Reviews

The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead by Chanelle Benz

joeholmes's review

4.0

I'm giving this four stars for the best of the stories, but the collection is a mixed bag, including some tales that didn't work for me at all.

pearloz's review against another edition

2.0

Jack of all trades, master of none, as they say. Too genre-hop-y for me: first story was an ok western, second a great mystery/regency/Victorian gothic, next was a slave narrative, there was a story set in the 1600s? with a lot of thee and thous that didn't ring true at all. Most of the stories I found weak and not very compelling at all.

hottiereads's review

challenging dark mysterious medium-paced

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

4.75

A surprising short story collection. It's been on my TBR for 5 years and I'm upset it took me so long to read. When I started each story, I had no idea where it would take me but was pleasantly surprised with it's resolution. Each story is unique and unlike the last.

dillarhonda's review

Chanelle Benz, author of The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead, has a predilection for historical fiction. Many of these eclectic stories take place hundreds of years in the past; in the Wild West, on a Southern plantation, in a English monastery. Uneven in voice and tone, Benz’s talent for dialect is often poorly matched with her handling of plot and character. Too many of these stories meander for pages before finding a point. Despite their flaws, each of the stories presents a small window into another place and time, another flawed community. The standout story, “Recognition” takes place in a future where the land had died and violent dust storms bring terror to small communities. The collection is united by an interrogation of violence and an examination of whether unity can emerge in these eternally violent times.

breadandmushrooms's review

challenging dark emotional medium-paced

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

4.75

applezing's review against another edition

2.0

I liked the premise of most of the stories but found the writing style to be distracting. It reminded me a bit of an assignment I had in high school to write short stories imitating the style of famous authors, since each story has its own quirks of writing.

gingerrachelle's review

adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

This collection is all over the place not in a bad way but it’s not one style or genre.
I read her novel first so this style was not exactly what I was expecting. I enjoyed it because it gave me something different but I found 2 stories that were reminiscent of Gone Dead which I absolutely loved. 
Anyway I enjoyed most of this but the last story wasn’t for me. 

matthewcpeck's review

4.0

Eclecticism is the name of the game in Chanelle Benz's mesmerizing collection. The stories cover a dazzling, "Cloud Atlas"-like array of time periods and styles: the opener is a blood-soaked Western, and the closer is about a monk during the reign of Henry VIII, complete with archaic diction. And between the gothic nineteenth-century tales and post-apocalyptic sci-fi, there's down-to-earth contemporary fiction like my favorite, "James III", a heartbreaking coming-of-age story about a Philadelphia teen.

These disparate stories are united by persistent themes of family and race/gender identity, as well as Benz's off-kilter sentences. It could be said that the whole of "The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead" is more than the sum of its parts, for a few of the stories start with a bang and end with an unsatisfying whimper. I hope that Chanelle Benz doesn't pull a Wells Tower on us, and that she follows up with a fat, juicy novel that delivers on the promise of this exhilarating debut.

laura_trap's review against another edition

4.0

These stories are fantastic. Each one is distinctive and creative and dark in its own shiver-down-your-spine way. I enjoyed that there was a variety of characters, ranging in all time periods. Although my two favorites took place in the late West of America, with gunslingers and bandits. All of them lurk within this moral gray area that makes you, as a reader, want to defend the main characters, even if the actions they take are wrong. The first story "West of the Unknown" is unforgiving and violent and leaves you completely shellshocked by its ending. And the last story, "That We May Be All One Sheepfolde" was one of the most absolute brilliant pieces of historical fiction writing I have ever written and it was about twenty pages. It grapples with morality and God and religion and the hurts we carry with us all our lives and what the place of us humans is in a world full of bad people who do careless and hurtful things. You feel for Jerome who wanted a father and didn't know he had one until he saw his head on a pike outside of a ransacked monastery and if that's isn't a brutally beautiful imagery I don't know what is. Overall, I loved all these stories. I loved her style and her diction and the very precise but very different voices she conjured for each story. No two were the same and I loved that, there was no overlap. Each one a dark gem of its own.

tfredenburg's review against another edition

5.0

I am BLOWN away by how diverse this collection is — each story is totally different from the next. My top three (at least on this first read) were "The Peculiar Narrative... of Orrinda Thomas," "James III," and "O Saeculum Corruptissimum." Can't wait for The Gone Dead release!