You Will Grow Into Them by Malcolm Devlin
| You Will Grow Into Them by Malcolm Devlin | |
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| Category: Short Stories | |
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Reviewer: Megan Kenny
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| Summary: You Will Grow Into Them is a playfully perverse collection of short stories focusing on the nature of transition and change. Each macabre tale draws the reader ever deeper in a thrilling web of everyday life touched by otherworldly horror and allows illicit glimpses into lives touched by madness and magic. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 344 | Date: May 2017 |
| Publisher: Unsung Stories | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1907389436 | |
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You Will Grow Into Them is a thrilling collection of ten short stories all centred on the nature of transition and change. The often grisly, macabre and ghoulish nature of the stories included in Devlin's debut collection are intoxicatingly illicit and the darkness within each tale is deviously addictive.
Change comes in many forms here - from a man who finds himself wolfishly warped in Dogsbody, to a girl blossoming into a woman in Her First Harvest. Often these tales offer a glimpse behind the curtain of normality into a vivid and horrifying world which leaves the reader breathless, as seen in Songs Like They Used to Play, or filled with an ever-growing sense of dread, as in The Last Meal He Ate Before She Killed Him. Whilst I loved all the stories included here I must confess to a particularly nasty fondness for The Bridge, the shortest story but for me the most unsettling. I don't want to give too much away about any of the tales included here, as I never want to spoil the unbridled joy of a truly excellent book, so I will simply say that you will devour this book and that it will be an electrifying journey from the first page to the last.
I loved You Will Grow Into Them; I found Devlin's writing engaging and thrillingly dark. He weaves together narratives of everyday horror with a velvet tongue and draws the reader into an abyss of magic and violence. This is not to imply that You Will Grow Into Them is grisly or unnecessarily gory, indeed this is not a book for fans of bloody horror but for those of us who prefer our scares to be insidious and serpentine in their approach. The unsettling nature of many of the stories creeps up on you, like the heart stopping thrill of a cold hand on the back of your neck or the spine-tingling creep of fear that you may not be totally alone upon waking in the night. The often impish tone of the stories here juxtaposes delectably with the repulsive horror described and makes for an enticing and delightfully disturbing read.
For those interested in reading more ghoulish tales of the macabre you could try Eye Classics: Nevermore - A Graphic Novel Anthology of Edgar Allan Poe's Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Various, Dan Whitehead (Editor).
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You can read more book reviews or buy You Will Grow Into Them by Malcolm Devlin at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy You Will Grow Into Them by Malcolm Devlin at Amazon.com.
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