Y'all know about southern gothic stories? Well, I guess this is bavarian gothic. Succinctly written with flashes of brilliance. Grimm's fairy tales meets Children of the Corn. ( )

What happened? We start off with a chapter about cannibalism and people's tongue's turning black and then we go off into chapter upon chapter of people being horrible to each other because I guess there's just nothing better to do.
I would give it 3 stars, but knocked one off for false advertising. ( )

I toyed with two stars but I’m an easy reviewer generally. Sometime after WWII in West Germany some kids grow up in the shadow of a concentration camp. Kiesbye saves that last bit for the final 20 pages. Before we get to that revelation, or twist if you will, people act in bizarre and selfishly cruel ways towards each other. That’s where the a-ha gets you - that concentration camp thingy. The problem for me was there is no subtlety. The behavior is too unbelievably weird over and over again and Kiesbye hits you with basically the same message of selfish callousness until you don’t feel it anymore. These were the same places where a few years before people were cruel on an industrial basis. It’s like, okay we get that already. The author waits too long to pull the pin out of the grenade to where we are already numb to the fact that these people are going to act in the worst possible way in every situation. The knife is dull. The message is weakened.

Would have been more effective in a novella length offering IMHO. ( )

Sometimes I hate the star ratings on here because my personal feelings about a book don't reflect my critical thinking about it.

Critically, this book is probably four stars. Hypnotic and lyrical, beautifully written. Sometimes moving, mostly grim, told without judgment. Had the subject matter been different I probably would have loved it.

On a personal level, I hated this. It's a series of interconnected stories all about horrible people doing terrible things. Rapes, murders, lies, secrets. The gang's all here. And because the story is told so dispassionately, there's no emotional center to connect to. The narrators all experience traumas, but then they inflict just as much damage. Only once before has a novel left me this queasy with disgust, and that was primarily because of the author's intent. I didn't finish that one. But I did finish this one, and I suppose that says something. I appreciate this story for its construction, but I didn't enjoy it. ( )

This was strange, but in a very good way. A group of former childhood friends return to the remote German village where they grew up many years later for the funeral of one of them. The strange and sometimes brutal events of their childhood are related through the alternating points of views of each of the survivors. Comparisons to Shirley Jackson, William Faulkner, and Gunter Grass are apt, as are comparisons to some of the darker tales of the Brothers Grimm. I will also say I was reminded of Jerzy Kosinki's The Painted Bird.

I'm not a fan of horror, and this book occasionally flirts with horror, but the writing is delicious, very different and inventive. For example, "In our village time didn't progress courageously. In our village she limped a bit and got lost more than once...." Or, "The teacher had told them to collect colorful leaves and dry them between sheets of blotting paper imported into the pages of large and heavy books. Now they were trying the method on lizards and blindworms."

So strange, but very enjoyable.

4 stars ( )