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jckmd's reviews
472 reviews
Sea Above, Sun Below by George Salis
Did not finish book.
Did not finish book.
Wow, this made me want to die. The purple prose is so superficial it would make even Marguerite Young turn up her nose, yet it still never manages to obscure Salis's incompetent storytelling (one need look no further than the first page for an example: "Yet Charles, an Iraq War veteran..." made me laugh out loud). Should one make the mistake of giving the benefit of the doubt, they'll be confronted with an absurd sex scene, horrendous dialogue, and a character needlessly dropping the n-word, all within the first thirty pages. Don't believe the hype! This book sucks.
BIB. by Tan Lin
2.75
More enjoyable than you'd expect, but also seems to mainly be proof of concept for this specific strain of what Lin himself has dubbed "ambient literature," a classifier that I'd argue also encompasses work by Fénéon, Markson, etc. Clearly not proofread, but I'm not sure the incessant typos add any authenticity—they're just annoying, and occasionally embarrassing ("Iraqui"? really?). The fleeting, mundane catharses one finds here are much the same as those of the modern human experience: serendipity, search engine rabbit-holes, an hour's worth of free time to read.
Imagine a Death by Janice Lee
3.5
Liked this one despite some issues I had with it, namely that the author seems to use the stream-of-consciousness approach as an excuse to tell instead of show. This isn't always a bad thing, but some of the Photographer sections really suffer from over-explanation of aspects of his character that his actions already make quite clear. The interlude chapters are gorgeous though, and aside from some heavy-handedness the conclusion sticks the landing. A book that seems dense at first but is actually fairly accessible.
Under the Sign of the Labyrinth by Christina Tudor-Sideri
3.75
Really liked this one (cool press too). Far from perfect but beautiful nonetheless. There's a tad too much cliché "poet's torment" waffling, but whenever she's writing about labyrinths or corpses or nature—or, especially, all three—it's marvelous. I think I also have trouble with writing like this that doesn't cite anything, similar to Omnicide II. There has to be a library's worth of reading behind your patterns of thinking... you really can't be bothered to actually credit any of it?
1000 Coils of Fear by Olivia Wenzel
2.5
I don't know if the phrase conveys something different in the original German, but this title does such a disservice to the book. No, this is definitely not a horror novel, but rather anxious, memoiristic fiction. I found myself enjoying it more than I thought I would, but around the halfway point I started to realize none of it was really coming together. The revelation at the end of the first part is when all of the momentum lapses, and from then on it just limps to a weak ending.