May ScaredyKIT: Graphic Novels and Short Works

May ScaredyKIT: Graphic Novels and Short Works

  

Lots of options to read in May, and as it's a busy time of year for me something short is always welcome. So, graphic novels and short fiction or nonfiction.

Some graphic novels and series:

Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran
The Raven's Child by Tom Sniegoski and Tom Brown
Sandman by Neil Gaiman
Monstress by Marjorie M. Liu and Sana Takeda
Locke & Key by Joe Hill

And a rather random selection of a few short stories anthologies and collections:

Never Whistle at Night, edited by Shane Hawk
The October Country by Ray Bradbury
Night Shift by Stephen King

I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone reads!

Wiki: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/2024_ScaredyKIT#May:_Graphic_Novels_and_...

I have 6 or 7 graphic novels on my tbr that appear to fit (2 or 3 by Gaiman!). I'll have to see which my library has. (Hopefully they'll have at least one!)

I've been meaning to continue with Sandman for a while now - looks like I'm up to Vol. 3 - good time to get back to it!

I'm going with A Skeleton At the Helm, a collection of spooky sea stories.

I've been hearing fantastic things about Never Whistle at Night, which is on my TBR, but I think I'm going to go with another anthology for this month. Humans are the Problem: A Monster's Anthology has been staring at me from beside my desk for months, and I think I'm too curious at this point to let the staring go on any longer!

I have Something Is Killing The Children Volume 1 which looks suitably scary!

I am doing the June ScaredyKIT. I wanted to let everyone know I will be away from May 12-18, so right when it would usually be posted. I doubt I'll be ready to post it before I leave, so it will likely be done the 19th or 20th. As a reminder the theme will be "serial killers" if anyone wanted a head start on finding something.

I read a nonfiction graphic novel, Vlad the Impaler for this month's challenge. The book is very graphic in its illustrations of Vlad's rapes and murders.

I read Something Is Killing The Children Volume 1 - ended very much up in the air so will need to get Volume 2 soon!

Gnaw by Jennifer Morrow in Vexed to Nightmare anthology
Even though I enjoy bloody Scottish and Scandi crime fiction, the horror genre has never appealed as reading material so I have to admit the story by Jennifer Morrow (known as mstrust here at LT) was the only one in the collection that I read. Her creation is a truly horrific concept but the suspense and anticipation only adds to the terror.

Well done, Jennifer!

Ha, I didn't expect to find my own work listed, so thanks! I'm glad you could handle it and I appreciate that you took the time. (And I was surprised to find that my story was probably the goriest, so you may have no trouble with the others.)

>11 mstrust: It certainly had the goriest kiss ever!

I'll get to the other stories eventually. I think I can handle anything now!

😁 Sorry for the trauma! 🧟

>13 mstrust: No worries! I'll be ok again in a week or two! 😳

I read In a Glass Darkly by J. Sheridan LeFanu which is a collection of three short stores and two stories that are more of a novella length, including his vampire tale, Carmilla.

I have also been slowly making my way through a collection called Weird Tales: 101 Weird, Strange and Supernatural Stories. I started this quite a while ago and had read about 20 of the stories before May started. So far I've managed to finish 4.5 more this month. No way I will even come close to finishing the collection this month, but I've made some good progress so far. considering I am reading this on my Kindle app with my eyes (I'm slow with eBooks due to vision issues).

Sorry for the delay in posting June's thread. For those following the planning thread, I did mention that I'd be away for a week. I just got back last night and thought I'd get this posted right away this morning. Here is the link to June's thread.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/360950

Finished Humans are the Problem: A Monster's Anthology. This was a really fun anthology, with a great variety of horror stories. The one warning: The first story is among the best, so it sets such a high bar that some pretty good stories end up not quite making that bar and being disappointing. I'm not sure the order does a lot of justice to many of the stories, but I nevertheless really enjoyed the collection. Full review written!

The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country / Neil Gaiman.
4 stars

In this 3rd volume of Gaiman’s “Sandman” series, there are four separate short stories presented, though they all involve dreams and the characters Death or Dream in some way. One was about an author with writer’s block, who acquired the muse Calliope to help him out. One was a cat who told a story trying to get other cats to dream with her to become more powerful than humans. The third was Will Shakespeare and his son Hamnet, travelling and performing for one patron “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. The last one involved some kind of supernatural creature who cannot die who is lonely and desperately wants to find a way.

I quite liked this one. I don’t always like short stories, but I think I like them better in graphic novel format. I like Death portrayed as a woman, as it was on the last story, but the first story was my favourite. Included at the end of the book is Gaiman’s script on how one of the stories (Calliope, my favourite one) should be drawn and formatted. That was interesting to see how he writes his graphic novels (though he specifically explains that not everyone does it the same way).

I probably won't finish in May, but I acquired and started You Like It Darker, a new short story collection by Stephen King.

I read Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh. The majority of the stories can be categorized as "weird fiction", though the last, the story of an Eastern European girl of about seven or eight years old who is clearly a psychopath and determines to murder a sadistic local man, is pretty dang sinister.