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A collection of literary horror short stories.Williams has considerable sentence-level talent, which gives his stories mood (to which plot cohesion sometimes becomes secondary)and sophistication. Nearly all are urban and extremely British (or alternative-British) in setting and theme, and that, as well as the unrelenting grimth of his tone, gives the work a certain sameness. Williams can definitely ring the changes on one type of story effectively, but it would be interesting to see if he can do...
Each story delivers a level of description beyond the realms of some of the best horror. When Williams describes a red brick wall, you cant help but feel the grainy chalk between your fingers. The same is always true for his characters. Which I have always found the most impressive in his writing. Composed so well, it's difficult not to have to take a quick breath when they get a paper cut....They usually get a bit more then a paper cut. I feel lucky for having trodden through so many mediocre h...
Don't know. I realized as I started reading it that I had borrowed it from the library before and not loved it then. Took another crack at it. I've read one or two of his stories in other collections and admired them (seems like it would be weird to say 'liked', because he's a fairly twisted puppy). I don't know if it was reading all of these together or if these just weren't quite as strong, but they all seemed to blend together into one oppressive, not entirely coherent, intriguing and yet ult...
(This is one of the times I really wish there half-star ratings; "it was ok" seems unduly harsh, but "liked it" is false.)Williams brings a number of good, and often slightly contradictory, tricks to bear in this collection of 17 stories spanning a dozen years of his career:*His prose juxtaposes lyrical, even pastoral imagery with the ugliness of urban decay. The book is full of description like, "There was a moon low in the sky, like an albino's eyelash. What light there was came from the stars...
The idea of this book is that it compiles all the "scary" stories written by Conrad Williams. This wouldn't be a bad approach if his stories were different and didn't have the same similar outcome. This book could've improved "immensely" if different writers were contributing their stories to this book. It would've given it a reason to push through to the end and have a new, refreshing perspective every time you started reading the next short story. But...no. It's like eating stale bread that ha...
"Use Once, Then Destroy" is a collection of 17 stories which includes one novella, "Nearly People". I'll say from the start that "Nearly People" is quite a different work from the other stories and to be honest I couldn't finish it. It's a post-apocalyptic piece with too many new-named things for my personal taste and I couldn't engage. However, the other stories in the book are much more to my liking. If I could coin a term for them, it would probably be 'urban gristle'.Williams is a word-dense...
