Literary Horror discussion

Please join us for our April 2021 monthly read: The Seven Deadliest (ed. Patrick Beltran).

A couple reviews:
https://storgy.com/2019/05/29/book-re...
https://www.cemeterydance.com/extras/...

It's available as a paperback.

Let's start close to next weekend.

The first story is titled "Gilda" and is on the sin of avarice (an unnecessary English duplicate word for the concept greed). I find the story to be in sum mildly entertaining, nearly three-star, but difficult to comment on. Light spoilers follow, so I'll put the body of my review in spoiler tags for those who want to make their own untainted opinion of a story they fully intend to read before reading my take.

(view spoiler)[There are two stories, really, one set within the frame of another. The outer frame is a club of storytellers, all old women, who are in the process of initiating a new member, the daughter of one of its recently deceased original members. The inner frame story is told by the group's leader, Gilda, about one then another person who receive briefcases of cash then jewels for no reason. Not surprisingly, receipt of this kind of unearned money turns out not to be the blessing for them we all know it would be if it happened to us.

Usually one frame of a story is given less regard than the other, but in this case each frame (the outer and inner) carries about equal weight, which is unusual and not entirely effective. Also, the outer frame is usually considered more real since the inner one is the story inside the story, but again the frames don't quite work that way in this story, which is again unusual and to no positive effect.

Both stories have their beginning, middle, and end and are reasonably well told. Yet at the end I am wondering what really the point was. It all seems rather random. For example, the setting is some house in Thailand. Why? The story could have been set in Billings, Montana, Bucharest, Romania, or Budapest, Hungary. It would not make an ounce of difference. Why tell two stories, each in a frame? Nothing was gained except the author could tell two instead of one story. The frames don't really overlap or have anything to do with one another. (hide spoiler)]

So, in all I am left not particularly impressed with this John C. Foster story. I think Foster is probably a capable writer if he settles down with a good, single story that has one main idea and one main theme. I'd read him again, figuring that he could do a fine job on it. I don't think the story in this collection will be what he gets remembered for. His Libros de Inferno series (https://www.goodreads.com/series/2624...), on the other hand, looks interesting.

The next story, "A Short Madness," takes up the sin of wrath, anger in modern language. This one was worth the price of admission, a five star story to be sure. It's about a priest who has to hear confessions. I never really thought about what that must be like as a human being to have to do. Until this story. Then what would happen if the priest heard a confession that couldn't and shouldn't just stay in the confessional, yet had to.

We see this story in crime dramas on TV and in films. The detective just needs one thing from a priest to arrest a perp, but the priest won't "break the sanctity" of the confessional. But who ever thought of the situation completely from the priest's perspective?

I loved the realism and humanity in this story. If I were to in any way criticize it, I felt the ending could have been more interesting to make a more meaningful statement. Still, the ending wasn't bad by any means. A great story that makes me happy I got the book.

I would definitely like to read more of Bracken MacLeod. I can tell he writes stories that bring up interesting moral dilemmas for protagonists to have to wrestle with. Those are the kind of stories I like to read most.

I've finished reading the first two novellas, and I enjoyed both to different degrees. Gilda dragged on a little longer than necessary, and although I tend to love nested narratives, in the case of this novella, I agree with Dan that the author's decision to attribute the same weight to both stories didn't quite work. However, I enjoyed the nod to Peter Straub's Chowder Society, and overall, I found the novella entertaining.

Bracken McLeod's A Short Madness is a great one! It caught my attention from the beginning and I just couldn't stop reading it until I reached its conclusion, which was thoroughly satisfying.

One thing I'd like to point out is that I love how the afterwords give us an insight into the authors' creative processes and how they apporached each sin. It's a very welcome feature of this anthology.

Nominations for May's monthly read? I'm keen to read some of April's books that didn't win, for starters.

After reading Cap Diamant - Kasey Lansdale's take on the sin of Pride - and - Brian Kirk's novella on Jealousy - I am even more excited that I voted for The Seven Deadliest as this month's read. Kasey Lansdale spun an absolutely fantastic yarn that initially brought me the sin of Lust to mind, but as the story developed, Pride was brought into the equation along with a lot of other fun elements. The best one so far!
Brian Kirk's Chisel and Stone started off nice and gentle and it slowly built up into this over-the-top insanity that can be seen as an example of the proverb "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
I had never read anything by these authors before, but based on their additions to this anthology, I will be reading more of their work.

The next three stories were a delight. Kasey Lansdale's "Cap Diamant" was an odd story, as overly simple as Foster's "Gilda" was needlessly complicated. It actually read a lot like a fairy tale. "Once upon a time in a land far away lived three brothers. The youngest was the fairest. One day he saw a beautiful maiden and decided he must have her. But the beautiful maiden was not what she seemed.... Then the youngest brother's middle brother investigated and he too... Finally, the oldest brother, wiser by nature and made more cautious by the disappearance of his brothers, investigated." In any event, it is an easy story to read, fun, and simply told in direct narrative, nothing fancy. I give it a 3.5.

The next story blew me away. It was not at all what I would expect to find in a collection like this. Brian Kirk's "Chisel and Stone" is a story that will haunt me for a long time. Even the title is well selected, one person being like a would be chisel, finding that the stone she wishes to carve, the other person, can't be fixed, not that she quits trying. I don't want to say more about this plot for spoilers sake. This is straight fiction, not really what I think of as horror. The story contains a lot of profound insights into human nature: the true motivation for charitable work among some wealthy people (as opposed to what it should be), the way some marriages work (or dysfunction), the importance of due process and our country's abject failure in this regard, our latest shared societal moral stain because of what we have all allowed to happen in Gitmo, a profound statement on the nature of mob violence. And the hits just keep coming. Brian Kirk is truly an amazing writer. I will be seeking to read more of him. A 5.0 story to be sure.

And that concludes my comments on the four shorter stories of the book's first half.

The next story, "Clevengers of the Carrion Sea" by Rena Mason was another surprise. It was one of the purest examples of New Weird genre I've ever read, and I've read a fair amount of it these past couple years. The story could easily have emerged straight out of a VanderMeer anthology of New Weird like The New Weird, except it was written too late to be published there. Furthermore, Mason's story is a better story and more well-written than two thirds of the stories that featured in that anthology.

Unless I miss my guess and readers in this group are more familiar with New Weird writer customs and reader expectations than I currently realize, I predict this story will rate the lowest among other members of this group and readers of horror in general. This is mostly because New Weird stories are told in non-linear fashion, meaning the words on the page don't correspond directly with our shared reality. The text suggests and shares in another reality that is assumed by the author with her readers but at the same time constructed as part of the proceeding of the narration of the story.

Frankly, non-linear stories of this nature demand a lot from readers and many readers aren't up to/for the challenge. It has taken a while for me to get myself up to the challenge to the extent I have managed. Non-linear stories are an acquired taste (like straight coffee or whiskey served neat--not for kids). Even then, I don't always like to work that hard to be able to read and enjoy a story. For me, the story has to be exceptional to justify the extra work it demands. Mieville's Perdido Street Station, Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, or to a lesser extent Herbert's Dune are good examples of novels that can justify the extra work required to read them. The world building and plot are sufficiently spectacular in all these cases. This novella, for me, although interesting, doesn't quite provide the reward it should either in terms of plot or world building. Enough of both are there for it to justify the story, but only barely. On the one hand, I am grateful it's a novella so that I didn't have to spend hundreds of pages of time in being ultimately not as sufficiently rewarded for my time and effort as I would like, just thirty-three pages. On the other hand, the fact that it's a novella is part of the reason its world-building is not deep enough and its plot is not quite compelling enough. It's still a good story, well told, and will be a welcome addition to New Weird literature for deeper fans of the genre than I am. It gets my 3.0 rating.

It's time to say something about the two-page afterwords written by the authors that discuss their stories. For the first four stories, these have added to and enhanced my understanding and enjoyment of the stories. Mason's is the first afterword I thought subtracted from the story. Her afterword does what I imagine the editors requested of the authors and further explains her story. But I had already made a satisfying (for me) explanation for the events of her story from its text. That was part of the pleasure of reading the story. To have what was implicit made explicit by the author's explanation subtracted some of the other explanations for events I had formulated, which were equally possible.

I read with interest the insight she offered in her afterword on how she works when writing a story and getting it to publication and how her slothfulness is a professional challenge she has to overcome. Confessional and revealing, it sheds light for us all, and was appreciated.

The last two stories were a good roundout of a really good anthology. The sixth story was Richard Thomas's treatment of the sin of lust, "Ring of Fire." It is the story I regard the least in this collection. On the surface I should like it. It has the most science fiction in it of all the stories. The premise is really cool. A man is confined to an area in isolation he agreed to in order to process rare elements society needs. He is visited once every three months by a woman who brings him supplies. He is desperately lonely and tries to forge a relationship with his supply bringer.

So far, so good. But then the story breaks down. At least, for me. There are many questions raised by the plot when not everything adds up to what the narrator is revealing. We have an unreliable narrator therefore, which means we the reader have to look under the surface to figure things out. I formed three maybe four hypotheses that accounted for most everything, but by the end of the story, things were still really ambiguous. This is not good, unacceptable actually, even for an unreliable protagonist type plot.

The author's afterword explained which of the three or four hypotheses I had going was the correct one. But this is cheating. A joke that has to be explained loses its charm in the same way. I reread the story with the author's explanation in mind, but it didn't help. The story that was being told was rather flat, explaining why the author wanted to play games with his readers in the first place. The plot couldn't stand on its own in terms of generating interest. Even worse, after rereading the story the plot holes became even more apparent to me.

This is really a shame because there were a number of promising elements in the above described premise. The author just needed to pick a direction and take the story somewhere meaningful. But he never did. I have also become tired of the overuse of nanotechnology as a plot element. It didn't add here either and was another plot point that never went anywhere. This story would have been better with less science fiction, more low technology manipulation by the characters. Two stars and a sigh of disappointment for great unrealized potential.

The seventh and final story on gluttony, "All You Care to Eat" was light, fun fare. It didn't make much sense, but it didn't have to. The story was nothing fancy and rather bizarro, a genre none of the other stories share in. Not to be taken seriously, it made for an easy and somewhat comic end to a highly entertaining anthology overall. Four stars.

In sum, the stories for me spanned quite a range in quality, genre, and enjoyability:
1. "Gilda" 2.5
2. "A Short Madness" 4.5
3. "Cap Diamant" 3.5
4. "Chisel and Stone" 5.0
5. "Clevengers of the Carion Sea" 3.0
6. "Ring of Fire" 2.0
7 "All You Can Eat" 4.0

Note to self: read more bizarro. It is fun stuff.

May 2021 poll is up!
https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/2...

Remember: if you vote for a book and it wins, you are committing to participate in the discussions.

Please join us for our May 2021 monthly read: Arthur Machen's classic The Hill of Dreams!

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...