Clare Rhoden
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The 15 short stories are:
- The Bowl
- Ducking Hell
- The Devil's Hair
- 20th Century Elf
- Sea Mist Shore Witch
- Rain Dance
- Clarrie's Dam
- Miri
- The Curse of Curtis Falls
- Terriswalkers Terraerengerie
- Trash and Treasure
- Love to Travel Local
- Follow the Water
- Gothic Queen
- The Garage
These are plot-driven horror stories, some dark and some gory. They each have their own interpretation of weird stories. My favourite are The Bowl, The Devil's Hair, Gothic Queen, and The Garage.
I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.… (mere)
- The Bowl
- Ducking Hell
- The Devil's Hair
- 20th Century Elf
- Sea Mist Shore Witch
- Rain Dance
- Clarrie's Dam
- Miri
- The Curse of Curtis Falls
- Terriswalkers Terraerengerie
- Trash and Treasure
- Love to Travel Local
- Follow the Water
- Gothic Queen
- The Garage
These are plot-driven horror stories, some dark and some gory. They each have their own interpretation of weird stories. My favourite are The Bowl, The Devil's Hair, Gothic Queen, and The Garage.
I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.… (mere)
1970 in suburban Melbourne: ‘That was how it happened, thought Harry, feeling the memories rise; they were never far away .. Trusting you to remember, trusting you to do something about it. As if you could fix things, mend the dead, put the world back the way it was.’
And so we go back into Harry’s memories, into the seared experiences that gave him writhing nightmares for decades, back to the day in 1917 when Harry cannot find his foster brother Eddie. Harry searches. He crawls out of the Passchendaele mud in no-man’s land searching for him. He looks into dugouts and stumbles down communication trenches and he asks at Casualty Clearing Stations. Fifty years later his granddaughter comes upon an old notebook in the attic and asks, "Who is Eddie?”
This is a story of love. Nora waits for Harry but he harbours fears whether she can accept him after what he has been through. Eddie hopes for a life with Claudelle. It is a story too of love between men, the love of the two brothers, and the love between brothers-in-arms, Harry and Eddie, Wallis, Hartigan, Alex. From Gallipoli to Flanders the war thunders over all of them like the endless numbing artillery barrages. But it does not end for them when the guns fall silent.
The women have their losses too, not helped by Harry’s inability to speak of things he simply does not want to bring to mind. This is hard on all of them. We have only recently begun to speak openly of PTSD or 'shell shock'. Harry survives wounds and sickness and comes home, but in dreams he returns often to no-man's land, still trying to rescue comrades.
‘The mines and the shelling is like the end of the world. The worst we have seen, and we have seen some bad ones. Harry and me are fine but it makes you cry. There are so many dead you can't help but walk on them’. Eddies notebook.
Clare Rhoden takes us into this vast arena of events, from the debate in Australia about the rightness of the war, into terrible battles, and on through into the waves of pyschological effects upon those who survived and their families. These 220 pages hold material for a 1000 page book. But the author has brought these large and complicated things down to the personal level by describing and revealing things in the way that we all ordinarily talk to each other: through a household argument, the queries of a nosy neighbour, the grumbles of soldiers about the food and the cold, the guarded talk about Gallipoli by a sergeant to a fresh officer as they weigh each other up, and through diaries and from letters home. This makes Stars in the Night deeply personal and emotional. I got so caught up in it that I paused reading several times so as to absorb it. I cannot praise this novel highly enough both for its story and it’s technical execution.
Although it is about the experiences of Australian soldiers, this novel could really be about the horror of any war, not just the one that millions prayed would be ‘The War To End All Wars.’ The character Harry Fletcher, like thousands of veterans, could not bring himself to attend Anzac Day ceremonies but stayed quietly at home; yet, for anyone interested in the scars left by the Great War and thus the origin of the ‘Anzac legend’, the facts of it, and sometimes the mythology of it, this is a must-read.
Lest We Forget.
Note about ‘Anzac’ to readers unfamiliar with it: The first units of Australians shipped out in 1915 were merged with the first New Zealanders into the Australia New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC). Their losses in Gallipoli and later in France shocked both young countries. Australia, population four million in 1914, sent 417,000 men to the conflict, every one of them a volunteer. 62,000 died. Both Australia and New Zealand forces suffered casualty rates of over 55% – killed, wounded, gassed, captured, marked as ‘missing’. The term ‘ANZAC’ endures.
Personal note 2020: As I began this book, Australia was dealing with the Black Summer and the world was attuned to news about some sort of virus. There was tension in the air, and for the first time I think I had an inkling of what it had been like in 1914 in the households across nations as they readied for conflict, not knowing what lay ahead. On the day I thoughtfully laid down Stars in the Night, Anzac Day services were cancelled for the first time in a century, due to the invisible menace of Covid-19.… (mere)
And so we go back into Harry’s memories, into the seared experiences that gave him writhing nightmares for decades, back to the day in 1917 when Harry cannot find his foster brother Eddie. Harry searches. He crawls out of the Passchendaele mud in no-man’s land searching for him. He looks into dugouts and stumbles down communication trenches and he asks at Casualty Clearing Stations. Fifty years later his granddaughter comes upon an old notebook in the attic and asks, "Who is Eddie?”
This is a story of love. Nora waits for Harry but he harbours fears whether she can accept him after what he has been through. Eddie hopes for a life with Claudelle. It is a story too of love between men, the love of the two brothers, and the love between brothers-in-arms, Harry and Eddie, Wallis, Hartigan, Alex. From Gallipoli to Flanders the war thunders over all of them like the endless numbing artillery barrages. But it does not end for them when the guns fall silent.
The women have their losses too, not helped by Harry’s inability to speak of things he simply does not want to bring to mind. This is hard on all of them. We have only recently begun to speak openly of PTSD or 'shell shock'. Harry survives wounds and sickness and comes home, but in dreams he returns often to no-man's land, still trying to rescue comrades.
‘The mines and the shelling is like the end of the world. The worst we have seen, and we have seen some bad ones. Harry and me are fine but it makes you cry. There are so many dead you can't help but walk on them’. Eddies notebook.
Clare Rhoden takes us into this vast arena of events, from the debate in Australia about the rightness of the war, into terrible battles, and on through into the waves of pyschological effects upon those who survived and their families. These 220 pages hold material for a 1000 page book. But the author has brought these large and complicated things down to the personal level by describing and revealing things in the way that we all ordinarily talk to each other: through a household argument, the queries of a nosy neighbour, the grumbles of soldiers about the food and the cold, the guarded talk about Gallipoli by a sergeant to a fresh officer as they weigh each other up, and through diaries and from letters home. This makes Stars in the Night deeply personal and emotional. I got so caught up in it that I paused reading several times so as to absorb it. I cannot praise this novel highly enough both for its story and it’s technical execution.
Although it is about the experiences of Australian soldiers, this novel could really be about the horror of any war, not just the one that millions prayed would be ‘The War To End All Wars.’ The character Harry Fletcher, like thousands of veterans, could not bring himself to attend Anzac Day ceremonies but stayed quietly at home; yet, for anyone interested in the scars left by the Great War and thus the origin of the ‘Anzac legend’, the facts of it, and sometimes the mythology of it, this is a must-read.
Lest We Forget.
Note about ‘Anzac’ to readers unfamiliar with it: The first units of Australians shipped out in 1915 were merged with the first New Zealanders into the Australia New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC). Their losses in Gallipoli and later in France shocked both young countries. Australia, population four million in 1914, sent 417,000 men to the conflict, every one of them a volunteer. 62,000 died. Both Australia and New Zealand forces suffered casualty rates of over 55% – killed, wounded, gassed, captured, marked as ‘missing’. The term ‘ANZAC’ endures.
Personal note 2020: As I began this book, Australia was dealing with the Black Summer and the world was attuned to news about some sort of virus. There was tension in the air, and for the first time I think I had an inkling of what it had been like in 1914 in the households across nations as they readied for conflict, not knowing what lay ahead. On the day I thoughtfully laid down Stars in the Night, Anzac Day services were cancelled for the first time in a century, due to the invisible menace of Covid-19.… (mere)
The Pale centres around the fallout from a cataclysmic earthquake, which affects many different groups in a post-apocalyptic society: settlers, tribes, canini, and the modified humans of the Pale.
The Pale itself is a walled city populated with humachines: humans who have been augmented with technology in order to become more efficient citizens. Genetic breeding is commonplace. Those who are no longer considered worthy of 'upgrades' are 'recycled', and this is considered perfectly normal to the inhabitants of the Pale. The fortress-like city is run by a Regent devoid of empathy, who rules with a tyrant’s fist. Rhoden’s impressive prose captures the Regent's nuances well.
“The Regent was exhibiting her particular brand of brilliant anger. Jaxon watched with some admiration as sparks erupted from the anthracite curls of her lashes, and her brows flashed arcs of light. Most alarming of all, Jaxon noticed, was the ripple of power that flowed over her skin, as if her body was insufficient to contain the emotion that roiled through her blood, that jagged through every biowire and agitated every nerve.”
In true dystopian style, The Pale looks into the future to show where our own obsession with technology might lead us. A thought-provoking read reminiscent of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The Pale raises many questions as to what it truly means to be human.… (mere)
The Pale itself is a walled city populated with humachines: humans who have been augmented with technology in order to become more efficient citizens. Genetic breeding is commonplace. Those who are no longer considered worthy of 'upgrades' are 'recycled', and this is considered perfectly normal to the inhabitants of the Pale. The fortress-like city is run by a Regent devoid of empathy, who rules with a tyrant’s fist. Rhoden’s impressive prose captures the Regent's nuances well.
“The Regent was exhibiting her particular brand of brilliant anger. Jaxon watched with some admiration as sparks erupted from the anthracite curls of her lashes, and her brows flashed arcs of light. Most alarming of all, Jaxon noticed, was the ripple of power that flowed over her skin, as if her body was insufficient to contain the emotion that roiled through her blood, that jagged through every biowire and agitated every nerve.”
In true dystopian style, The Pale looks into the future to show where our own obsession with technology might lead us. A thought-provoking read reminiscent of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The Pale raises many questions as to what it truly means to be human.… (mere)
Statistikker
- Værker
- 9
- Medlemmer
- 18
- Popularitet
- #630,789
- Vurdering
- 4.6
- Anmeldelser
- 6
- ISBN
- 11
- Udvalgt
- 1
- The Bowl
- Ducking Hell
- The Devil's Hair
- 20th Century Elf
- Sea Mist Shore Witch
- Rain Dance
- Clarrie's Dam
- Miri
- The Curse of Curtis Falls
- Terriswalkers Terraerengerie
- Trash and Treasure
- Love to Travel Local
- Follow the Water
- Gothic Queen
- The Garage
These are plot-driven horror stories, some dark and some gory. They each have their own interpretation of weird stories. My favourite are The Bowl, The Devil's Hair, Gothic Queen, and The Garage.
I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.… (mere)