Holy shit. 

Bananas. 

I can’t deal with this narration. The narrator’s pacing is super weird. She doesn’t pause between trains of thought so it’s really difficult to follow what she’s saying. 

This book was everything I’d hoped it would be. 

This was an intriguing read, but I have light beef. I love me some absurdism, but I think the promise of this book is less effective because there wasn’t enough of a concrete difference between the stories of Y/N and the Narrator.  I think if the ‘real’ story was more grounded in realism and devolved as the fanfiction became more prominent, it would have had me. This is sort of the implicit promise put out by the flap copy, and it just didn’t quite do that, so it kind of left me feeling like we began and ended in the same place. 

I’m glad I read this and will certainly recommend it to folks that enjoy a weird-ass high concept book, but I don’t think It succeeded in its goals with me reading. 

This is a knee-jerk review I may revisit after I’ve gotten some distance, but the author really did herself a disservice in the last quarter of the book. Her world has rules. It’s the only way readers buy the whole thing, and then she broke her rules to achieve her ending. And that totally lost me as a reader. Either your revived corpses are shambling slowly decaying tortured souls or they aren’t. And that’s without magically

CURING BLOODY CONSUMPTION IN 18TH CENTURY FRANCE.  

I’m fine. 

As with any anthology, some are much stronger than others. I listened to this on audio, and that was maybe a mistake, as the singular narrator made it a little tough to keep straight in my head where I was and what I was listening to. This is a huge project, and it has loads of contributors already, but it could have done with a more diverse audio offering for sure for sure. 

T. Kingfisher could write a novelization of shampoo ingredients and I’d enjoy it. This re-imagining of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” was an eerie environmental delight I devoured in a sitting. There are rumors of another Sworn Soldier book coming, and I anticipate it with feral glee.

If you’re looking for unpredictability in your horror rather than creeping inevitable knowing, this isn’t the book for you at this present moment. Kingfisher’s twist is a little predictable to anyone who watches HBO in the year of our Lord 2023, as we see ‘mycologist’ and immediately know where the story is heading. However, I found the reveals and build in the tension to be supremely well-executed and eerie as hell nevertheless. 

I also really appreciated and was into the lore surrounding Kingfisher’s fictional Europe and the Gallacian culture in particular. I loved, LOVED, Alex Easton and Hob, as well as the characters they meet in the course of the story. I look forward to the next installation!