Oh, joy! The second October-appropriate review! The Drowning Kind by Jennifer McMahon was more haunting, definitely not scary. I’ve got a few more scary novels lined up for this month, but let me not get ahead of myself. Sing Your Sadness Deep by Laura Mauro is a collection of short stories that dip into various genres: horror, fantasy, fairy tale. And just look at that wonderful cover, which I believe encompasses all three:
We all know the mantra: collections cause headaches because some stories shine, others are shit, and we’re left feeling “meh.” My other pet peeve is when a collection basically rehashes the same themes and character to the point I can’t tell one story from the next. Neither of these is true of Mauro. What if you could suck out a suffering person’s pain like a smoke that you put in jars and collect? Would you believe your twin dying of cancer was a changeling lost in the human world? If an ancient creature that controlled the attitude of London lived in a bathtub, would you care for him or destroy him? I mean, each tale is so dissimilar I can easily recall all thirteen (heh) stories of darkness.
One theme is control of others, be they human, ghosts, or creatures. In “Letters from Elodie,” the narrator recalls an enigmatic young woman whose personality everyone, men and women, falls in love with. Except the narrator; she knows this about Elodie:
I’d looked inside of her and seen nothing at all but bones couched in black rot; her magpie soul, pieced together out of the fragments she stole from other people, other lives, a ransom note assembled from newsprint. I could have destroyed her, if I’d wanted to. I could have ruined her. I could have.
In “Looking for Laika,” a brother who fears everything, but nuclear war especially, controls his sister by telling her a romantic story of the space dog, Laika, and how she’s still out there looking for a safer home for humans. But does telling a tale make it true when you add a dose of fantasy? When a dog-size space craft lands in the ocean by their house, questions arise.
Death also plays a significant theme in Sing Your Sadness Deep, though Mauro plays with it so we must look from all angles, and are occasionally given a grace period. What is killed may come back and demand you care for it. The method by which badness is killed may require the savior to take badness into themselves. And sometimes creatures kill out of sheer necessity, like hunger. If a human harbors a killer, what becomes of the human? Mauro writes, “When you grow up monstrous, the one who grants you your humanity is the closest thing there is to God.” Of course, she’s making a point about “otherness” (LGBTQ people, immigrants, disabled folks) without being outright about it in most cases.
For its cleverness, strong variety, excellent imagery, and ability to immerse readers, Sing Your Sadness Deep is a must-read short story collection.
Grab the Lapels 
This sounds excellent and the kind of creepy that I would find enjoyable. Just the other day I was telling my kids that a dog had been to space and as soon as I started talking about it I realized I didn’t want to tell them the ending but I also didn’t want to lie. There’s something charming about the idea of Laika still out there searching for a better home for us.
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I will say there are a couple of stories where children seem to be in danger, but I’ll spoil it for you and tell you that no children are harmed in Sing Your Sadness Deep.
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That’s the kind of spoiling I appreciate!
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This sounds like a wonderful collection. I particularly love that “all the stories shine and that they don’t basically rehashes the same themes and character to the point you can’t tell one story from the next.” Because you are so right – these are problems I have had with collections. Wonderful review!
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Thanks, Tessa! Given the variety of books you read, especially in horror and fantasy, I think you would be a great audience for this book. I was happy that the e-books are so reasonably priced and can be uploaded into any app that you prefer.
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❤️❤️❤️
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This sounds fun! I like speculative fiction.
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Same here! I like the way speculative fiction doesn’t hug quite so hard to one genre, meaning my expectations aren’t always met — in a good way. Some of these might be a bit scary for you, Laila, but if you like speculative fiction, have you read Kelly Link or Stacy Richter?
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I have read Kelly Link and enjoyed her!
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Stone Animals is my favorite. I can analyze the crap out of that story with students.
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That cover really does span fantasy, horror, and fairy-tale! It’s very evocative. I suspect this collection would be too scary for me (honestly, October is always just a lot of people reviewing books I’ll never read), but like Karissa I find the idea of a more hopeful ending for Laika appealing.
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This author is British, which made me wonder if some of the atmospheric stuff would be familiar to you. However, she also has a variety of settings, from the deserts of the U.S. to Trinidad to Italy and Romania.
The Drowning Kind by Jennifer McMahon would be your speed, but probably not this one.
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The horror! The horror! My question was how long does it go on for? But another month apparently. Then can we have a normal looking young woman carrying a bit of weight who has a normal time with her normal guy? Please.
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Ha! Oh, Bill! Yes, I shall get back to more books with fat women (and Deaf people!) very soon. Actually, given how much you like science fiction, I do think you might like this collection. I tried to choose a variety of books: scary, spooky, atmospheric, haunting. I’m not sure how steady my definition of horror is. For instance, I consider Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier to be horror because I was scared the whole book, but I think other folks would call it an atmospheric classic.
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This sounds so good! I just went and added it to my TBR List. 🙂
– Sugar
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Nice! Undertow Publications are big on e-books because the paperback ones cost time and money (the owner was saying this on Twitter), and I think the e-books are reasonably priced if you can’t get this at your library or through inter-library loan.
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I think you’ve quite cleverly pointed out why short story collections don’t sell as well! Good on ya, I never thought of it that way, but you are SO right, I totally prefer a collection where each story is completely different. I think that’s why linked stories are so difficult to pull off, because to me it seems like it should just be made into a novel instead.
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If linked stories are held together by an event or location, I think it’s cool. I read a book set in a cul-de-sac in which you’d get a story from each household, so there was crossover because they are neighbors. Or, if you get several perspectives surrounding an event, I also enjoy that.
On a different note: I use Libby to listen to library audiobooks, and just recently they added about 10 books that are from Bespeak Audio Editions. Do you know anything about this? They’re all from Canada by people of a variety of backgrounds, and they were all free on Libby and available to multiple users at once.
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Hmmm no I haven’t heard of that, but I think it’s wonderful people are getting into audiobooks more and more, and the options are expanding too – whatever gets people consuming more books is just wonderful 🙂
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The book ended with a statement that Canada had a 30 million dollar grant to do this. I was like…that’s a lot of money for books, right??
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OMG What? 30 million dollars? That seems crazy, I assumed that was the entire budget of our Canadian artist granting system LOL
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Maybe! I know Libby has 10 CanLit books for free and can be checked out by multiple people at once, so that’s a lot of check outs.
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This does sound like a great collection! I’m one of those people who doesn’t really get into collections except for once in awhile. I think this one is going to make the list though. Sometimes, I’ll take collections for my lunch book at work because it’s kind of nice to have something easily digestible where I don’t have to constantly remember where I left off. (Looking at you, On the Road. Not even sure why I’ve kept going with that one.)
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On the Road is one of those novels that I think lots of folks picked up because they love the movie, but you hit a point where a book just isn’t a movie and you have to let it go. I’ve heard McCarthy’s stuff is fairly dense, too, like literary post-apocalyptic stuff.
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Dani has read The Road and enjoyed it. She thought that was the book I was talking about when I text her trashing On the Road lol. I’ve never seen the movie to the book and I don’t think I really want to.
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Oh!!!! I totally confused them, too! I was thinking Cormac McCarthy. He wrote The Road. Jack Kerouac wrote ON The Road, which is a boring novel about wandering around that undergrads take to for some reason and end up on their own dippy road trips. Okay, so ignore my previous comment because I was talking about McCarthy, too.
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I on the other hand have never stopped being undergrad, nor taking dippy road trips. On the Road, one of my favourite books ever!
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I added more about why I don’t like what this novel does to its readers in a different comment on your blog, Bill. Also, when was the last time you took a road trip that wasn’t trucking?
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OK, good question. In 2001 Milly and I drove her little Daewoo round the whole southern coast of Australia from Melbourne to Perth (about 4000km or 2500 miles by the coast road) taking a week, staying at hotels, and discussing our mostly off-again marriage. She stayed in Perth and I hitchhiked back to Melbourne (age 50).
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If you hitchhiked as a 50-year-old man, I can only imagine the folks who picked you up. I have to imagine it was truckers??
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That time it was, but I’ve hitchhiked a few times in the last 20 years – guys in utes (pickups), an Aboriginal lady magistrate once, other truck drivers.
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Oooooh, the Aboriginal lady magistrate sounds cool. I hope she lectured you about safety or told some cool stories. Or both!
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Haha, no worries! I have not read The Road so I reserve any judgement on that one. But it did seem like you were kind of disappointed that I didn’t like it lol. I was sitting here wondering how you could have possibly liked it. 😛
I absolutely do not understand the fascination with this book. Unless you’re a guy looking to travel, do drugs and have random sex, then I get it.
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