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Book Review: Midnight Masquerade by Greg Chapman

 

Midnight Masquerade by Greg Chapman

IFWG Publishing Australia 2023

ISBN: 978-1922856432

Available :  paperback, Kindle edition (pre-order, ships Oct. 31)

Buy: Bookshop.org | Amazon.com

 

This is my first encounter with Greg Chapman (and I’m sure it won’t be the last).

 

The present collection, assembling both previously published material and brand new stories, has been, to me, an enticing reading experience. 

 

In her introduction to the book, Lisa Morton states that Chapman’s  spiritual father is Clive Barker, and this already explains many things. But Chapman has a voice of his own, a narrative voice able to scare and to delight, never ordinary and never boring (which nowadays is a rarity, at least for me).

 

Reviewing this collection is both an easy and a difficult task at the same time. You have to read it to understand what kind of writer Chapman is.

 

So I will simply mention the stories which, to me, really stand out. And I will avoid the use of adjectives such as “unusual”, “offbeat”, “bizarre”, “astonishing” etc., although they keep coming to my mind.

 

“The Last Night of October” is a tense and quite  terrifying novella, although it may be a bit overlong to fully maintain suspension of disbelief until the very end.

 

“Second Coming Circus” features a priest facing an abnormal situation which is totally beyond his understanding, while in “Octoberville”, a traveling agent has a car accident in the outskirts of a very peculiar town.

 

“Vaudeville” is a very imaginative tale, blending fantasy and reality, taking place in a forest populated by half-alive, half-dead monsters, hungry for young people’s flesh.

 

A new collection by Chapman is scheduled for 2024. I’m already eagerly looking forward to it.

 

Reviewed by Mario Guslandi

Posted on August 31, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros

The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros

Inkyard Press, 2021

ISBN-13: ‎978-1335402509

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

Buy;   Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com

 

Wow. Polydoros set out to write a work of historical fantasy about Jews and Judaism not set during the Holocaust, and was inspired by an article about H.H. Holmes to set his story among Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

 

Alter, the main character, was ill as a baby and named to avoid the notice of the Angel of Death, but people around him frequently die. Alter is also gay, but in denial and ashamed. He is in love with his roommate Yakov, who leaves to meet someone and is found drowned the next day, the most recent of several Jewish boys who are dead or missing.

 

Alter, a member of the burial society, is helping immerse Yakov in the mikveh when he thinks he sees Yakov move, and jumps in the mikveh to pull the body out. Instead, he is possessed by Yakov’s dybbuk (a dybbuk is a malicious spirit, usually the dislocated soul of a dead person with unfinished business). Alter’s only choices to save his own soul are either0 to exorcise the dybbuk or to find Yakov’s killer and exact revenge. Luckily, he has the help of Raizel, a unionist working for an anarchist newspaper (the local matchmaker keeps trying to hook them up), and Frankie, an ambitious Russian Jewish teenage criminal and boxer who heads a gang of thieves.

 

This is such a layered, detailed story, both in the integration of the various aspects of Jewish culture and the Eastern European immigrant experience, and the vividness of the Chicago and World’s Fair setting. In addition, it really reveals the viciousness of antisemitism in this country and how it also traveled from overseas. I think people don’t really think about how insidious and common it was. It’s truly a Jewish horror story, and there aren’t too many of those around. I’m so impressed with the research and writing on some very difficult-to-address topics.

 

The City Beautiful won the 2022 Sydney Taylor Award and was a finalist for the 2022 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, the 2021 National Jewish Book Award, and the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Award for Toung Adult Novels. The attention is well-deserved.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on August 29, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good: Stories by Helene Tursten, translated from Swedish by Marlaine Delargy

An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good: Stories by Helene Tursten, translated from Swedish by Marlaine Delargy.

Soho Crime, 2018 (1st edition)

ISBN-13 ‎978-1641290111

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD.

Buy:  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com

 

 

Maud is an eighty-eight year old woman with a contract that allows her to live rent-free in her apartment as long as she is alive. She lives alone, likes to travel, and likes a peaceful, orderly life… and she knows how to get away with murder.

 

Three of the five stories are previously published. In “An Elderly Lady Has Accomodation Problems”, Maud discovers her friendly new neighbor is scheming to get her large apartment by trying to convince her that her smaller ground floor apartment is a better choice for an elderly lady, with fatal results. In “An Elderly Lady on Her Travels” Maud sees a notice that her ex-fiance is marrying one of her former students, a porn actress half his age, and decides to vacation at the same spa, with unfortunate consequences for the future bride. In “An Elderly Lady at Christmastime” Maud decides to take care of the loud arguments upstairs that are disrupting her peace by setting up an accident for the abusive husband. The last two stories are different perspectives on the same events, from a building resident and a police detective. Maud calls the police after discovering the dead body of a silver thief.

 

Maud is a sharp and canny elderly woman unafraid to use people’s perceptions of older women to influence the way they think of her: better for people to think she is dotty and deaf than a murderer. But she has no problem eliminating obstacles with premeditation and/or extreme violence. These aren’t murder mysteries, they are simply enjoyable stories where you can’t help being on the criminal’s side.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on August 20, 2023 by , Reply
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