Thus Were Their Faces
This book is a selection of work spanning multiple decades, and particularly has a focus on showcasing Ocampo’s tendency to be both insightful and at the same time grotesque, haunting, and fantastic.
Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
Short story collections.
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This book is a selection of work spanning multiple decades, and particularly has a focus on showcasing Ocampo’s tendency to be both insightful and at the same time grotesque, haunting, and fantastic.
It’s not the usual gothic fare, but instead is a bit more subtle in its spookiness. However, there is a spooky graveyard and a few scary desolate locations.
More powerful than gore, I find an eerie atmosphere is what really makes a collection like Ghostroots tick.
Enríquez loves a twist ending, and ghosts and horrors found in unlikely places.
Gallant clusters the stories like one is hearing about a circle of friends or acquaintances at a party.
Reading Isherwood brings you into a moment in history, and there’s something really powerful and rare about that.
Sometimes books constructed out of vignettes seem to be built on a faulty foundation and have frames that are not enough to withstand the weight of a message or a book. Firestone here has used the flexibility of very short vignettes to construct just what her title implies — an airless space.
I do love a short novel. Not only do they reliably help me out of even the most prolonged of reading slumps, but short novels are where writers really shine. It takes a lot of skill to craft a narrative that is tight but still full of intent and power.
When you read these stories, it’s easy to start looking for threads of his eventual fate or at least the mental state that led to it. Are they there? Yes, but they are subtle.
A New Tradition Maybe? This year the holiday season proved strangely elusive, and then, when it finally felt like it arrived, it was fraught with problems. Wesker had a bad weigh in. First, my lovely spouse was sick, then I fell ill and am still not well two weeks later. There were so many blizzards. […]