This is getting a heartfelt "meh" from me.

 

One the one hand the story is a rather compelling one, being about a time-travelling serial killer, who kills women because a house has told him to do so.  On the other hand this story is a rather pointless one, because Lauren Beukes doesn´t explain anything in the end. What motivation does the killer have to kill the women? What is up with that house? And what does it mean when a girl has the "shine"? She explains absolutely nothing. And as usual the time travel thing doesn´t make any kind of sense and towards the end I was confused out of my mind. And I really didn´t like that Lauren Beukes left the ending to my own imagination.

 

I was entertained while reading this book, but it has the nutritional value of a bag of potato chips. 

While I was reading this I was totally in it. Because it involved time travel and enough clues I could kind of tell that things would be resolved the way I wanted, but that didn't lessen the tension. And I kept seeing Kirby as the actor who played Alice in the 3rd season of Channel Zero (Olivia Luccardi) which I just watched and really liked. It's not a horror novel with a moral, I don't think, it's a straight-up slasher novel with a purely evil villain, so the criticisms about the violence being empty are valid in that sense. I thought the mild romance was totally unnecessary.

While reading this book, I began to imagine a conversation that goes something like this:

 

A whole bunch of authors: “We like to try to confuse readers by making our stories bounce back and forth between three or four different time periods.”

 

Lauren Beukes: *indelicate snort* “Bitches, that’s nothing. Hold my beer.”

 

Which isn’t to say that I think Beukes drinks beer and calls other authors bitches, but you never know. I hear some of these literary conventions are pretty wild.

 

I don’t really know how to feel about this one. I enjoyed it, but like Moxyland, it feels like an amalgam of other books. It’s sort of like Slade House meets Dark Places and Sharp Objects. A supernatural catalyst in the form of a house. Lots of gruesome murders and a sole survivor hunting for the killer. Broken people and awkward, awkward romance. It all works together surprisingly well, but the shifts through time are quite disorienting at first, and the little vignettes of the victims’ life stories almost make the book feel like a short story collection.

 

Also, third person present tense. I don’t like it, but in my past experience with Beukes’s books I thought she wrote it so well I hardly noticed it was my least favorite narrative style. I noticed this time, and boy was it annoying. Overall, the book was just okay.

 

I think after three of her books, I can safely conclude that I love Beukes’s story concepts more than I love her actual stories, and I need to either manage my expectations or stop reading her stuff.

 

I read this for the Halloween Bingo 2018 Modern Masters of Horror square.

 

The librarian usually sends out links for each months topic. This month, her links include an article titled something like "what is urban fantasy" that only says it's a marketing category and a list of "where to start" that has more male authors than female authors. I, just, I don't know, ya'll. If I were introducing someone to UF, I'd probably talk about the use of noir tropes in contemporary fantasy settings, broken vs unbroken masquerades, and Carrie Vaughn's theory, "these books are symptomatic of an anxiety about women and power." But, sure, here's a dude saying it's meaningless marketing and a list of mostly dudes to read.

 

The other big UF reader in the group is going to be out of town for this one, so I'm trying to psych myself up to deal with a room full of guys all talking about Harry Fucking Dresden. 

 

I'm also bounding myself by recommending in-progress series or stand alone books. A few months back, one of the members asked for recommendations for completed UF series that weren't PNR, and I want to avoid repeats. Okay, he didn't say PNR, he asked for books that weren't all about vampire sex. So at least one person may have some non-Dresden. . . take a deep breathe, Saturdays, you don't want to start another fight in book club.

 

Whatever. I love this genre. 

 

Shadowshaper - Daniel José Older. So far this series has 2 novels and 3 novellas and is dynamite. The protagonist is an artist who discovers her legacy includes channeling spirits into physical forms. She makes her graffiti come alive. Yeah, that's right, I talk all that shit and then start off with a book by a man.

 

Owl and the Japanese Circus - Kristi Charish. Action packed with an unlikable heroine, this series follows an antiquities thief and her vampire hunting cat through endless poor decisions and explosions. I adore that she isn't good with weapons and doesn't have powerful magic abilities. I just recently finished the 4th installment, and the heroine is consistently a train wreck.

 

Zero Sum Game (Russell's Attic) (Volume 1) - SL Huang. Fast paced, plenty of violence, and her magic power is being really good at math. Do I need to go on? 

 

Drink, Slay, Love - Sarah Beth Durst. A teenage vampire gets stabbed by a unicorn and finds herself able to go out in daylight. Her family decides to enroll her in high school so she can lure teens back to the rest of the bloodsuckers. This is a lighthearted, almost rom-com book that is exactly as much fun as my first sentence indicates.

 

Broken Monsters - Lauren Beukes. The protagonists are all human in this not-quite police procedural where strange murders point toward incomprehensible motives.

 

 And I think I'll stop there. I really want to add about 10 more books. We'll see where the night leads.

Could zombies be a viable replacement for slave labour? Asking for a certain electronics company. And most clothing manufacturers.

Slipping is an interesting collection of writing from the brain of Lauren Beukes. From enhanced athletes to bored ghosts, these stories display Lauren's spec-fic interests. There are also a few essays at the end of the collection, one of which explains the personal inspiration behind The Shining Girls; an essay well worth reading.

I met Lauren at a writers' festival where she was running a workshop on, surprise surprise, writing. I really enjoyed reading the aforementioned The Shining Girls as it was a highly enjoyable mix of crime and spec-fic. So I was looking forward to reading this collection. As with any collection of previously published works, there are highs and lows. For me the highs outweighed the lows, with Slipping, The Green, and Ghost Girl being amongst my favourites. I think the strengths of this collection come from the South African cultural influence to Lauren's writing, which gives far more grittiness to the bleak sci-fi stories than you usually see.

If you're a spec-fic fan, or a fan of Lauren's writing - and how could you not be? - then you will find some compelling stories in this collection.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.