A review by verkisto
The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, by Stephen Jones, Lisa L. Hannett, Kathleen Jennings, Angela Slatter
4.0
I discovered Angela Slatter through her Tor.com novella, Of Sorrow and Such. I loved the story and her writing, so shortly after finishing the book, I tracked down the rest of her fiction. The Bitterwood Bible is the first of her works outside of that novella I've read.
The book is, at a glance, a collection of short stories, but it's also a novel, in that all the stories are related by characters and location (though not always by time). The stories run the gamut from horror to fantasy, while most of them walk the line that divides the two genres. The story that leads off the collection is a wonderfully eerie one that reminded me what I liked so much about Of Sorrow and Such -- Slatter's language. She creates atmosphere like it's candy floss, weaving it through the story with such light touches that you almost don't know it's there.
The foreword tells us this collection is a prequel of sorts to another book, Sourdough and Other Stories, and I regret reading the two books out of order. Either way, though, I look forward to reading it to see how the two books connect, and just to marvel at how Slatter writes her stories.
The book is, at a glance, a collection of short stories, but it's also a novel, in that all the stories are related by characters and location (though not always by time). The stories run the gamut from horror to fantasy, while most of them walk the line that divides the two genres. The story that leads off the collection is a wonderfully eerie one that reminded me what I liked so much about Of Sorrow and Such -- Slatter's language. She creates atmosphere like it's candy floss, weaving it through the story with such light touches that you almost don't know it's there.
The foreword tells us this collection is a prequel of sorts to another book, Sourdough and Other Stories, and I regret reading the two books out of order. Either way, though, I look forward to reading it to see how the two books connect, and just to marvel at how Slatter writes her stories.