Review: Two Plays for Voices (repost from GoodReads, 2016)

Two Plays for Voices by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This full cast audio CD includes 2 short stories previously published in Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions. There are some gruesome bits in both stories, but I didn't find them gratuitous. The highlight is definitely "Murder Mysteries" which I think is the best of Gaiman’s short stories that he's written outside of comics.

"Snow, Glass, Apples" is a retelling of Snow White, from the stepmother’s point of view, in which (view spoiler)[Snow White is a vampire (hide spoiler)] It’s elegant and creepy - this version really isn’t a children’s story, any more than the original was. The basic idea is one I’ve seen before, though. Tanith Lee did it first in "Red As Blood," Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer although that one has a very different ending. I'd probably give this 3 stars if I were rating it separately.

"Murder Mysteries" is a story within a story. In the frame story, the narrator, a British man, remembers a time when he was stuck in Los Angeles while trying to get back home. He briefly hooks up with an old girlfriend, and after leaving her apartment he meets an old man who tells him a story in exchange for some cigarettes. The old man claims that he was once the angel Raguel, charged with carrying out the Lord’s vengeance. He explains how he investigated the first crime in the history of the universe, the murder of an angel in the Silver City, the precursor of Heaven. There was no obvious motive, so there was no obvious suspect -- but Raguel was willing to interview everyone in the City if he had to.

The full cast performance is absolutely captivating, and the eerie music is great.

"Perhaps it is true that all that happens is in accordance with Your Will, and thus it is good. But sometimes You leave blood on Your instruments."

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Review: The House on the Borderland

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The House on the Borderland was first published in 1908. This is my entry for the Novella category in the Back to the Classics challenge. According to GoodReads it is 156 pages, under the 250 page limit for the category. It is also my second book for the Readers Imbibing Peril challenge (http://readersimbibingperil.com). I listened to it as an audiobook from LibriVox.

Synopsis: Two guys visiting Ireland find a manuscript in the ruins of an old house. It is a diary from the last inhabitant of the house, an old man who had lived in the house with his sister and his dog. Most of the story is the contents of the diary.

I read, and, in reading, lifted the Curtains of the Impossible that blind the mind, and looked out into the unknown.

What I liked:
* The descriptions! This book is definitely more about establishing a mood than about character or plot.
* The sense of mystery. The house is a "house on the borderland", a portal to other dimensions. The house is besieged by swine-like monsters, and after that it gets weird. A substantial chunk of the book describes a journey over vast distances of time and space.

Another vast space went by, and the whole enormous flame had sunk to a deep, copper color. Gradually, it darkened, from copper to copper-red, and from this, at times, to a deep, heavy, purplish tint, with, in it, a strange loom of blood.

Review: Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), also known as Koizumi Yakumo after gaining Japanese citizenship, was best known for his books about Japan. He was born in Greece and raised in England, and moved to Japan in 1890. Kwaidan is a book of Japanese ghost stories. The last three chapters are studies on Chinese and Japanese folklore about insects (butterflies, ants, and mosquitoes). Most of the tales are collected and translated from old Japanese texts. one of the stories -- Yuki-onna, or The Snow-Woman -- was told to him by a farmer in Musashi Province, and Hearn could not determine whether it had been recorded before.

There are twenty stories in this book. I enjoyed all of them, but my favorites were:

"Of a mirror & a bell:" A woman kills herself and her ghost haunts a bell that was made of the metal from her mirror.
"The dream of Akinosuke:" A man has a dream in which he becomes governor of the mysterious island of Raishu.

Both have twist endings, which I won't spoil.

I found this book on a list of early Gothic novels & ghost stories at GoodReads. This is one of my books for the Back to the Classics Challenge, Category: Classic from Africa, Asia, or Oceania. And it is my first book for RIP XIV, a September-October challenge to read horror, gothic fiction, and suspense.

It is in the public domain, so you can find it at Project Gutenberg.

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Mini-reviews for comics: Monstress Vol. 3 + House of Whispers #1

I don't think I will manage to write longer reviews for either of these, so I have decided to review them together. Both of these comics are fantasy with elements of horror. Monstress is definitely the darker of the two, but if you have read the previous volumes you already know that.



Monstress Vol. 3 Written by Marjorie Liu

Illustrated by Sana Takeda

Synopsis: Maika has spent most of her life learning how to fight, but how will she fare when the only way to save her life...is to make friends?

My rating: ** 2 stars, or maybe 2.5?

I really liked the previous 2 volumes of this series and gave both of them 3 stars. This one was significantly harder to follow than the others, though. The art is excellent as always, but I had a hard time connecting the dots this time. I wish the plot would slow down a bit; in addition to making it easier to follow, that would probably make me more invested in the characters. This is the most recent volume, and I am on the fence about whether I will want to read Volume 4 when it comes out. I still love the alternate Asia fantasy setting, but apart from that I'm a bit frustrated with this one.

previous reviews: vol. 1, vol. 2



House of Whispers (2018-) -- single issue

Written by Nalo Hopkinson

Illustrated by Dominike Stanton

Synopsis: An all-new corner has been added to Neil Gaiman's Sandman Universe!

Welcome to the House of Dahomey, the houseboat of Erzulie Fréda, where the souls of Voodoo followers go when they sleep to beseech the flirtatious and tragic goddess to grant them their hearts' desires and counsel them on their futures and fortunes. When you arrive, you'll find a party is in full swing, filled with all kinds of fabulous and fierce folk, while fish fry and music blasts.

From her bayou, Erzulie scries upon the mortal realm and sees four human girls open a mysterious and magical journal filled with whispers and rumors that, if they spread, could cause a pandemic unlike any the Earth has seen, with the power to release Sopona, the loa lord of infectious disease and cousin to Erzulie, who is currently banned from the human plane.

But even the fearsome Erzulie cannot be of assistance when her dream river turns tumultuous, tossing her house from her realm and into another…
My rating: 3 stars

Review: This is the third of the new Sandman Universe comics (published 2018) that I have read. It should probably be read after the others, The Sandman Universe #1 and The Kingdom (Simon Spurrier). It was established in The Sandman Universe #1 that a new House —the House of Whispers— had joined the Houses of Secret and Mystery in the Dreaming.

House of Whispers #1 picks up this thread of the plot and introduces some new characters. Most of the story takes place at the Voodoo party described above, and the rest takes place inside an apartment where three teenage girls attract the attention of a Voodoo spirit. This single issue is very much an introduction to a larger storyline, but it definitely has potential. The first volume has already been collected, so I will put it on my TBR list.

24 in 48 challenge!: Your Favorite Series post

The current challenge for the 24 in 48 readathon is to post about your favorite series. So... one of my favorite series, which I reviewed before I started a blog, is The Sandman comics series, by Neil Gaiman. It tells the story of Dream of the Endless (aka Morpheus) who rules over the realm of dreams. The other main characters are the rest of the Endless (his siblings, anthropomorphic personifications of various concepts), but there is a large cast of characters, human and otherwise.  I mentioned the series in one of my Top 10 Tuesday posts (Top 10 Platonic Relationships in Books) but my reviews are on GoodReads. I wrote reviews the second time I read the series, which was in 2017. I read it the first time in 2011 (starting with volume 3, which is a good one to start with). Volume 2 would also work, I think. The first volume is maybe not the best place to start; I like it but it’s nowhere near as good as the rest. By the end of volume 4 (Season of Mists) I really loved it. I laughed and cried in all the obvious places. It was fabulous.

It is horror/fantasy, and the main series is ten volumes, of which my favorite is probably Volume 7:Brief Lives.  The series gets pretty gruesome at times, but it’s not the dominant tone of the series; it is, however, disturbing enough that I don't recommend it if you're really averse to horror. (I also really loved vol. 4: Season of Mists and vol. 9: The Kindly Ones.)  There are several spinoffs. My favorite of those is probably The Dream Hunters. There are also several comics in a new series called Sandman Universe, written by other writers.




My favorite character is Morpheus, my second favorite character is either Death or Delirium, and my favorite character who is not one of the Endless is probably Hob Gadling, the man who lives forever for no obvious reason.

My favorite short stories in the series:
Men of Good Fortune (vol. 2, The Dolls House)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (vol. 3, Dream Country)
Thermidor / Ramadan, (vol. 6, Fables & Reflections)
The Dream Hunters (published in its own volume)

Review: Her Body and Other Parties

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a collection of supernatural stories about women and their bodies. My favorite was definitely The Husband Stitch, which retells the urban legend of the Green Ribbon.

Podcastle did an excellent podcast version of this one:

http://podcastle.org/2016/03/29/podca...

In the beginning, I know I want him before he does. This isn’t how things are done, but this is how I am going to do them. I am at a neighbour’s party with my parents, and I am seventeen.

The other highlights were "Eight Bites," about an insecure woman who undergoes bariatric surgery for cosmetic reasons, and becomes haunted (literally) by the parts of herself that she has gotten rid of, and "Real Women Have Bodies," in which women start to mysteriously become invisible for no apparent reason.

Abigail Nussbaum at Asking the Wrong Questions liked "Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU" better than I did, but then, she’s more familiar with its inspiration than I am, which probably makes a difference.

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Review: Tales of Moonlight and Rain

Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Ueda Akinari
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A wonderful collection of strange and elegant stories from 18th century Japan. The title ("Ugetsu Monogatari," or "Rain-Moon Tales") alludes to the beig that mysterious beings appear on cloudy, rainy nights and in mornings with a lingering moon. These nine stories are based on earlier versions of Chinese tales. Ueda Akinari retold these stories in a Japanese setting.

The highlights for me were probably "The Chysanthemum Vow" and "The Reed-Choked House."

For a more detailed review, I think The Guardian has one that gives a good overview of the book:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...

The Japanese word for this kind of tale is kaidan, which means "narrating the strange": a lower-key, more delicate enterprise, in other words, than the bloodcurdling designs of Walpole and his followers, and closer perhaps to what we now think of as "the uncanny".

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The Sunday Post

The Sunday Post is hosted by Kimberly @ Caffeinated Reviewer.


Reviews on this blog: I posted reviews for On Bullshit  and The Red Tree (also posted on GoodReads).

Last week was Horror Week on the GoodReads blog, which posted this list:

The 50 Most Popular Horror Novels on GoodReads (the list also includes some short story collections)

I've read: 

Coraline

Frankenstein

Poe’s stories & poems 

The Haunting of Hill House

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

some Lovecraft stories (but not an entire collection)

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde

On my list: 

The Ballad of Black Tom

House of Leaves

Of the classics on the list, the big one I haven’t read is Dracula, but I don’t know if I want to read it. 

On Sunday I posted The Monday Poem again for All About Books. I picked "Alone" by Edgar Allen Poe. I'm also doing next week. 

I finished Manfred by Lord Byron. It was great, but I still need to write a review. This will be my first book review for the Classics Club and my third review for the Readers Imbibing Peril Challenge. (I think I heard of this play originally from some review of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Manfred is mentioned, and quoted, in that book, but not by name, if I remember right. And JS & MN is one of my favorite books, so this has been on my to-read list for a while. (Also: I really wanted to have some books by the Romantic poets on my Classics Club list, but reading this reminded me that I haven't read Prometheus Unbound, which I completely forgot about when I made my list. So, I'll keep it in mind and maybe if I find something on my list that I don't want to read, I'll read that instead.) 

After that, I think I'll read at least one more book for the RIP Challenge.

Review: The Red Tree

The Red Tree by Caitlín R. Kiernan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been meaning to try a book by and this was the one OverDrive had. The Red Tree is an epistolary novel about a writer with a who rents an old farmhouse near an ancient red oak tree. She ends up committing suicide, and a month later her editor receives a package containing her journal entries, from the time she moved into the farmhouse to the point of her death. The package arrives with no return address and no explanation.

She finds a manuscript about the red tree, written by the previous tenant. Most of the horror is psychological; there may or may not be something supernatural going on. Everything feels quite real, though. Not a whole lot happens, but overall I found this pretty compelling for the characters and the eerie setting.

I’m still not sure what to make of the ending.

I’d like to read more of her work, probably The Drowning Girl.

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Book Beginnings

I tried to post about this yesterday. Not sure what happened to that post, so I'm reposting this.

My book is The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan. When I finish it, this will be book #2 for the RIP Challenge.

"Editor's Preface

I have visited the old Wight Farm and its "red tree," there where the house squats ancient and neglected below the bogs that lie at the southern edge of Ramswool Pond. So, I have been. I have seen it for myself, but just once. Having accepted the task of editing The Red Tree for posthumous publication, it seemed, somehow, like a necessary pilgrimage. A sort of duty, required of me if I were to gain any insight at all into Sarah Crowe's state of mind in those last months of her life. So, I went, and even went alone."

A great beginning, I think. Very mysterious.