It’s great to get back to some semblance of a routine to my reading again, and just in time because it’s the 1st October and the first day in my 31 Shots of Shock reading challenge; reading one horror-related short story every day throughout the month of October, in the run up to Halloween.
07:30 – Unfortunately I’ve not managed to finish deciding on the 31 stories I’m going to be reading for this Shots of Shock challenge (thanks again for all your suggestions guys) so my list isn’t up yet. But I knew I was starting with the nine stories found in Kelly Link’s Pretty Monsters collection (Canongate Books).
So the first story in this collection is The Wrong Grave (which you can read for free on Kelly’s site), and that’s the one I read over breakfast. In a nutshell, not a bad story, although there weren’t really any scares. It’s my first time reading Link and I think she’s OK. I won’t say a lot more about it, and instead point you to my official afterthoughts on the story which I posted earlier.
I’ve got a few reservations that the stories found in Pretty Monsters are not the ideal choice for a 42-year-old who’s pretty much desensitised with anything but the most abhorrent and chilling horror tales, but I’m game with sticking to Kelly Link for the next eight days. Who knows, I may be proved wrong.
23:00 – Writing up today’s journal entry I had hoped to tell you that I’d finished Jayne Joso’s Soothing Music for Stray Cats (Alcemi). I’m down to the last 30 pages and I could have finished it, but it was a toss-up between that and writing up this reading journal entry. I thought you would prefer the journal entry.
So am I still as enamoured with Joso’s novel as I was yesterday? Absolutely! But today a strange thought’s come into my head. Not a lot seems to really happen in Soothing Music for Stray Cats, but at the same there’s loads going on. What kind of bizarre statement is that to make? I don’t know but that’s the way I’m feeling about Soothing Music for Stray Cats right now, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Maybe I’ll be able to explain it better once I’ve finished it and had a chance to mull it over.
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