sucreslibrary's reviews
1219 reviews

i think i was too entrenched in creepypasta and online horror culture in the early 2010s for this to have the same effect on me as it does others. i did all the extra legwork the book requires (deciphering codes, translating phrases, etc) and the payoff didn't feel worth it. it hits on a lot of tropes i'm worn out on and i think it was just too overhyped for me. im quite sad about it! i was really looking forward to this one! but i did read it all in one go and that means the library gets it back a lot quicker, hopefully for people who likes it better than I did.

a super mixed bag of stories but there were a few standouts that make me feel comfortable giving it 3 stars overall. I'm not sure I'd recommend this collection to people who truly want a gothic time, as many stories didn't feel "gothic" in any way. I was also surprised by just how much animals played a part - by my count, out of 17 stories, 6 of them had to do with animals and shapeshifting into animals in some way, with a 7th having to do with freeing animals.

the stories I liked were "Creepers" by Joanna Dahme (this one did feel very gothic - little ghost girls and spooky ivy taking over a home), "Aperitif" by Susan Raffo (this one got points for being just flat-out weird, though it isn't gothic at all. the author's note at the end was cute), "Silkie" by Barbara Wilson (lesbian selkie love story!), and "Vengeance of Epona" by Susanna Sturgis (having a fat MC in a 90s story collection who likes being fat and calls out other people for being shitty about it was really surprising and cool to see. this one is also sapphic but not super gothic).

the truly terrible ones were "Femme Coverte" by Diane DeKalb-Rittenhouse (white woman becomes empowered to take ownership of her family's plantation and is totally a "good" slave owner and feels super bad she can't let all of them go :( this one also ended in some of the cringiest romance dialogue I've seen in a while and nearly caused me to drop the collection as it was the second story and made me worry about what else was coming) and "Feeding the Dark" by Jean Stewart (lesbian cop that comes under the spell of a goddess and has a lot of awful cop thoughts while internally debating on the nature of justice).

the amount of lesbian stories in this was really refreshing, and having a story focused on a mother that lost her son to police brutality and her learning how to cope with that was interesting (I do feel like this one fit as a "gothic" story). there were several authors of color included as well. as mentioned above, getting a story with a fat protagonist that isn't focused on her losing weight was a nice surprise and I enjoyed that one quite a bit. I've had this book sitting around forever so I'm glad to have finally read it!

really disappointed with this one for a variety reasons. I wish this series wasn't so inconsistent in quality! this one almost felt like a different writer at the helm though it wasn't, and the expanded backstory was so uninteresting and bland compared to things we've gotten before. Hopefully the next volume will be one of the high quality ones 

definitely my second favorite volume (after volume 2). the only reason it isn't 5 stars is because the story seemed to be wrapped up a bit too quickly (though of course there's always a cliffhanger and an expectation for more). the exposition in this one doesn't feel as heavy handed as volume 5, and we get to meet a lot of interesting characters. Bernice also gets a decent chunk which is always good to see (kinda wish we got more of her and her explaining her new role to Emmy, honestly). Tyler Crook is the only artist for the entire volume and there's some truly stunning panels and double page spreads. this encapsulates exactly what I love about Harrow County and I wish the writing and art team could be this consistently good with each volume. 

just really mediocre. lots of build up to a nothing ending. really sucks to go look at reviews and see how many are other white people complaining about the MC being "racist" when sol's fears are very justified. she is a hard perspective to read from, but that's not why i gave this a low rating (aside from how long it would take her to piece anything together - that did get exhausting b/c the reader figures it out and then it takes sol like 100 pages to catch up until the very end when suddenly her motivations are extremely opaque and confusing). i truly hated reading about sol's and alice's relationship - neither of them are good for each other and don't even seem to like each other at any point. there is so much contempt and resentment between the two of them even outside of the weird shit happening in the neighborhood and it made it so i didn't particularly care about whatever troubles they were having. i really didn't understand why they got together in the first place or why i should be rooting for their marriage. there's also a few side plots in this that were not paced well, with one of them culminating in a truly embarrassing villain monologue that kills what little forward momentum was happening. 

just kind of disappointed since i wanted this to be more of a fun pulpy read with good social commentary or to be a hard hitting horror - it attempts both and fails each genre in doing so.

I had never read any of M.R. James stories before picking this up, so it was really fun to be thrown into such a well-researched edition of not only his stories, but also his life. this collection includes a timeline of James' entire life, as well as a very lengthy 'Explanatory Notes' section that explains various elements that pop up in his stories, usually something to do with British or religious history but also sometimes just defining specific terms. it did make this read a bit longer than I expected it to be, as some stories have over 20 "explanatory notes", so I found myself often flipping back and forth between the story and the notes section. I took to placing my bookmark in the "notes" section while I read so I could reference things easier. even if many of the stories were a 3.5 to me, the thoroughness of this volume easily bumps it to 4 stars. (out of the 33 stories, 21 were a 3.5 or higher, with only four rating a 2, which is a pretty great turnout!)

as for the stories themselves, reading such a big collection of them back-to-back makes it easy to pick up on certain themes. I could see that being overwhelming or boring for a lot of people, but I really enjoyed James' "voice" and so seeing the same central themes and tropes was entertaining. I didn't expect to laugh as much as I did while reading these (James' distaste for golf felt palpable in several of the stories, and I appreciated him sparing us from long descriptions of it). I also found it interesting how a lot of the stories central scares were often not from the perspective of the narrator, and were usually told to them instead of us experiencing them as they happen (there are exceptions to this, and some of my favorites were the exceptions, so take that as you will).

the way the ghouls and monsters are described really took me by surprise - there's a lot of variety, and I could see them so clearly in my head that I wished I was a better artist just so I could sketch them out! I think I wasn't expecting such detail when it came to their appearances, and to be as creeped out as I was (something about the way he describes how a lot of them move could really make my skin crawl!). I'm looking forward to watching some live action adaptations I've seen recommended, especially since a lot of them seem to be of my favorite stories.

speaking of, my favorites were 'The Mezzotint', 'The Ash-Tree', 'Number 13', 'Casting the Runes', 'A Warning to the Curious', and 'Wailing Well'. I can easily see myself referring back to these in the future, especially during these spooky and colder months.

as far as the stories that I wasn't a fan of, I think most of them were bogged down in a lot of history that I'm not well-versed in and also don't care as much about. there's a lot of academics in these tales, and while we are often spared some of the most boring topics, James still has some he quite likes to focus on. I probably would have liked these stories even less if I didn't have the context from the "notes" in the back! I really can't stress enough how much those helped contextualize and add flavor to a lot of these tales. if you're going to pick up his work, I highly recommend this specific edition.

really enjoyed everything to do with Bernice in this volume! I honestly wish the whole thing had been focused on her as the other two chapters didn't do as much for me - having a different artist didn't help for those sections either, especially the last one. I did like learning more about the Skinless Boy and hope we follow up on that more than we do the actual cliffhanger we ended on.

I really loved the additional sketches and pencils included at the end of this volume - they're absolutely gorgeous!