Alexander Sinclair/ Captain Howdy
2.5K posts
@Alexrites
Burnt out adventurer of dead faith. Proud father of DEAD ORCHID. DM for commissions https://t.co/5o9mhoytjF
So, here goes, spooky story fans - a chance to fancy up your bookshelf and inject some Hartmouth Horrors into your life. I’ll let her run for a couple of days and announce the winner shortly after. Best of luck 🙏🏼❤️
The Crow (1994)
Dead Orchid, by @Alexrites is a trip. It's Heart of Darkness meets Trainspotting in Cambodia, where a disparate collection of mostly horrible people meet absolutely horrifying fates. I often say I'm not the target audience for certain books. If I am the target audience for any book, ever, it's Dead Orchid. I've been to Cambodia. I'm very familiar with psychedelics. There's heaps of both here. Reading this feels a bit like riding a rodeo, in that if I break concentration for even a second I am thrown off and have no idea what's happening. It has the wild, chaotic sense of a debut bursting with ideas and honestly that's my absolute jam, so I'm eating it all up. It's evocative as hell, briskly paced and crammed with imagery that's both bleak and humorous, riddled with anxiety and confusion. It runs on similes and metaphor, almost half of the written sentences are just vividly creative bits of imagery. It feels like a bad trip and then a horrid comedown, written in a clammy fever-dream of a voice. It feels contagious. I love it. Its structure is also worth talking about - numerous POVs that interweave in unpredictable ways and lead to a satisfying if bleak conclusion. At about 80% it starts literally injecting more insanity until it goes full Evil Dead - I came out the other side feeling like I needed a wash. But it does have one major drawback, which is that it needs to be properly edited and formatted. Honestly, the writing is strong enough that il overlook it, something I don't do often. But it really trips over itself at times with errors and mistakes. If I had any other very minute critique, it would be that the density of metaphors becomes a bit of a slog in later, faster paced scenes that need to move faster. Neither issue takes away from what a staggering impact this book had on me. Some of the best prose and the worst editing iv ever read. 5 stars, I will read anything this guy writes. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Also JOSS EXTRA MENTIONED
“Highly recommend this to all Splatterpunk fans” “A brutal gorefest that had me laughing out loud” “Fred and Pinkie were my faves. I could honestly read about them all day long” Always lovely to receive a review like this. Makes all the effort worthwhile 🤘💀
Union Jack’s coming to town And he’s got time to kill
