Evie Wyld (My Rating: 3/5) This is a graphic novel (no surprise there, as I’ve been reading a ton of them lately) that serves as a memoir for part of Wyld’s childhood. She has an obsession with sharks that is born of a fearful respect for them. There are tidbits about her brother having some difficulties, about her relationship with her father, and so on. But it’s all so amorphous and flimsy with the focus being laser-sighted on sharks that it doesn’t come together like I’d hoped. I wanted the shark metaphor to feel stronger. It’s there, but it doesn’t make the story rise to the greatness I wanted of it. More it makes it stagnate. I can appreciate that the style was meant to be poetic, but it didn’t really work for me overall.
Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler (My Rating: 5/5) This is a collection of Octavia Butler’s short works. In her introduction, she explains that she never felt comfortable writing short stories. She felt more suited to novels. And yet these are amazing, like all of her work has been so far as I’ve made my way through it. Some of the most original, shocking, strange, and beautiful pieces of work I’ve ever read.
In particular, the title story “Bloodchild” stands out as a challenging piece. With each story, she gives an afterword that explains her intentions and her inspiration. In this case, it’s up for debate if she achieved what she intended. She sees a love story in “Bloodchild”. I saw a horror. A sad one at that, for the fact that there was clearly some love there. Either way, it’s a story that forces you to think about the boundaries (or lack of) and strangeness of love. I also highly recommend this collection for “Amnesty” and her two non-fiction essays that give some rare insight into who she was as a writer and a person.
Painted Devils by Robert Aickman (My Rating: 3/5) This was a gothic horror short story collection, and while that sounds like you might understand immediately what that means, it’s very different from most things in the genre. The scares in the stories tend to be very strange and not altogether explained, which makes your mind turn on them long after you’ve put the book down. In particular, “Ravissante” and “The View” are excellent stories worth reading the entire collection for.
I also have to admit that I didn’t love how he dealt with female characters. One, “The School Friend”, was negative enough that it ruined the entire story for me. He also tended to have black characters pop up in the background in ways that were cliche to horror at the time and not complimentary in the slightest. Welcome to the things you have to endure when you start delving into older work, but it unfortunately revealed the laziness of Aickmen’s writing. I’d still recommend the collection, and I want to seek more of his work, but with the knowledge that these things slip in.
DNFs
Hemlock Grove by Brian McGreevy. I wanted to read the book before I tried out the Netflix series of the same name. It turns out this might’ve been a mistake. The writing itself was trying very hard for lyrical, literary prose and mainly just came off as highly pretentious. The story is narrated by the book’s killer, which begs the question how they could know all the things they know and be everywhere they were without anyone suspecting them in the first place.
And those are minor nitpicks. The much more major problem at hand was Peter. A Romani werewolf who is only ever referred to, so far as I managed to get into this book (100 pages), as a Romani slur. You know the one. Unfortunately, he also fits into the most amount of horrible stereotypes possible. He’s a thief who does drugs, turns into a werewolf, is super spiritual and mystical and believes in every religion, and has a sixth sense so that he can predict Roman is a vampire. It all had the effect of making me wince every time the story shifted to his perspective. McGreevy even went out of his way to have Peter constantly think about what a nomad he is and how he can never be caged and must always roam. How he may not be rich, but he’s the king of his world! Ugh. Okay. Enough. He clearly just wanted to write someone he viewed as being exotic and wild and mythical, and it’s not okay.
I officially didn’t want to see how bad this could get. Not when I was warned a rape by the other lead was in this story’s future. Nope. Already not handled well enough for me to proceed in that direction.
As you can tell, I didn’t read much. I started getting into a slump. Too many books that were meh in a row. It does it to me every time. Hoping to climb out of it in December. Until then, thanks for reading and happy geeking!
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