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Your House Is On Fire, Your Children All Gone (2012)

by Stefan Kiesbye(Favorite Author)

3.24 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0143121464 (ISBN13: 9780143121466)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Penguin Books

review 1: Definitely one I wanted to like more than I actually did. On paper it all works perfectly for me: creepy village, middle of nowhere, buried small-town secrets, weird gothic happenings, unsettling children? All these things are a big yes but sadly I was... mostly unmoved. I'd say this is about a 3.5 but I didn't like it enough to round up to an even 4 stars, so 3 it is. Things about this are wonderful: there are some great eerie moments, and the Shirley Jackson-type tone is delightfully disturbing, but I think the short story format really undercuts what might have been something far more awesome. The series of child narrators all blur together and don't seem to have any voices or traits separate from one another, and it's very easy to lose track of which character is retel... moreling which event, and who knows what. (Another thing I'll chalk up to personal preference: I found the most memorable stories to be the ones where the lines between supernatural events and plain old people-being-terrible were ambiguous; the stories where there wasn't even a hint of a supernatural element were a lot less interesting.) Basically, this had all the ingredients I was looking for in a book, but it ended up being less than the sum of its parts. By no means was it bad, exactly; I think I just expected more.
review 2: Sort of a modern day Grimm's tales...small village in Germany re-visited by one of the villagers who has come back for a funeral and then the re-telling of the stories of his childhood. Man's inhumanity to man!! The brutality of basic instincts! Memorable, but discomforting. I "liked" it because I thought it was well done, but it's not a likeable book if you consider the meaning of like as in pleasurable, however it certainly uncovered an aspect of consistent human behavior. less

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