Scan barcode
elothwen's review
2.0
I just wasn't a fan of this one. The author certainly has a distinct voice, but it harmed some of the stories for me, making the narrators/protagonists feel the same throughout time and place. One story took me 'til the end to realize the narrator was a male because of how similar he felt to the other stories' main characters.
I was pretty bored by the modern day stories, so I was excited to get to the ones set in the past, but only "The Walking Hours" ended up feeling authentic. The rest only used thin misogyny (in my opinion) and mentions of corsets (blah, blah, corsets bad) to try to cement a feeling of time and place. I wasn't buying it. Also, there were far too many mentions of taste and tongues and mouths and licking and teeth. It was just jarring to see it so many times (and not really as a cohesive theme).
In the end, the only stories I enjoyed were "The Red House", "A Lesson in Sophistication", "Honeymoon" (this one would make a sick short film), and "The Walking Hours". Even then, I expected the collection to be more scary overall. If you want to feel creeped out and perverted, this collection works for that, but not scared, horrified, or thrilled (at least not for me). It's billed as gothic horror, but I generally like gothic horror, and I didn't really feel a sense of gothic in this collection. Only the overt mentions of the genre in "Honeymoon".
I received an advance review copy from BookSirens for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
I was pretty bored by the modern day stories, so I was excited to get to the ones set in the past, but only "The Walking Hours" ended up feeling authentic. The rest only used thin misogyny (in my opinion) and mentions of corsets (blah, blah, corsets bad) to try to cement a feeling of time and place. I wasn't buying it. Also, there were far too many mentions of taste and tongues and mouths and licking and teeth. It was just jarring to see it so many times (and not really as a cohesive theme).
In the end, the only stories I enjoyed were "The Red House", "A Lesson in Sophistication", "Honeymoon" (this one would make a sick short film), and "The Walking Hours". Even then, I expected the collection to be more scary overall. If you want to feel creeped out and perverted, this collection works for that, but not scared, horrified, or thrilled (at least not for me). It's billed as gothic horror, but I generally like gothic horror, and I didn't really feel a sense of gothic in this collection. Only the overt mentions of the genre in "Honeymoon".
I received an advance review copy from BookSirens for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
More...