Lost Minds, Wandering Souls 4 by George Adamczyk

Rating: 4/5, good

I really enjoyed this book! It’s comprised of four short horror stories with plenty of blood, guts, and chaos.

In the first one, “Emma”, a group of “party girls” get terrorized by a haunted virtual assistant.

In the second, “A Grave Situation”, an abusive executive is dogged by undead unfortunates he took advantage of.

In the third, “Slime Dwellers”… if I say what the premise is, it’ll spoil it, so I’ll just say that it’s as sexy as it is scary.

In the fourth, “Gnome More, Gnome More”… I also won’t spoil that one, but it does literally involve garden gnomes and it’s equal parts humor and carnage. It also involves an abusive boyfriend getting his just deserts.

I met George Adamczyk at Las Vegas Comic Con and he described this installment of the Lost Minds, Wandering Souls anthology series as similar to Tales of the Crypt, but while I was reading it I thought of it as “adult Goosebumps” because that was the horror anthology series of my generation (though I do want to watch Tales of the Crypt someday based on how much I liked this book!). He also took care to spell my name correctly when he signed my copy even though Sayre is a bit hard to hear or spell, so points for that!

These stories are pretty simple thematically. Most of them are tales of karmic justice being delivered via supernatural means. The morality is mostly clear (especially in “A Grave Situation”), with evil people getting what they deserve, so it’s more comforting than challenging.

The only part where I raise an eyebrow is where the “party girls” have bad things happen to them, but I’m not sure if that was intended to be a moralistic thing because they liked to party or if it was just mixing horror and sex appeal for maximum interest. I liked the female characters because they were pretty realistic, reasonable, and relatable. There is a bit of sexualization, but they are firmly subjects (as opposed to objects) in their narratives. “Slime Dwellers” and “Gnome More, Gnome More” have a bit of moral ambiguity as well, but I can’t discuss them without spoiling.

Continue reading “Lost Minds, Wandering Souls 4 by George Adamczyk”

Eversion by Alastair Reynolds

Rating: 4/5, good

Eversion is the mathematical problem of turning a sphere inside out without breaking it. In the 2022 book Eversion, the crew of a ship finds a mysterious structure that appears to be in the middle of that process of turning inside out. The protagonist Silas Coade, the ship’s doctor, is trapped in a Groundhog’s Day cycle of repeatedly dying and reawakening into a similar scenario a century or so later until he figures out important truths about the building, the crew, and himself.

The characters really turned me off at first, but they grew on me over time. I almost put this book down after the Russian financier of the expedition (Topolsky) said some very racist things about the Mexican explosives expert (Ramos). It reminded me of some of the more iffy parts of The Sparrow where the narration discusses the main character’s Spanish and indigenous heritage almost as a symbol of colonization or the West mixing with the exotified other rather than a mundane fact of life.

It made me wonder, “Why is scifi being weird about mestizos again? It’s strange enough that it happened once!” What furthered this impression was that Silas dismisses it weakly, only telling Topolsky not to breathe on his patient (what makes it worse is that Ramos was unconscious and undergoing cranial surgery at the time). In retrospect it makes sense because Silas didn’t want to anger his employer and his character is not the type to speak up, but since this happens so close to the beginning of the novel I wasn’t sure if Silas (or the author) shared Topolsky’s opinions about Ramos.

I wasn’t sure if I should keep reading or not, so I read reviews and watched a video by Raf Blutaxt raving about it and saying that there was a twist that plays on the main character’s sexism later in the novel, so I decided to give it a chance to see if it would get more woke. I wouldn’t really say it’s woke (the twist mentioned is a fairly minor point because the character in question is mostly out of the narrative by then) but all the characters do get a lot more sympathetic except for Topolsky, who becomes a clear villain.

Continue reading “Eversion by Alastair Reynolds”

Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw

Rating: 4/5, good

If you’re looking for a comfort read with supernatural characters, look no further…

Strange Practice is about Dr. Greta Helsing, daughter of Wilfert Helsing. Greta inherited her father’s practice when he died a few years ago. She works to keep the undead in good “health”—in this universe, vampires and ghouls can suffer from the same ailments as human beings.

Enter the Rosary Ripper, a ruthless murderer who leaves cheap plastic rosaries on their victims…

Greta treats Varney, a vampire who got attacked by a group of monks that the heroes suspect are the group behind the Rosary Ripper’s murders. Greta teams up with her old supernatural friends Fastitocalon and Ruthven as well as Ruthven’s human friend August Cranswell to get to the bottom of the scourge sweeping London.

This is a pretty simple story and the prose is just kind of okay, but it’s fun. This is a very character-driven, female-gaze kind of series with lots of the hurt/comfort trope (to the point where it gets a little bit repetitive at times…). The plot could fit into a Buffy episode and moves a touch slowly (especially if you’re a slow reader like me).

There are a couple moving scenes, like when Greta is thinking about her father:

“She had asked her father how he could bear the entire responsibility alone, how do you stand it, how do you know you’re not going to make mistakes with no one else there to help you, and he had laughed a little. I don’t, he had said. I don’t know for a fact. But I know that I know how to do this job. I trust in my own skill and experience to help me make good decisions. When it comes right down to it, you must be able to trust yourself, before asking your patients to place their trust in you. If you cannot do that, do not pursue medicine as a career. She had shivered. But I don’t trust myself, yet. Not entirely. You will get there, Gretalina. Confidence comes with practice and reinforcement of learning. You have the right kind of brain for this, and you also—he had tapped her solemnly on the chest—have the right kind of heart.”

Greta is very much still missing her father and looking for guidance from other older men around her like Fastitocalon and Ruthven. Greta’s closeness to Fastitocalon is really sweet and if I read the later books, it’ll be to experience more of their cuteness (and find out what happens with Greta and Varney, as Varney’s attracted to her but it doesn’t develop much in this volume…).

The dry humor at parts is really fun, too:

There wasn’t a lot in the literature about the use of antidepressants in ghouls.

I’d say this is a satisfying first installment. It’s a complete story arc that sets up the worldbuilding, characters, and structural expectations but leaves the reader with a few residual questions. If you don’t mind the slowness or simplicity, I’d recommend it! (If those things bother you, I would skip it, though)

Best of Apex Magazine

apex-magazineEdited by Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner

Rating: 5/5

This story collection totally blew me away. There are 21 stories and they’re all so good. The thing I like about them most is they’re all really unique. Genre fiction can get a little formulaic sometimes, so I think it’s good to shake it up.

Apex Magazine has been publishing issues for about 10 years. They used to sell the hard copies at Barnes & Noble, but it’s ebook only now. This collection was published in January 2016, so it collects the best of 7 years of Apex Magazine.

I’ll give just a short peek at the contents (all of the stories are available to read on the Apex website): Continue reading “Best of Apex Magazine”

Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Ueda Akinari

moonlightandrain

Rating: 3/5, average

(note: I’m rating my experience of reading this, not the quality, which is phenomenal because it’s a Japanese classic. It is beautifully written and painstakingly translated, but quite dry.)

Tales of Moonlight and Rain in a nutshell:

  • Ghosts of thwarted noblemen and mistreated women
  • Decrepit thatched-roof houses
  • Lovers undeterred by death
  • Sages, saints, fools, and demons
  • Transformations into fish or serpents
  •  Evil spirits that must be exorcised with traditional magic
  • Desire corrupting souls and turning them away from the Buddhist path

Tales of Moonlight and Rain is a Japanese classic written by Ueda Akinari in 1776 in Japanese prose. It is a collection of nine supernatural tales based on stories written in vernacular Chinese during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Tales of Moonlight and Rain helped establish the yomihon (reading book) tradition, which demonstrated that vernacular Japanese prose could be used to high literary effect (previous to the yomihon movement, Japanese literary works were written in Chinese). Continue reading “Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Ueda Akinari”

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

annihilationRating: 4/5, good

I saw the movie version of Annihilation before I read the book, and I really liked it. The movie does a great job of balancing its horror and science fiction aspects, and has a lot of great terrifying and surreal moments. The book is more Lovecraftian than the movie. It has more out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye creepiness whereas the movie has more present-threat scares. The book also explores the psychology aspect a bit more than the movie, with hypnosis and perception being major themes.

The book and the movie share the same basic idea: there’s a place called Area X, which is surrounded by a strange forcefield, within which living things change in eerie ways. Four female professionals: a biologist (the main character), a psychologist (the semi-antagonist), a surveyor, and an anthropologist are on an expedition to find out what Area X is and what is happening to the plants and animals within it. In both the book and the movie, the biologist’s husband, who went on the expedition prior to hers, returns and then falls ill, and this motivates her to go to Area X to find out what happened to him. Continue reading “Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer”

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

 

kangRating: 5/5, excellent

Have you ever felt like a book was written specifically for you?

That’s how I felt reading Han Kang’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Vegetarian. I’ve been a vegetarian on and off over the years, and depressed sometimes, and I feel a kinship with Yeong-hye, the protagonist of this book.

Yeong-hye is a young Korean woman who has recurring dreams about dead animals. These dreams lead her to become a vegan in real life, a choice which alienates her family. In Korean society, conspicuous consumption of meat is a display of wealth, and rejecting that expectation is almost unthinkable.

The Vegetarian is a short book (around 190 pages), divided up into 3 sections that portray Yeong-hye’s veganism in a different way: in the first section, her veganism is shown as strange and humorous, in the second it’s strange and erotic, in the third it’s strange and self-destructive. Continue reading “The Vegetarian by Han Kang”

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft

The-Dream-Quest-of-Unknown-Kadath

Rating: 3/5

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a novella of about 40,000 words written by Lovecraft in 1927. It’s one of his later stories, and it incorporates a lot of the monsters he created in earlier works. Even though it has the usual Lovecraftian horror suspects like Nyarlathotep, the night-gaunts, and the gibbering Outer Gods, Dream-Quest is more of an adventure story than a horror story. Most of the book is Randolf Carter (the protagonist from “The Statement of Randolf Carter”) travelling across the dreamlands and talking with its various peoples and species.

It’s interesting to see how the Lovecraftian monsters go about their normal lives and see where they fit into the mythos, but this novella is almost boring enough to make you want to beat your head against the wall. There are two battles/skirmishes, and Carter gets kidnapped twice and almost dies once, but there’s not a lot of real tension because the characters aren’t fleshed out enough to get invested in. The bulk of the book is descriptions of places and races, but there’s not a whole lot going on, so it can get very boring. For someone who’s familiar with Lovecraft, though, you get a little bit of excitement from recognizing characters or creatures from other stories. Continue reading “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft”

The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

islandofdrmoreauH.G. Wells is my favorite author, but when I tried to read this in high school I had to put it down after a few chapters. The first bit of it is extremely slow and if you’re not reading it closely it comes off as very racist. I must have been really tired the first time I read it because I thought Montgomery’s manservant M’ling was a black guy who was being described in a grotesquely animalistic way. The second time I read it it was for book group, so I persevered through those parts and discovered that M’ling is actually part animal and that explains the awkward descriptions, like this one:

I had paused half-way through the hatchway, looking back, still astonished beyond measure at the grotesque ugliness of this black-faced creature. I had never beheld such a repulsive and extraordinary face before, and yet– if the contradiction is credible – I experienced at the same time an odd feeling that in some way I had already encountered exactly the features and gestures that now amazed me.

It’s still probably kind of racist but it’s not (as I’d thought) an Englishman meeting a black man for the first time and describing him like an animal. Well, that solves some of my cognitive dissonance about H.G. Wells… Continue reading “The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells”

Space is Just a Starry Night by Tanith Lee

spaceisjustastarrySpace is Just a Starry Night – a book about the supernatural, space, aliens, advanced technology, and lonely, lonely women.

Tanith Lee’s new collection of short stories is divided into five parts, titled: Myth Remembered, Burning Bright, Falling Angels, Death’s Door, and Exiles.

Myth Remembered

A vampire story and a werewolf story, but in space! Vampire/robot and werewolf/moon-ghost. The vampire story has some excellent descriptions of aliens. The werewolf story has some nice ethereal imagery, but it’s a little hard to follow the plot as it gets lost in style.

Burning Bright

Three harrowing tales of ugly, lonely, dangerous women. The first tale is about a rich but ugly daughter of a beautiful couple who is charmed into marrying a thief. The second is about a homely, shy artist whose great-ancestor is revived from cryogenic sleep, and suddenly she has to share her tiny apartment with the oddly powerful woman. The third is about a frumpy, timid woman incongruously named Appolonia Hartley, who takes a cruise by the sun and magically becomes more beautiful the longer she spends bathing in the rays. Continue reading “Space is Just a Starry Night by Tanith Lee”