Shape Without Form, Shade Without Color by Sunny Moraine
My rating: 3/5 cats
All these thoughts, waiting in the shadows, solidifying into facts. Those people you sleep beside: Do you realize how much trust that is? How much you trust them? It would be so easy. I don’t know why every bedroom wall isn’t painted with blood.
i do my weekly “free tor short read” every saturday morning, usually between 5 and 6 a.m.
that’s a pretty bleary-eyed time of day, but routines are routines. and when i find myself reading a really great one, it’s a fantastic experience—a sort of tender bridge between dreaming and reading that enhances the magic of a well-told story.
but it can so easily go the other way—reading a slow story in the too-early morning makes it very tempting to fall back into sleepytime, and reading a confusing one sometimes makes me question that i haven’t in fact drifted off in the middle and filled in the gaps with dreams.
this one confused me.
if you like stories that evoke mood and atmosphere, that leave you with more questions than answers, that give you the shivers of there being some unidentifiable horror just beyond your vision—this story will probably please you just fine.
sometimes that kind of reading experience pleases me, too.
but sometimes i like my ambiguity to be a bit more leading, more fathomable—i want to be able to follow clues to an unwritten but reasonable conclusion that at least allows me the illusion of closure, at least in my own mind.
i don’t know what to make of this one.
it just frustrated me. and maybe it’s me doing myself a disservice by reading these at the wrong time of day, but i read it through a couple of times, to make sure i hadn’t just dreamed-over important details, and while it’s evocative and appealing on a sensory level, with strong imagery and some lovely lines, it’s too mooshy a story, and not enough of its dots connect for me.
i’m probably wrong, and this is the internet, so i’ll hear all about how very wrong i am, but until i get my corrective snark to set me straight, this is gonna stay at a medium-three. birds birds birds.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2017/05/31/shape-w…
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