(no subject)

[skygiants]

jothra lent me Yoko Ogawa's Revenge after warning me that it was extremely creepy, and I should not read it late at night.

Of course I did not listen and now LOOK WHERE THAT GETS ME. No, I was mostly OK, until the short story where a girl visits a torture museum and nothing bad actually happens at all except an internal realization on the part of the protagonist that torture sounds kind of like fun, but the descriptions made me so uncomfortable that I had to put the book down for a while and stare at kittens or something.

Revenge consists of eleven short stories. Most of them are about obsession to some degree or another. Some of the stories have murders; some of them have weird magical realism; some of them have both, and some of them have neither! Even the ones that have neither are creepy to a certain extent.

Some of the stories stand more or less alone, but most are loosely connected -- a death in one story will frequently show up as a background event in another; more metatextually, a character in one story occasionally turns out to be the writer of another. I am perhaps most fascinated by the story in which a character, who says she is an author, who seems to have written several of the stories in the book, complains to the protagonist about another woman who steals her work and goes about promoting it like her own. Yoko Ogawa, what are you trying to say ...?

Anyway, I imagine that reading these stories as individual pieces when they were originally published must have been a very different experience than reading them in collection. Some stories I think I would flip through if I was reading them solo as either having no point, or dropping the DUN DUN!!! too heavily on the last page, but having them woven together made a deeply surreal whole that was greater (and creepier) than the sum of its parts.

Comments

[jothra]

I WARNED YOU.

I had that reaction of 'HNGH SHIT CREEPY FOR NO REAL REASON' and had to put the book down at the first story.

And yes, I was feeling the same until I realized the stories were tied together, and that made them more creepy, and me more interested!

But did you like it??

[skygiants]

YOU DID WARN ME. It's those weird offbeat images that get you -- the finger-carrots in the salad! The make-you-taller device!

I did like it!! but I also felt the need to go read something quite fluffy afterwards...

[jothra]

oh goodness yes you are not alone there. It was the cake in the fridge that did it for me.

I think I finished reading it on a nice sunny afternoon, just to be safe.

[skygiants]

I think the Museum of Torture story and the follow-up story about the uncle creeped me out way worse than any of the stories that actually ended up with somebody dead

[thewickedlady]

Ooooh, can I borrow it next?

[skygiants]

I was gonna bring it to return to Jo tonight - if Jo agrees I will pass it to you instead! :D

[sovay]

Some of the stories have murders; some of them have weird magical realism; some of them have both, and some of them have neither! Even the ones that have neither are creepy to a certain extent.

That sounds like Robert Aickman, honestly. Things are wrong in his stories, but most of them aren't that wrong, and nonetheless the effect is incredibly destabiling, unsettling, and, if taken in sufficient quantities, the best cure for ever wanting to sleep again I have read in a long time.

[skygiants]

I have never read any Robert Aickman, but yes, that description sounds 100% accurate.

[sovay]

I have never read any Robert Aickman, but yes, that description sounds 100% accurate.

I started with "The Stains"; it has an ambiguous dryad and some very unambiguous lichen. Matthew Cheney writes about it really well. The only collection I have read in full is Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories (1975), thanks to rushthatspeaks lending it to me in 2014, but he's relatively widely available in anthologies and the internet and I believe his complete short fiction was reprinted last year for his centenary, I just haven't picked any of the reprints up yet. When last I checked, "The Stains," "The Cicerones," "The Same Dog," "Ringing the Changes," and "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" were some favorite stories of mine, for given values of "favorite." There is a very good short film of "The Cicerones."