This was a really enjoyable and immersive collection of short stories! While a couple didn’t really land for me, the majority of the stories were engaging, vivid and compelling to read. Some of my favorite stories were “The Mall on the Hill”, “Swallow”, and “Baba Yaga Helps Build a House”.

What worked for me:
The strongest aspect of this collection was definitely its atmosphere. The prose is often visceral and haunting, with horror elements that are genuinely unsettling. There were moments (yeah, I’m looking at you “The Midnight Feast”) that made me recoil - deeply disturbing, but also so well executed. I will say though - not for the faint of heart!

I also really appreciated the way Slavic mythology was woven throughout. Other than Baba Yaga, I’m not very familiar with Slavic folklore, so it was interesting to learn and see how those influences presented themselves in these stories. It gives the collection a distinct identity that helps it stand out from other folklore-inspired pieces.

Finally, I found the themes of queerness and outsiderhood very compelling, perhaps because they’re themes that I strongly identify with. While queerness wasn’t necessarily the centerpoint of the stories, it often shaped how characters moved through the world (as it does in real life) - as outsiders searched for meaning, belonging, or transformation; especially through supernatural or mystical experiences. Other recurring themes included desire, inheritance, and family.

What didn’t work for me:
As mentioned, a few stories didn’t fully click for me. However, that’s likely just personal preference and often will be the case with short story collections!

One thing I noticed as I continued through the book was that the stories had a fairly consistent pacing and structure to them. While this helped to make the book feel cohesive, it also meant that after a while I started to anticipate the rhythm of each story, which sometimes lessened the surprise or impact it had on me.

I would recommend this book to: readers who enjoy dark, atmospheric and sometimes disturbing horror stories, especially those interested in folklore-inspired and queer-leaning fiction.

Content Warnings: disturbing imagery, body horror, gore, violence, death, sex, genitalia, cannibalism

I read this as an ARC reader on NetGalley, cross posted my review on Goodreads.

Wow. If I'm being honest, I didn't expect to like this book as much as I did, considering it is a collection of non-related short stories, and not a full story novel. Every time I finished a story, from the third story onwards, I would think to myself; "Wow, that has to be my favourite so far.", and I would have to keep correcting myself and saying it over and over again as I read each story afterwards. I actually thought about Convalescence enough that themes of it ended up appearing in my dreams, which I can confidently say is the first time that has happened to me.

I loved reading When Raspberries Bloom In August and Baba Yaga Helps Build A House. I think its more of a personal preference that I love when a group of characters are driven to the point of insanity by an inanimate object, especially when it's more of an infection style of mental corruption. This also bleeds into me really liking the inanimate object with mild sentience in BYHBAH, which gives the story free points in my eyes. The stories were great, and mixed with two of my favourite things, I would rate both stories 4.5 stars or higher if they were their own short story.

I enjoyed The Drowning Line, Swallow, and The Language Of Knives as well, all of which mixed the horror aspect with the ideas of family and community pretty well. They weren't my favourite stories of the bunch, but I did really enjoy the horror aspects, and every story kind of reminds me of The Twilight Zone, where you get shown something strange or horrific, and the ending moral is 'that would be fucked up if it was real, huh?'.

I didn't really care for Nine Tongues Tell Of, The Town The Forest Ate, The Midnight Feast, and Bones Are Stones For Building. The first two didn't really pull me in, and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to get stuck into the stories because of them, but was thankfully proven wrong. The first two just felt kind of empty to me. The last two were good stories, and I could connect and understand certain aspects, but I don't really like them, whether it's the setting of the story or the characters in it, I'm not sure.

Holding Hands With Monsters and Spring Is Violence. I'm not sure how to explain my feeling for these two. I don't hate them, and I don't exceptionally love them. I think out of all the stories, these two are the ones that actually ended up creeping me out a little. They were both great reads, and while I enjoyed both of them, I feel like they were both missing something; but if the intention was to mostly just freak out the reader, it definitely worked on me.