Christa Carmen

Please meet the Klutz sisters. OMFG, would you stop running into things, tripping, dropping things, jerking, staggering and stumbling! Fuck. It's always women, too, as if we have some spaz gene. Quit it writers. This is just one incident of many -

"Finally, she drops the umbrella, lurches forward, and, once moving, careens toward the podium so fast she almost bowls it over."

Blake (who frigging names a girl Blake? Wish for a boy much?) is especially annoying with all her fretting and freaking and obsession with her addiction/sobriety and gothic novels. Just a few pages in I wished she would just die already (she does, we know that before we actually meet her). On top of that, she's emotionally and mentally a 10 year old. Check out this astute observation about her biological mother -

"Who keeps one daughter but gives away the second as if they were donating a goddamn sweater?"

OMG who?? Who? Maybe a struggling woman who didn't want to get pregnant in the first place? Maybe a woman who was raped? Maybe a woman who has a complicated life (a life, no! you don't say. mothers don't have lives.). Maybe a woman who already has too much on her plate with one child. OMFG grow the fuck up already. Stop making everything about you and die please.

And there's this gem -
"Was it a cliché to have seen herself in Jane Eyre, or the eponymous Rebecca,"

Um...did you read Rebecca? Do you know what eponymous means? Clearly no to both.

Or this -
"Yes, the mansion inspires disquiet, and yes, she feels as if she’s trapped here,"

Then why the hell are you there? Idiot.

"Years of substance abuse have rendered intuition and self-preservation nonexistent." - You're telling me.

"Still, Martin has given hours of his day to help her," - Why? Blake is the stupidest person ever...all the drugs or just congenitally dumb? Never does she doubt his motives. Please die.

Oh wait, more spaz on display - "Something shakes in her fingers. Blake yelps before realizing it’s her phone. It’s been off, not dead, and she inadvertently squeezed it to life in her white-knuckled fear. It takes her three swipes to activate the flashlight,"

So after a while, light dawns on marble head (mine!) When will she die already? Maybe as a millennial she’s been as sheltered as some 18th century girl. Helicopter parents keep kids from having to deal with anything and so when they have to, they can’t. Like the girl in an old gothic novel she can only cry and faint and be manipulated because she doesn’t know better and has no spine. Should I blame her or society for letting her be brought up this way? So much for empowering etc...what a grand failure my generation is at parenting. I guess she does fit as the heroine (???) of a gothic novel - incompetent, flighty, stupid and unable to do anything for herself except trip and break stuff.

"until the nail of her left ring finger catches in a chink in the stone and rips.

But then, Blake is falling forward as the door flies open." - OMG how did she survive to adulthood?

"The plumbing looks to be mid–twentieth century." - Blake is a plumbing expert now?

"Her foot slips on the boardwalk, and she goes down." Of course.

Enter Thalia - "She gasps, and her fingers lose their grip on the bottle." Then "The chair shoots out from under her, and Thalia crashes to the floor." - Yup, sisters for sure.

And she brings clothes right for a tea party with the queen or a Summer's Eve commercial. No weather app on that phone? OMFG. The stupidity is genetic.

I did finish it though despite many situational gaffes and weird plot holes (skimming might have made me miss something, but who knows). There are plenty of gothic tropes on display including hidden passageways, old bones, ghosts and family secrets and there is a reasonably happy ending. Could have totally done without Thalia's summing up at the end - she's no Poirot and it was irritating that the author had to spell out her dastardly plot so pointedly, but because it was basically a hot mess she had to. Glad I didn't pay for this book.… (más)

I first read Christa Carmen's story "Red Room" in Unnerving magazine and loved it. This collection was every bit as good as I expected. She does a great job of taking old school horror tropes & even older school gothic conventions, placing them in scary modern settings, then subverting half of them and embracing the rest. The tales that result are refreshing takes on the influences they are rooted in and give nods to. Addiction is a big theme in this book, which is a horror close to my heart. I also really liked the sense of a shared universe with some characters appearing, or at least being mentioned in, more than one story. If you like mess-with-your-head horror that is just as poetic as it is disturbing, read this book.… (más)