Two Sentence-ish Sometimes-Horror Reviews (Part 3)

I’ve been writing reviews for a month or so now and have yet to get out of my December reading. In an effort to catch up. I’m just going to do a batches of one or two sentence reviews. Given that I read two-three books a week, I’d otherwise just be a skeleton typing things 400 years from now like some Muir protagonist.

How to Be Eaten by Maria Adelmann: 4. No one emerges unscathed, even those in fairy tales; what happens to those women when the story is over, in a world where public opinion and social media are just as destructive as any evil queen? Four women come together to tell the stories that made them from their viewpoint as trauma group therapy for each of them. These were brilliant retellings with a bit of emphasis on what happens when the happy story is just another bit of fiction.

The Tiger Flu by Larissa Rai**: 4. One person seeks a new starfish— a young woman who can regenerate any portion of her body to provide spare body parts— after her lover, the only remaining starfish in her tribe, dies from the flu. Lai does well with character voice, narrating the point of view with different words, structures, and tones to differentiate who is telling the story, and I’m looking forward to Salt Fish Girl.

Mostly Dead Things** by Kristen Arnett: 2.5. After Jessa-Lynn’s father commits suicide, her mother goes off the rails and her brother’s wife— and maybe Jessa-Lynn’s one true love— abandons him as well; then there’s that pesky art curator who just keeps encouraging…. Nonsense. I wanted to like this more, with all the dead things and queer love (and it does have some black humor I enjoyed), but it just never hits quite right with its plot or characters.

The Sundown Motel by Simone St. James***: 3. After her aunt disappears from a motel under mysterious circumstances, Carly moves to the same town and works at the same place only to find ghosts the building— and a serial killer— have left behind. It’s solid, though the plot telegraphs from a mile away and just needs a true crime podcaster to put the few missing clues together.

Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu**: 3. A coming of age tale between two adolescent girls on the Canary Islands, it’s a story that focuses on how all those things at that age have a measure of the grotesque, especially attraction. I think the story loses a lot in the language translation, although the narrator does sound like the almost obsessive 10 year old girl she is. 

**There was a meme going around that listed a series of Lesbian/Queer novels for every mood. I read every one of them, except for Salt Fish Girl as I had to order a hard copy. I replaced it with a novel, The Tiger Flu, from the same author which was also featured queer relationships.

***From what I’ve read of Simone St. James, she blends the beats of crime mystery with a supernatural force in every book. Best of both worlds if you’re a true crime lover who just wants a ghost to pop up and testify now and then.