February’s Reads
February was a combination of finishing off books I had already started or had my eye on from last year, alongside starting reading with a book club, as reading can be a lonely exercise. I spent last year in the Goodreads Book Club, but found there wasn’t enough interaction for my personal taste, and the book choices were also only occasionally of interest to me. I am not a big reader of the list toppers it seems. This is a great book club though to get started with, there is no dedication, you can give as much or as little as you wish, and the book choices are very eclectic. It is also very easy to link up book challenges.
So what sorts of things was I reading and listening to? I caught up with the latest in the Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman. This is a great cozy crime fiction series to unwind with, and I never fail to enjoy an installation. This episode has some beautiful imagery of lives spent together, and the important aspects of relationships. Generally, I returned much more closely to my horror preferences, and took a break from non-fiction. Other than Richard Osman and a short M. C. Beaton which is a re-read for me, and the two of which took me all month to read as I kept dipping in and out of them, February was all horror fiction. It was also a short month, and I found I did not have much energy; there are few books on the list this month even though some of them are short.
February’s surprise best read for me was Michelle Paver’s “Thin Air: A Ghost Story”, which I found to be an exceptional piece of modern writing designed to mimic period writing reflecting colonialism from the time of the early mountain climbs. Eerie and lush in it’s stark brutality, the story is told almost as a first-hand memoir from the time, and could easily be confused with a non-fiction piece describing one of the climbs. Thin Air is both a brave piece of writing for the modern age, as well as being intelligent, well researched, malevolent and has a great story.
The oddest read on the February list, and in some ways unfortunately the most disappointing, was the newly discovered "Gibbet Hill” by Bram Stoker. I am willing to admit that my astronomical expectations were the core of my issue here, as was my belief that this was related to the Dracula origin story (never buy in to the hype). Now that my simmering rage and resentment has eased, and I can mull over this short story for what it actually is (please note that it is very expensive on a page count basis right now), it is in fact a fascinating little story more in the line of strigoi than vampires. It is short, weird, and very unsettling, and I’m glad I read it.
One that I had on last year’s list, I pretty much swallowed “I Was A Teenage Slasher” by Stephen Graham Jones in one sitting. It stayed with me enough that I now look out for the author. It is unashamedly American, I had to look up terms while reading, which slowed me down a little, but this really is part of its unusual charm. A thread of dark, rollercoaster humour shines through the whole book, the ending is great, the content is fantastic fun, the characters are surprisingly relatable given that you start the book knowing exactly what the protagonist is, and it’s a wild ride from an odd perspective. A gem of a read.
An honourable mention is going to The Bookkeepers Skull. Truly casually horrific even for the Grimdark, this Warhammer non-army horror novel focuses on the lives of minor noble enforcers on the agri-planets. In a few short sentences and paragraphs, it sums up a lifetime of ways humanity can betray itself and everything we consider goof about the human condition.
