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Book Review: The Taxidermist’s Lover by Polly Hall

cover art for The Taxidermist's Lover by Polly Hall

The Taxidermist’s Lover by Polly Hall

Camcat Publishing, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-0744303810

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

 

There are books that just spin into something unique, something that could either crash and burn or catch fire and pull the reader into the pages from the opening chapter. The Taxidermist’s Lover claims to be a modern gothic horror novel, yet it is a bit more than that. Its brave form and writing elevates it from your typical horror yarn.

 

Polly Hall has penned a different sort of novel, with a second person point of view that, while not typical, works well for the story of Scarlett in her love with husband, Henry. Henry has the odd profession of a taxidermist, which obviously seeps into the relationship that undoubtedly turns twisted.

 

The readers follow the strange couple, along with twin sister Rhett and rival Felix, as true love has consequences.

 

Henry has a predilection for creating “special” animals for Scarlett, often mashups of beasts both beautiful and grotesque. She comes to develop a fondness for them, despite their nightmarishness.

 

As Scarlett’s psyche begins to fracture, the story spirals into a hypnotic ellipse that in lesser hands, would fall apart.

 

Hall has created a thing of beauty, with poetic prose that entrances as the sparse story and dialogue swell into a fever dream.

 

Recommended for all gothic horror fans, especially those who enjoy literary fiction.

 

Reviewed by David Simms

Editor’s note: The Taxidermist’s Lover is a nominee on the final ballot of this year’s Bram Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a First Novel.

Posted on May 17, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

(  Bookshop.org |  Amazon.com )

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Del Rey, 2020

ISBN: 9780525620785

Available: Hardcover, Paperback, Audiobook, Kindle

 

In 1950’s Mexico, Noemi, a flirtatious, intelligent fashionista, decides her cousin Catalina has been out of touch for too long.  When Noemi receives a disturbing letter from Catalina suggesting that she might want to escape from her new marriage, Noemi packs her gorgeous wardrobe and heads to isolated High Place, the ancestral home of the English Doyles, to investigate.

Ever the realist, skeptical of her cousin’s fairytale princess notions about marriage, Noemi immediately distrusts her suave brother-in-law. She soon realizes that he is evil, and so is his menacing house that has wallpaper “slippery, like a strained muscle” and walls like “sickly organs” with “veins and arteries clogged with secret excesses.” Something is not right at High Place, and Noemi starts to feel its curse invading her mind and body, slowly but surely, just as it has infected her cousin.

What begins as a poetic, gothic fairytale, becomes a wild blend of fantasy, horror, and science-fiction in Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. The Doyle men and women have preserved their family line by choosing between “fit and unfit people.” The men wield their power by practicing eugenics through a weird and totally terrifying combination of sexual abuse, drugs, intimidation, and psychological control. The house has an actual heartbeat that is pulsing with mold, fungus and rot, and the creepy family patriarch, an ugly man full of secrets and disgusting tumors, sores, and black bile, is directing and insuring the family’s future from his deathbed. Murders have occurred at High Place, and strange epidemics have killed droves of workers in the family’s silver mine. Once Noemi has the facts, she knows she must fight and use her wits  to survive and save the people she cares about before the evil overcomes them and traps them in a living hell forever.

Although the book seems set in a period later than the 50’s in terms Noemi’s language and sensibility, it still is, in more than one sense, a horror story that reflects the historically violent subjugation of women used as breeders in families and cultures obsessed with lineage and legacy. Religion, status, and seclusion frequently became barriers to freedom for these women by preventing them from making choices about the direction of their own lives. The women of Mexican Gothic cope with horrible suffering and mirror the superhuman strength it took for real women to endure, and sometimes find rare opportunities to escape, the nightmarish situations forced on their gender. Highly Recommended.

Contains: gore, sexual situations, profanity, incest, body horror

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Editor’s note: Mexican Gothic is a nominee on the final ballot for the 2020 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel. 

 

Posted on March 1, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: The Perfectly Fine House by Stephen Kozeniewski and Wile E. Young

cover image for The Perfectly Fine House by Stephen Kozeniewski and Wile E. Young

The Perfectly Fine House by Stephen Kozeniewski and Wile E. Young (  Bookshop.org |  Amazon.com )

Grindhouse Press, 2020

ISBN: 13:978-1-9419-18-63-0

Available: Kindle, paperback

 

The “breathers” depicted in The Perfectly Fine House do the usual: work, shop, have kids. The ghosts are busy, too. Sometimes, they help out with the great-grandkids, travel to exotic locations or hang out with their friends. They go to their local bar, smoke sage to get high, and maybe meet up with a young Unenlightened person who likes to date dead people.

But being dead isn’t all fun and games. There are those who disrespectfully walk straight through you, and you risk being arrested for any “unsanctioned possessions.” It’s also really disturbing to find a friend or relative “relapsing” because you can actually see the wounds that killed him. For the ghosts in this book, things get even worse than that when they realize their community is disappearing from Earth.

Stephen Koseniewski and Wile E. Young have written a clever and frequently amusing tale that blends ghostly and human lifestyles with appealing characters. Donna, a “surrogate” who makes love matches between the dead and the living, and her brother Kyle, killed in a motorcycle accident, struggle to find out what is causing the holes all over the world into which ghosts are vanishing. Characters include an exorcist love interest for Donna, a friend of Kyle’s who died “trying to flash fry a turkey in gasoline,” and a poet who comes up with a way to execute ghosts. Will Bonnie, the first to witness a disappearance, be able to apply her scientific savvy in time to stop the destruction? Will Donna lose her brother forever? At a time when having no “ghostsense” is a disability, you need to be careful to avoid provoking the dead “to go all poltergeist on you.” Good luck with that. Recommended.

Contains: adult situations and language

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Posted on November 9, 2020 by , Reply
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