viragohaus's reviews
237 reviews

Navigates the affect and meaning we ascribe to death in a manner not sharp enough to standout.

I somehow missed Elisabeth Murray's novella on its release in 2014 but I am very glad to have caught up with it now.
Like Patricia Highsmith's The Cry of the Owl haunted by Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (that's a high concept meeting that I'm always going to bundy into), The Loud Earth tells you its secret early but makes you hope you're wrong. What a fantastic debut.

There's the world in this story, running from the hopeful to the relentlessly horrific. And Merridale sets it out on the page but her mastery of the archives does not translate into a deftness with structure or with prose.

Routledge’s Fourth Wall series has a remit to be brisk and accessible so Caridad Svich’s ‘Mitchell and Trask’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch’ hits its subjects of memoir, LGBT representation and the development of this century’s best musical (so far) with the breathy rush of a song. It is then entirely my fault given the musical’s fascinating use of 70s musical tropes, early period fluidity and rich production history that I felt it would have more than borne the weight of an operatic scrutiny. But then I’m always confusing my genres.

Resonant of Alice Munro, Paddy O'Reilly's novella 'Deep Water' submerges* the reader into the hard scrabble world of a child. Life's big events can't make it past the sorry choke in your throat; small moments of fear and wonderment burn into your skin like a hot 50 cent piece.

88 pages of seawater-sweet observation & emotional weight. Dive right in.

* Yes, I had to.

NB: Rating is for 'Deep Water' only

I have an enormous affection for comic book heroes but haven't read them in any way since 1982. It's an uncanny pleasure then to pick up a character after that long a gap and still know their imperatives well.
The clean storytelling and mostly impressive art make this a thoroughly enjoyable read.
I do wonder, though, if your childhood didn't give you a love of the form, why would you pick this up? Are comics irretrievably nostalgic?