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Book Summary

Reviewed byMatt Berman
Ten short stories, many involving the supernatural or other worlds. A sampling: A queen comes from another world to force a boy to aid her in childbirth. The leader of a monkey tribe dies, leaving the females to be raped. A girl is kidnapped by a monster. A man is led to Hell. An old woman, beaten nearly to death, unleashes a plague of mice.

Is It Any Good?

2
It may be a blessing that these nasty little stories are so confusingly told that the reader often has no idea what is going on; when you do get a glimmer of meaning, you'll often wish you hadn't. This is the kind of collection that makes you wonder about the author -- what kind of person has this kind of perversity floating around in her head?

No doubt this kind of storytelling appeals to some readers, especially older teens who have an appreciation for the dark and twisted themselves. But even they may be frustrated by the writing, which is often so deliberately opaque that the reader may wonder whether the author is hiding something -- or assume she has nothing much to say. Amid all the run-on sentences and arcane language, it often seems as if Lanagan is trying so hard to sound clever and literary that she has completely lost her train of thought.

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