Raven is Looking for the North American Lake Monsters: Great Disappointment Ensues

Look at that, Raven finished a book this quickly. I had been drawn in by North American Lake Monsters, seeing it was a short story anthology I figured it would be a good start for the year. Admittedly I judged this book by its cover. I thought the art was beautiful depicting some strange beast and with a title like North American Lake Monsters I felt like it was going to fit perfectly into my interests. This book came with such high acclaim as well, being a winner of The Shirley Jackson Award and a finalist for The Bram Stoker Award I figured it had to be good. I didn't even bother to read the tiny kind of hidden synopsis before purchasing it. Have I done enough foreshadowing?

I have found an enemy in this book. More than anything this book left me feeling low. I was angry at times and other times I was just plain bored. So in the interest of full disclosure, I want to make it clear I did not finish this book. I read the first four stories, read part of the fifth one, and tried to read the last one. Ultimately my partner was the one who asked me to stop reading it because I was at the point that it was only upsetting me. When out of nine stories my emotions are only negative at some point I have to cut my losses and accept that I spent $16 on a book that had no positive impact on me. So how should I kick off my review?

Let's talk about the title. When you name a short story anthology you are setting up the expectations for all of your stories. It's not an easy feat of course. No one wants theirs to be too broad and be simply another collection titled "Ghost Stories". Some short story collections choose to be very specific such as the case of My Mother She Cooked Me and My Father He Ate Me which is a collection of dark fairy tale retellings. This makes it stand out for having a unique title that is also honest with what can be expected from the collection. There is also a common style of naming the collection after the main story. My all-time favorite collection is Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, which names the anthology after the first story "The Bloody Chamber". So when you present a collection whose full proper title is North American Lake Monster Stories people are going to quickly notice a very distinct lack of lake monsters. Now, credit where credit is due the stories pretty much all take place in North America so I guess half points for that. There is a story buried amongst all the other stories by the same title. However, with only 1 out 9 stories having anything to do with a lake monster if I were grading this it would be a 55 and a note saying "see me after class". Some may find this part to be a little nitpicky, but be honest if you picked up a collection of ghost stories and then the first 6 stories were about a robber breaking into your house and no ghosts you would probably feel a little misled

. My next issue lies in the hearts of our characters. I've heard many people say that they don't like short stories because they can't get connected enough to the characters. I am not one of those people, but I found myself wondering why I was staring at the same stoic masculine plank of wood in each story. Every male main character in our collection with very few exceptions is stoic to a fault, misogynistic, the victim of a mean or angry woman. Our female characters are often depicted as poor mothers who take their anger out on male characters, are often cold, and are driven to cheat or sleep around to get what they want. And to top it all off, a never-ending supply of absent, or emotionally unavailable fathers. This is the basic stock that we will see across all the entries of this book and it becomes a blur of the same awful people doing awful things.

Now I don't want to sit and review each and every single story, but there was one that definitely soured my entire opinion and made me more willing to admit the flaws I was seeing in this work. The short story "S.S." (yes, exactly that one) is about a teenage boy becoming radicalized into racist ideology. I'm not in any way saying you can't write a story like that, but the topic does demand a certain level of care lest you end up writing a story sympathizing with those who cause harm and inflict more pain on their victims. The story is about a boy (with an absent father, what a twist) who takes care of his injured mother who is slowly eating parts of her paralyzed body. But that's not important to our author, so instead we focus on an awkward sex scene between our main character and a girl getting passed around by a white supremacist group. He makes plans to kill a coworker that gets sidetracked by him getting into a huge car wreck with the girl he realizes is only sleeping with him to radicalize him. He decides instead to shoot a horse that was also in this accident, putting it out of its misery. If this sounds random or convoluted it is in a way. But it's also just a lot of information thrown at you that doesn't add up or lead to anything other than another dead end.

Speaking of dead ends let's talk about how stories end. Now I am a former theatre kid. When doing musicals we always wanted to end our numbers with something called "a button". A button was meant to be a small signal to the audience that its okay to clap now because the number is over. Buttons had many different forms but it was normally something that the composers already thought of for the music and that the actors put together in the choreography such as in one play I did our button was everyone at the very final note sat down in a chair and put our heads down. This takes teamwork but has a great payoff for the performances. Now even a good button would never be used to signal the end of the entire show. For the lack of a better term, these buttons are meant to be abrupt so there is no question hanging in the air that that little section is done. This author has mastered buttons. The endings bring everything to a halt, but I would not use the phrase resolution to describe it in any way. The stories end, as in they have a final sentence. However, there is nothing truly resolved and often the endings feel as though the author didn't want to think about them anymore. Our second story simply ends by telling us the beast never shows up, but if the story is about our main character who is literally in the dead middle of a conflict that doesn't end simply because the beast never showed up I'm left more so wondering what the guy is gonna do after an hour of waiting.

Perhaps more than anything our stories seem to at times focus on the wrong people. We have a cannibalistic zombie character who gets overshadowed by her POS son. We randomly are supposed to stop thinking about a main character because the beast didn't show up. At times I felt like there just wasn't much of a reason for me to care about some of these people. A lot of that does come back to the endless supply of driftwood that is our main men. Ultimately I am constantly more interested in things that have to be shoved out of the way to explore the same bland themes of abandonment and poverty.

At the end of the day, this book wasn't enough for me to call it horror. The stories often felt like I was walking the same loop. The themes hit you over the head repeatedly with their repetitive stories and characters. Reading this book for as many stories as I did left me with a weird sense of guilt. I had before me so many books on important subjects and here I was with a book that left me with nothing.

Final Rating- DNF. For dragging on and on, leaving me with nothing to do but drag on and on. For making me stare at the same plank of wood thinking it would be different. For tricking me with its title and cover. While it may have impressed panels at the Shirley Jackson Awards and the Bram Stoker Awards, Raven will not be awarding it much more than the lowest ranking I can give. And Raven never thought about this book again.

-Sincerely Raven