The work this book most reminded me of wasn’t actually a book; despite having no similarities in characters or plot, the FEELING it left me with was exactly like the movie It Follows. I was done reading this and had the same queasy wrongness that I did after watching the dissonant film about a sexually transmitted haunting. Sweet Lamb of Heaven follows a woman who begins having auditory hallucinations at the birth of her daughter and the group of fellow sufferers in the hotel where […]
So that’s what happens to…
Lydia Millet wrote one of my top choices for the Longlist for the National Book Award, The Sweet Lamb of God, and I liked it a lot, but it has, what I consider, one of the lowest and inexplicably lowest ratings on Goodreads. That doesn’t deter me. Instead, it sort of suggests a kind of specialness I felt with it. This novel had some version of that too, though I didn’t like this one nearly as much as I liked that one. In this novel, our […]
[existentialist quote here]
3.5 stars. How the Dead Dream is a somewhat strange book that I nonetheless enjoyed. It’s one of those “slice of life” stories that is barely generalize-able to the population at large, but uses the character study of one man and his stunted relationships to satirize the societal values that spit out his type. Our first introduction to main character T. is as a young boy, when he is in the midst of cultivating a fetish of sorts for physical currency. The feel of coins […]