Cry Your Way Home

I've enjoyed Walters' stories when I've come across them, so I was very happy to receive an entire collection of her work; unfortunately, I made the mistake of trying to read the book straight through, and it began to feel a bit monotonous. The stories are good, but I really should have dipped in and out of it instead.

Cry Your Way Home is a collection of short dark, twisted, and haunting stories. While they are all well written most of them fell a little flat for me. They started off good but by the end they were underwhelming and not quite satisfying. There were a couple that really stood out and I enjoyed like The Judas Child, The Floating Girls, Take a Walk in the Night My Love and Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys: The Elephant's Tale (which was my favorite). So while I wouldn't exactly recommend it, it wasn't a total loss for me. ( )

Just the way fairy tales should be written. All the stories were viscerally unsettling in their own ways, to the point where I wanted to read more but had to stop because I couldn't expect any of the short stories to spare me a gut-punch. More impressive, the stories had diverse narrative style! In particular my favorites were the amazing "Take a Walk in the Night, My Love" and "The Serial Killer's Astronaut Daughter" which were still different enough to be written by two separate authors.

That being said, some of the stories missed their nexus of creepy/dark/unsettling for me. I found "Not my Circus, not my Monkeys: The Elephant's Tale" and "Umbilicus" were too obscure. They were well-written though, so consider it a matter of my tastes more than anything else. ( )

Powerful, vivid stories about women dealing with horror, trauma or loss in a variety of real or fantasic situations.
Walters is a compelling storyteller, and sucks you into each situation within the first half-page. Most of her stories here don't have tidy endings - they leave lingering feelings behind rather than any sense of closure or wrapped-up narrative.
A couple of the pieces here didn't work quite as well for me - "S Is for Soliloquy" and "Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice" felt more familiar and well-trodden than the others - and her open-ended style might not be to everyone's taste, but the greatest compliment I can pay the others is that I was sorry when most of them finished.
Well worth reading. ( )

"Once upon a time there was a monster. This is how they tell you the story starts. This is a lie."

So starts Cry Your Way Home, a collection of short stories by Damien Angelica Walters. These stories span from fairy tale-like to science fiction to magical realism, with the common thread of being dark, dealing with loss and grief, dealing with monsters (allegorical or not) and things that go bump in the night.

Most of the 17 stories in this collection were enjoyable - only a few didn't quite work for me. The opening story, Tooth, Tongue, and Claw, had me worried that there wouldn't be a happy ending, that that would be the tone of the entire collection. But while most of the endings are not happy, this one included, they are not grim and dark and full of hopelessness has I had feared. In most of the cases there is some kind of closure to be had.

And still speaking of endings, a few of the stories felt incomplete, like the actual story had just started and then it ended. Two others were a variation of this: they felt as the start of something great, something that I would love to read in a longer format. The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter feels like this, and so does The Floating Girls: A Documentary, but the latter still works very well as a short story and was my favourite of the book.

Although some of the stories weren't totally to my liking, I enjoyed this book. It was well written, and vivid enough to leave me with that pleasant-unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach that something terrible was about to happen.

Also at Spoilers and Nuts ( )