Reviews tagging 'Body horror'

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

9 reviews

celisabeth's review against another edition

adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

Imagine a thousand-piece puzzle, but you start out with zero puzzle pieces. You have to wait for new pieces to appear in the box and the process is gradual. You don’t know what image you’re trying to piece together, and the initial puzzle pieces don’t even seem to form one coherent image. You can sense with growing frustration that it’s all supposed to fit, but it’s not quite there just yet. So you keep sifting and trying new combinations, gaining more and more success as new pieces appear.

Sometimes your first predictions are wrong, so you growl under your breath, recalibrate, and try another arrangement. It requires faith, patience, and maybe a glass of wine (ignore this advice if you’re under twenty-one). After a while, you finally understand. It is one cohesive puzzle and not separate entities. It fits. Hallelujah! The electrifying elation you sense while gazing at the finished product isn’t just because you finally comprehend the image. The satisfaction stems from the process, especially the thrill of putting clues together and finding connections between two dissimilar pieces.

Reading The Starless Sea feels like solving that puzzle: It’s a crisscrossing story within a story within a story within a story. Only that fourth story is also somehow the first story, but you don’t realize it because the initial appearance is different. Oh, and there’s also an eleventh story that somehow intertwines the second and seventh story together. Now multiply that by infinity. Forget eight years — I’m shocked it didn’t take Morgenstern a quarter of a century to type out a first draft. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Kidnapping

Moderate: Drug use

Minor: Animal death and Body horror

peperopoi's review against another edition

challenging mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Suicide and Body horror

Moderate: Death and Alcohol

Minor: Abandonment and Adult/minor relationship

Alcohol is consumed regularly in the novel. In the beginning, rituals are described in detail that include branding, burning, cutting off of body parts. It is not disgustingly graphic (in my opinion) but smells are described. There is a complicated relationship that at first seems like a relationship with a large age gap, and made me, personally, wonder if there was child grooming, but it is later explained through mythology and magic. The only graphic death is due to drowning. There are other deaths and false-deaths but they are not described in detail. No one dies from suicide, but there is a scene when there is a false, staged suicide that may be triggering to some.

chelonie's review against another edition

adventurous challenging hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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Content Warnings

Minor: Blood and Body horror

There is one scene near the end where a character has to face a particular type of monster.

They take the forms of people from his mind to deceive him, so he has to kill people he knows over and over again to survive.

strawberrypinch's review against another edition

adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Alcohol

Moderate: Murder, Animal death, Body horror, Torture, Blood, Panic attacks/disorders, Grief, Dementia, Death, Gaslighting, Pregnancy, Fire/Fire injury, Violence, Kidnapping, Physical abuse, and Stalking

Minor: Child abuse, Death of parent, Injury/Injury detail, and Sexual content

lanid's review against another edition

adventurous emotional mysterious

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.75

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Content Warnings

Minor: Death, Violence, Body horror, and Confinement

cathannahs's review against another edition

adventurous mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Body horror

glacialis's review against another edition

mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

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Content Warnings

Minor: Body horror and Murder

norwegianforestreader's review

adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Blood, Death of parent, Death, Alcohol, Body horror, Confinement, Murder, Injury/Injury detail, Sexual assault, Violence, Fire/Fire injury, and Grief

emcatbee's review against another edition

adventurous emotional hopeful mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Body horror and Gore