Zoje Stage

This book feels like it wants to be disturbing but it also doesn't understand what truly makes a book disturbing. Simply throwing words and phrases on to pages doesn't make it creepy. The baby deciding to be a weirdo and watching the parents have sex for example is it weird the baby wants the mother to die from sex which doesn't make sense because how would they know it happens so often but yet expect death from it?

There's a lot of scenes that are just supposed to be like gross out horror but it's not working because there author does not understand horror is a slow build and also a collection of emotions being provoked. For example the child will chew food up and gross combinations and spit it onto her mother's face but that's not gross because the child's been doing stuff like that this entire time. It's not a new thing or surprising it's just gross but we're supposed to feel something about it. Besides annoyed at this child.

The child also has weird comprehensions beyond their capabilities but also is a child and toxic child understands things like a child but other times will know enough that they want their mother to die. Inconsistently the series of pages that I read made me exhausted and rolling my eyes.

It feels like it wanted to be splatterpunk gore but it didn't really hit the mark, it didn't really hit any mark actually. It's just a weird attempt at being controversial but everybody reading it can tell that it's tryharding. It's not even enjoyable in a way that it makes you laugh it just makes you annoyed, cringe, or just tired. Reading it made me so tired that I kept falling asleep because some scenarios are just impossible to imagine with the child doing this or that or even attempting to kill the parent because why would a child understand such complicated things yet talk like a little baby? And when the toddler talks more adult it's in weird clunky sentences.

I don't care about the characters, I don't care about the risks, I don't care about anything going on in this book, I don't even care if somebody new comes in, I just expect them all to go the same way one way or another. Something something the child torments them. It's so quirky and unique it's not like the other girls. Ugh.

1 star and I'm not the only one rolling my eyes at this book.… (altro)

This is a slow burn, phantasmagorical, novel that unfortunately doesn’t have the greatest ending. In Wonderland, the yuppie-ish Bennett family move from their small, crowded apartment in NYC, to an utterly isolated cabin in Northern NY. Why? So the husband, Shaw, can focus on his muse - a 500 year old Eastern white pine in the middle of the Adirondacks. (What??? - are you kidding me?) Orla, his wife (who happens to be a retired ballerina), is supportive until Shaw turns manic and distant and strange occurrences start to happen. For instance, their daughter Eleanor Queen senses an entity trying to communicate with her, and the homestead is beset by inexplicable phenomena. And attempts to leave are not only thwarted, but punished. The premise and set up is so perfect for some intense horror and well...

A couple of tense, even shocking, moments kept me going, hopeful that the conclusion would pay off the dreary middle, but it never really did. Stage is an excellent writer (this book has plenty of atmosphere), and it was never completely unpleasant to read Wonderland, but it never paid off either.

There are a few problems with this book (including some of the decisions made by the characters) but mainly the ending is just downright confusing. It seemed to me that Stage couldn’t really figure out how to finish the book and couldn’t settle on how she wanted to resolve the story. Is it a story of possession? Is it a story of a girl morphing into a tree evolving into a god?

The ending was too ambiguous for my taste.

That being said, Wonderland is by no means a terrible read, although it is flawed. Those looking for subtle scares and atmosphere will enjoy this one but this really isn't a "horror" novel at all. I liked this one but didn't love it. I expected more scares from this one.… (altro)