Reviews and Comments

The set-up to this thing is pretty weak. In a proto-slasher such as this, it's fine, perhaps even preferable, for the characters to have trivial concerns , but Ketchum spends way too long establishing their run-of-the-mill relationships, most of which ultimately do not matter to the story. However, once things get going, the action and gore are very well written, and the bleakness of the story's conclusion (apparently bowdlerized beyond recognition in the original edition) is note-perfect.

A very enjoyable throwaway read.

Excellent read. The epilogue is a hell of a downer after the giddy excitement that precedes it, but imo Miéville gets his summary about right. It's important to interrogate the October Revolution: to ask how much of the horror that followed was inevitable, how things could have been different.

The climactic chapter to this book is absolutely intoxicating. I could not put it down, and by the time it ended I was high as a kite.

Now I'm steeling myself for the inevitably depressing epilogue.

I distinctly remember all the theory-folk I followed on Twitter describing this as a 'novelisation'. Now I'm a good way in and I'm beginning to wonder if those people had ever read a novel before?

Maybe things will change when the narrative reaches the titular month, but for now it is more reminiscent of a Mike Duncan podcast. Not a criticism ofc, just very strange to me that anyone could read this as anything other than a (accessible, well-written) history book 🤷

Loving this so far.

This might seem like a silly complaint to make about a ≈200 page book, but the set up takes way too long imho, especially considering that it's all rather insubstantial relationship stuff. Things get pretty exciting once the action starts though!

Complete trash. I enjoyed it immensely.

Great read. Enríquez continues to be perhaps the best short horror writer in the business. Nothing in the collection can quite compete with La Casa de Adela, but what can.

Quite excited to be starting this

I've not had a lot time for reading anything other than technical manuals recently, but I finally finished this one last night, and I still have very mixed feelings about it tbh.

It's just quite badly organized. Some things get repeated, some things get skipped over when they really need to be developed, sometimes the thread of a chapter is weirdly tenuous and disappointed, sometimes you ask yourself, "is this really the best quote you could find to support this position?"

I don't know how much of the blame belongs to the writer though, because this is all stuff that an editor should have picked up on. A shame, because this book could have been beat into far better shape imo.

Hmmm I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it's a fascinating subject that I've never seen treated all in one place before, and the writer seems to know it inside-out; on the other, he often makes strange leaps, or frames a chapter around rather flimsy coincidence — one chapter tries to draw a line between the Martin Luther's conception of the word 'poltergeist' and the Third Reich ffs!

The chapter on M.R. James is pretty great though, so 🤷

Finding this very interesting so far!

I had never considered this, but apparently belief in ghosts was repressed under protestant rule because their existence implies the existence of purgatory, which the protestants rejected. Maybe the book will go into it later, but imo this dynamic might go some way to explaining the tendency in American ghost stories (particularly movies) to present ghosts as demons rather than... ghosts