Chris reviewed Voice of Our Shadow by Jonathan Carroll
None
3 stars
This, while a chill little ghost story, didn’t impress me quite as much as "Sleeping in Flame." It was still better than many things I’ve read recently, though. The feeling of dissatisfaction after reading some of these books - leaving aside the impression that everything Carroll ever writes is about Americans living in Vienna and it must pall at some time - may be simply that feeling which ghost stories are supposed to give the reader, and which with more modern Horror and even Dark Fantasy we have begun to lose sight of, that strangeness builds up until the whole structure of the book as well as of the world it describes collapses on the protagonist and on the reader.
In Voice of Our Shadow the protagonist seems to end up being punished for being the kind of person - parasitic and unwilling to commit himself - that one of …
This, while a chill little ghost story, didn’t impress me quite as much as "Sleeping in Flame." It was still better than many things I’ve read recently, though. The feeling of dissatisfaction after reading some of these books - leaving aside the impression that everything Carroll ever writes is about Americans living in Vienna and it must pall at some time - may be simply that feeling which ghost stories are supposed to give the reader, and which with more modern Horror and even Dark Fantasy we have begun to lose sight of, that strangeness builds up until the whole structure of the book as well as of the world it describes collapses on the protagonist and on the reader.
In Voice of Our Shadow the protagonist seems to end up being punished for being the kind of person - parasitic and unwilling to commit himself - that one of the other characters (whom he had an affair with while she was still married) accuses him of being; and yet what we see of his life elsewhere suggests that there is more to him than that, that indeed he is capable of initiative, caring and a considerable amount of self-sacrifice. There is, of course, always the possibility that the narrator (or someone else) is lying.
