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Tag Archives: japanese horror story

Best Books of 2012 Round-Up

20 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Book Review

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

banana yoshimoto, book review, daniel keyes, forster, japanese horror story, jeffrey eugenides, ryunosuke akutagawa


It’s that time of year again when I do a little retrospective of best books. I’m quite surprised that I’ve been a little frugal with my 5/5 stars, but 2012 has certainly put me in touch with some awesome authors I have never heard of or read before. So, without further ado, here’s a taste of the best bits of how my reading year went.

Flowers for Algernon

By far the most heartbreaking and astonishing book I have come across during the year. It’s one hell of a story that really examines the fleeting nature of our lives, our achievements and our losses. Nothing prepares you for the amazement and devastation you will feel when Charlie Gordon, a simpleton with an IQ of 18 undergoes breakthrough brain surgery to increase his intelligence levels. His one goal in life is to be intelligent, yet when this wish is granted, he is unaware of the horrible revelations it brings with it. As the veil of dumb ignorance is slowly lifted, his perception of friends and family also change. On his journey of discovery he gets a taste of emotions and thoughts he never knew existed. ‘Flowers for Algernon‘ is a beautiful illustration of how bitter the fruit of knowledge really can be.

Middlesex

My first attempt at Eugenides was absolute bliss. ‘Middlesex’ explores themes of incest and family history through the eyes of Cal, a hermaphrodite. “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver-s license…records my first name simply as Cal.” The opening paragraph on it’s own is electrifying enough. I couldn’t put it down and if you choose to read this, neither will you. Hilarious and tragic in equal amounts with just the right dose of literary intelligence to keep the literary critic in you smiling too.

Kitchen

My first attempt at Banana Yoshimoto also left me with warm, fuzzy feelings. Japanese fiction is so beautiful, and ‘Kitchen’ embodies faithful representations of human emotions with that trademark simplicity that Japanese writers seem to have a knack for. This book is like a celebration of death and life, and reminds us that we must cherish the people around us when we still have them. This book reads like a series of short stories. Here’s my review of it.

Hell Screen

Akutagawa, the father of modern Japanese literature, translated by Jay Rubin. What more could you want? This is a short, short read that packs one hell of a punch. Akutagawa brings out the delicious lacquerwork and intricate embellishment of Japanese folklore in this collection of sharp, disturbing tales about art and sacrifice. Read my review here.

A Room with a View

Romance novels, I do not like. However, I am willing to change that with a book like ‘A Room With A View’. Forster’s perspective of love is what really endeared this novel to me. It’s not lovey-dovey, wishy-wishy. Real love is messy, it’s more to do with gut feelings than rationality. It’s a tricky path to negotiate and our two lovers here certainly fall from grace more than once trying to find their way to one another. Read my review here.

That’s it folks! Those are my best pickings of 2012. What are yours?

Related articles
  • The Japanese Literature Publishing Project and The Private Library (privatelibrary.typepad.com)
  • Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon (booknutcase.wordpress.com)
  • Review of the Year 2012- Fiction (lucybirdbooks.wordpress.com)
  • Friday Round-Up: December 28, 2012 (themidwestmaven.wordpress.com)
  • What Was The Most Reviewed Book Of 2012? (huffingtonpost.com)
  • 2012 round-up (jennydavidson.blogspot.com)

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Book Review | ‘Hell Screen’ by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

03 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Book Review, Excerpts

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

book review, hell screen, in a grove, japanese horror story, Lotus Pond, rashoumon, ryunosuke akutagawa, Samuel Beckett, the spiders thread, truman capote, Vladimir Nabokov


Hell ScreenHell Screen by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In celebration of their 50th birthday, Penguin Modern Classics launched a series of 50 mini books to honour and bring to light the lesser known works of famous authors like Samuel Beckett, Truman Capote and Vladimir Nabokov.

These pocket-sized books may be very quick reads, but the stories in them certainly pack a punch and are guaranteed to stay with you for a long time. By chance I picked up ‘Hell Screen’ by Akutagawa, which is the first in the series, and was completely blown away by the brilliance of the prose.

In this slim volume the reader gets to know the more spiritual side of Akutagawa through the short stories ‘Hell Screen’ and ‘The Spider Thread’, the latter of which is more like a parable. Both stories are told in a conversational tone, bringing us closer to Akutagawa as ‘story-teller’ rather than author. They are also cautionary tales that show us how our actions (whether good or bad) will be rewarded in like regardless of whether we are in the land of the living or the dead.

‘Hell Screen’ is the macabre tale of the nefarious yet gifted painter Yoshihide, who is notorious for his obsession with his art, so much so that he will do anything to be the best. The repellent nature of the man is constantly mentioned, his cruelty, borderline insanity and unorthodox ways of approaching his craft is also illustrated with examples. He will stop at nothing to create the most realistic portrayals of beauty and suffering and claims he can only paint what he has seen. Therefore when his Imperial Majesty orders him to paint a screen depicting the sufferings of hell, Yoshihide shuts himself up in his atelier and commences to produce the most terrifying images conceivable – to the great suffering of his apprentices.

“Being attacked by the owl however was not what frightened the lad. What really made his flesh crawl was the way master Yoshihide followed the commotion with his cold stare, taking his time to spread out a piece of paper, lick his brush, and then set about capturing the terrible image of a delicate boy being tormented by a hideous bird.”

However, one image, the crowning glory of the screen, is to be of a beautiful woman crashing down a cliff in a horse-drawn carriage enveloped in flames. This being beyond Yoshihide’s means, he decides to request a true-life re-enactment from the Imperial Majesty himself. To the horror of the townsfolk, his request is granted, and what follows is the beginning of Yoshihide’s undoing.

‘The Spider Thread’ also deals with visions of heaven and hell, but is much shorter and more vivid in its description. It starts with one of the most elegant descriptions of paradise I have ever come across and ends in much the same way:

“And now, children, let me tell you a story about the Lord Buddha Shakyamuni.
           It begins one day as He was strolling along in Paradise by the banks of the Lotus Pond. The blossoms on the pond were like perfect white pearls, and from their golden centers wafted forth a never-ending fragrance wonderful beyond description. I think it must have been morning in Paradise.”

The beauty of this last story actually surpasses ‘Hell Screen’, the execution of it being absolutely masterful. Again the focus is on the merits of mercy and cruelty and how a single act of kindness no matter how small, can give a sinner the slimmest of chance to enter the grace of heaven.

I fully intend to read the next 49 in this series. If you have not read Akutagawa yet, then these two stories are an excellent introduction to him. ‘In a Grove‘ and ‘Rashoumon’ might be his most famous works, but I feel ‘Hell Screen’ and ‘The Spider’s Thread‘ are far superior when it comes to literary merit.

View all my reviews

Related articles
  • Best Books of 2012 Round-Up (mywordlyobsessions.wordpress.com)
  • Watch Kurosawa’s Rashomon Free Online, the Film That Introduced Japanese Cinema to the West (openculture.com)
  • The Western World’s Introduction to Japanese Cinema: ‘Rashomon’ (Review) (popmatters.com)

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Book Review | ‘In The Miso Soup’ by Ryu Murakami

09 Wednesday Feb 2011

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Book Review

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Bret Easton Ellis, Frank, Haruki Murakami, in the miso soup, japanese horror story, Patrick Bateman, ryu murakami, Tokyo


In The Miso SoupIn The Miso Soup by Ryū Murakami

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Murakami channels Brett Easton Ellis in this Japanese psycho-thriller with his version of Patrick Bateman. Stockholm syndrome never felt so creepy!” – Zee, The Observer

Haha, only joking. If I were a hip, well-paid reviewer for say, The Guardian or The Times (I know, I know, delusions of grandeur!) this is what I’d want the publishers to display on the back-cover. What I’d also demand is that the book should come with a warning label; the kind they put on CD’s for explicit language. Not that anyone would actually heed it. If anything, it would serve as a homing beacon for spotty emo-goth teenagers to revel in this ‘Japanese’ blood-fest.

I decided to read this after I discovered it was Haruki Murakami‘s favourite author (no relation) but quickly realised that Ryu Murakami had little influence over the former’s writing. ‘In the Miso Soup’ is more in the calibre of Ellis’s ‘American Psycho’, but without the density of long, tedious descriptions of designer-wear. In fact, I’d like to call this a Japanese view on the dangers of Western people; Americans in particular. Murakami seems to have taken the classic American horror elements and placed them in a Japanese setting. Ryu then goes on to create some non-judgmental characters like Kenji and his girlfriend, and just lets the whole thing play out on the garish, neon-lit underworld of Tokyo’s red-light district.

The story centres around Kenji, a ‘tour-guide’ for foreigners aiming to make their way through the sleazy night-life of the city. One night he happens upon American tourist Frank, who hires Kenji for this purpose. But right off, Kenji knows that something is amiss. His feelings only grow stronger as Franks strange behaviour leads Kenji to assume that he might be the serial-killer-at-large that’s been rocking Japanese headlines for the past few days. It all comes to a head when Kenji realises the only way to deal with a man like this, is to try to understand him, and even sympathise.

I found the narrative to be of a sweet and sour mix that is so intrinsic to Japanese story-telling. There were moments of sheer horror, that were later tempered by humour and even pensive reflection. Frank is portrayed as a lardy, pasty, pale psychotic who, despite all his madness has some sort of coherent method to his murders. Like Bateman, there is a side of him that is completely inaccessible, his kill-zone area that operates outside of his will. Personally, I found him more realistic and relatable than Kenji, but was equally relieved that I couldn’t/ didn’t have access to that part of him. In essence, we realise that Frank’s solitude is probably one of the major factors of his being this way:

“… The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different than the sort you know you’ll get through if you just hang in there”

As slimy and repulsive as Frank is (almost reptilian with his dead-pan expression) there is also a very human part to him that Murakami did well to bring out in the end. The chemistry between him and Kenji displays ‘stockholm syndrome’ at its best. In general, the Japanese do not treat horror the same way as the West. Which means they come up with more original material to scare by. The scare factor here wasn’t so much the bloodbath, the disseminated school-girl prostitutes or Frank himself, but the fact that Kenji relates to Frank far more deeply than he, or we, could ever imagine. It brings home the fact that serial-killers aren’t a world away from us. They were, perhaps, once ‘normal’. But sometimes something happens somewhere, the normal becomes singed, burned or corrupted. That plastic layer that is clamped over our sensitivity might become unhinged, and the poison of life gets under it; sullying the way we see the world around us.

Frank comes across as one such tragedy. He knows what he is, and confides in Kenji, tries to tell him what and why he does things. The effort alone is humbling really. What ultimately happens is that the two men learn that they are more similar than they think they are:

“Nobody, I don’t care what country they’re from, has a perfect personality. Everyone has a good side and a side that’s not so good …. What’s good about Americans, if I can generalize a little, is that they have a kind of openhearted innocence. And what’s not good is that they can’t imagine any world outside of the States, or any value system different from their own. The Japanese have a similar defect…”

It is passages like this that really helped gel together what Murakami was thinking about. The divide between East and West, their methods and ways of doing things become a metaphor. Kenji and Frank meet, East and West collide. Like the left and right sides of a brain, the conscious and unconscious, they probe and attack each other until they come to an understanding. The inaccessibility of Japanese culture has been the subject of many novels and movies. ‘Lost in Translation’ is a firm favourite of mine in this respect. Tokyo city could be a major culture shock and a source of alienation if you don’t know what it’s all about. It’s a bewildering place, but not as bewildering as perhaps, the inner world of Frank the killer. Murakami manages to unite two opposing cultures who are both fascinated and terrified of the other, through some impressive role reversals.

In some respects, Kenji was more American than Frank and Frank more Japanese than Kenji. Both characters see their cultural ‘self’ in the other; and to them, it doesn’t make sense. If that’s not pure genius, then I don’t know what is.

View all my reviews

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Literary Blog Hop! – What Is Literary Fiction?

05 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Meme

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

1984, frankenstein, george orwell, japanese horror story, Koji Suzuki, literary fiction, mary shelley, meme, science fiction


 Don\

Welcome to the ‘Literary Blog Hop’, a meme hosted by The Blue Bookcase for book bloggers who focus on reviewing literary fiction. This weeks’ hop comes with the question:

“What is your favourite book, and why would you consider it as ‘literary’.”

When I received news of this meme in my inbox, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to talk about a popular Japanese trilogy that has been on my mind ever since I read it about 5 years ago. The books I’m
talking about are known as ‘The Ring Trilogy’. The three books ‘Ring’ (1991), ‘Spiral’ (1995) and ‘Loop’ (2002) were written by Koji Suzuki and became a literary phenomenon all over the world. While ‘Ring’ is the most popular book in the series, ‘Spiral’ and ‘Loop’ provide an excellent follow-up to the chilling story of the cursed videotape that kills its’ viewers in seven days. Here is a short synopsis of each book without any spoilers.

‘RING’ – BOOK 1

Ring (Book 1)

“One night in Tokyo, four healthy teenagers die simultaneously. Autopsy reports list the cause as heart failure, but for journalist Kazuyuki Asakawa whose niece was among the dead, it seems something more sinister is afoot. Asakawa’s suspicions drive him to investigate further, which leads him to a strange videotape found in a mountain lodge the teenagers visited together over the holidays. At first, the tape is nothing more than a random series of unrelated images. However the images end abruptly, and what follows is an inexplicable message that condemns the viewer to die in seven days unless they complete a charm. But to Asakawa’s horror, the instructions have been erased. Now it becomes a race against the clock to find out the mystery of the tape, the truth behind the curse and who made it. 

Soon Asakawa realises the images themselves are a series of clues, which point to a terrible secret and an insatiable revenge against humanity.” 

____________________
‘SPIRAL’ – BOOK 2

Spiral (Book 2)

“Dr. Ando suffers from nightmares. In his dreams he is trying to save his drowning son. But everyday he wakes to the cruel reality of his death and the fact that his marriage has all but fallen apart. The only thing keeping him going is his job – performing autopsies. That is, until his old rival Ryuji Takayama, turns up on the steel slab. In High School, Ryuji was famous for being a  codebreaker. He would have remained undefeated, if it wasn’t for Ando. Yet here he is, and ironically Ando has the honour of doing the last duties. But Ryuji’s death soon turns out to be as cryptic as the codes they used to crack back in school. A blood test reveals the impossible truth that Ryuji died from a virus supposed to be extinct, and it turns out he isn’t the only one to have been infected. Being the only person ever to have beat Ryuji, Ando gets the unshakable feeling that his friend is controlling things from beyond the grave by chosing him to solve this mystery.

It’s not long before Ando’s investigation leads him to a videotape, and a crucial choice between life, death – and rebirth.”

____________________

‘LOOP’ – BOOK 3

Loop (Book 3)

“In the ‘Ring’, vendetta came in the form of a videotape. In ‘Spiral’, a mutating virus threatened the entire diversity of life. In ‘Loop’, everything about the ‘Ring’ universe is turned on its head, as the story opens on Kaoru Futami, a precocious ten year old boy born to an era on the brink of a cancer epidemic. This new, aggressive form of the illness is incurable; yet Kaoru has hope as his father lies dying in a hospital along with many other patients. Now a medical student, Kaoru sets out to discover the origins of the disease which takes him to the barren desert of New Mexico and the abandoned HQ’s of the elusive ‘Loop’ project. What he discovers there is an advanced artificial life programme designed to imitate all stages of human civilization. As Kaoru watches events unfold, he realises that a virus mysteriously wiped out the inhabitants of the virtual world; a virus that managed to escape the ‘Loop’ project and somehow find its way into reality.

Yet that isn’t all. Kaoru also finds himself facing a shocking personal truth and a destiny requiring the ultimate sacrifice.”

The reason I chose these books is because despite of their place in popular culture and the ‘hype’ generated by their film versions, I strongly believe they deserve to be recognised as literary fiction.

“The Ring Trilogy? Wait a minute… isn’t that mainstream fiction, Science-Fiction, Gothic horror? How the ‘Ring’ compare to the likes of ‘The English Patient’ and ‘The Catcher in the Rye’?”

Well, it can’t. Purely because of the difference in genres, but more importantly because books like the trilogy only begin to work on a literary level when it is perceived as a synergistic whole. In other words, you have to read them in order to get the full effect of the intricate way in which the seemingly disconnected plots come together to form the ‘big picture’. Suzuki also provides access to Japanese folklore, offering insight into how various supernatural beliefs developed in this culture. There is also the way each book takes mythological themes of death, life and rebirth and re-works them into a perspective the modern reader can easily relate to. One common problem is that literary fiction is often confused with the  ‘Classics’.  While the canon will always remain as a set number of key texts, literary fiction is the quite the opposite. If it can be regarded as a genre, it is the most flexible of them all, as literary fiction can turn up in any style of writing.  To clear things up, I feel a great need to classify once and for all exactly what literary fiction means.

Literary Fiction – A Short Introduction
The term itself is very difficult to pin down and is surrounded by a plethora of preconceived ideas, most of which are often negative to say the least. The words ‘literary fiction’ are often associated with highbrow art that is often written in a way to be largely unintelligible to the average reader, and more often than not, with a focus on garnering as many awards as it possibly can.

While some of these are tell-tale traits of literary fiction, I am glad to say that it isn’t as straight-forward or narrow as that. ‘Literary’ means ‘of words’, and a work of literary fiction often indicates one to be of considerable merit within its own respectful genre. It may also mean that the book is written with a focus on style, psychological depth or character development.The best thing about literary fiction, is that it often has something important to say about its subject matter or about the art of writing, which means a relatively new book can be classed as literary fiction.

These are traits carried by the books as each one takes the ‘viral’ theme and develops it in a new direction. While some people may not like the progressive changes Suzuki made in his follow-up novels, I thoroughly enjoyed them, as it challenged me to refocus my own theories and assumptions about the plot which taught me a lot about how important it is to keep a story as creative as possible. It was also wonderful to see a work that straddles more than one genre keep the plot balanced between the two. Even though horror and science-fiction do go quite well together, it is difficult to produce a story that is ‘credible’ enough to keep the reader involved, and this is a very important factor for both these genres. If you think of literary classics like Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, both depicted at the time, a fantastical future that was thoroughly make-believe. But what made them so popular for later generations was their grounding in the political and scientific theories at the time. Of course today’s critics hail them as works of immense foresight, as some of those fantastical things have become a reality.

Frankenstein’s monster was created by various body parts and resurrected through ‘galvanism’ or lightning. Today, doctors can perform amazing surgical feats such as skin grafts and organ transplants. We have also discovered that the human body has its own electrical current and cloning is now a reality. ‘Big Brother’ was the theme of Orwell’s dystopian story, as people are ruled by a despotic government that perpetrates mind control, constant surveillance of its citizens and torture. This scenario is not far off, as some governments i.e. China and Iran constantly monitor, block and censor information on the internet that goes against it’s policies. In a time where freedom of speech and thought has never been so relaxed; there are still parts of the world where people are punished for their thoughts. 

In the ‘Ring’, the now extinct smallpox virus finds it’s way onto a video tape, which when viewed infects its audience in the form of a curse. In ‘Spiral’ this virus mutates, finding it’s way onto the internet and to millions of viewers. The result is an epidemic on an unprecedented scale. Contrary to popular belief, in reality the smallpox virus is all but extinct. It is still kept alive in two places; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in United States and the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR in Koltsovo, Russia. There have been rumours that the virus is intended for use in biological warfare.

The viral theme however does not end here, as in ‘Loop’ we are introduced to the concept of artificial intelligence; something that many programmers are working on. Lately gaming systems like the Nintendo Wii have made physical interaction a part of the gaming experience. There is a great desire to create an ‘intuitive’ relationship between man and machine. The iPad is a great example of how this what with the development of the ergonomic touchscreen and the facility to flip the screen any way you like. I feel that it’s only a matter of time before a totally independent artificial intelligence program is created. What something like this will bring only time will tell, but one thing is for sure, art often does imitate life which gives me the feeling that fiction offers us an uncanny glimpse into the future.

These are but a few of the big themes these books analyse. As technology takes over making our lives more easier, we tend to lose other things. We become alienated from the organic and the natural. What Suzuki tries to illustrate is what happens when the unnatural begins to control our lives as it changes it against our will. The symbol of the virus comes to mean many things. The mutation of it throughout the three books shows the relentless process of evolution and the fact that we haven’t arrived at out final state and we are still a work in progress. The creation of artificial intelligence (playing ‘god’) brings about the ‘curse’ or the cross all humanity has to bear for making something it cannot even begin to fathom. I could go on and on, but I would be giving away a lot of spoilers, and that wouldn’t be fair for those who wish to read and find out for themselves.

Oh, and for all those who think that Suzuki might have stolen the ‘world within a world’ plot from the Matrix films, think again. ‘Loop’ was first published a year before Matrix Reloaded was screened. How’s that for predictive fiction?

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Book Review | ‘After Dark’ by Haruki Murakami

19 Saturday Jun 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Book Review

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

7/11, After Dark, book review, full moon, Haruki Murakami, japanese horror story, Koji Suzuki, love hotels, nocturnal, Norwegian Wood, Paul Auster, Tokyo, Travels in the Scriptorium


First of all, I think everybody should read ‘Norwegian Wood’. It’s not particularly vital that they understand it, but it would do them good to take a little trip down the back-alleys of frustrated love and deathly longing that Murakami is so good at writing about. Another reason they should read it, is because when they come to ‘After Dark’, they will appreciate the maturity of Murakami as an author and his mastery in the art of saying so much, with so little.

 

This is a novel I struggle to place. Murakami seems to straddle several genres, using different elements from each, enmeshing them in his own way to form a narrative that flows delicately from one character to the next. As the title suggests, the novel explores the strange nocturnal activities in the city of Tokyo. We are introduced to Mari, yet through her a string of other characters begin to form odd, disjointed relationships with one another.

Sometimes by past events, other times by chance and occasionally through indirect technological encounters, Murakami’s characters lead us through very personal, tragic and often unintelligible moments of their lives. This attempt at emulating Koji Suzuki is not uncommon; as Paul Auster demonstrated a similar, yet more subtle version of this in his novel ‘Travels in the  Scriptorium’. For example, Murakami’s way of making two seemingly unrelated characters interact with one another could be through a mobile phone (one character loses her phone, the other by chance discovers it in a supermarket and answers a call). Or one scene might end with a character watching a program, and the next begins with another character watching the same show.

As I read, I got a sense that this was a detective story that didn’t want to be solved. In fact, I think things are better that way with a story like this, where characters begin in a state of limbo and leave without much change in their status. It was refreshing to watch them get pulled into the ebb and flow of a fate they have no control over. They often found themselves in ridiculous situations like love hotels and 7/11’s, criss-crossing each other’s lives like busy city traffic, oblivious to the fact that they are part of a much bigger, chaotic storyline. These are characters that feel their lack of control, yet they can sense a frustration similar to theirs being suffered somewhere on the periphery of their ‘vision’. While the full moon turns their actions and intentions into lunar paranoia; the characters themselves enjoy being on the edges of sanity. By no means are these characters incapable of happiness, it is fully in their means to be so. Yet it is the choices they make that put them in the position they are in.

Murakami has offered up an intense, yet deliciously frustrating plot due to its lack of a good ending. There are many questions left unanswered in the reader’s mind, and I think this was intentional on the author’s behalf. The narrative also changes form, veering from a ghost-story to a crime novel, and then hitting the well-known notes of a classic Japanese horror story. It is in fact neither of these, but the expert use of them in subtle, suggestive ways that enable a reader to create their own answers to the questions.

This short novel will stay with you for a long time, often making you wonder just how he did it.

I give this 4/5 stars.

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  • Review of the Year 2012- Challenges (lucybirdbooks.wordpress.com)

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