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Loading... Northwest Passagesby Barbara Roden
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A terrific collection of creepy stories. Roden has successfully reclaimed dread fiction with this group of tales. Most every one of them are a winner, evoking the shadows and nightmares in some pretty good situations. Settings are all over the place; be it the frontier in the Canadian wilderness or some lobby of a ritzy hotel, she brings the environment and characters to vivid realization. Reminds me of Lovecraft, Poe, King in his early works. Traditional style but done well, and will put shivers up the spine. Recommended. no reviews | add a review
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Be careful what you wish for. Young men in search of adventure...explorers driven to investigate the ends of the earth... a girl trying to findthe perfect hiding place... a curiosity-seeker drawn to an abandoned amusementpark. All of th No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Varying in length from just a few pages to around thirty, the stories here cover everything from vampires to haunted houses, with nods to everyone from Algernon Blackwood to Peter Straub. In general, the stories centre around isolation, people or things being where they don't belong, and the futility of... humanity, I guess. So they definitely plug into the Blackwood/Machen tradition rather than your M.R James.
The chill-factor will vary between readers - though fans of oft-times violent and explicit contemporary horror will find little to please them here. The horror here is generally allusive and metaphorical.
In terms of originality, the collection is a bit of a mixed bag.I found the ant/arctic tales to be the most compelling. It's hard for me to as I'm a bit of a ghost story addict and have read several hundred myself, and the genre as a whole tends to cluster around sub-types. Suffice to say, I never felt there was anything blatantly derivative, though I did find myself comfortably slotting the bulk of the stories into one format or another within a page or so.
Prose-wise, Roden is confident and competent. There's nothing flashy or sublime here. She goes for a quiet, almost detached tone (this is not to say the characters do so). It's very well put together, but I think something with a slightly stronger flavour could have helped a few stories, and increased the originality.
For all that, Northwest Passages is a more than worthy addition to the genre - and I think several of the stories are likely to pop up in anthologies over the years, they are solid. ( )