Jonica
Contains spoilers
I read the whole thing but as a full collection online so im just counting this as my review for the whole thing.
I really loved the art style and found the homunculi so cool and creative. It felt very cinematic to me and id be curious to see what this would look and sound like through film cause I have a feeling the author has a very strong sense of all of those aspects despite it being restricted to one medium. Despite the craziness of this it felt relatable and I'll be wondering for awhile if he was really seeing hearts or just loony. Also I wish I looked like ito. What a diva
This thing was so racist that it knocked the air right out of me. When oolanga was talking to lady Arabella in the woods I thought I was having a stroke and hallucinating because I had never seen such overt and blatant bigotry written down in plain English before. Like I get that people were generally uncool about black people in the early 1900s but Jesus give it a rest bro like aren't you tired of being a hateful bitch? Also, there are simply not enough snakes. I was promised snakes and all I got was Bram Stoker using the n word with the hard r 1000 times
I'm a pretty avid horror reader but I didn't come into the genre easily. I spent most of my life being mesmerized by the mysteries and monsters but being so deeply afraid of being afraid that I couldn't bare to look past the cover of a horror book or watch more than few seconds of a spooky movie. The fear I felt of what "true" fear might feel like was so profound that I couldn't experience much of life at all. I couldn't stay the night at friends houses, go to museums, answer the phone, walk around a corner without anticipating the horror lurking just out of view. It would take some pretty intense antidepressants and a year of letting those marinate before I could dip a toe into the world of horror and when I finally did, nothing could capture the fear I felt for the unknown.
All this to say that this book and its weird little stories might be the closest anythings come to that feeling from when I was a kid. The stories aren't scary (to me), to be honest, the almost feel mundane but it's that mundanity that makes the approach of the unsettling so effective. These stories creep up slow on you and I love how it slightly gets more intense with each story till there's almost a release at the end. This selection of stories is it for me and I will be digging into whatever else Guadeloupe Nettle has in store!
Such a strange and stirring book. There's a 2006 video game called Rule Of Rose that (for me) lives in the same universe as this. Both stories contain an outpouring of complex emotions from little girls who feel so far removed from everyone and everything. As a result, you end up marooned on an island with these girls and go back and forth between despair and tenderness for the experience.
Contains spoilers
Ok, so this one is a tough read. It doesn't hold your hand and it's best to just kind of give yourself up to it and just take in the words if you can't take in the meaning quite yet. I would suggest using this as an exercise in developing media literacy and avoid looking up explanations while reading. It took me till about 2/3rds of the way through before my thoughts started to become cohesive about what I was reading.
Keep reading if you'd like to hear about what I think is happening:
I believe that this story is about evolution. The huge environment changes and the strange creatures melding into the narrator or giving things like their eyes to them feels like a poetic way to describe the evolutionary process. For awhile, I thought that the narrator was never human like I thought but was making their way to human and perhaps started as plant or small single celled creature. But towards the end, with the single eye (or potential space helmet) and launching into space thing, I believe that it's possible that narratively, evolution is used to describe the dramatic shift in humanity. Could be wrong but being right ain't really the point!
