a book of in-betweens. dreamscapes that never get quite as strange as they could. surrealist weird fiction that rejects the catharsis of vandermeer. stark quiet language, plenty of body horror, but nothing ever begins or ends- we just drop into the middle of it, regard for a while, and then the story is over. 3.5 stars. i rather like the catharsis of vandermeer.
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satanicguava rated Heaven: 4 stars
satanicguava finished reading The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell by Brian Evenson
satanicguava rated The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell: 3 stars
satanicguava started reading The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell by Brian Evenson
i'm about 3/4 of the way through. strange surreal violent and melancholy, with forays into edgy teenage boy levels of "we live in a society"
satanicguava finished reading Point of Hopes by Melissa Scott (Astreiant, #1)
The royal city of Astreiant, the capital of the Kingdom of Chenedolle, is bracing itself …
ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh this book accidentally got right up to the precipice of something interesting several times, and then each time immediately startled itself and sprinted away
satanicguava started reading Point of Hopes by Melissa Scott (Astreiant, #1)
The royal city of Astreiant, the capital of the Kingdom of Chenedolle, is bracing itself …
i'm 1/2 way through and really don't get a single thing that's going on. it's engaging in that it's making me consider what makes effective vs ineffective fantasy, but it's also a shame because i think that buried under waaay too much vocab there's an interesting world in there- if only i could figure out what it is.
satanicguava finished reading Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo
Winner of the Finlandia Award, Troll: A Love Story is an enchanting novel that has …
no idea how i felt about that one
satanicguava reviewed The Helios Syndrome by Vivian Shaw
When Devin Stacy, a freelance necromancer, though the National Transportation Safety Board considers him an …
yup
3 stars
pretty much just a tv pilot for a show about a necromancer solving plane crashes. entertaining enough.
satanicguava rated The Grief of Stones: 4 stars
The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #2)
In The Grief of Stones, Katherine Addison returns to the world of The Goblin Emperor with a direct sequel …
satanicguava rated The Witness for the Dead: 5 stars
The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison (The Goblin Emperor #2)
A standalone novel in the fantastic world of Katherine Addison's award-winning The Goblin Emperor.
When young half-goblin emperor Maia sought …
satanicguava reviewed Los Nefilim by T. Frohock
Three brilliant novellas. One fantastic story. Collected together for the first time, T. Frohock’s three …
wanted to like this, gave up at like 10%
a guy who is half angel half demon has to go rescue his husband and long-lost son from celestial shenanigans. kinda reads like if the DaVinci Code and The Old Guard had a baby. that sounds entertaining in theory, but you need to work a little to convincingly write an 800 year old character, and for me this didn't hit the mark.
satanicguava finished reading In Memoriam by Alice Winn
the epilogue where a surviving character is thrilled that after so many years of surviving the pure horror of WWI, they get to move to berlin and work with magnus hirschfeld to legalize homosexuality is. well.
this may be the bleakest book i have ever read.
satanicguava reviewed In Memoriam by Alice Winn
very very very very very very bleak.
5 stars
world war i was very bad.
satanicguava reviewed In an Orchard Grown from Ash by Rory Power
now what was the point of all that
2 stars
any theme established in the first book is so very neatly and meticulously deconstructed by this book that i'm confused as to why this was written. neither the world, nor any single character grows or changes, which is weird because they do in the first book, and then all that change is carefully undone in this one.