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A review by kblincoln
Twisted Reveries by Meg Hafdahl
5.0
4.5 stars, actually.
This is pleasant surprise of a book. Horror-tinged short stories isn't my usual go-to genre, but I picked up this after seeing the author at a panel here in Minnesota. Very glad I did. I love characters and emotional conflict. Many short stories having trouble packing enough emotional development into their form to satisfy me, and often horror focus more on the gory details than the psychological angst.
I love me the angst.
Hafdahl manages for many of the stories to do both. Take "Guts" for example. The main character is at a hospital getting her infusion (quite realistically, I might add. I'm a breast cancer survivor and this story has all the lingo down such as picc lines and the snack tray guy in the infusion suite) who has Crohn's disease (affecting bowels). People begin dying around her, but it's the parallel story of her anger/fear of disease that kept me reading as well as the horror situation of being trapped in a hospital with something evil.
At times, a couple of the stories fall into oft-used horror trope of the main character having mental issues that shields the reader from important knowledge, but there are quite a few stories where I felt Hafdahl managed to hit some emotional button while being creeptastic at the same time.
Not for the faint of heart. I hope the author writes a full length novel as I would love to see what she does angst-wise with characters when she has more time for them to develop.
This is pleasant surprise of a book. Horror-tinged short stories isn't my usual go-to genre, but I picked up this after seeing the author at a panel here in Minnesota. Very glad I did. I love characters and emotional conflict. Many short stories having trouble packing enough emotional development into their form to satisfy me, and often horror focus more on the gory details than the psychological angst.
I love me the angst.
Hafdahl manages for many of the stories to do both. Take "Guts" for example. The main character is at a hospital getting her infusion (quite realistically, I might add. I'm a breast cancer survivor and this story has all the lingo down such as picc lines and the snack tray guy in the infusion suite) who has Crohn's disease (affecting bowels). People begin dying around her, but it's the parallel story of her anger/fear of disease that kept me reading as well as the horror situation of being trapped in a hospital with something evil.
At times, a couple of the stories fall into oft-used horror trope of the main character having mental issues that shields the reader from important knowledge, but there are quite a few stories where I felt Hafdahl managed to hit some emotional button while being creeptastic at the same time.
Not for the faint of heart. I hope the author writes a full length novel as I would love to see what she does angst-wise with characters when she has more time for them to develop.