Yes, Cate Gardner’s Nowhere Hall has been out for a while now, but the fine reviewer at Black Static magazine, Peter Tennant, has been saving a few things by this excellent writer so he could review them all at once. And so, in the latest issue of the magazine (#27), Peter reviews not just Cate’s chapbook, but also two of her recent novellas, Barbed Wire Hearts (Delirium) and Theatre of Curious Acts (Hadley Rille Books), both of which are eminently worth getting hold of. As he writes so eloquently of Cate, she is indeed in a “genre of one”.
Getting to the main point here, however, Peter says of Nowhere Hall:
“It’s almost a stream of consciousness ghost story, if there can be such a thing, with events bleeding into each other and surreal imagery (e.g. Death as a man with an umbrella), not a word wasted and imagery laden with meaning, so that you almost instantly want to read the work again and pick up on all the things you missed first time around, and then again after that, with the assurance that there will always be something new waiting to be discovered.”
Further, Peter also says:
“It is a tale that is as unique as it is eminently readable, the ghost story as something strangely beautiful and beautifully strange.”
However, if you want to read what else Peter says about Nowhere Hall, as well as Barbed Wire Hearts and Theatre of Curious Acts, then you’ll just have to hunt down a copy of Black Static #27, which is published by TTA Press.
More reviews soon!!
Spectral Press 