Not too long ago it seems everyone was talking about Saturday Night Ghost Club, a book I still haven’t read because our library stubbornly refuses to get a copy. But it certainly made me aware of the author, so when I found a collection of his short fiction on Netgalley, I was eager to check it out. And now I have. And now I no longer care that much about missing out on SNGC, though if you have a digital copy of that to lend, I’d be very appreciative.
Which is to say, I’m not in love with this, I didn’t hate it, it was very much a mixed bag. A mixed bag that displayed obvious and ample talent, but nevertheless didn’t quite wow. These are pretty long short stories, so there are only six of them in this collection, all set in an imaginary Niagara adjacent Canadian place. It’s a pretty bleak place and these are pretty bleak stories. It didn’t immediately grab attention, but then the Vanishing Twin got closer and then there was a ridiculously dragged out basketball themed story that just about turned me off completely. Davidson is great on details, bizarrely meticulous on details, in fact, which can work for some readers, but this one found the approach overwhelming. The author also tends to get too busy with the metaphors, often cramming one atop another until the entire thing is one giant impressionistic abstract. It’s meant to hit a certain tone on the heartstrings, but it doesn’t always succeed and as a writing technique it’s really overused here. After that, the stories improved. A lot. Got much more interesting, more emotionally engaging, got more…Those stories didn’t just emotionally engage, they devastated, quietly, the way slow unfolding tragedies can, the way real life does. And more often than not you can sift through all the stylistic embellishments and obscene amounts of details and technical lingo to the sheer beauty of narrative storytelling. In those moments the author would shine. And the appeal would be easily understood. So not the easiest of reads. Nor is it as incendiary as the cover suggest, though fire is heavily featured. But an interesting read all the same. Something different. Something realistically surreal. Something very, very sad. Difficult to recommend outside of fans of tragically devastating slice of life stories, so read at your own discretion and ideally coordinate to an appropriate mood. Thanks Netgalley.
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