Behold the Void

First book finished in 2019, and first 5-star review.

Fracassi is just goddamn brilliant. There's nine stories here, and each one is a treat and worth the price of the book. Barron, in his introduction, states that no one is safe in a Fracassi story, and he's right.

What that meant for me was, there's no comfort to be found here. There's no really predictable outcomes. Characters that you care for can be wiped out with the turn of a page. And, while Fracassi isn't scared to get gruesome, he never does it wantonly or gratuitously. He's always got a reason.

I don't want to go through the stories one-by-one, because every reader should simply go in and enjoy each story cold.

Because Fracassi is just goddamn brilliant.

I fell in utter love with this collection of short stories. It put me headfirst into an alternate universe. Beautiful lush descriptions, most of these tales were absolutely terrifying. I couldn't put this down. I sometimes have a hard time finishing a full book of short stories, but this one was easy and very enjoyable. Will be hard to top this collection in the future. If you notice I never really describe the actual story in any of my reviews as I never want to spoil/ruin the plot for anyone. Its best to go into this one blind without reading any spoily reviews!

Literary horror of the highest caliber. Professional, polished prose. Well-rendered and delineated characters and realistic settings and situations which deepen and broaden through the course of the story into something else, something far stranger and more disquieting. Fracassi excels at exploring fears grounded in the everyday, but as the stories progress we start to find find breaches in the fabric of our reality, glimpses of horrors untold from the depths of the void.

This was an up and down collection for me, though there's no denying that Fracassi is an incredibly talented writer. The stories are varied and interesting, with just enough thematic connections that the collection doesn't become boring--however, the longer stories that are closer to novella length dragged along for me, so that although I loved many of the shorter stories, the longer ones that required the most time/commitment just didn't live up to the standards of the shorter ones. I'd revisit the shorter ones in a heartbeat... but the longer ones, not so much. I should also note that while some of the story notes at the end were really interesting, there were others that made it feel like the author was trying to put words in his show more stories' mouths--making them more than they were, or telling the reader what they were meant to understand, which I didn't love.

All told, the collection ended up leaving me with mixed feelings only because of the two long stories, and I wish they'd had the same surprise and urgency developed in the shorter stories. show less