The side effects of the medicationwax
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The Side Effects of the Medication is Lauren James s debut and is full of interesting ideas and striking imagery throughout the collection her voice gets stronger and the final couple of stories The Devils and Full really jumped out at me The Devils begins as we meet the unwholesome Quentin Fisher whose daughter Mellie is imprisoned behind bars in her attic bedroom The reader is lulled into a false sense of security assuming this to be a conventional tale of possession and exorcism yet it turns into something quite different and much unsettling Highly recommended reading and I look forward to Lauren James s writing developing in the future Horror Suspense Fantasy This collection provided a quick but deeply disturbing read The characters were extremely well drawn in a short space of text and the tone of most of the stories was gritty and menacing My favorite of the collection was the story it is titled for The Side Effects of the Medication In it we get a flash of a dystopian world where dreams can be turned into pebbles by medication so that the dreamer doesn t have to experience them The kicker is that those who stay on the medication lose their ability to dream entirely and often become dream junkies paying to experience the dreams of those who still have the ability no matter how warped the dreams are It is a richly imagined scenario that was complete in itself though I wouldn t have minded a full length novel version My second favorite was the offbeat paranormal anti romance Post It was both repugnant and accessible A must read for zombie fans Horror Suspense Fantasy I m not a regular horror dark fiction reader so in hindsight I don t think I knew what to expect from this collection The collection s descriptions are striking and its plots well constructed but I was most impressed by its diversity The first story Fences presented a series of weird but ostensibly innocuous events that nonetheless had me on the edge of my seat until their dramatic climax a thoroughly enjoyable horror story in much the way I expected a horror story to be enjoyable thrilling suspenseful and creepy in the way it pulls the horrible out of the ordinary From the second story though I knew that I could expect even than that from the rest of the collection But Not Too Bold turns the building action structure of Fences on its head departing from the horrible and folding it unsettlingly back into the ordinary In the remaining eight stories James covers a great deal of thematic and stylistic ground My personal favorite was One and Two whose distinctive first person narrative voice that of an experienced necromancer had me laughing out loud until the conclusion snuck up from behind me I also enjoyed The Night She Made the Monster which inserts itself seamlessly into its historical setting and leaves its reader reconsidering with fresh eyes the classic anguish of Frankenstein The Devils and Full together form a fitting conclusion as both of these final two stories leave the reader both disturbed and reflective. The side effects of the medicationopa I read it in one afternoon evening and like I said I m not a regular horror reader Horror Suspense Fantasy The Side Effects Of The Medication is one of the strongest short story collections I ve read all year and almost certainly the best from a d but author bursting into the party out of nowhere The stories veer between horror crime and even science fiction The tone is equally varied James handling black comedy and grim horror with equal aplomb She even writes a story in the second person that doesn t sound awful Fences starts the collection and it s a riveting tale about the fear of our neighbours and of trespass Marianne and her husband have their garden invaded by their neighbour s big black dogs and put up a fence to stop them returning But the intrusions of various kinds keep occurring and escalating As the plural title suggests there are multiple boundaries erected and being crossed here not just the physical one that marks off one property from another The theme of lines being crossed physical mental or ethical and of boundaries being blurred is central to many of the stories here As such Fences is a perfect opening story to the collection and one of my favourites Others that especially stood out were Cover Yourself here James mixes science fiction with the kind of ambiguity found in the best weird fiction although what is happening is clear enough the significance of it to those participating is vague in fact exactly who is participating is vague As is this description because I don t want to ruin things for you The Devils is the first of two stories about an exorcist called Reese Campbell who deals with human created horrors as much as anything supernatural The lesson being I guess that if we believe in devils and demons of any stripe we legitimise evil behaviour in ourselves Not that this story is that simply black and white for there is an outside evil here too The final story in the collection Full is also about Campbell investigating a too perfect house Maybe best is The Side Effects Of The Medication the title story contains the kind of surreal magic realism you might find in someone like David Barthelme s work In this story some people s dreams are physical fragile things like soap bubbles these dreams are the side effects of the title And other dreamless people pay good money to see the dreams Again boundaries are crossed as the personal becomes public and all too visible Horror Suspense Fantasy
A wife recounts her marriage and her husband s other women all of them dead A college student in a strange universe goes to a party and accepts a dare Prescriptions crystallize dreams An investigator visits a defiantly unhaunted house Sometimes horror is only a side effect The Side Effects of the Medication.
