Halloween Special! I recently read Kathe Koja’s Six Stories collection, all of which were spooky or unnatural in one sense or another, and I thought that these stories would be a perfect match for the week leading up to Halloween. Then I got sick, and healthy, and sick. So: post-Halloween Special!
Baby is pretty creepy. It is much more “nightmare fodder” than the previous story, albeit less so as the story winds towards the end, but dolls are just kinda creepy and uncanny. So a doll of a baby with unnatural powers and that can move and communicate its desires, and that hungers? That is super creepy.
That said, I really enjoyed and respected the resolution for several reasons. It was unexpected, simultaneously hopeful and touching but uneasy and potentially threatening. The ending also looped into the beginning of the story extremely well, and used the thread of history of the doll to seal the past and open the way for the protagonist’s future.
This is more of a note about Six Stories than any individual story, but the collection felt like a well-composed album rather than just a collection of similar stories. For example, the contrast between Baby and the previous story in the volume, At Eventide, contributed positively to my experience reading the stories. Structurally, At Eventide is two narratives interweaving, aiming towards a single point in time, told exclusively in third person, distant. Then Baby opens with the protagonist speaking straight to the reader, and the story isn’t a series of structured vignettes of the past as much as a fluid stream of experience and relived memories. Both stories are written skillfully, and share similarities in general tone and content, but are different from each other such that they feels fresh and distinct.
Obligatory Kindle Note: Read this on a kindle!
morningbookreview 