Book #12 for this year. Not pissfarting around this time! Another one easily read in a single hit… but how “horror” is it? It’s a somewhat vexed question, cos it both is and isn’t obviously a horror novel. It’s in the Horror: Another 100 Best Books list, so it’s on my own to-read list, but I don’t have that actual book so I don’t know what it specifically says about it. Anyway, the setting is “wartime, or something very like it”—Sturgeon is a bit coy on whether this is supposed to have been the Korean War or something else entirely—and our main character is George Smith, who’s been delivered to a military psych ward for attacking an officer. Part of therapy involves him writing the story of his life to that point, but gradually we start to realise George may not be the most reliable of narrators. The book is a bit of a slow burner, and George’s narrative takes up enough of the book that I did start to wonder when it would get to the point, but I will say the second half leads to a sufficiently satisfying climax as the unspoken parts of George’s story are brought out; ultimately the horror proves to be, well, human in the worst way, and though George may be the nominal “monster” he is pretty more sinned against than sinning as someone or other once said. If I did have doubts about the book in the first half, I was pretty happy with it by the end.
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