Week Eight: Contemporary Urban Fantasy


The Ocean at the End of the Lane

I really liked reading this story, it is the wacky weird that I love; similar to Coralline or any of Tim Burton’s pieces. Except for a few scenes and themes, I feel like this could be a really good children’s book! For most of the duration of the story I thought the narrator was using a coping mechanism to alter his memories of a traumatic childhood event, creating this fantastic story in his mind. I still think I could be right, but the ending threw me off. I thought the neighbor would explain and clarify what really happened in his childhood and the mystery would be solved. But no. Like many alternate reality, crazy fantasy stories the ending is ambiguous. I suppose I could still be right, but I have trouble rationalizing some of the events in his memories into something that could have possibly actually happened to him. For example, the hunger birds. If these crazy events did not really happen, what were the hunger birds really? Are they representative of his fears and his denial of this supposed childhood trauma. torturing him and hurting the people around him?

Well whether the narrator really did experience this crazy adventure, or if it was just his way of coping with a childhood trauma, this book was really immersive and took me on an adventure!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week Two: Vampires

For this week’s reading, I decided to read Twilight . I was a huge fan of the movies when I was in middle and high school, but it has been a long time since I read the first book of the saga. It was interesting returning to a book after so many years. I had to have been in 7 th  grade the last time I read this particular book. It was not my favorite of the series, so I only read it the once.               Reading Twilight as a kid and an adult is a completely different experience. As a kid, like I said, I was a huge fan. I accepted it all, holding onto every word, like Bella’s love life was as important as the book made it out to be. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge sentimentalist and still adore these movies, although now acknowledging and even sharing the opinions of the critics. But, when reading the book last week, I was able, as an adult, to really separate myself from the book and try to analyze it for what i...
Read more

Week Three: Old Horror

Reading the short stories of Kwaidan was not the experience I was expecting. As an American, when someone says horror, some of the first things that come to mind are, Jason Voorhees, Insidious, and Saw. All gory and or demonic; purely created to disturb its viewers. These do not even belong in the same category as Kwaidan . Looking back, my views on what “horror” is were closed minded. Kwaidan was not gory, demonic and dark, but more like classic fairytales, similar to Grimm’s fairytales in which the stories had some sort of a moral at the end and that was the point. Classic fairytales were made to teach lessons and scare kids into doing what was right. The story, the journey, did not have to make complete sense as long as it was interesting, memorable, and had that lesson. That was the important part. That is exactly what Kwaidan is and even though that surprised me, I really enjoyed the read. I would much rather experience something that makes me think and see the ...
Read more

Week Ten: The Fiction of Ideas

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Aldrich I found The Three Stigmata of Palmer Aldrich a very ambiguous book packed full of many subplots and extraneous themes. There was a lot going on. As a person who is really bad with names, I found it hard to keep up with which character was which; Myerson, Bulero, Eldritch. Also, this was compounded by the fact that they all seemed to be very similar in character traits. Maybe this was on purpose. Maybe it adds to the confusing story filled with alternate universes and time travel. Even though I had problems with the story, I cannot say I hated this book. I found it very interesting and I enjoyed reading it. I cannot pretend to be a good writer, I am not, but I just cannot help but wonder what the story would be like when it was stripped of some of the themes that felt unimportant to the main plot. For example, the bit about the neo-Christian woman on Mars. That whole subplot was unnecessary.   The story took a detour for this story poi...
Read more