When Darkness Loves Us

I read Grady Hendrix’s “Paperbacks from Hell” sometime around Halloween last year, and the only title that I remembered enough to google afterwards was this one. “A newlywed, pregnant 16-year-old girl gets lost inside some endlessly twisting cave tunnels right under her house and has to learn to survive in the inhospitable darkness” is quite the pitch, and the story itself met my expectations wonderfully.

It's a suffocating situation, and an equally suffocating story. In the complete dark, notions of time, humanity, and even reality blur and erode. Scenes of familiar normalcy contrast with the raw and painful world beIow. Even if you manage to claw your way out of the darkness, the darkness doesn't quite leave you. Is there anything supernatural afoot, or is there only human cruelty and unfairness? In the end, I almost felt like a part of my mind was still inside those pitch-black tunnels, unable to get out.

This book actually has two unrelated stories; I didn't like the second one, "Beauty Is...", as much(though it's not bad at all!). It’s got the same strong points as the first one—the twisting, introspective pictures of the characters' thoughts, the cruelty, never made casual but made inescapable—look at it, she says, see how much it hurts.The story goes from a past filled with magic that slowly falls apart to a present filled with struggles, and along the way we're given small, tantalizing bits of hope that end up feeling like a knife to the chest, like knowing a tragedy's coming even if you can't exactly tell how it's going to happen.

Either way, it's an amazing read...though not very easy to stomach. Love me a book that makes me feel like I've got a migraine...or maybe it's an actual migraine? Only time will tell.

The Great Passage

How would you define “island”? The last time I picked up a dictionary surely coincided with the first time I got a cellphone that could access the internet. But upon reading that line, I got up from my sofa and dug through the pile of books in the living room, finally unearthing a battered, cover-less dictionary that's been in this house since the late 90’s. I wish I could put the definition in this review, but the books were moved and I've since lost the dictionary again...oh well. I remember thinking the definition given in the book was much better, but who am I to criticize, really?

In this world, there's many jobs you have no idea exist. I never gave any thought to the process behind how a dictionary was put together, but I love reading about people who are passionate about what they do—and passion is what this story is all about.

Whether it's money and time constraints, whether it's romance and personal life, whether it's discussions of how to define words, everyone is bound together by their dreams—even if it seems like a weird, pointless dream to those on the outside.

All in all, it's a lovely book. The characters’ relationships are lively and fun to read about, and as someone who spent a long time reading the dictionary as a kid, it also made me feel “seen”, in a way.

Now I wonder how it was for the people who put that old dictionary together. Probably they were just doing their jobs as always, but I hope they enjoyed the process, somehow.