Okay, seems like about that time again... time for another book review! I read this little piece for the Nightmare Factory Book Club, which is hosted every month at BookPeople here in Austin. If you're in the area, I highly recommend it. This review is definitely informed by the wonderful conversations I had with my fellow book club members, so I wanted to be sure to give a shout out.This book contains several short stories focusing on the horrors of suburbia, all written by Susie Moloney. Honestly, that's probably it's greatest weakness. With a single author and a tightly constrained concept, it's hard to maintain stories that feel original back-to-back with one another. I feel like she either needed to make a general horror compilation of her writing or have this specific suburban theme mettered out through a few different authors. As it was it got a little repetitive for my taste.
However, I think a lot of the stories still had great merit. None of them really scared me, but some did disturb or horrify me. More than a few made me laugh a little. And all of them had heavy-handed messages about what femininity, masculinity and conformity mean within a suburban setting. I couldn't help but picturing all of the stories as being set in the 50s or 60s (in spite of Beiber references and other obviously modern moments). I couldn't shake that dated feeling from it. At book club we talked about how revolutionary this book would have felt if it had come out in 1965. But it didn't.
It's clearly a second wave feminist piece, and thus gets boring for the modern reader. These are mostly stories about a specific kind of woman - mostly middle-class, by definition suburban, in a long-term relationship with a man. These are mixed in with stories about men suffering from acute toxic masculinity and old ladies struggling to adjust to their surroundings. It gives the book as a whole a sort of flat, stereotypical feeling.
There are a few stories, however, that really seemed to shine. For me, the standouts were as follows:
The Windemere: a slowly creepy story about an aging real estate agent who needs a stroke of luck.
Truckdriver: the slow decent of a man who defines hinself by his new truck, his physical manifestation of toxic masculinity, which he allows to define himself by sexualization of young girls, fantasies of violence and a the idea of strength.
The Last Living Summer: a surprisingly realistic post-apocalyptic tale about a little old lady on the beach.
The Audit: a classically creepy tale, about everyone's greatest adult fear: the IRS.
The others aren't bad, but if you want to just skip around, I'd say those are the strongest. The Human Society is actually a phenomenal story as well, but I'd call it a tragedy, not a horror story. I suppose it is horrific, but it didn't make me scared, just really sad.
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Entertaining 2/5 Intelligent 3/5 Unsettling 4/5
Scary 2/5 Gory 1/5 Funny 1/5 Artistic 3/5
Representation of Minorities 1/5 Representation of Women 3.5/5
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