Moonflower in Autumn Rain

Have you ever found yourself sucked into the first part of a book, only to end up sorely disappointed, counting the pages left in each chapter as you debate with your inner need to complete each book you start? If so, you'll understand what I mean when I say this book exhausted me. I'm not sure if it's the writing style which stops to excessively describe scenery in the middle of nearly every thought or if it's the abundant grammar issues and typographical errors, but something about this book made me feel like I was struggling to make sense of each story's flow and events - often just to be highly disappointed by the story's outcome regardless.

Now, don't get me wrong: I understand there's a level of surrealism in this book. I understand that it's not supposed to be happy stories or something for a pick-me-up. I'm not expecting utter realism or jovial prose. I am, however, exhausted by the twisting contradictions and abandoned/neglected plot threads and excess attempts to paint mental pictures of irrelevant scenery. It's dreamlike, sure, but for me it feels more like a fever dream, and I don't believe that surrealism should be an excuse for leaving abandoned plot threads at every turn. And it certainly is no excuse for all the characters sounding the same and the two main characters in each having the same personalities.

This book also relies heavily on namedropping songs (only one of which - Nirvana's ‘Heart Shaped Box' - I actually recognized) and other books, which quite often takes away from both the narrative in general and the sense of dreamlike flow. The quotes from other books tend to work into each story in such a way that some of the stories try to make poignant ties to them... only to fall incredibly flat and feel very forced. The narrative surroundings of the book quotes assume that everyone gathers the same thing from every book, and often don't really fit into context.

It's as if all the characters just live within their own heads, ready to quote random literary works when not really relevant to the outside world. I found it frustrating, as quite often the quotes were nonsensical out of the original context and just made characters come across as insane or incapable of understanding the meaning of English words.

Because this book is separated into stories, I'll be reviewing each one individually - without any significant spoilers, though honestly I'm not sure I understand what happened well enough to give spoilers for some of them anyway. Like I said: it feels as if I've just lived through a series of fever dreams.

The book starts with a preface wherein the author waxes poetic about why he wanted to write this book and why he structured it as he did. I can relate quite a bit when it comes to wanting to explain and justify one's own writing, but there's always the risk of sounding pretentious and the intro here comes dangerously close to crossing that line. Within the preface, the author claims his stories are character-driven, but I found that there was very little driving and more attention to scenery than people in many areas. I usually love character exploration, so I was surprised I didn't like this collection more.

“The Antonym of Flower is Wind” is about... uhm. Well, there's a girl involved? And some people? But maybe there isn't? And maybe there is?

Frankly, I don't even know what to say about this one. It feels as if the author didn't actually know where this one was heading while writing it. There either is or isn't a lost friend or lover. There either is or isn't something supernatural happening. There either is or isn't something psychological happening. I'm not just being vague to avoid spoilers; I'm being vague because this story gives literally no answers while hinting at all kinds of things.

Overal, it drew me in from the beginning but lost me once things became confusingly contradictory. Especially when poetry suddenly popped up, it just came across as pretentious. There's potential for a great story at first, and I'm disappointed it fell apart so quickly. (Note that poetry popping up at the end of each story is something we're warned of in the preface, but this poetry has no logical flow and the ending was so abrupt in the first tale that it honestly felt that the poetic piece was in the middle.)

Next in line, “Origami Airplane” has a lot of confusing points. It suffers from poor grammar and typographical errors and gets bogged down by frequent asides to explain unnecessary visual elements. The story itself also has basically nothing to do with origami or airplanes, except for maybe two mentions of something which is neither origami or a plane vaguely resembling them. It isn't the point of the story, which... well, it tries to be science fiction, but in an extremely weird manner which starts out feeling like a personal drama or criminal mystery and leaves all the questions you'd ask about those elements unanswered except with a vague ‘maybe' of a hint.Ultimately, the original draw of the story as a mystery falls completely flat, seeming more like an aside despite the impact it SHOULD have in so-called character driven fiction, and the science fiction (perhaps even paranormal; it's very difficult to decide) element leaves much to be desired. The ending poetry once again didn't impress me; it had no flow and felt very shallow despite clearly attempting to have depth related to the story preceding it.

“A Silent Anemone” seems to keep running with the established theme of not knowing whether to be paranormal or mundane. Is there a crazy person? Or is there an alien? Is there a deaf girl? Or is there a mentally ill girl? These questions, at times, get answered... only to have contradictory evidence surface later, and then contradictions to that wash up again and suggest the original answers were more accurate - rinse and repeat. It's almost like the rise and fall of the tides, and in that way this story ALMOST works. Were the ending better and the story itself not a minefield of sloppy grammar, I think I would have liked this one. The poetry at the end is not as grating as after previous stories, either.

I would also like to add that, while I'm not a fan of the way it's handled in certain places - which is more about the writing style than the content, I think - I'm glad to see that the story includes a semi-realistic depiction of what it's like to be hard of hearing yet mistaken for completely deaf.

“Blue Hydrangea” is... peculiar. It's difficult to follow what's being alluded to at the beginning, though I think that may be intentional. (At first, I thought the emotions being described were surrounding a violation - a rape or something of that sort - but those with triggers in that regard can rest assured that I was wrong.) With grammatical gymnastics such as “Its long neck???the pale cup at the end scooped out me out: all the leftover parts.” it comes across more as someone ATTEMPTING to be deep than someone actually being deep. This one also suffers more than the other stories from the overuse of other works to prop its narrative. In example: “Every ???eck of rain, I felt, like the moonlight in Murakami???s Sputnik Sweetheart, were blind cancer cells. Spreading out over my house, trying to find their way to me.” Why even include this? Either say every drop/fleck of rain felt like a spreading cancer or say something else if that particular phrase has you worried about seeming unoriginal. Tossing in the name of the work you originally heard it from doesn't actually make the reference any more your own or any less unoriginal. This story, however, does strike a bit of a chord with me in how it depicts the mind wandering in a depression after a loved one's death. It feels like the most real, the closest to actually being a surrealistic story of longing and loss. As such, it didn't exhaust me as much to read through it and I found myself eagerly flipping through the pages even as I took notes about grammatical issues and overuse of (not-so-) popular culture references. In the case of this story, some of the musical references are actually relevant, so I'd say it gets a pass on those anyway. On the flip side, it's just TOO MUCH surrealism for a story which is otherwise focused on mundane and (for a change) non-paranormal events. There's a big difference between saying that something feels as if [insert surreal body horror here] and just flat-out stating it as if the thing happened and nobody around noticed and the narrator went around searching for the missing body parts afterward. I don't think the author knows quite how to balance the difference between the two, and it makes for some very confusing moments where the narrative outright lies to the reader and forces a re-read just to process what's real and what isn't. (Like a fever dream. All of these stories, so much like fever dreams...)Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but this tale struck me more as a lost love than a lost friend. There are elements I won't share for the sake of not spoiling which come across very, very much as if they're moments between lovers and not just friends. The way the poems refer to the lost friend after the story ends feel more like fleeting glimpses of a love wanted yet not pursued. Oddly, I think despite the gripes I had with it, I liked this particular story and the poetry which followed - even if I did grow annoyed at the repetition of words in the final poem.

Next up is “Violet Amandrea,” a novella. I stalled on reading this one, knowing it'd be even longer than the ones before it and likely require even more mental energy. I must have read the first two parts thrice each before I felt I even had a vague sense of what was happening, and I do mean TRULY VAGUE. Eventually, I gave up and just kept going in the hopes it'd eventually start making sense.

The fact a wet shirt is described as searing skin on a night which was just described as unseasonably cold should explain how confusing and nonsensical this one is in places. You know, searing, which means to heat up or burn. It's summer in the story, so there's no way it's cold enough for wetness to cause a freezerburn effect.

As the novella goes on, things get slightly - and I do mean SLIGHTLY - more coherent in places. It becomes the story of an insufferably annoying woman and the man who's creepily obsessed after seeing her only once, at least from what I can tell. I didn't feel a connection to any of the characters, and honestly wanted to reach through the pages to smack both the guy and the girl at least twice each. There's also an unsettlingly creepy teacher and the same voice being used for all the characters. (As in: you really can't tell who's saying what until it's indicated because everyone has the same - or highly similar - verbal ticks and vocabulary.)

The story is... odd, confusing. I suppose maybe it's a love story, but about people who are kind of, well, odd. If they're even ‘real' (within the narrative; they're obviously fictional in terms of the real world). Very much was lost to the overuse of painting titles, song names, band names, etc. Instead of saying “there's a flowery painting” - or whatever kind of painting it may be - hanging as a poster on the wall, it names the artist and the painting's title. Instead of saying there's synth-pop, indie acoustic, dubstep, whatever (I didn't know any of the songs so I have no clue what genres they were) playing, it names bands and song titles. I honestly don't even know if all of them were real, but some of the namedropped bands - like Joy Division - were. I often felt myself drawn out of the story and away from the tone that was being set because all I could do was sigh in frustration that I had no clue what music was supposed to be playing or what tone was therefore supposed to exist. I'm not going to go hunt down a son on Spotify or look for a painting on Wikipedia just to be able to understand a story, which is supposed to provide the entire mental image for me with the wordcrafting alone.

It's also of note that, while no other parts of this book contained sex, this portion does. It's out of the blue and kind of crude; it doesn't use the same, flowery, overly metaphorical prose that the rest of the book does. Now, before you think I'm just upset that it's sex, that's not the case; the inclusion doesn't offend me or anything like that, but the presentation does feel extremely out of place and oddly handled due to not being written in the same manner as surrounding paragraphs. The best way I can explain the disconnect is to imagine that you're at a fancy party with lords and ladies in the middle of a mansion ballroom. Suddenly, someone lets out a huge, resounding fart and yells afterward that they shouldn't have eaten food truck sushi. As if nothing has happened at all, the party carries on. A nice waltz begins, and the prince and princess join together to dance. A bystander farts again. The smell lingers, but you're the only one who seems to smell it. The party carries on around you as if nothing has happened at all - as if nobody in this very etiquette-driven gathering has noticed the faux pas.

By the end of this one, as I'd predicted, I felt very mentally exhausted and annoyed. I won't lie and say that there aren't intriguing and even good parts to it, but it definitely wasn't my cup of tea and the characters made me more annoyed than any other emotion. The ending felt a bit cheap, like the wrap-up of a Lifetime movie instead of the sort of ending I felt a tale like this one should have. Everything just seemed to be waved away or else tied up hastily with no true sense of resolution.

Overall, I suppose I can't say that I regret reading Moonflowers in Autumn Rain. I trudged through when it dragged and I experienced what feels like a somewhat psychedelic and intensely creepy fever dream in the form of words on digital pages. There's an odd sense of melancholy in me now, and I think that may very well have been the author's intent, so... I suppose I can't fault it too hard if it achieved the end goal.This wasn't my cup of tea, and the surrealism was just too much at many points, but I'm hesitant to take away stars for that. Am I just someone who's too desperately in need for resolution and thus not the target audience? Am I someone who's too analytical and thus gets bogged down on trying to figure out what each piece of surrealistic imagery means and why it's there? Perhaps, yes. I believe so, in fact.But I also think that, at times, the writing deviates from being surrealism and veers toward just plain confusing. That, coupled with the grammatical and wording errors, knock it down by at least one star in my mind. The overabundance of relying on others' works - songs, literary quotes, paintings - take it down one more star to three, for me. On Goodreads, that means “i liked it,” which isn't exactly true, but on Amazon it's more negative than I think this book deserves. With a good bit of editing and a touch of reworking of plots to give characters more unique personalities, it could easily be a five-star book, so after much consideration I'm just not comfortable giving two stars (on Goodreads, that means “it's okay,” which is far less negative than two stars on Amazon). I think a nice, middle-of-the-road three stars works.

Full disclosure: I received an advance review copy of this book through BookSirens. After reading, I decided to leave this review which contains my honest opinions and was not incentivized.