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mattdube 's review for:
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories
by Laura van den Berg
I don't think I picked this one to read around Halloween, but I read most of it last weekend, and these unsettling stories were just the thing. They aren't jump scares and they don't have the shock ending you worry about from a scary story. Instead, they are just full of unsettling things.
Some of them were strange in ways I expected after reading The Third Hotel. So there are people pretending to be other people, or else being mistaken for someone they're not, that kind of identity slippage. But there were also some really grounded traumas here that resonated with me more than what was in the novel.... The opening story, about being institutionalized and then not being anymore was really powerful, and a lot of these stories worked their doubling in kind of similar ways, where the strangeness was rooted in how we can't always reconcile who we are with who we were, that kind of emptiness and fear about what happened and what if it happens again.
There are also a couple very funny political stories here, one about the Kavanaugh hearings and seltzer that is hilarious and wrong.
Lots to like in this collection, which is really accomplished on the level of craft and the way it made me feel unsettled.
Some of them were strange in ways I expected after reading The Third Hotel. So there are people pretending to be other people, or else being mistaken for someone they're not, that kind of identity slippage. But there were also some really grounded traumas here that resonated with me more than what was in the novel.... The opening story, about being institutionalized and then not being anymore was really powerful, and a lot of these stories worked their doubling in kind of similar ways, where the strangeness was rooted in how we can't always reconcile who we are with who we were, that kind of emptiness and fear about what happened and what if it happens again.
There are also a couple very funny political stories here, one about the Kavanaugh hearings and seltzer that is hilarious and wrong.
Lots to like in this collection, which is really accomplished on the level of craft and the way it made me feel unsettled.