Songs From Spider Street eBook Mark Howard Jones Steve Upham
Download As PDF : Songs From Spider Street eBook Mark Howard Jones Steve Upham 
Spider Street is a particular place in an abandoned future Paris where the secrets of tomorrow, yesterday and all the times lost in-between are revealed to those who are strong enough to listen. A collection of dark fiction.
Songs From Spider Street eBook Mark Howard Jones Steve Upham
I found this collection of horror stories to be OK. My favorite stories were "Interior Design" and "Token Blonde" and of course I love the cover art. However, even those two stories failed to really grab me hard, I just think they were the better stories in the lot. Short horror anthologies are some of my favorite books to read and sadly, this book just failed to either scare or excite me.Product details
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Tags : Buy Songs From Spider Street: Read 4 Books Reviews - Amazon.com,ebook,Mark Howard Jones, Steve Upham,Songs From Spider Street,Screaming Dreams,FICTION Horror
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Songs From Spider Street eBook Mark Howard Jones Steve Upham Reviews
I do not write critiques of individual stories within a single-author collection since I believe the collection should stand has a single piece of work much like a novel.
Colin Leslie's review very much echoes my own sentiments an incredibly strong collection, with definite nods to Thomas Ligotti and Mark Samuels, but I'd also like to say that there is more than a passing reference to J G Ballard. Jones - like Ballard - takes the sf and horror tropes to produce stories that aren't quintessentially sf or horror. There's an otherworldliness to the tales but they feel quite "real".
Jones' writing ability is incredibly strong - especially when you consider this is his debut collection - all wrapped in a rather splendid package courtesy of Screaming Dreams and Steve Upham.
Even if you're not necessarily a horror or sf fan, but you do like short stories, then I urge you to give this book a go.
Recommended.
The world of Mark Howard Jones is a bizarre place. This is a land inhabited by mechanical houses, giant ice sculpted horse prisons ...oh and singing spiders. It's also a world of dark despair, dreams and deep emotions. It's the world we all share but it's a slanted, tilted place slightly off balance, a terrible place to live but a wonderful place to visit.
These twenty-five tales transport us to various parts of that world and allow us share fragments of the life taking place there. Many of these stories are indeed fragments, small shavings from a much bigger carving which we will never get to see, we can only speculate on its form. As such they are often perplexing but that offers them a mystique which keeps them fresh.
Ranging from a few sentences to a few pages the stories here cover a wide variety of styles. We have the quasi- steam punk fantasy of Heart Is Where The Home Is, high fantasy of The Ice Horse, SF in Token Blonde and the emotional horror of Hunt/ed. Holding all the stories together, however, is a rich emotional thread. All the stories are driven by emotion whether it be tragedy such as Trackside, the eroticism of Lovebox or the deep despair of Window.
The stories are almost impossible to summarise in a traditional way as they become as much about the readers own emotions as the writers. This produces some stories which fail to meet the mark for me but also some which resound so deeply they will remain in the memory for a long time. For me, the less successful tales were those rooted in reality such as Backseat Ballet or Muse. The best tales are those which transcend reality to hint at much deeper and often darker places such as the poetic Shards From The House Of Glass or the eponymous Songs From Spider Street.
It should also be noted that the hits vastly outnumber the near misses. This is one of the strongest collections I have read for a while. It is original, intelligent and highly imaginative without being impenetrable or too obscure. It's not easy to draw neat comparisons with other writers, but there are hints of the nightmare worlds of Ligotti or Samuels without the weighty nihilism. The stories are probably closest in tone to early Ray Bradbury managing to retain a connection with normality whilst firing the imagination with intense fantasy.
A highly recommended book and an author to watch in the future. Songs From Spider Street is simply stunning.
- Colin Leslie
(fractional score 3.25 stars)
The work of Mark Howard Jones reminds me of another rather obscure, UK-based writer of dark fiction John B. Ford. A richly-textured haunting and oppressive atmosphere, often dominating concerns of characterization and plot, is the main virtue of both authors' works; in this way, they resemble their major literary forefathers Lovecraft and, to a lesser extent, Poe. The comparison between Ford and Jones grows thinner, however, when one considers the often far more eclectic and original concepts, perhaps due to a more inclusive influence from genres besides horror (sf and fantasy), demonstrated throughout the work of the latter.
The diverse multi-genre influences on Jones' work--and their arguable variations from story to story--are best shown by pairing certain stories together. For instance, "Mirrorcle" and "Cloud Harvesting" lie closer to magical realism than horror and are fairly poignant examples of this sub-genre's potential to skew the variables of verisimilitude just enough to stimulate the imagination as much as a straightforward fantasy would in much more obvious ways. "Token Blonde" and "Interior Design", the latter employing an initially banal plot which cleverly unravels toward a very numinous denouement, straddle the fence between horror and science fiction.
He even takes a shot at allegory with "The Condition", a piece of effective brevity and ambiguity which seems to perfectly crystallize humanity's enduring state of epistemological uncertainty and the attempt to escape through self-realization; above all other stories, this one shows that Jones is capable of expressing profound themes in simple, elegant language and further suggests that perhaps he's at his best when writing outside the lines of genres and their respective dogmas.
Still, this book leaves plenty to be desired, as many debut collections do. "Shards from the House of Glass", while steadily increasing the intensity of its brilliantly bizarre imagery, makes the mistake of pairing the present tense with third-person perspective; the effect being a narrative which can often seem simultaneously rushed yet detached. There are, of course, pieces arguably devoid of any value--"Change Here", "Hunter/ed" and "Muse" being my personal picks--but the last truly notable problem, beyond the usual minor editorial issues scattered throughout most small press releases, is how the book doesn't fulfill the structure suggested by its table of contents; beginning with the titular tale and ending with its reprise, this set-up will likely confuse most readers' expectations that the rest of the stories will possess overlapping characters, plots or at least an overarching fictional world. But beyond the opening and closing pieces, this collection possesses no such unity other than that achieved by Jones' somewhat skillful oscillation across the spectrum of dark fiction. This being said, I won't belabor the point since the author has admitted this flaw of his debut in a later interview.
Songs from Spider Street is nevertheless a generous offering from a young author who displays a fine imagination and an enthusiastic engagement with genre fiction's mistier corridors; he's since released two other collections, so future readings and reviews will decide if Jones' skill has come to match his obvious passion for all things dark and strange in literature.
I found this collection of horror stories to be OK. My favorite stories were "Interior Design" and "Token Blonde" and of course I love the cover art. However, even those two stories failed to really grab me hard, I just think they were the better stories in the lot. Short horror anthologies are some of my favorite books to read and sadly, this book just failed to either scare or excite me.
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