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mandygollaher 's review for:
Eyes Guts Throat Bones
by Moïra Fowley-Doyle
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book was DELICIOUS!!! It's got these visceral, sensual descriptions that immerse you fully in each of the short stories and while I definitely think that the first half of the collection was far stronger than the second half, those first 5 stories were just so good that I can't not give this a five star rating. If you like books that are sexy in an almost gross way (like only the queer body horror genre can be) then gosh are these the spooky season stories for you. I said this in an update for this book a few days ago but I genuinely wanted each of these stories to be their own novel. This is magical realism and poetic prose at its finest and even though the plot of these tales isn't the focus, you can see the vision for something truly incredible had the author more of a word count to flush out the characters and the setting even more.
These short stories are pretty vague; Moira Fowley-Doyle sets an ambience and tells a cheeky little tale that reads like poetry. I feel like you could dig into all these stories with a highlighter and a nice sharp pencil and really analyze the hell out of all of the themes and imagery and honestly, I just might put that on my agenda for next year. Towards the latter half of the collection the stories get shorter and more snap-shot-esque and while I think that those stories had interesting themes, because they weren't as long they didn't feel as immersive and meaty as the first half.
The stand out stories for me are probably "Such a Pretty Face" (about a girl who steals the faces of the girls she dates), "Rath" (if One Day was sapphic and rural and also involved long-dead warrior queens living beneath the earth), "What Would You Give For a Treat Like Me" (an apocalyptic look at what might happen if nature sunk us back into it's clutches one by one), "Only Corpses Stay" (a story of betrayal, young love, and apathy at the end of the world), and "The Summoning" (because the idea of raising a really hot demon to be your girlfriend and avenge everyone at your college whose done you wrong is iconic). That being said, "Flowers", "Nature Morte", and "Break Up Poem Recited Knee-Deep in Bog Water" are all contenders to be on that list. If you're thinking "gee Mandy, just how many stories are in that collection, you just named eight" well I only picked just over half of them so I actually showed a lot of restraint with this list, thank you very much.
To sum up some things you can look forward to in this collection (because I could fill a syllabus with lectures deep dives into all these different stories):
- cryptic, poetic looks at sapphic desire so strong that it consumes everything around it
- what we do during the apocalypse
- genuinely incredible (and pretty gosh darn sexy) sex
- mother nature's revenge
- what it means to cede power to something greater
- cheeky relationships to/with the occult
If you've picked up and enjoyed any of Julia Armfield's fiction (especially her short story collection Salt Slow ) or Kathryn Harlan's Fruiting Bodies then you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't add this to your TBR immediately. This review is a rave, it's EXACTLY what I wanted to read over Halloween weekend. Bring on the bogs and bones my friend.
These short stories are pretty vague; Moira Fowley-Doyle sets an ambience and tells a cheeky little tale that reads like poetry. I feel like you could dig into all these stories with a highlighter and a nice sharp pencil and really analyze the hell out of all of the themes and imagery and honestly, I just might put that on my agenda for next year. Towards the latter half of the collection the stories get shorter and more snap-shot-esque and while I think that those stories had interesting themes, because they weren't as long they didn't feel as immersive and meaty as the first half.
The stand out stories for me are probably "Such a Pretty Face" (about a girl who steals the faces of the girls she dates), "Rath" (if One Day was sapphic and rural and also involved long-dead warrior queens living beneath the earth), "What Would You Give For a Treat Like Me" (an apocalyptic look at what might happen if nature sunk us back into it's clutches one by one), "Only Corpses Stay" (a story of betrayal, young love, and apathy at the end of the world), and "The Summoning" (because the idea of raising a really hot demon to be your girlfriend and avenge everyone at your college whose done you wrong is iconic). That being said, "Flowers", "Nature Morte", and "Break Up Poem Recited Knee-Deep in Bog Water" are all contenders to be on that list. If you're thinking "gee Mandy, just how many stories are in that collection, you just named eight" well I only picked just over half of them so I actually showed a lot of restraint with this list, thank you very much.
To sum up some things you can look forward to in this collection (because I could fill a syllabus with lectures deep dives into all these different stories):
- cryptic, poetic looks at sapphic desire so strong that it consumes everything around it
- what we do during the apocalypse
- genuinely incredible (and pretty gosh darn sexy) sex
- mother nature's revenge
- what it means to cede power to something greater
- cheeky relationships to/with the occult
If you've picked up and enjoyed any of Julia Armfield's fiction (especially her short story collection Salt Slow ) or Kathryn Harlan's Fruiting Bodies then you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't add this to your TBR immediately. This review is a rave, it's EXACTLY what I wanted to read over Halloween weekend. Bring on the bogs and bones my friend.