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 Reviews for the 2024 Reading Club originally, but I'm adding the 2025 reviews. |
I enjoyed my first book by Edogawa Ranpo so much that I decided to read Japanese Gothic, a collection of four of Ranpo's shorter works. The first, The Idol is a novella from the point of view of a young Japanese girl in an arranged marriage. She begins to suspect that her husband is cheating on her, but then sbe finds out that he's not, at least not in the way she thought. I won't say anything more then that. The narrator has an innocence which makes the story ironically disturbing. Pomegranate is a story within a story which starts with a retired detective meeting a person with an interest in crime. He relates a case called "The Case of the Acid Murder". It's a twisted tale of a corpse that has been burned beyond recognitiion with acid and can only be identified with fingerprints. There's a lot of back and forth about the fingerprints. At one point, characters have a discussion which reminds one of the iocaine powder scene from The Princess Bride. And when the detective finishes the story, something else is revealed by the person he's telling the story to. The Hand is the shortest and probably the most supernatural of the stories in this book. It's about a piano player whose hand is amputated.That's all I can say about that one. Finally, The Devouring Insects is the story most clearly inspired by Poe. It is about an introverted young man who becomes obsessed with an actress and resolves to abduct and murder her. After doing this, he has problems with the body. I'll just say that it's The Telltale Heart with insects instead of a heart. This is definitely a good read for fans of the macabre. { |
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