I read Shibuyama’s review of The Merry Spinster before I got into the book and braced myself for horror. I don’t like horror (I get nightmares easily, apparently) but I’d heard good things and still wanted to read it. This was a case of bracing myself and then it really not being as bad as I was thinking so yay! Played the expectations game and won. It helped that the book opens with a retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid, the OG little mermaid which is […]
Murky and Dim
This Fritz Leiber novel, published in 1977, seems both of and outside of its time. It appeared after The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and Carrie, three books that reinvigorated the genre, but it reaches back to earlier traditions. The slim but still overly long novel tells of Franz Westen, a San Francisco resident who catches sight, through his binoculars, of a strange form. After some scene-setting, he sets off to track the creature down. Looking back at his apartment through those same binoculars, he’s startled to […]
Way more involved than I originally anticipated, but still good!
I’m not entirely sure where to start this review. I guess I’ll start at the beginning, and how I got into reading this book. I’m one of those people who sees that a new movie / TV show is based on a book and wants to immediately read the book. It’s happened so far with: A Handmaid’s Tale, A Wrinkle in Time, The Darkest Minds, and this book. I’m sure there were others too! I always want to read the source material before I see […]
Fractal and fractured
The work this book most reminded me of wasn’t actually a book; despite having no similarities in characters or plot, the FEELING it left me with was exactly like the movie It Follows. I was done reading this and had the same queasy wrongness that I did after watching the dissonant film about a sexually transmitted haunting. Sweet Lamb of Heaven follows a woman who begins having auditory hallucinations at the birth of her daughter and the group of fellow sufferers in the hotel where […]
The implacable horror of isolation
There are books that speak to you. Books that reach down into the core of your inner being to play the delicate chords of your heart strings. Books that stay with you, becoming a passenger for life, indelibly connecting you to a particular place and time, like some kind of existential anchor of permanence in a sea of change. Moby Dick is one such book, for me. That book haunts me. It’s the girl I had a crush on in high school but was too afraid […]
Killer Queen
I honest to the heavens thought I’d reviewed this one. The short version is: True crime fans/Murderinos will probably enjoy this one. I’m not sure anyone else will; the subject matter is pretty grim and the person in question warped like HH Holmes. Lizzie Borden may have killed her father and stepmother with an axe, but Belle Gunness killed a hell of a lot more, including her own children.
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