Review by Booklist Review
Lanchester follows his dystopian novel, The Wall (2019), with eight gothic tales in which he continues to play with genre forms. Like Jennifer Egan in The Keep (2006), Lanchester explores the spectral nature of the digital world. The stories constantly allude to gothic classics by Poe, Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Henry James, and are often set in typical gothic locations--a secluded country house in "Signal," Romania in "Coffin Liquor," and a prison in "Which of These Would You Like?" But Lanchester uses gothic tropes and settings to explore contemporary concerns. "Cold Call" explores the ubiquity of connectivity, and in "We Happy Few," academic pontificating about social media becomes a wonderfully provocative exploration of what is real. The finest tale of the collection is the title story, "Reality," a twist on Sartre's No Exit in which a reality TV show is the setting for a gloriously haunting depiction of the psychological effects of constantly being viewed. Across these immensely enjoyable and varied tales, Lanchester embraces the camp silliness of the gothic sensibility, while also making astute observations about our ever-developing digital reality.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Lanchester (The Wall) returns with a modest collection of supernatural or vaguely dystopian tales that are constructed with cool precision, but fail to produce chills. The most engaging is "Coffin Liquor," whose narrator, a prickly economics professor, resembles the snobbish misanthrope of Lanchester's diabolical The Debt to Pleasure. The professor is attending a conference in Romania with such talks as "What economists can learn from Vlad the Impaler," when the dark magic of literature and myth seeps into his hyperrational life. Another success is "Signal," which cleverly recasts the restless ghost story as an allegory of technological dependence. "Charity," about a cursed selfie stick whose malevolence seems to spring from colonial crimes, societal standards of beauty, and human vanity, is murkier. The title story, about a purgatorial reality television show in which the competition never begins, has some subtle observations about behavior within a crude genre, but like several others ("We Happy Few" and "The Kit"), feels undercooked. The conclusion to another ghost story, "Cold Call," illustrates the fine line between horror and silliness. Lanchester is too good a writer--ironic, observant, worldly--not to imbue these tales with some degree of charm and pathos. Still, they feel more like exercises than genuine experiences of terror. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In the spirit--a word used advisedly--of M.R. James, British novelist Lanchester delivers a splendidly eerie suite of stories. The opening story in Lanchester's collection, "Signal," sets the tone nicely. A college friend of the narrator's, who has grown unimaginably wealthy ("The driveway of Michael's big house was so long that even after we got there it took a while to get there"), can buy everything he wants except a decent Wi-Fi signal. Enter the spectral image of a tall man in a household full of short ones--one, a Bolivian, is a comparative giant back home among "the second-shortest people in the world," but barely qualifies here--who, it appears, is still trying to get a reliable connection from the spirit world. In "Coffin Liquor," whose title comes, Lanchester's narrator explains, from "the liquefaction of improperly preserved corpses," modern vampirism meets the still more dreadful prospect of an academic conference. Wi-Fi figures into it, and so, in a Groundhog Day sort of trope, does Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, all culminating in a psychiatrist's weary assessment of the protagonist as someone suffering a psychosis with "the most florid manifestations." One character is imprisoned in a dungeon straight out of Poe, another philosophically explores the question of whether we're not ambulatory critters but instead "a brain in a vat" before being interrupted by a trope from the book of Revelation, still another snipes that the one book he can't stand teaching is Lord of the Flies, since "glasses with prescriptions for short-sight cannot be used to start a fire in the manner that Piggy's spectacles are." It wouldn't be a set of supernatural stories without at least one in which a painting comes to life, though, true to form, Lanchester brings in a selfie stick as part of the malevolent furnishings, to say nothing of a swarm of icky maggots. A deliciously creepy book. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
