An assemblage of horror tales and somber verses that frighten and fascinate.
Supernatural menaces, body thieves, and ferocious killers pervade Allen’s grim collection of stories and poems.
John Starkey, in the tale “Strange Wisdoms of the Dead,” sails a rotting ship out to sea carrying victims of the Plague. Far away from the surviving villagers of Bliss, he can set the vessel afire and burn the corpses. Along the way, however, something else takes the helm, turning Starkey into a passenger with no idea of the ship’s new destination. These assembled short stories feature such spooky conventions as ghosts, a witch, and someone trying to bring a creature to life, but the prevailing theme of this book is body horror—grotesque depictions of torn or modified flesh and impossibly contorted bodies. That’s just where the title story leads, with Aaron Friedrich and his online publication for Owlswick County; he’s always looking for material for his website, and Aaron’s own town of Grandy Springs, Virginia, has an especially bizarre history. Locals like Aaron bear scars on each side of their faces but have no recollection whatsoever as to what caused them. As Aaron inches closer to a terrifying hidden truth, he may prefer to forget all over again. Characters from “Slow Burn” also pop up in the equally gruesome and novella-length “The Comforter,” which takes place in another Virginia town. The story focuses on 13-year-old foster kid Maddy, who’s receiving cryptic notes (“my mom stole your mom’s skin”) stuck to her school desk. Even with someone looking out for her, Maddy may be unable to elude the terrors awaiting her.
It won’t surprise readers familiar with Allen’s work (Aftermath of an Industrial Accident: Stories, 2020) that he doesn’t shy away from violent bits. Descriptions include viscera, teeth (not just in mouths), and tortured limbs of all shapes and lengths. Many passages are outright disconcerting even out of context: “She fills his mouth and plugs his throat, his tongue slapping uselessly against a column that tastes of blood and raw river silt.” The author’s gleefully vibrant prose animates these stories; this also holds true for the collection’s free-verse poetry. The poem “The Windows Breathe” gives life to an old house with “hungry shuddering groans” and a hall that’s “rounded, glistening, so much like a gullet”; “The Sacrifices” makes an abstraction tangible, as “shriveled souls brushed our skin, / like dried leaves.” As in many works in this genre, the monster or brooding presence often reveals itself only at the end or opts to remain ambiguous. This narrative approach injects these stories with nerve-racking anticipation and dread over what may happen to characters like friends Andi and Celine in “Machine Learning,” in which an early-morning casting call leads to a mysterious detour. Owen’s black-and-white digital illustrations accompany each of the stories and poems, though there are only five unique pieces with multiple repeats throughout. These stark images (a monster peeking over a horizon; tendrils emerging from a skeletal chest) nevertheless enrich the dark tales herein.
An assemblage of horror tales and somber verses that frighten and fascinate.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781956522037
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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