Cheng Bogdani > Recent Status Updates

Breathe, Blow, Burn
by Ai Jiang
Arguably the best take on "the monkey's paw" trope I've read in years. The style leans to fluffy and figurative rather than literal and straightforward, but it's not so abstract that I had any difficulty following along. Five stars.

Marshman
by Sara Omer

Written in second person POV, so it was immediately skipped with prejudice

Burial
by Kristi DeMeester
Another home run. Revenge is a dish best served by The Old Gods.

Rare Bindings
by Mathew Cheney
Good stuff! Sometimes, they 'why' isn't as important as the 'how'. 5 stars. No notes.

I'm really liking this. I hope Lynnette survives, but I doubt it.

Reading this for the Splatterpunk group read

"Wren's Flight"
by Darka Malcolm-Clarke
This is a really good story from a technical perspective, and I think a lot of people will rightly give it 5 stars. But it's a three star story for me because, frankly, I just wanted the author to wrap it up sooner. I feel like I lost some emotional impact waiting for the inevitable conclusion.
..

Three stories in and I'm reminded why I try to avoid KU content that hasn't been vetted by a publishing house.

Maybe the start of the collection are the author's early stories and they get better later on.

"Mulch"
by Vajra Chandrasekera
I stopped reading this story near the end to read some other stuff. When I came back to it I had no recollection of the first part of the story. This one simply missed all my buttons - it passed through me without any reaction at all. One star for technical competence and another star for finishing it.

My Containment
by Shannon Scott
A river nymph in the modern world - and it turns out the old ways are still stronger than the the new world. Five stars.

"De*crypt*ed: Taylor on King"
by Sonora Taylor
An author writes about why she likes one of her favorite shirt stories. Three stars.

The H Word: Walking in Cemetaries
by Corey Farenkopf
Short nonfiction observational piece about how the look and feel of cemeteries have changed over the years. Three stars.

"Backseat Kiss"
By James Tatam
There aren't enough proper succubus stories in the world. This is helping to fill the void. Five stars.

"There are Three Children Jumping Over a Can Outside a Bodega"
By Mark Galarrita

Great premise, but the style was too... ephemeral and the tone felt like it skirted dangerously close to second person POV. Not visceral enough for my taste, and lacked any emotional impact. Two stars for technical skill (spelling, editing) and the premise.

"Lola: A Love Story"
Written well enough from a technical standpoint, but I feel like I've read so many by variations on this theme I won't remember this iteration next week. Two stars.

"A Manual of Care for the Unliving Child"
DNF after skimming the first few pages. It's an interesting premise but I could not get into the 'three ring binder SOP' format.

"Headdressing"
That was surprisingly hard hitting, given the cliched first sentence. Five stars. I'm looking forward to reading more Benjamin C. Jenkins.

"My Cremation"
This is written in second person POV, so it was immediately skipped over with prejudice. No stars.

"Snapshots of Aleppo"
Prenumbral ghost stories are the best kind of ghost stories. I would like to see this as a novella. Five stars.

"Margaery the Wolf"
To paraphrase the Battlestar Galactica reboot - 'This has all happened before, and this will all happen again'. Three stars.

"Welcome to the Graveyard of Dead Lilians"
Generally, I really like the mechanic of pointing out humanity's shortcomings by using a lens made from aliens, but this one fell flat - I just couldn't quite get into the plot or the characters. Two stars

"Blindness"
This felt overwhelmingly Orwellian, specifically 1984ish - rebooted through the lens of 21st century misogyny. Five stars.

"Last Time At Thanksgiving" Ahh, the zombie apocalypse. First person style. The characterization felt all over the place; the narrative was clear, but it had that problem that Stephen King books have - why are we spending so much time on characters that hardly move the story forward? Three stars.

"Temple of Amduscias" I do love a good "oops we stumbled into a gate into Hell story". I'd like to more about the MC's motivations though. Four stars.

"Orificially Compromised" - Interesting premise I bought into, but the supporting world building doesn't really stand up well to scrutiny. Three stars.

"Junk" - Great idea, would love to see it fleshed out a little more. Read the first few pages of the next story and it looks like they may be related. Again, I'd like to see the MC get built up a bit more so the 'crux' of the story hits a little harder. Four stars.

"Down There" - I love a good Spirit of the Forest story, and this one delivers. I'd like to see this expanded into an entire novel length story. 5 stars.

"Divine Red" - It's like the myth of Tristan and Isolde, but filtered through a late-stage capitalist post industrial version of Dante's Hell. I felt a little of the The Famous Scene from Blade, too.

I think the story resolved too quickly, I would have liked to see the MC get gl uolt up before the sacrifice.

"Threesome" - technically fine, definitely a huge step above some unedited self published Kindle fodder, but ultimately just a predictable rehashed trope. The sex and violence needs to be more specific. Three stars.