Halloween Book Review: Suicide Stitch by Sarah L. Johnson

Since I started this blog in 2013, I’ve made a few observations about the book blogging community as a whole. They are as follows:

• most of us love drinking tea while reading
• cats are our favourite animal
• we love holidays
• romance and YA bloggers are easy to find and are very passionate about these genres

I fit into three of the four categories, so of course I’m reviewing scary(ish) books this month. I’ve got a picture of my cat and a pumpkin to prove it. The last point regarding YA and romance bloggers, I must confess I don’t identify with as much. I find romance a bit cheesy, so I avoid it. And I’ve always felt like an old soul, so YA books don’t typically speak to me as much, although I will read one every once in a while. Sometimes I start reading a book not fully realizing what genre it’s going to land in. Suicide Stitch by Sarah L. Johnson was one of those books.

Johnson has written a collection of eleven stories, and the best way I can describe them is: unnerving. There is death, and a bit of gore, but most of the stories are tinged with sex. The mixture of sex and horror is nothing new of course, just look at the popularity of Anne Rice‘s books, but that didn’t stop me from raising a few eyebrows as I continued through the stories. 

Reading this book also broke another one of my ‘rules’ that I typically follow as a blogger. I’m pretty sure (although not 100% sure) this book is self-published-not that there’s anything wrong with that! But I typically avoid reviewing self-published books. So why did I take this on? One simple reason: the author is a bookseller. And booksellers know good writing, usually well enough to not write badly themselves, so I thought I’d take a chance on Johnson. Plus, she lives in Calgary, and reading local is the best kind of reading.

So what did I think? After I got over my initial squeamishness (for various reasons, insert eyebrow raise here) I realized that I actually enjoyed this book. The writing is very good, that I can say with complete confidence. The collection is a mish-mash of sorts, I wouldn’t say the stories flowed in a great order, and some could be taken out entirely, but I did like most of the pieces individually. Therefore,  I look forward to what this author has in store for us in the future, and you should too.