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Forget the Sleepless Shores: Stories
In Forget the Sleepless Shores readers should expect to be captivated by many ghosts and spirits who inhabit brine, some from tears of heartache and loss, some from strange bodies of water, not necessarily found on the map but definitely discovered through charting a course though the perilous straits of author Taaffe's imagination, which is eerie and queer (by every definition of the word).
329 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 13, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
August 6, 2018
These are tactile, sensual, allusive, oblique, powerful stories of yearning, obsession, and regret that take place in the liminal places where worlds meet.
That's a taste, from "The Salt House." If you like that way of getting at human emotion, you will like this anthology.
Much longer review here.
All raw edges: nowhere he could rest even a smile without knowing if it would hurt her, as a thousand times driving or dreaming he had imagined he had.
That's a taste, from "The Salt House." If you like that way of getting at human emotion, you will like this anthology.
Much longer review here.
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August 7, 2018Update: my review is now online -
http://www.bogireadstheworld.com/coll...
I really enjoyed this collection of poetic, often queer, often Jewish short stories.
Original post:
Review coming very soon! (Pub date is Aug 7.) This was JUST THE SHABBES READING I didn't know I needed. Cool collection and now I feel like I've been to New England (I've *never* been to New England).
Source of the book: Print ARC from the publisher
http://www.bogireadstheworld.com/coll...
I really enjoyed this collection of poetic, often queer, often Jewish short stories.
Original post:
Review coming very soon! (Pub date is Aug 7.) This was JUST THE SHABBES READING I didn't know I needed. Cool collection and now I feel like I've been to New England (I've *never* been to New England).
Source of the book: Print ARC from the publisher
August 28, 2018
Fifteen years have passed since Sonya Taaffe's last collection of short stories. "Forget the Sleepless Shores" is worth waiting for. It's a joy to read, calling to all the reader's senses as much as the dead and the sea call to its living characters. "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" deals with the descendants of Lovecraft's Innsmouth, some of whom find the waves are closed to them; "The Depth Oracle" gives us the longing of a drowned man, a witch in a beach-comber's house. The collection moves from the coastline of New England to the canals of the English Midlands, where in "The Face of the Waters" a man encounters ghosts amongst the drinkers in a canalside rock pub. In "The Creeping Influences", one of Taaffe's most powerful stories, peat-cutters in Thirties Ireland uncover an ancient murder; it has consequences for both the non-binary narrator and their lover. There are hauntings a-plenty, not always by the dead: "The Trinite Golem" confronts J. Robert Oppenheimer with an unlooked-for birth in the fires of the atom bomb. "Like Milkweed" trades missing loved ones for the butterfly-like monarchs, who might be the dead returned or angels or aliens or something else entirely. The collection is rich in queer and trans protagonists; frequently melancholic. This is offset by tenderness - these characters are loved - and dialogue often laced with a dry, wry wit. An essential book for lovers of sensual weird fiction.
July 6, 2018
Sonya Taaffe is a writer’s writer. She is a classical scholar and a poet as well as a writer of literary fiction, and her signature style is both poetic and cosmopolitan. The stories in this collection make it clear that she prefers to “show, not tell,” and she ignores the standard fiction-writing advice to “murder one’s darlings” by deleting colorful words that don’t advance a plot. Her depictions of her native New England include so much imagery of rain and ocean waves that a reader can almost taste the drops.
Here is the opening paragraph of “Chez Vous Soon,” the story of a doomed sexual relationship:
“The rain was full of leaves, like hands on her hair as she hurried home. Grey as a whale’s back, the last cold light before evening: the clouds as heavy as handsful of slate, pebble-dash and mortar; the pavement under Vetiver’s feet where blown leaves stuck in scraps to her sneakers, brown as old paper, tissue-torn. There were few trees on her street, but the wind hurled through them as hungrily as for a forest.”
The somewhat pretentiously-named Vetiver (who prefers her middle name to her first name, Julia) is going to visit her artist lover in the run-down apartment where he is obsessively trying to capture the look, sound, smell and feel of Autumn on canvas. The word-pictures in the story illustrate his efforts to express what seems inexpressible, at least to him. Asked if he has taken his medication for mental illness, he responds that he doesn’t want to blunt the power of his mind when he is working. The distance between the lovers seems unbridgeable, and the tragic outcome seems inevitable.
Most of the stories in this collection were previously-published in various anthologies and journals of speculative fiction (the on-line journal Not One of Us ran five of them), and therefore they are inconsistent in length, theme, and impact. The “sleepless shores” of the title are not clearly identified, although the spirit world is plausibly described in several stories. In the most unnerving, the dead literally walk among the living.
Several of these stories seem to channel the voices of immigrant ancestors, translated from Yiddish and various other European languages. In “The Dybbuk in Love,” a contemporary woman is the love-object of a man who is long-dead but is capable of temporarily possessing the bodies of the men in her life.
The most brilliant of the stories that invoke Jewish folklore is “The Trinitite Golem,” in which an animated bomb confronts J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who created it. Here is the clinical description of its making:
“It is easy to destroy a life. Take thirteen and a half pounds of 8-phase plutonium-239, stabilized by alloying with gallium at three percent molar weight and hot-pressed into solid hemispheres of slightly more than nine centimeters in diameter, electroplate with galvanic silver to reduce chemical reactivity and encase within seven-centimeter tamper of neutron-reflecting uranium-238."
The recipe for the “golem” continues in detail, and is then followed by a recipe for the ruined creator, a kind of modern-day Victor Frankenstein:
“It is easy to destroy a life. Take one theoretical physicist who has not published a paper in four years, who a dozen years ago made himself over into a director and administrator as thoroughly and ruthlessly as he once metamorphosed a misfit rock collector from Riverside Drive into a mesmerizing polymath with quotations in nine languages at his Chesterfield-callused fingertips, the benefit being the A-bomb, the cost being the rest of his concentration, and then in open court and the public eye strip him of all authority and trust.”
The confrontation between the two beings, both dressed as gentlemen of the 1950s, is chilling.
Several pieces in this collection are from different cultural traditions, and the author seems equally at home in all of them. “All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts” is a kind of fan-fiction story based on “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Taaffe’s story was originally published in Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (Dark Regions Press, 2016). This reviewer was especially interested in this story because I wrote a very different take on the same Lovecraft story, which appeared in yet another response to Lovecraft, Equal Opportunity Madness: A Mythos Anthology (Otter Libris Press, 2017). Taaffe’s version focuses on the process of transformation, in which a central character who is at least “half-deep” (descended from “the people of the sea”) comes of age by desperately trying to return to her true home in the depths.
“The Creeping Influences” is set in Ireland, and features an ancient body uncovered by peat-cutters:
“She came out of the peat like a sixpence in a barmbrack, her face shining like wet iron between the spade-edge and the turf, the bright rusty plait of her hair broken like a birth-cord around her neck.”
One of the peat-cutters is Matthews, a woman who passes for male, and she is invited to spend nights with a woman who likes her just as she is. The exact era of the story is unclear, but the contemporary culture is clearly patriarchal and homophobic. The preserved body raises questions about her status in the distant past: was she sacrificed to the gods? Was she executed for adultery, or some other sexual transgression? The woman in the bog haunts Matthews in her dreams, and the eroticism of these dreams is mixed with the violence of Irish history.
Space does not allow me to do justice to all 22 stories in this collection, but they are all worth reading. Classifying any of them as “LGBTQ fiction,” or “horror,” or “literary erotica” would be an over-simplification. This collection deserves to be savored slowly.
Here is the opening paragraph of “Chez Vous Soon,” the story of a doomed sexual relationship:
“The rain was full of leaves, like hands on her hair as she hurried home. Grey as a whale’s back, the last cold light before evening: the clouds as heavy as handsful of slate, pebble-dash and mortar; the pavement under Vetiver’s feet where blown leaves stuck in scraps to her sneakers, brown as old paper, tissue-torn. There were few trees on her street, but the wind hurled through them as hungrily as for a forest.”
The somewhat pretentiously-named Vetiver (who prefers her middle name to her first name, Julia) is going to visit her artist lover in the run-down apartment where he is obsessively trying to capture the look, sound, smell and feel of Autumn on canvas. The word-pictures in the story illustrate his efforts to express what seems inexpressible, at least to him. Asked if he has taken his medication for mental illness, he responds that he doesn’t want to blunt the power of his mind when he is working. The distance between the lovers seems unbridgeable, and the tragic outcome seems inevitable.
Most of the stories in this collection were previously-published in various anthologies and journals of speculative fiction (the on-line journal Not One of Us ran five of them), and therefore they are inconsistent in length, theme, and impact. The “sleepless shores” of the title are not clearly identified, although the spirit world is plausibly described in several stories. In the most unnerving, the dead literally walk among the living.
Several of these stories seem to channel the voices of immigrant ancestors, translated from Yiddish and various other European languages. In “The Dybbuk in Love,” a contemporary woman is the love-object of a man who is long-dead but is capable of temporarily possessing the bodies of the men in her life.
The most brilliant of the stories that invoke Jewish folklore is “The Trinitite Golem,” in which an animated bomb confronts J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who created it. Here is the clinical description of its making:
“It is easy to destroy a life. Take thirteen and a half pounds of 8-phase plutonium-239, stabilized by alloying with gallium at three percent molar weight and hot-pressed into solid hemispheres of slightly more than nine centimeters in diameter, electroplate with galvanic silver to reduce chemical reactivity and encase within seven-centimeter tamper of neutron-reflecting uranium-238."
The recipe for the “golem” continues in detail, and is then followed by a recipe for the ruined creator, a kind of modern-day Victor Frankenstein:
“It is easy to destroy a life. Take one theoretical physicist who has not published a paper in four years, who a dozen years ago made himself over into a director and administrator as thoroughly and ruthlessly as he once metamorphosed a misfit rock collector from Riverside Drive into a mesmerizing polymath with quotations in nine languages at his Chesterfield-callused fingertips, the benefit being the A-bomb, the cost being the rest of his concentration, and then in open court and the public eye strip him of all authority and trust.”
The confrontation between the two beings, both dressed as gentlemen of the 1950s, is chilling.
Several pieces in this collection are from different cultural traditions, and the author seems equally at home in all of them. “All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts” is a kind of fan-fiction story based on “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Taaffe’s story was originally published in Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (Dark Regions Press, 2016). This reviewer was especially interested in this story because I wrote a very different take on the same Lovecraft story, which appeared in yet another response to Lovecraft, Equal Opportunity Madness: A Mythos Anthology (Otter Libris Press, 2017). Taaffe’s version focuses on the process of transformation, in which a central character who is at least “half-deep” (descended from “the people of the sea”) comes of age by desperately trying to return to her true home in the depths.
“The Creeping Influences” is set in Ireland, and features an ancient body uncovered by peat-cutters:
“She came out of the peat like a sixpence in a barmbrack, her face shining like wet iron between the spade-edge and the turf, the bright rusty plait of her hair broken like a birth-cord around her neck.”
One of the peat-cutters is Matthews, a woman who passes for male, and she is invited to spend nights with a woman who likes her just as she is. The exact era of the story is unclear, but the contemporary culture is clearly patriarchal and homophobic. The preserved body raises questions about her status in the distant past: was she sacrificed to the gods? Was she executed for adultery, or some other sexual transgression? The woman in the bog haunts Matthews in her dreams, and the eroticism of these dreams is mixed with the violence of Irish history.
Space does not allow me to do justice to all 22 stories in this collection, but they are all worth reading. Classifying any of them as “LGBTQ fiction,” or “horror,” or “literary erotica” would be an over-simplification. This collection deserves to be savored slowly.
January 22, 2019
This collection is mostly reprints from 2005 through 2018 (many from the venerable 'zine Not One of Us, but there's at least one brand new story.
Taaffe's prose is endlessly gorgeous, so much so that I often feel distracted from the plot. But in that swirling prose, mesmerism must be at work because I instantly recognize the stories I've previously read--Taaffe has burned indelible images into my brain. And I can't distinguish when Taaffe is quoting a song or poem, as opposed to weaving in original lyrics/poetry, because she's just that good.
My favorite stories were "The Dybbuk in Love," about a body-hopping spirit obsessed with a kindergarten teacher, "The Salt House" and "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts," both of which explore the complications of blended families split apart, and "The Creeping Influences," in which the narrator discovers their grisly connection to two mysterious bog bodies.
If you've ever read and loved one of Taaffe's short stories (and if you haven't, what's wrong with you), there's a bounty to be enjoyed in the aptly titled Forget the Sleepless Shores.
Taaffe's prose is endlessly gorgeous, so much so that I often feel distracted from the plot. But in that swirling prose, mesmerism must be at work because I instantly recognize the stories I've previously read--Taaffe has burned indelible images into my brain. And I can't distinguish when Taaffe is quoting a song or poem, as opposed to weaving in original lyrics/poetry, because she's just that good.
My favorite stories were "The Dybbuk in Love," about a body-hopping spirit obsessed with a kindergarten teacher, "The Salt House" and "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts," both of which explore the complications of blended families split apart, and "The Creeping Influences," in which the narrator discovers their grisly connection to two mysterious bog bodies.
If you've ever read and loved one of Taaffe's short stories (and if you haven't, what's wrong with you), there's a bounty to be enjoyed in the aptly titled Forget the Sleepless Shores.
December 30, 2023
4/5 stars
The final book I completed this calendar-year ended it on a high note: a deeply atmospheric short-story collection with themes of water, ghosts and the murkiness of memory and loss.
Short story collections rarely make it to my favourites, as it’s incredibly rare for me to like every single story in a collection. This was the case for Forget the Sleepless Shore as well, yet overall, this was one of the best and most coherent collections I’ve read in a long time. Incredibly consistent in its tone and themes, and penned in stunning prose, this is a must-read for everyone who’s fascinated by the strange connection between water, memory and hauntings across cultures and time.
Standout stories:
- Like Milkweed
- The Salt House
-All our Salt-Bottled Hearts
The final book I completed this calendar-year ended it on a high note: a deeply atmospheric short-story collection with themes of water, ghosts and the murkiness of memory and loss.
Short story collections rarely make it to my favourites, as it’s incredibly rare for me to like every single story in a collection. This was the case for Forget the Sleepless Shore as well, yet overall, this was one of the best and most coherent collections I’ve read in a long time. Incredibly consistent in its tone and themes, and penned in stunning prose, this is a must-read for everyone who’s fascinated by the strange connection between water, memory and hauntings across cultures and time.
Standout stories:
- Like Milkweed
- The Salt House
-All our Salt-Bottled Hearts
September 18, 2018
Story upon story of dreamy, beautiful prose. Sonya Taaffe restructures reality around you. I still felt immersed in her world every time I put this book down. She has a gift for horror and pain, not to mention cracking them open to find their beauty.
March 26, 2019
Yes, it took me six months to read a collection of short stories. This is because these are all dense, layered stories, written in beautiful and evocative language that for me, at least, requires a slow read and time to sink in. I am not sure how to classify these stories, but most of them have elements of fantasy and a sharp edge of horror. Themes include queer relationships, Judaism, and people who are helplessly drawn to the sea, perhaps because they are part-sea-creature or in love with someone who is. Some stories didn't grab me; others I found myself thinking constantly about after I'd finished.
My favorites:
"Another Coming" - a woman in a triad relationship is pregnant, possibly by her partner who is an angel, and angels are forbidden to have children with humans. (And if by her other partner, he's not so keen on it, either.)
"The Dybbuk in Love" - a long-dead man from a past era in love with a modern woman, his spirit possessing others so they can talk.
"Like Milkweed" - creatures like giant silent butterflies, who may or may not be what missing-presumed-dead people have transformed into.
"The Salt House" - a man and his part-sea-creature daughter.
"The Face of the Waters" - a man saved from accidental drowning by a woman not quite human.
"The Creeping Influences" - one of my most favorites, more narrative than most. Irish turf-cutters, including a trans man who's the lover of a woman whose husband disappeared one day, find a centuries-old woman's body in a bog.
"When Can a Broken Glass Mend" - another one I really liked, about a woman who accidentally married a mirror-demon as a young girl playing in her grandparents' attic.
"The Trinitite Golem" - Oppenheimer and a personification of the atomic bomb, really fantastic.
"All our Salt-Bottled Hearts" - almost Lovecraftian fanfiction, about the part-sea-creature people who eventually change and go into the sea.
My favorites:
"Another Coming" - a woman in a triad relationship is pregnant, possibly by her partner who is an angel, and angels are forbidden to have children with humans. (And if by her other partner, he's not so keen on it, either.)
"The Dybbuk in Love" - a long-dead man from a past era in love with a modern woman, his spirit possessing others so they can talk.
"Like Milkweed" - creatures like giant silent butterflies, who may or may not be what missing-presumed-dead people have transformed into.
"The Salt House" - a man and his part-sea-creature daughter.
"The Face of the Waters" - a man saved from accidental drowning by a woman not quite human.
"The Creeping Influences" - one of my most favorites, more narrative than most. Irish turf-cutters, including a trans man who's the lover of a woman whose husband disappeared one day, find a centuries-old woman's body in a bog.
"When Can a Broken Glass Mend" - another one I really liked, about a woman who accidentally married a mirror-demon as a young girl playing in her grandparents' attic.
"The Trinitite Golem" - Oppenheimer and a personification of the atomic bomb, really fantastic.
"All our Salt-Bottled Hearts" - almost Lovecraftian fanfiction, about the part-sea-creature people who eventually change and go into the sea.
April 14, 2019
Beautiful and haunting
The stories in this collection are beautiful and haunting, and Taaffe's prose is wonderfully wrought. I look forward to reading more!
The stories in this collection are beautiful and haunting, and Taaffe's prose is wonderfully wrought. I look forward to reading more!
February 3, 2020
A solid collection of short weird tales, some of which I really loved. "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" is especially a new Lovecrafty favorite.
May 9, 2022
I am in awe of this collection. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but since I often prefer style over plot, in situations where it delivers a deeper experience, such as a feeling or an idea that will stay with me, then I will embrace it completely. Sonya Taaffe is both a poet and a classical studies scholar and it shows. Her style is simply gorgeous; well balanced between literary and cosmopolitan. I loved the soft tones, the vivid imagery - I could almost feel the sea smell and the chilly breeze. Each word seems to fall exactly where it was always meant to; even when quotes were inserted, it flowed so naturally; it didn’t feel like distinct authors. You need time to take it all in, so I welcomed a pause between each story. Most of them are odd, unsettling, melancholic, sad and surprisingly tender. They touch upon themes such as death, grief, yearning, or tragic love. We follow these tragic characters and stumble upon haunting creatures such as monsters, ghosts, angels, dybbuks and golems. Some stories are actually heavily imbued with Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, one of my favourites, The Dybbuk in Love, is simultaneously romantic and creepy. Also, most have LGBTQ+ representation.
It’s very difficult to place into a certain category. I would recommend for weird fiction readers who enjoy surreal, unsettling and sensual writing.
It’s very difficult to place into a certain category. I would recommend for weird fiction readers who enjoy surreal, unsettling and sensual writing.
February 6, 2020
Here it is. My first 1-star review since I started in on Goodreads. I have an immensely hard time being outright negative on just about anything. I'm critical, but I'm not cruel or given to flights of intense dislike for no reason.
But Forget The Sleepless Shores was honestly quite......bad. It just wasn't good.
It felt as impressive as a sophomore year creative writing assignment, as it overflows with half-thought and verbose simile, much like a long dead fountain of some New Hampshire old-money mansion overflowing with stagnant but still so verdant waters, spilling over the old plaster which now only looks like tarnished wool, it's glorious and vibrant glean forgotten to the cruel ages like so many before it, the brass pipes clogged with the desiccated leaves of a generation too long-gone to have every remembered those peaceful summer nights which felt like a half-remembered dream from your childhood.
It's like that. Every. Chapter. It's the pits.
I don't think I've ever disliked someone's writing so quickly.
But Forget The Sleepless Shores was honestly quite......bad. It just wasn't good.
It felt as impressive as a sophomore year creative writing assignment, as it overflows with half-thought and verbose simile, much like a long dead fountain of some New Hampshire old-money mansion overflowing with stagnant but still so verdant waters, spilling over the old plaster which now only looks like tarnished wool, it's glorious and vibrant glean forgotten to the cruel ages like so many before it, the brass pipes clogged with the desiccated leaves of a generation too long-gone to have every remembered those peaceful summer nights which felt like a half-remembered dream from your childhood.
It's like that. Every. Chapter. It's the pits.
I don't think I've ever disliked someone's writing so quickly.
March 29, 2022
This short story collection was captivating. I loved that each story dealt with mythological beings and their interactions with the mundane world. Sonya Taaffe is a very talented writer. Her words felt like poetry. The imagery she created was fantastic. I could clearly picture the events as they unfolded in each story. My favorite stories were: “All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts”, “The Trinitite Golem”, “The Salt House”, and “The Boatman’s Cure”. All of the stories were strange, with some odder than others. (I love reading weird books and stories). After reading this collection, I look forward to reading Sonya Taaffe other works.
December 13, 2019
Forget the Sleepless Shores by Sonya Taaffe is a gorgeous collection, echoing with themes of loss, longing, and separation. Many of the stories either draw from mythology and history, or create their own, giving them a timeless, fairy tale feel. As a result, the characters have a sense of lives extending far beyond the page, as though the reader is merely peeking in on a slice of their existence. They feel familiar and strange all at once, giving the stories a haunted, and unsettling feel, in the best of ways. Another common thread tying the collection together is Taaffe’s meticulous use of language. Not only is the imagery striking, but sentences are constructed with a unique sense of rhythm that shakes the reader out of complacency and makes them carefully consider each word, its placement, and what Taaffe is saying. There’s a poetic quality and a flow to the language that only increases the dreamy, magical feel saturating the collection.
There are ghost stories, a father trying to reconcile with a daughter born of the sea, a dybbuk carried inside a lover’s skin, restless spirits, bodies buried in peat, and a monster born from the weight of history and science and the atomic bomb. Each story is unique, but again connected by that timeless feel and a beauty of language. In an overall strong collection, the stories that stood out as my favorites were “Little Fix of Friction”, “On the Blindside”, “The Boatman’s Cure”, “The Dybbuk in Love”, “Like Milkweed”, “The Salt House”, and “The Creeping Influences”.
There are ghost stories, a father trying to reconcile with a daughter born of the sea, a dybbuk carried inside a lover’s skin, restless spirits, bodies buried in peat, and a monster born from the weight of history and science and the atomic bomb. Each story is unique, but again connected by that timeless feel and a beauty of language. In an overall strong collection, the stories that stood out as my favorites were “Little Fix of Friction”, “On the Blindside”, “The Boatman’s Cure”, “The Dybbuk in Love”, “Like Milkweed”, “The Salt House”, and “The Creeping Influences”.
September 17, 2018
This collection of short stories was haunting and enchanting and sensuous, and at times a little frightening. I loved it - this is one of those books I was sorry to have finished, because I wanted to continue living in its world. All of the stories center around people who have encounters with something from another world - the dead, people or creatures from ancient myths, or simply friends, family, or lovers who do not entirely belong to this world. Threads of New England and the sea run through the whole collection, which gave it the kind of unity and coherence I often find missing from short story collections. Taaffe is also a master at details that reveal the whole, especially when it comes to illuminating an entire complex relationship between two people with small observations. That quality made the stories as full and rich as novels.
It's hard to pick out a favorite, but "The Dybbuk in Love", "The Salt House", "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts", "And Black Unfathomable Lakes", and "Like Milkweed" stand out the most for me. I particularly like "The Salt House" and "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" as a pair, because of the way they explore similar ideas and themes in two different ways. The latter is also especially effective for the way it plays with Lovecraft.
It's hard to pick out a favorite, but "The Dybbuk in Love", "The Salt House", "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts", "And Black Unfathomable Lakes", and "Like Milkweed" stand out the most for me. I particularly like "The Salt House" and "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" as a pair, because of the way they explore similar ideas and themes in two different ways. The latter is also especially effective for the way it plays with Lovecraft.
July 1, 2025
The author is under the apparent delusion that making something disgusting is the same as making something scary. I was so glad when I finished this collection of "horror" stories so that the only truly horrifying thing (actually reading this drivel) could finally come to an end.
September 2, 2018
Weird fiction at its most gorgeous.
September 17, 2019
A beautiful collection of surreal stories.
December 9, 2019
A warning and also an invitation.
These stories aren’t an easy read. It is often hard to work out the meaning and tell what is happening and even discover who is there.
I plan to return to them later on when I am able to focus and concentrate better. Nevertheless I expect to be repaid well from a more careful reading.
Despite my difficulties I enjoyed my first read through.
These stories aren’t an easy read. It is often hard to work out the meaning and tell what is happening and even discover who is there.
I plan to return to them later on when I am able to focus and concentrate better. Nevertheless I expect to be repaid well from a more careful reading.
Despite my difficulties I enjoyed my first read through.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews