With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer

With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer is another fantastic collection by the author. Well written, and so fun to read. We see again the amazingly done characters, with their endless insights, and depression mixed with dark humor.

Opening with Vernichtungsschmerz a being invades the dreams of a group of high schoolers, offering to end their existence. Death offers never-ending pain it tells them, and it says it reaches out to the few who can hear it to save them from this. The author is rather verbose in his writing, and here to prove the Being is real one character asks it to tell her words she doesn't know. It gave me a pretty good laugh cause J.R. did that quite a bit in the first collection. He tones it down in this one though so thankfully it's not as excessive. “Sagacious.”

A Related Corollary sets up the major theme of depression in this. The character knows it's not a phase to go through or something that will pass. It's just always there, and they carry on as they are expected to outwardly because that's just how it is... It's quite a sad short story reflecting on depression and will come up more and more in most of the collection's stories.

A Gulf of Responsibility sees a social worker find one of his clients has an abortion she can't pay for and money she couldn't have earned. As he investigates he finds some sort of otherworldly beings at play behind the scenes. It's a great story full of the slow, careful character work the author does so well.

Soon Enough This Will Essentially Be a True Story actually has no topics of depression, it's just a great slasher and satire of Goodreads and reviewing things online, as I'm doing now .. Err... After entering a giveaway, Karen wins a book by the author KatMandu. It's a terrible book full of awful stories, even one about a man and melting crap babies... Anyways, since it's so bad she refuses to review it and KatMandu gets increasingly angry with her... It's a fun story full of dark humor.

I'll leave it at that, as I feel these four show the major themes running throughout, great character insights, dark humor, the Lovecraftian beings in the background, the depression, and just a general sense that it would be better to have never existed at all. Although every story is great, there is not a weak one in the bunch, and one can go on and on about the themes and what it means to them. It all leads up to the last one “It's Not Feelings of Anxiety; It's One, Constant Feeling: Anxiety”. It's just an absolute gut-punch of a story, the author clearly wanted to end this one on a sour note, and he pulled it off well.

Just so well done, stories that I will remember for quite a long time. I kind of wanted to get into all the stories in this, but this review is already so long, and trust me, it's just worth reading. I cannot say enough how much I enjoyed this. Once again, strongly recommended.