Engelbrecht
2/4/2016
Livia Llewellyn still has room to grow as a writer, but she's completely mastered the art of making the reader squirm in their seat as they're reading. Her stories are bleak, brutal, disturbing & perverse, but you just can't put them down. I haven't read the like since I read Lucy Taylor's (even more disturbing) Unnatural Acts some twenty years ago.
The collection was a finalist for the 2011 Shirley Jackson award in the collection category. The best story might have been "Omphalos", which was also a Shirley Jackson award finalist in the novelette category. It's about a vacation road-trip undertaken by a loving family of four who are far, far from being the Cleavers from Leave it to Beaver. Quite squicky, and, needless to say, things don't end well (things never do in Llewellyn's stories).
Highly recommended for people who like this sort of thing.
(After I wrote this, I noticed that Nina Allen put "Her Deepness" from this collection in her list of top 10 favorite horror stories. I don't think I'd go that far, but it was a great story...)