How much weirdness is acceptable and what becomes gross or nauseating? What is the limit? I find it interesting for the body too. . . What’s the limit of grossing out a reader and having someone stay with a story?
Mystery Lights – Lena Valencia
Through the process of stripping away parts of the self . . . the women come face-to-face with their own uncanny reality, however ugly. Ghosts do not give up easily.
Sister Golden Calf – Colleen Burner
One of the greatest joys of Burner’s novella is that classic feature of the road trip: not having any clue who or what you are going to run into next.
No paean to Montreal’s transformation into a global capital of commerce and culture . . . [Bock’s novel] imagines one of the countless souls who built contemporary Montreal, giving their bodies for the city . . .
Sun’s first novel is very much its own book, but it invites comparison to Fyodor’s 1880 family-drama-cum-spiritual-murder-mystery, The Brothers Karamazov, so boldly that I think I’ll go ahead and compare them.
A hypnotic novel, itself seemingly hypnotized by bodily fluids.
A Small Apocalypse – Laura Chow Reeve
Reeve’s imagined worlds are not habitable alternatives but critical comments on this one. Her idea of a refuge is not the infinite expanse of the interior self, but the tight-knit, embattled queer family in a hostile world.
She Is Haunted mixes elements of melodrama—the mother-daughter psychodrama above all—into a traumatic temporality in which the past is never-ending.
The Moon Over Edgar – Ian Felice
This collection advocates for attention to dreams, the uncanny, the mundane, and the moon as if now is the time to devote ourselves to that possibility rather than, like Edgar, letting our life pass before us.
An interesting consequence occurs in the titular tale, when time seems to proceed not along any linear or standardized path, but according to the Minke Whale’s appearance, disappearance, reappearance.