spacestationtrustfund's review
4.0
What the fuck did I just read? I mean, I loved it, but what the fuck?
vonneguts's review
5.0
Vi Khi Nao's works have never failed to amaze me. Bizarre, beautiful, and honestly biting. The stories in feel like a love song, and horror film at the same time. I have yet to read an author with as unique (or well defined) of a voice in some time. Do yourself a favor and check it out! (Also Fish in Exile)
meganmilks's review against another edition
5.0
Routinely in this astonishing collection Nao becomes a torture artist, peeling the skin off of story, slicing in with surgical precision and poking around in its insides. The surreal is absurdist; the violence is real; and Nao’s prose kills: artfully weaponized, surprising, superb. From “Sexual Dogs,” in which an affluent woman turns humans into dogs and trains them as her prostitutes: “The prostitute spent an entire day pleasuring her until her face cut open like light.” In “The Watermelon Body,” a woman wishes her suitor to be a watermelon: “She believed that sexually (there was no other way of looking at it), a watermelon was truly a perfectly designed man. Seeds dispersed throughout the body; his sexual belongings ubiquitously within reach. In other words, the woman found the body of a man with all the eggs in one basket as defective. Seeds should be scattered” (60). “The Bald Sparrow” is perfect. The title story is an index of cruel, imaginative horrors. I’m impressed and a little bit scared.
drewsof's review
4.0
Rounding up from a 3.5, I think, because the stories that do work in this collection work SO WELL - and the ones that didn't largely didn't work *for me* as opposed to a more general "didn't work" statement. Some of these stories lit my fire in a way that hasn't happened since I was first introduced to more experimental and avant-garde playwrights like Mac Wellman, Chuck Mee, Suzan-Lori Parks. Some of them were just dripping with beauty. And some of them are fucking harrowing. And still others are... well, they just are. You'll know how you feel about the collection by the end of the first section of four stories; for me, I was cautiously in.
This is one of those collections I never would've ever encountered were it not for SMDB - and, as ever, my reading life is enriched for the fact that I did.
This is one of those collections I never would've ever encountered were it not for SMDB - and, as ever, my reading life is enriched for the fact that I did.
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