![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
double horror
Jan. 18th, 2021 07:58 pmI got bogged down in both of these, and I can't tell whether it's just because of my ongoing difficulty reading anything or if it was also the books.
I was into the first third of Silvia Garcia-Moreno's Mexican Gothic when it was all creepy atmosphere and the fun of speculating what the deal was (vampires? racism? racist vampires?), but I kind of lost enthusiasm as we got into the more overtly threatening part, until we finally got to the big finale. Which might have been that I just wasn't in the mood! Or that I often disengage a bit from stuff with rape threats. Or maybe it had middle-act pacing problems. (And I ended up really confused about the timeline of the backstory, and never quite sorted that out.) I don't know, I think it was well done, I don't want to *not* recommend it, I just kept picking it up and then putting it down again.
I liked T Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)'s first foray into horror, The Twisted Ones (link to my entry about it), but unfortunately the new one, The Hollow Places, fell flat for me. Like I think this is the first thing Vernon ever wrote that I didn't like. Possibly Twisted Ones just happened to push my particular scare buttons, and Hollow Places didn't? Or, I don't know, it had some good lines and character stuff, so maybe it was just another not-in-the-mood problem. Or maybe I just have, like, a novella's worth of attention span right now, and so my reaction to every novel is going to be that it might have made a tight novella. Looking ahead, the next several things I'm reading are also not novellas, so I guess we'll see how that goes.
I was into the first third of Silvia Garcia-Moreno's Mexican Gothic when it was all creepy atmosphere and the fun of speculating what the deal was (vampires? racism? racist vampires?), but I kind of lost enthusiasm as we got into the more overtly threatening part, until we finally got to the big finale. Which might have been that I just wasn't in the mood! Or that I often disengage a bit from stuff with rape threats. Or maybe it had middle-act pacing problems. (And I ended up really confused about the timeline of the backstory, and never quite sorted that out.) I don't know, I think it was well done, I don't want to *not* recommend it, I just kept picking it up and then putting it down again.
I liked T Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)'s first foray into horror, The Twisted Ones (link to my entry about it), but unfortunately the new one, The Hollow Places, fell flat for me. Like I think this is the first thing Vernon ever wrote that I didn't like. Possibly Twisted Ones just happened to push my particular scare buttons, and Hollow Places didn't? Or, I don't know, it had some good lines and character stuff, so maybe it was just another not-in-the-mood problem. Or maybe I just have, like, a novella's worth of attention span right now, and so my reaction to every novel is going to be that it might have made a tight novella. Looking ahead, the next several things I'm reading are also not novellas, so I guess we'll see how that goes.
