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Cathy Butterfield, Collections Manager, recommends My Heart is a Chainsaw and The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water.
Halloween is coming, a holiday rife with perilous contradictions. Gifts of candy are shared with stories of ghosts. Pre-Christian traditions tangle with All Hallow’s Eve observances. The walls of reality thin, and bend, and rumors of the dead rise as the last rays of summer set. The living don masquerade and dance in the darkened streets. Trick or treat.
I searched for a good, crunchy, literary horror book to immerse myself in, to honor (or appease?) the spirits of the season. Stephen Graham Jones’ Bram Stoker award-winning book My Heart is a Chainsaw seemed an ideal read. Stephen King calls Jones the best new horror writer since Neil Gaiman launched. The book is set in a (fictional?) resort on a lake in northern Idaho, where scary people sometimes really do in fact do very scary things. Even the title is creepy. Too creepy.
Yet the setting and characters and trauma introduced in the first chapters are intensely real. Utterly realistic. Jones turns over the rocks in small town Idaho and exposes the abuse, racism, gentrification, and worse crawling underneath. And therein lay the crux of the problem...
Read Cathy's entire Book Review here.
Find more staff book recommendations here.
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