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Book Review: You Know It’s True by J.R. Hamantaschen

cover art for You Know It's True by J.R. Hamantaschen

You Know It’s True by J.R. Hamantaschen

Self-published, 2021

ISBN: 9798706071196

Available: Paperback, Kindle  ( Amazon.com )

 

A more fitting title for this collection of short stories would be The World’s Absolute Weirdest Tales.  These aren’t just out of left field: they leave left field, clear the Green Monster and land somewhere beyond Lansdowne St.

 

Readers who prefer stories that move from Point A to Point B in a  straightforward fashion will find that those are in the minority, although the ones included are real barn-burners.  “Short Bloom”, “Grab More Knives”, and ‘”More as a Keeper” are phenomenal, the only real letdown being that the last of them ends right when the story cranks into overdrive.  “Short Bloom” features an Earth where tiny holes open anywhere on the ground at random, and a fiber-thin appendage protrudes and painfully kills any living thing.  “Grab More Knives” is a brilliant and ironic look at what happens when people who justify vandalism and harassment under the guise of activism for a cause get a freight-load of payback, all due to a simple misunderstanding.  It’ll make some readers cheer, and others cry.  “More as a Keeper” is a look at what happens when the dead in purgatory get a chance for revenge.  It’s outstanding, and these three stories alone could probably justify the purchase of the book.

 

The other stories are more likely to appeal to fans of non-traditional stories, as some of them feel more like in-depth sketches or portraits of an individual.  The stories in this mold have a fully-developed character backstory, but then the actual story ends quickly, often with little resolve, and sometimes making no sense at all.  “Sad Life” is a good example.  Set at a wedding, it details a woman’s failed attempts and lack of desire for a standard relationship.  It’s well-written and detailed,  but then her face splits apart and the story ends.  This is what you have to enjoy to really like this book– excellent buildup, but a sometimes incomprehensible ending.  The stories “Night Devours My Days” and ” I Should Have Been a Pair of Ragged Claws/Scuttling Across The Floors of Silent Seas” also fall into this category.  The prose is solid, but the style may not be for everyone.

 

The last two stories, “It’s Always Time to Go” and “Beholden to the Past” are excellent ones that combine the above two story types.  “Beholden to the Past” is also notable for its unusual plot.  A college student has a serious addiction to whacking off, often to live online porn.  The catch?  When he has an orgasm, the person he was fantasizing about and/or watching dies.  It doesn’t get stranger than that, and seems a fitting final story for a very strange collection.  Overall, this book has a lot to recommend it, but enjoyment will depend greatly on the reader.  You Know It’s True defies categorization: there’s nothing else out there like it. Recommended for fans of unusual writing.

 

Contains: profanity, gore, murder, violence, sex, body horror, miscarriage, necrophilia, suicide, self-harm, and large doses of utter lunacy

 

 

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on May 14, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Bent Heavens by Daniel Kraus

cover art for Bent Heavens by Daniel Kraus

Bent Heavens by Daniel Kraus

Henry Holt & Co., 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-1250151674

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook (  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

Liv’s father disappeared for four days and returned with vague memories of alien abduction. Becoming more and more erratic, he lost his job and retreated to the shed in his backyard where he built weapons and vicious traps around his house in case the aliens returned. Liv’s childhood friend Doug, neglected by his own parents and ostracized by other kids, adopted Liv’s father as a mentor, helping him with designing and building the traps, with Liv reluctantly along for the ride.  After Liv’s father disappears a second time, Liv and Doug make a ritual out of testing the traps every Sunday to make sure they still work. And at the beginning of her senior year of high school, Liv finds an alien in one of the traps, and she and Doug are determined to find out from the alien what happened to her dad.

Liv has worked to distance herself from her father’s bizarre behavior, making new friends and the cross-country team, but she is a hot mess, with grief and anger balled up inside her without a healthy outlet. Doug has no one holding him back. Having the alien in their power, hidden in the shed, leads to violence, and, as Liv begins to have doubts, complicity. There are explicit scenes of body horror and torture in the book. Seeing her inability to escape participation once it has begun is horrifying.

This is a painful book to read. Kraus shows how human monsters are made in visceral and grotesque detail. Kraus refers to a CIA report on “enhanced interrogation techniques” at the end that I am sure informed the events of the book. The book is made even more painful and heartbreaking by the reveals at the end.

While Kraus does a superior job with the plot focused on Liv, Doug, and the alien, other parts aren’t as strong. The book takes awhile to get going, secondary characters’ motivations are unclear, and parts of the plot don’t make sense.  Still, he has written a powerful and deeply disturbing horror story and condemnation of government secrecy, torture, and complicity.

 

Contains: explicit body horror and torture, violence, sex, alcohol abuse, bullying

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Editor’s note: Bent Heavens is a nominee on the final ballot for this year’s Bram Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel. 

Posted on May 11, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: The Bone Carver (The Night Weaver, Book 2) by Monique Snyman

cover art for The Bone Carver by Monique Snyman

The Bone Carver (The Night Weaver, Book 2) by Monique Snyman

Vesuvian Press, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-1645480082

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition ( Bookshop.org   | Amazon.com )

 

The Bone Carver is the sequel to The Night Weaver, a previous Stoker nominee in the YA category. These two factors mean it has a high bar to jump, as the second book in a series usually isn’t able to stand alone.

In The Night Weaver, seventeen-year old Rachel Cleary lives in the isolated New England community of Shadow Grove. She discovers her neighbor across the street, Mrs. Crenshaw, is a guardian protecting the boundary between our world and the fae realm in Shadow Grove. While out with Rachel, Mrs. Crenshaw’s visiting grandson, Dougal, recognizes the Black Annis, a fae creature who feeds on children. With the help of her former boyfriend, Greg, and Dougal, Rachel realizes there is a pattern of children’s disappearances over time that has been covered up by the town council and the sheriff. Complicating this mess is the involvement of a Orion, a drug-dealing fairy prince who has a strange connection with Rachel. She defeats the Night Weaver and saves the children.

The Bone Carver continues Rachel’s story. Reasonably wanting to escape Shadow Grove and go to college, Rachel has studied hard, but unfortunately she has a panic attack during her SATs.  Dougal is now enrolled in school with her, Greg is attempting to make her jealous, Orion has returned to the fae realm, and a creepy new boy, Cam, is following her around. Entering an abandoned part of her high school, she discovers popular girl Mercia, who has epilepsy, having a seizure, and helps her recover. After the seizure is over, Rachel finds a bone carving of Mercia having a seizure.  Later that day, after Mrs. Crenshaw falls and breaks her hip,  Rachel finds another bone carving. Rachel is convinced a “miser fae” called the Bone Carver is causing the accidents. As more people find disturbing bone carvings of themselves, Rachel and Dougal investigate, and find gory evidence of powerful fae magic. They determine that Rachel needs to enter the fae realm to find Orion.

Mercia reveals that she is a witch able to open a dimensional portal to the fae realm, and Rachel goes through, wanders aimlessly, causes a disaster, is kidnapped by Orion’s older brother Nova, the king of the fairies, and finally leaves with Orion to (hopefully) save the day. During her five days in fairyland, things have gotten exponentially worse, with people, including her mother, ending up in the hospital or acting violent or irrational, and the high school in a shambles. Despite her recent desire to flee Shadow Grove, Rachel decides she is willing to die to take the Bone Carver down and save the town.

The Bone Carver is suitably chilling and gruesome and doesn’t stint on body horror. Snyman has a talent for vivid description, as evidenced by Rachel’s visions of the vicious deaths the Bone Carver has inflicted on the girls he’s murdered. The plot around Jenny, Rachel’s mother, was extremely disturbing. There’s a heavy #MeToo, anti-incel message to the book as well, and the scenes between Rachel and Greg, Rachel and Cam, and Rachel and the Bone Carver thoroughly creeped me out.

However, what most impressed me, was the author’s depiction of Mercia. She is a well-developed character: competent, smart, caring, attractive, and popular, and when Greg gets irrational and handsy with Rachel, Mercia has no problem knocking him out. It’s easy to write a character who is living with epilepsy as an invalid or pitiful and in need of rescue, but Mercia is never written that way or treated like one by other characters. Although she comes from a family of witches (and it irritated me that her epilepsy was magically caused) she isn’t effortlessly “magical”, and she isn’t suddenly “cured” at the end of the story. In fact, her seizures aren’t quite under control, and she needs medication to help. As someone living with epilepsy I can tell you that this is a character type I have NEVER seen in any book depicting someone living with epilepsy in any age group or genre, and it was absolutely a pleasure to read this.

Unfortunately, Mercia is one of the few characters that actually did have character development and purpose in the book. Dougal and Mrs. Crenshaw are out of the picture for a majority of the book, Greg is essentially a plot device, and after all the to-do about going to the fae realm and bringing back Orion, I question whether he was useful enough to justify Rachel’s disappearing for five days while everything fell to pieces. There’s a huge reveal at the end of the book, so I assume he’ll be more involved in book three. While a nice addition to the series, though, The Bone Carver really cannot stand alone as a novel, and doesn’t hold together as well as the first book. For its depiction of a character living with epilepsy, however, I highly recommend it.

 

Contains: body horror, gore, violence, sexual assault, mentions of self-harm and suicide.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Editor’s note: The Bone Carver (Shadow Grove, Vol. #2) is a nominee on the final ballot for the Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.

 

Posted on May 7, 2021 by , Reply
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