Review: Two Great Stories, and Two Merely Very, Very Good Ones
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 27, 2012
If you're the kind of person who likes nicely delineated genres, then Autumn Christian is probably your worst nightmare - a writer a dark, vaguely philosophical, sometimes lyrical sometimes gruesome short stores. I guess, if you have a bookseller's mentality, you'd have to call this 'horror', but really Christian is one of those writers classified as 'horror' simply because they don't fit anywhere else...This is a collection of four stories, the first I've read by this author. Two of the stories were amazing - very original, very distinctive 'horror' stories. The other two were never less than interesting, contained much great writing, but also the odd flaw (to my mind).The two great ones were 'Your Demiurge is Dead' and 'The Dog That Bit Her'. The first of these starts off with the body parts of the Old/New Testament God being washed up in bin-liners off the Mexico coast, and proceeds to get weirder from there on in. A new goddess, who seems more American politician than divine, appears, as well as new prophets. As well as telling of these events, the story is also about the disappearance of several children from a trailer-park family, and the cop investigating.'The Dog That Bit Her' was if anything even better, the story of a relationship falling apart from the inside, about dependency and about independence. The supernatural element, which I won't specify, is gradually introduced, and dovetails wonderfully with the non-supernatural elements, being both pungently realistic and ambiguously metaphoric.Of the weaker two stories, 'They Promised Dreamless Death' had an interesting premise and much to commend in it, but it felt a bit too long to me, a bit too obvious in its 'message'. 'The Singing Grass' is the most surreal story in the collection, and again has a lot of good points (some of the imagery being particularly memorable) but occasionally the prose seemed too aimless, the plot a bit too obtuse.All four stories are certainly worth reading, and different readers may well have different opinion on their relative merits to me. Autumn Christian certainly seems a name to watch, an individual voice in amidst all the generic zombie stories and déjà-vu inducing vampire romances. Recommended.