More Reviews
Jul. 5th, 2007 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustI've been really bad about posting reviews, however short, of the stuff I've been reading...indeed, some of these date back to the WHC, where I picked them up. And I'm feeling very guilty about not yet having posted the first in the bunch. So here, without much ado and certainly without much forethought, they are:
Scratching the Surface is Michael Kelly's collection of short stories, from Crowswing Books. Very nicely put together. As with Richard Gavin, the "Get off my jello tree!" old lady in me wants to point out that sometimes things could really stand to be longer than 3,000/4,000 words; indeed, with many of these otherwise outstanding little slices of creep and despair, I feel like they need to be longer, so that their main characters (in particular) can have space to develop the slightly more novelistic personality and depth which will make them more than just a plot-furthering linchpin for everything else going on around them. But you have to keep to the market standard, and I get that. Actually, a few of the sketchier entries nevertheless manage to pack an immense amount of power into one truncated punch: See "Seas of Ash and Sorrow", "The Man Who Ate Moths", "When Children Weep", "A Place of Stone and Thorns", etc. But this makes the truly integrated pieces pop out even more distinctly: The bracketting title story and final piece ("Worse Things", which is heartbreaking in its compact dread), "Warm Wet Circles", "Wolves and Angels". I've gotta say, though, there are no real clinkers here. And God knows, there are far worse things to want when you get to the end of narrative than "more, please".
We move on now to two entries from Cutting Block Press--Butcher Shop Quartet and Tattered Souls. What a huge improvement in both packaging and content occurs between the two! Editor Frank J. Hutton seems to be mainly interested in "extreme" horror, that most difficult-to-define of qualities. In the first anthology, longer does NOT turn out the be better for Boyd E. Harris's interminable "The Last of Boca Verde" and Clinton Green's stretched-thin "The House on the Hill" (though if you ever wanted to read something Lovecraftian set during WWI, here's your chance). Michael Stone's "The Reconstruction of Kaspar Clark" has a great sting in its tail, though, and the best is saved for last: A.T. Andras' odd little goth-lyric fairytale "Darkling Child", which occasionally touches on Arthur Machen's offhanded weirdness.
All the entries in Tattered Souls, meanwhile, are just long enough to support/develop their initial premises--six stories to Quartet's four--and the book contains three stand-outs: Jeff Crook's Pulp Grotesque "The Monkey Skin Cloak", a delirium of period-perfect racist freakery, M.E. Palmer's "Clipped Dirty Wings", a goddess-avatar tale which packs an intensity and power most other down-in-the-depths, slice o' human misery stories can only scrabble at...and the piece de resistance, Matt Walace's "The End of Flesh", a cannibal Future Noir set after animals have become extinct, making humans the only viable source of fresh meat. A note at the back says somebody's trying to making it into a film, and man, I'd buy THAT for a dollar. Or maybe more.;)
Okay, more later. But at least that's a start.
Scratching the Surface is Michael Kelly's collection of short stories, from Crowswing Books. Very nicely put together. As with Richard Gavin, the "Get off my jello tree!" old lady in me wants to point out that sometimes things could really stand to be longer than 3,000/4,000 words; indeed, with many of these otherwise outstanding little slices of creep and despair, I feel like they need to be longer, so that their main characters (in particular) can have space to develop the slightly more novelistic personality and depth which will make them more than just a plot-furthering linchpin for everything else going on around them. But you have to keep to the market standard, and I get that. Actually, a few of the sketchier entries nevertheless manage to pack an immense amount of power into one truncated punch: See "Seas of Ash and Sorrow", "The Man Who Ate Moths", "When Children Weep", "A Place of Stone and Thorns", etc. But this makes the truly integrated pieces pop out even more distinctly: The bracketting title story and final piece ("Worse Things", which is heartbreaking in its compact dread), "Warm Wet Circles", "Wolves and Angels". I've gotta say, though, there are no real clinkers here. And God knows, there are far worse things to want when you get to the end of narrative than "more, please".
We move on now to two entries from Cutting Block Press--Butcher Shop Quartet and Tattered Souls. What a huge improvement in both packaging and content occurs between the two! Editor Frank J. Hutton seems to be mainly interested in "extreme" horror, that most difficult-to-define of qualities. In the first anthology, longer does NOT turn out the be better for Boyd E. Harris's interminable "The Last of Boca Verde" and Clinton Green's stretched-thin "The House on the Hill" (though if you ever wanted to read something Lovecraftian set during WWI, here's your chance). Michael Stone's "The Reconstruction of Kaspar Clark" has a great sting in its tail, though, and the best is saved for last: A.T. Andras' odd little goth-lyric fairytale "Darkling Child", which occasionally touches on Arthur Machen's offhanded weirdness.
All the entries in Tattered Souls, meanwhile, are just long enough to support/develop their initial premises--six stories to Quartet's four--and the book contains three stand-outs: Jeff Crook's Pulp Grotesque "The Monkey Skin Cloak", a delirium of period-perfect racist freakery, M.E. Palmer's "Clipped Dirty Wings", a goddess-avatar tale which packs an intensity and power most other down-in-the-depths, slice o' human misery stories can only scrabble at...and the piece de resistance, Matt Walace's "The End of Flesh", a cannibal Future Noir set after animals have become extinct, making humans the only viable source of fresh meat. A note at the back says somebody's trying to making it into a film, and man, I'd buy THAT for a dollar. Or maybe more.;)
Okay, more later. But at least that's a start.
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Date: 2007-07-05 03:08 pm (UTC)Wow! Thanks very much for reading the book, and for the kind words. I really do appreciate you taking the time. Your book is still on my TBR pile, though, truth be told, I've dipped into it. It's lush and poetic and decadent in all the good ways.
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Date: 2007-07-06 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-05 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-06 02:00 pm (UTC)