The Cipher
The Cipher is an interesting story that uses extreme violence to help the narrative. It doesn’t become the narrative.
S. Hargrave
S. Hargrave is a Canadian writer and the book reviewer at Old Paper & Cats. Hargrave has a love of rare, antiquarian, and classic literature, works in translation, and cats.
Dark Tales
The thing I love most about Jackson’s short stories is the way that she twists seemingly ordinary events into strange and unsettling directions. You won’t find ghouls and goblins here, but you will find human monsters and ominous atmospheres that leave the reader wondering how things went so wrong and why.
Mourning Diary
Of all of the forms of memoir that I read, I feel particularly drawn towards the diary. There’s something about reading the immediate thoughts of the writer as they live through and work through the moment.
Cloudland Revisited
Cloudland Revisited is a hilarious ode to the movies, including all of those bad and cheesy ones that we watch and then wonder why hundreds of people came together to produce such a clunker.
Caliban Shrieks
Caliban Shrieks has been described as somewhere between an autobiographical novel and a rant, and you know what? I actually agree with this statement.
Siblings
Elisabeth is supposedly fully invested in the GDR and stubbornly sees it as the way to some kind of utopian realization of equality for all. However, her doubts have started to creep in.
The Fire Within
He has been institutionalized and addicted to drugs for quite some time, and he feels that he is on the verge of losing his looks and his status as he continues to fail to meet expectations.
Murder in the Age of Enlightenment
Though the subjects are varied, what remains is Akutagawa’s beautiful starkness and his precise use of prose. There is the feeling that cutting one word would be impossible, but adding one would be a shame.
Rope
Patrick Hamilton’s Rope is a subtle kind of spooky. It’s not a murder-mystery. The murder has happened and it is no mystery who did it.
Termush
Termush centres around a seaside resort that after an unnamed disaster (but all signs seem to point to a nuclear war followed by a plague or a plague followed by nuclear war), which now houses those individuals that could pay for shelter and medical care.