Status Updates From The Beauty of the Death Cap

I don't get along so well with these loooong paragraphs.

Just keeps getting drenched in gentlemanly insidiousness. I love the narrative voice, but despise the narrator. Okay, who am I kidding? I love the narrator, though I should despise him.

I love how Dousteyssier-Khoze turns the banal into the fantastical, but without any truly outre methodology. She nudges the imagination, just barely, but it's enough to push the reader into phantasmagoria, even without such things explicitly appearing on the page.

The segment on pp 66 + 67 is deliciously devious and understated. It shall have to be quoted in full in my review. Really, it's a short story, in 3 paragraphs, that reflects all the underlying themes, black humor, and wit throughout the book.

I absolutely love this snarky, secretly-insecure narrative voice.

I do appreciate a good, mildly-neurotic narrator.

Any book that begins by quoting Pliny the Elder either can't take itself seriously or is full of sinister deceipt. Or both