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plagued_by_visions's reviews
209 reviews
Darkest Hours by Sadie Hartmann, Mike Thorn
3.0
3 1/2⭐️
A more thorough review is coming to my YouTube channel, but overall this was a delightful love letter to the “metal band t-shirt” generation, with a sensible and grotesque treatment of a variety of topics plaguing aimless youth: drugs, peer pressure, the erratic and tragically passionate first pangs of love, and there’s even quite a bit of satirization and lampooning of pompous academia, which I quite enjoyed. Mike Thorn’s writing style is infatuated with viscera, liquids, and abnormal psychologies (Lovecraft, Ligotti, and King stood out as possible main inspirations), yet at times it feels bound and compact, and he never quite spends a lot of time on any given story (some stories felt too short even for a “short story”—does that make sense?), so, as with most collections, there were some definite misses. However, overall, the more I kindled to the world he was trying to portray through these varied threads, the more I enjoyed his sentimental, loving, and horrific explorations of eroding suburbia and wormy minds.
The supplemental pieces (author’s notes, nonfiction film criticism) I did not read as part of this review, because that was not the experience I was looking for out of a “short story collection,” and because the author’s thoughts and analyses on his own stories are secondary to me. However, in a good way, I’m happy they’re there for any instance in which I feel like paying them a visit! “Hair,” “A New Kind of Drug,” and “The Auteur” were delightful and ghastly highlights.
A more thorough review is coming to my YouTube channel, but overall this was a delightful love letter to the “metal band t-shirt” generation, with a sensible and grotesque treatment of a variety of topics plaguing aimless youth: drugs, peer pressure, the erratic and tragically passionate first pangs of love, and there’s even quite a bit of satirization and lampooning of pompous academia, which I quite enjoyed. Mike Thorn’s writing style is infatuated with viscera, liquids, and abnormal psychologies (Lovecraft, Ligotti, and King stood out as possible main inspirations), yet at times it feels bound and compact, and he never quite spends a lot of time on any given story (some stories felt too short even for a “short story”—does that make sense?), so, as with most collections, there were some definite misses. However, overall, the more I kindled to the world he was trying to portray through these varied threads, the more I enjoyed his sentimental, loving, and horrific explorations of eroding suburbia and wormy minds.
The supplemental pieces (author’s notes, nonfiction film criticism) I did not read as part of this review, because that was not the experience I was looking for out of a “short story collection,” and because the author’s thoughts and analyses on his own stories are secondary to me. However, in a good way, I’m happy they’re there for any instance in which I feel like paying them a visit! “Hair,” “A New Kind of Drug,” and “The Auteur” were delightful and ghastly highlights.
Scanlines by Todd Keisling
4.0
People like me. The thought drove home this harsh reality of Stauford's sons and daughters. Most of the people here were born with nothing, lived with little, and died with even less. Tiny blips in human history, offering nothing to the species except a chiseled marker saying "I was here for a time. Now I'm not."
Lurking under this simple premise of a technological haunting is a novella about melancholy, grief, aimless small-town youth, and the true misery of existing in the modern world. Keisling's Scanlines is a deep allegorical exploration of the early days of internet file sharing as a metaphor for the looming American disenchantment that Y2K soon came to deliver.
Admittedly, with such a lean length, some of its characters are screaming for more development, and the "haunting" concept seemed a bit stunted and unexplored. However, there is an artful and engrossing poignancy here, one that I have always suspected horror is the only genre able to truly achieve. There's copious emotional investment, with Keisling being the rare author who writes adolescents with brutal and unflinching reality, giving airs of Scott Heim, and of course, the King himself.
The comparisons to Suzuki's Ring series are inevitable. However, the two couldn't be more different in terms of authorial concerns. While Suzuki deftly dissects the concept of virality in a truly visionary way, with an emphasis on exploring the nature of infection, Keisling explores no such infection, instead portraying characters already fragile and on the verge of self-destruction, the haunting almost secondary at times. His story is a moment in history paused, obsessively rewound and replayed, a retrospection of the wild and untamed days of the internet and how they mirrored the collapse and ever-present struggle of the oldest batch of millennials thrown into an America no longer able to provide the prosperity it once deafeningly promised.
There is a lot here to engross and break your heart. Any story that explores horror and emotion on equal terms is always a winner in my eyes. Keisling has wrought a tale of hurt and loss, and his semi-autobiographical insights on depression and suicide were truly gripping. While there's something lacking in terms of a more developed story, and while some characters within the main cast seem abandoned and underdeveloped after the first act, nonetheless there is a lot in here to provoke and warrant discussion, which horror should always aim to do. Fantastic book.
Lurking under this simple premise of a technological haunting is a novella about melancholy, grief, aimless small-town youth, and the true misery of existing in the modern world. Keisling's Scanlines is a deep allegorical exploration of the early days of internet file sharing as a metaphor for the looming American disenchantment that Y2K soon came to deliver.
Admittedly, with such a lean length, some of its characters are screaming for more development, and the "haunting" concept seemed a bit stunted and unexplored. However, there is an artful and engrossing poignancy here, one that I have always suspected horror is the only genre able to truly achieve. There's copious emotional investment, with Keisling being the rare author who writes adolescents with brutal and unflinching reality, giving airs of Scott Heim, and of course, the King himself.
The comparisons to Suzuki's Ring series are inevitable. However, the two couldn't be more different in terms of authorial concerns. While Suzuki deftly dissects the concept of virality in a truly visionary way, with an emphasis on exploring the nature of infection, Keisling explores no such infection, instead portraying characters already fragile and on the verge of self-destruction, the haunting almost secondary at times. His story is a moment in history paused, obsessively rewound and replayed, a retrospection of the wild and untamed days of the internet and how they mirrored the collapse and ever-present struggle of the oldest batch of millennials thrown into an America no longer able to provide the prosperity it once deafeningly promised.
There is a lot here to engross and break your heart. Any story that explores horror and emotion on equal terms is always a winner in my eyes. Keisling has wrought a tale of hurt and loss, and his semi-autobiographical insights on depression and suicide were truly gripping. While there's something lacking in terms of a more developed story, and while some characters within the main cast seem abandoned and underdeveloped after the first act, nonetheless there is a lot in here to provoke and warrant discussion, which horror should always aim to do. Fantastic book.
El Huesped Y Otros Relatos Siniestros by Amparo Dávila
5.0
La inquietud, la voracidad repentina de sólo unas cuantas palabras, todo contado tan sigilosa y quietamente. Amparo Dávila es una cuentista que utiliza imágenes borrosas y censuradas, las cuales no obstante exacerban lo contundentes que son sus historias. Del amor, el miedo, y la melancolía, Dávila fue la gran maestra.
Dawn by Octavia E. Butler
5.0
A novel about power, the order of humanity, and the ravaging toll of love and sacrifice. Octavia Butler here imagines the end of humanity, the start of something new, and our refusal to shed our convictions and flaws, and how these flaws have come to define our comfort and identity. Absolutely, without a doubt, the most impactful science fiction novel I have ever read, along with her other work, Kindred.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
2.0
1 1/2 ⭐️
Derivative, painfully uninspired, overly wrought with unnecessary detail, plot holes galore, and quite offensively poised as “Mexican Gothic” while affording nothing to a deeper cultural understanding of Mexico and its traditions, geography, and psychology (there are glimpses of it, sure, but nothing that quite reaches for that dissonance of language and decay that authors like Fuentes and Dávila have cemented as the classic voice of a true “Mexican Gothic”).
I’m starting to see a trend with all these highly rated “pez dispenser” novels (beautiful, cool-looking container, with not much in the way of taste or enjoyment within).
All opinions, of course! It is also not horror, which was a huge disappointment.
Derivative, painfully uninspired, overly wrought with unnecessary detail, plot holes galore, and quite offensively poised as “Mexican Gothic” while affording nothing to a deeper cultural understanding of Mexico and its traditions, geography, and psychology (there are glimpses of it, sure, but nothing that quite reaches for that dissonance of language and decay that authors like Fuentes and Dávila have cemented as the classic voice of a true “Mexican Gothic”).
I’m starting to see a trend with all these highly rated “pez dispenser” novels (beautiful, cool-looking container, with not much in the way of taste or enjoyment within).
All opinions, of course! It is also not horror, which was a huge disappointment.