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!

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