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Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

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Squarely in both the crime and body horror traditions, Mutant Circuit reads like Elmore Leonard and David Cronenberg meeting at 3 AM in a run-down strip mall parking lot, and Mark Jaskowski is the conspirator who brought them there. Without giving anything away I will say that all three stories have a reoccurring theme but each story is unique in its own style which shows the author has a lot of range. This is my first read by the author and I am very impressed by his writing. I loved how each story evoked a strong emotion in me and I loved how each story was vastly different. The author managed to keep my interest piqued and had me dying to learn what would happen next. There are moments of this brilliance in the other two stories, but Things Have Gotten Worse… doesn’t again reach the consistent quality of its titular tale. And in November, Weirdpunk is accepting submissions for an upcoming anthology titled Stories of the Eye, edited by Sam Richard and Joanna Koch. They’re seeking horror stories “that explore the complex relationships between artists and models. Go beyond the male gaze. Show us the queer gaze, the disabled gaze, the un-colonialized gaze, the intergalactic gaze.”

But the story isn’t just parroting genre conventions. The form is familiar, but its narrative is ground-breaking in its exploration of the darker side of online queer ‘safe’ spaces. It is a skillful interplay between the intense psychological trauma of its characters, the sexual simulacrum of online dating, and the unfeeling bureaucracy of legal paperwork – a juxtaposition similarly explored by Nat Ogle’s 2021 novel In the Seeing Hands of Others. The son’s manner of death in The Enchantment didn’t seem physically possible but, because it fit with one of the themes of the story, I wasn’t overly concerned about the question marks that popped up over my head when I read about it.Spoke And Other Misfortunes by Eric LaRocca is a collection of three short stories. Included are Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, The Enchantment, and You'll Find it's Like that all Over. I'm not going to write a synopsis because I highly recommend going into this completely blind. Also, I truly feel like I couldn't write a fair enough blurb without spoiling anything for readers.

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke basically carries the star rating for this short stories collection, which remains powerful (and grotesque) upon re-read. The remainder is inoffensive at best, forgettable at worst — if you're expecting a consistent caliber as THGWSWLS, you may find the overall experience a slight letdown . Appeal is a way of determining why people enjoy the books they read. Some readers already have a good vocabulary for talking about the books they love, while some do better in talking about books they never want to read again – but framing these conversations around appeal is the foundation for helping people find what to read next. This was probably my fave of the three, because it's straightforward and everything works towards the point. Once again it's extreme in its point-making, but at least here it makes a bit more sense. About the book:"Each precious thing I show you in this book is a holy relic from the night we both perished-the night when I combed you from my hair and watered the moon with your blood. You've lost a lot of blood . . ." I really liked the conversations between Martyr and Ambrose, my fav ones were the difference between scary and disturbing and that everything contains plagiarism in some way.The poems and recordings veered into philosophical territory so much that there was little to no horror—and the one thing that was horror-y made me uncomfortable but not in a good way. My eyes rolled on their own from the halfway point. Tamsen’s story was okay, though it would have been better if there was something concrete enough to tie that story to the bigger picture of this novella. This is honestly my biggest complaint, because having an idea of how these two parts connected in the end would have single-handedly made this book a whole other experience. I find the vague plagiarism explanation to be flimsy at best. The story opens with a plea for its realism, classifying the story as ‘evidence’ to which we have been granted access: ‘… Because the litigation surrounding Zoe Cross’s case remains open at the time of this publication, certain elements of their communication have been redacted or censored at the behest of the Henley’s Edge Police Department’ (p.ii). The ‘redacted’ content acts as a negative space in the centre of the story; an insistence on journalistic integrity that undermines the assumed omnipotence of a fictional voice. Calling to mind the openings of H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, M. R. James’s ‘A Warning to the Curious’, or the always-unsettling ‘The following is edited from real footage…’ at the start of every found footage horror film, ‘Things Have Gotten Worse…’ is a love-letter to established horror forms from the very first word.

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