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By my count, I've already read four different books that either touched on, danced around, or directly referenced Lovecraft's greater mythos, without ever actually giving the source material a shot. Figured it was time to finally rectify that.

This was an interesting collection in that the entries were sorted in chronological order of when they were written, and coincidentally I enjoyed the later pieces better than the earlier ones. It was all pretty uniformly dense to get through however; sentences ran long and used obscure and uncommon vocabulary for seemingly its own sake. Definitely a unique style, but not exactly one that I was a fan of. At times I could see the value of mimicking a character's descent into madness or trying to decipher true meaning from a complicated text (something that characters do a few times), but mostly it just felt like a book that actively resisted being read.

Quick synopses of the five works included in this collection:

Dagon - A sailor in the south Pacific during WWI escapes German captivity in a lifeboat and is adrift for days before finding some previously unknown island. On it, he sees things that eventually drive him to suicide.

The Call of Cthulu - The last surviving heir of an academic inherits his great-uncle's notes on an investigation into a secret cult that seemingly spans the world. The revelations make him fear for his own safety.

The Dunwich Horror - A familial cult in rural New England creates a monster that gets loose, and three academics have to decipher strange texts to figure out how to defeat it.

The Whisperer in Darkness - An university professor is a vocal skeptic against a spate of cryptid sightings in the New England countryside and gains the attention of a reclusive academic who lives out there. The hermit claims to have evidence of the creatures, and their back-and-forth correspondence escalates into a threatening climax.

The Haunter of the Dark - A writer seeking inspiration begins to investigate a massive abandoned cathedral in the center of a city that the locals steadfastly refuse to acknowledge. Cult shenanigans ensue.

Lots of scholarly protagonists, lots of cults, lots of esoteric texts. The idea of a single author utilizing the same setting and mythos for multiple different works was interesting and I could see the appeal. I just found that the prose and extremely sparse use of dialogue to be more of a struggle to get through than a more contemporary work would be.

I don't read many series because I have completionist tendencies (hell, I can barely convince myself to DNF a book I'm actively hating), but I'm slowly coming around to trying a few out. I also wanted to try dipping back into military sci-fi which I read a lot of in my early twenties, so this book was killing two birds with one stone with respect to my reading goals.

The premise alone was enough to get my interest; a space military organization only accepts new recruits that are at least 75-years-old, whisking them away to undergo some mystery medical treatment and then off to the front-lines fighting literal aliens, never to return back to earth. As you progress through the story it kinda feels like the idea of an army made up of old people came first and the (to me, weak) justification came afterwards, but whatever. This book definitely has big "first in a series" vibes though, because damn near the first two thirds of the book is just worldbuilding and training montages; we're well past the halfway point before anything resembling a central conflict shows up.

This book also came across as explicitly pro-military and anti-diplomacy with about the subtlety of an elephant. But, it was fun. Sure, I more or less correctly guessed the big reveal of how senior citizens were turned into supersoldiers, and the lifelong civilians transitioned into hardened infantrymen way faster than I found believable. But we got cool descriptions of aliens and multiple over-the-top battle scenes à la Starship Troopers or Halo that scratched an itch I didn't know I've been sitting on. Interesting ethical scenarios occasionally flashed across the pages, but they were whisked away by the next action scene as soon as they came up.

To me, this was a, "turn your brain off and have fun" kind of book, which sometimes is just what you need.

Trench warfare on the Western Front of World War I has gotta be like, at least in the top 5 worst experiences in all of human history. But I think this is the first fictional account I've read that really nailed just how fucking bleak it could be by looking at it directly rather than shunting it to the background or a flashback.

Strangely enough, this book strongly reminded me of [b:Fever Dream|30763882|Fever Dream|Samanta Schweblin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1471279721l/30763882.SX50.jpg|42701168], in that it's a brief look at a character's descent into madness. A Senegalese soldier who's drafted up by France to fight the Germans watches his best friend die and Does Not Handle It Well™. His white French commanding officers just want the Africans to act savage and scare the opposing Germans, and our protagonist is all too willing to play the part. Problem is, his own side starts becoming afraid of him as well. Very much a, "we asked you to give an 8 or a 9 on the crazy scale, and you're giving us a 20" kind of situation.

There's a series of vignettes of trench life and life before the war, but the book has a very loose flow and structure, and I didn't really know what to expect at any point as past and present blended together with increasing frequency. But that very well could have been intentional, as our protagonist starts to lose his own sense of identity towards the end.

Definitely a unique perspective for a historical period I thought I'd already seen from every angle. And in retrospect, there really wasn't any supernatural aspect at all like I expected going into it, which actually heightens the depravity of it all. Maybe give this one a go when you're already in a good state of mind and not when you're looking for a feel-good/pick-me-up kind of story.

I just had two back-to-back plane flights for a short trip. Were it not for the fact that I didn't bring anything else to read, I don't know that I would've brought myself to finish this book.

This is my second book with this author, and I really enjoyed The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. But whereas I found that to be a very creative and inventive short story collection, this book was a single narrative that felt like an entirely different person wrote it, which is wild considering they were only published a year apart from each other. The Croning also felt very dated, like classic horror literature from the 70's or 80's, so I was surprised to see it came out in 2012.

It's hard to criticize and nail down what I didn't like here, and a large part of that is that there wasn't a lot that happened in this book. I haven't read as much cosmic horror as other subgenres, but I'm at least aware not to expect outright explanations or a clearly defined central conflict or antagonists. Still, it felt like there was nothing to focus on at all. Tangents and side stories and endless prose out the wazoo in this one! For a story coming in under 250 pages, it felt way longer and a lot could have been trimmed out for the benefit of the main plot. Maybe on a meta level it was an intentional decision to be written that way because the protagonist suffers from multiple signs of dementia (for a reason that has an in-fiction justification). So whenever we did catch a glimpse of something interesting happening in the background it felt like one of his increasingly rare moments of lucidity before it was gone again.

But it didn't roll all the way over for me. There was simply too much unnecessary infodumping and drinking and smoking and out-of-left-field horniness for me to care about the occasional passages I was meant to remember. Or maybe I just don't like books where the most clearly interesting person isn't the protagonist that the narrative is tied to. Or maybe this one just went clear over my head, because a lot of my trusted mutuals on GoodReads gave this one high praise and I cannot understand why.

As of the time of my writing this, I've only given a 5-star review to 10% of the 103 books I've rated on here, so I like to think that I'm stingy with handing those out. But honestly, I knew I was going to end up here with this book after just the first chapter.

I don't really read many thrillers, let alone the courtroom procedural variety, and I also don't even remember how this book ended up on my TBR or why I bought a physical copy several months ago. But the simple fact is that I had an unexpectedly good time with this book and literally did not want to stop reading when my lunch breaks were wrapping up.

Chapters alternate back and forth between an extremely high-profile court case that happened in 2009 (think like O.J. Simpson or Casey Anthony-levels of media attention), and forward to 2019, when the surviving jurors are summoned back together by a podcast doing a special on the ten-year anniversary of the verdict. The case involved the disappearance of a billionaire's daughter, and the jury voted to acquit her teacher who was suspected of the murder, a decision that 84% of the entire country disagreed with. Needless to say, none of the jurors ever really were able to re-integrate back into society after that, so the reunion was a way to commiserate with the only other people who knew what they were going through.

Except one of the jurors is murdered the night before his interview. The one juror who claimed to have new evidence on the case.

It sounds way more cliché than I'm describing, but the execution is anything but. I can think of three specific scenes that honestly surprised me, and this plot really kept me on my toes. And I was also impressed how a roster of 12 jurors could have such distinct personalities that I never really got confused. And that's not even including all the present-day people and other characters that get involved; there's a really big cast here, but it never felt unmanageable. The fact that each of the "flashback" chapters focused on a different juror while the "present day" chapters followed just a singular protagonist probably went a long way towards achieving that, and I think that was a smart decision to structure the book that way.

I genuinely have no complaints about this book. I can't think of anything I didn't like or would've done differently.

I feel like such a fake sometimes. I say stuff like, "I like eerie, atmospheric books," and think that there's nothing inherently wrong with an unreliable narrator or open endings. And yet when I read a story like this that has all three I'm just left thinking: wow, this was not for me!

Definitely a unique, lonely, and melancholic book. Kind of gave me James and the Giant Peach/Coraline/Series of Unfortunate Events-kind of vibes with respect to children in strange environments and an innate distrust of adults, especially parents. It's not necessarily a coming-of-age story so much as an adult man reflecting back on an unusual period of his childhood, but it feels like so little dramatic action is actually happening that I never felt unease or tension. It also has a fairly abrupt ending, which really got me because the last twenty pages or so of the physical book version is actually an excerpt from a different book by the same author, so I was holding several pages thinking I had that much more to go when I really didn't.

This is another candidate for my "Goodreads should give us half-star increments" campaign, because I'm treating this as a 2.5 rounded up for uniqueness. I try to think who I would recommend a book to at the end of my reviews, but this one is tricky. I guess if you're looking for a sort of Rorschach test situation where two people can look at the same thing and come up with wildly different interpretations, this would be a good one to consider; would be fun to do in a book club situation.

Normally I'd consider it a red flag when a character speaks directly to the reader in first person and says, "You're probably not going to like me." It screams of edginess for its own sake and I feel like I need to settle in for something that's going to try so hard to be jarring and surprising that it fails to do so. And yet, that happens here, and I still managed to be surprised (in a good way!).

Fantasy novellas tend to be sparse, but this has got to be a record for describing the bare minimum of the worldbuilding, if there's even a way to measure that metric. But maybe because I was given the bare minimum to understand what was going on I wanted to know more. Hell, three of the main characters weren't even named and I was still hooked on their dynamics and interactions. But I was able to read between the lines and get a sense of the logic this setting operated under and understood that there was a lot of underlying history that we simply did not have time to learn about.

I feel like I just read a ghost of an outline of a story, and it was still so good that I'm not mad about it. I guess gun-to-my-head if I had to describe what kind of archetype it was I'd call it a heist even though nothing was stolen and the protagonist didn't fail? Don't worry about it, it's a quirky little book with a lot of heart and you can knock this one off in a day; give it a go if you're looking for a short read.

Oh wow. What a fundamentally unenjoyable experience reading this book was.

I'll try to keep this short because I hate the idea of giving this book even more time than it's already taken from me, but this really felt like a story that did not want to be told. Thematically I suppose that makes sense because at the center of it all lies an event that happened a long time ago and that five of the main characters would very much like to keep in the past, but you don't even find that out until 3/4s of the way through the book. Every bit of progress felt like pulling teeth and there's just way too much nothing happening on these pages.

It leans very heavily on a Gothic Horror style, being very oppressive and isolated and claustrophobic at times, but I simply... didn't care. Damn near the entire town gets namedropped and there are so many characters I'm forced to remember for no discernible benefit. Pair that with an anticlimactic "that's it?" kind of ending, and there's really nothing to recommend here.

If you stripped away 60% of the wordcount and gave the premise and concept to a better writer, I can see how this would've been good. Instead, we have this dated, strangely misogynistic doorstop that should only be read for it's historical value so you can see how much better books have gotten since 1979. But even that's probably not a good reason unless you're some kind of literary academic.

Don't be like me. Stay away from this one.

Not to be one of those girlies who puts GIFs in their reviews, but this one really had me like:


Let's unpack.

I don't consider myself a huge modern war buff who follows the military industrial complex and plays armchair strategist with all the keyboard warriors in the War Thunder forums, but I'm aware of that whole subculture and have dipped my toe into learning more about it from time to time. Hell, the only reason I picked this book up in the first place (besides the cover; I'm a sucker for an orange and black motif) was because I was so fascinated with the 2020 Commission Report that I read last year and thought, "maybe this is a new genre I could get into." Not necessarily military thrillers a la Clancy, but more grounded, near-future "what-if" scenarios written by subject matter experts.

That's what I was expecting given the authors' credentials, but that's not what we have here. There is a lot more suspension of disbelief required of the reader than I was expecting. So much so that after the inciting incident I was preparing to strap in and get a Boomer-esque "technology bad!" lecturing for the next 250 pages, but that would've been a little too coherent. In fact, this book felt like it couldn't really decide on what message it wanted to convey. But I do know that a lot of time was given to foreign nationals shit-talking America, but nothing at all from our allies (the EU literally is not even mentioned in the entire book, and neither is South Korea. Japan and Australia are likewise checked out from a developing hot war in their own backyard for no discernible reason).

Without giving anything away, the plot follows multiple people on different sides of the developing conflict, often simultaneously during the bigger events, but the story still feels "small" for lack of a better word. And I think the story suffers for it, because the big picture geopolitcs churning in the background is more interesting than what most of the characters have to offer. I wish I got more of that one step removed perspective; maybe that'd help me understand how a crisis between two nuclear armed first-rate powers slowly escalates over the course of weeks instead of hours.

I don't think this book meant to glorify war, but that kinda happens anyway because I feel like I'm supposed to be rooting for a certain character who defies orders (twice!) with disastrous results in pursuit of ~that moment~. I also don't think it intended to come down as particularly anti-war either because two separate Pearl Harbor-level events happen 'off-screen' as it were, instead of being described in every grisly, unsettling detail that they could have been. This book simply didn't know what it wanted to do.

Side note: it's kind of odd to say this of a book written in 2021 about events in 2034, but this book did not age well. You mean to tell me that while shit's going down in the South China Sea, Russia is able to unilaterally attack Poland (a NATO member), establish a zone of control linking Kaliningrad to Belarus in just two weeks, and Western Europe does nothing? And that these attacks are launched from the Admiral Kuznetsov, Russia's aircraft carrier that is notorious for being constantly under repair and by my math would be 52 years old in 2034? I have to laugh.

There's simply too many technical mistakes going on here for me to enjoy the story. "Cyber warfare" may as well be magic in this setting. Entire carrier groups can just go missing with the flip of a switch. Yet sometimes aircraft carriers are just cruising around unescorted without even an AEGIS vessel, and apparently no one has a CIWS system to deal with enemy fighters. The ending is ambiguous and the mediating power is... not who I expected it to be, but sure.

If this book wanted to make a statement on geopolitics and ideology, it should have picked a side. If it wanted to be a warning for how future conflicts may look, it should have done more research. If it just wanted to be entertaining, it should have been more fun.

Reading this book felt like watching a truck try to get out of a patch of mud; the tires certainly spent a lot of time spinning, but we sure weren't going anywhere.

The setting and inciting incident were promising enough, but they only served to get me in the door and were quickly discarded after the first third or so. I was expecting to get bashed over the head with a nostalgia hammer for the late 90's and go down a sinister path of depraved home videos that lead to some twisted climax. Instead I got a decades-spanning family drama and characters that actively resisted anything interesting.

Which is a shame because the prose was actually good and there were a few lines that impressed me with their wordplay, but that alone doesn't carry a book. There was also a strange choice in narration style; it was some kind of omnipotent first-person narration which you can't clock until the first "I" is casually thrown in somewhere after page 40 and doesn't show up again for several chapters. Like I was being told this story by someone who was trying to remain impartial but occasionally let their own biases bleed through.

What we're left with is a sort of mystery that no one really seems to put the effort into figuring out, and if the characters don't care, why should I?

This book was a wonderful companion to me on a recent vacation; who knew fear of oppressive government systems was an effective distraction from a fear of flying?

Pretty much any review of this book might use the word "political" in one way or another, and I won't be an exception, but it might help to understand the context here. The introduction by Paul Tremblay explains that the author has advanced degrees in Political Science and International Politics and partially grew up in Indonesia. That goes a long way in explaining why many of the entries have recurring motifs of jungles, strictly enforced curfews, generals and war criminals, factional disputes, etc. But all of the elements float around the background of any given story and don't distract from the central plot in any instance.

As with any short story collection, some will be better than others (or at least my opinion of them will be), but there weren't any obvious misses here. Was there context and symbolism going over my head that I would have picked up if I had a better understanding of Indonesia's post-independence history? Almost undoubtedly, but that doesn't mean I didn't have a good time reading this anyway.

There were thirteen stories total, but my favorite three were:
No Gods, No Masters - A woman in the 1600's makes a pact with a demon for a favor, and in return, the first boy born from her bloodline will become possessed by him and destroy the world. Fast-forward to modern day and the extended family members have to reckon with a pregnant cousin who wants to release the Beast once and for all.

Endless Life - A war criminal commits suicide in a hotel room before his enemies can catch up to him. Later, a lowly cleaning lady dies in the same room and is quickly forgotten. Her spirit strives to be remembered, but her hauntings are attributed to the warlord instead. She decides to roll with it.

Only Unity Saves the Damned - Three teenagers trapped in small-town rural America stage a ghost sighting video that goes viral. Everything goes downhill from there.

As far as books that I bought simply because I liked the cover/title/quick blurb when I saw it in the store, I've certainly done worse before. Maybe I should've spent a little longer researching it though because this book wasn't at all what I was expecting to be, and that's entirely on me.

I was very into the first third or so of the book: a woman detective in noir Chicago scopes out crime scenes and dips into secret lesbian speakeasies with some loose magical elements floating around the fringes. But then the magic started getting impossible to ignore and went full-blown Constantine with angels vs. demons and Deus ex Machina scenes. Kinda wished the supernatural elements stayed subtle, but that's a personal preference. I also got the sense that the protagonist was just kind of swept along by events happening around her and only made a significant decision at the climax. A little more agency on her end would've been appreciated.

Still, at 130-ish pages, this was the correct length for this kind of story. If Goodreads allowed half-star increments, I'd probably put it at 2.5, but I'll round up because lesbians.