Dear Mr. Ajvide Lindqvist, I find myself wanting to see your arm, to verify if there is an ‘X’ scarring it, carved by a monster of a policeman. Seeing this scar, I think, might convince me of the existence of horrors beyond this world. In this year of firsts, I was lucky enough recently…
Tag: horror
Traumata: Such Small Hands / Andrés Barba
In an afterword by Edmund White, Andrés Barba’s chilling and sparse novella Such Small Hands is said to be based on events in an orphanage in 1960s Brazil in which a group of young girls killed a fellow child and played with her body parts for some time afterward. This point is almost universally noted…
Dead girl and heron: Joyce Carol Oates
Content warning: child abuse (reference), sexual assault (reference) Before reading her work, I’d assumed Joyce Carol Oates was one of those writers who churned out weepy family sagas. As many fateful reading habits begin, I picked up Daddy Love (2013) by accident. It was an entirely disturbing read, tracking the fate of a young boy…
Review: See What I Have Done / Sarah Schmidt
I saw the ink-bled pigeon on the cover; it was beautiful. I heard the title; I was intrigued. When I discovered the story was about an infamous slaying, I couldn’t not read it. I must admit my approach to Australian author Sarah Schmidt’s chilling debut See What I Have Done was tinted with classic writer’s…
Mini review: The Fisherman / John Langan
Highly underrated and overlooked, The Fisherman is one of those chance treasures I am grateful to have forcibly thrust upon me by fellow reader friends. Having not read horror for some time – because it often feels like a guilty pleasure, I was intrigued to find this was a kind of literary horror that straddles…
Mini review: The Wasp Factory / Iain Banks
Another case of being late to the party, reading-wise. Although, in my defence, The Wasp Factory was published in 1984. Frank Cauldhame, sixteen years old, serial animal mutilator and multiple murderer, lives on a remote Scottish island with his incapacitated father. He has a ritualistic contraption in the attic, the eponymous ‘Wasp Factory’, and his…
Review: There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby
How have I never heard of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya before? Admittedly, my reading of contemporary Russian literature is dependent on the availability of English translations, since my Russian reading ability is torturously slow. The title of this collection of works appeared in my Goodreads suggestions: There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s…
Dasha Maiorova 