I was feeling sort of so-so about this collection of short stories — nothing wrong with it, just not really blowing me away — and then it was a hot hot Chicago day, and I was at my partner's mother's apartment, and she has no air conditioning, and I felt absolutely swollen with heat, so (taking advantage of my child being distracted by his grandmother) I ran myself an ice cold bath, and grabbed this book. The specific story I started reading is one about halfway through, called Adela's House, and it is terrifying. Reading it in a silent bathroom, slipping slowly into the icy water, was absolutely incredible — literally chilling. And that fantastic experience totally changed my relationship to the book: I tore through the rest over the next few days.
These are fascinating stories, to me, because they are so hard to place, generically. You want to call them gothic, but they're more like actual horror — at times, almost unbearably so — and yet, they're also deeply interested in the inner lives and feelings of the characters. The terror stems both from deeply weird and creepy things happening in the world, and from subterranean traumas in the characters' own psyches. And so the plots balance between the two, emphasizing the impossibility of any real resolution.
It's a intensely unsettling collection, and I'm honestly not sure how I felt about it, but it's definitely unlike anything else I've read.
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