As I mentioned July was a poor reading month for me as I only read 4 books and I did DNF one of those so I am hoping August will be better.
The Dark Chorus by Ashley Meggitt ****.5 - I didn’t know anything about The Dark Chorus going into it but with this kind of book I felt that was a good thing. I will say that the religious overtones of the synopsis made me really weary despite this falling perfectly into my favourite genre and I wasn’t sure how those themes were going to come into play. The opening of The Dark Chorus was actually pretty interesting as we are introduced to a unnamed boy born in an asylum taken from his mother shortly after birth. However, he remembers being born because they essentially bound themselves to each other before he was taken away. He develops gifts as a child to influence others which is why he was never adopted and when he felt his mother die he held onto her soul forcing her to be trapped in what he calls the Dark Chorus, a collection of souls bound to the asylum sort of like purgatory. At 13 he has been having dreams instructing him on how to capture and bind a soul so he returns to the asylum and waits for the perfect moment to find and capture his mother’s soul which he does. However, he takes it a step further by finding a woman who his mother could essentially possess so they can be together again. This doesn’t go the way the boy planned as his mother still suffer from whatever landed her in the asylum in the first place and he performs the ritual again, killing his mother and binding her soul once more. However, during this ritual the police and someone concerned for the woman find the boy in the middle of killing the woman possessed by his mother and I can’t wait to see where this goes.
You & Me at the End of the World by Brianna Bourne *** - From what I can gather this is a dual perspective novel following Hannah Ashton and Leo Sterling during the apocalypse, like 28 Day Later style where everyone just vanishes so I am intrigued. At the opening of the novel we know through Hannah that five days ago basically everything and everyone like people and animals disappeared and she has lived for the past five days thinking she is the only person in her city as she hasn’t gone beyond that. Hannah is very anxious about the situation and upon visiting the bookstore owned by a friend’s family she meets Leo. She knows Leo from school even though they don’t run in the same circles and she is delighted as there is another person. Leo is just as delighted even if he doesn’t show it at first because he like Hannah has felt an increasing anxiety stemming from being alone all the time. The first interaction between the pair is extremely awkward as neither can believe it is happening, Hannah is also a little dumbstruck by the fact the only other living being she has seen in five days is one of the hottest boys at school and someone she might have had a crush on for a long time. We can immediately see that each has pre-set ideas about what the other one is liked based of their knowledge from other people not knowing that person themselves. I did like the fact both have anxious tics, Hannah acts out her ballet choreography with her hands to calm herself down where as Leo uses music but he bounces his leg a lot which was nice to see in both a male and female character.
The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft ***.6 - I haven’t read any Lovecraft before but I have read book and been recommended books that are similar so I decided to pick up The Call of Cthulhu to see what Lovecraft’s writing is actually like. As this is a short story collection I will review each stories individually and the end this review with my thoughts on the collection as a whole. Dagon – *** Dagon was a strange story following a German naval prisoner of war who escapes from the ship housing them in a small boat. For a while he drifts at sea before awaking one morning to find himself on a strange and foreboding island. On this island he sees the decaying bodies of many strange creatures but eventually finds himself in a valley where he comes across a strange statue. The statue he later learns might be Dagon, the Fish-God but what unnerves him is the depictions of mermaid like people of a huge size worshipping Dagon. He ends up seeing one of the creatures before fleeing in terror, afterwards he uses drugs like morphine and eventually suicide to escape the madness plaguing him and the knowledge that one day when the land sinks into the ocean these creatures will reign supreme.
The Wives by Tarryn Fisher DNF - I didn’t know anything about The Wives before getting into it and I prefer reading mysteries and thrillers this way because you don’t know what to expect. From the synopsis all I can gather is that Thursday’s husband, Seth has two other wives who she knows about but has never meet and that there is a mystery surrounding the husband’s behaviour which causes the wives to meet. We learn very quickly that we don’t get to know the names of the wives just the day of the week that Seth is with them and we are following Thursday. It turns out she is the legal wife of Seth and yet many of his family believe that he is still married to Tuesday who is technically his ex-wife and there is also Monday who is currently pregnant. We haven’t even really got into the meat of the novel at all and this is already severally messed up as the other wives except Tuesday seem to be kept hidden meaning that in Seattle where Thursday is living in America it might not be legal. I actually looked this up and currently polygamy or being married to more than one person is illegal in every state except Utah but that only came into effect in 2020 so we can safely assume that Seth having more than one wife is very illegal which is why they are kept hidden. Thursday loves the attention Seth gives her, however, she is extremely jealous of the other wives and find herself having to not think about them if she wants to have a good day with Seth. She also seems to resent both the fact that Tuesday was the first wife and that Monday is pregnant but her world revolves around Seth so she says nothing to avoid upsetting him because she wants to keep him.
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