12/24/2023 0 Comments Laura tarsi shotty horroh![]() ![]() In "Your Second Wife," a woman creates a new gig for herself by using makeup, prostheses, and wigs to morph into the dead wives of men who want one last date. In "Slumberland," a woman who drives around taking creepy photos discovers her neighbor, who spends her nights wailing, makes a living crying for men on the phone who are into dacryphilia, meaning they get aroused by the sound of another person weeping. If urgency and sadness are the main elements here, then strangeness is the glue Van den Berg uses to bond them together. "I have learned that one must be very careful about the desperate wishes cast out into the ether," she says, "because perhaps someone is listening, someone all too willing to grant us exactly what we have asked for and maybe even what we deserve." The second time it works, but her daughter gives her years of heartbreak and then dies from a tumor in her brain.īook Reviews 'Find Me' Gets Lost Along The Way And in "Hill of Hell," a woman loses a baby, gets a divorce, remarries, and gets pregnant again. "Karolina" takes place in Mexico, where a woman finds her ex-sister-in-law living on the streets and is forced to face ugly truths about her brother in the aftermath of an earthquake. "Volcano House" is about a woman remembering a trip to Iceland with her sister, who's in the hospital dying, a bullet from a rampage killer lodged in her cerebellum. She was never hit by a train, but her story about being in an institution for ten months after several suicide attempts hits like a locomotive. "I want to tell you about the night I got hit by a train and died," says the narrator of "Last Night," the first story in the book. The urgency comes from the frenetic pace, the economy of language that makes every line feel necessary and meaningful. Varying in length and tone, the tales in I Hold a Wolf by the Ears share a sense of urgency and sadness that helps the collection cohere. They are unsettling and bizarre, coming at you from weird angles to hit you in unexpected ways like the well-trained fists of a professional boxer. They deal with death and loss, with isolation and falling in love with the wrong person. They're tiny, uncanny morsels about broken women and mysterious things that possess a literary umami that falls somewhere between horror, literary fiction, mystery, drama, and social critique. It took a decade of writing book reviews to get here, but here we are - I've used "exquisite." The stories in Laura van den Berg's I Hold a Wolf by the Ears are exquisite.
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