My novella of choice for the obligatory spooky horror read for Halloween, this was an odd read that I have mixed feelings about. It really captures the gothic horror fairytale genre well and feels like a modern reimagining of Edgar Allen Poe’s literary style (in concept only unfortunately). The narrative themes of humanity and what constitutes being alive is interesting, if only the writing quality matched it. The writing is typically quite readable with great visuals but then Khaw forces complex and obscure vocabulary in randomly that derails the literary flow. It’s as if Khaw flipped open a thesaurus and actively tried to find the most obtuse and unheard of word to give the writing a more classical or educated flair (it doesn’t). You can deduce what the random words mean by using context clues and analyzing the sentence structure of the passage, but the fact that you’re able to do that just shows how out of the place the vocabulary is when the rest of the writing is straightforward and simplistic. Not only that, the writing itself suddenly drops the vague attempt at old English about 30-40 pages in which is also a welcome relief since it wasn’t ever…
