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Book Review: Hexis by Charlene Elsby

Editor’s note: Straight up, Monster Librarian needs $45 to cover hosting fees. I mean that is the absolute base. To revamp our static site would be a much larger cost but this is what we need to keep moving forward. We are one of the oldest horror fiction review sites online. If you find any benefit at all to what we do, I really need the financial support. I can’t do it all alone. Please use the link to Bookshop.org to purchase the books we review through our affiliate storefront or contribute through PayPal  using the red “contribute” button in the menu on the right to support our work. And now our review of Hexis by Charlene Elsby.

Cover art for Hexis by Charlene Elsby

Hexis by Charlene Elsby  (Bookshop.org)

CLASHbooks, February 2020

ISBN: 9781944866525

Available: Paperback, Kindle

 

Hexis, the slickly crafted debut novella from Charlene Elsby, is entertaining, while using almost none of the conventions of typical horror writing.  Linear stories, easy to follow happenings…they don’t exist here.  Instead, you get a down-the-rabbit-hole journey into the inner mind and musings of a seriously disturbed lady.  This is what might have happened if Aristotle and Timothy Leary had decided to pool their intellectual resources to create their own version of serial killer Aileen Wuornos.  Sound insane?  So is the book.

 

Hexis is written in an extremely vague, open-ended fashion, so much so that even describing the book is difficult, a lot of it will depend on how the reader interprets it.  It seems to be about a lady who is never even named, so for this review, she’ll be called ‘X.’  X had a crummy relationship with a man at some point in her younger years, so she killed him.  From time to time as her life progresses, the man shows back up in her life, so she kills him, again…and again…and again.  The End.

 

If only it were that simple.  Due to the vague way this is written, even determining what actually happens will depend on personal perception.  Is he somehow brought back to life each time, forcing her to kill him again?  Is she simply killing people who look like him, and her deranged mind fills in the blanks to make it seem like the same person?  Does the whole thing take place completely in her mind, and none of it really happened?  No explanation is ever given, and that’s the enjoyable part about the book; the story allows the reader to decide what actually happened.  The whole book is an introspective study of X: what she feels, her anti-social tendencies, how she perceives her reality, or lack of it.  The story does not move in a linear fashion; it’s more akin to jumping in and out of the river of time at different points, for a brief moment.  Some of those moments are loaded with graphic sex and violent, gory killings, and that’s about the only nod to conventional horror writing.  This is written to appeal to a certain type of horror fan: the ones who like a lot of psychology and musings, and aren’t as interested in fast-paced plots that zip from Point A to Point B.  It’s a very well written piece of work, it just works best for a certain type of reader.  The book works best if you read a chapter or two at a time.  Take a break, think about what you just read, what it means to you, and what you think happened.  Then, read another chapter or two, and prepare to have your cerebrum twisted yet again.  Trying to burn through this book cover to cover in a sitting or two won’t work, you really need to take the time to think about it and enjoy it.  Otherwise, you’re missing the point.  This is meant for you to ponder over, not have everything explained and handed to you.  That’s why it’s so much fun, you can almost mold the story to your own liking.  It’s an unusual way to write, and makes for an “out there” reading experience.

 

Also worth noting is the author’s ability to write long passages that at times, don’t really mean anything at all… but they sound really good.  It’s not just rambling for the sake of wasting pages, it’s done to sound incredible, without really saying much at all.  It’s as if the words are no longer words, they are musical notes that form a melody, and it’s a quite a melody.  You may find some meaning, or it may mean nothing at all, but the melody sounds beautiful.  It’s not something you find often in horror writing; I really can’t think of any other examples to compare it to.  Well done, and truly original.

 

Bottom line: if you are looking for something that is truly unique and different from a standard horror novel, and you want a mind-breaker of titanic proportions, this is the way to go.  If you prefer straight-ahead stories where all is explained, look elsewhere.  It will be interesting to see where author Elsby goes next; she’s got an original and enjoyable style.  Highly recommended, for the reader type mentioned.

 

Contains:  graphic violence, profanity, graphic sex

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on December 9, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Into The Forest And All The Way Through by Cynthia Pelayo

A note from the editor:

It is the end of November and Monster Librarian still needs to raise the funds to pay for our hosting fees and postage in 2021. If you like what we’re doing, please take a moment to click on that red “Contribute” button in the sidebar to the right, to help us keep going!  Even five dollars will get us closer to the $45 we still need to keep going at the most basic level. We have never accepted paid advertising so you can be guaranteed that our reviews are objective. We’ve been reviewing and supporting the horror community for 15 years now, help us make it another year! Thank you! And now our review of  Into The Forest And All The Way Through by Cynthia Pelayo.

 

cover art for Into the Forest and All The Way Through

Into The Forest And All The Way Through by Cynthia Pelayo ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

Burial Day Books, 2020

ISBN: 9781735693613

Available:  Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Through a collection of terrifying portraits, Cynthia Pelayo creates a true crime portfolio in her provocative book of poems Into the Forest and All the Way Through. Each poem memorializes a particular child or woman who was murdered or simply vanished never to be seen again. Some of the poems describe the victim and some the scene of the murder. Others give us a snapshot of tragic moments in time or suggest the final minutes of agony and fear that these people suffered.

 

Pelayo’s choice of genre lends itself well to revealing the random clues left behind pointing to abduction, the details of clothing collected from people trying hard to remember something that might prove useful to an investigation, and the cataloguing of the victim’s habits, interests, and favorite places. All of these fragments paint a picture in the reader’s mind of the terror of those whose lives have been taken and of those left behind to deal with either the finality of death or the suffering of never knowing what really happened or why. There are also some poems in the collection that depict the murderers: their brutality, lack of human emotion, and even glee in frustrating the efforts of loved ones wanting to find a body to bury.

 

The most bone-chilling poems are those that describe the things that scare us the most – what we can’t see and what we can’t stop. There is the woman “found stuffed in a chimney” where different people had lived for years without knowing she was there or the man who worked at a home for the disabled and took the life of “a sweet young woman” “like a child, innocent.” The abducted “island girls” whose pictures have been discovered in the ground are “singing their mourning songs” “pleading come find / Me.” The poems in this book forcibly call us to be aware of the thousands of “forgotten and ignored women,” the dangers that still exist, and the problems that have gone unsolved, just as their murders and disappearances have to this day. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Posted on November 30, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Whitechapel Rhapsody by Alessandro Manzetti

A note from the editor (that’s me) :

We are midway through October and Monster Librarian still needs to raise the funds to pay for our hosting fees and postage in 2021. If you like what we’re doing, please take a moment to click on that red “Contribute” button in the sidebar to the right, to help us keep going!  Even five dollars will get us closer to the $195 we need to keep going at the most basic level. We have never accepted paid advertising so you can be guaranteed that our reviews are objective. We’ve been reviewing and supporting the horror community for 15 years now, help us make it another year! Thank you! And now our review of Whitechapel Rhapsody by Alessandro Manzetti.

cover art for Whitechapel Rhapsody by Alessandro Manzetti

Whitechapel Rhapsody by Alessandro Manzetti   (Amazon.com)

Independent Legions Publishing,  2020

ISBN: 978-88-31959

Available: Kindle edition, Paperback

Ever since Jack the Ripper prowled the streets, he has been the worst kind of nightmare, the shockingly brutal and chilling reality that monster-men can be living among us unnoticed, watching and freely choosing fresh victims. In his new book of poetry, Whitechapel Rhapsody, Alessandro Manzetti uses words from The Ripper’s letters to the police, information about the women and their possible murderers, and even one of the autopsies to access the mind of a killer who has never been identified for certain.

In “The Lair”, which begins the book, and in the rhapsody poems (“Sick Rhapsody,” “Entangled Rhapsody,” and “Madhouse Rhapsody”) which appear at intervals throughout the collection, we are plunged into the ugly, sordid, sick environment of physical and spiritual contagion that was the setting for the murders, if not the spawning ground of the murderer. Against this background, the poems describe the killer as a macabre artist who vows to his victims, “I will make art of you” and causes them to be “carved” by his “iron brushes,” his “long-bladed knife accurate like a Mozart composition.” True to The Ripper’s artistic vision, there is a focus on color, especially shades of red blood and the textures of the organs of the human body in each “still life.” This is the portrait of a demented artist whose imagination is a “giant” that “can feel the vibrating legs of a grasshopper ready to jump on a leaf of a remote island.”

This extreme sensitivity is on display in “She Knew My Name” which riffs on Poe’s “The Raven.” Both poems are about the narrator’s mind and what is happening inside it, how each is processing his experiences. Both narrators indulge in their madness, and that has an emotional impact on the reader. Manzetti confirms that it is not the facts of blood or death that most inspire terror in a reader but the evil imagination of the poem’s speaker igniting the active imagination of the reader’s “dark side.” This fascination that ordinary people have with horror is apparent in “Madhouse Rhapsody,” a reminder of Bedlam where the English citizenry actually went to enjoy the suffering of the imprisoned mentally ill as live entertainment. Also, many of the poems mention the opium, syphilis, perversions, and abuses which were common at the time and could be the source of madness.

Even though it is unlikely we will ever know Jack the Ripper’s identity or what caused him to kill, Whitechapel Rhapsody pulls back the curtain enough for us to fully feel the evil behind the facts and sense the cold, hard facts behind the dark poetic imagination.

Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Posted on October 11, 2020 by , Reply
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