Scan barcode
holly_117's review against another edition
3.0
As with any short story collection, some stories were better than others. This collection was more good than bad, though there were a couple of stories I really disliked - namely The Sand-man, The Stoker, and The Usher.
I particularly enjoyed Berenice, On The Water, Pomegranate Seed, The Waiting Room, Paranoia, The Jesters, Phantoms, On Jacob's Ladder, Old Mrs. J, Stone Animals, Foundation, Reindeer Mountain, and Haunting Olivia. (That seems like a lot, but there are 32 short stories in this book.)
Overall, this was a pretty good collection. I'd recommend it if you're looking for stories that are kind of eerie, but not TOO scary.
I particularly enjoyed Berenice, On The Water, Pomegranate Seed, The Waiting Room, Paranoia, The Jesters, Phantoms, On Jacob's Ladder, Old Mrs. J, Stone Animals, Foundation, Reindeer Mountain, and Haunting Olivia. (That seems like a lot, but there are 32 short stories in this book.)
Overall, this was a pretty good collection. I'd recommend it if you're looking for stories that are kind of eerie, but not TOO scary.
pamwinkler's review against another edition
2.0
This is one of those books where I get the uncomfortable feeling that I missing something. It may be that these stories tend to be more poetic and literary, I don't tend to do those. I'll probably read it again someday; maybe I'll like it then?
Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe was good. Everyone knows the story; it's always good.
The Music of Erich Zann was also good, I love that story.
The Waiting Room by Robert Aickman was good, a bit predictable but good.
Phantoms by Steven Millhauser was very good.
Tiger Mending by Aimee Bender was pretty unsettling.
The Black Square by Chris Adrian was absolutely fantastic.
Reindeer Mountain by Karin Tidbeck was good. And a little painful.
Haunting Olivia by Karen Russell was also good and painful.
Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe was good. Everyone knows the story; it's always good.
The Music of Erich Zann was also good, I love that story.
The Waiting Room by Robert Aickman was good, a bit predictable but good.
Phantoms by Steven Millhauser was very good.
Tiger Mending by Aimee Bender was pretty unsettling.
The Black Square by Chris Adrian was absolutely fantastic.
Reindeer Mountain by Karin Tidbeck was good. And a little painful.
Haunting Olivia by Karen Russell was also good and painful.
megapolisomancy's review against another edition
3.0
Takes stories that are decidedly genre-specific and those that are decidedly not and presents them, side by side, to prove that the weird (sorry, the uncanny) is not “a literary genre so much as a genre buster” and ends up tending, even more than most, toward the inclusion of literary stories that flirt with genre moreso than genre stories that flirt with being literary and is also (therefore?) rather front-loaded with recent stories.
The uncanny, editor Marjorie Sandor tells us, is the literature of uncertainty, liminality, and alienation; works which "take place in a recognizable world, in which something, or someone, begins to go unfamiliar" (7). The most common modern application of the idea is the "uncanny valley," that region where a construct looks enough like a human to pass at first glance, but enough not like a human to be unsettling on closer inspection. Indeed, automatons are the most frequently-recurring trope in the collection.
If weird fiction, then, is horror with some cultural capital, maybe uncanny fiction is quiet horror with some cultural capital.
Two chief flavors: something supernatural is happening, in a relatively subtle, understated manner, or there's no specific supernatural intrusion to be pointed to aside from a generalized feeling of wrongness.
Some facile capsule reviews:
The Sand-man /Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman
A deserved classic - an epistolary tale (partially) of a coward's lifelong encounters with an otherworldly force in the shape of a man. Eyes, and the stealing thereof, recur. The ur-tale of the uncanny automaton.
Berenice /Edgar Allan Poe
Decadent stagnation, sickness, trances, a beautiful woman's death, obsessive fixations, etc etc. I'm just going to start copying and pasting that for all of my Poe reviews.
One of twins /Ambrose Bierce
I've really enjoyed one of Bierce's stories ("The Moonlit Road"), mostly enjoyed another ("The Boarded Window"), and not been impressed with the others ("The Middle Toe of the Right Foot," the one about the ghost knocking on a second story window whose title I can't remember, etc). This one falls in with the latter bunch, sadly; a kind of Romeo-and-Juliet-by-way-of-Poe affair of identical twins and their unnatural bond and an unfaithful beautiful woman. I do appreciate his very bitter strains of black humor, though.
On the water /Guy de Maupassant
A basically plotless weird place story about a man stuck on a boat overnight. Not that there's anything wrong with that - I think it's hard to go wrong with weird stories about bodies of water.
Oysters /Anton Chekhov
A starving boy in Moscow has nightmarish daydreams about what these strange, edible creatures could be. Sandor acknowledges that this is a strange inclusion, but I am fascinated by the use of the uncanny here to draw attention to the alienating effects of poverty.
Pomegranate seed /Edith Wharton
A woman is bothered by the mysterious letters her husband (a widower) receives and refuses to talk to her about. I read this one a few years ago and was too annoyed with the protagonist's refusal to comprehend what was going on to really enjoy it. That didn't bother me so much this time, although I still think the story is longer than it needed to be. An interesting look at the bourgeois home as a sanctuary from the modernization of NYC, mirroring the husband's bondage to the past, even as our protagonist's wifely/domestic duties are impugned.
The stoker /Franz Kafka
An immigrant comes to America and descends into paranoia following a lost suitcase and some uncanny happenings with the crew and a lost uncle. I run hot and cold on Kafka, and while I liked this one in theory, in practice I thought it was much too long (even moreso than Wharton) and definitely a lesser entry in his oeuvre (down there with "Josephine the Singer").
Decay /Marjorie Bowen
An epistolary story in which a journalist frets over a school chum who married into money and, therefore, the stink of selling out to the low expectations of his fiancee ("the woman pervaded the whole house").
The music of Erich Zann /H.P. Lovecraft
A poor student residing on a street that later doesn't appear to exist is intrigued by his neighbor's weird viol performances. Relatively lucid/calm prose for Lovecraft, but still way too overt for this volume - the subtly off-kilter vibe of Sandor's "uncanny" was not so much HPL's thing.
The birds /Bruno Schulz
Schulz's surreal prose poetry has never clicked for me.
The usher /Felisberto Hernandez
A movie theater usher attends a bizarre dinner party and has flashlights for eyes. He is fixated first on shining his light on the hosts's knick knacks, then on a ghostly woman. I forget how all this resolves - this story was dreamlike in a way that did not appeal to me at all, maybe approaching bizarro more than anything else.
The waiting room /Robert Aickman
This story (where a man has to spend the night in a strange train station) is a surprisingly straightforward ghost tale, although me saying so probably just means I wasn't picking up on certain clues Aickman was dropping.
Paranoia /Shirley Jackson
A surprisingly urban entry for her, with big city crowds providing the unknowable intrusion of weirdness into the world. If Aickman is the example par excellence of the British uncanny, I think Jackson is probably the American author to beat. These two stories are particularly well-paired in terms of the connections one forms (or fails to form) with strangers.
The helper /Joan Aiken
A British Patent Officer visits an old acquaintance in Paris who has invented a functioning automaton (housed in a suit of armor), which gives him a "slight, uneasy feeling of repugnance." The men's daughters had been friends long ago until one succumbed to addiction, and this history, along with a present sense of ennui, unpleasantly colors their interaction. A very pleasant surprise - I don't know why I had never read anything by Aiken before.
The jesters /Joyce Carol Oates
A husband and wife, retirees in a gated community, fear the changing and encroaching outside world, personified by neighbors seen but not heard. The inverse of Shirley Jackson's "The Summer People," but similarly great.
The devil and Dr. Tuberose - John Herdman
Satire of academia and departmental politics, complete with goofy names, a faux folksy voice, and a grandiose delusional protagonist. Not particularly uncanny.
Phantoms /Steven Millhauser
A town is infested by phantoms, indistinguishable from normal citizens, but possessed of a faint unpleasantness and avoiding all attempts to communicate with them. The ne plus ultra of possible explanations for the weirdness being given and then discarded. Presented as something of a journalistic (academic?) report rather than a standard narrative; not dissimilar to Peter Straub's "A Short Guide to the City" either tactically or strategically. I loved this one.
On Jacob's ladder /Steve Stern
A Jewish concentration camp prisoner forced to work as a chimney sweep has lived much longer than his Nazi overseer expected (hoped) and thinks he's found the corpse of an angel. Fine enough on its own, but I'm sure there was a lot of allusion/depth here that sailed over my head.
The panic hand /Jonathan Carroll
This I did not care for. The voice grated on me, and the story itself (a man on a train in Germany meets a sexy woman, who turns out to be an imaginary mother projected by a girl who is practicing being sexually attractive to grown men) was not for me. Or anyone, frankly.
Moriya /Dean Paschal
Despite not being disposed to thinking positively of stories about boys and sex-bots (or sex clockwork automatons, in this case), I enjoyed this one. Being set in New Orleans didn't hurt.
The puppets /Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris
In Napoleonic France, a puppet writes a letter to her former mistress about the policeman who loves them both. Three stories in a row about sexy uncanny women is a bit much.
Old Mrs. J /Yoko Ogawa
An elderly landlady/masseuse, much stronger than she should be, spends most of her time gardening in the middle of her U-shaped building. Our narrator is a writer who's just moved in and becomes fixated on her uncanny qualities (and vegetables). A rare (and welcome) example of a Weird Woman story in which sexual attraction is not the driving force.
Whitework /Kate Bernheimer
In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait," a wounded traveler seeks refuge in a mountain house and becomes fixated on a painting therein of a woman so obedient to her husband that she posed unmoving for weeks as he painted, and then died. In Kate Bernheimer's "Whitework," a woman finds herself in a mountain cottage out of a fairy tale, her legs wounded, her memory mostly gone. She takes up residence in a turret of uncertain shape, invisible from the outside, and decorated throughout with whitework embroidery with the caption "Hommage a Ma Marraine" ("Tribute to my Godmother") and the image of a priest holding blackbirds (which we might interprate as a father holding ravens, hmm?). Much like Poe's work, we have an unhealthy fixation, but here perhaps it is a fixation on Poe himself and the anxiety of influence. Also, of course, a feminist flipping-on-its-head of the original: "I don't know how that phrase comes to me -ripening into womanhood- for I would prefer simply to describe the portrait as a very small portrait of a young lady." "The Yellow Wallpaper" also reverberates throughout, and there is a brief echo of Lovecraft's groan-worthy "The Statement of Randolph Carter." I loved this one.
Stone animals /Kelly Link
I skipped this one here because I've read it a couple of times recently - it's anthologized often for good reason, and that really is just one of the all-time greatest openings, isn't it?
Tiger mending /Aimee Bender
A quirky story about sisters and jobs and sewing tigers back together. Where the Bernheimer story was similar to the aspects of Link's fiction that I enjoy, this one mirrors some of her tendencies I find less interesting.
The black square /Chris Adrian
I read Adrian's The Children's Hospital a while back and thought it was an interesting failure, so I didn't have particularly high hopes, but was very pleasantly surprised by this beautiful, melancholic story. A mysterious square in Nantucket swallows up anything dropped into it, a message board springs up for those fixated on it, and we think on suicide and sexuality and loneliness. Shades of Paul Tremblay's "SWIM Wants To Know If It's As Bad as SWIM Thinks."
Foundation /China Mieville
I thought this was a story about reified dead labor ("Every home is built on them"), but it turns out to be about the Iraq war and blood and oil. Even as I would've preferred the former, a great nightmarish examination of hunger and the grim underpinnings of the modern world.
Gothic night /Mansoura Ez Eldin
A hazy, fractured narrative about a mysterious city and a blind giant searching for the night. More of a fantastical prose poem than a story of the uncanny, I'd say.
Reindeer mountain /Karin Tidbeck
A Swedish family deal with the government expropriation of their ancestral house, where their reclusive great-uncle still lives. Lots of parallels with Helen Marshall's "Ship House:" mental illness and folklore, returning to the fold, a sort-of-haunted-but-not-exactly house, etc. Not as weird as I expect/want Tidbeck's stories to be, but still solid.
Muzungu /C. Namwali Serpell
A miserable white expat child in Zambia experiences whiteness as uncanniness. Kafkaesque, one might say, and a welcome use of the trope (habit? practice? tendency? genre?), one might also say. I look forward to reading more from Serpell in the future.
Haunting Olivia /Karen Russell
Two brothers look for their missing (presumed dead) sister underwater in a boat graveyard. They find a pair of goggles that allow them to see ghostly marine life (death?), which is either a gift to help find Olivia or a punishment for their role in her death. Their parents are miserable and absent (especially the mother, who is a void in the shape of a character). I like stories about grief and the interstices between life and death, but I'm conflicted about this one, because it never seemed to decide how seriously it was taking itself or how childish a voice it wanted to have (these two going hand-in-hand and possibly a purposeful stylistic choice, but that doesn't mean I have to like it).
The uncanny, editor Marjorie Sandor tells us, is the literature of uncertainty, liminality, and alienation; works which "take place in a recognizable world, in which something, or someone, begins to go unfamiliar" (7). The most common modern application of the idea is the "uncanny valley," that region where a construct looks enough like a human to pass at first glance, but enough not like a human to be unsettling on closer inspection. Indeed, automatons are the most frequently-recurring trope in the collection.
If weird fiction, then, is horror with some cultural capital, maybe uncanny fiction is quiet horror with some cultural capital.
Two chief flavors: something supernatural is happening, in a relatively subtle, understated manner, or there's no specific supernatural intrusion to be pointed to aside from a generalized feeling of wrongness.
Some facile capsule reviews:
The Sand-man /Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman
A deserved classic - an epistolary tale (partially) of a coward's lifelong encounters with an otherworldly force in the shape of a man. Eyes, and the stealing thereof, recur. The ur-tale of the uncanny automaton.
Berenice /Edgar Allan Poe
Decadent stagnation, sickness, trances, a beautiful woman's death, obsessive fixations, etc etc. I'm just going to start copying and pasting that for all of my Poe reviews.
One of twins /Ambrose Bierce
I've really enjoyed one of Bierce's stories ("The Moonlit Road"), mostly enjoyed another ("The Boarded Window"), and not been impressed with the others ("The Middle Toe of the Right Foot," the one about the ghost knocking on a second story window whose title I can't remember, etc). This one falls in with the latter bunch, sadly; a kind of Romeo-and-Juliet-by-way-of-Poe affair of identical twins and their unnatural bond and an unfaithful beautiful woman. I do appreciate his very bitter strains of black humor, though.
On the water /Guy de Maupassant
A basically plotless weird place story about a man stuck on a boat overnight. Not that there's anything wrong with that - I think it's hard to go wrong with weird stories about bodies of water.
Oysters /Anton Chekhov
A starving boy in Moscow has nightmarish daydreams about what these strange, edible creatures could be. Sandor acknowledges that this is a strange inclusion, but I am fascinated by the use of the uncanny here to draw attention to the alienating effects of poverty.
Pomegranate seed /Edith Wharton
A woman is bothered by the mysterious letters her husband (a widower) receives and refuses to talk to her about. I read this one a few years ago and was too annoyed with the protagonist's refusal to comprehend what was going on to really enjoy it. That didn't bother me so much this time, although I still think the story is longer than it needed to be. An interesting look at the bourgeois home as a sanctuary from the modernization of NYC, mirroring the husband's bondage to the past, even as our protagonist's wifely/domestic duties are impugned.
The stoker /Franz Kafka
An immigrant comes to America and descends into paranoia following a lost suitcase and some uncanny happenings with the crew and a lost uncle. I run hot and cold on Kafka, and while I liked this one in theory, in practice I thought it was much too long (even moreso than Wharton) and definitely a lesser entry in his oeuvre (down there with "Josephine the Singer").
Decay /Marjorie Bowen
An epistolary story in which a journalist frets over a school chum who married into money and, therefore, the stink of selling out to the low expectations of his fiancee ("the woman pervaded the whole house").
The music of Erich Zann /H.P. Lovecraft
A poor student residing on a street that later doesn't appear to exist is intrigued by his neighbor's weird viol performances. Relatively lucid/calm prose for Lovecraft, but still way too overt for this volume - the subtly off-kilter vibe of Sandor's "uncanny" was not so much HPL's thing.
The birds /Bruno Schulz
Schulz's surreal prose poetry has never clicked for me.
The usher /Felisberto Hernandez
A movie theater usher attends a bizarre dinner party and has flashlights for eyes. He is fixated first on shining his light on the hosts's knick knacks, then on a ghostly woman. I forget how all this resolves - this story was dreamlike in a way that did not appeal to me at all, maybe approaching bizarro more than anything else.
The waiting room /Robert Aickman
This story (where a man has to spend the night in a strange train station) is a surprisingly straightforward ghost tale, although me saying so probably just means I wasn't picking up on certain clues Aickman was dropping.
Paranoia /Shirley Jackson
A surprisingly urban entry for her, with big city crowds providing the unknowable intrusion of weirdness into the world. If Aickman is the example par excellence of the British uncanny, I think Jackson is probably the American author to beat. These two stories are particularly well-paired in terms of the connections one forms (or fails to form) with strangers.
The helper /Joan Aiken
A British Patent Officer visits an old acquaintance in Paris who has invented a functioning automaton (housed in a suit of armor), which gives him a "slight, uneasy feeling of repugnance." The men's daughters had been friends long ago until one succumbed to addiction, and this history, along with a present sense of ennui, unpleasantly colors their interaction. A very pleasant surprise - I don't know why I had never read anything by Aiken before.
The jesters /Joyce Carol Oates
A husband and wife, retirees in a gated community, fear the changing and encroaching outside world, personified by neighbors seen but not heard. The inverse of Shirley Jackson's "The Summer People," but similarly great.
The devil and Dr. Tuberose - John Herdman
Satire of academia and departmental politics, complete with goofy names, a faux folksy voice, and a grandiose delusional protagonist. Not particularly uncanny.
Phantoms /Steven Millhauser
A town is infested by phantoms, indistinguishable from normal citizens, but possessed of a faint unpleasantness and avoiding all attempts to communicate with them. The ne plus ultra of possible explanations for the weirdness being given and then discarded. Presented as something of a journalistic (academic?) report rather than a standard narrative; not dissimilar to Peter Straub's "A Short Guide to the City" either tactically or strategically. I loved this one.
On Jacob's ladder /Steve Stern
A Jewish concentration camp prisoner forced to work as a chimney sweep has lived much longer than his Nazi overseer expected (hoped) and thinks he's found the corpse of an angel. Fine enough on its own, but I'm sure there was a lot of allusion/depth here that sailed over my head.
The panic hand /Jonathan Carroll
This I did not care for. The voice grated on me, and the story itself (a man on a train in Germany meets a sexy woman, who turns out to be an imaginary mother projected by a girl who is practicing being sexually attractive to grown men) was not for me. Or anyone, frankly.
Moriya /Dean Paschal
Despite not being disposed to thinking positively of stories about boys and sex-bots (or sex clockwork automatons, in this case), I enjoyed this one. Being set in New Orleans didn't hurt.
The puppets /Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris
In Napoleonic France, a puppet writes a letter to her former mistress about the policeman who loves them both. Three stories in a row about sexy uncanny women is a bit much.
Old Mrs. J /Yoko Ogawa
An elderly landlady/masseuse, much stronger than she should be, spends most of her time gardening in the middle of her U-shaped building. Our narrator is a writer who's just moved in and becomes fixated on her uncanny qualities (and vegetables). A rare (and welcome) example of a Weird Woman story in which sexual attraction is not the driving force.
Whitework /Kate Bernheimer
In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait," a wounded traveler seeks refuge in a mountain house and becomes fixated on a painting therein of a woman so obedient to her husband that she posed unmoving for weeks as he painted, and then died. In Kate Bernheimer's "Whitework," a woman finds herself in a mountain cottage out of a fairy tale, her legs wounded, her memory mostly gone. She takes up residence in a turret of uncertain shape, invisible from the outside, and decorated throughout with whitework embroidery with the caption "Hommage a Ma Marraine" ("Tribute to my Godmother") and the image of a priest holding blackbirds (which we might interprate as a father holding ravens, hmm?). Much like Poe's work, we have an unhealthy fixation, but here perhaps it is a fixation on Poe himself and the anxiety of influence. Also, of course, a feminist flipping-on-its-head of the original: "I don't know how that phrase comes to me -ripening into womanhood- for I would prefer simply to describe the portrait as a very small portrait of a young lady." "The Yellow Wallpaper" also reverberates throughout, and there is a brief echo of Lovecraft's groan-worthy "The Statement of Randolph Carter." I loved this one.
Stone animals /Kelly Link
I skipped this one here because I've read it a couple of times recently - it's anthologized often for good reason, and that really is just one of the all-time greatest openings, isn't it?
Tiger mending /Aimee Bender
A quirky story about sisters and jobs and sewing tigers back together. Where the Bernheimer story was similar to the aspects of Link's fiction that I enjoy, this one mirrors some of her tendencies I find less interesting.
The black square /Chris Adrian
I read Adrian's The Children's Hospital a while back and thought it was an interesting failure, so I didn't have particularly high hopes, but was very pleasantly surprised by this beautiful, melancholic story. A mysterious square in Nantucket swallows up anything dropped into it, a message board springs up for those fixated on it, and we think on suicide and sexuality and loneliness. Shades of Paul Tremblay's "SWIM Wants To Know If It's As Bad as SWIM Thinks."
Foundation /China Mieville
I thought this was a story about reified dead labor ("Every home is built on them"), but it turns out to be about the Iraq war and blood and oil. Even as I would've preferred the former, a great nightmarish examination of hunger and the grim underpinnings of the modern world.
Gothic night /Mansoura Ez Eldin
A hazy, fractured narrative about a mysterious city and a blind giant searching for the night. More of a fantastical prose poem than a story of the uncanny, I'd say.
Reindeer mountain /Karin Tidbeck
A Swedish family deal with the government expropriation of their ancestral house, where their reclusive great-uncle still lives. Lots of parallels with Helen Marshall's "Ship House:" mental illness and folklore, returning to the fold, a sort-of-haunted-but-not-exactly house, etc. Not as weird as I expect/want Tidbeck's stories to be, but still solid.
Muzungu /C. Namwali Serpell
A miserable white expat child in Zambia experiences whiteness as uncanniness. Kafkaesque, one might say, and a welcome use of the trope (habit? practice? tendency? genre?), one might also say. I look forward to reading more from Serpell in the future.
Haunting Olivia /Karen Russell
Two brothers look for their missing (presumed dead) sister underwater in a boat graveyard. They find a pair of goggles that allow them to see ghostly marine life (death?), which is either a gift to help find Olivia or a punishment for their role in her death. Their parents are miserable and absent (especially the mother, who is a void in the shape of a character). I like stories about grief and the interstices between life and death, but I'm conflicted about this one, because it never seemed to decide how seriously it was taking itself or how childish a voice it wanted to have (these two going hand-in-hand and possibly a purposeful stylistic choice, but that doesn't mean I have to like it).
jackiekeating's review against another edition
5.0
This was a really good anthology collected and edited by my English professor Marjorie Sandor. Each story has a unique feel, although they are all considered "uncanny" or "unheimlich." I recommend it to anyone who is a fan of unsettling short stories!
writerrhiannon's review
5.0
This review originally appeared in this blog post:
http://ivoryowlreviews.blogspot.com/2015/04/addressing-bloggy-blahs-and-4-books-i.html
This is another book that I felt I would have loved reading at a different time of year. I think I will revisit it this October when I'm ready for a little "scary" since I don't really read horror but want a little something unsettling. This collection is massive but perfect for a nightly short story. This will be on my nightstand all of October.
http://ivoryowlreviews.blogspot.com/2015/04/addressing-bloggy-blahs-and-4-books-i.html
This is another book that I felt I would have loved reading at a different time of year. I think I will revisit it this October when I'm ready for a little "scary" since I don't really read horror but want a little something unsettling. This collection is massive but perfect for a nightly short story. This will be on my nightstand all of October.
kellyd's review
3.0
DNF
Overall, I was underwhelmed by this short story collection although I was intrigued by the premise of uncanny stories. Some were decent, but some were so slow I just skipped them.
My favorite was Phantoms by Steven Millhauser. I also liked Berenice by Edgar Allen Poe, The Music of Erich Zann by H.P. Lovecraft, and Haunting Olivia by Karen Russell. But as a whole, I felt pretty meh about this collection.
Overall, I was underwhelmed by this short story collection although I was intrigued by the premise of uncanny stories. Some were decent, but some were so slow I just skipped them.
My favorite was Phantoms by Steven Millhauser. I also liked Berenice by Edgar Allen Poe, The Music of Erich Zann by H.P. Lovecraft, and Haunting Olivia by Karen Russell. But as a whole, I felt pretty meh about this collection.
pirate's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.0
Not nearly as creepy as I thought it would be.
More...