Let's get this out of the way right up front: I'm not exactly an unbiased party, here. Silvia is a friend, an editor, and, occasionally, an accomplice. I'd read a few of these stories in the places where they initially appeared, and I was pretty sold on this collection before my copy ever made its way to my inbox.
There's something so effortless about the way that the weird finds its way into the stories in This Strange Way of Dying. A casualness that does nothing to reduce the weirdness of it, but instead gives the whole story a feeling of being a part of something larger, deeper, older, stranger. There's a sense of dream, or of the fairy tale in many of the stories, and welcome dashes of Lovecraft in tales like "Flash Frame" or even "Snow." Even those that dip all the way into genres like science fiction or alternate history still have an intimacy that keeps them feeling immediate and palpable in a way that many of those sorts of stories don't, for me.
While there are certainly horror stories here, it's not a horror collection. Instead the stories are what I'd call maybe "strange fiction," or something of the effect. Capturing weirdness, the outsider perspective, and numinosity, rather than necessarily going for terror. Which, obviously, is an approach that I'm quite fond of.
There are vampires here, and aliens, and necromancers, weird cults, nahuales, dopplegangers, even giant penguins. Most of the stories are set in Mexico, and they have the flavor of Mexican folklore woven throughout them, but they're rooted in other traditions as well, and beholden to none of them. Silvia is part of a crop of current writers whose work would be right at home in those pulp paperback anthologies with the garish covers, but is at the same time completely modern. Many of the stories here feel like instant classics, evoking that sense of familiarity that makes you feel you've read them before, even as you know they're totally new.
Many people are probably already familiar with Silvia as an editor (she and I worked together on
Fungi
), but This Strange Way of Dying is a reminder that she's also an author to be reckoned with, and one for all of us to keep our eye on.
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Pages missing! Bummer! Great book, just missing a couple chapters!
I was really enjoying this book when suddenly there was a sudden shift in the story. I noticed the page numbers went from 134 to 151. Book is missing 1.5 chapters. Sure would like this problem fixed. Purchased in November so can’t return. Publisher should have better quality control!
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Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2022
Pages missing! Bummer! Great book, just missing a couple chapters!
Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2022
I was really enjoying this book when suddenly there was a sudden shift in the story. I noticed the page numbers went from 134 to 151. Book is missing 1.5 chapters. Sure would like this problem fixed. Purchased in November so can’t return. Publisher should have better quality control!
Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2022
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