i'm pretty unseasoned when it comes to urban fantasy—i've dipped a toe here and there, but it's not a genre that i'm too familiar withNOW AVAILABLE!!!
i'm pretty unseasoned when it comes to urban fantasy—i've dipped a toe here and there, but it's not a genre that i'm too familiar with. to be honest, i'm not clear on what distinguishes urban fantasy from paranormal romance—such a large chunk of the UF market looks to me like romance novels backdropped with cryptids, and romance novels hold little appeal for me. there have been a few UF books i've loved: Borderline, rachel vincent's menagerie trilogy, and i still plan to (someday) try seanan maguire's UF series because i love all her other stuff so much. all of this blahblah is meant to emphasize that i'm no authority on the genre, and i'm sort of reviewing this one in a vacuum here, so i'll leave it to genre-folks to weigh in on how it stacks up against others of its kind. however, i will note that there's no romance-plot in this one, which means more time can be spent on the creatures and blood smears, which i appreciate way more than lingering gazes and sweaty abs. in books.
this is a series opener, so a lot of its focus is directed at introducing the reader to the world. there's definitely YA-reader crossover appeal here: set in a dystopic near-future edinburgh, it features young dreadlocked n' steel-toe-booted zimbabwean/scottish gothpunk ropa—a ghostalker-for-hire who uses her ancestral magic to serve as an intermediary between the dead and the living.
she lives in a teensy caravan with her gran and her little sister izwe, and has a respectfully-distant companionship with a fox named river.
ropa dropped out of school to help pay the bills, but she has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and on her rounds, in-between resolving the last-last wishes of the lingering departed, she listens to audiobooks and podcasts constantly—a true autodidact absorbing whatever she can, and making her own astute value judgments on what she learns.
That's the thing about this learning stuff. No sooner have you picked one thing up before you're sent off after another book. Sometimes the guys I listen to say contradictory things and I have to choose for myself who's right and who's wrong. Other times they're both right and it makes no sense to pick one over the other, so you just have to be pragmatic: pick what works now and discard it for something else when the time comes. That's how I like to operate. Can't afford to put myself in some sort of ideological straitjacket. That's for losers.
it's basically a supernatural missing persons story, populated by the mysterious characters that prowl thru the urban underbelly; urchins and those who seeking to exploit them—like dickens with a bit more dismemberment and a little of this:
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i will absolutely read the rest of the series, because i am intrigued by that library, which was only a small part of this story, and i'm really drawn to ropa's voice and attitude.
if you like reading horror novels for their rich character development where all your questions about their individual and collective NOW AVAILABLE!!!
if you like reading horror novels for their rich character development where all your questions about their individual and collective pasts are answered, move along. if you like reading horror novels because you want to be in the same WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? headspace as the characters for a little while, have a seat—you're gonna love this haunted house story.
a group of five friends reunite in japan for a destination wedding, renting a heian-era mansion where obscenely wealthy golden boy-heir phillip will officiate the sacred union of faiz and talia. it would all be picture-postcard idyllic, except for the fact that the mansion's already got a bride in it—or what's left of one: the bones of a woman whose almost-husband died on the way to their wedding, who had herself buried alive in the foundation to wait for his ghost to come home. and every year after that, another girl was buried alive in the walls, to keep her company.
now, in a typical ghost story, this tragic-wedding backstory would be an unexpected discovery, causing concern and dismay amongst the wedding guests, but here it's a selling point. these particular friends grew up ghosthunting through malaysia together, and blushing bride talia's girlhood dream was to be married in a haunted house. wish = granted.
...the interior didn't smell like it'd had people here, not for a long, long time, and smelled instead like such old buildings do: green and damp and dark and hungry, hollow as a stomach that'd forgotten what it was like to eat.
the dream wedding quickly becomes a nightmare, but not—at first—for the reasons you'd expect. the guests have all brought their own ghosts with them, in the form of old grievances, secrets, flirtations, and conflicts, and none of them seem to like each other very much.
our ingress into the story is cat, a woman whose unspecified mental instability; her 'terminal ennui,' made her suicidal and led to a hospitalization from which she has not really recovered. there's also a particular hostility between her and talia, and with the arrival of lin, a consummate disruptor, the tensions between all of them escalate, fueled by alcohol, creepy games, and, you know, being assailed by a parade of demons.
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there's a lot left unsaid here, when it comes to the characters' shared past, and who has beef with whom and why, but when it comes to the horror elements, every disturbing and grotesque situation is laid out in thick chewy prose, even if i couldn't always wrap my head around the visuals, which is a long-standing me-problem.
although wayyyyyy more graphic than shirley jackson, it's very shirley jackson-esque in the way it sets up the seductive nature of a haunting to a character whose fragile mental health empathizes with the loneliness of the restless dead and catches that yearn:
You know how poets say sometimes that it feels like the whole world is listening?
It was just like that.
Except with a house instead of an auditorium of academics, collars starched, textbooks like scriptures, each chapter color-coded by importance. The manor inhaled. It felt like church. Like the architecture had dulled its heartbeat so it could hear me better, the wood warping, curling around the room like it was a womb, and I was a new beginning. Dust sighed from the ceiling. Spiderwebs fell in umbilical cords, a drape of silver.
It felt like the house talking to me through the mouths of moths and woodlice, the creak of its foundations, the little black summer ants chewing through what remained of our food like we'd left bodies, not balled-up, slickly gleaming cling wrap. The air smelled of raw meat, lard, and bits of seared protein.
I hoped to hell in that moment that she was listening.
Half because I was tired of being unloved, being pitied like a fawn panting its last handful of breaths into a ditch. Half because I hoped it was all true.
A little bit of magic.
Even if it was hungry.
Even if it was a house with rotting bones and a heart made out of a dead girl's ghost, I'd give it everything it wanted just for scraps. Some unabridged attention, some love.
Even if it was from a corpse with blackened teeth.
Anything to feel alive again right now.
it's a dark and icky story, but lin's frequent "You guys go do protagonist shit" meta-commentaries on horror tropes provide some welcome comic relief through the onslaught.
you're gonna be left with some questions at the end: relationships are messy, mental health is messy, hauntings are messy. there are books that do a better job making you understand and care about the characters, but sometimes you just wanna turn over a rock and watch things squirm.
P.S. i want whoever did the cover art for this book...do the work, karen...samuel araya—DEAR SAMUEL ARAYA, please illustrate some of the...occurrences in this book, specifically dolls and kitsune and tanuki k thx.
P.P.S. my ARC informed me that there is a 'preorder campaign with promotional item' for this book, so i RACED to find out what this item could be.
it is one of these:
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i do not have a phone—who has suggestions about how to repurpose one of these things?
this middle grade horror book is a hundred and a half times better and darker than anything i read during m[image]
MAKE SPOOKTOBER GREAT AGAIN!!
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this middle grade horror book is a hundred and a half times better and darker than anything i read during my own middle grade years.
it's a framed tale of seven fox kits who, one chilly autumn night, are hungry for scary stories—far scarier than the babyish ones their dear old fox mum knows.
in what may very well be a br'er rabbit anti-warning, she plants a seed in their little fox heads:
"Sorry to be a disappointment," their mom said, lying down. She paused and looked at the kits with all seriousness. "But you must promise that no matter what you do tonight, you will not go to Bog Cavern."
The kits' ears perked.
"What's...Bog Cavern?" the alpha asked.
"That's where the old storyteller lives," their mom said. "If you go there, you'll hear a story so frightening it will put the white in your tail."
so, obviously, as soon as she falls asleep, the skulk of foxen set straight off for bog cavern, where they do indeed meet the storyteller, who proceeds to tell them not one but seven terrifying stories over the course of the night. in-between each story, we witness his audience dwindle as, one by one, the kits slink back to the safety of their den until only the littlest fox remains to hear the final tale.
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so the book is structured with a setup-introduction that leads into the seven stories, broken up by brief chapters (on black pages!) of the foxes' reactions to or commentary on to the stories, followed by a perfect ties-it-all-together conclusion that is equal parts chilling and heartwarming.
the stories may not be suuuuper scary to a grown woman, but they are certainly dark, and certainly terrifying to the fox kits as they are trick-or-treated to tales of unfortunate fox succumbing to nature's myriad perils: rabies, snakes, hunger, cold, rivers, badgers, rival foxes, as well as to the threats of man: traps, and—inexplicably—beatrix potter, who scoops up assorted woodland creatures to use as unwilling art models until she can draw them well enough to trap their souls in her paintings, before using their lifeless bodies in her whimsical taxidermy projects.
yikes.
the illustrations are beeyootiful, creepily offsetting the harshness of the stories' situations
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the FOWELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the FOURTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your 2019 reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.
if you scroll to the end of the reviews linked here, you will find links to all the previous years’ stories, which means NINETY-THREE FREEBIES FOR YOU!
reviews of these will vary in length/quality depending on my available time/brain power.
so, let’s begin
DECEMBER 21
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I did love you so much sometimes it hurt so much
okay, this was yesterday's story; delayed by me working hard all day, shopping hard all night, feeling triumphant with holiday successes and exhausted by holiday helpermonkeying, getting all the way home only to realize i'd left my keys at work. so i had to lug all my holiday successes back across boroughs to retrieve my keys and lurch all the way back home and no one wants to read a short story and post about a short story after that. all someone wants to do is pee, eat a pint of ice cream while watching garbage teevee, and fall asleep clutching a spoon.
since i had to do two today (LGM)(i will do todays' tonight)(LGM), i thought i'd take an easy path and do another graphic-short story, but far from a throwaway panic-read, this is an excellent story not to be missed. i am usually a little yes-and-no with emily carroll, but this one is a HARD YES.
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the FOWELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the FOURTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your 2019 reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.
if you scroll to the end of the reviews linked here, you will find links to all the previous years’ stories, which means NINETY-THREE FREEBIES FOR YOU!
reviews of these will vary in length/quality depending on my available time/brain power.
so, let’s begin
DECEMBER 16
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that picture is from the very end of the story, and is indicative of the way many human/fox interactions end; frustration and screaming.
i had some other screenshots ready to post, but as always, photobucket let me down. so you'll have to read this one yourself, because waiting for photobucket to play nice again is a fool's errand.
as i bring it back home, it is also a fool's errand to expect a FOX to play nice, although whatever they do, they're gonna do in style.
apart from that lesson, this transformation-based fairytale reminds us that change is bad. there's more to it than that, obviously, but those are the lessons i'm choosing to take away today because mood.
when i first saw this title and cover, i said AWWWWW! and then, over the holiday season, so many people were praising this book in print and in[image]
when i first saw this title and cover, i said AWWWWW! and then, over the holiday season, so many people were praising this book in print and in person, i knew i needed to get a copy for myself. OR, to get a copy for greg because - fox - and read it before gifting it to him. because i am a monster.
for me it's a mixed bag. on the one hand, the artwork is gorgeous
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on the other hand, this
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which just, no. like capital-letter NO with all of my being.
again, i am a monster. this is known.
show me a cute animal, and i melt like an ice cap, but human children inspire nothing outta me but low-level panic, gracelessly suppressed. i'm just...not interested, which makes me feel guilty as a human person and plays its part in my nightly insomniac personal reckoning/shame spiral. also keeping me from sleep is my cynical inability to be charmed by the well-intentioned but facile insights this book offers up to readers. because people are getting genuine comfort from this book and i feel like a dick for rolling my eyes and imagining these words carved on a block of wood and sold for like twenty dollars.
does this book have messages this girl needs to hear? hell yes.
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but then this happens
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and it's like that olde aesop's fable about the signal and the noise.
i am a monster. my dreams aren't coming true, my ship's not coming in, 'at least i have my health' doesn't apply, i'm growing old and bitter, and platitudes really only work for people with vanilla froyo problems.
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if i treat it like a book written in a foreign language, it's great - i can enjoy the pictures, and i can recognize the individual words even though the messages mean nothing to me.
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i am a monster. like the mole, i will eat all your cake.
for the past two years, i’ve set december’s project aside to do my own version of a sh
WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
boilerplate mission statement intro:
for the past two years, i’ve set december’s project aside to do my own version of a short story advent calendar. it’s not a true advent calendar since i choose all the stories myself, but what it lacks in the ‘element of surprise’ department it more than makes up for in hassle, as i try to cram even MORE reading into a life already overcrammed with impossible personal goals (live up to your potential! find meaningful work! learn to knit!) merry merry wheee!
since i am already well behind in my *regular* reviewing, when it comes to these stories, whatever i poop out as far as reflections or impressions are going to be superficial and perfunctory at best. please do not weep for the great big hole my absented, much-vaunted critical insights are gonna leave in these daily review-spaces (and your hearts); i’ll try to drop shiny insights elsewhere in other reviews, and here, i will at least drop links to where you can read the stories yourselves for free, which - let’s be honest - is gonna serve you better anyway.
HAPPY READING, BOOKNERDS!
links to all stories read in previous years' calendars can be found at the end of these reviews, in case you are a person who likes to read stories for free:
scroll down for links to this year’s stories which i will update as we go, and if you have any suggestions, send 'em my way! the only rules are: it must be available free online (links greatly appreciated), and it must be here on gr as its own thing so i can review it. thank you in advance!
DECEMBER 16
When the little blue mark came, of course it couldn’t tell me I was carrying a fox, just that I was pregnant. And even the scans didn’t seem to pick anything up, except they couldn’t agree whether or not I was carrying a girl or a boy. One hospital person seemed sure I was carrying a son. It all falls into place now of course, because that would have been her tail.
this is a short story about a woman who gives birth to a fox and the world is NOT COOL with it. she did not set out to have a fox-baby; she intercoursed a human male, but sometimes life throws you a genetic curveball and you end up with a child with heterochromia or a caul or sometimes they are a fox.
i do not have any children - that i know of- nor do i intend to. however, i have in the past publicly offered up my womb to science, for the noble cause of red panda-gestation, which offer still stands, if science can get their shit together. tick, tock mad scientists. in fact, i will offer it up for any endangered species that'll fit and isn't a bird or otherwise off-puttingly horned/clawed.
getting back on track, i loved this story because while everyone from the delivery room nurse to the foxen's father, grandmother, and her mother's friends and neighbors are horrified at the situation, the mother has the right idea, which is JACKPOT! A BABY FOX COMETH FROM MY LOINS!
obviously this is all meant to be allegorical &yadda, but i prefer to fantasize about me and my baby red panda having girls' night over a bowl of chocolate ice cream and bamboo shoots. come knock me up already, science! the rest of youse,
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