mayblegrace's reviews
68 reviews

Melmoth by Sarah Perry

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dark emotional mysterious sad slow-paced

Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

The Haunted Vagina by Carlton Mellick III

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dark funny mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.5

I read a lot. I love trashy books about giant sharks, dense classics, and erotica. I read everything from Jurassic Park to Jane Eyre, from Delta of Venus to House of Holes... Austen, Shakespeare, Henry Miller, Max Brooks, Tom Stoppard, Isabel Allende, Nicholson Baker, Henry James, Kipling, Piers Anthony, Margaret Atwood, Arthur Conan Doyle, Louise Erdrich, James Baldwin, and Elizabeth Gaskell.

I mention this to give some context to my criticism: I am not easily turned off by a book.
I bought The Haunted Vagina because Bizarro fiction was a genre I had never heard of and was therefore curious about. I hoped it might be a refreshing change from the literature I was slogging through for university. Not to sound like a literary snob, but this novella was actually bad- worse than 50 Shades. That's right, 50 Shades of Gray had more proficient character development. Hell, TWILIGHT had a better plot.

I have very few limits when it comes to reading matter. I am not a prude. I know what unbirth is. And yet, I have never read anything as terrible as this book. It isn't sexy (if it was, I might forgive it). It isn't, in any sense, compelling. It is not beautifully written (style might have made up for a lack of substance). At times, the language was vaguely erotic, but more often it read like a bullet point list of unconnected sentences. I had to go back and scan pages to pull meaning from them. At other times, the writing was like a film script, with everything laid out painfully clearly, like an exposed nerve. It lacked nuance, tension, taste, humour, anything that might have given its semblance of a plot one iota of meaning.

Look, I get it. Erotica doesn't really need a plot, although the best erotica is woven so deftly that it's hard to extricate plot from porn. But this is not erotica. It isn’t even a book of raunchy smut, like House of Holes. It was just tasteless, badly written, shock-value words on a page. For context, I have read more compelling narratives on furry roleplay websites, frequently. Not to attack anyone’s writing- I am sure Carlton Mellick III works hard on his stories- but I feel like he needs a proficient editor and some actual ideas. If the book had a plot worth talking about, I would forgive the style issues. If the style was beautiful or interesting, I would forgive the awful narrative. But it isn’t.

Nothing interesting happens. The scanty explanations offered by the characters have no importance on or even inside the story because there are no stakes attached to whether the characters learn anything. For example, a discussion about the metaphysics of the world inside Stacy’s vagina is thrown in, discussed for a page, and has no consequences on anything at all. It doesn’t matter! Neither does the conjecturing about the origin of the world inside her. These are interesting questions, but they aren’t explored. Why did the skeleton try to escape her in the opening segment? Hell if I know.

This book wears the trappings of surrealism, but it is not surrealist or even absurdist. Surrealist literature is like The Metamorphosis where somebody wakes up as an insect and it's not explained WHY they wake up as an insect, but by distorting this one aspect of everyday life, it sheds light on other things within our everyday existence. This book, unless it's making some kind of weird point about cancer, it doesn't make any sense. And if it IS making a point about inherited trauma and cancer, then it handles it very insensitively indeed.

The author… he can't write very well. No wonder bizarro authors have to have their own publishing firm! The amount of minor sentences in this book. Made it seem. Really disjointed. Most of the sentences were simple declarative sentences, which got repetitive and boring quickly. It seemed like nothing was done for effect, or with care or thought. There are arbitrary breaks marked by asterisks, but not at a point in the story where it would be sensible to put a break. Maybe this is a feature of bizarro fiction. Guess what? It’s also a feature of bad writing.

The Guardian described Mellick as a “true artist” of Bizarro fiction. I just don’t think that’s true. Okay, I will give him props: he can tell a story in a sort of basic way. But there's no art to his writing, there is no lyricalness. It is just not good. For all the vaguely entertaining descriptions of sex, the book lacks any punch that isn’t solely made up of shock value. OOOooooOo, a man being consumed by a vagina????? Oh my, how bizarre is that! So revolutionary! Oh wait, no it isn’t; Neil Gaiman did it in American Gods in 2001, a decade before Carlton Mellick III, and it’s been a thing in fetish circles since, like, the Edo era.

I think there is something of value in every book, just by dint of someone sitting down and writing it, spending time with words on a page, smoothing out the edges and presenting the reader with information. This book is no exception. Clearly, I'm able to criticise it so there is something in it that is… something. But it is absolutely dreadful, absolutely pointless and I didn't get anything out of it other than a headache and significant annoyance.

The book also contains a throwaway segment about a black homeless man that left a bad taste in my mouth because the author does nothing with it. If you want to write about a black homeless man and present him as unsympathetic and “racist against generous whites, actually,” then you need to do something with that discussion. Otherwise, it is tasteless and pointless. I get that there may have been a nutshell of an idea about learned helplessness and victimhood, or lack of personal responsibility. In and of itself, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Coming in a nuanced, longer text that deals with race in other ways, that would be a perfectly acceptable thing to discuss. Maybe he's making a point about victim culture! But coming in in a book that's like 90 pages long and in which this is the only treatment of race you get? What are you saying, Mr Author? What is your point? What are you trying to imply?

I am reading into the text very, very generously and drawing an extremely implicit point out by saying Mellick may have had a point. It’s so implicit that one might even conclude that the author didn’t intend such a generous interpretation. If you want to criticise liberals, comedians who deal with politics, and black people in general, go for it. I am all ears, if you put the effort in and make a valid point. But don’t be lazy and disingenuous.

Mellick’s characterization is awful. It’s so flat and two dimensional. I guess in a short novella, a novella that's like 90 pages long and could probably be written in a smaller font in about 50 pages or so, it is hard to write really deep characters. But a skilled author is more than capable of giving the reader some meat to chew on. Mellick manages to demonstrate that Stacy… is quirky. And Fig? Fig is quirky. And that’s it. And even that is accomplished through the protagonist telling us this rather than the text showing it.

Overall, if you take away Stacy’s vagina containing a world, the plot is boring. Nothing changes. It’s just cheap, shoddy, shock-value literature that relies on a pornographic trope. It isn’t sexy. It isn’t fun. If it was ten pages longer, I wouldn’t have finished it. I’m ashamed I wasted my time reading it and I can only hope Mellick thinks hard before he wastes paper writing another book. Write me something good, or save the resources and brainpower it takes to produce something as lax as The Haunted Vagina.

Eighty Million Eyes by Ed McBain

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adventurous dark funny mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

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adventurous funny fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

1.0

This hippo book was crazy and I'm not pleased with it. In fact, I'm manifestly unsatisfied. I read a review that said...

"On a separate note, the importation of 21st-century notions of gender and sexuality into 19th-century America is distracting. Even the bad guy apologizes for using the wrong pronoun"

And it's true. 19th century America had its own interesting conceptions of gender, but this book didn't pick up any of those. It just transported modern characters who behaved like modern people into the American Western genre. Consequently, the internal validity of the plot really suffered. I feel like it just wasn't picking what it wanted to be. On the one hand it wants to be speculative fantasy fiction, in which non orthodox gender identity and such would be 100 percent fine, but on the other, it's trying to be a serious discussion of a historical what if, with none of the nuances that such an assemblage of characters would entail.

So it's such a mishmash that it ends up feeling like nothing.

Content Warnings