Things Withered by Susie Moloney

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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Suffer the Children by Craig DiLouie

Hello again!  Time for something a little different.  This time, a book review!

This is one of the most heart-wrenching, chilling, and intriguing books I have ever read.  I devoured it.  In a single day I consumed every single page.  The tension and immersion are intense.  The premise is simple but the implications are complex. 

One day, all of the children in the world die.  The world is thrust into mourning.  Humanity seems to be over.  There is nowhere to put all the bodies.  Our cast of characters grieve, each in their own disturbing way, for the loss of a child is always disturbing.

Three days later, the children come back.  They struggle out of bodybags crying for their mommies and daddies.  When they arrive home, the children die again.  Their pulses stop, their bodies decompose.  Was it mass hysteria that brought them home?  Parents swear their children's eyes are following them.

The children begin to ask for blood.  A sacrifice of love.  And it brings the children fully to life, cheeks rosy.  They play with toys and giggle and get in fights with their siblings.  All is right with the world.  For a little while.  And then they die again.  And the true horror begins.  What would you be willing to do to bring back your child?

My favorite thing about this book is the way in which it subverts the zombie trope.  Zombies are morally unambiguous.  It's one of our favorite things about them.  They aren't who they used to be and nothing can bring them back and so you just kill them.  Simple.  Easy.  Morally secure.  But what if they weren't that way?  What if they demanded blood and sacrifice but in return they were your loved ones?  What if you could get them back, for a price?

Having a child die is a horrific experience.  What would people do if they had to go through it over and over again?  To what lengths would they go to get their children back?  The best of horror and science fiction asks these sorts of questions, and Suffer the Children passes with flying colors on that part.

The book is very self-conscious in how it understands gender.  Traditional gender roles are explored in a realistic way.  There are stay-at-home moms and working single mothers.  There are men and women both vicious and gentle.  And the book explores the feelings of inadequacy that many mothers feel.  Feelings placed on them by society that they have to be perfect mothers.  And how far will they be willing to go when they've been given a second chance to give everything to their children? The book is subtly subversive.  It challenges the idea that parents (and women in particular) should be willing to do anything for their children.  Ultimately many of the gender roles in the book are relatively normative.  However, the author is careful to keep this work descriptive rather than prescriptive.  It is set in our modern time and reflects our modern time, but delicately.  So while the characters themselves could be more interesting and subversive, the book carefully reflects what small-town America looks like.  And it questions our everyday assumptions about parenthood.

This is a book about pain.  About suffering.  About impossible moral quandaries.  But mostly about guilt.  And how the desire to be a perfect parent (and again, particularly a perfect mother) can become something dangerous when taken to it's extreme.

Horror fans, read this book.