About Visceral Vices Alexandrines singing of carnage, collapse, a capricious, convulsing wormwood bitterness reeking of decay, dolor, and delusions. Sonnets hissing with treachery, tragedy, a trickling, liminal longing that cannot-and will never-be fulfilled.Stories, alive with guttural shrieks and lilts, breeding demonic aura, human vengeance, and beasts and monsters that, like insoluble echoes or silhouetted revenants,Continue reading “Book Review: Visceral Vices by Shawn Chang”
Tag Archives: literary fiction
Book review: The Good Messenger by John Simmons
The Good Messenger is the second novel I have read by John Simmons and I have to say I am a fan of this author’s writing style. Here’s why… About The Good Messenger 1912: Tom Shepherd reluctantly stays for two weeks at Hardinge Hall. Mr and Mrs Hardinge are trying to arrange a marriage forContinue reading “Book review: The Good Messenger by John Simmons”
Book review: The Visitors by Catherine Burns
Horror fiction takes many forms. Good horror is an art form, one that requires considerable mastery and imagination. Psychological horror shades into dark fiction – bleak, gothic at times, often literary – and as ever, books can be hard to categorise. Catherine Burn’s The Visitors is one of those books. I’m only sharing some of theContinue reading “Book review: The Visitors by Catherine Burns”
Artefacts and other stories by Rebecca Burns
I’m delighted to share my review of Artefacts and other stories by Rebecca Burns That dandelion. A flash of stubborn yellow in a dark box of space. It had promised sunshine but had tasted sour. Artefacts. A dandelion. A mayfly. A family, bereft. Items and mementos of a life, lived hard and with love,Continue reading “Artefacts and other stories by Rebecca Burns”
The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose – book review
Heather Rose has produced a work of considerable finesse. The Museum of Modern Love sets a high bar for Australian literary fiction. “Arky Levin is a film composer in New York separated from his wife, who has asked him to keep one devastating promise. One day he finds his way to The AtriumContinue reading “The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose – book review”
The Tower by Marguerite Steen
In The Tower, Marguerite Steen provides the contemporary reader with her valuable insights into the world of the struggling if moderately successful artist of 1950s Britain, a time of post-war transition in society and the art world, as abstractionism grew in ascendancy. “Painter Tom Proctor and his wife Antonia are among innumerable victims of theContinue reading “The Tower by Marguerite Steen”
Ghosts Like Us, Inez Baranay
Lately, I’ve started getting into book reviewing. I hadn’t expected to enjoy it so much and it’s becoming something of a compulsion. Sometimes I post my reviews here on my website. I reviewed Inez Baranay’s Ghosts Like Us, for Newtown Review of Books. “Ghosts Like Us is a poetic, ambiguous and subversive exploration of the nature of historyContinue reading “Ghosts Like Us, Inez Baranay”
On Gilgamesh by Joan London
I’m about halfway through Joan London’s Gilgamesh and toying with writing something on Goodreads. Just now I scrolled through the reviews to read what others were saying but stopped when I realised there were over 1,800 of them. I really only have one word to add – bleak. And I realise much of the bleakness comesContinue reading “On Gilgamesh by Joan London”
Narrative as Navigation Through the Self: Isobel Blackthorn’s Asylum
(‘Narrative as Navigation Through the Self: Isobel Blackthorn’s Asylum’ by Ness Mercieca was originally published in the October 2015 edition of The Tertangala) They say the mind does not create, and that it only cuts and pastes the stimulus it receives from the outside world. Author Isobel Blackthorn has a talent for this, in fact, I oftenContinue reading “Narrative as Navigation Through the Self: Isobel Blackthorn’s Asylum”
Lanzarote: the fulcrum of an empire
The history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas upon the famous voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492, pivots on an earlier conquest, that of Lanzarote and the Canary Islands. Sailing is largely dependent on ocean currents. The Canary current sweeps down from Spain and Portugal along the West African coast, until it reaches the EquatorialContinue reading “Lanzarote: the fulcrum of an empire”
Isobel Blackthorn 