Sing Me Your Scars Review
Leave a commentNovember 27, 2015 by Laird
Here is my Locus review for Damien Angelica Walters’s collection, Sing Me Your Scars.
An excerpt:
Sing Me Your Scars contains 21 stories, eight of which are original to the collection. Walters’s narratives travel a spectrum of pure horror literature to the out-and-out weird. She throws aside the curtain on a macabre universe of body horror, ghosts, and murder. She writes of damage and trauma and doomed relationships, and does it with powerful affect that reminds me of Livia Llewellyn and Nathan Ballingrud for its lyric rawness and psychological flensing of numerous protagonists. Recurring scenes of surgeries, mutilations, and self-inflicted poisoning are also reminiscent of Brian Evenson’s best work, a contemporary master of the surreal and Kafkaesque. Also redolent of Evenson, in a Walters narrative, mythology and supernatural forces routinely impinge upon mundane reality; quotidian existence is punctuated by intrusions of the existentially horrific and the absurdly fantastical. One’s diminishment leads to power, one’s loss is often a net gain (of awfulness), and one’s scars do indeed sing.
image via Amazon
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