North American Lake Monsters: Stories

There's something exciting in the fact that even at thirty-mumbles the rest-years old I'm still coming across books where I can honestly say, "I have never read anything like this before." And it isn't just that I typically shy away from short story collections like this one in favor of full-length novels; this was a truly special book.

Each of the nine stories hold up on their own and there were no overarching hints that they were related or anything like that, this isn't a Tarantinoverse situation. But what struck me was 1) how consistently good the writing was and 2) how consistently they hammered on themes of masculinity, and specifically the less favorable aspects of it. We see deadbeat dads, abusive husbands, and misguided teenagers just absolutely fail themselves and those around them for any number of reasons: refusing to ask for help for fear of being seen as weak; doing incredibly stupid things to 'prove' their manhood to others; putting their own desires over the wants and needs of their family because they're the ~man of the house~; etc. Reading the publication history at the back of the book and seeing that these stories were written over a nine year period with such consistent (this is the word that keeps coming back to me) quality just further impressed me.

These stories were my favorite kinds of horror stories. Yes, there is weird and spooky and unexplainable stuff blatantly happening to the characters, but the spooky stuff isn't the point of the story. It's not included specifically to scare the reader, but rather as a vehicle for carrying the underlying theme and to help keep the reader's attention. And it wasn't a particularly violent book as much as it was more eerie and unsettling, which I tend to prefer over the books that read like 80's slasher films. (Although The Crevasse had a scene that had me sit upright and think "whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck")

I'd be remiss not to mention the settings as well. One was in Antarctica (always here for wilderness survival horror), two in Appalachian North Carolina (love me some spooky wooded mountains), but four took place in the New Orleans/Mississippi Gulf Coast region. This is a part of the country I'm familiar with because that's where my husband's family is from, and I don't think it's given enough attention in most media. I could perfectly see and imagine the Katrina-wreaked house in Sunbleached, or the I-10 underpass mentioned in The Way Station, and that helped me establish a connection to this book that I wasn't expecting to.

This book was a pleasant surprise that I know I will be thinking about for a while afterwards. Wild Acre, The Crevasse and Sunbleached were my favorites, and I'm now more encouraged to give short story collections like this one a chance moving forward.

Despite sometimes quite lovely prose, this collection suffered from both of my pet peeves in a horror story collection: I was not scared, and there were no clear endings.

I fully admit that my expectations for horror were rather remarkably high going in. The first time I saw this on a list of "scariest" books, I tossed it on my Goodreads TBR list. The second time, I hopped on over the to library's website and, noting they didn't own it, asked that they consider getting it from Overdrive. I do love being scared, so anything that was hitting multiple "scariest" lists seemed like a fantastic idea, and done, well, short horror stories can be utterly fantastic and breathtakingly terrifying.

I was not scared once.

I set myself up for fear when starting them. I waited until evening. I read them in the dark. I was creeping myself out just opening the book on my Kindle. Every sound was questionable, every hint of a shadow I saw out of the corner of my eye was something I needed to look at immediately or not at all.

I think I actively became less scared while reading this collection.

This was not helped by the lack of actual endings on the stories.

Now, full disclosure here: this is a pet peeve of mine. I am really particular about any kind of "open" ending, especially on a short story. If it's done well, it is a beautiful thing. If not...there's really very little that is more likely to completely ruin a story for me.

I don't think I felt a single one of these stories actually "ended." They stopped, obviously, but where and how the stopping happened was not satisfying in any way. Even the stories I was starting to enjoy ended abruptly and inadequately. I ended up wondering why the story had even been told, and I've never found that fun.