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Book Review: Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia Millet

Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia Millet
W.W. Norton and Company, 2016
ISBN-13: 978-0393285543
Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, and Audible audio

When Anna discovers she’s pregnant, her husband Ned wants nothing to do with her pregnancy and insists she have an abortion: when she chooses not to do so, he becomes hostile and absent in their relationship, spending all his time at work. In the hospital, in the first moments alone with her new baby, Anna has the first of many unexplainable auditory hallucinations. Having dismissed ear infections, neurological issues, mental illness, and demon possession, she learns from the Internet that at least she is not alone: there are others who also hear voices. Rather than getting drawn in, Anna decides to keep a diary of what she hears, and keep the voices to herself. After years of being alone with the voices and her little girl, Lena, she leaves Ned, and goes off the grid so he can’t find her and take back their daughter, Lena. Now Ned is running for office, though. Ironically, he needs his family back to promote his pro-life, family values agenda… and he’ll do anything he needs to, to make that happen.

This sounds like a fairly straightforward narrative, but it’s really not: while I started out wanting to believe Anna, she is an extremely unreliable narrator, and becomes more and more so as the book continues. Even she starts to doubt her perceptions, and it’s hard to tell whether this is because Ned is gaslighting her, or because she harbors paranoid delusions. Did she ever actually leave home? How long is Ned’s reach? Are her friends during her escape real people, and if they are, are they even sane? Are the voices evidence of God, or the absence of God, or something else? The only thing we know for sure is that she has a deep love for her daughter that transcends anything else that happens. And some very terrifying things do happen. If we trust Anna’s perception of what Ned is capable of at all, he is not just a narcissist, but a genuinely frightening force able to tamper with the brain, and, through that, our sense of reality.

Readers looking for a straightforward, fast-paced narrative won’t find that here. However, those who enjoy the puzzle of a compelling psychological thriller with a plot complicated by an unreliable narrator, or fragmented reality, with a taste of an apocalyptic future, will find a lot to chew on here. Recommended.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 


Posted on November 2, 2016 by , Reply

Book Review: Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow

Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror edited by Ellen Datlow
Tachyon Publications, 2016
ISBN-13: 978-1616962326
Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Nightmares is a collection of stories chosen by Ellen Datlow as the best stories of 2005-2015. It is a companion volume to Darkness, a previously published anthology of stories chosen by her as the best stories written between 1985 and 2005. Not being as widely read in contemporary short horror fiction as Datlow is, I can’t say whether I agree with her choices or not, but I can say that the stories she chose do live up to the book’s title: in one way or another, they are all nightmares.

Datlow chose stories that take a variety of approaches to instilling horror, from the understated to over-the-top: you’ll find weird fiction, cosmic horror, twisted fairy tales, disturbing family secrets, ghosts and hauntings, Gothic horrors, body horror, incestuous relationships, and more than enough blood and gore. As a reader who prefers creepy and atmospheric writing to graphic descriptions, I found this book to be emotionally, mentally, and even physically exhausting. I received it as an ebook from NetGalley and am not sure how long it actually was, but it required several days for me to read it through. However, as a sampler of well-done short fiction in the horror genre, I think it is successful. Certainly, I have found that several stories have stuck with me even though a few weeks have passed since I finished it.

Standout stories include “Shallaballah” by Mark Samuels, a surreal tale that takes a disoriented plastic surgery patient through a disturbing Punch-and-Judy inspired hospital experience; “Dead Sea Fruit” by Kaaron Warren, about a dentist with a taste for revenge who destroys a man whose kiss drives girls to starve themselves to death; “Closet Dreams” by Lisa Tuttle, the story of a girl who was trapped in a closet by her kidnapper;  “The Goosle” by Margo Lanagan, a horrific take on the Hansel and Gretel story requiring the reader to have an iron stomach; “The Shallows” by John Langan, a tale of a gardener trying to keep going after his wife has died, his son has left, and tentacled aliens have begun their invasion; and “Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8)” by Caitlin Kiernan, a bloody tale of a road trip of serial murders by vicious, incestuous, necrophiliac sisters that you won’t soon forget.

For those horror readers who enjoy variety in their short fiction,  Nightmares is an excellent way to discover authors they may not have tried out before. With her choices for this collection of short fiction from the past decade, despite her disclaimer, Ellen Datlow continues to show not just her enthusiasm as a fan of the horror genre, but her excellence as an anthologist. Recommended.

Contains: graphic gore and torture, cannibalism, incest, necrophilia, violent murders, disturbing sexual situations, body horror, rape


Posted on October 31, 2016 by , 2 comments

Book Review: By Summer’s Last Twilight by Robert J. Stava

By Summer’s Last Twilight by Robert J. Stava

Deathwatch Books, 2015

ISBN-13: 978-1515150749

Available:  Paperback, Kindle edition

 

This is a rip-roaring story, combining elements of action, mystery and horror with a coming-of-age story: think of Stand By Me, Jack Reacher, and Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Doom.  The story begins in a town in the Hudson River Valley, where the grandson of Aleister Crowley, the notorious occultist, magician and libertine of the early 20th century, plots to create a new age and open a portal into another dimension of dark forces.

A group of teenagers, an English-born detective, and a small group of men who are descendants of townspeople who battled the dark forces in the previous generation, face off against Crowley’s grandson, other clandestine occultists in the town and mercenaries led by a mysterious mastermind, called the Weatherman.  The detective, the Weatherman and some other characters appeared in Stava’s previous books in his Hudson Horror series (The Feast of St. Anne and At Van Eyckmann’s Request).

Stava adeptly creates a mood of suspense and dread in which nature itself seems to embody danger and evil.  The heroes slowly come together as they learn the enormity of the threat and power of their adversaries.  Each of them must use their special abilities to fight their human enemies and hideous monsters, in a dramatic, hair-raising showdown.

Stava’s characters tend to be one-dimensional.  Heroes are sympathetic, and villains are despicable.  Sexual scenes are mild.  Violence is graphic, but not gory.  There are more than forty misspellings and grammatical errors that interrupt the reader’s concentration.  These errors were probably missed by a spell/grammar-checking algorithm, but would not have been missed by a human editor.  I would recommend this book for adults if the errors were corrected.

Contains: Sexual situations, graphic violence.

Reviewed by Robert D. Yee

Posted on October 28, 2016 by , Reply
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