By GennaRose Nethercott
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: February 6, 2024
ASIN: B0C4JC1JZ5 ISBN: 9780593314180
The stories in Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart are about the abomination that resides within us all. That churning, clawing, ravenous yearning: the hunger to be held, and seen, and known. And the terror, too: to be loved too well, or not enough, or for long enough. To be laid bare before your sweetheart, to their horror. To be recognized as the monstrous thing you are.
Two teenage girls working at a sinister roadside attraction called the Eternal Staircase explore its secrets—and their own doomed summer love. A zombie rooster plays detective in a missing persons case. A woman moves into a new house with her acclaimed artist boyfriend—and finds her body slowly shifting into something specially constructed to accommodate his needs and whims. A pack of middle schoolers turn to the occult to rid themselves of a hated new classmate. And a pair of outcasts, a vampire and a goat woman, find solace in each other, even as the world's lack of understanding might bring about its own end.
In these lush, strange, beautifully written stories, GennaRose Nethercott explores human longing in all its diamond-dark facets to create a collection that will redefine what you see as a beast, and make you beg to have your heart broken.
Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories is a collection of dark fantasy tales like strange and unsettling urban legends and folklore for modern times. Two favorites of mine were the story about the Eternal Staircase--like one of those roadside attractions one might have found while driving on Route 66, and the story of preteens using the occult to get rid of a hated classmate.
If you are looking for something dark and unsettling, a mix of the weird and fantastical, Nethercott has brought a collection of prose that might just be the fairy tales that reflect our modern times.
I gave Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories 5 sheep.
Reviewed by Pamela K. Kinney
Website
GennaRose Nethercott’s book THE LUMBERJACK'S DOVE (Ecco/HarperCollins) was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series for 2017. She is also the lyricist behind the narrative song collection MODERN BALLADS, and is a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellow. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies including BOMB, The Massachusetts Review, The Offing, and PANK, and she has been writer-in-residence at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore, Art Farm Nebraska, and The Vermont Studio Center, among others. A born Vermonter, she tours nationally and internationally composing poems-to-order for strangers on a 1952 Hermes Rocket typewriter.
No comments:
Post a Comment