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Women in Horror Month: Book Review: Velocities: Stories by Kathe Koja

cover art for Velocities: Stories by Kathe Koja

(  Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com )

Velocities: Stories by Kathe Koja

Meerkat Press, 2020

ISBN-13: 139781946154231

Available : Paperback and Kindle

 

Kathe Koja’s work defies any label. Certainly it is in the area of dark fiction, often imbued with gloomy atmospheres, occasionally turning into horror, sometimes disguised as historical vignettes. The eclectic nature of her  literary output is well represented in this collection, which provides an effective showcase of some her short fiction, previously scattered in different anthologies, as well as two new ones.

Thus, if you’re not familiar with this gifted author, the present volume is a great opportunity to get acquainted with her work. While most of the stories collected here have been previously published, there are two original to this collection.

The book is formally divided into five  different sections: At Home, Downtown, On the Way, Over There, and Inside, but, truth be told, these labels mean very little in terms of the stories’ content.

This volume features thirteen stories, some more memorable than others, but mostly interesting and quite enjoyable. To me the more accomplished tales are:  “Baby”, a dark story revolving around a peculiar puppet; “The Marble Lily”, featuring a morgue janitor morbidily fascinated with death; “Pas de Deux”, portraying a woman who decides to leave the boring comfort of her married life to totally devote herself to dancing; “Far and Wee”, where country life and city life are painfully compared;  the disquieting “ La Reine d’Enfer”; and the gloomy “Coyote Pass”.

Very few writers share Koja’s ability to describe the grim side of life and the pain and secret melancholy of human condition. You’ve been warned.

 

Contains: occasional sex and mild violence

 

Reviewed by Mario Guslandi

 

Editor’s note: Velocities: Stories is a nominee on the final ballot for the 2020 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection.

 

 

 

Posted on February 27, 2021 by , Reply

Women in Horror Month: Book Review: A Collection of Dreamscapes by Christina Sng

cover art for A Collection of Dreamscapes by Christina Sng

( Bookshop.org  | Amazon.com )

A Collection of Dreamscapes by Christina Sng

Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-947879-17-1

Available: Paperback, Kindle

 

Christina Sng’s A Collection of Dreamscapes is a deceptive title for dark and subversive poems about myths and fairytales. Sng takes Emily Dickinson’s advice to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” and not only slants it, but twists it into a more horrible truth than she found in the original stories. The poems are divided into five sections, with titles for the first three that are, again, deceptive. We begin with “The Love Song of Allegra”, about the exploits of a viciously murderous warrior, and recognize childhood favorites in “Fairy Tales”, involving female victims who choose revenge. Next, “All the Monsters in the World” are overcome by strong women who refuse to give up. The horror increases and becomes more explicitly described in the section called “The Capacity of Violence” and concludes with glimpses of hope in “Myths and Dreamscapes.”

 

The opening poems in this collection create a mythological backdrop for the horror heroines of the fairytales. However, these tales combined with predictable new narratives make the second section feel longer than it needs to be. The third and fourth sections include the most important poems of the book in terms of revealing the world’s horrors. Although the reality of pervasive evil, the idea that no place is completely safe, and the thought that we can never really know a person’s deepest darkness until it is too late are truths spun into many a story and poem, Sng brings them to greater heights through artistry. The speakers in these poems deny the existence of monsters while actually being or becoming monsters. It seems the dividing line is in the doing: sewing body parts together; performing a lobotomy; strangling the man who left you, an infant, to die in the forest. After all of the violence, the final poems suggest that there could be a fresh start, a new way, an end to the horror, but that reaching that point will also involve violence and possible death. The question remains whether the future is just as much a cruel myth or terrifying fairytale as what we have already experienced. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Posted on February 8, 2021 by , Reply

15 Years of Monster Librarian

It is hard to believe we’ve been doing this for fifteen years now. My husband Dylan, the original Monster Librarian, posted the first reviews on January 1, 2006, just three months (and a couple of days) after our first child was born, because what better time to take on a gigantic project than when you have a newborn.

He founded Monster Librarian because at the time, he was working an internship at a branch of the Indianapolis Public Library as part of completing his master’s degree in library science, and he found that the librarians there didn’t know anything about the horror genre past Stephen King and had no interest in putting in the effort to learn more about it. At the time, much of the horror fiction available was also being published only by small presses not listed in the databases of major wholesalers like Baker & Taylor, Follett, and Ingram. It required a commitment for librarians to seek out publishers and order individual titles, and the books could be expensive ( I was working as an elementary school library media specialist at the time, and Baker & Taylor provided a 40% discount. That’s a big deal for a small budget). As a longtime horror reader who started building his collection as a teenager by haunting his local used book store, the indifference the librarians had to the horror genre was something her felt he needed to do something about.

At the same time, I was working with elementary kids who were asking me for scary books while sitting on an awards committee for my state library association’s children’s choice award. The way that was supposed to work was that we read all nominated books, then met to choose a representative sample of 20 books that would cover all genres. The genre I had to fight for was horror. It went beyond indifference– some committee members actively disliked it. I had done research into reading engagement while working on my MLS and one thing Dylan and I both agreed on was how important it was to hook kids and teens with what researcher Stephen Krashen calls “home run books”. So many kids and teens get hooked through scary stories and horror that he felt it was important to reach librarians and advocate for the horror genre for readers. This was his passion and he posted reviews even after he became ill and through five years of painful migraines and chronic, life-imparing pain, until just before he died in 2014. I think he’d be delighted to see all the positive changes that have occurred in the horror genre and in librarians’ attitudes and knowledge of the horror genre and scary stories for kids since the site was founded in 2006.

I love seeing the diversity growing in the genre. There is still plenty of room for growth, but wow, things have changed a lot, and mostly for the better. I think Dylan would love to see it.

I would like to make sure we are providing useful information to you. Monster Librarian is an all-volunteer effort and I need to make sure we are at least covering our hosting costs and postage. That costs about $200  every year and we almost didn’t make it this year. Without your support, either through purchasing items through Monster Librarian’s store at Bookshop.org or contributing through Paypal, we will struggle to continue our work, and after this long at running the site, I’m not sure what I would do without it! Thanks for visiting, and I hope you’ll be back again soon!

 

Posted on January 1, 2021 by , Reply
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