2 Books Like The Old Lady

M. Ennenbach’s CUCKOO is a love story, a dark fantasy, a horror story, a book of poetry, a literary experiment, and… and, well, I could probably think of a few other ways to describe it, but my point is that you can’t pin it down, and its refusal to be typical while always being a pleasure to read makes it great. Experience with love and loss shatters the main character, who has a sometimes-debilitating mental illness, and since he is shattered, the book is shattered as well. It appears mostly in three types of sections, Before, Now, and After, but the timelines it explores aren’t as tidy as those divisions suggest. Going beyond the usual questions about what is “real” raised by an unreliable narrator, the main character’s perspective conjures multiple realities, some of which seem to encode others, and the reader gets lost along with “Cuckoo,” adrift in his… show more.

I wouldn't often--I would almost never--consider describing a book as "original" because I tend to think everything's been done, but the main point of MOTEL STYX, an exploration of a world where necrophilia is legal but regulated--is not something I've seen before, and authors von Eschen and Butcher handle their subject with frank rationality that endows it with fascination that balances its inherent repulsiveness. Don't get me wrong: the book is very, very nasty, definitely extreme horror that goes for gross-outs like you might expect. However, it delves with surprising insight into psychological states surrounding death and loss that both give rise to the taboo on necrophilia and some people's desire to break it. I found two characters, one alive and one dead, to have a quite endearing relationship once I came to understand them. The authors weave different aspects of the motel that fulfills necrophiles' fantasies around a compelling… show more.