Horror
Stories that make me afraid and anxious.
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Each Kazuo Umezz story has a supernatural or mystery element and ends with a twist. The more provocative stories just end! Like “Combat” in Volume 3. It left me wondering if its “cliffhanger” ending were intentional pun (not sure if “cliffhanger” has the same meaning in Japanese as it does in English) or a conclusion…
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SPOILERS! DON’T LOOK FURTHER IF IT MATTERS! Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, deserves more than the brief, unintentionally flippant review I initially gave it on Goodreads. I read it a little over a year ago and its ending still haunts me in a very welcomed way. The end of Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings…
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This post was initially published to Goodreads on February 12, 2023. An Invitation from a Crab by panpanya Panpanya creates imaginative, often surreal stories from the little life details most others would ignore. For example, one story describes the “mysterious” toys the protagonist’s grandmother gives her – old timey gadgets foreign to the modern age…
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Despair deserved better in Volume 11 of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman series, Endless Nights. She deserved the narrative thread that Delirium got to connect the varied and convoluted thoughts of its characters. Compared to the stories of their Endless siblings, Delirium and Despair have the most unconventional and abstract structures. I’m not going to say…
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I remember enough to say for sure I was looking through the shelves at Forbidden Planet on the corner of 13th and Broadway (it’s moved since) when I first flipped through the pages of Neil Gaiman’s Preludes and Nocturnes. I was attracted to Dave McKean’s cover art and a review I read just a few…
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Hye-young Pyun’s City of Ash and Red is a more impactful book after a worldwide pandemic lockdown. We all experienced firsthand the frustration and tribulation Pyun’s nameless protagonist endured as he attempted to begin his new life in Country C during an epidemic. Not that the examiner’s choice of words was particularly difficult, but the…
