wonderfully unsettling
582913
I purchased and read Marvel Zombies 1 and 2 and I was intriguingly appalled at the behavior and condition of my childhood heros.  To see them shamelessly (except for spidey) pursuing and devouring every living body in sight is profoundly disturbing, but its so riveting.  I love to hate them but I do want some one to stop them.  I'm so confused, what to do, what to do!!!  I just wished they didn't enjoy it so.  I want more!!!I want more!!!!
3882353
I remember first reading this book on a day of train-riding towards Saxmundham. At one point the train could go no further -- some car had unwisely fallen off the overhead bridge and onto the rails -- and we all had to amble off into the night air. Clutching white-knuckled at my seat cushion, I did not want to leave the darkened train ... certainly not after hours spent reading of the things that go on in this book, if you just take just that one wrong turn. How can a book scare us so? When it reminds us vividly that there are some cellars you should not enter, some barns you should not open, some goats you should never purchase, some rivers you never want to step into, some lines you should never trespass, and some women you should never love.  Despite this perfectly wise advice I'm giving, the London author Anna Taborska decides to pull us towards all of these. There are things that live in places and in people which I cannot describe, yet the artist/playwright Reggie Oliver dares the darkness and offers illustrations for every one of her stories.  Her collection is never horror-lite. It is always unpredictable, sometimes sorrowful, often erotic, and at times gruesomely intense. I imagine the next time I, say, rent a cabin all alone in the woods, that this book will be inexplicably waiting on the bed stand ... just for me. And I will go through it all again!  The book is like drinking tea with the devil: there is elegance but it is still wholly unnerving, and the horns be sharp  ... indeed, one of its stories bears that very name.
1625533
Wonderfully strange novel, and Gilman nails the setting.  The writing is beautiful, and the story and characters intrigued me from the very first pages.  Highly recommended!
3102633
Extremely disturbing but in a good way. I was grabbed from the very first line, wondering what had Alice done that was so bad that her friend refused to go to her funeral and hated her for destroying her life. As the story unfolds, in drips of horror and terror, I started looking around every corner, suspecting bad things to come for Katherine, the survivor, and wondering what other tragedies would happen to her.

Rebecca James weaves a hypnotizing tale, one that has you almost believing in a happy ending, tempted to ignore the warning signs, yet knowing all along that whatever happiness that can be retrieved blossomed out of depth-less grief.

Well done and masterful. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough and often peeked ahead, unable to sustain the tension.
4458910
A wonderful book of a future gone wrong, with an imagination run wild yet coherent . A future not too far from today, and not impossible to imagine so that the fear that this could actually take place is very real and gripping. The odd realities and odder creatures are strange but bizarrely not farfetched. It makes one wonder what laboratories are cooking up, what science can do if in the wrong hands, and how we would all react. We can feel ourselves as an additional "snowman" confused, losing it, but with no choice but to live on. The novel is a warning, and also a deep investigation into human psychology, into civilisation, into purity (the crakers....) and the lack of it (us).
3534359
Sour Candy is a delicately woven tale. I love a thoroughly written "nothing is what it seems" plot.  It seems Phil Pendleton has a loving son. They share many Kodak worthy moments. The manner in which Adam (Phil's son) fawns over his father makes your heart melt. The unsettling thing is that Adam isn't his son...like at all. He found Phil at a local Walmart minding his own business and through a series of unfortunate events performed some sort of ritualistic "pseudo adoption" spinning Phil's reality into a whirlwind nightmare. In the depths of this murky tale you'll only find a sinister plot with the face of an innocent child tacked to it. Children make the best villains as they aren't bound by logic or fear. For children the possibilities are endless.
296076
This is perhaps the most disturbing book I have ever read. I'm not into the "weird fiction" or horror genre but this book got passed around my family and I was curious. My brother literally had to get the book out of his house so he could go to sleep at night. My mother said she hated it, but wouldn't put it down. So I read it. Aronovitz' writing is is compelling and "true" in that the characters and their words/actions are natural, real, believable. That made the weird and creepy things that happened far more weird or creepy than one might normally expect from a genre book. I recommend this, but don't blame me if it gets to you.
1168776
Jon Padgett hits the ground running and never stops. I loved every story in here. I had read some before but reading them again was a pleasure, with new meanings and connections suggesting themselves repeatedly. I felt like there was a nebulous slimy film of some sort covering me when I finished reading it, probably the result of mental exposure to "paper mill days." Eminently creepy and at times existentially unsettling. Wonderful and highly recommended to everyone who can read.
2538422
The central plotline of this novel - a rape victim unknowingly falling in love with one of her rapists - sounds perverse. I was offended by the very idea but also curious. I'm glad I read this book. It's very strange yet very beautiful, in terms of both the story and the style. I even bought a copy as a gift for a friend because I had to share this novel with someone. It's unforgettable.
1442581
I really liked this book.  It centers on the topic of sexual abuse of children, told from the perspective of the child.  Very unsettling and dealt with in a way which is not too graphic.
Other reviewers have said it well:  haunting, disturbing, riveting.  Important.
4808973
This is one of the few novels that have ever made me feel genuinely terrified.  I was reading this alone in an empty house and had to stop because I felt so creeped out.  The novel is written in a deceptively simple style that soon had me frantically turning pages.  I read it in one day and then read it again straight after- it's that good.

I don't want to give anything away, but I will say that this novel is horrific and convincing.  It makes some of the cookie-cutter Hollywood `horror' novels (the ones where the girls with big boobs always get caught by the villain with the fish hook who always walks, never runs) look pathetic and childish.  The narrator of the story, Amanda, seems so real and normal that watching her life fall apart in such a horrible way made me feel deeply unsettled.

Overall, I recommended this for people who want a short novel that is refreshing, scary and unusual.  It's a quick read that packs a huge emotional punch and is very satisfying.  I don't normally read horror books, but found this one to be everything I expected and more.  The ending is macarbre and a real bone-chiller.  Enjoy!
1358974
Had to give up reading (it) in bed at night and settle for lunchtime reading instead--scared me that much (and I'm not easily scared). But it's precisely because things like this have happened--and are still happening somewhere in the world--that this read is so unsettling (and only a very capable writer like Sirota can make it all feel so horribly real). Pick it up--you'll never forget Freedom's Hand (and you shouldn't).
255875
Shortly after his mother's death, Ryosuke visits his parents' house. In his father's office he finds four notebooks, recently pulled from the back of the closet. As Rosuke starts to flip through them, he discovers something truly unsettling: the books seem to chronicle the growth of a psychopathic killer. The notebooks were clearly written by either Ryo's mother or father. But who? And is this some heretofore undisclosed propensity for fiction...or a memoir?

NAN-CORE, by Mahokaru Numata, is, at its best, truly unnerving. There are passages that make you shiver. It's really a crime novel...of sorts...but at its best, it hits all the right elements of horror. It's short, and moves along perhaps too briskly, until the final few pages, which actually slow down too much. And yet, the imagery is vivid, the story is gripping, and the repercussions are truly disturbing. Not for the faint of heart.
724020
I will never look at the snow quite the same. Wonderfully disturbing.
3506954
Amelia Gray understands horror. Not the B-movie hack-and-slash or cheap psychological twist, but a deeply unsettling perversion of the Known. Not to say that elements of body horror don't exist within Grays third short story collection, GUTSHOT: Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover illustrates the emotional consumption of a failed relationship through an array of grotesque body mutilations; the aptly titled Viscera draws connections between the stories we read and the bodily excretions we leave on the paper they're printed on; and Heart features a family trying to get rid of the heart of (supposedly) a blue whale by hacking it into pieces.

Gray takes the obvious hallmarks of the genre --- the guts, the terror, and the purely kinetic energy of violence --- and abstracts them. Vomit becomes a link between two lost souls. A fetal resorption swallows the world around her. Men and women dismember their own bodies in an orgiastic celebration of life. In the worlds that Gray creates, these are typical events --- events that run the gamut of emotions and tones.

While GUTSHOT is never a comfortable read, the emotional depth of these stories prevents them from being easily categorized as just horror or literary fiction or, occasionally, satire.

This isn't simply a collection of spooky and grotesque stories. Gray is a master at imbuing humor in the most unlikely of places, such as when a womans dead mother possesses her pimple and interjects (in all caps, because of course she speaks in all caps) at any moment she sees fit. Jesus appears to a fatally wounded man to express his displeasure of having his name taken in vain. A father-to-be lists all the reasons he shouldnt have children, including his addictions to heroin, keno and tattoos, and his refusal to eat vegetables.

Its one thing to watch a movie or read a book and be thrown into disruption along with a character; its quite another to experience the surreal on its own terms with no shared experiences. These are the fables we will tell our children, Gray writes, and it rings true for each story in this collection. These stories bare closer relation to the fable than the modern incarnation of the short story.

These stories are intense bursts of humanity filtered through a surrealist lens. There is no banal obsession over the moment a life went wrong, no literary bluster bloating the pages. They are lean, expertly cut down to deliver their conclusions, and leave the reader to discover the rest.

There is terror, sex, humor and even hope, but they all feel a bit beside the point. Not in the sense that they are unnecessary, but that their purpose is to make palatable the truths we try to ignore, truths that would seem too obvious or emotionally estranged if said outright. There is a deeper magic at work here, some primordial instinct that propels the characters of GUTSHOT to the extremes of action and thought.

Reviewed by Matthew Mastricova
910828
What the Hell Did I Just Read is another weird, exciting, and unsettling story from David Wong. It made me laugh, cringe, feel nauseated, and then laugh some more all on the same page. I can't wait for another one. I'm impressed with how he was able to delve into such a serious topic as depression and keep the story on the familiar frantic pace. It also touches on the subject of unemployment in the Midwest. Though the situation in Undisclosed is exaggerated to say the least, it's a very real problem and few are talking about it.
1296534
This is Highsmith's collection of 11 short stories, written from 1945 to 1970, and a phenomenal read. Writing with an economical, non-showy style, she pulls you into the characters, their emotions, and the underlying threat of every story so effortlessly that you mistrust her literary intentions from the first -- and are cursing her name by the end of the story for making your heart pound outside your chest until it's ready to burst. "The Birds Poised to Fly" is a creepy, obsessive little ditty about the nature of infatuation, while "The Heroine" still manages to shock despite the obvious direction of the story. My other favorites were "The Terrapin" about the fate of a turtle and the family who cooks him, and "Another Bridge to Cross" a wonderfully somber and affecting story about loss, disillusionment and the need to go on.